Okay, good morning everybody. Welcome to week 11 of our class on emotional wholeness. I hope all of you are doing well and enjoying God's grace and mercy. Welcome to all our e-learning students as well who continue to keep walking alongside with the course. We welcome all of you as well. We trust that as you're learning, you're being encouraged, you're being built up. A lot of the truths that we learn through these lessons are being applied on a regular day-to-day basis. So we're just praying that each of us are being made whole even as we walk through this journey of life. So shall we just start with the word of prayer? I'll start and we could all join in. Heavenly Father, gracious Father, we thank you Lord for this day. We thank you for this new gift of a day that you have given each one of us. Lord, we are so amazed at your work in our lives. Thank you Father for bringing each one of us here to listen, to hear, to understand, to apply, to be changed emotionally in our spirits, in our minds, Father. Lord, even as we go through new words from your scripture, we pray that whatever struggles we may be going through each of us in our different areas of life that you would teach us to apply your word and live victorious and abundant lives as you have promised. Father, we pray that your joy would be made whole in each one of us, Lord. Thank you for bringing us here today, Lord. We pray for those who are yet to come. We pray that you remove every kind of a hindrance or limitation that they may be facing to join in today. Lord, we pray that the power of the Holy Spirit works in a deep and a wonderful way as we move forward in learning further today. Thank you, God. We submit the next two hours to your throne of grace and pray that you will mightily work a new thing, Lord, a supernatural thing in each of our lives. We ask all these things in your precious and matchless name. Amen. Okay, so we are into the next chapter of our lesson on emotional wholeness. We've been going through the last 10 weeks about different ways of understanding the mind, things of how we get into issues and problems, how we can get our healing and our deliverance and walking into emotional wholeness. The last week we spoke about staying emotionally whole and we looked at a couple of spiritual disciplines in helping us walk into that, into journeying into spiritual, into emotional wholeness today. We're going to be looking at another very related, very important part of our emotional wholeness, which is the work of our minds, the conquest of our minds. So I'm on chapter 7 at page 40. If you would like to go through this alongside with me, that would be wonderful. What we are going to be doing in class today is taken partly from another one of the resources that we have available, which is the conquest of the mind, which is available at the website. I will post the link in between so that you can go in and take some time to read this book as well. But we will be following some bits of it in this lesson. A greater, more intense reading can be found in that book as well. So we're going to look at how and what is the relation of the mind to our emotional wholeness. So if we remember, we did talk about the mind in our very first class and we spoke about how man, being a tripartite being, having the body, the soul and the spirit, we did see that when we were born again, our spirits are the one, is the part of us that is born anew, that is bought afresh and new in the image of God. And we are filled with the nature of God in our spirits when we come to a place of salvation, when we receive salvation, when we become born again, when we believe in Christ. When we are in Christ, we become that new creation in our spirits. However, our minds and our bodies are not born again, and our minds and our bodies are things that continuously needs to be renewed. Okay, so if what is in the spirit is what should be seen on the outside. So the soul and the body needs to be renewed, the soul needs to be renewed and the flesh needs to be crucified, which is something apart that we will be looking at next week. How the body or the flesh needs to be crucified as we walk into emotional and as we maintain that emotional wholeness. So the responsibility of the mind stays with us, the responsibility of renewing the mind and crucifying the flesh stays with us as a believer. And that's something that we continue to do by studying God's word and by the power of the Holy Spirit. So here today, we are just going to be focusing on the mind and what needs to be done and how we can do it. So let's, let's first of all look at what are some of the functions of our mind. So the mind is the core center where we core center of the functions of our brain.  So every function of the brain is manifested out of the mind and our mind becomes important because these processes, these functional processes that we spoke about, like especially our thoughts, it is our thoughts that really feed into our actions. Our actions is, is thereby moves into our behavior. And our behavior is what really brings about the way that we live or our lifestyle. So our thoughts are what determines these things are thoughts or things that we think about is what really affects our emotions. And we saw that kind of a relation, both in this class, as well as those of you who've been in the Christian counseling, we did see that that our thoughts affect the way that we feel and this, these emotions affect the way that we respond spiritually, we respond mentally as well as physically. What we think and what ever we imagine the things that we imagine are things that either brings us to a place of constructive demeanor or a destructive one or that which is really propels us or that which could could break us down. So these faculties of our mind, the ability to learn, to reason, to understand, to imagine, to feel, to remember, all of this are very important and that becomes the construct of everything in our lives. So what is in, what happens in our spirit, the, the, the refreshing or the, the, the new creation that happens in our spirit is something that needs to be continually released into our minds and into our bodies. So God uses this, this faculties that we have in, in, in his work in us and the way that he talks to us and the way that he communes to us. So we did look at significantly at what, what are the certain problems that, that, that is caused. So we do see that because of where we are and, you know, in, in the place that we are in the world that we live in, the interactions we have, our mind is like a battlefield. It is always constantly being thrown in with all kinds of information, with ideas, with sides, with sounds, with, with anything around us and how, what are the windows to our mind is of course through our physical senses. What we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we touch and what we taste, all of this brings in information into our mind. So constantly at all points, right from the waking up, from the time you wake up till the time you sleep, your mind is always being thrown with different kinds of information. And this information has a way to impact the way that we think, impact the way that we feel and impacts the way that we may behave or it brings about certain responses and certain reactions to us. So the, the, that's what we need to ensure on one point to be able to guard what is being, what are the things that influences us. So we may not really, at all points of time, we may not have a complete control of, of what we are seeing, what we are hearing, although there are of course some places where we do not give in to those temptations or given to those desires. There may be a lot of times that we may be in the midst of receiving information that where we have not willfully placed ourselves. Like for example, you may be driving on the street and you may, you know, you may, you may come across a huge billboard that has some, you know, questionable material on it.  There are things that you need to do. But your mind gets, gets this information a lot of times, even when you're not in a place of being able to control it. So there are times that you may, you may be bombarded with things that you may not be able to completely control or the information that you may not be, be able to control. And this is what the enemy and, you know, the evil, evil one does is to use whatever you are seeing or whatever you're hearing or the information that comes to give it to make it work on your minds so that it presents itself. As thoughts, as thoughts that become evil, that is those evil thoughts or those ideas or those the kind of imagination that comes up. So what you're seeing the enemy uses it to stir up desires that may be, that may be your own desires that, that are internal. And that, and when we come to a place of not being able to resist these enticements or these, these entrapments, we become sucked in to what is wrong. So the very fact that these, the information or what you're seeing is being bombarded at you is not sin in itself. The fact that you've probably seen it or, or the thought has come and is not a sin in itself. But what it does, allowing it to dwell and to stir in to your desires and not being able to resist that is what becomes, we will talk about that a little bit later. So James describes it in, in scripture in James 1 13 to 16, it says, I'll read that for you, let no one say, when he's tempted, I am tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he's drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin and sin when it is full grown brings forth death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. So what we see here in this verse is that temptation is or things that you see around is not something that is brought about by God. It says, do not deceive yourself to think or you are in a state of deception or yourself deceiving yourself if you think that you are being tempted by God.  It very clearly says, let no one say, when he is tempted, I am tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone. And I think often we have heard probably people having the wrong notion of saying that God is the one who's tempting me. I am being tempted by God to do this kind of a sin. But it very clearly says verse 14, each one is tempted when he's drawn away by his own desire and is enticed. So it is our own flesh or we are drawn by our own desires. It's something that is conceived from within the carnal mind. The desire is conceived within us and when we yield to sin, as it says in verse 15, when desire has conceived, that is when it has come about, when those desires are being birthed within us in itself. That's when and when you yield to that, that's what causes sin. And I'm just looking at it in another version. I just wanted to read that out for you in another version, which just give me a minute. Okay, so it says temptation, this is from NLT, that's the New Living Translation. So I'll just read that out again. And remember, no one who wants to do wrong should ever say God is tempting me. God is tempted to do wrong and he never tempts anyone else either. Temptation comes from the lure of our own evil desires. So each man is tempted when he's drawn away by his own lust or enticed and baited by his own desire or his own lust or his own passion when he is trapped, when he's dragged and trapped by one's own desires. And so there it says when it is conceived, it gives birth to sin and that becomes full grown when you dwell in it more and more, it brings forth death. So an example that we could probably look at is the common example of when people lust after wrong thoughts. So there is probably maybe an image that flashes by or an image that one sees maybe in a newspaper or on a billboard or any kind of maybe material that you're reading. There is this, the image that comes about and that begins to entice or that begins you're drawn in by your own desires. And when it is conceived of that, the desire is already birthed and you give birth to sin when you yield to that. When you keep dwelling, you keep thinking about it more and more, coming to a place of flourishing that very conceived desire in your mind by adding to it by putting a lot more of spice to it. And that's what gives birth to sin. So when it is full grown, then it leads to a behavior or it leads to something that causes you to sin. So scripture is very clear about the fact that the mind is the place where we are drawn by our own desires. When we are enticed, what happens when we are enticed? Our wills are weakened. It weakens our will or our determination and it entraps. It's almost like a mouse being trapped in a mouse trap and the desire has been conceived and you yield to that desire and this is what results in sin. So when we have our desires aroused within us for something that is wrong, we are drawn by these desires, but remember it is still not sin. It becomes sin when we have yielded to the desire, when we have fallen for the desire. It is then that we have sinned. So a lot of times and we do see that there are many times Christians do condemn themselves because these wrong desires have been aroused in them or there is a desire that's come up. So that in itself is not sin only when we yield, when we pay attention, when we dwell in it and it is done by when we are committing a wrong act or continuously feeding in and contemplating these desires have been sinned. And so all of this happens within the entrapment of the mind. And to just understand the mind is so powerful to bring about a small desire into something that is such a full blown well planned thing. So even in issues like maybe in an emotion, you know, so maybe you've heard something that has caused a sense of anger that has caused. I will answer the question, Mangi, just a minute for me to just complete. So when you're having a specific emotion that comes up, you know, the fact that maybe you've heard something and scripture says in your anger do not sin. Right. So yes, the emotion of anger is probably something that is a natural and we spoke about that. I think a couple of weeks back where we said our emotions are naturally given to us. It is acts like a barometer. But when we we face that anger, we begin to contemplate it, we begin to grow more and more of it, you know, begin to picture in our minds about the anger, add in more thoughts that feed in to the anger that that grows into so you're yielding to that anger and creating a lot more of a lot more of substance to the anger willfully contemplating the anger. That's when you have sinned and it moves from one to another. So if we remember we had spoken about this earlier also, you know, the the anger moves into rage moves into probably murder, or sadness moves into helplessness moves into hopelessness could move into depression. The thought of lust can move into, you know, stronger stronger enticement of lust that can move into adultery. So this is a progression. So what we do see is that when we when the when when the desire is conceived, that's where we come to a place of being able to understand that the mind is very powerful to move it from one to another. And what we're looking at is here is how do we conquer that? What do we do when when these grip our mind? What is it that we can do to keep ourselves away from being from falling into a place of sin? Okay. Yes, Mangi, how I think you had a question. Would you like to bring your question up, please? Okay. Thank you, Pastor. If I hear correctly, and if the scripture read, which is true, says that we we attempted our own desire, but things that we see, and then we conceived those ideas in our mind and our hearts. So most of the time, they say that the devil. Okay, my question is, well, what? When does the devil come in and where?  Thank you, Pastor. Okay, so you're saying when does the devil come in? When does the devil come in? When we have, so remember, we've been talking about open doors, where we open the door for the enemy to walk in. And when these are desires are being conceived, and we are contemplating further on that, yes, we are opening the door for the enemy to walk in and create damage in us. So once we have given the enemy a foothold, we have, we have managed to bring entrance into the evil one. So it talks about how you resist the devil. Resisting the devil is also ways of how you would conquer these thoughts in your mind by using, sorry, by using scripture. Or by you, by the power of the Holy Spirit. So it initially begins when we give permission to give, you know, open a door like a thief does not, you know, an intruder does not walk in until there is an open door, or you have given or he deceives you into entering the door, entering your house. So to being able to resist the devil means that you need to stand in the armor of God, not giving permission to what the enemy is standing in to come in. So that's where the enemy walks in. But initially it is your desires that conceive sin, that conceives your desires that are being, that are being, that are being, I mean, sin is being conceived in your heart when your desires are being, are led to that. So it's only after that is when the enemy walks in. Manki, I hope I answered that question. Yes, Pastor. Thank you. Okay. All right. Elisha, I think you have a question too. Yes, yes, man. The question was put on the stream, but let me, let me. Oh, sorry. Yeah, yes, please go ahead. You mentioned that God does not tempt us. And that is according to James. But if you read the story of Jesus temptation on the wilderness, we read that Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. That is one. And then when you read Matthew chapter six, which Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, a part of the prayer reads that and lead us not into temptation. I believe this presupposes that we can be led, God can lead us into temptation. That is why we pray to him that he leads us not into temptation. So can you help me understand with the, with what James says that God cannot tempt us. Okay. All right. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that question. Okay. So I think let's look at the word temptation and this is the word temptation can also refer to the word trials. Okay. And one Corinthians, I think it's just going to give me to pick up that verse. I think it's one Corinthians chapter 10 verse 13. Okay. One Corinthians 10 verse 13 says, No temptation has overtaken you except such as this common to man. But God is faithful who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you're able. But with the temptation will also make the way of escape that you may be able to bear it. So here the word temptation refers also to trials. And we know that, you know, God will not test us beyond our ability in Christ Jesus to, we will be given the ability to bear it and God will always provide a way out. God does subject us to trials that may expose us to the enemy's assaults for his own purposes, like as you can see in Job. If the temptation in the Lord's prayer refers to trials, then, you know, the meaning of that verse Matthew chapter six verse 13 is do not afflict or try us. So it's not wrong to pray that we may be delivered from trials and sufferings as we submit to the will of God. The believer can ask the Lord to be delivered from testings or for strength. So I see that this word of temptation is a referring to trials more than the desires being conceived. So if we were to, you know, look at these words, lead us not to into temptation.   In wisdom, she's taking another place where she may have, you know, needed down that go down that store or that place where they're getting chocolates. They will have to wait for another day. So in this way, the mother is moving away the unpleasantness and sparing the children from that kind of a trial. So praying, lead us not to temptation is like, is like saying, God, you know, do not take me down that wrong path today. It's recognizing that we often can grasp things that are not right or may get into places that is not profitable for us and that God's wisdom can keep us away from that unpleasantness of that sin. So when we are asking God to lead us away from sin or from difficult trials, it's, it's, it's the goal is also saying, Lord, deliver us from the evil one. It is, it is a petition that we are asking of the Lord. So, so there are two things. So one is that we see that word as trials more so. And that when we, when we're talking about leading us not into temptation is that God gives us that grace that we will not be in positions where we are faced with, with a temptation that he will, he will give us the wisdom and the ability and he will help us through that. So that's, that's what specifically is meant by, by that scripture. I hope I was clear enough was able to articulate it. Okay, Elisha. Yes. All right. Okay. Thank you. All right. So moving on. Yeah. Okay. So when I think there's another question. Is that another question? Sorry, I can't see a hand up. Is there anyone else who has a question? Oh, it was me. Sorry. Okay. All right. So we'll, so what we, what we were looking at is, so there are temptations and deceptions and all kinds of things that grip us as believers. And this, so what we were determining is that all of this starts with just a thought in the mind. Okay. And we also do see, you know, like Lashu, you said that when, when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, that's what we, we have seen in, in Matthew and in Luke. We can deduce that these also came as thoughts and pictures in the mind and the way that the Lord refutes is, refutes it is by the word of God. So that's what we understand that, you know, these could be, would it, it's an understanding that it may not have been that Jesus was taken up literally to these places, but it could. We can just deduce that these could come in as thoughts or pictures in the mind, like, like it does come in for us and the way that the Lord refutes that is through the word of God. So we do see that a lot of things that we may be, we are going through is, is built up in the mind and, you know, I think just to bring in some more examples is that when, let's say in a workplace, you know, you're, you're sitting in your workplace and maybe your boss has given your, you know, given some kind of a work that you've been proficient in to somebody else. Okay. And this is a situation as it is, but then the mind begins to conceive it in a very different way, depending on whatever background or an experience and jealousy can, can build and build, covetousness can build, all of this happens within the mind. So to, to begin with it, a certain, to begin with it, it starts with a very, very small thought.  So keep a picture of that in mind, every information, everything that comes in starts with within the mind. So that's, that's the reason why we understand that the mind becomes that's why we call the mind a battlefield. So we're going to be looking at three specific points as to what, how do we, how do we conquer this? What do we do to combat the, the struggles that the mind has and to take it three disciplines is one is to be take is to take every thought captive. The second is to come to a place of renewing the mind and the third is to developing a mindset that is positive. Okay, so we look at, we'll spend some time looking at the first one taking every thought captive and let's look at the scripture that talks about this in two Corinthians 10 verses three to five. Okay, so it says, for though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty to God in pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. Okay, so when we look at these verses, the war that Paul is really referring to is all that has to do in the mind. So there are a lot of, if you look at that verse, there are many things that talks about ways or descriptions of how things have become very embedded. And you see words like strongholds, you read words like arguments or in other translations, the words that are used is imaginations, the words that are used are reasonings. They become like strong pillars and foundations that occupy the mind. Okay, so when you look at the word stronghold, it is the word stronghold in itself appears as something that that is very deeply rooted, something that has it. Stations very, very deep, not something that can be easily uprooted, you know, like for example, when you look at a banyan tree, it has a very strong root system. It's not something that you can uproot easily, it's got its root so ingrained and far into the soil that it is not easily shakeable. And these strongholds, so picture it like that, it is a fortress, and it's something that has been occupied and it is a place that has been controlled. So when you have a stronghold in your mind, it is that which is built with with multiple thoughts and arguments and reasoning and imaginations that become very embedded in in our in our minds. And this begins, how does this begin, it begins with thoughts, it just begins with those initial roots, like even the banyan tree, it started off probably with one root, but then as it grew, it started making its inroads into the part of the soil. So what does what does scripture say here, how do we conquer our mind is it, it talks first and foremost that our warfare is not carnal. Okay, our warfare is not something that is a flesh and blood, but something that is spiritual in nature. Okay, something where and it talks about in the preceding preceding verse that when we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, but according to what is happening in the spiritual realm so we need to take every thought captive now what is that word captive mean, it is to, it is to enslave or it is to imprison. So every time you have a thought that is not right, or it says you know that exalts itself against the knowledge of God so every thought, or every argument or everything, whatever it is that the mind conceives you imprison it, and you imprison it to the obedience of Christ. It's like, you know, if there is a convict, or if there is a criminal that's out, the first thing you need to do is to bring it in bring him into captivity. Otherwise, he is going to create immense havoc. So we are to take every thought captive, make it a slave or enslave it or imprison it and bring it to the obedience of Christ. Okay, we are to cast down or bring down every argument, imagination, reasoning, every stronghold, every opinion that is contrary to the knowledge of God.  So if you look at those entire verses, the same theme is being repeated over and over again. And the next it says is, we are to pull down, or, which is very similar to cast down, it is to break down, it is to come against every brick that has been built over and over again, you cast it down, you pull it down to bring it to the obedience of Christ. And how do we do all of this? We use it, we do it by what God has given us. And it talks about the armor of God, right? And we all know that in Ephesians 6, it talks about the armor of God. We are to pull it down using the armor of God. And the primary thing that we use is the word of God, the primary weapon that we use, that we use to bring these downs, these thoughts, these imaginations, these reasonings, these strongholds that has built itself up like a fortress is through the word of God. As scripture says, it is living and active, the word of God is living and active, able, it is able to pull through, to immerse through any, any joint, any bone, any marrow, anything that is against the knowledge of God. And as we do that, we will begin to see things breaking down. An example that we have seen is through what Jesus did when he was being tempted. All of those thoughts, those imaginations that the devil bought to him was combated with, it is written. And you see that, you know, we've read this so many times, it says, it is written, man shall not live by bread alone. It is written, thou shall not bow before anyone else but thy God, right? So it is written. So the primary weapon that we use is the word of God. So what are we called to do in order to walk in that emotional wholeness, walk in emotional fullness is to, at a regular basis, to be able to guard our thoughts, our ideas, our imaginations that are being conceived in our minds, that's being thrown in our minds, that come to our minds against the word of God. So it's like, it's like doing a test. Every time there is a thought that comes, you are putting it through a test to see whether it is contrary to what God's word says, or is it, does it align to what God's word says. The minute that you do see that it is contrary to God's word, you take it captive, you enslave it so that it does not build into something that conceives itself a sin. It does not build itself. You do not contemplate in your mind to conceive it to sin. Now this could be anything, you know, if you look at the varied number of instances or examples, it can be anything. It could even start with thoughts about oneself, right, about maybe comments that are made to you. And we spoke about it, you know, we said that when people do say words to us, it comes into us as a thought, and it builds itself as a wrong thought, and we dwell it, we, you know, we decorate it, we feed it, we do all sorts of things to it to make it, to bring it to something that it shouldn't be, or to create it in a proportion so much higher than what it came to us. So taking that captive and not letting this influence us. Okay, so what, what I'd like you to do is maybe through the last week. And I think this is a struggle, all of us, or this is a challenge that all of us go through a trial, I'd say that all of us go through that, especially when you have, you know, significant challenges in life where you're not seeing an answer. Then there are these thoughts that come up, even the thoughts of, you know, maybe God doesn't love me, or maybe God blesses only somebody else. So these are thoughts that are enough to be created and to, to, to churn itself out and, you know, move into something that is much more, much more stronger. Right.   God's going to open your eyes. So you see that all of this began to churn inside conceiving bringing itself into sin. So what I'd like you to do, we have, I think, five minutes. Okay, just quickly take some time to check on your thoughts or, or what, what have been any kind of ideas that you have, you have encouraged in your mind that has been contrary to God's word and put that down and commit to, to enslaving this commit to taking this captive over the next one week and begin to see the difference or the freedom that God gives you in your mind. It could be even something, something somebody has done. And there is, there is a, there is a wrong thought that has come about it and which can lead to a place of unforgiveness. So come to a place of bringing it to enslaving it and imprisoning it and bringing it captive unto the obedience of Christ. Okay, so a few minutes, just take to write that down and, you know, we can, we can probably then break for class and come back by 11 o'clock. Okay, so take three or four minutes to do that before you break in for us and we'll come back at 11 o'clock to, to look at the other two points as well. Okay, we shall break for, for 10 minutes and we'll come back at 11 o'clock to resume. Abraham, I'll take your question once we have returned. We'll stop in for a break and come back at 11.


Thanks. Thanks Daniel. So I'm I'm Harrison kill in the Texas commissioner of higher education and I appreciate this opportunity to speak with you all about the challenges we're facing some of our immediate responses in Texas. And also to share a few suggestions for how I think we might want to approach digital learning so we can bolster the historic transformation in higher education. It's already underway. So of course, 2020 has been quite a year. I'm only about a year into my new position, although it seems a lot longer than that right now. And in addition to the kinds of major issues we routinely have to deal with. We've also in Texas felt the combined pain of the COVID-19 pandemic and a crisis in our global energy markets in the shocks to our state and national economies have been profound. So we've had nearly 3.8 million Texans apply for unemployment since March in September. Our unemployment rate was about 8.3%. And that was down from a high of about 13% in May and still more than double what it was at the beginning of the year. Our sales tax collections which are the major source of revenue for our state budget. Were also down by more than 6% in September, but they had been down by more than 13% in May and that was the steepest year over year decline we'd seen in Texas in more than a decade. So the current recession is also the most inequitable that we've seen since unemployment data was tracked. So women. Black Texans Hispanic Texans low income Texans and our Texans who live in rural communities have disproportionately lost jobs and are seeing slower returns to employment. So what we're seeing in all this data isn't like anything that any of us or most of our parents ever experienced because in a period of about eight months. We went from having one of the most robust economies and state history to having millions of people out of work. And we know that many of those same jobs may not come back. Meanwhile, the uncertainty and the fear that's created by COVID-19 continues to disrupt our daily lives and our livelihoods. Most students and their families, the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating. So even before the pandemic, our institutions weren't able to meet all students financial aid with grants and scholarships. A few months ago, about 70% of our college students were working, and yet we still had many students who struggled with food and housing insecurity. This academic year, there are far fewer of the kinds of jobs that students typically rely on and students have had more trouble paying new bills. We also continue to have significant challenges in college and career advising, not only because of low counselor student ratios in secondary schools, but also because students connection to the resources that were offered in conjunction with college entrance exams has been disrupted. For our adults, one of our recent polls found that fewer than one in three adults without degrees said that they understand the available pathways and marketable skills and details about available educational programs very well. All these factors are contributing to a current situation where low income students, black and Hispanic students and students from rural communities are less likely to enroll in higher education and more likely to stop out or delay graduation. And our enrollments, and surprisingly, are down at the broad access institutions that most students attend. Now for our colleges and universities, the COVID-19 pandemic has entailed massive costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars, not only with the new costs of converting to online learning and moving students off campus and setting up new COVID-19 mitigation strategies and testing centers, but also with the simultaneous collapse of multiple revenue streams they depended on from housing, from food service, events, athletics, and philanthropy. This has been the most significant disruption to the operations of our colleges and universities since the end of the Second World War. And I want to commend you all and all of the leadership of our colleges, our universities, our university systems for their swift and creative responses that have prioritized the safety of our students, our faculty, and our staff. So I know many institutional leaders and faculty across the state, I know they've been working tirelessly to support their students continued academic progress and success. Of course, that included converting nearly all their courses to online delivery, standing up a merchant's aid, and buying thousands of laptops and hotspots. It's kind of flowing below the radar screen that the institutions have also been active partners in communities' public health responses, not only through hospitals and clinics, but also by donating personal protective equipment, re-engineering respirators, sanitizing masks, bringing face shields and contributing in other ways. Now the pandemic's not yet behind us, and we remain in a state of uncertainty about the rest of the school year and so many other aspects of our lives. But even as we take necessary measures to limit the spread of COVID-19, we have to look to the future and chart a course to recovery, and that recovery starts with higher education. So we know this because we've seen aspects of it before and not that long ago. So in the Great Recession, the U.S. lost more than 7 million jobs, including 5.6 million that had required only a high school diploma. Now by 2016, our U.S. economy had added more than 11.4 million net new jobs, but only about 80,000 jobs that required just high school diploma had come back. So put another way, American workers with only a high school education had experienced almost no recovery at all. And now we're facing even greater challenges, and people without post-secondary credentials are especially vulnerable. Right now, the unemployment rates for American workers who don't have post-secondary credentials are more than twice the rates for workers who have bachelor's degrees. So these disruptions we're experiencing are accelerating changes that were already underway in our economy. And that means that Americans who participate in our economic recovery who are going to fill the jobs of tomorrow's emerging economy are increasingly going to need new skills and high-value credentials. Now at the Texas Higher Ed Coordinating Board, our primary roles through the crisis have been to act as a resource, a partner, and an advocate for Texas higher education. So in particular, we've been partnering closely with our governor with legislative leadership and other state agencies so we can provide regulatory flexibility to help our public institutions adapt to COVID-19 and continue to serve students. We've been partnering with state and national philanthropies to raise private funds for emergency student aid, and we continue to support our higher education institutions to help them ensure continuity of campus operations and instruction for students. The most significant recent actions that we've been able to take have come about because of a commitment by our governor, Governor Greg Abbott, and our legislative leadership of $175 million of federal CARES Act stimulus funds, particularly the component that's known as the governor's emergency education relief funds or gear for strategic investments in higher education initiatives that are specifically tied to economic recovery. The majority of these funds, about $150 million were allocated for student financial aid that included $57 million allocated to protect our major student financial aid programs from coronavirus-related state budget cuts, $46.5 million for additional emergency aid for students who were suddenly at risk of foregoing higher education because their families financial situations had suddenly changed, and then another $46.5 million dedicated to support displaced workers who need to reskill or upskill to get back into the workforce and the nearly 3.9 million Texans who at some point had stopped out or dropped out of college. Many of those students aren't striking distance of finishing, so we're going to support our institutions in re-enrolling these students so they can reskill or upskill, get onto a new career path, and contribute to our Texas recovery. The remaining gear funds that our Texas state leadership committed for higher education, about $25 million, was allocated to our agency to modernize our educational and workforce data infrastructure and to bolster the quality of online learning, including through the development and adoption of open educational resources. So as we look beyond our immediate responses to economic recovery, these kinds of strategic investments in higher education are going to be essential for our students, for our institutions, for our states. This time of disruption is also a unique window of opportunity when it's increasingly urgent to design and implement new models of higher education that reflect a renewed commitment to our responsibilities to promote access, foster social capital, increase student success, and drive upward mobility at scale. Now, if we were having this conversation a year ago and I'd announced that all of our colleges and universities were going to be able to transition all their courses online within a couple of weeks, I would have sounded pretty crazy, but of course that's exactly what had happened. Remember that so there were these old criticisms about colleges and universities being resistant to technology and slow to change and a lot of that got blown out of the water in about two weeks last March and this was amazing. Now, especially with you all let's stipulate that neither the technologies nor the course result redesigns have always worked as they were intended, especially in the first versions that were rolled out. But still what I've consistently heard across our state and across the nation is that as the creative energies of our students, faculty, departments, whole institutions were suddenly thrust into working on digital learning, a panoply of new ideas and experiments have emerged. So higher ed has been implementing major changes to courses, programs, academic calendars, how they use physical spaces and how they use technologies far faster and far beyond anything we anticipated a year ago. I've been arguing that this is a critical moment when we need to get behind our innovators and higher education share what we're learning about more effective designs for learning and advocate for new resources policies and partnerships that are going to allow these educational innovations to flourish and scale. So that's why I was grateful to our state leadership for committing a portion of our gear funds to strengthen the quality of digital learning and reduce the cost of instructional materials to students. Right now, faculty teams at our public and independent institutions across Texas are working on applications for grants through our agency to build out and scale work, they've already begun with open educational resources across three major strands of work. The core courses that most students take and frequently transfer among institutions, college readiness materials and workforce education materials. And I want to say we deeply appreciate our partnerships with open stacks with UT Austin's Charles Adana Center and also with Dallas Dallas College as thought partners in this work and as technical assistance providers for our faculty and institutions across the state. But the challenges we face today are much deeper than a lack of resources for the kinds of things that we've already been doing. We're in the early stages of the historic transformation in higher education and of course many of you all are right on the front lines. The way forward is going to require bold leadership, strategic investment, stronger partnerships and true grit so we can emerge with renewed commitments to our public missions and a better future. Over the last several months, I've spent a lot of time in long conversations and late night communications and texting with college and university and system leaders and board members and legislators. And despite the scale of the challenges we're still facing, I think we all recognize that higher ed has got to be an essential part of the solution for how we're going to adapt, overcome and emerge even stronger as a state and as a nation. And this work is already underway, but it's going to have to accelerate over the next several months and into the coming years. I know that our community and technical colleges are already gearing up to expand access so people can achieve high value post-secondary credentials more than we've ever served before. Our institutions continue to work at the frontiers of knowledge, leading discoveries and insights that are going to power a brighter and more competitive future. And all of our institutions are rapidly expanding their capacity to leverage digital learning and find innovative ways to deliver higher education. So in this unique time, when students and faculty and campuses are suddenly dependent on digital learning, what should our approaches include so we can effectively cut across and dampen the current challenges we face and advance our broader public mission at scale. I'd like to nominate three components. So first instructional technologies, second facilitated networks, and third data infrastructure. So of course, instructional technologies are becoming more sophisticated, more ubiquitous and let's stipulate that these technologies have often been designed and deployed to support current practices, which means that they can reinforce our traditional and more formal conceptions teaching in classrooms and learning. But there's a subset of these technologies that are being designed and deployed in ways that transcend those traditional structures. So not only on demand, but adaptive technologies, learning applications and advising tools that are powered by AI, integrated learning analytics, more intentional focus on intersections among instructional design and UI UX design. And of course, next generation open educational resources that can better support instructional design in deeper learning. So I'd emphasize a couple of points about these technologies. So first, I think that the design of instructional technologies in general needs to be brought into closer dialogue with the learning sciences, especially intersections among cognitive science neuroscience instructional design. I'm especially excited about the work that price is undertaken to promote more effective use of the open stacks resources and better course design. And I'm also excited about new platforms that are being built to facilitate learning in ways that are collaborative, social, and to promote learner engagement. I say also as a dad to two teenagers, I suggest that maybe down the road, we might want to consider whether there's elements of the kind of coordination and collaboration and learning happening in the context of gaming that might be transformed and transposed more effectively into the context because that was how it comes a great relief to many of us. So, second point I'd like to emphasize is that our students and faculty have to be supported in the use of these technologies and to be candid. I'm concerned about the current state of many of our campus teaching centers and our digital learning support groups for facilitating this work within and across our campuses so over the last few years. Some of our provosts and presidents has started to look at these as cost centers and had pulled back their support. And then all of a sudden this last March those same centers went from supporting a few dozen online courses to several thousand online courses, and many of those centers are still scrambling. The second major component I'd recommend is technology enabled facilitated networks, especially to foster and support well trained empowered educators so to illustrate the kind of networks. I have in mind, let me talk a little bit about the on ramps initiative that Daniel mentioned. So that's a dual enrollment program I'd founded when I was at UT Austin and on ramps was designed around facilitated networks of university faculty and high school teachers so the program works like this so your faculty teams at the university lead development of low cost prototype college courses in corresponding high school courses and training materials, working with teams of instructional designers and technologists. And some of that lower cost is achieved by using best in class open educational resources. Then high school teachers affiliate with the university, and they're trained, along with the faculty and technology pedagogy and content so they can teach corresponding high school courses and join networks of other teachers who are connected to and supported by the university based hub, and then high school students simultaneously take faculty led distance education college courses from the university faculty and corresponding high school courses. The high school teachers receive ongoing coaching and support from peers from university faculty and staff and contribute to ongoing improvements as co authors they can even assign the students to create new content. And then finally the course design the content the training materials are refined and scaled and improved based on data and input from across the network so of course finally there is tongue in cheek because the process is never really final. So, in terms of student success and educator engagement, what we've seen is that on ramps courses get far better traction than in our UT mooks and in more conventional dual credit courses so why is that because all of these leverage cutting edge technologies, all of them leverage strong instructional design, but it turns out that the key wasn't really in the technology, or even in the instructional design it was a combination of high touch coaching and support systems that were enabled by a technology stack, which we designed to support respectful engagement among the educators through facilitated networks versus more passive broadcast models or disempowering direct instruction models. Now in Texas, we're increasingly bringing these approaches and insights into other domains in particular at the coordinating board we're standing up major initiatives to strengthen advising from middle school through high school through post secondary education to adult learners. And then we're also standing up another initiative in partnership with institutions teaching support centers to establish a digital learning clearinghouse of assets that can be shared across institutions. We're very excited about the potential of these kinds of efforts to leverage the technology and build our educators pedagogical social capital at scale. Looking further down the road. Also, I do think it's going to be important for us to train and support and promote educators in a way that will enable them to further enlist their students as co authors and co development co developers not only in discrete assignments, but also in the design of their educational pathways we see glimmers of this already but it's mostly happening on the margins. And then the third major component I think it's critical for an efforts and digital learning is going to be educational workforce data. So it's increasingly possible for us to link and analyze and map this detailed data about our students pathways through k 12 and the higher ed into the workforce and bring that data into dialogue with other data like the detailed course level data of the LMS or unstructured data from syllabi and other data about career paths and the skills employers are looking for so we can eliminate what's happening with students within and across institutions and enable us to focus our attention and resources. So right now at the coordinating board we're leading an effort for the governor and in partnership with the workforce commission Texas Education Agency to to stand up a new data infrastructure with modern data modeling visualization analytics. So we can help create new opportunities to drive improvement reduce costs and increase value. These. So these three major components of digital digital learning infrastructure that I'm talking about so the instructional technologies the facilitated networks the data infrastructure. I think are all essential to enable higher education to advance equity at scale far beyond the traditional boundaries of our physical campuses and our institutions traditional conceptions of who they serve versus more familiar notions of who they are. So one especially important way we do this is we can create dynamic platforms for rapid testing research and evaluation improvement across institutions with the ability to operate at far greater speed and scale than was ever possible before. So finally let me just say a couple of things about policy because in addition to providing funding policy provides essential enabling conditions for higher education to be able to be effective and driving student success and upward mobility. So the basic principles is straightforward for new designs and digital learning and higher education to be stable and resilient they're going to have to be designed and built with careful consideration of the context in which we're building. So in particular, I'd argue that this moment requires higher education policy context that effectively are going to create access, encourage cross institutional collaboration, encourage innovation support improvement and facilitate upward mobility. So as as we consider options I think we can take a lot of inspiration but also caution from K 12 policies, but I'd recommend that we, we need to encourage not just our institutional leaders but our policymakers to have serious conversations about the kind of capital investment that's going to be required for this transformation to take hold. Student financing options, regulatory room for us to innovate the policy guardrails that are going to prioritize the return on investment for students and public data publicity about key indicators that as Sharon mentioned in the transparency of data for deeper dives. We're still in the early stages on identifying scaling and improving effective practices so we've started multiple aspects of this work in our state but we're still in the early stages there's a lot of hard work ahead, and we look forward to partnering with institutions university systems and other partners across Texas and beyond, so we can accelerate and increase the impact of this work in closing I just want to say again how much I appreciate this discussion today, and the work you all are doing. We're on the front lines of this work on behalf of your students your institutions, your states, and our nation. So we continue to face unprecedented challenges, and our students and institutions have suffered severe financial shocks but I think all of us in higher education recognized that this isn't a time to try to backfill lost revenue and hunker down. See what grants we can get hope things get back to normal. So now our priority has to be laying foundations and building new kinds of free economic recovery and a better, more just future so committed educators, like, like you all whose ideas and energy will accelerate our path through these incredibly challenging times are essential partners in this work and I think we need to hear new voices, including communities and institutions, employers students whose perspectives haven't always been heard. Thank you again for the voice the work you do. And thank you for including me in the program today I'm looking forward to our conversations.


Imagine Doeshe mustn't catch the cold programmes The early birdie catch us social Friday They say ones like me say when we are busy it is Thanksgiving were not made look what has happened Do you remember all the pictures you took that train Bad manners Isit? For the first time Because it would have been so bad Sii? It started yesterday but no Okay Alright What are we asking in social media Today we are asking Which social media platform do you think has the most influence? Ganyndo kusema. Isit watuwa Twitter? Isit watuwa... Okay, I'm saying it and then my analytics word is coming back. Not something about Twitter. They can support you today and then tomorrow, they'll be against you. The same as politics. And if they support you, they'll have you held you accountable. So if they open a business, the next day they'll be asking you, how is our business moving? If they take you to school, so show us your grades, how are you performing? Okay, alright. So you decided which one is the heaviest TikTok? For now it's TikTok. Okay, alright. But what is Snapchat? What is that? Are you too cool for it? It's either or, are you too cool for it or not? No, my main question is when it is... Excuse. Okay, so that particular platform is for agenda. Do you know what it is? Yes, that's what I can say. Well, men can also be on Snapchat. Men who want to do filters. I think I should keep quiet. Yes, you really should. Because they'll come for you, Bona, they are coming for you. Yes, would you like to introduce our guest? Yes, today... Today we are honored. I mean, we are privileged to have a very special guest. All the way from Nigeria. She's multi-talented. Super talented, beautiful. She has a beautiful accent actually. Masai, can you tell her how he killed Sijuia Lyon guys lives? I've told everyone. Sijuia Lyon. Even if it's Sijuia Lyon. Are you guys at all? Lies. Lies that she was busy being told while you were away. Hi, welcome to Kenya. Thank you for having me. How is it so far? I've loved the place. It's very, very beautiful country. You guys have trees and flowers and everything. It looks really nice. I mean, yeah, of course the flowers. Beautiful people everywhere. Nairobi so far. I just said it, the place is very beautiful. Yeah, you've not tried to afford to have you. No, I haven't. You should, you should. Yeah, I will. For those who are asking, her name is Morave. We have just, the songs that we are playing are her songs. And she's also collaborated with Davido. So the video and that's a huge, for me that's a huge drug. I played it to my friends. Was it on Wednesday? So I was going through the profile, I played the songs to my friends. And then they were like, wait, that's the guy that's coming to your show. We actually dance to this song. So Kenya's all been listening to your music. That's nice. Yes, and it's amazing that you're here. And they can actually even see you in person. Alright, so can I just give her her flowers for what I'm seeing right here. So according to Spotify, you have a brand new EP. That's your debut EP. Yes, Ravi. Negative Magician, What Is Love? High Again, Condo My Baby. I think it's what we have heard. Without Swahili, it's hard a bit. I might have to teach you a couple of words. Okay. So he's played What Is Love, he's played Condo. Yes. You've played it too? Yes. And then now I think the highest one right now at 1,399,000 and is Magician. Really congratulations on that. You have 44.9k monthly listeners. Monthly. How does it feel? It feels good. Like starting from zero to like 44. It feels great. Yes. You're so sweet. Okay. Ah, you're so humble. I would not be humble at all. I would not. Hey. Alright. So I want to ask her where Morave came from but I think I kind of know. But just for the sake of the listeners or the viewers who do not know where Morave came from. Okay. I'm from Nigeria. Viva States, Posh Harcots. Like the state in Nigeria. That's like the same place Bonaboi and Omar Lee is from. That's where I'm from. Viva States. What's it like just out of curiosity? It's like, okay, it's called the Garden City but we don't really have like much gardens like this place anymore. So like we have like different cultures there. Yeah. That's kind of what it's like. Alright. I saw you in London on a particular stage. How was that for me? It feels like 20,000 people performing in London. Coming from like pH where I was like singing just in my bedroom. I like to my family and like maybe to my costmates and like my roommates in school. Then to performing at O2. It's like a dream come true. Oh wow. And you've just started. Yes. This is just a beginning. I just started. Yeah, I did. And she's gonna be on a big stage right here in Nairobi. Yeah. It's called the Raha Festival, right? Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward to actually seeing her perform. Yeah. You'll be front line and center in front. If you see someone screaming out loud. It's you. Remember that Masai? Yeah. Okay. I wanted to give another fun fact about Masai. The leaves, aha. Did you know Masai is actually drink blood? Drink blood over. That is actually very true. Let me specify. Oh. We actually drink the blood. It's part of the culture. Like you drink the raw blood. Yes. Sometimes they cook it. We are a normal tribe. We are Pasareli. So we spend a lot of our time hiding cows. It doesn't like do anything. No, it's actually gives you protein. You know, like that's like kind of vampire kind of vibe.   She's gonna create her mind. I wouldn't say that. You can either take it straight from the cow that's raw. You can mix it with milk and then stir it and drink it. Or you can cook it. I'm not going to do anything. It's just like taking liver. Like liver is different.  You can change it to become meat. How you'd like to tell somebody, I drink blood. I mix it with milk. It's like your drink some money. Thank you. It doesn't, it's not adding up. It's not adding up. I've gotten my match. I tried to be the person with violence. But it seems she's now she's she's matched it. Okay. I'm happy. I'm very very happy today. This is my day, yes. At least we love to let you try some new match on or something. They told me to like try that on guest delay. And now because you're saying it like for the second time. It's like that's what I'm going to try. Yes. They really go to the meat delicacies. They chase meat with meat. It's not even meat for strangers. Anyway, let's continue guys. But try it. Nyama drama. It has to be from a very good reputable place. Yes. Not the one you go for five days and five nights. All right. So before we continue, I want to ask her a question. Yes. So this game, it's a little game. 21 questions. Ready. I don't have the conditions to give me. Let me try this. If you could travel to any year in a time machine. What year would you choose and why? 2020. Why? Because that was like the year my grandmother died. I like to like spend more time with her before she like goes goes. Yes. That's the same year also you went to studio in December, right? Yeah. That was the same year. She motivated me to like live because one day we are all going to leave this place. So. All right. I see you. I see you. That was like the year of lockdown. Yes. It feels so far away 2020. And it's just 2024. Well, 2020 is when I discovered I could work from home. And since then I've never looked back. Well, except here. But generally, yes. But I am at home. This is home. Wow. Okay. Sorry. He really hates it when I say wow. But I see her face even as we are confused. Why? Why? Why? She not the reason. She has been. Excuse me, sir. If you could go back to any year. In any year. He would not go back. I'm not going to like spend a lot of time there. Just like. Come back. Come back. Okay. Another one.  This is business. But what's a bad habit you had you've been able to overcome? Okay. There was a time that I did not like used to hear my alarm ring. I will be like switching it off. No, it's not a click. No, it's to come back again. So I like end, end, end. But now I hear it. And then I wake up. Are you what's a bad habit? I mean I have a lot of bad habits. We just pick one that you had not have. And then I overcome it. I mean I think I used to be too social and trusting to people. Before. You are still social and trusting. Too social and trusting according to stories. And apparently I didn't know that. I just saw me being a nice person. But over time I realized. Wait a minute. I'm losing a lot personally rather than what I'm giving out. So I was able to balance it. Not overcome just balance it. You? No, you don't have bad habits. Wow. You don't have bad habits. I don't think he talks a lot. He's always like. Thank you. Good. Thank you. Look at how he is all looking at him. That's an incorrect statement. I don't know why he's not talking today. I don't know why you're not talking today. But misawa is fine. It's okay. So what's a bad habit I had? Me? I'm hearing about things that are not in my workflow. I have learned to just let go of things. If I cannot control it, it should not upset me. I just see you by peace. Yes, people, situations. I've been very peaceful since. You found inner peace. It feels good. But to make me spiritual. Speaking of spiritual, I have watched in a previous interview.   You pray. You pray on your songs. Has anyone ever kind of questioned you because you know you're not singing gospel but you pray for the lyrics? Yes, something like that. I'm not sad anymore. There's nothing to actually say. I'm doing my job. I feel for me to get anything done. I have to ask the creator of heaven and ex to help me do my job. So you're saying I'm not doing gospel. That's your problem. Man, I'm close to God. So that's on you. I like that. But you actually started in church. So that's transition. Do you still perform in church maybe when you have time? No. Was that phase? It was a phase. I was freestyling. You know in church teenage section where you do different things and you're like is there anybody else to sing for us?  That's how I started. How do you feel when you blew up after Davido DM'd you and I've already watched that you went screaming out of your bedroom. Sorry! Sorry! I didn't mean to go so I know more than I should perhaps maybe. So maybe tell us the story, you tell us the story. It felt like a dream come true. I knew that something was going to happen through social media because every time I dropped a cover on the internet something happens. There was this time I dropped something on WhatsApp somebody took it to Twitter then he blew up there then there was this time on Facebook somebody took it to Instagram so I just knew that something was going to happen soon. I didn't know how. So my friend texted me and said we should make covers of songs then I practiced one particular song that we were going to do. So when I was done with that song we couldn't like use just 24 hours to make only one cover. It's not nice, you have to do a lot of things so we have content to post. So I was practicing Fireboy Bandana. I did not know the lyrics word for word but I knew the song. So I was practicing in the background and I told him to record so that when I'm done I'll use the rehearsal to know what I want to do in the main video. So when we're done the main video wasn't nice I didn't like it. But the other practice was nice. So three weeks later after I finished posting all the ones we thought were good there was nothing else to post. Then he posted the video I wasn't in it I wasn't tagged he was like guess the access. So he blew up on TikTok then he blockhired it to Instagram but from Instagram I think the video like scrolled to the comments and he saw my name then he texted me on Instagram. That's a lovely story. At Skalamiva if you feel like just I used to be a rapper back then. I started rapping that's why I didn't church. I had the mindset that everybody was like I don't like doing whatever that's doing. So everybody was singing come to church there was nobody rapping so I was like I'm going to something different I want to stand out so like rapping and rhyming then I said okay I'm actually a singer. How long ago was that? It's 2020 2010 yes I was about I thought she was going to say when she was still in primary. I was joking around stuff I was playing nobody was serious we're just being children. Another fun fact about my size Oh God Like there's only one type but it's okay it's okay we jump really high jump so that we can see you feel like not me they jump now I'm putting myself out of the question yes we do jump really high you have seen videos of maybe tourism in Kenya and then the massage that jump yes so we can really jump so if ever need someone to jump in your music video I'm the massage to go for thank you for that but they have very colourful dressing he's not wrong yes yes we have that we still keep our culture I don't think he's going to talk I feel like he likes talking about weird facts he's not going to say we have pretty people he's not going to talk about that yes and that's the end of my fun facts for my size man I don't think that's the end he's not even ready well there was one time when you were still in primary school I think I was I don't know if you have a grading system in Nigeria is it classes or grading system like for primary school I was like in year 8 primary school primary one two three four five yeah so in primary I was in class 8 class 8 and in class 7 we went out hunting my hometown is called Kajiadu wait stop us you went hunting in primary school have you all noticed how we went tell the truth let me finish I'm the one who's telling the story so yes we went hunting your parents were aware well I was raised in a rural area okay it's a town but we still had rural neighborhood it was a small town you guys went hunting for like what gazelles and rabbits na gazelle kajiadu yes they are called dik dik they are small gazelles ni kawawa it's a small antelope no repeat the name that's what she was doing so we went hunting and there we had bows and spears you were like how old it's still in primary I was like was it 13 or 12 somewhat I can't really remember we were with some older guys but then a leopard approached us and then we went to run so we saw a leopard so one of the guys who were hunting me was actually they carried you people because there is a white animal to go no white animals are everywhere in Kenya I mean they are in the park but outside there are some areas, the interiors they just roam around freely and at that time it wasn't much developed and we didn't have fences or something like that they really like that they would be friends so one of the guys who we were with was attacked by a leopard he died? no he just got scared but we managed to chase the leopard like 10 girl children chasing more I'm happy for your achievement I know it's not normal it's not like in a mountain where I'm from children don't chase we don't do that that's what I told you I don't even think Grumman do that where I'm from but I'm happy for your culture it's different Wakanda forever are you related to basketball? no I'm not we are looking he's never asked a question it's like here you speak for the first time it was a good day to come to Wakanda it was a very good day I'm feeling like we might be running out of time or we can continue my director is telling me the time is over kindly remind us your social media handles and where guys can stream and listen to your music I have a last question what's your celebrity fashion? Kilani now my name is Morave and Morave is spelled M-O-R-R-A-V-E-Y you can find me on all social platforms Instagram, Twitter, Facebook everywhere please go and stream my EP Rave the EP thank you we are asking you which platform do you think has the most influence in Kenya and we forgot to ask Morave that in Nigeria what platform do you think? I feel like every platform sometimes you like trend on TikTok then you carry it to Instagram then sometimes you like everybody is on Twitter so they take it from Twitter and bring it to Instagram Facebook is like the last people certain people that get information they like get some information like 3Ds after or something so it comes from other media to Instagram now that she's talked about Twitter X, formerly Twitter sorry X, yes formerly Twitter then you have to do this what do you think about the tours that happen on Twitter like Kenya vs Nigeria you know that I am in Nigeria right? one of the best things I love is African, different countries fighting each other we do know it's banter but once we attack as a continent we all go ham it doesn't matter we're just gonna go like Nigeria South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana we're all gonna go and join forces and attack whomever what is happening the biggest scenario is when during the Russia Ukraine and then we had Africans now trying to be evacuated from Ukraine we saw the whole continent going ham and the memes especially in Nigeria memes sometimes we just banter ourselves for fun so we are always ready we're always ready we came prepared I thought we could have a little bit of view I think we met our match we really have what you're gonna do we have an amazing DJ coming right up he goes by the name we're gonna tell you when he comes I'm just saying we're gonna tell you when he comes that's not the name I'm tired of his joke and he explained it to make it worse IG Masekta that's KTA alright


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com. Happy Wednesday, hump day coming at you with 2021 Panini flawless collegiate football pick your team number 26 Second half of the case that we popped open a little bit earlier today right here That's the last collegiate we have for now. So big. Thanks everybody For filling those two breaks up for this current break. No fillers Nice. Thanks everybody Will with that last mod mojo bills Thanks everybody for digging deep and making this break happen. I appreciate it now the first half was pretty solid But someone I think it might have been will who pointed out That we did not see any quarterbacks in that first half. So maybe just maybe we'll find some of those big names Here in this half Use where am I? We're gonna use a few blank cards right here To hide the encase cards. It's not an auto That's an auto That's not an auto. So we've got Gem gem autograph. We'll do this first, right? And we there is a checklist That was in the item description. We're gonna go by that Legacy patches three out of ten deandre swift that goes to Davis and Detroit 25 out of 25 two-color dual relic Cow pits that's for the ATL. That'll be for Paul 10 out of 15 team logo signatures Rakeem Boyd think Rakeem Boyd is in that none Group, but I think he was on the Lions practice squad. Yeah, so we'll send him there We have eight out of 15 Ronald Jones the second TJ's dad Ronald Jones, I think Leonard for net might be injured, right? Is that a Leonard for net injury a long-term injury if so Which is unfortunate, but if so that means Ronald Jones may get some extra looks and that is for Sean Maddock in the 10-bit buccaneers and that's a 2020 flawless collegiate card two out of 15 Diami Brown That is for will and the Washington football team Didn't you have a touchdown the other day was that Antonio Brown two out of five patch and autograph Trey sermon that goes to the Niners. That'll be for will Where there's a will there's a way and of course will knows out of fives and under get the train whistle All aboard the big-head Express Whoop whoop That may be part of that logo right there conference logo, or maybe it's a Bowl patch or something like that It's a good-looking card though With no Elijah Mitchell. He might get some more action to unless he's injured as well Two-color patch an autograph star swatch signatures 19 out of 25 It's the butcher the baker the candlestick maker Baker Mayfield And that is for Oliver and the Cleveland Browns Cleveland. This is for you Nice one Oliver right Peters looking for what an Alvin Camara or a breeze, okay? Maybe one of these gem cards here or the autograph Gem gem auto. I think there's a patch auto too. All right. So on this side these course naturally mined not lab grown We have 14 out of 25 Kenneth Gainwell nice diamond right there for the Eagles Bill Norton picked up the Eagles straight up He's shown some he's shown some moments of He's shown some moments. I feel like the other gem ten out of 15. Oh Joe Namath sapphire At an old-school sapphire right here Joe Namath. How young he looks there that'll be for Will and the Jets and the last one the autograph goes this way I think Trevor Lawrence who called that That's bacon and card saying gonna have a big Trevor Lawrence in this box About five six minutes ago and there he is five out of 25 two-color patch and autograph T-Law Trevor Lawrence and that is will triggers There you go will bought the Jaguar straight up And lands is Trevor Lawrence There you go boys and girls Thanks for watching. Thanks for breaking with us. The case is closed On pick your team 26 keep your eye out for more on jaspercasebrakes.com I'm Joe for jaspercasebrakes.com and I'll see you next time for the next football break. Bye. Bye


All right. First question is from Waiko. Is muscle memory a real thing? Yep. 100%. I think it just seems like it, because it's a weird name, why people question it. How does your muscle actually have memory? It doesn't make sense. It has its own brains in there. Yeah. So if you've ever had a broken arm or leg or sprain that you've had to wear a cast on or a splint for weeks or maybe a month or longer, and then you know when you take it off and you look, we've all experienced this. If you've had a broken leg or arm or whatever, you take the cast off and most people, if they've never seen this before, are shocked when they look at their leg or arm. It's like so skinny, right? The muscle's totally atrophied because you weren't able to move. Yeah. Down regulates. Right. But then when you're starting to rehab and move, you find that the muscle comes back super fast. This is an evolutionary trait. It allows our bodies to kind of get back to where they were before, so we could get back to living our lives. And this is true if you build muscle too. If you train and build muscle and then you lose it, it's much faster to regain it than it was the first time around. Yeah. Do the muscles just shrink down? Obviously, you're not really getting rid of muscle cells. It's just that this is more of a central nervous system thing where then now it responds again and then makes it a priority. Well, wouldn't it be like, isn't it, it's more so like it's a neurological pathway that's been established and been connected very well. And so that still remains the same. The atrophy happens because you're not sending the signal for it to adapt anymore, so then it shrinks down. But then because the pathway has already been established really well, the minute that you decide, hey, I'm going to go back to lifting weights again, it remembers that instead of having to learn that. Like if you've never done a squat, there's a lot of stuff going on a neurological level, the body learning how to communicate in order to perform that. Once you've done that for hundreds, thousands of times, you've now established that pathway. Once you learn to ride a bike, you can ride a bike forever type of deal. You may not have ridden a bike for 10 years, but you get back on, your body remembers how to do that right away. I would think that it's a very similar adaptation process for building muscle, again, is that you've established a pathway, a very strong pathway. Even if you stop lifting weights, sure the muscle atrophies because you're not sending a signal that you need muscle and it's an expensive tissue, so it shrinks or whatever, but then the pathway still is there. That communication has still been established. Yeah, there's a few theories. That probably plays a role. Then the other thing that they've observed is when muscle cells grow or hypertrophy, the number of satellite cells in muscles increases. These satellite cells are important. They play a role in muscle protein synthesis, which is the fancy term for building muscle and recovery. Now, when you shrink that muscle, those satellite cells don't go away. If you increase the number of satellite cells through the first round of building muscle, but then you atrophy muscle, although the muscle fiber gets smaller, those satellite cells stick around, so then when you go and lift weights again, it's primed to respond faster. I mean, no joke, it might have took me years to gain 15 pounds of lean body mass on my frame working out, like years. It might have took me five years of consistent, hard, good training to gain 15 pounds. I could stop working out and lose that 15 pounds in a very short period of time, six months to a year, especially my diet was bad. I'm sure that 15 pounds would be gone. If I started lifting weights again, what took me years before would take me months. I could very easily rebuild that muscle in a very, very short period of time. I remember when I had shoulder surgery, as an adult, I had my AC joint resected a little bit on my left shoulder. I had to wear a brace or a cast or whatever. When I took it off, it was like totally atrophied. My shoulder was atrophied. My arm was atrophied. My pec was atrophied. All the muscles that helped move the arm were totally, totally weak and skinny. I started working out and lifting weights. It literally within a month or a month and a half, all that lost muscle flew back on my body. This is the good news for people who, because I've gotten this from clients, like, oh, if I work out and build muscle and I stop when I lose it, which, yeah, of course you will, but it comes back faster because you gained it the first time. No, this is for all you young lifters that are just getting started or in the first couple years of lifting. This is the exciting part, is it does get easier. It gets much easier as you get older. The more you've been doing this, the longer you've been doing it for, the easier it is to maintain muscle mass or rebuild it. I just had this conversation with Katrina literally yesterday. I was getting out of the shower and she was making a comment about how much my body's changed just in the last two weeks. She goes, it frustrates me sometimes to see how quick you can change. I was explained to her, so you can understand that I barely got her really strength, like programming, strength training, right the last five years. Sure, she was an athlete and she exercised and she did a lot and she was in shape most of her life, but she hasn't been like really strength training until like the last five, six years of our relationship. I said, you've got to know that I've got over 15 years, damn near 20 years of real consistency and some like a lot of hours in the gym of lifting. It was a long grind for that first decade to get to a point, but now that I've gotten to that point and I've gotten all the way up to where I've been 230 pounds and single digit body fat, my body has got used to that. So even when I fall way off, lose all kinds of muscle, it doesn't take very long. If I adjust to a diet, I get back in the gym and start training again, my body remembers it comes right back. Yeah, I was always telling clients this because it gets so frustrated and they're like new to the experience of lifting weights and it's like, you can't be so hard on yourself. You literally, that's all dependent on how long you've been in the gym and training your body and these patterns. So the more like you train your body and these patterns, the more hard wire it is, the more it, the quicker it responds.  That's still a loud signal that all of a sudden gets turned back on. So yeah, when you get to the point where you've put so much work in, now you have to do is maintain that's the ideal place to be.  Oh, it took my whole life to hit 200 pounds. It took forever. Oh, when I was younger, I remember the first, you know, when I was, I was like, I had to fight to stay above 200 pounds and the, anything out, if I was just off with anything, I'd shrink really quick. But now that I've maintained that for so long, it's easy.  I don't have to work out nearly as much or as hard to maintain the muscle that I've built through the years. And there's something called muscle fiber hyperplasia. This probably happens after years and years and years of consistent intense training where muscle fibers actually, you actually increase the number of muscle fibers you have. So although muscle fibers shrink and grow, once you increase the number, the evidence suggests that the number of muscle fibers never goes away. So if you had that muscle hyperplasia going on, and you've been training for a long time, that makes muscle memory even more of a powerful thing. And I've experienced this with clients. I've had old, I've seen old clients who are in their seventies who had a long history of strength training and then stop for decades. And you can still see it. You can still see it. Well, Ben Pacolski, he's an example of this. I mean, we talked about that. That was one of the first things that we theorized with him when we were off air talking. He's like, this dude has literally, he was trying to, trying to lose a hundred pounds of muscle. He was like, literally fasting, not eating hardly anything forever, not weight training for a long time. And he still looks jacked, you know, but that dude has put so much time under the iron for so long. And for sure, he's probably built a bunch more. Oh, you look at my dad, my dad's hands and his forearms, just permanently strong and muscular, just because he's been working with them for, for, since he was a kid. So yeah, the longer you stick with it, the easier it is to maintain, which is, which is great news.


I think one of the excitements as you walk across the Piazza into the British Library building is that you're really walking across the roof of basements full of books and journals, recordings which will only be known about properly if researchers find their knowledge path through those things. It is like a knowledge machine waiting to be turned on. That's what we hope social scientists will do. Find that knowledge path through an immense but fascinating resource. The first thing you can say about the British Library, it is a kind of a library plus. We definitely have faith in the word in the book, but it's a much, much bigger spectrum that you're talking about here. There are some surprising places that social scientists will be interested to find out about in the collections. I'm here today for a social science open day at the British Library for doctoral researchers. I really wanted to get a sense of what the library offers. Social science is so exciting, there's actually a lot to do with it, but it's massive and that's quite daunting as well. There is so much material here and of course that raises real challenges about what you're accessing and how you access that material. But if you think of the British Library rather than being one place but actually a series of different collections, the exciting thing is that we will usually have many different formats which will shed light on a particular subject and it's a question of locating those and then choosing where to focus, but they all inform one another I think. For me, interdisciplinary work, even within the social sciences is also extremely important and kind of the future. I think people are really thinking more and more about how do you use sort of big data sets with political ephemera for instance or trying to mix up the kind of sources that you use to ask new questions. So I think that the British Library is excellent for that and that's what I always encourage researchers to do. The reason why the Library has such kind of a vast and broad collection around UK publishing is legal deposit which is an obligation on all publishers in the UK to deposit one copy of their publication with the British Library. Now that covers mainstream books, academic books and journals, but also stretches out into news both national and local and regional through to the independent and small press. Even people kind of just producing a zine or a comic in their own room. If they're publishing it, if they're making it available then there is an obligation to deposit a copy of the library and we strongly encourage and support people in doing that so that we can make really as broad and as comprehensive a picture of UK publishing as we can. The Sounds website, sounds.bl.uk has a variety of collections presented in curatorial areas from music through to spoken voice material through to wildlife sounds. What's unique about the Library's collections is we have material across all sorts of formats so as somebody who's interested perhaps in the way English language has changed over the last 100 years they're able to access dictionaries, style guides, written descriptions but also sound recordings that were created as part of linguistic surveys that have kind of been documenting that. Can you tell us what you did when you left school? So they couldn't access all that material in one place. The Web Archive attempts to be a snapshot of the UK web space. Once a year we will try to capture something like four to five million websites that we can identify as being UK as well as that we build special collections, collections of news sites, collections on recent referendums and collections. There's material here that you won't now find on the live web but also it gives you the opportunity to look at change over time and that's one thing we've been quite active in terms of working with researchers to understand what their needs are for that and also how we can design kind of analytical engines to help researchers work with that kind of material. The Archives and Manuscripts department is responsible for collections that relate to politics and public life which of course is an enormous area so part of the challenge is defining what politics and public life are in the contemporary period and when we talk about contemporary we're talking about 1950 onwards so we're thinking about that sort of post-war period and what's happened around politics and public life and the sorts of materials that we take in is a huge range because we could be taking in the research papers of significant individuals and all we're also looking at important institutions and organisations which represent something significant about British political and public life in that period. Some of the things that I usually suggest to people when they ask me as a social scientist what are the resources I could use We have good data sets, good databases including censuses from all of the Caribbean and Latin American countries Newspapers are again a very good resource that I would ask social scientists to look at depending on their project Economic historians would find a lot of company records and correspondences related to British investment in the region and again not just historical but definitely mid to late 20th century resources. We see ourselves as a world library, as a library to find out things wherever that may take you in the imagination and in scholarship. You need a collection which has depth going back years. There is no other place like the British Library for doing that than the breadth and depth of the collections that we have.