So I spent a long time thinking about what I wanted to ask Charles I have this Philosopher in front of me and I get to ask him whatever I want He doesn't call himself a philosopher, but he is and I couldn't get away from this topic of metaphysics and how it affects me in my personal life and I had some cacao a little bit ago, and I realized like the deep down reason for why I I Can't get away from that like it's hard for me to even pay attention to the more earthly question sometimes without these being answered at least a little bit and I felt like it was my This like six-year-old in me this like inner child Who was asking these questions all the time of my dad a lot of the times or anybody would listen? Why am I here? Why is mom sick? You know, what do you what do you mean the universe is this big and what have what exists beyond the universe and How does the universe end or if it does end what's beyond it or if it's nothingness? How is that a thing and he was very patient? He would sit with me and answer these questions, which I'm very grateful for but ultimately You know, he didn't have answers to most of these things of course and And a lot of the answers he did have was this is what physics knows at this point You know we we came from the Big Bang and everything is just Randomness running into each other and the universe is expanding and eventually it'll expand so far that it's Cold and everything dies and then it'll Contract and explode again and There's may not be anything beyond it and all this and most of the time people wouldn't entertain these questions And it was like stop over analyzing things. You're super weird But there's like this very deep place in my heart That wants to know why I'm here. I spent like the first 22 years of my life in science Mainly because I wanted to explore the universe on like the most fundamental level possible so I studied chemistry and biochemistry and The answers are bleak the answers are what my dad would tell me about you know Everything is just increasing entropy until there's nothing and I think I I learned to like suppress these questions and To sort of just try to enjoy my experience of life or to try to create my own meaning like well I'm here. Anyway, I may as well make the best of it, but there's like the most core place in me like wants To be connected to something that matters to something bigger and I'm like, I'm never gonna stop asking these questions And there may not be answers, but I at least want to know like what What can be known about why I'm here or why my life matters or What the point is when things get really really really quiet and I'm not in a place of distracting myself with you know the feeling of meaning through my work or my relationships When I get really really quiet and honest, there's like a Spiritual sickness in there. That's like Okay, but I'm not satisfied with any of the answers that I've gotten There's like a disconnection there there's like a very vulnerable little six-year-old in there that Still has no idea You know, there are philosophies that feel better than others but there's like a huge uncertainty and most people Don't really want to go there Or they're just not interested in it. So I have an opportunity here to talk to somebody who's been thinking about this a lot longer than me I don't expect him to have the answers. It's not the all-knowing guru or anything, but he is a delightful nerd Yeah, so this is for six-year-old six-year-old Lauren So Charles you may have noticed I'm often asking you questions about metaphysics and I've noticed you don't always love to answer them So I've been asking myself a lot like why do I really want to know this and why can I not let it go? It's like I crave it deep down And it's because I don't know why I'm here and I don't know what the point is And I'm afraid there isn't a point and I'm afraid of Deluding myself into thinking there's a point when there really isn't or it's actually a different point Like I'm afraid of missing out on the point. I want to be part of a meaningful life meaningful Relationships a meaningful species a meaningful planet a meaningful universe And I want to know like what is actually happening? It's easy to see nihilism or existentialism as making a lot of sense But they do not feel very good And it's easy for me to see why religion would be comforting, but for me it seems contrived Scared to say that Controversial, but it doesn't feel right to me and I can't bring myself to believe it So here I am in a space between stories. I Exited mainstream science The what I see as the religion now that I was indoctrinated into for the first 22 years of my life And I still love science, but I also now see its limitations and see the dogma in it and I've been exploring these agnostic and secular spiritual communities and I feel surrounded by Misinformation disinformation people with agendas People with the answer people with certainty Who think they have it all figured out? people who over-represent their knowledge and understanding of this stuff and people projecting certainty for whatever reason maybe their own deep-down existential fear or You know, maybe for profit. I don't know Although the process of learning and seeking new ideas and new experiences is a total flow state for me It's also Disillusioning to look for so long and find so little and it turns out it takes a pretty special brain To have the patience and talent to even make a half decent attempt. I wrapping your head around this topic of metaphysics So this is me thinking Charles has been thinking about metaphysics the meaning of life how to live a meaningful life For decades longer than me and in a totally different way a way that I don't use my brain To go Myers-Briggs for a second in an INTJ way And he is smart and not guru-y He doesn't think he has the answers or think he's the chosen one and That is why I want his thoughts on these things even though it might feel totally out of his depth and Even if he feels afraid that he might be like dipping his toes into guru territory. It's like There are seven point five billion people on this planet that are flailing about in all kinds of ways Because they don't know why they're here and they don't know if anything matters and they don't know if they matter it feels like this is such a core sickness that most people share and Maybe not everyone will want this huge abstract topic addressed directly But enough people will this subject metaphysics is that the tippy top of everything and Not that many people can reach the tippy top or even try or even find it interesting And here we have Charles Who's probably been thinking about this his entire life? I would guess and Yes, many of these questions. Maybe all of them are ultimately unanswerable but there's some wisdom and knowledge in there and Even just like a lay of the land would be incredible To me, this is like the most transcendent level of Like a radicalization of love and to use Myers-Briggs language again I can tell you like the less than ten percent of people that lead with an intuitive cognitive function Are going to want to go to this information first so badly that they will never stop asking you about it and Almost nobody serves that population well, so I don't expect you to have the answer to you. What's the point? Why am I here? What's actually happening? I Mean these are ancient questions But it would be really great to have somebody Who's been thinking about this a long time who's thinking I respect and Constantly in line with in some deep and eerie way Who's on a similar quest to drop some wisdom and Knowing all that My main question is What would you say to somebody like me? Because I think there's a lot of people in this situation If not, I am verbatim Yeah, I was great Yeah, I really appreciate this inquiry and the invitation to speak on these things The first thing that comes to mind though is Maybe my favorite saying from the Dao the jing I like to say it in Chinese just because it has such a beautiful Poetics Literally means and you've heard it before Those who know do not say and those who say do not know and it's not because those who know are Holding back on saying it's that Translated into words it becomes something other than the truth Because this inquiry is Highly personal it's not to say that there isn't an answer That might might come to you in in through your inquiry and through your processes of life But that answer Translated into words may not be the answer for another person and the answer has to Grow from within rather than being Placed from without And that doesn't mean that that coming across Spiritual teachings metaphysical teachings that that's not useful, but those have to be met with an inner development and the particular Words or teachings that meet at the inner development are are personal so somebody Who is in the role of a spiritual teacher or guru or something like that which as Lauren said isn't me But someone who is in that role will know when and how to meet the Germanating Inquiry and processes of another person with the right words for that person And so really what I would start by saying is that this is The right question and the value of the question. Why am I here? Doesn't depend on it achieving an answer, but it drives a life process and one thing I really appreciate about about some of the things that Lauren was saying is is that She's not satisfied with a false answer and is staying with the question and That's really all that's required is to stay with the question And I would also say that it's a dangerous question in a certain sense because it opens the floodgates to a lot of A lot of you could say different energies Different inheritances that we have from our culture the floodgates it opens up the floodgates to to despair to the Esoteric teachings of the religion that Lauren referred to the religion of science You could look at and and it goes to a very very dark place. You could look at science as a mystery school Where there are different levels of initiation there's kind of the popular version and then there's the Levels that are only available to high initiates those who have studied mathematics for example those who have studied physics and And and they're able to get more than just the Popularized version they're able to really understand what is meant by a universe composed of atoms and void a universe composed of of pure information or a Universe devolving toward entropy and to grasp the horrifying enormity of that concept so That's what can come in Through this inquiry, and I think a lot of people instinctively don't want to really go there and And just to live lives that are oblivious to the horrifying esoteric teachings of our Our religion the religion of science so I'll just say that that that religion is Today crumbling on its on its own merits that even from a purely rational logical place it has inconsistencies and limitations and incongruence with observed reality it can be maintained by Ignoring those inconsistencies and incongruities and if we're doing that if we're maintaining it in that way With this secret voice saying, you know, it's true But really what is true is not that we know that it's true What's true is that we're afraid that it's true and so to recognize that What is masquerading as reason is actually fear? It's fear masquerading as reason that we're afraid that it's true, but it's On an observe on like an observational level and on a logical level There's really no good reason to accept the truth of this particular Religion the the teachings of this particular mystery school over some other ones But these teachings are in alignment with the whole culture So you'll notice I have not given any answers to what is the point of life Why am I here? But maybe I'll say that The reason for life is life The reason for life is to make more life. The reason for life is to bring More life into all that is to make the universe more and more and more alive that life is unfolding into greater and greater livingness and That the point is to be and this is just one way to look at things but it could expand to an awful lot the point is to be part of the livingness and And the increasing livingness of life and this it goes opposite to sort of go into a scientific Frame, this is the opposite of the teaching of entropy which says the universe is essentially winding down toward heat death Where are the where everything is just one uniform? Black body at whatever four degrees Kelvin or something like that spread over the entire universe That's that's the end of things and maybe there'll be a big crunch after the after this is all said and done But you know depending on which theory you subscribe to or which which interpretation of data you subscribe to Maybe it'll just keep expanding forever until it's this diffuse amorphous Uniform mass of particles, so that's that's what that The story of science the religion of science has taught us The universe is winding down but What we've been learning for the last 50 years through complexity theory through cybernetics through nonlinear dynamics is that Systems that are Through which energy is moving Where there's a flux of energy tend toward greater and greater and greater complexity So if you look at the universe as a flux of energy, then you see that That this complexity and life is a stage It's the name that we give to a certain stage of this complexity It's it's increasing Along an arrow of time It's the opposite of what the mystery school has told us In other words that the nature of reality is to is toward life To become more and more alive to become more and more complex and we can see this in the history of the earth like conventional like near Darwinian biology essentially thinks that Life is an accident. There was by chance a replicating molecule that Began to repute began to reproduce itself and then it mutated and more efficient reproducing versions developed and then some of them Built protein coats around themselves and lipid membranes about around themselves and it's all but and got more and more complicated better and better at reproducing themselves, but that's the fundamental driver of everything a chemical accident and What we're seeing or I guess this is maybe a suggestion that I take from Complexity theory is that this is a universal process that happens in any sufficiently complex system with nonlinear feedbacks That light that the that that the universe and reality is pregnant with life life always wanting to burst forth and and can only be suppressed with great effort actually so So I'm seeing then this this incomprehensible incomprehensibly vast exfoliation of order from the unicellular level to the multicellular to the level of of humans and and ecosystems and societies and civilizations and and you know, these are just Maybe a few of the early steps toward the universe coming alive We don't actually understand how alive the universe is the dominant cosmological models today are all based on gravitation Which is pretty darn linear. I mean you can calculate things very very precisely by integrating all of the different gravitational components whereas the Minority view of cosmology, which is based on Electromagnetism and plasma physics is highly nonlinear And if you look at a map of the universe through the lens of plasma You get all these structures if you look at the Sun through the through the electromagnetic lens You see all these incredibly complicated structures or I would actually say complex structures And the whole thing looks alive Like you have the feeling that you're looking at this living thing that Only becomes available that view only becomes available when you look for it so the Alienated self in a universe of atoms and void that grinds along mechanically toward heat death That is a myth. It's a story. It is one way of looking at things and that way of looking at things corresponds to a state of being that is an evolutionary stage in human development it is An expression of the course of separation as I call it It is the quintessence of separation So separate Excuse me so separate we are that that that we deny the livingness of the universe itself and our part in it And I think that in order to move past this particular level of development it needs to be Inhabited in all of its fullness and that's where the last few generations have gone. It's it's to the full grokking of this metaphysical teaching this which goes along with a state of being a profound existential alienation from the universe where you are nothing but a Biochemical accident a fuzz of biochemistry whirling along and Living out your life until you're snuffed out at the end and that's it and I'm not gonna Disprove that it is a full-on state of being and there really is no disproof possible because no matter what evidence you're offered Even if you've you know had communications from deceased relatives where you've had experiences that just Do not fit into that World view you can still dismiss them you can They don't they don't meet That state of being on its own terms necessarily they only meet the intellectual layer of that state of being what meets it on its own terms are experiences like you know having a near-death experience maybe or a Religious spiritual mystical experience or a psychedelic experience And they they just invalidate the entire like you've moved on and once you've moved on on on that deeper level then Alternative cosmologies become very Attractive and common sense so Yeah, and then maybe that's why in In what why the sage that lousy speaks of Does not say even though he knows because maybe he recognizes that this process this full inhabiting of that state of being needs to ripen to its bursting point until it's ready to move on to something else and I think that this ripening has happened on a collective level and that Um Many of us are really done with it No longer need to be there It is a couple hundred years old. My favorite formulation of it was Bertrand Russell, you know, and he this is hundreds some years ago that he said that um Basically, he said, you know, we cannot deny we cannot reasonably deny that the universe is nothing but a Relocation of atoms bouncing around according to mathematical forces. We can't deny that and so he said any philosophy any authentic honest philosophy any It must be built on a firm foundation of unyielding despair That's what he said Only that will be a sound foundation For for constructing a habitation for the human soul Pretty bleak But he was like Lauren. He was like I'm not going to accept any comforting delusionary substitutes for the truth and that was I mean this was before before the scientific underpinnings of that worldview began to crumble this before quantum mechanics before chaos theory And Yeah, those are the two main pillars of the religion the metaphysics of science That are in fact no longer scientifically current So, yeah, we're we're still working through the legacy trauma of that worldview and I think it echoes with other experiences of alienation and despair that our culture visits upon us It's the distillation of all of those So, yeah, I mean I could you know like so I can offer this alternative scenario of an unfolding of life and and a universe coming alive and us being part of that coming alive and And even us being a holographic map of this unfolding And it may offer a little comfort if it doesn't touch the core wound that magnetizes the story of the dead mechanical universe to it and I would also say that Alongside the fear that that's true there's also a Like you never fully succumb to it. There's always a intimation of a larger world story A larger reality what I'm offering here is a real a world story that includes the story of separation The that that Lauren's spoke of the the Entropy the heat death of the universe the meaninglessness all that It includes that inside of a larger story. It says yeah, that is a phase of human development a phase of civilization a phase of consciousness and A necessary phase but just a phase. So I'm I'm offering an inclusion of that into a larger story But that will be of scant solace if That phase has not fully reached its maturity So but I will point then also like what carries us through that phase is the intimation of a larger reality A spark of knowledge that that isn't all there is to it and that Can stay alive even when the mind completely rejects it when the mind fully accepts the um Biomechanical machine in a dead solace universe story And you can feel the presence of that inside of you alongside the fear um Yeah, that's I guess that's what I would say initially You know one reason I'm hesitant to to go into metaphysics I mean one for one thing. I don't want to over over represent my knowledge what I've said Fits it's logically coherent to me. And so it has an aesthetic appeal But I don't know it um I tend to be oriented toward beauty and if something is elegant and beautiful and coherent I want to try it out But that that fear lives in me too the fear of come on charles. You know that this is just an illusion that in the end you're just Yourself a collocation of atoms with the illusion of consciousness Denying that until you get snuffed out too and I guess my my my practice is to recognize that as a state of being and a story and to be willing and and and open to To experiences that prove that wrong it is a bit of a familiar abode and Be careful what you wish for because what does it call you into If you are here indeed to serve life to be life What ways of you habituated To the story that we grew up in So there's a lot a lot here um you gotta You know in order to maintain the story of separation you got to dismiss a lot of stuff Your sense of humor you got to dismiss that as some kind of You know cynically putting a Cheerful cover on something but you can't say that that humor comes from a deep knowing that This is all some kind of game um Like you have to rewrite a lot of things you have to interpret a lot of things to fit that narrative And at some point you start asking well, why am I so intent on conforming everything to this narrative? Why am I so intent on writing off every spiritual experience that that I have or if I don't maybe I don't have any But the people are telling me about left and right. Oh, they must just be diluting themselves Like this is a kind of separation too to reject the reports of other people To write off people who are not living in that story As being you know subject to some kind of delusion because I know better than them that I would be suspicious Of that. Do you really know better than them? Do you know that you know? Why are you so sure? All right. Yeah, I hope that was helpful Lauren Yeah, why don't I go into more detail or Yeah, I might have missed some things Yeah, if you want to move the chair over near the camera too, that might be helpful They don't want me too because then you might look at you Oh, all right You could sit right behind the camera. Yeah, you can sit right behind it Like even closer than last night. Yeah, right behind it. Yeah I'll say one more thing about this question. Why am I here? What's the point? Uh, not everybody needs to ask that question What's important is not to ask that question. What's important is not to deny that question when it comes up and wants you to ask it once it comes up once you've reached that that phase where it's coming up and depending on your circumstances your lineage your your psychic constitution it could come up at age five or six it could come up At adolescence very commonly could come up in middle age Could come up on through the dying process But when it does come up it can be denied only at great cost to your soul so You don't need to rush into that question as Lauren was saying maybe 90 of the people are not that interested in such metaphysical questions but if it's up for you then It's important to to accept that question to to let it in and to let it work you That's what it really does is it works you It won't let you go And and you can pretend I mean you can and this is what what Lauren was wary of you know to to somehow quell it to offer it a booby prize a compensation um You know a a sop To make it go away to deny it you can only deny it once it's up for you You can only deny it by walling off part of yourself and living partially so once it's up like yeah, I really do invite you to To let it in Hi everybody, Charles here again half a year after the initial recording. Hopefully half a year wiser as well So in this second stage of the course production, I looked at session one and I was like wow, this is really abstract I'm speaking really slow. It's super heady. This isn't good enough And I said maybe we should even re-record it, you know take it out and more and was like but this is my favorite part so So thinking about that I I decided yeah There's a lot of great material there and it would really benefit by being made more concrete Um and more applicable to life to give you something to talk about also So I want to address Maybe three or four of the topics that I touched on in The first session the first of them this It kind of came across as an answer to the question Why am I here or what is the purpose of life? The idea that the purpose of life is to create more life that or in other words the purpose of life is life That I described this movement of the universe toward being more and more alive I don't mean this as the answer. I mean it as an alternative to the story of the world that lauren was talking about that I grew up in that explicitly or not said the purpose of life It's either nothing there is no purpose purpose is just our projection onto the world. It's our imagination It's our desperate attempt to make meaning where there is no meaning Or it said the purpose of life is to maximize reproductive self-interest Encoded by our genes and what I'm saying is that is a story Another story is that the purpose of life is to be alive to become more and more alive and the purpose of a life Your life is to contribute to this Unfolding of aliveness in the universe the same as Is true of any living being in an ecosystem? They don't just survive and reproduce, but they contribute to the livingness of something bigger than themselves So the human being is rather rather new on this planet And so our particular contribution to the unfolding of life Is different than other organisms on this planet or to the unfolding of complexity So I'm not restricting life simply to what we call biological organisms And I'm not saying that who you are I mean we're talking about why you're here Another question is who are you and that is a completely Well, it's a related topic, but it's another topic that maybe we'll touch on later I mean really only two answers make sense ultimately to who are you Nothing or everything But we'll visit that another time right now and we're talking about why are you here so So to contribute to life not just biological life as I was saying but also To something like the organism of a society the organism of a civilization or what the planet is becoming when you add the Levels of human interaction and complexity onto the biological levels And this does not so i'm not saying okay all you are Is this biological organism what we define as life what you learned life is in science class Later in the course we talk about questions like you know is a rock conscious So we're really expanding what we mean by life here. So i'm not saying That all you are is just what Science class told you reducible to protons neutrons and electrons to 92 elements to biochemistry to Electrical impulses in the meat machine of your brain. I'm not saying that The unfolding of complexity extends to realms that are pretty much off the map In terms of conventional science in terms of what we know how to measure today So they might include subtle energies Or patterns of patterns meta patterns that have an aliveness that is Not completely independent of the substrate on which they operate but that are a separate Or an additional living thing. So i'm not trying to reduce Provide a reductionist answer here So anything else about that? Yeah I'll say that what a contribution to life is for a person Depends on the context that that you're in That the context that we are in in this time is rapidly changing I speak a lot about the story that we live in the story of separation the discrete and separate self in a universe of other And and that story actually was a driver of What I call the ascent of humanity the unfolding of complex societies division of labor specialization technology all the things that we associate good and bad with civilization were in some sense Driven by or co-evolved with the With the idea of separation and with the identity of separation So that served the unfolding of life for a while, but today it does not today that story serves Death on this planet the reduction of complexity the killing of ecosystems The conversion of forests into tree plantations the fishing out of the oceans That story is no longer a In service to the unfolding of life and so when our life energy and this kind of goes to to It helps me at least understand My resistance my lifelong resistance to full participation in the program that I was offered My life my my deep innate Um impulse and intuition About here's what I'm here for and here's what I'm not and this doesn't feel right. It comes down to What what I've been offered not really being in service to life So this might be a practical It might be even an orienting question that you could use In informing your choices Is this in service to life? And if something is repellent to you Is that because it's not serving life? and I'm not all I'm also not saying that This choice is always obviously altruistic Serving your own healing might be a really important step right now in this phase of your development in serving life Serving your psychological healing your physical healing your recovery from trauma That there might be a phase of that that looks very inward But that actually is preparing you to Move beyond the patterning and the roles that correspond to that wounded state of being So Yeah, please allow the Service to life This this concept of I am life Therefore I like all life am here to make the whole world more alive Let that try that on and let that color your perceptions for a while and and see how that idea works on you Okay, the second thing It's related It's the the idea that this Story this whole metaphysics that we were Born into that is embedded in science That I grew up in that lauren is speaking about that her father told her about When he tried to answer her deep questions Well, you know, his go to was here's what science says that this isn't just an intellectual edifice But it is also a state of being and you can feel You can actually here's a way. We'll do a little experiment here to Notice the state of being that co resonates with that ideology of A dead material universe a biochemical accident. That's you Like what is the state of being? How does it feel to inhabit that story today? And once maybe felt different it once might have been a very liberating story from rigid religious orthodoxy Science this these ideas were once like astonishing. They were liberatory But today they they feel very different so imagine That you have a mind-blowing mystical experience And you're you have I hear stories like this sometimes like in this intense telepathic Relationship with somebody and everything they're thinking you're thinking it too And and then you you confirm it by saying were you just thinking of that and they're like, yeah And and it's just this incredible thing Wow, what does that open up to you?  That's all Or your experience of communion with god. Oh, yeah, there's a center in your brain that is responsible for Orienting you in external reality and defining your boundaries and when that malfunctions you have a sense of universal oneness That's all that happened.  Don't you feel a kind of a deflation? and that leads me to a third thing here Of what are we afraid of? And what is the comfort of staying in the world And the identity that goes along with it and that whole state of being what's the comfort in staying there? And what becomes possible when we step out of that what?  For me, it's almost scary. What happens when I truly believe and I really occupy the place of I am a holographic Map of everything in the universe or everything on this planet And that what I do to the world somehow comes back to me In some way in some form Not necessarily as a direct consequence but But anything I put out there Any violence I cause Maybe it doesn't mean that someone's going to be violent to me But maybe any violence I do externally corresponds to an inner violence That shuts down kills some part of myself and my experience of life becomes that much less alive Like that kind of logic what happens if I if I really accept that and have the faith and trust in that? Who do I become then? So these are questions that I'd like you to explore As I as I raise these topics Okay, so I'll add one more thing to all of this Even though I thought ah, it's just like too much sciencey stuff for one session, but Lauren again encouraged me to go with it So the this question is well, okay What does it look like for the universe to become more and more alive? and and maybe one way to see it is to take the initial transition from A unicellular life to multicellular life like the cells are just as alive Maybe no more no less than they ever were but there's a new aliveness that comes through their their They're coming together and then the another level of aliveness is the interactions of Of the whole community of unicellular and multicellular organisms into an ecosystem And and so to understand that the ecosystem is alive too I mean, this was this is actually really new for science to even recognize that ecosystems that forests that soil These are alive. These are living beings not just conglomerates Of living beings, but they in themselves are alive and then we can take it to even another level of the Of human culture which has all of these the same kinds of feedback mechanisms and nonlinear relationships that a living being does Incredible complexity the way that an economy works the way that a society works So that's a new level of aliveness that humans have brought to the world and you could debate whether is that really different and how is it different from the aliveness of soil but still it's another Another unfolding of complexity of livingness and so here we are Many people think that we're kind of at a critical juncture in the Coming of age of the transition of humanity to a true organism Rather than kind of a bunch of competing cells that are kind of still learning how to work together This might be the transition that's in front of us to really become an organism, you know in your body Your cells are not selfish.  They're getting supplied all the time with glucose And they are in turn they completely are in service to the rest of the body They are not in scarcity Humans in relationship to each other in this meta organism called a civilization or a society We haven't quite gotten to that yet. Maybe actually you could say that indigenous people hunter-gatherers Traditional people did Do that, but that was on a much smaller scale on a on a vast scale of billions of people That has not happened yet. So perhaps Our service to life or part of it or for many of us it could be Serving the coherence of all of humanity into a Meta organism that is as well functioning and as as a Biological organism multicellular organism is so that's the kind of speculation I would I would take that in And then what's after that? it is endless level after level after level


In this video, I'm going to show you how to create high quality feedback forms in Zoom using the new advanced poll features. Let's dive right into it. If you don't know how the advanced poll feature works, make sure to check out my earlier video. Link is in the description. When you are in a Toastmaster meeting that is conducted online, one of the challenges is to get audience feedback for your speakers. What if we could launch a feedback form like this? Wouldn't that be amazing? Let me show you how to do it. Start by going to your Zoom account and schedule a new meeting. Click on Meetings, Scheduler Meeting and enter the details of your meeting. Choose the date, time and the duration and click on the Save button. Scroll down till you find this option, Polls and Quizzes and click on the Create button. You should be presented with two options, Polls and Advanced Polls and Quizzing. If you don't get this, go back to my previous video. Click on Advanced Polls and Quizzing. Start by giving a title to your poll. Let's call it feedback for speaker number one. For the first question, we could ask the audience to rate the overall performance of the speaker. For such type of questions, the right choice is what we call a Rating Scale which is here. Frame your question accordingly. How would you rate the overall performance of the speech? And we will ask the audience to rate it from 0 to 10. We can change the labels to represent the low scores and the high scores. Rather than using negative terms, let's use Toastmaster terms. So a low score would represent developing and a high score would mean exemplary. Let's make it a mandatory option. One of the cool things we can do with Advanced Polls is to add images. Click on the three buttons and select Upload Image. Navigate to the folder that has the images. In this case, let's say I want to choose an image of our speaker and there we have our first question. For our second question, I want to evaluate the speaker on different speaking criteria as defined by Toastmasters such as clarity, vocal variety, eye contact and so forth. Let me copy the same criteria in my feedback form. I will choose the question type as Rank Order and phrase the question. How would you rate the speaker on the following criteria? Let me enter all the criteria on the left hand side starting with clarity, vocal variety, eye contact, gestures, audience awareness. Click on Add row to add more rows. Let me add comfort level and finally interest. For the columns, let's use the same terminology as Toastmasters. One means developing, two emerging, three accomplished, four excels and five exemplary. Let's make that also as a required field. We can also create text boxes where audience can enter their feedback as free text. Let's create two text boxes. One to highlight things that the speaker has done really well and one to indicate some areas of improvement. Click on Add question. Choose long answer from this list and phrase your question. For example, what did the speaker do really well? You can change the length of the text box from 200 to a higher number, let's say 500. We will keep this field optional. If the audience wants to enter something, they will. If they don't want, they can leave it blank. Add one more question. This will also be a long answer. Let's phrase the question. For example, what are areas of improvement for the speaker? Let's also keep it to 500 characters. That should be enough. Also not mandatory. Let's leave it optional. That completes the feedback form for the speaker. Click on the Save button. If you have more than one speaker for the meeting, it's very easy to duplicate the poll. Click on these three buttons and select duplicate poll. Now we have two polls. All I have to do is change the name of the speaker and the photo. Click on the Edit button, change the title of the poll and click here and upload the relevant photo of that speaker and your second feedback form is done. Click Save. If you have more than two speakers, do the same thing. Click on the three dots, duplicate the poll and change the name of the poll and the photo. Of course, you don't want to do this process for every meeting as it can be time consuming. But there is a solution for that too. Pull up and save this meeting as a template. Click on Save as template, give a name for your template and Save as template. The next time you want to create a meeting with all of these feedback forms ready made, all you have to do is when you schedule a meeting, click on Meetings, choose Meeting Templates and select this template that you have just created. And when you use this template, all of the feedback forms will be already there. All you have to do is go and change the speaker name and their photo. The last part is how to share this feedback with the speakers. That's very easy. Once the meeting is over, come to your Zoom account and head over to Account Management and choose Reports. Select the option Meeting and there is an option here called Poll Report. Choose the date of your meeting and click on the search button. And once you identify your meeting, you can click on the Generate button. This will generate an Excel file for you which you can click on the download button here. And this will create a CSV file that you can easily open in Excel. The Excel file contains everything that is captured in the feedback forms. All you have to do is copy and email that feedback to the speakers. And that my friends is how you can get amazing quality feedback for your speakers in your next Zoom meeting. Give it a try.


Ukraine's defense forces eliminated about 361,500 Russian invaders between February 24, 2022 and January 3, 2024, including 680 in the past day alone, the general staff of the armed forces of Ukraine said this in a post on Facebook. In addition, Ukraine's defense forces destroyed 5,990 enemy tanks, 11,107 armored fighting vehicles, 8,546 artillery systems, 945 multiple rocket launchers, 629 anti-aircraft warfare systems, 329 warplanes, 324 helicopters, 6,748 tactical unmanned aerial systems, 1,783 cruise missiles, 23 warships slash cutters, one submarine, 11,391 trucks and fuel tankers, and 1,298 pieces of special equipment.It's no secret that Moscow's new strategy is to outlast Kiev to win a war of attrition. But the Russians can't win a war of attrition if they continue to lose many more vehicles and troops than the Ukrainians lose. In that context, the battle for Avdeevka has been a disaster for Russia. The Kremlin drafted 300,000 fresh troops this year but, amid protests and labor shortages, hasn't yet begun a second mobilization.