That whoever believes in him should not pay much but have eternal life. Well, good morning, radiant church. How's everybody doing? Christmas, you guys ready? Raise your hand if you are completely 100% ready, everything all set to go. Raise your hand if you're needing reindeer games and Christmas miracles to get it all done. Okay, we're praying for you. We hope that you have an amazing Christmas. How many of you are gonna be here tomorrow for one of our Christmas Eve services? Raise your hand. It is going to be beautiful and phenomenal, both here and at our Portage Campus as well. And so we really encourage you bring somebody and don't come to the 530 service because it's probably gonna be standing room only. So that might make you wanna come to it here at the Richland Campus or the four o'clock over at Portage, but we've got lots of different options and it's just gonna, it's our favorite service of the year and so we're looking really forward to it. If you have your Bibles, open it with me to John chapter three. John chapter three, this is part seven and it is the final part of our series entitled 316. As we have spent the last several weeks, if you're new, kind of going through John 316, the most famous scripture out of the New Testament of all time and we've been taking it almost word for word, at least phrase by phrase idea for idea for the last several weeks, because there's so much in this verse to mine out that will strengthen us and build us up and there's so much that we miss if we just kind of give it a cursory read, if we just kind of read it on the surface and kind of skim over it, we're gonna miss everything about the gospel. The entirety of the gospel is encapsulated in this one verse and so every week we've started by saying this verse together out loud together, so we're gonna put it up on the screens. Let's all say it together one last time. Ready, begin.  Hopefully you've got it memorized by now and the last portion of that verse says this. It says, if we believe should not perish but have eternal life. And so the title of the message this weekend is shall not perish, because that's what Jesus came. That's the gift of Jesus. Jesus came as the savior of the world to give us eternal life so that we should not perish or will not perish. The word perish is very interesting. It doesn't just mean kind of fade away. It means to be destroyed. It means to be overwhelmed and to die. And when the Bible is talking about perishing it's talking about spiritual death. The gift of Christmas, the gift of Jesus was given so that you and I would not perish in our sins but that we could experience eternal life and that's why Jesus came. Jesus came as the savior of the world and the greatest gift that was given was the gift of eternal life. It's important that we understand what the gift is really all about because if we get the idea or we misunderstand what the gift is all about then we won't understand what Christmas is about and we definitely won't understand what the cross and what the resurrection of Jesus are all about. How many of you have ever gotten a gift from somebody that totally just blew your mind? You didn't see it coming. You went to an office party. The spending limit was $25 and somebody bought you an iPod. How many have ever experienced one of those moments? Or just had somebody that you loved just give you a gift that just kind of blew your mind. Anybody gotten one of those type of gifts?  You know, that was kind of my era. I don't know what they are now, PS4s or whatever but you didn't see it coming and then you open it and it's like, it's a little red ranger BB gun, you know.  You know, one of those things. So you got one of those gifts.  Anybody ever gotten one of those? Brute cologne from Walgreens.  I'll never wear this. It's wonderful. Thank you. It's exactly the opposite of what I like. Thank you. Or have you ever gotten a gift that the person forgot you gave them the year before and they re-gifted it back to you the next year? Anybody got one of those gifts? See, gifts say a lot about value. Gifts say a lot about value when we, you know, what does a gift card say to somebody? It's kind of like, hey, forgot to buy you something. Merry Christmas. No, maybe not. Maybe it's a really great gift card and I'm not a hater of gift cards because sometimes you just don't know what somebody wants and so you just kind of know the store or whatever. But, you know, sometimes you can receive a gift that's just kind of like, ah, okay, I'm not high on your priority list. Other times you get a gift that just blows your mind and it just expresses amazing love. What does Christmas express to us? It expresses the value that the Father had for us. God so loved the world that He gave and He didn't just give any gift, He gave His Son. He gave His Son the perfect atoning sacrifice, Jesus, the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world. God who stepped into history, took on humanity, died for our sins to change our eternity, our eternal destination. I mean, amazing love.  All you have to do is remember child in a manger. It was not just any child, it was God. Now, listen, being human is a pretty good gig if you can get it. It's better than all the other options.      Shepherds come to behold this sight. That's what Christmas is. That's the length that God went to demonstrate to you his great love. And the gift that he gave was not just his son, it is the reason why his son came and the reason why Jesus came was so that you and I could receive eternal life. What does that mean? It means Jesus came as the savior of the world. 1 John chapter four, verse 14 says, this we have seen, this we testified to, that the father sent the son into the world to be the savior of the world. Savior, unto you this day is born a savior. Jesus is a savior. Well, what does a savior do? A savior brings and gives salvation. It changes our destinies. It rearranges the access of power in our life. Our relationship with God, it changes everything. It rescues, it saves that which was lost. And if, honestly, if you go and you read the rest of John chapter three, we've read 316, but 317 says, God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Jesus came to save us. So the gift is not just Jesus, but it was the reason why Jesus came, which was to save us in order to give us eternal life. A lot of different people have a lot of different ideas of what salvation looks like and whatever you think salvation is. Salvation meaning change us, fix us, fix our broken world is the answer to the problem, the solution to the issues in our world today. We'll determine how you view salvation. If we're gonna figure out, if we're gonna know today what Jesus came to give us and what it really means to be saved, then we also have to understand what Jesus did not come to give us. Because sometimes we project our ideas of what salvation is and write relationship with God onto Jesus. But let me give you five things this morning that Jesus did not come to give us. Number one is Jesus did not come to give us therapeutic moralism. You may say, well, what in the world's that? Therapeutic moralism is actually a term that's talking about the primary viewpoint, religious spiritual viewpoint that people in American culture today have. When you ask them, do you believe in Jesus? Oh yeah, I believe in Jesus. Do you believe in God? Oh yeah, I believe in God. But then from there it takes a hard left turn because of our view of salvation. Here's what most people, when we're talking about therapeutic moralism, believe. It's got five tenets to it.  When they think about Jesus, they think about God, they think about salvation, this is what they think. It might be, you might even think like this. But here's the five things. They start off pretty good. Number one is therapeutic moralism says that God exists and he created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth. Okay, check, we can check the box. That's pretty good, right? Okay, there's a God who created everything, he ordered everything and he watches over it. But it begins to go downhill from there. Number two, therapeutic moralism believes that God wants people to be good and nice and fair to each other as taught in the Bible and by all other world religions. Okay, well that's not bad because we wanna be kind to one another. That's pretty good. Fair, we're all for justice. And yeah, there's some universal things kind of across the board where we should all love one another. Okay, so, but number three is where it goes badly wrong because the third tenant of therapeutic moralism, which is the predominant American culture of spirituality says this, the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about yourself. The goal of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself. Don't shout me down, okay. Number four, God does not need to be particularly involved in a person's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. See where this is going? In lastly, number five is all good people go to heaven when they die. That's therapeutic moralism. So there's a God, he created everything, he ordered everything, he wants us to be nice, wants us to be good people. What he really wants us to focus on is just doing whatever makes us happy. And if we have issues, call him. And if we're good when we die, we go to heaven. This is a predominant view of how people view God, Jesus, the Bible, spirituality, their own life and the need of salvation.  He was God's gift and he came to just kind of give us a connection with God but now we take it from there. Jesus did not come to give us therapeutic moralism. Number two, you ready for it? Second thing Jesus did not come to give us is behavior modification, behavior modification, change. Jesus did not come to just be a moral example of how to live better. He did not come to motivate us and demonstrate, hey, you can change your behavior. He didn't come for that. Behavior modification is a failed theory. How do I know? Because I still eat chips and salsa after 8 p.m. Even though I have resolved over and over and over, I'm not gonna do that anymore. I wake up in the morning, I eat oatmeal, I'm like, good, healthy, all right. Lunch, have a nice salad, some protein there, void all the carbs, I'm doing really good. Have a piece of string cheese at five o'clock in the afternoon, cup of coffee, I'm like, good, 8 p.m. Those chips and salsa are calling me.     At 8.02 p.m., I am in the cabinet going just one more night with the frogs. Just one more night, Lord, with the chips. And I'm eating them and feeling guilty. Anybody ever done that?  And then because you've already crossed the line, you bust the queso out. Now it's going to a whole nother level of depravity. And then you start over because his mercies are new every morning.  I'm eating chips and salsa until I hear that call. Hey man, why don't you come over here? We got some chess. What you focus on, you end up gravitationally being pulled towards. Behavioral modification fails because it is sin-centered. And Jesus came to save us from sin because the wages of sin is death. So when we focus on sin, we live sin-centered lives. Whatever you focus on, whatever your sin of choice is, if you focus on it to change it, you actually get pulled closer to it.  Man, cigarettes really sound good. Little nicotine, that warm feeling, exhale. I've never smoked a day in my life, but my dad always did and it was like an art form to him. I'm not gonna do it, it's terrible for me, I'm terrible. When you think about it, guess what you're gonna end up doing?  Stop it, you can't, why? Because your hangup is, you got the wrong focus. Jesus didn't come to give us a better example and say, here's how you live a good life and stop doing the bad things, start doing the right things. No, Jesus knows that the only answer is not having a sin focus, it's having a savior focus. It's having your eyes on Jesus, the author and the finisher of your faith. Third thing Jesus did not come to give us is he did not come to give us self-help motivation. You can do it, come on, you've got what it takes on the inside of you, just dig down a little bit harder. Listen, that is fortune cookie theology and that is not Jesus. You don't have what it takes on the inside of you to save yourself, to make yourself better. If you did, there was no need for Christmas. There was no need for Jesus to savior. If you can save yourself, if you can fix yourself, if you can be a better version of yourself, if it's just a matter of motivation, God could have sent a courier.  Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but we needed more than self-help motivation. We needed a rescuer, a savior to deliver us out of our slavery and out of our sin. Number four, Jesus did not come to give us capitalistic materialism. Contrary to what you may hear on television, Jesus is not your seven keys to financial success and prosperity. That's not why Jesus came. Jesus did not come so that you could get rich so that you could live the American dream so that you could have more things so that you could have a spiritual add-on accessory to your already good life. That is not why Jesus came. He did not come to give us that. Now, he's not mad if you have material wealth. He's just mad when material wealth has you. Because that slavery, that's the very thing that Jesus came to set us free from. And the fifth thing that Jesus came did not come to give us is he did not come to give us political militarism. What do I mean by that? Well, you know, there are a lot of people who think that the answer to the world's problems is revolution. You look at different revolutions, national revolutions that have taken place, whether it's the Bolshevik revolution in Russia or whether it was some of the revolutions in Central American nations or whether it was even a movement of people in Jesus' day called the zealots who thought when the Messiah comes, it's going to spark a military uprising and we're going to establish the kingdom now and we're gonna defeat Rome and that's why they were asking Jesus, when are we gonna get the kingdom? Are we going into Jerusalem? Because some of them had this idea that it was gonna be by natural means. Listen, Jesus didn't come to produce a military uprising or a political movement. Jesus came to save us. Where did he come to save us from? Came to save us from our sin. Because the problem that we have is we don't have political, well, we have political problems, but, our main problems are not political problems. Our main problems are not motivation problems. Our main problems are not behavior problems. Our main problems are not morality problems. You wanna know what our real problem is from which all those things branch off is we have a massive sin problem. Oh, I can't believe you used that word. Sin, I'm gonna use it 20 times. Sin, sin, sin, sin, sin, sin, sin, sin, sin, sin, sin. Because sin is a destructive force that is eating away like cancer at our souls and our culture and our relationships and our nations. And sin is not just the fruit that's growing on the branches that we see. Sin is actually the disease that's deep inside embedded into our soul. That causes us to perish. The wages of sin, Romans chapter six says is death, but the gift of God through Jesus Christ is eternal life. Sin, sin is a violation of God's will. Sin is a violation of God's order. Sin is missing the mark. Sin is coming short, all have fallen short of the glory of God. And guess what, we all sin. We all have pet sins, but we all sin. If you've never sinned, would you raise your hand please? Don't wanna make it the first time by raising your hand, so. We've all sinned. We've all missed God's mark. See, our problem is a sin problem that produces a death problem. Have you figured out this that 100% of people that are born will also die? Nobody gets off this planet alive, but yet we spend a lot of time trying to fight against death, don't we? Sometimes we can be alive on this planet, but yet experiencing death every single day of our lives. Because death isn't just a physical death. In fact, physical death is actually the culmination of spiritual death, starts in our soul, but it works its way out. But 100% of people who live on this planet who are born will also, 100% of them will also die. Nobody gets off the planet alive. All of us have an expiration date. I know that that's positive and exciting. You came to church this morning thinking it's Christmas, it's gonna be happy, but this is a reality. And we spend millions and billions of dollars trying to fight against dying. You can take supplements. Oh, I'm trying to stay young, I'm taking vitamins. That's healthy, that's great. You can have essential oils, but they have not yet found any essential oil that will keep you from dying. Some people are, I'm going to the gym, I gotta stay young. Yeah, you can do it. You can be Jacqueline with your juicer at 95 years old, but you're still going to experience death. You cannot cheat it. People turn vegan. I'm like, that does not sound like eternal life.  Hell is eating vegan.  I feel amazing eating vegetables, but after they've been eaten by an animal and I eat the animal.  But I enjoy my vegan diet in the form of a rib eye. Come on somebody, can I get, can I get a, what, what? All right. You can take supplements, you can juice, you can bathe, you can dip yourself in certain mineral waters, you can cryogenically freeze your body, you can download your personality into a hard drive on the cloud waiting for the day when androids and robots are able to animate your spirit once again and you can try and live forever. There are people trying to do all that by the way. You can't cheat death. Because the problem we have is a death problem. Where did death come from? Well, it didn't come from God. It was never God's design for human beings to die. C.S. Lewis says it the best. He says, the reason why we grieve so deeply at the death of a loved one is because there's something deeply and innately woven into the human soul that knows that death is not natural. It's not how it's supposed to be. When God created Abner and Eve, He didn't create us to die. He created humanity to thrive and to flourish. In Genesis 2, verse 15, it says, the Lord God took man and He put him in the garden of Eden in order to work it and to keep it.  So God created mankind perfect. I want you to think about what it would be like to walk with God daily. I mean like no God as well as you know the person that you're sitting next to. To be able to talk to him, asking questions, to never experience a day of sickness, to have no idea what death is, no idea what fighting is. Can you imagine a world where there's no marital strife, where there's no arguments, where there are no enemies, there's no injustice? Can you imagine a day where we don't hate each other, where we don't hurt each other, where we don't wake up and experience shame or guilt ever? Because we don't know any of that. And to be able to walk perfectly with God, the Hebrew word for that that is used when it says all things were made and God said it was all good, it's this concept of shalom. It means all things as they're supposed to be perfect. Walking in a relationship with God. And in the middle of the garden, He puts Adam and Eve, He says it's all yours, you can have it all. Have it all! Every day I'm gonna come with you.  Oh, by the way, that tree over there, that's the only one I don't want you to eat. You can have everything else. Well, why God? That's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I don't want you to eat that. If you do it, the day you do it, you'll die. Now, some have asked the question, why would God put a tree in the garden that He knew could kill and let Adam and Eve have the choice? Why would He do that? If God knows all things and knows what He could do, knows what they would do, why would God do that? Why would He even put that tree in the garden? And here's the answer. The answer is because God's ultimate goal is love. The reason why He created it is because He wanted to have a family and a loving relationship with creatures that had a choice. See, if you can't choose love, it's not really love. Love is only expressed when you give it and it's reciprocated by choice. And God created Adam and Eve with free will, but unless free will has an option, then it's not really free will. If God put them in a perfect garden and there was absolutely no way that they could ever choose another path, that's not really love, that's automation. But the fact that standing in the center of the garden was a representation of God's word and God's ways and God's will. And every time they looked at it and said, I want that, but I want God more, and they reject it, they were expressing love and obedience to God. God said, if we do it, we'll die and I don't want to displease God. But when the tempter comes in and he says to them, no, no, no, that's not it.   You can be independent to make your own choices about what's good and evil, the knowledge of good and evil. He knows you won't need him anymore, you can make your own determinations about what's good and what's evil. And it says they looked at it, they wanted it, it looked good, and they ate it and ate it. And immediately when they did it, says that their eyes were open and they realized not that they were just like God, how many know they already were like God? They were created in Genesis 1 verse 26 in the image and alightness of God already. Now what they realized is that they had just separated themselves from life, eternal life. As long as they were in relationship with the Father and obeying the Father, they would live forever. They would never experience death, but as soon as they violated God's word and God's truth, he warned them the wages of sin, of transgressing God's word is death and that's experience. What is death? Death is separation from life. Adam did it and spun humanity from that point on into slavery to sin because the thing that we thought we had control of now controls us. And sin always produces more sin, which produces death and separation from God. The other day we watched as a staff at our Christmas party, my favorite movie of all time, which is the Return of the King. You guys ever seen Lord of the Rings? The Return of the King, it's my favorite all time movie. Gladiator's a close second. But in the Return of the King, it talks about the transformation that took place in a hobbit named Shmigel who becomes golem because of a ring. So they're fishing, his buddy's in the boat, catches it, goes, dives down in there, finds this ring and you guys know the, most of you know the story, it's one of the rings. The ring in Lord of the Rings represents the power of sin. And he brings it and then Shmigel wants the ring. He's like, give me the ring. And he kills his buddy and he takes the ring because he wants the precious. And he wants the ring and he is willing to kill for it. Once he gains what he thinks is worth everything, over the course of time, it actually begins to deform him and destroy him from the inside out. Until pretty soon, this normal looking hobbit turns into, the precious. He tries to steal it from us. It's coming with me. And he turns into this creature. Sorry, sorry I had to see that. He turns into this creature who's not in control of the ring. The ring now controls him and shapes him and is destroying him from the inside out. It's like this radioactive bomb that he has set off in his soul that has so diabolically destroyed what he was supposed to be, that he can never recover. That's what sin does to us. We think we have control of it. I know what God says, but I want this. And we all have our pet sins. And listen, it's not just about your behavior. You're chosen, we all have sins of choice. But the sins of choice are just the fruit growing on the branches. The real issue is not the fruit, the real issue is the roots. Because you can pick all the fruit off, that's behavior modification.  It's because we're holding on to this saying, I want this. I want the decision making of good and evil. We're still saying to God, God, I'm in control and what now has become, not a possession has possessed us. We become slaves to it and we hold on to it and we lose our minds over sin thinking we can control it and it actually destroys us from the inside out. You want to know what Jesus came to save us from? He came to save us from ourselves. He came to save us from ourselves and the sin that so easily besets us and he came to save us from hell itself. People have a hard time. They say, well, how could a loving God send anyone to hell?   They perish because they reject eternal life. Because they reject the gift that is Jesus, who is the savior of the world, who came to save us from our sins.  He comes to save us from our sins. Our sins that destroy us from the inside out and eventually cause us to perish. And when we die in our sins as enemies of God, there's only one place that we would ever wanna be. Why would we ever wanna choose God on the other side of death if we won't choose him on this side? Jesus comes to rescue us. Jesus comes to save us. Paul writes in Ephesians two, verse one, he says, and you were dead in your trespasses. You once walked according to the ways of this world following the course of this world, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, that's us. Verse four, but God, being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he's loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, he's made us alive together with Christ. I love that phrase, but God, because you can put anything you want to in front of it. You can say, I've messed up royally, but God. I have lived for myself so deluded, but God. I have failed him over and over and over again, but God.  Let me conclude with this. Like I mentioned, we have a sin problem that leads to a death problem. We all have our pet sins. Here's the number one question I'm asked when it comes to the issue of sin. Pastor Lee, is there a sin that cannot be forgiven? And a lot of times what it's attached to is this phrase. It's my sin. Will this sin send me to hell? I'm asked that a lot. I was asked by the media a couple of years ago. I was talking about the issue of what the church's stance was on homosexuality. The reporter was standing right over there. He'd come down from Grand Rapids and he asked me.  And I said, no, because heterosexuality won't get you into heaven. See what I did there? Believe me, I've tried. You don't get saved that way. I said, it's not particular sins themselves that send us to hell, but it's the radioactive effect of sin in general that ultimately lead us to perishing and destruction. But there is, and this is what I told them, there is one sin that will send you straight to hell. That will separate you from God for eternity, no matter what. And if you want to know what it is, you have to come back next week. No, I'll tell you, here's what it is. The sin that cannot be forgiven that will send you to an eternity separated from God is self-righteousness. It's self-righteousness. God can forgive. God will forgive any sin. I don't care what it is. There's one sin that will cause you to perish every single time. Self-righteousness. Here's why. It's because self-righteousness believes that we can be our own saviors, and I can continue to be my own Lord and Master. You see, standing at the base of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, just like Adam, here's what we say. I don't need you to tell me what's right and wrong, God. I'll figure it out. I'm good. I don't need a savior. I'm good. I'm a good person. I try hard, and I've only got a few issues. You know what that is that self-righteousness is saying? My righteousness is enough. If we reject the gift of God's righteousness found in Jesus Christ, if we reject that so that we can hold on to our righteousness, it will lead us into an eternity of destruction.  Again, quoting C.S. Lewis, he says this, hell is a door that's locked from the inside. It's because it destroys us from the inside to where we reject God ultimately. Here's the good news.  God didn't leave us in the state of spiritual death when he could have. Do you know what God could have done to Adam and Eve and all of us by virtue of that? He could have just said, I warned him. I told him not to do this. And they did it anyways. I told him on the day that they eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they will die. And you know what? It took 900 years, but Adam eventually did die. He could have just said, all of humanity, let them run its course.  Let them have at it. I'm God. I don't need that. I'm worshiped by angels. I'm untainted and untouched by the destruction and the sin. And they just get what they wanted. But God, who is rich in mercy, did not do that. No, here's what God did. God said, and you can find it in Genesis 3.15. He's saying to the enemy, it's called the proto-Evangelium, which in Latin means the first mention of the gospel. In the aftermath of sin's destruction and devastation, staying there in the garden. And Adam and Eve's shame and the serpent, who is the devil, standing there before God. God said, there's gonna come a day when the seed of this woman is going to crush your head, Satan. In the process, you may bruise his heel, but he's gonna crush your head, the seed of the woman. 80 generations after Adam, a woman named Mary gave birth to the seed of the woman, who lived 30 years, who was God in the flesh, named Jesus, was tempted in every way that you and I are tempted, but never sinned. And he went to the cross, the only human being who's never sinned, but he went to the cross, and the enemy, the devil, thought he had destroyed him, but all he did was bruise his heel. But in the process of bruising his heel, Jesus crushed the head of your enemy. He paid the price for your sin, and he made it possible for you to have eternal life. God was not content for you to get what you deserve. God at Christmas gave you the gift that you could never have earned, never could have imagined that God would love you that much to reach out of heaven and eternity, to step into history, to alter your eternity, and change your destiny. And the gift that he gave, his name is Jesus. All the name of Jesus. Shepherds bow down, angels rejoice, wise men travel to worship this one named Jesus. You say, well, you don't really believe in Jesus? I believe him to the bone. I believe him in the morning. I believe him in the night. I believe him when it's day. I believe when it's dark outside. I believe it when I'm asleep. I believe it in my good days. I believe it in my bad days, because it has changed me as much as the sin can destroy you wherever sin abounds. Grace does much more abound. The power of the gospel of Jesus Christ has radically changed my life and millions of other people's lives turned the world upside down on its ear all because of a child born in a manger. I'm telling you, John 3.16, we need to live this, we need to shout it, and we need to thank God for it because it is good news of great joy for all people. It's the story of Christmas. Did you stand up with me this morning? It's what the angels declared. What would happen if we declared that this Christmas? I've got good news. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son whosoever should believe in him, not perish. You don't have to perish. You don't have to die. You don't have to be separate from God for eternity. You don't have to earn it. You don't have to impress God. You don't have to change your behavior and modify yourself. You don't have to find some cause and you don't have to pick out an enemy.  Save me. Forgive me from my sins. Change my heart. Give me eternal life so that Heaven's my home that I'll live forever with You. I'll tell you what. To anybody who calls upon the name of the Lord, it's exactly what Jesus will do. He did it to me when I was 13 years old. He'll do it for you no matter where you're at in life. He's an equal opportunity saviour. Would you buy your heads with me all over this room? So I'll simply ask you this. If you're here today or you're watching and you're at the Portage Campus and you know in your heart of hearts I've been talking that you're not right with God.  You've never surrendered to Jesus and received the free gift of salvation. Or maybe you have, but you've walked away from it and you're living in modification land or moralism or some of these other ideas but you need to come back to Jesus. You need to return. Today, the Spirit of the Living God is moving amongst us. And he's saying come home. Come home. He's calling to dead hearts right now.  No one can come into the Father unless the Spirit draws him but I know that right now it didn't sound in my voice the Holy Spirit of God the same Holy Spirit that hovered over the deep in creation the same Holy Spirit that hovered over Mary's womb is the same Holy Spirit that this morning is hovering over some of our lives and he's calling us out of death into life.


My name is Dan Chudnov, aka Dee Chud, and to my left in order are Dan Kirchner, Burgess Jules, and Laura Rubel, who each of whom you'll hear from in a moment. We're going to talk to you a little bit about what we're doing at George Washington Libraries to capture social media, to support research teaching and collection development in libraries. It's a real treat to be able to stand here in this great room with so many friends and colleagues and to actually have a turnout that's a lot better than the Redskins got yesterday. It's very exciting to be able to share this with you, and I have to first of all thank the IMLS who has funded us under their SPARKS grant program to do the work we're going to be talking about today. In addition to Joan and Diane and Clifford and everyone at CNI who helped get us here. So we're going to tell you about a traditional project here. It's actually really easy once you get your head around it to think of what we're working on as a very traditional library project. We're focused on the kinds of things we've been doing for decades quite well. Maybe the material is different here, and that's why it's worth thinking about. But in a lot of ways it's a lot of things we know how to do. We're trying to save the time of our researchers. We're working with at-risk resources that are online, and we're looking at licensing scenarios for them. And we are essentially expanding the scope of what we're collecting. So through those lens, here's a little bit about what we're up to. I worked at the Library of Congress for a couple of years on the Twitter archive project there up until 2011 when I went to work at George Washington University. And in addition to the technical challenge of collecting dozens of billions of tweets, which they have a pretty good handle on there now, fortunately, it was very interesting to see the demand come in from all over the internet for access to this data. There were hundreds and hundreds of requests for researchers in any discipline you could imagine to get access to historical Twitter data. Now, I don't know the latest about what the Library of Congress is up to in terms of giving that data away, but as far as I know they're not yet, although I do know they have the data safely. And there's a lot of news in terms of corporate commercial access to the data that you'll hear more from Laura about in a moment. But when I went over to the George Washington University libraries in the fall of 2011, it was really interesting that the first thing I saw in the GW Faculty Research News letter that goes around was a report on a study done led by Kimberly Gross of the School of Medium Public Affairs at GW on how mainstream news outlets use Twitter. This was work done in coordination with the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism and the primary finding of this work, which was quite excellent and I encourage you to read it. You should probably Google it if you can't quite catch the URL, sorry about that. That basically news agencies use Twitter and things like it to adopt and promote the same message they're putting out on their mainstream channels like the web and their video stream and all of that, which in and of itself is not a dramatic finding, but nobody had studied this yet. And it's a question that gives them a foundation to do more sort of layers of work on top of that. This is the way research does. So I was very exciting to see people at GW who were working with some material that I knew a little bit about. So I reached out to Professor Gross and asked number one after congratulating her, how do you collect your data? And the answer was clear. They were as social scientists collecting the data quite literally hand by hand, tweet by tweet.  Step number one was they subscribed to Twitter's RSS feeds. Okay, maybe, okay, there's a couple of people who know that Twitter no longer has RSS feeds. Number two was they subscribed to these RSS feeds using Google Reader. All right, now I see more head shaking. Google Reader no longer exists. They would then fold, spin, mutilate, literally copy and paste the data over into Excel. And when I say they, I mean her students in her class were assigned copying and pasting of data into Excel where they would then do some additional coding of it as social scientists do and pull the data into SPSS and Stata and their more familiar tools ultimately. And this was a very painstaking progress and what I found out when I asked if they needed help was yes. They will take any help they can get getting this data. They're doing too much work for too little data. We're literally talking about thousands of tweets, not billions, not millions, thousands. That study was done on a slice of data taken over a couple of dozen accounts over a couple of weeks if I'm not mistaken, maybe even one week. So you're looking at about a 4,000, 5,000 tweet data set that took all semester to gather code and collect so they could actually do their analysis of it. It doesn't scale and it's not something we can expect our researchers to do and we certainly don't want our people teaching classes to assign their students. If you wanna know how well this went in terms of the learning experience, you just need to look at Professor Gross's student evaluations at the end of the semester. The students didn't like copying and pasted tweets by hand, one by one. So this is not, as I mentioned before, in terms of the demand the Library of Congress has gotten, this is not an isolated case. We have several people at GW doing work in this area, not just in Twitter, not just in social sciences. We have computer science researchers just like many of you do and people in other disciplines as well looking at different slices of what social media gives us. And if you look at ProQuest, VCs and dissertation database, you'll find over 5,000 unique items about Twitter data in one way or another. And if you click through, that's actually seriously considering Twitter data, not just computer science. It's really a cornucopia of disciplinary looks. In just the last few years, there are a lot of people at our institutions doing this and they can use our help. And if we don't save their time, we're putting them behind the eight ball. So we like to think of this service we're providing that we'll tell you a lot more about in a moment as saving time of researchers as a strategic advantage, getting them to do their work more readily and more efficiently. Laura? Thank you. So we found that we had researchers not just in the School of Media and Public Affairs, but across our campus doing research on social media and Twitter. So political science, business, computer science, public health, even the English department. And there were certain kinds of data that they were interested in. They were looking at how specific Twitter users might tweet. So members of Congress or how news organizations might tweet. They were also interested in looking at particular keywords. So how keywords were used during the presidential debates or other hashtags were used in Twitter. They're basic values they were interested in in addition to the user and the time period, the text itself of the tweet, links that were in those tweets, and then also retweet and follower counts of various points in time. And they're interested in data at the size of tens of thousands, not tens of millions. So we're not talking big data here by any means, but they are data sets that may be larger than particularly social sciences and humanities researchers may be accustomed to working with. So they need to limited files to import into their software, maybe Stata or some other kind of coding platform. And they're interested in historic data. So an event or topic might not emerge as being of research interest until sometime after the fact. They don't always know when it's happening that it's something they're gonna want to research later on. Now getting historic data usually requires licensing it from a Twitter certified data reseller. And these are companies that have exclusive rights to license access to the Twitter fire hose. These are the four companies that are the current group that have a relationship with Twitter to do this. Datasift is a UK company, NTT data is in Japan, and Gnip and Topsy are both in the US here. And it's a changing marketplace. You may have heard just in the past couple of weeks that Apple announced that they've purchased Topsy. So things are changing. There are some other companies that have relationships with these companies to provide access to Twitter data. So for example, TechSifter is a company that provides a platform geared for researchers to do some coding analysis with Twitter data sets. And they all offer bulk data sets of historic data. So they're who you would need to go to if you wanted to purchase a historic data set. They're pricing generally factors in the number of days that you're searching, the time period that you're searching. So a longer time period is a higher cost. And then the size of your resulting data set is a factor in the pricing as well. We've found in speaking with them, their data's not cheap. The commercial sector is their main market. And while that's the case, they're very friendly and receptive to working with researchers. So we've been talking with them a little bit our needs and they've been very helpful in talking with us through that. And I think we'll be hearing some announcements in the next few weeks of some products they've been able to develop more for the academic community. At this point it's been a little too pricey for our researchers to actually purchase data at the commercial price level. They're also used to working with customers who can handle very large data sets and who wanna work with the fire hose directly. So there's definitely an area there where we can help them deal with these challenges. So what can we do in libraries to help? We can help them get the data they need at the scale that they're interested in. And Dan's gonna show you the tool we developed here in a moment. And we've also can help them navigate this vendor space and understand the options that are out there and help them proactively collect the data that they need. One of our media and public affairs faculty members, David Karp has written about the problem for social science researchers that the data they wanna work with, blogs and social media is so transitory and it disappears so quickly. So he calls for setting up what he calls lobster traps. So just as you might drop a lobster trap in the ocean and leave it there for some time and see what comes through, pull it up from time to time and see what you've captured. He calls for setting lobster traps of our own to capture social media data. So we can proactively capture this kind of data now before it disappears, whether or not we're sure exactly how it might be used by our researchers. And we do know that Twitter and social media data disappear all the time. When Congress turned over, when the 113th Congress started at the beginning of January just now, we noticed that the outgoing members of Congress were shutting down their Twitter accounts as the rules of House and Senate require them to do. And they had been tweeting as members of Congress during that time, but those tweets were no longer gonna be available. So we were able to go out and very quickly try to capture as much as we could so that the researchers in our meeting public affairs and political science departments would have that available for them to use. So at this point, I'm gonna turn it over to Burgess to talk about the archive's perspective. Hi, Burgess Jules, university archivist at George Washington University. So this is probably the least technical part of the presentation. But I wanted to start you off since we're all tweeting these days with a perfectly well-crafted tweet that's ready to go about how we're using social feed manager to collect records for university archives. So for us, when Dan told me about this tool, I had just started a process to engage student organizations at the university about how to transfer their records over to university archives. So this tool, this app came about at the perfect time for us. For university archives, we're finding that it's a very practical tool. It offers us instant value to address a major collection development gap for university archives specifically, which is documenting student organizations. Why did we choose student organizations? We thought it was a good test case because it's a well-defined group and they're very highly active on Twitter. And they are also a great representation of student activity on campus. University administration is increasingly getting interested in student life, student culture, and how to document those. And I think that's mainly because of marketing and promoting the university message, which is good for us because it makes the university archives relevant. It's also a difficult collecting area because these groups come and go, their leadership come and go, and there's not really a history of documentation, culture of documentation in student organizations. So as a result, a lot of student organizations in student life in general are not well documented in the university archives. What you'll find mostly are administration offices, administrators are the ones who are really well represented in the university archives and students are really kind of non-existent. So we're using this, we hope to use this as a way to sort of bring students back into the university archives and to document their life and experiences there. So GW on Twitter, it's a very highly active user community back in 2009, I think some local newspaper here named us the most highly active Twitter university around or something. So it's a mix of students, administrators, offices. There are also 400 student organizations at the university including Greek, cultural, social, political, activist organizations and most of them are exclusively on Twitter. Most of them don't have any other web presence. So we're thinking about this, I mean this is really the only way a lot of them exist to the public. So this tool is gonna be really helpful for us to help bring some of these groups back in. So what we've collected so far since March of 2013, we're currently tracking 329 accounts that hasn't been updated for a while but over 200,000 tweets that we have in SFM specifically for this university archives project and Dan and I did a test the other day just looking at tweets for the month of October and there were over 10,000 in just in one month. Now are all of these tweets historically valuable and significant? No, but the point is we're capturing them and we've figured out a way to pull them in. What happens next? We're still trying to work on that but the point is we went to make sure that we were getting this information and capturing these accounts and capturing these tweets before, I don't know, did the student groups dissolve and they all disappeared. So that was for university archives. For special collections, we see this, I mean there are multiple ways that this could help general special collections but two really important ways we see it helping special collections is by creating new types of collections, these are new types of records, social media records and by enhancing existing collections. So let's say you get an organization sort of physical papers of 2,500 linear feet or something, if that organization is prolific on Twitter or the social media, now we can go in and grab that part of their collection. It helps us get a more complete record of our organizations that we document of people that we have in our archives. Beyond special collections, the National Archives and Records Administration has pretty much decided that social media is a record because government business happens there which makes it a place that records are created. As a, so one of the goals and responsibilities of the Presidential Records Management Directive issued in 2011, asked National Archives and other government agencies to come up with innovative ways to address electronic records management. National Archives has decided that social media is one place, not just Twitter, but sort of all social media platforms is one place that they wanna work to try to figure out how to capture some of these records and they're currently trying to think about several options for doing that. Some include in commercial options which are really what's the only thing available right now other than you sort of manually doing this. So we think that SFM, social feed manager has a role to play in helping government organizations, university archives, special collections, build these collections. The narrow bulletin on guidance and managing social media records that came out this year really makes it clear that the National Archives, this is a place where they want to be. So we hope they'll maybe they'll contact us to see how we could work with them on that. Moving forward, this tool like I said is really as far as university archives, special collections is concerned, it's not very complete. All it does right now basically is capture the records. We really need to start thinking about, well in the next phase hopefully, we'll start thinking about collection development policies, how to roll this tool, how to roll these social media records into sort of general collection development within our organizations. I think Dan Kershner will show later a screenshot of all the unique metadata that's attached to each tweet you send out. So it's a very rich sort of rich piece of metadata that's attached to every piece of this record. So how are we then gonna fold these into our catalogs? How are we gonna sort of help with discovery? We need to start thinking about how some of these tweets, so SFM does not, if I understand correctly, does not collect full links, right, sort of. Okay, so we need to figure out how to pull these things in, links, images, and also some of these groups do have websites, right? So we need to start thinking about how we could roll SFM out into a wider audience and to sort of roll in web archiving and all that so we can really try to capture the full record. And now Dan Kershner is going to give us a demo. Now that Burgess and Laura and Dan have talked about this mysterious social feed manager tool, hopefully it's not anticlimactic, but I'd like to show you what we've been talking about. So I am one of the software developers who's contributed to this tool, as is Dan. Actually, Laura, I think you've put in a ticket. And the other software developers, and we actually have a part-time graduate student, but we're looking to go beyond our institution and have others participate. In fact, we have a meeting on Wednesday where we invited other institutions, not just software developers, but to help us not only develop ideas where we want to take it going forward functionally, but I think on the second day we're going to have a hack fest for those who want to stay around and contribute to the software itself. So we're looking to leverage beyond just our team and make it a truly collaborative effort. You'll notice here, I'm going a little out of order here, but our code is on GitHub as our repository and it's open to everybody. We like to use GitHub as an integral part of our software project management at GW Libraries. And that also helps us and it makes it easy to collaborate with others outside of GW. So as far as the basic stack, we use the Django framework, which is built on Python language, and a couple of libraries, which make it a lot easier for us. The Django social auth library helps with the authentication, with in this case the Twitter credentials. And Tweepy is the Python, that's the PY part, wrapper around the Twitter API, which is kind of implicit there. So we're using the Twitter API through the Tweepy library. And as I mentioned, everything you can go see it yourself. It's on GitHub and there's a license.txt file, which you'll find to be very MIT software licensed style. So it's freely distributable and things like that. So I think on that note, let's just go to the actual, we have a local instance running here. And let's see if I can do this. Okay, that's a little bit wide, but let's see, no? Okay, well, we'll do our best here. So as I said, for those who have built basic Django framework applications, this type of styling should look fairly familiar. It's actually, it's boot swatch as well. So the homepage right now, and again this is in, it's very early stages. So you'll be able to say that you saw the SFM back when it was just this. So right here, and this is probably the biggest screen it's ever been on. Just, you know, that as well. We're setting new records today. So the homepage, as far as the UI, really just provides kind of a random sample of some of the Twitter user feeds that we're tracking. Here we have a setup with over 1300. And then off to the right a little bit, just we're kind of lacking the display here. A basic graph of the number of tweets per day. We're looking to look into other data visualization that might be useful. And a sampling of recent tweets. So I can't seem to get to the right there, but I just wanna show you how you would set this up. So again, this is just out of the box, the Django administrative page. So you add Twitter users that you wanna follow here. So if you look in this column, these are the names that we've set it up to follow to gather the tweets. The actual tweets here are the user items. And so once this loads up, one thing you notice is that we are capturing the entire, I'll go back to this later. We're capturing basically the entire JSON structure that Twitter gives us, whether we present all of those different, here we go, all the different elements or not. That's something that we've chosen certain data elements right now to present in the Excel download, which is the next part. But we do archive the whole JSON that we get here. So what I'd like to show you is, I'm not quite sure what this Twitter feed is about, but how about WRGW? That's our radio station at GW. I have a history in radio myself. So this is probably one of the more useful features here is if you click on this link here, you will get, it will generate an Excel, let's see. Okay, all right. Okay, so these are all the tweets that we've gathered for the WRGW Twitter feed. So we assign our own ID, that's kind of the object ID in our table, the primary key. Some of these columns here are straight from the JSON that Twitter provided back. Some of them we've cleaned up a little bit to make it easier. As an example, if there are multiple elements, sometimes we'll, like for example in the hashtags, column will just comma separate them to make it easier to work with. We capture the URL of the tweet, whether it's a retweet, the text of the tweet itself, of course, and then if at least the first two URLs we pull out, this obviously something we could expand the future. And given that the URLs are usually link shortened, we try to grab the unshortened original URL as well. So that's pretty much what we're aiming for here as a more useful form for researchers to work with. And let me go back to the application here. Okay, some other conveniences which are kind of off to the right is you can link to the actual tweet itself to the entire JSON object. We have a slide here with one of those. So let's see if we can go to that. Okay, good. Oops, okay. Yeah, those links that I was referring to, if you click on the cached version, you will get something that looks more like this. This is actually one of the first tweets ever, I believe. So this is the nicer layout of what we get back. So you'll see all the fields that we're capturing in that one field in the user item table. Okay, so again, if you go to our GitHub repo, you'll be able to see not only the code, but a window into the types of issues that we are looking to work on. And some of the other items that we're looking to attack in terms of, in the longer term, enhancements, just capturing the feed from an individual user doesn't really capture the whole conversation. Really the question is, we wanna get the interactions and the other tweets that reference that user, let's say. So we have to grapple with the problem of how far out we wanna branch from that stream.  So the way that we've built the application, hopefully is general enough that it should be fairly straightforward to expand it so that we can do this for more than just Twitter. It's the same idea, just apply it to other sources. So the libraries that we've used, for example, Django Social Auth, is pretty much ready to use with more than just Twitter. You'll notice that we do not, at this point, capture the items that those links refer to. So for example, if a tweet has a picture in it, all we capture is the link to the picture, but we don't capture the image file itself, so that's something we're gonna look into. This really is just providing a raw dump of the streams that we've opted to capture, but there are some possibilities that we can include some analysis tools, some searching tools to make it easier to work through the data that we have captured. You're probably wondering how the mechanism works that we're gathering the tweets. Right now, we have some cron jobs set up that run every couple hours and go through each of the IDs and call out to Twitter, which presents some problems because Twitter has rate limiting where you can only call out to the API for certain API functions a certain number of times in a given time period for an individual user, actually for an individual authentication token. So there are some ways that we're looking to improve the application so we can do more things in parallel so that we were not so limited by the rate limiting. And nicer ways of, let's say that you have already captured some tweets outside of this tool, ways that you can import it in and make it part of the same database, perhaps other ways that we can export the tweets that we have captured besides just the form that I showed you. And while I personally think the application is not that hard to install, there's always better ways that we can make it, package it up. We realize that not everybody's a software developer, but if you do wanna check it out, the instructions are there on the GitHub page for the project. So we certainly encourage everybody to check it out if you feel like participating, you can send us a pull request. So are we due to break it 3.15 or 3.30? 3.30, okay, great. Every one of these topics is a lot bigger than three or four words. If any of them interest you, we only have one or two slides left so we can dig back into them and we'd be happy to answer questions or spell out any of these a little more. But just to wrap up, our immediate next steps, under the aegis of this IMLS grant, which we'll run through next summer, our goal is to improve SFM the app so that it meets diverse research teaching and collection development needs. And when we say diverse, we mean multiple institutions using it. We'd like to see many of our peers as many as possible get into the business of extending their own collection development and supportive research to use tools like this to provide an advantage to their researchers and their environments, that there are different institutions. We are also under IMLS working Wednesday and Thursday this week with a group of people who have kindly agreed to come in and join us to talk about the scope of what the app does, how it relates to use cases they've run into at their own institutions. Everybody from people like us who have similar research requests and are trying to catch your student groups and that sort of thing, to archivists who are coming from a few different institutions who've had to do something like this and reach out when we got somebody coming from UVA who was involved in trying to catch your social media around the hullabaloo with the president's situation last summer. I don't mean to refer to it so lightly, but I think you know what I mean. They very actively went out to try to get things from Twitter and blogs and Facebook and found it quite an interesting set of challenges. So hopefully institutions like that with immediate problems like that as well as sort of long-term goals that can be met with this sort of lobster trap strategy we heard about earlier. We'll be able to use this app which in a way that is reliable. That's the number one thing. We want you to be able to take this and run it and define what you need to do with it, trust that it's going to work and if you need to get a lot of stuff at once, have a way to scale up as Dan mentioned and have a pretty easy path to get started as well. And of course we're looking for more people to work with. The code is on GitHub. We work in a GitHub way. If you want to improve something, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter in person over email, whatever works for you. Send us a pull request, whatever. We work that way. So pull requests are very welcome. Our license is a, as you heard earlier, an MIT-style license. The only thing we'd ask is an explicit assignment of copyright. Other than that, we'd welcome your feedback in the form of questions, comments, code and suggestions. So thank you.


What's up guys, it's Josh and we're back again with another video. Today is the next installment in my Yale student interview series. And today I have a very special guest, another one of the people that lives on the beautiful floor. Objectively the best floor of the best college. In Timothy Dwight College. Yeah, in Timothy Dwight. It's a pretty good floor. We've got a lot of cool people. This is Kingery. If you guys remember Walker from a couple of videos ago, this is Walker's roommate. Kingery's a man. I mean, I don't have anything else to say about him. He's a great guy. He's from Texas, right? Yeah. We're in Texas. I'm from Halsville, Texas. None of you know where that is. What's the population there? There's like 300 people there, maybe. So it's a really, really small town. If you get a mental picture of small town Texas, you're probably inadvertently imagining Halsville right now. I mean, there's like three traffic lights and two Mexican food restaurants and a Baptist church and there you have Halsville. So by the way, a few Halsville guys are watching this. What's up? Got to represent. Is it true that you're like the first person from your town to get accepted? I'm the first person from my town and the history of my town to get into an Ivy. There's been two other people, I believe, that got into rice. But technically, rice is not an Ivy League, so I'm the first one. So what's it like living with Walker? Walker is a big man.  So it's very easy to entertain him. He's very easily entertained. Sometimes I just get an empty Amazon box and I throw it down and that'll keep him entertained for hours. No, he's a great guy. He's just a big old sweetheart, love him to death. We get along so well. Yeah, I know Dean was really proud of pairing you guys together. Oh, yeah. Dean has said that she was most proud about pairing us up together. It's perfect. We're good friends, good buddies. You want to go show me your room? Yeah, let's go so you all can see what I have to live with. We're right this way. We got our top notch security system here. Oh, that's good stuff. There we go. Co-handler's even drunken. There's Walker's office. Closet. Oh, yeah. There you got to show them my setup. Oh, yeah. There's Kangaroo's setup. Yeah. That's pretty nice. So you got four people living in this suite? Technically six because right over there. Oh, yeah. Across the hall is Jacob and Ethan. They share everything. We allow them. All right. Here's our humble abode. I sleep here. I'm shorter, so I don't have to jump as far as Walker's. Yeah, I didn't realize you were bench shorter than Walker's. Yeah, yeah. There's very intentional because I thought about putting it up to Walker's height and I realized that it's very difficult. Yeah, so this is absolutely incredibly tiny. You guys got a bigger closet than we do, though. Yeah, unfortunately, that's like most of them. And a wardrobe. That's nice. That's my wardrobe. Check out the fan. Got to always have the fan. Oh, yeah. Walker hooked us up with an AC, which is long. I didn't even realize that you guys had your own AC. Yeah, we had our own AC. That's probably nice for when it gets hot. It was really nice in the summer. This is nice. You guys don't have to live in bunk beds like everyone over there does. Yeah. That was the one thing. I was willing to put up with almost anything, but bunk beds. I could not do bunk beds. It's awful. Let's head back. So, Kingerie, obviously, us Yale students, we were pretty involved in high school, tried to do a lot of stuff. What did you do in high school extracurricular-wise, and what was your high school experience like? Good grief. What didn't I do? Okay, Kingerie. Yeah. Yeah. Big guy. No, no, no. This is every Yale's story, so you should start making it yours if you haven't already. I was president of the Student Council. I was president of the National Honor Society. I was president of the Class of 2017. I was team captain of Lincoln Douglas Debate. Look who it is. This is my video. Jake, you already had your video. Jake, get out of here. This was intentional. I promise you, this was intentional. What? Jake coming in. Jake is sabotaging my video. Anyway. Everyone loved him in the comment section. He just wants more of this box. Keeps coming back. That was it. This is... Anyway, where was I? Talking about... President of the Class of 2015. Team captain, Lincoln Douglas Debate. Oh, I gave the morning announcements. I MC'd all the pep rallies. I played football, which basically equated me watching from the sidelines, but I had fun doing it. You know, the best seats in the house where you stand the whole time in pads. So I was a mediocre player on a mediocre high school team, so that's how it goes. That's a pretty busy schedule you had there. It was. You enjoyed doing it, right? Yeah. Oh, did powerlifting too. Powerlifting. Yeah, it's really fun. Big guy. Big guy. So why do you think you got into Yale, and what was your special thing?   I'm a big opportunist. So anything that I thought, hey, this might look good on a resume, I went and did, like, you know, people-to-people world leadership forum in Washington, D.C. I did Boy State. I did Boy State, too. Texas. Hey! Yeah, I did Boy State in Virginia. Yeah. Do you know the song? Boy State song? Yeah. I don't want to sing it right now. Come on. Oh, but it'll be different, because yours is Virginia and mine is Texas. Yeah, yeah, it probably is. It's like, boys from every part of Texas come to whatever it's completely different. Yeah, it's weird. We don't need to sing. It's weird. Yeah. But, you know, do it.  They have a girl state. I was getting there. Okay. So go ahead. Go ahead. Big advocate for gender equality.  Do that as well. Yeah. But anything like that that I could possibly get a hold of, I did. And so that way I looked like I had a really strong, you know, resume to give them.  I tried to make sure that my application looked like what I imagined a Yale students application should look like. And I also happened to be from a family of 10, in case you missed the large amount of people that was in that picture. And we were in the lower income level.  So at first I thought, you know, no possible way I'm going to be able to get into an Ivy because, you know, the thing about Ivy's is that they're super expensive. But there are programs that the Ivy's offer that help you get the foot in the door. And I think the way the admissions officer actually phrased it, this is line for line. He said, put a finger on the scale. So there's, there's programs you can do that. The program I chose was Questbridge. And it's a good program.  I just got to send my applications in for free. So I mean, if you want, go check out and see if you qualify for that. That's already a good way to get started working on getting into an Ivy. So I don't want, I don't want anybody to think that because of their income, they can't get in to an Ivy League.  Yeah, that's a good point. So a lot of the viewers are not only like juniors and seniors looking at applying to college. They're also, you know, freshmen or even like middle schoolers that are trying to get an early jump on the whole college application process. Which is good. Good for y'all. Good for all you seventh and eighth graders. Do you have any advice for those people that are like just starting high school? Because I know talking to a lot of people, they have a lot of regrets from like their early years of high school. Do you have any advice for those people? I do. Freshman year is the most important year when it comes to your GPA, which is weird because a lot of people think that you can just, you know, take it easy and kind of, you know, I don't, you know, half rear end your way through a, through a freshman year. Don't do it. You go into freshman year and you start swinging immediately. Do not let your grades drop. That is imperative. Somebody told me that and I followed it. And that's in large part why I am here today is because I had a good foundation my freshman year for my GPA that I could build off of.  And I ended up on top because of that. Yeah, that's a really good point because also your freshman year, you're not going to have the opportunity to take as many honors or AP classes, which are the, a lot of times the weighted classes that boost your GPA. So if you're getting like B's or maybe like even C's in regular classes, your GPA is going down. That's like a three, right?   You got to, you got to hold strong. You got to start early.  And then when you're taking these harder, higher level classes, you won't have to worry so much about having to make an A because you've already done the preliminary work your freshman year. Yeah. Okay, we talked about the people that are like just starting high school, but what about the, the juniors that are starting to like develop their list of colleges or the seniors that maybe have like already started applying early and they had the regular decision application deadlines coming up soon. Do you have any advice for them? Yeah, have some idea of what you want to do, even if it's like two or three things, because a lot of people have no idea what they're going to do whenever they grow up. And that, that leads to a problem when applying to colleges because you don't want to apply to MIT and go through all that paperwork if you want to be an author and MIT is not the school for you if you want to do that. So if you know I want to be an engineer, I want to be a pharmaceutical lawyer, then you can start looking at schools that might help you accomplish that goal. And I'm not saying you have to know exactly what you want to be as soon as you set foot on whatever college you end up going to. I'm just saying you need to know what you want to do, what you'd like to do, and then you need to look at colleges that have options for you to do that.  You know, this is just the things that you've got to start thinking about and you should always apply to Yale because Yale has everything. So that's my advice as far as that goes. Are you back? Jake, you want to come across the video again? Yeah. He keeps sabotaging. All right, you've got to comment. You've got to comment. Kingry Solans is better looking than Jake. Hashtag do it for Jake. No, hashtag do it for Kingry. That's K-I-N-G-R-E-Y. All right? There you go. That's your mission. He thinks he can walk in here and get into other people's videos. Jake just loves to sponsor. This is not your interview. All right. Oh, how creative. Oh, man. What a guy.


Hey my friends, nothing excites me more than hearing about your goals but nothing pains me more than hearing about your struggles to achieve them. So we're going to talk about some of the reasons you may be struggling with your goals and hopefully find a few solutions that will get you back on the right track. My meeting and event prof and hotel prof friends, we're talking about goals setting today in particular what we do when we're struggling to meet our goals. Friends it is an honor when people share with me their goals journey and listening to the things they want to achieve in their life. I get so excited maybe even more excited than you when you tell them to me but it also pains me deeply when I hear that you're struggling to meet your goals. I know what that feels like. I do it every single day when I fail to meet the goals on my list and of course every single quarter and every single year when I fall short of expectations. Now at some point we should probably talk about when we need to be less hard on ourselves when we don't meet our goals but today is really about encouraging you, I hope encouraging you to get over those struggles and kind of put you back on the right track when moving towards your goals. Most importantly I think if you're struggling to meet your goals and it's because you're feeling alone and you don't have a support system, please know you have a place to hang out.  Okay so what are some things that we can do to help get you back on the right track towards achieving some of your goals? Probably one of the easiest things we can do is set aside time to actually attack your goals. So we're going to put time, set aside times in your calendar time blocks per se where all you focus on is that goal. So you're going to turn off all your distractions, your email and your phone and you're going to focus solely on the next steps that are required to achieve that goal. So that's an easy one just make sure you have a calendar make sure you stick to it and put those goals in your calendar. Another thing that you can try especially if it's a very very large goal is to start to break it down a bit. Perhaps the goal was a bit big and a bit audacious to begin with and you were struggling even to get started because it just seemed like too too much. No goal is too lofty but perhaps breaking it down into small or almost digestible steps you're able to make small incremental improvements and incremental progress towards the goal. So take a look at that lofty goal break it down and again time chunk that into your calendar and now you've got yourself set towards achieving that goal. Another pitfall that we run into is we just have way too many goals to focus on and maybe they're not all big, hairy audacious goals but there's a lot of goals on our plate and I love people who have a ton of goals it's what makes my world turn is when I have something to look forward to and something to plan for. So if you're an overachieving goal setter you're just one of my favorite people as well but guess what peeps sometimes we set too many goals and now we're running at a time we're running out of energy to actually achieve them. So take a look at your roster of goals and pick and choose a few that you can focus on right now and then a few that you can focus on in three, six or 12 months time even later if it's something that you can push off for a year's time and that way we can focus on one project at a time give it our all not be distracted with all the other goals in front of us and just work on achieving that one goal before we jump on to the next. Another thing that might help you with your goals is know what part of the process of achieving the goal that you're going to be really really good at and look at the places that you're not as strong at so what you want to do is focus on your strengths and use your strengths to achieve the parts of the goal that you can achieve and maybe there's potential to even partner with someone who has all other strengths compared to yours that can fill in the gaps with parts of the goal that maybe you're not as strong at so keep in your strengths zone and try not to worry too too much about the things that you're not good at but stay in your strengths zone learn about the skills that you want to learn about and perhaps leave some of the the goal that just isn't in your wheelhouse leave it to someone to help you kind of backfill those parts of the goal and finally know that no matter what your goal is no matter how big or how small you are not alone if you have a circle around you that may not be as supportive as you would hoped when setting these big hairy audacious goals know that you have a community here we're here to help you meet your goals but there's other communities as well there's tons of different Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups and other associations out there that provide this kind of community support and resources to help you achieve your dreams so know that you're not alone and that there's lots of people out there rooting for you I hope you found these tips helpful I also have a fairly robust business plan template and if you're looking for a business plan to kind of kick start your goals I invite you to download it over at my website at leoncaldorwood.com and get started filling out your goals on your business plan today while you're over there make sure you sign up for my newsletter and that way you won't miss any other resources that I put out to the community you'll be the first to know good luck with your goals this week this month this quarter I'm excited to hear how you're doing with them and again if you're struggling to achieve your goals you're not alone tomorrow is a new day you can get back on that horse and start working towards your goals have a great week and I'll see you soon bye for now


Have you ever won an argument with someone over the internet? Normally when you prove someone wrong, it's pretty satisfying. Your ego just gets massive and you establish yourself as the better human.  But that would make for a very entertaining video so allow me to introduce you to our friend Pantorius. Pantorius had a Twitter and now he doesn't. I'll tell you why he doesn't, but first let me tell you what he had to say. So I was on Twitter when someone added me with a budget question like they normally do, trying to get some help building their PC. And then, before it could respond, someone already did. You can't build a budget PC for $4, $500 that would run Apex and Fortnite well. I was pretty interested that some random took such a hard stance on something so, oh really? You can't? And then him being the open-minded individual that he is, he said, no. So at this point I figured I might as well have some fun with this guy. How much would you like to bet? So which he gave me a much more mature response than I expected. I'm 35, been putting together my own PC since I was 12. If you want a good PC that will run Apex and Fortnite well without lag, stutters, or hiccups, and a 180 plus frame rate, you will spend $1,500 plus. Can you put one together for $500? Yes. Will it run those games well? No. Okay, Boomer, can't argue with 23 years of experience or maybe we can. You see I actually tried to get this guy on my Twitch stream live for an interview. I messaged him on Twitter asking if he would be on it and he blocked me. So I asked one of my moderators to message this guy and it turns out the great Pantorius felt so strongly about his opinion that he deleted his Twitter account. After a little more research we did find him on the internet and found a way to get ahold of him. I'll tell you what we're going to do at the end of the video so if you want to catch that make sure you go to the link in the description and click follow. Turn on live notifications or you won't see it. Anyways so apparently a good computer for cheaper than $500 is impossible. You like my new slider? I just got it. Now why is 180 FPS the metric for good? No clue. But it shouldn't be impossible. The only thing we need to focus on getting is a really good graphics card which admittedly is the hardest part. In case you're unaware the graphics card is pretty much always the most expensive part in a computer build these days.  So while we're looking for a good deal on that we're going to go pick up some other cheap parts that we need for this build. How's it going? Nice to meet you. Chris. It's been serious. Okay. Cool. All right. 20, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45. All righty. If there's any problems with them they should all be fine. Awesome. They were lightly used for a work project but we upgraded so. Looks good to me. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Hey, how's it going? Okay. Cool. What if I check it out here? This should be 60. Awesome. Perfect. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Have a good one. Okay. So I did get our RAM and SSD and I also made a deal for the CPU and cooler. Unfortunately I didn't get that on video because I just had the guy drop it off at my house. I do have a picture of the deal as proof. Anyways, I tried making a deal for a graphics card while I was out and unfortunately someone ghosted me, which is totally fine because we got a better deal for another graphics card. Someone is selling their old GTX 1070 for $150. This is perfect because this is the cheapest 8 gigabyte graphics card that is available right now that we need to hit those high FPS numbers. I also had to order a motherboard because I looked everywhere in town and no one is selling a motherboard that will hold our Ryzen 7 1700. So I just went ahead and ordered the cheapest thing that I could find online and now we just need to pick up a few more things and then we have everything we need. Do I get bonus points for putting this all together in like two days? I feel like I should get bonus points. This video is sponsored by CyberGhost VPN. Now on the chance you don't know, a VPN is a virtual private network. What a VPN does is it allows you to create a secure connection to another network over the internet. Why would you need one? Well, a VPN can help you access a region restricted website that wouldn't be available to you otherwise and it can help shield your browsing activity from prying eyes over public Wi-Fi. It basically gives you an extra layer of protection while you are on the internet. So why use CyberGhost? Well, they are a company that has been around for 15 years and have over 30 million customers around the world. CyberGhost VPN has dedicated apps across all platforms, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, TV, Firestick, Linux and even for routers. Their extensive network has over 6,100 VPN servers. These are located across 90 countries all over the world. The best part is one CyberGhost subscription can cover up to seven different devices. They have a 45 money back guarantee and they have 24 seven customer service. And if you click the link in the description, you will get a discounted price on CyberGhost VPN service. So go ahead and check that out. I promise you a VPN is something you need, especially if you spend your time at all on the internet. Hello. Hey. Chris. Nice to meet you. Yes, Charles. Yeah, it's me. Nice to meet you. And it's how much again? 150. Got it. Okay, perfect. Now if I check it out. Yeah. What did you use it for? Gaming. Okay. What games you play? Final Fantasy, League of Legends, that kind of stuff. Awesome. Everything looks good. GQ, whatever. So this one was actually 40 bucks. I'm sorry I didn't get the cash exchange. I know that's what I try to use to be legitimate, but Homeboy was missing his second eight pin cable for the graphics card, the six plus two, whatever you want to call it. He wanted it at 50, which I believe I have somewhere in the messages. I'll try to show it on screen. But because he was missing when he went back home and he got me an extra one that's not EVGA. So now I got it for 40. I'm not sure if it's going to work, but hopefully it does. And last but not least, we got to get the case, which we are actually getting from a store. And the store we are getting it from is the electronic store here in Las Vegas that is pretty much just about to go out of business. If you look around me, this parking lot is pretty much empty. And there was a point in time where it was the only electronic store you would go to because, well, it used to be pretty cool, but it's going out of business. And I'm not going to tell you where the store it is because one of my sponsors conflicts with it. So if you got a brain or you live in Vegas, you know what store I'm talking about. The motherboard just got here, so we have everything we need now. We're actually going to build it live on stream. So there's no way for me to fudge any of the numbers. Yeah, let's see if this computer actually works ready. That was a terrible appeal. You disappoint me. I agree. It wasn't the best appeal. It could have been better. I apologize. When I have to use my left hand, I usually just got up. I'm not lefty. Three, two, one is having a boot issue. Let me try taking out one of the Rams. Let me try to take out one of the Rams. Oh, perfect. Awesome. Now, I'm assuming most of you guys have heard the term overclocking, right? We're going to do is we're going to install MSI afterburner right now. And we're going to see how hard we can push this card and then try to get over the 180 FPS sweet spot that we're looking for. 150, enter. 150, enter. OK, we're staying above 180. Oh, the overclock is too strong. It's going now. This is what I assume to be regular gameplay. We'll try. Oh, OK. Wait, that's a bot. I'll take it. We take these. Look at the FPS we're getting. I know we're inside and this could be called cheating, but that's fine. Look at this. I'm ending their career. OK, no, no, no, no. OK. In case anyone was wondering if it was possible to build a computer for under $500 that can play games at high enough FPS, the answer is yes. So that is the end of the video. But like I did promise earlier, there is going to be some follow up to this. Pantorius, this message is specifically for you. You see, we know where to get ahold of you now. Well, me and my moderators do. We're going to message you again. I don't know if you've heard, but I have kind of a nice computer lying around. It didn't cost me too much, you know, just approximately 475. And it plays games pretty well. I'm willing to give that to you for free on the condition that you admit on my stream that I was right and you were wrong. No takebacks. The offer is open. We'll send this over to you and we'll see what you have to say. Anyways, I hope you guys found this video creative, entertaining or informative in any way, shape or form. And as always, have a great day.