Well thank you guys so much for being here. In this breakout I wanted to talk a little bit about some of this near and dear to me and that would be pro-life activism. Before I was engaged in Catholic apologetics, especially full-time, my first foray was into pro-life apologetics. That's how my role as an apologist really got started. So I want to talk about that, about where we're going as a movement, things we have to watch out for, and then I wanted to make things pretty dynamic actually to have a lot of time for Q&A and for things you're wondering about in pro-life arguments, what pro-choice people are saying, how we move forward as a movement because we're in a momentous time really. So let me set the stage a little bit. Like I said, before I got involved in being a Catholic apologist, so when I was in high school I converted. I was interested in apologetics because I had to go through all the objections myself before I came into the church. That was in March of 2002. And then when I was a senior in high school, so I came into the church when I was a junior in high school, when I was a senior I remember, well yes, here's how the story goes of how I got involved with the pro-life movement. There was a girl who invited me, she went to a very tiny, tiny, tiny Catholic high school, like the smallest Catholic high school you've ever been to. You've been to a small Catholic high school, this one is smaller than that. I went there once for a senior graduation and it was one person. So he was like student body president, valedictorian, homecoming king. I've actually heard about another one of these at a tiny Catholic high school where it was like two siblings, or like one person and two siblings. Like how awful would it be if it's like your brother and it's like he's valedictorian, president, homecoming king, all this other stuff because you only know the person in class like them more than you? So tiny Catholic high school and they were only like 15 of them. So they all agreed to invite somebody to their, they wanted to have a prom. So they all said we're all going to invite somebody who doesn't go to this school so we can have 30 people. So it's still not as bad. And so she invited me and then I went and met her dad and you know being like a teenager going to meet and now I am the dad, but I have boys. So I'm like, off you go. See if you have a girl you're just like, you know all your hair just starts to migrate south basically. It's like a state of terror.  Off you go. But then being the teenager, I'm like, hello sir. I'll have her back by 1030. But he was the president of the state right to life organization. And so we developed a friendship from that point and he introduced me to the issue of abortion, to pro-life arguments, pro-life books. I just devoured them and I felt convicted. Well, I need to do something about this. That's if no one's doing something, I need to do something. But I really wasn't pushed into action until 2006. That was when I was a junior at Arizona State University. I was studying to get a history degree. I was planning to become a high school history teacher. And a pro-life organization visited our campus with these huge pro-life displays. They were 18 feet high. So they would have been as high. It would have been, yeah, as high as where it goes up to just a little below that ceiling. 18 feet, 40 feet wide, put up on the front lawn with pictures of unborn children before and after abortion. And surprisingly people got really upset. People were really upset, which I expected them to be upset. But I thought they would come up to us and say, oh my gosh, where is this happening? What can we do about this? But surprisingly enough, nobody asked about that. Instead, people would come up to me and say, how dare you put up these pictures? They were so mad at me. And I mean, I was very compassion empathetic with people. But as the day drug on, it was very hard for me not to be a little bit glib here or there. Like, how could you do something like this? Excuse me, why are you being so mad at me? Do you think I did this to these babies? Like, I understand if you're mad at me for that. And so I saw, well, I wasn't actually a volunteer with this organization just yet. I saw them doing this and thought, wow, what's, what is going on here? And so I went over there and started dialoguing with the pro choice people who came to look at this exhibit. And that's where I got started with engaging people in the pro life argument. By the way, the reaction that I would get from people when they would see these pictures and be completely offended and angry about it, the pictures of abortion, but still passionately defend legal abortion. It's a morally perverse thing. And it's hard to see it when you're in the moment right then and there. But usually it takes a long time to reflect back on history to see the moral perversity. It reminds me of a film based on a, based on a book. It's called The Boy in the Stripe Pajamas. Has anyone ever seen it? Yeah, get ready to cry your eyes out. Well, any story about the Holocaust, you know, you should obviously cry about it. The story is about an eight year old boy named Bruno, whose father is a officer, one of the commanding officers for a Nazi concentration camp. And they're moved from the city to live outside of this concentration camp. The family is Bruno, his mom, dad, and Bruno befriends a boy inside the camp. He goes up to the barbed wire fence. The boy's name is Shmuel and he thinks they are farm workers and that he's wearing pajamas. He doesn't understand what's going on. And he go and one day, you know, he makes his way to the camp and finds us out and asks his dad about it. Two things in the movie stuck out to me. Number one, he asks his dad, who are these people? And he said, son, they're Jews. You have to understand, son, these people, well, they're not really people. And the C, I'm like, that sounds eerily familiar. Okay. But the thing that really struck me was, you know, there's a scene in the movie where Bruno's mother and father are having an argument. And she is just livid and laying into Bruno's father, the mom, saying, how could you do this? Why would you move us? Why would you expose your son to something like this?  You would move us outside a place like this. And of course, it's morally, it's moral lunacy that the thing she's most angry about is living outside of a concentration camp and not that a concentration camp exists. It's moral lunacy. Just like being really mad that you see a picture of a dismembered baby, but not that it's legal to dismember babies. That is moral lunacy. And yet people can't, they can't see it. And it's our job to help them to see it, but to do so in a gracious way. And so that's when I got started engaging others, going to these different university campuses and talking with people and training others. And I felt from that time, when I was in my early twenties, my mission would be to go out, if we're going to ever change the laws, people would say, when are we going to change the laws? And I'd say, look, we live in a democratic republic. The laws really only change once you change enough hearts. Though we can't change the laws while we have a supreme court decision that strikes down every law that we try to pass to protect unborn children. But we have to keep at it. If we can change enough hearts and minds, we can really change society itself. So that's where I saw my movement. And that's what I saw when people had asked me, what do you think is going to happen in Roe v. Wade? I am, I am just such a Debbie Downer. I am an introverted, melancholic, pessimistic, not necessarily pessimistic, but I don't often get my hopes up about things. That's your little glimpse into my personality. Then I married this girl who's this little blonde lady who's super bubbly, sanguine, always is optimistic and always hopelessly disappointed. I know it's my birthday on Wednesday. Maybe my parents will come visit to town. You never know.  And now this reflects in our two oldest children. Matthew is like Laura and Thomas is this little melancholic introvert who remembers everything he sees or hears all the time and has now caught up with his brother academically. But he's the more pessimistic one. When their grandparents visited, their grandparents left, Matthew says, maybe Mimi and Papa will come back tomorrow to surprise us. And then Thomas says, Mimi and Papa are gone, Matthew. They are gone. They're not coming back. So I'm like, oh, there it is. There it is right there. And he was four. He was four. And he's just like, here's how it is. I wasn't born yesterday. I was born four years ago, and I've learned what this world is like. And so when people would ask me, even leading up to the Dobbs decision, I did an interview with Psy Kellett for the Catholic Answers podcast, and he asked me, what do we do after the Dobbs versus Jackson decision? I said, well, you know, no matter what happens to that decision, we'll have to keep pressing on, thinking in the back of my head, I'm just going to have to, I got to keep pro life spirits up when the football gets snatched away again. That is a reference, of course, to the peanuts comic strip.  Okay. It's very, now you're the people, see, I made fun of Matt frat. He said he was going to cry in his talk, and now I'm getting, now I'm getting emotional because when Dobbs versus Jackson was handed down, I called my mentor, the guy whose daughter I went to prom with who showed me all this stuff, because he had been fighting this since before Roe versus Wade as well. You know, he was aware of it before Roe versus Wade, and then Roe kicked him in the high gear and he had to do something about it. And I called him and I just thanked him for bringing me into this movement and training me. And I said, I was so grateful that you lived to see the day that if I'm pessimistic, I didn't think, if I didn't think I was going to live to see the day Roe versus Wade to be overturned, then I definitely didn't think people who saw Roe when it was handed down would ever, there would be anybody left who saw it, who would see it be overturned. And I was pleasantly surprised. And so pray, we pray, we pray to God for that. And so everything leading up to that, like I said, pro lifers, we've gotten into this habit where we're like Charlie Brown in the football, Lucy always ends up snatching the football away and we think we're going to kick it. But we also have to be able to persevere. Reading news articles that were, it's so funny reading the news articles about this decision, things like pro-choice Democrats outraged at the, that overturning Roe versus Wade that Republicans and pro life pro lifers, how could they do something like this? It's like, you know, we've been saying we're going to do this for 50 years, right? It's not like, why are you acting all outraged and surprised? Like we had this really sneaky maneuver or something. We've been telling you for 50 years that justice, that the laws must be amended for the sake of justice. And we have worked through the right way to do that, through the courts, through education, to consistently not to change public opinion, but also even just to hold the line. And that's what's interesting because if you look at other moral issues, when you look at, for example, so-called same sex marriage, that came over the country, the culture like a tsunami, we went from one point where the majority of people were opposed to so-called same sex marriage to just a few years later, the majority are in favor. But with abortion is very different. It's more like World War one. It's just more like trench warfare and we can't move the needle as much, at least with everyone as a whole with young people we're seeing big gains in people who are being pro-life. Well, there is a weird thing about why we're gaining with young people. So a good and a bad. It's good, young people have, they have their own 4D ultrasound images of when they were, when they were born. Or now with really young people, Gen Alpha, that's my kids, they're Gen Alpha now. People are probably live streaming their ultrasound in the womb and they have a TikTok account from when they were like 18 days old. So I'm like, okay, the other problem is that Gen Alpha and Gen Z, the youngest generation, they're pro-life because teen pregnancies and teen sexuality are at some of their lowest rates because people of those ages don't actually spend time in physical proximity with one another because their idea of friendship is essentially through a screen. So there's not as much of a need to defend abortion because there's not as much worry about premarital sex. You don't have to worry about premarital sex because if you're not in the same room together, it's, I mean, that's the 100% effective method of preventing an unintended pregnancy. Just not being in the same room with somebody, you know. So whether that, how good or bad that is, that's a mixed right there. I remember when the Dobbs versus Jackson decision was handed down. And it's so funny now, I'll explain to my kids forever, like living through history, where I was when that happened, and I'll share that with you. I was on a trampoline because I have small children. Well, I was waiting by my computer, had the laptop up and I was on a SCOTUS blog, Supreme Court of the United States blog. SCOTUS blog is always the first to get breaking news on the court. So I'm sitting there hitting refresh, hitting refresh, hitting refresh. And John Paul, my two-year-old, comes up to me. He's pulling on my pants side, side, side, outside, to pointing to the trampoline. And like, what do you get? I don't have time for you. I'm trying to help babies, you know. No, I go, I take him out to the trampoline. Well, because it's, this is June, now because it's Texas and we're going to heat wave right now, I actually have to spray the thing down to get our feet on it. And so I, so I'm just, I'm only a, not a totally neglectful father, I'm a semi-neglectful father. I'm jumping on the trampoline, looking at my phone, refreshing. I think it's fine to be on your phone before your kid can remember you're a bad parent. So before that, it's just like, you're golden before they think you're all checked out. And then I see the first case and it was a, it was about a logistical issue, a technical issue with Medicaid. And I was like, ah, they're not going to release it today. Yeah, I'm not going to do that. So I go and I take him off the trampoline. I walk upstairs and I walk by my computer. I think, okay, all right. I open it up, I hit refresh. And then on the SCOTUS blog, I see Dobbs is out. And it's like, and then in the next line, Casey and Rowe are overruled, are overturned. And just like my heart dropped and I was just brought to, brought to tears, that to have lived to see the day. But as I said last night, it's not the beginning. This is not the end of the fight. And what I'm concerned about, what I worry about is that a sense of complacency will fall over pro-life advocates. They have done studies on this when it comes to social movements. And when a social movement thinks it is winning, it does not try as hard. And that's been shown across social movements time and time again. And that was really shown by the pro-choice movement. And I think they're now seeing the error of their ways and they're going to change some of their strategies. Because one of their strategies for the longest time was to ignore the issue. Although that was a smart issue for them at that time, because when you actually look at the issue of abortion, honestly and graphically, the pro-choice position can't win. It just can't because of how viscerally evil this is. And because of the pain that many people associate with abortion. So the pro-choice movement would say, well, we're not going to debate this issue. We're not going to talk about it. We're not going to even mention the A word. We're going to talk about reproductive health. We're going to talk about choice. We're not going to talk about, we're not even going to say the word abortion, much less have a debate. For example, a few months ago in the spring, I debated one of the sharpest pro-choice philosophers on the scene today. A guy named Nathan Novus. Nathan teaches at Morehouse College, I believe. And he's published several papers and a book on the issue of abortion. And so we were going to have a debate. We had a debate at Emory University. It was sponsored by the Emory University Medical Students for Life. So different medical students had got together, wanted to do this. And Nathan personally reached out to the pro-choice medical students at Emory University, saying, do you want to co-sponsor this debate? We'd love to have you involved. And what they said was, no, abortion is not up for debate. We're not going to debate this. We're not going to talk about this issue. And so then when I go to Emory, I look out in the audience and the only students that were actually present, and this amazed me actually, the only students who were present were the pro-life students in the club. No other Emory students wanted to come to to see this event. They're just, if they're pro-choice, they're not interested. I also find it hard that people who probably call themselves pro-life are not as interested as well. I already know about all of that. And so, but I think pro-choice advocates are seeing, well, if we just keep, it's not up for debate. And Nathan on his blog writes, yeah, it is. Why do you think these laws are all being passed? Why do you think things are changing? We have to confront this issue. And that's the same for us, that if we think, oh, good, Roe vs. Wade is overturned, so we're done. No, we're not done. It's like, in episode four, when they blow up the Death Star, it's not done. It's not like, yeah, obviously everybody can go back and we should have a weekend where we cheer and celebrate on Yavin 4. That's fine. That's well deserved. But we can't just sit on our rumps because the pro-choice movement will be back with their AT-AT walkers and we're going to be caught flatfooted. Everyone's like, what is he talking about? I'm sure that's an old enough movie for nearly everybody here to be able to appreciate. But it's true, though. It's funny, people ask me, okay, what do we do now? Immediately after, what do we do right now? And I said, take a weekend off. This is a time where we can, and I did, I took my kids out to dinner every night. I just spent lavishly. We bought a cake for the babies to celebrate because we did work. So it's okay. We worked very hard. This is a significant victory that has now moved a major hurdle. But now, with Rowe gone, Dobbs versus Jackson takes a place in society that is similar to another Supreme Court case, and that is a case called Washington versus Glucksburg. Washington versus Glucksburg is an interesting case. It was handed down in 1999, and there was a group of doctors and terminally ill people in the state of Washington who were suing for the right to have physician-assisted suicide, because physician-assisted suicide was illegal in the state at that time. And so they sued the state, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court, which, by the way, you would never have this ruling today. You would never have this particular ruling today. This ruling was unanimous, nine to zero. Nine to zero, the court said there is no right to assisted suicide in the constitution. And so unanimously, the court affirmed that there is no right to a suicide, that the Constitution doesn't say anything about it, and we can know there is no right to it because state statutes prohibited suicide throughout our nation's history. So clearly, it was never thought of as any kind of a right. Even though punishments for a suicide might change over time, nobody ever thought anybody had a right to this kind of thing. So Washington versus Glucksburg said that the issue of assisted suicide was something that there is no right to it in the Constitution, which means you can't force it to be legal in all 50 states, but you also can't say that it must be illegal in all 50 states. It's something that the Constitution doesn't speak of, so every state gets to decide. So then later after that, you had states like Oregon, California that would pass measures to promote it, and other states that would prohibit it. I often cite this example with friends who are pro-choice lawyers or they're pro-choice legal scholars. They'll say things like, we can't have a patchwork where it's fine in some states, but not others. That'd be legal, legal anarchy, it'd be chaos, no. We already have that. There are things that are legal in some states and things that are illegal in other states. So you have physician assisted suicide in California and you have freedom in Texas. You don't have freedom in California. That's why we got on the last U-Haul out of town.  And now we're in a similar position when it comes to abortion. So what do we need to do now moving forward? Not only have we had our time to celebrate this momentous victory moving forward, what are things that we have to have to watch out for? Well, the biggest thing is we have to continue doing what has worked before when it comes to promoting the pro-life argument. And the thing that has worked before is focusing on the one question that matters most. What are the unborn? Because the other side loses whenever we talk about that particular issue. We lose when we talk about something that is not what are the unborn. So, and you see, and I was watching the media reports after the Dobbs versus Jackson decision where they would have a pro-lifer on and a pro-choice person and they're talking about things. And the pro-choicer always got the upper hand when they would say things like this, well, now that it's illegal, what are you going to do to help all of these kids that are in foster care? And the pro-lifer lost immediately when they said we're helping everybody. We're promoting programs. We're caring for people. That's what we want to do. Because then the pro-choicer, all they have to do is say, but you voted for this politician or you didn't vote for this spending bill or you didn't vote for this and you lost. But you won when you say, what are you going to do about all help all of these kids that are in foster care now? The pro-lifer says, well, I'll tell you what we're not going to do. We're not going to kill them.  Would you agree those things should be illegal? Done. We have to do that because if people think that abortion is just a debate about what's the most prudent way to address poverty, we've lost. We've turned abortion, whether abortion should be legal or not, into a question like, should we have a flat tax or not? Or should we increase welfare benefits? Those are prudential judgments. There's things that people can reasonably disagree about. We can't reasonably disagree about other basic questions of morality, like whether it should be legal to lynch people because a mob says they're guilty or whether it should be legal to dismember a human being because he or she is unwanted. That's why we always have to focus on the one question. What are the unborn? So in our conversations, whether it's in public, whether it's with media, whether it's with friends or family, when people bring this up, we have to focus on that. And then one of the most common things that's coming up now is people are bringing up hard cases. So they're bringing up the cases that pull at the heartstrings. So they look at these cruel pro-lifers and they lie. Well, some people are mistaken because they just uncritically follow the liars. I remember, I always appreciate John, my mentor, because I was this young, bright-eyed, naive, 21-year-old, like, I'm going to change the world and I'm going to help people. And I would say, John, don't be as mean to these pro-choice people. They're just sincerely mistaken. He's like some of them are, but Trent, I got to get my John voice suit on. He's wearing a hat.  They will lie through their freaking teeth looking at you.  And then it's so funny. In fact, I'm always on my, you know, I'm young. I have energy. I've gotten sleep. I want to always be perfectly gracious with everyone.  All right, let's stick to this right now. I am slowly losing the patience I once had when I was a young. And also I've had experience of pro-choice people lying to my face, lying about my colleagues, committing dirty tricks to get us, you know, blocked from being on campuses, lying right to my face. And those words always stuck with me from John, that the activists, not just the people who uncritically follow this, but the people leading the charge, if you're okay with killing babies, obviously you're going to be okay with lying. You're okay with doing whatever it takes to win. So that's why going forward, we also have to remember what Jesus said in Matthew 10.16. Be as wise as serpents, but as gentle as doves. As wise as serpents, but as gentle as doves. I love what Jesus says that the children, he says the children of this world are often wiser, more prudent than the children of the kingdom. And that's true, right?  And so it's, it's kind of sad. That's kind of a debate, not a debate, but it's something my wife and I wrestle with, because we homeschool our kids. They go to, they're homeschooled in two days a week. They go to a, they go to a homeschool co-op. All right. So, and we love it. You know, they're just with all the other homeschool kids, but my wife and I, we were both public schooled, government schooled, I should say, our entire lives. So it's like we were put through the ringer, you know, put through the social pecking order. And especially the most cruel one, of course, being public middle school or junior high. Like, I don't know who thought of that. I really think once a kid turns 12, they should just be kept at home and then reintroduced to school when they're 16. Like that gap period, like they just shouldn't even be let out. They should just put them under lockdown. Yeah. So it's like, I was talking to Father John Parks last night, we're reminiscing because Father Parks was one of the volunteers in our youth group when I was a teenager and now how things have changed since then. And I said to him, I don't understand why the Lord gave 12 year olds puberty. That'd be like, if I gave a handgun to my two year old, like you don't even know what to do with this. I got to kill somebody. So when it comes to, you know, when we are out in the world, we have to balance that. We have to be wise to tricks and deception, but without becoming jaded and cynical. So it's a balancing act, I believe that we have to make when we're engaging others. And that's why we always have to, going forward, we have to understand in this pro-life fight, we have to stay connected to the Lord and to the sacraments, especially to reconciliation and the Eucharist. I will tell you this.  I graduated as a state university. I worked for the state right to life organization, Arizona right to life, worked for justice for all pro-life groups. So I did full-time pro-life work from 2008 till about 2007 to about 2012. Yeah. Cause then I started working for the diocese of Phoenix as their pro-life coordinator. That was the last position I held before I went to work with Catholic Answers. That was in 2012. I'm kind of grateful though, that I'm not in the pro-life movement full-time. I am so grateful for the people who are in that movement. We need them. I will do anything I can to help them, but it is a tough and grueling. If you are full-time, you're at a pregnancy resource center. If you do pro-life education on campuses, if you do it full-time, it takes a toll. I believe it takes a toll on your mental and spiritual health. After being in the trenches for several years, I've seen it because I've seen the burnout. I've seen marriages fall apart. And it makes sense to me.  And when you think you live in a crazy world, you start to think, maybe I'm just crazy, at least deep down inside. And so it's hard. You end up having to develop things like dark humor to handle all of it. And it makes sense to me because it does make sense to be pro-lifers develop things like dark humor to handle the work that they do because it resembles other people like paramedics, police officers, emergency room physicians, people who see death and gore every day. They also have to do that. And it takes a tremendous toll on them. So moving forward, that would be my recommendation is to stay close to the sacrament, stay close to a good community to get your head out of the fight. Even if you're not fully in it, if you are committed to making this important, something you want to share with other people, you have to be careful. When I would do pro-life talks, I gave like these rules for people to follow. And the number one rule was DBW. It stood for don't be weird. DBW, don't be weird. And so we would be out and people would do something weird. Now I'd say DBW, don't be weird. When you pray in front of an abortion facility, you're just praying quietly with your rosary, that's great. People think it's weird, but don't be unnecessarily weird.  Here's the thing. I appreciate that people driving by, they'll get their attention. I highly doubt a woman walking into this abortion facility would want to come over and talk to you. So don't create an unnecessary obstacle to conversation. Don't be weird. And we get weird. Now you might think, well, I'm not going to dress up as the grim reaper. True, probably. But we get weird in other ways. We do this so much, someone says, well, what about abortion in the case of rape? And the first thing we say is, well, look, that's just something that's brought up to divide the issue. It's only like 1% of abortions happen because of rape. Like it's dishonest to even bring that up. The point is, should we be killing babies or not? Now that is actually being weird. Now you would say that because you've heard this question 100 times and you're sick of hearing it. But it doesn't land well for someone who the first, maybe this is the first time they've asked someone who's pro-life, yeah, but what about abortion in the case of rape?  Maybe they have been, or someone close to them has been. And the first thing we lead with is, well, basically it doesn't happen. So it's not a big deal. Well, when it does, that doesn't go over well when it does happen to people. It's dismissive. An empathetic person would say, yeah, that's terrible if someone, anyone who's a victim of assault or violence.   It's called honor killing. And that's barbaric that anyone would do something like that. Like we should never, a pregnant woman didn't do anything wrong. She shouldn't be killed. She didn't do anything wrong. Would you agree though that the baby also didn't do anything wrong? So shouldn't we treat them both the same way? See? And then after I've led with that, and would you agree also when it comes to abortion, nearly every case is about people who choose to engage in intimacy. So can I ask you a question? Would you be okay with outlawing abortion and like there's an exception for rape? What do you think about all the other cases? Now notice here, I'm not compromising in any way, shape or form. I've given an answer, but I want this person to focus on the main issue. Some people who bring up these tough objections, they really are conflicted. There's two different kinds of people who bring up what about rape? What about the life of the mother? One type are people who are genuinely conflicted. Okay. And you can talk with them and work them through. And some of them will say, yeah, I do think it's wrong in these other cases. It should be illegal. But what about in these cases? And then you can have a conversation saying, well, is it still the same human being? But it's a different circumstance, but that's still a human being who's being killed. Other people though, there's the conflicted, genuinely conflicted. The other group, I call them crusaders. And this comes up maybe at a dinner party or with a group of people or they just want to really stick it to you. They bring this up. They're not, they think all abortion should be legal for any reason.   So you think a 10 year old is raped should give birth? And just to make you look bad? So that's why for the, when I know someone's being a crusader like that, I'll sometimes then offer them, well, look, let me ask you this. There's different pro life laws. What if there was a law that made an exception for rape? Do you think abortion should be illegal in the other 99% of cases? Well, you know, you answer my question. I will gladly answer your question, but I want to understand where you're coming from. What about the other 99%? Well, no, a woman has the right to choose. Okay. So then why do you even care about bringing up rape in the first place? If the unborn is not a human being, who cares? You don't need a reason. Like imagine if you went to the dentist, he said, okay, you have, you got three cavities.  I actually wasn't brushing my teeth. I can't help you today. You're not responsible. Out you go. You, you were brushing your teeth. You're responsible. I'm willing to help you out. Nobody judges whether you can get a cavity filled based on your previous behavior. It's just a cavity. Who cares? You know, maybe, maybe you get the lecture later, you know, from the dentist, but he'll, he'll fill it as it's not the morality doesn't change based on your previous behavior. But if the unborn are not human beings, then abortion, whether it's in the case of rape or in the case of I had a sexual encounter that probably wasn't the best idea at the time, it doesn't matter morally. It doesn't matter because what is killed is not human. It's not a human being. But if the unborn are human beings, then it can't be justified in any case. And that's what we have to bring up to heel. So for the same thing, if a woman's life is in danger, someone says, what if a woman's life is in danger? Are you this cruel pro-lifer? You can say, well, look, can you answer this question for me? Are the unborn human beings or not? If they are not human beings, then we should have abortion for any reason. It does not matter. But if they are human beings, and we both agree, then it follows from that. In all the other cases, it should be illegal. And in a tiny minority of cases, we may not be sure what to do. We have two people whose lives are in danger and we can only save one. And so there are cases like this that happen with born people. We just don't kill one person to save another. So the arguments from hard cases, you can also point this out to people. And someone says, yeah, but what about abortion to save somebody's life? So in order for that, why don't we need to keep abortion legal because of that? You could say to that person, well, let me ask you a question. Do you think it should be illegal to run red lights? You should give somebody a ticket if they run a red light. If we're all running red lights, that's bad. He's like, well, yeah, sure. Oh, yeah, but what about if my aunt is dying and I got to get her to the hospital and on this desolate country road with a broken red traffic light and I'm just sitting there and I'm like, okay, fine, yeah, you can run that traffic light. Great. So we should get rid of traffic lights.  Just because there's that one hard case where maybe you need to do that, it doesn't follow. We get rid of everything. That's not a perfect analogy, but you can help people to see clearly hard cases make bad laws. Hard cases make bad laws. Instead, when we dialogue with other people and these hard cases come up, always, always bring them back to that one question, what are the unborn? And then apply that and then work through the hard cases. So someone's life is in danger, for example. Every state allows, every single state, Alexander desanctus at National Review has compiled all these state laws showing that every state that criminalizes abortion allows medical providers to treat ectopic pregnancies. It's not even the same thing. You don't, you use a different procedure to remove the damaged section of a woman's fallopian tube where an embryo has implanted and can no longer survive with both of them will die if nothing is done unless you remove that damaged part of the tube versus dismembering or causing a child to be purposely miscarried. They're two completely different procedures. So that's to summarize as we're moving forward in order for us to make headway on this issue, we have to stay focused on the one issue that matters most. What are the unborn? We also have to maintain our spiritual sanity and our emotional health. It will be hard. It's 50 new fights. Oh, one last point. We also can't be our own worst enemies. Okay, we're going to end up disagreeing about what's the most prudent way forward, and we shouldn't demonize one another if we disagree about these things. For example, you might live in a state where pro-lifers disagree. Should we try to completely ban abortion or have an exception for rape and incest? And one person will say, if you do exceptions, that means you don't care about those babies. We have to do all or none. But the church allows people to pass feasible laws. It would be wrong to go from a complete ban to exceptions. But it's not wrong if you have abortion is completely available and you pass the law that you can feasibly pass. If you have good reason to believe the ideal law, you don't have political capital or voter support to be able to do that. For a reference to that, you can check out paragraph 73 of Pope St. John Paul II's encyclical The Gospel of Life. In that context, he was talking about a legislator. He said a legislator whose opposition to abortion was publicly known, was well known, could vote for a less than ideal law to restrict abortion if that is the most feasible law that he's able to accomplish. If he's going from less protection of the unborn to more protection, as long as he's moving in that general direction. So we as pro-lifers, we're going to disagree about the best way forward, but me, I'm an incrementalist. I really believe the best path forward is to go for the things that we are able to win on. And the reason for that is when I look at other social movements in the past, that is what they did. When I look at the LGBT movement, for example, they didn't start with, we want all of the crazy stuff. They just said, well, we just want this little thing, we just want this same little equality protection, nothing else like that. And then now eventually it's turned into, they didn't start with, we want kids at drag shows, right? Because that would give the game away. That they saved till after they've made all of these other victories. And the same for us that we have to meet people where they're at and move incrementally towards the goal. So that's, that's what I think. And yeah, that's how I'd recommend is you engage others.


What's going on everyone Sam here late in sports cards. We've been one box of Tag this really quick. I think it's 20 2022 Bowman baseball first edition for Stephen S. So good luck here Stephen Thanks, buddy That's a nice express, baby. Good luck here. Let's do it right here Blue Brennan Davis 45 out of 150. Let's take that big Cubs one right there base I see a big aqua too.  That'd be pretty awesome base Aqua Victor La Brata for the Mariners Bill Wagner Christian Hernandez Aqua for the Cubs over for you Base there's clear Watson on the back not bad base base There's a base right there There's an aqua of Jorbit V. V boss for the Dodgers And aqua's not numbered just your kind of parallels see some big like an Ellie or a Valera or wood or Watson somebody big There's a Ricardo Genoves base Felix Valeria nice one there go into the brew a brew crew Luke Waddell on the first aqua. I used to know exactly how these were like structured Cooper Kenny Going to the race like when he took them out What was gonna be your base packs and what we're gonna be your foil packs? He knew them like down on every single first edition. Yeah wild Jeter Downs going to the Red Sox nice one there James Wood first nice one there sir There's Jackson winski first he made his debut he's got his rookies an update So he has a 20 20 22 bowman first and he has a 20 22 update rookie It's funny. Yeah, it's a really good Waldo Cabrera and the inks Lenin Sosa and the White Sox they all have like in the majors It's kind of wild Dorey Lorenzo nice one there for the Stroze Base Robert Hassell part of that Soto trade Full some Montgomery first base back There's a color out here three to go Get some more colors of gold. Well, maybe big gold. Come on. Come on. That's gonna be South Frelik Nice, that'll work. You go for the brew crew one out of 50. Let's go He was the He's like 14th overall. He's 21 bowman draft is his first, but that's pretty solid right there He's gonna be a good player. I think he's one of their top prospects between Perez him and Like Gilbert Sanchez, I think Blue Hedbert Perez 119 out of 150 literally just who we were talking about right there Well, if you weren't a brewers fan before there Steven, I think you are now Bobby win jr. Nice. There we go. That'll work. Let's go great way to end it right there on the aqua That'll do it for the your break right there Steven. Thanks as always man. Appreciate you chilling with us We'll get him right out to my man


Police are investigating an armed robbery that occurred at the Kira Sports Club in Hotel Street Kira early this morning at just before 6 a.m. an employee of the club attended the club to open up upon opening the front doors. A single male offender has approached the employee and demanded to open the door. The offender was armed with a handgun. The offender has then taken the employee of the club inside. He's demanded to be taken to an area of the administration area of the club where he asked the employee to open the safe. The employee was tied up and a large sum of money was taken. The male person, the male offender was last seen escaping through the car park of the of the Kira Sports Club on foot. He's been described as between 175 and 180 centimetres tall. The offender was wearing all dark clothing, a balaclava, a dark jacket and dark pants and was wearing gloves. We would be asking any member of the public who saw anything suspicious suspicious who saw anything untowards in that area this morning to contact crime stoppers or their local police concerning sorry is this concerning any offense involving firearms or weapons is concerning to us. There have been any sightings of this fellow at all other than one from the victim. We're still investigating that. At this point of time we're not aware of any further witnesses. Was the victim touched or pushed or anything like that of that nature? The victim was not harmed but was obviously there was some physical contact between the two but he was not harmed at all but obviously he's quite shaken by the experience. His report said he was bound. Can you expand? No that's all I can tell you at this point of time. Security pictures of the incident there are some. We do have some CCTV footage which I'll try and make available to you immediately. Now we only just received it two minutes ago. Okay. So we're just checking that now and it should be available for you by the time we've finished here. Have you seen that at all? Just now, yes. Can you just talk us through briefly what it is? I mean is it fairly violent sort of stuff? Well in answer to your question, will any robbery involving a weapon is violent even though physical violence may not be used? We do consider it an offensive violence but the footage shows the manager arriving or the employee arriving at the club, the offender then approaching him at the front door, they enter the club and then he commits the offense and then he leaves the club or in the space of you know 15 to 20 minutes. Are you able to say how old the victim was? No I'm not. So he lasted that long about 20 minutes? Roughly between 15 to 20 minutes. How is he? He must be careful. He's quite shaken yes. Given that he complied did he react as you would expect someone or you would like someone to do in the situation? Certainly yes. We would not advocate people take things into their own hands. We will not advocate that people confront anyone who's armed with any sort of weapon. It's probably too early to say but any from looking at the footage or does he very resemblance or act in any way to similar crimes that we've seen down here? It's too early to say at this point in time. It's been some similar hold-off sit-down in Molymo and Condon at sports clubs as well. Is there any relation do you reckon on? It's too early to say at this point in time but we have been conversing with our colleagues in NSW in relation to similar offences. What are you looking for from the public Brian? Anyone who's got any information at all about who may have committed this offence and anyone who may have seen anyone acting suspiciously in the vicinity of the Kira Sports Club early this morning before 6am if they could contact their local police or crime stoppers on 1800 triple three triple zero. There was some reports apparently that somebody saw a suspicious character yesterday lurking around because would you have to know that the club would be open at 6am? Isn't that very usual? Well not able to comment on that. If your question is if you think if there was a degree of planning in this offence well there does appear to be a degree of planning in the commission of the offences. How long was he sort of tied up and before somebody else came to? I couldn't say at this point of time. Is it now? No it wasn't that long. No. No less it was certainly less than now. Was he able to free himself to phone? Yes he was. I don't know if we'll be getting that into that in a moment but is this a matter for the new task force as well? Yes we're working closely with our colleagues from State Crime Operations Command. And I did hear one officer say that it was a shame it's happened the day before the funeral tomorrow. Must be pretty high branching for officers today. It is a very difficult time for any police officer but in particular detectives in this region. Of course we as we remember the events of last week but you know they are a very good group of professionals here and they're just doing their job as best they can.


Two Palestinian attackers opened fire at a bus stop during morning rush hour at the entrance to Jerusalem on November 30, killing at least two people and wounding eight others, Israeli police said. Two terrorists arrived at the scene in a vehicle armed with firearms, these terrorists opened fire towards civilians at the bus station and were subsequently neutralized by security forces and a nearby civilian, Israeli police said, the attackers came from east Jerusalem. Jerusalem Police District Commander Doran Terjman told reporters at the scene.A large number of ambulances and police converged on the street that was crowded with morning commuters and police said they were searching the area to make sure there were no other attackers.


And in closing, just before we close for lunch, we're going to welcome back Nathan Scott to round us up for the morning session on a very inspirational talk, just to keep your thinking moving forward, the science of motivation. So apologies for anyone who thought I was rubbish the first time you've got me again. Right, so this is a very different topic to what I covered first up, but I want you to think about how you actually operate within your own business. And one of the things we really need to try and be aware of is the fact that in your everyday life you have various levels of control and influence over things that you might be worried about within your business, or things that are happening in and around your business. So we talk about this thing called the sphere of control and influence. And essentially we have some things that we can only ever be concerned about. We can't actually influence them. We certainly can't control them. So what's the first one that comes to your mind when you think of that? Weather, absolutely. The problem is we spend a lot of time and a lot of energy worrying about things that we can't do a bloody thing about. Now it's very easy for me to stand here and tell you don't do it. It's very hard for us to actually be able to change the way we go about it. But in everyday lives managing a farm you have all of these various things going on at any one time. Your aim is to try and drag as many of those into the center of that sphere of control and influence as you possibly can. So there are things there that we can absolutely control. There are some things that we can influence and there are others that we can only ever be concerned about. So we can only ever be concerned about the weather but we can absolutely control our stocking rate in response to what climatic conditions we've got at the time. And so we need to be more conscious of that in the way we go about things. That's the first thing I want you to think about. The next thing is to think about what actually motivates us. Why do we do the things that we do? Why do we do them the way that we do them? And I want you to think about this in terms of yourself, in terms of your family that works on the farm, employees that work on the farm. We can actually think about and have a better influence over the way that we all react in our day to day lives. And the first thing to think about when we think about motivation and there are three key things that I'm gonna talk about. What do you think, what motivates you? What's a good motivator? Holidays is a really good one, it should motivate you. I actually spend a lot of time with my clients making sure that every one of them has a holiday booked in and booked in advance that they can't get out of because we're all, and I'm as bad as anyone.  So holidays is a really good one but what if we talk about the industry and I've heard it quite a few times today, what's the profit proposition gonna be? What's the value proposition? Is profit a good motivator? You think so? I've got clients who do the equivalent of drive a brand new BMW off a cliff each year just in school fees. Now if I go to them and say, hey, if we do this, you're gonna make an extra $5,000 profit.  Not really. It's not a great motivator. They're already pretty comfortable. They're pretty comfortable with the fact that they're driving a brand new BMW off a cliff each year in school fees. So the extra $5,000 doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference. What if I went to them and said, if we achieve this, you'll be in the top 5% of sheep producers in the country. It's a very different response from people because they want that. The outcome's exactly the same. To me, profit's an outcome. It's not a motivator. I need my clients to be profitable. The more profitable they are, the more likely they are to spend money on me. It's very selfish for you of it, that's the reality. I need my clients to be profitable, but it's an outcome, not a motivator.  Do things your own way. We're pretty lucky in farming because we've got stacks of autonomy. But think about it in terms of the other people in your business. Are you breathing down their neck all the time? Or are you letting them have some of that control to be able to figure out their own way to do it? The next one is mastery, and that's the one I use a lot. So when I'm talking to clients, we rarely talk about profit. But I do talk about them being the best. Mastery is being the best you can possibly be. And the third one is purpose. And that's about being part of something much bigger than yourself. That's about, it's one of the reasons why I show you things like the video of the robots cutting up the carcass. How much more money is that gonna make you? It doesn't make you money. The actual robot cutting up the carcass isn't necessarily gonna make you money. And you just heard from, that we're gonna see that flow back in. The reason I show it to you though is, because I know you wanna be a part of an industry that is making progress. It doesn't have to be you. It doesn't have to be you that's making the more money each time.  It's the same reason why across my client base we have a really high uptake of pain relief for landmarking. Not for mulesing, just talking about for marking. And I can't give them a demonstrated commercial benefit of them doing it. But everyone who uses it says we'll never go back. And that's not anything to do with making more money. That's about being part of something bigger than themselves. That's about being part of an industry that they can be proud of. Something where they can put their hand on their heart and say we are doing the best thing we can possibly do. So it gives them the hit of both, mastery and purpose. What I want you to think about is what is it? What's the fire in your belly? Because ultimately that's what you need to know. If you want people to work for you, if you want people to achieve, if you want to understand yourself, you need to know what you believe in. Change doesn't happen because you ask for it. Change will happen because you inspire it. So if you want people to do things for you, you want people to help you achieve things, so it's people in your team, which could be family, could be employees, then you need to show them why we're trying to do it. What is it that we're actually trying to achieve? What do we believe in? And we start thinking about the way our brain actually works. How does the science, what does the science tell us about how your brain works? Really simple one on motivation. If we come along to a day like this, you could go home with a to-do list. Whole bunch of things that you could go home they're going to implement. Now, this is from another conference that I spoke at, but someone could have gone home with that as their list.  Now, dopamine is the neurochemical that makes you feel good. It's the same thing that's heavily linked to addiction. So alcohol, drugs, gambling, all those things is because each of those gives you constant feeding of dopamine into your system. Makes you feel good, makes you want to do it again. That's why to-do lists work, because we get this hit a dopamine. And to prove it, I know that you have all done this, where you've got your to-do list and you will write something on the bottom that you've just done, so that you can cross it out. And the reason is because you still get the hit a dopamine when you do that. Even though it's got nothing to do with all the things that are actually on your to-do list. Social media and the addiction to our phones. I get in trouble for it all the time at home. Stop looking at your phone. But it's because every time someone follows you on Twitter, every time someone likes something on Facebook, even every time you get a text message or an email, you hear that noise, you get a hit a dopamine. So for those of you that aren't already, you can follow me at a cheebag. Keep feeding me the dopamine.  Someone likes me. Someone wants to be a part of something I'm doing. It's great. But that's why we become addicted to these things. The problem with a to-do list like this, if you look at each of those items on there, they are too all-encompassing. They're too big. What does that mean, improve lamb survival? How the hell am I going to do that? And what happens when we've got things that are too big? Our brain doesn't cope with it. And procrastination kicks in. Now, some of us are particularly good at procrastinating. And my best example is when I was at uni, took me a little while to get through uni. That's a different story. If I had an assignment due, theoretically, there's an amount of work to be done and there's an amount of time before the due date. It would make perfect sense to work studiously away at that until you had had it done. What do you reckon I did? LAUGHTER And we fill that void with a whole lot of other stuff. Predominantly useless stuff. And if you think about it, it is the sole reason that things like YouTube exist. And that's because if we didn't procrastinate, we would never find this stuff. I did find that when I was supposed to be building the presentation. So the problem is, if we take that, that's too all-encompassing. It allows us to procrastinate, which isn't going to help us get there. So the next step is to think, how can we break it down into manageable tasks? The problem is, if I just take these top two and I break them down, that's what they start to look like. All of a sudden, I've got this really long-to-do list. And that creates a real challenge for us. And it introduces us to the paradox of choice. And this is one of the... Out of everything I've ever done, all the sheep research, all the stuff that MLA, AWI and everyone do, this alone is the single best bit of research I've ever found.  The paradox of choice. A university set up two jam stalls in a park. In one of them, they had 24 different varieties of jam. In the other one, they only had six. For all the people who walked past, 60% of people stopped to look when there was 24 varieties of jam. Only 40% of people stopped to look where there was only six varieties of jam. 3% of people bought jam where there was 24. 30% of people bought jam where there was only six. So 100 people walked past. Less than two people actually bought jam where there was 24 options. 12 people bought jam where there was only six. If we give ourselves too many options, we make no decision at all. If you think about Audi supermarket, you walk in and you say, I want biscuits. You get there and you go, that'll be those biscuits. Because they don't give you too many options. There is a genuine reason for it.   Give ourselves too many options, we don't make any decision at all. And that's the problem with it to do this like this. It becomes overwhelming for our brain. You look at it and you think, I don't know which one I should be doing. And so we don't do any of them. So we start thinking about, well, how can we prioritize it? Maybe we should prioritize it into A's, B's and C's. That'll work. That draws our attention to the A's, doesn't it? The problem is, when do the C's get done? Either never or when they become an A. So like service the ute was a C until it started making that horrible noise and it becomes an A. And that's a problem for us. But if I take this same to-do list, every single one of those items you can see there and I put them into a calendar, that's one month, that's every one of those items in that calendar. It's not that daunting, is it? If we just take them from a to-do list, put them into your calendar, you still get to cross them off when they're done. So you still get your hit of dopamine. The difference is as you sit there and you look at that whole list, it's not that overwhelming. And it allows us to make that progress. Often our biggest challenge is actually starting. Most of the time we get caught up in our own heads and we don't make the start. So what I want you to think about, we need to know what motivates us and how our brain works. I said earlier in my first presentation that we need to set goals and I want you to sit there and write down a goal at some point. And I don't want you to set little ones, I want big goals. Couple of little things, when you set a goal, if you type your goal, it only requires eight muscle functions. If you write, handwrite your goal, it uses 22,000 neurological functions. And as soon as you do that, it helps commit that to your conscious brain. So that your brain becomes much more aware of that as a goal, as opposed to just typing it. So handwrite your goals. And I always say to people, don't tell anyone. Why would I say don't tell anyone? The reason is, I also said I want you to set big goals, didn't I?  What's the first thing they're gonna tell you? That won't work. You can't do that. My whole thing is just because no one else has done it, doesn't mean it can't be done. And that's exactly how we go about it with our client base. So just as a little example of how this works in your brain. I decided a little while ago, I really want to do it Jeep Wrangler. Not because they're any good, because they're pretty confident we know they're not. I just want one.  You see them everywhere, don't you? Why had I never noticed them before? Because it wasn't important to me.  Because if it didn't, you'd go insane. The overload of stimulus would be too much for you and you would go insane. So what it does is it subconsciously makes all these decisions for you. Don't need to know that, don't worry about that, don't worry about that. The minute I said I want a Jeep Wrangler, there's one, there's one, there's one. It's the same if you decide I want to go overseas. I want to go to Canada. All of a sudden you see cheap flights to Canada. Next thing you're at a party and you hear someone talking over there and they've got a Canadian accent and you're over there having a chat to them. Now you know where to go. Now you've possibly got somewhere to stay. People say, oh, it must be fate. I don't believe in fate. Fate is the excuse for what your brain actually achieves for you. Your brain does all of that filtering and what we classes fate is actually the fact that you made a conscious decision, brought into your conscious brain and that started filtering all that information in rather than out. And that's how it works. So my view is that things don't just happen, you make them happen. And part of that is if you want to be better, if you want to achieve more, you want to achieve a certain thing on your property, in your business, for your family, then sit down and write the goals. I never, ever want any of you to aim to be average. I think we spend too much time talking about averages. Averages can be very, very deceiving. A man drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches. We can be easily deceived by averages, but also if you aim to be average, you're probably gonna fall short of average or you might achieve average, but that's still not what you're capable of. One thing with our clients, I'm not a massive fan of benchmarking in terms of production, mainly because I don't think we know where we're going until we get there. I don't think we know what's possible. The science tells us what's possible. In terms of what we can achieve within our businesses, I want the science to tell me and then I want to go and achieve it. And if no one else is achieving it, that's still not relevant to me. If the science tells me we can do it, then that's what we're aiming for, is to be the best. So just to finish off, as an industry in general, I think that we need more leadership. I think all of you have a responsibility to be leaders, within your families, within your business, within your community, within our bigger, wider industry. I think as an industry, we have far too many people that talk about they. They should do this, they should do that. They shouldn't have done it that way. I don't know who they are, but they sound like a pack of bastards to me. The reality is it's not their industry. Whoever they are, it's not their industry. It's ours, we are the industry. So we've got to take some ownership of it as a collective. Now whether that means taking some technology and bringing it into your business, whether it means just sitting and setting proper goals for your business, making sure everyone in the business understands what it is that you're trying to achieve. I said earlier, whatever we do well today, we can do better tomorrow. That's what I truly believe. Thanks very much.


Let me talk to the men. Because the men actually have the power to do the most damage here. Because you are the leader. If I'm driving a bus along a cliff, it's not the people that are riding in the bus with me that can steer the bus off the cliff. It's me, right? It's me that can drive that bus to safety, or it's me that can drive that bus off the cliff. Look, none of this works without your leadership. Now, I see, personally, and I don't want to, I don't really know all that much about you all yet, but I see a real disconnect today amongst young men, especially. And even in churches like ours, I see a real disconnect here. You know, there's this, these zealous young men. I want a virtuous woman.  And, you know, but look, if you want a separated family and you want to do these things, you had better learn to work. You had better learn to work. Because you know what? If you're gonna have a, in a society where both parents work, 90% of both parents work, and you're gonna talk about having a life where only you work, you better learn to work hard. Or this isn't gonna work. You know, I told my kids, since the time that they were this tall, that the worst thing you could be in life is lazy, period. And I feel that way from the top of my head to the tip of my toes, too. If you're lazy, you can forget what I'm saying if you're lazy, because you can't separate your family. If you're lazy and you're not willing to work for it. Who's gonna support them when all this is going on? You know, 1 Timothy 5, 8 says, but if any provide not for his own, especially for those in his own house, he had denied the face and it is worse than an infidel. The Bible says you're worse than an unbeliever. And that's true. I mean, it doesn't say you're not saved, but it says you're worse than an unbeliever.  The consequences will be worse.   Your wife will have no respect for you.    You're living in a dream world, my friend. You better have a plan and you better get things together. And then God will put things in, God will bless that. God will bless that. But worse than an infidel, I've seen, it's almost 100% when we get these men that come into these churches and they're perpetually unemployed, they're not gonna, it's not gonna work here. They cause all kinds of problems, 100% of them. Because all kinds of trouble and problems some get thrown out, it's crazy. It's a serious predictor. So if you wanna raise kids, you wanna separate your family, you wanna lead in that area, get to work. Get a plan to get to work. Spiritual leadership, you're the spiritual leader in your family, what are you doing to lead spiritually? These women are supposed to be silent in this church. They're supposed to learn in silence. How are they gonna learn if you never do anything?   Here's how complicated it is. You open up the Bible, you pick a chapter, you read it 10 minutes beforehand and then you bring your family out to the living room. This is what I do. I bring my family out to the living room and then we all read the chapter together. And when I read it 10 minutes beforehand, I noted some things that I just wanted to talk about and then I let my family talk about it. Like, hey, what do you think? You'd be shocked that your 12 year old daughter will get out of the Bible. But I wanna know, sermon ideas have come out of it for me.  Your family's gonna learn the Bible. Lead your home. Lead your home. The whole exercise takes about 25 minutes. And if you get some good conversation going, it's a great time. Make some popcorn. We try to do it every single night, there's not church. And you know what, I'm proud to say that because my family loves it so much, even when I've been busy, they now come to me and say, what are we doing a Bible study? And I'm like, okay, right now, that's what we're doing it. It's awesome, do it. Lead. It's your job. It's your job.


We want to share a word to us this morning in the Book of Revelation chapter 2 verse 1. The book of Revelation chapter 2 verse 1. The Bible says to the angel of the church of Ephesus write these. These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lamsters. I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tasted those who claim to be apostles but are not and have found them false. You have persevered and you have endured hardship from my name and have not grown weary verse 4. Yet I hold these against you. You have forsaken the love and the love you had at the first time. Verse 5. Consider how far you have fallen, repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lamster. I was reading this word and meditating upon this scripture and this letter to the church of Ephesus where the letter was written and it was speaking about the people in the church of Ephesus. Where now God was speaking and saying, I know your deeds, I know you have been serving God, I know you have been in church, I know you have been paying your tithes and your offerings, you have been the praise and worship, I know you have been in the team, in the media team, working, doing all you can to the kingdom. But now here he comes and he says that imagine and I appreciate that I know the things you have been doing in church, I know the things you have been doing for the sake of the kingdom, I know the things you have been doing. But he comes here and he says that this is what I have against you after serving, after praising us on what you have been doing in church. He says that I have this against you, I have this one thing against you that you have neglected the first love, you have neglected the first love. God is not moved by how you can pay your tithes. God is not moved by how you can be doing things in church. God is not moved by how you can participate in the departments of the church. God is moved by the relationship you have with him. God is moved by the you time, the relationship you have with him. And this is what God is telling us this morning that all I want from you is to have a relationship with me. The Bible saying Genesis that anytime you wanted something he spoke to it and as we were sharing here we saw that when you remove a fish from the water it is the fish that dies not the water. If you remove the plant from the ground it is the plant that dies not the ground meaning that if we are disconnected from God it is us who are dead we are having many people who are serving in church and yet they are dead. Now look at this, the Bible said and God told Adam you can eat from anything you can eat anything from this place but don't eat from that tree don't touch or eat from that tree and the Bible say when they ate they when they ate the Bible say when they ate they were driven away from the Garden of Eden now people have discovered where Jesus used to eat where he fed the 5,000 people where he did the miracles but no one has discovered the Garden of Eden because the Garden of Eden it was not a place it was the presence of God so in other words when Adam ate the fruit he was disconnected from the presence of God and the first time we see God coming to the Garden of Eden and calls Adam where are you why did he call because he found that Adam was not in his presence he found that they were already disconnected from the presence of God the message is clear this morning that God is calling us to the first place God is calling us to the first love God is calling us to the place where we used to fast like never before the place where we used to fear God because we are being a generation that no longer fear God we can sleep outside partying doing all kind of man of things that we are doing outside and still come in the presence of God and still do the things of God God is not happy about that let us also as we go back to the first love honor our fathers pray for them encourage them and as we pray for them and as we encourage them our days because you say honor your father and mother and your days will be added we will have long life when we honor and respect them and this morning all I'm asking is that let us join together and pray for them we pray for them because they are looking fine and yet some of them wanna find they are looking good well in suits in ties yet kuna pains kuna bitanes wanna struggle now and your manaka say my songs of Solomon that cuts for me the little foxes that eat the vineyard there are issues inside that are eating the vineyard and I want us to pray for them and God will remember them this morning that God will strengthen them that God will encourage them and as he is strengthening them they will continue to serve us in Jesus name


Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece. And today we are going to have a very important discussion centering on the question of whether or not One Piece Manga Readers should support the official release by Viz. And in this video I'm going to go over why I chose to support the official translation on this channel, a brief history of why scans exist, as well as the arguments for and against reading them. I also want to make it very clear that my purpose here today is not to preach at you all or present myself for some sort of arbiter of honor, because I really am the very last person who gets to call people who read scans wrong, as one of the foundations for building this channel was reviewing scans. In fact the argument can be made that I personally was doing far more damage by reviewing scan lations than combined thousands of people who simply read them week to week. But let's get straight into it by further laying down my bias in this discussion. This channel for some time now has instigated a policy on only reviewing the official Viz release for a wide variety of reasons, and I'm very happy to explain those for transparency. Firstly we have the lesser noble reason that if I uploaded a chapter of you based on a scan, then there was a significantly higher chance that my video would be flagged by Shueisha even though it didn't actually use any images from the manga chapter in question. This is because Shueisha, Toei and a whole ton of other global companies have a policy of flagging and removing any video they come across that even looks like it might infringe on their copyright, pretty much from the thumbnail alone. In many cases they won't even watch the video and if they do, the chances that they understand what I'm saying as an English speaker are extraordinarily low. They just recognize that the title and thumbnail says one piece chapter or whatever, and because they see this video before the chapter is officially released, they just assume that it's me uploading the entire chapter rather than discussing it in a review context. And it's not like this happened every week, but over the course of my YouTube career I have had five copyright complaints, with one of them being a false flag on my Luffy vs Kata Curry video, one of them being Toei claiming my Luffy vs Kaito video, and the other three were all Shueisha taking down a chapter review video. So three out of five issues have spawned from early chapter reviews. That is a ridiculously high hit rate and a very obvious pattern, which led me to make the practical decision to switch to the official release. And honestly, I was pretty terrified about making that decision. At one point I was considering whether or not it would still be worth me doing manga reviews at all, because I thought that my views would be drastically reduced as a result of me being late. But I bit the bullet and when I uploaded my first chapter review on a Monday morning, after all of my contemporaries had done theirs on Friday evening, I noticed, well, very little substantive change. There were definitely less views, yes, but the difference was so negligible that I could not believe how I was pushing myself to release a video mere hours after a scan had dropped just for the reward of maybe a couple of extra thousand views at most. And that's when it hit me that even from a strictly business and even profit-driven perspective, it was not worth reviewing a scan. I mean, why push yourself to churn out some initial thoughts based on a product of questionable quality and accuracy when you could take your time to put together a really well thought out and digested review based on the most accurate possible translation. And yes, we'll get into some of the issues that people have with the Viz translation in a bit, but this is where I am coming into this discussion. I, as a YouTuber, even before I realized that reviewing scans was potentially channel threatening, would be constantly frustrated by the fact that on many occasions, my reviews were based on false information. I won't deny that there were a collective of scan groups out there that produced some high-quality stuff, but they still contained very consistent errors, and it's frankly embarrassing when I do something like base an entire two-minute section of a review on information that is false. And not only that, but if I didn't read the official translation at all, I could be basing any future discussion in any of my videos on said false information, and I have done so in the past. And with a channel that's motto is your source for everything one piece, that simply is not good enough. So I saw my unfortunate copyright situation as an opportunity to fine-tune the quality of information that gets disseminated on this channel, which I truly believe can only result in a better product for all of you, even if there is a couple of days waiting attached to it. But with this all in mind, I would not blame anybody for asking the question of why I used scans in the first place, especially if I knew that there was a chance of blatant misinformation. And one reason, as alluded to before, was because I thought that in terms of chapter reviews, being the quickest was the most important factor, and I was very wrong about that. But the other has to do with my long-standing mentality regarding scans, because I've been a One Piece fan for close to 14 years now, and for about 13 of those 14 years, I would read the scans as soon as they dropped. But for some context, I do want to take this all back to what the Manga landscape actually looked like 14 years ago. In 2005, there was no online Manga options. It was print or nothing.  And meanwhile, the Manga being published in Japan was just entering the any-slobby arc. And with the extraordinarily slow pace in which the English volumes were being released, it would have taken the better part of a decade to catch up to the point where the Manga was currently. Of course, as a dumbass teenager, what I did not predict was the eventual One Piece speed up that Viz did, and thank God for that. But at the time, a high school me was not willing to accept waiting that long, nor would I have had the money to spend buying 40-plus volumes at almost 30 Australian dollars a piece. And yes, the anime existed as well and was ahead of the Manga. But at the time, the only choice of anime was the Four Kids adaptation. So being a One Piece fan was prohibitive in every way imaginable. The only way that a satisfying experience was possible was to read the scans. Errors and all. And my God, oh, there were errors back then. Plus, the actual image quality was comparable to literal garbage, but these were very desperate times. And I think that overall, scan relations had a positive effect on the Manga industry because it forced them to provide readers with an online alternative delivered in a prompt manner worldwide. So illegal or not, I think that both readers and publishers were great thanks to ScanLations for providing us with a vision of the future for a globalized society. I mean, it still took an awfully long time to get to that point, but here we are in this day and age, and I personally think that scans have now been made redundant. However, I was still in a habit of reading them as all of this innovation was going on around me. Yes, Shueisha and Viz began their online services, but I had been reading scans for like a decade at this point. In fact, it was the most consistent part of my life looking back on it. You know how things change, like being in university, working different jobs, or even being in different relationships, but the one constant was the fact that every week, a scan of One Piece was going to drop, and I was going to click it immediately. And that's been a really difficult habit to break, especially because running a channel and a community on Discord and Facebook, specifically about One Piece, it's just impossible for me to avoid spoilers. I would have to actively not look at my comments, my page, or even some of my primary server channels for almost three days straight, and I just can't do that because I do value communicating with all of you. But that's very much my personal problem, and the large majority of people aren't going to be too affected in that regard. So that leaves us with two potential arguments in favor of reading scan lations, one being the speed at which they are released, and the other being the very subjective notion of quality. Starting with speed, there's no way around this, but scans will always be available before the official chapter provided that Shueisha is determined to continue focusing on their print business model. And the Library of Ohara put together a really good timeline in regards to this as part of an article on why he supports scan lations, which I will link in the description because he does raise a lot of interesting arguments, most of which I don't personally agree with, but you guys are free to engage in some critical thinking and make up your own minds. But what this particular point boils down to is that until Shueisha further adapts to the digital market and releases chapters online prior to the magazine release, we're going to be stuck with a system of early scans, meaning that for those of you who want One Piece as fast as possible quality be damned, that is always going to be your natural option. And I get why you'd want to do that, I really do, because this is such a wonderful community built around an amazing story that has had us all gripped for over two decades now, and we want to be in the know and in the discussion as soon as possible.  As the community currently stands, you would have to effectively ostracize yourself for it for just under half a week, which is not a pleasant thought. Although as a community, I think we can do much better in this regard simply by not being dicks and being very considerate about spoilers, keeping them under lock and key for those who don't want to see them. But then again, this is the internet so I don't expect that sort of social responsibility to take place. Although that isn't to say that it can't be done, I mean when Avengers Endgame came out, I witnessed an unparalleled wall of support for not spoiling the experience for others. So surely we as a community can stop doing that as well? That would be one step towards fostering a better environment for supporting the official release. But now, why should we support the official release beyond legal or moral obligation? Neither of which I'm going to go into, because quite frankly, they are boring and they won't convince anybody who regularly reads scans to stop anyway. But one of my primary arguments for supporting the official release is simply quality. And a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this, which is fine because quality is very subjective, but a lot of the examples are going to cite specific translation grabs. So for example, the obvious one is the fact that Viz still translates Zoro as Zolo. Now we know that they do this for continuity reasons, I still find it personally a bit ridiculous and I would say just change it, no one's going to care. But even if it has to be Zolo for the end of time, it's not the biggest issue in the world. There are also other translation issues I do have, such as calling Kido's crew the animal kingdom pirates. That in particular just doesn't suit my taste at all. Or effectively give me an impression of what Kido's crew actually is. It sounds more like a crew made up entirely of creatures in Movie 3, where they visited the island that may chopper a king. And there are others, and as much as they get cited by the fans, they are really not a big issue in the grand scheme of the story, because they are surface level changes. Almost all of these gripes are going to be completely based in nouns. And nouns by and large do not affect the greatest story. They don't impact the narrative or the perception of what's happening in the manga. Nouns are just a quality of life preference. However, scans do the exact opposite. They will honor nouns incessantly, and acquiesce to the general fan consensus regarding names. But when it comes to the story, they make mistakes left, right, and center, which I would argue is so much more damaging to the series than a cringy name here and there. And even then, scanlations are not immune from cringy names. Every time a new character is introduced, every scan group will translate their name differently, and it just leads to mass confusion amongst the fanbase, which is a much longer lasting effect than you'd think. I mean for example, do we all remember when Katakuri was translated as Dogtooth?  Like it really does such a significant amount of damage to the perception of One Piece within the community. And we all need a universal point of reference, and the only organization that is going to give us that is Viz. So you know what, we as fans can keep calling Zoro Zoro and keep referring to the Beast Pirates as the Beast Pirates. But in regards to the story, Viz is the only trustworthy source. And for a series where story is more important than anything else, I believe that this is as good a reason as any to support the official release exclusively. But in the end, it's not up to me to make that decision for you, especially with my particularly hypocritical background. I would implore you to support the official release, but I also think that Shueisha needs to wake up, realize it's 2020 now, and deliver their product to a new world digital medium. The free market has spoken, and it has determined that 3 days to wait is simply too long. People are willing to accept products of lower quality for the sake of speed, and Shueisha needs to learn from this and offer a high quality product with a similar speed. From a business standpoint, I think that is the only way to truly solve piracy once and for all. With that said, that doesn't mean that you have to take part in it. Reading ScanLations is always a choice that we make. Nobody forces us to sit down clockwork orange style and projects 18 pages of scanned manga into our eyeballs every week against our will, and especially when the official release is completely 100% free and to the best of my knowledge available worldwide through either the Viz website or Manga Plus. Links to which will be in a pinned comment below. And some of you may also have problems with the usability of these sites, I've personally never had an issue, but if you have, then great, send them some feedback so they can improve that product for you, because if enough people take a minute out of their day to report something, it will be listened to. In the end though, while I don't think that this battle between scans and the official release is going to be over anytime soon, I just wanted to make it clear why I've made the decision that I have. I will be supporting the official release from here on out because it makes almost no difference to my channel, and because I believe that it will result in better content for all of you. And that pretty much does it for this discussion regarding the official release of the One Piece Manga. If you enjoyed this video and the content this channel produced in general, then please do consider donating to the Grand Line Review Patreon because the support of all of your amazing people is what continues to make this channel possible. And if you'd like to see more videos like this but applied to other anime and manga series, then please do feel free to check out my second channel New World Review for all of your wider needs. And if you'd like to join the fun at any time then please do head over to my Discord server where a wide array of shenanigans takes place on a daily basis. And finally please do comment with your thoughts on scans versus the official release. This has been the Grand Line Review, and I'll see you next time.