I'm Marcia Aljusson, Interfaith Interconnect Leadership Coordinator, and welcome to Interfaith Interconnect Religion Chat today. We're very glad to have you all here. Starting out on a sad note, we just learned that there was a shooting in a high school in Florida this afternoon, and several students were killed. So I'd like to begin today with a moment of silence in remembrance of those who have died. How many people are here at Religion Chat for the first time? Great. And people are here at Muslim Community Center for the first time. Well, good. We're very grateful to MCC for hosting today. They're always so warm and welcoming and generous anytime we want to hold one of our events here. And we really appreciate that, thank you. A couple of announcements from restrooms are off to my left, that corner. The banquet hall and the prayer room, is that the right thing to call it? Okay, out that door. What we're going to operate today is that the two speakers will each speak as usual. And then when they're finished, there are refreshments in the banquet hall. You can go get refreshments and come back and break into small groups as we usually do for discussion. Or you could also join the others for prayer. It will start about 10 minutes to 6. You're welcome to do that also. So when we're finished with the speakers, then I'll announce that at that time. Just to give you a feel for what's going on. We hold Religion Chat the second Wednesday of the month. And we welcome your suggestions for topics. For the March Religion Chat, we confirm speakers and we're going to do a new topic. We'll be meeting a little more, but we don't have the location yet. So watch your email box for details. As is our custom, we'll begin today's program with a Russian statement. To enrich, inform, and educate ourselves and others about the great diversity of faiths and cultures in our valley. Today we are holding the last of... March, I'm just wondering for the new people. Could we be sure that we get their emails so that there's a sheet going around to sign up to be sure that they give us their emails and then they'll be able to keep in touch? Thank you, Ellen. I meant to say that. Thanks for reminding me. We have a sign-in list going around. Some people came in that way and signed in. But if you signed in and didn't write your email and you want us to have your email, go ahead and add that. And then people came in the other door, did not sign in probably. So if you could do that as we're going. Today we're holding the last of three religion chat sessions on the topic. What behaviors will get you thrown out of your religion? How has it changed through the years? And we heard from Catholic, Episcopalian, Muslim, and Hindu in the previous two chats. And today we are going to be hearing from Ken Black, who is from Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Livermore Stake, and Chris Andrus of Presbyterian Church in America, Canyon Creek Presbyterians in San Ramon. So each speaker will take up to 20 minutes altogether, which will include time for questions. And then, as I said, we'll break into small discussion groups. If that's informal time, you can go into the banquet hall or into the prayer room instead if you want to do that. So I would first like to welcome and introduce Ken Black. Thank you. So to just briefly answer the question, I don't know. I've never been thrown out of the church. I have a well-known bad habit of going over time when I'm speaking. So maybe between technology and Marsha waving at me, maybe I can stick to this. So to lay the groundwork for this, I think I need to have some framework to work from. This sort of falls under the broad umbrella of what we call referred to as church discipline in our religion. And so to really understand the answer to this question or these questions, I kind of need to paint the picture so you understand the framework that we operate in as we perform church discipline. We as leaders in the church are doing this. So I think to really understand what motivates the way we do things, I probably need to make this one statement that sort of gets to some of the underlying beliefs and doctrines that we have. I think there's two things that really are key to church discipline. This one is more broad-based. The church was established by and is led by the Savior Jesus Christ in that we as mortals are not free to change His commandments or modify His will. So with that in mind, I think the next key element of this is that our primary goal, I guess, as church leadership and church members who are not necessarily in leadership is to help people grow and become more like the Savior, to continually develop and become better people, become more Christ-like in the way that they live their lives and their interactions with other people. So that's really what we try to do as we operate programs and do things within the church. Church discipline is a pretty broad subject and the thought of addressing this in 15 minutes was a little daunting. And so the approach I'm going to try to take is skim over the top, but give you enough of an explanation so you have enough concept to be able to ask questions and maybe between what I say and the questions that I feel we can kind of address your questions and maybe give you a better feel for how this works for us. So one of the things that we try to do, I think really our focus is not to throw people out. Again, think about the purpose of trying to help people become more like the Savior. Driving them out of the church is probably not going to advance that goal. So we try to, if there is a disciplinary problem or if they're doing something that really is not appropriate, we really try to work with them as ecclesiastical leaders and try to help them change and repent and get their lives in order. But anyway, I'll get to what some of those things are. So within this umbrella of church discipline, there's informal and formal discipline. And I'm going to focus mostly on, well, I'll talk about both. But to bring about formal discipline, there's three purposes of that, really. We are going to initiate the process of formal discipline. And this is what we call a disciplinary counsel. So the three purposes, the number one is to help the individual, the transgressor, to get their life in order and strive to follow the Savior better. That's the number one. And most of what we deal with in disciplinary issues has to do with that particular issue. The second and third one, some of them are somewhat corollary, but the second one is to protect the innocent. Okay, now sometimes that's a real issue, sometimes it's not. But if we're dealing with, for instance, a child molester, there's a clear issue there, somebody who's maybe involved in illegal activities and taking advantage of people and things like that, where innocent people are going to be affected, then that would be a key element. And then the third one is to protect the integrity of the church. And there's a couple of different things involved in that. But again, that one is rare. It's usually the first one. So let me talk about the typical process that happens. Most, in most cases, it's initiated when a member of the church approaches their local ecclesiastical leader. And I guess just to give you a framework, some of you may be aware of this, but we're organized geographically. So like I represent today, the Livermore Stake, which is a geographical area that includes congregations in Livermore and also a congregation of young and single adults that cover the tri-value area that are also assigned to us geographically. So in the stake we have what we call Warns, which is the geographic entity that we function in. A ward is led by a bishop. So he's the pastor and leader of the church. And then within the stake we have stake organizations that coordinate multi-ward activities and things like that. And there's the leadership team that is led by a president and two counselors, and he's referred to as the stake president. So he has ecclesiastical leadership over all of Livermore and the bishops that function under him. So typically what would happen is someone would approach their bishop and say, Bishop, I need to talk to you. I've got something that I'm struggling with. And that would begin the process. So they would have their conversation, private conversations obviously. And whatever it is, the bishop would try to work with that individual to help them. And most of it never goes beyond that point. The bishop is able to deal with a lot of disciplinary issues, people that are struggling with whatever it is, you know, maybe infidelity or spousal abuse or, I don't know, that one's probably a little extreme because that can get into the area of illegal activity. It could be struggling with sexual addiction or whatever. So that's where it starts. And the bishop can do what we call informal discipline. He can work with the individual, obviously, counsel them, work with them, whatever the case may be that they need. And nobody else knows about it. And it stays there. And if it's something serious enough that the bishop feels that there needs to be more, that there may be a need to take this to the next level, then there's what's called a disciplinary counsel. And there's two types of those. So the first one is done at the ward level. And that involves the bishop and his two counselors. And it is a counsel, if you will, where the four people would gather together and talk about what the problem is. Now, I've said that generally the bishop and the individual are the only ones who know all the details. This is not a fishing expedition or anything like this. The only thing that's shared is what's key information that needs to be shared. And again, the focus of this is to help the individual overcome their problems, get their lives back in order, and try to become better at following the Savior and His commandments. Any time a bishop feels like there may be a need for a disciplinary counsel, he needs to consult with the stake president. In certain cases, a disciplinary counsel at the ward level is not appropriate. It needs to go to a stake level, a higher level. And that typically involves transgressions that involve either people in higher levels of leadership within the church and typically for the priesthood leaders in the church or priesthood holders in the church who have made the higher level of covenants and then it goes to the stake level. So let's talk about the ward level for a minute here. As I said, it's just the bishop and his two counselors. And this is really, I want to tell you what it's not. This is not, as I mentioned, it's not a fishing expedition. It is not legalistic, it's not adversarial, it's very much a counsel focused on love. I've been a part of these a number of times and I can tell you every single time, it's not only a deeply spiritual experience, it's heartbreaking at times. It can be very heartbreaking as you empathize and feel for what people are struggling with. And some of them are really challenging as you can imagine. But the focus is really on how can we bless the life of this individual? What can we do for them? What is best for them? And to some degree, like the concept of tough love that those of us understand who have had teenagers, we haven't always had to apply that, but we understand the concept, right? Sometimes people need to be jolted a little bit to kind of have to make a decision, which side of the fence am I going to go on? I can't sit on the fence, I've got to go one way or the other. So what are the possible outcomes? So the disciplinary counsel typically is 30 minutes an hour, sometimes they can go much longer, that's probably fairly rare. A couple of factors that can influence that. So there's several outcomes, there's actually four. The first one is no action, no formal action. So it could just be the bishop continues to work with an individual. The second outcome would be informal probation, what it's called, which is just a slight step above that. It might involve some restriction of privileges. For example, the person may be asked not to particularly sacrament or communion for a period of time, or they may be instructed to do something or whatever, to try to help them recognize the severity of what they're doing and demonstrate some sense of remorse and help in the repentance process. The third level then would be what we call disfellowshipment, which is again another step up, a little more formal, a little more restrictive. That generally involves some specified period of time, might be six months or a year, or could be semi-indeterminate. But that usually involves a number of things. They're not allowed to do public prayers in the church. They're not allowed to hold callings or assignments in the church where they might be teaching or speaking in our worship service, things like that. And then the highest level of that getting thrown out of the church is what we refer to as excommunication. And in that case, they actually do lose their membership. Their names are removed from the records of the church. And in that case, it's at least one year. Now, we don't kick them out. That's the last thing we want to do. We want them to continue to come to church. We want them to continue to work with their bishop and their state president to try to get their own tribes in order. And so that's really the focus of that. So after whatever period of time, if there's been formal discipline like that, there is a reconvening at the point where the bishop and or the state president feel that the person is ready. There's a reconvening of this disciplinary counsel. And the person comes back and everything is reviewed again, not their transgression, but what have they done to overcome it and get their lives in order? And if everything's in order, then at that point, their fellowship is restored or if they were excommunicated, they can be rebaptized into the church as if it had never happened.  So again, it's very focused on the individual and focused on encouraging them to move forward in their lives. So I'm running short on time. Let me just briefly touch on this. And these are fairly short things. So what can get you thrown out? Well, excommunication could result from and there are no hard and fast. But I'll tell you, some of these things, you know, you go into some of these, it's like it's hard to imagine that this will not result in excommunication. But we always try to really follow the spirit, to have the spirit of the Lord guide us in this process because we recognize the significance and the importance of what we're doing here. So a couple of ideas or a couple of things that could result in excommunication. Some of these are mandatory, convenient disciplinary counsel and some are not, but all of these could. So sexual sins such as adultery, fornication or homosexual relations, apostasy which we define as a repeated, clear and open opposition to the church, and again that's repeated, clear and open. This is not people disagreeing. These are the ones you're going to see in the media, right? The big ones that make the news where they're really trying to make it a very public thing. And then criminal activities of most any kind.  So that gives you some idea of the things that could happen. So how has it changed over the years? My experience with this direct experience goes back about 15, 17, 18 years. I talked to a friend who spans the period before that. So covering the last 50 years, I'm not an expert on this, but over the last 50 years, procedurally and in terms of the things that could get you excommunicated, virtually no change. It's pretty much the same. I think there's a couple of minor things, for instance. Now if a member wants to have their name removed, they no longer want membership in the church. It's a procedural issue, administrative as opposed to a disciplinary council, which is what had to be done many years ago. A few things like that, but pretty much it really hasn't changed in quite a while. So, I'm at 16 minutes. Questions? Yes. Supposing I come to you and say, Bishop, there's something I want to talk to you about. I'm doing just fine in following the savior, but Alan over here is a real scoundrel and I think you need to talk to him. He wouldn't show up. Give me his phone number. So that does happen, and sometimes it's very legitimate. So you talk about maybe child abuse. That might be one where somebody doesn't walk in and say, hey, I'm a child abuser, I need help. So we would take those things very seriously and check it out. You also have to be careful, obviously. But yeah, we would act on that because we are very sensitive. And sometimes it's just personal disputes and personalities, right? But yeah, we would not ignore that. Yes? Yes. So a parishioner is excommunicated from the church. What happens if they were sealed in the temple of marriage? Great question. So that is also nullified. So there's a follow up to that. So that's nullified as well. All blessings of membership and temple sealing is gone. As I mentioned, if they've been excommunicated, and that's only if they've been excommunicated. It doesn't happen otherwise. So after the year, whenever, after that minimum year, they can be rebaptized into the church that restores their membership. Okay, it does not restore temple blessing. There is an additional time period after that that's undefined, but might be another six months, a year, two years. It depends on what happened, the severity of what it was. At that point, they can, again, under the advisement of the bishop and the state president, they can then say, this person really is ready to have all of their blessings restored. And that's the terminology we use, which would include their sealing and the temple marriage and everything. At that point, they have to submit a recommendation to the first presidency in Salt Lake. They will review it. They review the records of the disciplinary council, which are kept. And if they approve it, then they will send someone to do a face-to-face interview with that person. If they approve that, then they, on the spot, will restore all of those blessings. And again, everything is restored as if nothing had ever happened. It's completely erased from back to the way it was originally. So what you're saying is that nobody is lightly kicked out of your church?  Lightly kicked out? Oh, lightly. If they happen to do something really serious to be excommunicated? Yes. Yeah. And, you know, we really try, like I said, we really try to work with them. This is Chris Andrews. Yeah, my church is County Creek Presbyterian Church in San Ramon. And Ken actually stole some of my thunder. A lot of the, both in terms of procedurally and even the issues, it's very similar, which is not maybe not that surprising in terms of what would initiate church discipline.  We have different levels. Presbyterian Church government works on different levels, works on the local level first informally. And that would be, it could go to a formal, which is rare. One of the things to add to what you were saying, most issues are kind of resolved informally either in the way of people agreeing to adjust their behavior or by going somewhere else, just reality of, you know, the society we live in. There are a lot of other places that people can go if they have to dispute with the church that they're in. Churches are voluntary associations. So, you know, there is, there's nothing that really keeping them, you know, that people are free to kind of come and go. So I think that really ends up being the case in the vast majority of times, although there are on occasions situations where it does go to formal church discipline. And for us yet similar, it would be a matter of, you know, being restricted from really, it would be like the full privilege of membership. Historically in Christianity, it's always been regarded as, the communion has been regarded as kind of the focus of, kind of the height of your membership privileges. And actually excommunication, a lot of people don't realize it, really kind of focuses more on the excommunio as the original term. And it didn't have to do with being really a member in good standing.  There are certainly situations that arise where a person is, you know, is found to be in a situation. It's not even so much what they're doing. It's the fact that they are unrepentant in activity which is regarded as, is clearly regarded as sinful and a lot of the same things that Ken listed would be there as well. And what I'll add to it is just being a disruptive person, and a person that has unresolved disputes, interpersonal disputes, and showing no unwillingness to reconcile in relationships. Of course that applies to most of all the marriage relationship, but also relationships within the church otherwise. So the issue really is whether or not there's the willingness to be repented. And the understanding of repentance is first to acknowledge that there's sin going on, that there have been guilty of sinful behavior or speech, and then also then the commitment to overcoming that sin, growing out of that sin, confessing it, and asking the Lord's help to overcome it so that it is no longer an issue. And as with the way Ken shared, the goal is always restorative. As far as kicking out, kicking people out of the church, I've never known a case of that. Theoretically if somebody was really wanting to remain a part of the church and was very disruptive, it would go in our case if they went through the formal process, it would go from the church congregation level up to the Presbyterian regional church, and conceivably out to the general assembly, which is the entire denomination. And there's appeals, much like there is in our system, there's different courts of appeal. If they went through all that, they still wanted to stay and were causing trouble. I guess at that point they could be kicked out in terms of being welcome in the congregation to be a part of the congregation. I've never known that to happen because people usually will just at some point well be sorted out though, decide, well, I don't fit in here and go somewhere else. So that's usually the way it goes. And as far as the goal is always, the person will always be welcomed too, even in a case like that, if they're willing to promote the peace of the church. That's one of the membership questions that our members are asked. Do you submit yourselves to the church's government and discipline and promise to study your purity and peace and also do you promise to support the church and to worship the work to the best of your ability? So, church being a voluntary organization, it's a place that you go and when you have shared beliefs and practices with others. We've probably, it's not thought of a lot, but I think it should be recognized that it's just not right for a person to join a group with the goal of causing it to change in order to conform with one's own beliefs and practices. Instead, such a person should find a group that better fits their beliefs and practices that they already have. So I think that understanding would, I think it does come into play. It's pretty rare. I think people are going to come in. They have it on occasion where they come in and they want to change a group. The beauty of America, the variety that we have here, is that there are usually places that fit a person's beliefs and practices quite well. So that's usually what happens with situations like that. Some of this stuff can cover it already. I also wanted to add this too in the whole area. I sort of detected a question behind the question about what gets you kicked out. And that is this idea that a voluntary association does have the right to determine its membership requirements. We all understand that. And they do have the right to say, well, you're not really with us in spirit. So unless you want to kind of get with the program and at least be willing to consider our point of view, then you probably should be somewhere else. I think that really is sensible. Also, we would say it's not right for the government, whether through court rulings or laws, to dictate the beliefs and membership standards of any private association. A lot of people today think that the government does have the right to do this. But I would suggest that it's a very dangerous idea. And if the government does that, it really does deprive people of freedom of association, freedom of speech, even freedom of conscience conceivably. And there are some dangers in that area. These freedoms must be protected, even for people with whom we strongly disagree. And I always give an example. I think maybe the most obvious example would be something like a racist group. And most people, myself included, really detest racism and people who are racist. Nevertheless, freedom means that we must allow people to be racist to some extent. And even to associate with other racists, white supremacist groups and black supremacists that could be religious supremacist groups. And that's part of freedom that such groups will exist. We do, of course, have the right to express strong opposition to their views and the messages. And we may also seek to stop such people when they seek to impose their supremacist views on others. In fact, I would say even stronger. I would say that we must seek to stop people if they seek to impose evil ideas, racist, whether racist or otherwise on society. We actually have the obligation to do that. But short of that, there is that area of freedom of association that is a very important thing to maintain. As for being kicked out, really, ultimately, for our church, it's about relationship with God. And we would say that God will never kick out anyone who truly comes to Him in faith. And even with areas of church discipline, as Ken mentioned, the goal is always restorative in terms of getting the person back into right relationship with our Lord and Savior. And in doing so, that leads to reconciliation, leads to improvement of relationships with one another. So that goal is always to call the person back to the faith that they perfected and to live according to that faith and to continue on the road of walking as a true disciple of Christ, walking in love, walking in fellowship with others. As for how this has changed over the years, I would say, in principle, it hasn't. I think in our church, we really hold to the, I would say, literal understanding. That's a kind of dangerous adjective that we use, but I'd verb it, I guess it is. We would hold to a spiritual literal understanding of the Apostles Creed of, we believe, the biblical, the Bible is, was given by God. He guided the writers, human writers, to write exactly what He wanted. It's not men putting together their thoughts about God. It was from God down to us. So we would hold to pretty much the same principles that came out of our affirmation. But in practice, it's a lot different. In practice, it has softened through over the years. One of the things, in many cases, issues which would have come to the attention of the church in the past, just don't anymore. This is partly because of how society has changed. Most people in the developed world today no longer live in the kind of close-knit communities that most people once lived in, even in the cities in the past. There was more of a sense of people of one church kind of live together more and certainly in the smaller town, so you don't have that anymore. So there's a lot more privacy than there was in the past. So also, I would say that what churches tend to do today is to pursue kind of a don't-ask-don't-tell policy in many areas. Yeah, I think that's a good thing. Part of that is the respect for the privacy. Even in churches, I've been a part of two presbyterian denominations. One was a lot stricter than the other's doctorly. And there was smaller congregations, so you did tend to have more accountability naturally with it. The one I'm in now is a lot bigger church, and there is a lot of stuff that they don't know about. And as long as it doesn't become a divisive issue, it's not an issue. It doesn't cause problems for the church. So that leads to really fewer public church disputes than occurred in the past. And the other aspect of that is that churches just don't have to influence on society that they once did. We live in a much more secular culture today. That can be seen to have a good side and a bad side. But that will have to be a topic press for another meeting. So that's pretty much what I have. I have a question for both of you actually.  Okay. Yeah, it's interesting. I was going to mention that, and I figured I would not mention it specifically because there's a tendency for people to think that conservative churches, churches that hold to traditional Christian teaching would single out homosexuals. In reality, that's not true. I would kind of mention it too, as far as sexual, all forms of sexual sin. The historic understanding of Christianity, we understand the biology of teaching, is really that all sexual relationships outside of a faithful, marital relationship between a husband and a woman, all, no matter what they are, are probably very sinful. And that God gave us sexual desires for the goal of bringing male and female together to be mates also, but also, and I would say that it's also the greatest expression, ideally, of the love of a man and a woman would be their sexual relationship. I think it's interesting Valentine's Day. Maybe you think about this. Of course, this is not a sexual area, and it's true, but in some ways, Valentine's Day, of course, is about love, and Christianity is very much about love, but really love of a husband, a man and a woman, as God designed us to come together as one. And it's interesting to just be, can you send a message, this is a little not quite related, but message of Christianity, can you see the reflect Valentine's Day in that the message of Christianity is this, Almighty God, the Creator, Lord, and Judge of all, wants to be your Valentine, if you are willing to let, that's just a thought I want to leave with you, but one other area is the whole confusion, kind of a sexual desire and love. Up until fairly recently, those were considered two separate things, and there's been a tendency today to, really to expand or distort really the, to make love akin to having a sexual attraction to somebody else, and that is not the way it was historically understood in fact until quite recently. Yet it is helpful to have historical perspective, especially on issues like the LGBTQ issues that are facing us today, and that really up until about 30 years ago, virtually every religion, every historic religion, centuries old, time-tested religion, and really this whole scientific world, and really all of academia, did not hold homosexuality to be as normal as heterosexual relations, and it's interesting, this has been one of those things where there's been a very striking change in a short period of time. Whatever that happens, you have to really, you should really, I think, as well, why is this happening, was everyone else up until recently wrong on this? And we would say that they weren't. And I think that what has happened in the last 30 years has been a really kind of a departure from human relations as God designed them. Okay. Thank you. Joe, just in the interest of time and fairness, since Chris only got one question, does someone else have a question for Chris?  And if not... I'm not going to be here afterwards. Okay. Go ahead. I do have a question. Ken was very clear about who you went to speak to. Is it the minister? Is it the head of the... If you are feeling troubled, or do you come to the leadership, or does the leadership say you are a thorn in our side, a pebble in our shoe, and we are coming to you? I would say the latter, almost never happens really. It's possible it could, but it depends on what the issue is really. I think sometimes things come to the attention, something like a criminal activity or something that comes to the attention. If the person is not willing to go and say, listen, I have a problem, because ideally, if a person is caught up in a behavior that is clearly wrong, they will go seek help in the church. Our church, there is a group of elders, it's called the Session of Elders, similar to what Ken was, the council there. They are there in theory, although in reality, what tends to happen is people go to counselors outside the church with Christian counselors or otherwise and usually deal with it that way. If they let the leadership of the church, a lot of people just don't do this really. They kind of work out all their stuff on their own, which can be good in a way, but it also might lead to problems to have a line too. But it would be, we would have to step the way out to be informal, usually one of the elders, one of the pastors, it would be more than an informal level, and if they could work things out, it's fine. If they can't, then they would take it to the whole body of elders, and if that can work out, then they would go to a preparatory level. Kind of reflects, actually Matthew chapter 18 has steps of how to deal with disagreements between brothers and sisters in the church. Okay, we have to stop right now. Sorry. Thank you so much, Chris. I have some time to talk with each other and then also people want to join for prayer they can. So don't move yet, but what I'd like you to talk about when you get into your small group, what I suggest is, what did you learn today that was new to you? What are some differences and similarities between your own faith traditions view of the topic and what you heard today? So those are just suggestions for discussion. And we always encourage people to talk with someone you don't know, you may have met them before, but you've never really talked with them, someone from a different faith than yours. And so now it's prayer time if you want to go there. Can people also go into the banquet hall now or do they need to wait? No, it's open. Okay, great. So this is very informal. It's fine to move your chairs around and move around. Thank you so much for coming everybody.


Today, I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Mark from Seattle Mobile. How are you today? Good. Thank you. How are you? Mark, let me start with congratulations. Your stocks have 25% and you just announced your first purchase order with the Tier 1 US Cellular Carrier. Markets responding very positively to you. Tell us more about this deal, please. We've been working for the past two years to launch at US Carriers. We launched at Bell at the end of last year. This is a very long process and very few companies are able to actually achieve device approval at the US Carriers. We actually got our first purchase order from one of the largest carriers in the United States to do a trial with one of their leading customers and that was the PR that we put out. We're going to be launching our product with AT&T. It's already public information and that was part of the PR that we put out. But we're going to be launching both with the AT&T network and also with the first responders network, the first network. So between the two of those, it's a multi-billion dollar opportunity for us and we're very excited about it. Well, obviously the market's appreciating that. I think we've noticed your volume is up too. You're doing about a half a million shares a day. Is that correct? Yes. And what's interesting is that we're starting to see a lot of volume coming in from the United States. We're also traded on the OTC. So we see that US investors are also starting to get involved in the stock and we think that we're going to have a very good story for US investors and we're going to put a lot of effort into making sure that the US market knows about our story and to get US investors also involved in the company. Of course, one of the critical points you just made was that this deal took two years to make. I think the market, a lot of people invest in the market. They don't realize how much work it actually takes to achieve some of these major milestones. And this is obviously a major milestone for SCIATA. Correct. We're going to be working this year and our goal is to be working with the two largest cellular carriers in the United States. It's not trivial for a micro-camp company like SCIATA to be able to partner with carriers of that scale and we think that that's really going to assist us to grow our revenue and to grow the visibility of the company. We think that it's going to be very good both for the company and for its shareholders. With your market, with your stock moving as quickly as it is right now, is it too late to get in? Absolutely not. We've just started. We think that we have a very bright future. We think that we're going to have a major uptick this year in our sales, both in our top line and our bottom line. And we think that that's what's going to affect the stock at the end of the day. We have a lot of news that's going to be coming out over the next couple of months and we think that we're just getting started. The market cap of the company is still around $50 million, which is very low. And we think that there's a lot of upside, a lot of upside going forward. Well, our analyst described you as your new UB350, allowing drivers to keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. Maybe we can use that as a platform for you to quickly introduce those out there that may not be familiar with your company. So we have created a new category within the cellular device community. So you've known until now feature phones like Nokia phones, basic phones. You've seen smartphones like iPhones and Samsung phones. You've seen maybe rugged phones that you can drop them and get them wet. We are the first company to have developed, and we're starting to sell now, a smartphone that is dedicated for commercial vehicles. So it's sort of an IoT device and it's sort of a smartphone. It is a device that gives the ultimate communications for commercial vehicles. And just you understand the size of the market, there's over 10 million commercial vehicles in the United States and there's over three million first responder vehicles in the United States. So we're going after a market just in North America of over 13 million commercial vehicles and we're the only ones that are doing this. There is no other company that has anything like this. And as I said, we've been developing these products for a long time. We've been doing certification for a long time. And I think that now it's really going to pay off both for our investors and for the company because as we launch in these large scale markets, we think that it's going to be a very compelling company, a very compelling story. Okay, well with such big news this quarter, what should dare I ask what's coming up next in the next quarter? So you're going to see a lot of news come out on various launches that we're going to have, various customers that we're going to have. Just you understand the ASP of the products that we were selling until now was around $200. The ASP of the current product is over $700. So just to give you a size, the ASP is more than triple than what it has been historically for the company. So we think that that's really going to impact ourselves and it's going to allow us to grow the company much, much quicker. Our gross margin is far better now than it was in the past because we have such unique products. We sell the device, we sell various peripherals for the device, we sell warranty packages and we think that it's going to be a really, really exciting story for a little TSX company to going into the United States, partnering with some of the largest telecom companies we think is going to be a really exciting story, not just in the coming quarter but in many quarters to come. Well, I'll tell you, Mark, thank you so much for joining us and congratulations again. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.


Hello folks, in this Gaffer 56 video, we're going to cover some of the improvements we've made to area light visualization within the viewer. The first thing you'll probably notice is by default, we now shade area lights with their color. And when we say color, we mean effectively either the color plug or anything connected into this. So we no longer include the effects of intensity or exposure in this shading. So you can see here we've got some lights with individual color set. If we hook up a shading network to lights that support it, such as this quad light, we have limited support for Arnold shader networks and full support for our SL shader networks a little more on that at the end of the video. You might be asking, hang on a minute, why is this on its side? What's going on there? It turns out the default Arnold quad light, if you plug an image in, that's actually what you get in your render. So we've tried to match it up there. Let us know if you see any inconsistencies. We've also added this spread visualization that you can kind of see here sticking out the light. As you adjust this, you can see the arrows diverge a little more in the middle just to give you a bit of a representation from a distance as to which ones you've tweaked. And I appreciate this new shaded mode can often get in the way if you need to be looking at the scene through this light, it's a little bit in your face. In the viewer global drawing menu, which you can get to clicking on the cube up here, we have a new section for lights and you can change whether they're textured, just drawn with their color, or in the y-frame mode, which makes it a little easier to see through them. We've also improved, well, cleaned up the standard sort of exposure color widget that you see on all lights. It now represents the color as well, has been sort of visually simplified, and is camera facing, which makes it a bit easier to see at different angles. It also no longer scales with the light, so you can see as we do this, it doesn't get distorted, which means that it's a bit easier to get a relative sense of distance when you're looking at these things. If you want to adjust the shaded mode per light, you can do this too. All lights now have a visualization tab, and if you look inside of here, you'll see we have a bunch of controls, and one of them is this light drawing mode, which, when turned on, allows you to change for any specific light, how it's going to appear, so you can go with colored, textured, or y-frame. You can also do this for multiple lights at once, if you wish, using the open GL attributes node. So if we take a little look here, I could grab two of these lights, and I could say in the visualization section here, you see the same controls. I could say these ones, these ones should go back to being textured, and you can see underneath there the discs updated too. That can be quite useful if you have a lot of procedurally generated lights, or lights coming in from caches, and you want to edit those because you don't have the node elements of the lights available directly. So we mentioned earlier in the video we had varying support for different network connected to area lights. So I just wanted to talk a little bit more about that. You can see we've got three different ones here. The first one is the one you can see up here, which is a quad light with an Arnold image and an Arnold color correct node, and we do our best to give a bit of a preview of it. But what you'll notice is though, say for example in the color correct, some parameters work, others don't. So like if I adjust the gamma, you'll see that the output doesn't change. Let us know if anything particular is missing. We've had to sort of recreate how Arnold works in order to show you this. So let us know. If you connect other shaders into the network that we don't know about. So for example, this middle light is actually multiplying a checker board and then the image together. We know about the multiply, we know about the image, but we don't know about the checker board. So what we do is we fall back on the image, the first image that we find that we come across, we'll use that one. If you'll notice if this happens, if you take a look in your terminal, you should see messages like this that shows you that something hasn't worked in the network. The last case where you have something that we have absolutely no idea, particularly esoteric Arnold shader, we'll just have to end up falling back and you'll just see white. So if you don't see something looking quite right in the viewer, let us know which nodes you're using if there are Arnold ones and we can try and fix that. OSL on the other hand should work pretty much entirely. The only thing we can't support is the use of P in the shading network. So if you had a noise that you were trying to use that was varying across the quadalight, we can't support that at the moment. But other than that, all OSL networks should work fully.


NBA Top Shot is one of the hottest things out in the NFT world right now. In its simplest form, it is an online forum for trading cards. But instead of trading cards, you collect video clips. Each clip has a limited supply, which is one of the factors that go into how valuable they are. Some LeBron James moments are going for as high as $250,000 for a clip. And as you can see here, some people have turned a few thousand dollars into millions of dollars. So, do you like basketball? Do you like money? Then I think I found the thing for you. Hey, what's up Jay here and welcome to Bitcoin Daily bringing you guys the best tips, tutorials and ideas to help you guys become profitable and successful traders. The goal of this channel is to empower you guys with the knowledge and resources to put it all together and help you get to that next level. So if you guys are new here, make sure to hit that subscribe button, make sure to smash the like and turn on that notification bell. So today, we're talking about NBA Top Shot, which is the hottest thing currently around. The first thing I'm going to show you guys is my first organic experience on this website when I finally got my first drop. I was able to enter the queue, get a drop and actually buy the cards. At the time, I had done zero research on this other than what I had heard from people. So I had no idea what I was doing, what was going on, what to expect. I had zero knowledge, which is probably where you're at right now. So first, we're going to watch that clip as I open up those cards. And then we're going to jump into the tutorial after I did the research behind everything and understood how everything worked. And then I'll give you guys a breakdown on exactly how the site works, you know, how you can see the value for your cards and why they're valuable, right? And how you can get into the marketplace and flip cards, buy them for cheaper and sell them for more. So all right, guys, let's go ahead and jump right in. All right, guys. So I finally, after spending a few hours in line for this drop, it's called the cold cats drop, I guess is drop number three. I finally was able to get actually a pack. This is the first time that I'm able to get a pack at this basically queue myself in line at mbatopshop.com. I got a notification that this drop was coming and then I queued myself and I was able to get a spot in line and then waited like two hours basically, maybe an hour or an hour or two hours or something like that. And now I finally got a pack. So I asked me for my payment and I just paid and now he gave me the pack. So this is the first time I do this. I've never opened any of these packs. I've never bought any of these packs. This is officially my first NFT purchase. So I have no idea what to even expect. I don't even know how this works, but we're going to learn together. So I'm recording this video before I've even recorded any of the other videos. Let's jump right in. Let's see what happens. I'm kind of excited. Let's see. Open pack. Okay. It has music and everything. Okay. Yandre Hunter. Okay. Cool. Larry Nance. All right. So I muted it because that music is really loud. Yeah. So that's some crazy music as you open the cards here. So let's take a look at this one. Donovan Mitchell Dunk. Okay. Let's see. Oh, that's a nice dunk. That's a nice dunk. He went all the way back. He cocked back behind his head. Look at that PJ Tucker that just got traded. So that's a little description and everything. So that's kind of cool. It's kind of cool. Three pointer. Okay. It's kind of cool. You know, let's see the last one. Dunk. There you go. Dunk are my favorite ones. RJ Barrett. Oh, something cool. Something cool. Wack RJ. Come on. Even a 360 between the legs. Something. But all right. So now let's figure out what happens here because I have no idea. I've, again, never done any of this. So view my progress. Notable pool is this one. Yeah, this is a nasty dunk. Packs open one to one. Moments pulled five. Level up your baller status. 40 out of 50. I don't really know what that means. I'm learning as I do this. Let's see what where this takes me. I don't know. I just hit that button. Okay. So what do I need? Customize your username. Change your username to something balling. Okay. So I got to customize my username.  Incabarries. Incabar- what? I don't even know what that means. All right. So let's do Bitcoin daily. Hopefully nobody has taken my username. Save changes. All right. I did it. Sign in again. What? Can I buy again? Does it let me buy again? How many times can I buy? Let's see what happens if I try to buy again. All right. I guess I can't buy again. It was worth a shot. Let's see what people are selling these for. How much are they selling these for? Lowest ask. Nine dollars. Top sell. Four thousand dollars. See, like that's so weird. Recent sales. Bro, somebody sold this for four thousand dollars. Oh, but that's why I cannot believe that somebody sold this for four grand. March 11th. So it's a 20 second March 11th. Somebody sold this for four thousand dollars. March 20th. Somebody sold it for 1250. Yo, I want to sell it for 1252. All right. I'm going to just I think I'm going to just hold it because all of these people just got the card as well. The 20 second, right? All right. So I'm going to just hold on to this and try to figure out once the marketplace opens, marketplace is disabled. So once it opens, then we're going to look back and try to figure out. I'm going to do some research as well and try to figure out exactly what am I doing? What do I do with these cards? Let's go to some of the other cards and see what they're selling for a thousand seventy two for sell. The same thing, the lower they're selling for like $13 and the top sells like $3,000. That's crazy to me. Let's check the next one. They all have a lot of sellers. See, it looks like they all kind of are the same 1400 available. So this one's actually cost more because I guess because it's Donovan Mitchell. So the lowest ask on this one is $17. This card has sold for almost $11,000. Dude, somebody sold this card for almost 11 grand, but most of these look at these. These are all for $16 and $17 is what everybody's selling it for.  All right, guys. So I have now done a little bit more research on NBA Top Shot and I could bring to you some more education on this as I've been getting educated on it as well. So when pulling packs, there's three main things that you need to look at that will give different moments, different prices. So one of the main thing is a common card, right? You will see here that you have a serial number. It says common serial number and then you have this number here, which is 6048 and then it says 35,000 plus CC. So what this means is that this is a common card, right? It's a 6048 card that was minted, which means that it was created. It was a 6048 that was created of this exact moment out of 35,000 plus. So that means that there's over 35,000 possible people or moments just like this one. And then at the end, CC means circulating count. So that means the count may change. More of these cards may get minted again. So because of that, the value of these cards, which is this one, this one, this one, and this one, right? These four here are all CC. They all have 35,000 plus and they're all, as you can see, common cards and base sets. So the value of these are not going to be as expensive or as high as, for example, this card. This is the RJ Barrett card. So now what differentiates this RJ Barrett card from these, right? So first off, this is a cool cat. As you can see here, you can see here that says base set series two, right? So that's what it is. These are the base sets series two cards. These are base set, base set, base set. You see all of these are base set series two cards. This one is a cool cat series two cards. So it's a different set of moments, right? Then the next thing that you'll look at is it does have common, right? So it's a common card from the cool cat's base set. I mean, not base set from the cool cat's set. It was a 12,000 card minted out of 15,000. So that means that this card was 12,033, which is a really high number. So that takes away from its value, right? Usually you want a lower number. The lower this number, the higher the value of the moment. Then next, you see here, it says 15,000. These say 35,000. So because this has less cards, now this card becomes more valuable because there's more scarcity. So because this moment is more scarce, therefore it is more valuable. Then last, LE. So LE stands for limited addition. COUNT is final. So that means that while these are CC circulating COUNT, COUNT may change, which means that they might add more to this number. This is limited edition COUNT is final. That means that there can never be another replica of the same moment created ever again out of these 15,000. So if I go ahead and click on this and I go for sell, now you can see that the lowest asking price for this RJ Barrett card is $99. So that means that this card, this moment right here that I'm currently holding is worth $99. I could sell it right now for $99. So I could probably sell it for more. If you look at recent sales, you see that the highest sell so far was for $2,222. But that was look at the serial number. It was the number two created card. So that means whoever has the number one card could sell it for even more, right? You see here the 29th card was sold for 550. The 30th was for 500. And then remember, I have what what number is my card? I think my card, I think I had like 12,000, right? So let's look at someone that has the same serial as me. This one, look at this one, 12,911. So this is worse, worse than my card, right? It was minted after mine. And it's sold for $98. This one's $14,000 sold for $98. $99. I'm sorry. So yeah, those are the two that are worse. They're further back minted than mines and they sold for basically $100 each. So what I'm thinking of possibly doing is selling this card just to go through the process and see what it's like for you guys. Let's let's actually take a look real quick before we do that. So this is a website called evaluate.market where they basically give you an idea of what your account value is worth depending on what cards you have. And it tells you and it gives you this guesstimate depending on what the lowest ask for each card is. So if you look here, these are the remember I bought one pack for $14, one pack for $14. My account is worth $140, right? That's crazy. That's a 10x return, right? So if you go down, you can see which cards I have and what their lowest asking price for each of those cards is. So for example, PJ Tucker, the lowest asking is $9. So that means that if I put it right now for $9, I could probably sell it. Larry Nance Jr., also $9, Deandre Hunter, $10, Donovan Mitchell, $13.  So RJ Barrett is my most valuable moment that I currently have. It's part of the Colcats set and it's a limited edition. The lowest asking price currently is $99 for this one moment. And you can see now because of that, it makes my account value for my account right now is $140. So I spent $14 on these cards and basically a profit of 100 and some change. And of course, that's nothing, guys. If you go to account values here, if you take my name off, let me see, trying to reset it here and you look at the top people on the leaderboards. Look at these numbers. Total moment valuation. This guy has $43 million. His account is worth $43 million. Total purchase price, $3,298. Market profit loss, $43 million. So this guy must have got in super early. It had to be, I would imagine, somebody from the team here because it's ridiculous. They spent $3,300 on packs and cards and their account is now worth $43 million. So they for sure, they have 9,500 cards. So they for sure work for the team or something because it's just, it's such a big difference. Look at this guy here. Auzo, whatever his name is, he has spent $233,000 on his holdings and now they're worth $15 million. So that's a lot more realistic as far as what you can expect. That's a $6,000 return. I mean, 6,000% return. This guy spent $50,000. This guy spent $60,000. This guy again spent $239,000 for all those cards. This guy here, look at this guy. This guy spent $748,000 on his cards to have the same amount of cards that this guy has. 9,500, right? This guy has 9,500. He spent almost a million dollars, but now his valuation is 10 million. So if you go through here, you're going to see some people have spent over $1 million on this to just be on this leaderboard, right? So you kind of have to spend money to be on here. If you want to be on the leaderboard, you see his account value is currently at $9 million. So he's got a 800% return on his $1 million investment. He has over 10,000 cards. Look at this guy. He has 26,000 cards. So a lot of these people, you will see that they have a whole lot of money. They've spent a whole lot of money. I think it just goes down to how early you were in the process. The earlier you were, the cheaper these cards were worth at that time. So this guy just had to be one of the first people here. Probably the one that was testing it or something. I don't know. All right. So as we continue to look at this card, this is the RJ Barrett card. You can see here, it tells you a lot of cool stuff here on this site. So you can see the lowest asking price is $99. It tells you the amount of circulation there is, which is $15,000. Told you that it tells you the total market cap, which is the lowest asked times circulation. So it's currently at almost $1.5 million. You can see the amount of unique owners here, the total owned. So total owned is more than unique owners because owners could have multiples of the same card. Then the percentage impacts 14% of these cards are still impacts and have still not been pulled. So that means that only 86% of the cards of the current circulation available has been owned to date. So right now there's 2,121 more of these cards that could that will eventually go into circulation, but are not pulled yet. So next on the top you have community where you can see showcases, challenges, upcoming events, find a collector. You know, you can see your the total fans for your favorite team rankings for little boards for your favorite team, the blog and all that going over to collection. This is basically where you have your moments. So you have my moments there, my packs. So if you have any packs that you haven't opened to be there, your showcase, you can make a showcase with your favorite moments, your challenges, your active challenges that you haven't completed and your completed challenges. So that is pretty much it guys. I think we touched on a little bit of everything as far as what top shot is how it works and how the system works, how the cards work, how the website works, all that the only thing that we haven't done. I even showed you the clip of me opening my first card when I had zero clue about what I was doing. The only thing I haven't recorded is queuing up to get in line for a drop in that process. So I'll do another video on that and I'll keep updating you guys as I hopefully continue to build my account here on top shot. As you guys know, I started out with my account around a valued around 140 and currently it's valued around $191. As you can see my RJ Barrett, that first card I got, it's currently to Lois Ask is $123 now and I did this on my own. I bought a BAM Atabayo card for $59. Lois Ask is $25 but I got a lower serial number for him, which is why I paid more for that and I'm a Miami Pete fan so that's why I got the Atabayo card. But if you guys have enjoyed this video so far man, go ahead and subscribe to the channel. Make sure that you smash that like button as well and turn on those post notifications so that you guys know as soon as we post these new videos. We post videos five times a week, Mondays through Fridays. Don't miss out. Alrighty guys, I hope you enjoyed this video. I will see you on the next one. As always, peace and love.