One of the most common complaints I hear from Windows users that are thinking about switching over to Linux is the fact that they're worried about having to use free and open source software. They have this misconception that proprietary software is inherently better. It's just better software that free and open source software is somehow inferior. The fact that you didn't pay for it means it's bad, it's cheap in quality, and that's not the case. Also, a lot of Windows users have this misconception that for many tasks out there, all you have are proprietary software solutions, that there's no good free and open source software solutions for certain tasks. And for the most part, this is not true either. There are some things that maybe there's not great free and open source alternatives for, but for 99.9% of the tasks that you do on a computer, trust me, you're going to find great free and open source software. In most cases, the free and open source software is actually better than the proprietary software that you were used to using on Windows or Mac or whatever proprietary operating system you're coming from. So let's talk a little bit about some of the more popular proprietary software out there that there are great free and open source alternatives for. Probably the most common complaints that I hear from potential new to Linux users, especially you guys coming from Windows, is that things like Microsoft Office, the Adobe Creative Suite, Dropbox, OneDrive, things like that, you have to use those in a business environment or sometimes in a school environment and those products are required for you to do your work and you can't just switch to free and open source alternatives. That's not really a good criticism of free and open source software. There are actually free and open source alternatives to all of that stuff, Microsoft Office. We have several really good free and open source office suites available on Linux, the most common one is LibreOffice, which is typically installed on most desktop Linux distributions out of the box and LibreOffice is fantastic. Everything you could want in an office suite is in LibreOffice and again, we have many many other full office suites available on Linux that are free and open source, completely free and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office. Yes, I get that your business or your university requires you to specifically use Microsoft Office. That's not a problem with free and open source software. That's a problem with your place of employment or your school. The problem is they don't understand that they're forcing you to give up a little bit of your freedom to use proprietary software when free and open source solutions are out there. What I strongly suggest is instead of complaining to the Linux community that you can't use free and open source software because your workplace requires you to use Microsoft Office, complain to your boss about forcing you to use Microsoft Office. They've probably never heard about the free and open source software movements, maybe direct them to my YouTube channel. I have a video on this channel titled, Why I Choose Free Software and I explained the evils of proprietary software and the benefits of free software and I doubt that anybody, your professor at your university or your boss at your work could watch that video and not think, oh yeah, I get it now. I see the point why me forcing people to use these privacy invasive proprietary software suites, this is a bad idea. I shouldn't be putting this on my employees or my students. I should be allowing them freedom of choice in this case or at least choosing something for them that is actually free and open source that is not spying on them or data mining them. So I strongly recommend if you're in that situation. Again, this is not a problem with free software or open source software. This is a problem with unfortunately the powers that be at your work or university. And again, direct them to this channel. I've got several videos about why you should be using free software rather than proprietary software. Now, I mentioned several alternatives to the Microsoft Office suite, the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. We've got a ton of good creative programs on Linux. Some of the ones I use all the time, I use GIMP for raster images. GIMP is kind of like our open source alternative to Photoshop. You also have Inkscape, which is for scalable vector graphics. You have Krita, which is another image creation program that's very popular on Linux. You have Blender, which is a great animation, multimedia kind of program. That's probably when people talk about there's no professional software that's free and open source software. Show them Blender. Blender is like the gold standard as far as animation software. Let's talk about video editing. Kaden Live is my video editor of choice. We have actually several free and open source video editors. Unfortunately, most of them are not quite up to the level of a lot of the proprietary solutions, the professional proprietary solutions like DaVinci and Lightworks and things like that. But Kaden Live is really close. Kaden Live is really close. And of course, it's completely free, free of cost and free as in freedom. I also mentioned some of the other things you see in workplace settings. I've worked in offices where everybody had to use things like a Dropbox or OneDrive, you know, those proprietary syncing services, cloud services. And of course, we have a free and open source alternative. That free and open source alternative is NextCloud. Anybody can host their own NextCloud. And with NextCloud, you get your file sharing abilities the same as you would in something like Dropbox or OneDrive. You also have email and things like that.  So NextCloud is really fantastic. I've actually done a video or two on NextCloud on my channel before. Again, if your business or your university is forcing you to use proprietary solutions like Dropbox or OneDrive, again, let them know about NextCloud. Now, let's talk a little bit about some software that I don't think the free and open source alternatives are quite as good as the proprietary alternatives, but still, even though they're not quite as good for most people, they're good enough for me. You know, I'm always going to choose free and open source software where I can just for ideological reasons. But web conferencing has become a really big deal in the last couple of years because of the pandemic. So let's talk about video chat services, things like Discord, Zoom, Skype, Teams, platforms like that. And they're all proprietary. And you know what? There's not really great free and open source alternatives to those programs. The most popular one these days, this free and open source software is a program called Jitsie. I use Jitsie all the time. I do a monthly chat with my patrons, a live stream where patrons can join me live in a video conference and I stream it on YouTube. And we use Jitsie for that. Jitsie is kind of like your open source Zoom. It doesn't have all the features that Zoom has.  But I've switched to Jitsie because again, it's free and open source software. And even though it's not quite to the level of Zoom, it's close enough that I don't mind, you know, sacrificing a little convenience for a little freedom. Now let's talk about some genres of software that just have no free and open source software solutions at all. The most common one would be gaming all of your big triple A games. All of them, 100% of them are proprietary software free and open source games. It's just not a thing.  You know, there's DRM, Digital Rights Management, built into a lot of these gaming platforms. And there's nothing free software about gaming, gaming in general.  In my opinion, I know people love their games, but you got to understand ideologically. I'd rather not play proprietary games. Open source games, there's a few out there, and I've highlighted a few of these on this channel. One of my favorite free and open source games is a real time strategy game called Zero AD. I've played it many times on the channel. One of my favorite free and open source first person shooters is a game called Zodnautic. I've played it several times on the channel as well. I also love a turn based strategy game called Battle for West Knot. That's available free and open source. And all these games being free and open source software are available in your Linux repositories. You can actually just install them from your software center and whatever Linux distribution you happen to be running. Now, I've talked a little bit about situations where maybe the proprietary software is a little better than the free and open source software, but we've seen many instances in the past where one piece of proprietary software was king in that particular genre or niche, and then a piece of open source software comes along and completely destroys it and dominates that market share. One obvious example, you Windows users, long time Windows users, you remember an archiving tool, a zip unzip kind of tool that was called WinZip. Probably every long time Windows user remembers WinZip. It was the program for zipping, unzipping, you know, making compression, compressed files and a free and open source version of WinZip or alternative to WinZip came along called Seven Zip. And Seven Zip being free and open source software and the fact that it was free of charge is even more really exploded in popularity and became the standard, the de facto standard for an archiving tool on Windows. And also it's available on Mac and Linux being free and open source software. It's cross platform, so it's actually available on all the major operating systems. And many people, probably you guys right now, many of you guys that don't know much about free and open source software probably have Seven Zip installed on your Windows machine and you probably use it all the time and you never even realize that that's a piece of free and open source software. Another good example of this is on Windows. You guys have the Windows media player. That's your multimedia player, your video player typically, but it'll play audio as well. But many Windows users don't really use the Windows media player. It's lacking in a lot of features and many of them are looking for a good alternative and probably the most common alternative to the Windows media player that people install is a program called VLC. VLC is a fantastic video player, audio player as well. Multimedia player VLC has probably hundreds of millions of installs on Windows machines around the world. VLC is free and open source software. So that's just a couple of examples of where free and open source software came along and eventually surpassed the proprietary software that was leading in that genre or that niche. Let's talk about a really big proprietary software that eventually became free and open source because that's becoming a rather common occurrence these days is proprietary software switching to a free and open source license because the writing is on the wall. These days, I think everybody in the software community realizes that it's all about open source these days, that the old way of developing software that proprietary model that is dying and that the future is actually free and open source software. So you're seeing a lot of really important proprietary software starting to change over to being free and open source. A few examples of this, well, we can talk about Blender again. Blender probably the leader as far as animated software, animation software Blender began development in the mid 1990s as proprietary software. I mean, that was the standard back then proprietary software, right? But, you know, after a few years of development, I want to say around 2003 Blender switched over to a free and open source license. And that was great. And it didn't hurt Blender at all because Blender, I mean, we're in 2021 now. So it's been licensed under free and open source license for 18 years. And Blender just dominates that particular market share. Some other good examples of proprietary software switching to free and open source software Qt, QT, the Qt toolkit began development in the early 1990s as proprietary software. And for a long time in the early days of Linux, a lot of Linux distributions wouldn't actually ship a Qt based desktops because of the licensing issues. It was proprietary. But Qt saw the light and in 1999, around 2000, 1999 2000, they switched over to a free license, which allowed Linux distributions, Linux desktop distributions, for example, to really start pushing things like the Qt desktop and, you know, later LX, Qt and other Qt based desktop environments. Another great example, especially for us Linux users is idtech, some of the old id game engines. So we're talking about game engines from the Doom and Quake franchises. I mentioned earlier, we don't have a lot of free and open source games on Linux. But what we do have, we have a ton of free and open source first person shooters because most of them are based on these old Doom and Quake engines that id actually open source. They were originally proprietary, but after id, you know, made their money on them for a few years, you know, selling them as proprietary games, they open sourced it and gave those engines to the community for us to work on and develop our own games based on that technology. And it's just not Linux software that has switched from proprietary to free licenses. Many things on Windows were proprietary and are now free and open source. For example, the PowerShell that so many people love PowerShell and Windows PowerShell was originally proprietary software when it began development, you know, about 15 years ago. But three or four years ago, of course, Microsoft open sourced the PowerShell. Now, it's now licensed under a free license. Other things that Microsoft has licensed under free and open license include things like the Microsoft calculator. They open sourced the calculator. Now, that's not a big deal because on Linux we have literally hundreds of free and open source calculators. Most of them much better than the Microsoft calculator. But that's still nice that they open sourced a piece of software that was previously proprietary. I believe they also open sourced a file manager at 1.2 that was proprietary on Windows. Now, I've been rambling a little bit about this proprietary software versus free software debate.  And that's not that many of you. I mean, that's a small percentage of you watching this video right now. They're actually forced to use proprietary software. Most of the people that complain about not being able to switch from proprietary software to free software, it is all willpower. It is all mental. Honestly, it's one of those things. Change is hard. It's one of those things. I have to use all this proprietary software because it's what I'm used to. I've used it for years. I've only used this suite of applications. It's what I know. It's what I love. And I can't live without it. Yeah, you can. You know how you live without it? You make yourself live without it. You have to switch. And that's what is the problem is people are scared to switch. Once you switch and you start using the free and open source alternatives and you start getting used to them, you start loving them. And then you can't switch from them. You could never go back to the proprietary software you used to use because you realize how inferior in many cases that software is to the free and open source software that now you've grown to love. So my advice is that if you really want to switch away from proprietary software to free and open source software because you've come to realize it's something you need to do, how do you do it? Well, my advice, just do it. Just do it.  Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Gabe James, Mitchell Paul, Scott West, Akami Allen, Chuck Commander Angry Diyoka, David Dillon, Gregory Hiko Lee, Maxim, Michael, Mike Nitrix, Alexander, Peace, Archon Fedora, Polytech, Raver, Rick Prophet, Stephen and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon because without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to support me, please consider subscribing to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.


I'm Rusty Kamori, and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou School Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my books Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game, and it's about leadership, overcoming adversities, and creating a superior culture of excellence. My special guest today is the owner of the very popular pint and jigger in Honolulu. He is Dave Newman, and today we are going Beyond Cocktails. Hey, Dave, welcome to Beyond the Lines. Thank you so much for having me, Rusty. I really appreciate being on the show. Dave, you are an incredible person, a terrific leader, and you've been helping our community in so many ways. But can you first share with our viewers a bit about your background? Absolutely, and thank you for the kind words. You're much to go in. I've been in the restaurant industry for 30 years. I was born and raised in Southern California, worked for a small sushi company called Nobu in Malibu, and had always been drawn to Hawaii, actually was a sponsored body boarder in California, got to come to Hawaii and enjoy the waves a little bit and take some pictures and stuff. I always knew I wanted to come back, and unfortunately my father had passed while I was working at Nobu, and I told them I wanted to transfer to whatever open person, their San Diego location or their Waikiki location. And the Waikiki location opened up six weeks before San Diego, so I moved here in 2007 and helped open the Nobu when it was in Waikiki. Dave, what would you say was the most important thing that you learned while you were working at Nobu? Well, Nobu is just such a master of his craft and so well respected. I don't think anybody at the time would have thought that you would go to Nobu to drink craft cocktails. So I just learned to try to really up my game and do everything I possibly could to elevate my cocktails to at least match the level of his food. And over time, I worked at that location for five years, we developed a huge following, not just for his amazing food, but also for what we had created in the lounge over there. Well, I think Dave, because I remember you at Nobu, and because of what you were doing at Nobu, I mean, you were really building your identity as well, right? A hundred percent, you know, we started an industry night over there that we ran for the five years on Sundays, which came immensely popular. I ran the chapter of the United States bartender's guild, the Hawaii chapter for five years and just really immersed myself in the culture in our bar community, our restaurant community. And it really just kick started, you know, the impetus to open pint and jigger. Yeah, so Dave, let's talk about that right now. What caused you to really want to be your own owner, to own your own place? I think that's a natural inclination before you know better, that you want to be your own boss and own your own space. And, you know, where you get to make all of the decisions and take that responsibility for each of those decisions is a huge undertaking. But it was something that I was always, always driven to do. And I saw a huge gap in in the marketplace and thought that we could fill it. Now, I got to I got to say, Dave, your location at the Alamoana Hotel is absolutely terrific. I mean, how did that come about and how happy are you being there? Oh, we love it. The previous GM of the Alamoana Hotel was a huge fan of pint and jigger and Harry's. You know, I thought in the beginning he was just teasing. He's like, oh, you should come open a slot inside the hotel. And finally he was like, no, really, you need to come look at these spaces. I know the relationship's been great. The new GM of the hotel is also now a huge fan. It's a great location. Parking is good. And high ceilings allow us to really expand what we're doing in the whiskey segment, especially. Dave, you I mean, there's so many locals that love coming to pint and jigger and there's so many visitors that love to come there as well. And when you walk in, I mean, it's such a nice, cool place. I mean, the concept is great. And then you see that big, huge, impressive wall. I mean, how did that wall come about? So when we actually came in this space, it used to be a restaurant called Yuzu. It was a little Japanese restaurant. The ceilings were barely eight feet tall through the whole space. We poked up some of the ceiling tiles and it went up maybe five or six feet. So we were like, well, that's probably good enough. It's about match the old pint and jigger. When we came in to do demo, that was a second drop ceiling. We knocked that out and then, oh, it's like, OK, now we have 35 foot tall ceilings.  Well, it is absolutely impressive. I mean, it's huge, that whole wall.  Right? We get to climb the ladder and it's funny how many people will just be like, well, what's on the top shelf that we can make you climb up there to get? Because it's enjoyable for them to pick something off the top shelf. And Dave, tell us about your secret entry to your Speak Easy. Well, we ran Harry's Hardware Emporium, which is our Speak Easy for about three years at our old location. So we really wanted to make sure that we had a space for that. We wanted to hide the entrance a little bit and have some fun with it. So we built what looks like almost like a little bit of a display, liquor shelf, like there might be in somebody's home or a liquor store. But it's actually a secret door that that speaks you up into our little playground Speak Easy called Harry's Hardware Emporium. Well, that that is super cool. I mean, if if you don't know, then you won't know. Only people that know that that's the door really knows about it, right? Yeah, I mean, unless you see us opening it to go through to the office or to come up to Harry's, it's pretty well hidden. So we're super happy with the way it came out. Now, share with us the concept that you came up with with Harry's Hardware. Well, when we first opened Pine Jigger 2012, there weren't really a craft beer craft cocktail scene in Hawaii. So that was just wanted to see if we could do it. We wanted it to be really approachable. We, you know, T-shirts and blue jeans. Harry's I basically created my little playground to make the most elevated, super cool cocktails.  So, you know, the bartenders are wearing vests or suspenders and ties and slacks and the ambiance. Everything up here screams that you've been transported to another time and place. Well, it is absolutely such a cool vibe. I mean, I love coming in there.  What are some of the most popular drinks that people love to order with you? I mean, the old fashioned is really, really taken over the scene. All the variations of that, but the most most popular. And I think that people that get the most enjoyment out of their experience at Pine Jigger, we call bartenders choice. Other places will call it bartenders. Lindsay, but it's actually just a dialogue back and forth between you and I. And we try to figure out what's the perfect cocktail, not only for you, but for the mood that you're in for the night that you're having. Are you going to eat? Did you just eat? We've tried to factor in as many possible things that we create a specific cocktail for you at that moment. Nine times out of ten, it's cocktail we've never made before.  And it's always a wow, I have to say. And Dave, when I come in, I need two food dishes. I need the Brussels sprouts and the double bacon. I mean, it's not a one. It's a need. I mean, I need those two dishes. Now, tell me about those two dishes and what makes it so good and popular? Well, we've been blessed over the years to have some really amazing executive chefs. Currently, Spencer is helming our kitchen. He has a long history from Alan Wong, just a superior chef, which is weird because we're more of a bar environment. And we just have this amazing human back there. But the double cut bacon is definitely just one that that people go crazy for. I love it. Three giant strips of thick bacon with a corn sauce that has a little bit of hot paint. It's a little bit of spice, onions, and it just melds so well. Those flavors go together. It's almost like a Southern succotash style dish, but with bacon. And then the Brussels sprouts, it's just the key is just cooking them just right, getting them a little bit crunchy. And then, you know, we have a little secret vinaigrette that we put on there and it's people go nuts for it. And Dave, what are some other food items that you offer? We've won Hawaii's Best Burger a few times. We put a lot of effort into that. The Scotch egg, one of the few spots on Island that does that. And we do a little Hawaii twist to it. So instead of doing like a breakfast sausage wrapped around the poached egg, we do actually a pork riette, which we think about a pulled pork. But if you scrape it really small with a fork and then wrap in panko and deep fried, it's it's phenomenal. And then black and marlin sliders have been kind of my go to lately. So we're getting a local fish and doing a Southern style black. And then filming it just awesome. Oh, see, I'm getting hungry already. Now, Dave, this past my birthday this past year, one of my best friends, Daniel Day Kim, took me out for my birthday. And one of the stops we went to was Pine and Jigger, your place.  And then you did something special by bringing bringing us up into Harry's hardware for a celebratory birthday drink. And I know you know Daniel for many years. What's what do you appreciate and love about Daniel? Oh, Daniel's been amazing.  And I just appreciate somebody that's so talented and so successful, just remains so humble.  Just like I doesn't bring any pretense with him.  Yeah, I have to say, I mean, as an actor, as a famous actor, he's he's like the nicest actor anybody can meet.  He always says yes.  I would I would I would have to say. And Dave, I want to ask you about my books. You have both of my books. And what what are some of the concepts that stood out to you in the books? One of the ones that I that I've always done, which I really appreciate is that if somebody makes the mistake, you know, you're really discreet about that. You know, let them know individually or whatnot. I will never break one of my bartenders or servers down on the floor. If they make a mistake, we'll have a small conversation about it. But if they do something right, I'll sing their praises to the world. It's just it's just part of the culture here. And I love that you included that. The 99 things that you do right, you do one thing wrong and help your one star Yelp review, because that's the thing they're going to remember. And that one that I actually took from you that I didn't incorporate in I do now. So thank you is that, you know, if people are late, I would always do the traditional you're getting punished for that. And now we've changed that into a kind of a mix of something that's really more positive for the team. If somebody is late, they get a cleaning chore that not everybody wants to do. But that helps our team by the fact that we were going to have to do it anyway. And they're going to take that on themselves. So I really appreciate that. And thank you. Well, Dave, I'm glad to help. Well, the books were amazing. I highly recommend if you have a bar or restaurant, you know, and I know they're about tennis, but they're not there. They're about leadership and team building and you crush them. So thank you. Dave, how did you like the Mikey Lim and Skyler Tateishi story in there?   And the way you handled it and it could have been really negative where Skyler actually, you know, won that match. Mikey could have gone to a dark place, but the way you handled it and just turned it into a team building experience where they then were rooting for each other during future matches and both going on to be incredibly successful is really cool. Now, Dave, how does that story of Mikey and Skyler relate to you and your co-workers there? Well, I'm an open book. There's nothing that I won't train my guys when I try to instill that to each other. So we do a lot of bartending competitions. And before the team would never want to compete against each other because we'd always just pick one person and try to support them. But now, like, after having read that, I was like, you guys should enter and compete against each other and sing each other's praises. And if one person wins that time, that's awesome. It doesn't mean they're going to win the next one. And but that's a better way for us to grow as a cohesive unit. So it's been great. Yeah, and they all have to realize that that they're all on the pint and jigger team.   And so it's just a major positive thing where it brings in more recognition. People hold you guys to a higher standard. And they speaking about holding you to a higher standard. My third book, Superior, is going to be coming out very soon. And in it, I talk about the difference between high achievers versus superior achievers. You are not a high achiever.  And that's that's a word that I invented. Because for me, I want to train people to become high achievers. But once they become a high achiever, I want to coach them to become superior achievers. What are your thoughts about that? I think it's amazing. I've seen other restaurants or restaurant famous restaurant tours not do that. Mine is once my staff reaches a certain level of bartending, I want to push them out the nest and see where they go. So, you know, Quinn Mears was one of our best bartenders here. And I encouraged him to go run Encore Saloon when they first opened. And very sadly, at the end of this month, that restaurant's coming to the end of its run. But Quinn set up an amazing program there. Ari Hayfin is over at Brickfire running that program. Kootla is going to be leaving us in a month to go open Dusty Grable's three new spots inside the Manoa Marketplace. And for me, it's just, yes, I want to see all of these humans go out and do what I've done and surpass me and do amazing things.   You all understand the highs and the lows that you deal with. But what would you want to share to some other business owners out there in regards to that that kind of mindset?  Yes, I think the more people that do it, the better off everybody's going to be. Dave, can you share with us, you know, what are what would you say are the toughest parts of being in the restaurant industry? I've learned the lesson that it is so easy to overwork for yourself.  But when you're working for yourself, there's no end to that and it never ends. And then right now staffing is just really, really difficult in, I think, all industries, but the restaurant industry has been hit really, really hard with that post COVID. Yeah, now, so during COVID, how I mean, obviously, there's so many businesses, restaurants that closed. Now, you survive. It doesn't mean that you're thriving right now.  So many restaurants are still struggling. How how were you able to adapt and adjust to try to navigate your way through COVID and come out and still try to find a way to succeed? I think everybody had to, you know, really think on your feet. You know, I don't even like using the word because it was your use so much. But the pivot, you know, how are you going to pivot to get through the situation? And, you know, we were incredibly fortunate that we ran our old location for 10 years on King Street and McCully. And we had a huge following and it really allowed us to kind of weather the storm and to reopen. And honestly, it's been fabulous. The support from our community is amazing. I couldn't pick a better place to call home. Now, Dave, I want to ask you about this because you and I both know in the past so many chefs or general managers that really watch what the owner does.  I can do what they do. And then all of a sudden, they try to, you know, become an owner on their own and then they fail because they don't see all of the things that is done behind the scenes. What are your thoughts about that? And can you share with our viewers a lot of the things that you do as an owner behind the scene? If you're not willing to do whatever you consider the hardest, worst part, the lowest things that need to be done at the very least, you shouldn't be an owner. Like if you're not willing to jump in and wash dishes and pick up trash and unclog toilets, don't do it. But the behind the scenes thing is a lot about what you talk about in your book. It's this team building and making these incredible relationships with people. I don't hire based off of Gilstead anymore. I hire off of character.  I can teach you how to make amazing cocktails. I can teach you almost everything. But if you don't have good character, you're not a good human. You're not going to go that far in this industry.  And you also know that I talk a lot about the importance of building relationships about really making your team members feel important as a person first and then as a employee second, or like I would say as a tennis player second. What are your thoughts about the importance of really building relationships? It's the most important thing. It's the most important thing, especially in Hawaii for business. But as far as team building goes, every person is different. Everybody has different needs. They need to be spoken to a different way. I see a lot of managers, owners that have just one style that they're going to give to their team. And it does offer consistency, but I feel like making that intimate relationship with the staff is just huge. And then giving them a role where they can like express their self-importance. So each of my bartenders gets a spirit category. One of them will have Tequila, one of them will have gin, one of them will have rum. And they're responsible for that category in totality. They decide which brands we carry. They help create the cocktails for those that category for the menu. We work together on that and then they really get to take ownership of it. And it's really incredible to see how much that makes them blossom. And Dave, I mean, you I mean, both of us, we've been on so many teams before, whether it be in sports or business and we watch what the coach does or what the owner or CEO does. What do you feel the greatest? Well, I know that the greatest leaders really have incredible communication. And for me, I like to be proactive when I'm coaching teams and businesses about the importance of communication. What are your thoughts about that?  And, you know, I think in this day and age, a lot of things are getting lost in translation as far as emails and text messages. But as far as when you're communicating with people, the most important thing is to be a better listener. And you talk a lot about that and it just it's a hundred percent sure. Yeah, listen first, speak last. I mean, when your people feel like they're being heard, they feel more of a part of being on that team, you know, and sometimes what I say is when everyone can share their feelings, their thoughts, then you understand what they're thinking and feeling. So you have a good, you know, vibe on what the pulse of the team is like.  But what's some of the best advice you've ever received? Um, there's been so much. I think one of the best things I've ever heard is is once once you start believing the hype that's been said and written about you, you're you're in trouble. I mean, I strive every day to continue learning and be passionate about what I do. And I'll be the first person to be a Google searching things. And the thirst for knowledge just keep going and driving towards what you love and consume knowledge and read amazing books about tennis that aren't really about tennis. And, um, yeah, I think I think just being passionate, like I'm 30 years into it. And I'd be hard pressed to find somebody that's more passionate about what they do behind the bar than myself. Yeah. Well, Dave, that's why I always say the greatest leaders are always learning, which, which makes them even greater.  Um, and like you said before, I mean, if you stop learning, I mean, you've got to throw in the towel right there. Right. What's your thoughts behind that? I just think that, you know, if you are really interested in what you're doing and you're passionate about it and you're constantly learning, it shows and and you really start to separate yourself from from a lot of the people that are just putting in the time, you know, I don't remember where I saw this, but you know, they said, if you're doing like 15 minutes a day on any different thing in the course of two years, you'll, you'll be one of the masters in that area.  So, so Dave, I want to ask you now who or what inspires you? Oh, I get inspiration from so many places, but we are surrounded by some of the most amazing humans. I don't know if people really realize in Hawaii how blessed we are with that. I mean, you look at a, a Michelle Carr and a Wade over at an MW and how hard they work and what they're doing. You look at a Dusty Grable and all the success he had with livestock, Lucky Billion, Chinchin, Justin Park, Chandra, Luca Ruello. So these are, you know, my colleagues that are just absolutely crushing it. They're, that list goes on and on and on. Traveling and tasting amazing food and bringing, you know, different experiences back to share or share with our guests. Inspiration from everywhere, read, read books and, you know, listen to podcasts. I try to find it from everywhere. I'm a sponge and, like I said, we live in an amazing place. There's a bounty of local fruits that we get to harvest and vegetables. We are incredibly spoiled with the melting pot that we have in Hawaii of all the different cultures there. I completely agree with you, David. Dave, what, what would you say is a future goal or future goals that you have? You know, we're going to open up our retail space. We've, we've joined forces with some of those amazing humans. And we've created a whiskey buying collective where we buy barrels of whiskey and then we sell them under the, the name, the Hawaii Whiskey Mafia. I'd love to put some effort in actually growing that it's, it's grown really well on its own. But I think getting behind it and giving it a little push would be amazing. So we're going to open a retail space across from Pine and Jigger, hopefully in the next few months and, and you'll be able to purchase some of those whiskies there. Dave, I want to ask you one more thing before we wrap up. Can you share with our viewers how, how is some variety of ways that you have helped our community? Thanks, Senator. I ran our chapter of the United States bartenders guild for five years. It's a non-paid position that was just trying to grow our community and, and grow, grow what we love. I mean, we try to support UH sports and we just did a bunch of charity work for the Maui fires. We opened up Harry's for that. And, you know, we have a lot of friends and a lot of dear humans lost homes and businesses and, you know, whatever we can do to help, we really try to do that. So being part of a community means really being part of the community. Well, Dave, I have to say you are a man of great character.  I want everybody to go and support Pine and Jigger. And I really want to thank you for taking time to be on the show today. Super honored to be on your show. And I can't wait to pick up the new book. When's it going to drop? Well, officially May 7th, but my book signing at Barnes & Noble at Alamoana will be on Saturday, April 6th at 2 p.m. So people that come to the book signing can get an advanced printing of it unless they got to wait a month later. Oh, that's amazing. Thanks. Thanks for letting us know. Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it. Thank you. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, please visit RustyKamori.com, and my books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope that Dave and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha. If you liked this show, why don't you give us a like or subscribe to our channel? Thanks so much.


This is part three and I've entitled this message this morning, power, persecution, and counter-cultural living. Power, persecution, and counter-cultural living. Let's look here, Acts chapter three, or Acts chapter four, sorry, Acts chapter four, beginning in verse number one. And it says, and as they were speaking to the people, the priests and the captain of the temple in the Sadducees came upon them, greatly annoyed because they were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead. And they arrested them and put them in custody until the next day for it was already evening. But many of those who had heard the word believed and the number of men came to about 5,000. On the next day, the rulers and the elders and the scribes gathered together in Jerusalem with Annas, the high priest, and Caiaphas, and John, and Alexander, and all who were of the high priestly family. And when they had set them in their midst, they inquired by what power or by what name did you do this? Talking about the miracle of healing of the lame man.  This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has now become the cornerstone. And there is salvation and no one else for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and perceived that they were uneducated common men, they were astonished and they recognized that they had been with Jesus. But seeing the man who was healed standing beside them, they had nothing to say in opposition. But when they had commanded them to leave the council, they conferred with one another saying, what shall we do with these men? For that a notable miracle has been performed through them as evident to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem and we cannot deny it. But in order that it may spread no further among the people, let us warn them to speak no more to anyone in this name. So they called them and charged them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John answered them, whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge. For we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard. And when they had further threatened them, they let them go. Finding no way to punish them because of the people for all were praising God for what had happened. For the man on whom the sign of healing was performed was more than 40 years old. This is the beginning in chapter three and chapter four. It's the beginning of not just the power of God being poured out on the early church, which we saw in Acts one and Acts chapter two last week as John Tyson shared that with us. But now we begin to see not only the culture and the community of the church, but we also see the response of the culture around them to the church. And the response and in some ways, the persecution, the beginning of the persecution of Christians because of the way that they lived and because of their exclusive claims of who Jesus was. You see what we find in the very early chapters of the book of Acts is that the church under the power of the Holy Spirit is beginning to proclaim a message that is counter-cultural. It's a message that says that Jesus is king, Jesus is savior, and then they demonstrated both in the way that they live, their community and their culture, and also by the power that they demonstrated, the presence of the kingdom through signs and wonders. And their preaching and the message that they preached was this, it was repent, which was a confrontational counter-cultural message to the world, repent so that your sins may be forgiven, believe in Jesus, he's the only name, he's the only one that can save you and change the way that you think and the way that you live so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord. And what this did was this preaching and the way that they lived and the value system that the community of the church began to live out was so contrary to the way that the world lived that this confrontation actually produced conflict. It produced friction and agitation. Their message was subversive and in many ways was disruptive to the status quo of the community in which they found themselves, whether it was in Israel and Acts chapter three and four, or whether it's in Antioch and Acts chapter 15 or Greece and Athens in the mid-parts of the book of Acts or even in Rome, as we'll see near the end. It was subversive, which means it comes underneath and actually destabilizes the established order of things and it was disruptive because what we'll see is that as the message is preached, thousands and thousands of people believed in this message, this gospel message, this good news that Jesus saves and they began to join themselves to God's new alternative society, the church. It's what the church really was, was an alternative society. Paul writes in Philippians chapter three when he's writing to the church which has been established several years later after this, he says he reminds them that your citizenship is in heaven. In other words, you're part of a different culture, you're part of a different community and as the church is emerging and preaching this message with such boldness that has no earthly natural explanation for it, they begin to experience persecution in response to their boldness, but their boldness causes them to continue to preach the word and the word begins to spread like wildfire and what we will find, you can see this in the book of Acts, you can also see it throughout church history is that in about 200 to 250 year period of time, the message of Jesus, the subversive counter cultural message and people of Jesus actually begins to destabilize the most powerful empire and culture that the world has ever seen because of how subversive and because of how contrary it is to the rest of the culture that it finds itself in. And it literally overthrows the Roman empire, it literally overthrows the established order because the church and the message that it carried and the boldness that it proclaimed their message with could not be stopped. And this is what we see right in the very beginning of the book of Acts and this story that we just read in Acts chapter four is about John and Peter. Acts chapter three, they were just on their way to the temple at the hour of prayer. They had established times of prayer and this was one of those times they're on their way up, they're entering into the temple and as they come to the Eastern gate, the gate called beautiful, there's a man who is sitting outside the temple. The reason why he's sitting outside the temple is because ceremonially he's unclean, he can't go in and worship. But he's 40 years old, he's been lame his entire life from birth. He's never walked a day in his life, but every day somebody brings him and sets him outside of the gate to beg for alms. And on this particular day as they come by him, he asks them for silver or for gold, he asks them for a donation, I can just see him holding a sign, please help, anything helps. And in this moment, Peter and John turn their attention to him and say, we don't have any money but what we do have, we freely give to you. And what they had was they had the heart of Jesus, they had the gospel message and they had the power of the Holy Spirit and they prayed for the man and he was instantly healed, a notable miracle. I mean this man, they lift him up, he stands, he jumps, he runs, he walks and he runs into the temple.  And what I think is interesting is instead of that sign and that wonder softening their heart to believe in Jesus, they actually double down and they harden their hearts against Jesus and against his followers and against the message they proclaim and they persecute them. See, oftentimes we think, wow, if a miracle would happen in our culture, if a miracle, a massive miracle would happen in our city, everybody would believe, not necessarily so. I think we underestimate how hard and how deceptively wicked the human heart is and how many times we just wanna resist what we know is really the heart of God. That's what happens here. But what I think is really interesting is the response of the church, the response of the apostles. It says that they knew that they were uneducated, common, everyday men, they didn't go to seminary, they weren't on the same intellectual level as the religious leaders were, but what they knew about them was that they had been with Jesus and it changed them. They had been with Jesus. You see, when you are not just believing in Jesus from a secondhand experience or a secondhand rumor, but when you've had a first-hand encounter with God, it changes everything in your life. You can't literally be around Jesus for real, around Jesus, with a soft tender heart and have it not change your life and have it not be evident to the world around you. How many of you remember when there were smoking sections in restaurants? Remember that? Remember Denny's? Denny's was the worst. My first job was working at Denny's. I was 16 years old, I was a busboy dishwasher. I was back in the days in the 80s when they had, it was open 24-7 and they had the bar crowds that would come in late at night and they had a smoking section, but what that means is you can smoke here, but everybody else is gonna get secondhand smoke. You could always tell when somebody was in either a bowling alley, a bar, or a smoking section of a restaurant. When they came out of it, it's like they would come into the room and you'd be like, where have you been? Oh, Denny's, that makes sense.  Obviously, that's Denny's.  You've been in a bowling alley. It's because you could tell the environment they had been in or who they had been around. My mom used to always smell me for cigarettes when I would come in the house after hanging out with a friend.  I was like, mom, mom, I'm good, I'm good. Because she knew that you could smell who someone had been with. There was a fragrance. There was something that was imparted. And the same is true when you've been around Jesus.  That's what they knew about this band of Jesus followers early on in the book of Acts. It says that when they saw their boldness, Peter and John, and they perceived that they were uneducated and common men, they were astonished. But then they recognized, oh, they've been with Jesus. What was it about the church that caused them to be so powerful? To be so culture bending? Well, I believe the answer was they were counter-cultural. They were counter-cultural. What does it mean to be counter-cultural? Here's the definition. A counter-culture is a culture in which the values expressed and promoted are in potential and actual opposition to those of the dominant culture. Sometimes amounting to a wholesale rejection of that culture. In other words, a group of people who live within a dominant culture who have embraced a set of virtues and values and beliefs as truth and choose to live by them even though it goes contrary to the established culture that they find themselves in. This is what a counter-culture is. And it's exactly what the church was and was called to be. It was going against the grain of the world system. It was becoming an alternative culture in the midst of a world gone wrong. It was literally embracing the culture of heaven in the midst of the kingdoms of this world and living according to the way of Jesus. It's exactly what Paul means when he writes in Romans chapter 12 verse two when he says, do not be conformed to this world but be transformed how? By the renewing of your mind so that you might prove what is the good, the acceptable and the perfect will of God. We all know this. Whatever you conform to or whatever you're shaped by will determine the responses and the way that you live your life. So if we allow the world to put us into their cookie cutter mold and we live like everybody else and we think like everybody else and we agree with everybody else and we just find what's the path of least resistance? What's the consensus? What is the majority of polls say that people believe? And if we just get into that jet stream because we don't wanna stand out then what's happening is we're actually being conformed but Jesus does not call us to be conformed to the world. He wants us to be transformed. In other words, he wants us to be changed. He wants our thinking to be renewed and to be changed and transformed to actually think like God thinks, to agree with God and not to agree with the world even when it means that it will cause us to stand out. It will call us to stand out and in some cases to go against the grain. This is what the church is always called to be a counterculture. And it's why the book of Acts reveals a church that was countercultural and effective. And I believe what we need more than anything today is in the American church, in the church of Jesus Christ for us to re-embrace our call to be a countercultural people. To be people that are known by the power of God's spirit in our midst. To be known by the love of God that's expressed through us but even more than that, to be known by the fact that we're willing to embrace a culture and a way of living that even if it means persecution and difficulty, we embrace it because whether we obey man or whether we obey God, we choose to obey God no matter what. Radical obedience. Jesus didn't just call us to believe in him intellectually. Jesus said, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments. Jesus didn't call us to his disciples and any of us, he didn't say believe in me, he said follow me. Which means if we're gonna follow Jesus, we're gonna have to walk in the way of Jesus. And Jesus said, narrow is the way that leads to life but wide is the way that leads to destruction. What is the wide way? The wide way is the way everybody else is going. It's a 10 lane highway and it leads right to a drop off into the abyss. But there is a narrow way that leads to life and Jesus said, few are those who find it. Why is it so few? Because so few are willing to choose it. What we need today is we don't need more intellectual content. What we need more is we need more spiritual commitment. I'm gonna preach to the 9 a.m. I promise you, it's coming. So let me give you three things this morning that I believe with all of my heart. We're called to, we're called and what is required to be a counter cultural people. Number one is it requires seeing through a different lens, seeing through a different lens. If we're gonna be counter cultural people, kingdom people, we're gonna have to see ourselves, see God, see the world and see the purpose for our life to see truth through a different lens. See the way that the world sees things, the world just kind of the consensus, the generally accepted belief system is this, is that the world is good and people are good and nothing bad should ever happen and if something bad does happen, it's probably God's fault. It's a good world, good people, nothing bad should ever happen. God, why are you picking on us? But actually the kingdom or the way that we're supposed to view it is this, the way God views it. The world is broken, God did create the world good and perfect in the beginning, but we broke it. The world is broken, people are broken and only God can fix it. And he has in the person of Jesus Christ, he has made a way for all things to be made new again. But there's no other name given among men by which we must be saved except the name of Jesus. You see, as kingdom people, we see through the lens of Jesus.  John 14 says that.  He's not an option at Walmart where you can do this, this or this. He said, I'm the way, the truth and the life. Seeing through a different lens is exactly what Jesus met in Matthew 633 when he said, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And then all these other things will be added unto you. What does it mean to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness? It means this, when you seek his kingdom, it means you're coming under Jesus' kingship. It means I'm not my own master. Jesus is king. And when it says, and his righteousness, it means this. I wanna do things the way you do things, Jesus, because your way is perfect. How many have discovered in your own life that you have a way that very often you think is the right way, but most of the time it pans out not being the right way? Has anybody ever found that to be true in your own life? My way is not necessarily the right way. Trying to put furniture together and you've got all these extra pieces and you've got the instruction manual wide open and it's like, yeah, I could do it that way, but I think my way works pretty good. And that's why your table does this. Anytime you set anything on it. It's like, that's your way. Our life reflects our way, but Jesus calls us to repent. I mean, change your mind, change the way that you think things and believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life and that as we seek Him and His way of doing things, His lens becomes our lens and we begin to see through the way that Jesus sees things. It's interesting right now, most recently, they did a survey among millennials and Gen Z. What do you think are the biggest problems that are keeping us from fixing the world? And this is from a world's perspective and here's the top 10 problems as they see it. In other words, if these things were fixed, our world would be perfect. We would just have everything right. Number one is climate change. Number two is lack of education. Number three, hunger and malnutrition. Number four, security and safety. Number five, income inequality. Number six, religious extremism. Number seven, global poverty. Number eight, nuclear war and major conflicts. Number nine, unemployment and opportunities. And number 10, corruption and politics and government. So they said these are the top, these are the biggest problems right now in the world. If we could fix these issues, we would live in the age of Aquarius, in a Utopia. It would be a paradise. We just have to fix these problems. That's the world's perspective. And by the way, some of these issues are really important issues, but they're not the biggest issues. Let me give you the biggest problems that keep us from fixing the world from a kingdom perspective. You ready? They may not what you think. They may not be what you think. Number one, human beings are in rebellion against God. Number two, human beings cannot save themselves. Number three, human beings are massively deceived. Number four, human beings have chosen to worship themselves. Number five, human beings have put God on trial. Number six, human beings think everyone else is wrong except them. Number seven, human beings are spiritually blinded because of their sin. Number eight, human beings are dead in their sins and do not know it. Number nine, human beings make matters worse when they try to fix it in their own strength. And number 10, human beings have rejected God's son. Those are the 10 biggest issues in the world. Have you noticed what's the common denominator in all 10 of those? Human beings. Because the problem that has wrecked our world that started in the garden and that Jesus comes to restore is not the things that are out there. It starts with the human heart. Because the problem with all these other things, the problem with injustice and the problem with being deceived and the problem with safety and security and wars and rumors of wars and all these things, they are the things that flow out of the heart of sinful human beings. We create these problems. The only way to solve these issues is if you solve the issue of the human heart. You solve that and it's amazing. We can have perfect shalom in the world just as it was in the garden but first you have to address the issue of the heart. And that is what the church carries, the message that saves and delivers. It's the message that Jesus Christ was crucified for the sins of the world, raised on the third day, is seated at the right hand of the Father, reigning and ruling over the universe and one day he's going to come to judge the living and the dead. Repent and believe. Repent and believe. Well I don't wanna repent. Great, stand in judgment. Because that's your alternative.  There will be nothing that is hidden when Jesus returns. Every man and woman will stand before Jesus because he is the rightful king and would be judged not best on your best intentions but on his righteousness and his word and his truth.  My Lord church. Happy Mother's Day. Okay so the call to repent is a call to reverse course and to submit to the kingship of Jesus. And the reason why we do that is because of grace and truth. Grace because we've experienced grace from God. This is what the early church had experienced. They had been so shaken by God's grace in their life and it was truth, the truth of who Jesus was that had so shaken them and changed them and transformed them that they wanted everybody else to know.  You wouldn't keep that to yourself and say, well I don't wanna impose my belief on anybody else.  But yet here we are as the church. We have the cure for sin. We have the cure for spiritual death and we have the answer to eternal life. And oftentimes we're intimidated. Oftentimes we're insecure or we just wanna keep it to ourselves. But it's the answer. The gospel is the power of God under salvation for those who believe beginning with the Jew first and also for the Greek. It's the only hope of this world. And we need to be motivated by grace and truth. Number two, if we're gonna be counter cultural people it requires a radically different response to the brokenness of our world. And a radically different response to the agitation, disruption, confrontation that occurs as a result of the faith that we hold. In Acts chapter four verse 18 through 20 it says they called them and they charged them not to speak or to teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John answered them and said this whether it's right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge. For we cannot but speak what we have seen and heard. They said, listen, listen, you're threatening us.  You're gonna jealous.  But we're telling you you're gonna have to determine what you're gonna do because we've already determined what we're gonna do. If it comes down to obeying man in order to maintain status quo and acceptance or to obey God and that produces persecution and suffering and even the loss of our lives then we're going to obey God. And their response was a radically different response in the way that they lived their lives was a radically different. It was actually a prophetic declaration back to a broken culture because the church in and of itself was a radically different organism. You see in the Roman culture in the Greco-Roman culture there was a class system. You had the very wealthy and you had the very poor.  Women didn't have rights that men had. Slaves had no rights. There were property. Then you had the upper class. You had a lower class. And there were all these different structures and people of the high class didn't associate with the low class. The color of clothing that you wore in the Roman world was determined by the class that you were in. If you were wealthy, you were allowed to wear a certain color. If you were poor, you had to wear a different color.  If you were a woman, you didn't have right to property. You didn't have right to divorce in many cases. But yet in the church, as people from all these different classes, wealthy and poor, slave and free, men and women were encountering Jesus and gathering together. It was the only place. Imagine in Rome, imagine this epicenter of Greco-Roman culture. There were these subversive meetings of people that were gathering together, of Jews and Greeks, men and women, rich and poor, slave and free, who were gathering together and there was no hierarchy. Everybody was on level ground in the eyes of Jesus. Receiving communion together, singing together, taking turns reading the scriptures together, praying for one another, a slave laying hands on a very wealthy senator. This was taking place in the church and it was an abomination to the rest of the Greco-Roman culture. They're just like, these people are crazy. What are they doing? What's that slave woman doing by laying her hands upon a very rich, patrician senator and praying for his healing and yet they're God desert. It was so subversive that it actually is what overthrew the entire structure and the entire system of the Roman Empire. Because it was love and it was unity and it was equality. Jesus gave us the constitution to the kingdom of God. It's called the Sermon on the Mount lifestyle. How many of you have ever read the Sermon on the Mount? Matthew five, six and seven. Raise your hand if you've read the Sermon on the Mount. If you've read it really through the eyes of not just poetry, but you've read it like, okay, what would it take to live this out? You know it's the most difficult lifestyle to live because it's all about forgiveness. How many of you know forgiveness is easy as long as nobody offends you? It's a lifestyle of reconciliation. It's a lifestyle of peacemaking. It's a lifestyle of remaining pure in the heart, not just in your behavior. It's a lifestyle where we're called to loyalty and fidelity and faithfulness, called to love our enemies, called to pray for those who persecute us, called to care for the poor. It's a radical lifestyle. And if we're going to be followers of Jesus, then we're not gonna get it perfect, but that's our aim. To live in this way as a counterculture in the midst of a world that is living for themselves, that is bent on vengeance and retribution, that pleasure is top of the chart. If you want it, buy it. If it feels good, do it. There's no parameters to pleasure. There's no parameters to fidelity. It's a no fault divorce culture. And it doesn't matter what's going on in your heart. You're automatically a good person. It's just about your external image. That's the world. This is the kingdom. We're called to live radically different from the inside out. And because we believe these things, the church is a counterculture way of life. This last week, we saw leaked documents from the Supreme Court about the issue of Roe versus Wade and abortion in our nation. And we've seen people respond and react from both sides of the political spectrum on this issue. Protesters all over the place. In fact, yesterday we had protesters downtown in front of Matchhead. 30 or so protesters who were chanting, they didn't want us in the city, my body, my choice, because they know that as Christians, we are a countercultural group of people, followers of Jesus, and we place an incredible intrinsic value on life from beginning from conception all the way through life because of what we believe about every human being. That every human being is indelibly marked and a bearer of the image of God. And because they're an image bearer, they have value and they have the right to life. But I wanna tell you, this is nothing new to the Christian church. And I'm addressing this this morning because I think it's important congregation that we know that as followers of Jesus, if we're disciples of the world, then we can believe whatever we wanna believe. But if we've claimed loyalty to Jesus, then his way and his righteousness is truth. And this is what the church historically is always embraced. The church has always, always, always valued human life. And in fact, think about this. This is the Roman perspective on life. In first century, this is what was written in some of their documents. This is from the law of the 12 tablets. This is table number four, quoted about unborn children. A dreadfully deformed child shall be quickly killed. So a child who's born and has a deformity was to be quickly killed. Cicero on law wrote this. Deformed infants shall be killed.  On natural progeny we destroy. We drown even children at birth who are weak and abnormal. Lots of different reasons in the Roman culture of why you could have an abortion or why you could leave your children out for exposure. You see, that's what they would do. If they had a child that was born and they didn't want it, they just left it on the trash heaps. And you could do it for these reasons legally. Economics, if you were too poor and didn't feel like you could provide for your child, you could do it because of their sex or their gender. Girls were abandoned to exposure at higher rates than boys because they were devalued and also carried a doll reliability.  A child with deformities was commanded to be killed and children that appeared weak or imperfect were often judged unworthy of becoming part of society and therefore left out for exposure. You could do that for questionable paternity. If you did not know who the father was or you could just simply do it because you had no desire for the child. Fathers had the legal right to abandon any infants under his power to exposure because they had no value for human life. But let me read to you the early church's response to that. This is one of the early church fathers, his name is Tertullian. And he said this, he said, in our case, a murder, a murder being once and for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb. While as yet, the human being derives blood from the other parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man killing. Nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born or destroy one that is coming to birth. That is a man which is going to be one and you have the fruit already in the seed. And here was one of the radical things that the early church did. The early Christians knew that Romans threw children out on the trash heaps when they didn't want them. You know what the Christians would do? They would walk up and down the alleyways of Rome and they would collect the children and they would take them in and families would adopt them. Families would provide for them.  And it's one of the ways that the church grew exponentially. See, it was even written about Christians and about the Christian culture from secular descriptions. This is what I'm about to read to you as a secular description of how the Romans saw the Christians in response to this issue of unborn and infant children that were left to exposure. It says this about Christians. Kindness is their nature. There is no falsehood among them. They love one another. They do not neglect widows. Orphans they rescue from those who would be cruel to them. Every one of them who has anything gives up ungrudgingly to the one who has nothing. So this is how the world saw the church. And you know, one of the arguments that's made against Christians and their view of the sanctity of life and their view that life begins at conception and it's so because in Jeremiah chapter one, God said to Jeremiah, before you were even in your mother's womb, I knew you. The first person who greeted Jesus, our Lord, when he was in his mother's womb was his cousin, John the Baptist, who was still a first trimester embryo who leapt in his mother's womb and celebration at the glory of God in Mary. So we've always believed this. But one of the major arguments against this is, well, you Christians, all you care about is the unborn and then after they're born, they don't care anymore.  You need to have a holistic life view. Well, first of all, let me just say, at least they have an opportunity to live. But second of all, every crisis pregnancy center in America is run by Christians. Christians adopt more children and are more involved in the foster care system than any other segment of society. Christians give generously to more needs and care for the poor in our cities across America and around the world than any other segment of society. And there is no more pro-woman religion on the face of the earth than Christianity. And the reason why we do that, the reason why we do that is because we believe that our creator has made every single one of us and put life in us so that we might know him. And listen, there's not just one victim when it comes to abortion. There are so many women in our world that have been deceived by the spirit of death across our country. Just get rid of your child. And that they've had to live with the guilt and the shame of that decision for the rest of their life.  You can have a brand new beginning. You weren't created to carry shame. You were created to know your God, to be a child of God. And that's why the church as a counterculture has always cared for the poor, the widows, and the orphans and children. Because God who is our Father sent his son Jesus to come and rescue us, our prodigal orphaned hearts. It just requires us to live out a radically different response and to also recognize that we have to have a willingness to suffer in the short term. Church, if we're gonna live in the radical Jesus way, we're gonna be persecuted. We're gonna be persecuted.   Jesus said this, if you won't confess me before men, I won't confess you before my father.  People aren't gonna understand. They're gonna think you're strange. They're gonna think you're weird. Why are you living like that? We're not doing it for any other reason, but because this world is broken and Jesus is the only answer for the world today. Jesus can save, Jesus can heal, Jesus can deliver, Jesus can transform a society, He can turn the tide, He can restore families, He can heal broken hearts, He can give purpose to every single human being. And this is why we care. We care because people last forever. Nothing else in this world lasts forever, but people do. And God has called us to rescue the perishing and that's why the good news is so good. On this Mother's Day, it's good news. Jesus is alive and well. Would you stand with me to your feet? All across this room, I just wanna ask you and also at Portage, would you just bow your heads with me? Father, today, in this place and in this moment, we stand humbled before you because you didn't have to rescue us. Jesus, you didn't have to save us. You could have left us to our own devices. You could have left us in our brokenness, in our shame, in our sin. You could have left us in our deception. And we would go off into eternity, separated from you and never experience the life and the relationship with you that you always wanted for us. Jesus, you are the way.  And you look at every single one of the 8 billion people on this planet, men and women, young and old, orphans, widows, rich and poor, black, white, brown and every other color on the spectrum. And you see us and you see the image of God marked upon us even though it's been broken by sin.  Jesus, you loved us. You didn't love us because we behaved. You didn't love us because we were qualified. You loved us because you made us for yourself. And I pray that the things that hold us back from you would be broken down in our lives and we would have hearts that say yes to you. Yes, God, have your way. Jesus, come in, reorient my world, reorient my thinking around your thinking. Renew my mind, restore my heart, save me, rescue me. I pray that you do it. And those of us who are already believers and you would do it in those of us who have not yet placed our trust in you, Jesus. And in this moment, please, everyone around the room, just continue to just pray for a second because I believe that there are some that may be listening to me right now and you do not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. You've never placed your trust in him to forgive your sins, to give you eternal life and submitted your life to him. You say, well, why do I need to do that? Because number one, we're all dead in our sins. We're all dead spiritually. And number two, none of us can fix ourselves. But number three, God so loved you that he did for you what you could not do for yourself. He came, he lived perfectly. He died upon a cross for your sins to pay for them completely.  But he calls you to repent.  If you'll do that today, if you'll do that right now, you can be made right with God. You can have a relationship with God and you don't have to do anything other than receive it. It's a gift. Today all over this room, I wanna lead those in a prayer of commitment of your life and receiving that grace that God has for you. The Holy Spirit right now is moving through the room and there's some, he's tugging on your heart saying, it's you, I need to do this. You need to do this. Today, surrender your life to Jesus. Receive him as your personal Lord and savior. Be saved from this twisted and perverse generation. Today all over this room, if you're here and you say, I know I need to get my life right with God, passionately pray for me. Today I want this to be a new beginning. I want Jesus to be my Lord and savior. I wanna be forgiven. I wanna have eternal life. Pray for me. If that's you, I just simply want you to raise your hand, indicate that, say pray for me, include me in this prayer. Thank you, I see that hand. I'm scanning the room. Raise it if that's you. Say, today I need Jesus. Thank you, thank you, thank you. All the way in the back, yes.  Thank you, sir. Just like he did in the book of Acts. Thank you, young lady. He'll forgive, he'll wash it all away as if it never happened and give you a brand new heart. Last call, if you've not raised your hand, raise it right now. Thank you, young lady.  The Bible says this, if we believe in our heart on the Lord Jesus Christ and we confess with our mouth that God raised him from the dead, we will be saved. I'm just gonna lead you in a prayer of confession. I want everyone in the room to pray this with me. Out loud, here we go. Say, Heavenly Father, I come in Jesus' name and I confess, I have sinned, I've lived for myself and I need a savior. Jesus, I believe in you.  You died upon the cross for my sins and you rose on the third day. And Jesus, you are returning to reign and rule. I invite you into my heart to be my Lord and savior. Please forgive my sins. Please give me a new heart and put your spirit in me. From this day forward, I repent and I turn my back on my past. I turn my back on my sins and my way of doing things. And from this point forward, I will follow Jesus, no matter what. Thank you for loving me and saving me in Jesus' name. Amen.


Oh, I have another one. Another what? Thing that we never opened. Oh, you do? Yeah. Oh. How many did you got back there? Well, this is the last package. OK. It's like a letter. A letter as well that we can open off camera. Well, let's see. Ew. It's a book! Ooh. Hi, Corbin. Hey, that works. This one's for you. Hi, Corbin. Hope you like this book. I haven't read it, but it looked promising, best wishes. And now you know, again, what's the same person? Rule number one. Read my book.   Better late than never. How you doing over there?  She's doing real well. She came three times. Oh, wow, Corbin. Have to go there. I tried to stop myself. I just couldn't. Wow. That's what she said. Today we got a village cooking channel. Oh. This is going to be yummy. I'm always so, so happy when I hear that. It's called mutton curry. Oh! Oh, I wish. Where's my wife? Mutton curry, dosai? Yeah, it says dosai, D-O-S-I-A-I. Say this. Madurai special street food, South Indian curry dosa recipe with mutton gravy. Good night, Irene. I bet that's going to be scrumdiddly umptious. Indeed. Here we go. Oh, my stars. Scream at us. That's what your mom said. Sorry for the veg people out there. Clearly, ginger. That was turmeric. I said that in the last video. Oh, really? They were like, I love the confidence at which you were wrong, Corbin. I'm always here for confidence.  Really mincing the meat. Mince your mom's meat. Stop giving me layups.  Pretty regularly. What gorgeous place to cook by series. Like I would never cook in a kitchen if I had right. You had that option? I couldn't even repeat what he said if I tried. I know. Curly, never ceases to delight. I hope it's nice and lean. Come on, soon. That place would be even more gorgeous after a rain, man. Yeah. I could eat that grass right now. It's the end of the world as we know it. It's the end. Bucket's going on. I need a mother to get on. Sorry, I don't know what happened. It's amazing. That looks incredible. You guys made mutton since you've been here? No, but our friends, Ross and Roshni, came over and Roshni is an amazing chef. And she made a dish. She used beef, but it was really, really close in flavor. And the ingredients are, it's originally a Bengali dish that's designed to have mutton. And it was amazing. Sounds like a train starting up. And then Kalishi goes into the fire and dragons come out. It's going to be so freaking good. You're going to use that dough. What are they putting on it? Hold on. That's an egg mixture. OK, so that's going on the grill. That's interesting. It's like a pancake. Much fatter than a dosa. Gee whiz. Oh, mama. Oh, that's so interesting. I'm touching myself tonight. That looks incredible. Ain't credit. Oh!  That's incredible. Food-borne. Got it? 59490. Is there a website, too, or just that phone number? 65949490. That was a feed these people. Contact old age home trust office. OK, so you got to call the office. That looked unbelievable. Oh, man. I never even seen anything like that. It looked like I was not expecting the end drop of mutton and juice. A more delicious pancake. Pancake, shmankake.  Pancakes are a food, Rick. There? I thought they were a person. That was, yeah. I'm so hungry. And now I'm really craving the dish that Roshni made for us was off the charts. Oh, man. Delicious. I don't even know what to say. That was amazing. I could eat that all right now. Yep. Happily. That was amazing. I hope to one day be able to. Like if, when we get down to the South India, meet up with the Village Cooking Channel and be like. For one of their cooking times. Can we just, can we just sit and watch you film your thing? And eat with you? Yeah. That's all we want. Yep. That's it. I agree. I think it'll be, I think it'll be so fun. And they can yell at us. Just yell at me right at the beginning. Ah, welcome to you. That's what we should do.  And we could do stuff like that. That'd be amazing. Yeah. Anyway, so let us know what the next video, Village Cooking Channel, we've got another food video we've got to do down below, so I'm so hungry. I want to eat that right now. Josh!


First question is from Carly LaTessa. How often should you be adding weight to your routine? I get this question all the time. Okay, so obviously it depends on the person. Here's a deal, okay? And I want to say this is very clear. There are many many ways to increase the tension or the difficulty of an exercise. Adding weight is one of them. So if you go into a workout and you're stronger and you want to add weight, one thing you can do is slow down your reps, which will actually produce a very similar effect and actually probably improve your form and reduce your risk of injury. Adding weight in my opinion for most people is one of those things that I reserve for later. So when I'm training a client I notice that they're stronger. I just have them perfect their form or slow down first. Once everything is in, you know, all the pieces are in play because we've done this now for a few weeks and everything looks perfect. They've slowed down the reps. They're controlling things. They're going maybe a little deeper on their squat or whatever. Then I'll add the weight. So the answer to this is you should increase the intensity or of your workout whenever possible, but within those parameters I talked about, that would be my answer. Well, Doug, what was the name of the episode? I think it was eight or nine ways to progressively overload. We did an episode. I would refer this person to that first of all, to your point, Sal. Yeah. And I remember training clients, right? So it really would depend on where this person's level of fitness is at because tempo, rest periods, rep range, those things, I would much rather manipulate that before I start to add weight to the bar for most clients. Now let's pretend I'm training somebody who's got 10 plus years and they're super advanced, different story. I definitely want to add weight to the bar and I'm going to push that. Although even that person, I'm still manipulating those other things too. I just would avoid adding weight to the bar if it's someone who's brand new and I think our form is not perfect for that. I want to perfect that and get that down really well before I start loading. Yeah, unless I have a real competitive power lifter type client where their entire goal is to keep increasing the amount of load that they can try and achieve. It's way better to assess how much control you have, how great your form is and then manipulate all those other variables first. But increasing load is just another one of those things that you got to consider in order to gain more strength. Right. And now this is another strategy that's kind of interesting that I've played with in the past that was very effective. This was a strategy that was employed by some of the Eastern Bloc strength athletes. So this is during the, when the Soviet Union was a thing and they were dominating in some of the weightlifting sports and we didn't know how they were training. It was what's called the iron curtain. So nobody was sharing training secrets or whatever. Of course, when the Soviet Union collapsed, we got a lot of the coaches and we learned about some of these training techniques. One of them is very interesting is you pick a weight. Let's say for me, let's say deadlifting 315 pounds for eight reps is like 80% intensity, right? So, which is a good intensity to train with. So today I do eight reps with 315. I do that exact same thing for the next, I don't know, five or six weeks, even if the intensity continues to drop because I'm getting stronger. So I go next week, I do eight reps, but now it feels like it's 75% intensity. It doesn't matter. I stayed eight reps. Then the next week, then you do this for about five or six weeks, the weight gets real easy. Then you add a lot of weight rather than adding weight each time. It's a very interesting strategy. I've actually messed with this in the past and I get tremendous strength things from doing it. Well, the reason is because when the weight gets really heavy, the first thing to go is form. And it takes a lot of discipline to still maintain form while struggling to push through a weight. So that's the, I mean, you, to your point about training that way, even what you're practicing, you're practicing, you're getting the mechanics down so well so that when you do start to load the bar and you start to struggle, you don't break form. If you take a person who's just, just teaching them how to deadlift or squat or any of these movements and all right, we're getting a little bit of traction. I'm feeling stronger. Adam, let's add some weight. As soon as I add weight, it's like putting them right back down to square one again because they've only got five, six weeks of training. And now I just, I've made it at max intensity for them. Their form's going to break down. Right. Now there's always, there's this other strategy, which is opposite, but also very interesting where you get incremental weights. Have you guys ever messed with these before? Two and a half. Brad, they're even smaller. They're like magnets and you literally will go up every week half a pound. And you just every week, I like this approach. It is, it is kind of like, I don't know, it's kind of annoying that, you know, like it's little tiny bits of load that you don't even really notice, but it's over time.  And like, before you know it, like you've gained like, I don't know, like 20, 30 pounds to that weight. Now, the only reason why I like the other strategy that you first mentioned, Sal, better is because what we know is that you have two days of not the best sleep, you calories weren't up all the way, a little bit of stress in your life. And I don't care how good your programming is and your training consistency is, those other factors play a role in how strongly you're in your workout. And so inevitably, you could easily come into a week and be weaker than the week before. And it's not because you're not programming. Well, it's just that there's other factors that contribute to strength. Totally.