Thank you very much land. I Was sort of wondering when you were speaking and you were inviting me up to the floor to do the Sort of thing with the balls. I actually have a dysfunctional shoulder. So that's why I refrained But I was sort of wondering what I was the dysfunctional state It's now time for questions Comments and I'd like to invite people from here, but there are also people who are accompanying this by the webcast Which we will Be asking to comment. I'm going to start in this side and then sort of gradually move over here and What I'm suggesting is that we sort of take three comments three observations and then give land a chance To respond and I will sort of try to at least keep an eye on Who might want to Jump in to the discussion So anyone wants to go first Nobody this side you sure Yes You said that when folk should find their own ways what happens if they have all kind of a kind of kinds of aggressive ways Well, lots of examples, but when you said about Indonesia for example after the Financial crisis in Asia in Indonesia. They had all kinds of problems aggression toward other People for example the ethnic Chinese Please say your name and at least where you come from So my name is Rob Glanders. I just started working in the Alto University And I'll ask this question in the in the kind of juggling and out there metaphor injuries Do you think your apprentice juggler would have juggled better in his first try with an incentive? Hi Andy here from Alto University I Trying to use the knowledge that you just that you spoke about how that we all are aware We've been trying to use this with things like Handwashing and sanitation and hygiene we we know for a fact that We as adults may not know how to wash our hands and we don't want to be told that we don't know how to wash our hands So we tried to focus our education on the children So we showed and taught children with the with the with the adults present So that we could give a little sneaky wink to each other that we taught the children and the children were glad to learn But then we looked at each other and could admit that we didn't know that But it was something that we didn't want to highlight the fact that I know you don't know But we both know that we may not know as much as we should know But if we can find a way to teach the children and be in that vicinity and learn at the same time So use the the negative Situation that you spoke about as a positive opportunity Okay, thank you, man. Do you want to try to address these three? There's the there's a right level of conflict and there's a wrong level of conflict and What mostly people try and do is avoid all conflict, but nearly every successful institution grows out of conflict So if you avoid if you suppress the conflict and external actors can easily suppress conflicts If you suppress all of the conflict you may well be Suppressing precisely the arenas in which people will arrive at solutions that they can then live by and you just Perpetuate problems by having suppressed them and let them go on longer If you look at the history of any now developed country it was full of all kinds of aggression and You know the premature suppression of what looks like aggression in the interest of order Often can you know just let a problem fester and not ever read No one ever then feels like the conflict was settled in a way they can live with so Now that said, you know, am I promoting civil war am I promoting that people be allowed to cut people's heads off? No, of course not, but The the level to which the international community has preferred order even if externally imposed and top-down especially if imposed by a government they like Over allowing people to work problems out in ways that look quite chaotic has probably been on the too much on the Preference for an externally imposed top-down order over letting the processes play out that is going to include You know a certain healthy amount of conflict a certain healthy amount of disputation So behind any successful institution. There is usually that the institution arose to settle a conflict and hence the premature skipping the conflict straight to the institution I I just don't believe it again. We're in an environment in which all lots of things have been tried so, you know You know if a lot of these ideas of Avoiding this aggression by suppressing were to have worked it would have worked better And we wouldn't be in the deteriorating situation I feel that we're in now in lots of places where the aggression is just coming out Having been suppressed in an even more virulent form. So The question about incentives the question is of You know, I Don't like to use the word incentives. I Like to use the word motivation And if you ask me the question whether the incipient juggler had become a better juggler had they been motivated It's kind of obvious that yes, they have to have been motivated Incentives can only be a form of motivation if you can control The states of the world in which the incentives are paid so the nurses program was an attempt to impose incentives on nurses attendance when they didn't have any motivation and What they learned was that if your incentives contradict the motivation the motivation will win And so even though I'm an economist. I am very much more about What's the motivation? What's the account here? Not what's the accounting? Not will I get some dollars and cents if I juggle three more balls than I did yesterday But moreover do I want to juggle? And the difficulty is in a lot of the area in a lot of the arenas the Internal folk culture of wanting to be a juggler. It's what has fundamentally broken down The idea of what it is to be a policeman the idea of what it is to be a postman is Now perfectly compatible with not delivering any mail with not actually enforcing law And I think until you fix that problem incentives can't be a Part of the solution because you can't control the incentives themselves Okay, the thing about children and stuff You know, I I mean Kids are great washing hands is great sanitation is great, but it's not really most people's problem So people you know part of the problem is is that lots of the externally driven ideas about how to make people's lives better Don't count on that. They might just not be concerned about the problem that you want them to be concerned about And that's often just a deep. They just don't care about what you're trying to do and and I think Asking more deeply what is the problem that they are caring about that they're not caring about mine might actually be an Instructive exercise sometimes that said kids are great washing hands is great and Rob Davies from Zimbabwe and I Think it's fantastic, but you said Really really had a lot of meat and could you stand up? It was a great paper and great presentation just just picking a bone with actually your last slide Which has just been taken off where you where you start of saying a solution people don't want I think there's a slip there. It's not people who don't want it And and your presentation of that. It's a solution that Some people involved in governments and some do not want and one of the things which I suspect is in the part you skipped over, you know the addressing of of interests and Which I presume is why it's so difficult to Build something on top of what was there rather than you You've got to take into account those interests that are obstacles Absolutely, okay, we'll come back to that. That's out of Nicaragua. Thank you so much for your brilliant presentation What you are brilliant? Economist and I wonder if you were the president of the USA or Chairman of the World Bank or yeah, okay. I am half one of these very important Organizations with regard to your research. What would you do to improve? this situation With the failing states and all that. Thank you. Thank you very much for a great presentation I was some we had Paul Collier here maybe a year ago, and he seems to share a lot of your Skepticism about how easily we can take an institution from the West and impose it say on Countries in Africa and he seems to be more pessimistic than you are he thinks that African government should outsource privatize the postal service. That's one way to start again I don't know if you would share that that that sentiment one way to get get past the the inertia You seem to be more positive about Being able to reform or set up or revise or start again with within government. Do you have? Any examples of a successful reform has there been a police service that's been reformed or that that you have in hand Okay, thanks. So let I mean let me let me start So I'm not going to disagree directly with Paul Collier But let me disagree directly with Paul Collier. I changed my mind No, because because the difficulty is Countries like Finland countries like Great Britain countries like You know Germany they have a huge amounts of capability that they have acquired through a historical process of struggle That then gets routinized in super high capability organizations So any small fraction of that capability could easily be channeled into outsourced Things that could drop into any country in the world that's small and kind of make a huge difference in the short run But I don't get what the long run vision is is What's the path from where we are to where you want to be that goes that direction? So how do we then get out of those guys or once we're outsourced them? Do they become the new police force? Do they become the new government? To how you know, it's just I don't get what the end game is So I get the impetus to do it because we have a lot of capability and and they You know and Paul I which is why I like to talk about India because for India That's not even an option Right. No Indian government's gonna allow you to pop in with independent service authorities and go around the government So you got to fix the government and I think that's a much more typical situation So I just don't I see it as an extemporizing major As opposed to kind of really a long-term development strategy and Mine has much less chance of immediate success, but I just don't see I've never heard Articulated this happens then this happens then this happens then Kenya does it on their own And until I hear that I'm a little suspicious of getting off onto a path That might lock us into a whole different set of interests. So having Halliburton provide security in Afghanistan Anyway, enough said Go back to this first question. I did slip a lot skip a lot of slides about interests and Partly that's why I call this an incrementally strategic. What do I mean by incrementally strategic? What I mean is let's not take the interests head-on Let's start by creating successes that Cumulate into ways in which we can eventually challenge the interests So, you know part of the issue is how do you put together some pathway towards success? And I don't think the pathway towards success You know the metaphor I often use is the interests are going to defend their interests and if you attack their hardcore economic and Political interests directly head-on You're not going to win Right, so but there are spaces into which you can move successfully and consolidate from there So, you know, I worked with my friend Scott Guggenheim on designing a large-scale bottom-up kind of Program as a way of changing in which local governments budgeted and decided on controlling their own funds And it started as a project expanded expanded to where now it's become the default way in which local governments do their things By building from an incremental base where you weren't yet challenging the powers that be over contracting and then By proving the success it could erode them from below So and by the way, I say solutions They don't want not us of course right lots people that do want these solutions But the they and the they for some reason are always not very good people But the they don't want those solutions not us, of course Finally if I were president of the World Bank, I would do this meaning it's perfectly possible to take your portfolio of projects in the world Go to governments and say look we have to move a billion dollars in your country 800 million we're going to move in the standard ways that we move money will do that right But we want to take some amount of the money. We want to work with you to Nominate, you know get beneath the top Nominate problems on which you're willing to work in innovative ways and then we'll provide you extra support To that policy deviation Right that often is going to provide a large amount of support on a very focalized problem and build that up It's not going to be a hundred percent of the portfolio of large development organizations If it is not going to take 80% of its portfolio and start doing this what they're going to do is they're going to create this space with 10% of the portfolio 15% of the portfolio for the people at different to work with locally motivated partners To build this kind of success But until you break it out of the top, you know Until you break it out of the need to move these large amounts of resources, which is a perfectly legitimate target You have to have multiple instruments for multiple goals And it would be inside any of these organizations if I were in control you could create this in a year Because inside these organizations are people desperate to break out of the existing process controls that prevent them from doing this Thanks, we have more than 300 people watching this all over the world as we saw on Fin's map and Some I've put some questions here. We will be able to answer them all but some of them One Big one is how should the development framework look like after? 2015 talking about the MDGs and how should it be developed? This is from my you a student in Finland the next one is from Philippines What is the difference between strategic bottom-up approach and? Participatory participatory process of development And can you take a third one? Yeah Can you provide a successful example of a positive positive deviation that has applied PDE a How has the organization is structurally allowed for failure? The first question is a great question just way too hard What the post-2015 development program what I know it shouldn't look like though is what we have now Which is a bunch of very con seemingly concrete very sort of externally driven goals You know I work a lot on education You know the education goal that has been part of the MDGs has been mostly irrelevant to more than half the countries And just not that helpful to the other half So it's kind of an externally driven thing that you know people could comply with so how one works into The way in which more local domination of problems more local definition of problems and in particular where you worry about The capability to get things done as opposed to naming what it is you think needs to get done and working backwards Is important to be getting there? I don't know how that would go What's different between what I'm saying and participatory approaches is most participatory approaches in in the current development practice Are actually canalized vertical components of existing top-down projects So if the person understands what that means they'll understand what I'm saying if no one else did it basically Means you know a top-down project says we're going to be participatory so we'll show up and say You know here's the space in which you can be participatory about my project that's already designed Well, yeah, that's a little bit better than not being participator at all But that doesn't actually work into any existing process. It doesn't spill over at the local level It doesn't build capability. It doesn't do any of those things and in fact it can be it can work against true bottom-up because When you have a participatory process as part of a top-down scheme They often subvert the locally the already ongoing local processes so, you know Big top-down projects on education in India built participation from parents into the project But ignored the fact that there were already huge local community and locally elected officials who had as their responsibility You know overseeing the schools so you actually subverted the local government Which was the long-term institutional structure that had its responsibility in the name of participation Which then of course is a complete charade because Who pays the piper calls the tune? The last question was oh Like examples I think only one of the nice things about the experimental approaches that is freeing people up to do experiments so for instance People looked at what was going on with reading in India and decided that lots of kids were being promoted through to higher grades without having learned to read and then Couldn't you know they were given through third grade texts when they couldn't read first grade texts and did you know started with remediation in a very local community way kind of Defined the problem search for solutions got feedback and then finally whole states in India can now scale up This kind of a focus on early grade how to remediate early grade reading deficits by having built this From the bottom up at the same time they were building the political sort of willpower for it were to happen So eventually the agenda sort of leverages itself inside out So I think there are lots. I mean there are lots of examples Moreover if you look at the history of any now developed country It's full of places in which they got from dysfunction dysfunction through policy deviation. So Hi, my name is Esa. I work for a Finnish NGO called KEPA and I wanted to ask you if Facts are fixtures as we saw. How do you feel about the? The boom in development industry on open data open knowledge IAE the World Bank's open data, etc Thanks IMF so the you know, I loved your the idea that experimenting may generate some Some information that would be useful to reform But then I I I have a general feeling that it looks to me that your approach is really Isolated from the context in which the administration operate You know so in if I take the framework that Douglass North Referred to when he he talks about institution he refers to institution as a set of formal rule informal norms and basically an enforcement Mechanism so you seem to speak to the issue of the lack of informal norm and the fact that Formal rule are useless and and therefore you want to create some sort of a culture that would reinforce the Informal norm, but you don't speak to the issue of an enforcement mechanism Because of what problem the enforcement mechanism say a strong judiciary So my point is if the rents you get out the problem then we you know motivation is important But you still need a stick to get to get people to Get the act together and and act in favor of the public good so how does your approach a You know fit with this general Point that you know we do Public administration do not evolve in in isolation from the Informsman's mechanism and informal rule so you speak to the issue of culture building a culture But what about the enforcement mechanism? Darrell sequera About 30 years ago. I worked for Danita in Tanzania and on one occasion the higher-ups from Copenhagen visited the institution and when they were leaving I saw them off and One of the junior staff members privately asked me Why do people from so far away want to help us? Well, I won't tell you what answer I gave him but a few days later. There was a Meeting of all Danita experts in Dar es Salaam where I was invited I posed this question to the very same person that visited the Institute because he was the higher-up from Copenhagen and He said that it's because we know what to do in order to Improve the country in order to raise these people to our level of development as we have in the Nordic countries and in Denmark and that was his answer Okay, now that Raises a question which I would like to ask you you have given several examples of the Incapabilities of so many developing countries and to a large extent I agree with you because I've observed this myself But what I would like to ask you is that is whether? whether the international development institutions Also change facts into fiction That's a very big question because that would would roll on the the ball of Incapability, so that's one question the other question concerns the business the the idea of bottom-up approach Well, I'm glad that you've experienced in India because from my observations over several years the bottoms-up approach in Goa Which is a rather developed state in India doesn't work The Portuguese when the Portuguese colonized goa They found the age-old system of village management or village governance, which is a more than maybe a thousand years old They kept that system and they call it the community dad the British destroyed the system in other parts of India and Put in their puppets to manage the villages But in the Portuguese recognized the the land ownership of Villages and they allowed the community dad to to function for about four or five hundred years Then when India took over goa, they replaced the criminal dogs abuse the community dogs If we have to we count 400 years then we might run a little bit out of time. I do apologize Very quickly very quickly They installed a panchayats in the converted become dozen of panchayats five-member village governance And those are panchayats that proved to be incapable of managing the villages The the idea is grassroots approach. It has failed in goa. Thank you So the problem with this is it's just irrelevant to tell you the truth meaning kind of the the kinds of so So what we keep looking for are you know the distinction in thick accountability? What's the justificatory narrative that we tell about ourselves and others and thin accountability? What are the facts right the problem is you can't fight the deeply corrupted accounts with some additional data Because if the data really matters it can be fabricated right such that you're propagating in you know If we looked at if we put online You know all this information. It's not clear What it would do unless we built it into a way in which people could actually have feedback about it and care about it And could change outcomes so I think a lot of the transparency initiatives so far have been Too focused on in thin account of thin Information and not focused enough on how it was going to feed into actually motivations and decisions of actors So, you know GDP data being available, you know on the web, you know fantastic I'm not gonna make any difference Enforcement is just exactly exactly exactly the wrong way into it just completely the wrong way into it You know Enforcement only works once you've moved your organization to where nearly everyone is It has intrinsic motivation and wants to do the good job Such that you can focus the enforcement on the few that aren't once your system is completely broken a you can't you know Let's say 45% of nurses aren't in attendance How are we gonna punish 45% of nurses and if we single out these nurses to punish for not being in attendance when those aren't That's not horizontally equitable be Precisely what states lack the capability for is to make the decisions of what the enforcement should be the most corrupt Part of many states are the police in the courts. I Mean I can get any decision. I want I can buy out of most courts in most countries Right, so the idea that enforcement mechanisms So enforcement mechanisms depend on your being able to decide what the true state of the world was and punish Someone based on that state of the world, but that's precisely what you don't have in the situations So yes, eventually you need a good enforcement mechanism, but the question is what are you going to do in Pakistan? What are you going to do in Afghanistan? What are you going to do in Kenya where you don't have a good enforcement mechanism starting from a good enforcement mechanism? It's just like it gets the causation and cause and effect just completely completely backwards in my view And and Douglas north's own theory is a theory of failure Right. I mean his story is why everyone fails So why we want to rely on that story for how to do success? Finally lots of bottom-up fails. I mean bottom-up's not a panacea if they're a panacea We would have found it the right kind of bottom-up can succeed So it's not you know No one is going to say every form of local government's going to work better than any form of top-down government And one of the things in the slides I missed is when are the kinds of activities you want bottom-up and what are the kinds of activities for which top-down? Really might work in a professionalized top-down approach probably work And the question is getting to the problems and letting them sort themselves out into which requires which but no there is no Romantic illusion in my mind that if we just let people left to their own devices They'll all work it out. It has to be a very structured kind of bottom-up approach Which is why I'm trying to put structure on how you nominate problems how you provide feedback how you learn how it diffuses Certain of the punch-out expert. I worked for three years on the punch-out Raj in India So I know the punch-out Raj experience pretty well. Yeah, some places it failed some places didn't succeed But mostly it wasn't given a chance by the top-down bureaucracies. So ladies and gentlemen We have a lot of participant on the web I hope that you will apologize that I wasn't capable of enforcing exactly the five o'clock time What could be easier to enforce than time? Would you please join me in thanking Landpetschit for a great lecture. Thank you very much We look forward to announcing Next year's wider annual lecture look out for it on our website The information will be there do follow us Do follow what we try to inject into the development debate Thank you very much for this afternoon


Okay. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to BC 314, our course on media and technology in ministry. Thank you to everyone for joining today. Thank you for joining the class. Let's take a moment to pray and we will get started. Could somebody please lead us? Dear Heavenly Father, I come to you under the name of Jesus. Thank you for the stage. Thank you for the clash we are about to have. Thank you for the skills and talent that you have placed in us, Lord. And as we learn about this media and technology, God, I pray that you will help us to understand the things and we use it in our life so that we can glorify you through this technology. We can use it for the expansion of the Kingdom of Jesus. Be with us and guide us. Give us a good life recognition throughout the session. We thank you for past rashes and I thank you for all my classmates over here. Be with us and guide us. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you. All right, so the last couple of weeks, we've been considering different areas where the church and the way we do ministry in the church has gone through several transitions. So we talked about the ministry of the word of God, the way the word is being preached, called preaching styles or the way the preacher presents everything. We talked about the venue, how that has changed. We talked about worship, worship ministry, how that has changed. We also then talked about creative arts, performing arts, how that has been useful and how that has evolved. Then we also talked about some aspects of media, radio, television and films. How in those areas things have really evolved and served the church. We want to cover one more set of things in which we just refer to as entertainment and gaming. So this is something more current. And just to give us some perspective and realize that these are also areas where people are being involved and where ministry can happen as we talk about that. And after that, in lesson number 11, we are going to change and move more towards the use of social media and communication, social media and then slowly start moving into other areas where media technology is being used and we'll get into those details. So first let's just talk about entertainment and gaming. So this is another area where by entertainment we mean people want to relax. They want to do something light, something fun, like recreation.  So generally there will be some form of entertainment. So it's interesting to see and it's good to see that believers have provided good alternatives to what the world is of. So this form of entertainment or recreation we can see in terms of maybe exhibitions, maybe live entertainment like you may have people doing stand-up comedies or things like that. And of course you can have entertainment that comes to media. All of these things can find expressions in many different ways. You can have amusement parks, art exhibitions, fairs, festivals, museums and so on. And it's interesting to see to some extent the church of believers being involved in this area. I'm not saying you find it all over the world. For example, in India I wouldn't say there's a lot. There's probably not much or very little. Sometimes you may go to a church that is like a museum and it's okay. Here are all the things that remind us of the missionaries who came or the people who served here from some several hundred years ago. And it's very inspiring to go and see this. I remember when I was in the US, I went to Otto Roberts University campus. And it was so amazing. I think I forget the details now, but they had, maybe it was under the prayer tab itself, but they had this whole, it's almost like you can say kind of like a museum, but they had pictures and other things from the beginning of all Robert Satanist history. And you could walk through it. It was so inspiring to just walk through it, see all these things like, hey, here was a man who was dying and God healed him. And God gave him a vision of serving. God raised him up to serve. And then God gave him a vision to build a university and he built a university. So just going through that museum kind of thing was so inspiring. I also remember going through, I think Billy Graham in North Carolina, they have another museum, just the life and the story of Billy Graham. And so you just walk through that museum. They have all the pictures and from different things from his life. And you walk through it and you see, and it's so inspiring. It inspires you. It gives you encouragement that, hey, this is how God works. You can take some ordinary person and use them to impact the world. So these kinds of things, which they fall in the category of entertainment, meaning you're not like doing some big study or anything. You just hear being relaxed, you're going, you're seeing these things. But as you walk through that museum, you get so inspired. You get so encouraged and so on. So that's just another area that we can minister to people, be an encouragement to people. And along those lines that are Christian theme parks. And I think it's nice to get some time. You can go online and go to these websites here in Ark Encounter. So in Ark Encounter, somebody has, this person has tried to recreate the art, like rebuild the entire art. So they actually built it.  Like, okay, of course we are thinking this how it would have happened, how the animals would have been all kept inside the Ark. And it's kind of like almost a real life, life-size experience. You walk through the Ark. And of course it's an opportunity to speak about the Lord and speak about God and things of the Bible. And it's a learning, plus it's a real life encounter with these things. So you can, it's nice. Same thing with the creation of the Asian. So it's nice that people are doing this because, yeah, even Christians, we need some, you know, time to relax and go out and see these things and relax. And then it's nice that we can go to such places and at the same time be encouraged and reminded. But just to let us know that these are the things that are being done in a nice way. Not all over the world, but at least in some measure, some things happening. And the last point I just want to mention is about gaming. When you say gaming, we're just talking about using video games or any form of video technology to create something that is fun. But of course we are using it in an educational way in a positive way. Yes, there is the wrong use of gaming, meaning, you know, there are a lot of games that are created which are, you know, which, you know, incorrect fighting and war and this, that and all those kinds of things. That's the wrong use. But it can also be used in a positive way, like for education or community building, training and so on. So I'm talking about the positive use of gaming. So even if you're training, for example, you want to train doctors, you want to train people in other aspects. They use these kinds of technology, video games to simulate things. So it's actually like you're doing it, but you're not doing it on a physical person, but it's simulated. So that's how people learn. So they simulate whatever they want to train them in and it gives them experience. Now, the thought here is why can't we use this for, you know, kingdom purposes for church or ministry purposes. And there are lots of ideas and there are some people I think you can search online. You'll find some people who are beginning to do things here, but I fully feel that there's so much more that can be done in this space. So just presenting it here, something to keep in mind. And if there are people with these skills, we should encourage them. We can create some nice educational games where we teach people Bible stories in an interactive way. They can run it on their phone or their computer and interact with it and learn through it.  So not everybody can physically get up and go, you know, to other places, but at least they can see and kind of physically, I mean, experience through video and simulation, what it would have been, what it would look like. I can go through those parts of the world. We can have interactive sermons and devotionals.  It's getting people to engage with the sermon or the devotional. You could have multiplayer games where four or five people are playing and it's building community. Of course, you're playing around something that's Bible based, things like that. We can also use it for missions and outreach. We can create awareness of other parts of the world, what is happening in other parts of the world. Through these short videos and presentations and give people an opportunity to think about what, how will you solve the problems in other parts of the world and so on. Similarly with worship and music, Bible study, discipleship, testimonies, social issues, apps, storytelling, maybe even to help people meditate in the Word of God. We can create something where they can listen, watch and at the same time meditate in God's Word. So there are many ideas there. Some people have started doing something and there's an example in christianity.com where you can go and it's almost like a crossword puzzle. It's a small game but it tests your knowledge about certain Bible things. But people will have fun doing it, filling up the crossword, but at the same time they're reminding themselves about Bible stories and so on. So this is also another area that can be used. Now one reason why I think this is important is because a lot of young people are being caught up in video games, especially because many of them have phones, mobile phones, mobile devices and so on. When I say young, talking about kids and teenagers especially, sometimes you might even see adults playing video games, but generally kids and teenagers who are so caught up, they're playing something so intensely on their phone, and sometimes hours they can go by with them doing this. Of course we don't want, it's an addiction, it can become an addiction, so we should not let it become an addiction, but if we can provide some healthy alternatives, some meaningful alternatives so that at least they focus their attention on something meaningful or something that's educational, that would be a think of positive things. That's why I'm presenting it here. But we also have to be careful that this should not become an addiction, it should not consume people's time. So those thoughts here on entertainment and gaming, just to be aware of what's happening in the world and something to keep in mind, let's see if there are any thoughts or comments from anyone in the class. Any thoughts, any comments on this lesson 10 on entertainment and gaming? Do you think these are positive things, or do you think we should just stay away from any form of entertainment and any form of gaming? I would just like to hear your thoughts. Personally I think it's positive, and I remember long back maybe when I was a teenager and I saw a Christian Bible story kind of something, I don't remember the names, but even though I knew all the stories I still went in and it was quite exciting to see how they have made it, what they want to say to it and all this. So it was nice, it was really engaging above all. There's no distraction I believe. It's not like listening to a long sermon where sometimes we think of something else. We are so caught up in it, that's what I feel like because there's always some shift happening, change in colors, something different coming up. So distraction can be very less I think. I think it's positive and it's good for the next generation as so many wrong things are coming up, even in the game industry and so many things. It's good if the kids have access to this so that they can choose the right things and they can go really strong in the world. Thank you for sharing here. It really holds people's attention and so engages the young people, the teenagers and at the same time meaningfully communicating something from God's Word. So it's nice. Divya, go ahead please. Thank you, Pastor. I was especially thinking about young kids. There were times when I had searched for things to safely show to my kids that are biblical and that do not divert from the doctrines and such and it's really helpful when people do take it up into this level of... It's a ministry I would say because surely parents are looking for something that's safe and something that's useful for kids. So, yeah, one of the programs that my kids still watch that even I enjoy seeing it. It's a superb book. It's very entertaining as well as... It really brings out the Bible stories in a very practical way. So that's really helpful. Also, there are lots of resources available especially for young kids. There's even... You might have heard of Answers in Genesis by Ken Ham, which talks about the creation story and they have even... We can subscribe for their channel and they have very good programs for kids which really helps parents and I believe it's such a great ministry and really people need it because there's so much of other things that is going on around and so difficult to always filter what is good and which is not good for the kids. I just want to share. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that, Vivian. Anyone else who wants to share any thoughts and experiences or any resources that you have encountered in entertainment and gaming that is useful? Okay, fine. So, with that, we bring to a close this particular section of thinking of all the contemporary ways ministry is being done. We've covered a wide range of things. Now, we are going to shift slightly and kind of focus on communications and online engagement, how we engage people. Now, that's also very big space, big areas so we will take some time to go through this and I'll just share with you some of our learning some of our experiences. I'm not saying that we know everything, we don't. We are still learning as we go through what we're doing but I can share with you some of the practices we are using and we are also constantly evolving in what we do. So, I'll share with you some of the things and then I'll encourage you to explore whatever areas of interest. So, we're going to start off with chapter 11. We're going to talk about digital communications and engagement. Essentially, we are in this lesson, we are talking about using digital communication tools and how we can engage with people. I will share these things with you and a little later, we'll get into more software platforms and we'll get into more of telling you what these are the platforms we're using, these are the technology we're using that comes later but this one is kind of giving us an overview of all the communication tools. So, we'll talk about websites. Initially, we just started by saying we need to have a strategy, how are we going to engage people and then we'll talk about websites, email communications, messaging which we'll meet in switch. I think all of us are familiar with some of the content platforms where we can distribute digital content, how we can use a church app, podcasts and so on. So, now, when we talk about digital communications, engaging with people digitally, like when we started off this course, we said, you know, all of us, especially in urban cities and so on, we do spend a lot of time connected in the connected world online, whether it may be online websites, whether it's social media platforms, whether it's messaging, whatever software we use, whether it's WhatsApp or anything else. Whether it's email communications, all of these things have become kind of a normal class of our life. For those of us who are living in cities, now, of course, those who might be living in rural areas, maybe to a lesser extent, but definitely those of us living in urban centers, it's just so much, the digital world is so much of our lives. So, it is important for us as a church, as a ministry, to think about ways in which we are going to engage people, you know, and things have changed. So, example, maybe 30 years ago, or 35 years ago, before Internet came on the scene, you would not be thinking about this if we want to reach people, we would be thinking about printing tracts, going door to door, house to house, giving tracts, doing ministry that way, reaching people that way. But in the last 30 years, so much has changed.  We can't ignore it. We can't say, no, this is not important. It is such an important part of our lives, everybody's life. And so, we need to start thinking, we need to think about, okay, how can we use all that we have in the digital world to reach people, to serve people inside the church, that means our own congregation, believers, and those outside the church, that means those who still need to be focused with the gospel, how to be ministered to them in this digital world, because everybody is there, they're connected, they're doing something. So, we need some thoughts, we need some ideas, and we need to have some strategy. So, general, some basic questions we should ask is, okay, inside the church, think about the congregation, the people you're ministering to, who are they? So, you can say, a lot of my people, they're all young people, just depending on their demographic, or a lot of young people in the church, they are maybe on this social platform, media platform, and so on. What are their needs? Okay, young people are going through a lot of challenges, emotionally, mentally, peer pressure, whatever, identify their needs. You also have elderly people who are lonely, who are alone, they're at home, so understand their needs. How are they to interact digitally? So, what are these people doing? Now, which part of the digital world are they in? Are they comfortable, what are they comfortable using? Maybe they're comfortable with, you know, using certain kind of messaging platform, or they are comfortable watching things on social media, so on, so forth. So, what digital channels would serve that you would use to service people? What are the objectives you want to achieve? Okay, we want for believers, of course, we want to strengthen them, we want to encourage them, we want to answer their questions, we want to provide them resources that they can use to help others, you know, all these things you can think about. And then, so in order to achieve that, what content, what must you give to them, what content must you provide? How should you provide it? Or, you know, on a daily basis, if I can give them a short message for five minutes, that will be very obvious to them. Or maybe, you know, if I can put all the verses on a particular topic and give to them, that will be useful, so on, so forth. So, think about, you know, how can we provide this to them? And then, okay, evaluate progress, modify and repeat. That means things are changing, so keep an eye on how things are changing and how you need to be serving the people. So, those in the congregation and those outside the church, the crowd out there in the world around the church and beyond, how can you serve them? So, these are simple questions to ask and to think and, you know, and just be very mindful of what is happening in the digital world so that you could leverage those opportunities to serve people both inside the church and outside the church. So, think about this and this will help you and help us to develop some sort of a strategy. Now, of course, when we do things, we need to evaluate progress. That means, you know, how effective are we in serving the people and so on. So, in doing this, one is we should avoid what we, you know, generally we refer to as vanity matrix. That means these are numbers, but they don't really tell us, they don't tell us the real picture. So, for example, YouTube, if you put out a video on YouTube, well, for example, a Sunday sermon video, right? The views that you see the view come out is not actually a real picture of how many people watched the sermon because the way YouTube counts is if somebody watches even 30 seconds of the video, it's counted as a view. But what would they have listened in 30 seconds in a 30-minute sermon? I think, right? So, we can't take that count, the view count as a direct correlation of how many people were actually ministered to through the sermon. For example, if the view count had 100,000, it doesn't mean there were 100,000 people who listened to the sermon. It could be that maybe only a thousand people actually actually listened to the full sermon. The rest of it may have watched, you know, 5 seconds, 10 seconds.  So, we call it a vanity metrics or how many views, likes and comments. In one sense, it does give a metric on visibility. That means at least 100,000 people saw or came to know that there was this video. That's a correct metric. That means they knew or they hadn't even, you know, 30-second engagement to the video. That means at least 100,000 people knew or know that this video exists. That's correct. But it doesn't mean 100,000 people actually listen to the sermon. That's a different metric, right? So to get that, you'll have to go into the YouTube analytics and look at the duration of people who watched the video. So then that's another different metric. You see the duration engagement or how many people actually stayed on this for 30 minutes. Then you'll get a correct count. Okay, there were 100,000 people actually watched for 30 minutes. That means 1000 people actually watched the sermon. View count is 100,000. It was exposed to, it was presented to 100,000 people who watched it for maybe 30 seconds or whatever, not duration. So the actual number of people who watched that full sermon was this. So these are two different metrics, right? One is just a vanity metric.  But there's a different metric that tells you the real impact, right? So to evaluate progress, we should ask real questions and we should look at the real numbers, the real metrics of the people. So the real question is like, are we reaching people online? So how many people are we reaching online? How many people are responding to what we're doing? And how many people are actually connecting? So if you're looking at, we have tried to generate people back to connect with the church and that's a real number, like how many people are actually connecting back to the church? Or if you're thinking about how effective your website is and how many people are finding us online. So that's a real number. If you have that number, how many people are moving from the first step to the next step? That is, they may maybe find us online. How many of them actually come to church? How many of them actually get connected? So those are things that we should be looking at. Those are the real numbers we should be looking at. These are just examples. So to evaluate progress, ask real questions. Don't get trapped. Don't get fascinated or caught up by the views or the likes or things like that. Because that really is not giving us an accurate picture. Some examples of how we can generate some real engagement. So there used to be a time when people come to visit church and we still do. If they come physically, we tell them, please fill up a card. We give them, we call it the first time it's this card. But then let's say, so that is what people come physically to church. When people are coming online or seeing us online, we can't give them a physical card, but maybe we can give them an e-book. Say, go to our website, download this e-book, experiencing God or something. Then we can count how many people are actually going and downloading the book. So they'll fill up maybe and give us a name and email ID and download the book. So then we know, okay, that's an actual engagement. We know actual count, like how many people actually came into the service. We know how many people actually did something. They went, they entered their details and they downloaded this e-book. That's a real, you know, a good way of online engagement. So suppose you host, we used to do, let's say, seminars in-house, but now that we have online tools, conferencing tools, what do we do a webinar like a Zoom conference or Zoom online thing, on Wednesday, up on topics that are interest and engage people. So then, and you're talking about things that are relevant, say for families, anxieties or whatever, something that's relevant to the, there are different topics here that's mentioned or issues or matters that are relevant to different segments and you engage with people. So that's a real thing. Now you're using a digital platform like some online conferencing webinar tool and you're engaging with people digitally on matters that they would be interested in and people are connected. That's real.  So, you know, and so just making it like, hey, this is who we are, this is our address and fine, but now you're doing your website and this play that I'll help you on your spiritual journey. So that's a meaningful change to engage people online or you can even do a podcast on some say example, just example of marriage to help people in their marriage and from there, they can connect with the church. That's a, again, another form of digital engagement. You're using podcasts to address a particular area of need which is for marriages and from there you're helping people connect to the church or you can even and do an online marriage program, whatever the treat or whatever you can call it and from there, so people participate online and from there you welcome them to church. So, and this is just ideas which different people have tried and they're using a digital platform to address the particular needs, the real needs, engage the people online and from there invite them to be part of the Christian community and so on. So this is that. So we can think of, so when you talk about digital engagement, here's some things you can just work thinking about it. Suppose you want to create a digital engagement to target teens and younger adults like to be between 13 to 23. So what are some of the things we can do to target teenagers and younger adults? How would we go about this? So first of all, we want to identify digital platforms. Where are these people spending their time? Are they on Instagram? Are they using some other platform? I mean, whoever the group that target the people that you're engaging with, are they active on some other? And so, of course, we can go online, look at some data. Sometimes we're able to get data. Otherwise, you just ask around, hey, where are all these people? What are you guys using mostly? So then, if they all are using a certain platform, then try to engage them there or on those few platforms that they are involved in, you engage them there. And then you think about what are their needs. Therefore, what is the content I'm going to create and how am I going to release it and so on. We'll talk more about that as we go. So let me just pause here for a moment. Any thoughts or any questions here on what we just talked about now? Having a strategy for digital engagement and then to look at real numbers to assess how effective we are. Don't get caught up by, you know, vanity metrics, but look at real numbers and just giving us an assortment of ideas. Let me say there's so many different things we can do to address different needs, whether it is teenagers, marriages, young couples, working professionals. There are different things we can do, whether you want a webinar or a podcast and engage them in their platforms. Just to give us an introduction here. Any questions, any comments anybody wants to make? Okay. All good? Okay, so let's start. Sorry about that, I was clicking on the wrong button. Let's break this down further. And we will talk about, we start off with the very basics, which is emails, right? So, sorry, websites. We don't start off with websites. So a website these days is almost everybody expected. Now, you know, maybe some years ago, if we wanted, we used to use brochures, printed brochures.  The people who share about the church or ministry, it used to be, that's the way generally we would do it.  Everybody, you know, just are expecting you to have a website because if they want to know more about the church or they want to know more about the ministry, so what's the website? Can I go, you know, read up online what you're doing, what are the people, what are the ministries you do? That's kind of an expectation. So let's talk a little bit here about, so having a website for your church or ministry is a useful thing. And then compared to printing brochures, it's lower cost and it's available 24-7 online. Anybody can go and access it and so there's so many benefits. You can have a website as compared to printed brochures. So just some thoughts here when you are considering setting up a website for your church or ministry. Usually you would use what we refer to as a content management system. That means you don't have to build a website from scratch. Now, of course, there are people who can help you build a website from scratch if you want to. But if you're thinking of something long-term, if you're thinking of something that's going to keep growing, we would recommend using a content management website. There are different platforms and these are open source that means they are freely available. We, at APC, we build all the websites using Joomla. We use this. Lots of other people use WordPress. We just chose Joomla because we felt uncomfortable working but it had kind of things that we were looking for. WordPress is also a very, very common content management system and then there are other things, other places you could do. The advantage of using a content management system is you can just customize things. You can create certain things out of the way you want it. It's very easy to learn and there are lots and lots of people who build websites using content management systems. You can also use other platforms like you mentioned where you can just build it yourself. Today you can go and you can set up a website on Squarespace or WordPress, get whatever name you want and it's very easy to set it up. Now, some things I just want to mention here is if you are using a consultant or somebody from outside to help you do this, very important, make sure that you have full control over your website and platform. I don't remember. There have been instances where another Christian ministry would reach out to us and they would say, we engage this developer to build our website and now he's holding us ransom basically. He's not giving us the username password and he's controlling us and he can't make any changes. Basically, that developer or consultant is holding this Christian organization because he set up everything, he's forgot control on their website and so they're in bigger than a difficult situation. So don't let that happen. So all the lobbying credentials, registration commission, it should be in your organization's control and don't hand that off to some other consultant and if you're engaging an outside consultant, have a contract in place so that all the response is done. So be careful when you're engaging somebody from outside even though they believe us, sometimes they can become a little unreasonable. So choose a very meaningful domain name. You may want something short and easy to remember, something that they can associate with the ministry, easy to type and if you're using a mnemonic, it should not be too long. So example, if the name of the church is Hope City Church in Bangalore, you'll try to see if you can find something like Hope City or HCCB, Hope City Church Bangalore or something like that. So for example, for us, it's all people's church and World Outreach. So we just call it APCWO. It's just the mnemonic for all people's church and World Outreach, apcwo.org or apcmusor, examinejesus.com. And you can find out what domain names are available.  You can find out if it's available. And for a church or a ministry, you'll usually use .orgs extension and you can use other extensions depending on which part of the world you are. Then of course you would, once you register your domain name, you will want to host it somewhere. So you will use a hosting provider to register your name, your domain name and also to host your website. So basically, I don't want to get too technical here, but when somebody types in your URL of your website, of course, through the internet, it goes to a registrar, looks it up and then from there the DNS server says, okay, you have to go to this address. It goes to the hosting server and then serves your content from there. So you register it and your domain name is registered on a domain name server from where people can go to your website. So you would use a hosting provider. I just mentioned too that there are so many all over the world. Maybe a local one will be cheaper. You will register your website and they will host your website for you as well and they will take care of all the details of registering your domain name and pushing it on domain name servers. Just a few more thoughts. So when you're building your website, you need to think about how you want to build it, what you want to communicate through your website. Okay, maybe we'll take a break and come back on and talk about that. We'll talk about the building of the website, some thoughts here. Are you all with me so far? Is it getting boring or is it getting too uninteresting? You all with me so far? Yes, it's good. All right, so if it's getting boring, if you're not interested, just let me know. I don't know much. I'll tell you later on. I'll show you in our next lecture how important this is because people will find you. If you build a good website, people will find you easily come shop and church because you have a good website. All right, so let's take a break. I've got 11 and continue the class. Thank you.


Dennis overall, what can you just say about what it took to win this one down the stretch, especially what you guys are able to do in that fourth quarter? Just resilience. We had to come out, be gritty, and we knew that off top. Coach came out, he challenged us during the shoot-around or the walk-through earlier, you know. And he mentioned it yesterday. It's about how we respond. We had two good games versus Atlanta, and then we dropped the first Memphis. We dropped the ball versus Memphis, so, you know, it's about how we respond, and how resilient we could be tonight. You got the fans up on their feet with that 360 dunk. I asked Kevin Olly about it, and he said he wishes that you could have just laid it in, but that's just to insure me, but what did you see and what made you go up for that 360? Shit, that's an opportunity. That's all the way. That's an opportunity to put on a show, you know. I'm blessed with it. I got to use it whenever I get a chance. And then I had to build up for the one earlier that I ended up laying up, besides I just had to make up for that. Obviously, Doe was huge tonight with Daeron out, but just, obviously, you know what he brings to the table, but just when he plays like this, how much does that mean to this team when he fills in for Daeron, gets eight rebounds, hits that big three at the corner, kind of puts this away? That's a Doe that I'm used to. Like, it's not surprising to me.  You know, he really does his thing in big moments, so whenever I see him step up, I'm not surprised by it at all, you know, but it's good to see, though. It's definitely good to see. Endgame execution has on occasion been an issue for this team, you know, building leads, but not being able to hold them. You guys flipped that script. I think you were down to eight in the fourth, go on 11-0 run, shoot almost 60 percent in the fourth. What does that say to you about the way you guys have grown as a unit? We're doing a good job of playing together. Everybody's sharing a cake, so everybody's involved. We all participate in our offense, defense. Dennis do a great job of breaking the paint, keeping guys involved, scoring the ball as well, so, you know, adding him to the team. You can't say enough about that. That was a major for us. And, yeah, it's just about us playing a real team game. Everybody. With you and Dennis sharing that backcourt, just curious. One, how much more comfortable are you seeing him now as he's getting these two guys in two? What are you seeing when you two share that backcourt and are able to kind of make some things happen? Just a fast-paced game, high energy, and we're trying to get out of backcourt hell. You know, we want to pick him up 94 feet, whether it's me or him picking up just to, you know, just trying to put our imprint on the game. You know what I'm saying? We're trying to come out here first, and it's easy to do that whenever both of us are there. And you see him being more comfortable, I guess, just what's now that he's getting more comfortable, what's, what is it about how he runs this offense that just makes it so easy for you guys? He was comfortable with day one. He came out with a double-double, you know what I'm saying? I'll notice me getting more comfortable. He came out, he's doing what he does, you know what I'm saying? And it's good to see, you know? We sent him in Feeble, he came over, and he slowed down a bit, so it's a big contribution to our team.


This is lecture four. In this lecture, we'll be talking about social perception. So how do we perceive people around us in our social world? But in this first part of the lecture, we'll first be talking about how information is presented to us. General information, overall information, not only information about people. Because that's very important and our mind is biased and sometimes how we perceive information influences everything and that can be very subtle. In order to illustrate this, I will start this part of the lecture by giving you a memory test. So there it goes. This is a very simple test. All you need to do is listen to me. I will speak out loud and I will say several words and your task is very easy. It's to remember the words, as many words as you can remember, okay? So I'll be naming the words right now one by one slowly and your task is to remember the words. Please don't cheat. Don't write them down. Then it doesn't work. So no pen and paper, no notes on your phone. Just listen to me and try to use your memory and I'm going to test how good your memory is. Okay, there we go, right? Bike bag, cookie jar, rooftop, fridge magnet, tree root, stepfather, thermometer, chocolate chip, bird droppings. Okay, then we'll continue. Okay, we're just going to continue with it. I'm going to come back to this. So what I'm going to talk to you about right now and that has to do with your memory test are order effects. The order in which information is presented to us impacts our memory. And in order to illustrate this, I will give you another example. I will ask you a question. So let's imagine you applied for a job and it's actually your dream job.  You get a phone call and the person on the phone says to you, you're invited for an interview, but there are nine other candidates. You are the first person that we call. When do you want to come in for the interview? Do you want to be the very first person to come into the interview, maybe somewhere in the middle or the last person? Okay, let's imagine a scenario. Okay, when do you want to go in for the interview? The best answer actually is given by the memory test. So now you can for yourself write down the answers to the question, which words do you remember?  You can pause the video also if you need more time. Please write down the words that you remember from the memory test. Okay, so I hope you wrote them down. If not pause the video. I will continue now and I will tell you which words I said out loud. So which were the words that you had to remember? There they go again. Okay, biteback, cookie jar, rooftop, fridge magnets, tree roots, stepfather, thermometer, chocolate chip, bird droppings. Which words did you remember? Well, there's a high like view that some words are very relevant for you. Maybe you have a stepfather. Maybe you love chocolate chip cookies. So these are the words that are because these schemas are chronically activated. Remember, we talked about this in lecture three, they're easier to remember because they sort of you can attach them to the schema that's already activated. But for the other words that are pretty random words that are not relevant for you, are not automatically activated, there's an order effect. And that means that the words that you are most likely to have remembered are either the words that I said in the beginning, biteback, cookie jar, rooftop, or the words at the very end. So thermometer, chocolate chip, and bird droppings. Are those words that you remembered? It's actually more likely that you remembered those words than the words somewhere in the middle. Fridge magnets, tree roots. These are the words that are most likely to be forgotten. And that's also what the research showed. So this is with a comparable memory test. You see that words that are recalled are mostly the words either in the beginning of a line of words or at the end. And this is called either the primacy or the recency effect. And the primacy effect means that words in the beginning of a sequence or general information in the beginning of a sequence is easier to remember. The reason for this primacy effect is that the words or the information you get in the beginning is a higher likelihood that these words are thoroughly processed and end up in your longer term memory. So you have a fresh sort of a clean slate then. And these words sort of are remembered better because you can move them to your long term memory faster. For the words at the very end, you also remember them better. That's called the recency effect. And in the end of the sequence, those words are remembered better because there's a higher chance that this information is still available in your short term memory. So this has to do with how memory works. And the information in the very middle, the intermediate information, that's most likely to be forgotten. So that's also the answer to the question. If you get invited for a job interview, would you rather be the middle in the beginning or in the end? Both the beginning is good or the end, but try to prevent being the middle candidate because there's a higher likelihood that you'll be forgotten by then. So this is an example of an order effect with general information. But we also know that order effects and especially the primacy effect also applies to people. So if we hear information about a person, the very first words that this person uses, for example, to describe their personality, is remembered best. So for example, here you see two dating profiles from Kate and Dieter. And they both describe themselves in different ways. And Kate starts off by mentioning that she's funny or that humor is something that's really important to her. And Dieter starts by saying something about that she is sporty. And these traits are probably remembered best. So keep this in mind while you're updating your dating profile on your dating app. So primacy effect also applies to people. So the order in which information reaches us matters. Information that we get first is better remembered as well as information that we received last. But there's more. For example, the negativity bias. And negativity bias means that information that is about negative events is, for us, easier to notice. It's better processed and it's also remembered better. We are, as people, sort of cautious. We're always on the lookout for danger. And that steers our attention. So this is actually not so good for us generally. It's not very good for our mood. So there can be a lot going on in your life that's very positive. But one thing might be going bad. And that can change everything. That can change your entire perspective on how you're doing, for example. We tend to zoom into the bad and sort of ignore the good, which is, yeah, again, not really good for our mood. It's also that if we're going about our lives, we notice dangers. We notice how things can go wrong, that we might get bitten by a dog or fall off the stairs or fall off a slide. And this also can be explained from a evolutionary perspective. Because, of course, being on the lookout for dangers is something that can help us keep us alive. Making sure that we see that dangerous dog or making sure that we are aware of the risks that are there in the surroundings that helped us in the past. So that's also why this negativity bias persisted. However, it also has some bad consequences, especially when it comes to feedback that we receive. And I think we can all relate to this. You can get, for example, if you gave a presentation, for example, in my case, if I give a lecture, a lot of people often say that they enjoyed the lecture. But there's always some people that didn't or had criticism and negative feedback, which is completely fine. Of course, you should always feel open-minded and free to speak your mind. But this negative information, this negative feedback always comes in much harder than the positive words. So you can hear all positive words and praise. But then this one person saying something negative, that's what we remember and that's what we seek out. So this negativity bias is helping us in a way, but it's also hurting us in other ways. Then finally, the media and politicians are also well aware of the fact that the way information is presented to us is steering our judgments. And people in marketing use this, for example, in selling us their products. For example, we know that a phone charger that retains 95% of the energy in your phone is of course sold better than one that says the phone charger that loses 5%, even though the information is completely the same. I'm pretty sure the green batteries, phone chargers are sold better than the brown ones. And politicians use spin framing, use a specific presentation of information in a valenced way, so either in a positive or a negative way to sell us their ideas. For example, operation enduring freedom, that's the official name used by the U.S. government for the war in Afghanistan that was used. And this has a very positive ring to it, right? Enduring freedom. Who would be against enduring freedom, right? So this is sort of a smart tactic that they use to sell us their political agenda. And also in the media, this used a lot of spin framing also when it comes to stereotypical information. So here you see two front pages of magazines. On the one hand, you see the children of 9-11. And the other hand, you see the children of Bin Laden. You see that there's quite a difference there. And these images are also one of the roots of why stereotyping and prejudice remains, because these images are used and they reinforce a certain stereotype, which is very detrimental in many regards. Spin framing is also often used in tabloids when people, especially magazines, like junk magazines basically, want us to either like or dislike a certain person. Especially the British tabloids are really quite famous for this. For example, if you compare the information that they gave out surrounding, for example, the pregnancies of either Kate Middleton or Meghan Markle to princesses of the United Kingdom, the presentation of information was completely different. So Meghan Markle was always mocked in the media. She got very negative feedback just by just going about her life. For example, holding her bump while she was pregnant. She was mocked. She got very negative feedback. Also on generally their behavior, for example, when Kate Middleton and Prince William did not visit the Queen for a specific family occasion, it was very understandable. The Daily Mail said, of course, they have busy lives and the Queen understands this while when Meghan Markle and her husband did not visit the Queen on a special occasion, they get a lot of backlash. And this had huge consequences because the way the media presents us this information, of course, really impacts the judgment that the people have on these public figures. And for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the consequences were really big because they decided to step back as senior members of the royal family because they just couldn't handle it anymore. It was too bad. So the media has a lot of power in this regard by using spin framing, presenting information to us in a valenced way. So we now saw that the way information is presented to us, either by the order in which it's presented or in the way the story is sold to us, impacts us. And it's really, really hard to stay objective when information is presented. The only upside of all this is that while we know this now, this can be helpful. So you can be more on guard for, for example, the negativity bias, the order effect, and also be more on the lookouts when you experience spin framing in the media.


Other teams like, hey, I want that ball because there's like a time limit going on. He's like, I'll keep it away from you real quick.  Don't try to steal the ball from my coach. That was my coach who tried to steal the ball from me. I was just trying to play the sport that we're playing and the coaches kind of stopped me. Ref says, red card, coach is ejected. He doesn't know what to do with himself. I heard he's a bad guy. He says, please go take a replay. Please, I'm begging you. He's obviously a man of faith. They disregard his prayers altogether, keep playing and in the eighth minute of stoppage time, I believe this is a championship game as well.  I forget which team's the green team. Bam, cross, header, in, shirt, off, bra, flashing, running away from all his teammates, crying, smiling, just so damn happy, look at that. This guy is on the ground crying and he runs straight to the fans. The security's trying to keep the fans away. He's dodging security on the other side of security. Tough job for security here because the fans and the players both wanna hang out and security's kind of like stay away from each other. This dude is still crying. So a real nice slide by his teammate to get down and dirty with him. And then the other dude comes and just sprays him. Coaches in the stands still coaching as if they're gonna come back. This dude hikes his shorts up, no one knows why.


But I refuse to cave into that bulls**t. I refuse. In my opinion, I think you should refuse too right now. Because it's more important than ever not to cave into their propaganda and to make a statement. Make a visible statement that you're not going to go along with the crowd, that you are not a sheep. And what more powerful statement is there by then just not wearing a mask? It's unconstitutional. I don't have to f**king do it. I don't want to do it. I just want to shop. Maybe it is unconstitutional. It is. I'm an American. This is f**king America. Make a visible statement. And what more powerful statement is there by then just... Not wearing a mask? You can't mandate somebody to wear a mask. If you want to wear a mask, hey, but... What are you talking about? I've been walking around for four months, flying, interacting with people, no issues. Don't buy into the media hype. I still have constitutional rights though. Have you ever sat back and wondered who these people are and why they're so confident in their refusal to wear a mask? People being able to record misconduct is one of the reasons we're so aware of Karen's and police brutality. But what about the other people who are holding the camera? As you saw from the previous video clips, people are so confident that they're right, that they're recording their arguments with others about why they won't wear a mask. Another thing I've been doing more and more is try to ask myself, why did this person post this? Why do we tweet out our opinions? Why do we showcase our outrage on Facebook? And why do some people record themselves refusing to wear a mask? While there are many reasons why we throw out these various social signals on social media, we're going to focus on aspects of validation and being part of an in-group.  The underlying psychology is the hope for some sort of validation. Once they publish this video, they're hoping that people will say, you did a great job taking a stand. But who would validate something like this during a global pandemic? Well, a specific population of people is actively trying to get one another to not wear a mask. And this is why conspiracy theories can potentially be dangerous. While I can't say for certain if any of the people in these clips I showed you are part of QAnon, they very well could be. If you don't know what QAnon is, we don't have time to get deep into all of the details in this video, but here's a top-level overview. QAnon is a conspiracy group that Twitter recently had to take action against because of the fear that QAnon's actions could turn into real-life violence.  Recently, in a BBC piece, people discuss how they've even lost family members who fell into the QAnon rabbit hole. People are coming here to post about family members that they feel have been sucked into the QAnon conspiracy. A lot of these relatives are older, parents or even grandparents. She believes that Bill Gates created the COVID pandemic. That COVID-19 is by a warfare that only affects pedophiles. And also created the upcoming vaccine. Bill Gates is a cure-all. Which is going to contain microchips to track everybody. Wacky things such as Michelle Obama is really a man. And people like Ellen and J.Lo are all Satanists. And the pedophile rings interdimensional demonic pedophiles. For the last few years, QAnon has been focused on their sex trafficking conspiracies, but now that we're in a pandemic, their focus has shifted. If you thought influencers having parties was bad because they're being a bad example, influencers in the QAnon community are actively telling people not to wear masks. This is a channel called Destroying the Illusion. He's a conspiracy theory YouTuber with over 235,000 followers. In June, when his state of Washington mandated masks, he made a video expressing his anger while telling his following not to wear masks. While a lot of focus has been on young influencers being bad examples, the psychology around influence is much weaker than the psychology of obedience. As someone giving his audience instructions to not wearing masks, this QAnon channel is doing something far worse, and it's putting many people at risk. I wish I could say that videos like this get flooded with people saying how wrong they are, but that's not the case. At the time of writing this, the video has over 35,000 views, but that's not the worrisome part. When we look at the like to dislike ratio, that's what we need to worry about. In this video, not only are we going to debunk some of the QAnon COVID conspiracies, but we're also going to discuss the psychological motivation behind channels like this. As critical thinkers, it's important that we understand motivated reasoning. When our reasoning is motivated by being part of a community, it can skew our logic. But as with channels like this, money can be quite the motivator as well. But before we get started, if you're new to the Rewired Soul, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. Here, we use critical thinking and skepticism to not only improve our emotional intelligence, but our overall well-being. As you know by now, I'm quite the skeptic. And based on my history, I'm the prime target for QAnon to sell me on the idea that COVID is a hoax cooked up by Big Pharma. Eight years ago, I almost died from a prescription opioid addiction. And in my recovery, I spent a lot of time learning how Big Pharma helped create the opioid epidemic. So if anyone is going to be skeptical about Big Pharma, it's going to be me. And that's what QAnon and other conspiracy theorists will try to sell you on. Fortunately, people like you and I practice critical thinking to see what's really going on. Humans are creatures that are fueled by incentives. So it's a good critical thinking practice to always ask what someone's motivation might be. For example, the United States is one of the only two countries in the world where it's legal to do direct to consumer marketing for medications. So I hope you ask yourself the motives of the commercial when it tells you to ask your doctor about medications. But more importantly, when we come across major claims such as COVID is a hoax and masks don't help keep you safe, we need to ask if the person telling us this has any incentives. Although there are many QAnon members pushing this narrative, we'll be focusing on the channel destroying the illusions because he's one of the bigger creators with the most influence. His theory is that this is all a hoax to control us. So before we analyze his potential motivator reasoning, let's start by taking a look at the other side. He argues that COVID is a hoax and the government is trying to control us. He cites fake research and fake science. His best theory is that this is a way for the government to control us. So what does that mean? As a critical thinker, I think it's okay to hear an argument out, but we need to ask if it makes sense. What would the government have to gain by having us wear masks? How would that control benefit the government in any way? Now one could argue that they would start out with a small amount of control so they could control us more later, but this is using the slippery slope logical fallacy. There's no evidence that having us wear masks would somehow lead us to being mindless zombies they could control in other aspects. And many conspiracy theorists are also worried about facial recognition. So wouldn't this be counterproductive? My iPhone won't even unlock with my mask on. So making us wear masks would just make it more difficult for quote unquote big brother to spy on us. I have seen some QAnon people say that the masks help hide the identity of child sex traffickers, but which one is it? You either believe that the government wants to use facial recognition on us, or they want to hide the faces of traffickers. It can't be both. Next, we can ask ourselves what motivated reasoning doctors would have to tell us to wear masks. What argument people from QAnon use is that people like Dr. Fauci have vested interest based on some debunked information. But let's say that hypothetically Dr. Fauci would somehow benefit financially from us wearing masks, because maybe he has a massive amount of stocks in a mask making company. What about all of the other doctors encouraging us to wear masks? How would this benefit them? With a few keyword searches on YouTube, you can find plenty of videos showing how masks help slow the spread of the virus. So QAnon would have to argue that not only does every doctor have some sort of vested interest in us wearing masks, but so would all of these people making videos about how masks work. As you start to ask yourself more common sense questions about conspiracy theories, they start to crumple like a house of cars with the slightest breeze. But what about this channel destroying the illusion? Does he have any reason to push the narrative about COVID being a hoax? Why would people like him do this if he could possibly put people's lives at risk? While he may 100% believe in this conspiracy, some of the reasons he believes in it may be due to his own financial benefit. Unlike QAnon claims, we can actually trace the financial benefit back to QAnon members making these claims. QAnon channels like destroying the illusion will tell their audience that their videos are being suppressed by the algorithm and don't get monetized. This is a manipulation tactic to have people support them in other ways, which makes much more money than YouTube monetization. As you can see from his Patreon, he has 674 members. His tiers range from $3 up to $177 per month. Even if we took a conservative estimate and assumed that each of the 674 members are signed up at the lowest tier, he'd be making roughly $2,000 a month. But if we're just even a little bit more realistic and assume that even 50 people are at the $17 tier, 5 people are at the $37 tier and just one person is at the $177 tier, it's over $3,000 a month. Right now, tens of millions of people are unemployed in the United States and millions may not be able to pay rent. Meanwhile, destroying the illusion is making a minimum of $2,000 a month from his supporters on Patreon. In a video last year from some more news, they pointed out how many of these QAnon people sell merch or other items. This is the powder keg in which Q currently resides. And along with being volatile, it is extremely susceptible, which is probably why there are so many people fanning the flames in exchange for neat blood bucks. Also known as the Great Awake Grifsteading. Hey you, do you like having your walls plastered with conspiracy board gibberish but simply don't have the time to cobble together miles of twine into an elaborate web of thumb-tacked photos and scribblings? Well, luckily there's not one, but two. No, not two, but three. No, actually four. Not four, but five. Or maybe six QAnon deep state maps that you can purchase for your wall. This website seems to be offering a seventh, but is also asking for our email to even look at it, which we're not going to bother even making a dummy account for. Because when you're the true believer to what would be the biggest conspiracy known to mankind, you're going to need a commemorative coin to kickstart that revolution for the low, low price of $17. And yes, while there are multiple coins to choose from, that first Q coin is the only one you can get from Jordan Sather, a real thinker seen here boasting about drinking chlorine dioxide, something he regularly does, and also the host of destroying the illusion. So, when your income is based around you being a source spreading conspiracy theories, what happens when presented with contradictory information? Even the most rational and moral person will be biased towards the information they receive when they're affected by motivated reasoning. Now that we've taken a step back to look at the potentially motivated reasoning on both sides, we're going to jump into this last section by asking more questions that help us debunk QAnon COVID conspiracies. Let's talk about the real reason why masks are being pushed so hard right now. The real reason is not for our health. It's not for you. It's not for me. It's not for the greater good of society. No, the real reason why masks are being pushed so hard right now is simple. It's for control. That's it. Control. Because when you put a mask on and go out in public, what does that say?  I'm a sheep. And I do as I'm told by the talking heads on television. That's what it says. You don't even need to say anything. But it says all about you when you put that mask on and acquiesce to their propaganda. Social engineering, that's the real reason why masks are being pushed right now. And it's so sad that people are more than happy to go along with it. More than happy just to do as they're fricking told and not think twice. Not even think once really. They don't even second guess or question what they're being fed by their TV. A common tactic conspiracy theorists use is that they sell their followers on the belief that they are in fact the independent thinkers. As you saw in destroying the illusions video, he talks about how the ones wearing the masks aren't the ones thinking for themselves. But when you put it under a microscope, you realize that groups like QAnon are reliant upon people that don't ask enough questions. As I mentioned before, I'm one of the most skeptical people when it comes to doctors, but I've had to learn how to ask the right questions. If we hope to be critical thinkers, we need to be curious and constantly have our wheels turning. I try my best not to be an alarmist, but when it comes to COVID, this is extremely serious due to how contagious it is. So we all need to stay vigilant about the information that we're receiving. Let's take a look at that. What they're trying to do with masks is basically the same thing, okay? What they're trying to do is force a medical procedure onto us, whether it's injecting something into our bodies or putting the cloth over your mouth. They're trying to force a medical procedure onto us, and they're doing that through faked wrong information, faked data, faked science. If you think your news is fake, try science.  They're literally selling this forced medical procedure onto us with fake statistics. When I was watching this QAnon conspiracy video, this young man made claims of fake science and fake studies. And then I asked myself, who is he? Personally, I'm more than happy to concede that there are a lot of bad studies out there. But you just need to show me the evidence. In fact, I love reading books about bad science, and I talk about it quite a bit on my channel. I think it's important that we question sensational studies that come out, and if you're interested in learning more about how to spot these bad studies, I highly recommend two great books that just came out this year. Science Fictions, How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype undermine the search for truth, and Calling BS, the art of skepticism in a data-driven world. So, what's different about the authors of these books calling out bad science compared to QAnon? These authors are credentialed scientists and college professors. In each book, they pick apart specific studies and explain why they're flawed. Another great website is RetractionWatch.com, and this is where they share retracted studies. Meanwhile, as you saw from the QAnon video, he doesn't cite any specific study. Listen, I get it. COVID is scary, and most of us don't know the ins and outs about medical science, which is why it's so important that we practice critical thinking. QAnon is able to sell their conspiracies by giving seemingly simple answers to complex topics, but topics like this can put lives at risk. Personally, I try to educate myself as much as possible, which is why I recently binged Dr. Steven Novella's audiobook, The Skeptics Guide to Alternative Medicine. Dr. Novella understands that some doctors out there aren't great, and he gives some fantastic advice to stay skeptical while practicing critical thinking. Here are two tips he offers when confronted with what people like QAnon members say. 1. Ask yourself, what's the medical community say? Yes, it's true that sometimes the medical community disagrees, but on many subjects, such as wearing a mask, there's a vast consensus. While there are French doctors out there giving bad information about COVID, it's important to research and see what the majority of doctors are in agreement on. 2. Ask yourself, when confronted with some of these claims, if this was true, what else would need to be true? This is the best question you can ask yourself if you think you might be hearing a conspiracy. What else would have to be true for COVID to be a host? Here's a list of things that would also have to be true if COVID was a host.  Next, thousands upon thousands of hospital staff members around the country would have to be incentivized to sell the same lie. Then, millions of people around the world would also have to be in on it. And finally, and this is the most important one, if this was a hoax, none of us would know anyone infected by COVID. But personally, I know of multiple people who have contracted the virus, so obviously that can't be it. And even though you might not personally know somebody who's been infected by the virus, I guarantee within one or two degrees of separation, you could find somebody. As many of you know by now, I don't mind what people believe in as long as they aren't hurting anyone. Unfortunately, QAnon is actively telling people not to wear masks. And in order to prove their loyalty to the group, they're filming themselves not wearing masks. But remember, yelling at someone or insulting their intelligence isn't going to help the situation. Try to understand why the person believes what they believe. And through your conversation, they may discover that there are a lot of questions about QAnon that they never asked themselves. And that may help pull them out of the rabbit hole. But if you're ever confronted by someone trying to make these claims, who has a lot of influence, feel free to put them on blast like Anderson Cooper did. You said you've seen this test. Where is it? The tests are out there. The 1,000 people face one face two. Where is the test? Show it to us. I don't have the test. Name where it's from? Who did the test? What university? What doctor? Well, you'd have to talk to, I guess you'd have to have Dr. Carson and then the company and all the tests that were done on yourself. You said you saw the test. You read the test, so tell me about the test. Where was it done? The test was done on over 1,000 people. Where was it done? And what were the procedures for the test? You read this. Let's hear it. The procedures are that was used against cancer. So they did, when you do a safety test of phase one and phase two, it's to see if there's any... There's been no phase one and phase two on this drug, sir. There's been no phase one and phase two on this drug, sir. Yeah, absolutely there has. The FDA has had it since April. 100%. You're just misconstrued because the media is trying to take away this amazing cure that works for everybody. Okay, so just for our viewers, you have no medical background. You're not a scientist. A guy called you in April said he had this product. You are now on the board and going to make money from the sale of this product. No, no, no. The reason he reached out to you is because you have the ear of the president, so he gets a meeting with the president and you stand to make money from this. How do you sleep at night? All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that video. A lot of you requested it. I put a poll up over on Instagram, and a lot of you wanted me to discuss conspiracy theories and things like that, and I keep seeing QAnon pop-ups, so do me a favor and please share this video out. One of my goals is to help people start thinking more critically about the information that they're getting, especially when it comes to this pandemic. This is some serious stuff. Like I mentioned in the video, I know people who have been infected. One of my best friends, like three or four people in his family got infected, including his parents, who were basically like my parents growing up and his father had to go to the hospital. So I'm sitting here worried. I'm like, okay, this dude is older and he has this illness and it's killing older people. You know what I mean, so we need to take this seriously, and hopefully this video provides you with some tools that you can use to maybe talk to people and just get them started asking questions. Like I said, like the number one thing to ask when confronted with any type of possible conspiracy theory is if this is true, what else would have to be true? And as you start that line of thinking, you start to see how it is no way conceivable how that many people could be involved. You know what I mean? But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And a huge, huge thank you to everybody who supports the channel over on Patreon or gets my mental health books at therewiresole.com or gets merch from the merch store, you're all amazing. Alright, thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.


Anything and everything that I knew was sin I turned away from, and when I repented I just gave all of that up to follow Jesus, and to this day I haven't turned back to those things. All those idols I got rid of as quickly as I could. I watched movies quite a bit, and I got rid of all my movies, I threw out my TV, I don't watch any television or movies or anything like that. The first reason why I'm a shoo-in for heaven is because I've stopped watching the Smurfs. Nobody can watch the Smurfs and expect to go to heaven, and you too could go to heaven. But only if you become special, anointed, and repented, and amazing as me.