Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Helen Raleigh. Thank you very much, especially thanks, Stimbo Institute. I'm just relieved that my mother is not in the audience, so she cannot criticize my hair. It's my great honor to introduce to you the next speaker. He's the executive director of the Aran Institute, a man with a lot of accomplishments. But most importantly, he's the most fearless and outspoken defender of capitalism. Ladies and gentlemen, let's give a warm welcome to Dr. Yaron Brooks. They told me I had to walk up and shake people's hands in the way and I said, I'm not a politician. So Helen and I have something important in common. We are both immigrants to this country. We both chose to come to America. I was born and raised in Israel. At a time when Israel was quite socialist, nowhere near as bad as China, not even close. But I made a decision at some point in my life, soon after finishing Atlas Shrugged, that I was gonna make the most of my life, that I was gonna choose to go live in the place that allowed me the most freedom and the most opportunities. And I chose, therefore, from the age of 16 on, you know, strove to achieve this choice to move to the United States. And I came here in 1987 with my wife and became a citizen in 2003. And I came here because in 1987, I still believed that America was it, that it was the freest country in the world. It was the country with the most opportunities. It was the country where an immigrant could still come and make something of himself. It was still the land of opportunity that we were told about in stories. And the sad thing is that I've been disappointed. America is drifting away from that vision, from that promise, for what it used to be. And I know that right now it's easy. It's easy to blame Obama for everything. It's Obama this and Obama that and Obama so on. And you should because Obama's terrible, anything you can do to get rid of him is a good thing. But let's be honest, this didn't start with Obama. It's not gonna end with Obama. This has been a trend, a trend for at least 100 years. You know, 2013 is an important year because it's 100 years from the first massive status laws passed by the United States. Maybe the worst president in American history. Woodrow Wilson, 1913 saw the introduction of the income tax. 1913 saw the establishment of the Federal Reserve. We're paying dearly for both of those today. For 100 years, we have drifted from the vision of the founding fathers. For 100 years, we have moved away from capitalism, from limited government, from the idea, the vision of individual rights. We are so removed from the idea of individual rights that I would bet you that nine out of 10 Americans don't even know what the term means. Yet, it is the foundational term for this country. It is the principle on which this country was founded. There is no America, if not for the concept of individual rights. In spite of what the congressman said, this country is not about its people. This country is not about its government. What makes this country unique is the ideas of the founding fathers. This is the first country in human history founded on a moral principle. The first country in human history founded on ideas. And what is this idea? What is the idea that Americans fought a revolution over? Was it t-taxes? Was it a stamp tax?  Now, there was an ideological revolution that happened in this country. A once in human history revolution. Before America, who did your life belong to? Before America, who did your life belong to? A king, King George, Queens, tribes, ethnic groups, races.  The American Revolution is about a rejection of that idea. The American Founders said, no. My life does not belong to anybody. My life does not belong to the political party. It doesn't belong to the group. It doesn't belong to the tribe. It doesn't belong to our king. It belongs to me. My life is mine. They called that the Declaration of Independence. Now, you could view that Declaration of Independence as the Declaration of Independence from England. But there's another way to view that Declaration of Independence. It's a declaration of each American's independence.  The Declaration of Independence articulates the idea for the first time in human history. And this is what makes America great. This is why it's been successful. That each one of us, each one of us has an inalienable right, an inalienable right. What does inalienable mean? Inalienable, what does it mean? Nobody can take it away. What about 99% of the votes? 99%? No, inalienable means nobody. Nobody can take these rights away. And what do you have an inalienable right to? To be your brother's keeper? To maximize social utility? To help your fellow man? To be a good Samaritan? What do you have an inalienable right to be? You have an inalienable right to your life. And what does a right mean? What does it mean to say somebody has a right to? What does it mean? It means you have freedom. Freedom from what?  Everybody cheers and say, we're for freedom. But what does it mean? Free from? Cursion. Free from force. So what does it mean to have a right to life? An inalienable right to life and nobody can take it away from you? It means you have a freedom to live your life as you see fit. You have a right to make decisions, to pursue values that you believe are good for you and nobody can interfere with that. Not even a majority. They can't vote your values away. They don't have a right to take your stuff away. They can't have a right to change your path. That's what the right to life means. That's what the founders meant. They meant a life free of coercion. They meant a life free and who are the biggest courses in human history, by the way? Government. Reed Madison. Government is the biggest cursor there is. So it's free of government coercion. The founding fathers were radicals. The founding fathers were radicals. They were way out there. Nobody ever articulated these kind of ideas in a political setting. I mean, they were inherited a long tradition from Locke and Montesquieu and the Scottish and French Enlightenment. But they were the first politicians, if you will, political leaders to ever articulate this and put it into practice. The idea that every individual is an end to himself, that every individual has a right, an inalienable right to pursue their own values, to pursue their own life, to pursue the values that they believe are necessary for their own life. That's what made America great. That's why this country has been successful. And that is what we have lost. We don't have rights anymore. Do you have a right to property? Anybody have a right to property? Well, 50%, the other 50% is taken away from you. By vote. You have a right to your home? Well, not if your neighbors decided it would be better as a tennis court. We call that eminent domain. Just look up at the kilo decision. You don't have a right to your property. You don't have a right to make decisions for yourself. You don't have to write to start whatever business you want in California. You need government approval to shampoo hair. It's called a license by the state. Individual rights are what we've lost. If we want a political agenda, if we want to reverse the current trends, tinkering around the edges is not going to work. I don't care if the budget is balanced.   That's what I care about. I want government to shrink. You know how you balance the budget? I mean, everybody's for a balanced budget. Democrats want a balanced budget. That's just raised taxes. A lot. When we get a balanced budget, right? Now it would have been nice if politicians didn't spend money they didn't have. Right? So yeah, deficit spending is bad. But that's not the evil. The evil is what government does today. The founding fathers created a government that protects individual rights. That's it. That's all it's supposed to do. It's not supposed to get involved in regulating business. It's not supposed to get involved in what our kids study in school. It's not supposed to get involved in the healthcare choices we make. It's not supposed to get involved in redistributing our wealth. It's supposed to protect us from bad guys. We can't even do that. You just saw a panel here. And I know your frustration because not one of them gave you a solution.  We're so pathetic, right? People live in caves and we can't beat them. So ask me in the Q and A, I will give you the answer. You might not like it, but I'll give you the answer.  All government should do is catch money made off. They can't do that because they're so busy looking at my filings and your filings, right? How many of you invest, right? Can't invest more than 5% without letting the government know. God forbid you should own more than 5% of a company. You might be a bad guy. I mean, why is it that they're business? When did they become government's business? How much money I invest in a business? Oh, if you get 10%, now you have to find a 13D and announce to the world your intentions. Why? These are the million of these regulations so we won't even get... So they're so busy reading my 13Ds, they don't have time to catch money made off. The things that they're supposed to do, they can't do because they're so busy listening to what we're doing right now, right? You know, I'm all for the NSA listening to the bad guys. Have a listening post outside every mosque in America. Fine. Right? But they're listening to all of us and they tell us they'll never use it. They'll never use it, right? Obama said that and within two days it turned out that there'd been thousands of abuses. And of course this is all in the context of the IRS, right? Where they are using information against us. So don't tell me they're not gonna use it. Of course they're gonna use it, right? You're listening? We're on to you. What we need is a new vision for America. An old vision for America. What we need is to return to the foundation, to the founding vision of America. But to do that we need to understand it. Again, the founding vision of America is individual rights. The founding vision of America is freedom. Freedom of the individual from being coerced by government and by his neighbors and by terrorists. It means that as long as my neighbor doesn't have his hand in my pocket, as Jefferson said, it's none of my business what he does. It means true commitment to individual liberty. It means shrinking government down to where it only protects individual rights. You know the problem with the sequester? 80 billion dollar sequester? Is it lack to zero? 800 billion, now you're starting to talk. 80 billion is not shrinking government. 80 billion is a rounding error in what our government spends. And it's time we held the party that I think most of you belong to or most of you vote for. It's time we held them accountable. The Republican Party is who? I'm gonna say something controversial. The Republican Party is the enemy in this sense. The Democrats are leftists. They're socialists. We know that. We know how to deal with that. They're bad guys. Well, it won't touch them. The Republican Party is supposed to be the party of the founding fathers, of a principle defensive capitalism. It's supposed to be the party of freedom, of free markets, of individual rights. They're much closer to the Democrats, much closer to the Democrats than they are to the founders. And we let them get away with it because we don't hold them accountable. We don't hold them accountable. We're afraid of losing. We lose anyway. We lose anyway because even when these guys get elected, even when Republicans get elected, what do they do? They violate our rights. They increase government spending. They don't solve problems that governments should be solving. Take eight years of George Bush. Government grew three times over. Everything Obama's done since he got elected was just continued the policies of Bush. Bailouts, auto bailout was December 2008 Bush. Top stimulus. Every Republicans went freaky because Obama suggested the stimulus package. They voted for it in 2008, but it was a smaller one. It was only 300 billion, Obama did 900 billion. But it's not the size, it's the principle. If a 300 billion stimulus is gonna work, why not a 900 billion stimulus? Stimulus has never worked. They've never worked in history, they never will work. We keep trying, right? Einstein had a name for that. You know what their name was? Yeah, you do the same thing over and over again and you expect different results? Insanity. We're insane. This country's insane. So is the rest of the world. The Republican Party is far more to the left than this group is. The Republican Party has no nothing to defend capitalism and free market. And I'll give you a fantastic example that they've just provided me on a silver platter. The farm bill. Anybody familiar with the farm bill? Yes. So Republicans thought they were very brave because what they did is they took the farm bill and they split it into two and they said we're not gonna vote on food stamps because we think food stamps are terrible and we're not gonna vote on that, we're just gonna vote on this part, right? And we're gonna approve this part and this part has to do with price controls, subsidies, regulations and control over farming in America, right? Socialist fascist policies for farming. And it was voted for by every Republican in the House of Representatives. The Democrats voted against it because it didn't include food stamps. Every Republican in the House of Representatives including Tea Party Republicans voted for a farm bill. This is socialism as applied to farming. It's cronyism as applied to farming. This is the exact opposite of free markets. The exact opposite of free markets. So how can Republicans stand up and say, well, for free markets when they vote for a bill like that? They lose all credibility. They lose all moral authority. And when the party that claims to be pro-capitalist, pro-individual rights, pro-finding fathers loses their moral authority. Nobody's gonna believe them. Nobody's gonna trust them. And they can never fight for those real values. I'll give you another example from Obamacare. Obamacare is great, right? Defeated. We should fight to defeat it. We should do everything we can. It is a monster. It is awful. It is a huge step towards single-payer, universal healthcare, socialized medicine. But you will never defeat socialized medicine unless you're willing to propose an alternative. Today's healthcare system is broken. It's broken. Healthcare costs are rising. A lot of people don't have insurance. It's not a healthy system. So we have to fix it. Obamacare proposed an alternative. An alternative, by the way, should come as no surprise. This has been the left agenda for the last 50 years. Socialized medicine, they've told us. They've told us it's coming. They've been advocating for it.  Where's the free market alternative? Where's the plan to liberate healthcare from government involvement? Where's the individual rights-based alternative to Obamacare? Where is it? They're cowards. They're afraid to propose it. I mean, told that they're afraid to propose it because the American people might not like it. But if you don't present a vision, if you don't present an alternative, if you don't present what like can and should be like, then you will lose. You might not lose right now, but you will lose ultimately. When the Democrats first proposed socialized medicine 50, 60 years ago, they were gonna lose. But they presented a vision, and then every year they walked towards that vision slowly, systematically, digitally. You remember they tried Hillary care, and they failed, but that's okay. They stepped back, they regrouped, and they tried again. If Republicans presented an image of what a free market healthcare system would look like, where you had real choice between doctors, where you had private insurance that you owned. So when you lost your job, you wouldn't lose your healthcare. How did we combine jobs with healthcare? I have no idea. Price and wage controls during World War II. I know exactly where, but, right? Phase of speech. An image of innovation and competition that is possible in the healthcare space. A vision of what true private healthcare would look like. And we could say, look, we're not gonna get there anytime soon. It's gonna take maybe 50 years to get there. But let's start moving in that direction. Let's start innovating towards that. Let's make compromises with Democrats in that direction, rather than the opposite. But you have to have a vision. And by the way, that vision has to include, has to include, you're gonna be uncomfortable, doing away with Medicare and Medicaid.  And they get you on this. I remember an op-ed by Michael Steele. Remember Michael Steele? He was the chairman of the Republican Party during the Obamacare debate. And he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. And he said, look, we're against Obamacare because we hate socialized medicine. We think socialized medicine's awful. And we will fight to the death against socialized medicine. By the way, we will protect Medicare better than anybody else. And the next morning, he was on NPR. I listen to NPR every morning because I wanna know what the enemy's thinking. So it's important.  And he couldn't answer. He couldn't answer. Medicare is socialized medicine. And with all due respect to all of you, some of you I know are receiving Medicare. You're receiving it on the backs of your children and grandchildren. You're gonna bankrupt this country. Medicare will bankrupt this country. It's much worse than Social Security, any other system out there. It is the one single most expensive program we have. We don't have it funded. We cannot fund it.  That has to be one of the most immoral things in human history. It's wrong. It's immoral. It's unjust. It's unfair. Let's throw all these small terms back at Obama. But we have to have a vision. How do we wind down Medicare? You can't just do away with it tomorrow, right? You have to wind down it. Let's have a plan. Paul Ryan's plan was a first step. We'll make it a voucher system. That's a first step. But even Paul Ryan doesn't have the guts to say it's a first step towards. Paul Ryan's budget is a good illustration of Republicans, right? I mean, I love Paul Ryan. I think he's great. But he proposed a budget that was considered radical. You remember, he was throwing grandmothers off the cliff. And it was gonna shrink government. You know how much it shrunk government by? How much it would shrink government by? Because it didn't. Nobody can come up with a number because it didn't shrink government at all. Paul Ryan's budget involves increasing government spending by 3.5% every year for the next 10 years. The reason they said it was cutting is because Obama's budget would increase by 5.5% every year. Now, if you did that kind of accounting in your business, you would go to jail for fraud, right? Oh, I cut spending, right? Because I didn't spend as much as my wife would have spent. I'd try that sometime. That's Republicans. Why don't Republicans say, look, nobody cuts spending in Washington. We're shrinking the growth rate. Be honest at least with American people. Say it like it is. And do we call them on it? We don't call them on it. It's our fault. Look, we can rile in politicians all we want, all day long, all night long. And the fact is it's our fault because we elect them, we re-elect them, we re-elect them again, right?  All the polls show this. The approval rating of Congress is on like 12%, but everybody loves their own congressman. But our own congressman is just as bad as the rest of them, believe me. I shouldn't say that because at 4.30, I'm being interviewed by Congressman Campbell for he's on the radio today and he's having me on so I should be nice. It's hard for me, though. He knows, he'll get it from me. We need a political party. We need a political party that stands for principles, for reality, for individualism, for individual rights, for capitalism and free markets. We need a political party that says to farmers, we are not going to subsidize you. We're not gonna put price controls on you. We're not gonna tell you what to grow and what not to grow. We're not gonna tell you to keep your farmland vacant. We're gonna let the free, we believe in free markets. So we're gonna let the free market dictate foreign prices. That's the kind of congressman we need. That's the kind of political party we need. That says the financial crisis wasn't caused by free markets because let me tell you a secret. In 2007, there were no free markets in the US. I know that comes as a shock, but banks who failed were the most regulated industry in America. What free market? Every bank in the United States is regulated by at least five different agencies. The Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the OCC, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. It's an office that was invented during the Civil War and they keep reinventing its function because they don't wanna go away, right? Typical bureaucracy, right? State bank regulators and the SEC, five. So it couldn't have been free markets that failed in 2008. So how about a Republican platform, or a political party platform that says we're gonna deregulate? And we heard the congressman say, we're gonna evaluate regulations based on whether they're good. They're all bad. What do you mean based on what they were good? How about repealing Dodd-Frank, repealing Sarbanes-Oxley and repealing every regulatory bill of the last 50 years? What good regulations? What good regulations? What businessmen here? In his industry, are the regulations helping? They're hurting you as a businessman. They're hurting consumers. They're hurting the American people. They're hurting all of us. Look what they're doing to Apple right now and what they're doing to, what they did to Microsoft and what they're doing to US Air and American Airlines of all people. They're going after them now, right? We live in this massive state, regulatory state, entitlement state. We need a political party that would question both of those, challenge both of those. We need to stop redistributing and we need to stop the cronyism of regulation and the cronyism of subsidies. We need free markets. We need to be America. We need a return to being America, protecting individuals from crooks. That's what the government's there for. Leave us alone. Get your hands out of our pockets. And I have to tell you, if the Republican Party is not gonna step up to do that, to stand for that, then we need a new political party. We need a third party. Now, if you guys believe you can reform the Republican Party, all the power to you. It's cheaper and easier. I don't see any evidence that that's true. I just don't see it. We need a party, a pro-capitalist party, a pro-free market party, a pro-individual rates party. We need to resurrect the spirit of the founders and not the spirit of the founders superficially, but the spirit of the founders ideologically. We need to be radicals. Radicals with a capital R. Don't be afraid of the word. It means non-conformist, not part of the mainstream. We're not part of the mainstream. I hope, I'm not. I hope you guys are not. We're for something. We're for this great country. What we need in this country today is a movement, a movement based on the principle of individual rights, on the principle of inalienable rights. We're not a democracy party. This country's not a democracy. I hate to tell you this, because I know it creates cognitive difference. This is a constitutional republic. You cannot vote me into silence. That's what the Bill of Rights means. I have free speech, no matter how many people vote. We don't quite have it anymore, but that's the intention of the fathers, the founding fathers. So we need to resurrect the spirit of inalienable rights, the right to life, the right to pursue the values that make your life possible. Free of coercion from all sources. Islamist and Washingtonian. And I put those together on purpose. You have a right and inalienable right to pursue your liberty, which means to think the thoughts that you want to think and act on those thoughts. And it's nobody's business to tell you what to think. There should be a separation of government from ideas. The government has should have no ideas. They shouldn't be telling us what to think and as a first action of that, they shouldn't be educating our kids because they are telling our kids what to think. We need to fight for the right to liberty. And I think the most important of all our rights in a declaration, because I think it captures what it is to be an American and it captures what America means. I came here not in pursuit of wealth. I came here not in pursuit of anything specific. I came here to pursue happiness. This country is the country of the pursuit of happiness. Each one of us is born with an inalienable right to pursue their own happiness. We need a political system. We need a government that leaves us alone and protects us so we can pursue our happiness. That is a rallying call. That is what we need to fight for. And I mean fight. I'll end with this. The founding fathers, when they wrote the declaration, faced the mightiest military force known to man at that point. They faced the British Empire. And they committed their lives, their property and their sacred honor to fight for all of our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Can we afford to do anything less than that? Thank you. I think we have time for some questions. Dr. Brook. It's connected only to the last panel. Could you give us your impression of American foreign policy in the Middle East? What it is and what it should be? Well, first let me say that I don't believe America has a foreign policy. I don't think we know what we're doing. I think we're clueless. I don't think America's had a foreign policy probably since World War II. This is not new. Our blindness in the Middle East is not new. This has been going on for a long time. And I think George Bush is as culpable here as is Obama. But let me go back to a hero of yours, Ronald Reagan. Because I think to a large extent, well, it really starts with Jimmy Carter, right? The beginning of the modern problem in the Middle East starts in November 4th, 1979. I remember that date well, because two things happened on that date completely unrelated. One, I was enlisted in the Israeli army, which is why I remember it. Second, the U.S. Embassy was invaded in Tehran, and Americans were taken hostage for 444 days. And what did the U.S. government do in response to that? Nothing. Zero, zilch, nada, nothing. One attempt at a rescue, which was pretty pathetic. What signal did we send the Islamists, that we heard very eloquently, the threat that we face? What signal did we send? Weakness. We will not pursue the enemy. We will not defend our own citizens. You're worried about Benghazi? These people in Tehran were there for 444 days under horrific conditions. Where was the president of the United States? Jimmy Carter, right? In 1983, 244 Marines were killed in their barracks in Beirut by the Iranians in Khizballah, the very beginnings of Khizballah.  And what did he do? He got the Marines out of there, they took their ships and sailed home. We did nothing, nada. What message did we send the Islamists? Weakness, weakness, weakness, weakness. Throughout the 1980s, Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon and killed. What did we do about it? Nothing. In 1990, the Kobo Towers in Saudi Arabia were bombed. I can't remember the number of American soldiers who were killed. What did we do about it? Nothing.  This has been going on for decades and we do nothing. And we American people don't stand up and demand action. We don't, you know, when you join the army, you don't lose your rights. It's a job of the American government to defend the lives of their soldiers. Okay, so we get 9-11, right? Which is a combination of all these terrorist attacks of which we've done nothing. And George Bush stands up and says, okay, I'm gonna do something, right? We've got to warn terrorism. You know, that's like FDR after Pearl Harbor declaring war on kamikaze pilots. The enemy is politically slum. The enemy is Islamic totalitarianism, fascism, however you want to call it. The enemy's not terrorism. The enemy's not in Baghdad. The enemy's not even in Kabul. The enemy's in Tehran and Riyadh. The enemy's in Iran and Saudi Arabia. You heard where all the funding comes from? But a month after 9-11, George Bush was hugging the Prince of Saudi Arabia. They were our best friends. We love those guys. And as long as we love Saudi Arabia, this will continue. You want to know how to deal with this? Those are the two regimes that have to go. Go. You want to deal with this? We have to stand up for what it means to be America. You remember the forward strategy for freedom, 2005? This was Bush's foreign policy, bringing democracy to the Middle East. Well, we're getting democracy in Egypt. And if you had democracy in Syria and in Jordan, they would both be Muslim brotherhood countries. The solution is not democracy. The solution is America standing up for itself and defending itself. We are fighting people in caves. We have the mightiest military force in human history. We could defeat these guys in weeks if we're willing to fight.  Let me tell you something. The General Sherman said, one of my great heroes, and I've said this in Atlanta, I have, taking my life into my own hands, war is hell. And if you're not willing to make it hell, stay home. That's the Israeli in me talking. So how do we win it? How do we do font policy? We go to where the enemy is, two countries, Iran, Saudi Arabia. We destroy one of them and we tell the other, if you don't behave, that's what you're gonna get. But this is, you see, this is why Fox won't have me on anymore. Which is true, true story. They won't have me on anymore. Except Stossel. Stossel's the only one we'll have. Second question. Ron, you talked about a new political party and eloquently outlined the foundation and the principles that that would stand for. Part of what we fight, I think, is those of us that somewhere on the right spectrum here is how do we, what does that message sound like for youth today? That's great. It brings them to the party, if you will. So this is the challenge we face. The average age in this room is about 65. And that's only because they're like three people in the 20s who drive the average down. This is almost dominantly old and white.  We're a minority. This is a message, and I believe we have the message, that we need to ignite young people with. And this is why I think we should be radical. Young people love radical. They do. They want to be excited about something. They want to be passionate about something. They want a cause. They want a vision to fight for. So what do we need to do? One, the fact is the young people don't know economics. They have no clue about it. They don't care about it. They've never got the paycheck. They've never had taxes taken out of them. That is not what they vote. They don't vote economics. And you have to acknowledge the fact that they are being brainwashed as we speak by leftist professors and high school teachers. So you can't blame them for not knowing anything about economics. But what do they care about? Because they live it. They care about social issues. Because that's the world they're leaving. Republicans want to make a big deal out of social issues? Fine, but you're going to lose the youth vote. You're going to lose it. You lost it this last election. You're going to lose it forever.  Let them live. Let them live. You might be offended because it offends your religion. Fine, don't associate with them. But you don't have all these laws against it and accept the fact we're the party, supposed to be the party, right, of individual liberty. Well, individual liberty doesn't mean what you think they should do. It doesn't mean your values. It means liberty. It means whatever ideas they have, whether you think they're good or bad, whether you think they're moral or not, government is not an instrument to impose your morality on other people. That's not what governs there for. It's to protect people of different codes. So we need to drop the social issues. I mean, I think we should take the right side of the social issues. But given that that's a reach for many people, let's just not talk about them. How about not talking about rape when you're running for Senate? That would be a good Republican strategy, just generally, right? So to get young people, you need to switch sides on the social issues, on many of the social issues. Number two, you got to project a vision. You got to have a dream. You got to tell them what the world will look like and why their world would be better. And you have to relate to their values, whether it's an iPhone, they understand iPhones. Well, tell them what makes this? How does this come about? Was this created by government? What would it look like if it was created by government? They get it. They don't want it. So then ask them, do they want their health care to be this quality? Or do they want it to be the quality of an iPhone created by government, right? Relate to the things that they are passionate about, that they understand, right? You got to have a vision. You also, we also got to have, we also got to portray it in terms of their happiness, right? I believe that this party, this new political party or the Republican party or whatever, should be the party for the pursuit of happiness. That's cool, right, for young people. What does that mean? We need to explain to them, for example, that to the extent that they get goodies from government, they will never be happy. Think about it. Where does your happiness come from? Your happiness comes from your self-esteem. You have to have self-esteem, confidence.  Where does our self-esteem come from? Ribbons? Self-esteem comes from everybody getting a ribbon? Does self-esteem come from your parents patting you on the back? Where does self-esteem come from? This is the most important question we could have. From what? From accomplishment, from achievement, from setting goals and attaining them. Where in our life do we achieve goals? Do we set goals? Do we strive towards goals? What is the activity we most engage in in which we achieve and set goals? Work, career, being productive. Nobody who doesn't work can ever be happy. Now, I count being at home, taking care of kids, hard work. But if you don't work, you will never be happy, ever.  You are guaranteeing that they will never be happy. You are guaranteeing them into poverty for the rest of their life because they'll never learn the skills. We need to explain that to young people that entitlement state is destroying the people it's supposedly trying to help. And I say supposedly because I don't believe they want to help anybody. Entitlement state's about power. It's not about helping. And we need to go into poor neighborhoods and we need to tell poor kids that their lives are being destroyed. And something else the cognitive has said flipped me out, right? Minimum wage. My favorite topic, one of my favorite topics. Who does minimum wage help? No, no, it helps some people. Who does it help? It helps the unions because union pay is tied to the minimum wage. The only reason they want to increase minimum wage is because union wages will go up. Who does it hurt? Employers, okay, well, they're rich, who cares? Consumers, it hurts consumers. But who else does it hurt? Kids. It hurts poor youth. It hurts minority youth. If you're a kid and you know nothing, a lot of kids know nothing, in spite of what they think. And you can produce at five bucks an hour. That's what you can produce. If you set the minimum wage at 10 bucks an hour, who's gonna employ you? Nobody. Nobody. Minimum wage is one of most evil laws ever instituted. It hurts poor inner city kids. They don't get a $5 an hour job. And if they got that job, they would learn skills that would then allow them to get $7, which they learn skills which allow them to get $15, which maybe one day they'll be ranking 100 or $200,000 an hour. There's no limit under capitalism. But if you don't get the start, as many of you know, I'm sure many of you come from poorer backgrounds and started out at the bottom, right? If you don't get that first chance, if you don't learn those basic skills of showing up to work on time and working hard and treating the customer right, and you'll never rise up. So minimum wage is a law instituted in order to keep the poor poor. Now that's a message that we need to advocate. This is, by the way, economics 101. You will not find an economist. Even Paul Krugman. Well, he's not an economist, but he's a hack. You will not find an economist who doesn't agree with that statement. This is supply and demand. This is very simple. This is price controls. This is exactly what happens. This is not rocket science. This is economics 101. But I wanna find a Republican who says, gets up on stage and says, minimum wage is destroying the youth of America. It is destroying poor kids. It is bad for the inner city kids. That's a candidate I could vote for. That's somebody to get excited about. That should be in the platform of the new political party. And then I think young people can get excited about because it's kind of interesting. Ah, kids like me don't get a break. I'm denying them by being for minimum wage. They can relate to these kind of things.  There are lots of things that we have to emphasize. Happiness, we have to emphasize that the statism destroys everybody's life, that it's anti-ambition, including the ambitious poor, that it's destroying life. And of course the other thing, and this will be my last point about young people, they're not gonna have a future. You just don't have one, right? They're gonna have to pay for your healthcare. They're gonna have to pay for your social security. They have to pay for all the other government services that are involved. Their tax rates are gonna be through the roof to get a balanced budget, right? They're gonna have a federal $17 trillion of debt. It's just now, it's gonna be $20, $30, $40, $50 trillion of debt. They're gonna have to pay for it. It means higher interest rates. It means all kinds of bad stuff. Their future is being mortgaged by us. That's a message to tell them. It's time for them to reverse that. It's time for them to stand up for their own rights, for their own life, for their own happiness. Next question. You want me to do a quick wrap-up? I don't know what quick means. Look, I don't know if what we need is a third party or if the Republican Party can be saved, but I do know that we need a new story. We need a new vision for America. We need politicians who are willing to say, I'm for private healthcare 100%, including no Medicare and Medicaid, and I'm moving towards that. I'm from doing away with the minimum wage. I'm for defending America and standing up to the evil in the world. I am for the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Those are the kind of politicians we need to start electing. Those are the kind of ideas we need to start demanding our politicians live up to. And if they don't, we need to kick them out. Even if it means the Democrats win for a while. If we move the political party in the right direction, it's okay to lose for a while, because at least there's hope. Right now there's no hope, because there's nobody even talking our language. There's nobody on the political frame who's even close to what we stand for. Can you arrange for a birth certificate from Hawaii? I am much more valuable to you. Much more valuable to you. Gone out there on college campuses and among young people and talking and lecturing and speaking. Every time I go to Washington, I feel like I have to clean myself thoroughly afterwards.  Everybody either has their hand in my pocket or is paying somebody to stick their hand in my pocket. I don't want to have anything to do with that place. But yes, we need good people to run. And we need, but more important than the end, you know, I'll end with this, right? What can one do? Right, because it's so depressing. What you have to do is speak up.  Don't be embarrassed. You are right. They are wrong. Don't be embarrassed by that. So you're the minority. The founders went a smaller minority. Again, they put their lives at stake. What are you gonna do? Somebody will say you're wrong. Somebody would be pissed off at you around the dinner table. What's at stake here? Speak up, right, demand, demand, demand. Do not, do not compromise. Never compromise. Let the politicians do that. We do not compromise. Thank you.


Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event which we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians across the state and across the country. Any activities, topics, whatever that may be useful to librarians. We do these shows every Wednesday morning live at 10 a.m. central time. They last for about an hour, give or take, but they are all recorded so you can, if you cannot join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always go onto our Encompass Live website and watch any of our recordings that we have for all of our shows. And we do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, training sessions, anything that we can come up with, as I said. And we do have sessions presented by commission staff, of course, but also we bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. Today we are going to learn about health information that you can use, online resources that you can use in your community to help your patrons. And we have Marty McGee, the coordinator, the Nebraska coordinator for the National Network Libraries of Medicine, and Terry Hartman from the McGuggan Library of Medicine at University of Nebraska Medical Center. And they're both joining us remotely from up in Omaha. Hello. Hi. Marty and Terry. Hi. So I think we're all set to go. I will just hand over to you and go and take it away. You are set to go. Okay. Great. Thank you, Krista. Yep. Well, as Krista mentioned, my name is Marty McGee, and I'm the Nebraska representative of the National Library of Medicine. So I'm going to do the first part of this presentation, and then I'll be turning it over to Terry Hartman, who represents the McGuggan Library where I am based here at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. And we have been transversing the state doing multiple presentations at many of the public libraries in the state that have been part of the VTOP program, the broadband program. So perhaps some of you may have benefited from that, but this is the same presentation. So we wanted to share that in another venue so that people who did not elect to have trainings at their libraries would have another way of accessing this information. So here we go. The National Library of Medicine. This is just a little picture of it, and it is the world's largest medical library. It's on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. I've been there a couple of times, but it's a really interesting place, and has been a part of the national government's information services for more than 175 years. So we've been in business a long time, and we hope we're giving you all the right information. So let me progress with our screen here. There we go. You know, some people say, well, why does the government do this, or why should we be listening to this information? And I just wanted to include something that I had run across not all that long ago. You can see this is dated August 3rd, and it's talking about how people go to Google, which is a natural tendency because it's easy to use, but I want to tell you why you shouldn't just be going to Google, because not all the information there is going to be correct. So according to this study, almost half of the websites that came up on a Google search when people were looking for infant sleep safety provided inaccurate information. And of that, 28% of the search results provided that inaccurate information and about the same number had nothing to do with infant sleep safety. So my job really is to promote these databases that come from the National Library of Medicine and will point you in the right direction for what's most current and what's most evidence based in the world of medicine. So here's the homepage of Medline Plus, which I hope all of you are using and have bookmarked from your site. It's a very robust site, has loads of information, and I'll talk about these things here that are listed on the right. But I also want you to pay attention from this home screen, and I don't know if you can see my cursor. Can you, Krista? Yes, we can. Yep, we can see it when you're highlighting things. Yep. Right now. So the three major parts of this page are the health topics, the drugs and supplements, and the videos and cool tools. And I'll be talking about those. But we're basically going to take a little tour here of the website. And again, I remind you all if you ever need more information, you can contact me too. So here's the home page. But one of the things I particularly want to point out for librarians is this About Medline Plus page. And what that does is take it to additional training materials. So let me click here, and we get to that next page. So this is the About Medline Plus page. But there are a couple of really useful things here for you. If you do not, if you have a library website and you want to add a little Medline Plus logo to your site, or if you just want to add it as a link, you can click on this link that says Adding Medline Plus to your website. Or you can give that information to your webmaster. And it has the coding there that you can add this easily. And we want you to share this information. So we encourage you to do that. The other thing I want to point out is at the bottom here where it says Training Materials, if you click on that page, you should get to this page. And on here, you can see where it says Information for Librarians and Trainers. So the things that are included on this page are brochures in English and Spanish. And actually, if you look where I have my cursor right now, here is the Medline Plus brochure in English. And I'll show you that in just a minute. And then right next to it, it's available in Spanish as well. So if you have people in that population, you have some resources for them. We also have tutorials. So if you look up here where it says Medline Plus Tour, you can take a little quick tutorial. So if you didn't actually want to present a class like I'm doing to you, you could use this as part of your training. And again, that's available in English and Spanish. Another nice feature of these Information for Librarians as Trainers is a new tutorial called New, and that's like within the last couple of years here, called Understanding Medical Words. And if you had scrolled down on that page, you would get to this, which is the tutorial. And one of the reasons I like this tutorial is that it breaks down words, obviously, but that it has an audio component. So now you can hear the correct pronunciation of these words. And I know I've shown this to people who are in the beginning stages of their health careers. And this is a real benefit for them, too. Or if you're working with a community college or even in a high school where they're having kids explore different careers, this is a nice resource. And this is what the Medline Plus brochure looks like. I often hand this out at exhibits, because it's something anybody can print out from their own library. I've given you here the URL. But the URL is also listed where I have this red arrow pointing. So if you happen to print out the brochure and you want to print more of them, you can just go to this website and print as many as you like. Obviously, this is not a copyrighted information. We want to be able to share this information. So this is an easy way for us to do that. Now, I want to remind people that Medline Plus is available in Spanish. But we also do have some other language materials. So in this screen, I'm showing you what it looks like on the English as the backside here. And if you look in this upper part of the screen where I'm circling Espanol, if you click on that Espanol button, then you'll get to a screen where essentially the same screen is available in Spanish. So about 95% of this whole website is available in Spanish. So because we keep it in the same, it looks the same, except that it has orange tabs instead of green tabs. You should be able to direct people to information that they may need. Now, the other thing I want to point out on the English screen here is that we have something here called multiple languages. Now, we don't have all languages in all things, but we are starting to collect that information. So if you go to that page, this is what it looks like. So it's the health information in multiple languages. And you can begin to see just how many languages there are here. We couldn't possibly collect everything in every language, but we at least have a place now to begin to collect that information. OK, now I'm going to focus on the three big tabs, which I pointed out in the beginning here, which are health topics, drugs and supplements, and videos and cool tools. So right now, I'm going to look here in health topics. There are really a couple of different ways to search MedlinePlus. You can either go through the health topics or you can search it in the search box. If you go through the health topics, you'll see that you can search either by the body location, the disorders and conditions, the diagnosis of therapy, or by demographic groups, or by health and wellness. So know that there are about 900 different health topics. So it's really got a lot of information here and a lot of different ways to get to it. So on this health topics page, this would be like a typical page. If I had gone into the search box and I had put in heart disease, what it's going to do is give you a description. It's got a nice little picture here to the right. And then underneath that, you're going to see a list of different links that you can search. Now the first one here says heart diseases and it says National Library of Medicine. And we'll look at what that page looks like. But you may find other URL links from other parts of the list here. So for example, if we were looking at diabetes, you might also see a reference for the American Diabetes Association. So anything that we have put here as links, and I say we being medical librarians of the National Library of Medicine, who review this on a daily basis and add more links, are looking at reliable resources. So we're not always recreating information, but we're linking you to information outside of our own site. The other thing I want to point out is over here on the left-hand side, you'll see where it says refined by type and refined by key word. Each one of these major headings has a number after it. And that means the number of references about that particular topic. So if you looked at health topics, it has the number 165 next to it. That means there are 165 references in all the health topic information. Or if you went to drugs and supplements, there's more than 619. And here's what the page then looks like from the National Library of Medicine. It starts out with the URL. It gives you a description of what it's also called. It gives you some other information where you can start to look at things and good overview information too. Now the second tab here is the drugs and supplements tab. And this is divided into two parts. So you have drugs on the upper part here and you have herbs and supplements on the second part. So the drugs, you can either browse it by a generic name or by a brand name. So I'm gonna start with the drugs here. And this one is Adder-Vastatin, which is the generic name for Lipitor. Lipitor is one of the most prescribed medications around because it is prescribed for high cholesterol. But if you wanted to find out more information on this, you can say, why is this medication prescribed? How should the medicine be used? What are other uses? What kind of precaution should I use? What other brand names might it have? What do you do if you take an overdose or what if you miss a dose? What kinds of things do you do? So this information is all provided in relatively easy to read information. And this comes from the same source that pharmacists use, which is called Micrometics. You know, when we were doing these B-top presentations, I had a question that someone had said, well, what about a PDR? Many of you might be familiar with that, which stands for the physician's desk reference, which is not a bad source, but it's not really your best source because the physician's desk reference is really all the drug companies send in their information about the drugs that they manufacture. So it is gonna be biased toward that manufacturer because obviously they wanna provide the best light for their particular drug. This information is not biased. So it's looking at all sides of it to tell you what's good and what may be things that you need to look out for. So we hope it is a great resource for you to find. Okay, going to the next screen here, videos and cool tools. You'll see there are three big parts here, the interactive tutorials, anatomy videos, and surgery videos. So I'm gonna show you what a screen looks like first from interactive tutorials. These are like little slideshows, if you will. And they're not, they're just drawings. They're not actual pictures of things. So this one happens to be on smoking. You can see these blue bars here to the left. Each one of those is just like a little chapter, if you will. So it may include a few slides. They have a question at the end of the chapter, if you will, just to test for your understanding. But if you don't get a question right, it's okay. It just tells you whether you have it right or not. So the nice part about this also is that I like the fact that it has audio. You can listen to this. So this is good for people who may not be good readers, or people who have English as a second language so that they can listen to them. And many of these are also available in Spanish. So you can just go to that interactive tutorial site and click on the Spanish site and see what's available there as well. Another piece of this is the calculators and quizzes. So here you can just get an example of some of the calculators and quizzes here, an alcohol calorie calculator, or calculating your body mass index, for example. There's also a game section here. So if you're looking to provide some extra stimulus to your children that have some health benefits, you can direct them to this game section too. This NIH senior health is directed toward seniors. So this has senior topics, but the special characteristics of this particular website are that you can resize the text so you can make it from small to larger to larger. You can actually get it very large. And you can also change the contrast. So if you have someone who has macular degeneration, they can change that contrast. So instead of having a white background and you've got a black background on which to look at things.  So now there's also a mobile website and the only difference in this is that it would have an M before it. So it's the M.MedlinePlus.gov. And you can see that this is kind of an abbreviated format for M.MedlinePlus, but obviously you couldn't fit everything that we had on our regular webpage on the size of a small smart phone. So this is an alternative. We're told by probably, I don't know, just a few more years. I think it's maybe by 2016 that 97% of people will be getting their information through a smart phone. So this is one of the reasons we pursue this as well. I wanna remind you if you're not already receiving the M.MedlinePlus magazine that you can subscribe to this. You would just fill in a little form like this for your library and then they'll send you a copy of this. It comes out quarterly. It usually features a celebrity, in this case, it's Chloris Leachman. And it's just a nice thing to have in your library to provide some information on things that are of current interest. Another thing I like to share is the My Family Health Portrait.  You can provide that portrait by going online here and you have two ways to do that. You can either print off a copy and just fill it out that way or you can create a copy that you store in the cloud, if you will. And so what that means is I can start an account and then if I wanna give the information to get into that account to my cousin who lives in Philadelphia, they can fill out some additional information that they may have on our family that maybe I don't have so that we can get a more complete picture of things. So this is a nice way to be able to put that together. I always find it interesting that this is recommended as a good Thanksgiving activity, which some people laugh about, but people aren't opening gifts and things so at least it's some way to concentrate that effort when you've got family or around. This just happened to be a Family Health Portrait that I printed off a couple of years ago. You can see the date here is 2009. This happens to be the Kennedys. Most of us are familiar with the Kennedys family, but I've noticed that when I go onto that site now that information is no longer available and I'm pretty sure that's because of HIPAA arrangements and the fact that we can no longer share that kind of information. Here's a directory of health organizations that I think you might find useful. If someone comes to you and says, oh, I need information on Alzheimer's, we don't have anything current perhaps in our library, you could go online here and find the national organization which in turn could direct you to something local if you are interested in locating that. And I'm including healthcare.gov here too because again, people have a lot of questions about what is covered in their state or what's happening with Medicare. This one happens to be put off by the government. It's called healthcare.gov. So this first arrow here, you would just pick your state, Nebraska, and then it would tell you what is covered there. So I found this interesting when I was exploring this a little bit further that if I clicked on that, learn more about preventing and wellness. I got a list of 16 covered preventive services for adults. So you might find it interesting that blood pressure screening, for example, is covered or depression screening. Or I think there was one also here about an aspirin regimen too. But you can see what is or is not covered for you. I do wanna remind people just about a few things in terms of providing reference and Terry will probably talk more to this. But we just wanna remind folks that everyone has the right to access medical information in the library. That we wanna make sure that we're counseling folks on the limitations of the information that we can provide. We are not doctors. We are providing information to them or directing them to information so that they can take it to their doctor and discuss it with their doctor. And again, we hope that they're taking these reliable resources as opposed to printing off a stack of papers that is two inches tall that all comes from Google. Always tell the patrons the source of the information. So again, if they need to share that with their physician, they can do so and make sure that you're protecting the privacy of the patron because that's very important. I wanted to mention this additional resource that actually was a joint project that came out of the National Network Fibrates of Medicine. It's a document that's probably about 40 or 50 pages long and you can print this out and I'm giving you the website here. But it includes not just the websites that I mentioned, but it also includes these tips on reference, how to conduct a reference interview as well. Now, as I mentioned, I'm based at the University of Nebraska Med Center and the McGuggan Library of Medicine. And we have a tool, LibGuides, which we are each allowed to put up our own page for. So I created a National Library of Medicine databases and resources page. You can see me circling this with my cursor here. I really created two sides of this. One, the left-hand side is National Library of Medicine databases and some of these are things that I have mentioned here today. But if you just click on this, then you can go directly to that website. So this is all hyperlink. The other side that I created is National Library of Medicine K through 12 resources. So if you're working with a high school teacher, for example, this might be a good place to direct them as well. Because we've got a lot of resources and we have a real initiative going right now about getting in touch with those folks so we can provide that information for them. I wanna put in a couple of advertisements now. One is that we do update things from time to time on the Library Broadband Builds Nebraska Communities blog. And so you'll see, for example, this one happens to be about the technology planning summer camp. But occasionally you'll see postings there from me. I also wanna point out this yellow arrow is pointing to where you can see a calendar. So if there are trainings going on, this is what that page would look like and you can get an idea of what's happening in our state across the entire state. I do wanna mention one other thing before I move on. As you know, most of you know, next week is our Nebraska Library Association conference in conjunction with the school librarians and the Mountain Plains Library Association. So I will be doing a presentation there, which will include some of this information because I'm doing a session on teaching Medline Plus and that will be on Thursday morning at eight o'clock for you, early risers. And I'll also be on a panel discussion for BTOP, the Broadband Communities Project. And that will be Friday, I think, at nine o'clock. So you can check your schedule to make sure, but just wanted to remind you of those. And again, if you have questions, don't hesitate to give me a call. I have an 800 number here or you can reach me by email as well. And now I'm gonna turn it over to Terri Hartman, who will be telling you how to get health information with a personal touch. So I'm gonna just change out our presentations here. Give me just a second. And it's all yours, Terri. Thanks very much. As a member of a team that personally traveled over 2,500 miles across Nebraska in nine days, I know that Nebraska is not remote. No matter where you are in Nebraska, you have access to vital health information. Our Consumer Health Information Resource Service has been around since 1985, nearly 30 years. And that's thanks to a partnership between UNMC Library, the Nebraska Library Commission and every one of the Nebraska Public Libraries. Hopefully you're familiar with the CHIRS program, which is letting you know that it's still kicking, still vital, and it still works to help you bring health information into your communities. We have a website that you can get to right away. We want to let you know, we do take you to the MedlinePlus website because there's no way that our library would be able to gather as much vital information they have there as well as they've done. But for the service itself, we have the medical librarians here, there's a team of five medical librarians that work on the reference desk led by Roxanne Cox, head of reference, and they will look up the information that you request. We did create this website though, so that you would have some additional, maybe more Nebraska focused resources. On the homepage, we usually have features of the month because most of the months have a health flavor, and this changes. On the right hand side, we have our consumer health disclaimer, which you should also have on your website, that it's talking about the information that we gather, some material may contain information that's the opinion of the author, not necessarily data of the physician. It encourages all of our customers to go to their healthcare professional to get specific interpretation of the information that we give them. We do get calls occasionally, that somebody calls up at the reference desk and they say, I have a call, and we say, well, we're the medical library, we can help you with that. Once you have a diagnosis, we'll help you. Professor Cox has instructions on how to handle reference requests, similar to the information that Marty just mentioned as well. On the right hand side, there's following the clues, the online video that was created in 2005. It was created to be timeless, take a look at it short. It's in three languages, English, Spanish, and Sudanese newer. It's ideal for children and folks that may be new to the healthcare system in the United States on learning how to go to the doctor and then also go to the library for information. You may recognize the librarian in this video. It's Marty. You can request, or your patrons can request themselves, that their cheers request, that we have a form, online form, you can email just ask us at UNMC, or we do have a toll free number and a direct number that people can contact us. They can't go through your library, you can make the request for them. Sometimes the world is too small and they don't wanna discuss the specific condition with you. Nothing about that, people are allowed to have their privacy. So they can call us directly, but we also serve patrons through the library. We treat us like you do your Ram McNally Atlas, where your health information, back room. This is a form, hopefully you're able to see it, the cheers request form. All that needs to be done is fill in all the boxes with the red asterisks, the names, the email information, and down below is describing their requests. This is the second part of the form. They don't necessarily have to fill this out, but it's useful for our searches. Their gender, age group, it doesn't have to be exact. What they're interested in, if it's all information, if they would like to know consumer information or consumer or professional information. If somebody's got a condition for several years or it's been in the family for a while, they may be considered something like an expert patient, and so they may want professional level information that they can carry back to their professional. For cancer requests, the specific type of cancer, the stage, and if it metastasize or spread, that's useful for us to be able to search the information. We use this information that's given on the form to go through our medical library resources here and find the information. We will print it out and mail it, or now that most people have an email, we can digitize it and email it to them, but we don't charge for the service. There's never been a fee for it. It's all included with their call, you just call up and we'll mail it out or email it out, no fee. This again is an example of our consumer health disclaimer. If you haven't set one up for your public library, you can get a hold of Roxanne Cox here at the library and get assistance with this. You need to have something on there saying that your information is given with the understanding that person will consult their health professional on specific medical questions. I come from the 80s as a librarian. Back then they said, okay, you can't touch medical, legal, or financial information. We could only point to it. We've come a long way with the health information, but you still need to let them know there are limits to what we can do. We don't interpret, we share the information. Couple more of the tabs on our website. The second tab is health information. Again, the LinkedIn Medline Plus, and we also have health and disease information sources here. The top 10 health related websites, according to the Medical Library Association, and over on the right is the additional resources, some of those that Marty talked about, the Medline Plus Magazine, and my family health portrait. If you have, we've left a comment feature open on this page. If you find additional resources that you find very useful for your customers, please share them with us. Folks that read these pages are the most polite I've ever worked with. Nobody lets us know if it's working out or not. So you can put the comment in there if you want us to take it off. You can say please delete this comment after you read it, but that's an easy way to get to us, or you can drop us a note at askusatunmc.edu and say here's a resource that I think might be useful for your cheer site. Useful for your patrons as well as for your staff evaluating a website. We have some tips on here about what to think about when you're looking at any website's quality. This could be for used car sites or for health information. The source, is there bias? Marty was mentioning the PDR earlier that that's a bias towards the companies that do the drugs. That's useful information to know if you're only looking for the information that's ideal, but you need to know the bias of a resource. The level of the reading, what's the intended audience? The references, if they are even there, how current is the information and the ease of use? All of those draw back to library science. We're all hands at this, but it is useful to share with your patrons so that they know how to evaluate a website when they're looking at it. We have a link to the Dr. Google's story, and then there's some more information on evaluating health information from the Medline Plus. There's actually a section on that, and then there's an online tutorial about evaluating health information on the web by the National Library of Nursing. Under drug and supplement info, yes, we could take you to the drug information, the Medline Plus Drug and Supplement Information, but there are a couple other ones that we have there directly linked. One of the ones that we find pretty useful here at the reference desk at the Med Center is the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. That gives a good place to go as somebody comes in. Search that I heard referred earlier was herbal stem cell supplements. That was a new term to us, and we found a little bit of information in there. Because if you just look it up on web, you usually find the companies that are selling it to you. Under finding contact to doctor, we include the AMA, Dr. Finder. We do include some of the UNMC and TNMC links. However, our job is to find any doctor. So if you happen to call us, contact us, drop us a note. We can find specialists anywhere in the nation on any condition that somebody's wanting treated. I've looked up physicians that ended up being on the East Coast, the West Coast, and the Mayo Clinic. And I believe I've even looked up some in Germany. So let us know if there's a specific condition that somebody's needing a specialist for. We have additional resources that we couldn't link here that are on our shelves and we can look through them. We do have a link to clinical trials. In addition to the UNMC trials, theclinicaltrials.gov. For folks that are going through treatment and they would like to know a different level, maybe things haven't worked out or had they have worked out or they just wanna keep track of what's going on on their chronic condition. This is a great place for them to be able to look up the information and then carry it to their healthcare professional and say, would this apply to me? I remember a long time ago, I helped somebody that had an inborn likelihood to have meningitis. It was twins, sisters. All they had to do was send in their blood. They didn't have to physically go. There was clinical trial going on on that. So it could be that there could be something going on that they wouldn't physically have to go someplace else, but it's something on their chronic condition that they'd be able to find information on. We do have information for the underinsured and uninsured. We do include the healthcare.gov page, but also some local information towards with the Nebraska focus. If somebody's looking at information on that, we can help you identify resources or people at the state level to be able to identify local planks. We do have the pre-existing condition insurance plan here, and I believe this is in Nebraska, but this may be nationwide. And then Nebraska Medicaid and the immunization program are linked there. Four librarians. BTOP promotional items that we carried out with us are here on the left-hand side. We also have the training materials on the right-hand side. Remember for your BTOP training, all of these resources were showing you, they would probably qualify, and Crystal would be able to tell us more if these would qualify for your training needs. Hopefully you're counting today as your training. The Finding Health and Wellness at the library, that resource that Marty showed, we did include a link directly to that so you can get right to it and print it. On the left-hand side, ordering cheers promotional items. You can request the tabletop displayed for free. We also have brochures and cards. Just to drop some note, if you have something going on that you'd like to market, the access to health information that your community has through your library, because we are through your library, you are offering this, if it wasn't for you, they wouldn't have it. Please let us know if we can send this out to you. Free, it's about 18 inches tall. It's not as big as what this picture I should have stood in this picture so it'd show you how small it was. You can check it out. We mail it to you free. You mail it back free. Again, additional training. We have a training tab. All of these tours, tutorials, the print materials, video tutorial on the Medline Plus, evaluating health information. It's excellent source of training for your staff and customers. We do have a Spanish member of our team, Spanish language member, who is going through and translating material, translating links. And so far we have the ones on the left, the consumer health resources in Spanish. Let us know if there's specifically something you're looking for, but additional resources will be adding to this as we go along throughout the final year at BTOP. You can always contact us for more information. The email is the best way. Ask us at unofc.edu. You can call us toll free. Your library through the access to health information on your BTOP computers, as well as direct search expertise through the medical librarians here, improves the wellbeing of your community. It's an honor for us to serve you as your health information experts. And we stand ready to support your future training events and staff training. If you're going to conduct any training for your community, which we really hope you are. We get out to you about once every five years, it seems like. We're right there for you. We look forward to seeing you at our booth at MLA next week. And however we can help you out, please let us know. Thanks for all you do. Thank you, Marty and Terry. Does anybody have any questions or comments or anything? You can type into the questions section of the GoToWebinar interface. And we can read that and pass it along. Nobody had any questions during your presentation guys. So, obviously you're telling them everything they ever wanted to know. We should mention that you're going to post these presentations with the archive recording, right? Yes, the recording. Actually what I did is I took the two power points that you guys had and just put them into one, just as one document. It's already up on our slide share page for the commission. This session has been recorded. So it will be posted as well with our archives and all of the URLs that are in the power points, I pulled them and put them into the commission's delicious account as well. So those will all be available when the recording is ready too, yep. And that'll be available for anyone to watch. And as I think, Terry, you mentioned about training hours. Yes, this session for any BTAP library is definitely reported as for training, whether you watch it in person or recorded. Were there other sessions that you were wondering if we're able to get their training hours from or you just talk about this one, Terry. We list training sites on the cheers page. OK, right. Yes, those would be things they'd want to submit as well. For BTAP libraries, you're submitting your training hours to Angela, we hope, monthly. And those would definitely be things you'd want to include with the number of hours that your staff has done training. We don't have any questions. We do have a very informative and useful thank you comment on the question section for you guys. I was actually like I've actually noted down for myself that family health portrait website that you said the surgeon general does. That is great. I know that when I've first gone to my doctor's trying to remember everything that everyone had is a possible disease in my host or his family was. I think I did OK, but I'm sure I missed something. But that's a great resource to use. And it reminds me. We're actually doing that as a wedding gift for one of our newly engaged people, but they don't know. Right, yeah. And it reminded me of those genealogy sites. I have in our family, we use the genie.com site. And all of us can log in and add information of just your family history.  And oh, those so-and-so is married to so-and-so. This would be, yeah, I'm going to go in and start using it and try and share it with my mom and my aunts and uncles and whatnot to see if we can get a better picture of things. Excellent. Yeah, we do have one question. Is there a way to link the UNMC site to our web page, our being the Crete Public Library? It's Carol Aiden asking about that. It's a country convention. Yeah, you can just use that link right there and put it anywhere on your website that you want to and link out to them, absolutely. That would be wonderful. We have human resource places that have put us up on their company page. This is available to all Nebraskans. No other state does it. So yes, please. That's right. I remember you mentioned that at one of our summer camps that there were some before, but there aren't any more, it seems, that they've all kind of, where the only one out there, yeah. That's a great resource, yeah. And I was also very happy to hear about the Cheers Forum, that I know we have a lot of libraries who are in our BTOP program, and just in the state, who are very small, in very small towns where everybody knows everyone, and having that forum on the Cheers site where they can just send their medical question to you guys instead of talking to the local people, I think that's a great thing for them. Right, and we do have some people who just go home and call us. Oh, sure, yeah. Because I don't personally like forums. You want to talk to an actual person? Absolutely, yeah. Very good. OK, well, it doesn't look like anything else has come in while we were chatting, so that's fine. So the session has been recorded, as I said, and it will be available, I'll say later today. I'll get it up and going. So I think I'm going to wrap it up for today. I'm going to take back control here, and just show my screen. So thank you very much, Marty and Terry. This is great. As you said, you haven't been going around the state and doing these sessions, but we have 270 some odd public libraries in the state, and 140 of them are in the grant. Obviously, not everybody can attend everything that we do, so I think this is great that we've got this now recorded here so that people who can't make it to the in-person sessions can go and get the same information from here. Thank you very much for being here with us. And I want to, well, next week we do not have an Encompass Live. I was going to invite people to come next week. Next week is, as Marty mentioned, the MPLA, NLA, and SLA annual conference, so we also go on Haydus. That's the one week of the year that we do not do Encompass Live because we, our staff and, of course, librarians across the state are heading, in this case, up to Levista for the annual state library conference. So there will be no Encompass Live next week, but the week after that we will have the third part, third in the series about your government online that Laura Johnson has been doing here. This is the third and last one, and it will be about independent federal government agencies, so hopefully you will register for that one and come and see that session. And we are on Facebook Encompass Live, so if you would like to have announcements and notifications of when we are doing things, please like us on Facebook and you will get all of the announcements, as you can see here. Join us right now for this morning's one. I announced about a little over an hour ago to remind people that we were gonna be doing the show, so like us on Facebook and you'll get our notifications there. So thank you very much, Marty, Terry, and everyone who was attending this morning, and we will see you in two weeks on the next Encompass Live. That's good, thanks, Krista. Thank you, bye-bye. Bye now.


This video is dedicated to all of you who buy online courses or sell online courses. Or if you have been on the fence about whether or not online courses are worth selling, this is also for you. Because one of the common income models these days is to create lots of content and hope that your followers will be so kind as to make some donations so that you can actually have a living wage for making content. And I'm gonna give you the numbers from my experience towards the end of this video, but I first want to build a foundation for why I believe it is worthwhile to not only buy online courses while it's the same equation. Why should we buy something when information is all out there for free, right? In fact, back in 2014, 2013, 2014, when I had my spiritual breakdown and breakthrough, I got into this really idealistic state. And I don't even think it's idealism anymore. I think it's just lack of thinking things through. So I got into the state where I'm like, all information should be free. I should just give everything that I know away for free. And this will just help humanity. It'll help everyone faster. And hopefully some of them will decide to work with me one-to-one as a coach, et cetera. And I think if you are only wanting to do one-to-one services as a consultant or a coach, and that's your business model, then I think creating lots of content, lots of helpful, authentic content is great because people start to trust your expertise. They start to learn from you. And they said, well, instead of doing it myself, can you help me do it? Or can you walk me through it personally from my own situation, et cetera? So that's what I used to believe back in 2014. Like everything should be free. And then what happened was I came to this realization that information is valuable to the person who actually puts in some kind of signal, or in other words, they invest in it to say, no, this is actually valuable enough for me that I'm going to pay something for it and now I'm going to use it. Now, I don't mean that the more you pay for information, the more you will use it because you may, you and I don't know, you have the experience, but I certainly have had the experience of paying lots of money, like $2,000. Yes, in my early days, I paid $1,000 or $2,000 for online courses. Many of them are sitting on the shelf to the right of me that I barely used. So paying more doesn't mean that we're going to use it more but paying something is a powerful signal of commitment to yourself. And if it's like a purchase where you actually have to ask for permission from your spouse partner or just it's expensive enough where you have to like ask for and say, should I buy this thing? Then you're also signaling your commitment to them that, okay, you're going to actually use this, right? Because you're going to pay for this. But let's talk about how this common objections like, oh, information should be, information wants to be free. You can Google it. This is phrase, information wants to be free. And so therefore we should not charge for information. Just give it all away for free. Now, let me ask you this. If information wants to be free, why is it that millions of people, myself included, earn money by providing information? Information wants to be free? Well, the evidence says no because lots and lots of people, and I would say an increasing number over the years as for example, the Western world moves more and more away from a manufacturing economy into an information economy, much of the more and more jobs and businesses are created because people have valuable information and they provide it to others. Or here's the thing, when information becomes abundant, it becomes valuable when someone understands how to curate and structure that information to be valuable, to be helpful for others. So it's not that the more information's out there, the less business opportunity there is in selling online courses. The opposite may be true. I mean, when there was not enough information, yes, it's very clear. Oh, I need information. I couldn't find it. Let me buy it from somebody who has it. But like I said, the opposite is also true when there's an abundance of information we're all overwhelmed by, you know, how many blog posts, how many videos to watch, how many podcasts that people listen to and someone comes along says, okay, I understand that your problem is this or your yearning is to experience this. Well, guess what? Let me curate it down into a step-by-step sequence that if you went into the step-by-step, you're gonna save yourself tons of time because I did the research and I organize it all for you. So let me ask you this. Is it worth it for you, for someone to organize a bunch of data and information for you into a step-by-step sequence that actually helps you to improve your life? I assume the answer is yes. Otherwise, what's the alternative? You're gonna have to figure that out yourself. You're gonna have to wade through the hundreds or thousands of blog posts, articles, podcast episodes, Google searches, that the content creator, the course creator already spent all that time and put it together. So is it valuable for you? Well, obviously, because you usually save yourself tons of time. And the other thing is that sometimes you don't even know what to look for, right? Yes, as you get into the research, you'll start to get a sense of what the landscape of the topic is. But then wouldn't it save you dozens of hours or hundreds of hours or more? Wouldn't it be valuable for you to save dozens or hundreds of hours to get sequence information that you can actually apply? So instead of spending 100, 200 hours, probably more for most course creators, instead of spending a couple hundred hours to try to figure it out, you can spend the same 100 to 200 hours applying the information that has been sequenced for you. So you move your life forward so much faster. So now that's on one perspective. The other perspective is, don't you think that somebody who takes the energy and time to organize all that for you, don't you think they deserve to be compensated? Or no, they should do it for free. Why should they do it for free? Well, because they do it for free then, and we appreciate them with our likes and with our shares and with our comments, then maybe they'll get famous enough that they'll be able to make a living from donations. Again, I'll talk about the numbers towards later on, because I made the experiment myself. Can I make a living on donations or can I sell? Should I sell courses? Well, you'll find out. I'm not trying to make you watch the end of the video, but I'm kind of setting some more foundation here. The other reason why online courses, even offline courses, I guess, as we go back to in-person events, the other reason why courses are worth buying or selling, again, I'm addressing those of you who are like, something feels ethically wrong about selling information that I can easily find on Google. Here's the thing, lots of information aren't easily discoverable by Google. If the course creator has had personal experiences, their own journey of experimenting with lots of different things themselves, and now they are gathering all the data from their own experiences and presenting it in a course, you can't find it on Google or whatever because they didn't put it out there for free. It's something that, the school of hard knocks is where they got their PhD, and now they're putting it into, it's like, may you not have to go through the years of trial and error that I did to create this solution, to create this experience, to create this transformation that I now have. So the creator's own personal experience cannot be found on Google or YouTube or wherever you search. They themselves went through that, and then now they're putting it together, and isn't that worth something? No, they should give it away for free. Really? So let me just ask you this, this is a very basic question. Do teachers deserve an income? Do teachers deserve to be paid? I hope you say yes. Do teachers deserve to be paid? Okay, those teachers deserve to be paid, then why should information be free? Information, especially that's organized and sequenced into a step by step, you have this problem, you apply these steps and at the end you have a transformation that's worthwhile to you. Why should that be free? If teachers deserve to be paid? George, teachers deserve to be paid, but online nowadays it's online busking, right? Like buskers of people who like play music on the streets and then they people throw coins and dollar bills and hopefully five or $10 or $20 bills into their bucket to try to, they should do that. They should just give away everything and be allowed as possible and then people donate. Again, I will address the numbers, but let me go to another reason why. A curated learning community is valuable. How can you find a dedicated group of students who all care about a topic that you want to learn? Can you go to go under many YouTube videos that are popular? Sure, there's a little community there. You can go to Reddit, you can find a Facebook group, you can go to and some Instagram influencer if they're talking about the topic, maybe there are people within the comment section that you can gather together, try to gather your own community, but have you tried organizing your own study group and keeping it actually not having a fall apart and you have to do all the work of organizing a study group to study something together? That's what a teacher has done.  Well, obviously they are interested they signal their interest by paying for the course. So a curated learning community is difficult to actually develop unless you buy into a course. And now you're like, oh, the student directory, you can now, it's proven that everybody has bought into this and they're interested in this topic. So at least, or maybe the teacher will create some Q and A calls or some coaching calls where people gather live and you can find the other people there or sometimes there's like a private group of students that this teacher has created for that. So curated learning community, very valuable because you have accountability, you have ideas bouncing with each other and it's all done. The other benefit is in a private setting because courses are private. You have to pay for it to be able to access both the content and the community and those comments, et cetera, right? So now let's talk about finally, we've gotten here. Why not just make money from donations, George? Why not have the model, George, be so generous that you just put your best stuff out there? George, I bet you if you put all of your courses that you charge $120 full, you put it out for free on YouTube? Oh my God, people would flock and just people would, you would become famous and then you could just get donations, George. Have you ever thought of that?  And then I started to do that. I said, let me give my best, even the technical information, the step I step, how to run Facebook ads or whatever. I mean, back then I didn't know Facebook ads but other specific technical marketing things. I put it all out there for free. I did that for two years, for two years I put it all out there for free and I had a Patreon page. Yes, back in 2014, 2015, I had a Patreon page. I had a YouTube channel with all my free stuff. I had a podcast where I gave away everything for free. I just tried to give everything for free. I said, please, if you like this, please donate at my Patreon page or you can use PayPal or whatever you want. Guess what? Did all that hard work after two years? How much was I making in donations? $500, 500 bucks. After two years, $500 a month was the high side of any given month. That was a lot of hard work. And then on the lesser months, it was more like $100 a month. A few hundred bucks a month. I mean, I live in United States. You can't live off of that, especially not anymore these days. Now, guess what happened? I then switched to selling online courses. So 2016, I started selling online courses again. And within two years, guess how much I was making? $5,000 a month. I'm just, I'm not bragging. I'm just giving you my own data, my own experience.  But here's what happened. So, George, why didn't it work? Why don't you think it worked? And why are you making 10 times the amount by selling online courses? Here's why. When information is freely available and abundant, like I said, people don't value it as much. It's like, oh, I can always come back to this later. I'll just save this YouTube video to my watch later and then watch later. How many of you actually watch all your watch later videos? Oh, blog posts looks really valuable. Let me go ahead and bookmark this and then I'll come back to it later because remember the psychology, your psychology, when you're consuming free information, when you consume free information, do you sit down and go, okay, I'm gonna spend one hour to consume free information now. So let me go ahead and get a notepad and pen and study diligently this free information and input. Well, okay, maybe like one to 5% of people might do that. Maybe I don't know what that, but most of us don't. What do most of us do? We're like sitting back on our phones, scrolling through free information because we're trying to relax when we're consuming YouTube videos or blog posts, free stuff, we're relaxing. We're not being in study mode, but when you buy an online course, especially if there are live sessions of some kind, then you're like scheduled to be there, right? Then you're like, oh, I paid for this thing. I better show up and be a student. And so people actually, ironically, they end up, even if it's the same information, one is free, one is paid, they're more likely to actually have the paid one change their life because they're taking it much more seriously. They've paid the money or that there's a live session, they're showing up for it. So like I said, and this whole online busking thing, you know, get money from Patreon, just put everything out there for free. It's not new. It's this 2,500 year old tradition of Donna, like from Buddhism, right? Like I'm sure other religious traditions have this too, where Buddhist monks would basically go around with a begging bowl, but they would just, they would teach for free and support others and they would just beg, just get donations. But that was much more doable because it was an in-person community. It's like you knew the monk and the monk probably helped you with some personal issues or whatever. Like, oh yeah, the monk's coming around and then it's like paying them, donating them. Well, also there was like community pressure or expectation to donate to the monk. So there was this in-person village, it worked, it worked. Oh, there's our monk, there's our shaman or there's our holy person and we're donating to that person because that's how they make a living. Online now, you can't do it.  No, 100,000 real followers who engage with us, then we might be able to make enough from donations to make a few thousand dollars a month. Yes, those are the numbers, people. Okay, same thing with YouTube, making money from YouTube ads, really. I had, I have over a thousand YouTube videos and most of my videos don't have enough views to even make a dollar a month. And then I got lucky in one of my YouTube videos, my Zoom tutorial at the beginning of the pandemic suddenly took off and I had millions of views and I was able to make like $25,000 from that one video. And I've tried to duplicate that for other ones, $25, $10. I mean, like I said, you have to have a huge audience, 100,000 followers or more to be able to make a living wage versus a thousand followers, a thousand people who follow you and you sell courses, you can make a living wage pretty easy, a few thousand dollars a month, no problem by selling online courses. Okay, so basically, I'm hoping that I've given you a good enough reason. And the other thing I want to say as we complete this video is that when you put something, if you sell online course, you put something together and then you sell it, you feel, you'll try it out, you'll feel much more responsible for making it better than if you just put something out there for free. Now, I know the people who have large followings, they have really high quality content because now they have a large following. So now they have a lot of pressure to put out high quality content to keep their large following. But for most of us, we'll start out with a large following. So how many years are gonna take you to get to 100,000 followers? Have you tried? I've tried. I've been on YouTube for years, 15,000 followers. Years, years of hard work over a thousand videos. So like I said, I don't recommend online busking or free content for donations. I think it's the exception for those, the people who are able to do it are like a very small exception. You have to be highly entertaining and charismatic or you just happen to chance upon some sliver of knowledge that people are just looking for or if you're really good at keyword research, you wanna make videos. But even so, it's still extremely competitive, so much easier for those of us who are less entertaining, myself included, and who have pretty common knowledge, myself included. Easy, not hard to make $5,000 to $15,000 a month selling online courses with just a few hundred or a few thousand followers, which is fairly easy to do compared to getting to 100,000 followers. So I hope this is helpful and I look forward to your comments and your questions below. I hope this will help you to shift your mindset about whether teachers are worth supporting and whether you might want to become a paid teacher as well. So thank you so much and I'll see you in the next video.