Today I'm going to talk to you about what's been going on in our country for over half a year now, not just in the United States but around the world. Some of this we all know. But we've been getting, let's say, not the entire story for much of the time, and we've had to wait to hear additional experts chime in to say, wait a minute, maybe the first experts were all wrong. It's been hard to know exactly what to think and what numbers we ought to be looking at and when it comes to this COVID-19, should we be looking at cases, should we be looking at percent positive rates, hospitalizations, deaths, all kinds of numbers have been thrown at us, some with context, some without. So I'm going to spend a little time reviewing this and making a bit of a clarion call to enjoy human life the way it's meant to be enjoyed. Now since March we've experienced lockdowns and restrictions of various kinds, supposedly all in the name of science, you understand. If you don't support these things, you must hate science. That's the intellectual level of the conversation. We were told we need 15 days to flatten the curve, 15 days. I believe we're on day number 209 of 15 days to flatten the curve. The idea of flattening the curve, as you'll remember, remember the old days when the concern was we don't want to overwhelm the hospitals. We can't cure this thing, but at least we could get the hospitals in the condition they need to be in and allow them to be able to cope with reasonable numbers of people and we would flatten out the number of hospitalizations and deaths over time so as to allow the hospitals to be able to cope with them rather than have everybody arriving at the hospital all at once. Okay, then you started to see on social media all your friends saying the hospitals are overwhelmed.  Like your friends couldn't even be creative enough to come up with a different word. They all have the same word. The hospitals are overwhelmed because their other friend said the hospitals are overwhelmed because the other friend said that. What actually happened was that in April alone, 1.4 million jobs in health care were lost because far from being overwhelmed, the hospitals were mostly empty. As a matter of fact, in May NPR ran a story with this headline about all those field hospitals that they built because of all the overflow that was supposedly going to happen. Headline, US field hospitals stand down most without treating any COVID-19 patients. What was going on here? The hospitals were never overwhelmed at any time with the possible brief exception of New York City. In California, we begin to see how the goalposts begin to be changed. What they were worried about at the time they were telling us about flattening the curve was 30,000 hospitalizations. We really have to be careful about hitting that number. The current hospitalization number in California, as of this time, we're in October 2020, is just over 3,000. And they're still so panicked that they won't open anything. Although they'll open a little tiny thing and you have to put your mask on in between bites while you're eating in a restaurant. So it's one-tenth what they feared and they still... So there are state after state after state, Washington, D.C., not a state, but nevertheless in Washington, D.C., that's an example of one of many places in the U.S. where the numbers all indicate, have indicated for months that the state is clearly at the phase justifying reopening. The numbers clearly indicate from what they said at the beginning, we need to reach such and such that they've reached it and now they keep changing it. Now it's not hospitalizations anymore. Now it's quote-unquote cases. And as we'll talk about the way the testing is being done, even the New York Times had to say, maybe your coronavirus test shouldn't have been positive. Even the New York Times was reduced to admitting this. That as many as 90% of the tests because the testing is so sensitive are yielding just viral debris that isn't infectious at all. But you've got to go and isolate yourself for X number of days for no reason. And we're going to use this number and we're going to wait till this number hits zero, which even just given the problem of false positives is impossible to ever happen. So you can't have your life back in some states unless you more or less take it back. That's what they've done to us. Oh, also in Washington, D.C., the public schools have been closed, but they put a cap on 11 students per room in private schools no matter how big the room is that basically cripples the private schools for no reason. There's no scientific basis for that. Then it became you can have your life back once there's a vaccine. What? There might never be a vaccine. As Martin Koldorf of Harvard Medical School puts it, the timeline for a vaccine is anywhere between six months from now and never. So at some point we have to figure out how to live with this kind of situation. Well, then when it started to look like maybe we might get a vaccine, then the story became even with a vaccine, you can't have your life back. And if you object to that, you're the problem. You're not listening to the science. Everything that brought people joy was abruptly taken away. And every time it looked like it might creep back in, you'd get another headline about how you can't have this back, can't have that back. This will never be the same. Maybe we'll never have sports again. And it's almost like they take a perverse delight in this. Well, if ever there were a use for the expression get bent, I would say it's right about now. Now, of course, people will say, wait a minute, what do you just want people to die? Again, this is the intellectual level of the conversation.  How do you talk to somebody like that? So in order to do that, I'm going to appeal to the above mid-wit level population. And I'm going to remind people of the important lesson in Henry Haslett's great book, Economics in One Lesson. This is a book that's sold millions of copies. And Haslett's one lesson, as we all know in this room, is that if you're going to evaluate an economic policy, it's not enough to evaluate the short-term consequences for one earmarked group. Any blockhead can do that. If you want to know the long-term consequences, the real consequence of it, you look at the long-term effects on everybody, not the short-term effects on an earmarked group. For example, suppose the government taxes the public to build a stadium. Well, the mid-wit will simply point to the stadium and say, hey, look at this wonderful thing that the government did. It's a stadium. And yes, we can all see with our physical eyes that there's a stadium there. But they think that's the entirety of the analysis. A stadium has somehow appeared. There's no thought of costs, opportunity costs, where the money came from, where it would have gone otherwise.  To understand the fullness of the policy, you have to be able to think and see with your mind's eye. So likewise with rent control, people think you impose rent control and people get lower rents. And that's the entirety of the analysis as far as they're concerned. There's nothing further we need to consider. We just take these fat cats and just force them to lower rents, and then everybody gets lower rent. And that's as far as the mid-wit is concerned, that's the end of the discussion, because that's what he sees with his physical eyes. But for people capable of seeing with their mind's eye, they ask other questions like, how many people are going to start building low-cost rental housing if they know that this ceiling has been imposed? There will obviously be far less housing built, which will make the problem of housing people worse. We also know that at these particular rates, you have a million people, a surfeit of demand.  You don't have to fix that leaky pipe. You don't have to do any maintenance, because if somebody's upset about it, you've got eight million other people who would be very happy to take that person's place. So in other words, if you see with your mind's eye, you understand that rent control is a lot more complicated than just, we forced them to lower the rent, and it's low for everybody. And in fact, if for some reason you wanted to lower rents through the means of government impositions, you would actually want to do the exact opposite of rent control. You would want to control every single price in the entire economy except rents, because that would make entrepreneurs not want to go into the production of anything other than rental property, because everything else would be unprofitable. The one thing they could produce would be rental property, which would lead to a collapse in rental prices, which would be great for everybody. So literally the opposite of what these people recommend would be the best thing. But the point is we have to think about all the consequences for everybody. Well, the same thing goes for public health, because my talk could be called public health in one lesson. Because yes, if you simply focus monomaniacally on one virus, you might be able to say, look at what we did for this one virus. You might be able to say that. I'm not even sure they can say that, but they might be able to say, look what we've done for people with this one virus. And then being midwits, they leave the discussion right there. They don't bother to investigate the 17 other aspects of health that have catastrophically collapsed because of that one thing they did. All they say is look at what we did in the short run for this targeted group, instead of saying look at the long run consequences for everybody. And because they don't look at that, it's not even mentioned. When was the last time Dr. Fauci, who is viewed superstitiously by everybody, even acknowledged that there are collateral damages from lockdowns. Even mentioned them, nothing. And so they are therefore able to turn around and say, you just want people to die. Okay. Well, let's play that game. They want to play it, let's play it. How about this? We know, for example, coming out of the UK, that there will be more likely to be, at least as many, if not more preventable cancer deaths than COVID deaths because of the diversion of resources into COVID and the panicking of everybody about it. And so we read Richard Sullivan, professor of cancer and global health at King's College London, director of its Institute for Cancer Policy saying, the number of deaths due to the disruption of cancer services is likely to outweigh the number of deaths from the coronavirus itself. The cessation and delay of cancer care will cause considerable avoidable suffering. Cancer screening services have stopped, which means we will miss our chance to catch many cancers when they are treatable and curable, such as cervical, bowel, and breast. When we do restart normal service delivery after the lockdown is lifted, the backlog of cases will be a huge challenge to the health care system. We read October 6th in the Daily Mail coming out of the UK that Health Secretary Matt Hancock says, cancer patients may only be guaranteed treatment if COVID-19 stays under control. How about that? Almost, and this is the Daily Mail, which is much more honest than the American press. Almost two and a half million people missed out on cancer screening, referrals, or treatment at the height of lockdown, even though the NHS was never overwhelmed. They had the honesty in the UK to say that. Experts now fear the number of people dying as a result of delays triggered by the treatment of coronavirus patients could even end up being responsible for as many deaths as the pandemic itself. Now, we won't see that kind of effect right away. It's not like a huge number of cancer patients are going to die immediately in 2020, but it does mean that people who might have lived an extra 15 to 20 years may live just another three or four, and we'll see those numbers in the coming years. Then we heard a United Nations report in April saying that economic hardship generated by the radical interruptions of commerce could result in hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020. UNICEF later increased that number to 1.2 million child deaths. And at Oxford University, Professor Sinitra Gupta has reminded us several times in recent weeks and months of the UN's prediction that as many as 130 million people could be at risk of starvation because of the lockdowns, because of the possibility of famine in several dozen places around the world. Now who are the ones who don't care about human life? But that's not all, because in the United States, in Oakland, California, we have Benjamin Miller of the Well-Being Trust who tells us as co-author of a study on deaths of despair, so that's drug or alcohol abuse or suicide, that an excess, that is to say, above what would normally occur of 75,000 deaths will occur as a result of all this. Not to mention the CDC itself estimates that in the United States alone, there will be more than 93,000 excess non-COVID deaths this year because of what's been going on, including over 42,000 from cardiovascular conditions, over 10,000 from diabetes, and 3,600 from cancer. A recent UK study just out found that the risk of death was increased because of lockdowns by 53% among seniors with dementia and another 123% among seniors with severe mental illness. For four decades, Indian Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyati rescued thousands of children from slavery and human trafficking, and he fears that that's going to be reversed. He says the biggest threat is that millions of children may fall back into slavery, trafficking, child labor, child marriage. Well, with millions of families being pushed into poverty, they're being pressured to do something, to put their children to work to make ends meet. So this is being done. They're trying these lockdowns, even in the developing world where people live hand-to-mouth. When you live hand-to-mouth, it means that every day you earn enough money to feed yourself for that day. And they're being told to stay home for weeks and months. I think we see where this is going. Now, the people of Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, when they've got wind of their government's lockdown plans, they rose up and said we're not abiding by this, there will be no lockdown, and so there wasn't. We could learn from them. Even the Atlantic had to admit, when you ask them to stay home, in many cases, you're asking them to starve. In the UK, the Telegraph says, the absurd demand that developing countries adopt economically disastrous lockdowns is driving untold misery. How often is that mentioned in the US? Ever? Any of our people ever mentioned that?  Because now we're being told, maybe you can have your life back in the spring of 2022, not 15 days to flatten the curve, probably spring of 2022, you can start getting back all these pleasurable things that make life worth living. Okay. So, it seems to me that the crazies who think that public health should mean a monomaniacal fixation on one virus, and then pretending that none of the other stuff is happening, should have to answer for this a little bit more. Now, some of this stuff that I'm talking to you about now appears in, wait for it, the free e-book I wrote on this subject. Your Facebook friends are wrong about the lockdown. They're even wronger than you thought these people. Wrong as wrong can be if you value human life and flourishing. So, in the United States, you can get this free book by just texting the word lockdown to the number 33444, and you'll like it because it smashes these SOBs completely. Or you can get it at wrongaboutlockdown.com. Yes, I bought that domain. I was so happy to nab that one. Now, not to mention that, of course, over the course of this, people's life savings have been depleted, their livelihoods have been destroyed, and things that give their lives meaning and fulfillment abruptly removed. So, we're supposed to believe that all that matters is just biological existence. And this prompts some interesting philosophical questions. If I could live to be 120 and enjoy robust health for all those years, but the price was we would destroy all the architectural treasures of Europe, we would abolish music altogether, and we would restrict social life to five percent of its formal level, would I choose that? Who would? Human happiness is not some optional extra. These things, like close intimate relationships or so-called large gatherings, like concerts, theater, lectures, church, sporting events, the arts in general, if you think these are merely dispensable adjuncts to human life and flourishing, you have no business being in charge of anything. These are life itself. And as I've said in a previous talk, for anybody who performs in front of an audience and particularly think about your children, dancers, musicians, athletes, magicians, comedians, singers, actors, whatever, they're basically being told maybe you can never have this, maybe you can never ever do what brings your soul happiness. And yeah, maybe we can't have these until we have a vaccine, said Dr. Ezek Emmanuel. We may have to give up cherished things for a long time, he says, things like schooling and income and contact with our friends and extended family for at least 18 months. Maybe this talk could also be called get bent. Well, another terrifying statistic came out recently, showing the grim, if entirely predictable effects, all this inhuman regimentation has been having on the young, particularly those between 18 and 24. Now, the federal government has a substance abuse and mental health services administration and they, among other things, look at percentages of people who have considered suicide within the previous 12 months. Now, typically before all these lockdowns occurred in the 18 to 25 group, it fluctuates between just about 7%, just under 7% and 11% of those people have contemplated suicide in the previous 12 months. Well, we now know that just in June, not 12 months, just one month, it's now over 25% of them have contemplated suicide in just one month. Now, why is that?  Yeah, that's selfish. That right there. That's selfish. One of my friends has a friend in Melbourne, Australia which is under a severe lockdown. Here's what this friend wrote. It's been three months since I saw another human face besides my partners. Seven months since my partner and I had a little break together in the form of going and having a coffee down the street.  I can't think of anything to look forward to because I don't know when we will be allowed to do anything. Just go for a drive, go to the forest, just go somewhere together, far from all this. We are not allowed. The police could enter our homes at any point and arrest us if we say the wrong thing online. That has happened. This doesn't feel human. I don't smile. I don't laugh. I worked out the other day and felt nothing, no pain. Nothing would register as pain. I couldn't feel anything. I feel far away from myself. Sometimes I forget how long the day has been going for. Does it matter? You're not allowed to leave even if family members are terminally ill. They could die before we are let out of Melbourne. We got told it isn't a good enough reason to be let out. You aren't allowed more than five kilometers from your house. You aren't allowed to buy a takeaway coffee and sit under a tree or on the ground anywhere that isn't your house. This isn't human. This isn't human. This isn't human. This isn't human. There is no empathy here. No price is too high. Suicide is not too great a price to pay. Self-harm is not too great a price to pay. Structural brain changes in large portions of the population is not too high a price to pay. Do you know what prolonged social isolation does to the brain? We are made to feel it does not matter because all we are are numbers. We are not people. We are the masses without a say. Without a time period to look forward to when we can hug again. I am sharing my experience because you should know the truth. Sincerely, a faceless number in Melbourne. And we're the ones who don't care about human lives.  Over at Stanford, Dr. J. Botticharia put it this way. If you get zero COVID, I don't know if it's even technically feasible. We know that we're going to have to destroy our society in order to get it. Essentially, it's so high a cost that it's not worth it. Oh, we're just doing it until there's a vaccine. But in just half a year of doing it, the consequences have been to quote Dr. Botticharia again, catastrophic. Suneitra Gupta of Oxford, whom I mentioned before, who's been called the world's preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist, says it's a good thing for young and healthy people to be exposed. She says, this is how we have always managed viruses. Why is this so different? If we keep introducing restrictions and lockdowns while we wait for a vaccine, it will be the young that suffer the most, particularly those from more deprived backgrounds. We can't keep doing this. It would be an injustice. One Yale professor came back with, well, no serious scientist is calling for lockdowns everywhere all the time. Some of them are. So that's not even true. Some of them are. But all these other scientists want are just sudden lockdowns here, there, and everywhere, then partial resumptions, then lockdowns, all the while with the arts completely shut down. Oh, yeah, that's a whole lot different. We cannot run a society like this. And without the arts as Professor Gupta put it, what are we alive for in the first place? What kind of a life does this portend? Everything that makes life worth living. Now, we hear this a lot. If you knew someone who died of it, maybe you'd take this virus seriously. Well, how about this? I'll take the virus seriously, whatever that means. If you take seriously, or even mention even once, the 17 areas of non-COVID life where your supposedly anti-COVID strategy has left wreckage everywhere. How about that? Is that a deal? Or how about this one? All the people who have died from COVID, all those people had families, and we should honor that and respect that. Of course, of course, no one's denying that. But how about the 1.4 million people who, according to The New York Times, will die of tuberculosis because of the lockdowns over and above the number of tuberculosis deaths we would have had otherwise? Do those people have families? We don't have to think about that because they don't exist. Because don't forget, public health just means the monomaniacal fixation on one virus. Tuberculosis, sorry, didn't make the cut. Those people's families don't matter. They're not even going to be mentioned. How about the extra 385,000 malaria deaths? The extra half a million HIV deaths? Do those people have families? Can we not be narcissists for five seconds and consider that maybe other people matter too? Not just your friends, but other people and their friends. How about that for a change? 130 million people at risk of starvation from the lockdowns? And we're even having this debate anymore? But woods, you'll say, you've got to listen to the science. Listen to the science has become the rallying cry of the most irrational, anecdote-driven, fact-free believers in voodoo I have encountered in my lifetime. I had Martin Koldorf on my podcast, The Tom Wood Show. I actually bought the domain tomspodcast.com. You can get there very easily. He is an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. And he told me that it may be that a lot of scientists think lockdowns are the way to go. He said, but I basically talked to infectious disease epidemiologists. And among that group, from what I can see, a majority of us are against the lockdowns, have been from the beginning. And we favor a totally different strategy of what we call focused protection of vulnerable groups. But yeah, the infectious disease epidemiologist, he said, we're not calling for lockdowns. But isn't that funny? We don't really hear from these people very much, do we? By some odd coincidence, we don't hear from them. Can you believe that people who shout at you for jogging without a mask or who hurriedly cross the street when they see you so that they can maintain social distance? You don't get COVID by a chance passing on the street. Those people don't get to lecture you about science, okay? If they themselves were less ignorant of the science, they'd be embarrassed by their irrational behavior. The listen to the science people warned us about opening schools. The results have been fine. Even the Atlantic just ran an article like within the past 24 hours saying, hmm, the crazy warnings over the summer seem to have been overblown. Well, there's an understatement. At the universities, we've had so far 70,000 so-called cases, three hospitalizations, and zero deaths. Then there's the general craziness. In the county where the city of Gainesville, Florida is, they established a one person per 1,000 square feet rule for private businesses. And at a meeting, the county commission chair was asked to justify this. Now, did he justify this on the basis of, well, science tells us that one person, I mean, you already know the answer, right? None of this has, this is all voodoo. None of it has to do with science. His answer was, well, we put that in there, quote, because it's easy math for everybody to do. I mean, if I were one of these, quote, unquote, listen to the science people, I would be mortified right now. I mean, I feel like I am listening to the actual science, not the voodoo practitioners, but the actual science. Lockdowns aren't science, by the way. There's no book that they're following that tells them lockdowns are the way to go. So when we get told, well, the reason that lockdown didn't work is that you didn't do it right, this is based on literally nothing. And I asked again, Professor Koldover about this. He said, there's essentially no chance of eradicating a virus in this way. What you can do is cause a huge number of ancillary problems that will be worse, but you won't eradicate it. Now they can get away with that because we just don't mention those ancillary problems. We shouldn't even call them ancillary. If I show you charts of different American states or different countries, and we look at cases or deaths or whatever, you will not be able to tell me which one of these places, which one's locked down, when they locked down, how hard they locked down, when they lifted the lockdown, whether they had a mask mandate, when they imposed the mask mandate, and when and if they lifted the mask mandate, you have absolutely no way of knowing that. Now if these things were as powerful as we're told, they're darn well better be some clear and obvious way of distinguishing one jurisdiction from another, and there is not. Therefore, it is voodoo. And I think the more we use the word voodoo, the better. I have an article linked on a special page I put together that goes through and justifies this and looks and says, look, obviously the lockdowns did not solve the problem. So you can find that on my website, tomwoods.com slash COVID. And you'll find some other very interesting things there as well. But in the interest of time, I'll refer you to that there. Same with mask mandates. Now, is it possible that certain types of masks in certain types of situations when worn correctly could have some minor effect? Sure it is. But the religious fervor behind masks, which it clearly cannot be justified, because we're being told if we had worn masks sooner, if we just wear masks for six weeks, this will all stop or whatever. Again, go to tomwoods.com slash COVID. I've got the charts up there for place, after place, after place, after place. And on each chart, it's indicated exactly when the mask mandate went into effect. And you ask yourself, if I hadn't told you where on that chart the mask mandate had gone into effect, would you have been able to tell? Would you have had any idea? So if they're that effective, they're so effective that the director of the CDC says they're better than a vaccine, you would think we'd be able to see it on the charts. Can't see it at all. Nothing. Oh, it would be worse if we did. Come on. We should see something. Nothing. There's a guy on Twitter, Eric Topol, T-O-P-O-L, who is the most, one of the big, the world is ending, apocalyptic people on the virus. And he told us, the reason Japan did well is their government shipped masks to the people. Okay, if you needed any more evidence, this guy is a total BS artist. There you go. Because number one, yeah, they sent enough masks to last people one day. Secondly, the masks were all the wrong size. This is a government, after all. They're all child-size. Nobody could fit them. So everybody in Japan laughed and joked about these masks, and nobody wore them.  He doesn't know a thing. Again, look at the charts for the Philippines, the most mask-compliant country in the world. In Hawaii, he doesn't have a neighbor for 2,000 miles, and they wore masks religiously. Didn't do a thing in terms of cases. What exactly would the graphs have to look like in order for the lockdowners to say, maybe none of this does any good? What would they have to look like? I think they'd have to look exactly the way they look now. Meanwhile, in the Sun Belt, I live in Florida, the spike there fizzled out on its own everywhere, despite different policies. We were told, oh, what they're going to be, I saw on Twitter, we're going to have half a million deaths, we're going to have dozens of New Yorks if they don't lock down. We didn't lock down. We didn't come anywhere near that. In Florida, the only thing that happened in some places was that some bars closed, but what really happened was, the bars pretended to be restaurants, and they kept going, and that was it. And I guess when the virus was tricked by the bars pretending to be restaurants, I mean, what kind of BS is this? California, where they had this massive lockdown, their curve looks exactly like Florida's. And a friend told me at his work, they're scared of an applicant from Florida, and they said, we got to be careful. They do things differently there. Their curves are the same. Paul Krugman, when Governor DeSantis said he was opening up Florida, Paul Krugman said, oh, that's very unwise. They're still having over 100 deaths per day in Florida.  Not having 100 deaths per day. They're reporting 100 deaths per day. Now, reporting date is very different from actual date of death. So for example, I just looked at October 1st. October 1st, there were, let's see, I guess, 130 deaths reported. 65 of them were in September. 54 were in August. Another 11 were in July. There are no 100 deaths occurring per day. And with hospitalizations plunging, it's not like three months from now when we recount today, it will turn out to be 100.  I don't know, I don't know. And now we've learned from the New York Times, as I mentioned before, that up to 90% of these tests could be of, that are coming back positive, could be of people who are not contagious and therefore being ordered to isolate for no reason. Because the PCR tests that they're using are being calibrated in a way that they're super sensitive in the United States. So in Europe, they're using about, let's say, 30 cycles. In the U.S., it's 37 to 40. In Arizona, it's 40. At 40, they're detecting nothing. That is completely pointless. And most of what's going on in Arizona is at 40. So in Washington, D.C., a fellow named Phil Kerpin from American Commitment asked them, you know, if, what's the cycle threshold that you're using for these tests? And D.C. Health got back to him. D.C. Health, quote, does not have information about cycle thresholds. What kind of a joke is that? So the tests could be completely meaningless and they're not even gonna, but we haven't even looked into it. Now finally, an immunologist, like somebody who is an expert on immunology, like Dr. Fauci, is not taught how to balance public health concerns. People say, oh, just listen to the experts and you won't listen to the expert. Well, I feel like I am listening to the experts, but there are some questions that no expert can answer or that some experts aren't trained to answer. There's no class that an immunologist takes that teaches, well, if you lock everybody in their houses, there could be other effects of this. He doesn't learn anything like that. And then here's how you balance it. Well, if you do this, there'll be this many of that. He doesn't learn anything like that. So it's just, again, it's rank superstition. Like this is some kind of priesthood. It's rank superstition to think that Dr. Fauci could view this so holistically as to have the overall answer. We have to answer what is worth doing and what isn't. We could all drive our cars at five miles an hour and save a lot of lives. We don't think that's worth doing. We don't wait for Dr. Fauci to tell us what the speed limit should be. Okay, we understand the absurdity of that. And here's what Dr. Badacharya said. I love this guy. He's from Stanford. He is the consummate professional. He's not like me, gets really worked up and that makes him all the more effective because he's slicing and dicing with his calmly delivered sentences. So here's what he said about Dr. Fauci and it's about time this crazy priesthood was taken down a peg. Dr. Fauci has been involved in infectious disease control for a very long time. He's a preeminent scientist for a good reason. He's an expert. But in early February, March, we sort of put him on a pedestal to essentially give his knowledge about a whole range of things, some of which were in his control and knowledge set and some of which were not. And I saw him a few months ago where he very humbly said, look, I'm giving you my expertise as an infectious disease expert on how to manage this disease. I'm not looking at the broader policy context. Exactly my point. Dr. Bhattacharya again. We think about science as giving us all the answers, but that's a mistake. What science does is tell us if we do A, we might get B. It's up to non-scientists to make a decision. Do we want to get B if we know the cost of getting B are C, D and E? Do we really want zero COVID? Well, again, only a blockhead would think that's a scientific question. That's a philosophical question. And again, this is where he says, if you get zero COVID, we know that we're going to have to destroy our society in order to get it. We'll have to get rid of all our freedoms. We'll have to make sure that very few people interact with each other. Essentially, it's so high a cost that it's not worth it. Science can tell us, here's how you can minimize the probability of getting zero COVID, but it's up to non-scientists to decide whether it's worth it. You can't put one person on a pedestal and ask him to make that decision for society. I love that I live in a democratic society where those kinds of decisions aren't up to experts. It's up to people deciding together through electoral processes what we value. That's Bhattacharya. So of course, no expert can tell you if the costs are worth the benefits because no expert can know your value scale. So when people say we need to listen to the experts as they urge us to dismantle everything that makes a society function and brings people joy, they have no idea what they're talking about. This is a philosophical question, not one that a scientific source would have the standing to answer. Unfortunately for some people, science is not an ongoing search for the truth and whose findings can help us make good decisions. It's a kind of priesthood and whatever scientists tell us about anything, no matter how far removed from their areas of expertise, these people will obey and the dangers of that should be obvious. Not only do we have a priesthood that isn't even thinking about trade-offs or collateral damage from their COVID monomania, but we also have tens of millions of devoted followers who will help enforce whatever lunacy the priesthood proposes and your hopes, dreams and livelihood will be placed on that altar. Of that you can be sure. Now what should have been done instead? Well, here I refer you to Drs. Bhattacharya and Koldorf and Gupta who have a recent statement explaining that so-called focused protection makes much more sense and is certainly feasible. That is to say, you give young people their lives back. Have the arts be resumed immediately? And again, Dr. Gupta said, why are we even living? What is the point of living? If living is simply having a pulse, I could do that in a windowless room eating cans of navy beans for 75 years. Is that a human life? These are the kinds of questions we need to ask ourselves. Finally, how about Sweden? You're not supposed to mention Sweden. Now I could mention Japan. They had one of the highest COVID infection rates in the world, the world's oldest population, yet one of the lowest death rates. And they did that with very half-hearted measures and no mass testing. So there are a million explanations as to what they have to explain this away. But the key example is Sweden. Now what they used to say to us was, you can't use the example of Sweden because Sweden has a high death rate, blah, blah, blah. Sweden had 5,000 deaths out of a country of 10 million. About two-thirds to three-quarters of those were in long-term care facilities and they did a horrendous job there and they admit that. But look at the rest of them. So that means that they actually have a very small number in the general society. Because the question of how did people do in nursing homes, where they're completely isolated from society, is in no way a commentary on how the strategy works for society at large. And now that Sweden's example is looking really good because their curve looks like this.  Just look at pictures from Stockholm. Okay? It lists down, right down here. Whereas you look at Spain, it's like this and France, it's like this. Sweden is just like that. So now we don't mention Sweden. Or what we say is, oh well, this reason Sweden did so well, so now notice it switched. First it was Sweden, they're dying everywhere. Now it's, the reason Sweden did so well, so they can't just stop and say, maybe I don't have all the answers. Can't. The reason they did so well is people voluntarily complied with these measures and blah, blah, blah.  Okay. All you have to do is look at pictures from Stockholm over the summer and you decide if that's true or not. But the key thing is, they never closed schools for ages one to 15. They never closed down businesses and they had no mask mandate. How do you account for this? It's, and you don't get an answer. You just, you do not get an answer. It seems to me the only answer at this point is the one that was obvious from the beginning. Let people decide how they want to live, what risks they're willing to take, and what life means to them.  I want to see your smile. And who are we to say no, no, or you should see your grandchildren only over zoom forever. Or you should be isolated in a nursing home forever with no human contact. Or you can see people through a window, if you like. We're really not going to ultimately say, you decide what's best for you because we all take different risks that we're willing to tolerate. Martin Koldorf at Harvard Medical School says, the experts are afraid to speak out. You have a lot of blah, blah, blah, people who have no, who are not entitled to an opinion. He says the experts, the infectious disease epidemiologists are afraid to speak out. Nice society you've given us, hysterics, where the actual experts qualified in this field are afraid to speak out. A society of fear. Nice going. Now, incidentally, my view is there are people who have lost their livelihoods, their lives, things that give them meaning. And all you have to do is speak out, speak out. Enough is enough. By now we've all gotten the message that you're selfish if you want to do the kinds of things that once gave your life meaning. For these people, life is about nothing, but the avoidance of death. And you can't have anything back until they say so. How did we let this happen? They wouldn't dare have told us this back when it was 15 days to flatten the curve. No way. Nope, it's, you got to have virtual events over Zoom and no hugs and no weddings and 10 people at your father's funeral and all these other grotesque demands that we've gone along with. What metrics are they using to tell us when we can have things back? Not the ones they told us at the beginning. We've met all those. We still can't have anything back. Well, maybe you can have it in 2021. Fauci says, spring of 2022, if everybody gets vaccinated. Okay. So part of the natural order is that parents make sacrifices for their children, not the other way around. If vulnerable people want to isolate themselves and I can understand why they would, then they should do that. But as I am going through middle age, it would never occur to me to make those demands of young people. Never. Because I would think that was selfish, selfish of me, that when I was young, I got to experience all these things, all these irreplaceably beautiful moments of youth. But you can't have them to keep me safe. No, I'll stay safe by following precautions and limiting my contacts.  That's what a good and decent human being says. That's what an unselfish person says. The CDC is now saying we should go have a virtual Thanksgiving. Nope. Not doing that. Not doing that. I'm going to go see people and hug them on Thanksgiving like a human. And that is what we should do. Older people say, a lot of older people I talk to say, we don't want our children's lives ruined. We don't want our grandchildren's lives ruined. We don't want you to do this for us. Enough is enough at this point. The doomers keep having this crazy comic book view of the virus. When Wisconsin's bars were allowed to open, that was supposed to lead to a million deaths. It didn't. The Sun Belt spike was supposed to kill everybody. It didn't. Those spikes were long over. They were brought down without lockdowns. South Dakota never closed at all. They're doing fine. But then they had that Sturgis motorcycle rally and we got told the Sturgis motorcycle rally led to 260,000 cases. It was a super spreader event. Well, then Slate, you know Slate the enemy of mankind, Slate the website. They ran an article. They ran an article saying, look, let's be honest, the Sturgis motorcycle rally did not lead to 260,000 cases. You're only saying that because you want it to have led to 260,000 cases. But this is BS. Now Slate is not known for standing up for Trump loving biker dudes. So the only reason they would run an article like that is that it's true. The virus does what it will do regardless of what our priesthood with their white coats and clipboards tries to do. There's a sickness out there. All right. But I'm not talking about COVID-19. I'm talking about the irrational fact-free response. We should demand our lives back, take our lives back. This is not selfish. It is selfish to be ignoring all the collateral damage that's being done by this policy. You get one life, you want to live it, that's normal. What's selfish and abnormal is the presumption that other people are entitled to your life or to take an arbitrary number of years away from your life. If they want to live as prisoners in their own homes and experience life over Zoom, they can be our guest. The rest of us, I think I can speak for all of us in this room, intend to live. Thank you.


Alright, let's see. Witcher. Witcher is the new show on Netflix which is supposed to be the new game of thrones. I watched the whole first season. I won't give any, I'm not going to give any too many spoilers away. Witchers are people who fight monsters. I guess people who are genetically modified so they could fight monsters and they have some magic and so on. You know, it's tolerable and somewhat enjoyable and there are parts of it that are quite enjoyable. Overall, I find that there's too much magic so I think you can only have, once you have too many different beings exerting too much different types of magic in too many ways, then what are the rules? How does it, how does it work? What is the logic? What can it, cannot be done in the next episode?  It's too, it's too arbitrary. It's too difficult to build a plot. It's very rare, I think, that fantasy works because of that because once you give too much power to magic then the rules are not set and you have to, and you have to set some, some sense of rules, some standards, some criteria.  It's also super deterministic as often things with magic are because there's, there's prophecy and there's destiny and you're going to meet this person, so just wait until the last episode and you meet and I mean there's a certain aspect of the movie that is heroic. There's certain aspects of it that is people searching for a purpose. So you've got the two main characters, the witcher and the witch, who are both kind of searching for purpose in their life and in the final episode they find that purpose because that purpose was predestined to be their purpose. So they go out into the world for purpose. So I think it's, it can be enjoyable. It's got elements of, you know, heroism. Of course you can't have heroism in a ordinary person. You can't have heroism with somebody without magic and superpowers. So this is like superhero movies a little bit. It lacks the scope, the drama, the power of Game of Thrones. There's a sense of a political battle brewing that we'll get more into in seasons two and three and four I guess. But it lacks that, I don't know, Game of Thrones had a big scope to it. It had big drama. It had larger than life characters. Here there are a few larger than life characters but it just doesn't have the power, the thrill and the, I don't know, the grandeur that Game of Thrones had. Game of Thrones was bigger than life.  The elements here are heroism. But I'm not, so I'm not a huge fan but I wouldn't say don't watch it. It's entertaining but not great and philosophically a mess because anything that does too much drama. And it's not clear what it's about yet. So we'll know more in terms of the philosophy as we move forward. Now somebody mentioned Peaky Blinders. I really enjoyed Peaky Blinders. I like Peaky Blinders a lot. I've watched and I think I've talked about in a previous show, I've watched five or six. I think I've watched all the seasons. It's very, very well made. You know, if you like gangster movies and it certainly is a gangster movie but it's a gangster movie without the hedonism. It's a gangster movies where the gangsters definitely pay a psychological cost for their crimes and a real cost, a cost in lives for their lives. It's a gangster movie that's smart and clever, a series, not a movie. And interesting and with real interesting characters that have real psychological depth and real psychological complexity but also in it there's interesting politics and an interesting view of, you know, how politics shape everything. So anyway, thanks for reminding me of Peaky Blinders, although I think I have talked about in the past. All right, let's see. Those were the two movie recommendations I wanted to... What we need today, what I called a new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism, and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought. Using the super chat, and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to www.uranbrookshow.com slash support, or go to www.subscribestar.com, you're on Brooke's show, and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going. I'm not showing the next-


Hello and welcome to the screencast on Open Sentences. So I want to take you back all the way to the very first screencast in this whole series, screencast 111, and we were discussing statements versus sentences that weren't statements. And this equation right here is an example of latter. It's a sentence that is not a statement. Now why is this not a statement? Well remember a statement is a well-formed declarative English sentence, which this is, but it has a definite true or false value to it. You can look at it and tell that it's true or false. This one we cannot determine the truth or falsehood value of the statement or the sentence because of the variable. The fact that there's an x right here means that this sentence 2x plus 10 equals 14 is sometimes true, but sometimes false as well. If I put in x equals 2, then I have a true statement. If I put in x equals 3, I have a false statement. The universal set for this variable refers to just the set from which these variable values come. Here I was putting in whole numbers, but really you could set your universal set to be anything you want, depending on context. Let's suppose that the universal set for now is just the set of all real numbers. Now so we have a statement that is not a sentence because of the variables. Here's another example of such a thing, except now we have two variables, an x and a y. And again, this is a sentence. It's well formed. It's well understood in math or you could even say it in English, but it's not a statement because we can't tell what the truth value is until we know an x and a y value. There are a lot of x values and y values that make this true. We have to think of them in pairs, right? Just to say x equals 5 doesn't really quantify this enough. I'd have to say x equals 5, y equals 4. And that, if you plug those in, would give you a true statement. 5 minus 4 is indeed equal to 1. But if I have x equals 5 and say y equals 2, then that does not give me a true statement. So there's another example of a sentence that's almost a statement. If you could just plug in the holes, plug in numbers for the variables, you'd have yourself an actual statement that's definitely true or definitely false. So we have a name for such things and that is an open sentence. Okay, that is a sentence. Could be an English sentence. It could be a mathematical expression like an equation that involves variables and it's such that once you put in specific values for the variables, whether there's one of them or two of them or many of them, then what you get is a statement. Something that's definitely true or definitely false like our two examples over here. We use the word open to specify the fact that we have some holes to plug in here. Once I put in a number for x, then maybe I can tell whether this is a true statement or not. But until I do, it's ambiguous and it's merely an open sentence. So let's look at a couple of other open sentences here. 2x plus 10 equals 14 and the inequality x squared less than or equal to four and I want to ask the same question both times. What is the set of variable values that makes this open sentence into a true statement? We saw that I could put in certain values for x that might make this a false statement, but what are the variable values that make it a true statement? Here I'm going to fix in this first bullet point, this first example, I'm going to fix down the universal set to be the set of real numbers just to open up my options completely. So what is the set of all real numbers that makes the equation 2x plus 10 equal 14 true? Well, that's fairly easy. We can just do a little math in our heads and realize that the set consisting of the number two is the set of all real numbers that makes this a true statement. There are no others. There's only this one here and I'm putting it in my curly brackets. By the same token, if I look at the inequality x squared less than or equal to four, what is the set of all variable values that make this true? Now notice here I'm changing the universal set to be integers. So I want to only think about whole numbers, positive negative zero whole numbers. What is the set of all integers that makes this inequality true? Well, with a little bit of thinking, I can start my curly brackets. I need stuff that's close to four and we'll find that negative two works because negative two squared is four. That's less than or equal to four. Negative one works. So does zero. So does one. So does two. And that's it. So that's the complete list of integers that makes this inequality true. So what we're doing here is we're taking an open sentence and looking for the variable values from the universal set that makes the open sentence into not just a statement but a true statement. That set is generally known as the truth set of an open sentence. Again, just the collection of objects from the universal set that can be substituted in for the variable to make the sentence a true statement. So let's end off with a concept check to see how well you understand the notions of open sentences and truth sets. So suppose that the universal set is the set of integers, the set of all whole numbers both positive, negative, and zero. And we're going to look at the open sentence cube root of n is an integer. Okay, so again n is an integer but here's an open sentence cube root of n is an integer. So this is an open sentence because it has this variable in it and the variable is some other integer. So what's the truth set? What is the set of all integers that I could plug in to make this quoted sentence a true statement? Is that set empty? Are there no integers that work? Is it the set of cube roots that you see here? Is it the set of plus or minus cube roots that you see here? Is it the set 0, 1, 8, 27, 64, and so forth? Is it the set 0, plus or minus 1, plus or minus 8, and so forth? Or is it basically everything in the universal set, the entire set z of integers? So think about this one and play around with the problem and pause the video and when you come back we'll reveal the answer. So the answer here, what is the set of all integers n such that the cube root of n is an integer would be this one here in e. Now again why is that true? Here are the inputs. This is where it would be going in to in. So first of all the sentence is claiming that the cube root of n is an integer. So these guys here if I take their cube roots those are not going to be integers. So these guys are out. I know that 0, the cube root of 0 is 0, the cube root of 1 is 1, the cube root of 8 is 2, the cube root of 27 is 3, the cube root of 64 is 4. So all these guys work. That makes empty out of the question. But also if you remember your basic math here the cube root of a negative number is okay to compute so I also want to include negative 8 for example. The cube root of negative 8 is negative 2 and that's an integer. So all these guys work but not the entire set z. You can easily try out say n equal to 5. If I look at the cube root of 5 just a quick punch through a calculator will tell me that this is not it is not an integer. So it's not everything. It's some set halfway in between not halfway really but empty and between empty and the entire set of integers is actually this set right here. Those are all the integers which when evaluated into n make this quoted thing a true statement. So we'll have many many opportunities to return to the notion of open sentences and true sets later on. But for now thanks for watching.


fight and you know a lot of dogs like do you says I can't say nothing else this is we're dogs out here


Welcome to the April edition of Cornerstone Connect. We are giving you a sneak peek into our shows, specials and guests this month on Cornerstone Network. We are celebrating Easter with my Hope Today co-host Tom Hollis as he shares how we can have hope even in the darkest of times. And speaking of hope, producers, Crystal Tillman and Sidney Goldman reveal how God is working in and through you as we prepare for our Hope Arising special. All that and more coming up next. I'm Amanda Brocker, your host of Cornerstone Connect and I have a question for you. Have you received your April Hope Today newsletter in the mail? If not, please give us a call at<PHONE_NUMBER> or go to ctvn.org and make sure that yours comes into the mail. We love to bring this to life to you in this program, but I have to thank you. The many of you who've been writing into Cornerstone, we love to get mail. So I'm just gonna reflect on some of these. This is from Judith. She said, thank you so much for your wonderful programs. I so enjoy Rick Renner, The 700 Club, CBN News, Bible Discovery, Joyce Meyer and other teaching programs. God bless you. And she said how her family, they used to live during the 50s at the foot of the hill here and they would stand above Pitcairn and they would pray to God to move over this valley. So I just wanna thank Judith and her family for those prayers. And wow, in the 50s, that's before Cornerstone was ever even here. I'm sure you are a part of making the way through prayer for us to be up on this hill. And then here I have from Carol. She says, thank you for your Christian programs, especially Origins and Hard Questions. And we just thank you Carol so much for writing in and letting us know what you like. And I encourage you, if you watch or you have a favorite on Cornerstone, we wanna know what that is. We love to just hear from you. This is from Denise. She said, I watch Cornerstone and I love the programs. I learn so much from the teachings. Isn't that the truth of it? God has really blessed us with so many great programs and Tom does a great job making sure as that program director that we're putting things out there that are edifying and building up for the believers. Here's another one from Charlotte. She said, God bless Cornerstone Network. And then Ruth, she wrote in, she said, Dear Lord, I ask your abundant blessings on each prayer partner who has prayed with me and for me over the years. You know, Ruth, our prayer line has been here ever since our programming has been here. So not only when you partner with us and we just thank you so much for those who have supported, it has allowed us to have a prayer line 24 seven alongside our programming. And just like Ruth and many others who have wrote in, they thank us for that prayer line. You know, when you're in that desperate time of need, it's wonderful to know that you have godly brothers and sisters that you can reach out to and they're not gonna give you their opinions. They're gonna give you the word of God because we desire to see you overcome in every area. So just thank you so much for your support and for your support to our network, both for our programming and for that prayer line. Well, coming up next, we have Tom Hollis. He's gonna join me as we celebrate Easter. Did you know your favorite programs on Cornerstone Telstra Network like Hope Today, Sister to Sister, Hard Questions, Dashing Dish, At Home and Move Your Mountain are not only on your TV screen, but also on YouTube. YouTube is the second most popular media platform in the world with more than 2.5 billion viewers. And the way we're consuming media may be changing, but what remains the same and continues to stand true is God's word and the power of the gospel. Now take a look at this map behind me. These are the top cities that are watching Cornerstone Telstra Network and because of your partnership, they are getting life-changing television every day. So in the U.S., you see it's New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Seattle, Dallas, and then we go to Canada, Toronto and Regina and then over to Europe, Dublin, London, and then in Africa, we have Buacke, Nairobi, Pretoria, Cape Town in Johannesburg, and in Asia, Cochie, Jakarta, Bengaluru, Manila, Yangusi, Sydney and Melbourne. This is just the list of many of the cities we reach because of your faithful giving to Cornerstone Telstra Network. Thank you for helping us bring hope to people around the world and right here in Pittsburgh. Welcome to Cornerstone Connect. My Hope Today co-host and Cornerstone COO, Tom Hollis. Hello, Amanda. We're so glad to have you on this month and I absolutely love the article you wrote. It is finished.  You did a great job writing it. Well, when I was thinking about writing an article for Easter, obviously we're gonna write about the resurrection and that's what we usually write about and that's what we should write about. That's the exciting thing that Jesus rose from the dead but I got to thinking and as I was first asked to write it, the thought it is finished dropped into my head and even a picture of Jesus on the cross with the weight of sin on him. And you know, Amanda, it says in the scriptures that it pleased God to crush him or to bruise him because of that he took that weight upon him. And so I started writing about that, thinking what was Jesus thinking? And I'm not putting words in his mouth here. Just thinking about what are the natural emotions that any person would go through when every one of their, they've been falsely accused, every friend has departed them or mostly every friend has departed them. John was still there. But, and I got to thinking about the heartbreak in the Son of God for that. Because even though his friends left, it was also the people that were accusing him and say, crucify him. He loved them too. And those things would crush him. I love how you bring it to life. I feel like sometimes in our Christianese, we can almost get so familiar with the Easter story or the Christmas story. And I feel like you really tapped into something to bring Jesus to life for all of us in his humanity. Well, he was 100% God and he was 100% man. So he felt all the pain of rejection. He felt the weight of sin. He felt the pain of the nails. He felt all of that and the scourging. He felt all of that and he did it for us. And he didn't want to go through it. He had that garden to get so many experience but he got through it and he came out the other side. Praise God that he did or we wouldn't be sitting here, redeemed people. People whose lives have been changed through the power of the gospel. The only reason there's power there is that he died and he said, it is finished. Of course, he rose again. Again, the good news of the gospel is that we can be reconciled to God because of his sacrifice. So I just, I'm picturing like Tom Hollis, you know, writing this article out and I loved all the describing words that you used and it just made me appreciate my savior once again. But tell us, you know, in your heart of heart when you read those words from, I have it pulled up in John 19, 29 or 30. It says, so when Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, it is finished. And bowing his head, he gave up his spirit. What does that mean? I get chills just here and you read it right now. But to think of that, at one point, at some point he realized the sacrifice has been made. The penalty of sin, my sin, your sin, every person who's ever lived sin has been paid. He took all of that on his shoulders and he paid the debt for all of us. All we need to do now is enter into that. But when he realized it was finished, finally he could release his spirit back to God. He could release his spirit and to be, you know, again, three days hidden to then be resurrected. So all those things are happening all at once there. And he's, but that fact that he recognized what I came into the world for this reason he came, you know, he testified to the truth, he taught us how to live, but then he was the sacrifice lamb that takes away the sin of the world. Amen. He was all about saving lives, Jesus. And that very personage is here at Cornerstone and we are all about saving lives. It's why it's so important for us to declare the gospel 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we couldn't do one minute of that apart from you. So we just want to say thank you for giving us what we need to continue to declare the gospel. So we are just so thankful, you know, here at Cornerstone for the many of you who have supported our network over the years to keep the gospel going out over the airwaves 24 hours a day, seven days a week because it's about saving lives. It's about seeing lives changed here at Cornerstone Television. And you know, speaking of saving lives, there's something that Cornerstone connects as a part of Cornerstone Cares and it has saved over 7,000 lives just in 2022. I know it's amazing. And just to say a moment about Cornerstone Cares, you know, Cornerstone Cares is our tie. It's our outreach into the community and around the world. We support ministries that are doing amazing work. They're feeding children, they're housing people, they're preaching the gospel, they're planning churches, all these things. But one of the ones that we love here in the Pittsburgh area is Women's Choice Network. And Amanda, there's the article on here says 7,180 babies saved just in the past year. Isn't that amazing? That we could be involved in that. And you know, they're under attack too because ever since Roe v. Wade was overturned nationally, the fight's been taken to this local level and you have these centers like Women's Choice Network that is able to do wonderful work, compassionate work and bless the mothers and save lives. And I just love that we're involved with them. Absolutely. And it was a woman named Haley that this article featured. And if you haven't got your newsletter, please make sure that we have your information. We would love to send this out to you. You can call us at our prayer line<PHONE_NUMBER> or go to ctbn.org. But in Haley's life, like literally she was headed down a road of destruction. Drugs were involved and what caused her to reach out to the Women's Choice Network was she found herself pregnant in the middle of this. But one of their workers didn't give up on Haley. She didn't look like someone who was going to turn around but this woman kept calling Haley and just saying, hey, we love you, you're valuable, we care about you. And that is what caused Haley's life to turn around. So her life was saved and the life that was within her. So this is really life saving television program. It really is. And whenever anybody's involved, all of our friends who pray for this ministry, who watch this ministry and who donate to this ministry, all of that goes towards helping organizations like Women's Choice Network as part of our outreach. I'm so glad to be involved with them and I'm so glad that we have a part in that saving of lives. Amen, Tom, as our COO, I would love for you to have the opportunity to just look into the camera and talk to those viewers and let them know how valuable they are to us.  And I just wanna say thank you, thank you so much for all that you do. Please continue to pray for us. Please continue to watch and be part of our programs and please continue to give to the ministry here. We could not do it without you.  It's always been the heart and vision of our founders, Russ and Norma Bixler, to reach the nations, people of every nation, every tribe, and every tongue through Cornerstone Television Network. For more than 40 years, the station has reached families through the TV screen, the way you're watching us right now. And with the internet and streaming platforms like YouTube, your generosity is helping us to expand our reach around the world. Cornerstone Television Network's YouTube page has more than 60,000 subscribers and nearly 100,000 views per month. Take a look at this world map that's behind me. Your continuous support is making an impact in these countries. Here are the top countries that are watching on YouTube. USA, Canada, Mexico, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. Cornerstone is making an impact on every continent on the planet. When you partner with Cornerstone, you're not only changing lives here in Pittsburgh and America, but all around the world. Thank you for your support. Welcome Crystal Tillman and Sydney Goldman. You know, you both wear so many hats here at Cornerstone. Can you tell us a little bit what that looks like? We'll start with Crystal. So technically my title is Marketing Director of Marketing and Development, but that basically just means I'm over fundraising and promotions and communicating with our partners. I've been here for 11 years now and counting and can't wait to see what God is going to do next. You do a great job. I know I've seen you out at many women's conferences and you've been to other things all around the neighborhood. So thank you for getting us out there. And Sydney, what about you? Well, I have the joy of like I'm under Crystal. So with marketing and development. So I'm a development producer. So helping with the fundraiser also just in producing also things on Cornerstone. So different things with that initiative. And then also just being able to connect with the viewers and going out and about. So that's like truly a joy of just being able to connect with people that are out there on the streets and everywhere. So y'all make it sound so easy what they do. Y'all, I see what they do. And it's a lot more than the words that you all just described, but you're doing a fantastic job. You know, can you talk to us about the heart behind hope arising? Absolutely. Here at Cornerstone TV, we bring a message of hope every day. And there's three particular reasons why I think what we do is so critical. We bring a message of salvation. In spite of what's going on in the news and what's happening with the economy, wars and rumors of wars and all the things that you can expect in these end of days, we bring the truth that we can be victorious. We also bring connection and discipleship through our faith and family channel. And we bring people truth through hard questions and origins and hope today. So multiple ways of discipleship through our programming and connecting you to local bodies of Christ that you can actually visit and be a part of. And finally, if you watched our last fundraiser, which we call Visions of Hope, we talked about how here in the city of Pittsburgh, it's one of the loneliest cities in the nation. So we bring hope through our prayer line. And so I encourage people even now use<PHONE_NUMBER>, which you've probably already shared on this program. But we, those three things is why we want to see hope arise. And so this special week is about bringing the body of Christ to come together as the kingdom to spread that message of hope. And so we're glad to have with us Jason Howard from Amplify coming with us, a new pastor, Pastor Jim out of Ohio, a ministry called Wealth with God. And then Matt Sorgher, we're building up the week with Apostle Connie Brooks and also our own pastor, Jay Gilbert. So gearing up for a great week coming up. Amen, this sounds awesome. Was there anything you wanted to tag on to that? I'll just say, like, you know, the whole thing with Hope arising, I think, you know, we see there's so many, you saw like part of even like the logo with our, like a special broadcast that's coming up is that there's personal mountains that we have and there's personal mountains in our culture, but we know through Christ and through Christ alone, that's how we get over at the mountain. And so it's just gonna be a wonderful time of just like having fresh prophetic voices come to speak to the hearts of viewers and also to help us continue to be a voice that goes out there in the airwaves and just even beyond, you know, the airways, the internet, there's so many different ways to connect and to watch the Cornerstone television network. So that's like our heart for Hope arising because we are trying, you know, we are a message of Hope a vehicle, Hope that God is using in this season. Can we talk a little bit about the God stories that folks will see when they tune in a little bit? Yeah. So also too, one thing we're like putting into the broadcasts is also just stories of people of how their journeys and their connection to Cornerstone. So we're just really excited to incorporate that in Hope arising as well, because I think, you know, it's so powerful, you know, what the Bible says, we overcome by the word of our testimony in the blood of the lamb. And you know, Cornerstone has been a part of so many people's lives of how, you know, through watching this, you know, the through this TV network is that their lives have been transformed and changed. So we want to highlight and focus on that too. Amen. Nothing like a power of a life changed. Well, talk to us about, you know, what do you ladies see happening, the move of God in the city of Pittsburgh and surrounding area? Well, I think it's amazing just to see the unity and the body of Christ coming together, especially over this past year. I was just in a meeting last week with some of the folks that coordinated Pittsburgh praise and talking about how prayer walks are still going on. And so I'm just seeing us beginning to lay down our platforms for the presence of the Holy Spirit, which I know is one of our goals here at Cornerstone TV. And it doesn't matter if your ministry is large or small, there's nothing small in the body of Christ. So people are laying down their agendas and really making Christ more visible instead of being concerned about our visibility and what we can gain from our kingdom impact. So lots of good things happening here in the city of Pittsburgh. Kind of just a little tag, because I'm in marketing, I can't help myself, is to visit ctvn.org slash events to see some of the new things happening in the city of Pittsburgh, such as Pit Walks, which is coming up on April 30th. I know on April 8th, there's gonna be an outreach crusade at Market Square. So some of the good things happening, stay tuned to ctvn.org slash events and learn more about what's going on. Amen, that's awesome. And I just think like, you know, overall, like just to piggyback what Crystal was saying about the kingdom impact, I really feel like what you're seeing is just more of the body of Christ coming together and these denominationalism, the division. It's like, we're putting our walls out and I'm just seeing different ministries, different people collaborating coming together because I truly believe that in order for what God, you know, bringing forth the kingdom, let his kingdom come, his will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we can't do it separated. We all are one because when we all go to heaven, he's on your part of this church or that church. No, we are the church, we are the Ecclesia. And so I think having that revelation in our minds of understanding what the Ecclesia means that our kingdom authority that we have, we are ambassadors of Christ and walking in that authority. I'm beginning to see that more and more in our city. And I also am seeing like a changing of a guard also as well. So I'm seeing a lot of ministries. It's like passing the baton, you know, to the next generation, whether it's like millennials are just having those opportunities. So you just see a changing of a guard that's happening in this season where I think it's exciting and the generations are running together. So it's a really beautiful time for our city. That's awesome. What about in your personal lives? You know, I know we have the title of hope arising, but how has hope been arising in your own lives? So I feel like for me, God is just teaching me to go deeper with him and to be still and to abide. And I've got to give credit to some of the intercessors here at Cornerstone TV for challenging me in that to spend more time in my word for where he's taking me next, that I have to be attuned into him and on his frequency. One of the scriptures that keeps coming back to mind for me, and I've probably said this on this program before, it's Proverbs three, five to six. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean that on your own understanding and all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your path straight. So he's teaching me that and I'm seeing that hope when I put my trust in him instead of my agendas and my strategies. Amen, so powerful. What about you, Sid? So I would say the one thing I am literally saying, well, I just recently celebrated my 35th birthday and something that God spoke to me was victory, that this is a season of victory. And I'm just seeing like prophetic words that have been spoken on my like, they are coming to pass.  And I think a lot of times, you know, no matter what the age, if you're 15, 35, 45, 95, that we put these limitations on ourselves.  Don't follow the ways of the world thing. You know, living your life, I think a lot of us tend to live our life linearly, but it's an important thing to see that God is like this, you know, if things are full circle. So that's what I'm just seeing God do in my life as he's like, it's a season of victory. It's a season of focusing my eyes on him and trusting the process and enjoying the journey. Such powerful words. Well, thinking about hope arising, you know, how do you see that happening in history right now? Oh gosh, when do we not see? I think it's amazing even to see like with the Ashbury revival if I'm pronouncing that right and things happening across college campuses. And we're just another part of what God has been doing throughout history. So he's been faithful from the beginning. He's been faithful now and he'll continue to be faithful to us in the future. I see it in the different mountains. I know we talk about there's like the different mountains. There's like, you know, the government, educational, arts and media. We are seeing just such a move in the mountains themselves. There's so many believers that are in all these different spheres that are making an impact. I mean, you just see, even here in the city of Pittsburgh there's so many people that are in key leadership positions that are taking a stand that are working behind the scenes. So I think we're going to continue. That's like hope that's arising like on the ground and it's just rising up. And so I think we're going to continue to see it. Even, you know, we see the wars and just different things that are happening but it's so important for us to fix our eyes on him. We know there's going to be shakings. We know there's going to be rumblings but he has truly called us as the body of Christ for such a time as this. Amen. Well, you've heard it folks right from Cornerstone Television. You ladies are doing a fantastic job and we thank you for your leadership, quality leadership. It's good leadership. And I look forward to coming here and just seeing what all God is doing. But you know, in parting I'm just like, these people who have given so much of themselves to Cornerstone and to keep us on air, I want to give you the opportunity, you know, to speak those words of kindness to them. Well, we just want to say thank you for all that we've done over the years and every God story is really your story. So without your help, without your support, none of this will be possible. So we know they hear us say that all the time but we truly mean that from the bottom of our hearts. Amen. It's just beautiful. Thank you again. And do not miss Hope Arising. It will be April 24th through the 28th at 8 p.m. every evening. It'll actually play 24-7 so that way if you miss it in the evening, you can catch it the next day. It's kind of like camp meeting revival. You don't want to miss it. Grab your pen and paper. Make sure you're ready to take some notes because you know, the gospel is all about sharing and we're all about giving you the gospel. Well, thank you so much and stay tuned. God spoke to our beloved late founders, Russinorma Bixler, this scripture from Isaiah, raise his signal high to the nations. Your giving and support of Cornerstone Telstra Network is helping us raise a different signal nowadays, a digital signal through the airways. Take a look at this map. Your donation helps us reach and impact people who watch our programming on our website at ctvn.org and the streaming platform Roku. Here's a list of the countries. USA, Canada, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Barbados, the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Czechia, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Turkey, Israel, Kenya, South Africa, India, China, Russia, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia. And you know, this is just a list of the many countries that we reach and it's all because of your faithful partnership with Cornerstone. Your gift is helping us to bring hope to people around the world and we just want to say thank you for being part of our family. Well, I always enjoy our time together and hearing about how God is moving here at Cornerstone and across the Pittsburgh region and really around our world. It's so exciting to me and I just, I have to go back to some of our letters because we so appreciate your words. This comes from Vivian and she said she got the book Break Every Chain by John Eckerd and it has been the best book ever for her to read on that subject and she just thanks us so much for our recent article about Tom McGuff. We love Tom and Lucy and the Lord's continuing to do that wonderful work and yes, they are the most precious individuals. So Vivian, thank you for writing in and here's another from Shirley. She said, thank you for letting us get our leaned recipes from the website.  It is exciting and those recipes can't be beat but all right, here we have, well, I don't have any, Lilit Lynette, awesome. Thank you for all areas of people's lives that your ministry is ministering to, spiritual, emotional, physical. May God empower guide and direct you always. Lynette, we thank you for those words and truly we desired to be empowered by the Holy Spirit and nothing else but with the thoughts of Arlene, we have our new cook, Katie Farrell and she shared a wonderful recipe in this month's edition of the newsletter and it's air fryer, Greek chicken and vegetables. Now listen y'all, you can sit around the table just like Arlene teaches us and feed them something that they're gonna love and you and me, we love that air fryer. If you don't have one, you might wanna invest in one. It cooks it up just perfect. It's juicy but yet it's quick.  And in closing, I just wanna remind you of those words of Jesus that he said in John 19, chapter 30, it is finished. Aren't we grateful for the work of Jesus Christ?


really happy to be here to talk about clearly what is a topic of interest to everybody, which is Gen Z. We've heard a panel sometime back also talking about the same thing, and I'm going to kind of share our learnings and thoughts of talking to this target audience itself. For us, interestingly enough, Gen Z is not just a word that we want to talk about from a future perspective. We already have 10 million customers who are Gen Z. So it's a very, very real audience and a cohort that we go after because they drive business for us. So just to start talking about some of the numbers from a Gen Z perspective, anywhere between 250 to 300 million Gen Z in the country is what estimates are. We know that over 100 million of them are shoppers across the spectrum. And we know that there are 50 million of them who are actually e-com shoppers. So again, as an audience, as a cohort, when we talk about them from a future perspective, we also have to realize that even today they are a very strong business-building cohort. So today, 50 million, as far as we are concerned, e-com shoppers. Tomorrow it's the same, which will become 250 million plus. So for any brand, I don't think this is a cohort that you can ever ignore. And of course, the cohort does is do everything online. As the slide says, they live online, they connect online, and they entertain themselves online. So whether it's the amount number of hours they spend over seven hours a day digitally, 50% of them like to share things online, 70% of them are active on OTT. So huge online consumers, huge content consumers is who they are, and therefore it's important to understand how we can talk to them. As we were building things around for this cohort and audience, and because we see their behavior on the app, we've learned a few things about what they seek, and therefore sharpened our strategy towards that. The three things, one is they seek an immersive shopping experience. They see themselves as a cohort which is different from anybody else. We've all had cohorts right from Gen X to Millennials to Gen Z. Gen Z are the most differentiated cohort. They think of themselves as the most differentiated cohort. So they want brands to give them space and an architecture that's designed for Gen Z. So that was very important for us to create. Second is just from an insight into what they seek from a fashion perspective, they seek trends. For them, what is happening today right now, latest, is very important, because that helps craft for them their sense of identity. If there's one thing this cohort is very, very strong at and very good at, it is understanding what their sense of identity is and very clear on how they want to portray it to the world. From a fashion lens, that's about trends, and I think that's where the second insight came from. And the third one is, which was spoken about even in the earlier panel, is a sense of community building. For them to feel like they are part of a group of similarish cohort, because they believe in that kind of interpersonal acknowledgement itself. So these were the three pillars. I'll break down into how we kind of brought it to life. So the first one is about building immersive experience itself. So one thing that we did just as getting into the app itself is the first part, which is we created an app and app specifically for Gen Z. So anybody comes into the Mintra app, they kind of got this first screen, which said, if you are Gen Z and you want forward, you click on it and you just go to a forward experience directly. You don't see the rest of Mintra. You see Forward, which is the brand that we've created for Gen Z. Even if they go to the regular Mintra on the bottom nav, we had a very clear forward call out to make sure that if that's what you seek, we will take you there. And then, of course, the third one is the forward app and app itself. For us, again, the insight from an immersive perspective was they are social media first. So therefore, how do you build a shopping experience also, which is like social media first? So the use of just these white graphics and the visual treatment, for example, is one starting point of how we made it immersive. The next part of it was how do you really create a video-led first, even from a shopping experience perspective? So through the forward app and app, you will see a lot of video content that gets interspersed with the standard catalog that you would see in any shopping app. And these are videos that are across three verticals, which are important, again, from a Gen Z perspective. One was about discovery, which is how do I discover new trends and what's happening? Second is how to, which is, I want to know how to style A with B, what kind of beauty tips work for me for going to a party versus going out somewhere else, et cetera, so the education part of it. And the third part of it, which is important for them is inspiration. They take inspiration from influencers, creators. They take inspiration, of course, from the regular, what you would call, celebrities in India today across both movies and cricket. So we had video content across all through our app that does this. We have over 500 creators that we work with who are Gen Z creators, whom we work with who put out content, and this content is put out on their social media, whether it is Instagram, Snapchat, et cetera, and also on our app. So that's the second part of how we made it a little bit more immersive for Gen Z. And the third part was, I mean, we are a tech fashion platform. How do you use technology and make it more relevant and immersive for them? So we created features that help them in their purchase journey. So the first one is an AI fashion assistant called Maya. What she allows you to do is you can converse with Maya on a real-time basis on what you're looking for and she will help and guide you on your shopping as you go through the shopping journey itself. The second one is what we call my fashion GPT because again, the world is moved from doing just specific search terms to doing much more conversational search. So that's what my fashion GPT does. So you're not just searching for a pink sari, but what you can search for is a pink sari that I'm wearing for tour wedding in Chennai and it will contextualize that and show you results for that. That's really what my fashion GPT is about. The third part of it is the AI stylist, as we call it, which is everybody goes in to buy one article type. I'm looking for a jeans, I'm looking for a top, I'm looking for a dress, et cetera. But what's important for them to kind of showcase their identity is the full look. So as they're looking for one article type and as they make that choice, what we also ought to recommend to them is this is the rest of the look that you can potentially buy in Vintra to complete the whole look. So the first three are kind of on the fashion side. On the fourth one is on the beauty side where we have a skin analyzer, which again starts with taking a selfie and again the back end engine of that rec basis kind of analyzes your skin texture, et cetera, gives results and makes recommendations on the products and the kind of regimen that you need to follow. So this again is helping Gen Z in this journey across inspire, across discover, across education on the journey itself. And what we've seen is across all these, anybody who engages with these features, the ability to convert them, the ability to get more revenue from them, the ability to get repeat just increases dramatically. So this is another tech version of how we did an immersive experience for Gen Z. Moving on to the second part, which is trend first. Trend is super important for them and there are many kinds of trends. This is an audience which is digital first, so they know everything that's happening in Milan or New York real time. They don't depend on someone else to tell them they know it. That's one part of it, so it has to break geography. The second part of it is they look for trends which are not just seasonal, but they look for things which are very, very topical and here and now. A great example of that, which is a trend which lasted probably 45 days, was the Barbie trend. When that came in, it was a trend that took off and everything that was required was required for those 45 days and we had to kind of respond. So trend we identified was very important and we kind of brought that to what we offer them. So we said we would bring in 100,000 trend first styles and more importantly, we would update it really fast real time. So we had over 2,500 weekly drops of the latest trends that they could see every time they came to the app itself. But doing trends is, one part of it is simple which is what you showcase, but the back end part of it is extremely difficult because what you have to do is curate and find out trends globally what's happening on social media everywhere. Again, where tech comes in and plays a role, so the tech team has a trend identification engine which they run, which kind of scouts and scouts, social media platforms across the world, fashion first blocks across the world to identify trends real time, which kind of goes into a curation machine which goes into the feedback loop of the designers for them to produce and then it comes down to actually showing it on the app real time for them. So again, the back end of trends is super interesting and then how do you bring it for to the consumers is the front end of it and we said, Gen Z look for trends everywhere. And the first place they look for it in social media and we kind of said, if you spot a trend anywhere we will allow you to shop that trend on Minthra. So the first image that you see is Instagram. So let's assume you're looking at Viral Viani and you see someone wearing an outfit that you really like, real time you kind of share on Instagram to the Minthra handle and you will get a response back with the clothes which match that image real time, right? So that was done on Instagram. The same thing happens on our app itself also. So within the app we have image search. So you can take a snapshot from a magazine, from social media, search using that image on our app and it will real time show you what are the clothes that match that the most, right? So for everyone it was about not just spotting trends but it was also about closing the loop and buying trends. That was accompanied by a couple of the other widgets which I spoke about which is things that drop daily so that you know it's new. And again, and the fourth one which is as you're searching for anything you have a forward trending filter there which tells you again that not only are you searching for work clothes, party clothes, whatever but very real time what is the trending version of it. So this is the piece related to trends itself and how we showcased it. And then of course the fun part of it is when you really take it to communications and you say it in a fun engaging manner to the audience. So this is a video that we kind of put out to talk to everyone and say what spot the trend and get the trend is all about. I'm guessing I just played. Turn, turn, I'm so excited Take a sip of the style, don't bite it Move to the rhythm of the groove, don't fight it Make me shake it, shake it I love the spotlight But every time I'm stepping out I get snapped on sight It's like, spot it But we're spotted First access to latest trends with just a click Catch the hottest styles now Only on Mintra4 Yeah, so this was the fun little video and in the spirit of talking to the cohort we did two things one is of course whom we used were Gen Z themselves both Khushi and Vedang and in the spirit of trending this is something we launched just before the Archie movie came out so again a lot of those pieces kind of worked out well together so this was on trend the last piece is on building community and I think the best and only way to do this to this cohort is to go to the campuses which is where community formation happens so we have the Mintra Forward Campus Tribe which is our loyalty program where we go to campuses and get students to kind of enroll and get benefits out of it as we speak today we're probably going to about 500 plus campuses we're gonna aim to get 2000 plus campuses by through this year itself so that's one part of it the second part of it is an on the ground event that we do call the forward faces in each campus a key insight that you have about a lot of the Gen Z is whether they're working or not you will realize that they all have side hustles and they want to make money because they're not waiting for that first job and everything later to start spending they're doing it today and right now and one of the key pieces that they look and aspire for is to become a creator themselves so the way forward faces works is in each college we kind of do auditions to figure out who's the most fashionable there what they need to do is put out social media content tagging us we look at the likes and engagement that they get and we kind of every college gets two or three ambassadors and we provide them the Mintra platform to become really creators whether it is using the Mintra social handle where on Insta we are following upwards of three million whether on our app where we have all those creator videos that I spoke about we kind of help them in this journey of becoming creators themselves so that's another aspirational piece for them which is to become a Mintra forward face along with the campus tribe which we kind of build as the larger community piece itself and what we kind of close is just in terms of visual imagery across all communication we do do things which are a lot more trending so the first images of the recent sneaker campaign which was AI enabled that we kind of did the third one is again part of the sneaker campaign where we did an augmented reality piece with Snapchat that kind of went forth and again where all the youth festivals as we speak about kind of participating there the under 25 one is really the last part of it so catching them where they are enabling to build the community where they are is really the key so yeah those were the three pieces that I wanted to share with you which is building an immersive shopping experience was key second was being on trend and really the third is continuing to build community because that's what this audience really looks for thank you very much


Welcome back. Now recently we've been seeing a lot of quirky and youth-centric commercials. The latest one to join that list is Fast Tracks' latest campaign, which is a reflection of the way that youth lead their lives in the face of constant pressure to do something worthwhile, something different. The commercials are showing how youth are living up to these expectations in their own creative way really. So whether the conversations about recycling, about upholding the law or saving water, this brand now is telling its audience to never have a never-have-I-ever moment. Jagdish Acharya is founder and creative head at Cup the Crab. He breaks it down for us. Fast Tracks has always been a G and it has always tried to stay ahead of the curve, but now the curve itself has stretched. You know the bar has risen for grand like Fast Tracks because smart watches have come in almost overnight. And when it is between attitude and technology, technology wins hands down because technology itself is an attitude for the youngster. So it is in this context that I would say that this particular campaign doesn't cut it totally. I mean some add out of the three dust justice, but the other ones are kind of half below. The one which is about the water conservation, that's quite sharp. I think I think it is in tune with the attention span of the youngster. So the shorter they are, the sharper they are. So no issues on that. The one with the water conservation is kind of really irreverent. But overall it is continuing the same thought and stuff like that. But it is time for Fast Tracks to kind of figure out as to what kind of angle it needs to take now to counter the new threat for the smart watches.