and welcome everyone. Welcome to our day of getting really super, super clear on guidance. Yeah. My prayer is that after the next couple hours, you're just going to have the biggest smile on your face because all of your questions around guidance will get answered in this one session. So you're not going to have to worry about this tomorrow or Monday morning or something.  You just feel so happy and all of the mysteries of time and space and the mysteries of this whole world just will vanish as we go into this topic because, you know, this is what you've come for. You've come to a online retreat titled Guidance, the Direct Path to God. Direct, right? We know what direct means. Direct means don't beat around the bush. Like, let's go right to the core of it. Let's get right to the heart of the matter. Let's get so deep into this that you get so happy and you just start to feel so joyful because you can accept the light right now, right now, not in the future. And then as you accept the light, that will guide all of your seeming decisions and all the guidance that will come to you and through you again to take you into the present moment. This is not about making a better future. The whole belief in linear time, the ego invented time as a trick. As he tells us in lesson 158, you know, time is a trick, a sleight of hand in which figures come and go as if by magic. And I think you're just like me. It's like, let's go the direct path to God. Like Patrice was saying, she was a little girl. She believed God is real. That God is real. Love is real. God is a loving God. And now Patrice is going for it now. She is not messing around with time and space. She's not messing around with social media. She is not messing around with anything.  She's got an 11 year old nephew. Jesus is speaking through and that's better than 100 close friends. One Jesus loving nephew who says, oh, why do you think thank me? Thank God. I'm 11 years old. He's already got the core idea. Don't thank me. Thank God. God is behind all of this. God is the answer to your prayer. God is your joy.  God is your love. And it's just like we're ready to use today to let go of the mesmerism of time and space, the mesmerism of this illusory world, and really do it in a way where we really see the truth. Actually, I was on Facebook. I think Svava posted this Paramahansa Yogananda quote. And so I was just pondering before I came over today, oh, Paramahansa Yogananda. I just love him so dearly. He's just such a symbol. And I think he had many quotes because he and I have had many parallel experiences with time and space, except his was 50 years before me. He was traveling around, talking about God all the time, pointing to God, gleeful, joyful, bold, and we both came down here to Chapala, Lake Chapala, Mexico. We both enjoyed our time down here, but he was like 50 years ahead of me. So we have all these experiences. The only thing is my haircut is a little different than his, but that's minor. That's minor. So here's what Yogananda had to say because I think this will help us in our guidance thing today. Yogananda said, don't yearn for human love. It will vanish. Behind human love is the spiritual love of God. Seek that. Don't pray for home or for the money or for love or for friendship. Don't pray for anything of this world. Enjoy only what the Lord gives to you. All else leads to delusion. Man has come on earth solely to learn how to know God. He is here for no other reason. Thank you, Paramahansa. He's with us right now and he's smiling on us and he's saying, well, it's great that we can go to the heart of guidance and we can get clear on what the guidance is for, but that quote starts us off in a beautiful way. Some of you know that Jesus dictated a course in miracles to Helen Shuckman from 1965 to 1972 and then after that there was some supplements because Helen and Ken Wobnick were talking one day and Helen was talking about prayer and how Jesus helped her get some green pantyhose that she wanted and Jesus helped her get this used organic code in New York City that she wanted for the price that she wanted to pay. Jesus filters through the mind that believes in the ego and brings things that are helpful to you while you believe in them. So the guidance is always very practical, but also we want to get to the purpose of the guidance. Like I said, how do I find the holy instant? How do I get to the present moment? Our friend, Andy Page, that was beautiful. Andy's questions and prayers. It's the top one. High living miracles. My prayer is to let the Holy Spirit guide me step by step into the holy instant. Love, Andy. There you go. There you go. That's the purpose to be guided into the holy instant, to be guided into the present moment. Isn't that what all the saints and mystics have talked about throughout the centuries? All the avatars, all the sages, all the wise men and wise women have all been saying, be present. And so have the poets. So have the poets like Rumi and Kabir. So have the poets like Wordsworth and all the poets and mystics throughout all the centuries have been saying, love is real. Love is what you are. Love is in the present moment. Relax into the present moment. So that's the context for guidance. In fact, it's the song of prayer, which is one of these little adjunct supplements that came with the Course in Miracles in answer to Ken Woepnick and Helen's prayer to know more about prayer. Jesus gave the song of prayer and in the song of prayer Jesus has a line which he says, the secret of true prayer is to forget the things you think you need because if you forget the things you think you need, you really give them over to God, to the Holy Spirit and say, here, my mind has been preoccupied with these earthly human needs, needs that seem to be projected onto the body or my basic environment or my family, my partnership, my friendships, my relationships. I've projected all these needs kind of like that character in Bob. And what about Bob? Some of you have seen that movie played by Bill Murray. I need, I need, I want, I want, I need, I need. You know, he plays out the dependency and then he projects it onto his therapist, Richard Dreyfus, you know, who has his own ego issues of being the unhealed healer, but everybody is praying to be released from this belief in time and space. So if we just give a little context to this, we could say that in heaven all is one, Nirvana all is one. And then the belief in separation brings this feeling of unworthiness or lack. Some things missing, some things not right. Where is the love? You said was mine, all mine till the end of time. Was it just a lie? Where is the love? I'm going to tell you where the love is. You know it already. It's inside you. It's not in the images. Like Paramahansa was helping us out with don't search for human love. Don't search for friendships. Don't search for likes on your posts, on Facebook. Don't look outside yourself to the things of time and space and say where is the love because as long as you look in the darkened glass that was talked about in Corinthians in the Bible, as long as you look in time and space for love, for meaning, for understanding, for purpose, it's not there. As I say on the Spanish retreats, nada, nada, nada, nada. You have to realize nada. Don't look there in that darkened glass because the ego made the world as a distracted device. The ego made the world as a veil. Why would you look for divine love who you are in a distracted device? Why would you look inside a veil to find the truth? The truth cannot be found in form. And Jesus tells us that in the beyond idol sections in the Course he says truth is universal. Your will is universal and cannot be found in form of any kind. You cannot be content with form of any kind. It's like the ego has said, come here, look in my darkened glass. Come here, my pretty. You believe you've separated from God. Oh, too bad. Too bad. Now God will punish you. The ego says, so you might as well come over and look into my crystal ball. Look into my crystal ball over here. Look deep inside my crystal ball because you've lost your happiness and joy and love. You left God, so now you've got to make the best of it. Come and look into my crystal ball over here. What are you missing? Love? Oh, you lost it. You can't go back to God. He'll be angry with you. Come over, look into my crystal ball of time and space that I have invented for you. I have invented a world for you of time and space where you can find intimacy and happiness and joy and peace and love. You can find friendship, companionship. You can find success. You can have status. You can have money. Oh, look, you can possess things in my crystal ball. You could never have possessions with God.  But over here, you can possess things. And it's got some tricks in here. It's a competition, but work hard. Work hard over here in my crystal ball because you can make it to the end of the rainbow and that's somewhere off in this future because the ego invented the future and the ego invented the past. Nego says, just keep playing the game over here in this crystal ball and keep your mind focused on that. And then you go into the crystal ball with your mind and you try to enter this game of time and space and you try to find happiness there. But what did I say yesterday? I said, a son of God is only happy in the environment in which he was created. When I'm talking son of God, I'm talking the Christ, the pure Christ idea of unconditional love. That's a pure creation of God. And the Christ can only be happy in God's love, in heaven, in the mind of God. The Christ cannot forget that it's the Christ and then be a dreamer of a dream and find happiness in the dream world, in the crystal ball of the dream world. If you are created as an eternal being, what makes you think that you can actually find happiness in this crystal ball of time and space that the ego invented? And in fact, we just watched the movie Tron at our last Spanish English weekend retreat. And I was talking about Tron where Kevin Flynn, you know, invents a digital world, then he gets trapped in the digital world. And he's trying to do his zen thing. Some of you, I know, are trying to meditate your way out of this dream, out of the crystal ball. It seems to take a long time. You know, you're putting in a lot of hours there with your zen thing inside the crystal ball. And Jesus is saying, well, that's good. I'm glad you're meditating. That's good. And you can contemplate. That's good too. You can believe you're battling the ego and fighting against zen. All these ways will eventually reach God. But I'm going to give you a fast track to do it, to, to release your mind from the mesmerism, the hypnotism of this crystal ball of time and space. The fast track, I'm going to give it to you straight. I'll use even, I've used the parable of Jesus 2000 years ago, but let me use the parable of David, because that's a little more seemingly recent in time, that the parable of David the last 34 years have involved this thing called a course in miracles, not the first years of David's life in the parable of David, but the last 34 years have involved a course in miracles. And actually, the book is just a symbol, just like David's just a symbol in all the parables of the world. So there's nothing special about the parable, but the parable has been a parable of learning to follow guidance, the direct path to God. That's the name of our online retreat. And what it has been is now I can condense the wisdom of those last 34 years, for example, because it's really, I see that when you're all showing up here and you're praying, you want direct guidance, you want to take that direct path, so I can condense the wisdom that I've experienced through seemingly these last 34 years of praying, of listening, and following, and tuning into this guidance, these instructions. And there have been a lot of instructions that seem to come, but again, it's not about 34 years of instructions, it's about what is the purpose of the instructions, but to free your mind from the crystal ball. Because the mind is actually a part of the mind of God, it's a creation of God. But when you believe in the ego, the mind splits into two parts, the Holy Spirit, who remembers the truth and the ego, that is the lie. And the key point is that the all purpose of all guidance, the purpose of all prayer, the purpose of following the guidance, the purpose of it all is to come to the present moment. You already are what you're searching for. You're already there, you already are there, and you may say, well, I don't believe it. Well, that's the point of the prayer to activate the guidance so that you can remember the truth of who you are. And the parables seem to involve, you know, coming across the Course in Miracles in 1986, and then praying and asking, reading the book, following the guidance, opening up after maybe two and a half, three years, then I could hear the voice of Jesus speaking to me, and that really speeded things up as well, because I believed in the crystal ball. I believed in time and space, and I believed that there had to be a better way, like Helen and Bill had prayed. I really believed there had to be a better way, but, you know, when you're in your, at the time, maybe late, late 20s, you know, you've got things in your mind. What about the future? What about my career? What about my ambitions? What about the life that I am going to lead in time and space? Very much all tied into the crystal ball, and Jesus is, remember saying, he wants to call your mind back to, toward the light. He doesn't want you to be stuck, mesmerized by this pseudo fake, invented, make-believe crystal ball of a world. He wants you to, to release your investment in the ego and the crystal ball that the ego made up. So that's the key, that's the key bit of wisdom right there, is that all of this listen and follow that David seemed to go through, it seemed like David was receiving the guidance. It seemed like David was the one who was making those decisions, to like leave behind his career, give his life over to Jesus, leave behind his ambitions for the future, and basically say, here's my heart, here's my life, here's my bank account, here is my decision-making capacity, and saying, it seemed like David was back in 1986 saying, please help me, please help me. But dream figures don't wake up, and this parable has never been about David. This is about remembering the mind that we share. We all share the same mind, and everything is solved in that mind by the Holy Spirit. In fact, it doesn't say everything will be solved in the future by that mind in the Holy Spirit, it's saying everything has already been solved.   It's already been solved. The Holy Spirit has already answered this belief in separation. So really, following the guidance is just a way, a mechanism of remembering that everything has already been solved. That the belief in separation from God, which is just a belief, it's not a reality, it's not an actuality, it's already been solved, and now I need to accept the correction. I need to accept that it's already solved, that Jesus already solved this riddle 2,000 years ago, seemingly in time, but actually it was in the mind, he accepted the correction and now he's working directly with the mind that believes in this puff of nothingness to say, let it go, cough it up, spit it out.  Don't hold onto the belief in your mind. So the ego is a master at making up a crystal ball of a world in which there are many perceived problems. There's not only a body and bodies, but there's all these problems. There's financial problems. There's health issues. There's issues about interpersonal relationships. There's all these pseudo problems that all of them exist in this crystal ball of time and space, and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are like going, turn your mind to us, turn away from that crystal ball, turn to the light. In the light, that's who you are. You don't really have any problems because none of the crystal ball problems that you believe in are real. So you're hallucinating, but you think it's real. You've gone to a movie theater and now you've got hooked on the movie, and now you're reacting and responding to all the characters and the images that are part of the movie, and now you believe you're in the movie.  Problems that the ego set up, which are all these projected crystal ball problems, are problems that are made with one reason, and that's so you won't turn to the light, that you won't go within and go to the light. The whole crystal ball is a distracted device to keep you from turning to the light. The whole crystal ball was designed by the ego to avoid, be still and know that I am God. Be still and know that I am the Christ. I am one with God. So these pseudo problems are set up and you know the ego really likes this game because let's say you have like two or three or ten major problems that you're dealing with and you pray and you try to follow guidance and you're trying to solve the problems inside the crystal ball. I have a financial problem. Oh, I got a check in the mail or a friend loaned me some money or I won the lottery or dah, dah, dah, dah. Inside the crystal ball the ego says, oh very good, you solved that one. Now here's ten more and then you solve those ten and then what do you get? Twenty more. The ego loves the game of problems and solution inside the crystal ball because every time you seem to have personally solved some of them, it sends in the next set.  And Jesus is telling us, that's what I learned from the course in these last 34 years. I really learned it from Jesus in my mind but seemingly the course was a symbol that helped was, he's saying, your problems have already been solved. Come in with me. Come into your mind to me, to the presence of love. Let's see the happy dream together. Let's see the forgiven world together. Let's see the crystal ball from a point outside of the crystal ball. The ego just invented this thing to keep you distracted and if you just see it for what it is, you'll see that you have no problems. It's just inside the crystal ball of time and space the problems seem to be real. Therefore Jesus says, the secret of true prayer is to forget the things you think you need. He's basically just saying, don't look inside of time and space for the solutions. He says it a hundred different ways. Seek not outside yourself or it will fail and you will weep each time an idol falls. He's telling us, go within. He said that 2,000 years ago, take no thought for what you shall wear or what you shall eat. You see that's inside the crystal ball. Seek first the kingdom of heaven. He's saying, come out. Come back to your heart. Come back to the joy. You'll never find consistent joy, happiness, peace inside this crystal ball of time and space. It reminds me of that song about Vincent Van Gogh because Vincent Van Gogh would paint these amazing colors and these amazing paintings and yet he was very he was struggling as far as identity. Suicide all the way. I think he cut off part of his ear. Spectacular paintings and he's just wanting to go home. He's wanting outside of the crystal ball and then Jesus now is giving us the answer. He's saying, good, that's good. No matter how ingenious or creative or whatever you seem to do inside the crystal ball that will never content you. So guidance I could say is not about solving problems in time and space. Now I know a lot of you, a lot of the questions that you write in and a lot of your prayers are about here's my situation, David in the crystal ball. It's like, oh, I see you, David. You're in the crystal ball too. And I'm asking you now, can you help me with my crystal ball problems? And I'm saying, well, it can seem like the guidance will come through and I will definitely address your specific concerns because this is what you believe in and I'm going to address those very specifically. And then Francis will join me tomorrow and we will continue doing that. So we don't, we're not kind of like just saying, okay, just close your eyes and pray with me. All is love, all is God, all is love, all is God. That's the truth, but I'm trying to reach your mind in a way that you can actually hear what I'm saying, that it's all mind. Everything is mind. There are no problems apart from the mind. That's lesson 132 from A Course in Miracles. There are no problems apart from the mind, apart from what you think and apart from what you believe. It's not in the crystal ball of the world that you're going to find the problems or the solutions because the world was made that you would never find the solution, that you would never find the Holy Spirit in the mind. The world was made just with more problems. You solve a few, you get another set. You solve them, you get another set. You solve them, you get another set. You see how it's a wild goose chase to follow those problems out. So what I'd like to share is that once you begin to see that the problem is not inside the world, then you start to focus on your thoughts and your beliefs. So really we could say that to believe in the ego and to believe in the ego's thoughts and thought system is a thinking problem. So you could do that every time you seem to have a problem with finance, is a problem with the body or symptoms on the body or therapies and treatments for the body or food issues or any kind of issues with politicians, with the environment, issues with your interactions with your fellow humans, your brothers and sisters. Anytime you start to think about those problems, if you believe those problems are those specific things that I've just mentioned and many more, then that's a thinking problem. You're thinking with the ego and you're buying into the crystal ball and now you're thinking the problems are inside time and space and now you're trying to solve them and therefore you might have even signed up for this retreat thinking David's going to help me solve all of my specific problems and in one sense it's true, but I have to show you that they're in the mind. They're not in the world because if you continue to think that the problems are in time and space, you're going to actually continue to think that the guidance and the answers to those specific problems is inside of time and space and that's not the point of the guidance. The guidance is saying come to the holy instant, come beyond that whole trick of time and space, come beyond distractionville, come beyond this mesmerizing trick of past and future and you come into the present moment where you have always been, which is the gateway to eternity, which is what you are. You're an eternal being and you are not bound by time and space. You can start to realize, oh my gosh, I was just thinking that these were real problems because I was thinking that this world was real. That was my assumption, the world's real and now I've got to solve the problems inside of time and space. It is never going to happen. There is no solution. This crystal ball is actually external to you. You're this light in the mind and this ball is external to you, but now you believe you're in it. Because of your thoughts and beliefs, you think you're inside of it and now you're like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz who wants to go home to the light, not just Kansas. You want to go home to your eternal nature as the Christ. That's in the mind of God. That's what going home is all about. Yet you seem to go on an adventure and David seemed to go on this adventure where, oh, look in the crystal ball, David. Oh, look. He's got a course of miracles. Oh, look at that. Now he doesn't like to travel, but Jesus has got him traveling everywhere, all over the United States, Canada. Oh, now he's got him Argentina. Oh my God. He's going to 44 countries and he doesn't even like to travel. Wow. Jesus must be doing something in his mind because that character doesn't like to speak. That character was voted most quiet in the whole senior class, voted most quiet in the crystal ball. My goodness. Jesus has got him talking. Oh, he's going to course groups. Oh, he's talking. Now he's speaking. Oh my God. Jesus is speaking through him now. Look at that. Oh, now he's traveling and speaking. Oh my gosh. You see, the Holy Spirit and Jesus will use the skills and abilities in the crystal ball that the ego made up to take you to the present moment. That's the only point. It's not about the future. This is not about a future career.   I want to go and live in a living Miracles community. I want to go and live in Quantico, where everything is peaceful at the time, where they just, they do a show every once in a while. But meanwhile, they just sit there with ISO in Om Shanti Shanti Shanti. You know, maybe you think that they're just doing Om Shanti Shanti here in Quantico with ISO. ISO, I think probably is doing that a bit on inside. He's laughing. He's doing, he's our cat that has went into a Samadhi experience and left the body. It was, was just there like a glazed cat with glazed eyes because he had left the, he literally transcended the body. And, and we saw him, you know, with his eyes looking out into space. And it looked like he was dead, but he was actually just communing, communing with, with the source, you know. So now we have Samadhi cat that we call ISO. And the ISO, if you remember the movie, the ISOs are the ones that just started appearing. They weren't invented. They just, these sparkly light beings, if you ever watched the movie, Trump, the sparkly light beings just show up and no one knows where they came from. They're just these beings of light. Biodigital jazz, man. That's what the inventor calls them. Biodigital jazz, man. Did you invent them? No, of course not. So you, you can experience these miraculous experiences like Svava was singing about, you know, show me how to believe in miracles. That really, that's just saying show me that the crystal ball isn't who I am. Some of you, and I will deal with all these things. I know I was watching Jessica. You're just enjoying watching this all here. And you're over in the Netherlands. And you're sitting there and your, with your butterfly wings and your beautiful hammock and, and smiling and laughing and everything. And meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, there's Helena, who's Elias, who's also joining in with us too.  And now, oh, there's Jessica. She's sitting there. Well, what, what's going on with Helena and Jessica is both of them are feeling called by God into this deep journey into oneness. And Jessica has children. And Helena has children. And, and the mind of Jessica is thinking, yeah, I'd really love to wake up to God and, and, and follow my heart and go for it and everything. But, but I have these children. And I know that if there's going to be a plan for waking up, I don't know how this is going to go. Because with children, I have a lot of beliefs in the crystal ball in the mind that I'm a mother, that children need their mother and so on and so on and so forth. And Helena is over there too. You two are like counselors for each other. You two need each other more now than you ever did. Because most of the people on the screen you're looking at, you're thinking they're not going through the same thing. They're not, they're, they're, they're being called by God, but they, they don't have children that they're responsible for.  You're saying to the Holy Spirit, yeah, some of these other ones that, that are in community and they're, you know, they're following their guides and everything. Good for them. Yeah. Good for them. They don't have children. You know, like, you're saying my degree of difficulty is much greater than these other ones. Oh yeah, they're in Quantico and meditating and translating, having fun and I watch them and they're having so much fun and I've got children and they don't. And so, you know, they're closer because the degree of difficulty, you know, is like, if I'm a gymnast, now I'm trying to do a triple backflip axle and come down on my feet and land in heaven. And these other ones, you know, they're just like raising their arms and legs, you know, and they're just, they're not, they don't have to do like a triple reverse axle, but you believe that your path way to God is higher in degree of difficulty. And this, and Helena Elias, you know, it's the same thing. It's like, it's like, wow, I've got to really perform some kind of maneuver here with the Holy Spirit's help to get me out of what I perceive I am. And remember the first principle of a Course in Miracles is there's no order of difficulty in miracles. One miracle is not harder than another. And you are beginning to feel this like, wow, I'm called by God and it can't be that the circumstances that the ego invented have put me in a more difficult trap than other people. It can't be that way. Why is because the crystal ball is just a crystal ball and you have to see it for what it is no matter what you believe.  Like this is a wake up call and regardless of how you perceive yourself in that crystal ball, I am calling you out of the world. There is no harder or more difficult circumstances to realize who you are because God didn't generate or create any of those circumstances and God loves you so dearly that if you even came close to this light, you would just weep in gratitude and say, oh my God, I can't believe I thought those thoughts about me and I can't believe that I was this whatever that was. I don't even know what that crystal ball is anymore. You would just cry and weep as you got closer to that light. You would just you could not control your emotions. The love in your heart would just swell and swell to a giant proportions and you would think and and I was concerned about the crystal ball. I was concerned about the characters that they were going to scream at me, point the finger at me, you can't do it, you're abandoning, you're rejecting and and Jesus is like, well, yeah, that's what made the crystal ball, the belief in ego, the belief in abandonment, rejection, false responsibilities. Who generated all these except the ego that you're one responsibility is to accept the correction. The ego doesn't care which angle it gets you. It's always saying you can't leave this crystal ball because it's saying it's your home now. The ego says you live in the crystal ball and if you go, you're going to be so sorry. You're going to be so sad if you leave this crystal ball.  A bird in the hand is worth how many in the bush.  And now it seems to be a threat to let go of these earthly time-space problems and accept the correction in the mind. And you may think, well, I'm a human being, so I'm a human problem solver and I really tuned in to this retreat this weekend because I'm hoping David can give me better access to the Holy Spirit so he can help me solve my human problems. And then if I can do that, then I'll be good. And the ego will throw in another set of human problems tomorrow and then another set of human problems the next day and it will keep throwing in more and more stacks of problems.  And it's all within the crystal ball of time and space where it generates all these false problems of yesterday and problems of tomorrow. And if you keep believing in those problems, then you won't go back to the light. You'll say, I don't deserve to be in the light. I'm not a good enough problem solver. I don't know how to pray well enough. I don't receive enough guidance. And because I don't receive the guidance, I've got too many time-space problems to go back to heaven. And what Jesus is telling us is he's saying, no, no, no, don't look to that darkened glass. Don't keep thinking these thoughts and believing these beliefs. In fact, just today, Lynn Robin Miller from the United States, she shared a poem with us. And when I read this poem this morning, when I just sat down here and it was right on top for me, Lynn, Lynn Robin Miller of the United States, she wrote this poem called Over the Abyss. And I think this poem is for all of us. So I'm going to read it because this abyss is the crystal ball of time and space. And this is the poem that she gave to us. I walked to the edge of the abyss. Ego bid me look down. See? It's like, look in my crystal ball. See? A vast, vast nothingness stretching out to eternity. Ego said, this is what you'll encounter if you take one more step, like a step into the abyss. If you take one more step, this is what you'll encounter.  And I trembled as I contemplated the end of what I thought of as me. Ego screamed, it's time to step back. Don't fall. But in my right ear, I did hear a call that sounded like music of a grand symphony. And I floated over the abyss on its holy melody. What a beautiful poem for us. The ego is saying, if you listen to that small still voice, to that music, to that symphony of love that's playing in your mind, God's love, Jesus' love, the Holy Spirit's love, the love that's the light in your mind.  You'll have to let go of the me that was invented in order to soar and float on its holy melody.


Welcome to Insight, produced in partnership with Lakeland Public Television, serving North Central Minnesota. Today we are chatting with Pine Riverbacker's Family Center's Leslie Bouchonville and Pillager Family Center's Betty Doss. They have generously agreed to share some of their experience with us. I'd like to thank you both for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you. So the services that you provide are so essential and so difficult to provide. Talk about the kinds of services that you provide to citizens in this area. We are often referred to as the hub, probably a 30 or 40-mile radius, you know, and it could be more, but we do the food shelf, we have a food shelf, we have the WIC clinics and the public health clinics that folks from our area can't get to the county seat to have those and we do some outreach for that as folks come into the Family Center. We can, we have a relationship with them so we can inform them of what's available.  We also do a lot of prevention work in Pine River. We have a couple or one coalition and then we employ a regional prevention coordinator that serves certain counties. We do a home visiting program jointly with two other Family Centers. So the Pine River back as Family Center is providing support in a number of different ways. You're talking about food security, you're talking about prevention, prevention meaning trying to intervene before there is a crisis. To avoid a crisis, to finesse that you are providing physical and mental health referral services and counseling. So and you cover a very broad geographic area. Yes, we do. And so let's talk about Pillager Family Center, how does Pillager approach the services that you provide? Yes, Pillager is located 60 miles from Walker which is Cass County's county seat and where a lot of county services are provided. So 20 years ago when the Pillager Family Center started it was the county and community members thought let's open up a Family Center in the Pillager area so people didn't have to travel that 60 miles because that's a burden for a lot of families whether it's having a reliable car or just gas money to get to Walker and back. So they decided let's open up a Family Center where we can offer these services locally. So Pillager was the first Family Center to open with this thought process in mind and then it has evolved over the 20 years to we also offer the local food shelf in our facility and we find that that's a great way to connect with people when they come in to ask for help for food. We can also connect them to other services such as do they know about the SNAP program offered through the county if they're coming in consistently for food. Maybe they should apply for SNAP and we have those application forms available. Maybe they need to talk to somebody in veteran services so we can refer them to those services just depending on what the family's needs are. It's a great place to start building relationships and then seeing what families need and try and help them with whatever that need is. So let's talk about the definition of family, of being a Family Center. What do you have in common in terms of how you look at your clientele? Who are your clients and how do you first meet your clients? How do you encounter your clients when they first come into contact with your organizations? Leslie, do you want to start? Sure. I think it's taken like we've been around for 21 years so it's taken a while for people to understand you know what what we are as a family center and what we have there. I mean we do some outreach but we just don't have the staffing to do as much as we'd like. You can't be out on the road all the time if you're also serving people and you can't afford to fund people who are out there doing that that type of outreach. So it took a little while for people to get to know and when they come in what are they first encounter? People come in for lots of different reasons. We do you know we will do faxing for them. A lot of people who work in the community fax their time cards. You know we are a resource so people ask where they can find this or where they can find that or we also partner with community resource connection right here in Bemidji to do the Minsher navigation. Right. And so that that was a huge need.  Cass Coney was a void. I mean there was no one to do that so when we know that we have the need we step up and say what can our staff do? What skills do we have here? Who wants to do it? So it's really a needs driven approach right?  I think that's the beauty of family centers because we're each our own 501c3. We each have our own board of directors so we can identify the needs in our community and either we we create a program to meet that need or we partner with another program to meet that need. So you adopt a program that somebody else has already developed to meet that need and you apply it to your community. Yeah and then we don't duplicate service either because we're such a small community we try and do a lot of things to meet needs of families and we want to do them well we don't want to do them just to do them but it is community driven and I think that's been true since that we started since we started is that it's based on the needs of the community that determine where our programs are and we concentrate on that family support those family support kind of services basic needs. What do you say to to those and you you hear this argument sometimes at the state level and certainly you hear it on the on the federal level where where people assert that services like yours are not really necessary. If you just eliminated them eliminated the funding for them saved the money quote unquote of those services then those communities would just trundle along they'd be fine people would figure out other solutions. What do you say to to to that type of thinking. Well I would I would challenge that definitely we we have we know that what research says and one of the programs we do is home visiting so we get with the mom prenatally and we work with the mom to their to the child three years old. Those are targeted home visits and we know the dollars we're going to save if we can stay in there and connect that mom teach that mom help that mom support her through depression or whatever she's experiencing so that child can get into the school system ready to learn. Well let's talk about about the the impact of not doing that if you're not providing prenatal care then that also means that a certain number of new mothers are going to end up in the emergency room or in acute care. So there's actually a bell curve that you can look at and you can say well over there this this group of people we don't we can't predict who they will be but we know this group of people will be much larger and and end up absorbing a lot more resource right at at that end of crisis than if we are doing some prevent or identification identification of special needs both Betty and I know if we can get in visiting early the earlier way identify a child that may have special needs and the earlier you can start addressing that the less cost there is down the road. It's such a good point we are beginning to discover that what used to be called special needs is just they're just different learning attributes they're just different attributes and in particular it's very difficult to individually address those different attributes particularly if you never figure out what they are in a particular child and so if you don't do that early identification how can you actually ensure that those issues do not become issues by by how you interact with that child on the educational side or or or in terms of of other types of care you were going to well and I think a lot of learning happens or doesn't happen when even prenatally we're learning how much brain development is happening prenatally right and then in those first three years of of life how important connecting synapses in your brain and how important that is for a child to be successful later on in life if those things aren't happening then there there could be special needs or different learning but why not give them the best that they can have early to because we know research tells us that brain development is is critical during those first three years it's such a good point because you bring up the the prenatal issue which attaches to nutrition and your food shelf program so and there's an awareness of balanced nutrition and the the effect of balanced nutrition on prenatal development and then you also have the issue of self-medicating which can lead into drug dependency but even in the early stages of self-medication to deal with various forms of distress pressure physical pain that can the consumption of those drugs which seems to the the person who's consuming it to be just it just me well it affects a child's development it affects a child's DNA formation in those early years and so bringing that knowledge no you know you think that it's innocuous it is an innocuous i think i think there are so many so many ways that that relationship with the family and that trust that we can build up in a smaller setting we don't have the label as a county or somebody that could be a threat take the child away that's not what we're about the police or child protective services and and there are i mean there are families out there that have that view that that that could happen so for us to go in and work with that family and build up the trust sometimes it takes a long time to do that but once you're there it is amazing the results that you will see what does the future hold for your organizations do you feel like you're going to be expanding or shifting your your services do you have particular challenges that you that you'd like to highlight doing a few things well and not spreading ourselves real thin trying to do everything so i think we've really focused on a few areas early childhood is is something that we find important and that we're good at helping provide that service collaborating with the school collaborating with the county and providing services related that to that we are good in delivering the basic needs support in our community with the again collaborating with the churches collaborating with the school and community members they that's one other funding source we have is donations from from community members in the prime river area it's kind of been we've gone through a lot of strategic planning and the most recent one probably a two or three years ago was that you know we are a hub so we can do those things but we still partner and then we had some programs three or four bigger programs that we needed to maintain and keep them going and i was keeping our eye out for ways that we can sustain those well thank you so much for sharing the work of pine river back us and pillager family centers leslie bushonville beddy dos thank you very much for your service to the community and thank you so much for your insights


There's a reason why Xtrades is currently the fastest growing application on the market for sharing financial ideas. With over $2.5 million paid in the last two years to contributors, users are flocking to see what trades the top traders on the leaderboard are sharing in real time. If you're looking to grow your reputation as a trader on the internet or discuss your trading ideas with other reputable investors, click the link below and get connected with a trading mentor today completely free of charge. Alright, what's up everybody? This is Alex from Xtrades and welcome back to another educational video. We really needed to do this video because a lot of people get into options trading but they don't really know what they're trading, they don't really know the actual reasoning behind why they exist, and they don't know how much leverage is actually in these contracts. So these are some things you should know before trading options. Or maybe you're already experienced, you just want to up your knowledge in options. This video is for you. So what is an option exactly? So each contract is made up of 100 shares of underlying stock. So that's your total leverage per contract. You're getting exposure to 100 shares each contract. And then each options contract is made up of a strike price and expiration date and cost a premium. So this is the options chain. Pretty much your standard options chain on really any platform, thinkorswim, Webull, really anything. It's going to look like this.  Obviously you can adjust that. You can really adjust any settings in most platforms to whatever you want to see. You can see here it's got the bid, the ask, just your pricing or cost of premium. Your expiration dates are over here. This is when the contract expires. And basically each options chain on any platform kind of looks like this. So when buying an option, you are buying the right to purchase 100 shares of the underlying stock at the specific strike price you chose and buy the expiration date if your contract goes in the money. So that was the original purpose for options was to be able to pretty much get it leveraged to 100 shares and not have to buy it yet until the expiration date assuming you were right on your bet. And if the contract expired in the money, you would then have the right to purchase 100 shares if it expired in the money at whatever strike price you chose. So let's give an example. If you bought a 395 call, let's say on spy, and it ran all the way to 400 by November 18th, that means your contract would be in the money at that point. And then you could then purchase 100 shares at 395 a share as long as it's over 395 by November 18th. So when a contract goes in the money, that means the underlying stock price is above or below the strike price. And that depends if it's for calls or puts. When the underlying stock price is above the strike price, that means it's in the money for calls. When the underlying stock price is below the strike price, that's in the money for puts. And I can give you another example here on optionsstrat.com. So you can see a spy is trading at 454.22. Let's move it back to 453 call. You can see it gets more expensive because you are going deeper in the money. The strike price is at 453, price is at 454. It means it's the dollar in the money.  And that's just one part of how options are priced. So the further out of the money they go, the cheaper they get. The further in the money you go, the more expensive they get. And honestly, in the money, contracts are the safest way to trade if you're going to trade options. And that's why you're paying more for that quality. And as well, you're paying more for more deltas. And we'll get into deltas later. But the higher the delta, the better. And here's an example on puts. See, as we go further away from where it's trading, they get cheaper. And as we go deeper in the money for puts, they get more expensive. So if your strike price is at 457 and it's trading at 454, that means you're almost $3 in the money on the put already. And that's why the value is higher because you're already in the money. If you go to exactly at the money, which is going to be like 454, you can see this put is really cheap because it's right at the money. If you go almost $1 out of the money, you can see very cheap. And this is why they're cheap because they're trash. And it takes more of a move to get in the money, which is why they cost less. So as you move further out of the money on anything, everything is going to get cheaper as you go further in the money on any contract, call or put, they're going to be more expensive because they're more quality. And there's less risk of it being out of the money if it's already in the money. And when a contract expires out of the money, it expires at zero. So options always have a time limit and they are decaying assets. So they're very risky. As you can see, these expire in one hour. Even though it's relatively close to 454 on this 453 put, you would still need $1.39 to the downside to even get at the money on this, which is why it's so cheap because it's a trash contract. It's risky. It's going to take way more to get paid on this. So these are kind of like a lot of tickets. But if you were to buy a 456 put right now, it's about $1.70 in the money. Pay 164 bucks. You're already in the money. So if you got this put at 164 and it went down to 153.10, you'd make 125 bucks. And I really recommend using this website because options are a little confusing. If you've never traded before and you have no idea how they're priced, how they move, obviously paper trading is a good outlet to go with, as well as use this option strat website so you can see how everything is priced. So now that you've seen kind of what in the money, what out of the money and what at the money kind of mean, hope it makes sense of why out of the monies are cheaper and why in the monies are more expensive. It's all based on risk. And this is just one way of how options are priced. Another thing that people get confused about is the 5.6 number, right? Premium cost showing on the options chain is multiplied by 100 shares. So the spy 395 call for 1118 is showing 5.68, which means you multiply 5.68 times 100 shares.  Looks like I had a typo here. It says 558, but your cost would be 568. Assuming you bought this at the ask. So even though it says $5 and 68 cents, that's just for one share.  So you do 5.68 times 100. So you pay $568 total for one contract in this specific example. So another thing we'll get into here is reading open interest and volume. This is another piece of the options chain. So your volume is the total amount of contracts traded. Simple as that. Volume is your total amount of contracts traded on all exchanges. Open interest is the total amount of current open contracts that are not yet settled. So these are open contracts that nobody has closed yet. So in this example, you have 73,000 open 395 calls on spy here. While you have 54,000 contracts traded just on the day for this 395 call.  Paying attention to these on the options chain can give great insight to activity and how many other traders are opening and closing positions. Higher volume than open interest can also be viewed as unusual option activity, since it implies a sudden interest despite lacking open contracts. And if you want to see a cool unusual options activity website, go to barchart.com and just look up their unusual option activity. I'll show you a lot of different types of contracts on different tickers. Usually they have higher volume than open interest and that's what kind of implies the unusual activity when it has higher volume than open interest. And now we'll get into Greeks and implied volatility. So options are quite complex derivatives and pricing is made up of multiple factors. One of these are called Greeks. So you can see is theta, gamma, delta. So delta is showing how much the options pay per $1 move on the underlying stock. So if you have a 0.52 delta, that means you're making about $52 per $1 move on the underlying stock. So if you bought this 395 call at a 0.52 delta and it went up to 396, you're gonna make about 52 bucks on the contract. Theta, this is everybody's worst nightmare. Options are decaying assets that lose value slowly up into its expiration date. This is showing how much value the option loses per day. So you have a 0.37 theta. You have a $37 loss per day and this just keeps going. And as you get closer to expiration, theta gets a lot worse, which is why the short-term contracts are so risky. It's usually why you just want to day trade them. You don't want to swing these lotto tickets. You don't want to swing something with only eight days expiring. At least don't open anything fresh. That's expiring in eight days and hold it overnight. It's just risky because you have theta working against you. If it doesn't go in your favor, you're gonna get punished. You also have gamma. So that represents the rate in which the delta changes per $1 move on the underlying stock. So if you have a 0.02 gamma, that equals a 0.02 increase in delta per $1 move. So if you have a 0.02 here at the 395, if the stock price goes up $1 to 396, that means your delta is also changing. So that delta would then turn into a 0.54 in $1. Hope that makes sense. And like I said, your delta is showing how much the option is paying per $1 move. So that 52 delta equals a $52 game per $1 move. As the gamma moves, a $1 move would then change it 0.02. So then you'd probably be making about $54 per contract because your delta would change with the gamma. And then you have Vega. I don't really pay attention to this one too much. Mostly just paying attention to deltas and theta. But Vega is measuring the amount of increase or decrease in an options premium based on a 1% change in implied volatility. What is implied volatility? It is defined as the market's forecast of a likely movement in the underlying security. So low implied volatility, it's gonna be anywhere from probably like 20 to 30%. You can see implied vol right here. You got spy in the 24% range, relatively cheap. It's not too expensive. And most ETFs are gonna have lower implied volatility. Individual stocks like Tesla or Roku, stuff like that, they're gonna have higher implied volatility because they move more and they have a higher implied move. High implied volatility is probably gonna be like 70% or above and they're gonna have way more expensive premiums. So implied volatility is just another way options are priced. Options also get priced from the Black-Scholes model, which is just a super complex mathematical equation I have no idea about, but that is another way they get priced. So there's a lot of different factors that price it. I just wanted to show you the options Greeks and also a little bit about implied volatility. Kind of just give you the basics. Low implied volatility is gonna have cheaper premiums, high implied volatility is gonna have more expensive premiums, simple as that. And then like I said, your deltas pay attention to those. The higher the delta, the more in the money you are. The lower the delta, the more out of the money you are. So if you have a higher delta, usually above 0.5, that's gonna be like at the money. Anything higher than 0.5 is gonna be in the money. So you can use delta as another way to how to figure out how deep in the money or deep out of the money an options contract is. Like I said, the higher the delta, the better. So choosing an options contract, this is another thing people struggle with. For day trades, you probably wanna go with three to seven days till expiration at least. And this is only if you're day trading. Like I said earlier, should you pick anything less, you should cut down your position size. Go with at the money contracts at least, which should have a 50 delta minimum. Just like I showed you in the last example. So look for that delta, keep it at 50 or higher if you can. Swing trades, you wanna do 30 days till expiration at least, that's a good minimum threshold to go with. That gives you about a month till expiration unless theta burn or time decay. And I showed you the closer you get to expiration, the worse that the theta can get. You can go slight out of the money on these, but your delta should have a minimum of 0.30 if you're gonna open the position. Like I said, further out of the money, your deltas get lower. So 30 is a good minimum to go by, I would say. At least if you have 30 days of expiration, that gives it more time to work towards your strike price. Cause if you go with that 30 delta, you are buying something out of the money. So it's gonna take a bigger move to get closer to your strike price that you chose. An at the money contract and an in the money contract can also work for this if you need more safety. So if you wanna be safer, if you wanna pay more money for more quality, the at the money or the in the monies also work. I would recommend those. Those are gonna have higher deltas, you're not gonna have to worry about draw down risk as much, obviously there's always draw down risk if you trade in the markets. But to go at the money or in the money, it's not nearly as bad as if you bought an out of the money contract. Now we'll get into some basics for spreads.  So vertical spreads are defined risk to reward strategies. This means when you open them, your profit and loss is already limited and set in stone. This makes them more appealing to people who like safety and less risk. So a lot of platforms these days, they already have kind of like a spread helper. Like if you have Robin Hood, they'll have like a little section in the options chain that has debit spreads or credit spreads for you to kind of pick your strikes for you and help you out. I really recommend utilizing those if you're new, as well as utilize that option strat website. And we'll go over some examples on optionsstrat.com so you can get an idea of how the vertical spreads are priced, how to pick the strike prices, et cetera. So there are four different kinds of vertical spreads. There's two debits and two credits. Which one you choose depends on what direction you're trying to bet on and what kind of conditions you're trading in.  So I'll show you exactly how they work here. Like I said, when you're opening a call debit spread, it's a bull call spread. As you can see, it's highlighted here and you can literally build these.  Right now we're going over the bull call spread and these cost way less money because they have way less risk. They're defined risk to reward strategies. As you can see, your total cost and your max profit is already laid out here. So if we did a December 15th, 454 to 459 bull call spread, you're paying $245 with a max profit of 254. So you're getting about a one-to-one on this and as you move the strike prices, you can see it increases or decreases. Usually for a spy, I would say $5 wide is pretty good. So $5 wide is gonna be, you know, 450 and a 455. And you can see how the more deep in the money it is, it's a little bit more costly and you get a little bit less profit out of it. But like I said, it's defined risk to reward. If you were to do an out of the money bull put spread, say we do a 455 to 460, you're paying about $223 to make about 277. And then your max loss for debits are always just what you pay. Simple as that. Same thing if you were to buy a call or buy a put, your max loss is just whatever you spend. Credit spreads are a little bit different and we'll go over that next. But I just wanted to show you that if you were to bet on spy here and you thought it could get to 460 at least by 1215, you could do this as well. You're not gonna be spending as much but you're also not gonna be making as much. This is why it's more appealing to newer people, even people just like less risk. And it's just a great way to have a long exposure without just having to buy a single call.  But the fact that you added that 460 by buying one and selling one, you're kind of knocking down that cost as well as knocking down your reward. So I hope that makes sense. So you can see that this is the one you buy, you're buying the 455 and then you're selling the 460. You can see the quantity is negative. That means you sold it and you do this at the same time. So you buy one at 427, you sell one at 208. Your total cost is 427 minus 208, that's 219. Then your max profit, 281, max loss, whatever you paid. Hope that makes sense. Definitely go play with this. Do some more research on spreads if you have to. Go to optionalstrat.com, play with it. Maybe even paper trade these if you want. If you can find a platform that does it so you can see how they move, how you get filled, et cetera. It's pretty important. So I hope that made a little bit of sense. Call debit spreads are a bullish position where you're buying one call at your preferred strike price and then selling another strike price just above it simultaneously. And I showed you on spy, you probably want to go about $5 wide. So if you wanted to do a 455 call, you would then sell a 460 call to lessen the cost as well as lessen your reward. That's what makes them a little bit safer. And then your total risk is just whatever you pay for it. So that's paying a debit. Now onto the next, this is a put debit spread. This is a bearish position. Same thing if you were to buy a put, but it's just less risk, defined reward. So they put debit spread, you're buying one put at your preferred strike price and then selling another put with a strike price below it simultaneously. So let's say we wanted to do the same expiration we were just looking at on spy for the bull call spread. This is now a bear put spread. So this is a bearish position. You can see the 455 put and the 450 put together. It's going to give you a total cost of about $200 with a max profit of 300, assuming you can get down to 450. So you can see on the graph here, as it gets further down, as price gets further down away from 454, it is increasing in value. That's why it's a bearish position. Once it gets closer to expiration, that's when it starts getting deeper into profit. As long as it's staying in this range, if it's staying at 451 by expiration, this is going to be worth four. So you'll have about a $200 profit there. If it goes down below 450 by expiration, you can see it changes to five. That'd be a $300 profit, max profit. So it needs to get under that 450 strike by 1215 to have max profit. A lot of people they'll just take profit about 50% on any debit spread, 75%. You don't have to hold to expiration if you don't want to. I just wanted to show you an example of what it would be worth under 450 by expiration. Because you have that 450 strike, it needs to get under that by expiration on 1215 to get that full value at five. And there's your total profit, it'd be at about $301. So I mean, it's under 450 by then. And like I said, use optionstrat.com, play around with it. You can even play around with it before you enter a position. This is gonna kind of help you choose strike prices, see what looks most discounted to you, see what looks best. And then you can see, let's say I moved it down to a 445 to 450, it's further out of the money. So it's gonna cost less because it's gonna take more to get there. But you have a higher max profit and then it's still $5 wide. So you can see it would need to get under 445 by 1215 to get that max value. And another way to figure out your max profit is you take the width of the spread and you subtract the debit, that's your max profit. So you have $5 wide, you just subtract the debit. So it's 500 minus 117.50, it's gonna give you 382.50 max profit. Hope that makes sense. So the width of your strikes minus the debit paid is your max profit potential.  It's gonna change as you go wide. If you go tighter, you can see if I did a 454 to 450. Max profit's 246, you get that from 400 minus 153.50 to get 246.50 max profit. Hope that makes sense. So that was two debit spreads.  That's a debit. Now we're gonna go on to credit spreads. So this is pretty much the opposite of debit spreads but they are similar. They're both vertical spreads. You're just getting a credit upfront instead of paying a debit like these two. So this is a put credit spread. This is a bullish position. This is inverse to the bare put debit spread. On this put credit spread, you're gonna buy one put and sell a strike price above it simultaneously. This will result in receiving a credit straight to your account rather than paying for it upfront. But we'll go over some examples of a bull put spread. On spy, we'll do the same expiration date. Let's say you're a bullish on spy and you thought it could get over 460 by 1215. One way you could do this, you could do a 455 to 460 bull put spread. For this, you would take in $300 of credit. You'd probably need about 500 in margin with a max loss of 200. And another thing with credit spreads is you are capitalizing on theta or time decay. Since you're taking in a credit, you want these to lose value. That's why you are taking a bullish put position because you were hoping the price will get over these puts, these put strike prices and expire worthless. As you can see, they're worth zero. Once you can get to above 460 by 1215, that means you would keep the full $300 credit you took in and you'd also get your collateral back, et cetera. But that's your max profit. So max profit for credit spreads is always whatever you took in for credit. I showed you max profit for debits is the width of the strikes minus the debit paid. And then you can see the max loss for a credit spread for this one specifically. It's just the width of the strikes minus the credit. So you got 500 between the strikes minus 300 that equals your max loss. And I know this is a lot to take in but hopefully it's making sense. You can always go back as well as I'm gonna put this PDF inside the description so you can go back and look this all up. But it's really recommended you go to optionsstrat.com play around with this and move your strike prices around see how things are costing, see what you would need to get in profit by expiration, et cetera. That's how you're gonna learn as well as real time examples. Of course, you wanna take real time trades, start small of course, taking real trades is always gonna give you the best experience and screen time is always gonna give you the most knowledge and also give you the best examples. So hope that makes sense. This is a bull put spread. 460 by expiration to expire worthless which then you would keep the credit you took in. So with debits, you're paying a debit with credit you're taking in a credit. Simple as that. And as well as credit spreads are just great because you can capitalize on theta because options do naturally lose value as time goes on. This is a great way to capitalize on that. And like I said, 80% of options expire worthless. So credit spreads are great and selling options is also great but this is definitely where you wanna start. Start with credit spreads before you get into selling options too heavily. Start with credit spreads. They're great for beginners and they're fairly easy once you kinda get the gist of it. So hope that made sense guys. Put credit spreads is gonna be a bullish position. Like I said, it's inverse to the bearish put debit spread and you are buying one put and selling a strike price above it, another put simultaneously. Then you will get a credit straight to your account for that. The next one is a bearish position it's called a call credit spread. So this is inverse to the bullish call debit spread that we just went over. It's literally the opposite. You're gonna buy one call and sell a strike price below it simultaneously. This will also result in receiving your credit straight to your account. Same thing as the put credit spread. You're getting credits for taking these. So we'll go ahead and open one of these. Let's go to bear call spread under build on optionstrat.com. And let's say we thought spy could get under, let's say it could get under 450 by 1215. You would buy the 455 call 1215 for 457 and then you would sell or go short the 450 call 1215 for 789.    So you would need spy under 450 buy 1215 for this to expire worthless and you would keep that credit. It's the same thing as the other credit spread that you were looking at. You wanted to expire worthless or you wanted to lose value. As it loses value, you gain. So you always wanted to expire below your short strike or your furthest strike, which in this case would be your 450 call. If it gets under that buy 1215, you will keep that full credit. Like I said, sorry if this sounds repetitive but repetitiveness is the best thing to get it nailed into your brain. This is all very confusing to me when I first started trading. So I wish I had somebody kind of drill in my brain more. Obviously it took screen time and experience and actually opening these spreads to kind of get it and get how they move and how they work. But once you do, they're really easy. I mean, these are, these are for beginners. So I hope it makes sense to you going forward. So as a bear call spread, if you were bearish on spy and you thought it could get under 450 buy 1215, you would keep that full credit. Like I said, minus 331.50 is your max loss. So your max profits 331.50 just your credit max loss 168. Both of these combined is the width of your strikes. It's another way to look at it. And like I said, credit spreads are going to require collateral and that's gonna depend on what you're opening and your brokerage. So I can't exactly tell you what your collateral will be. So I hope that made sense guys. That was your last vertical spread. So they call credit spread a bearish position. I will put this PDF inside of the description. So you can go back and read this. But your call debit spread is a bullish position. Your put debit spread is a bearish position. Put credit spread is bullish. Call credit spread is bearish and credits and debits are just pretty much opposite to each other. So you can see the call debit spread is bullish but the call credit spread is bearish. Likewise, the put credit spread is bullish but the put debit spread is bearish. But vertical spreads are great. They're just more defined risk to reward and you're pretty much already setting in stone what you're gonna make and what you're gonna lose. And that's why they're more appealing to beginners and people who are trying to take less risk. Some extra notes. Call debit spreads if you're bullish on a stock and think it will stay above or get above a certain price. Bull call spreads might be the strategy for you.  Put debit spreads. Use these when you're bearish on a stock and think it will stay below or get below a certain price. Put credit spreads. Use these when you're bullish on a stock and think it can stay above or get above a certain price. It's smart to use these when implied volatility is higher since premiums cost more with higher IV you will receive a nice credit. Since you're shorting these and taking in a credit you benefit from theta and time decay and are also aiming for these to lose value. Credit spreads you want to lose value. Debit spreads you want to gain value. A call credit spread. Use when you're bearish on a stock and think it can stay below or get below a certain price. Same as the put credit. You will look to open these when implied volatility or IV percent is higher. So you are compensated a nice credit to your account. So I hope everything made sense guys. Hope you guys enjoyed this video. These are just some things you might want to know before getting into options. And also know that spreads are a really good way for beginners to get exposure to the stock market. Spend less than if you were to buy a regular call or put. We'll also kind of limiting your risk to reward. Spreads are great for that. And like I said, go to optionsstrat.com. It's a great website and go to build all your verticals are going to be right here.  Play around with your strike prices. Go in the money, go out of the money. See what they're worth. See what your max risk and your max profit is. All that good stuff. As you move your strike prices around for whatever you're going to open, could be any position. As you move your strike prices, your expiration dates, really anything, it's going to change the price. It's going to change the risk, et cetera. So it's important you play around with this and to kind of get a feel for it as well as get some real time experience and get some screen time. Maybe paper trade. If you got think or swim, I'm guessing they have paper trading still. You can play around and open these spreads, see how they move, see what they cost, see how easy or not easy it is to get filled. Sometimes spreads are tough to get filled on. But if you trade something like spy or QQQ and ETF, the options generally have tighter spreads. So it makes it easier to get filled and it'll make your life easier. So that's the video guys. Make sure you like, comment and subscribe to your extra YouTube channel. I love you guys. I'm gonna go ahead and get this chopped up, sent out, all that good stuff, got a lot of editing to do.  I love you guys and I'm out.


The competition kind of drives us to be better, drives us to have a goal besides just training for no purpose, but training to beat someone else. So I think that's a good aspect to it. Events like this are important for UD because it gives people the ability to sharpen skills that they wouldn't necessarily use a lot, such as stuck-round or any problems that they wouldn't necessarily think of training on. That's one of the main benefits of doing a team in your competition. It's just unique problems and exposure and experience.


But welcome to the streamers. This is your first time here. Welcome. My name is one. I'm a variety caster I used to do a lot more Minecraft streaming than I do now This was a game. I played I was playing way back in 2008 2009 ish And I put like five solid years. I want to say five years probably less Five or six solid years or just nothing but Minecraft and I Stopped for a long time because I was severely burned out and Occasionally I come back to it and I'll play it again and people who found me via Minecraft. They always how me about planning again So occasionally I'll break it out again today's one of those days Certain valence here. How you doing man? Hey, just read your rules and I'll follow cool, man. Thank you. I appreciate that Is it bound to shift yet is a shift I Mean works on the trees it just Maybe it's not bound to shift. Maybe it's bound to something else for dirt. Hey, it's a wiggly tinks. What's up, man? I'm saw this about Minecraft I don't know some kind of video game Well, you craft and mine and do something with creepers and bits Are you Santa?  It was working earlier. It just stopped just now How you doing Gotham is my city welcome. Hey, it didn't work. Okay. I guess it the plug is not working, but Oh cheated well tell. Oh, I said, thank you Smile There's no something guys. We're gonna be streaming for 12 hours. We're probably not gonna play Minecraft the entire time though Unless something drastic happens. We're gonna probably try to squeeze in another game. I've been looking at called two-point hospital hospital simulator game pretty cute game cured stupid got a lot of saplings and Fauna In my inventory So we're gonna make a tree farm like out to here. We're just gonna do like a fenced in area With a few trees and they just keep that control so we don't have like Nonsensical tree mazes being built. How long are you going? 12 hours, I just said it 12 hours 12 hours All right, I got it. I gotta drop off some stuff. Yep. Got a few subs man But this is not the reason for this is just a normal Minecraft stream It's not an incentive base one and I hate having trash No, no no sense in keeping a poisonous potato around No, I miss one of one of mods. I missed the most is inventory sort Just like you hit a button equals and just source the inventory It's bigger than something like that. I'll be man. I'll be all over that We'll throw the apple in here. I'm thinking of pulling it all night and I spend all my time here.   Cool, dude. I might break out mouse hunter, too We'll see I gotta do some tempered mobs, man. I Definitely got to temper stuff. Hey, Ty's zoom hitting the button 24 billion years in a row. That's two years, dude Yeah To your badge congrats man, you're now platinum Congrats, sir Everybody's showing some love in the chat. Thank you so much mr. Ty's zoom. All right, so we're getting a lot of dirt Thanks for the follows guys. I do appreciate it. I hate these horses, man They just move out of the and it's just out of the corner of my eye. I see something move and it catches my attention I'm not used to horses. Okay. That's the good amount Streamers old likey might be on your end, dude Might want to reduce the Take it down to a lower bit rate or lower resolution. I should say oh, I forgot I have to do this I'm also used to those mods that uh That when you deplete a certain resource like if I run on the dirt in my hand It'll automatically take dirt from my inventory and put it back in my hand. I See you man Well, that's something you don't see every day chat You don't see a dude with some doctor who glasses riding brand of piggy That is a host for mr. Two Luther. Thank you so much for the other host man. Everybody's showing some love Thank you too Luther for the other host. I appreciate it. That is definitely something you don't see every day Oi, why am I why is this taking I keep forgetting about Little nuances in Minecraft. I'm like, why isn't this going faster? I'm like, well, it's Minecraft sometimes it'll just pause Placing blocks because it feels like it. It's Java. It's like, hey I need another gig of ram for you to place that block. So just hold tight Okay, so after we do this uh this tree farm The next thing after that Is that I'm gonna have to establish a new strip mine because no mel built too close to me Yep, that's exactly why I can finally allocate over 20 gigabytes of ram to minecraft ye It's true It's about how much it needs You may have to close chrome true This is working the leaves north end bling Well, the good news is that I got enough saplings to last a long time There's a spider up my roof. I just watched this guy on twitch stream minecraft. It took him two hours To landscape a bunch of dirt and I couldn't stop watching On the next morning povich I got more trash in my inventory, man Protect me. I need to go make coffee Just moving dirt from one place to the other chat Uh-oh Uh-oh I see some stone that's going to be getting in the way Of my dirt plans bless you Did it come out?  You know what that'd be that look good on my resume Ah, yes, I'd like to You know your company really has A nice program and I want to help your Company expand in the realm of dirt and I happened to be a professional dirt shuffler Yes, I actually moved 600 units of dirt from one area to the other in a matter of an hour Earning me the certification of dirt shuffler Yes, as you can see as you can see on my resume I put in three years at this company and I was top dirt shuffler for two of those years The only reason I wasn't third year because I sprayed my ankle Uh watching football We're not sleeping There's a slash day slash day set time time What's the command? I'm not moderator time set day whoo Whoa, where'd that come from? Yeah, my bed hurts me too. It like damages me. I don't know what's going on with that No, borna. I'm not sleeping Slash day it works too. Okay Whoa jungle queen without a hose for 13 people. Thank you so much jungle queen for the other ones. Everybody shows some love in the chat We're playing Minecraft My village is pretty ugly. I got I got a I got a See right now. I'm in like The the medieval period we got we got to go modern We got we got to skip ahead to like The industrial revolution or something but I need brick. I feel like I need brick.  All right, we're making some progress I Definitely got chop all that down And flatten all that. Oh, okay. Let's just continue to mess it up But welcome to the stream guys. If it's your first time here, welcome Yes, I am Somewhat I wouldn't say new to the minecraft directory, but you probably haven't seen me that much Because I used to stream in a lot in the past Played a lot in the past had a lot of youtube videos and stuff and I just stopped They got buoyed out buoyed Boined out Um, so we this is the second time I played it this month That's a spider. Yep Please get all that. Okay, I did Oh, oh, oh looks like I found the party here chat.  He's gonna hurt Yep, felt good chat It was like a massage to my armor I just let it happen. I'm like just let it happen We have damaged The river Can't believe they were all hiding under that tree So it was a creeper a spider and a skeleton just all chilling there kind of shocked me and I have a Full inventory. Why am I keeping all these stones? Wait a minute I just realized I got a bunch of stone tools still in my inventory. Why am I doing that? I know right. That was definitely a monster mash They did the mash They did the bones the mash The monster mash. Okay, that's that and then this There we go. And then that guy just wanted to stick around Okay, lots of loose stuff because I'm out of space. Um Here hold this for me Now I'm not gonna do that. It's a bad idea Uh, let's pick up the important stuff Let it just for now Um, your babykills love monster mash They did that mash All right, we gotta clean this up because this is kind of ridiculous. What is this? I just suddenly have a pig on my farm chat Uh, yeah, y'all On the yule. All right. We're Like I need a garbage can like like a lava pit or something Because I got all these tools and I don't do with them Let's do this I'll keep the iron ones, but man. I'll get all this, uh Random stone I understand we speak english here. Thank you Yeah, I need a clay. I need a lot of clay Well, you guys What is this? You guys just come here.  Oh, you know what?  That's what I'm about to do There There All right, so Um, all right. We're good. I think So I've got three stacks of dirt left If they have woodhouse really the gift those keeps on giving it just burn it down, right? I know I don't know what that is. What is that? A sea pickle Guys, please speak english in the chat. Thank you There's an english on it. We can't moderate If we don't know what you're saying so please That's the only reason why I say that because we don't know what you're saying. That's all Um And the bot times you're all I think for a special character, I think Look, that's what happened Yeah, I figured I mean people keep talking in different language Most times they're trying to say stuff. Well, sometimes they're saying stuff that You normally wouldn't tolerate if you knew what they were saying All right guys It's sleep time Thanks for uh Taking care of that Yay We didn't have to slash day Take those done already. Wow Most of them probably because we keep flipping the cycles Okay, so we're going out in this direction Um Almost got enough room to start planting trees I want to go to Where that aqueduct is And then we'll uh, we'll start our next um We will start our next trip mine. Well, thank you for the clay Appreciate it Got sneeze.  I see jr. Blaze with what okay next to his name I'm like what? And I've I actually created them What the heck do you think you're building? You're not a roman Implying that only romans know how to build That we're just trying to say Does somebody post my stream on a swedish message message board or something? What's going on? What's with all the swedish people all of a sudden? I thought they taught manners in sweden I thought swedish people were like really nice and and civilized and Not like us dirty americans, you know because we don't have any kind of manners What's going on? No, my last stack of dirt Did I anger some swedish streamer? I don't know


Good morning, and welcome to the 19th meeting of the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. We have received apologies from Foisel Chowdry. Our first item of business today is a decision to take item 3 in private. Are we all agreed? Thank you very much, we are all agreed. The committee will now consider two negative instruments. First, we will consider the first tier tribunal for Scotland social security chamber and upper tribunal for Scotland rules of procedure miscellaneous amendment regulations 2022. Background information is outlined for the committee in paper number one. Are members content to note this instrument? Pam? Thank you. I have just one question on it. Are you in a position to set out the rationale and what the test for whether or not with information would be withheld from someone? I guess that it would be helpful if we had that information. I would anticipate that that information would need to be in a clinical way. I guess that the person who the information would be withheld from would have the right to know as to why the information was being withheld from them. That is my understanding upon reading it. It would have to be laid out quite explicitly as to why they would not be given the information due to the harmful nature as perceived by health professionals. As far as I can see, there will be circumstances that I just could not work out what they might be and why a panel, for example, would then become privy to a piece of information that the individual would not yet know. I get that it could cause harm, but in the circumstances of the particular type, I am not sure that I can imagine a reason or a rationale for that. I would not be able to say what the reason and the rationale behind that without a clinical background if we do not have anybody from the Government to be able to answer that. We could write and ask for that to be clarified to us. I wondered what, in relation to the appeal process around it, might be quite useful to include that in any letter as well. I would anticipate that, should information be withheld, somebody is then provided with the reasons why there has to be an appeals process contained there. We will ask the clerks to write and ask for that clarification for us. We will now consider the welfare foods best start food Scotland amendment regulations 2022, and I refer members to paper number two for the background information on this instrument. Our members are content to note this instrument. I myself had a slight concern with regards to always ensuring that the pregnant woman would have the right to apply in her own right and would supersede any other applications, but that is laid out there within it. I am happy to have that on the record and note that it is dealt with. Does anybody else have any comments on that one? Okay, so we are happy to note that instrument. That concludes this morning's public part of the meeting. At next week's meeting, we will hear from the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government and the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Economy on resource spending review framework. We will also hear again from the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government and the Minister for Public Finance, Planning and Community Wealth as our final evidence session on our inquiry into low-income and debt problems. The session was due to be heard today but had to be postponed. We will now move into private session to consider our remaining agenda item.


If you've ever wanted to own one of my customs that's been featured on my channel now's your chance. You can get it for $4 Hi there, it's DJV. I finally have some stickers available for sale This is something I wanted to do for a really long time so far It's been pretty successful and I just wanted to post a video here on YouTube to get kind of my other followers So I have a variety of stickers available and all of these stickers are available on my website But I'm gonna go through it all in this video as well So the stickers I'm gonna start with are the high quality stickers They are printed on a high grade vinyl in which has a rapid air backing which means that whatever you apply it to it's pretty hard to get bubbles When you're sticking it down and they are laminated with a matte laminate Which means that they are waterproof outdoor safe. You could put them on your car. So here we have Finnegan York Keon the famous YouTube creation horse and Bacillus So all of these stickers are available for $4 each. My prices are in US dollars But if you are from Canada, let me know. I have a slightly Discounted version of the three favorites. So these are the circle portraits of Bacillus, York and Keon These guys are $3 each So they're about a three inch circle and these are my original artworks of two horses We have an apple Lisa and a paint. This is kind of my cartoony Drawing style and I think that these translate as stickers really really well They're really really fun. These guys are also four dollars each and then I have two stickers that are Part of my wildlife series guys have been very popular. They're selling out very quickly I actually had a third design, but those that design is already sold out in the making of this video and so I have the giraffe with the Paper airplane and I have a Ram which is just pretty stylized pretty cool looking. So these guys are $5 each a little bit more They're a little bit bigger and then I just have some extra fun stickers for my studio page These guys are on a cheaper vinyl, which means they're not safe to go on your car They're kind of just a basic sticker and these are all $2 each So I have a happy customizing Because that's one of my best sayings on the channel. We have a boss mare Which is really fun. These ones are actually almost sold out This is my last boss mare and then I have a DJB Studios logo So that includes my horse logo with my fancy text that I really really like then we all need This one because I all know that all of you guys have too many whips Shipping is $2 to Canada and the US and it's $3 for international Now if you're ordering a ton of stickers the price of shipping may go up just based on the weight of the envelope So just send me basically an email with what stickers you want I will send you an invoice back of the total cost and you can pay Palmy the amount the stickers will ship within 1 to 2 business days. Thank you so much for watching and happy sticker collecting


What does what does a nice guy look like like the way the one that you write about in your book? Okay, and I'll talk about specifically nice guys, but also Say that a lot of things I talk about a lot of your women listeners will probably relate to as well Because there've been nice girls around forever. Okay, so it's the same It's the same problem for men and women at its at his base It is it then manifests often in a little bit different ways for men and women But the base core paradigm is a nice guy or a nice girl doesn't believe they're okay Just as they are and you know We mentioned Adam Lane Smith, and he did a really good job talking about how children internalize at a very young age Any negative painful experience as being caused about them all all children are very narcissistic They're the center of their world and so when something painful happens We believe I must have caused that which then turns into a grandiose belief system That has two sides to it.  We have it's not an intellect intellect Sexualization it's not even like visual memory It's just an emotional belief system down at our operating system that that then affects every other part of our brain And so we grow up to be children adolescents adults with a belief system if I can just be good enough and Become what I think other people want me to be then I'll be liked and loved and get my needs met And if I can hide anything about me that might get a negative response from other people then I'll never get abandoned So men and women both That they if they had these nice guys internalization or attachment issues as as Adam Smith called them They might manifest differently for a guy than they do for a woman But it the core belief system is the same is that there's something wrong with me. I'm not good enough That's typically called toxic shame. I have to become something different become what other people want me to be and hide Those whatever that bad thing about me that I think is and you for most nice guys What we tend to hide is our needs our wants and our sexuality So we keep that all under wraps so we don't get a negative reaction from anybody Okay, so would that kind of Would that kind of nice person arrive from a childhood that was like overly stressful Is that where it comes from or that does be a regular childhood and then like that anyway, you know the word stressful is probably a really good application because what happens and I write about this in my book is When I first started looking at nice guy syndrome, I was looking at me, right? So I thought I'm a nice guy How did I become a nice guy? Well, it's probably because I had this interaction with my foot this type of interaction with my father This kind of interaction with my mother I was brought up in a fundamental christian church that had a lot of you know hellfire and brimstone messages Just grew up in the 60s and 70s with angry feminism Every man's a rapist an erection to sign of aggression And so I all these got internalized into my emotional brain And I thought okay, maybe all other nice guys are just like me, but I quickly came to realize they weren't There's a lot of different factors and and the this you mentioned stress However, we might experience stress and a lot of this has to do with temperament because you can have two children Born into the same family with very different temperaments And they handle the stresses very differently and develop different survival and defense mechanisms So a lot for for what I found with nice guys and nice girls For many it partly is just do our net to our natural temperament I'm a fairly easygoing You know, don't rock the boat want to make everybody happy kind of guy. It's my basic temperament Yeah, okay. Yeah, so as part of who I am and then when you add those stresses as you speak of and and those stresses would be anything That's painful uncomfortable.  It's not going to be done logically. It's done emotionally and so Whatever those stresses might be it might be, you know, our parents don't get along well It might be that You know that they repress their feelings. It might be that sexuality is repressed in the family It might be that mom and dad fight a lot. It might be our, you know Maybe our father was never there. It could be any number of things It could be that we were hungry and didn't get fed quickly or we you know, wet our diaper and didn't get changed quickly Those kinds of things are the stresses That a child internalizes I've got to find a way to not keep experiencing these these painful experiences And all children do this not just nice guys or nice girls All children develop defense survival mechanisms to try to do two things number one Cope with the uncomfortable feelings they're feeling in the moment So I sucked my thumb till I was in kindergarten. That was a coping mechanism Some children become needless and wantless some cry some fight some Some please some smile all the time. Um, that's how we try to manage the uncomfortable feelings The second thing that we try to do is try to prevent the things that cause these uncomfortable feelings from happening again in the future Now take all of that bundle of stuff that we just talked about Fast forward that into adolescence and adulthood. We all have that emotional operating system We formalized at a very immature Helpless dependent stage of life and we assume that's the way the world works and we go out into the world Operate functioning from that emotional operating system And even if for example, we can't find any big trauma in our life or our parents are still married and have a have a good marriage Anything uncomfortable or painful is stressful to a young dependent child