investors and innovation. Tom, thanks for coming. How are you feeling? You were here already yesterday. I saw you walking around the booths. Yeah, sure. I saw the pitches. I saw the speakers here. It was a great day yesterday. I hope everyone else felt the same way. Yeah, so I've actually seen you a few times here in Japan. You seem to be a regular. You've had the idea office here for a while. Can you get started a little bit on idea and design thinking and how you guys came to Japan? Sure. So, idea started doing design thinking work 40 years ago this year. It's some ideas that came out of Stanford University and we've actually been working with startups the entire 40 years. But as time went on, we worked more and more with large corporations as well and so we got really interested in how to reconnect with the startup community. And the way we're doing that here in Tokyo is we partnered with other people who we liked and respected and we created a venture capital firm here just in Japan called D4V, Design for Ventures. And so it's been this really fun way of combining design thinking with startup cultures. And we've invested in 30 startups already and there's still more to come and really having a good time with it and a lot of interaction with the startup companies in our portfolio. So, let's talk a little bit more about D4V. When did you actually get started with that? So, the idea of D4V came from our CEO, Mak Takano, who some of you may know. He's the CEO of Forbes Japan. He's a very, very successful investor and as I got to be friends with Mak, we started talking about things we could do together and it was him that proposed this idea of combining the best of IDEO skills with Knowledge of Venture Capital, which was two and a half years ago. We launched officially in December of 2016. We raised the fund last year in 2017 and started investing. And so now we get to shift some of our attention, you know, that the fund is fully raised into more time that will be available for our portfolio companies. Yeah. For me, seeing you guys do what you do with IDEO and then what you do with D4V, it's been very interesting to follow that. Is there like something that is different for you guys in how you think when you do design thinking in the more IDEO sense versus like when you invest in the companies? If I have understood correctly, D4V is like you do, of course, invest but you kind of provide some sort of design thinking services or advice or how is it different working with those two entities? Sure. I mean, it has a lot in common with our consulting work, but it is there are some different elements. You know, when I have my venture capitalist hat on, I have to think a little bit differently about which companies to work with. You know, in the consulting role, it's easy to fall in love with a company that may not have tremendously high growth in its future, but you just kind of love the entrepreneurs and things like that. Whereas what's different when, you know, I have the venture capitalist hat on is I have to be responsible in thinking about our limited partners, right? It's not enough for them for us to just love the company. I have to also be thinking about the growth trajectory of that company, and we're especially looking for companies who have a chance for growth trajectory beyond Japan. As you may know, we're investing 100% in Japanese companies, but as you may know, when it comes time to, you know, have what they call liquidity event, whether it's an IPO or whether it's through mergers and acquisitions, it's great to be open to life beyond Japan because the numbers are higher, the rewards for entrepreneurs can be higher, so we want all of our companies to have at least that possibility. Not that they will all go global, but we want to find companies that all have the potential to go global. The global aspect is a very interesting point that you raised. I think it's very, very interesting and very, very cool. We're of course here in Tokyo, we're honored that you decided to make this kind of effort and initiative in Tokyo. Is there like, is it something that you're experimenting here or is it like something that you might take outside Tokyo at some point or how do you see that? So, you know, Antti, we've talked a lot and I've actually never talked to you about this. I mean, it's in Tokyo in many ways because of you. I mean, I came to slush, you know, I spoke at the first slush in 2015 and at the time, to me, the prevailing perception of Japan and I guess I'm guilty of having that same feeling that the economic success of Japan was basically built on Japan Inc.  But that entrepreneurship was kind of quiet in Japan. And then I come to slush 2015, the first one that you put on where you had to build your own venue out on Adaiba. And oh my God, the energy of slush was so amazing. It's like there are entrepreneurs in Japan. There are a lot of them that are just, just searching for, you know, the right amount of support. And so when Mach Mach Takano, our CEO, you know, I'm chairman, he's CEO and we have a, we have a really great team. When he proposed it, I mean, a part of why I said yes was slush because slush 2015 changed my point of view about entrepreneurship here. And there's still people out in the world who haven't changed their point of view that yet. And it's our job to, it's our job to change that. I feel like Japan is at a kind of an inflection point, you know, in the S-curve of growth, right? It's flat or it looks flat for a while. And then there's this magical time, which I've witnessed in many different locations and industries where, where growth happens and things really, really get exciting. And to me, Japan is in that moment now, that, that there's an inflection curve where entrepreneurship is cool, right? I swear 10 years ago, it felt like if you were to be an entrepreneur, first, you were going to disappoint your parents in Japan. It's like, oh, poor Takeshi couldn't get a job at Mitsubishi. He's got to try a startup, right? 10 years ago, it felt like you do a startup. It's going to be harder to get a girlfriend or a boyfriend, right? Because they really want somebody trustworthy who's, you know, working for Toyota, right? And, you know, there was a time when entrepreneurship was not cool in Japan or was not respected. And I think those times are over. Japan needs to turn up the engine of economic growth. And I personally believe we have all these wonderful big clients at IDEO, but I personally believe the economic growth in Japan is going to come from you, from the entrepreneurs. And yes, the big companies will continue, you know, on their way, and that's great. And we need that, right? But if Japan is going to outpace the growth of other countries, I think entrepreneurship is going to be part of it. This is true in America, right? We were talking earlier this morning about Hewlett Packard, you know, as the original company of the Silicon Valley that continues to this day. But look at the growth. Look at the growth in the U.S. It's Google. It's Facebook. It's Apple. It's the companies that were, you know, they were startups. In my career, those companies were startups. You know, I sat recently, well, it's a couple of years ago now by a very wise guy named Warren Benes. And he's a, he writes many books, has written many books on leadership. And he said to me one day, he said, Tom, you know, the number one role of every leader today is to make the leaders of tomorrow, right? And I actually have three roles right now. One at IDEO, one at D4V, one speaking out in the world. And I think all three of them, that is the theme. That is the overriding theme is try to create the leaders of tomorrow. And so the leaders of tomorrow are here in this room. They're at slush. They're at slush every year. And so, yes, I'm very happy to be here, auntie, because really you, well, you and slush changed my perspective about entrepreneurship in Japan. I was not expecting comments like that. No, we've never talked about this. Very honored with everything what you just said. This is a community effort. We have five, 600 volunteers here today.  Give it up. Thank you. Apparently, apparently we're doing something right. Thank you very much for that. Is there something that you've learned, like since your career in more traditional design consulting is very, very long? Is there something that you've learned through your new venture capitalist hat that you're going to do differently in your more traditional design consulting world? Well, one of the really fun things about D4V as opposed to the consultancy business is all of our portfolio companies are smaller than our clients on the consulting side. And so the really fun thing is speed, right? If I'm working with one of the largest companies in America or the world and we propose a new idea, we kick off a series, a long series of meetings in which they talk about the idea. And maybe there's a 20% chance they might implement the idea at the end of the meeting sequence. Whereas we meet with these portfolio companies, we do these design sprints. We're not actually doing the full design for the companies, but we help them in short bursts of energy. And we do the design sprint one week and the next week, it's like done. It's on their website. It's up and running. And so that speed, it's different and it's so much fun to see things come to life. You know, we have some portfolio companies here. I don't know if you saw Infosteller presentation here on the main stage, which has been named one of the future unicorns of Japan. Nikke said that about it. And so just to see the nimbleness with which companies like that or studio also presented, I think on the pitch stage, which makes websites without having to do the coding, you go straight from design and not templates, but actual custom design to webpage. And you know, both companies, they're just really quick at implementing. They take an idea straight into implementation. I see. One thing I've been thinking a little bit myself is that some of the design thinking methodologies, they've actually studied a little bit in university myself. And a lot of the projects we did were working with big companies is basically is the methodology something that works just like as it is for smaller companies? Like what I'm thinking is that do you, for example, your portfolio companies that you've invested in, do you advise them to use the framework exactly the same way from day one?  Like is design thinking for something that you should do later? Or like can you do it already early? Sure. Yeah. I mean, we're not locked into a certain specific. It doesn't have to follow five exact steps or anything. But yeah, sure, we think design thinking is really important from day one. I mean, the starting point of design thinking is, you know, always start with empathy, right? And so empathy deeply understanding your customers, that is huge for all companies, right? And in some ways, design thinking, I believe is more important for startups because it's a survival game for startups, right? If you can understand your customers better than your competitors do, or if you can build simplicity into their lives when other companies are trying to add more complexity, right? That's your that's your competitive advantage. And so in some ways, it's more important for startups. And by the way, I'm not talking about design, just like the appearance of things or the look of your website. I mean, design thinking is very broad. It's the it's the mindset with which you approach the world. You you start with empathy, you do lots of quick prototyping, you you prototype to learn. And so you associate your small failures with learning as opposed to small failures with depression, right? You know, that that's that you you build prototyping into your process. And then one thing that small companies sometimes struggle with a little bit is the storytelling part. And this is not specific to Japan. It's true in the Silicon Valley to the startups are so in love with their technology.    And he I remember there's this moment a long time ago in the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, he held up the first Apple iPod. It was the MP3 player. And he says, you know what this is? And I'm thinking, Yeah, that's an MP3 player. They existed already. I wasn't interested at all, right? And he did not talk about technology. He didn't talk about compression, algorithms, you know, no, he held up that that new device. And he told a six word story. He said, you know what this is? This is 1000 songs in your pocket. And me and everybody in the audience is like, got to have one of those got to have one, right? He talked about us. He talked about our lives. He didn't talk about his technology, right? And so I think that's a that's an issue that startups need to understand pretty early on, you know, especially as they approach market, we invested the seed stage. So some of our portfolio come to have not yet gone to market. But when you start going to market, wow, you have to speak your customers language using good storytelling. It's not about megabytes, or it's not about Hertz numbers, or it's it's about how how you get it to the customer. Yes. So another thing I had in mind was that since you guys have been I'm very curious on how idea or the design thinking existing design thinking people that you have, what kind of support they provide to the startups, you said that it's more than just money. It's also like concrete advice. And sure. And so how, how does that actually work? Like, it sounds like it's something really unique that most VCs can't really give to their company. Yeah, I mean, I think of it as truly unique here in Japan. By the way, this is happening in the VCs in Silicon Valley and has for many years combining design thinking with with venture capital.  And so what you're looking for is a VC partner who offers something more than that. And so we're offering the chance for coaching and mentoring and connection to IDO's global network, but also at critical moments design help.  And so that kind of quick hit consulting, we have, we have 30 people in IDO Tokyo, and they're all interested in D4V, they all want to work with startups. And so we're trying to find the match up between our interests and capabilities and the and the portfolio companies needs. All right. It seems we're running out of time.  Hey, thank you very much. We'll be heading to a slush cafe for some Q&A. So those who want to continue the discussion, see you there. Thank you. See you there.


I would like to have Prashant Matapati in the room. I don't know if he's in the room at the moment. I see someone sharing. Yeah, I'm here. Yeah, please, could you start with your presentation? And then Ronnie follows you immediately after? Yeah, sure, sure. OK, I see a presentation. OK, Prashant is there. Thank you. Please. Can you see the screen? Yes. OK, please start. Hello, good morning, everyone. So today I'm going to present about the program that, of course, we are launching through the Google Season of the Docs competition. So for those of you who are not aware of Google Season of the Docs, so this is a yearly program that is launched by Google in which they foster documentation for open source organizations. So luckily, I have been selected by LibreOffice to perform on one such operation that is advanced-scale course. So we are getting an advanced-scale course with the guidance of Olivia. So now let's quickly get into the program. So agenda for presentation is basically a project plan that is how we intend to cover this project plan. And then what are the topics that we are looking forward in this course. And finally, what have we done so far? So the timeline that Google has given, so basically, first, as I told, we are creating the advanced-scale course. So this course would be covering all the advanced topics of Calc, like formulae, pivot tables, statistical tools, et cetera. So the time frame given by Google for us is a 11-week window that is basically it starts from September 14th and runs along until November 13th. So basically, we have calculated it and we found that we have got 11 weeks in time. And within this 11 weeks of time, what we have done is we have chosen some 10 topics, 10 advanced topics from Calc. And we have been developing content for that. And once I develop the content, I send it for review for Olivia. And once the review is done, what we are doing, we are uploading the course content to Moodle Cloud. So once all the 10 topics that we have decided are uploaded to Moodle Cloud, at the end of the 11th week, we will make the course public. So that is what we have planned to do. And yeah, you can see that you can see the list of topics that we have seen. These are the 10 topics that we have selected, advanced topics, formulae functions. So you can see that anyone who wishes to learn about these topics should have at least some knowledge about Calc, like for example, what is a cell example. So once they are aware of that, then they can come to this advanced Calc course. So these are the topics that we intend to cover in our course in our 11 week period, throughout our 11 week period. And we have started off on September 14th itself on our project target. And so far, if I want to see the progress of this thing, so far we have four weeks are done and every week our plan is to complete one topic every week. So on the same lines, we have till now four weeks are completed and we are done with four topics, formulae functions, regular expressions, and pivot tables. So unfortunately, we are not yet uploaded anything to Moodle Cloud because there is minor issues, but that will be sorted out and within, from next week onwards, we will be able to upload all the content to Moodle Cloud. These courses are ready, three of them have been reviewed and they are ready to be uploaded to Moodle Cloud. So from next week, we'll start uploading the content to Moodle Cloud. And yeah, as I told by the end of 11th week, all 10 topics should be uploaded to Moodle Cloud. Yes, that's it, the short presentation from myself. Any questions? Just to comment, we are using an instance kindly offered by LibreOffice Italia, the Italian community for LibreOffice. They have a Moodle installation there, but the plan is to have a second installation inside the Document Foundation infra. So the classes will be shared between Libre Italia and the Document Foundation. And the idea was of course not to do things that we already find in the internet, either by videos or something like that, but to push for all the very advanced techniques that we have in Calc. So, any other question for Prashant? If not, then we follow with Ronny. Ronny Gandhi is... Olivia? Yeah. But Dan is asking if the work can be accessed already. Yes, but it's like a Moodle instance. We need some authorizations to get there. And at the moment, we are uploading some of the files, but we want to have something more interactive and we are working to make it more dynamic because we just don't want to have only files, auditive files uploaded. The idea is to have something that can be interactive using most of the Moodle facilities. So if you can wait a couple of weeks that we sort out all the issues that we have in Moodle, that would be okay. And if you have some experience in Moodle, and you want to help us, please contact us. We will appreciate to have your help in sorting out the Moodle instance. Yes, we will coordinate with Gillem.  But this was quite recent. So the point is that we were very busy in preparing the presentation and the LibreOffice conference. So time got short in the last couple of weeks, but the horizon is a little bit easier for us right now. Okay, let's follow with Ronnie. Ronnie is working on a second Google of Season of Doc program. Please, Ronnie. Prashant, could you cut your... Perfect, perfect. Please, Ronnie. Is my screen visible? Yes. Okay, so hello everyone. My name is Ronnie Gandhi. I am working on Calci Functions Wiki Reference and User Guide Project. So basically, I am editing the Wiki pages for Calci Functions. We have developed an agenda for this project, which is as follows, adding a universal structure to the Wiki pages, populating the Wiki structure, adding illustrations, diagrams and equations, handling or removing any copyrighted content, adding Wiki notes, warnings, pin messages and additional links. So adding a universal structure to the Wiki pages. Before this project began, Wiki pages for Calci Functions were non-uniform in addressing similar kind of contents. To solve this issue, I have followed a structure defining each function with the following sections in order. Function name, categories, summaries, syntax, returns, arguments section, additional details, examples, related LibreOffice functions, ODF standard and equivalent Excel functions. So these sections, we assume that these sections can well describe a function for any new user. So some of the common changes include adding uniform layout for keeping each category of text under the same section for multiple functions. For example, previously details about error cases based on arguments being passed were mentioned either in argument section or in detail section, but now all lies under argument section, adding tabulated examples which were earlier in plain text in some places and in tables in other places. Further, following a similar way of writing related functions, for example, now pages for functions like Count and CountA have almost similar content, but highlighting the key differences between each one of them, making it easier for user to interpret. Next, once the structure is established, we focus on populating Wiki structure. Most of the Wiki for Calci functions had many sections completely empty or others were filled with minimal details. So under this project, I added details about each section using help pages for reference along with the ODF. I have also researched additional details depending on particular functions, including what is the range of the result, whether a particular range of argument gives error cases, adding equations and images, finding related functions for related LibreOffice function section, any other additional details that seem important for the function, whether an argument can be passed directly via reference or as an array, adding all types of example cases, including those that result in errors with description about each one of them. Next is adding illustrations, diagrams and equations. I believe diagrams and equations act as an interactive connection between a documentation and the reader. As contrast to the plain text that was already out there, many mathematical, statistical and financial functions can be better described by adding a graph plot for their curves and equations wherever required. I have added such graphs and equations for functions mentioned here and many others like sine, cos, exponential, erf, beta, binomial distribution. Here is one example of 8-an-h function for which I have added a GIF that describes the curve of the function. Further equations for gamma and binomial distributions have been mentioned which are represented over here. Next, handling or removing copyrighted content. There have been some function pages that contain verbatim content from other sources. Also, there were cases where equivalent Excel functions were described and linked to their Excel pages. We see this as a serious problem and for which I have removed any occurrence of such issues and these changes have been further checked by Steve Fanning, my task mentor. Further, adding wiki notes, warning, pin messages and additional links. Following the same format as the help pages, offer, I have created templates to add note points, warning messages about certain criteria that must be satisfied for a particular function and pin messages. I believe these things act as an additional layer of information on top of the standard information that we are offering. Besides, I have added additional links to wikipedia pages for certain distribution functions like binomial, beta and f-distribution for those users who are keen to know about the mathematical side of these functions in depth. So with this guidelines, I am working on each Calci page functions, Calci functions for each page and with this, I would like to end my presentation and I would be happy to answer any of the queries that you have. Thanks a lot. If one of you has any questions to Ronny, please, just a complement of completion of information, you can access the work that is done by Ronny, accessing the wiki of the Document Foundation and clicking on the documentation entry page and then you have on the left, you will have a link to the wiki functions that we are developing. Just a question from myself. Alain, if you hear me. Yes. I was wondering if within Calci, there are functions, in particular text functions that manipulate and then define a list of texts in a similar fashion as the Perl function would do. Say you would receive a ABC parameter and perform an operation on the full list itself instead of a single string, for example. Am I clear? Do we have a list and link functionalities in Calc that would perform in a similar fashion as Perl's handling lists? Would there be text on numbers? This is Olivier speaking. I don't know this answer. Okay. I forgot to mention one thing that there are around 500 functions that I would be addressing in this period of GSOC, GSOC 2020. So, we have just come across 150 functions as of now. Thanks for your work. Back in the later section of the... Yes, I'm going to put the link here. Just a moment, please. Here is the link. Okay. No further questions. Thank you all for attending this meeting. Thank you to Prashant, Matapati and Ronnie Gandhi for coming to this conference. And present their work. And again, thank you guys for the opportunity. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thanks to you. Bye-bye. Thank you very much. Next talk will be in half an hour from now. Bye-bye. See you later. Bye-bye.


Well, how's it hanging freedom partners? My name is VW and welcome back to episode five of freedom for last Friday's in the last episode I showed you all how to make an awesome thumbnail But then I asked for you all in the comments what you wanted me to make in photopee So taking some of those suggestions Let's get to the true power of photopee by showing you something that you'll probably find pretty useful Gaming thumbnails my specialty and remember if you have any ideas of what you want me to make in photopee for the next Episodes, let me know in the comments down below But let's start and make our beautiful perfect Gaming thumbnail and here we are back again in our good friend photopee Now if this doesn't look familiar for some reason then be sure to go back and watch episodes one through four If you've already seen all those then you know what to do you go in start a new project Make sure that you are on HD make sure that your resolution is 200 background Transparent and then you can create your beautiful blank template now to begin with a gaming thumbnail You want a picture that is most likely taken right out of your video or the game that you are playing for instance I took this image while playing forza horizon 4. I took this image This is not an image that you'll find anywhere else that is ideally what you want However, if there are no good shots from within the game that you can use then of course you can go and look up Other pictures on Google images or whatever now there's one problem with this image And it's that it's not focusing on what we want it to we want the three cars here to be the focus We don't want text down here, and we don't want so much space on the sides So we're just gonna go and we're gonna resize it a bit Just to hide those and make it look a little prettier and Something something like this looks about right, and you'll see in a second why I left so much space open over here on The left. This is just by design choice You don't have to do this, but I'll talk about that more towards the end when we get there So next I'm gonna show you all a few new tricks that I haven't shown before and the first is By going up over to here to these three tools the one that we want to use is the magnetic Lasso tool now when you select the magnetic lasso tool Nothing is going to be happening until you click and you only want to click when you are on the car At least in this case you'll want to click on your subject at hand Which in our case is the car and you'll see that as we drag the cursor along It'll automatically for the most part connect to the side of the car and it may not be perfect And that's when you can click and that'll place a point like that and it'll snap to that point But for the most part it tends to do pretty good at Clipping to the car just going along the car making sure it gets the outline making sure that it doesn't mess up Down here since there are a lot of colors down here. It may want to mess up on So once you have that You'll see that it is outlined and once it is outlined you'll want to copy it and paste it in a new layer So now you have two different layers and your background You'll have the picture that you brought in and what you just made So if you make the picture that you brought in invisible You'll just have the part that you copied if you have make the part you copied invisible. You won't see a change yet This is where the fun begins. So now you want to go back to your image layer We're gonna do another new trick here. So get ready. We're gonna go up to filter We're gonna go down to blur and we're gonna go to motion blur since this is a race going on here We're gonna make it look like a little bit more like a race We're gonna angle this this way since the cars are going in that direction And we're gonna change the distance and you'll see as we make it the distance more It'll get blurrier and blurrier except for the part that we copied now It'll look like the front of the car is In focus and that's what we want something like that now that looks pretty good Now it's the front of the car in the focus and the rest of it is blurred out now Moving on from this we're gonna add a little touch to this just to make it look nice and these are Speed lines so once you have your speed lines in you're gonna go select the magic wand tool Click everything that's black and then erase it all and you'll see that now you have some nice little speed lines on Your screen, but that's not all we're not done with the speed lines yet We're gonna take the speed lines and add another blur to them But instead of using a motion blur We're gonna use a radial blur and this will add two different types of blurs you can use spin or zoom We want to use zoom and you'll see that as we move it It'll look as though they're zooming in towards the screen will press okay And then we have our beautiful speed lines now of course layering is everything so see all these down here They look kind of weird being over the car don't they but all we have to do is move the speed lines On this layer here below the layer that we copied and that already it looks much better It gives a 3d effect to the thumbnail and makes it look as though the car is sort of popping out of the thumbnail That is what you want next is not necessary But for this thumbnail I'm just gonna throw it in and that is of course the title of the game Forza horizon for or whatever game you may be playing You don't always have to put the title of the game or the logo for the game But for this one, I'm gonna put it especially if you play a lot of games on your channel. It can be helpful Especially if they're similar games So if you play lots of racing games having the title of the game in the thumbnail and in the title Would be really really helpful and for these we're just gonna go through give it a stroke and give it a drop Shadow, so of course you'll go into effects give it a white draw or a right stroke Make sure that it's not too thick not too thin just right and then we'll add a drop shadow to it Make sure it's angled right and make it a little darker to fit your fancy and boom just like that We have forza horizon for and our car now one thing I like to do sometimes is put the title Inside the thumbnail. Well, how are you gonna do that? This is how we're gonna take our text tool and we're gonna click and you'll see that it'll load our text tool Of course now we're gonna go and change the font that we have and the font that I'm going to use is called Action man once action man is loaded. We're just gonna type in cancaio Do it if do right there and of course resize it to the size that we want it to be put it about the same Angle as the logo and drop it right below Resize it to make it look prettier and boom. We have cancai drifto forza horizon for But something still doesn't look right. It's just black text. It looks kind of bland Well, you thought I was done introducing new things didn't show well. I'm not done Where's there's more to come so next you're going to want to find an image any image And we're gonna take that image save it on your computer and Drag it up here onto the project bar and when you let go you'll see that it will load Right here now for this part pay attention. You have to go up to edit Define new and pattern and you'll see that it will say pattern added and there's nothing here anymore Where'd it go?  You don't want that So all you have to do is click the pattern and you'll see your pattern Right there you can adjust it you can adjust to where it is on the text and you can adjust the size of it And of course the opacity now since the text is just black changing the opacity will make it darker We don't want any of that. We're just gonna make it look Pretty fancy gonna center it like this boom and there we have canside drift dough now Just like the fours of horizon four we're gonna add a stroke But since the text is bright with the bright red the white we're gonna take and make the stroke black Make it a little thicker not too thick But something like that looks good and then we'll add a drop shadow Don't need it to be that far away make it a little darker And boom you have your thumbnail for forza horizon four episode canside drift dough now Of course, you won't be using all these steps for every gaming thumbnail that you do However, they are all nice and really good tips for any thumbnail that you may be making You want there to be a focus from the episode on the thumbnail like we did with the car and the blurring It makes the car pop more and adds more focus to the car than anything in the background You have the title of the game so that it's easy to spot without having to read an entire title And the title of the video right there in The thumbnail now of course for the last step We've gone over this way too many times you go to file export as png And then make sure that everything is right 1280 720 100 percent Press save and it will download your new image right there And there you go one awesome thumbnail idea just for you Do you have any other suggestions? Let me know in the comments down below It can be anything as specific as fortnite gaming thumbnails Please help me if that's your request or anything as generic as just thumbnails in general banners Logos whatever it may be if you have an idea. Let me know down below So thank you all for watching freedom flash fridays My name is voya and I will see you all in the next episode


First, John chapter three, three little verses, yet they're powerful. And I'm going to do my best to elaborate on these verses, to encourage you through these three verses, because I think there's a lot here that we need to understand and grasp as Christians. And even if you're here, you're not a Christian, welcome. You're going to understand these things because they're important, and if there's a decision at the end that you would want to make as well. So I'm going to go ahead and read verses one, two and three. First John chapter three, verse one, behold, one manner of love the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called children of God. Therefore the world does not know us because it did not know him beloved. Now we are children of God, and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be. But we know that when he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure. A while ago I ran into this article that actually caught my attention, the headline, the title of this article actually caught my attention, and the headline said this or the article said this, tycoons who won't leave their fortunes to their kids. Now as I looked at this list of these fathers who are billionaires, they all have children, and I would think that these children would be privileged to be the son of these guys because not only of their accomplishments, but also because of their money, right? Billionaires.  The first person that you may know, you may not know, but the founder of eBay, he heir Amadeus, he became a billionaire when he was 31 years old, and as the eBay founder, he has made it his life to donate the majority of his money to those less fortunate instead of his three kids. Here's another guy, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. As of 2014, his net worth is $33 billion. I'm just right under that, no joking. He's pretty much set financially, right? Now in his letter to the Giving Pledge, Bloomberg wrote, and I quote, nearly all of my net worth will be given away in the years ahead or left to my foundation. Bloomberg's two daughters, he has two daughters, most likely will be left to basically foot the bill upon his death because he's not given anything to his daughters. Here's another one. You guys know this guy, Bill Gates. One of the richest guys in the world, right? He said this, I quote, I knew I didn't think it was a good idea to give the money to my kids. That wouldn't be good either for my kids or society. I feel sorry for those kids. Last guy, he's an actor, actor Jackie Chan, you guys know him, right? He said he wasn't going to leave any of his millions to his son JC, and he said this, and I quote, if he is capable, he could make his own money. If he is not, then he will just be wasting my money. I mean, these guys have fathers who are filthy rich, and if these guys were my father, I'd be privileged to say, yeah, this guy is my father, Michael Bloomberg or Bill Gates, and most of the people around me, my friends, would probably think that my fathers would actually leave some of the money. Now, I am not a billionaire, but if I was, I would give some of my wealth to my children. Now, I'm not going to just say, hey, you don't have to work, you don't have to go to school, don't worry about it. I would still encourage them to find what God wants to use through them and whatnot, but I would help them financially. I would help my kids, but these guys are so stingy that they're not leaving their money to their kids. Isn't that sad? That's pretty sad. I think it's sad, because these guys have enough money to just basically take care of the children. The thing about these guys is, and we're talking about these fathers, I want to talk about another father, another father who is filthy rich too. No, he's not in here. I'm talking about God, God the Father. He is extremely rich in love. He's so rich in love. And this is what John writes in these three verses. He is trying to really bring the point home to tell you and I that our God, our Father is filthy rich when it comes to love. And we see here very clearly that John is trying to remind us of these wonderful truths that we have about our Heavenly Father. Now John wrote this first letter to Christians, Christians who already knew the truth. If you go with me real quickly to John chapter, first John chapter 2 verse 21, it says very clearly there, I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you know it and that no lie is of the truth. So over and over and over, John the Apostle uses the phrase, you know, we know, and by this we know. He is writing to Christians who actually knew the truth, not non-Christians, not people that didn't understand about salvation, didn't understand about Jesus. This whole letter is about people that knew the truth. Now the letter here is a letter of encouragement. As you look at the entire letter, it's very encouraging with some practical insight about God's nature and our conduct as Christians. In fact, if I were to give you a quick outline of this entire letter, I would do it like this. Chapters 1 and 2, God is light. Chapters 3 and 4, God is love. And then chapter 5, God is life. It's a simple way of outlining this entire epistle. And these truths are important to us because they apply to our lives. Let me show you. God is light. Matthew 5, 14, Jesus said, you are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. So it applies to us because we are called to be lights. Now God is love. How does that apply in our lives? Well, Romans chapter 5, verse 5, and hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. It's like God took his love and he's just pouring it upon our hearts, giving us the ability to love people who are hard to love. Giving us the ability to love in a very unique way that when the world sees you loving people, they're tripping out, thinking, what is wrong with you? Well, that's the love of God.  John 20, verse 31, these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. And by believing, you may have life in his name. So all these three truths apply to our lives. And that is the way you can outline the entire epistle of 1 John. So let's get into our text. What is John trying to say to us? Notice what he says in verse 1. He says, behold, very first word, behold. It means this. It means to contemplate, to look, to study, to ponder upon. It speaks of a wonder. He is drawing your attention and my attention to an amazing wonder. He is really ramping it up for us. Now did you know that there are seven new wonders of the world today? That when 2014 started, I read an article that said we have seven new wonders of the world. Now most of us probably are familiar with some of the older ones, some of the older places in this world that are considered wonders, but there's a whole new list now. And I went to Google and I looked up at these seven wonders, and I'm going to give you four of these wonders to kind of show you how amazing these places are. The very first thing, the first place is the Sun Doon Cave in Vietnam. I have a picture of it to show you. This is the world's largest cave. It's now open to the public for tours. The massive cave is over 5.5 miles long, 650 feet, and for $3,000. You guys ready? Christmas presents here, guys. For $3,000, you get a six-day tour, includes camping gear, caving equipment, food, drink, and transfers to and from the cave for three grand. Parents are going to be like, I can't do this, son. Can't even fly there. Second, another one, which is amazing, is the Asik Falls in the Philippines. Now, what makes this majestic waterfall, especially eye-catching, is that the water does not spring from above, a body of water from above, but the water is actually coming through the cracks in the cliffs, which was actually formed in 2008 after a typhoon uprooted trees, big trees that attached to the cliff, creating these cracks. So the water is just coming right through the rock. Amazing. Exactly. Like, whoa, right? Amazing. It's wonder. Here's another one, the Camille Crater in the Sahara Desert in Egypt. This was just found in 2008. It was found by Google Earth. Somebody actually zoomed in and said, wait, what's that? And this here, two years after spotting this crater on the satellite, researchers visited and found that it could be the best preserved crater on Earth. It measures 140 feet wide. Amazing. You're like, wow, what could you do with Google Earth? Try it. You might find something else. The last one, Mount Mabu Rainforest in Africa. This is a 1700-acre rainforest, and scientists determined that the rainforest was the largest one in southern Africa. And I just took a, well, I didn't take a shot, but I found this, and that's the entire rainforest from satellite view. Huge. Now these things are supposed to cause this amazement, this wonder. You're like, this is crazy. Well, this outburst of wonderment that John begins with, behold, that's his excitement about something that he's going to share here, about God. You know, in fact, he said this in John 1.29, the next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, behold. He says, look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. What does John want us to behold? What does he want us to ponder? What does he want us to look at as something so amazing? Well, he says it right there. Behold what manner of what? Love. He wants us to be so amazed at the love of God. He wants us to see the love of God. He wants us to ponder upon his love. And I believe that it's a great benefit for us Christians to take a good, intense look at the love of God. Because what John is saying here, he's saying this, look at this love. He says, look at this wonder. It's unique. It's foreign. It's not earthly. The source and the origin is heavenly. And God is the initiator of this love. Because remember John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave.  You know, what's interesting to me is that John, when he followed Jesus, the first time he began to follow Jesus, he was a young adult. Some scholars believe he was around 20 to 30 years old. When John wrote first John, at this time, he was around 90 years old. So think about this. It's been already 60 years since he was face to face with Jesus. 60 years under his belt, walking with Jesus. And John, at 90 years old, he is still amazed at the love of God.  And when you talk to them about God, they're so low on that. They're like, well, I used to serve God, now it's okay. That was back in those early days, I used to do this and go to church, you know, Sundays, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights. But now I just watch it from on television. Sometimes I don't even watch it. I just go out in the forest and hug a tree. Like, what happened? Like 30 years. It's like, remember Jesus said that in the last days, the love of many will what? Wax cold. John is such an amazing witness of a man who's been walking with God for 60 years. And at this time, he is saying, guys, do you know about the love of God? It's amazing. I hope you're like that. I hope that your love hasn't grown cold. That when somebody talks to you about Jesus, you're like, yeah, sure, whatever. That you're like, yes, I know Jesus absolutely. I know what you're talking about. This is John's excitement. He's this is an older person is a 90 year old man who's saying, yes, check this out. And he's drawing our attention to the love of God. Why is it such an important thing about the love of God? Well, let me give you two things. Without God's love, we would all be damned eternally. Listen to this, Romans five, eight. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this while we were still sinners. Christ died for us. Isn't that crazy? While you were sinning against God, God died for us. The demonstration of God's love is to cross that while we were. Just living against God, he died for us. His love was demonstrated in the cross for us. Ephesians two, verses three through five, all of us who lived among among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following his desires and thoughts like the rest. We were by nature, objects, objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ. When we were dead in transgressions. Because of his great love, because of his mercy. I mean, you think about that. I mean, I remember, you know, before I became a Christian, I used to mock Christians. I remember I used to make fun of Christians. I used to totally do what everybody does with John three, 16, and just start mocking people with it. You know, kind of driving with my friends and posting John three, 16, just messing around drunk. You know, I remember those days. And I'm like, thank God that he looked at me.  You know what I mean? Because that's his love, you know. And it's like when I read these verses, I'm like, I remember those days and it was pretty bad. And yet here I am in the love of God, still amazed by his love. And I hope I will never, ever lose that amazement of God's love as I grow old. I want to stay pure in that. I want to be able to be excited when it comes to Jesus, when it comes to God's love, his nature. I don't want to get to a point where I'm just like, yeah, whatever. It's yeah, it's whatever. No, I wanted to be like, yes, it's still real. It's still fresh in my own heart. Another reason why it's important for us to ponder upon God's love is because without God's love, we would struggle to find a sense of belonging in the world. You know, right now with Christmas coming soon, there are a lot of homeless people that will put themselves, position themselves at markets and, you know, places where they're asking for money. And, you know, as for us, as we drive by or walk by a homeless person, what draws us to them is because we feel sorry for them. We do. We have pity on them. And what do we do sometimes? Some of us here probably will buy them a hamburger, a soda or something. They'll give them food, a glass of water or bottled water. And we just walk away, right? We don't take them home with us. I mean, we just say, here you go. Here's some food. God bless you. Let me pray for you and we walk out. We don't say, well, you come over, come over to my house. We have an extra room for you. Let's shower up. You see, we don't do that and God didn't do that to us. God didn't look down from heaven upon us sinners and say, oh, poor people. Oh, you guys are so bad here. Here's some food. Go get it. He didn't do that. What God did, he sent Jesus to this earth and what he did for us is that he actually went beyond that and he took us in. He saves us, takes us in and gives us purpose. And then he calls us children. Isn't that great that that God didn't just look at us with pity and said, ah, whatever, you know, here's some food, you'll be fine. But but we see here that God, that John is actually so thrilled with the love of God. And then he says here, behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us. Well, the word bestowed, the Greek word, it's a verb word, which expresses a generous kind of giving. We could almost say that he lavished on us. In fact, some of your Bibles might have that already translated. It's that God has lavished upon us his love. He's given it to us, which makes it a divine love, a generous love. God is very generous when it comes to his love. He goes beyond our minds, our comprehension. I like when one person said, and I quote, the love of God is like the Amazon River flowing down to water one day. It's huge. We can't even comprehend it. That's why John is just like, listen, check it out, guys. Look at the love of God. God's love was a free, uninfluenced, undeserved, unmerited with no human explanation, and there was nothing in us whatsoever to elicit this kind of love. It was strictly from heaven. God did not come to you and save you because you were cool. He didn't come and save you because you were pretty or because you were very successful.   So God changes that position. He changes that status. And that's what he does here. Notice, behold what manner of love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God. The greatness of his love is shown by this, that we are called children of God. Now I've talked to people in the past that say, well, we're all children of God.  You probably have that this month at Christmas time with a lot of your relatives or friends who don't know Jesus and you start talking about God.  Oh yeah, we're all children of God.  We're all children, you know, that song's out of context, actually.  No. Everybody on this, in this world, on this world is in a creation of God. But not everybody's a child of God, because we see here very clearly that not everyone, not everyone can call themselves a child of God.  It's a status given to you by God. But you got to remember, this is something that you become when you receive Christ. Listen to this, John 1 12. But as many as received him to them, he gave them the right to become children of God to those who believe in his name. Did you see that? But as many as received him to them, he gave, he says, the right to become children of God. So the next time you have a conversation with someone that says, we're all children of God while they're drunk, just let them know you're a creation of God. He loves you. He created you in his image, but you're not a child of God until you get right with God to become born again. Then you become part of the family. But until then, you're not. And we see this is what John is kind of showing us clearly. John is encouraging us to ponder upon this great privilege that we have, that we are called children of God. But he actually goes further than this and notice what he says. Therefore, the world does not know us because it did not know him. If the world knew us, the world would love us, but we don't belong to the world. We don't belong to the world at all. We're actually strangers to this world and God's love is very foreign to a non-Christian. You know, you've probably, if you've been walking with Jesus for a long time, you've kind of realized that there is a built in friction between us and the world, right? I mean, as you go to work, as you're hanging out with people, it's like there's a friction when you're hanging out with a non-Christian because something is going to come up in that conversation that you're not going to agree with. There's a worldview that's going to come up that you're going to say, I don't believe that. So there's like a built in friction in every Christian when it comes to relating to the world. And it's not that we're just being jerks about things. It's that just, it's who we are. We're not there anymore. We don't stand for those things anymore where we have a totally different worldview, a totally different life, a totally different heart. So when we're hanging out with non-Christians, we're going to clash eventually. And that's just the way it is. Don't, don't get discouraged. Don't, don't be bumped out about it. That's just the truth. That's reality. It comes with a territory of being a Christian. So, so just, you know, take advantage of the opportunity and witness to people when that opportunity comes up, when you bump heads with somebody, turn it into an evangelism time. Just, just encourage people to come to the Lord or whatever. But, but just don't get shot. Don't be shocked when it comes to that friction that you're like, wow, this is not right. Nobody told me there's going to be friction. There is. In fact, Jesus himself made it clear that there would be friction. You know, we see here very clearly that no matter how hard you or I try to make Christianity appealing to the world, it will never work. It will never work at all because the world does not know you and the world does not know God. They don't understand your passion and my passion for Jesus. So if somebody is trying to make Christianity pleasing to this world, they're not going to be good at it. In fact, there's a pressure in our society today, in our culture, even in churches with pastors, there's this pressure to somehow make Christianity pleasing to the world. And how do they do that? How do they accomplish that? Because you can accomplish that by one, by just staying away from sin. Don't talk about sin. Don't remind people that they're sinners. Keep them good. Let them enjoy themselves. They got great seats are sitting down at, you know, just let them enjoy themselves for the night. Don't tell them about Jesus. Keep it God. Don't go through the Bible. Don't bore them. Do something flashy. Give away a car at the end of the service. Whatever. There's, there's, there's. I know, and I'm not going to say the name of these churches, but there's one church that was given away a Harley. I was right there in the front seat. No, I wasn't. No, I'm joking. But, but seriously, there are churches.  You're like, what are they doing? This is crazy. It's all to just try to please the world. But see, the church is not supposed to please the world. The church is to give the world the truth, right? And the world's supposed to equip people to go out to witness the people. So the church has never been an entertainment center. It's been an equipment or equipping center, a center, a place that people come to get equipped and you invite friends that come to hear the truth with the hopes of them getting right with God and saying, I surrender, I need Jesus. But, but we see here that, that the pressure in our society today and our, in our culture is that they're trying to make Christianity appealing to the world. But we have to remember that the world doesn't know you. The world doesn't know you because it did not know Jesus. Let me, let me prove this to you. Let me, let's go into the heart of Christ's prayer. Turn to John chapter 17 real quickly. I want to, I want to show you something here real quickly. This is our own Lord praying and bringing up the whole topic of the world. And he said two things that are very interesting in John chapter 17, at verse 14, listen to this. He says, I have given them your word and the world has hated them because they're not of the world, just as I am not of the world. That's pretty straightforward, isn't it? It's like, I've given him your word and the world, the world has hated them for that. Now go to verse 25. O righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you and these have known that you sent me. The world has not known you. I mean, could you imagine?  And can you imagine, like especially this Christmas going out to your relatives, party or friends or whatever, and you get to their house and they all ignore you. They just don't want to talk to you. They reject you. You're like, Hey, what happened? I mean, wouldn't you feel really weird and uncomfortable?   What's going on here? They're just rejecting you.  Jesus, could you imagine Jesus when he came to this earth and God created humanity. God created every person and yet they did not recognize him. They did not give heed to him. They rejected him. They did not want, they didn't want anything to do with Jesus. And that's why he said, even to his own people, when he said, when he was overlooking Jerusalem, he says, oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You know, he was just sad. He was bummed that these guys that his own people leave the Jews, even rejected him. So, so we see here that it's very important. If you guys go back to first John, we see here that the world doesn't know Jesus. And because of that, the world will not know you. So don't, don't try to make it like a habit to try to be pleasing to people.  I don't do that. There's, there's got to be a balance to it. You know what I mean?  I'm not saying don't be friends with the world. I'm not saying don't have non-Christian friends. You should have non-Christian friends, but make sure you're influencing them instead of them influencing you because we're called to go out and make disciples and whatnot and share the gospel like the apostles did in the book of Acts. But just don't, don't get caught up with trying to make Christianity pleasing to somebody who doesn't know Jesus. They need to just know the truth. There's enough of that in this world already. There's even enough of that in churches where people are not being told the truth, but we have the truth. We're truth bearers. We're the light of the world. We're the salt of the earth. We need to be front up front with people. They didn't show them in love what it means to know Jesus Christ. And we see here that John is making it very, very clear that, that Jesus was not known by people. One of the people, one of the groups that didn't know Jesus or rejected Jesus were the religious leaders. John chapter eight, verse 19. Jesus said this to them. If you knew me, you would know my father also. If you knew me. And remember, that's when Jesus said, well, you know, your father is the devil. Remember that? Your father is the devil. Try that on somebody. Just make sure you're like a few feet away. Right. But your father is the devil. But isn't that the truth though? Seriously.  So, so I mean, that's, that's, that's black and white there. That's, that's pure truth there. There's no gray area here. And we see that Jesus was rejected by the religious leaders. John chapter one, verse 10. He was in the world. And though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. Another reason why we, the world doesn't know us is because we have a different father. That's what I kind of made mentioned already. Turn to first John chapter two, or you're already actually just right over verse 15. Another reason why the world doesn't know us is because we do have different fathers. Verse 15. Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the father, but is of the world. And the world is passing away and the lust of it. But he who does the will of God abides forever. Those three verses are very cool verses to actually just dissect and teach from. But, but just to look at this, that the world is passing away. If you put all of your efforts and energy to try to live for this world, trying to get satisfaction from this world, you're going to be left empty handed at the end. Because see this world, this material world is passing away. All of your accomplishments is passing away.  You're not going to take any of that stuff with you in heaven. The accomplishments that will go with us are things that we do here on earth for Christ's rewards we get our faithfulness in serving him. So the world is passing away, but the one who does the will of God will abide forever. That's where you should put all your efforts in is serving God, just furthering his kingdom, because at the end you will be rewarded for it. That stuff will not pass away. It's going to be awesome in heaven when we get there. And there's this time of giving away giving crowns to us and rewards for what we did here on this earth. That's pretty exciting. I don't know how that's going to look like, but it's going to be pretty cool to actually be there. And even it says that some obviously will not get rewards because they used the wrong heart or they had the wrong motive when they were serving Jesus. They were doing it probably just so others can see them and do the things that they do. You know, I remember in Bible College when I was really young and the Lord, when the church met in here, I went to Bible College back in the early 90s and the church met in this sanctuary. This was actually the main sanctuary of the Cabbage Chapel, Chino Valley. And one of the things that I did when I was in Bible College is I helped out. I served cleaning this chapel was actually the sanctuary. It was all pews here. And I would vacuum up and down here. And I remember that Pastor David would always walk through those doors and I was almost I would almost time it when he would come. And as he would come up, I would turn this thing on like, look at Pastor, look what I'm doing. Look what a great servant I am. This is so awesome. And he walked by, Hey, come there. Come, you know, I don't think I've ever told him this, I should someday. But but see, that's serving with the wrong heart, right? I'm not going to get rewarded for that. All I got was a vacuum. You know what I'm saying? And that's not even a last anyway. So it's like, you want to do something for God that will last forever without good heart, with a pure heart that you're not doing it to serve other people, men or to be seen by men. But you do it for Christ. And we see here that John says in first John chapter two, that the world is passing away, but the one who does the will of God abides forever. So as he continues on in verse two, he continues by saying beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be. But we know that when he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. We are being made into the image of Christ, and it won't be until we see Jesus face to face that we will experience ultimate conformity to his likeness. It's called glorification, or being glorified, or when our bodies are glorified. Listen to what Paul said in Romans 8 18. He says, I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. Paul who suffered a lot said, listen, there's a day coming where this stuff is going to be gone. The suffering, the pain, he says it's not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed. He also said in 2 Corinthians 3 18, and we who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord who is the spirit. And then he says in 1 Corinthians 13 verse 12, now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror that we shall see face to face. Now I know in part then I shall know fully even as I am fully known. When we look in a mirror today, we actually see a perfect image of ourselves, don't we? And I was at the store today before I came here just shopping for Christmas. And there were mirrors there that I was looking at myself pretty clearly. Not trying to be conceited here. Come on, you guys do this all the time. When you wake up in the morning, everybody's hair is combed and ladies are make up or dolled up whatever you want to call it. You use a mirror. Well, right now we can use mirrors that we can see clearly our image, who we are, every poor in our face we can see clearly. But see mirrors back then, ancient mirrors as John is referring to here were actually much different because the ancient world mirrors were made out of polished metal, making the image unclear and somewhat distorted. So right now, let me imply this, right now the presence of Jesus in you and in me is somewhat dim. Not only that, but it's also kind of hard to see the full effect of Christ in our lives. It's kind of like a dim view because his presence will eventually be unhindered and unrestricted when we get into heaven and see him as he is. That's what is happening to you right now that right now God is actually making you more like Jesus. He is actually preparing you for heaven. And you're not done yet. There's still work that he's doing in your life, but he's promised you to actually do that work. And it's interesting that John makes it clear here as he talks about this that the Christian should long to be like Jesus, but yet remember that God will never force a person to be like him. God is not going to force himself on somebody to say you're going to be like me. I mean we have part in that to allow him to do what he needs to do in our lives. And in part of that, which he adds to this in verse 3, he says in everyone he says who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure. Knowing that one day we will see Jesus face to face brings a purifying effect in our lives, doesn't it? It really does. When we know our end is to be more like Jesus, it will make us want to be more like him right now. I mean Jesus Christ is coming very soon. And just that truth, that fact should cause us to really be on our tippy toes. There's no time to be living in darkness. There's no time to mess around because Christ is coming.  A life that is pleasing before him. Listen to 2 Corinthians chapter 7 verse 1, he says since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness at a reverence for God. So living with the expectation of Christ's return will affect your conduct as a child of God. Don't be like those who say well God is not coming right now so I could do whatever I want. Don't be a fool because you know that Jesus can come back any time at any moment. And we have to live without understanding and people will mock you. Other Christians will mock you. Oh, you guys are into it.  You want to just escape. You just want to leave. Yeah, exactly. I do. I want to escape from here. Why? Who wouldn't? You can stay here. Enjoy the Great Tribulation. You know, I'll pray for you up in heaven.  Listen, for me to live every day as if Jesus is coming, purifies me in some way because I don't want to be caught doing something that I shouldn't be doing. And I hear the trumpet sound. I hear Jesus Christ rapture in the church. That's that's an important concept that we don't understand sometimes. And Paul, that generation lived with the expectation of the coming of Christ. That's why he wrote things like this. Of course, Christ didn't come in at their time, but now we're in the same way in our generation. We don't know if Jesus could come back in our generation, your generation. We don't know, but we're to be ready for him. We're to be ready for him and to be busy about our father's business. God here is in the process, like I mentioned here, John is making it clear that God is in the process of making all of us more like Jesus. He's working towards that. That is something that he's doing right now in your life. Whether you feel it or not, God is doing a work in your life. You're born again Christian here tonight. God is doing a mighty work in you right now. Listen to this, Philippians 1.6. I love this verse. Being confident of this very thing that he who has begun a good work in you, well, what? Complete it until the day of Jesus Christ. We're confident. I'm confident in Jesus that he's doing a work in me. But Robert, I failed the Lord yesterday. Does that count? Listen, it doesn't matter. You're going to fail the Lord. Yeah, that's going to happen because we're not going to reach perfection on this side of heaven. You and I will never be sinless here, but we will sin less. We'll never be sinless, but we'll sin less. We're not perfect. There'll be times that we're going to fail. We're going to fumble as a Christian, but even in the midst of all of that, God is still working his will in your life. God is still making you more like Christ because what he wants to do there is to make you more and more in love with his son, Jesus Christ. So we fail him. The effect of that should be Lord, I don't want to do it again. Help me. Help me be more stronger. Help me in these areas of weaknesses and God will come in and help us out because of this promise in Philippians 1-6. I want to close with a few comments here. A few thoughts. The great wonder of God's love is this, that we are called children of God. That we are called children of God. We are children of the King. We have an amazing father, a rich father, a father who is full of love. You see, when we read God is love, the Bible never says that part of God's nature is love. Just a little part of him is love, a little part of him is mercy. The Bible makes it clear that God is love. That's who he is. That's his nature. He's not a little bit of love, he is love. He is the one who initiates love. Because of his love, God took us in, adopted us and calls us his kids now. That's the amazement that John is having here. That through the love of God, that lavished love that has been poured upon us, he says, this love has made you a child of God. It's an amazing love. And that is our hope. That's our hope tonight. That we must never set our hope on other things. You should never set your hope on a relationship. You should never set your hope on personal success. You should never put your hope on your health, on your possessions, or simply on your own self. But your hope should always be in Christ, in Jesus. Because Jesus is our goal at the end of this life. Did you know that? When it's all said and done, guys, you know who you're gonna see? Jesus. You're not gonna see anything else. You're gonna see Jesus.  When you close your eyes on this side of heaven, and you open them up in eternity, the first person you're gonna see is Jesus. Jesus Christ is the goal at the end of your life. But let me ask you this question.


Play it again so I can rap start over Hey Wait, do it how you were doing it No, dude. Do the note.  This is what she wore back to again with another art video man today I will be showing you some of my sketches from back in the day If you're new to the channel go ahead and hit that like button Come in subscribe make sure you hit post notifications So you will be notified anytime you budge out some heat in today's video I will be going through a folder with some of my old work in it And if you like this video, I will make a part two So let me know in the comments what you think without further do that jump right into it Okay, the first picture I pulled out the box is a picture I did in high school on a poster board with a lead pencil And it's like they used to have these boots with a human turned into like an animal. So I just turned them Into a car I'm saying kind of like transforms, but Cool thing about it. I was using like exotic cars. You know I'm saying like I had I think it was a Phantom in the middle Lamborghini Front Just being creative man. Then you can see I turned this tires into hands I Had a wild imagination back in high school I used to really like doing like all the little mechanical parts Just making up how things work So I Did able to live pencil We got over here Most of I did this one. I was real small man. I probably was like Probably like nine or ten. I do my pops and my uncle. You know what I'm saying uncle car My dad man, I've been drawing forever.  I was super bored. So I drew myself and just Imagination I Got a couple pictures like this because after I drew this one I started making up like this I started getting a factuated with this like space thing So I just started drawing me In different space settings I'm gonna finish this Probably on Adobe you ain't got no digital tablet man. Get you some paper and go crazy This is like very old stuff for the digital for the digital audio was Me going crazy on paper Soon as we got and I got another box if we get a we make a part 2 video. I'm gonna go through this box They got most stuff in it, but we're going through this one today So see what else I can show on this T I'm recording my YouTube video. I love you.   I did man. I Wish that this before I start recording YouTube videos, you know, I'm saying I'm a strange safer man You know, I gotta have my boy Go through these pictures though For the camera dad though, but we might gotta make a part two of the first box door at the camera dial Oh my sister did this She used to draw with me to back in the day Like my whole family can draw man. I'm on in my pops I'm gonna show you I'm gonna make a bit. Let me know in the comments if you want to see some pictures my dad drew Like I drew this in high school What else we got I used to like doing these little collages Skateboard I used to walk around with a big old box Drawing expressing myself through the paper man. Most of these pictures are old Sketching really finished too many pieces back then but I always started on something new Guess I was just trying to express myself So when it's tough on you remember I still want that card at 240. I think don't drink and drive I got a throwback box This is a picture my dad Do my home girl Tiffany drew this in high school. Oh, that's how I used to draw my car First grade Everyday in my journal I used to draw cars from the like top angle and I used to like Jack Wars yeah, we got in here that we can dig out the box Mike What else we got in the box we can dig out the box I got a few more pictures I did Back in D. This is a high school Doing the space thing. Obviously. I used to waste a lot of paper in Kansas It's all dope. You want me to make a part make sure you hit that like button come and subscribe Moji coming soon And I'm out this thing


Soil is the largest living system and first thing is this must come into human consciousness that we are dealing with life, we are not dealing with the material. Soil is not a resource, soil is the source of our life. If we do not rejuvenate that, if we do not enhance the power and the quality of that soil, the power and quality of our own lives will go down, the life of every other organism will go down. Fantastic. Well really, well said. When you said soil is not a resource, it's a source. It is a source. I guess that is the reason behind the campaign and the conscious planet movement that you have created. Let's make this happen. Thank you very much. Let's make it happen.


Hi, you guys! Lindsay here. Welcome back to my channel, Inside the Hymn. So as you can imagine, it was a very crazy chaotic month for me. Between the week it took me to leave Charleston and get settled in here with the move to Charlotte and then also the holidays, Christmas and New Year's. I did not get a lot of sewing done if I'm being perfectly honest. So I thought I would just give you guys a rundown of what I did make. It's not very much and most of it you've already seen, seeing as I did an extensive sew along that ended last week, two weeks ago. So in that sew along, I made Vogue 9653, the jumpsuit and the jacket. So here is the jumpsuit. Anyways, I absolutely adore this jumpsuit. I think it is so sexy. It's so fun to wear. The day that I filmed that video, I actually wore this jumpsuit and the jacket all day. We went to lunch. We went and got manicures. All of that in my holiday outfit. I'm sure that they thought that I had somewhere really special I was going later. I didn't. I just came home. But here's the jacket. So cute. Here's the inside. Also after I sewed that, or after I posted that video, someone commented about the button because it's so big and heavy and suggested that I sew a clear button on the backside. So it's like the big button, the fabric, and then a little button on the other side. And I guess the little button sewn to the big button through the fabric helps stabilize everything. And in my mind, that makes a lot of sense. So I am going to do that. I will let you know how it goes. It's not super bad right now, but it does kind of flop down. Can you see there how it's like wanting to lay down? Anyways, here's the back. Both of these fabrics came from Minerva Crafts. And I really, really enjoyed working with both of them. They were just as advertised, which is awesome, whenever it's an online fabric shop. They are based in the UK, but they have some superb shipping for those of us in the United States. Honestly, it's comparable with fabric.com or any of the other online retailers that are based in the US or even Canada. So I encourage you to check them out if you haven't already. Okay. And then the only thing that you guys haven't seen yet is my new Butterick 6466. I love this pattern. I don't think it's out of print yet, but I think it's probably pretty close. And I'm telling you guys, it is phenomenal. Like you will love this dress. This is my second version. And you guys know I don't make repeats of patterns very often. But this one is just as good the second time around. The first version is that navy and cream stripe. Remember that? But this version is like a floral. The other one was a cotton satin. This is more of a crepe maybe? It actually feels like a crepe-backed satin. And this is the satin part. That's what it feels like. I got it in New York City this year. You can see that there. You can also see the lining peeping out. I ended up making, I converted the lining. Normally the lining mimics exactly the front of the bodice. That's all the same pieces. But I traced off those pieces and converted it into a two-part lining, which is had like a facing and then also a lining, which I was really proud of. I'll have a video on that coming up soon too as well. And then also, I did a little trickery. If you remember from that navy and white striped dress, the one thing that I complained about it was that because of the faux wrap situation, you could not create the zipper tape had to be exposed. You ended up having this sew that this these seams here as one. You couldn't separate the lining from the mane. And knowing that going into this, I thought I want to figure out a way to fix that. So I did. It cost me the clean construction in the waistband. But I thought this, that was the lesser of the two evils. I would rather have this look nice and this be not perfect. So yeah, I'll show you guys more about that whenever I film my pattern review video, like where I model the garment and stuff. But I thought I'd just give you guys a little sneak peek of it. Isn't it pretty? When I was first working on it, I thought this fabric was looking a little bit like old Asian grandma. But now I really like it. So anyways, uh, 6446 butterick.  I want to make like 14 versions of it, honestly, I could make it over and over again. And now that I have all that facing stuff figured out, I just might do that. The maxi version with that sleeve come on. Anyways, so that's all I made in December. But I do have some plans coming up in January, which include because it's the beginning of the year and like, you know, you get reinvigorated into some of those like sewing goals. Starting up the refashion, one refashion a month, starting up so my style again. So hopefully with those things, in addition to my regular plans, in addition to getting this place like figured out, you can tell by the background that things are a little bit chaotic still. Um, I'll get back in my groove again and be, you know, making more stuff. So anyways, that's going to do it for me today. I'm sure you guys all made a ton of stuff, including like gifts and you gave stuff away and all that is really awesome. So brag about yourself in the comments below. I'll just live vicariously through all of you guys. And until next time, I'll see you all very soon. Bye.


of my colleagues come from the geek world, Oracle, IBM, Cisco, startups, et cetera. And the mission that we realized we wanted to do and the thing that brought us together was basically that we want people to be able to make the most of the devices. We wanted people, we want people to be able to, as we said in Spanish, sacarle el jugo of the devices. We realized that devices are becoming ubiquitous and in Latin America they are becoming not just ubiquitous but they are becoming the first time that there's a bridge building a massive gap between the half and the low half. We didn't have desktops in Latin America. We jumped from nothing to mobile phones. We jumped from nothing to smartphones. So we have a huge opportunity to build up on those bridges and that's what we realized but we want people to be able really to make the most of that investment because a phone and a mobile device is an expensive investment and it's not just for entertaining and it's just not just for selfies and everything in the middle. A phone is to learn, a phone is to be more productive and a mobile device including a phone should be that. We use WordPress for all the good reasons that we have heard in this conference and many more and particularly because we are bootstrapping. We don't make money with our blog. So WordPress was the perfect platform to start this community. This is how we're moving forward. So we have a conversation with Spanish speaker and with a Spanish speaker audience. We realized that we have 20% of our readership is in the US, 20% of our readership is in Mexico and the other 20% is in Colombia where we come from. So without any effort particularly, we reach 40% of a wide population. The US Hispanics or the US people that speak Spanish. And the Mexicans, we are kind of a bit ahead of the rest of the Latin Americans because they have cheaper internet access in Latin America than the rest of us. We decided on a platform like WordPress because it was responsive and we realized that most of our traffic is coming from mobile devices as I said before and it's a big opportunity because penetration rates in Latin America are reaching 100% and the growth rates are double digit and there will be double digit for us. As far as we see, as far as the analytics see and we are seeing the big cheap smartphone players coming into Latin America. So that will become huge in the next couple of years. And this is what happened to our audience as you can see from the graph. We start with a few and a few were less than 1,000 which probably is the sum of all our friends from Facebook. And all of a sudden we start seeing more bigger numbers. Bigger numbers that in June last year became 412,000 views. And we haven't, and I want to insist on that and you will see why. We haven't done anything in particular or particularly sophisticated to reach those views. Those views are people that are engaging with us for the right reasons. I mean the right reasons. People who want to have a conversation with us to want to learn with us because if on the one hand when you have 90% or 80% on average penetration of smartphones and mobile devices you have less than 1% of the population speaking English in Latin America. So there's a huge, huge information gap because geeks will always find a way to read whatever language I mean. If they can call, they can read any language I guess. But no more people like me and the rest of the smart users as smartphone users wouldn't find the information they need. And still a phone in Latin America more than anywhere else, I mean like in most of the developing world is an investment. And we want people to feel there is an investment and they can make the most of it. So what happened? And we start kind of gathering and realizing why do we move from a few to a lot? The year 2015 was our big year. Lots of things happening on that year. And I will explain to you. First of all, one of the Flipboard editors realized that our magazine in Flipboard was super interesting because we don't talk nonsense about devices. We don't talk nonsense about apps. We didn't sell our soul to advertisers and we're making the most of it independent digital platform. And we talk about a lot of things. I talk about education and technology. I'm a women's advocate so I talk a lot about women and technology. One of my colleagues is a gadget geek so he will talk a lot about gadgets and he will manage to get gadgets from all over the world to review. Some people are better, some of us are better at talking about apps. One of my partners and my colleague is he's really good on productivity. He's an engineer, an industrial engineer and he's been working all his life on the paperless home, the paperless organization, the paperless teams. So he brought as well that kind of thing from technology. And one thing that is very important is we all brought out our political voice. And that's one thing that you can do on an independent digital platform is you can bring your own political voice either to advocate for women, either to advocate for services like Uber that we know it's been a big conversation but we also have talked about the Facebook plans to kind of bring cheaper internet on poorer countries and we want to have that political voice as well. And we start growing on the second quarter of last year we started growing and growing and on June 2015 we grew a lot. And at that point we met with some people in here in Miami that are investors in media and they suggest some ideas so we would monetize and we would become a money making machine and that's what they want us before we invest. And we have lots of discussions and philosophical discussions and money discussions and yes we want to work on this full time and then we realize well if we want to work on this full time we need to give our company to someone else. I mean as remember we have a hipster who's a successful entrepreneur. We have a banker, yes we're the salary of a banker and we have another entrepreneur who's a very successful so if you start summing up just what the four of us will cost to his endeavor we will need to give our company to investors. We didn't feel like that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to believe in the dream of having an audience as huge as Latin America and sell at the exit. And so that's what we decided. So at that moment our philosophy changed and we started realizing that we could make deals with people that normally we wouldn't make deals with a small outlet like us. 5,000 people, unique use. That's nothing compared with the big media or compared with anything. But we did and we made deals with these people and these people were startups two or three years ago. The people that you see there we make and they believe on us probably because they still have the startup spirit and these are the kind of people that we want to partner with. Of course if a big media comment say well you can keep your stock and be part of our media we will talk about it. But these people and I want to just stop a little bit on them in a minute. They gave us the opportunity to monetize our site without selling ourselves to anyone. The first ones are teed. There used to be a startup. So there's a French company. They have a big headquarter now in Miami and they monetize videos, video advertising. And their advertising is beautiful. It's beautiful as you can imagine French things be. I mean gorgeous. We made a partnership with Tuitube. They are an MDM. They monetize YouTube videos and they hit us very hard because we don't produce good videos. And we know that we don't produce good videos. We are bloggers not video bloggers which is kind of nice because we are experimenting and we are ready to experiment. And we have all that spirit that comes from a startup. And we have a deal with Line and this is our massive social media and they are great. If you don't know them go there. It's amazing. I wasn't there before. And they're doing a great job distributing content and providing a community that is very interesting. We did a deal with Pulso. Pulso is a bit like the Huffington Post but low-key I guess. But they gather and curate and provide content in Spanish about the news, about technology. We are going to be the provider for technology content and we like them because they didn't ask us much in terms of hours of work, in terms of money or in terms of anything. We are not, and this is not very humble for me but we are not ready to kind of give up what we have built to anyone. We did. And we just made a deal a month ago with Acast. Acast is a startup. They come from Sweden from probably the success of Spotify and they monetize podcasts. And all these people, they are becoming big players and we met them through the big media. I read Forbes and I saw a note about Acast. I met the 2B2 CEO on an event like this one. I met the TDS CEO for Latin America as well. So the takeaway here is go and meet the people that you want to work with. Go, go to the events and say, look, I have this. I have 10,000 people but this is my audience. There are women, there are Latino, Spanish, English with a strong accent. They're like this and they will love it because that's what they're looking for. That's what advertisers are looking for. That's what people like TDS want to show as a showcase. They don't want to show a site with five million people. They want to show a site where people appreciate what they're showing, that people will click and the video will show and we will see the art of those videos. We also have a deal with MSN and we are providing content to them, which is great as well. I mean, this is a massive platform and we are there. So for us, it's kind of, yes, we can make it. And by the end of last year, we have a ransomware virus, you name it, crisis. Of course, in the middle of the holidays and we Latinos, we know how to do holidays so there was no one available. And we were out for a week and then patch it for another week and that's what we begin this year. But I think we begin this year with all these things coming up and getting a little bit more money. So this is our platform, this is our community. We have 9,000 followers on Facebook and I hope all of you will follow us after this. And we have a Twitter line that is very interesting because it has news in Spanish, news in English and so on and so forth. We are online where we have 72,000 people. We're on YouTube and we want to grow that. So if you do videos in Spanish about technology, come and see me because we're looking for people. I'm looking for bloggers. I'm looking for female bloggers, please. We are 12 contributors and we talk about education. We talk about women. We talk about children. We are about to sign an agreement with Common Sense Media in Spano and we will be there together with Univision. So signing that deal for us is really, really a good deal. Not just because they have Univision as their other partner in Spanish but because we all know what Common Sense Media brings. It brings all the credibility that they have as a place where you can trust as a parent and as a teacher. We write about gadgets, we write about productivity. We are 12 people and we just brought someone to start writing about smart secrets. And technology is great to get our cities work and work for their citizens and to get the citizens work for the city as well. We have people talking about banking. We will, and that's what we're having. And we had already interviewed interesting people and these two guys, well, most of you know who they are. Mr. Wolf and Carlos Hackey. And we were the only ones who could interview them face to face in Colombia. So we feel very proud that these two gurus that most of us read on a regular basis were there that both was tweeting about us. I mean, that's kind of, ah! And being in Miami, covering the texting, speaking with people, being here, I mean, for me, it's amazing to be here. So this is the three takeaways of this, how to build a community. Be as independent as you can be. We couldn't be talking about devices and how good about or not so so the devices are if we sell our souls and our platform to technology companies. We wouldn't be able to have this platform if we weren't writing consistently. We wouldn't be able to reach millennials as well as 40 something like myself as well as people like my mom who's in her mid-70s. If we were an experiment, and we experiment all the time with video, with photos, with a covering event, we have two bloggers that are children, I mean children, 13, and they are our gamers. So we are experimenting. And most important, and I think that's one of the key takeaways of this conference is your credibility. And here is what you're using your name. And this credibility brings you to places like this where I feel super proud to be, but as well allow you to interview a guy like Awasaki or a guy like Voss or the people that I have interview here in Miami and well, I think that's it for me. And thank you very much, it's a pleasure being here.