In this video, I am going to share with you the holy grail for me of business, of approaching marketing, of growing your business and making more sales, more customers, more easily and multiplying your success rather than just slowly adding it. This video will teach you the absolute best way to look at a business and to identify how to multiply its income and we're going to call this the three business multipliers. So, you have a triangle, you have the three multipliers, the three multipliers are average income per client, you have opportunities and you have closing rate or effectiveness. What do these mean? Your average income per client means how much do you stand to make when you make a sale on average? How much is a sale worth to you in your business? The more a sale is worth to you, the higher up in the multiplication because let's say that you're selling a $500 product and your competition is selling a $5,000 product. You may think, whoa, I'm cheaper so it's going to be much easier for me and that might be the case but what's more likely is that if your competition is successfully selling a $5,000 product it means that they can basically outspend you 10 times to get to the same client. They can spend 10 times more on marketing to get to the same client and it's also a multiplier. What does a multiplier mean? It means that if I take the average income I make per client which is let's say $500 a month and I double it to $1,000 a month I basically double the whole equation and this equation will give me my actual income at the end of the month. So, what is a closing rate? Closing rate means how effective is your sales process? How many people do you need to contact to reach your sale? The higher the closing rate, the better the effectiveness, the easier it is for you to make a sale. And finally, we have opportunities which means how many times does this equation run? Because if I have a 10% closing rate and I have a $1,000 product and I talk to 100 people that means I'm going to get 10 sales of $1,000 which is $10,000. But what if my closing rate was not 10% what if it was 1% that means that for every 100 opportunities that I talk people that I contact I only get one sale of $1,000 or let's say my closing rate is 20% well in this case I need to contact only 20 people to get four sales of $1,000. So you see these are multipliers and you always want to approach them in this order. You want to always start with income. How can I increase the amount of money that I'm getting? And you can do this by adding packages for example.  If you start selling packages you basically increase vastly increase the amount of money you get on average per client because you commit people to a process and you can actually charge more when you package it because a package itself has value versus an hour an hour if your time doesn't work isn't worth anything but a package could actually lead to a result and results are worth a lot more value. Now the second thing you want to focus on is your closing rate. The reason for that the reason you need to close to do these two first is because what's the point of focusing hard on marketing to on promoting on getting as many people to hear about an offer if that offer doesn't convert if it doesn't get sales or if the sales are so small and teensy that they don't actually make a difference there's no meat you can't actually give out percentages you can't give out commissions you can't afford to advertise so you're looking to get the highest income for your sales and also the highest closing rate. Now once you have those two now you're in big boy problems and now your last step of this triangle is how do I get as many opportunities as possible. Imagine if you had a system so strong that every hundred people you talk to are worth $10,000 for you. How many people would you try to talk to? How many people would you hire to talk to people for you? How much money will you spend on advertising knowing that you're gonna make your money five or ten times back. So this is the reason we approach it from this angle from first of all increasing income increasing closing rate and finally focus on the opportunities once you have a hot product. Anytime you're having a marketing challenge anytime it's hard for you to market you have to exert a lot of effort to get your message out it means there's a problem in one of these two either the price is not good enough again imagine real estate we have low closing rates but you get a big big commission so you can actually afford to spend a lot more or imagine having a super high closing rate a really great offer that's really cheap but it sells really well something like Tai Lopez's the 67 steps program which he sold at the time which was just $67 and sold like cookies. I mean the guy reached like 70,000 clients within a few years so you can either have a high closing rate or a high average income if you don't have any of them your business is crap and there's no opportunity to exert effort on marketing because you basically have leverage against you it's actually harder because you don't have any of them once you have one of them it still doesn't make sense to do a lot of effort because let's say you do a lot of effort you have a high closing rate but the price is very low you're going to make a lot of sales but they're going to be small sales but let's say that the price is very high but the income the closing rate sucks you're going to have to talk to so many people to get that result it's not going to be worth it for sure but if you can get both of those really high really good you can get a really high closing rate and really high price then you're on fire now you can actually start to advertise like a maniac you can grow in multipliers on multipliers on multipliers and also one last point your income the average price you can ask for a product is sort of finite it's not exactly but it sort of is because let's say that you're selling a $500 coaching product how much higher can you get it you can you get it to a thousand sure two thousand sure four thousand sure eight thousand maybe sixteen thousand problematic thirty two thousand very problematic and more and higher and higher gets you more problems because people just literally can't afford it so you're capped to multiply your prices only by a certain amount before you reach a certain ceiling again you can always sell even for a million dollars but there's just not as much of a market for it now you also have the closing rate how much can you improve your closing rate the answer is to a hundred percent now let's you have a 20 percent closing rate you can kill yourself and do anything it takes to get it from 20 percent to 40 percent which might be worth it but that's only two times so if you get get it from 20 percent to 40 percent what that means is you doubled the result you got because if this is doubled that means that the whole equation the result is doubled but again you can only double it but this amount of opportunities amount of people that see you that think about you they get your email they get a call from you they get to see you see that your facebook ad that's you youtube ad they get a whatsapp for me all of these people you can multiply it up to seven billion people you can multiply it indefinitely so this can only multiply a couple of times this can only multiply a couple of times this can multiply indefinitely which means that you need to get these figured out figure out how to increase your product price figure out how to increase your closing rate whichever one is weak for you and everyone has a weak side everyone has a weak side and the thing is that most people have one thing that's working for them so imagine somebody who's a really high closer he can really go for high prices but his closing rate sucks and he doesn't take enough action to get enough opportunities or imagine somebody like like a party guy who knows everybody and he's in contact with thousands of people every day and he doesn't know how to sell and he doesn't know how to close people so he's not getting any money or imagine somebody who has a really really high closing rate but his prices are so low he's not actually moving forward he's not actually making money from his sales and so he's not going for many opportunities each of these people each of these cases if he teaches him just one more leg of this three multipliers just one more thing if you teach the guy who knows a lot of people only how to close a certain percentage of the people he meets then he's going to start making quite a bit of money and if he can learn how to sell for high prices he can multiply that again the same with the person who can sell very high prices but has a shit closing rate if you can get that person to a high closing rate then he'll want to be in front of as many people as possible so remember it's all about the leverage if your deal sucks that's why it's very hard for you to market it if your system sucks if it doesn't have a high closing rate or a high income or an extremely high amount of opportunities then why would it be a good deal you want to get to a situation where you got two of these figured out preferably these two because this one follows naturally after again imagine you have a deal you pay me a thousand dollars i give you a million dollars how many people would say yes quite a bit of people how much money is it a ton of money so are you going to be excited yes are you going to talk to a lot of people yes anytime you have an opportunity that has a high closing rate and a high price everybody wants in on it everybody wants percentage of the profits it's hot you just you can't find enough money to spend on it so this is the holy grail of looking at every business including your own business ask yourself where is my weakness right now and it changes once you solve it am i not making enough money per client is my closing rate shit or am i not seeing enough people and there's always one thing that needs improvement and if you just solve that one thing everything is going to be easier that's how you leverage and that's how you multiply if you have any questions let me know and i'll be happy to help you thanks for watching and i'll see you soon


And we are back. Again, my name is Tim Owens. I'm the co-founder of Reclaim Hosting. Yeah, and I'm Meredith Hero, the customer support team lead. So the goal of this session is to really talk about supporting and administering domain of one zone. And what does that mean? So in a previous session, we were talking about troubleshooting and really getting into the nitty gritty of like errors you'll run into, support scenarios and those kind of things. Now we wanna take a step back a little bit and look at the broader picture. How do you gather user analytics? How do you find out what activity is happening on the server or who are your heavy hitting users? And then what does a migration path look like for users? How do you not only remove accounts from the system when people graduate, but what does students do if they wanna take their stuff with them? So this session is gonna cover all of that kind of stuff. And let's start with user analytics. It's kind of a difficult scenario because in my eyes, C-Panel is very, obviously focused on being great web hosting software. What it's not great about is saying things like where is the activity happening? Who are your heavy hitting users and like how many pages as a whole are on the server? I always ask people like, well, what do you mean by page? Is a post a page or is an OMECA item? Is that a page? Somebody could have tens of thousands of items. What does that mean? What software is running on it? C-Panel doesn't really have a concept of software. People just upload files and it runs them. So it can be really hard to extrapolate anything out of the server. And so there's a couple of different techniques that I've come across that will kind of help with this. And I put a QR code, we've got a really good guide that I wrote that talks about some of this. The first thing that I like to look at because people wanna know like, well, what's some great stuff happening on my server? And so like I always say, the first thing you should check is bandwidth data because you figure if people are doing really cool stuff, that's the stuff that you get lots more traffic on. And so you may not know that somebody's got a great website, they built out a great exhibit and it's being passed around online, but the server is capturing all of that bandwidth. And this is right here in WHM. So if you search bandwidth, there's this section view bandwidth usage and you can sort over here by, it says expert, I guess that's for transfer. I like to sort it by transfer best fit and have the highest numbers at the top. And if you do that, you can get a sense of what sites are using the most bandwidth. Now, like most caveats that I'm gonna give throughout this session, this isn't a perfect scenario. You could have somebody whose account has been hacked and it's got a lot of bandwidth going out for malicious activity or something like that, but that's probably useful for you to know as well. But in most cases, what I find is that you'll sort by this and you'll go, oh, okay, so our main domain site gets a lot of traffic, but what is that? Oh, wow, there's like this library exhibit that I didn't even know about. And you can start to take that information and go, wow, I should reach out to them. Maybe we could feature them on a website or something like that. So this can just start to peel back the layers and start to help expose some of the activity that's happening on the server for you. The next thing that I like to look at is disk usage. And the reason for this is that you will certainly have a long tail of users that sign up for accounts. Maybe they installed WordPress, but then they didn't get much further with it or maybe they signed up for accounts and they didn't do anything with it. And so you can have hundreds and hundreds of accounts on a server, but many of them might not be doing anything worth really noting, you know, but then you've got a handful that are doing awesome stuff. Usually the disk usage can kind of tell a story there. So you can sort users under the list accounts area and WHM by disk usage. And I like to see like who's using the most. Obviously, if you don't have quota set and we always recommend that you set some kind of quota for users so that you don't run out of disk usage on the entire server. But if you don't have quota set or if you have quota set to a pretty high number, you might find users that are using a lot of storage. And that can be really useful information as well. It might mean that the person using it is not using it in a way you really want them to. We've seen scenarios, for example, where a faculty member uploaded their entire documents folder from their computer, including all of their personal home movies and music up to their account on C-Panel. Not quite what you want a web hosting server to be doing is storing that kind of content in there. But what you could maybe find is that again, maybe there's this great Omega install with tons of archival information.  This is great. How can we support this? Are there gonna be issues with the storage and those kinds of things? But still, it's great that this exists out there. So disk usage can be another one of those tools to really help you get a sense of like, where's the cool activity happening on the server? So I like it a lot. The other thing that I really like looking at on the server is getting a sense of what applications people have installed. Now, if someone's going the old school route and they've downloaded something from like a GitHub repo or from a website and they've uploaded it with FTP, you're not gonna necessarily know about it. Unfortunately, that's just the way it is. But luckily for us, a lot of people go the easy route and they use Installatron to install software, even I do. I mean, and I'm a geek, right? So I think most people, if they're installing WordPress or they want to run an application, they're gonna use the one-click installers in there. And Installatron has an administrative interface in WHM that gives you an overview of all of the applications that everybody has installed on your entire server. It's a great tool to use, not just to get a sense of what's out there, but also to be able to choose what things you want people to have access to. There's a whole administrative section and that goes way beyond this session that you can tweak the settings and Installatron. But what I really love about this interface is that it looks very much like a single user's, but it's got everybody's accounts in there. And you can search applications by name in here. So in this screenshot, you'll see I search Scalar and I can see there's a single Scalar instance on this server. If I were to search WordPress, I'm sure I would get a lot on there or maybe Omega. And so it doesn't take much time at all to just search some of the applications that you wanna get analytics on and get a sense of, okay, how many people are running this application or this one and you might find really interesting information, you might say, oh, we're really WordPress heavy school.  We should probably beef up our Omega support documentation to really marry the fact that we've got a lot of people using it and maybe it's our heavy hitters. And so this can give you more information about the applications installed on there. The other information that this tells you in here is like how many are out of date and which ones need to be updated. You could actually update applications for people in here. Now, that's a little bit more manual work. Again, you'd be looking at a list of lots of applications in here, but you can bulk select them and click the update button, which is nice by checking the box on the right-hand side for each application you wanna update. And Solitron's gonna automatically try to update things, but there may be times where the user said they don't want it updated, but you might have policies in place to say, no, we're gonna force updates at given times just to make sure that everybody's running the latest copy of code. So it's just a great way to bulk manage the applications that are on the server and really also get some insight into what's happening on the server. The other thing that we've created for folks is trying to gather lots of various pieces of information about usage on the server and bring it into a standard CSV file for administrators to be able to use as they see fit. And so we've got a script that runs and it generates once a night, it refreshes all of the data in there. And this is a CSV file that has all of the accounts on the system, including the last time that they logged in, what their C-Panel username is, what their domain name is, their email address, what that disk usage is, as well as when they signed up. And this is huge. This was a big question for folks because they wanted to get a sense of what that usage looked like in order to figure out what a migration path was or what the default policies would be. You don't wanna keep accounts on your server. If somebody logged in once two years ago, they're using no disk space and they never came back, right? So this kind of data can help you make informed decisions about what you do with accounts and when you decide to start doing cleanup options, whether that be once a semester, once a year, or some other variable time throughout the year. And so this usage script is located on the server. You'll have to use an FTP client to grab it. It's in the root folder, so you'll use your WHM credentials to log in to the server and then you'll find it right in the root folder on the server. If you ever have any questions or you just need us to send you a copy, we're happy to do that as well. Just put in the support ticket and we'll shoot you a copy of that file. But like I said, it's a script that runs every night and generates this file and it keeps it on the server. So those statistics are being updated dynamically every night. Oh, is this me too? I think so. I can talk about it though. No, I'm happy to. So as you've gotten this data, the next step would be like how to remove accounts from a server. Again, I got another QR code down here because we've got really good documentation on how to do this. But you can use that CSV file with the usage scripts or you might have your own CSV file of all of your graduates, for example. And that's totally fine. Really the only piece of information we need is the email address. We don't even need first name, last name, net ID, all that kind of stuff. All we need is the email address. And if you give us a list of email addresses in CSV format, we have scripts on our end that we can process on the server to remove them. For some schools, we've certainly done suspension first and then terminate. We think that's a great idea for folks who want to make sure that nobody was accidentally on that list. So sometimes you suspend accounts and then wait three months and terminate it. And somebody will say, hey, why is my account offline in your life? Well, you graduated. No, I didn't. Now I came to work for the school. I work here. And so it can really save you sometimes for stuff like that. But we can process that stuff for you. All you have to do is provide us a CSV file of email addresses and we can either suspend or completely terminate those accounts. When we terminate them, you will see in WHMCS that the accounts still exist in there, but you'll see it in red. And the reason for that is that WHMCS is kind of a database of all the accounts on the server, but all the activity as well. You don't necessarily want to delete the WHMCS accounts from that piece of software because this provides a record. You'll know when the account was terminated. A lot of times we'll put notes in there to say this was by request of this person and that kind of stuff. So it kind of tells a story for you. So if somebody comes and says, why is my account not loading?  And so then you can say, all right, well, it was terminated on this date. We requested, oh, your email address was a part of this CSV file. Let's see if we have a backup or something like that. So this just provides more information for you in WHMCS so that you know that it existed and that it's there. So not everything is active in WHMCS, I guess it's the best way to put out there. And it's important to note too that we only track the number of accounts on WHM for numbers based on your contract and that sort of thing. It's also good to tell when we terminate the account, we have backups of them for 30 days. So if there is a student that comes in within that 30 day window, we can restore the account very quickly. Anything after 30 days, unfortunately, they have to restart the account from there. Right, yeah. So based on the information that you've gathered with the tools that Tim talked about previously, there's a few things you can do to let the user know that you're gonna remove their account from the server or based on your records, it looks like you might have graduated and that sort of thing. WHMCS has a great mass email tool that lets you send out an email blast to particular client groups. And this lets you determine which, like you can set up the client group like graduated or faculty or something like that and designate the group to then send the emails. You all get to determine how long a counselor are kept, three months, six months, a year after graduation, that sort of thing. So you can customize the email template to include all of that. And then also let the user know what they can do to maintain the account. The easiest option is to purchase the account, purchase a shared hosting account with us at Reclaim. And then we can transfer the account through our transfer tool in WHM, change the primary domain and they're up and running with a new account that they can maintain on their end versus on the school's end. And so continuing with that, this is kind of what students should know. They can move to another hosting plan or purchase with us again. Plans start at $30 per year for a student and personal plan with two gigabytes of space. And it's important to note a pricing change. As of January 1st, we're no longer including domain registrations in that $30 per year. So each domain registration is now $15 per year. We do have options for free subdomain if they're concerned about costs and that sort of thing to keep it at the $30. So it's just important to know that that needs to, the domain registration needs to be included if they want a top level domain. So it's roughly $45 per year. Once they sign up, have them fill out a migration assistance form on our website. That will give us a record that they're moving from the school to reclaim because we don't have a record of the subdomains per project within our system. So it's important that they reach out to us for migration assistance. We'll do it on the house for free because they're moving from a domain of one's own school. It takes about half an hour for us to do. We have a max using the transfer tool in WHM and we will take care of the rest. We work with them directly and that sort of thing. So sure. And I also think like for students, some of them will say, well, I'm not ready to maintain this or keep this but what do I do if I want to in the future? And a lot of times I like to tell folks, take a full C panel backup. Like there's options in C panel for backups. And if you take a full C panel backup, it includes everything. It drops it in a single file and they can store that on their hard drive. They can put it up at the cloud and Google Drive or Dropbox or something like that and hold on to it. And then in the future, if they want to bring everything back online, they can provide that C panel backup to us or to another provider. In most cases that provider would be willing to unpack it as a full C panel account. So I actually think like that can work out really well for someone who says, I want my stuff but I don't necessarily want it to be online right now because I'm searching for jobs and not really sure if I want all this stuff. But in the future, I might. They're just not ready to make a decision yet and they've got to because, you know, their account's getting removed or something like that. So I think a full C panel backup is never a bad idea for someone who's just unsure right now and wants to make the decision later, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And then related to that, you were talking about the domains and a lot, like we said, a lot of schools are using subdomains. So when they're switching to another account, they're going to have to choose their own top level domain or they might get a subdomain from reclaimed hosting and just continue it on or something like that. So again, we would do like the primary domain switch for them and that kind of thing. But if they're not ready, there's no reason they have to, they could get a subdomain from us as well and then maybe buy a domain later down the road. I'm a fan of buying domains. Yeah. So yeah, I think it's, you know, never hurts. Yeah. And we've also set up a migration information page within the WordPress site. So they can, they can see all of that as well, like all the information. It's also handy to just send the email when the time comes, so. Yeah. Well, awesome. Well, hopefully this helps on all the various aspects of supporting and ministering domains. We're right there in the Discord chat and certainly happy to answer questions for folks or anything that's come up and drop links to various aspects of this or anything else that might have come up. So thanks for tuning in everybody. Yeah, absolutely. All right, take care. Bye. See ya.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session, we discussed the following question which says, using matrices, solve the following system of equations. 2x minus 3y plus 5z is equal to 11, 3x plus 2y minus 4z equal to minus 5, x plus y minus 2z equal to minus 3. Let's move on to the solution now. The given system of equations given to us is 2x minus 3y plus 5z equal to 11. Let this be equation 1, 3x plus 2y minus 4z equal to minus 5. Let this be equation 2, x plus y minus 2z equal to minus 3. Let this be equation 3. We can write these three equations in the form, ax equal to b where we have a is equal to the matrix with elements in the first row as 2 minus 3, 5. In the second row, the elements are 3, 2, minus 4. In the third row, the elements are 1, 1, minus 2. And we take x equal to the column matrix with elements x, y, z. And b is equal to the column matrix with elements as 11, minus 5, minus 3. Now first of all, we will find the determinant of a. This is equal to determinant with elements in the first row as 2, minus 3, 5. In the second row, the elements are 3, 2, minus 4. In the third row, the elements are 1, 1, minus 2. This is equal to 2 multiplied by 2 multiplied by minus 2, that is minus 4, minus minus 4 into 1, that is minus 4. Then minus of minus 3 into 3 multiplied by minus 2, that is minus 6, minus 1 multiplied by minus 4, that is minus 4. Plus 5 multiplied by 3 multiplied by 1, that is 3, minus 1 multiplied by 2, that is 2. And so this is equal to 2 multiplied by minus 4, plus 4, that would be 0. Then plus 3, minus 6, plus 4 is minus 2, plus 5 into 3, minus 2 is 1. And so this is equal to minus 6, plus 5, which is equal to minus 1. Thus determinant of a is equal to minus 1, which is not equal to 0. Now as the determinant of a is not equal to 0, this means that a inverse exists and a inverse is equal to 1 upon determinant of a into a joint of a. Now determinant of a is equal to determinant with elements in the first row as 2 minus 3, 5. In the second row the elements are 3, 2, minus 4. In the third row the elements are 1, 1, minus 2. Now the adjoint of the matrix a is equal to the transpose of the matrix with elements in the first row as a11, a12, a13. In the second row the elements are a21, a22, a23. In the third row the elements are a31, a32, a33. That means this is equal to the matrix with elements in the first row as a11, a21, a31. In the second row a12, a22, a32. In the third row a13, a23, a33. So this is the adjoint of a. Now these are the cofactors of the elements of the determinant a. Now a11 is equal to the determinant with elements in the first row as 2 minus 4 and in the second row as 1 minus 2. This is equal to 2 into minus 2 minus minus 4 into 1. That is this is equal to minus 4 plus 4 which is equal to 0. This is a11. Now a12 is equal to minus of the determinant with elements in the first row as 3 minus 4 and in the second row as 1 minus 2. So this is equal to minus of 3 into minus 2 minus 1 into minus 4. So this is equal to minus of minus 6 plus 4. That is equal to plus 2. So we have a12 is equal to 2. Now a13 is equal to determinant with elements in the first row as 3, 2 and elements in the second row as 1, 1. So this is equal to determinant 3, 2, 1, 1 which is equal to 3 into 1 that is 3 minus 2 into 1 that is 2 and this is equal to 1. That is a13 is equal to 1. In the same way we can find out a21, a22, a23, a31, a32 and a33. Now a21 would be equal to minus 1. a22 would be equal to minus 9. a23 would be equal to minus 5. Then a31 would be equal to 2. a32 would be equal to 23. a33 would be equal to 13. So thus we get a joint of a is equal to matrix with elements in the first row as a11, a21 and a31. Now a11 is 0, a21 is minus 1 and a31 is 2. So elements in the first row of the matrix a joint of a would be 0 minus 1, 2. Elements of the second row of the adjoint of a would be a12, a22 and a32. a12 is 2, a22 is minus 9 and a32 is 23. So here we have 2 minus 9, 23. Then the elements of the third row of adjoint of a would be a13, a23 and a33. Now a13 is 1, a23 is minus 5 and a33 is 13. So here we have 1 minus 5, 13. a inverse is equal to 1 upon determinant of a into adjoint of a. Now determinant of a is minus 1. So this is equal to minus 1 into adjoint of a which is the matrix with elements in the first row as 0 minus 1, 2. In the second row the elements are 2 minus 9, 23. In the third row the elements are 1 minus 5, 13. So this is a inverse which is equal to matrix with elements in the first row as 0, 1, minus 2. In the second row minus 2, 9, minus 23. In the third row minus 1, 5, minus 13. This is a inverse. We have taken ax equal to b. Now since ax is equal to b, so from here we get x is equal to a inverse into b. That is x would be equal to a inverse. That is this matrix multiplied by the column matrix b with elements 11, minus 5, minus 3. So further we have column matrix with elements. x, y, z is equal to the matrix with elements. That is the column matrix with elements 0 into 11, that is 0, plus 1 into minus 5, that is minus 5, plus minus 2 into minus 3, that is 6. Then the second element of this column matrix is minus 2 into 11, that is minus 22, plus 9 into minus 5, which is minus 45, plus minus 23 into minus 3, that is 69. Then the third element is minus 1 into 11, which is minus 11, plus 5 into minus 5, minus 25, plus minus 13 into minus 3, that is 39. So further this would be equal to the column matrix with elements 1, 2, 3. That is the column matrix x, y, z is equal to the column matrix with elements 1, 2, 3. And from here we get x is equal to 1, y is equal to 2 and z is equal to 3. So this is our final answer. This completes the session. Hope you have understood the solution of this question.


So, I'd like to welcome our 3MT finalists back on the stage. I think you'll all agree that they've done an outstanding job at each and every one of them.  I've never seen that. And that's a group effort. They tutored each other, they formed little groups, they helped each other, and they're also being graduated for that. We're so proud. So, I'd like to invite Tina Greger, Kristiana McDonald-Spicer, Peter Anderson, Jessica Lothack, Anupana Mukherjee, Jacob Ross, Hittra Patul, Bethany McBride, Erin Andrew, Leopold Sudiano, Christina Griffin, and Antika Gregani. Well done. Now I'd like to invite to the stage our PASA President, Alyssa Shaw, and Vice President Kim Marie Spence to the stage to present our PASA's People's Choice winner. Remember, this is a $500 check, which is a ridiculously large check. Just checking. Didn't want to get it wrong. Erin Andrews. I'd now like to invite to the stage our judges, Brian Schmidt, Andrew Barr, Janelle Wiseman, and Shane Drumgold. I believe we have tokens of appreciation for our judges, which Victoria will now hand out. So thank you so much. We're privileged here at ANU to be able to reach to people with such dedicated expertise and standing in the community. So thank you again, judges, thank you. And look, you couldn't put a piece of paper between our candidates tonight. And so the runner-up was hotly debated, and I'm pleased to announce wherever my check has gone, Victoria, I need to make sure I say the right person. Just checking. It's all the blur. Jacob Ross. Good work, Jacob. Okay. And the moment we've all been waiting for. Show me the check, please, Victoria. I just don't want to get this get wrong. Thank you. Thank you. The winner tonight, I will remind you, receives a $4,000 research grant, goes on to represent ANU at the Asia-Pacific final. All our hopes and dreams are with you. And I get so nervous at this bit. And the winner is Erin Andrew. Thank you for the paper, colleague. And now we also have a small prize for our winner's supervisor in recognition of all their support. Dr. Ord Farah. Would you like to come to the stage? Do we have Ord? Is Ord here? Would someone like to represent? All right, we're here. We're ahead of us. Inside the bag is a lovely clock, a desk clock, which we were told was lovely and gender-neutral with a little plaque on it. And I hope you'll put that on your desk with pride. Yeah. Okay. So, amazing outcome. Thank you all so much. Thank you to our deserving contestants, winners all. So it's time for a few thank yous before we close out tonight. Firstly, I'd like to thank again our 12 finalists for the enormous effort they've put into tonight's competition. Another round of applause and a bow, please, colleague. Can you take a bow? Bow. Well done. I'd like to thank our judges and of course, Partha. I'd like to thank Brian Schmidt for always supporting this competition. Also, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Margaret Harding and our boss, Amelda Wellahan, for their unstinting support. HDR administrators around the college finals, this success is sincerely shared with all of you. You put in a lot of invisible work and we appreciate you. Partners, families, supporters of finalists, we know all the work and how many times you've listened to it. You don't have two anymore. So the Wellan Hall office, technical staff, your assistants, and our lovely research training team staff and our volunteer helpers, our social media team, our wranglers, our ushers, our calmers down, our hand holders, our mic assistants. You wouldn't believe how many people are out there. It's working to a sweet, sweet pitch. So thank you. You're our dream team to work with, I can't say. Lastly, also, Lily Matthews for providing unstinting support and a smiling face always. And of course, finally, to my colleague, Victoria Firstsmith. I sometimes call Victoria my wingwoman, but honestly, we fly with you. Thank you, Victoria. So the 3&T finals always a popular event and thank you for joining us again. I hope you'll come next year and support our impressive researchers. Thank you for watching online. And we enjoy sharing what can change the world in three minutes. And let's go team A and U for the grand final in UQ. Thank you. Thank you tonight.


Welcome to church of the chair where we believe in retail therapy. I'm your hostee and today we're partaking in consumerism. But first, let me show off my current reads. This one is book four in a series, one of my favorite thriller series ever written. And I am currently reading it to my wife about 20 pages a day. We're on page 80.  I won't be reading the description of the books that I'm reading, because I will be reading those descriptions in the reviews that I will be doing. Next up, for my series time for a tome, I'm reading The Distant's Heavy and my camera's glitching out. Anyways, it's The Deluge by Stephen Markley, author of the absolutely fantastic Ohio. My review for that one is on the channel, but I will be here for a while because it is 896 pages. Lastly, last night, I started A Day by Michael Cunningham, the author of The Hours, which I believe was turned into a Nicole Kidman adaptation. I'm not quite sure, but I am enjoying the book, although I am only about 15 pages in. I did get an ARC from NetGalley and the publisher, and here's the cover. Now onto the book haul. The first four books that I picked up this past week all come from a thrift store, oddly enough named thrift store in Montgomery, Alabama. They were a dollar each. Let's jump into those. I have Tananarive Dew's Blood Colony, and I also picked up My Soul to Take. What I didn't know when I picked these up is this is book, sorry, this is book three and this is book four, but I have ordered book one and two from either book outlet or aid books. They were super cheap, like under $3 each. I have picked those up, but I have to wait for them to get here. Now onto the description. This one is the description for blood colony. There's a new drug on the street, Glow. Its main ingredient is blood, the blood of immortals, said to heal almost any illness.  Meet Fana Wold, F-A-N-A-W-O-L-D-E, 17 years old, the only immortal born with the living blood. She can read minds and her injuries heal immediately. When her best friend, a mortal, is imprisoned by Fana's family, Fana helps her escape, and together they run away from Fana's protected home in Washington state to join the underground railroad. But Fana has more than her parents to worry about. Glow peddlers are being murdered by a violent 100 year old sect with ties to the Vatican. Now when Fana is most vulnerable, she is being hunted to fulfill an ancient blood prophecy that could lead to countless deaths. While her people search for Fana and race to unravel the unknown sex mysterious origins, Fana must learn to confront the deadly forces or she and everyone she loves will die. Now onto the description of my soul to take. I gotta make sure I get that right because my soul to keep is the first book in the series. Fana, an immortal with tremendous telepathic abilities is locked in a battle of wills. Her fiance is Mitchell. But Johnny Wright, a mortal who is in love with her, believes that if she doesn't stay away from Mitchell, they will become the witnesses to the apocalypse described in the book of revelations. Fana and the life brothers are rushing to distribute their healing living blood throughout the world, hoping to eliminate most diseases before Fana is bound to marry Mitchell. It's M-I-C-H-E-L. Still, they cannot help people faster than Mitchell can kill them. Dew weaves a tangled web in this novel, including beloved characters from her best-selling Joplin's Ghost in a war of good against evil, making my soul to take a chilling and thrilling experience. Now I'm not sure if these are vampire novels or not, but I have been toying with the Tenana Reeve Dew Theorist series and seeing as Joplin's Ghost is a standalone novel that also ties in with this one and having read the between and have been picking away at the Good House, I feel like I can do a series with her stuff so definitely let me know if you'd like to see that down there in the comment section. Next up we have a classic that I've been trying to get my hands on for a while and that is The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Not that it's hard to find, but I would have preferred this edition of the book because it matches other editions of his books that I own. Also, it's a classic by John Steinbeck. I'm not going to read the description, so moving on. Next up we have a book and an author I've never heard of, but as soon as I saw the cover I had to pick it up and that is The Circus of the Earth and the Air by Brooke Stevens. This book is free on Kindle Unlimited right now and it's only $2.99 if you don't have Kindle Unlimited. The hard cover is super cheap. It kind of seems like it had disappeared from publication completely even though it is up for cheap. So if you guys like the description certainly go check it out because it sounds amazing to me. Let's get into that. During their summer vacation on an island off the coast of New England, Alex Barton watches his wife Iris swim in the calm blue-green sea, looking out at the water staring at the reflection of blue that his wife had become. He thought of how much he loved her and how strange and lucky it was that they were together. Later, beyond the dunes, they come across a circus tent where as price of admission Iris and actress volunteers for a disappearing act. After she steps into a box and the box is set on fire, she vanishes. And by the next morning the circus itself has disappeared without a trace. To find her, Alex sets out on a mesmerizing journey to a fantastical island owned by one of the great circus masters of Europe, where he believes the woman he loves is held hostage. In this existential realm of performers and soldiers, strong men and contortionists, trapeze artists and clowns, dreams and nightmares, Alex tortured, tempted, analyzed, sheds his identity and gains a new one as a tightrope walker whose strength is his vulnerability. The haunting, elusive world of the circus will lead him from Mississippi to New Hampshire to find what may or may not be the truth about his wife and himself. The circus of the earth and the air is a gripping and magical debut in which the circus, primitive, metaphysical, religious, violent, reveals the very essence of performance of loneliness and of love. That sounds absolutely amazing. I am all about that. It reminds me a bit of the Pilo family circus by Will Elliott and if it's anything like that, I'm gonna love it. And now let's get to the brand new books that I bought with a gift card from my friend Henry. Thanks Henry. First up we have a book from an author who I absolutely adore, I absolutely love, but I wasn't a huge fan of the first book in the series. I gave it three stars, I had some criticisms, but I definitely wanted to read the follow up and that is Don't Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones. I don't want to read the description of this one because I don't want any spoilers. I trust Jones but I don't trust the person who wrote the blur because I don't know them, so I'm gonna stay away from the description of this one for reasons I've just stated. Next up we have an author, this isn't the book I got but I read this book by Brian Washington, it was a collection of short stories called Lot. I fell in love with this and I was eagerly awaiting something longer from him and I finally got it. Memorial by Brian Washington. Benson and Mike are two young guys who lived together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black Daycare teacher and they've been together for a few years, good years, but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic acerbic mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit. Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan, he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that leads Benson to a deeper understanding of family and himself. Benson begins to push outward, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it. Sorry, stumbled. Both men will change in ways that will either make them strong together or fracture everything they've ever known. Memorial is a funny and profound story about big first loves, family in all its forms, becoming who you're supposed to be and the limits of love. This sounds great, I'm looking forward to it. I'll probably end up reading it after I get done with The Deluge by Stephen Markley. And finally, on the docket, we have an author that every single one of you, every time you hear that I do not enjoy fantasy or that I enjoy fantasy from everyone but the typical traditional authors that you see in every single sci-fi and fantasy shelf in a bookstore, everybody brings up NK I went ahead and I got the fifth season. I'm not a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, I've done the look inside for this book twice, and it seems like that's what it is. I don't want to read too much of the description, I'm not going to read it at all in this video, but I didn't want to read too much of the description because I don't want to know, but people keep telling me to get into her, so I'm going into this one as soon as I get done with Moon Witch Spider King by Marlon James. I also went ahead, because this one was on clearance for $7, I think, $6.97 at Books of Million, I also picked up The City We Became. Once again, because I am looking forward to these, I'm not going to be reading the descriptions. And the other ones were vague enough that I thought, like the Brian Washington book, were vague enough that I felt that I wouldn't be hurting my chances by reading them. But with something like this, I don't want to know anything about it. I'm especially particular when it comes to my fantasy, my horror, and my science fiction. But that's all the time I have for you today. If you've read any of these books, you can comment below, but please no spoilers whatsoever. Don't even give me a hint about what some of these books are about, especially not the ones that I didn't read the description for. Also, if you have a book haul yourself that you want to post, and go, I love seeing other people's book hauls. So definitely post what you picked up in the past couple of weeks, days, whatever, down there in the comments section. But until next time, I'll have the chair. Bye now.


Talmud says in Tractate Brachot, the Tractate Brachot is the first volume of the Talmud and it deals with prayer to a great extent and blessings and it says on the sixth page side B that prayer is one of the loftiest things in the universe. It stands in the highest realms of the universe yet the Talmud says people treat it very lightly. They don't take it seriously, they take prayer for granted, they often disparage prayer and they don't give it its due. So we're told that even though prayer is just about one of the greatest things that exists people do not really treat it with the proper respect and care. We have so many statements in our literature about the greatness and loftiness of prayer. Many of you have studied Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, which very early on says that all of existence, the whole world, stands on three things. Torah, Avoda, and Gamilut Chassadim. Torah, we know what Torah is. Gamilut Chassadim is Acts of Loving Kindness. Avoda, according to many, refers to prayer, worship. So it's one of the things that if we didn't have it the world would not be able to exist. The Kuzari, who was a very brilliant and wonderful poet and philosopher, wrote a very wonderful book basically explaining Judaism. About a thousand years ago, wrote that prayer is the laev hayom vipirio, that it's the heart of our day and the fruit of our day. Meaning that look at our day, what we've accomplished during the day. The Kuzari says that the times we pray, that's the fruit of the day. So we have these incredibly lofty statements about prayer and its importance, and yet the truth is that for many of us prayer is difficult, it's frustrating, it's sometimes seen as boring, we don't connect with it. Certainly it's a difficult area, and I think that we often have great problems with it. What I'm going to begin with tonight is a short catalog, not exhaustive. I didn't want to spend all of our time tonight detailing all the problems that people have with prayer. I just wanted to share a few problems I think that exist when it comes to prayer. First of all, many of us live, even if we think we don't, many of us live with the illusion that we are in control of our lives, and that everything has been figured out, and that today science understands everything, and they have a solution to everything, and our governments have solutions to everything. And there's a pill for every problem and complaint. We live in a world where so much seems to be understood and so much progress has been made that we think that we don't need God. We say to ourselves that prayer might have been necessary for ancient people who didn't really know and understand how the world works, but we are living in the 21st century. We understand everything from genomes to what have you. We know so much that we have figured everything out. We're in control. We can solve all our own problems. And therefore we feel that we don't need prayer, and we see, we look around and we see in our world that many people seem to get by perfectly fine without ever praying. So I think that's one of our problems with prayer. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov used to say that when it comes to people's problems with prayer, one of the major sources of that problem are what he classifies as problems with emunah, problems with faith. He says that if a person was really solid and clear in terms of their faith in God, prayer would be much, much easier. But I think that this is a significant problem that we don't think that we have to have God in our lives. We think that we control basically everything. Number two, we often don't really think that prayer works. We've all had so many unanswered prayers in our lives, and it's just difficult to believe that sometimes the creator of every atom in existence really cares about my gout or my car. So we both have difficulty believing that prayer works because we see so many of our own prayers unanswered, and we sometimes just can't imagine that God really cares about little old me. Number three, some of us have a difficult time relating to the forms and the words of prayer. They're in Hebrew, the language is arcane, it's often difficult. We don't understand the structure of the prayer service, what it's all about, how it's organized, and so we have a difficult time simply grasping the mechanics of prayer. Some people are just turned off by the repetitive nature of prayer. You know what, meatloaf again, right? Thursday night and Wednesday night and Thursday night, and we say the same prayers every day, three times a day practically, so people are often turned off to that. It seems boring, monotonous. I read that yesterday, I don't have to do it again today. It's hard for many people today to focus and pay attention. That's just the nature of reality. If you want to read a fascinating book on the way our brains have changed over the past 20 years, there's a book I recommend called The Shallows, and it's true that attention spans have been diminishing. And so we have a difficult time focusing, paying attention. We are easily distracted and our minds wander frequently, and so we get frustrated and therefore we rush through our prayers and therefore often don't feel very inspired. It's almost a vicious cycle. As well in our very high tech world today, we become very accustomed to background noise in our lives. We're always plugged in. We're always having our senses engaged. We're always online, and therefore we have a very, very difficult time being with ourselves and spending time in silence. Very, very hard. I remember years ago, I went to a three-day meditation retreat, and we were told that we will not be talking for three days. We were told we wouldn't communicate in any way for three days. And I said to myself, I'm very afraid I'm going to go crazy. I couldn't imagine having three days, no input, no radio, no newspapers. Just basically we sat and we would sit and meditate. We'd walk and meditate, we'd meditate while we were eating, and that was it for three days, and I was afraid. I was literally afraid I was going to go out of my mind. It was interesting, by the way, that I was at a place that was an eight-hour drive from here, and on the drive home, I realized that what I would have normally have done would have been to immediately turn on the radio of the car and have the radio noise blaring for eight hours. I didn't do that after these three days.  But I believe that today it's become very difficult for us to be with ourselves and to experience silence. By the way, the Bible says, the Torah says, that the greatest praise is silence. It's almost the greatest prayer. Another problem is that many of us are not in touch with ourselves and who we are, and therefore who is praying? In order to pray, you have to have a prayer, and if we're out of touch with ourselves and who we are, the whole experience of prayer becomes a very difficult enterprise. Another problem which hopefully isn't that common, but I have seen this, is that today people, and part of the problem is the technological world we live in, where it's so easy to just spend your whole time in front of your computer or phone, but often today people do not nurture relationships and they have often very shallow relationships, and it's very difficult, therefore, to relate to the transcendent to the ultimate other when we've cut so many other people out of our lives. It makes prayer more difficult. And even if we want to pray and we seek to have good prayer experiences, we wonder, why do I really have to ask God for what I need? Why do I have to tell God what I need? God created the whole world. He knows everything. There's nothing that He doesn't know. So what's the purpose of me telling God, look, God, my car broke. I need help. He knows that we need a job. And so why do I have to stand in front of God and tell Him I need a job? Furthermore, if God has not provided me now with a job, or with a spouse, or with a bigger house, if I don't have those things now, God is perfect, and He knows exactly what I'm supposed to have. And so if I don't have these things now, it must be what God wants me to not have. God wants me to have now what He thinks I need and what I should have, and what I don't have now are things that God does not feel I either deserve or I should be having.  You think that I don't need a bigger house. Well, let me tell you something. I know better than you. And so does prayer mean that I'm coming to God and I'm going to try and get God to change His mind because I know better. And I'm going to explain to God what He doesn't know. So the entire enterprise of prayer seems strange. Number one, why do I need to tell God anything? He knows everything. And number two, it seems a little bit bizarre that I'm going to try to change God's mind. It's obvious that He knows best for me anyway. Many of these difficulties, and I could have gone on for many, many more, but many of these difficulties can be resolved if we truly understand prayer, what it is, and how it works. The more we understand what prayer is, how it works, the more some of these problems, or many of them, disappear. So let's begin. The Hebrew word for prayer is tefila. Tefila. And one of the best ways of understanding something is to understand what the word means. And it's not a simple word. According to many of our sages, the one at least, at least one of the root meanings of this word tefila means bonding, or attachment, or connection. And therefore, what we're taught is that the essential purpose of prayer, what we're doing when we're praying is to connect with God, to attach ourselves to God, to get close to God. That's what prayer is all about.  A number of weeks ago we spoke about the black fire and the white fire, the form and the content. So we know that the form of prayer, the black fire, is expressing our requests to God for stuff that we need. That's what we're doing. That's the black fire. That's the form. But the content, what it's all about, is the subtext. The white fire is that these of this experience, this activity, is there to connect us and bring us closer to God. That's ultimately what prayer is about. So it's important to look beyond the surface and to see what is really going on. What's really happening when we pray? Give me an example. You can have children that nudge their parents forever. I want that toy. On television, their friend has a toy. I want the toy. I want the toy. And they can drive their parents crazy. But the truth is, does the child ever really get totally satisfied by getting more and more toys from their parents? We know so many children who are unhappy and they could have all the toys in the world. And their parents make the mistake sometimes of thinking they can buy their children off by giving them more things. Today, the kid does not want the toy.  The kid wants their parents. They want their parents' attention. They want their parents' love. The toy is not the love.  They don't want the presence. They want their parents' presence. And one is a means to the other. One is a means of facilitating and expressing the other. The gift, the present, is there because it represents. It facilitates the presence of the parents. The child begins to connect with their parents through the medium of this gift. But the gift does not end unto itself. And so in the same way, what we really want is not the toy, but we really want our parents. It's not getting the car. It's not getting the job. What we really want is to connect with God. We connect with God through this experience of expressing our needs, asking for what we would like and coming to God in prayer. The Zohar, the famous Kabbalistic text, teaches that Jacob's ladder, which was connecting heaven to earth, is a symbol for prayer. That's what Jacob's ladder symbolizes. It's the bridge that we have to God. And we're able to connect with God. How come we're able to do this? Because we have a divine godly soul. By nature, we are godly. God breathed our soul into us. Part of us is not only physical. Part of us is spiritual. We have a spiritual core to who we are. We have godly souls. And therefore, as it says in the book of Psalms, chapter 42, verse 3, My soul thirsts for God. Because I have a soul that is godly. And my godly soul wants to connect to its source. It's like a small flame that when you put it closer to a large, large fire, it becomes absorbed into the larger fire. So our souls naturally seek to be connected to their source. And that's what we're doing when we pray. Other commandments that we perform, almost everything else in the Torah and in Judaism, brings us close to God. But prayer is intimacy itself. Prayer doesn't bring us close to God. Prayer is closeness itself. Every relationship that we know is based upon communication. That lies at the core and the heart of all relationships. When we speak directly to God, we speak directly to God, we pour out our hearts, it's very much like a couple having a close intimate personal conversation. That is one of the most close kind of activities they can experience, to sit together and just talk and to be in each other's presence. And so having that time with God when we're in his presence and we speak to him directly, that is the experience of closeness itself. Prayer is the most direct way of bridging the seemingly infinite gap. We spoke about this already. That when we think about God being eternal, transcendent, totally spiritual, totally beyond our physical world, how do you bridge the gap between God and us puny little physical, finite, transient, temporal human beings? It says in the book of Psalms, we recite this every day in our prayers three times a day, Psalm 145 verse 18, Karov Adonai Lakol Korav. God is close to all who call upon him in sincerity and truth. When we call out to God, that establishes closeness and intimacy. Prayer is basically when you think about it a declaration and involvement in our faith when we pray, we're expressing our faith in God. Nachmanides, the famous Bible commentary in Exodus chapter 13 verse 16 says when we pray, we're coming before God and we're proclaiming, we are your creatures. Hacently we're saying I'm your child. We call God, our father in heaven. So when we come to God in prayer we're expressing our creature creator relationship. We're acknowledging that God created us. God's our parent in heaven so to speak. And so it declares our faith in God. The Maralph and Prague, the famous mystic said that the whole concept of prayer is an expression of our total dependency on God. When we pray, we're expressing that we depend on God for everything. We have no independent existence. We wouldn't be here if God didn't want us to be here and we wouldn't get anything in the world if God didn't want us to have it. So when we express our dependence on God, when we do that, we're drawing closer to him. We're getting closer to God when we acknowledge God, I depend on you for everything. In the same way again that a child understands intuitively that's their relationship with their parent. The little baby understands that they have to turn to their parents for everything. So having a clear appreciation of our relationship with God depends upon understanding that we turn to God and ask for what we need because we depend on him for everything. However, as we said the real goal of prayer is not to get what we're asking for. That's not the real goal. That's just a means to the end. The real goal is to experience the closeness to God that is engendered when we turn to him with these requests. So God in effect uses this mechanism of us having to turn to him to pray to him as a way of us developing closeness with him. That's why the Kusari said that prayer is the fruit of the day. We would often think that the fruit of the day is when you pull the lever and you get from the machine what you want. We would think that the fruit of the day is the $1,000 or the $500 or the $100 we made at the end of the day. Or it's the fact that I got my tooth capped and my tooth feels better. Or it's anything else that we get. Spiritual, material. I was able to be able to pay my bills on time. Whatever I got I often think, oh, that's I got my prayers answered. No, all of those things I was praying for I sometimes get those are just a means to an end to really experience the closeness with God. And therefore the Kusari says the fruit of the day is the prayer itself. Not what we get from the prayers. Because ultimately connection to God is far more important and pleasurable than getting into dental school. Not there's anything wrong with that. Perfectly good thing to do. But it's a matter of perspective. What really is the ultimate pleasure? What is the ultimate thing to experience? It's not getting anything physical in this world. It's being able to draw ourselves closer to God. Obviously praying to God builds faith in God. And it deepens that faith. The Naseevah Shalom the former Slalom Arabi said quoting a verse in Psalms, chapter 116 verse 10, it's from the Halal that we recite many times during the year the Psalmist says Ha-Emanthi Ki Adaber Ha-Emanthi I have faith, Ki Adaber because I'm speaking it. I mean that one of the ways to build faith and develop faith is to speak about your faith. To speak of matters of faith, to express your faith. It works. When you tell someone you love them that's a way of drawing closer to them. The words themselves impact the emotions inside. It impacts what happens between people that hear those words. And so speaking to God asking God for what we want and what we need, that action itself of speaking to God builds faith. It deepens our faith. That's why by the way, we make a blessing one of the blessings we recite after eating certain foods we say We bless God for what? For creating souls and their lax, their deficiencies. We're saying to God, God, thank you for making me a needy person. Thank you for giving me needs and because I have these needs and lax I have to turn to you. That's by the way, the explanation for why in the Garden of Eden story the snake was cursed. Because when you read the story it seems like the snake is making out like a bandit.  When you think of a bandit, the food is going to be the dust on the earth, he's going to crawl on his belly he's going to have an open refrigerator that's stocked full 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The snake will never lack for food wherever he crawls is going to be the dust of the earth right in front of him and the Kutskerebi said that's the curse because the snake will not have any needs, will never have the need to turn to God and express I need food I need something. Obviously the point of this teaching is not to learn about animals, it's teaching us that the worst position to be in as a human being is to feel we don't need God. I've got it covered. So the fact that I have needs and desires and wants and I turn to God to fulfill them, that's the greatest blessing and we bless God for our lacks and deficiencies. Now we saw that one etymological meaning of the Hebrew word for prayer, Tefilah is bonding. That's what we just discussed that prayer is bonding is attaching ourselves to God but there's another implication of the Hebrew word Tefilah. According to Rabbi Shem Shin Raphal Hirsch the famous German rabbi and thinker from the 20th century, he says that the root of Tefilah is Palal which means to judge, to clarify and when we say to pray prayer is Palal but to pray would be Lahit Palel and Hirsch explains that this is the reflexive form of Hebrew and Lahit Palel therefore means that you're judging yourself. It's an act of self judgment self assessment but according to Hirsch the activity of prayer he's not negating what we discussed but he's saying when you're praying you're engaging in a self reflective act of judging yourself. When we pray we clarify many things. For example when we're praying we should be asking ourselves this is what we should be doing asking ourselves are we asking for the right things what am I asking God for? I come with my shopping list but maybe I can upgrade my shopping list I'm asking for a greener lawn maybe I can ask for world peace I have things that are important to me but really what's important to me what am I really asking for am I really asking for the right things we can clarify do we want to use these things for the correct purpose when I'm asking for a bigger house is it because I want people to think I'm successful or do I want to do important things in my big house or do I want to have many more guests for Shabbat do I want to make gatherings where people can study Torah together my wife and I just had a program in our basement we wanted to have someone come and do a beautiful talk tying in Jewish thoughts to his trip to Nepal with his kids and we were bothered because we can only fit 15 people in our basement would have loved to have had 50 people not 15 so when we ask the question God I would like certain things prayer helps us clarify what do I want to use these things for what's my purpose in asking for these things number three do I really deserve what I'm asking for have I been living in a way that God expects me to live have I been actualizing my potential do I deserve these things so the act of asking and requesting puts us in a situation where I'm forced to confront myself and evaluate myself and judge myself and Hirsch and others say that that's really what we're doing we're praying so prayer doesn't really seek to change God prayer is not trying to change God prayer we're trying to change ourselves by Abraham Twersky said that prayer is not so much to get what we want but to become who we should be that's what prayer really is about now we do ask for health we do ask for finances we do ask for success we do ask for peace we make these requests so the question is how can I change God's mind he's giving me what I have right now because he's determined that's what's right for me so if I have what I have right now because God has already determined this is what's go back should be having so what does it mean I'm going to ask him for other things doesn't God know better so the truth is that he does know what we deserve and God does know what's best for us and it's not absurd for me to pray why Rav Yosef Albo the famous Jewish philosopher of the medieval ages said that this is not what prayer does in prayer we're not trying to change God's mind we're not trying to do that when we pray we're seeking to change ourselves and once we change ourselves and become different people then God's evaluation of what I should have changes so therefore moment A God sizes me up and God evaluates that at moment A I should be having these things before God the next day and I'm a different person then the evaluation is totally different so I haven't changed God's mind I've changed myself and now God is looking at a different person and therefore I may be able to get different things it's not an activity of changing God's mind perhaps now I'll use things for the proper purpose and that's why I might be able to get it but here we have a question if the basic purpose of prayer is to change ourselves that's what it's all about to change ourselves so why is the essential action of prayer directed towards getting closer to God meaning why don't we say that the focus of prayer is myself that why isn't the whole activity geared towards to speak about me not inside of me but we don't really do that the prayer experience as I've described before is essentially geared to getting close to God so if we're here really in prayer to change ourselves why focus on getting close to God well the answer is quite simple because focusing on our relationship with God can be the most powerful catalyst towards changing who we are and to growing as people because if God is real and I see God as real in my life and I'm striving for closeness to God if that's what I'm doing then the rest of my life has to be different think about it this way how many times we go through life and we experience something and we say my life has to be different now how many people after September 11th that incredible moment in history said now realizing that maybe life is uncertain it's going to be a different ball game for now on my life is going to be totally different how many people have that kind of wake up call when they almost go through their own brush with death or they go through a Yom Kippur and they say my life has got to be totally different well that kind of reaction can happen when we encounter God when we put God front and center in our lives the rest of our life has to be different what am I living for if I'm not a person whose main focus is in the world of the material and the world of the physical the main focus on getting close to God so what am I really living for what's really important to me what are my priorities all those things change when we put God front and center in our lives I've got to become more aligned with God I certainly have to become less selfish more generous when we feel I'm close to God I'm going to have to be much less arrogant if I have God front and center in my life much more humble if you see someone on a boat and they're trying to pull themselves to shore by a rope it can look like it can look like that they're pulling the shore closer to themselves it can almost look like that if you don't know how things work they're pulling themselves in and it looks like the shore is being pulled closer to their boat obviously that's not what's happening and so when we pray we're not changing God and we're not really moving God closer to us when we pray we're moving ourselves closer to God the Torah it says in our Bible we're told you shall worship serve God with all of your heart what does it mean to serve God with all of your heart so the Talmud says the service of the heart is prayer that's how we work it's a work it's a labor it's a service we work throughout our lives with the raw material that God gave us of who we are and we try to convert this raw material into a finished product we're here basically polishing God's diamonds and we're here to purify our diamond and to improve it and prayer becomes part of this process of polishing ourselves of improving ourselves Rabbi David Aaron further explores another root meaning of Tefilah and how change is affected by understanding this meaning of the word Tefilah we all know the famous very tragic story of Jacob to his son Joseph he thought for so many years that Joseph was killed and he mourned silently for his son Joseph not realizing Joseph was alive all these years and became the vice president of all of Egypt and years later when Jacob is finally reunited with his son Joseph he goes down to Egypt so at the end of the book of Genesis in Genesis chapter 48 Joseph asks Jacob to see his two children Joseph has two sons and he wants his father to see his two sons and Jacob comes he's very old and in chapter 48 verse 11 Jacob says to Joseph I could never have imagined I would never have imagined that I would ever even see your face and here God is showing me even your offspring so Jacob says he says I would never have dreamed I would never have hoped to have been able to see your face and Rashi explains that the word Pilate here what Jacob is saying is I never had filled my heart to think the thoughts of seeing you again I gave up on those hopes and therefore I would never have dreamed I would never have hoped to have been able to see your face and therefore prayer is basically an activity an avoda a work a service of filling our hearts with how we really want to see our lives and our world that's what we're doing we're praying we're filling our hearts with the proper kind of thoughts this is the avoda of prayer the work of prayer and to try and align our vision with God's vision so prayer basically when you think about it is allowing godly thoughts to enter and penetrate our minds and our hearts that's what it's an activity of it's filling our hearts to think the thoughts godly thoughts the katsgarabi he was a student of a very famous story a very famous story katsgarabi where is god and he says god is everywhere he asked him again no where is god and the katsgarabi says malochoharith kvado god's glory fills the entire universe and he said no he said god is wherever you let him in and so prayer is our time during the day to let god in and to fill our minds and our hearts with godly thoughts the question is therefore not whether god hears our prayers that's not the question of course he hears our prayers the question is whether we are hearing our prayers that's the question about prayer we need to hear ourselves saying certain things before god each day it's important for us to say certain things before god each day it's important to tell people it's important to say certain things before god each day to realize our dependence on him and understanding there's no other address for our needs it's important for us to state that and to fill our hearts with that understanding to ask god for what we need to thank god for what we have to acknowledge god's kindness and generosity and to understand what is important to god how does god see the world what are god's priorities god looks at the world much differently than we do god's vision for the world is sometimes much grander than our small visions for the world and so we want to fill our hearts with these thoughts the balshempt have said you are where your thoughts are you want to know who you are you want to know where you are it's where your thoughts are you want to be more in tune with god's thoughts changes us that's how this works once we cultivate a desire to receive god's blessings and we pray for them we become a vessel to receive those blessings god wants a relationship with us that's god's desire god wants to be in relationship with us and so god created the world in this way that bonding with him comes through prayer and therefore prayer creates the vessel for us to receive those things we're asking for the capacity to receive the blessings of god and in that to be able to bond with god Rav Moshe Chaim Lutzato in his famous work the Derek Hashem the way of god wrote that living in a physical world where we're living now believe it or not a materialistic physical world tends to pull us down into the material and into the world of the superficial it's just part of the danger of living in this world and it distracts us living in a physical world distracts us from the spiritual we begin to forget who we really are in this world as a famous story many of you have heard who's just not able to support his family he's just so frustrated he's so broken and he hears that there's a very very far off island and he hears on this island it's just covered with precious jewels and he's got to be able to get there somehow and he'll be able to make a ton of money and support his family so he manages to get all the way to this island very very far away and he sees the island is covered with jewels there's diamonds and rubies everywhere it's all you have and he quickly stuffs his pockets and he's got them coming out of every little tiny of his garments and he's holding them and everyone looking what are you doing he's saying I gotta get these diamonds and then people are laughing at him they're saying what's the big deal these things aren't worth anything this whole island is full with these diamonds so he was very upset he said oh my goodness I thought these things were very valuable he said not here they're not so he said what is valuable here he said well there's a little teeny fish that is very very hard to catch very hard to catch but it's a big delicacy here on this island and if you can manage to learn how to catch these fish it's not easy you can make a killing so he saves up and he buys a little boat and he takes lessons and whatever he's figuring out the best way and he finally managed to catch some of these fish and after a lot of practice he gets pretty good at it and he starts getting a lot of these fish and he's got now the thing on this island that's worth more than anything else in the world he's got a big boat filled with these fish anyway after he catches a huge huge load of this fish he realizes wait a second my family I got to get back to my family so he quickly gets in the boat he goes back all the way home and the family they've been waiting for him and they see the boat and they get all excited and then as the boat gets closer they're smelling and they say what in the world is this guy bringing back we didn't think the diamonds smelled anyway the smell is becoming very powerful because the boat is full of fish and the boat and he looks like he's very happy he's got a big smile and he says I became very rich I became a gazillionaire on that island and they said really? he says yeah look at all this fish and he said you mean this smelly fish is what you brought back and he realized oh my god where I'm living now these little smelly fish are not worth too much he was devastated the story usually ends with him finding one or two little loose diamonds in his pocket that he left there from the very first day on the island but the parable is that we come into this world our souls come from a spiritual realm connected to God connected to the world of spirituality connected to who we really are and we're told that for 70, 80, 90, 100 years we put on an earth suit and we come down to live on planet earth for just a short period of time and we're here to work on ourselves and to grow spiritually and we're here to pick up diamonds real diamonds what are the real diamonds that we're supposed to be picking up enlightenment refinement of who we are closest to God learning Torah praying there's a whole world of valuables that we can in this world there's a lot to get and what happens we're in this physical world and we begin to get distracted and what becomes very important to us now are more dollar bills and more stock holdings and a bigger house and more cars and more yachts and more vacations this becomes what we're after and so people can live 70 years in this world 90 years and at the end they've got a huge portfolio and maybe they'll give some of it to grandkids but they didn't end up getting in this life what they were supposed to be getting in terms of growing personally or spiritually nothing we get very distracted here because we don't see God and when we don't see God out of sight out of mind and we begin to forget God and we begin to trust in our own accomplishments God says this in the desert by the way in the desert 40 years we have Jewish people directly they only had Manah and they had this miracle war to come out of well and you read the book of Deuteronomy and God says look you're going to go into the land of Israel and you're going to big build houses there you're going to big build double you know mansions you're going to big build houses you're going to have lots of stuff and you're going to forget about me that's what God tells him exactly in the book of Deuteronomy he warns them that's what happens in this world and so what prayer helps us do is to lift us out of this mundane world and reorient us to true reality to what's truly important our divine soul gets occluded gets covered up by being placed in a physical body with physical drives and materialistic preoccupations prayer is that avoda that work that service to reveal our true inner self King David said in the book of Psalms va'ani tefila I am prayer that's who I am really deep down inside that's who I am we said last week that the Talmud says that one of the words for the human being is and the root of which means to pray meaning that the Talmud says what defines us as human beings is we are the creature that prays that's who we really are deep down inside Rufzadeqa Cohen of Lublin in his famous work that he died in the year 1900 I believe he said it's not only important for us to believe in God he said we have to believe in ourselves as well he says we have to remember that we have a godly soul and that we have huge spiritual potential and so prayer helps us get in touch with who we really are the Torah tells us at one point that Isaac Abraham's son went out he went out to meditate in the field what is meditation R. A. Kaplan in his book Jewish Meditation says that meditation basically is the directing and focusing our mind in a focused manner it's just the focusing and directing of our mind on something when you think about it formal prayer when we open up a prayer book three times a day we say the prayer is in the liturgy that can be a meditative experience not if you're going at 95 miles an hour but prayer can be a meditative experience when you're focused on the words when you're focused on the experience when you go through prayer slowly our rabbis say we should pray like we're counting money right when you get a big pile of money you count it very carefully every dollar you want to make sure you don't miss one not rushing through it quickly and so prayer can be a meditative experience if we're focused, if we have attention if we have what we call Kavanaugh intention on what we're saying prayer can be an important meditative experience however it's very critical to remember that prayer is not only formal prayer Rabbi Nachman of Breslov would recommend a practice called heat bododut heat bododut literally which means to seclude yourself and to be alone and to just speak to God in your own words you don't need a prayer book it means coming before God every day he would recommend an hour, half hour whatever it is you can do it for 10 minutes but he said it one of the most healthy things to do and in terms of building closest with God just about the most powerful thing you can do it's just speak directly to God with your own words like you would speak to a close friend it's the way Tevye lived in Fiddler on the Roof he would just speak to God like God was the most real thing in the world oh God my horse broke his leg and he would just talk to God we are grandmothers spoke to God what Rabbi Nachman of Breslov recommends you can have many prayers throughout the day just throughout the day something comes up you pray to God you're going to a meeting pray to God for wisdom I should say the right things you're going to a doctor pray to God that your doctor should be skillful or that you should be okay you're going to a meeting anything you do during the day driving up Bathurst Street God help me get there safely shouldn't get stuck in too much traffic you can take these little breaks during the day many meditations throughout the day singing can be a meditative experience just to sing a spiritual song to chant I mean Nachman of Breslov used to just repeat over and over and over again he would say he would just call out God's name just calling out the name the way people who were in love call out the name of the beloved so that's a meditation if you're focused because you want to get close to God you call out on God's name prayer is called the formal prayer we have is called Amida which means to stand and it's interesting that this is the core consciousness that we're supposed to have when we're praying not so much on the words but just on the fact that we're standing many synagogues right here in the Talmud in Tractate Brachot Rabbi Eliezer is about to die and his students are asking him please give us some wisdom before you leave for the next world he said to them when you pray when you pray he said know before whom you are standing and the core basic consciousness of prayer is just to realize I'm standing in the presence of God the words are less important than just knowing I'm in the presence of God this Shabbat we're going to read Prashasvara when God comes and appears to Abraham doesn't tell you what God said to Abraham all the Bible says is that God came and appeared to Abraham we know that Abraham was not well he just gotten circumcised the Talmud says God came to visit the sick the critical is not so much what was exchanged it was that God appeared to Abraham the presence being together and so an incredibly powerful meditation is just to spend some time every day just imagining that you are in the presence of God we said before that the entire world is filled with his glory there's no place that God is absent and so just to sit and to feel that you're in the presence of God or stand that you're in the presence of God is a very powerful meditation we're going to end by asking one final question what if you're not able to pray what if you're not sure you believe in God I mean it sounds like my whole talk tonight goes out the window if you don't believe in God so we quoted a few weeks ago the Nisiva Shalom the Slana Marebi who said that the mitzvah to believe in God is really the mitzvah to yearn for God to seek God so what everyone can pray for is for God to make himself real to us for God to make himself clear to us even if we don't believe in God we can pray and say God please or whoever you are to whom you may concern I want to get to know you that's what Rabbi Abraham Tversky calls a prayer for a prayer pray to be able to pray there's a famous story that's told after I think the Six-Day War the Yom Kippur War, I forget which one it is there were, I think it must have been the Six-Day War a bunch of Israeli soldiers were at the Western Wall in Jerusalem amazing, they haven't been here in so many years and they're all religious soldiers except for one so there were a whole bunch of religious soldiers and what are they doing at the Western Wall now that they finally have conquered it they're standing there crying in front of the Western Wall and they turn to look at their friend who's totally not religious and he's crying as well and they can't, what is he crying about this guy doesn't believe in God, he's not religious he doesn't have a spiritual bone in his body and he said, you know why I'm crying I'm crying because I don't know why I'm not crying he knew that he should be crying everybody else is crying so he was crying and that's a prayer when you cry you're really praying I want to end with a beautiful story if you want to read some of the most beautiful material on prayer, Abraham Joshua Heschel was descendant of the Opter Rebbe he wrote so many beautiful books about prayer this is called Quest for God but he tells a beautiful story here that applies to all of us whether we believe in God we're not sure if we believe in God but some of us we just have a hard time praying sometimes he says about a hundred years ago by Isaac Mayor Alter of Gehr, it's my namesake Mayor, the Gehrer Rebbe, the first Gehrer Rebbe he pondered over the question of what a certain shoemaker of his acquaintance should do about his morning prayer because his customers were poor men who owned only one pair of shoes the shoemaker used to pick up their shoes at a late evening hour work on them all night and part of the morning in order to deliver them before their owners had gone to work when should the shoemaker say his morning prayers pray quickly the first thing in the morning and then go back to work and just shoot off the prayers very quickly or should he let the approaching hour of prayer go by and every once in a while raising his hammer from his shoes utter a sigh, woe unto me I haven't prayed yet and the Gehrer Rebbe said perhaps that sigh is worth more than any prayer itself we too Heschel says face this dilemma of wholehearted regret or perfunctory fulfillment many of us regretfully refrain from habitual prayer waiting for an urge that is complete sudden and unexampled but the unexampled is scarce and perpetual refraining can easily grow into a habit we may even come to forget what to regret and what to miss