Welcome back to the channel guys got another juicy video for you here today on the Canadian series Hope you guys are enjoying the series Let me know in the comments down below every day for something different happening And this was definitely my favorite trip that I've been on and there's a lot to offer up there So I tried to switch it up every day and we got something special for you on this video If you guys are subscribers to the channel and you've watched a lot of my videos You know that I do like to do some crappie fish I think because it's kind of a microcosm of finding big schools of bass and then being able to pluck them out and then They are delish so today is an extra special crappie fishing video and they are giants and how we found them is crazy Let's roll Crappie found he's got a fish and it's a crappie sling him in. This is a little one though That's a little one, but we'll take him Yes Crappies the crappies have been located.  Yes Crappies of course, this is a small one for here. Yeah, that's a big one back in Texas There are some stud Crappies in here. Oh, I got a crop. Oh, that had to be a crappie. Wait hit it Yeah, there's another bite. Got him. That's crappie. That's a good good. Oh my gosh These are giants Yeah, yeah, these are giants.  Oh, it's happening Mm-mm. Oh my gosh.  Yeah, this one's yeah, tiny minnows So here's the deal y'all out here on rainy lake catching crappie is kind of a mysterious thing They have gigantic ones. I'm talking common 18 inch crappie. They can get up to three pounds out here on the regular That's a little one right there But they don't have a link limit you can keep 10 Usually they're just really hard to catch and there's this rare time where they get on beds Kind of like the smallmouth are right now, but the rest of the time they're mysterious So everyone up here talks about these crappie and they're more tasty than walleye even they're incredible So what we're going to try to do is try to capture these crappie my dad Yesterday he caught a crappie on a buzz bait I mean crappie giant. Oh my gosh.   Oh my gosh, that's a londo And when he went back and we told the other guys at the camp that they were like what a crappie We got to go back there. We got to see if they're there So that's what we're at right now So if we could put together a good limit of crappie and maybe it's probably going to be my pb crappie I would love to get a replica crappie of one of these giant black crappie up here made We're using these finesse rods in the ompa rivers to cast out. We're using the small I'm using the little micro shad the lft micro shad We're going to probably throw some some hair jigs and stuff like that But you guys just seem to use these in the videos before the ompa rivers. They're Probably the best crappie rod out there They're high-end rods, but they're ain't phenomenal for trout crappie panfish stuff like that back us up a little bit dad You're getting a little too close This guy Is that a crappie? You have another one That's a crappie Oh, yeah, look at his jump. Yeah Don't let him go We have found these crappie y'all Look at that Oh, I don't know if you're gonna be able to swim here Get in the boat Yes Look at the size These were giants I thought it was a bass put that guy in the well. He was right on the shoreline We've located them boys all because of a buzzbait I mean it's You can put that thing right where you want it. It's a little whip buggy whip. Yeah, all right boat positioning boat positioning Oh, sorry One of you sent in some little hair jigs for me I've never used them, but this seems like a perfect opportunity Got one What's that boulder? Oh gosh hammer Hammer time Got you buddy hammers Look at that. We're doing it now Crappie Crappie on that hair jig that you guys sent in it's a it's a giant It's a giant Oh, gosh Oh, baby.  That's a hammer dad. Look at that That is awesome. I don't know how long that let's let's just get a quick That's like 14 14 That's huge The other guys told us yesterday. They're like, don't ever don't let anyone see you with even one crappie They're like, don't let anyone see you. They're gonna be all on you asking where you caught them and everything So this might be some secret deal. I don't know, you know in texas. We're just we're catching them and We're happy about it, but up here. It's it's a very big deal and you can catch an absolute trophy That's what i'm really excited about the opportunity to catch like an 18 inch crappie Mount that up in the treehouse. Put that next to a big bass. That'd be awesome They're beautiful black crappie up here. So we got a couple more islands around here I think we're gonna hop around see if we can duplicate this pattern If not, we'll come back and fish these little spots a little bit more They're very concentrated it seems when you catch one throw back in the exact same spot You're probably gonna catch another one You got one too. Yeah, he had it too.  You got another one here.  That's a good one. Is it a magnum? Watch it easy Oh, yeah There's a juicy. Yeah, he's a throwbacker These are beautiful fish Pretty black tails Oh, I got a slime There's a crappie. That's a crappie. That's a good That's a good Get in here boy. There's the old thick back. Look at that Yes, sir going in the grease pile Y'all look inside this live well right now. We're gonna eat so good tonight that look at that Oh man, this is what we're catching them on before we look into the live well This uh lake fork trophy lures Um I think it's a baby live magic shad or micro live magic. I can't remember but it's got a little pink head on it And uh, that's on that yamper ripper. We're just stomping them They're coming in these little patches right here grass with rocks on the backside of this this island the bite's pretty subtle and they're up shallow Look at that That's what we got going guys That is spectacular Oh god look at that that might be a big one dad That could be a magnum staying down like a crappie. Oh god, he break you Got one got a crappie. That's for sure a crappie. That's a good one too Oh, they're all good ones. Come here, baby.  I don't think I can lift that one. He's so wide They're so wide, you know the big when you're lippin them by the boat. Goodness gracious Oh, you gotta love it Limits 20. I don't think we have 20 in there But there are some solid 14 and 15 inch crappies In that live well, and we're going to put them in some grease They're no good taking them home getting them frozen. You got to do crappies While they're fresh. So here's the plan.  We were going to go do that video Me and dad are going to do a challenge video with that But we got on those crappies We did not think that it was going to be possible because everyone was telling us Oh, if you find crappie, it's it's a golden It's a golden nugget and they're hard to catch and you know All this kind of stuff and then we go out there and we start whacking them the situation We found we couldn't duplicate it. They're feeding on really small minnows We use those pink 116 pounds jig heads with that little micro shad and it was killer for those magnum crappies So now we are going to take it to the kitchen part and do a catching cook with these Mondo slabs most of what I've caught in my lifetime has been white crappie Not so much black crappie, but they are thick and juicy up here guys And I don't know we tried the red hot on the wall eyes the other night and everybody loved it So we might be doing that but when we get to the kitchen we'll decide So if you guys haven't kept up with the other catching cooks, you'll like this portion of the video Of course, it's always my favorite success We just Slayed the crappie today. Now we got to take these babies in we're going to clean them We know these are going to be delicious my first canadian crappies How to switch jackets because I literally had slime all over that one right here is the fish shack This is where all the fish cleaning gets done pretty much out in the middle of the woods. There's Bears that try to get in here. There's actually wolves that live out in these woods. It's kind of crazy And there's also tons of mosquitoes. So this thing is locked down on the screen door. They look nice I measured one that was a 15 for sure You guys back home are crazy. Yeah, we gotta let the guys Any eggs in them? No So we're gonna cook them this size. We're gonna chop them up All right, you want me to turn the oven on again? Calvin, you think we'll need the oven? I don't know Look at that fresh delicious white flaky meat. Look at the size of that fillet. That's literally a crappie Look at the thickness turn it sideways. Look at the thickness on those bad boys This goodness this goodness from the north It's a 25 inch couch chopping in the chunks I'm three three inches long And I'm golden crispies get them juicy. All right, put them in the batter with a new There you go. There you go. Yes lightly better. Put them in Yes, there it is That is lightly bad beautiful Mostly done Cooking with LFD. So you guys know I've done this recipe a few times But this is Frank's red hot Smothered and covered With the chopped crappie fillets and then all you do is just toss it and some You can do all-purpose flour. This is kind of a mixture salt pepper all-purpose flour and a little bit of spices But you really don't need too much spices if you got the Frank's red hot in there This is the original that's original Frank's. I actually like the wing sauce a little bit better Folding is uh, once this camera guy told me this recipe. I learned it from him Anyway, it's huge up here. Everybody in the cabin loves it And we're going to be looking at many more tabs up here at the cat Fish is in the grease when they start to float. That's when you take them out Do a little pad and dry action Then you put it in your mouth You enjoy the golden crispies I Looking good, I think we gotta get these taste tests right here right now. What do you think go ahead, sir Okay You've done a great job here. These are golden crispies. All right I gotta do a raw taste test. Where's the coolest section working on where's the safe place to go On the front part. All right, we've got a nice juicy one here This is it y'all. This is for all the mall. This is all the hard work right here. The fork What's it make you want to be a crappy angler like the boat? The boat you're fishing. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure about that. Is that L.F.D? That's L.F.D. Be careful. You'll be able to be on the internet L.F.D. from the hole Godly y'all I wish you could all taste that fish up north in general are way better than the fish down here, especially in the summertime The meat just grows slower. It's super white and flaky, but those crappie I thought the walleyes are amazing and they are but crappie from up there on rainy lake If you guys want to try that recipe you didn't quite get it during the video I will leave it down below so you can try it on your next fish And if you need for you crappie guys or other fishermen want to try that micro shad or I actually don't think it's called a micro shad I think it's a baby shad I've caught bass with it. I've caught crappie with it a lots of pan fish. It's a good little lure And my friends over at lake for trophy lures make it. So if you want to check it out I'll have that link down in the description where you can go get it And if you're looking for that ultimate crappie rod, you're serious about it Or just an ultimate pan fish finesse ultra light rod that yamper river is the deal They are incredibly light and sensitive and just fun to fish with in general and that segues us into the next video y'all Which we are going to use those rods to attempt to catch Smallmouth on top water and do a challenge me and dad go ahead and hit the ding dongs You might get a notification for the videos. I'm not sure how youtube's doing it these days, but I don't I guess it helps until I see you again soon on the next canadian series video fishing freaks Hang on to your crawler harnesses and hit that sub button. I'll see you there


Before I begin, a bit of an announcement. In 2004, Dr. Hoppe came to Auburn, came to the Mises Institute in Auburn, and delivered a series of lectures for a week. He gave two lectures every day for five days, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, all of them 90 minutes each from notes. So the title of the series was called Economy, Society, and History. So as the title of that suggests, it was ambitious. It covers philosophy, law, property, contracts, the state, and society, elites, I think courts and security, democracy and monarchy, war, empire, secession, strategy. So it was really a comprehensive week. And our editor, Judy, and I did a little bit of math, and we figured out that a 90 minute speech is generally roughly about 11,000 words. So that means that some total a week is well over 100,000 words, which is going to make a book, a transcribed book of about 800 or 900 pages maybe, a really epic book by Dr. Hoppe. And we're going to work on the transcripts so I can see the joy in his face at the thought of us having to edit those. But really, the point is that one point of this is not only is it valuable material that sort of needs to be unearthed because not enough people heard it live, but the point is that I hope it'll serve as a reminder to some of his critics and his fans of how few people are really equipped to deliver this sort of intellectual work across disciplines. Because we see it so rarely today. I don't know if you've heard the saying that academics today know more and more about less and less. So I think we should applaud people who attempted even when they're a Steven Pinker or someone with whom we might not fully agree. So that being said, on to our topic for today, the zeitgeist libertarians. And you'll forgive me if I focus mostly on the United States, which is, I think, their natural habitat, where they're found in greatest numbers. If you've ever read Murray Rothbard on the Progressive Era, you'll know that he hated a reformer.  And there's nobody who embodied this more than John Dewey, who was a famous psychologist and professor. He lived from the 1850s to the 1950s. He had quite a robust life. And he was a psychologist. He really earned Murray Rothbard's wrath through his sort of evangelical zeal, although he was secular later in life, for saving the world. Saving the world through progress and, of course, statism, hand in hand. So Dewey had what Murray Rothbard called a seemingly endless career. And he had significant influence. He was one of the most significant writers at the then fledgling and brand new New Republic magazine, which was created in 1914. And it was designed to actually service the organ of the mouthpiece of an unholy alliance between big business and left public intellectuals. So in 1917, in the midst of US deciding to join the World War I fray, Dewey produced an astonishing article. And it bore the perfect title, I think, for our discussion today. It was called The Conscription of Thought. So Dewey, like his colleagues at the New Republic, urged, of course, that the US enter into the Great War in Europe. And they did everything they could at that magazine to encourage a war spirit among what, at that point, were still stubbornly doubtful Americans. And of course, many Americans had direct German ancestry, not too far removed. And they might not have too much enthusiasm for fighting their first cousins. So his pro-war perspective, however, it really had nothing to do with the realities of the war what was happening on the ground in Germany or Britain or France or even, particularly, US interests in those areas. His focus was entirely domestic. That war would help lead America to socialize its economy, of which he approved and greatly expand the powers of the state here at home. So war collectivism in Europe was something to be emulated by America. And war could be used as sort of an aggressive tool for democracy and help foist innovation here. So for Dewey, rejecting American neutrality in the war, it didn't have anything to do with the outcome of the war per se. It was part of his quest and the New Republic's quest to achieve national greatness. America couldn't afford to miss out on this opportunity to join a historic war in United Citizens under the banner of a big power rather than some provincial observer in this great event. So he adopted this pro-war view solely to advance the progressive program at home. And he knew that once this conscription of thought was achieved, once he had American minds convinced to join the war or other progressive causes, that their bodies and their wallets would be easy pickings and that that would follow. So I really love that phrase, conscription of thought, because I think it applies in spades still to America today and to the West. I think we have accepted the premises and the framework of the state, and thus we accept the degradations that follow from statism. The only corrective, of course, in Dewey's time on our own was a full-throated challenge, an intellectual challenge to these premises and to this framework. But yet it is precisely that challenge, the direct and robust challenge, from which the zeitgeist libertarian shrinks. So Lou Rockwell from Time Time has brought up the old adage, the smaller the movement, the louder and more vociferous the factions, which I think is true. And I know what you're thinking, that I'm going to talk to you about these endless libertarian factions left versus right or thick versus thin, modal, versus paleo modal was the term Murray Rothbard came up with, Beltway versus Mises Institute. That's my favorite one, actually. But this is not about factions. This is about something bigger. The zeitgeist libertarian transcends these categories by accepting, I would argue, the ends of progressivism and state action while only suggesting different means to those ends. And in many cases, increasingly only slightly different means to those ends.  That dreary talk about rights and property and the state, and instead we should all sort of happily accept the spirit and tenor of the age in which we live. So the details, like they did for Dewey, matter less than being in the game. So in this sense, the zeitgeister accepts this conscription of thought, accepts the parameters set by the political world and focuses only on influence within those parameters over all other considerations. So there's a great story involving David Gordon, whom I'm sure many of you know, and the late Ronald Hamway. I hope that name means something to some of you. He was a great intellectual, a Canadian, and he was also a very wonderful, un-PC scholar who was a member of Murray Rothbard's Circle of Osteot in New York City. So David Gordon and Ron Hamway attended a conference at Stanford University, David tells me, in the 1980s, and they were walking back to their car from this conference and a sort of scraggly person approached them. And he was obviously hoping for a ride. And so the stranger goes up to Ron and says, which way are you going? And Ron Hamway's answer was the other way. We're going the other way. And I think that's such a great analogy for how so many of us in this room, I suspect, feel that we're not only at odds with the dominant Western political landscape and the dominant Western economics, but also with the cultural landscape. We don't want to be, in Mises's term, historians of decline, but we're also clear eyed and honest about where we are after, let's face it, a progressive century of war and central banking and statism. But not so for the Zeitgeist libertarians who, as their name suggests, are not only caught up in the spirit of our age, but mostly actually approve of it. And of course this means that they cheer and even advance in cases the prevailing narratives of our day. And we all know what those are. Adnausium. The America and the West are deeply racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic. Western wealth is the result of colonialism and conquest. Climate change is, of course, an immediate civilizational threat. Income inequality is the most pressing economic issue of our time, and so forth. All of these things that just aren't so. So above all, the Zeitgeisters like to go along to get along. Unlike the happy radicals of Murray Rothbard and David Gordon and Ron Hamaway all going the other way from that scraggly person, they actually treat radicalism, at least libertarian radicalism, with this sort of reflexive suspicion and contempt. So we can recall how Murray Rothbard used the term, in the 60s and 70s especially, libertarian movement. A phrase today I think we might regret using. It's certainly a loaded term. Now, of course, when Murray Rothbard used the term by movement, he met a multi-pronged approach. Top-down intellectualism, bottom-up right populism, libertarian political action, but mostly of the educational, meaning purist, sort, along with sort of encouraging a healthy sense of bourgeois sensibility and a willingness for ordinary people to engage in a bit, perhaps a bit of Irish democracy when the state oversteps its bounds. But above all, Murray Rothbard's libertarian movement was something that called for radicalism and real opposition to state power. So by Murray's standards, I would argue that movement libertarianism has to be seen as a failure today, certainly in the political sense. And it is really in every way political and how could it not be? The Zeitgeisters pushing political libertarianism, they accept the politicization of everything in our society, a progressive norm, just as they accept other injuries to liberty. They take what ought to be a radical non-political movement, one that's dedicated not only to, of course, reducing the size and scope of government, but also reducing the size and scope of politics itself. In other words, a movement to make society less political. And they take all of this, this Rothbardian conception, and they water it down, they reduce it to a set of watered-down policy choices. So as a result of this neutering of libertarianism, political libertarianism, I think, has crashed. It's as all political movements eventually do on the shoals of compromise and co-option and dilution. But stepping back from it, to be fair, to the Zeitgeist libertarians, we have to understand that Zeitgeist in which they operate. We have to take a look at where we are and how we got there in the West. Now you're probably familiar with a political notion called the horseshoe theory. In other words, we take what most of us in this room would reject, which is a linear left-right continuum of political philosophy. And we bend that into a shape of a horseshoe. We take a linear concept. And it's used in sort of a facile way to suggest that the far left and the far right have so much in common that they come, they end up coming together like the ends of a horseshoe. So the left veers towards radical socialism the right veers towards some sort of virulent nationalism or fascism. But both movements, if left unchecked, they go to their logical extremes. They start to almost touch and both lead to violent suppression of freedom, to devolving economies and to some sort of nasty and authoritarian ruling class that treats its subjects very badly. So it's a facile argument but it's actually useful for making a larger point that what seem to be widely divergent political motivations can actually lead to similar destinations because I think if you read Paul Gottfried, you will admit that there actually are differences of opinion, motivation amongst the left and the right today. So in terms of differing motivations but similar destinations, I found this funny quote on a website called The Conversation. It's kind of one of these new websites like Quillette or Jacobite out there that's kind of trying to be nonpartisan. So this quote says, when fascists reject liberal individualism, it is in the name of a vision of national unity and ethnic purity rooted in a romanticized past when communists and socialists do, it is in the name of international solidarity and the redistribution of wealth. Well, thanks for clearing that up. I'm glad we all know our motivations but it remains true at the policy level, actual implement policies that what governments actually do, there's a greater degree of convergence than divergence regardless of what the motivations are behind those policies. And I'm speaking here mostly of America and the West. So that's why we might almost view the horseshoe today as having been cut off in the end and shaped into two parallel tracks. And those two tracks today are the dominant political ideologies of our time, neoliberalism and neoconservatism. We might almost call them default ideologies because they really represent a devolution of sorts from older versions of left liberalism and the old right and old conservatism. So the old ideologies and motivations almost seem quaint to us, they seem to scarcely matter anymore. So the old fight now politically is the fight over who controls the political turf, the apparatus of the state between these two sort of narrow ideologies. And when I say narrow or parallel, when I say that they're converging, a few points on that. And I'm talking about neoliberalism and neoconservatism, both purport to represent some sort of third way thinking between a fully planned economy and laissez-faire capitalism. Both are fully globalist, universalist in outlook, elitist, technocratic, hostile to populism certainly. Both treat breakaway sentiments or decentralized political decentralization as dangerous developments to be quashed. Both hate Trump and Brexit. I think that more importantly, they hate Trump and Brexit voters while viewing Hillary Clinton and the Remainers as sort of self-evidently preferable to anyone beyond an exasperating child. Both advocate for a robust role for the US as the chief or even unilateral enforcer of a global world order, military order, courtesy of US Armed Forces and NATO, and of course an economic order, courtesy of US Federal Reserve Bank and the US Treasury Market and other central banks. Both support nation building as an obvious and just endeavor for Western nations in doing so of course they're oblivious to their own neo-colonialist tendencies and impulses. Both support the legitimacy of international organizations like the UN, the IMF, EU, various trade bodies. Both give a somewhat healthy degree of lip service to market capitalism as the driver and as a necessary ingredient for a wealthy society but only within a robust regulatory environment and with robust restrictions on private property rights. Both advocate some variant of what I think we'd have to call social democracy as the acceptable way to organize society. Certainly with a strong safety net, the current Vogue term, I don't know if you've heard Bono from you too, called it welfare capitalism. And of course plenty of taxes to fund it. Both of these doctrines support political correctness, feminism, open immigration, diversity, all of these things as unquestioned positives. And both purport I think to be pragmatic rather than ideological. So you put all this in a blender and you find that today the differences between neoliberalism and neo-colonialism are really more tone and style than substance. So yet not shockingly even with this huge opening with this sort of one party ideology that we have, our Zeitgeist libertarian friends are right there with them. They're on a parallel track right there with the two dominant ideologies, oftentimes sharing their ends as I mentioned and only quibbling about means. So when we look at the Zeitgeisters, we'll find that they too are similarly globalist and universalist in outlook. And not just a good kind of globalist who says, well, Diet Coke is good the world and everybody wants it everywhere. And God bless Coke because I can get a Diet Coke wherever I go. I'm talking about the bad kind of globalist, a political globalist. Like our neoliberal, neo-conservative friends the Zeitgeisters hate Trump. They consider Hillary Clinton the far lesser of evils even when they aren't openly praising her. They accept or at least fail to be much exercised by US interventionism, by nation building, by the Pax Americana concept. Foreign policy in fact always takes a distant backseat to social and cultural issues in their worldview. They hate Ron Paul, of course, for existence, but for instance, but right only sort of muted peons to late John McCain. They accept the role of the Federal Reserve and merely, they tend to advocate for tinkering with these sort of rules-based reforms of monetary policy, not a philosophical or ideological approach. They accept the legitimacy or purported legitimacy of supernational organizations. And despite their sort of attenuated, despite these organizations attenuation of actual cherished democracy. So they accept these organizations lest they be lumped in with those reactionary get out of the UN types that Stephan Cancella mentioned earlier. I think they accept regulated capitalism in the regulatory state as pragmatic and in doing so are almost forced to dismiss property rights absolutism. And it even may be reject the concept of property as the core element of liberal thought. They certainly dismiss concerns about PC overreach or feminist excesses or diversity or academic freedom. These are imaginary right-wing, the Schiblisser constructs. And here's what occasionally galls me a bit. They accept this overarching narrative that liberals are well-intentioned but misguided, both as to means and as like, while conservatives are almost evil by definition. So as a result of swallowing this mainstream narrative, of course they obsess about the alt-right, so-called, which really has no institutional power, which consists mostly of some loud people on social media and really had little to do with the election of Donald Trump. Red states voted, red, blue states voted, blue, and some kind of angry people in the Rust Belt States and in Florida, many of whom had voted for Barack Obama, said, well, we're gonna vote for Trump. That wasn't the alt-right. It was mostly disgruntled baby boomer-aged people, actually. So they obsess about the alt-right and it's supposed to influence, but they don't worry too, too much. Even when Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez run on openly socialist platforms and actually gain quite a bit of ground doing so. And perhaps most importantly, in this set of facts, the zeitgeist libertarians increasingly seek to minimize the intellectual and philosophical components of libertarianism in favor of pragmatic and empirical approaches, excuse me. So in doing so, they end up sounding an awful lot like neoliberals and neoconservatives. And thus, inadvertent or not, they end up pushing political libertarianism toward a convergence with those two other doctrines. They sort of take the marrow out of the bone and reduce liberty to a variant of public policy. And even then, we're talking about approved public policy. Nothing too radical, nothing too intellectual. So they make a fetish, I would say, of appearing neither left nor right, but always end up nowhere and engaging in this sort of endless what-aboutism when it comes to left and right. So why should this be so? Why should it be that we know that neoliberalism and neoconservatives are where they are, but why should it be so that libertarians are in the same spot? It seems depressing, but why does movement libertarianism, the kind Murray sought to create, sort of lack the stomach to present a truly radical anti-state program for the world, a program bold enough to deny the concept of government itself as a central organizing principle in society? Well, yes, of course, we're all human. There is this sense of, again, not wanting to be seen as a reactionary, of wanting to be in the game in the fray in Washington DC and New York and Brussels and taken seriously. That's why you'll notice that libertarians are happy to write progressive friendly articles for the Washington Post or the New York Times, and they're hoping that they might be the next writer hired by the Atlantic or the New Yorker or someplace like that, but it's more than this. It's more than some sort of self-interest, and we're all self-interested. I think we need to cut the zeitgeist libertarians some slack and really view them through the lens of 20th century history and maybe judge them more leniently by doing so, because after all, like all of us, they're creatures of their environment. So if we look at progressivism, if we look at Murray's critique of it, going back to, let's say, late 1800s, progressivism really went from maybe 10 on a scale, a scale of 100 from 10 to maybe 95 today. So anyone who even suggests simply rolling things back from 95 to 93 or maybe going from 95 to 100 a little more slowly risks immediate branding as a neo-reactionary. And I would argue that that's the one thing that the zeitgeisters seek to avoid being called above all a reactionary. So progressivism has been the overwhelming force in Western politics for the last 100 odd years. We have to accept it, consider antitrust legislation, central banking, income taxes, the League of Nations giving way to the UN, two world wars, the rejection of economic freedoms by the Supreme Court, the New Deal, old age pensions like Social Security, Public Works, the Great Society with welfare entitlements and food stamps and healthcare schemes. And of course, finally, the absolute triumph by progressives and leftover each in every culture war issue. So that's where we are after a century plus of progressivism. So what kind of movement libertarianism should we really expect to emerge from all of this? In every meaningful way, progressives control politics, government, business, culture in America and the West. And really, progressivism has become so dominant that we've really stopped paying attention to it. It becomes sort of the baseline that's all around us. It's almost like the furniture or the plants in the room. We're not really aware of it anymore and it does color our thinking. We become so accustomed to it, we hardly even see it. But if we think for a moment that progressives control both major political parties and increasingly the third party and it's a libertarian party, they control the federal judiciary along with all the federal departments and agencies. They dominate education, both at the university level and also K through 12 in government and private. They run the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association. So these two formerly conservative professions are now steered leftward. The Fortune 500 and major global and domestic corporations are run by progressives. Their boards are progressives. Their corporate branding and messaging and political donations are progressive. Progressives run Wall Street. They give far more campaign money again to progressive candidates. Silicon Valley and the tech industry dominated by progressive social media, dominated by progressives. Traditional media, including broadcast news and print publications. Virtually all journalists are progressives. Progressives run Hollywood of course and they hold sway over the film and TV and video and music industries, popular culture, popular literature. And, lest we forget, progressives run all major religious institutions in the West. From the Vatican to mainline Protestant churches to virtually all synagogues, these are all now thoroughly progressive, not only in the political sense, but in the sense of church or doctrine. So the point here is that Zeitgeist libertarianism has not developed apart from this progressive milieu that we're all steeped in any more than any other movement in America the West. And how could it? So our point and our task is not to attack the Zeitgeisters so much as to understand them and to understand the impossibility of a political or movement libertarianism within the current progressive framework. No truly libertarian movement can, when it accepts the wrong premises, it asks the wrong questions as a result and then it of course seeds the terms of the debate from the starting point. It's not a matter of selling out principles for influence. It's more a matter of sort of preemptively accepting the organizing principle of the state from the very beginning. So our responsibility to the Zeitgeisters I would argue is really the same as our responsibility to the world at large. It's to truth regardless of where it might take us and to promoting the timeless ideas that we all know yield peace and human flourishing. But we are not however required to engage in watered down political movements or to engage in politics at all. We're not required to participate in ideological or intellectual movements that accept progressive ends or progressive framing. We're not required to append a set of left cultural precepts onto political liberty. And I think as Keir Martlin said earlier and very well what matters is getting first principles right because without that nothing good follows. Thank you very much.


QuickBooks Online 2023 Class Tracking Get ready to earn the skills needed to boost your bank books on up with QuickBooks Online 2023. Here we are in our QuickBooks Online Test Company file in the Accountant view. As opposed to the Business view, you can toggle between the two views by going to the cog up top, switch the view down below. Duplicating some tabs to put reports in like we do every time. Right-click on the tab up top to duplicate it. Right-click on the tab up top again to duplicate it again. Let's go back to the tab to the middle. Reports on the left. And we want to open up the balance sheet as it's thinking. We'll tab to the right reports on the left. This time open up the profit and loss report. Close up the hamburger. Scroll up top and we're going to go changing the range a little bit again. This time to be let's go 050123 to 053123. So we have some room to work within this month and run it. Nothing's in it thus far. That's what we're looking for. Tab to the left and I'm going to close up the hamburger. Do the same range 050123 to 053123. Run it. Okay. Go to the tab to the left. Now we want to focus more just simply on the support accounting instruction by clicking the link below. Giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. The class tracking. So remember the order that the things came about. We first had the jobs which were converted into sub customers and then we had the class tracking. So we'll focus in on the class tracking there and then we had the projects and the projects are the thing that's most similar to the sub customers that we'll talk about in a future presentation. So the class tracking can be used in a similar way as we talked about with the sub customers before with a job cost kind of system. However it's more expansive than that because you can use the class tracking to track all kinds of different things that you would like to break out on the income statement. So in other words if I go to the income statement if I hit the drop down the when I looked at the sub customers that's basically a variant of just breaking out by customers. So now we have the sub customers and the projects in some ways can be thought of as a similar thing as well. But the classes give you a whole nother set of columns to break out by which gives you a wide range of applications for the classes. So just to switch things up on the classes this time we're going to imagine we're going to use them if we had a small business and we wanted to break out our personal books from the business books. So now we can assign every transaction to either being personal or business related and I can break out my income statement by business income and expenses and personal income and expenses. Possibly using the personal one for my tax preparation at the end of the year for the schedule C. So let's go to the first tab let's just kind of review how to turn on the class tracking. It's up in the cog up top noting that you only have class tracking if you're in the QuickBooks Pro Plus or above. And some of the functionality might get more sophisticated as you go above QuickBooks Pro Plus such as the capacity to break out the balance sheet accounts in more detail. Although you have some detail to break out the balance sheet accounts in the Pro Plus class tracking. So we're going to go into the account and settings again account and settings and then in the advanced area advanced. We've got the categories and then we have our two categories. So I'm going to turn off the location tracking because our major goal is to focus on the classes. However note that the classes if you only if you were able to pick one option to break out your items by location or classes. You might still consider the use of the classes if they're not being used to do something else because you have more sophisticated kind of options with the classes. And the classes as we'll see have more payroll compatibility that you may not have with the location tracking. So even if you're just trying to track by location that's what you want to use the classes for. If you're not using the classes for something else you might not use the location tracking but the class tracking to do that.  Now if you use class tracking for many many kind of options that you would want to use class tracking for you would want to assign a class to every transaction. In other words if I'm if I'm breaking stuff out between personal and business I want to assign a class to every transaction as either personal or business. Usually I don't have to I could say everything that's not business is going to break out into personal as the default but usually you want that double check of assigning everything to a class. And if it's not assigned to a class then the class tracking gives you a nice indicator because it'll have a whole column that says hey you didn't assign it to a class and you can kind of fix it. But it'll give you this warning so I'm going to check it off to give us the warning as well. And then if I hit the drop down here you can assign one entire transaction which could make things easier or you can assign something to each row. Now one of the benefits of class tracking is the ability to assign it to each row. But sometimes this first one would be easier and if you're not breaking out a transaction between different classes that might be a good way to go. So let's just test both of them out. I'm going to do this one which is not the default one to enter the entire transaction and take a look at what it looks like and then we'll switch it up. So I'm going to save it and close this now to sort your classes. You can go to the cog up top and we can go to the lists and we set up some classes before so I'm going to go into the classes here. And let's go ahead and just delete these classes for now. I'm going to make them inactive going to make them inactive boom inactive and inactive and inactive. And then you could make your classes here or you could as you are entering data add classes. So if I'm doing business and personal as a breakout then I might say OK I'm just going to have two classes one is business I might just call it B for business. And the second is going to be personal so I could say new here and call it P for personal. And basically now I just want to have two columns on my income statement business versus personal right. So if I was to do that then I can enter all of my transactions and break them out from business to personal by assigning a class to it. So if we go into the plus button here let's see where the classes are located in an invoice form and expense form starting with the expense form. So if I go into the expense form you can see the classes are still breaking out line item by line item even though I assigned it to the full transaction. But if I go to an invoice over here plus button invoice then the class is up top at the top of the invoice assigning one class for the entire invoice not allowing us to break out line item by line item. We can change that option by changing the feature up top but this might make it a little bit easier for the data input. So that's actually kind of lines up to what most likely happens in a lot of scenarios. So in our case if we're breaking things out from business to personal we might have expenses that we need to break out between business and personal. It's less likely we're going to have income. The income is going to be either business or personal right. So if I go to the plus button up top and let's add an expense for example and let's say let's add a new vendor. Let's just call it vendor to vendor to sounds like a Star Wars planet or something vendor to let's make it as of let's make it as of 050123 to put it in our area in our range. And let's just make the category like utilities utilities and let's say it was for 400. And we're going to say the class is business with a B because we said a B for business and then utilities that we're going to break out the same bill for 200 to personal. And that's for P for personal and that comes out to a $600 total. What's this going to do decrease the checking account by 600 and then increase the utilities expense by 600 but break it out by column 400 200 for B and P classes. Now note I could have set up and said hey look I'm just going to say the utilities part that's business related. I'll make a business class and then I'm not going to make a class other than business and it'll just put everything else into unclassified which is personal. But usually when you use classes you would like to assign a class to every transaction because then it'll give you an indication if you just forgot to give a class it'll give you a column to show you that. So let's check it out. I'll say save and close that. If I go to my balance sheet and run it now we have a decrease to the checking account. If I run this by class hitting the drop down to the left classes and run it. Now it's got our breakout by classes and I deleted these ones and still pulling them in but in any case it's not breaking up that 600 because we were still able to assign it line item by line item. So that's kind of a one you can think of as kind of a detriment in the classes versus location tracking which might break out location tracking if it only allows you to assign one location per transaction on the expense side of things. But on the income statement tab into the right running it. Now we've got our expense of the 600. If I break that out by class. This is where the classes are kind of made for this is where they shine. You've got B and then you've got P on the utilities which is perfect. So now I can kind of track my business versus personal expenses. If I didn't assign a class if I go back into this and I said what if I didn't assign a class. Let's say I just didn't put one here and then save and close. Notice I get an error because I told QuickBooks to give me that error. So I'm going to say are you sure I'm going to say let's say I skip the error and then I go into here. Now it's been put into not specified. So notice you could do that you could say I just need one class which is going to be business and everything that's not business is going to default to not specified. It's easier but it's not really easier because you're still going to have to assign everything to business or not to anything. And you don't get this double check of using the not specified column as a check that you didn't properly allocate something. So usually you want to have a class most applications of classes you would like to have a class assigned to every transaction. So that you get that double check that if you didn't record something to a class then it's going to give you that non classified location. And you could just do just what we did is drill down on it and go in there and assign it to a class. Now obviously if we go to the income side of things let's make an invoice. Usually the invoice would just be for for business right now. Now you could have a situation where you have like W2 income which you might put on the personal side and then and then your other income which would be invoices and whatnot which would be business. Usually you're going to assign the entire transaction to one side or the other. You're not going to be breaking it out. And therefore this line item saying I just want you to assign it to business is quite nice. And then we can use our items down here to assign it out. Let's just say it was let's say it was ours and let's say we charge you know $5,000 just to put something in there. Let's increase accounts receivable the other side going to to what this is driven to which I think is going to be service items and then the class is going to be assigned to business. So accounts receivable goes up other side income assigning it to be for business for the entire thing. Save it and close it check it out on the balance sheet if I run it. So so now on the accounts receivable. It's interesting that the accounts receivable is over here and not specified as well on the balance sheet side of things, even though we assigned the full transaction to it. But the classes like I say where they usually shine is on the income statement side of things on the income statement if I run it by class. Now we've got our income on the business side and then our utilities broken out between business and personal. And then I'm building my income statement here that I can use to kind of make my schedule see for taxes and I can also track my personal and my total in a nice kind of column format which is really nice. Now note that the classes do break out some items on the on the balance sheet. So you might have like some items on the balance sheet that you need to break out like if you if you were paying for something that was a was a like a loan or something like that or you're tracking billings and work in process. Let's say let's say that we had a let's make an expense form and let's say that it's going to be decreasing the check in account say call it vendor to again. But instead of going to utilities it's going to go to like a loans payable or something loans payable and I'm going to set that up as an asset account. So it's going to be a I'm sorry liability account to be other current liability loan payable. That's what we want. So now now it's not going to the income statement. So this is going to decrease the check in account because it's an expense form. But the other side is going to a liability account and I'm going to assign it to business and save and close it. And then if I go back on over here and run this then that a breakout the loan payable it did. Right. So some accounts on the balance sheet it breaks out. It doesn't give up like if you if you get into the balance sheet you're going to you're going to start to think about well it doesn't like it doesn't balance for B doesn't balance on the business side. That's where the classes get quite complicated and kind of fall apart. And if you go into advanced use of QuickBooks pay more for QuickBooks level up you might get some more advanced uses of classes to kind of line up the balance sheet items but that gets kind of complicated. But you do have the limited functionality for some things that might be nice to break out some of the balance sheet items between whatever classes you're using. Obviously the income statement is usually where the focus is breaking out columns on the income statement and then having the total performance for that time frame. All right let's go back to the first tab. Now the other option let's go back up to the to the cog up top and accounting and settings and we're in the advanced settings again. Let's go back into the class tracking and this time let's say that we want to say one to each row of transaction. So I'm just that's like the default now so we're going to go back to the default and we can turn off the warning and save it. So let's just make sure that happened this time sometimes it doesn't take save it do it QuickBooks don't mess around with me. All right so then we're going to say let's go now if I go to an expense form looks pretty much the same because you got the classes that were broken out by line item. But the invoice form now if I go into my invoice then now we've got the classes by line item instead of up top where we have the classes. Now in our scenario it's less likely that we're going to have an invoice that we're going to send out part partially for personal versus business right. So so the other the other kind of setup worked fine for us but you can imagine situations where you where you have an invoice possibly that you need to assign out the income to part to different departments or whatever you're using the class tracking for so you might have a situation for whatever reason you got customer number one. And I'm going to exit out of this billable expenses and we're going to pull in just labor labor. Let's say it was was 700 that's going to business and then for whatever reason we had labor well not labor it's not to labor. Let's do let's do just hours and let's say it was 7000 and then we've got hours hours for personal and let's say that was 3000 and we'll put that to personal. So now we can break out the invoice line by line. So what's this going to do increase accounts receivable by the full amount 10,000. The other side going to income driven by these items and then breaking out by class on the income side business and personal doesn't really make sense for from our perspective for this scenario to have personal income that I'm going to invoice. It would make sense for me to have income from maybe a W2 job where I'm trying to break out the business on on invoicing from from customers on the business. But if you were using it in other scenarios like I'm breaking out income that I need to break out by department or something like that you can imagine where you would need to break out the income. I'm going to save it and close it balance sheet report run it. And now we've got our accounts receivable pulling in here not being specified so it doesn't do it on the balance sheet but on the income statement that's where our focus is. We've got the nice breakout between business and personal for the income so now we've got our personal income. So that actually works pretty pretty well in in this scenario where you want to break out business versus personal. Although most of the times if you tell a bookkeeper that or something they're going to be scared of doing that even if you have a small business. And it makes it a little bit more complicated to try to outsource your bookkeeping and whatnot because they want to you're going to want to keep everything as separate as possible so they can tell what's going on. But you can kind of do it on the small for a small schedule see business. Now the other thing you can imagine coming up is having the subclasses. So if I was to say that I want subclasses I can go back into my cog up top my lists and look at my classes and then and then maybe I've got a subclass here. Business business let's say run let's say new I'm going to make it number one subclass of business and then new number two subclass of business. So and this would often happen if you were running like departments or something like that or if you had like locations and then you wanted departments within those locations. But then you got to think about how this is going to play out on an income statement. It's just basically still going to have another column for the subclasses. They'll just be they'll just be kind of housed under the classes as opposed to like a filtering thing you might think of doing. So if I if I went and made another one like an expense for vendor to. And then this time I'm going to make it go to to do I have any other expenses supplies supplies for for six hundred. And this time let's make it go to subclass one business and then I'll do I'll do supplies. I'll do two line items on this one for four hundred and subclass number two. Okay so this is going to decrease the checking account the other time side going to supplies breaking out by subclass now one and two saving clothes. If I go to the tap to the right and run it the checking account doesn't really break out it's and not specified tapping to the right running it over here. Now you've got your B and you've got your subclasses. So if so notice like kind of the difference here of using a subclass versus using something else other than classes like tags or like locations. If I use a subclass now I've got this this this kind of sub situation I have I have a report that's going to be be longer or wider B and then the subclass subclass and then the total for B. So if I want that kind of totaling situation then I can do that versus P and I have this over here versus a situation where I wanted to basically have a whole another set of columns based on this other subclass. So for example if you had locations in California and Nevada and you wanted the sub locations of departments of each one you can do this method which is nice but it also will lead to a very wide report. Or you can think of having the locations being the the locations function and then the the other sections being the classes so that you can run a whole different set of columns by switching from classes here to locations. And then you can also sort by these items to so if I hit the filter option now that I have my classes I can sort by class. So if I go to my classes here I can sort by just the business or just be one and sort and that way to kind of drill down but it's still going to show that that area one is a subclass of B. Now the other thing with the classes is that they do kind of line up with payroll. So remember that payroll is a is a thing in and of itself that that is a whole world kind of in and of itself. Do you want to run payroll within QuickBooks or outside of QuickBooks and so on and so forth. But if you run payroll within QuickBooks then the question is maybe you want to assign the the employees to a particular class. Right. So so and you can kind of do that within QuickBooks but there's some limitations. So I turned on payroll if you want to turn on payroll. I think they use the author of a free 30 day trial. You can go into your accounting and settings and then go into your billings and you could basically turn on payroll within there and possibly get a free 30 day trial if you want to play around with it maybe. But I'm going to close this back out and then you'll have your payroll on the left hand side here. So I basically set up a quick payroll so that we can kind of look at it. And then if I go up top and I look at my payroll settings payroll settings are now on because I have payroll within QuickBooks. If I go into my payroll settings then down here I've got the accounting and I can assign I can assign class tracking. So if I go into class tracking I can assign each employee to a particular class and that's pretty nice. Notice I don't see the same option for location tracking. And so if I assign say my my employee here I'm going to close this back out. Do I have an employee did I set up an employee if I go down to payroll and go to my employees. Let's just I have Ivy I set up an employee for so I'm going to assign her to a class. OK I assigned Ivy to class B. So then when I say done I can then process payroll. See if I can do this process payroll payroll is a little tricky to do an example problem with. But I'm going to say let's go to the first tab. I'm going to run payroll and then I'm going to try to find a range within my within my range up top that I'm running in. And in May so let's say just let's say the beginning here that should work and I'm going to say OK. And then we're going to say Ivy regular pay. Let's say hours fifteen hours three hundred dollars preview. Let's do it and submit boom. And then let's do one oh five finish. And just to see it pull over. Now if I go to my balance sheet then you know it's going to be decreasing the checking account. And that's not breaking out but on the income statement. If I run it on the income statement now I've got my payroll that's running through a sign to business as opposed to personal. So that's pretty neat because again if you were using class tracking as like different locations then you would like to assign an employee ease the employees you would think to that location which might make it a little bit easier to to track that stuff the payroll. However if you're using class tracking similar to like projects then you're going to have a problem because that one employee might be working on multiple different projects. And you can't assign that one employee ease payroll to multiple different projects or I'm sorry to different to different sub customers. Now the projects does have a different way that you can do it instead of assigning the whole employee to a particular project. We could assign hourly employees their hours but we have to use we have to use the we have to use the weekly time entry to do that. So we can so we'll take a look at that when we get to projects but the location tracking I don't think has that capacity to kind of break that out now. Another method that you could use is you might use an external ADP or a paychecks or whatever to process your payroll and then you can just you could process payroll and possibly then break it out manually given the payroll reports. So you might go look at the payroll reports like I might process payroll and just put it into non classified. And then I'll go in and look at the payroll reports and maybe do a journal entry to properly allocate it either by class or by location or by or by project maybe making another account. So I don't disturb the actual payroll accounts and don't mess anything up there and but so that I can I can kind of break it out. So for example if I go back on over and I and I take a look at this again let's process payroll again and this time let's not assign it to a class. So now I turn class tracking off and I'm going to say all right done and then close back to payroll and then let's run payroll for the same employee. This time I'm going to choose the range this range and let's say just 10 hours this time and we'll say preview and submit the payroll. And then I'm going to say this is 1002 finish and finish boom I'll do it later. OK and so then if I run this now it's a not specified over here. So if that and then I can look at my payroll reports and look at which of the payroll should be assigned to which class depending on the employees and possibly do like a journal entry. So a journal entry I can go over here and say all right. Let's say new and then I'm going to say journal entry and let's make it five five one five eleven whenever that took place and then I'm going to put it into the they put it into wages. So let's say I say wages by class I'm going to just make another account and I'm going to make it an expense account just so I don't disturb the payroll account and I'll just make it other business expense wages by class. And I'll say save and let's say that let's say that that that that that one fifty is going to go into here and that's going to be for class number class B. Let's say subclass one and the other one's going to go wages by class for the other fifty and that's going to go into subclass two and then it's going to come out of of wages by class two hundred but I'm not going to assign it to a class. So notice what I did here is I put everything to the same account but I'm trying to assign it to break it out by class and not disturb the original account that was in place. So if I save and close this let's see if it does what I imagine and we'll run it and then we can see that that original two hundred dollar amount is now being is now broken out. I have an equal and opposite amount down here I didn't deal with the taxes. You can do the same thing for the taxes but an equal and opposite amount down here netting it out to zero and then I allocated it by class of the one fifty and the two and the fifty. That way you can you can keep this account to what it what it should what it's going to be. You could have I could do the same thing and just reduce this account and allocate it out and then I don't have this other line item down here. But some but my thought is that you might not want to touch that account because payroll is messy in and of itself. So so I'm thinking just leave that account alone so that we can make sure that it ties out to the to the nine forty ones and not mess up the payroll in any way. But then just kind of reverse it down here with another account and then properly break it out between these two.  But again if you go into the if you have a problem with payroll often times you want to drill down on this account and look at all the activity which could be complex in and of itself. And if you have journal entries there pulling the money out I don't really I would recommend leaving it alone and just making another account and then breaking it out and that's a nice little work around. And then you can process the payroll and then reassign it to another account break it out by class or by location or whatever you need to do and possibly break out costs to get sold component or job costing kind of stuff as well. So that's basically the classes.


searching your college library catalog. This video is about how to find a book in your college library catalog. The first thing you want to do is visit your college's website. Our college is Wenatchee Valley College and our website is www.wvc.edu. Your college will be different. Somewhere on that page there should be a link to the library. Ours is here in this menu. So I click that link and visit the library homepage. From here you'll see lots more links to different kinds of information. We're looking for books. So I'm going to click on Find Books and E-Books. E-Books stands for electronic books. I'm looking for a book. So again I want to click here to visit the WVC book catalog. This is the basic search screen. From here you can enter keywords or phrases to search for different subjects. I'm going to enter Nursing and click Search. You can see I get 403 results here on the results page. In each one of these listings represent a book that we have in our catalog. The first is Fundamentals for Nursing and it is available in Wenatchee Valley College. The second is a tease. A book with a red X means it's not available. If I want to see the catalog record, I would click on the book title. Here I can see a little bit more information about the book. Like the publisher, the description. This book is 369 pages long. Some of the subjects that the book talks about. And a little more, a few notes about the book. I can also see the call number, which tells me where to find the book. This is like an address. It's where to find the book on the shelf. If you want to do another search, you can hit the search button again. And type in a new word. If you want to go back to your results, you can use the back browser button up here. If you have any questions about searching your library catalog, please go see your friendly college librarian. They're always helping, happy to help.


Welcome back to another episode of the nonprofit show.  Today we have a really interesting and important conversation. And it's talking about equity in the nonprofit grant writing world, applications and understanding some things. And we have an expert with us, Stephanie Summerman, senior director at Elevate. Stephanie, everybody in the green room chat, we're like, wow, branding on your shirt. So you're starting off great, right? You don't have to do anything else. Well, Stephanie's gonna talk to us about some really important things. A lot of us in the grant space, when we're looking to review and grant submitting them, we don't always think about, and so this is gonna be an absolute fascinating conversation to have. And we are delighted that our sponsors can join us on this journey. They include Blumerang, American nonprofit academy, nonprofit thought leader, staffing boutique, your part time controller, 180 management group, fundraising academy at National University, JMT consulting, nonprofit nerd, and nonprofit tech talk.  And what was gonna be a two week gig because of the pandemic has turned into like a four year adventure. And so you have an opportunity to get so much information from so many thought leaders so you can download our app, which is like super cool and super easy. You can stream us on all these broadcast platforms as well as in podcast format. So Stephanie, you are so gracious to sit through this intro with Meredith Terian and I as we get into this conversation. You've seen your director at Elevate. Talk to us about what Elevate does. Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for having me first of all. I am just in love with the idea of a place and a platform to talk all things nonprofit. Nonprofits are my passion. My background is in public policy and I specifically chose to go into the nonprofit space because I think it's just such an important place to talk about these type of issues. And so I'm just glad to be here in a space where we are all nonprofits all the time. As you said, I'm a senior director at Elevate. Elevate is an institutional fundraising firm based out of Washington DC. We have staff all over the country. We work with over 100 different nonprofit organizations in all different locations, all different sizes, all different issue areas and we support them on their journey between finding foundation support, reaching out to foundation support, researching and making the best pitch to those foundations and then eventually getting to the grant application which is not the first place where we start with all of this which is just a little tip and trick here. And then we help you steward those relationships and continue to build on those so that you can, so our nonprofit clients can bring in more resources for the really important and valuable work for their communities. I love that. And so that's even more meaningful of a lens to look through when we talk about this concept because I think that you and your team and your website's amazing. The amount of people and resources that are up of the Elevate team, it's remarkable. And so I can't wait to hear what you have to say. Let's do the first question that we have and that is what is centering equity? What does that even mean? Absolutely. Well, the most important thing is equity, centering equity just means putting people at the center of your writing, people. Interesting. Every nonprofit in one way or another has a mission that is supporting people, community, animals. How do we take those people, community, animals and put them at the center of our work? And when we're writing about our work, and I think that sometimes when we think there's, obviously this wonderful graphic that most people have seen where we're talking about the difference between equality and equity, right? And equality is evenly distributed tools and assistance for people. Equity is custom tools that identify and address a specific inequity or inequality that that person is experiencing. And oftentimes in grant writing, we're trying to very simply convey to our foundation, our funder, how our work is meeting our mutual goals, our mutual shared vision, our mutual mission for the world and how our organization is unique in making that impact that us and the foundation have. And in order to do that, we have to talk about the people that are at the solution, not just how we're gonna do it, not how our work is gonna go about it, but how does the end result of our work help impact a person? And so by centering equity in our grant writing, we are always putting people first and using people first language. And the second most important trick is using people-centered language, all those people would want to describe themselves, not how you see it, now how a funder sees it, but how communities talk about themselves and putting that direct perspective, that historical context first, that cultural context first. Okay, so I gotta ask this question and this like you gotta get up your pitchers mitt because this might be a curveball. Do folks that are reading and reviewing grant applications, do you think they understand this? Cause this is kind of a pit. And I'm wondering if they're like, what, you know, if they get it, it's one of the things, how do you even know if they get it? That's such a great question. In my opinion, having worked with the dozens of clients across hundreds of different funders, I would say there's a very small percentage of funders who actually get it. I was afraid you were gonna say that. Sure. And what they on top of that don't necessarily understand is how the impact of their power imbalance that comes from philanthropy really skews how nonprofits talk about this work and then how it shows up in their community.  A lot of our grant writing is just branding our work and in turn brands our community. So we also as nonprofit grant writers contribute to the education of our foundation. So the more we can center equity in our grant writing, the more we are able to create that education opportunity for funders who are reading our work. So that maybe they can evolve our understanding of this.  You know, so Stephanie said something in the beginning that I thought was really insightful. And she said, you know, when we work with folks or clients, you said, Stephanie, we don't start with the grant, right? There's so much that goes on before that and the relationship building and the research. And I feel like that's really important because, you know, you had mentioned when you were talking and said, big part of this is not only to what we need as the grant seeking organization, but like what is the grant funder looking for, right? So, you know, how can we help them accomplish their goals? So I think that's, you know, part of that goes into that research process, right? Absolutely. And I think that's a really important part to pick up on. One of the most important things that I can do in my research is I can go and I look on their website. I look at who else they're funding. I look at how their strategy and how they're describing this work, describing the vision they see, describing the communities they wanna work with. And does that match what the communities I'm working with? Does their language, does their words, are they aware of the historical context? Are they aware of the historical context of an issue in my community? And I think that that is where we can, you know, one of the important tips that I always say with grant writing is, you do wanna match the funder's language. You want them to see themselves in your grant proposal, right? However, what if you come across a funder and they're not using terminology that is authentic, they're not using ideas that are culturally competent to your community? What do you do, right?  Two, allows you to convey your work and three, doesn't create conflict with the funder you're asking for money for, right? So I think that there are a few different opportunities that that research gives you to reframe how you're, or provide those two extra pieces of education in your grant writing by centering equity that you probably wouldn't normally include if a funder wasn't on the same level as you, but by making an assumption that a funder understands a topic or an issue or a community need more than you do, because you were on the ground, you were in their space, you were doing this work all the time. It'll gives you some tips and tricks to add a little extra explainer that does that, that can go a long way in terms of educating whoever's reading your grant application. Because remember, it's not just the program officer, it's not just the president of the foundation, it's the board, right? Think about how sometimes those board members who might be the family where the money is coming from or it might be a board member who has been doing this work forever, how you can give those people more information than you might not otherwise in let's be honest here, like what, like 5,000 characters, you know? Well, that kind of leads me into this next thing because you kind of gave me like a chill for a moment because I'm like, oh my God, that's so risky because you could turn off a viewer, I say viewer, but a reader is judging you. So I'll just stand as part and part of this, the issue of symptoms and root causes and trying to educate or at least highlight maybe is another word, what this actually means. Absolutely. So when we think about talking about our community, I really like to use this example in thinking through symptoms and root causes. So a lot of the time, you know, if we're thinking about disempowering language in our grant proposals, it's language or context that describes our communities as perceived as being incapable or somehow unable to affect change or lacking power. And how can we, and as a result, we as a nonprofit need to come into this space and help in some way. Whereas how can we talk about what the root causes are of why that program is needed in the first place? Because remember, as a nonprofit organization, we are coming into the space where government has failed and private business has failed. And so what are those failures from a systems perspective and how is that creating barriers for people to overcome in ways that were probably unintended or maybe they were intended. I'm not gonna go there. Structure. However, how do we fix the system to offer equal access to both tools and opportunities for people customized to their particular needs? Not just providing the same tools across the board because that's equality. But when we think about equity, some people need different things than others. And how is our nonprofit identifying what those root causes are, being clear about the systems that have created the environment for people to live in and adapt in ways that might not, that might have created this need or the problem. And what is our nonprofit solution providing and using to not only create the immediate solution to what people might need, but also looking at those bigger systems that have created the context and the root cause for where we are today. Okay, so you've said some magical things. And now I'm asking you to put up your catcher's mitt a second time in one episode. But do you find that nonprofits understand this themselves, that they can articulate this and that they've asked questions of themselves? Because I'm gonna be honest, I'm really shocked by the number of boards that I've been on or I advise or I work with. And I'm like, oh my God, you don't get it. Absolutely. So one of the hardest parts of my job in working with nonprofit organizations all the time is how do we engage our board? With our fundraising and making those connections to the foundation, right? Because we all know that a warm connection is better than a cold connection. And if you didn't know that, you know it now. So welcome to the nonprofit show, right? So here we are. But the number one thing that I hear sometimes from executive directors, directors of development is I would love to do that, but I would have to do some serious board education. Yeah. And that to me, because I have worked on, I've done some board governance work in the past and that to me is a huge red flag. Not something that you can overcome, but if your board member is not able to describe the needs and describe any grant proposal boils down to two things, the problem and the solution. What's the problem in the community? Which we're talking about writing about people and what they face. And then what's the solution? How do we overcome some of these systems? And also it's naming those systems, right? And that's where in our grant writing, more centering equity, we can think about a few different things. We can think about context, the historical context, the cultural context, and also collecting those direct perspectives from people that we work with so that we can put those things, put our work and our grant applications into the appropriate context about how people would wanna talk about themselves, how people would wanna talk about their problems themselves. Those contextual points are critical for a board member. And so I think that like one of the pieces of any good board onboarding is having board members read a grant proposal, read a general operating proposal, read about how we describe the problems and the solutions and how our writing then is centering equity and drawing that forward. And so I think it's just critical to think about this. I've seen lots of different things, but there are some, one of some of the best organizations that I've worked with have committees of their board that include people with direct experience, lived experience, directly impacted. I mean, one of the most impactful grants that I ever wrote was for a organization that works with unhoused populations in California. And one of the people that I worked with on this grant proposal was someone who was part of the program that they had had and went through the program, came out and sat down with me and we spent an hour together writing a proposal for a new program that they wanted to start. And so thinking about how you can gather those direct perspectives of the people you're working with, putting that into your grant writing and then having the extra knowledge to say, I really want to make sure that I'm centering equity here. Tell me how you would describe the problem for yourself and then using that to guide your writing. I love that. Well, that kind of leads us to our next topic. And I love your approach because it's more work, it's more work, but I love this kind of redefining, recontextualizing people and understanding a couple of things, which I don't think we do a good job of in the nonprofit sector. Some of these things that your community is capable that they're self-actualized, that they're effective, that they're knowledgeable. It goes back to what you first said, equity versus equality, they need more equity, right? It's talked to us about this, because again, I think this goes beyond the scope of just grant writing. I think this is like a systemic issue that we need to be addressing in our nonprofit sector. Well, I think it's really interesting that you say that part, because it's something that we should be identifying in our organizations. Yeah. How staff have agency in their work, right? So the idea just quickly to say about this, but I think it's a great through line to draw here. So in thinking about how you're describing a general, very common grant application, it asks you to describe the problem, tell us what the need is of the community, and then provide what your solution is, what are your goals, how you're gonna achieve that.  But in many ways, we need to not just say how people are experiencing the problem, but we need to talk about how the problem came about. And it's not because of me as an individual, it's because of the system that I was, and the environment that I was brought up in. And so talking about how people have the agency, or the power to address their need, but there's a few custom tools, remember our definition of equity, a few custom tools and custom opportunities that we need to help people be able to have a plan, create a solution for themselves, right? And so there are opportunities to say by using empowering language, how are the people in the communities that you're working with capable? How do they have a plan? What knowledge they possess, and how do they use and leverage their agency and power to create change? And this is some of the ways that we can tell a compelling story to uplift groups and communities that have dignity and respect for them as human beings and putting those people first. And then what is our organization coming in to take those plans and the knowledge and the rich experience that they have to uplift and create the solutions to the problems that we're looking at? Now, if you will indulge me for one second, if you take that concept and you put it into you inside of our nonprofit organizations, think about it from a strategic planning perspective, right? Maybe the strategic planning doesn't start at the top. Maybe the strategic planning starts with the staff who are closest to the work and they can come in and they can say, you have power, you have agency and how you are running your programs, iterating upon your programs, and how does that then build up? We are staff that have more capable. We are self-actualized. We have our own power and agency. And I think that could really help a lot of our nonprofit leadership to develop and create really compelling programs, be really honest with funders about what's working and what's not working and help to, again, all the way up to the top, educate those board members about why we need different resources and different shifts at different times. Meredith, have you ever seen this? Strategic? Yeah, so one of the things I love about what you're saying, Stephanie, is just the focus on how it's not a one-size-fits-all approach, right? Like when you're writing a grant application, what the funder is really looking for is that unique take or perspective on how to solve the issue, right? If it were easy to solve, I mean, you said something earlier in the broadcast and you said, we're here writing this grant right now because industry and government has likely failed at addressing this problem. So it's that really unique approach. And Julia, to your point, with strategic planning, I love what you said about starting with the staff, right? So let's get some stakeholder feedback from folks who are like boots on the ground, right? Who are living and working with these people or working in the, with a particular demographic, whatever it might be that you're trying to solve. And I think that's a really effective way to do your strategic planning is to start with the folks who are closest to the problem. Yeah, I love it. I mean, this is like, we need to have you back on. I'm just saying because, yeah, you've like lit a fire under me for some things and it's really been powerful. But unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time and I don't wanna leave this behind because you advise us to have some context in writing our narratives for grants. And this is one of those things that given what you've been talking about, for me it changes the way I would approach this. Absolutely. So as I mentioned before, there's three main types of contexts that you wanna include in your writing. And I forget who said this, but it does take, I think Julia was you, it takes time. It's gonna take you a little extra time to collect this information. And we all know that the funder asked for the proposal yesterday, even though you've been meeting with them for about six months to convince them to give you the grant, right? So once we've overcome those timelines, which again are part of a power and balance that everybody should be talking back to the funders about, is taking the time during your regular work and preparing some of these answers ahead of time, looking at historical context in your communities, talking to your communities about the historical context that they've overcome or they've seen, cultural context and then also that direct perspective context that we've talked about, because if you think about the juxtaposition between historical context of what did happen, but where we are now and how maybe solutions have come and gone, but we're a new generation and there's a new barrier in place. Like I'm thinking about AI technology where I'm working with one of my clients right now and how we need to maybe take that historical context and go back to the drawing board and reiterate. So those are a few different types of ways that you can help to illuminate equity in your grant writing and be really thoughtful about centering people and their lived experiences in your writing and how your programs are addressing those different types of context and taking that into account in your work. Wow, this has really been cool because I think a lot of times, Stephanie and it's really a dreadful comment and it's even more dreadful concept, but I think a lot of times we put like, oh, that's the grant writers issue. That's back over there. And they're in that circle back over there, kind of next to accounting, right? And some of the things that you've talked about here really should be a part of our overall philosophy and discussion. It was very powerful for me to hear you today. I really loved this conversation. And Mary, I think we got to get her on, don't you think? Absolutely, I think there, you know, Stephanie, one things you said I feel like we can all relate to with grant writing is the characters, right? You said, how are we supposed to squeeze this all into 5,000 characters? When I'm writing a grant, I'm staring at the little ticker that's like, you're down to a hundred characters left. Yeah, it's brutal. Yeah, it's brutal. Stephanie Summerman, senior director at Elevate, he got to go out, go to ElevatedEffect.com and check out their website. It's remarkable the amount of thought leadership they have, what they're doing, who they work with. Fascinating discussion. This goes, Stephanie, for me, this has gone so far beyond grant writing. It's really gone, it's spoken to me at the heart of how we have structure and how we have meaning and then we go out into our communities.  And I think, I don't know about you ladies, but I feel like we're in a new dawn of philanthropy in our country, that this will rival some of the things that are going on in the Industrial Revolution period of our country. So these are the conversations that we need to be having. And Stephanie, this has been cool. I'm really appreciative that you would bring this forward. And then another thing that's things forward for us are our sponsors. And they are amazing. Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Nonprofit Thought Leader, Staffing Boutique, Your Part-Time Controller, 180 Management Group, Fundraising Academy at National University, JMT Consulting, Nonprofit Nerd, and Nonprofit Tech Talk. You know, as I remind our viewers and our guests, our sponsors don't dictate our editorial content. We've done more than a thousand shows and that's a pretty powerful partnership that they trust us enough and they trust the industry to be talking about this, which Stephanie kind of leads what you were sharing with us today that we kind of change our mindset or so. Really powerful conversation. Ladies, it's been amazing. Meredith, this is only your second time co-hosting the Nonprofit Show. We're excited. We're gonna get you going even more. And so thank you for joining us episode that we signed off with this feature. And it means different things each time we say it. And so I want you to think about it because the message is this, to stay well, so you can do well. We'll see.


Okay, so one of the things that guys in my corner of the internet whether that's men's Influence or style in general one of the questions that we often take for granted is why does any of this stuff matter? But especially with the style guys, why does style matter? I mean, it's just clothing, you know it's just linen or Animal hair or something else that's put on my body and really originally it was just to protect me from the elements So why does any of this matter you guys ever thought about it? So one thing that it does do is it helps our brain Shortcut and be able to make judgments based on patterns now the world will tell us that that's bad That we shouldn't make those judgment based on those patterns and do a certain extent I agree as long as you're willing to make them and then override them once you're given different information But we can't always assess everything based on its own merit. We have to take those shortcuts We have to use those patterns and clothing is a huge way to do it now in the course of the day I've already had three gentlemen come up and introduce themselves to me and say I knew you were a speaker Why do you think they knew that? Because of what I was wearing right one of the specific who told me he said you don't roll into a conference Looking like you do and not be a guy who's speaking and presenting, right? I haven't done anything else. We hadn't said anything. We hadn't communicated sure. There's body language and there's presence But even that is either exaggerated or downplayed by the clothing that I choose to wear So style is a big one and it's one of those things that it helps us Facilitate our interaction with the rest of the world. It helps us determine who's in tribe and who's out tribe It helps us determine the value of what we have it helps us to signal our status It helps us signal signal our fertility It helps us signal all these other traits that we seek is virtuous and other people and it applies just as well to men as it does to women However, there's a big difference between the way that men and women should approach style And this is one of the things that I see a lot because most men have kind of this either Negative relationship with their appearance or they just have a neutral one They assume that as long as I don't look bad Then I don't really care how I look and I'll tell you that any guy who says that he doesn't care about his appearance All you have to do to calm on his bluff and say all right come to work tomorrow on a snuggie a pink one Right one of those big old blankets with sleeves No guy's gonna show up to work in that because he's gonna be embarrassed by it And he's not gonna feel comfortable or confident in it And so men we do care about our appearance But mostly we just care care about it in this neutral context as long as I don't look bad Then I'm fine as long as I don't look ridiculous Then I'm fine But we miss out on so many opportunities for what our clothing can do for us by not getting into the positive realm of Having our appearance do good things for us as opposed to just not doing negative things Now that jumps into this whole concept of visual appeal versus visual power As I speak to guys at different conferences as I meet men across the country and even throughout the world One of the things that guys who are new to the world of aesthetics or style tell me is oh, yeah My mom used to dress me or my girlfriend buys clothes for me or my wife dresses me nine times out of ten I don't need them to tell me that because I can tell because when a woman dresses herself Her primary goal is visual appeal She wants to accentuate the things that are appealing about her. We've learned that that's part of a sexual strategy That's part of accentuating the things that biologically we as men are attracted to in women The problem is is they take those same goals and then when they apply them to you you end up looking cute And no man should ever look cute. It's not your goal. It doesn't help facilitate what your goals are It doesn't help accomplish what you want to accomplish. No man should ever look cute Instead a man should be seeking visual power All right, it's a subtle difference as far as what's actually accomplished aesthetically, but socially it's a huge difference And that's why it's very easy to tell for me It was pretty easy to tell the difference between those who were speakers or those who run their own businesses Those who are kind of here to help with the conference versus some of you guys who are brand new here to learn I don't mean that as a value judgment, but it certainly is an observational judgment It's pretty easy for me to tell because some of you guys look like you just don't care or that at least you care not enough to Look bad or that you just at least want to look kind of good in the way that a girl would think you would look good But you don't look powerful and I'll tell you one of the biggest secrets to dressing well