Hello, and welcome to A Course in Miracles TV. My name is Robin Duncan, and I am your host. The purpose of this channel is to teach, share, and celebrate the principles of A Course in Miracles. I will be talking with many of the teachers of the course around the world, and I look forward to bringing great content, tips, tools, and miracle stories that will help you on your spiritual path. Our topic today is how A Course in Miracles changes your life, because it surely does. I have a very special guest with me today, and his name is David Huffmeister. I have known David for years, and I have always admired his dedication to teaching and sharing the principles of A Course in Miracles around the world. Over the past 34 years, David has traveled to 44 countries across six continents to share his message that truth is available for everyone. His books and audios and videos based on A Course in Miracles have been translated into 13 languages. David is a wonderful guide for anyone seeking clarity about the course. Welcome to the show, David. Thank you, Robin. It's a joy to be here, and I've enjoyed our friendship over all these years. It is so fun. It's been... I added it up. It's actually been about 16 years since we first met and traveled that journey together for you helping to kick off my first healing center, and I'm so grateful to this day. Tell me, David, how did A Course in Miracles come to you? How did that book find its way into your heart? Well, I was actually out in your part of the world. I came out to Southern California, and I traveled down to La Jolla, down towards San Diego for a humanistic psychology conference that I was going to see some of the speakers that really had touched my heart, like Carl Rogers and Virginia Satir and Roger Walsh, Francis Vaughn, and so I went there and I was going through listening to all these amazing speakers, and I went down to the area where the psychologists were selling their books and CDs and DVDs at the time. And there was a table that had a videotape playing of A Course in Miracles teacher from India named Tara Singh, and two of the students were there, and they were playing some videos, and they had his book called Nothing Real Can Be Threatened, and Ken Wabnick's book, Forgiveness in Jesus, and they had the course. They're right at the conference. And so I began talking to them, and I kept being drawn back there every day of the conference, because I was fascinated, and I felt this huge heart opening, and I felt as soon as I opened the book, I felt like waves, like a tsunami of love whoosh across me and splash across my mind, and I had this feeling in my heart like my whole life would be different and nothing would be the same, and somehow that my whole life would be dedicated to this book and sharing the teachings of this book. So it was quite a striking time there, and then I did come up to LA right after that and went to Tara Singh's center on South Burnside. So that's how it was. It had me from that first encounter. From right from hello, so you opened the book and you actually could see this journey for yourself, that this was going to be a huge impact to your life. Yeah, I don't think I'd ever had that experience where I could feel like the whole trajectory of my whole life was changing in one moment, and it was a very striking kind of feeling. And so I said, I don't even know how this is going to go. But when I did come up to LA to South Burnside Avenue, I walked into the house and there was Gandhi and sayings, Mother Teresa and sayings from the course on the walls. It was a group that was living there in community with Tara Singh. And I just had this feeling then again, like my life would never be the same and just get ready because here it goes. So that was it. That is so great. It's so nice when something is clear right out of the gate, you know. So when you were new and studying the course in the beginning, would you say that there were any parts of the course that you had to think about more deeply than others or challenges? What do you think you faced as you first started studying? Well, I was aware that the course was saying that whichever part resonated with you to go with, whether it was the manual for teachers or the workbook or the text and actually I was in such I would pray and kind of use the course very initially as as an oracle. So I would receive so many answers from just formulating a question or a prayer in my mind and then open the book seemingly randomly. Although now we know there really isn't anything random. But at the time I would open it up and then I would be so touched by the answer. Sometimes I didn't have tears at how relevant the answer was and is spectacular as if the spirit was just sitting right in front of me talking to me, addressing every nuance of every question. So I think of the sections of the book, though, I was actually when I started to actually study the book in that way, I was first drawn to actually the manual for teachers with the questions and answers. Fascinating about his reins carnation. So and development of trust and, you know, these is how his judgment relinquished. I mean, for somebody who was a curious spiritual seeker, those questions were my questions and then the answers were just so spectacular and succinct. They were very succinct in the manual for teachers. So I think that's why that grabbed me first. And then as I went on from that, I moved over to the text. And it didn't take me very long to start really feeling very strongly that I needed to really start on lesson one of the workbook and really go through this and really in a devoted way. So it all of it followed pretty quickly after that initial splurge. I know when I first came to the course, it was actually through my very good friend at the time. His name was Terry, who happens to be my husband now for going on 20 years. And it was something where every time I would have a challenge and I was going through a pretty dark time in my life and he would have these beautiful things to say and he would have these beautiful prayers. And I would just look at him and say, how do you know what to say? How do you know what to pray? And he said, oh, it's just this book I'm reading. It's called A Course in Miracles. He goes, I'm just sharing some of the things that I'm learning in the book. And I thought, I need to get a hold of that book. So it's amazing when people find their way to a course in miracles. It becomes a friend. And I love your journey that you knew right away what this was going to represent in your life, at least a little glimmer. So as you were studying the course, were there any aha moments where you read something and it just changed you? Do you recall any time like that? Well, I think I was pretty primed for the course because I'd seem like every day I just felt like the kid in the candy store.  I opened the book up. I just couldn't wait to do that. And I I think actually I I think for the first two and a half years, I think I I spent about eight hours a day on the average with my nose in that book, actually. And I it was like what people call an immersion. And there were different parts that really were lighting up. But I think I was so ripe and so ready for it at that time. When it first came in that it wasn't long. I mean, actually, after after maybe about four or five years, I actually had three revelatory experiences where I went just totally into the light and the entire world completely disappeared. And and after those three, I think they were probably over a span of like maybe two or three months, all three of them occurred. That when I would come back from the revelatory experience, I started to see the world in a drastically different way like a like it was a film, like it was a very thin veil. And it didn't have the heaviness that it had the rest of the beginning part of my life. The first twenty seven, twenty eight years of my life were pretty intense, a lot of intense reactions to the world and a lot of heaviness and sadness. And then this was like a piercing experience. So I think, you know, there was like the prayer on page twenty four of those early editions. I think it's on twenty eight, page twenty eight. I'm here only to be truly helpful. That was a prayer that became almost a bit like a mantra. I would I would actually practice it silently before I would go through a doorway, even when I was going to visit my grandmother or going to grocery shopping or to a restroom, whatever I would go through a doorway, I would pause and and silently repeat that to prepare my mind for what was to come on the other side of the doorway. That is so great. You know, those three times you say when you basically merged into the light or turned into light, I actually had one experience like that. And I know I tried to identify what was going on that made that happen. For me, it only was maybe about a ten minute experience, but it was so profound. And as I observed that situation, it seemed like what happened was it was the first time that I actually forgave myself, just forgave myself for mistakes, errors. And I was reading a part in the course that was telling me that all we needed to do was release the past, release the future and that freedom is available right now any moment. And that was such a big idea to me. The first time I read it, it hit me and I started almost seeing spots in my eyes and then all of a sudden I was one with the light.  Was there anything that prompted those three experiences? Or were they just spontaneous from all the study? Can you recall? Just so others listening, they might want to be able to jump right into that light experience as soon as possible. Well, you know, it's interesting how the course is a path of relationships. And I was actually in all three cases, I had a friend of mine and we were doing open eyed eye gazing meditations, like sometimes you hear about like Zen open eyed meditations where we would be sitting across from each other, across on a sitting across a table. Or in one case, we were out in a lake and in Kentucky and in a rowboat and the wind we pulled in the oars. The wind was just slowly moving the boat over the water.  And that was one of them. Oh, that's nice. It was it was very interpersonal. It started out where we were just gazing the two of us. And in each case, then the figure ground started to collapse. So what seemed to be the foreground and the background collapsed. And then where her silhouette was kind of her frame of her body, the light just started screaming through the crack right where the silhouette was where the border of the body and the background. And then then it just overtook everything and it all went to light and she just disappeared three different times. So it's kind of unique in that sense to be doing open eyed meditation with a friend. You know, it says the memory of God comes to a quiet mind. And, you know, in this world, it can be tough to get to that quiet mind. We have to actually make time. And I love that you are making time with others and just being quiet. You know, the times I've had my most spectacular experiences spiritually have been when I've been rested and my mind was very quiet. And I was just holding that place of listening and allowing because we go through the day and so many people have so many activities and things to do. And so it is so important. Would you agree that just to make that quiet time and really just kind of showing up in prayer and just letting yourself be in that space and spending time with God and the Holy Spirit and having that time available to them? What do you think about it? Oh, yeah, totally. I totally feel that. And in one of the descriptions of forgiveness in the course that really relates to that is forgiveness is quiet and silently does nothing. It looks and waits and watches and judges not. And to me, I like that feel of the quiet reverence. And I actually see that in one sense, it kind of gives a sense that forgiveness is like a state of mind, almost like a passive state of mind where you're so quiet and still and surrendered that you can behold the world in a new way, which a lot of times people think of forgiveness is more like a verb. Like I've got to forgive my mother or I have to forgive my neighbor as if they actively have to go and, you know, put the heebie-jeebies on something or do something in an active way. And that's not been my experience of forgiveness at all. It's much more like you just said, it's very still and very, very quiet. What do you think would help new people since you've had such a rich journey with the course? What do you think would help them to be able to embrace this information more easily? Is there any suggestion you have for them that would really quicken their pace a bit? Well, I think I would say to be extremely gentle with yourself to never feel like you have to make something happen or force something or push yourself. I find that it has more to do with readiness and as I've traveled around and talked to course students and teachers around the world in these 44 countries, that's what's come back to me as feedback. Like, wow, it just came at the perfect time in my life. Sometimes they had to get into their house, like, oh, I used it as a plant stand, as a doorstop. Oh, I had it in my library for two weeks or two months or two years, but all the stories I've heard there's a strong factor of readiness. So I would say be extremely gentle with yourself and just let it find you and use it in a way that feels nurturing and not something that has a pressure or some kind of a force to it. I love that because as we begin that study, the course is teaching us how to stop judging other people. It does so well at that and it tells us that our first temptation will be to judge ourselves because we stopped judging the world but then we turn that judgment on ourselves and that that is the same mistake. So I know for new people that I've been involved with, they become far less judgmental of others and then they almost heighten their judgment against themselves. I should be doing more, I should be saying it right, I should be praying more, I should be reading more and if we can refrain from doing that. Just do your best and really try to have non-judgment towards yourself as well. I think that slowed me down. My judgments against myself were always more harsh than against others and for other people it might be vice versa but once it got down to just those final judgments of myself, those were the ones I really had to let go of. Be more forgiving, I loved your words about being gentle with yourself and allowing yourself to go through this journey and sometimes we make mistakes, sometimes we still don't say it right or do it right but I love knowing that the Holy Spirit already has it right. There's a place within us that already has it right so we don't have to be so perfect and we don't have to say and do all the right things. That really helped me on my journey. You know as you travel through all the countries, is there a particular memory of a trip that you had or a group that you had, something that just really stood out to you in your travels? Well I think my first trip to Argentina was it really stands out because I felt like I was just being taken on a journey into a place that I'd never been in language, I didn't know culture, I didn't know and I think that's maybe why it stands out is because it seems like that the Holy Spirit's method of operation, the less I knew, the more helpful I could be. Because I didn't have any preconceived notions and then when I landed and I had two ladies who were course facilitators that had set up 19 gatherings and 19 days in Buenos Aires, my first time down there after I landed, then I was whisked around in basically taxicabs over Buenos Aires, it was a very large city, didn't speak the language and so I was having so much fun with everybody and I was in such a state of surrender that I could have the windows down in the taxi when the air condition wasn't working and a bus could go by and blow black soot in on my face and I just had the biggest smile on my face.  So that stands out plus just getting to know, meeting the people and yeah, it was just a good kind of inauguration to go away from the United States and Canada and start stretching it out. How was it working with a translator when you have this group and everything's through a translator, did you find that it moves a little bit at a slower pace but you really get the same content? I think that Argentinian trip showed me too. I was there for maybe a couple weeks, a few weeks maybe and it seems like there was about 14 different translators that were all part of that and that was my first experience about how the spirit, Jesus goes before me and handles everything including the translators and I found that it was more like a revival. The translators were so tuned in with me telepathically and I was tuned in with them that the spirit was pouring through both of us, me and the translator and people were crying and there were people running around like a Pentecostal service, nothing like I'd ever experienced and it was more like Jesus saying, well, get used to this. This is just the beginning here. So it relax and enjoy yourself. So that's kind of the way I did. I've never had translation difficulties because I feel like I show up in full service and then let Jesus arrange the translations and everything else and it seems to work best. That's great. So that trip to Argentina, that was pretty early on in your world travels? It was. I think I got the course in 1986 out there in La Jolla, California and then spent probably the 80s and the 90s immersing myself traveling a bit in the United States starting around 1989 to Michigan and then to Roscoe, New York where Ken and Gloria Wapnick were in 1990, 1991. And then by 2003, I was just in full swing. I was just had really got my stride and that's when the invitation came in to go to Argentina. I met a man named David on one of my tours in the United States who had won frequent flyer mile bonanza for Latin America Airlines. And I said, what? And he said, yeah, I won a million frequent flyer miles and I wanna fly you and himself and pick two guests of your choice. First class, a Hecutiva down to Argentina. Well, I can handle that. That's an example of how Jesus orchestrates things. So I had to get a passport and it just got more surreal from then on. It just got even more surreal. That's great, David. Can you tell us a little bit about one of your favorite miracle stories? I know you have many, but what's one that would light us up here today? Well, you know, I like being of service and I was just sharing this one last night too that I was in Argentina a number of times and I would go to the rural areas and the people were so poor, I would meet with a group of mothers who had young children and they would have a Xerox copy of one chapter of A Course in Miracles in Spanish of Incurso de Milagros and they would pass for weeks, they would pass around one chapter because they couldn't afford it. They just got a Xerox copy. So I got this feeling, Jesus was like saying, you know, you gotta get the book down here in an affordable way to my people. It takes to ship the book all the way from the United States to Buenos Aires and then out to the rural areas. And one woman told me she spent two months salary to buy the book and my heart was just like, oh. And then Jesus was like saying, do this. So then I meet another friend in Buenos Aires and he's also from the United States, from Connecticut and he's like, yeah, we've gotta get the book down here. It's gotta be affordable. So then I go back, I'm at watching at this little peace house I had in Cincinnati a movie about this German monk who translated the Bible into German because it was only available in Latin and the poor people couldn't read the Bible. And I'm like, that's striking. The doorbell rings, I go there and a man named Guzman, a professor from Mexico had translated the entire course book into Spanish and his daughter had mailed it up to me. And it was while I'm watching the movie after I've just got back from Argentina and now I'm seeing, here's a course book, hand translated. That is a small task. Yeah, years translating this. So I keep getting, all right, Jesus, I got you. You want your book in South America at an affordable rate, I get it. So I go down to Bogota on my next trip. I meet some friends, Leon and Elsa at their apartment as I walk in and I shake the hand of a Colombian businessman and I say to him, I think we have an assignment together. I think we're supposed to get the Course in Miracles printed down here on Cursor de Milagros in an affordable way for the people of South America. He said, I'm right with you, I'll do it. Oh, wow. We had never met, we just shook hands. And I told him what I was feeling. He said, I join you completely. Two years later, we got the plates, Judy, Scotch and Company Foundation for Interpeace shipped the plates down there. He took me to a factory in rural Columbia and there they had printed on Bible paper, a little, even a smaller paperback version than the one in English that was affordable for people and they shipped it. I went to the factory. He gave me a box of them, I took them to Medellin and the whole course group just ripped the box open and took the whole thing out, took them 30 seconds to get all these books out of this big box. That was a touching moment for me because I do feel like while we believe we have bodies and while we believe we are here in time and space, we do take a part in helping in a greater plan like Judy and Ken and Bill and Helen where you and I have done the same. You opened the one center you've continued on for years in Los Angeles and I've gone on my travels but we're very open to be used not just to sit in and read the book to really live it. It does feel like a family. I know when you meet other people studying and it's not just a course of miracles people but I think that because it teaches us to love so deeply without the judgments, without persecution, once you become a friend in the course it just seems that that friendship just goes on forever. I love that you were able to get those books down there. You have this joyful thought and then it shows up. So some people listening might think, well, that's great for you, David, you have miracles, but what about me? So what would you say? I have my own thoughts about it but what would you say really help to open the way for that to be such a beautiful miracle that just was like silk? What would help someone new to invite those miracles in their lives? Well, I think what comes to mind is that if we are willing, the spirit can work with us right as we perceive ourselves, right with the world as we believe it to be. Because a lot of us, like you were sharing earlier with me before we started about worthiness, we have a lot of beliefs about being ready, being worthy, being competent. And many people say, why me and why now? And I say, well, it's beautiful, it's that it's you and it's now and you don't have to have any huge expectations around that, you just have to be willing to be open to that opening in your heart and that shift of mind. And I think that's nice to know that it's not, you don't have to prepare like a resume for the spirit of to say, here, am I good enough? It's more like, here I am, I'm showing up, I'm ready. I'll give it my heart, I'll give it my best. And that's all this required really, we're not asked to present some kind of resume. It's not like a job interview. When we find this course, we must be ready in some sense for working with it. I think it does help to imagine that miracles can happen. I think there are people that I've met that feel like they happen for other people but not for themselves. And fortunately for me, I grew up in a home where actually I was raised in Christian science. So miracles were really a part of what we did and we would pray about things, we would have healings. My sister was healed of epilepsy in a day. After years with the challenge, I had seen so many healings in my life that as I became an adult and found my way to a course in miracles, the idea of miracles was very natural to me. And that's probably why I've had so many because I don't think at any level I've ever thought either I shouldn't have them or they're not possible. So that was helpful, seeing that as a child. But anyone listening here today, if you haven't had a miracle that you could call a miracle, that's okay. But open your heart to have one, to be wowed by the power and the greatness and the brilliance of the Holy Spirit as that flows through your life and just be willing to know that miracles are possible. I know David, I'm sure you've had dozens if not hundreds of just miraculous moments and events and so have I. And so the more that we study, the more that we practice, we have those gentle corrections all along the way and sometimes they look a whole lot like a miracle. We can't explain them. There's nothing we did to make them happen. They just happen. For those listening, if you can know that you're worthy of everything good, that God created you worthy, God created you to be happy and that if something's out of whack, it's a perfect time to pray, it's a perfect time to turn it over and to make room for the Holy Spirit to heal the part of the mind that is projecting that whole idea in the first place. As we think about those books that went down to Argentina, that just makes me really excited though because we find those resources are available and it really had nothing to do with you. It came through you and it opens you to such a big constellation of resources, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. I think we really can't conceive of the way our life can go and the way we can be used. I think if we're just open at the beginning just to be willing to give it a try, give it a chance, then really we're saying to the Spirit, okay, I'll give you a chance to convince me because honestly, everyone on earth needs lots of convincing. It's a place that has, but for many people had been very dark and dismal and even if they feel they've had a fairly happy home life or family life, they can all recite their challenges and their hard moments. So I think if we just give it a chance, then we can say, oh, it's on you Spirit, you show me, you convince me, then it takes the pressure off of thinking somehow that you have to personally figure out a way or be good enough to do it when it's really not that way at all. That is such a key part, I think allowing God's plan in your life that we're so busy trying to map out our own plan and we think we know where we're going and where we're headed and the scariest words to the ego are, I do not know. So for me, I was a CPA, a CFO, everything was about budgeting, forecasting, trying to anticipate the future. So it was very new to me when I started studying A Course in Miracles to think of this idea that a healed mind doesn't plan. Oh, yeah, that was so different and I had to really breathe that in and allow that to be. And it was a little scary at first because I used to be a planner. So I felt a little exposed, a little naked in that way, it's to go into a situation or a group and not have a plan. The first time I did go into a group without the plan, it was actually the Saturday after 9-11. And so this was for me 2001 where I was teaching just a fairly large group and I decided I would not go with any kind of a writeup or an agenda and that was very new to me. I mean, I know you do that all over the world and up till that point, I always had an agenda. I always had something written down so that I would know what I was doing and I decided to show up without the agenda and I sat down and we had this lovely group of people and right away this woman just starts crying and I couldn't have anticipated that and so I went over to her and I knelt down and it turned out that she had lost one of her sons in the towers on 9-11. And so it was just so raw, it was so right there ready for healing and so we ended up talking about that, we ended up helping her as a group through all of those feelings and emotions and it just ended up in the most wonderful way. She stayed for the whole event, she was able to be lifted, she was able to be just held up in the light and all of it. There's not one thing I could have written down that would have prepared me for what was about to happen. Did you ever have that experience where you walk in thinking you might think it's going this way and then it went completely another way? Can you think of a time? Yeah, I can. I had a feeling one time when I went to talk to a group in Michigan and I was ready to start speaking and then it felt like the spirit was just saying, wait, wait, wait. And so I was like, okay. And then the door opened and somebody came in a few minutes late who had just been to the doctor and had been diagnosed with cancer. So she came in, she sat down, she burst into tears. But then I could feel a weight. I could let her share her emotions and she'd been studying the course for years and she had the, of course, belief system of that sickness is a decision in your mind and she'd been preaching to her husband who's not a course student and her children on and on and on. And then when she was diagnosed with cancer, she felt so embarrassed, so ashamed that she had come to the meeting and said, how can I even go home? My children, my husband are going to just point the finger back into my face and I can't even bear to think of facing them. And I don't know what to do now whether I should go to a medical, to a hospital for a procedure to be treated and so forth. So after she poured all of that out, then the spirit gently came through me about how it's all perfect and about how she shouldn't shy away from her family or from going to a hospital that the spirit uses us in our attitude and our light to shine and we don't have to be afraid of situations. These situations are perfectly given for us to help us strengthen our own experience of the miracle.  And so she went from very shameful and fearful and depressed to back into her miracle working function and ready to go back and face her family and go for treatment, whatever she felt inspired to do. So that was very impactful for me about just wait, wait, don't, don't have a plan of thinking what you'll say and when the meeting will start, just like your 9-11 meeting, it had the same feel for me, like I need to step back and let spirit lead the way here. That's so great because can you imagine coming back from getting that kind of diagnosis and what a gift it is to walk into a situation where you can be so embraced and held in love and reminded that it's okay, you're going to be okay and maybe a few words of guidance to help you know what your next step is. So that's so wonderful that you're able to be there for her. So obviously she was really in sync to be able to walk right into a situation where she could be reinforced in that way. What do you think in terms of your own life, your relationships, like how has the course helped you the most on a personal level? What do you think? Well, I think cause I was so shy as a child and as an adolescent and into my 20s that I would say how the course has helped on a personal level is it really opened my heart up. It opened my emotions up from being more into denial and repression to being open-hearted. It opened my expression up of helping me be able to just relax and let the love flow through and smile and hug and laugh and let all those emotions pour through as well as let the dark emotions come up too which really needed to for healing. So I would say it changed the context. I even met a woman who had worked at a co-op job with me back in the, I think it was the 1980s. And then I remet her 10 years later and she just looked at me and she said, my God, what happened to you? You are not even the same person. It's just hard to believe that you've changed that much. It was like, she said you're like, your whole personality has changed like 360.  And she's like, what? She said, I started feeling that my life had something to do with peace and I was looking at the Peace Corps but I wanna hear more about this Course in Miracles book. If this has changed you that much in your personality, then I have to investigate it and she did. She ended up, you know, really diving into the Course as well. And that's the testimony right there of if it can change us seemingly that much, then it certainly could have a huge impact for basically anybody who gave themselves over to, practicing it. It sure does. And it's so great how it just has this ripple effect and people see the peace on your face and they just wanna know more about that peace. I've had many people ask me about that, you know, what is it you're doing? Why do you look different? And I am different, I feel different and I know you do too and I'm so grateful for it. I think I feel so much more peaceful now than I did 30 years ago, you know, that even in my younger years, I remember my jaw was clenched and my hair was falling out. I couldn't really turn my neck very well this way, that way. I was seeing a chiropractor three times a week to get injections into my neck so that I could be more relaxed and I was working 75 hours a week and it was just a lot and I had two little boys in the balance and I remember when I was first practicing a Course in Miracles and I was going through a divorce there was just so many things going on and I was holding on to it. Like you say, just immersion, like I just needed it like food and every day my head buried in the book and Terry was my friend at the time and we would talk from time to time on our breaks and things and we would just be sharing course quotes and what do you think about that and what do you think this means and how come it says this? And so we had so much banter about the course but one of the first times that I was ready to move I had moved out of my residence and into a little apartment and I was getting ready to move into a little rental house again, getting my life started again and one thing I knew is that I did not want to decide myself that I had learned from the course that there's a plan and if I will allow that plan to play through me I was feeling the nudge about moving but for the first time ever did not decide what that would look like or how it would go. So that was new to me and again CPA, CFO that was very different for me. Normally I'd have my pen and pencil out and I would be noodling the numbers and checking the places and going through statistics and all those things. So I gave it to God and I said, you know what God? I think I'm feeling this nudge to move if it is your will that I move I would love guidance about that. What would you have me do? And I just let that sit for a bit and I felt guided to pull out some one ads back when we had newspapers, right? Pull out the one ads for the apartments and things and I found about six places that I thought might fit with a budget. I called all of them and I went to see what I thought was all of them and none of them were good. I mean, they were just not very good not very safe. Some of them smelled just wasn't the right time. And I said, okay, I receive your message that this just isn't the right time. And instead of getting mopey or grumpy or feeling like God wasn't supporting me, I just took it to mean it just wasn't the right time. And I just let it be. And then all of a sudden about 8.30 that night I got a phone call and it was someone I had called and I thought I had actually checked off all the houses and somehow there was one left. And this man said to me, he said, you called about my house. And I said, I did. I thought I saw every house I had called about. And he said, well, I've had 35 people fill out applications for my house. Would you like to fill out an application? I said, well, if you've had 35 applications why did you call me? I mean, that's great. I'm glad you have that kind of turnout. And he said, well, you were the last one on the list. And I said, okay, tell me about your house. And he said, well, it's serene. And right away I'm like serene. And he said, it has four bedrooms. It has three bathrooms. It has a pool. It has a hot tub. It has a beautiful lot. It has a lot of trees. And I was like, wow, what do you mean? Because every house I had looked at looked nothing like that. It wasn't even half that. And then he said, it's on Denise Avenue. And I said, well, that's really interesting because that's my middle name. And I said, now, where is Denise Avenue? And he kind of forgotten my name, I guess. But he said, well, it's in the city of Orange and it's one street past Robin Hood. I just started laughing. And I just knew this was my house. And I went ahead, I went and saw the house. And ultimately I was the one that was able to move in. I ended up buying it like seven months later. It was such a lovely house. But God is so funny with names, with familiarity. I always feel like the Holy Spirit has such a great sense of humor. Jesus has such a great sense of humor. And there will be times when you're praying and asking for information and it will be given to you in such a familiar way. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, that's exactly how it went for me with guidance around traveling so much, meeting people. You know, it would be so obvious and there would be such a chuckle involved. And even last night we all watched the movie together and called, what was it, The Lego Movie. And it was from 2014 and it was packed full of all this meaning. And we just howled laughing. I don't think we've laughed so much but I find that that's the big characteristic where the symbols come in such an obvious way like that middle name is Denise and then Robin Hood. And then it's like you can't mess it up as you start to see these telegraph symbols that are like, here you go, here you go. I'm making it obvious for you. So I find that's been a lot of my journey with The Course in Miracles. It's very obvious symbols like that. Well, tell me about your mindful movie watching. What's that about? Well, I think I know that Jesus taught with parables 2,000 years ago. And then after I was guided by Jesus to watch movies and I would hear his commentary in my mind that I was so insightful that I sat down one day and started to put down the movies and the reviews and the insights and calling it the movie watchers guide to enlightenment. And then eventually there was a second edition, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh as it grew and grew and grew and people around the world found it so helpful that we eventually developed a website, mwge.org. And Pete, who's right here with me right now, he made a little caricature. What was it? Mr. Pops.  It was a little animation, Pete's good with those animations. We put that on there and then it has grown and grown now so that I basically do on Wednesday nights, like last night I do a movie with a group online on Zoom like we're using Zoom right now. We watch a movie with setup and commentary during the movie, discussion afterwards, basically anywhere from three and a half to four and a half, five hours of online joy together with these insightful, deep metaphysical movies, quantum movies, animated like last night, the Lego movie was. So it's a fun way to look differently at the world. It's a fun way to retrain the mind. And I find it's just catching on. We do a Wednesday night movie, then Thursday night, right now as we speak, they're playing the movie with my commentary over in Europe with a group of people. And then tomorrow, Marina who's in the room with me now, she puts the Spanish translation onto the movie and we go in live, we do with Latin America and we're even thinking maybe of doing Portuguese coming up as more and more things, just this catching on. So it's very practical and it's very fun and it's also very deep. People say they've never had such deep experiences sometimes as during these movies. Some, a few of my friends even have had mystical experiences in the movies, in the middle of the movies because it's so impactful. So it's just a way the course can be applied in this modern day world. So the website again is mwge.org? Yes. What does that stand for? The mwge part? Movie Watchers Guide to Enlightenment. There you go. So if somebody forgets the letters, they can maybe remember the phrase, movie watchers guide to enlightenment.org. You know, as we are all experiencing the things in the world that we are right now, there's so much temptation to either be in fear or worry about the future or judgment or conflict or trying to take a side. Do you have any words of wisdom you'd like to share for people as they are seeing what they're seeing to help them out with that? Well, I think the blessing of it is it is bringing in more flexibility, which to me equates to more willingness to just stay in the moment and follow the guidance. And like you, you know, CFO and what you came from and how your life has unfolded with you and Terry and your work with the course, the way it went for me being shy. I was in the university for 10 years and then whoosh, the way it's opened up for me. I think it's good for people to remember that you can stay in the moment and the more you are able to just stay tuned in in the moment, the more peaceful you will be and that you will be given what you need in terms of practical guidance, instruction or a feeling to do something and you don't have to try to figure the whole scheme out. You can just learn to flow with the guidance and your intuition be much more intuitive. I think everyone's becoming more intuitive that I know. They sure are. And you know, when Terry and I started our journey we did much of the same thing with the book. We would either have a question or a prayer and we would just flip open the book and see where we would land. And like you say, so many times it would bring up emotion because sometimes the answers would be so direct you would feel like there was no place else in the book that could give you the answer that you just got and it was so perfect. And if somebody opens the book and it doesn't seem to say what you would love it to say then open it again. Let Holy Spirit know that you really just want that answer. Sometimes we get in our own way I think and we might open up the book and we think, well, that doesn't say anything about what I know I've had that happen early on because maybe in my mind I was thinking that no one will answer or maybe I'm not worthy of an answer or sometimes we have those thoughts in the back of our mind. So I would say for those listening that if you haven't done that before those we call them flip opens. If you haven't done a flip open then just be very committed to the process. Like just keep flipping it until you get an answer that you love and you're going to find that it will turn out to be the first time in no time at all that you'll get something that just speaks right to you. You know, in my journey I had to really understand that I am worthy because God created me as worthy. You know, I think we've all made certain mistakes that we might call mistakes in our life. Maybe not everybody, but a lot of people. And I know I used to take my mistakes so seriously and I would be really hard on myself. And I went through a long period of time where I wouldn't really let good things happen to me. I felt like I hadn't done enough or I hadn't worked hard enough or and then this book called The Course in Miracles came along and I think it taught me so much about not only loving others that came much more naturally to me. I think it was about being willing to love, offer love back to myself and to recognize that light within me. And that took a little more time but as that began to take hold my life just started showing up in color and everything started to work and every relationship is healed, every relationship. And there was a time when there was quite a few that were not healed for one reason or another. So I have such gratitude for what I've learned and what would you say in this final moment here, David, about how is it in a summary, how has it just kissed your life? What do you think?  That's a big wet kiss. Because how we live our life and our state of mind, our attitude to me is everything. Some people say, oh, it's an amazing book and Shakespearean blank verse and all these different things about it. Those are all wonderful things but I think it's that attitude that you're left with where you wake up and your eyes are just sparkling to greet the new day. You can't wait to be about your joy, your intuitive extensions for the day and that is no small thing considering planet Earth to wake up and sparkle and shine throughout the day and feel that calmness and peace. The Bible said, don't go to bed angry. Wow, when you're into the course, sometimes you can't drift off to sleep. You've got so much energy going on from the day's miracles and experiences that you have to just, oh, okay, calm down and rest. So that's the greatest thing for me. It's just the state of mind that it has taken me into. Such a blessing, right? Just like you, David.  Thank you for all you are doing to make the world a better place.  I appreciate that. And I hope you'll join me again soon on another episode. So thank you for joining me today. Oh, thank you, Robin. Always such a joy to come together with you for whatever reason we do. It's really always a very deep joy in my heart. Thank you, David. We'll talk again soon. Have a blessed day and enjoy Mexico. Okay, thank you. All right, thank you, everyone. This is Robin Duncan with a Course in Miracles TV. Be sure to check out the website at accoursemiracles.tv for upcoming events and resources. And this channel is offered for public benefit and your support is so greatly appreciated. Thank you and have a blessed day. Bye-bye.


From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCube, covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, everybody. We're here at MIT sweltering Cambridge, Massachusetts. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, Paul Gilland. Special coverage of the MIT CDO IQ, the Chief Data Officer event. This is the 13th year of the event. We started seven years ago covering it. Mark Ramsey is here as the chief data and analytics officer, advisor at Ramsey International, LLC, and former chief data officer of GlaxoSmithKline, Big Pharma. Mark, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. Fresh off the keynote, fascinating keynote this evening or this morning, a lot of interest here, tons of questions, and we have some as well. But let's start with kind of your history and data. I was, I stood up for, I sat down after 10 years, but I could have stretched it to 20, but I figure I'll sit down with the young guns, but there were some folks in their 30 plus year careers. How about you? What does your data journey look like? Well, my data journey, of course, I was able to stand up for the whole time because I was in the front, but I actually started about 32, little over 32 years ago, and I was involved with building. What I always tell folks is that data and analytics, has been a long journey, and the name has changed over the years, but we've been really trying to tackle the same problems of using data as a strategic asset. So when I started, I was with the insurance and financial services company, building one of the first data warehouse environments in the insurance industry, and that was in the 87, 88 range. And then once I was able to deliver that, I ended up transitioning into being in consulting for IBM, and basically spent 18 years with IBM in consulting and services. When I joined, the name had evolved from data warehousing to business intelligence, and then over the years, it was master data management, customer 360, analytics and optimization, big data. And then in 2013, I joined Samsung Mobile as their first chief data officer. So moving out of consulting, I really wanted to own the end-to-end delivery of advanced solutions in the data analytics space, and so that made the transition to Samsung quite interesting, very much in the consumer electronics, mobile funds, tablets and things of that nature. And then in 2015, I joined GSK as their first chief data officer to deliver a data analytics solution. Long data history, and Paul, Mark took us through in your right, Mark. It's a lot of the same narrative, just kind of same wide new bottle, but the technologies obviously changed, the opportunities are greater today, but you took us through enterprise data warehouse, which was kind of ETL and then map, and then master data management, which is kind of this mapping and abstraction layer, then enterprise data model, top down, and then not all failed, so we turned to governance, which has been very, very difficult, and then you came up with another solution that we're going to dig into, but is it sort of same-wine new bottle from the industry? I think it has been over the last 20 or 30 years, which is why I kind of did the experiment at the beginning of how long folks have been in the industry. I think that certainly the technology has advanced, moving to a reduction in the amount of schema that's required to move data, so you can kind of move away from the map and move type of an approach of a data warehouse, but it is tackling the same types of problems, and like I said in the session, it's a little bit like Einstein's phrase of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different answer is certainly the definition of insanity, and what I really proposed at the session was, let's come at this from a very different perspective, let's actually use data analytics on the data to make it available for these purposes, and I do think it's, I think it's a different line now, and so I think it's just now a matter of if folks can really take off and head that direction. What struck me about, you were taking off some of the initiatives that have failed, like data warehouses. I was surprised to hear you say data governance really hasn't worked because there's a lot of, there's a lot of talk around that right now, but all of those are top-down initiatives, and what you did at GSK was really invert that model and go from the bottom up. What were some of the barriers that you had to face organizationally to get the cooperation of all these people who, in this different approach? Yeah, I think it's still key, it's not a complete bottoms up because then you do end up really just doing data for the sake of data, which is also something that's been tried and does not work. I think it has to be a balance, and that's really striking that right balance of really tackling the data at full perspective, but also making sure that you have very definitive use cases to deliver value for the organization, and then striking the balance of how you do that. And I think one of the things that becomes a struggle is you're talking about very large breadth, and any time you're covering multiple functions within a business, it's getting the support of those different business functions. And I think part of that is really around executive support, and what that means, I did mention it in the session, that executive support to me is really stepping up and saying that the data across the organization is the organization's data, it isn't owned by a particular person or a particular scientist, and I think in a lot of organization, that gatekeeper mentality really does put barriers up to really tackling the full breadth of the data. So I have a question around digital initiatives. Everywhere you go, every C-level executive is trying to get digital right, and a lot of this is top-down, a lot of it is big ideas, and it's kind of North Star. Do you think that that's the wrong approach, that maybe there should be a more tactical sort of line of business alignment with that threaded leader, as opposed to this sort of big picture we're going to change and transform our company? What are your thoughts? Yeah, I think one of the struggles is just, I'm not sure that organizations really have a good appreciation of what they mean when they talk about digital transformation. I think there's, in most of the industries, it is an initiative that's getting a lot of press within the organizations, and folks want to go through digital transformation, but in some cases that means having more interactive experience with consumers, and it's maybe through sensors or different ways to capture data, but if they haven't solved the data problem, it just becomes another source of data that we're going to mismanage, and so I do think there's a risk that we're going to see the same outcome from digital that we have when folks have tried other approaches to integrate information, and if you don't solve the basic blocking and tackling, having data that has higher velocity and more granularity, if you're not able to solve that because you haven't tackled the bigger problem, I'm not sure it's going to have the impact that folks really expect. You mentioned that at GSK, you found that you collected 15 petabytes of data of which only one petabyte was structured, so you had to make sense of all that unstructured data. What did you learn about that process, about how to unlock value from unstructured data as a result of that? Yeah, and I think this is something, I think it's extremely important in the unstructured data to apply advanced analytics against the data to go through a process of making sense of that information, and a lot of folks talk about, or have talked about historically, around text mining, of trying to extract an entity out of unstructured data and using that for the value. There's a few steps before you even get to that point, and first of all, it's classifying the information to understand which documents do you care about and which documents do you not care about, and I always use the story that in this vast amount of documents, there's going to be, somebody has probably uploaded the cafeteria menu from 10 years ago, that has no scientific value, whereas a protocol document for a clinical trial has significant value, you don't want to look through manually a billion documents to separate those, so you have to apply the technology even in that first step of classification, and then there's another number of steps that ultimately lead you to understanding the relationship of the knowledge that's in the documents. A side question on that, so you had discussed, okay, if it's a menu, you get rid of it, but there's certain restrictions where you've got to keep data for decades. It struck me, what about work in process, especially in the pharmaceutical industry? I mean, post-federal rules of civil procedure, it was everybody looking for a smoking gun, so how are organizations dealing with what to keep and what to get rid of? Yeah, and I think, certainly the thinking has been to remove the excess, and it's to your point, how do you draw the line as to what is excess, right? So you don't want to just keep every document because then, if an organization is involved in any type of litigation and there's disclosure requirements, you don't want to have to have thousands of documents. At the same time, there are requirements, and so it's like a lot of things. It's figuring out how do you abide by the requirements, but that is not an easy thing to do, and it really is another driver. Certainly, document retention has been a big thing over a number of years, but I think people have not applied advanced analytics to the level that they can to really help support that. Another Einstein from I'd keep everything you must, but no more. So you put forth a proposal where you basically have this sort of three approaches, well, combined three approaches, the crawlers to go, the spiders to go out and do the discovery, and I presume that's where the classification is done on. That's really the identification of all of the source information, so that's kind of stepped in. Find out what you have. Step two was the data repository, putting that in, and I thought it was, when I heard you, I said, okay, it must be a logical data repository. You said you basically, oh, the CIO, we're copying all the data and putting it into essentially one place. A physical location, yes. And then, so I got another question I have, and then use bots and the pipeline to move the data, and then you sort of drew the diagram of the backend, all the databases, unstructured, structured, and then all the fun stuff up front. The visualization and all the things you use. Which people love to focus on the fun stuff, right? Especially, you can't tell you how many articles are on, you've got to apply deep learning and machine learning, and that's where the answers are. We have to have the data, and that's the piece that people are missing. So my question there is, and you had this tactical mindset, it seems like you picked a good workload, the clinical trials, and you had, at least conceptually, a good chance of success. Is that a fair statement? Well, the clinical trials was one aspect. Again, we tackled the entire data landscape, so it was all of the data across all of R&D. It wasn't limited to just, you know, that's top down and bottom up, so the bottom up is tackle everything in the landscape. The top down is what's important to the organization for decision making. So it was essentially the entire R&D application portfolio. Both internal and external. Okay, so my follow up question there is, so that largely was kind of an inside the four walls of GSK workload, or not necessarily. My question is, what about, you hear about these emerging edge applications, and that's got to be a nightmare for what you described. In other words, putting all the data into one physical place. It's like, it must be like a snake swallowing a basketball, so thoughts on that. I think some of it really does depend on, you're always going to have these, IoT is another example where it's a large amount of streaming information, and so I'm not proposing that all data in every format and every location needs to be centralized and homogenized. I think you have to add some intelligence on top of that, but certainly from an edge perspective or an IoT perspective or sensors, the data that you want to then make decisions around, so you're probably going to have a filter level that will impact those things coming in, then you filter it down to where you're going to really want to make decisions on that, and then that comes together with the other. So it's a prioritization exercise, and that presumably can be automated. Right, but I think we always have these cases where we can say, well, what about this case, and I guess what I'm saying is, I've not seen organizations tackle their own data landscape challenges and really do it in an aggressive way to get value out of the data that's within their four walls. It's always, like I mentioned in the keynote, it's always let's do a very small proof of concept, let's take a very narrow chunk, and what ultimately ends up happening is that becomes the only solution they build, and then they go to another area and they build another solution, and that's why we end up with 15 or 20 fragments. Doctor, you had a great point about that. The conventional wisdom is you start small and you grow it from there, you fail, and that's not how you get big things done. Well, that's not how you support analytic algorithms like machine learning and deep learning. You can't feed those just fragmented data of one aspect of your business and expect it to learn intelligent things to then make recommendations. You've got to have a much broader perspective. I want to ask you about one statistic you shared. You found 26,000 relational database schemas for capturing experimental data and you standardized those into one. How? Yeah, I mean, we took advantage of the Tamer technology that Michael Stonebreaker created here at MIT a number of years ago, which is really, again, it's applying advanced analytics to the data and using the content of the data and the characteristics of the data to go from dispersed schemas into a unified schema. So if you look across 26,000 schemas using machine learning, you then can understand what's the consolidated view that gives you one perspective across all of those different schemas? Because ultimately, when you give people flexibility, they love to take advantage of it, but it doesn't mean that they're actually doing things in an extremely different way. Because ultimately, they're capturing the same kind of data, they're just calling things different names and they might be using different formats. But in that particular case, we use Tamer very heavily and that, again, is back to my example of using advanced analytics on the data to make it available to do the fun stuff, the visualization and the advanced analytics. So, Michael, last question is you well know that the CDO rule of role emerged in these highly regulated industries, and I guess in the case of pharma, quasi-regulated industries, but now it seems to be permeating all industries. We have Gokalon from McDonald's and virtually every industry, at least thinking about this role or has some kind of de facto CDO. So, if you were slotted in to a CDO role, let's make it generic, I know it depends on the industry, but where do you start as a CDO? For an organization, large company that doesn't have a CDO, even a mid-sized organization, where do you start? Yeah, I mean, my approach is that a true CDO is maximizing the strategic value of data within the organization. It isn't a regulatory requirement. I know a lot of the banks started there because they needed someone to be responsible for data quality and data privacy, but for me, the most critical thing is understanding the strategic objectives of the organization and how will data be used differently in the future to drive decisions and actions and the effectiveness of the business. In some cases, I mean, there was a lot of discussion around monetizing the value of data. People immediately took that that can we sell our data and make money as a different revenue stream. I'm not a proponent of that. It's internally monetizing your data. How do you triple the size of the business by using data as a strategic advantage? And how do you change the executive so what is good enough today is not good enough tomorrow because they are really focused on using data as their decision-making tool. And that, to me, is the difference that a CDO needs to make is really using data to drive those strategic decision points. And that nuance you mentioned, I think is really important. Indapal Bhandari, who's the Chief Data Officer of IBM, often says, you know, start with monitoring. How can you monetize the data? And you're right. I don't think he means selling the data. How does data contribute, if I could rephrase what you said, contribute to the value of the organization? That could be cutting costs. That could be driving new revenue streams. That could be saving lives if you're a hospital, improving productivity. Yeah, and I think what I've shared, typically shared with executives when I've been in the CDO role is that they need to change their behavior, right? If a CDO comes into an organization and a year later, the executives are still making decisions on the same data, you know, power points with spinning logos, and they said, ooh, we've got to have, if they're still making decisions that way, then the CDO has not been successful. It has to, the executives have to change what their level of expectation is in order to make a decision. Change agents, top down, bottom up. Last question. We're going back to GSK. But now that they've completed this massive data consolidation project, how are things different for that business? Yeah, I mean, you look, Hal Barron joined as the president of R&D about a year and a half ago, and his primary focus is using data and analytics and machine learning to drive the decision making in the discovery of a new medicine. And the environment that has been created is a key component to that strategic initiative. And so they are actually completely changing the way they're selecting new targets for new medicines based on data and analytics. Mark, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. Great keynote this morning. You're welcome. All right, to keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, Dave Vellante with Paul Gillan. We're right back from MIT.


Hi, my name is Hosefi Nkarujuan. I heard about the bootcamp from LinkedIn. Sometimes I have an encounter with the tutors, which when I received the email about the bootcamp starting that I was selected, I was very excited because being tutored by D Brown tutors is a real opportunity. Though my laptop was 40, I had to take a loan to get the laptop so that you know how serious I have to participate. So if you are not participating in the bootcamp, you are missing a lot. Prior to the bootcamp, I have lived through experience in Power Platform, do through some webinars from D Brown as well, and I have been following them on LinkedIn. So I follow everything they do. I attend their webinars, raise the webinars, toss the webinars at times when I am chance. So but after the bootcamp, during the bootcamp, I really have a lot of more experience, a lot of new knowledges, which I have added to my skill set. If I am chance, I will really get to work with D Brown, and if I am not chance, I will stay searching for job and data analytics. I believe even if I am not in D Brown, I am still with D Brown. Thank you very much.


Education is a human right, a public good and a public responsibility. The United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 24th of January as International Day of Education in celebration of the role of education for peace and development. I don't think we can overemphasize what power education wields. Part of what we're discussing today, imagine if we were well educated, well informed on certain things. I think it will do us a lot of good, I mean there are some things we will not struggle with even as a continent, as a people because now we understand, you know. So I mean for every opportunity to celebrate the space, we would always take on that opportunity. So I mean what major thing has education played, what role has education played in your life Mary? Excuse me, exposure, excuse me the ability to talk intelligently like you know, among my peers and there are just some basic things that like I would see businesses and I can tell if this person went to school and if this person didn't go to school. Education gives you a bit of finesse and adds you know a lot to my life. So it's done a lot for me, I'm grateful and I want to go farther like to take on more courses, masters, if possible PhD, you know because I can see what it does, it just opens up your intelligence to you know so many things, it seems little at first but it plays out in different areas of my life. So yes education is very important to me. How about you NJ, I was going to add that you know when we talk about education people should also understand there are informal education as well. So that was actually what I was about to say that education to me is learning and learning can be done anywhere in the school system, outside the school system, your environment. So the exposure you're talking about also by experiencing some of these things we get educated by traveling, going to learn things from other cultures and countries, we learn different things, we get educated so because there are a lot of people for example a lot of people who have never been to Nigeria or to Africa are being told that when they come to Nigeria or anywhere in Africa they're expecting to see animals just running alongside. So until you come to Africa then you see that that's not how it is, do you understand and when they come here they are re-educated about what they've been told and yes. So it's very very important, it gives you some level of confidence, knowledge is power so education is also gaining some from knowledge so definitely it gives you power to be able to achieve a lot of things in the world you know so it takes you as far as your eyes can see and that's why people go from degree to degree just trying to amass as much knowledge as they can. Alright so let's quickly go to what we found in the news, maybe I'll start with you. Chris and Broharie arrived Lagos to commission some projects. We have the Lakey Dealsil port yesterday and today we're doing the 13 kilometer blue rail line. This took place today at the Marina train station I think they had some blockages today because he was coming in and the train network is to transit between Marina and mile 2 axis as part of the state measure to reduce road congestion. I think this is actually a great idea and I hope we can maintain it because that's really where our problem is today but yeah, good luck to him. Moving on. So my news story is from the CBN Govno, Govno of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin MFLA has said CBN will not extend the January 31st deadline for the old notes. So and in other news a lot of agencies and a lot of companies even banks have been pleading and trying to solicit for an extension and most of the time if you go to the ATM even since you know they claim that the notes should have been with the banks which was last year. So it's quite hard to see I don't know how we're going to achieve this whole transition and everything I don't know how it's going to be done because he even MFLA is pleading with EFCC because a lot of people have cash at home Nigerians are used to keeping cash at home. So now you're saying that there's going to be a transition for the notes, a lot of people you can take there's a limited amount of funds and cash you can take to the bank to make a deposit. So I'm sure a lot of people are looking for it. You know how to really make a deposit, I think more of the withdrawal that's the problem. I can't I can't pay in what I have but it is in withdrawing right if it was easy for instance if I took a billion to the bank and they will give me back the billion worth of the new notes, we'll not be having all this problem. No, but you cannot, I can't take the billion cash without flagging EFCC, that's the problem. So I don't think depositing is really their problem actually. It's part of it. So that's what I'm saying to you that depositing is might be a problem but it is not the major problem. The problem most of these people have that stock cash in the house is so if I go to the bank and I make this deposit what then happens when I want my money back, the real crux of the pain, the pain point for most people is that there's nothing to give me back in return. So if I give you a billionaire please return my one billionaire in the new currency and the civilian is trying to say no, we have a limited amount that we can give to you when you withdraw. So it's going to cost quite a bit. Yeah, it's a big issue. We will have that conversation on Friday. We have one of our in-house and friend of the house coming to discuss elaborately on that. In fact, tomorrow we're also discussing some issues around money. But speaking about money, my story is actually tied to yours because it's now interesting that kidnappers are demanding ransom in dollars. I mean, I remember Uti typing in the group that we have not even got into January 31st yet. I said, but that is the aftermath or this is the rather ripple effect of these kinds of policies. Already we are still trying to solve money kidnapping problem and we've been saying something that why don't we follow the money to apprehend these kidnappers and end their terror. But now we are now seeing that some kidnappers are now demanding a ransom of dollars. So according to the report, one out of three of the kidnappers that were kidnapped near the Fulani settlement in Iwotown in an ocean state had been rescued. So the thing is, it's not like he was rescued per se. They ran into some sets of hunters. And I think in that process, there was a squabble and in that process, he ran away. And they were about eight gunmen. And two other people are still in their custody. And from the report, they reached out to the families and they asked them for a five million Naira ransom. We did. Now later came back to say, okay, pay four million Naira, but you have to pay the people who have led in dollars. Now tell me, how do we move from here? It's a very sad situation. But hey, that's part of all our conversations today because these are the things that we say when we were not understanding the impact of, you know, not really taking ownership of your country.  So we take a break now. Hopefully we will be able to reconnect with Nama. So she will join the conversation and we'll discuss the Western influence on us as Africans. Stay with us.


How do we market our business during a national or international disaster? While I'm recording this, there has recently been the Turkey-Syria earthquake, which has, I think the death toll is at least 33,000 people at this point. It's incredible. I mean, I hope this is a once in a lifetime kind of situation. And naturally, everybody in the world is concerned about this. Everybody in the world is, so many people are trying to give back, and that's been, you know, hopefully, understandably, a lot on social media posts about this. And what I hear sometimes is certain people who believe in ethical business, ethical marketing, and they put out these rules. And I've heard of rules like ethical marketing during a disaster. And by the way, I'm in the United States. We have, sadly, mass shootings, police brutality that happen multiple times a year. Right? Like, how do I deal with this? Like, you know, and so the ethical marketing, some ethical marketing people give us some rules like, number one, do not say anything about your business. Number two, only talk about the event and how you're getting back. And number three, put a black square as your profile photo or some kind of solidarity profile image. And to me, I am natural rebel. I don't like rules. I don't like bureaucracy. And every time I see someone said, you must do this, I'm like, sorry, but I don't agree. I think, I think you're being too harsh.  Some people who don't like authoritarianism are very authoritarian. And I could be that sometimes too, right? Talk about no funnels or no, I always talk about rebels. You're always welcome to rebel against my teachings. I welcome rebels because I like to be challenged. I like to grow and learn. And so I don't like people following rules and go, I'm supposed to do this because it's the right etiquette right now, even if they, unless they feel authentic for it. If it comes out of you authentically, wonderful, do the black square, do the stop your talking about your business. But I think also for a lot of us, and this is, this is true compassion for small business owners, a lot of us can't stop marketing our business because we won't have enough business to survive. We won't have enough income to pay the rent. Oh, mass shooting. Okay, I'm going to stop promoting my launch for the next two weeks and therefore have, you know, nobody show up to my course and I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills. You know, it's like the mass shooting not only destroyed a lot of people's lives but also destroyed my business for for a quarter or something like that. It's like, no, I feel more compassion towards, well, because those are my people I feel compassion towards my small business owners like so. So what I do now I know what I do is an ideal, but it's authentic to me, and you have to sense out. I'm just giving you another example in other words, and I'm just giving you these two examples right one example is follow these rules black square or whatever solidarity profile image or or band on your profile image you know, in support of you know whatever you can do that if you want, you know, stop only post about how how you're giving back on to me to me. Again, this is my opinion. I don't know what's virtue signaling, and what's real. That's my problem. Like, I'm like, when I see people do this stuff I'm like, Sure, I could do that too but I don't feel authentic when I do that. I mourn privately. I don't mourn publicly. That's just my style. Right. You don't see me posting about the turkey series not that I don't have a heart. I'm crying privately and I'm like, it's devastating to me, but I don't go out and go. Well, as I said, some of you do it publicly and it's natural and authentic to you and you do it. You do you. For me, if I were to do it, it would feel to me like virtue signaling. That's how it would feel to me. And I'm not judging others who do it, because I don't know whether. But some people I kind of feel like, I'm not too judgmental, but there's some marketers right some marketers in my industry I'm like, Yeah, I don't know if you really feel that or you're doing this because it's good for your business to do so. To you know, like during the black, black lives matter really big. Everyone, you know not everyone but all the smart smart marketers had the black square and everything I'm like, I feel it too I'm in San Francisco I mean I'm in California of course I feel it. I'm in solidarity but I do that stuff privately.  I know I know I know. There's many reasons to do it publicly. But for some of us, it's more authentic to do it privately, and you should respect us for that. Right. So, if you have true compassion, right. So, so that's what I say and and so I don't believe in following those rules. But what I do, I just continue marketing my business like nothing happened. I know it's not ideal for my public image. People I'm sure are judging me and going George you have you have no heart. You're not championing the cause.  Turkey Syria, Ukraine, I did not publicly champion any of those causes. Because I don't care about them. Of course I do. I read about them more than you think, you know, and I talked to friends about them more than you think and I. Anyway, I, but I don't talk about publicly I just continue my business and you also notice that other people do the same thing too. So yes, there are others who also continue just marketing themselves doing their regular content. Like nothing happened, even though, but we don't know if they're warning or doing other things privately, not in the public eye, at least not in the social media channel. If you if it's natural to you if it feels right to do it then do it, then do it. But I don't think it should be a blanket. You must do this or otherwise you're not a good person kind of a kind of a thing so I hope that my example will be one extreme for you. Because oh, that's possible too. And of course there's the other extreme of, I'm going to shut down my business for two months, you know, and only talk about the talk about the cause, which, like that both I think are applicable. If it's done authentically. So, I hope this is helpful. Let's say that you do have a program or service that's related to the healing that's going on in your cultural space in your national space. And remember that it is a resource for people. Sure, there is a there's a price attached to it because it's part of your business, but any product or service that is has a positive transformational effect, my opinion, is either worth paying for or is worth donating or is worth giving back to in some way, right. Like, and so you might, if you wanted to do some kind of healing experience, again related to your expertise, or some transformational thing that's related. There's a couple ideas, one, you know, some people already doing this like hey, I'm launching this course and part of the proceeds are going to go to support this cause. And it's very common to do right. But if you had a program or service that's literally helps people heal from the situation, then you could say, I'm doing this program, because I really believe, I really believe in the power of this kind of healing, or transformation or process to to you know, for the benefit of the situation. And I, because it's part of my business there is a fee attached to it. And here's where you may, because of the situation you may want to play with pay from the heart kind of model or some kind of sliding scale or a donation based model. Or you could do the kind of thing that I usually do would just free to attend paid recording kind of experience it's like, it gave you attend. It's free. If you cannot attend you can buy it as a nominal price later, maybe even as a, you know, as a donation or part of the go to the campaign, because at the end of the day, when you have people interact with you in a program. They're more likely to continue working with you in some way. Of course, people don't expect people have various kinds of expectations for what can be paid where you can write what can be sliding scale. When they're working with you one to one. They know they're taking the most time and energy from you. And it's least reasonable to say well sure I can do it for free because during a national disaster or sure I'm doing it pay because it's my likelihood. When it's a group situation, people have a bit more expectation that there's a bit more of a flexibility with with the pricing so I hope this is helpful and if you have any other thoughts about how someone might market their program or business during a crisis or during a cultural moment that needs healing. Please comment below and give us your examples if you'd like.