Not long ago, we published a video about how science seems to have its roots in ancient spirituality, and today we're going to go even further. You see, when we discuss the bridge between science and spirituality, there is a big problem that exists that is actually holding us back as a species, but it's not necessarily a problem with science or spirituality, but rather the reaction of the collective mind to new discoveries and scientific approaches to spiritual experiences. Throughout history, it's no secret that almost every great mind and idea has been met with opposition and skepticism. In fact, many of the great discoveries that today we take for granted originally were seen as hogwash, or even at times, silly, nonsense superstition. Galileo's heliocentric model of the universe was hugely controversial for its time. Lemaitre's theory of the Big Bang was met with rigid skepticism, and even Newton had been reluctant to publish his calculus because he feared controversy and criticism. Right from its inception as an academic discipline, science itself faced criticism. But now the question is, why? Why are humans so slow to adapt to new ideas? Why are we so rigid, quick to shoot down ideas that change the way that we see ourselves and the world? If we really wanted to advance as a species, the last thing we should be doing is closing our minds to new ideas. But yet, this mindset is nearly all-pervading in the world. Now, don't get me wrong. I think it's a good thing to approach new ideas with a healthy skepticism. But when we resist new ideas fundamentally, do not truly listen to the new material or wisdom and even become mean, derogatory or insulting towards people who don't share the same perspective as you, that's when we create serious divisions that can impact or even stunt our collective evolution for generations. Today, we're going to look at what causes us to assume a position of skepticism in the first place and what it says about us, our way of life, and ultimately, how we approach our relationship with the universe around us. Here we go. Back in 2015, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist from Cambridge University and author of more than 90 scientific papers and nine books, gave a lecture on the nature of consciousness and spoke about scientific approaches to spiritual experiences. He summarized that at the moment, there are two main views on the nature of our reality. The first view is that we live in a universe that is entirely unconscious and has little bits of consciousness sprinkled about, like within the brains of living things, and ultimately is just the product of complex but purely physical coincidences without purpose. Now, this is a concept that we know today as scientific materialism and it posits that other than ourselves, and of course, aliens if they exist, everything in existence is fully unconscious. For the majority of the scientific community, this is the stance or foundational approach that they take when observing new ideas or theories. Now, interestingly, the origins of scientific materialism lie in many ancient schools of thought too, ranging from Indian to Greek philosophy that was largely based on early ideas about atomism. Greek philosophers, such as Leopicus and Democritus, were some of the first people to be labeled as physical, which in Greek translated as a natural philosopher because they investigated natural causes, often excluding any role for gods in the creation or operation of the world. This eventually led to fully developed systems such as Epicureanism, which sought to explain everything that exists as the product of atoms falling and swerving and a void. Now, according to Rupert Sheldrake, this scientific materialism is the first common perspective. The second perspective is, as you might be guessing, seeing the universe as being permeated with consciousness. We find today that almost every form of religion and spirituality, tribal faith or ancient mystery school, held closely this idea that everything in some way was a part of the divine mind or a universal oneness, and that our world was within this oneness and the oneness was naturally conscious and imbued all that existed with this consciousness. Nowadays, a middle ground has appeared in some academic circles, a school of thought known as panpsychism, which is a belief that there is an underlying mind or consciousness even on a quantum level of electrons that moves throughout all of nature. And as a result, a large new wave of scientists are changing their position from rigid old-school materialism to this new middle ground. The list includes some pretty famous names. Rudolph Pirals, a physicist who played a major role in the Manhattan Project, rejected materialism saying, the premise that you can describe in terms of physics, the whole function of a human being, including knowledge and consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing. Schrödinger, you know, the guy with the famous cat, stated that consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms, for consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else. And even Heisenberg was quoted saying that, the ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct actuality of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible. Atoms are not things. Now, you might be wondering why I'm rambling on about all this. And the thing is, it's because this worldview directly affects how we interpret spiritual experiences in a scientific way. Spiritual experiences, by their very definition, are relative to conscious experiences. On a base level, they occur within ourselves. Or more importantly, within our own minds, within our consciousness, and our perspective of reality. Does this mean then, that whenever we have a significant spiritual experience, that it's all in our heads? Well, today, everyone tends to agree that the mind can be changed through mindful meditation, meaningful experiences, and of course, shamanic plant medicine ceremonies, or even a near-death experience. But what makes all the difference is in how we interpret those experiences. From a historic or materialistic point of view, yes, these experiences happen, but they happen within our mind, and are the result of biological impulses, the release of neurochemicals, or changes in the electrical signals within the brain. In this perspective, something divine can exist, but only within our head, as our own invention. This is nothing new, however, as it bears striking resemblance to the school of metaphysical naturalism that we spoke about earlier. Naturally, this is the default position of educated people in academia, and is the standard secularist view of the world. Historically, with the rise and dominance of Christianity in the West and the later spread of Islam in the East, metaphysical naturalism was generally abandoned by intellectuals as silly superstition. As a result, there is little evidence for it in medieval philosophy. The problem that no one seems to acknowledge, though, is that the assumptions on which philosophical materialism are based are just that. Assumptions. Throughout the Middle Ages, this idea of a divine mind was extremely popular. People believed everything existed in harmony and order, and that everything had an established place in a universal hierarchy known as the chain of being. Now, don't get us wrong. People have interpreted and used the chain concept to their own advantage countless times, so as always, please feel free to do your own research and form your own perspective on what you believe. The point is, though, there was this predominant belief that there was a universal spirit or soul that permeated all of nature. Even more so, completely the opposite of what we spoke about earlier, the Middle Age scientists or philosophers thought that everything was alive and had some form of soul. Following Aristotle, all beings had souls, which gave form to their bodies. In more modern languages, it seems as if Aristotle believed that the mechanism behind self-formation and auto responses within our body and those of plants and animals were the result of a guiding, yet underlying consciousness. In much the same way, animals were said to have souls, which provided basic movement patterns, instincts, and even emotions. In fact, even the word animal itself comes from the Latin animalis, which meant having soul or breath, where we as humans were different, however, in that we possessed different elements of which made up our overall spirit. So not only did we have a plant or earthly element to our soul which shaped the body and our embryo and enabled us to self-heal, and an animalistic part which gave us our emotions and our ability to interact with the natural world, but we also possessed a rational conscious mind which operated in the world through language. According to the legendary philosopher Thomas Aquinas, this rational mind was open to the Spirit of God, which could be experienced through spiritual acts such as prayer, meditation, and chanting. During the 17th century, however, the scientific revolution was described as such because it rejected this view of nature entirely. Many of the early Gnostic scientists that we spoke about in the last science episode, such as Copernicus, Galileo, and even Newton, began working at a time when the Christian church had created a huge split in the field of science. Science was emerging, describing the function of things, but the church had to keep its world views intact, and so the general belief system adapted so that there were still God, angels, our main man, JC, but the natural physical world in which we lived was stripped of its soul and seen as something purely mechanical, governed by impersonal forces. As a result, any spiritual significance to the physical world began to be seen as heresy by the church, as spiritual miracles were only seen to happen by God. Now, the concept of Cartesian dualism also comes into this, but this is a huge topic of its own, so we're not going to cover this today, but suffice to say, there were debates about whether the mind and body were indeed separate at all, which culminated in the dualism of religion and science. Religion got what was left of the Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies and the whole realm of spirit, and science was left with the pure physical mechanics of nature. Fast forward to the 19th century, a lot of scientists didn't like this idea of dualism and instead wanted one singular branch of study. There were a few theories at odds, such as idealism, stating that everything was in the mind and that even matter was simply a more dense version of the mind, or a materialistic view, that everything was just made of matter. We know from science today that it was this idea of materialism that took off, but let's look at why. Again, in the words of Rupert Sheldrake, the reason materialism took off wasn't because it was the best theory for science, but because by its very nature it is atheistic. And for various economical and political reasons, many people wanted to undermine the power of the Church, especially in states such as France and Germany, which were reactionary states at heart. As a result, matter is all there is, became the dominant go-to view for science by the end of the 19th century and still largely persists today. With this in mind, it's easy to see why and how people are naturally skeptical of a new discovery. Unless it fits into the materialistic view, it is no longer considered science. As the modern field of science has advanced, we gain new and exciting ways to study the world around us and collect empirical evidence. The problem is, since spirituality was severed from science, it has to some extent been left behind in the eyes of the public. Imagine for one second that the split never occurred, that science and spirit had evolved together as one discipline into our modern age. Think about what kind of proof mechanisms and tests we would be able to perform to accurately measure and make use of the spiritual truths within the world. The mind really does boggle at the possibilities. We know such fields like quantum physics and parapsychology are taking cues from early Gnostic scientists, but they are undoubtedly going to run into the same problem. Not only has our idea of spirituality hardly evolved since it was severed, but neither has our understanding. If we really knew, and I mean really knew, just how much energy and underlying connection there is in our world today, in the plants and the trees, in the air that we breathe, in the ground that we walk on, we would never feel alone or dwarfed by our misunderstanding of the universe. This, to us, is probably why people naturally gravitate towards a sense of skepticism when a new discovery is revealed. Materialism posits that this is all there is, except when we make a new discovery at any point in history, one that challenges and redefines our existence, not only do we not want to believe it, but we can barely comprehend it. And naturally, as humans, we deny that which we don't understand. It takes small numbers of people starting to take these ideas, play with them, implement them, and see them work in their lives. That slowly gets people talking about it until it hits a critical mass, and then suddenly everyone seems to wake up very quickly to this truth, and the cycle repeats again. And on this note, there is one more thing we must talk about briefly before we bring this conversation to a close, and this is the subject of academic jargon. On a purely physical front, the growing inaccessibility of science to the wider public is an issue that has been becoming more and more apparent in recent years, especially since the invention of the Internet. Take a moment and think about how you hear about and see new scientific journals or discoveries. Can you say for a fact that you read the actual publication and paper published and peer-reviewed by the authors? Or do you, like most of us, hear about these new discoveries through media outlets, articles, or other online sources like social media? And let me ask you another question. Do any of us actually know how to find and read an actual scientific paper? Unless you are in an academic institution, such as a university or college, chances are you probably do the former. This presents a huge problem for both the scientific community and the wider public, as it seems like only those within the bounds of academia can access academic work. If you take a look at any of the research paper sharing sites, such as JSTOR or research.org, they all require monthly subscriptions or pay per view that most people can't afford or justify paying for. And the other issue is, of course, the language. Most scientific papers are written by scientists, for scientists, and therefore make use of extensive jargon and complex language that is specific to certain disciplines. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing for the research, it does mean that the general public continually struggle to understand and even read new papers when they come out. The ultimate consequence of all of this is that it fosters a growing distrust of the scientific community. The whole, scientists are hiding the truth from us thing, and gives rise to more and more people who present alternative theories in an effort to discredit others, which ultimately creates an environment of fear and mistrust. Luckily though, there are websites that are appearing and sharing free research, and we'll leave links to some of them in the descriptions for you to check out below. To end with, I'd like to propose an idea that might seem kind of radical, but it's a great way to openly engage with a new idea about the world within you. It's the idea that human consciousness is a measurable field, and it exists within and throughout all of us and across the entire planet. Within this consciousness field exists a reflection of our thoughts, feelings and beliefs. However, when a new idea or theory is proposed or a new discovery is made, it takes some time to integrate into our shared perspective of reality, and it needs to find a place where it can fit or adapt into the consciousness field, so to speak. Until that energy can merge together with the collective whole, it is bound to uproot and shake up old ideas and paradigms, which is why people get upset when you tell them their perspective of the world is outdated. Nobody wants to hear that, you just gotta help them recognize the value of the new ideas in the process of the transition. But then, it's just an idea to think about. So with that, thank you so much for watching. If you haven't yet, please be sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell for more videos just like these. We post new Spirit Science episodes every week, so we'll see you in about seven days for another journey down the rabbit hole. Toodles!


Patriot Prime Reviews is a channel for adult collectors and may not be suitable for children under 13 years of age. Viewer discretion is advised. Hey, what's going on guys? Patriot Prime here once again with another toyhacks.com sponsored review. But before we get started I need you guys to do me a favor. If you're watching this video right here and are not a subscriber of Patriot Prime Reviews, please hit that subscribe button right now. It won't cost you a thing but will help me and my channel out tremendously. Now, on to the decals. And the set we're looking at in this video is the brand new decal set for the Warfors Cybertron Siege Netflix Megatron with Pinpointer and Lionizer. And this is a pretty big set with lots of options. You've got two decal sheets on foil backing and two decal sheets on vinyl. So without further ado, let's take a look at Megatron both before and after toyhacks decals. And welcome to Patriot Prime Reviews. Straight out of the packaging, the Battle Masters Lionizer and Pinpointer are very colorful and great callbacks to their original Generation 1 toys. Taking a closer look at Lionizer, primarily orange and silver. You've got a translucent blade up here at the top. Got some painted blue eyes, lots of molded details. And that's about it. Quickly transforming him to weapon mode. You'll see that everything pretty much carries over from robot mode or beast mode. You've got silver down here for the blade. There's the translucent plastic up top and he now has a translucent handle. Now let's take a look at Pinpointer. Pretty much the same thing. Lots of great molded detail. He's got a silver face and that's pretty much it for this guy. Let's go ahead and quickly transform him into weapon mode. And just like Lionizer, lots of molded detail carry over into weapon mode. He looks really, really good. He just needs something else to really make him pop. So there we have both Battle Masters Lionizer and Pinpointer before and after. Now let's take a look at Lionizer once again first in weapon mode. He gets a brand new decal right there along the blade on both sides. On the side of the figure you've got decals right there. And that's pretty much it for weapon mode. Quickly transforming back to beast mode. All the decals carry over. You've got the orange decal right there on top of the weapon. The silver decals are now on the hips and he has a new decal right there around his waist. Now the easiest way to apply that is to just pop the arm off that way you can get in there and make sure the decal is secured. And that is pretty much it for Lionizer. Now taking a look at Pinpointer. Pinpointer gets an absurd amount of decals for such a small figure. They knocked it out of the park with this guy. He looks awesome. Here on weapon mode the first thing you probably notice is the missile pods have new decals. There's also silver decals around the edge and some red decals there underneath. Along the side you've got new red decals there. Blue decals about in the middle. And that's it for weapon mode. Quickly transforming him to robot mode. Still a lot of great decals. He gets this little tiny gold decal there for the crest. You get quite a few options or extras of those. And Toyhacks got mine on the first try. He also gets new decals there on the chest. New decals for the arms. Blue there on the knees. And red decals down there on the shins. I mean this guy, whoops didn't get him transformed all the way. There we go. I mean this guy looks awesome. It was almost like putting decals on a deluxe figure for Pinpointer. So there you go guys. One final look at Lionizer and Pinpointer after. In vehicle mode straight out of the packaging. Megatron looks more like a stealth tank now. Thanks to his darker color scheme. And that darker color scheme looks really good on this figure. You've got blacks, two tone gray, silver. You've got some red areas to help break up all that dark color. And some yellow headlights right here on the front. And really that's about it. This is a vehicle mode that we're all really familiar with. Thanks to this version being released now four different times. A really good looking tank except for the feet hanging off the back. But it is what it is. And I think this looks really good as is. So here's one final look at Megatron in vehicle mode before. And after. Now the first thing you may be noticing is the brand new armor plating that Megatron has right here above the tank treads. I think that looks really good especially with the rivets. Now right here you do get the option where you can have a plain armor plate. Or one with a Decepticon insignia. And I of course always go for the insignias. Along the sides you also have some red lights right there. And right there along the turret a P38 decal. And we all know what P38 stands for. Along the front of the vehicle. Megatron gets a new decal right there for his hatch. And the squiggly lines right there along the front. Which is a representation of his generation one self. You do get options you can have either the squiggly lines there. Or these plain decals. Now I tried the plain silver before. But it just blended in too much. I really didn't notice a difference. So I went with the squiggly line instead. Also what is up with these Autobot symbols for Megatron. I know he turned Autobot in IDW. But I swear as long as I still function. My Megatron will never wear an Autobot insignia. Moving on to the other decals. You have new decals right there on the front. And headlights right on the front of the treads. On top of the vehicle you've got these lighted decals there. A decal there. And yellow decals right there within the red. The back of the vehicle you've got these purple and silver decals on the rear of the turret. And on the back of the vehicle he has taillights. Or brake lights. You know you gotta be safe when you're the evil ruler of the Decepticons. So there you go guys. There is one final look at Megatron in Tank Mode. After. In Robot Mode straight out of the packaging Megatron looks amazing. As I said in my video review of this figure. This is by far my favorite use of the Siege Megatron mold. I have all four versions. This is by far my favorite. My only complaint with the figure is right here on the head. His brow. They did not color in the triangles. Those triangles should have been black.  Lots of great molded details as we all know from the Siege Megatron mold. Great paint scheme. The paint scheme on this guy looks fantastic with all the silver, the gray, the two tone look. Especially down there on the legs that looks really good. Don't really understand why they gave him all the splotches on his underwear. But hey it's nothing I can't live with. Nice shiny paint applications down there on his torso control panel. Two tone look there on the fusion cannon. The sword. Sword has lots of nice details but it's kind of plain. But no big complaint there because I posed my Megatron with the sword attached to the back. Back of the figure more of that two tone look. I mean this is a great looking Megatron. My absolute favorite version and I can't wait to see how Toy Hacks improves on this already awesome looking figure. So there you go guys one final look at Megatron in robot mode before and after. And wow does Megatron look amazing now. First off my big complaint with the figure has been fixed. Megatron now has new decals right there in the brow to give it a black look. Also up here on his helmet he gets these new silver enhancing decals that kind of add a little bit more flair to the helmet. Those go all the way around and on the back of the helmet as well. If I will focus in you've got that little yellow triangle. Now you also see a new decal here on the chest. It kind of covers up all the battle damage. Though some of the battle damage does show through slightly but it's really not that bad. You do get a couple options. You get the clear chest here or the generation one inspired squiggly lines. I went with the clear version because I had the Toy Hacks decal set for the first siege Megatron and I went with the G1 squiggly lines on that one. Megatron also gets new silver enhancing decals right here on the shoulders. Little decal right there. Yellow decals right there on the bicep. Down here on the control panel area he gets these new red decals. And underneath the arm decals right there. He also gets a new red decal there and a yellow decal that enhances the yellow that was already there from before. He also gets a new decal here on the crotch. On the legs, new kneecaps. Very subtle decals right there. Still looks really good. You've got some of the red that carries over from vehicle mode. Inside the legs you get new decals here. And yellow decals right there. And then finishing up on the feet. You get these decals that go all the way around which looks like it adds some tread to his feet. Now taking a look at the sword. The sword gets new chrome blades. I love that. That looks really good. The original siege Megatron had that chrome look on his sword as well. And speaking of siege Megatron or the original. Here he is with a couple of the options that I mentioned earlier. Now there is an option with the Netflix Megatron to give him a black helmet. And I did that with my original siege Megatron just so I can see what it looked like. It looks okay. I mean it may have looked better on him. But I wanted to go with the silver because that's kind of the way he looks. I wanted him to be cohesive. But this doesn't really look that bad and actually kind of adds a new look to that figure. And you can see the generation one squiggly lines there on the chest. Now speaking of the chest a couple other decals that I almost forgot about. You've got these new black decals right here. And new decals there on the vent. So all in all I am really loving how the Netflix Megatron looks now. I almost forgot to show off his fusion cannon. If you take a look here he gets a new silver stripe along the barrel. And on this side I really like this one. It looks like a charging indicator going from green to yellow to red. So that is really really cool. I am loving this Megatron figure. I couldn't be happier. This thing looks great. So there you go guys one final look at Netflix Megatron after. Toyhacks really surprised me with their decal set for the Netflix Megatron 3 pack. I really didn't think Megatron needed that much improvement. But Toyhacks proved me wrong. Now granted Lionizer isn't that much to write home about. But Pinpointer and Megatron look fantastic. My hats off to the design team. This is a fun set to apply. This is a challenging set to apply. And it's great that they include so many options and extra decals for you in case you screw up. Now if you are interested in a decal set for your Netflix Megatron 3 pack. There will be a link in the description below. Now if you enjoyed the video don't forget to like. Don't forget to subscribe. And don't forget to click that bell icon to get notified when I upload new reviews. Once again this is Patriot Prime. Signing out. Ho-wah!


Okay, I think it's close enough to 10 o'clock that we can go ahead and get started. Please let me know if you guys can't hear me or if the sound is not perfect. I will certainly try to fix that for you. Just let me know in chat if you'd like. Or if you have any questions during the presentation, you can also send that to me via chat. And I will just send out a chat message in case the sound is completely muted for some of you. While I'm waiting for a response to that, welcome to the presentation. I'm very glad to have you all here today. My name is Craig Lefteroff, and I am within Nebraska Library Commission. And today we are going to be talking a bit about our WordPress network. We have a WordPress network called Nebraska Libraries on the web. And I'll give you a little information about that. I am not going to give you an hour-long PowerPoint, but I do want to present some slides to start off to give you some basic information about what we do and how the network operates. Just a second. Okay, so a lot of information on this slide. Basically, there are two people here at the commission who are responsible for the WordPress network. My colleague Diane deals with issues relating to installation, configuration, backups, security hardware, and all that sort of back-end stuff. My role is more or less to help librarians and people in Nebraska Libraries get set up with websites and tweak those websites to their specifications. So if there's something that they specifically need their website to do, if they have a catalog search that they want embedded, or if they want their website to look a certain way, I'll help them with those sort of aesthetic features. If they want a certain degree of functionality, I'll try to find a plug-in that will satisfy those requirements. And also, I do create new sites by cloning, and we'll talk a bit more about that in the following slides. Okay, so this is our website, essentially. This is the front page of our network where people go to get information. It's free to Nebraska Libraries, and as part of the accreditation process in our state, Nebraska Libraries can get points for posting certain things on their website, things like policies or various other resources that they offer. So Nebraska Libraries on the web gives them a free way to do this. We don't charge any money, of course. The graphic by the tree with the bird says that we currently host more than 50 of Nebraska's library websites, and that's actually a little update. At this point, we have over 100, and I've got a chat. Just one second. Or not. False alarm. Oh, okay. Just one second. I want to make sure that the mic is working properly. Okay. Well, I'm waiting for a response about that. Let me go ahead and continue. As I said, we have over 100 websites, and we also provide websites for the four systems that administer our Nebraska Public Libraries. The program began in 2010, so it's been running for about six or seven years. Before I go on, is anyone else having issues with the sound? I have one person who apparently can't hear. Okay. Alrighty, thank you. It appears that the sound is working. I just have one person who's having issues. So let me just respond and see if we can work that out quickly. Hopefully that resolved the issue. So it's been around for quite a few years, and we have 225 different users on our site at the moment. As I said, Diane mostly takes care of the more hardware, sort of techy, server-y stuff. I can tell you that our network is installed on a Windows machine, and that's apparently relatively uncommon. I think most people are still using Apache for their WordPress network. If you guys do have any questions about the installation or configuration, I will be sending out an email after this presentation that has some resources with information about that. If you have any questions specifically for us, I can take those, ask Diane, and then get back to you. Okay, so I mentioned that we clone websites, and the way we do that is by a plugin called NSCloner. It looks like this. You can buy all sorts of upgrades, of course, as is usual with plugins, but the functionality that we rely on is mostly included in the free service. We do have one site set up as a default. It looks like this. And it's not an empty site. We have some information there, some pages already set up. You can see, hopefully, calendar, contact for kids and teens, all these pages that we have included on the default site. We also have a fake post with a fake comment on the default site. And the reason we do that is because when we clone something, it's essentially just a standard duplication of what we had. This way the site arrives with a bit of information, so our libraries aren't just starting from scratch. They already have some guidance as far as how pages work, how posts work, what you can do with comments. And they can go in and rename the pages if they don't necessarily want to have a Nebraska Resources page. They don't have to keep that. They can transform it into something else. Pictures of local history, anything that they want. So with that said, let's get away from PowerPoint for a bit. I'm just going to escape out of here and switch over to the site that we made. So we've been having issues with our network leading up to this presentation. Of course, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. So I went ahead and duplicated a site for us to use during the presentation today. Looks like this. As you can see, it's pretty much identical to our default site. And this is how it would arrive for one of our libraries who wanted to use the service. Once they've been added to the network as an administrator for their site, when they're logged in, they'll see this black bar at the top. And that allows them to go in and customize anything that they want to change on their site. If they click on customize, they have all these options that are available to them. So they can change colors. They can change the title of the site, the site identity. They can change the header image, which is something we'll circle back to, menus, widgets, and so on. Or they can start from kind of a grand perspective and change the theme. A WordPress theme, as many of you know, is essentially the way that a site is controlled, the way it's presented in terms of its look and its functionality. The default site arrives with 2010, which is very stripped down, very basic. So if someone wants to get a little fancier, they can go to their customizer and change it. We have 71 different themes running on our network right now. That includes child themes, which again we'll address later. But basically you can go in and just find something that looks appealing to you, click on live preview, and it will show up with your current content included. So let's try graphene. So you can see it makes major differences in the look and structure of the site. In some cases there are problems that might arise with the theme, things that you'd want to change.  Probably not a good idea. If you don't like a theme, you can always click X to exit out of it or go to change and change it to something else. One thing to keep in mind with themes, especially for those of you who are current users of our site, or service rather, different themes will have varying levels of functionality. So some themes are going to let you change all sorts of things under the sun on your site. You can see that we've got basic stuff like site identity colors, header image, and so on here. But if we change it to something that's a little bit more intricate, let's find something intricate. Usually they hang out towards the bottom. Point sounds like a good one. If we change it over to point, instead of just a basic list of stuff that we can change, we've got all sorts of different options. We've got our basics here, site identity colors, and so on. But if you go into theme options, you can change a plethora of things. Everything from the font to pagination, footers, single post, and so on. So aside from the look, the functionality is something that you'll also want to consider when selecting a theme. For those of you who aren't in our networks, or maybe dealing with a WordPress multi-site in your own state or thinking about setting up a multi-site installation, sometimes it's easiest if people want to change a lot of things to create a child theme. Let me switch over to our Network Admin page here. This would be my login, so I kind of have free reign to change a bunch of different stuff. And if we go to our themes list, we use a plugin called ChildThemify that basically makes it a one-click process to create a child theme. A child theme basically inherits or duplicates a lot of the content from its parent theme, but it allows you to make changes to the code so you can change things like fonts, you can change what appears on a particular page. We've used child themes in the past because some themes work perfectly, but they had some content that was a little iffy. We had one site that had an RSS icon that was rather off-color for a library site, so we made a child theme that blocked that RSS icon out. And you can see from the list, I've got 2010 Weaver, I've got 2010 Weaver Child. If we go into the child theme by clicking Edit, it basically tells me that it's inheriting the style sheet from the parent theme, but if I wanted to change something about it, I could do it here. And let me show you how I would do that. Let's just copy this guy over. Usually I'll do this in Firefox because it has a bit more robust tools for picking out elements. So if I decide I don't want this to be black, I want my title of the page to be a different color, I would right-click on it, say Inspect Element. In Firefox, this gives me the whole Element Inspector. And I've got my element here, Site Title A. I can change the color in my child theme area, so I'm not doing this for real, just as a kind of how to... But it would basically look like that, and that would override the style sheet that's inherited from the original theme. So then our color would be something different. That's actually black, so it wouldn't make much of a change. But if I wanted it to be purple or white or something like that, and it helps if you do it properly here. Okay, so I turned it white. It essentially disappeared on this white background, but it's still there. See? The great thing about child themes is that they are generally not affected by updates. You guys can see over here that I have 25 themes waiting to update. And if someone's made major changes to the look or feel of their theme through the Customizer, those updates might just wipe them out. A child theme wouldn't be affected. Those pretty much stay static. So if you're going to make sweeping changes, if you're going to make a lot of tweaks to your theme, I think a child theme is the way to go. And you can do this manually, but for us installing that child themeify plugin just makes it incredibly easy. All we have to do is just one click and then go into our child theme and make our changes to our code. I mentioned plugins. I mentioned the NS Cloner plugin and the child themeify plugin. You'll get varying information about how many plugins you should have on your network. I try not to overload ours too much, not because I think that plugins necessarily slow down the performance of the network, but I think sometimes when you have too many things installed for one issue, they work at odds with one another. So you have things that are trying to do the same thing and that leads to problems with the network. I also think it's tough when you have a lot of plugins to go in and read the collection, which you really have to do with a WordPress network. I'll show you what I mean here. So we have 63 plugins installed on the network right now. 32 of those are active. 31 are inactive, and that's basically kind of a holding pin for plugins that will be deleted shortly. I don't like to delete anything without giving people a chance to say, hey, I had this functionality and now it's gone. So I'll usually make a plugin inactive for a few months and then if no one has a comment about functionality being missing, I'll go ahead and delete it altogether. I think periodically it's helpful to go in and get rid of stuff that hasn't been updated for quite a while. So if we go into inactive here, go down to the bottom and take a look at WordPress database backup. If we click on View Details, that gives us some reviews, if any exist of the plugin. It also tells us when it was last updated. In this case, nine months ago, not a big deal. We're actually doing backups through a different means at this point. So this is kind of an unnecessary addition to our network. If we go into WordPress Change Font Size, on the other hand, last updated seven years ago, to me this is a big red flag. You want things that are updated recently that will work with your network. I think keeping plugins that are not curated or maintained is sort of playing with fire. And while that's loading, we will go back to PowerPoint for just a second. So there are a few plugins that I think would be useful to you if you are going to start running your own network or dealing with multiple sites, multiple administrators. One of the big ones that's been helpful for us has been WordPress, which is a security plugin that also lets me know via email when somebody tries to reset a password or when an administrator logs in to the system.  So if someone else tries to get in, it's an issue and it's good to get that email. In addition to that, it will tell me the top five failed logins. So you can see that admin and test have been used pretty often to try to get into our network and I suspect that's probably just brute force hackers or people kind of writing code to try to log in. We don't actually have as existing users and I'd recommend that you do the same if you're having a multi site because those tend to pop up again and again at the top of the list. If you're very serious about security, you could also consider changing the URL of your login. Most people use WP login or WP admin and if you switch it to something else that just removes that sort of common URL that people attack. I mentioned ChildThemify that's been helpful for us just creating the child themes. Jetpack is one that's sort of controversial. It's very robust. It does a lot of stuff and I'll show you that in the next slide. It covers all this ground. You've got Photon which speeds up the images and photos and protect and monitor and data back up. You guys can see that some of the elements of Jetpack are not active on our site just because I don't think they're necessary. One thing that it does that is an absolute necessity at least for us is the publicize feature and this actually pushes out the content from your website to your various social networks. If you want the things that your users are writing or posting to appear on their Facebook, Twitter and so on, publicize will do it for you. We'll get more into that later on in the second half of the presentation. Insanity is a relatively recent plugin that I've added and I did it because we were having issues with people using up their space. When the network began back in 2010 images weren't necessarily super gigantic by default but now with very high resolution cameras or even cameras on a phone a lot of the time images are taken from those devices and added to the network and they're super duper gigantic. Insanity allows me as an administrator to set limits on those and sizes them down automatically that way I don't have to go to individual sites and check their space log or how much space they have remaining and then go in and try to resize all their images which is usually what's causing a lot of the space to be consumed. There are other plugins that do the same thing but Insanity to me was the most user friendly. I can just go in and put a maximum height and width and so on so it kind of takes care of it for me. And in as Cloner I mentioned before if you're going to be creating new sites for people it's really easy just to make a default and clone that. Another one that I don't have installed yet but I think I'm going to during our next update is Yoast and this is basically the most widely acclaimed SEO plugin. There's another plugin that I haven't installed yet that I probably will end up installing called Advanced Custom Fields and it's again very highly praised so if you're doing a multi-site network it's probably a good idea to think about that. We have not as of yet upgraded to the newest version of WordPress but I've looked at some of the features that are available in that update and a few other things actually seem like they would duplicate elements of the customizer or things that we had done with child themes. One of the big changes is thumbnail previews for PDS which right now for PDS that our users update are near a gray icon. It looks like a document so if they have a ton of PDS and a ton of different policies it's sometimes not that easy to tell them apart just at a glance. With a thumbnail preview they'll basically get some idea of what's in the document so they can determine what actually needs to be uploaded to a page, what needs to be put into a menu and so on. This is a big one for me I'm not sure how this is going to work but apparently they're going to start implementing custom CSS into the WordPress customizer and this would duplicate what we do with the child themes where we go in and find the elements that need to be changed and then write the code so this will apparently be available inside each theme's customizer and the new version of WordPress. I'm curious to see how this works it's kind of an interesting development and they'll also have custom language selection so if I speak English and my fellow admins speak Spanish we don't necessarily have to have one uniform language which is the case with past versions of WordPress we can choose our own language and then have content presented to us in that language. And there are a few other innovations or updates in the new version of WordPress I'm actually kind of curious to get that updated and see how everything works. At this point we've about hit the midway for the presentation and actually this is the end of dealing with general things about our network and plugins and so on so if you guys have any questions please enter them into the chat box and we'll talk about them. While you guys are thinking I actually forgot to say that I was really happy to see so many people from Ohio and Kentucky signed up for the webinar I used to live in Versailles, Kentucky just down the road in the BDLA so it was very nice to see some of you signed up to attend and of course it's always nice to see our Nebraska libraries on the web participants as well. Okay so no questions I will keep going and the next I should say the second portion of the presentation will probably be most helpful to people who are already using our services I did ask for some questions to address during this presentation from you guys and you really came through and gave me some good ideas and I wanted to talk about some of the things that you had asked and to do that we'll go ahead and get out of PowerPoint and go back into our kind of fake cloned WordPress site here I had a question about the header image how to change it, where to get an image how to size it down and so on so many themes arrive with this image right in the middle at the top and you can change this in the customize option so if we click on customize here and then go into header image for most themes you're actually going to get the dimensions that are recommended right here some themes will include some additional header images as an alternative so for this time of year you might select this one but you don't necessarily have to use what's included you can actually track down your own images you'll want to make sure that the images are not governed by copyright they're available to you one of the sites that I've recommended to people recently has been pixabay.com there are a plethora of sort of free use image sites on the internet but this one is very large so it has a lot of the the topics that you might want to find and implement on your site if you're looking for something seasonal you might say winter okay and this looks alright to me a little bit of color when I've helped people with the header image in the past I've recommended that they use a program called urfin view to do their editing it's a free program very small so you're not waiting all day for the download and so on so let me just bring that up okay and what I'll do after I check and make sure this is free for use no attribution required and so on is basically just copy the image and paste that into urfin view okay so I've got my image it tells me it's 960 by 640 I did not memorize the dimensions needed so I'll go back to our page and check that needs to be 940 by 198 the thing that I like about urfin view is you can click and drag to resize things so 960 by 640 what I'll do is just start over here click and drag across and if you look at the top of our screen there it's telling me as I drag the dimensions of the selection so 940 you almost need a surgeon's hand to do this okay so we've got 940 by 254 and if we need it to be 198 I think yes 198 I will just start at the top here and bring this guy down okay so 940 by 198 at this point I will go ahead and edit and crop that selection so we've got exactly what we need 940 by 198 I'll just save it and a place that I can recall usually I put stuff on the desktop so they don't get lost and that's done now at this point I can click add new image here in the customizer for my site let's go ahead and upload that file find it on our desktop double click it and you will have the option to select and crop even though we just cropped it down to its required dimensions we can say skip cropping because it's basically perfect it's exactly what we need okay and now that's on our site you will need to hit save and publish to make it official and now when we go to the site we've swapped out the header image so it's a few steps but it's not very involved it's a pretty easy process and I will go back to the dashboard on our site to address the next question so this is sort of the admin side the back end of the site we were just looking at the version of the page that users would see that patrons would see build things and tweak things I mentioned before that people have issues with space sometimes you can tell that when you go into your dashboard because we have the add a glance section here it tells you how much storage space is allotted and also how much space is currently being consumed 1% of space is obviously not a big deal but let's just assume we're pretty close to say 94% space used and we want to free up some of that space an easy way to do that would be to shrink down some of your images especially if they were uploaded prior to insanity being active on the network and taking care of the stuff for us automatically so if we go into media library it shows us everything that we've uploaded including our winter header right there this image is quite big 2000x1500 it doesn't necessarily need to be that large on our page depending on how we're using it if you're just having an image that's essentially sitting off to the side of some text it doesn't need to be gigantic and as I said with devices set to default for the largest possible image sometimes it's useful to go in and shrink them down if I decided I wanted to shrink this down and make it a bit more manageable I would open up the image like this so it's basically got the attachment details at the top and it's got all these other things I'm going to go down to edit image at the bottom and you have a scale feature built into WordPress so if I decide that 1000 is plenty big for this photo it basically automatically gives me the other dimension so if I change something in this box it corresponds in the second box and then I can click scale makes it smaller but again if this is basically just sitting on your page beside some text you don't need it to be enormous so this should work if you do that to multiple images that will free up a lot of space on your site and if we go back to our dashboard for this site I suspect it probably hasn't changed 1% used it might be a little different in terms of the tags consumed I didn't remember last number sorry guys but for something that you know a site that's using around 95 96% that would be an easy way to get that number down ok so next question uploading some people are basically adding policies and procedures and various kinds of documents to their WordPress site and they might have run into some problems because WordPress does not automatically accept Microsoft office formats so if I open up Microsoft office word in this case and say something like policies the library will not allow food and drinks the Nebraska room let's say we have a local history collection with older bugs we don't want people bringing in coffee and whatnot so I will go ahead and save this as a document file and then we'll go back to our WordPress site when we upload things we're putting them into the media section I know that sort of makes you think about images but in this case we are also adding a document so if I click on add new go through the process of selecting a file and click on my policies it doesn't do anything because it doesn't know what to do with this Microsoft Word document thankfully Microsoft Word allows us to convert things and we do that by going to file then going to export and we're going to turn this into a PDF so instead of it being a document file we're going to make it a sort of finished unchangeable PDF of course you do want to keep your original Word document file in case changes do arise later or you want to tweak things you can then export that new version as a new PDF but for now we'll just create this as PDF put it on the desktop so we can find it and it will probably give us a pop up here yes it did so now we'll go back to our website back to the dashboard and say select files and instead of clicking on the Microsoft Word version we're going to click on the PDF that is on our site so it's in our library right here we've got policies and it's all set to be used on our page one thing about PDF that's very useful is that you can create a page that points directly to the PDF so if I go in and grab the URL from this PDF this is basically the address that points right to that document I'll just copy it and then create a new page and there are multiple ways to do this on our network you can go up here and say new page or you can go here and say add new to your pages you have a ton of options as most users of our network have seen of course but if you go down to the bottom you have the option to change this from a normal WordPress URL to a custom URL which means when someone opens up this page they would go straight to that policies document policies for Nebraska Room and then we'll publish it and it is a live page on our site if we go into our page here you see it's been added as a link so now if a page run, if a user comes to our page and clicks on this it goes straight to the PDF they don't have to click through a million different embedded links and so on it's just a straight shot right to the policies document okay next question would be about plugins and widgets for plugins you guys really don't have to worry too much about them if there's something that you want to do that doesn't seem to be available on your site you can always let me know and we'll seek out a plugin for you that will resolve that issue widgets are something that are available to you and there are a ton of options with widgets so on your dashboard if you scroll down the page to appearance and then go to widgets you will see all this sort of stuff available widgets we've got two columns of options your page also arrives with some widgets already included and if you don't want anything that was included you can always just go over like for meta and say delete we don't need meta on our page so we'll just delete it out categories don't need it delete and so on you do have multiple widget areas with most themes so it might be helpful while you're looking at this widget section to go ahead and load up your page as well and I'm just going to open up our page in a new tab that way when you add stuff or delete stuff you can tell where it's located on the page so if I decide I want Google translator in my secondary widget area and I click on add let's just say translate page the title and save it now I can go back over to my live site and refresh it and I know it's not it's sort of difficult to differentiate between the first widget area and the second widget area but these are actually two different sections you also have second footer widget, fourth footer widget so it gets rather cramped depending on your theme and the structure of your page we'll go ahead and delete this out for now one thing that I did want to point out in terms of widgets is that you have a text widget available which is kind of a catch all it's almost like a bucket where you can put all sorts of stuff you know code you can put text and so on so your text widget will allow you to put in arbitrary text or HTML and it's really just kind of a blank slate you've got a title field and you've got a content field where your code would go what we've done with this in the past has been to set up things like local forecast when people want to get the weather the weather channel I think has a widget that's available and you can just copy the code and put it right in you can also do that with Facebook you can do it with Twitter so a lot of those websites and sort of third party social networks will have the code available that you can incorporate into your text widget and then that would appear on your page if you guys are interested in doing that or if you run into any problems of course just get in touch with me and I'll help you out with it next question sending stuff to your social networks that is handled I think I have a question number of users are site visits yes those those are available to you let me see if I have it on this clone site I don't think that I do but if I go back to the administrator side to dashboard we basically have a site stats section on the dashboard here and if you don't have this on your page please let me know I'll get it set up for you but it will track the number of visitors per day you can also see which posts are doing well so in this case I want to participate and also the top search which can be very helpful too is there a new link for Nebraska Overdrive library so that's not necessarily something to deal with Nebraska libraries on the web but I might let my colleague know that there's something pending there okay no problem so basically if you're sending stuff out to the dashboard so that is through the Jetpack plugin if you log into your dashboard and you see this please connect Jetpack that means that stuff is not going out to Facebook it's not going out to Twitter and so on so you'll need to connect it it's a very easy process just click on connect Jetpack and wait a few minutes this will take you out to wordpress.com this is basically not the same as your login for your website so it's something new if you already have an account you can click on sign in if not you can create an account and I'll see if I can do that now okay so if you've never done this before you will want to create an account again if your Jetpack is disconnected you can also get in touch with me and I'll connect that for you but we've basically created our new account here so we'll sign up and connect Jetpack and it is authorizing our connection finishing up and we are connected if you get to this screen please do not click on any of the premium options that are available we don't necessarily need it we're doing backups we've got all this stuff covered in other ways so we don't need the Jetpack to do it for us we'll just click on select free alright and ordinarily I don't bother going through the jump start thing but that can kind of give you a walk through what they have available if we click on skip and then go to publicize that is where our connections to the social networks are located so we'll click on the little gear icon lets us configure the publicize option and here you should see your social networks that are available so for publicize in this first section these are the places that are going to receive your content when you create a new post when you put a new photo on your site it would be pushed out to these various other social networks you also have sharing buttons which will add these little buttons below each post so if your users are reading a post and they think this would be really cool to share with their friends they can send it out to facebook theoretically ah there we go sorry guys I'm a professional um twitter google plus and to be honest with you some of this stuff I have no idea what it is I don't know what telegram is I assume maybe it's a network that is no longer that active or maybe it's just not in my age range maybe it's a millennial thing but those are all available to you if you're seeing the button that says connect here it means you do need to connect and log on to your facebook in order to make that connection and push your content out ok and you will be able to determine who needs to see these posts you might want to change this from just friends if it's your library page if you want the public to see it that would be an option and then click ok once you're done and then ok again alright so and I have two different accounts on there so at this point it showed me I'm connected when I go to create a new post it's got a section for publicize and it should show that it's connected to my facebook so whatever I write here whatever I publish on my site will go out to facebook if you have all that stuff showing that it's connected and that you have the publicize thing on your post but it's still not showing up on facebook sometimes it's necessary to go in and kind of restart that connection almost like you restart a computer if you go into jetpack go back to publicize and then just click the X to disconnect it that basically cuts the connection so whatever is going wrong will be severed and you would just start from scratch here so you would say connect and then enter your login information that usually does the trick if that doesn't work please get in touch with me and we'll see what's going on ok we have about 10 minutes so next question how to preview a post or a page before it appears on your site very easy to do if I go into add new and I am putting a post in for holiday party free hot chocolate I can go here to the preview button and it will give me a preview of how this will look on the page this is really helpful if you're embedding things like images or if you're dealing with you know code of some sort but that's basically how you would do it speaking of code you guys do have two different views on your post and your pages you have the visual view which is almost like a word Microsoft word view a text editor you just type and it shows what's there you also have the text view here and the difference would be if I want to emphasize free and make it bold I can then go to text and it's got the strong tags so if you guys are familiar with coding or if you prefer to code things and use the menu that's here you do have that text option available to you ok and last question putting post in order let's leave this page so right now we don't have a way to put post in order in terms of saying this top post needs to be number 9 this post needs to be number 3 and so on but we have one option that's active on the network that would allow you to keep something at the very top of the page right now we got hello world as the only post on our website what I can do if I wanted to make hello world the first thing that people see regardless of how much content is added to the page is go in and click edit and under the visibility section right over here on the right you'll click edit again and choose stick this post to the front page that makes it a sticky post so it stays at the top no matter what else is added say ok and update and now I will go back to my hot chocolate post let's go ahead and publish that Cindy said she also found sticky in quick edit so yeah as you guys know with wordpress there at least 5 different ways to do the same thing that's true of anything from adding new posts to making changes and so on ok so this was our site it's got hello world which was our only post and we just added the new post about the holiday party we didn't make this a sticky post so we refresh the page you'll see our sticky post here has a little bit of a blue background and it's sitting at the top even though this is the newer post published just now sticky post still reigns at the top this might be helpful if you have a post that is a catalog link or something that you know your patrons are going to go to first you might want to keep it a sticky just to keep it visible and important on the page and if you guys do need the functionality of selecting certain posts to be in a certain order please let me know because there's probably a way that we can do that if it's important to you let me check the time ok we've got about 5 minutes left to go did you guys have any questions anything that you wanted to address that I didn't talk about while you're thinking let me tell you that I will be sending out basically the video link for this presentation that will be available on the commission youtube page and I'll also be sending you a list of resources things that I didn't cover about dealing with the functions file or installation or all that sort of backend sort of thing also for people who are currently using our site there are a few beginner or how to resources that I think might be helpful to you so I'll be sending that out as well and I think I have a chat updating the calendar ok that actually depends on which calendar you're using we have multiple calendars available so for the one that's active on our page let's go to all calendars calendars not found so let's see ok we'll keep it grey theme you can also change the color when you're setting up your calendar and just say publish ok so you see we have this calendar short code you might want to do something with that later on you might want to bring it into text widget for now I'm just going into the calendar and down towards the bottom we have preview or add event if I click on that in this case with this particular calendar it lets me bring up something and I can say holiday party here and save it ok we also have the add event here there's a pop up sorry holiday party event dates and sorry about the military time for some calendars they require that and we can't change it so my apologies and just keep it going until 2100 no venue added we could certainly add the library's location for some reason I think it's picking up England as our location but sorry if anyone from Ashland is watching this we're sending people to have a holiday party at your event and you can fill in all this other information once you're done click on publish there are multiple calendars running on our network right now so there are multiple ways to do things if you run into problems with your particular calendar please let me know and I'll work with you directly to get that working and set up the way you'd like I hope that answered the question ok so we are close to 11 o'clock do you guys have any other questions ok well thank you all very much for attending today I really appreciate it I know this is sort of the busy season with the end of the year approaching and all your holiday activities so thanks very much for making time for me if you do have any questions for people who are using our network or people who are outside the network who attended today please feel free to email me and just get in touch and I will hopefully be doing another one of these in a few months to address other issues with WordPress and talk to our users about things they can do for now thanks again and have a great day


Got it. I'll mute this out and then we'll get started here. I'm super excited about tonight. In the chat, I'm going to look through the chat in just a second. I'm going to ask a couple people to share a couple little things when we get started here in a second. I just wanted to always come together and mute this out. Okay, we're muted. Okay, good. So first off, I'm going to introduce myself. I know some of you, most of you all know me. Hey, Nino, what's up, buddy? Nino, is it official? You're officially retired? I was thinking July. I'm not sure. Chad, it was great to see you out there in Minnesota. Michael, it's good to have you on. And then we have a, what's up, Michael? The other Michael? Nice. I like this. Charles is in the group. That's awesome. Dom's new. Super excited. I know we have, I don't know, 15, 20 new people on. So as you all know, it takes a little time to warm things up a little bit for some next week. Congratulations, Nino. Nino is graduating from the fire department. Because of our situation at home at the moment, I am going to keep this really tight. But the one thing I just wanted to say is this next 28 days, the idea behind this is about making a shift. And I want you to think about whatever your goals were, and I didn't get a chance to look at, I only see one thing written in the chat. So maybe it's on my phone and it didn't come onto this chat. That's exactly what happened. So I didn't see anybody's goals. If you don't mind putting the chat again, definitely put it down in the chat.  He's retiring from the fire department. I'm going to put my phone over. That was, I thought one of you guys texted me. And at the end of the day, it's like, his whole life is changing, right? And he knows it. So it's easy when you know your life is changing because you can put a lot of things in place. But when you're in your same world and environment, and then what happens in 28 days from now, that's going to sustain the new results that you have. And that's the idea that this 28 day challenge, it's not just to get a great result. We all want that. I have people that go, hey, I want to drop belly weight. Awesome. So to do that, what is the new life that we have to create? What's the new lifestyle? And like, Jeff's not on here. He's normally on everything, but he was walking like crazy, crazy pace.  And so he probably won't sustain a 13 minute mile, right? But he could probably sustain a 16 minute mile. And so you see the difference is like, you can push your body so far, but if you can't sustain it as a new lifestyle, then that's okay to challenge yourself. But it's more important to find something that you can find a new way to live. If you want to maintain that results, does that make any sense? It's kind of like, if you want to have a lot of money, you have to work, you have to put a lot of effort in. But at the same time, if you want to have a good relationship with your kids, you have to put a lot of effort and work there too. You can't have them both up here all the time. You can fluctuate them, right? And find, it's not balanced. It's finding, we call it priorities when wherever you have to put that energy in. So what I want you to focus on in this is in the chat, you put down some of the goals in here, but I want you to write down, like Michael said, goals, 20 more pounds of fat and lean. So I want Michael, I want you to think about is, I want you to think about what do you want to gain in this? So he put down, he wants the lean, that's great. That's a gain. But what does that gain look like?  Let's say that it's to run a mile in seven minutes, right? And that you want to create that is your new standard. And if you're like, if I could run a mile in seven minutes whenever I wanted to, and I could be consistent at doing that once a week, five times a week, 10 times a week, and I can do it anytime until I'm 60, like I want to do a backflip every year until I can't do a backflip anymore, right? If I can do that, that means a lot of things in my life have been put into place to sustain that. Does that make sense? So it's easy to maintain my results. So what are you trying to gain? If you can gain that improvement, you will then maintain the 20 pounds off. Does that make sense? So I know I was, Carlos will be, he'll be watching the replay here and you want to lose belly fat. That's awesome. But what do you want to gain in this? What is the gain? I want to gain, I want to build you 30 push-ups. They did a study, Marlin, Merlin sent it to me. They did a study on people that could do over 40 push-ups. Their risk of heart disease was like 300% less. And I go, do you think it's the push-ups or is the fact that you have to be consistently healthy to do 40 push-ups? Does that make sense? I think that's the secret. It's not the push-up itself. It's just that the act of being able to do 40 means that you have to do a lot of other things well to maintain that. So in the chat, I want you to put down, if you have something, I want you to put down a gain that you have in mind. And while you're writing that in the chat of Marlin, I would love for you to jump on.  I'll stop go. I gained a lot of consistency. The last challenge really pushed me to be consistent and I pretty much didn't do it four days a week. I pretty much did it seven days a week. What can you maintain though, long term? What can I maintain? Can you maintain seven days a week long term? No, but I can sure maintain five. There you go. There you go. See, I'm okay with you going overboard as long as you can find what's that maintain look like, that new standard you hold yourself by. Maintain's probably the wrong word. It's probably a standard you hold yourself by. I hold myself by a standard of working out three times a week, no matter what. And you guys don't know this. On Monday, I'm having a hip replaced and I'll still get my three days a weekend. I don't know how, but I'll get it in. I'll get it in somehow. I'm sure you'll find a way. So that's awesome. Anything else that you gained through that last journey? A lot of muscle actually. I did gain. How about strength? Do you see something in your strength change throughout that 28 days? Yes. Most of my exercises in the gym have increased the weights. Perfect. Now, is there a new level that you hold yourself to now that you're at this new standard? Well, I'm at those levels and I'm just keep going up. Being 60 years old, I have to take it easy on the connective tissue. So I can't push too hard. That's the point. The whole idea isn't to beat yourself up. It's to create a standard to live by. I hope that makes sense. I try to quantify that as much as possible. Anybody else want to share that did the last challenge? Anybody want to share a gain they had? And just for all your new people, we really focused on gain. A lot of people want to lose weight. But if you focus on your gains, I know Marlin, he literally, or Merlin, sorry, Marlin, Merlin, I'm all confused now. I got Marlins and Merlins coming from my, he's like, I mean, he was plateaued for how long would you plateaued on your weight? You know, Dustin, it was probably five or six months that I just kind of stayed right around the same. And it wasn't two weeks in and I had dropped three or four pounds within the first like 12 or 13 days. Awesome. And then since we started that, I've dropped like 16 or 17 pounds. But I was focused. Number one, I did not eat enough food. I wasn't eating enough. I was starving myself. We're going to talk about that in a second. I appreciate that. Anything else you gained? I mean, obviously that's loss. What did you gain in that? I think you gained a lot of knowledge about the fuel of your body. I think that was probably one of the, probably the best thing you gained was you got to feed the beast, feed the warrior. And that's exactly right. Cause the things that I learned, well, last me forever, you know, and I was going to work and I work a lot of, or like a bunch of hours and then I was going to the gym, but I was waking up in the middle of the night hungry and for a long time, I thought, man, that's normal, you know, cause of what I'm trying to do, but I learned that I need to feed the beast. So, and mentally I am like thinking, man, that's way too much food, but it's not. It's the right kind of food. Right. That's just it. You almost can't overeat the right foods. It's, it's, you know, Dr. Ryan Lauer talks about all the time. He goes, it's like, if you're a low carb, especially it's really hard to overeat, but even the right foods, high quality foods, it's actually really hard to overeat them.  We're gonna get some stuff going on in our family right now that can create that, but that's not the worry we're living, right? Cause we're always focusing on growing in so many other places. Anybody else want to share before I just close out on that last part that you just talked about about feeding the beast? I know we had a few other people, I know Michael, Chad, Nino, anybody else that wanted to want to share? If not, that's cool. I, I'm just waiting here. All right, cool, cool, cool. All right. So, as you're new to this, the webpage that I have up, I'm going to be adding some new workouts to those, some things I had in there. I think I had some things language wrong, so I'll be adding some new workouts there into there. And the idea is we have, I have another guy that he's not as super active into the group as much, but he's been doing my interval trainings and he's a biker and he's like 300 plus pounds. And he's biking and he is setting a huge standard using the interval cycles and he's doing it in a really cool way, but he's using that as his strategy to get fit and he's using the bike as a strategy of, of because it's less on his joints, he likes to bike, he likes to get out. But the big thing I want everybody to really pay attention to, and I think it's really important is we're still following the core four principles, right? So drink to your ketones every day. You work out four days a week, 30 minutes minimum. Now it doesn't have to be hardcore workouts. If your body's fatigued, give it a day off, but you can still go for a 30 minute walk. Still set your stuff that standard of four days, but don't have to be push, push, push, but push your body to a level that you want to go to, right?  So we're not always killing it in the gym. If that makes any sense, we're being responsible, but we're still holding ourselves to a higher standard. We're still pushing ourselves, but not trying to beat ourselves up. Okay. Now the next thing is the meals. I'll talk about that in a second. Then the accountability. We're going to encourage you four days a week to share your journey on social, share it in the group. We're going to ask for things in the group. I'm going to ask for everybody that participated last time. I want you to help me over Sunday. I'll probably be pretty involved Sunday, but Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, those three days after surgery, I'll be in hospital for a couple of days. I'll probably be a little out of it, just so you all know. So feel free to jump in and give some insights because you kind of, this is not rocket science, y'all. It's actually fundamentally pretty basic, but they have a lot of wisdom. They probably have more than they actually even probably realize. The last part is the food. So improve it, we get caught up into fasting and everything else, which I think is great. It's great for anti-aging longevity. But the one thing that we have to be aware of is we still have to feed the body. So people are like competitively fasting and not fueling their body. And that's not the way humans were designed to. So we get competitive on the extremes of the other side of it. So what we did is I took Dr. Jacob Wilson's protocol that he built out, I don't know, a year ago. And that's what I presented to everybody. He said, listen, follow this. And so it's four days a week. I use private meals. They've been wonderful for me. So four days a week, I do my ketones morning and afternoon. I do keto kick for my pre-workout.  So that's four days. I wrote the schedule on there. There's a print out too. There's a really good new print out. If you haven't seen it, print that out. It's really awesome. It says print guide on that website. And I'll send that website into the chat again. So the next thing is two days, I want you to fuel your body. And I did that as Wednesday and Saturday. Feed. Eat as much as you want. Still hold yourself to high quality standards. Like eat high quality food. But Dom, if you're like Dom, Dom's a chef. He can cook like amazing. Dude, that's when you go and do it. But thinking about his fuel, not, oh, I'm messing up. No, I'm feeding the warrior. I'm feeding myself so I can go out and perform again.  It's a wedding. You're going to have a couple of drinks of alcohol. Have it on those two days. Add that into those two days. It's your, it's your free day to fuel your body. Okay. You can be as strict as you want, or you can be as loose as you want. That's your journey to decide. Right. For me, it's about designing a lifestyle that I can sustain forever. And then what I do is one day a week, this is optional. You do a 24 hour fast, which is Sunday to Monday night. That's how I wrote the schedule. So what you're doing is you're giving yourself a little reset. You can, we can still do them. I would still do the reboot through this journey. I would still do all that, but add the two fuel days and see what happens when you fuel your body. See what happens. See how your energy, you're like, Marlon hits me. He's like, dude, I feel like just like he felt the energy when he fed it. So if you're on, if you're in core deficit too long, your body is in a deprivation stage. It's not, it's not in a growth stage. Now, if you're overfeeding yourself too long, you get complacent.  It doesn't want to do anything.   There's a balance in there. Does that make sense? You got to feed it the right amount from time to time, but you don't want to overfeed it and you don't want to underfeed it. Okay. Now, the fasting days help with the body composition and the anti-aging. Right. I still eat. I don't, my weight's always been the same. I'm the same for seven years. So I haven't changed anything, but, but I don't think I realized how much people were fasting. Not fasting, just cutting their calories too low and they weren't free feeding themselves. I naturally do that because as an athlete, we never focused on cut calorie cut. We always focus on enough food. As a military guys, can you get enough food? It was always, can you eat enough? It was never cut back. Right. So I'm programmed kind of opposite of what most people are in their health journey. And I didn't realize how much that was pushed out to the world. So, so when you think about food, I want you to follow that schedule and then have fun with this y'all. But I really want you to encourage in the chat, when you get back into the messenger thread, what's your gain and have a benchmark. So when you, when you get to print out the guide on the last section, and I'm going to challenge everybody, I already did my mile walk. I've already done, I've done my whole, my whole measurement, but I want you to do is assess yourself. Go do your mile walk, do a plank, do some burpees, do some push-ups, anything that you can physically do that doesn't hold you back, like as a can injury, do the assessment and write it in there. Now, add your own assessment to it. If you have something else that you're passionate about, if Michael likes to go run, then dude, go run, go push yourself to whatever standard and then go, okay, 28 days, I'm going to hold myself to a higher standard. And then try to make that the new bar you want to set. Okay. So any questions for me before I hop off? Mine, this is a unique one, because I'm going to be literally going through surgery after five days in. And so I have, I have unique goals. My goals will be the most unique they've ever been. I have a couple shoulder external rotator strength goals that I'm going to be setting for myself. So it's kind of weird, but it's fine. It's my goals. So anybody have any questions for me? Dustin, I will hit you a message, but I need the name of the women's group. My daughter, my daughter bought her ketones. And so she'll be joining that one. Awesome. Did the link not out, I'm going to test everything tomorrow. Once hopefully things settle down, I'll test everything on the website that there's a link for the group on the website. It says on there, but Luis is the one that put it on there. So I don't even know, he knows how to run all that stuff. But maybe I heard some people get glitched and some people it works for, but we'll get connected or maybe just introduce her and me a messenger. And then I can just add her directly to the group. So we do have a woman's group. Y'all, I'm just going to tell you, man, those ladies are there.  They're like, they're coming out of the woodworks everywhere. So that's cool. This is designed for dudes to talk, dude talk and however that sounds, it's going to sound and let's have some fun with this y'all. We can still add some guys. They can get in the next couple of days. After that is probably going to just be too late. If you're checking out this replay, stay in the chat with us, kind of plug in with the chat as often as you can. There's no hard feelings if you can't be in there all the time, but feel free to share your perspectives because we all bring different wisdoms in different times. So definitely please be feel free to share. Cool. New guys, the chat is very motivational just to throw that in there. Yes, it is. It helped me, it helped me tremendously. So help me, help me a bunch, help me push through and