This is a video about hypothesis testing and in particular hypothesis tests where the test statistic has a Poisson distribution. I'm going to look at three examples. The first will be a typical case where the test statistic has a Poisson distribution. The second will be a case where the test statistic actually has a binomial distribution but we'll want to approximate that with a different random variable that has the Poisson distribution. In other words, we'll want to use a Poisson approximation to the binomial. And the third example will be a case where the test statistic has the Poisson distribution but we'll want to use the normal approximation in order to calculate the relevant probability. So let's look at the first example. And this is going to be to do with large fires in the US. In particular, we're going to be looking at large fires that burn over 100,000 hectares of land. That's over 100,000 square kilometres of land. So large fires in the US have occurred at the rate of about 9 per year over the last decade or so. But in 2012, there were 16 large fires. So let's test at the 5% level of significance whether the rate of large fires has increased. Now, the number of large fires is a number of events in a fixed interval of time. So it makes sense to assume that the test statistic here has the Poisson distribution. The number of fires should have the Poisson distribution with parameter lambda. And we should set our null hypothesis as lambda equals 9 because that should be our default assumption about the number of large fires that should happen in one year. Lambda would be 9 if there's been no change from the historical average. Our alternative hypothesis would be that lambda is greater than 9 because we want to know whether the rate of large fires has increased. Okay, now the probability that we want to work out is the chance that we get 16 large fires or a number like 16 large fires. But remember, what we mean by like 16 is 16 or more because the alternative hypothesis says that lambda is greater than 9. So the numbers that are like 16 here are the numbers that are greater than 16. So we need to find the probability of getting 16 or more large fires on the assumption that lambda equals 9. Now we'll do that using the tables. And in order to use the tables, we need to convert this into the probability that x is less than or equal to something. So the probability that x is greater than or equal to 16 will be one take away the probability that x is less than or equal to 15. And that's something we can look up using the tables. If we find where lambda equals 9 and we look along the row where x is equal to 15, we see the probability 0.9780. So the probability that we want to calculate is one take away 0.9780 and that's equal to 0.0220. Now that's a lot less than 5% the level of significance that we're using. So this means that we will reject H0. The logic here is that if lambda equal to 9, then the probability of getting 16 or more large fires would be tiny. So small that what we're going to say is that we don't believe that lambda is equal to 9. The probability of that outcome is so tiny that we don't believe the null hypothesis anymore. So we reject the null hypothesis. And that means that we've got sufficient evidence to conclude that the rate of large fires has increased. Okay, so that's one way of answering this question. But you should be aware that there's a different method and that uses a critical region. If we go back to this stage, we can find the critical region, in other words the set of values which would cause us to reject the null hypothesis. And we can do that using the tables. What we need to do in this case is to scan up the column where lambda equals 9 and stop at the last probability that's still greater than 0.95. So in this case we stop at 0.9585. So that means that the probability of getting 14 or less is 0.9585. And if we subtract that from 1, 1 minus 0.9585 will be the probability of getting 15 or more. So if we come along the row that's just below 0.9585, we reach 15. And the critical region here will be the numbers that are 15 or more. It's really important to understand why we come along the row below. That's because 0.9585 is the probability of getting 14 or less. But when we subtract that from 1, 1 minus 0.9585 is the probability of getting 15 or more. So we can say here that the critical region is x is greater than or equal to 15. It's the numbers that are 15, 16 and higher. And obviously 16 is in the critical region here. And that's another way of seeing that we should reject H0. And we can say that there's enough evidence to conclude that the rate of large fires has increased. Okay, so that's two ways of answering this question, two ways of carrying out this hypothesis test. It's completely up to you which one you want to use. Okay, now before we finish this example, it's worth pointing out that an increased rate of fires is one predicted outcome of climate change. And so it would be interesting to know what's been happening to the rate of large fires in America. So here's a graph which shows the number of large fires each year for the last decade or so. You can see that it's very variable and that's not surprising because the number of very large fires is quite small. And so it's subject to random events. But nevertheless, there is an upward trend. And if I draw a line of best fit, you can see that it's steadily going upwards. So there's some evidence here that the rate of large fires in America is increasing. And that should be a great cause of worry because, needless to say, large fires cause a lot of destruction. And one more thing before we move on. I said at the beginning that the test statistic will have the Poisson distribution because it represents the number of events in a fixed interval of time. But let's just think about whether it meets all the criteria for a Poisson distribution. So the first criterion is that the events must occur randomly in a fixed interval of time or space. And that seems to be okay. Presumably fires do on the whole occur randomly. They're caused by things like lightning strikes. And although some of them are triggered by human beings, they're presumably mostly by accident. And even the odd one that's set off deliberately, I suppose you could still see as a random event. But the second criterion says that they must occur at a constant average rate. And a little thought will show that that's probably not true of large fires. Because presumably on the whole they're more likely to occur in the summer when the ground is dry and warm. And they're much less likely to occur in the winter or when it's raining. So it's very unlikely that fires occur at a constant average rate. The third criterion says that they must occur independently. And that probably won't be true either. Because if you know that a fire has just happened, that indicates that you're probably dealing with the summer months where it's warm and dry. And that there are lightning storms around. And that means that if one fire has just been triggered, it's probably more likely that another one is going to happen fairly soon. So it won't be true that the fires occur independently, I don't think. The final criterion says that things must occur one at a time. I'm not sure about this one. It's probably case because if you had two fires being triggered near to each other, perhaps related, they'd probably just merge into one anyway. And they'd probably count as one big fire. But it's clear that not all of these criteria are satisfied. And so it's doubtful whether the number of fires would have an exact Poisson distribution. But hopefully the distribution of the test statistic will be sufficiently similar to a Poisson distribution for the hypothesis test to be valid. And remember the probability that we calculated was significantly less than 5%. Okay, let's move on and look at my second example. And this is going to be to do with connecting to a Wi-Fi network. Suppose that a teacher manages to connect to his school's Wi-Fi network once every 20 attempts on average. And he complains about this a lot. So the school carries out some network maintenance to try and improve the situation. But afterwards, the teacher manages to connect only twice in his first 150 attempts. Can we conclude that the network maintenance has made a difference to the teacher's ability to connect to the Wi-Fi network? With a random variable here, the test statistic will have a binomial distribution because we're dealing with a number of successes in a sequence of trials. The trials of the attempts to connect to the network and success is managing to get online. The null hypothesis will say that P is 0.05, the probability of success is 1 over 20 because we're told that in the past the teacher manages to connect once every 20 attempts. The alternative hypothesis will be that P is not equal to 0.05. It won't say that P is less than 0.05 or P is greater than 0.05 because we're asked to look into whether the network maintenance has made a difference to the teacher's ability to connect. We're not asked to find out whether it's improved it or reduced it. We're just asked to find out whether it's made a difference. Okay, so in principle we're dealing with a test statistic that has a binomial distribution. But you may remember that the tables we have for the binomial distribution don't tell us about the situation where n, the number of trials, is 150. The number of trials here is too big for us to be able to calculate probabilities easily. So the thing to do is to use a Poisson approximation. And that's valid because we're dealing with a situation where the number of trials is large and the probability of success is small. And if the number of trials is large and the probability of success is small then we're allowed to use the Poisson distribution to approximate the binomial distribution. Now in order to do that we need to find the expected number of successes and that's going to be n times P. Lambda will be 150 times 0.05. And that's 7.5. So the expected number of successes is 7.5. And so instead of using our original test statistic we'll use a new test statistic which has the Poisson distribution with parameter 7.5. Now the probability that we need to calculate is the probability that x is less than or equal to 2. We need to find the probability that the number of times the teacher manages to connect is a number like 2. And like 2 here means less than 2. Because clearly no successes and one success are further away from 7.5 than 2. So we'll calculate the probability that x is less than or equal to 2. We can do that easily by looking at the tables. We find the column where lambda equals 7.5 and we look along the row where x is equal to 2 we get the probability 0.0203. So the chance that x is less than or equal to 2 is 0.0203. The only thing is though that this is a two-tailed test because remember the alternative hypothesis says that P is not equal to 0.05. And so that's the probability that we could get an outcome like 2 which is less than 7.5, less than the expected number of successful connections. But we could also end up rejecting the null hypothesis by getting a number which is much bigger than 7.5. And so there are outcomes which are like 2 which are more than 7.5. So as we've only got the probability for some of the outcomes which are like 2 we need to double it. And double 0.0203 is 0.0406. So let's assume a significance level of 5%. 0.0406 is less than 5%. So this is another situation where we'll reject the null hypothesis. We'll say the probability of getting an outcome like 2 is tiny and that means we no longer believe that the probability of a successful connection is 1 in 20. In context we can say there's enough evidence to conclude that the maintenance has made a difference. Actually we have enough evidence to conclude that the maintenance has made the situation worse but that's not what we were asked to investigate. Now there's a couple of things I want to draw your attention to here. First of all this was a two-tailed test because the alternative hypothesis said that P was not equal to 0.05. And that's because in the question we were asked to look into whether the maintenance had made a difference not whether it had improved the situation or made it worse. And as it was a two-tailed test we needed to double the probability that we calculated. And that was because 0.0203 is the probability of getting an outcome like 2 which is less than 7.5 the expected number of events. But we also need to include the probability of getting an outcome like 2 that's much bigger than 7.5 an outcome which is much larger than the expected number of successful connections. And the point is that whenever you have a two-tailed test you're going to need to double the probability here. Okay so that's nearly the end of this example but before we move on I just want to investigate whether it's actually appropriate to say that the test statistic will have a binomial distribution. So let's look at the criteria for a binomial distribution. First of all the number of trials must be fixed and that's okay because we had 150 trials. And that's definitely a fixed number. The second criterion says that each trial must have the same two possible outcomes. And that's okay because clearly either the teacher manages to connect or he doesn't. The third criterion says that the trials must be independent. And I'm not sure whether this will be the case or not. I suppose it depends on precisely why the teacher isn't managing to connect to the network. It's possible that if the teacher hasn't managed to connect that's because of some temporary problem or glitch which means that it's less likely that he'll manage to connect immediately afterwards. And so it's possible that the trials are not independent. Although I need to know a lot more about how Wi-Fi networks actually work and why the teacher might not be able to connect in order to make a judgment here. The final criterion says that the probability of success must be the same in each trial. And that seems okay. I can't see any reason why the probability would differ from time to time unless the ability of the teacher to connect to the network depends upon how many other users are currently connected and then if the number of users changes from one time of day to another I suppose the probability of success might vary. So again it's not totally clear that a binomial distribution is appropriate in this case but hopefully the test statistic will have a distribution sufficiently close to the binomial distribution for the hypothesis test that we just did to be valid. Okay let's move on to my last example and this is going to be to do with teenage pregnancy in England and Wales. Here's a map which originally appeared in The Guardian which shows the different rates of teenage pregnancy of teenage conception more accurately in different parts of the UK. Everything here has been scaled relative to the population of each local authority area and the colouring is showing you where there are particularly high rates of teenage pregnancy where there are particularly low rates. So for example you can see that in Southwark in London and also in Method Tidville in Wales there's a particularly high rate of teenage pregnancy whereas in someone like Windsor and Maidenhead the rate is much lower. Now we're going to look at a particular example that involves Blackpool which as you can see is one of the nation's black spots where the rate of teenage pregnancy is particularly high. So in Blackpool the mean under 18 conception rate for the years 1998 to 2010 was 173 per year but in 2011 there were 149 under 18 conceptions in Blackpool. So we're going to test at the 5% level of significance whether the under 18 conception rate in Blackpool has decreased. Now again we're dealing with a random variable that's the number of events in a fixed interval of time so it's reasonable to think that this has the Poisson distribution. So let's assume that our test statistic has the Poisson distribution with parameter lambda. Now the null hypothesis will say that lambda is 173 because historically that's the mean under 18 conception rate. That should be our default. The alternative hypothesis will be that lambda is less than 173 because they're investigating whether the conception rate has gone down. Now we're about to find a probability for the Poisson distribution with parameter 173 but we're not going to be able to do that using the Poisson probability tables because they only cover the cases where lambda is less than or equal to 10. So what we need to do is to use a normal approximation and to do that we need to find the mean and the variance for this Poisson distribution. Well the mean is always the same as lambda so the mean will be 173 and the variance you may remember is also lambda so the variance will also be 173. So what we're going to do is look at a different random variable y which has the normal distribution with mean 173 and variance 173. Okay now the probability that we need to work out is the chance that x is less than or equal to 149 because we need to know the chance of getting a number like 149 under 18 conceptions and in this context like 149 means 149 or less. So we need to find the probability that x is less than or equal to 149 and that would be approximately the same as the chance that y is less than or equal to 149 and a half. Remember you need to make a continuity correction when you're using a continuous random variable to approximate a discrete one. So the probability that x is less than or equal to 149 is about the same as the chance that y is less than or equal to 149.5. Now to find that probability we standardize to the standard normal distribution. So that's the same as the probability that z is less than or equal to 149.5 take of 173 over the square root of 173. In other words it's the probability that z is less than or equal to minus 1.79. Well that's something that we can look up in the tables because if you find positive 1.79 you'll see that the probability that z is less than or equal to that is 0.9633. The only thing is that we don't want to know the probability that z is less than or equal to positive 1.79 we want to know the chance that it's less than or equal to minus 1.79. So what we have to do is to subtract the number that we looked up from 1 and do the sum 1 take away 0.9633 and that gives us the answer 0.0367. Okay well 0.0367 is less than 5% and that means that we can reject the null hypothesis. And in context we can say that there's enough evidence to conclude that the under 18 conception rate in Blackpool has gone down. Okay there's one thing I want to draw your attention to here and that's that we used a continuity correction when we were using the normal distribution to approximate the Poisson distribution. Remember you always have to make a continuity correction when you use a continuous random variable to approximate a discrete one. And that's because if x is discrete but y is continuous the probability that x is equal to 149 will not be the same as the probability that y is equal to 149. In fact the probability that y a continuous random variable is exactly equal to 149 will be 0. The chance that x is equal to 149 will be about the same as the chance that y is between 148.5 and 149.5. So when you're using the normal distribution to approximate the Poisson distribution you make a continuity correction on your way to calculating a probability. Okay you may be interested to see how the under 18 conception rate has been changing. And interestingly the under 18 conception rate in England and Wales has decreased enormously. It's gone down from 47.1 in 1998 to 30.9 in 2011. In Blackpool it's been much higher and there's been a lot more variation it's gone up and down but also it's been decreasing on the whole. By the way it's not surprising that the rate in Blackpool has gone up and down a lot more and that's because we're dealing with a much smaller number of under 18 conceptions and therefore there's going to be a lot more random variation in it. But they've both gone down and if we draw a line of best fit you can see that they both slope down quite reasonably. Well I suppose you should be careful of drawing a line of best fit here because there's no reason to suppose that the trend is linear. Okay well before I finish this video the whole topic of under 18 conceptions or teenage pregnancy as it's always referred to in the media is an interesting one and it's one where statisticians need to be careful. Here's what the Office for National Statistics in the UK has to say about teenage conceptions. They say it's widely understood that teenage conception and early motherhood can be associated with poor educational achievement, poor physical and mental health for both mother and child, social isolation and poverty and they say there's recognition that socio-economic disadvantage can be both a cause and a consequence of teenage motherhood. This is why the Labour government from 1997 to 2010 set a target to halve the under 18 conception rate in England by 2010 when compared with 1998. Local authorities like Blackpool have got 10-year strategies in place aiming to reduce the local rate between 40% and 60%. Well the interesting thing here is all this talk about association between under 18 conception and bad things like poor educational achievement, mental health, social isolation and poverty and the carefully worded statement that socio-economic disadvantage is both a cause and a consequence of teenage motherhood. So I just wanted to draw your attention to this because it shows how careful this group of statisticians is being not to overstate the importance of their findings. I mean here's a scatter chart which shows the degree of correlation between under 18 conception, teenage pregnancy and child poverty. Each dot represents one of the local authorities in England and for each local authority we've got the under 18 conception rate and also the percentage of children within that local authority that are living with poverty. And what you can see there's a very high degree of correlation between these two measures. So the local authorities with very high under 18 conception rates are also the places where high proportion of children are living in poverty and the opposite is true as well that the local authorities with a low under 18 conception rate are also the places where not many children are living in poverty. And if you remember back to the map of England and Wales that I showed you at the start that makes sense, remember we had Windsor and Maidenhead which had a very low under 18 conception rate and that's also somewhere that you think of with wealthy people and not much poverty whereas some of those black spots with high rates of teenage pregnancy are also places with high levels of poverty. So there's a very high degree of correlation between teenage pregnancy and bad things like poverty and bad educational achievement and so on. But what the statisticians are being careful about is not to say that one is actually the cause of the other because it could be that teenage pregnancy is a cause of poverty and bad mental health and things like that but it could also be the other way around it could be that bad mental health and bad educational achievement are causes of teenage pregnancy or of course it could be that neither is a cause of the other and actually there's something quite different that causes both. So it could be something of the lifestyle or the background of different places which means that first of all people opt to have children when they're still teenagers and on the other hand that they end up with bad educational results and end up being socially isolated and poor. So the statisticians who are being very careful not to overstate their case they say that there's an association but they don't tell us what's causing what and they say explicitly that the cause could work one way around or the other. Socio-economic disadvantage can be both a cause and a consequence of teenage motherhood. An interesting thing for statisticians is that all of these statistics and the correlation measures and the graphs don't really tell us precisely what we want to know which is I suppose whether the young mothers the women who have opted to have children when they're still teenagers are better off or worse off as a result and also whether the children are better off or worse off than if the mothers had chosen to wait until they were somewhat older. And that's something that we can't investigate so easily and we can't measure using the statistics that it's easiest to gather because you can see that the statistics that the Office for National Statistics are working with are ones that it's probably quite easy to get hold of I mean it must be relatively easy to find out the age of mothers at birth or conception by looking at hospital records and stuff like that. But it would be much harder to investigate vaguer questions like is this person better off or worse off because of having this child in particular because that would involve a value judgment and statisticians presumably are not so well qualified to make value judgments like that. And it's also fair to point out that the Office for National Statistics continue and should be noted that teenage conceptions can be the result of planning within established relationships and as such are not always a cause for concern. Okay so I hope you found that a little bit interesting. It's interesting to think about how we can use these statistics in a real world context and also how we need to be very careful in not drawing conclusions from statistics that are too strong. Okay thank you very much for watching my video about hypothesis testing. I hope you found it useful for showing you how to carry a hypothesis test where the test statistic has a plus on distribution. Thank you very much for watching. I hope you come back and watch one of my other videos soon.


Good morning everybody, welcome back to another vlog. I just got out of the shower and I have to leave the house in about eight minutes. I am, oh my god, my face is so red when I mess with it.  I have a really fun afternoon planned because I'm basically, no, I'm not changing that much, but when I got back from England, also yes, don't mind all the hair that's coming out of my head. It's been that way my whole life. When I came back from England, I was like, I cannot handle this closet situation in this apartment anymore.  It's just how it has to be, not looking for suggestions. And so my stuff, like my clothes have been scattered kind of throughout the house and lately I've been noticing a lot more clothes being hung up on like my clothing rack in my office slash filming room. And I'm essentially going to turn that into like my closet room. I'll show you later, but basically I ordered a new clothing rack, like a double tiered one so that I can basically have that be my closet room. And I'm really excited. I got some like organizational stuff, but just did a workout, made a smoothie. I tried a new protein powder because the Oli protein powder, I don't think exists anymore, which is really devastating. So because I have to leave the house in like six minutes, I'm just going to do like a slip back moment. But yeah, hope everyone's doing well. It is Wednesday on the day that I'm filming this and my very last England vlog just went live or England video, main channel video. These vlogs are pretty delayed, which just helps me and my sanity, honestly. So anyway, that's what's going on this morning. I am going to quickly do my hair, hit the road and then fix these nails because it's been like three and a half weeks, I think. And it's just time for something new. All right, we're done at the nail salon, got my nails done, looking super cute. And like I went for something a little different. I did a square this time, because why not? And I did sort of like a olive sage green color for fall. I'm not much for like super dark nails. So this is like super cute and fall to me. So now I'm going to run a couple of errands. We're going to run some errands together because I don't know if you could tell from the backseat, but I have major donations to give. I have like certain things that I set aside for like thrift store donations specifically. And then I have like things set aside for women's shelters or Poshmark or whatever. So this stuff is going. I need to drop something off at the post office. And then I want to get a car wash, at least the outside of my car, because it's like humiliating. It's literally so bad. So let's do the car wash first. I found a place. Let's get that out of the way first, things first. Do you never feel stupider in your entire life than when they're telling you how to get on the car wash thing?  Okay, back to the car wash concept. Clothing donations. I have stuff in my trunk as well and I'm desperate to get rid of it. So let's do that. Stop by the post office and drop off a package. I am starving. So I'm going to go home and make a very delicious lunch. Let's do it. Last errand. That's literally me every day. Like I'm not even joking. Same. Like after I get on a call or answering email, I'm like, I need like a pretty minute break after this. All right, we're back home. I'm going to make a like salad that's sort of like a bowl. It's loosely based on a half baked harvest recipe, I believe. And I'm just kind of gonna wing it with stuff I have. But it's like air fried sweet potato and chickpeas and like a Caesar salad kind of. And I saw someone else share it on Instagram and I was like, yeah, that looks good. So that's what we're gonna do. Chopping up a sweet potato into like kind of like fries. I guess they're kind of like potato wedges in a way. I have been thinking about this salad since I saw it. And I just absolutely need to make it now. So that's what we're gonna do. So I'm gonna put them in the air fryer. I wish I could cut these longer pieces. It's gonna do a little bit of olive oil, not too much. Can you see actually the, these are flowers from the farmer's market that are a little much. Then I'm gonna do a little bit of Lowery's seasoning salt. Last time I put way too much of this. We'll do some pepper. My air fryer doesn't have enough room to do both the sweet potatoes and the chickpeas really. So I might end up just doing the chickpeas on the stove to save some time. Like crispy thing about the pan. These probably are gonna take like 15 minutes on the air fryer. So I'm gonna get them in now. Come after 10. For the, oh, I just realized that my hair is still wet. I took it out of the slot, it was hurt in my head. It's cute, but I can't wear it for like hours and hours. Oh, you can see a little bit Drew's making a pot pie. So again, we're gonna do a little bit of olive oil. I'm gonna do just regular salt, paprika. I think that's what we used to do back in the day. Now I'm gonna grab my farmer's market kale. I do think the recipe I'm referring to like calls for homemade dressing. I'm not doing that. I'll just use, oh, the fresh is in here. Of course, tragic, but the rest of these look good. So I'm gonna, this is dinosaur kale, I think. I'm gonna rinse this off, de-ribbit, and then chop it up and do the salad spinner and all that. And a quick snack break. I got these, we got these two dips at the farmer's market and it's called Natural Combo is the brand. And we got a tri-color, which we've shown before, I think. It's like a pesto sundry tomato feta dip. And then this one is a spicy red lentil hummus. It's not spicy at all, but it is delicious. I think I need to have a little snack before my lunch. Obviously. This one, though, for my spicy water of the day because I always have spicy water with my lunch. I recently saw that Liquid Death, who was like my favorite can of water, came out with flavored sparkling water. So I was like, I obviously have to try it. So this one is called Berry It Alive. First of all, huge can of sparkling water. But this one is sweetened with agave nectar. So we got all three flavors to try them. Drew drank the mango and the lime ones and I was like, I'll try the berry. And when I tasted his, they tasted like white claw. And I think it's because it's sweetened and like, you know, all the other waters and stuff. All the other like waters and stuff that I drink unsweetened. So we're gonna try it. Doesn't look nice.  That's weird. I'm sorry. No, it's not that busy. I like it spicy. This is like half the spice of a La Croix. And also it tastes like a white claw. Like if I'm gonna drink a white claw or something that tastes like a white claw, I want it to have alcohol in it.  But it's not my favorite. It literally tastes like white claw. Oh, that's you. Oh my goodness. Okay, everything's done. So I'm gonna put some chickpeas. And then I don't actually, I thought I had some Caesar dressing, but I don't. So I'm just gonna do some of my tried and true Annie's goddess dressing. You can also get the Trader Joe's goddess dressing. It's like pretty much the same. And do a little drizzle of that. And then because it's about to go bad, I'm trying to use it up. I'm gonna put some Parmesan cheese. Gotta have cheese on my salad. Don't really have anything for crunch, but I think it'll still be good. Look how nice this looks. Looks delicious. Even with like maybe some quinoa or something. This would be really good. Cheers. It needs some crunch. Maybe I'll put like some almonds. I'm gonna have some pistachios because I couldn't find any almonds. And now let's try. Pistachios are just the superior nut for salads anyways. I'm very pleased with this. I'm not as pleased with this, but that's okay. I'm gonna take my lunch, clean up my mess here. And then we'll meet back up in a bit when I remake my, essentially in my closet room. I'm so excited. All right, so now it begins. The just sort of like organizational, I just, I love organization. So I ordered a couple things to help me out. The first being some like under the bed storage because I have a pile of clothes over here on this couch. That's like off season. I'm gonna start putting away some of my summer clothes because I mean, it's still hot here in LA, but we'll start changing in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully God, I just got these like fabric ones. And then they have like a little bottom part of it that you can just stick in the bottom and it like helps it stay, you know, keep it shape and stuff. And then hopefully that will get us going in the right direction. Basically, so far I've gone through my clothing rack, pulled everything that I'm not gonna wear for the rest of the season, like until spring or summer. It's actually kind of nice. So let's fill it up. Little sunglasses holder because I have never actually really had fantastic storage solutions for my sunglasses. They've kind of just like all lived loose in all of my purses and my car and closet.  I thought that would be great. So hopefully this one works. It has good reviews, very satisfying. So you just kind of do that. Beautiful. Okay, so I'm gonna remove this stuff that needs to go to like the tailor. Both of those things need to be altered. I might do them for like a main channel video. Still haven't figured out a belt situation yet, but we'll get there. And now I'm gonna put, I think just in the corner here with the sunglasses. Is this how it goes? Oh, cute. Do I have this right side up? Yes. Oh my God, that is so cute. And it does perfectly fit two pairs side by side. I love that. Wait, I do have two more pairs. Now I need to fill it up. Secured the last two pair. That is so satisfying. This will be really helpful too because I can like see all of the sunglasses that I have basically. So I usually leave them scattered all over the place and then I forget that I have them. And like now I can kind of keep track of like what I have. And then I can know, okay, if I want a new pair of sunglasses, I'm gonna have to like get rid of one, you know? And I think literally every single pair of these is from Amazon, just in case you were wondering. Next, I did get a little thing to organize my purses. However, it's way bigger than I anticipated.  Well, yeah, I thought it was way smaller.  I could like loop this over a little bit. But like, is that necessary? Like that just feels huge. I think I'm gonna return this and either look for a smaller one or just like leave them the way they were because that was fine. But this is too big. She's going back where she came from. Totally forgot to mention that I've had this accordion rack that I thrifted since like probably 2017-ish. And I think it looks really good here. I just put all of my hats on it. Cause again, I just wanna be like, I want there to be one area where I get dressed and get ready. All departments are just kind of weird with like storage and stuff. And because of like our animals and everything like that, it just worked out best that I had stuff spread around and I just can't do that anymore. So I have a hall closet that has like my coats and like sweatshirts in it, just outerwear. That's literally it. And then everything else will be in here, hopefully. Besides like workout clothes, pajamas. You know what I mean? I get dressed like when I film outfit videos when I'm getting ready to go out for the night, whatever. I want like everything to be in here. Do you know what I mean? My solution for that, as I mentioned, is this big old bad boy right here, which is a, I think, double layer clothing rack. And I've seen like my friends Macy and Alexa use these and I need to just be better about like maximizing this area. So I have like this whole area right here. Oh yeah, I also forgot to mention I put on these cute prismatic privacy screens. Like how adorable is that? So fun. There's someone walking into their car, but guess what? Can't really see. It'll be a lot better for like filming purposes, obviously. Like I am very selective about what I show because I don't want people to see out the window. So you can't really see anything with that. And then also when I'm filming videos in here, like I make eye contact with people quite frequently and it's like awkward. So perfect solution. Anyways, okay. Wish me luck. I hope this isn't too difficult to build. I believe in myself. Let's do this. Oh God. There'll be so many of these. All right, here it is. She's done. It actually wasn't that bad. It probably took me like 35 minutes, but that's cause I had to like start a couple of things over again. So it wasn't bad at all. It does feel pretty sturdy to be honest. And we're really gonna put her to the test. So let's start loading it up. Ignore the prism that just jiggled because I moved it. But it's looking absolutely gorgeous. This is as good as it's gonna get. It's not perfect, but we moved to the shoe rack over here and the hat over here. This corner is like similar. The light going off of that disco ball right now. Amazing. With like the windows, obsessed. I do have to have a full length mirror in here for filming purposes. So I just like moved it over to this corner. I don't know. It's not that bad. It's fine. There's like a lot of doors and not a lot of, you know, windows and stuff. There's not a lot of blank walls. So we moved the clothing rack over here. I love it. And then we just have my orange couch and some leaves on the floor that I need to sweep up. So there we have it. I even think that it helped with like the echo a little bit in here because there's like two layers of the clothes. And it's like absorbing a lot of the sound. But yeah, that's gonna do it for today. Hopefully you enjoyed this vlog. We made a really delicious fall classic in the crock pot first meal of the season. Freaking chicken and dumplings. I'm so excited. We're gonna go eat that and enjoy our evening, but thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next vlog. Bye.


We're thinking about e-commerce situations where we sell infantry but not on-ground in a store but rather online in the cloud with the help, use and support of third-party applications for example like a Shopify or Amazon amongst others giving us that online presence where we can facilitate the sales and helping us with the logistics of facilitating the sales. We're now looking at this from the accounting perspective and more specifically with the use of QuickBooks online thinking about how we can pull the data into our accounting system so that we can get that data in a relevant form financial statements generally being a balance sheet and an income statement at the least so that we can do our tax preparation for federal income taxes if we are in the United States. We talked about the concept in prior presentations of decoupling the inventory side of the transactions and the sales side of the transaction and related fees on the sales side because that could help us to pull the information that's already being generated with the help of third-party applications like the Shopify's and the Amazon so instead of using a perpetual inventory tracking system where you're generally going to be using a periodic inventory tracking system although we'll touch on the use of a perpetual inventory tracking system as well. So now we are not thinking about trying to get the sales information in but we are now focusing in on the inventory and related expense the cost of goods sold so what are the different kinds of tracking methods that we might use in an e-commerce situation to track our inventory and the related expense of cost of goods sold one method is the easiest method we could use just a cash-based system and just expense the inventory as we purchase it using cost of goods sold as the expense account we'll go into each of these in more detail i'll just list them out first and then we could have a perpetual inventory system using third-party application integration meaning we could use some integrations that would be pulling every transaction in from the third-party platforms such as the Shopify and Amazon into our QuickBooks system and try to track on a perpetual inventory method then we could have a periodic inventory system using Excel or another spreadsheet in other words we might use Excel or some other spreadsheet to be tracking our units of inventory and typically a flow assumption like FIFO or weighted average method and then putting periodic adjusting entries into our financial statements just to get the ending inventory and cost of goods sold correct but not to track the actual units in QuickBooks online because we're going to be tracking them elsewhere in a spreadsheet and then we could have inventory system using third-party app integration in other words if we have more advanced inventory needs we might be having our Shopify or our Amazon helping us to generate the sales and we might then have a third-party app which is helping us to basically manage our inventory exclusively integrated into our system along with our QuickBooks system where we're going to have the financial statements


The Chief of Army Staff Lieutenant-General Ibrahim Atahiru has warned officers and men of the Nigerian Army to desist from any form of politics and avoid being used by politicians to achieve their personal interests. The Chief of Army Staff disclosed this at the Gibson Jalo Contilment in Yola during this year's Inter Brigade Corporal below competition. Our correspondent reports. It is no doubt that the security situation in the northeastern part of Nigeria, but particularly in Adamawa states, is gradually reducing. Hence, this competition, which is meant to send signals to Boko Haram and other criminal outfits that the Nigerian Army is on top of their game. Represented by the general officer commanding three-division Nigerian Army, Brigadier-General Bello Mohammed says the competition is pertinent within the troops as it will go a long way in boosting the morale of the officers and men. Brigadier-General Mohammed says there is no gain saying that the competition develops the resilience required to win battles, hence the activity that is repositioned to professionally defeat all adversaries in a joint environment. It is the duty of all officers and men to be absolutely loyal to constituted authority at all times. Therefore, I urge you to remain focused, professional and political in the discharge of your duties. Therefore, you must resist by all means be called by some unpatriotic Nigerians for military intervention of the current political dispensation. One of the participants thanked the Chief of Army staff for organising the event as it will help the troops to share ideas through sports. She, however, appealed to the Chief of Army staff not to relent in bringing the troops together, not only through sports but with other activities. By getting the cup, the trophy to come from a commander and by the three-division garrison Winnie, I'm very, very happy to get to the end of this competition because we never know that we get to the end of this competition successfully. At the end of the competition, three-division garrison command, where the overall winners of this year's inter-brigade cup rally below competition.


Okay, Moses got angry, struck the rock, and couldn't enter the Promised Land. Jonah disobeyed God and tried to run away from God. Lies complained and doubted God and thought that he was the only one that was serving God. And then you go to the New Testament. Paul rebukes Peter for his treatment of the Gentiles. Paul and Barnabas have a dispute and a split over John Mark. Paul was wrong. The point is, every man of God, every leader of God, every preacher, every teacher of God, at least once gets it wrong. Every now and then, I don't care who the person is, you're going to run into a favorite teacher or preacher, your pastor maybe, who is going to be wrong on something, hopefully not a lot. And I want to talk about four people who I absolutely like. These are good men of God. These are men who for the most part are sound. But there are a couple of things that I think that are just definitely wrong. That means that they are false teachers or false prophets or heretics. Everybody gets something wrong, including them. And so what do we do with them when they get something wrong? And how do we know if they've gotten something wrong? So before we begin, let me give you a really good rule of thumb when it comes to understanding the Bible. One, you need to have a good, strong sound hermeneutic, which is the method that you use to read the Bible. I suggest that you read the Bible in plain understanding, the way that the people who hear it, the people who read it originally, who the book was written to or the books were written to, how they would have understood it. And second, when you make a statement or you declare an understanding or teaching of the Bible, earn that statement. In other words, back that up with Scripture.  Try to avoid the temptation or the desire to want to be defensive of that person. Again, everybody gets something wrong unless your name is Jesus Christ. And if this person, if this is a person that you can't find anything that you may disagree with or you're not willing to accept that you might be in disagreement with, if they're wrong on something, then you might be in danger of idolizing that person.  These are people that you know of, that being John MacArthur, Vodibhakam, Tony Evans, and Justin Peters. Now there are other people that I could have highlighted who I think are very sound teachers, but these are four that kind of stick out at least right now for whatever reasons. And I want to highlight some things that I think that they're wrong on and why I'm highlighting that because guess what? You could probably go back and look at things that I've said or even saying now and I'd be foolish to say that I'm right on everything. That being said, Tony Evans has spoken about this thing that he has called trans-dispensationalism. He coined this phrase about 10, 15 years ago and for some reason started to make a little bit of noise. Now people have brought it up. I even did a video about it, not that I agreed with it or disagreed with it. That wasn't the point of the video. But now I'm going to tell you that I do disagree with what he's saying and why. And oh by the way, he's not the only person that supports this belief. Dr. William Lane Craig who also believes in this trans-dispensationalism, this belief that people who have not had an opportunity to hear the gospel, God is going to sovereignly show them some sort of grace and bring them into the fold if their heart is looking towards him. I'm painting a scenario where a person wants to know the true God, desires to know the true God, that gives God three options. One, God can send him a missionary in a traditional way. Two, God can give them a direct revelation of himself that can get Paul on the Damascus Road. For three, and here it is, God can trans-dispensationalize it. That is, relate to him out of another dispensation because dispensations are based on information given. So that all throughout the Bible, all people had to do was believe what God had revealed and they were saved. If a person believes, somebody's up there that created this, somebody created me, I don't know who he is, but I want to know him. If that person were to have a heart attack at that moment, God could not condemn him and be just because God says, he will sink your body. So since God makes that promise, if God doesn't give him the gospel or give him a direct revelation, then he has to judge him out of another dispensation. Now, just as famous in this whole issue is the descent that John MacArthur has with them. John MacArthur, I believe, is correct that I don't see any scriptural evidence for there being this trans-dispensationalism, this God using a different matter or different means of dispensation to bring these people to him. Now, I understand his point where he comes from because if a baby dies and you believe that baby goes to heaven, it's because you believe that that child did not confess Christ because he could not confess Christ. And so God will show love and mercy to this child and bring them in. Similarly, some people will say the same thing holds true when it comes to people who don't have the ability to do so because of some sort of mental handicap. And so Tony Evans makes the leap. So does William Lane Craig. They make the leap that this also would apply to those who have not had a chance to hear the gospel? I believe this. And this is why I believe the scripture is clear on this, that people are put where they are because God puts them there. And if a person is in a place where he cannot hear the gospel, only God knows what he's going to do.  And so it may very well be that this person is in a place where they don't hear the gospel because they're not going to accept it anyway. But I also believe that if there is a certain person, some guy in some backwoods place somewhere who's never heard of the gospel, he knows that there's a God and is looking for the true God. I believe that God is going to send this person a witness. Let me give you a little bit of a testimony. When I was in college, I did not believe in God. I kind of thought that this was all some sort of weird, hocus pocus kind of stuff. I kind of thought one way maybe, but I wasn't totally sure. And a friend of mine, my roommate, said to me, he said, why don't you just ask? And so I asked. I said, Lord, I prayed first time really praying. Lord, I don't know if you're real. I know who you are. But if you're real, would you please send me somebody? Would you show me? Would you show something? Let me know that you're there. I won't tell you how to do it. Just I'll just trust that you will if you do it. And after that prayer with sincerity, I mean immediately I started getting all these different something on TV. Somebody walking down the hallway will say something about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. And then the very next day, a lady asked me about if I'd go to heaven or hell. If I died, do I know and so forth. And so that night, on August 6, 1991, I trusted in Christ for salvation. And I think the same thing would happen to someone whether they're here in America or in Afghanistan or some other remote part of the world. I think God would do the same thing. And so on this side, you've got William Lane Craig and Tony Evans. And on this side, you've got John MacArthur. I think in this case, John MacArthur wins. Vodibachem, who I absolutely love met him a few times. I'm friends with his family. And so somebody I definitely, definitely admire. But he's wrong on this issue of eschatology. Vodibachem is a millennialist, meaning that he believes that not that there is no millennium, but that we are in the millennium. He takes a more of an allegorized or spiritual view of the scriptures. He didn't have a consistent hermeneutic, which is why I made that suggestion earlier. He does not believe that there is going to be a literal thousand year reign. In the scriptures, we have this picture of two ages, not three. We don't have, in the scriptures, a picture of the present age and in the millennial age and in the age to come. We don't find that anywhere. In the New Testament, when Jesus speaks and when his apostles speak, they speak about the present age and the age to come. And that's it. When they speak about Christ's return, they don't speak about Christ's return in stages. They speak about Christ's return and the end, period. Not he comes and does a few things and then there's a difference. No, he comes and that's the end of the age. There's this present age and there's the age to come, which is another reason why I believe that what we're dealing with here is the present age. The problem with that is that you kind of mess up some of the prophecies that were given to David and the whole Davidic covenant because this is a literal covenant that's going to be carried out in a literal fashion. That's exactly how the Jews understood it. That's exactly how David understood it. That's exactly how the writer wrote it. And so now it's going to come to fruition. And part of that is going to be in the millennial reign because again, this is going to be someone who's going to reign as a king, not like David, but a seed of his. And so there's some other problems and John MacArthur who differs with him addresses that. Now to go back to the foundation for just a very, very brief moment, you're going to end up as a millennialist. You're going to end up with a real kingdom with Christ really on earth, reigning in Israel, in Jerusalem to a redeemed...over a redeemed nation of Israel and all the saints gathered around. And I would just remind you that the plain meaning of a text is always the preferred interpretation. There is never a reason to spiritualize, to allegorize, to try to explain a text away if the plain meaning is clear. Christ will return to earth to judge the world, establish His kingdom for a thousand years during which Satan will be bound and His demons. So while I love Bodhi Bakim and he makes some strong cases on a lot of things, especially a lot of social issues, and he's just, he is a staunch warrior when it comes to the gospel. But he is absolutely wrong on this. On this side you've got Bodhi Bakim, but on this side you're going to have Tony Evans, John MacArthur, Justin Peters, and most of Orthodox Christianity. John MacArthur, who I love, matter of fact I've got my John MacArthur study, Bible's a little raggedy, but absolutely I love John MacArthur and his dedication and consistency to the ministry for these several decades. John MacArthur made a statement some time ago about can a person receive the mark of the beast? Is it possible for them to change their mind and repent and then be saved? My question is, once a person takes the mark, is there any possibility of him coming to Christ? The tribulation is a seven-year period, right? The rapture, the church seven-year tribulation, then Christ returns, sets up His kingdom. Now in that seven-year period, really two things happen. God begins to judge the world with a series of holocausts, and at the same time He begins to redeem His people, Israel. And in the process of this, the Antichrist establishes His rule and in order to function in the economy of the Antichrist, you have to take the mark of the beast. Now the question is, if you're living in the tribulation period and you take this mark, in other words, you identify with the beast's empire, will you still be able to be redeemed? And I think the answer to that is yes. Yes, otherwise there would be no salvation of anybody in the end of the tribulation. So I don't think the fact that someone takes that is a sentence to it, to permanency.  There was a lot of hubbub about it, and then even some people have tried to address it. Justin Peters tried to address it on his behalf, and Bill Johnson also tried to address it. I'm not interested in what they say, I'm interested in what he would say, because he's over talking about making the statement. And so whether he has changed his mind, he ought to say so, or if he wants to clarify, he ought to clarify it. But the statement that he made, which is all we have, I've got to deal with that. And here's why I think he is wrong. Revelation 13 and 14, I think are pretty clear. Let's read. Speaking of the beast and the image of the beast, in verse 15 of chapter 13 says, And it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak and cause might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain. The image of the beast might even cause those who did not receive this mark, who did not worship, gave him the ability to kill these people who would not bow down to this beast. Verse 16 also it causes all both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he has the mark that is the name of the beast or the number of its name. So you will have to either take this mark or you won't eat. You won't be able to buy or sell goods and those who don't take the beast, they'll only be able to buy and sell goods, but they will be subject to be killed. Most likely they probably will be killed. Doesn't say definitively if they definitely will be killed at this moment, but the ability for them to be killed is now given. All right, you with me? Here's where it gets hairy and this goes into kind of defeating the point that John MacArthur makes. In verse nine he says, And another angel of third, followed them saying with a loud voice, if anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he will also drink of the wine of God's wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of holy angels and in the presence of the lamb. So the question is, if you take this, will there be the possibility, like John MacArthur says, of a person repenting? You can't compare that to people who have committed other sins, lying and fornication and adultery and murder and all these other different sins, who have the ability to come and sin because the Bible speaks of them having the ability to repent. There is no such thing given here because what it says is, these people whatever does this, verse 10, he will also drink of the wine of God's wrath. The word that's used there is the word Piatai, which is saying future of what is going to happen. He will drink of God's wrath. There is no, this person might, it's likely happened to know, this is at a time where, let's remember what's going on, the world is in a different place. And so if you take this, you have already gone down this path and he says you will taste the wrath. There is no other way to give any sort of way around it. That's why I said earlier, if a person makes a statement, you've got to earn the statement. There are times where you can say, well, I think based on this and this and this that we can, but that I think in this case, it's probably faulty logic. And so on this case, you're going to have John MacArthur on this side, but over here you're going to have a Bodhi Baccham. You're going to have a Tony Evans, and most of Christendom disagreeing with this take. And then Justin Peters, who I certainly respect and admire, has made the statement, like many others, that God does not speak. How do you know when it's God speaking to you? You remember what the disciples asked Jesus in Luke chapter 11? Lord, teach us to pray. The ball is sitting on the proverbial tee, waiting for Jesus to knock it out of the park and affirm what Robert Morris and the vast majority of evangelicals believe today that prayers are two-way street. Lord, teach us to pray. What did Jesus say? Okay, here's how you do it.  Is that what he said? No, he didn't say that at all. He said, when you pray, say this, Lord, hallowed be thy name. Nothing about listening for some still small voice. Nothing about listening for God to speak back to you. So this whole notion of prayer being a two-way street, that is foreign to the Word of God. There's nothing in the Bible about that at all. Now, not only was he saying that God does not speak audibly, but maybe God doesn't speak either in dreams or impressions or what have you. Well, God doesn't speak necessarily in English. He speaks whatever or however he needs to. That's my take. That's my belief. I believe Justin is wrong on this because he references the Lord's prayer, or we call the Lord's prayer. He says, Lord, give us this day our daily bread. And so when he's saying that, this is how we ought to pray, that he's not telling us, and then we wait for him to respond back. Well, all throughout Scripture, when we see people praying, we do see people speaking with God and God speaking back with him in different ways. He says, I the Lord do not change. And so we have no reason to believe that he has changed that. And he says, lead us not into temptation. And so what does that mean to lead us? Well, I would say that lead us can be very many different ways. It can be maybe through something that's happening in our lives, but also through impressions on our heart. Maybe we are sleeping. Maybe we're dreaming he speaks to us. Then we're quiet because oftentimes when we're sleeping, we're getting ready for sleep. We seem to be a little bit more clear-minded when we think about what we need to do. And so maybe God does speak this way. He doesn't say that he doesn't. That's my point. And so since God doesn't say that he doesn't speak a certain way to us, since he doesn't say that he does not speak, then we can't say that. God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in times past to the fathers by prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the world. In the old days, in the days of the prophets, in the Old Testament, God spoke in a lot of different ways. But in these last days, says the writer of Hebrews, he has spoken to us in his Son. Friends, Jesus is the final speaking of God. The final speaking of God. Everything that God has to say, he has said to us in his Son, Jesus Christ, and we have a perfect, inerrant, infallible, all-sufficient record of that in his Word. Do not look at the passage in Hebrews and say that because God spoke in the past this way that now he speaks through his Son. Does that mean that he only speaks through the Bible? That is not what that says. And so people make their sleep. Here's why they make the sleep. It'll take us into why sometimes even well-meaning and sound and well-versed preachers sometimes get some things wrong. In this case, people will say that God doesn't speak to us that way because it's something that's been abused. There are a lot of people out there who say the Lord told me this. God told me this. I had this vision and so forth.  And so what's the natural tendency is to push back. And so if they're this far gone on this side we might want to push back and kind of overcompensate to the other side that no guy did do that at all. Well no, because they messed up and misabused or misinterpreted something that means that we take the extreme on the other side we just call them out to note that's wrong. Similarly, you see that all four of them as a matter of fact would believe or state that these gifts have ceased. Justin Peters speaks about these gifts as being certain gifts. These sign gifts or what do you call these apostolic gifts which the Bible can call them apostolic gifts. They just call them gifts of the spirit or spiritual things that they've ceased. Well, do I think that some of these gifts are still in play? I always say I don't know. With tongues, if they are in play, show me. Just do them the appropriate way. They're not spoken about again after 1 Corinthians but are there some people that could still use the gift of languages, not this ecstatic babbling but the gift of languages in some far remote part of the world where civilization hadn't touched him and they don't speak English or we don't know their understanding of their dialect? Well, he may do that. I can't say that he will or that he won't. But there is no basis, scripturally, to say that they have ceased. Now, it may very well be that these gifts have ceased but the rationale for saying that they've ceased might be wrong. You can be right for the wrong reasons. It's kind of like getting the right answer to a math question. You don't know how you got it but you just got the right one. And so you want to be consistent. And so it's okay sometimes to say I'm just not sure. We'll talk about that in a second. There's other reasons for why people can be wrong. Some of these trusted preachers, maybe they bring in their human preconceived notions into the discussion. If you've been raised by another sound preacher who maybe got tithes wrong and still teaching on tithes and so this otherwise sound preacher is going to teach that we still do pay tithes. Well, then I disagree because there is no command to do so. We're taking something that not only was in the law but also this sort of tithing was done before the law. And so again, you've got to earn a statement so for someone to say certain things I need your book that's coming from the chapter in verse. But sometimes we just believe something is and so we read that into the scriptures. Sometimes a pastor may misread a passage especially if there is a lack of understanding when it comes to Greek and Hebrew. Oftentimes pastors who have studied Greek and Hebrew because they don't apply it every day there's so much to deal with when it comes to the certain ministries that you don't have time to devote to the study and reading of Greek and Hebrew as you would like to and sometimes you just kind of fall out of use when it comes to that. And you may not use that when exiting the passage and so you might miss something. I think one of the biggest reasons why sometimes preachers get it wrong is because like in John MacArthur's case or Tony Evans's case you ask a question what pastors don't do trust me I know this for a fact from personal experience you ask someone a question and since preachers teachers are used to giving an answer we're going to give an answer. Maybe I don't have enough to give the correct answer but I've got enough to come up with something and so sometimes we're just not good at saying I don't know I'm not sure. I think that's something that we ought to get used to saying I just don't know I'm not sure maybe I think this but that right that way you're not so definitive and you allow yourself the possibility of being wrong but there's some humility in that in saying that I just don't know everything but if I act like I know everything if I give an answer to everything I'm going to be wrong on some things. A good preacher should know more than the average lay person. I mean why are you the pastor or the preacher the teacher if you all know the same thing right but a good preacher though he should know more than the average person in his in his community won't know everything but you should be able to explain what it is you know and not so much out of opinions or I feel this way there are times when you're going to have to but let's try to avoid that as much as possible. So now this is not a real exhaustive in-depth dive into who's wrong who's right about certain things. No the point of this is this again I love these preachers don't leave in the comment section hey you're this that guy you don't like that guy you're jealous of that person this guy's a good golly person why are you saying this? No the point is this the onus is not so much on them but on you now granted each pastor should be diligent to make sure that he says what he's supposed to say that he rightly divides the word that Paul tells Timothy to do and to be like but for us we need to understand that they are sometimes wrong and don't get caught up into this person's style this person's boldness and confidence as they speak to think that they can't be wrong that though they speak for Jesus that though they speak for God this is not literally God speaking to them they are not get this they are not inspired they're not like the scriptures scriptures are inspired they're not so if there's something that you that doesn't quite sound right or feel right with you then go and investigate as a matter of fact even if it does sound right to you as a matter of fact especially if it sounds right to you and feels right to you go back and further confirm that you might find that you know what hey I didn't quite see this at first I've got to rethink that and so when someone has a teaching that's not true that's not correct what do we do with that? does that make that person a false teacher a false prophet a heritage? no no again everybody has something wrong I do you do hey your mother has something wrong your father has something wrong everybody that you know who doesn't come from heaven has something wrong and so we give them the same amount of grace that we would want have done to us when we're wrong we don't want folks condemning us and coming down on us same thing with these guys we're not going to throw the baby out with the bath water so yeah Lorde Bacchum I think his hermeneutic on the last days I think that's wrong but I still love him I'm not going to dismiss him because of that do I think that John MacArthur aired when it came to this issue of the Mark of the Beast? yeah I do has he corrected? I don't know but if he hasn't I still love him still got to study Bible Tony Evans think he's wrong on transism especially I think he's wrong when it comes to tithing but love him matter of fact he was a former pastor of mine Justin Peters love him to death is he wrong I think on does God speak I believe so is he wrong on gifts having ceased maybe maybe not I think his rationale for it is off but love him to death and so you can be and admire someone and still say I just don't quite agree with that as a matter of fact do you agree with everything that you think or say so why would you agree with everything that this other person says and so let's be wise let's be constantly searching the scriptures let's back up what someone says search it as Paul says as the Bereans did to him and if what he says is true then amen I can know it for myself


So as some of you saw yesterday when I posted on Twitter, as well as Instagram, that I ran out of my Prozac. All right, so in this video I wanted to discuss the very real situation that a lot of you get into where you run out of medications because a healthcare system isn't so great here in the United States, but I also had a reply on Instagram to the effect of have you ever just tried being sad. And the inner angry Chris wanted to be offended by this statement, but the reality is there are a lot of misconceptions about antidepressants and depression and anxiety and everything like that. So let's clear all that stuff up in this video. What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health. So what I try to do sometimes is share a little bit of my experience, get some advice based on my experience and what I've learned over the years. So if you're into that stuff, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And make sure you follow me over on Instagram and Twitter at the Rewired Soul because I often get feedback from all of you guys asking about topics that you want me to cover and everything like that. So make sure you follow me over on social media. All right. So yeah, like I said, we're going to be talking about a few things. We're going to be talking about medications. We're going to talk about running out. We're going to talk about misconceptions about medications and everything. So I recently did a blog post. I can't remember if I did it on my website, the Rewired Soul dot com or over on medium. But I just finished reading two great books. One of them is called Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. It's all about evolutionary psychology and why we get anxious, why we get depressed. It even dives into addiction and eating disorders and schizophrenia. And it takes a whole evolutionary look at all these things. And I also finished reading a book called Saving Normal. And this was written by the guy who headed the team that wrote the DSM for all right. And a lot of what both these books were talking about is how some of these feelings are absolutely normal. We have a tendency to over diagnose over Medicaid and all that. All right. So I'm going to circle back to that a little bit later. But first I just want to share my experience about being on antidepressants. And the thing is like, unless you're talking about Xanax, pretty much everything else is like just classified as an antidepressant. Right. And when I say Xanax, I mean more benzodiazepines as a whole like volume and things like that. But anyways, I was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder. All right. And I also have depression. The primary reason that I actually take medications is for my anxiety. All right. Like if it was like which one's worse, it's my anxiety and the depression is, you know, it's down here.  But the anxiety is the worst part. But anyways, when I got diagnosed about seven years ago, they put me on Lexapro. I'm going to link a video up in the info card about why I switched from Lexapro to Prozac. It had to do with, you know, side effects and, you know, just some other stuff like that after I was on it for years. But yeah, I've been on Prozac for the most part of the last almost a year, I think, just kind of off and on. So anyways, when I switch from one medication to another, there's one piece of advice I'll give all of you. When you're switching medications, always have a refill of your old medications. All right. Like going through that whole rickamarole of like getting the new medication and then maybe it doesn't work out and then having to set up a doctor's appointment and getting a different refill. I always make sure I have a backup. And the other thing is too, whenever you're switching or getting off of one and onto another one, make sure it's under a doctor's supervision. All right. Like for example, one time after I wasn't taking Lexapro for a while and I got back on it, like I started out with my original dose, which I think was like 20 milligrams and I was sick to my stomach like all day long. Like I thought I was going to puke. You know what I mean? And that's like, those are like mild symptoms compared to what some other people have when they go back and forth on medications. But anyways, I went into a situation that a lot of you have run into where I don't have health insurance. Well, let me correct that. I didn't have health insurance. I'm in a weird situation right now. But anyways, I was self-employed for the most part of the last year. Some of you saw that I recently went back to work. I have a full-time job. I have a part-time job. I also have YouTube and everything else that I'm doing. Right. But anyways, I haven't had insurance, but luckily the pharmacy that I use here, they gave me like this little discount card because I also take some blood pressure medications and like the medications were super cheap. I think for three months of Prozac it was about, I don't know, I think like 10 bucks, which is not bad at all. But anyways, I saw that I was running out. I was running out of Prozac and I tried calling my doctor to see if she could just refill my prescription. And I have one of the best primary care doctors. Like I know a lot of people have bad experiences with doctors, but like my doctor is amazing. And I don't know what's going on because I haven't talked to her in months since the last time I went in for an appointment that I had to pay out of pocket for. But yeah, I tried calling earlier this week when I got back in town to be like, yo, I need a refill. And usually they make you come in, but like my doctor knows I haven't had insurance, so she'll try to just refill my prescriptions as long as, you know, they're not like addictive medications or dangerous or anything like that. Like some doctors will just refill it without you coming in.  Some medications do have more severe side effects. So before they keep you on a medication, they want to do a follow-up. All right? The pessimistic view is like, oh, they just want money for these visits. But a lot of it is so they can follow up with you. But anyways, I couldn't get a hold of my doctor. I couldn't get a hold of anybody at the office. And I ran out of my Prozac. And like I mentioned, I had a backup of my Lexapro. So this is the second day in a row where I've been on Lexapro after I ran out of Prozac. And because of my full-time job, I just qualified for health insurance. I haven't gotten my information in yet. But like if it was really like, if it was something I was really freaking out about, I could probably, you know, call the insurance provider and get the numbers and stuff like that and, you know, set up an appointment and all these other things. You know what I mean? But it's just not something that I'm freaking out about at this point because I still have the Lexapro. All right? So I hope those are some tips for all of you who struggle with medications and everything like that. I did a poll a while back asking how many of you go to therapy and how many of you can't afford therapy, but you would go if you could.  All right? But just remember that Medicare and stuff like that, like if you're unemployed, like you can typically qualify for state insurance that will get you the mental health medications. There are also a lot of resources in different cities and states for free mental health care, even if you don't have Medicare yet. Like I know here in Las Vegas, they have probably three or four locations of free mental health clinics and they'll refill medications and things like that. So anyways, getting back to that Instagram comment that I got where haven't, have you ever just tried being sad, right? So like I said, like I just finished reading those two books, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings and Saving Normal. And it's, it's this fine line because I'm recovering prescription drug addict.  I absolutely hate taking medications because of the prescription drug epidemic in the United States. You know, I'm very mindful of the overprescribing and everything like that. So I'm like, you know, it's this weird line, right? And something that I've talked about many times on my channel is that, you know, my, my end goal is to just have good mental health and get off meds, right? But the thing is, is that some of us do need these medications. So the first thing that we'll talk about is that comment specifically, have you ever just tried being sad? Yes. All right. And I recommend all of you do the same. One of the biggest misconceptions about antidepressants is that there's just this happy pill. I remember back in college, my, one of my best friends, he went through a breakup. He had his high school sweetheart. We went off to college. They broke up and he was so sad, so sad, right? So like, part of those two books I've referenced, like it is normal to be sad after a breakup. Let me repeat that for the people in the back. It is normal to be sad after a breakup. All right? It's normal to be sad after someone close to you passes away. These are normal feelings. But my friend, he was talking to different doctors and things like that. And he even talked to my mom asking, you know, how he can go about getting antidepressants. And that's when I first learned. We were about 18 years old. So I first learned like these pills are not just a happy pill. There's this idea that if you're sad, you just pop that pill and you're happy. That is not how these things work. Like if you're going through a difficult time, like, sorry, baby girl, sometimes you just got to go through that stuff. Right? So why do I take these? Like I said, my generalized anxiety disorder is my main problem. Depression is down here. Like my depression is a lot to do with like numbness, not feeling anything at all. You know, it's not, it's not as much about negative thoughts. That's, that's something I just chalk up to normal because I get imposter syndrome and all that. But anyways, like about that comment, have you ever just tried being sad? I don't take these pills to not be sad. I embrace my sadness. I understand sadness is going to come. I understand, you know, even anxiety is going to come and everything like that. But here's why I take these medications, even though I've tried to be off of them many, many times, when I stop taking these medications, my head gets really loopy. All right? Like that's why I take these medications like, and it's not just for me. It is very apparent. Like it is like my beautiful girlfriend Tristan and I, we are great communicators. I don't mean to brag, but we communicate fantastically.  But one of the reasons I do that, I recommend that for all of you too, is like two reasons. So, a little bit of accountability, right? Like, you know, like if I'm taking my meds and, you know, all this other stuff. But the other one is, is like, if, if I start getting a little wacky, I want her to know, like, there's something changed in my life, right? When it comes to my mental health medications, because when we're struggling with mental health issues, we don't even know that they're happening, right? Because it's all, it's all just one organ. It's all just our brain, right? So, we start believing our thoughts. We start thinking this is normal. It's very hard to pull ourselves out of it. So, it's great to have somebody in your life who acknowledges this. But anyways, like Tristan, she, it's very apparent to her when I'm off my medications, right? Like, if I'm not taking them for a while. I did a video a week or two ago about, you know, we're applying to leafy greens. We're cool now. But yeah, just talking about, like, I get it. Like, when some of us, when we're off our meds, we get wacky, right? So, so I wanted to squash that kind of misconception that anti-depressants or even anti-anxiety medications, whatever you're taking them for, like, they're not all about just not being sad or not being anxious. Like, when I say wacky, like, let me elaborate on that. My head races a million miles a minute. I've never been diagnosed with, you know, other illnesses and everything like that. But, you know, I do get very hyperactive.  Like, I go completely off the rails. And I'm just, like, some, there might be some videos that you can find in me where it's like, oh, maybe Chris wasn't on his medications. And, you know, even if I was, like, I wasn't doing the other things to supplement those medications. But anyways, if you have experience with this stuff, share them down in the comments below. Let me know why you take medications or why you don't or what your experience is. Like, I want this to be a community where we share our experience. But remember, everyone out there, I'm not a doctor. And most of the people you see down in the comments aren't doctors either. We are just sharing our experience. But always, always, always talk to a doctor, talk to a psychiatrist, a mental health professional, whoever it is. And by the way, there's a little bit of a debate on whether or not primary care doctors should even prescribe mental health medications. If that's something that you want me to talk about, let me know down in the comments below. All right. But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And a huge, huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon, as well as everybody who supports the channel by buying my mental health books over at the rewiredsoul.com or buying my merch. You are all amazing. All right. Thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.