Unique set of circumstances for all of us. Appreciate you guys taking the time to jump on this call here with us and trying to kind of talk to you a little bit about our preparation and what we've done to date to get ready for the draft this weekend. Super excited about all the work that's gone into it from our scouts, from our coaches navigating a different set of circumstances that none of us have really ever dealt with. But excited about the opportunity to build our football team with some players over the weekend, Coach Vrable and his staff have done a great job. Ryan Cowden, John Salgi, all of our scouts have done a great job with, whether it was in meetings or getting information on players, getting in contact with players. All that stuff has been really good for us and we feel good about where we're at. And excited to continue to build this football team and try to improve on what we were able to accomplish last year. With that. Yeah, John, Teresa Walker has a question for both of you all to start it off. Far away, Teresa, I think you're muted, so. Put me in second to unmute. For John, at this point, the reports of a draft run through this morning, did that take part and how did it work for your end? Yeah, so it's this afternoon. We're going to work through that as soon as we get off the call here. We've got IT here is at my house now. Just finalizing some phones and some computers. Making sure we have everything from a tech standpoint. And looking forward to going through that this afternoon with the league and the other 31 teams to make sure that we're all on the same page. Has there been any talk in prepping for the draft for contingency for if preseason games, regular season games get moved, games without fans at this point? Not to not to my knowledge, Teresa, you know, we're kind of at the at the mercy of the league there. They'll dictate and and, you know, kind of double that information. If if that if that is in fact the case when they see fit. And for Mike, hope you're doing well as well. I'm good. You might want to work on that backdrop for Thursday night. I'm just saying. What do we got? We got the grease board here. We're working football trees. So it's all white from here is all I'm saying. But for a more serious point, are you all able to get started with your offseason program virtually? Is that starting out? You had originally been scheduled to start today. Are you able to start that yet or what? Where's that in the process up? Yeah, we're anticipating that we'll be off and run on the 27th. We had two choices. Returning coaches had two choices of the 20th of the 27th could go three weeks. And so we thought instead of having a week off and starting on the 20th, we're just going to start on the 27th and kind of go straight through. And at that point in time, just would take it one day at a time. Try to focus on some positive learning and really get our guys brought back up to speed on the things that we've changed and the things that we're going to continue to remain consistent at. We got a question from Jim Wyatt for John. Hey, Jim. John, how you doing? I want to ask you about this year's draft and maybe how the strengths of it match up with the needs for your football team. Yeah. You know, I talked about it before a little bit at the combine, but have, you know, having been able to kind of dig through these position groups. We feel like there's players really across the board that there's depth at certain position groups. Some positions are a little more top heavy maybe than others, but I feel like we've got some players identified really that we think, I mean, you never know once the draft unfolds where guys are going to go. But we feel like there's guys in all the rounds that we can, you know, that we'll look to try to add to help the football team. And looking at the draft a little further. Is there any, what positions would you say the draft is maybe the deepest? Well, I think it's been widely talked about this, the receipt, the receiver group. You know, they're coming in all shapes and sizes. There's big physical receivers. There's smaller, faster guys. There's the crafty route runners. There's the guys with the ball that go with the ball in their hands. I think the whole line group's got some depth at it. I think the D line group has some depth at it. I think there's some runners. There's pretty good depth there. And there's some LinkedIn size in the secondary. John Glennon had a question for both John and Mike. Morning John. John, how are you? Good, man. Good, good, good. I know you just talked a little bit about the depth here, but I wonder how unusual is it to have such a strong crop of tackles this year? It seems like they're becoming increasingly rare. And does that possibly make it any more likely that you, that you go after one early this year because you don't know, you know, what next year's crop or future crops might look like at that position? Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a position group. There's, this is kind of a unique draft here where you've got several guys at that position that we feel can step in and help our football team and help a lot of football teams in the league. And those guys, those big guys, they're not walking around around Walmart or Target. They don't come around very often. So, you know, we'll see kind of how the draft unfolds and see where that position group, when we're on the clock, whether that, if there's a player there, how he stacks up to another player at a different position possibly, and then make a call on it. But you're right. It's kind of a, I don't know if it's a unique year for that position group, but it's certainly a year where there's really good depth with good players at it. I mean, Tuss, one more at you on the draft there, if I could. The cornerback class, wondering if you guys would like or look very closely at someone who could step in and play slot immediately. How much that factors into a possible cornerback guy with the chance that Logan Ryan doesn't come back. Yeah, I think, you know, I think we always talk about position versatility and the ability for guys to play a couple of different spots. And we feel like there's some players in that corner group that can play inside corner. And there's a lot that, you know, that, that Mike puts on those guys plate, which spent a lot of time with, with several guys in that position group, just seeing if they're going to be able to, to handle the mental component that's asked of that position group. And there's, there's certainly guys in, in that category that we think have versatility to play on the outside and play on the inside. And one for, for Mike also, please. Mike, with, with the trade of Jarrell, wondering how much of an urgency do you feel to add another, you know, high quality D lineman or, or on the other hand, I guess, do you think Simmons has filled that spot and that it's not a huge priority at that point. I got you, John. I don't know if Graves is frozen. Maybe he was stunned by the question. He was shocked and all. Do you want to go ahead and, and answer that, John, or yeah, I can, I can, I can speak to that, not to speak for, for Mike, but yeah, I mean, I think Simmons has played there. He played there in college. He played there some for us last year. So, you know, I feel pretty good. Certainly if there's somebody there that we think improves that position group and we like them, and players at another position group, then we won't hesitate to take a D lineman. Again, I love those big guys. I don't think you can ever have enough offensive and defensive linemen. Those lines of scrimmage, that's where it all starts, but feel really good about the position group that, that we have with, with Jeffrey, with Dayquan, with, with adding Crawford and having Mack back and, and Dickerson and Ivy and those guys feel like we've got really good competition, you know, across the board at those spots. As we wait for Mike to get back, Joe Rexroad had one for John. Hey, Joe. Oh, there we go. Hey, John, how you doing? Good, man. Good. Hey, I just wanted to ask you about, of course, the Davian Clowney, if there's anything you can tell us about where that is right now. And then also, correct me if I'm wrong, but you haven't really had a draft before where you had a guy like that, sort of in the midst still, correct? I mean, you know, a potential pursuit of someone that could obviously significantly change your roster and, and your payroll going into a draft. And how does that impact how you approach this? Yeah, I think, like with anything, you have to have a couple of scenarios mapped out. And, you know, I would say I talked about it last week with a couple of the TV spots that, you know, we haven't closed the door on anything, but I would say that we really haven't inched closer to having any finality to that either. I mean, he's obviously a good football player. And I think where we're at, depending up on who we pick, could potentially impact that, but I would say it doesn't close the, close the door on it completely either. Again, like I said last week, you don't ever close the door on the, you know, potentially adding good football players to your team. So we'll just kind of take it, take it how it goes and probably circle back with that one here this week or next week once the draft's over. Thanks, man. Gentry had a question for John. Yeah. Hey, John, I'm curious. Gentry, how are we doing, man? Good. I'm curious about the logistics of how things are going to work on draft night for you. I assume you're on a call with the people who would normally be in your own room. How difficult is it going to be for other teams to reach you? And I guess every team's going to kind of be dealing with that same thing. Yeah. So, so we're going to have a couple of different, you know, things in place here. That's why I've got three surfaces and an iPad on my desk here. But I'll be in one kind of channel if you will in a video conference call with our typical draft room participants. And then there'll be another, you know, conference call that I'll have with the scouts on another kind of channel. And then we have a couple of different ways of communicating with the league. And I have my draft phone and my cell phone, which is kind of standard operating procedure. And we'll run through it today. We did kind of an internal mock last week with our scouts and with our draft room. And it went pretty well. You know, we've got a couple of documents that we've got to have and being able to manipulate that, you know, whether it's the draft board or who's picking who, we've kind of assigned people to that that they will work that they'll be able to hear who gets selected and they can make adjustments on the draft board or if there's a trade, make adjustments to our picks board so that I can see, you know, who's picking when and who's been taken. And I'll have, you know, direct communication with, with coach rabble, everybody that's in the draft room in our scouts as well. If there's any aspect of this draft that concerns you the most just in terms of logistics and what you might be able to do, what is it about this year that concerns you the most? Well, I think my biggest concern was the ability to make trades and how that was going to go off. I think that I feel a little bit more at ease now that we've got the draft phones set up and there's a lot of trades that get done via cell phone. Like sometimes like in typical draft years in the past where I'll text, you know, another GM and say, Hey, are you going to pick here? Would you be looking to move? And they'll text me back. And I don't want to say you consummate a trade via text, but you at least get the ball rolling that way. And then you pick up the phone and call. So I think that style of business with being able to move around on the draft board will still be able to do that. Paul had a couple of questions for John. Hey, John, how much? Good. Thanks. How many guys did you get to the facility for a visit before things were shut down? 10. 10. So you feel pretty good about a third. You think that's about what most teams did. You have access to that information, right? Yeah, I think we may have been a little, maybe may have had a few more than some teams, but I think there was, you know, that as we started to talk to prospects, you know, on FaceTime or on Zoom calls, there were several that were able to make trips as well. You know, certainly missing the pro days, the private workouts and those other, you know, 20 guys, you would obviously love to have gotten all of that accomplished, but, you know, we're all kind of fishing in the same pond for lack of a better term. And it's the kind of the cards we've been dealt and we've been able to navigate it and feel pretty good about where we're at. Does that include locals or are you talking out of town? Yeah, we didn't do the, I mean, we typically have our local day. We would have had it last week and or in early April where we would have brought those, those, you know, local guys in for the local day and worked out some of them, some of the more high profile players. We just bring them in if they're in town and they visit with us, but that we did not, we were not able to get the local day worked in. How much do you have to think about contract status of John new, Dayquan and Jay on as, as you draft here, or do you think optimistically about your ability to extend guys you want long term? Yeah, I think, you know, that's right now our focus is on the draft and making sure we try to come away with next weekend with a bolster roster and some good players on our team.  So our Ben Jones, whoever may be just to pick two examples there. There's there's time to to work through all of that in the future. I know this mock is is scrambled. What what number pick do you have? And do you know who they're having you take? We have been advised Paul not to disclose any of this information. So I'll have to plead the fifth on that one. Mike, do you want to be a rebel on that and share? I don't even they're going to million emails from them. So they just tell me to be ready to go at noon. So that's what I'm going to do. Be ready to go at noon. Thank you both. James Slater had a question for Mike. I'll just ask this to both of you guys. Hi, James Slater NFL Network, new to the beat. So thanks for doing this question for you about not obviously getting those guys in there for a workout. Is it a good or bad thing that there's a more heavy reliance on the tape? And are you at all concerned about some of the medical aspects of this? And is the leak protecting you in any sense given the circumstances? As far as for bringing him in to to work out, the only guys who would be able to work out will be our local guys potentially. But the medical is extremely important. I mean, that's an important component when you're making a decision on a player.  Our training staff and our doctors have done an extreme amount of due diligence and talking with trainers and that have dealt with these prospects at their respective universities and trying to get as much medical information as possible and grading them accordingly. I think the tape is something from the coaching perspective that we always look at as far as the coordinators or the position coaches or the head coach in my perspective is what we try to rely on. We're not, we're not scouts. We're coaches. And so I think we rely on the tape and the interview and would we like to bring this guy? Would we like to coach this guy and have him in our room is something that from a coaching perspective, we rely heavily on our evaluation as we talk with John and his department.  Are you guys getting a sense of these players in those virtual chat room that you would typically get face to face? What's been lacking and what have you gained from the virtual chats? I would think they've been great. I think John and I have enjoyed them. I think we've really probably taken that to something where we had an opinion and a player thought about a player and then you meet with them for 30 or 40 minutes and you really get a sense of do you want this guy to represent your organization and do you want to work with him on a daily basis? So I think that those have been really good to help build a profile of the player. And I would echo that, you know, some of the guys that we talked to at the Combine, we circled back with and it's 18 minutes, it was 18 minutes this year per prospect and these guys have a lot going on whether it's medical or they're downstairs with what we call the train station interviewing with, you know, five or six teams in a row and they've installed 48 plays over the course of three hours with the guys and they're kind of their heads swimming a little bit. So when they come into your room, they're trying to make an impression on you, they've just got so much on their plate and there's some guys that, you know, may not have passed that test in Indy or, you know, not fully passed it, but we've been able to jump on calls with them and get to know them a little bit better in their setting and had a little bit better impression of them. Terry McCormick had a question for both John and Mike. Morning Terry. There we go. Terry's there. Okay. Picking at 29, that's lower than you picked in previous years, obviously, because of the success you had last year, but given that in most drafts, there may not be 29 players with first round grades, that sort of thing, are you more apt to maybe want to trade down and pick up some extra picks if possible? Yeah, you're right. It's the lowest we've picked.  Do we have a vision for the player? Is the player going to be able to come in and help our football team, and are we going to be able to, you know, to work with them on a day in and day out basis and make them a better player and then make us a better football team? And we'll just kind of see how it goes. You're right. We've got to sit there and pick picks. And when we're on the clock, you know, it's no different than any other draft where if the phone rings, you take down the potential trade, and you kind of value that relative to the player you're thinking of picking. And can you get that player, if you have to slide back seven, eight, nine, ten spots, do you think that player will be there or is there somebody similar that you like? Or you better off just taking the player and not risking losing them. All of those things and those decisions, you know, we've started to work through and we've talked through different scenarios. And as that manifests itself on the clock, we'll work through it. And this is for Mike. As far as the running back situation, looking for somebody to compliment Derek Henry, you're looking for, you want somebody that maybe is similar to Derek or would you prefer somebody that has a different skill set that you can do some different things? Terry, I don't know how many guys you're familiar with out there that are similar to Derek, but if you can find them, let us know. So with that being said, you know, I mean, just, I think a, you know, a player that we feel like that can come in and play in all three downs and then really can help in the kicking game. Somebody that can come in and be able to protect, you know, that we asked our guys to do a lot. And I think we've been able to put together a group of guys that we feel like can do that in different areas of this draft. And so we're obviously going to have to continue to take a look at that position to be able to give Derek some help as the season goes on. Dave Boclair had a question for John. Hey, John. Just, you've made only 10 picks the last two years. Is seven a good number this year or do you have in your mind a goal to maybe try and get a couple extra and beef up the youth of this team that way this year? Sorry about the dog. Somebody's trying to get in the house. Yeah, I think I think we the more picks you can have the better. But, you know, feel like we've got it. We've got we've got some we've got enough ammunition draft pick wise to make ourselves a better football team. Hopefully. But if we I think you would you could pull 31 other gems and ask them if they could if they could pick up another pick here here or there they would they would certainly entertain that so we'll kind of see how they start to unfold on on Thursday and Friday and Saturday and as more picks potentially become available available by trade. We'll certainly entertain that. Would you consider it kind of following up on Terry's question a big deal to not pick in the first round if that's the way it works out? Um, no, I don't I don't think so. I think from a football team from a general managers and not to speak for Mike, but we're just trying to make the football team better. It doesn't really matter and we tell these players when we we hang up the call with them. We're like it really doesn't matter whether you go in the first round of the second round or the third round of the I mean, it does from a compensation standpoint on their rookie contract to say there was a first round pick, but um, what matters is that they help the football team win and um, you really won't know that until until we we tee it up and kick it off in September. Teran had a question for both John and Mike. Hey, TD. Alright I wanted to ask you in regards to this this class of cornerbacks because I feel like that's a pretty deep class. Can you speak to just how you can get help from day one always through day three?  Um, but but you're right. I mean, there was several guys down at the at the senior bowl who you know, they may not be first round picks, but they look they look, you know, competent enough to go out there and help a team. And there was a couple at the East West Ryan game that we took notice of to that, you know, that had had good weeks down there. So as I said earlier, I think I think that I think that position group is is a is a pretty deep one that you know, you can you can get guys that might can help you in all three days of the draft and when you're looking at position versatility specifically on your roster, do you feel that a Dory Jackson is a guy that can if need be bump inside and give you an option that at nickel. Um, yeah, I mean, I think he's played in there some whether it was adjusting to a formation or company. I mean, I think he shows a willingness to tackle. I think he's got pretty good match quickness and the ability to mirror. So at the end of the day, you know, Coach Vrable and his staff might they do a great job of putting guys in the best position to be successful. Um, and maybe maybe that's maybe that's Dory in there. Maybe that's somebody else at the end of the day we're going to try to get the best 11 guys on the field at different whatever position helps us, you know, make a make a play successful down in and down out and coach John earlier in the call he had mentioned how there are things that you stress out of your your nickel guys, some of the responsibilities when you're looking at these guys in this draft class what are some of the things like the traits that you look to to make you feel like they could come in and help you out. Well, I mean, I think first and foremost, I think there's a there's a versatility to be able to to play against two tight end sets with one of those guys being a, you know, a speed tight end or a move tight end that maybe we want to play against and out substituted defense the ability to blitz the ability to play man and zone coverage and then more so now to be able to you know to match up on some vertical routes inside I think for for so long in the slot there was this horizontal thought that that guys had to work defenses horizontally and now we're seeing a lot more vertical routes that are coming out of the slot so I think that that's something that's always a challenge when you and you're looking for players that do all those things and and do them very well. Thanks coach. Thanks. You got a T.D. Eric Backrack had one for John. Hey John. If you've you know communicated anymore with teams across the league ahead of the draft this year just because it might be a little bit harder or maybe more chaotic to communicate with them come draft a just as it relates to potential trades or or anything like that have you reached out or been reached out to more just from other teams across the league I would say nothing more than than normal I was on the phone with the team right before I jumped on here so you know I think those those phone calls will start to pick up you know I talked to one team and and asked them if they were hearing anything up in the in the first part of the round and they said it was pretty quiet so far so I think those conversations will start to start to heat up as we inch closer to to Thursday Harkening back to you know 2016 when we had moved back and then moved back up to eight you know that those conversations really didn't get fast and furious until Thursday morning and then Thursday afternoon when we when we finally you know jump back up to eight there with Cleveland Jared Stillman had one for both John and Mike just for John John when it comes to Logan Ryan replacing him are you looking at a corner who would probably be smaller but faster or looking for a guy who would maybe be in the case you talked about length maybe longer but not as quick um um well I think at the end of the day we talk about the um the corner position um Mike and I always ask the corners when we're talking to them whether it's the senior ball or the you know the combine or when they come in on a visit like what are the most important things for a corner um and they inevitably talk about their foot quickness or their speed or or this and I kind of simplify it we simplify form is like don't let your guy catch the ball and tackle so whatever shape or size that guy comes in the more times that they cover their guy or they knock the ball away and they tackle a guy who's got the ball um that's that's what we're looking for if it's a longer guy in there and and he can handle some of those routes so be it um if it's if it's a smaller guy that's that's feisty and he's fast and not afraid to tackle then then so be it I think that like I said earlier we're trying to get as many guys in that back end there that can that can tackle and keep their guy from catching the ball as possible is it harder for you to figure out exactly what you want in that regard when a lot of these guys didn't run at the combine and they were planning to run at their pro days so you don't have an exact time and you can't look at it and say okay this guy could cover Brandon cooks or Kenny stills or TY Hilton etc yeah I think that's a great point Jerry and I think what you what you do is um I mean you try to look at matchups or they matched up on some of those you know some of those guys who you know um our scouts do a good job of getting um it's not you know it may not be 100% accurate but we we get a pretty good estimate on um from the strength coaches around at these various universities about what their players have tested at um and and you see those matchups and if they're matched up on a speed guy you know are they able to kind of are they able to stay with that guy and you're trying to decipher what they're being asked of in coverage too because you know maybe they're asked to cover him for a little while and then they're passing them off to somebody else so there's a lot that goes in the to the evaluation piece when you're determining to find a value of that player uh Buck had a question for John actually for both you guys good to talk with you hope you're doing okay um thanks man we spent a lot of time with Daniel Jeremiah on our media call talking about how football is becoming more positionless last week I guess how much do you guys notice that trend in this draft in particular and how much more how much more difficult does it make your evaluation process uh process when you're trying to figure out just how many different things you can do with a particular player um I don't know about positionless because I think you have to have you have to have a defined role for the player and then the more the more the player can handle from a mental and or physical standpoint you know you you put on that player now there there are some players in this draft that I think um they are kind of hybrid players whether that's you know a bigger safety that might play linebacker or uh you know a really athletic safety that might could play nickel corner or corner um but I think what we try to do as a football team is we try to try to evaluate and and and make a definitive statement on what we think the role of the player is going to be and how they can impact our football team um and then it's really it's really up to the player and that's what we tell the players when when they get here it's like you know you're here you're going to work at this position and what what else you can handle um you will determine that same question for your coach um you know I just think that you got to be able to be in a room I think that's the one thing when we talk about and John's like well whose rooms he going to be I think that's a question that he's always asked when we talk about a player's versatility and his ability to play um more than one position I think John wants to know hey whose rooms he going to be in what do we see but I think it's critical that we always have a vision for the player uh and that's made up of a scouting department, a coaching staff and when they're going to start and then ultimately the role the player is going to be determined by the player um the more that they can do and the more that they can handle the more that we'll give them I would use a money hooker as an example of that he came in right away and as a safety but played some different spots for us played down a little closer and new nickel learn nickel new safety was involved in all four of our special teams phases and played multiple positions on that so he was a player that could handle a lot and then we gave him a lot so you know that that all gets determined by when we get them and we can figure out what they can retain and how they fit into our system and what are we doing to put them in a best position to succeed thanks guys Luke had a question for John yeah Luke had bumped out but I've got his question here is Austin for John how do you balance the need to improve I thought you guys were the same person for the first six months I was here I'm quite a bit taller than Luke sorry Luke but how do you balance John the need to improve the team for this year versus planning for the future in this draft yeah I think you're always looking at um certainly the current roster and how you're going to construct that and how those players are going to impact this year's team I think that's the first and foremost but you're also looking at maybe some players in the latter part of the draft that it might it might be a year or two years before they really start to take off and blossom you see a kind of a developmental piece to their game and you have to keep that in mind as well because the vision that we have for the player we're going to be playing in 2021 and 2022 as well so certainly the short term is at the forefront but you're thinking about the long term as well and coach in your experience how do you determine what kind of workload is fair to ask of a rookie and what factors play into that well I think you give them you know you ask yourself is this player changing positions are you asking him to go to a different position when you get here is it a defensive end that's going through an outside linebacker that workload may not be as much or is this a player that's um has been in a similar system we try to give them a lot we do and normally in our normal circumstances I think that probably will change a little bit on this virtual meeting stuff but we try to give them a lot and then fill in the blanks as you go and you're giving it to them at rookie minicamp normally you're giving it to them during the off-season program you're giving it to them in the OTAs and you start to see what they can develop and what they can understand I think this year will be critical that we probably don't do that and that we don't throw a bunch at them so that we don't lose them over these virtual meetings and classroom sessions so I'm very conscious of what that schedule looks like for those rookies and how we're able to teach them and get them brought up to speed so this year may be a little different Austin but normally we're trying to throw a lot at them because we have them in person and we can have a lot of meetings with them appreciate it Mike you already had a question for John John thanks for doing this just a question in terms of gaps and picks I think it's 80 between your third round your fifth round and 50 or so between the fifth and the seventh is that something that you're interested in trying to close the gap considering the depth of this draft sure if we've got the ability to maneuver around and get picks and slide back a few and pick up extra picks to I don't necessarily look at it perhaps but if we're able to acquire some picks via moving around I think we've proven that we're more than open for business when it comes to navigating around the draft board and positioning ourselves to get as many picks as possible thanks sir Cal Baxter had one for John John with given the uncertainty with the off season and Mike kind of touched on it do you have to maybe lower your expectations for your rookie class this year I don't think you ever lower the expectations for anybody I think we have a standard set in place different players players are different people are different and we're going to treat everybody the same we're going to expect them to come in and treat the team the way that they would want to be treated and put whatever on their plate that they can handle some guys might take off and blossom quick some guys a little longer there's no different than any other rookie class but they're going to have to buy into our philosophy of how we go about doing things be accountable be dependable show up and be a good teammate and I think that will never change when you're judging edge positions how do you weigh size versus speed what do you mean and which one to take yeah like how do you which one is there one of the size or speed you value more for an edge guy or is it I mean obviously like to have both but I think you know again players are different there's I don't think that the tackles are they're good in this game I don't think that that you can just win by running around on the edge of tackles all the time there's the tackles are good and coaches put things in place to help you know stop that but you have to have somewhat of an arsenal or developmental skill set that our coach and staff can work with to improve but all of those things are important you know length, size, speed, ability to set really downs how crafty are they can you move them around can they rush inside can they stand up can they drop all of those things go into the evaluation piece that's it thank you I've got time for two more Chris Harris for Mike Hi Mike how are you sir great Chris all right John talked a little bit about his setup on drop time just curious to know your logistical setup you obviously got the whiteboard there how is it structured in a room is your family locked out what's going to be the protocol for you during the draft the whiteboard will probably be covered we were using that for some defensive stuff and John and I talked to some of these rookies and you know I like to draw on there so it's better than drawing on a table I'm in my basement and you know I don't know I got a bunch of kids here and a wife so I'm sure that they'll be watching the draft somewhere in the house but pretty comfortable with the conversations that we've had and John and I were unbelievably excited with our mock draft that we did with our organization I thought it was cool I thought it was unbelievably functional it was amazing the work that those people put in whether it be our IT department whether it be the scouting department and some of those people involved with making sure that that was the virtual draft was as perfect as it could be and then just one more for you you're such a hands-on coach how tough is that going to be these virtual workouts and off seasons when you can't physically get out there with the guys well right now we're going to work under the assumption that these are going to be virtual classroom opportunities and now we're going to try to you know share our message through through the classroom virtually and get these guys brought up to speed and start back over you know I think that's what you do every year is you start back over you don't you know just jump in and assume that they know something that's been a long time since they've been involved in football and making sure that we go back to the basics and not rushing anything that's not my intent is to to rush it's to teach and make sure that that each and every guy is going to improve on their learning and their understanding of our offense or our defense our special teams when we get done with this and when they tell us that they can come back in you know we'll have them back in and we'll evaluate where they are physically and mentally and see when we can practice thank you Teresa we'll finish this up I think she had one for Mike Mike with this virtual off season are you all sending players equipment or monitors or you know how are you trying to take care of augmenting some of the equipment maybe they don't have well I think it's identifying what they do have and what access they have but you know per the league we were able to send them with some equipment we were also able to reimburse some equipment but for me it's really critical that our players stay self-motivated I believe that that is going to be the core to this team success right now is that we're self-motivated and that we're building a routine and that when we are going to the meetings next week the voluntary phase that players are engaged if they choose to be there and learning and that our coaches are going to be great teachers during that phase


Thanks folks for joining in. It's a real pleasure and honor to have Dan do the lightning talks. Dan will tell you the story about why lightning talks really matter, but Dan is the original creator of the APM project. And he's been the, he actually, Dan was it you, me, Srinni, a couple of us just happened to have a conversation at one of the Selenium conference and decided that we need to do an APM conference in India. And so we did one in 2019. And again, we are here. Thanks for all your help and support and putting the conference together. So cool. I mean, it's, again, great to have Dan and we're going to kickstart the lightning talks. I think I'll let Dan kind of explain how this is going to work and maybe even give a little bit of the background around the lightning talks why this is important. So over to you, Dan. Thanks again for joining from Vancouver. Right. Yeah, good. I'll say good morning. I know it's 6pm where you guys are. So I, this is why I wish I like India, you know, it's 6pm on a Friday night. We have 130 people on one track of this conference just coming to hear people talk about cool things with test automation. And so I have the task of introducing those people this evening for you guys this morning for me. So quickly, I'll sort of set out the rules. I guess I'll start with why we do this and then we'll set out the rules. And then we have five people on the schedule and we have room for a few more. I will tell you to message in a rush if you want to get added to the list. If you, we still have, I would say at least three more, something like that if you want to sign up. So first, why do we do this? We do this because the APM project would not exist largely without lightning talks. So, I won't go through the whole story again, but this project started as the sort of aftermath of a lightning talk I gave at the Selenium conference almost 10 years ago. I think it's nine and a half years ago at this point. And so, when we made Appium, we decided we wanted to always have lightning talks and so the idea of furthering the tradition and potentially hopefully one day we'll spawn another highly important highly successful project. But if not, I think there's a lot of value in listening to just what people have to say, even if it's just for five minutes. A lot of people have great ideas and so I'd like to have as part of this conference, an opportunity to give those people a large audience to share those ideas with and hopefully those sort of chemical reactions occur from this. All right, so rules. There are many rules. I'm not keeping a five minute timer. I'm not doing it. I'll assume it's in a rush, but I'll have to cut someone off if they exceed five minutes so you get five minutes. Talk about whatever you like. Those are the rules. That's all there is to this. And so with that, let me find our first presenter and promote him. All right, Daniel, your five minutes starts now. I'm keeping the time I guess. Okay, cool. Hey, everyone, Daniel. And so this talk is about a project that I did. So my last job at saw steps I reverse engineered a few things for us and Android devices. And one thing that we were looking into back then was how do you this was iOS 10 and 11. So quite some time ago. So we were looking in ways of how we could for a real device testing cloud get like fast video streaming to the cloud right so customers could do live testing and it will be super fast. Which it wasn't back then. And one of the ideas that we had was could we reverse engineer how quick time does it right so you might all know if you open quick time you can actually record iOS screen and everything so we found a better way and contributed actually trap you. But still you know I just couldn't get let this one go. So the question is how do you reverse engineer something like this right so as any good senior engineer like the first thing you do is you try to Google it. I'm like maybe someone has already done this. So you find this video on YouTube that is gone by now but back then there was one and you're like, yeah, somebody actually did it. So there's a way to get it working. Then you look further and you find discussions online without any links to any solutions and you're like those source code attached anywhere to the video and you're like okay damn it works somehow but there is no source code anyway so I thought you know how hard can this possibly be. And so basically started reverse engineering this and the question is how do you actually do this. Right. I mean one option is you decompile the source code and then you get something like this and try to understand how it works. Okay, the other idea is use fire shark and look what's going over the wire, right. And I always like to explain this. If you want to privately reverse engineer rest API right as a comparison what would you rather do. Look at modified JavaScript code, or just look at the, you know, API in your Chrome browser. That was basically what I did right so I open wire shark stop playing a video stop playing video, save the capture do some post processing and look at what I get and then I get this and like what is that. And I Google it and I'm like what is a good tip. And I Google it I find nothing. All these strings right there not helping me, but at some point it struck me is like oh this is just reverse by order right so let's skip some of those. And then suddenly it all makes sense right so this is actually not a good tip this is a ping, because you just have to reverse the bite order. And then everything comes together and you see all these values in it all sort of dictionaries and stuff and you go through the whole hex thumb figure everything out. And then you find that there's just a bunch of age to 64 units in there. So I concatenate them all to a file and then I was actually able to play video with video land. One second Daniel, we can't see your screen at the moment. Oh, you may need to click sharing. Don't worry. We won't take this. I'll pause the clock. Go for it. Did you see it. Yeah, now we see it. Totally forgot. Yes, this is the sharing thing that I was talking about wrap. Too nervous. Exactly this is a quick time feature right and. And let's see. So then I implemented this. It's open source. There's a huge reference documentation so if you're interested in how this actually works under the hood you can read that. And then in detail explains every little piece of it. Let's skip these things. And also there's a little demo on YouTube where you can actually see me doing it for the first time. So part of the goal was figuring out how to do this and run it on Linux, which is now possible. So if for whatever reason you want to have super high quality video stream from iOS device to a Linux machine you can do this now. So usually, if you do things like this the cool thing is if you reverse engineer it and actually really understand how it works you can do even cooler stuff than quick time can do. So one thing that is possible with this project is if you want to record audio only then you can also do that. So there's no need to get a video stream. If you run an Appium test and you want to capture device audio or something, you can totally use this tool and record the audio output of the device on Linux or Mac, whatever you want. And here's the link to the golden reference implementation. Right, so this works you can download it run it like I said it works on Mac works on Linux doesn't work on windows I tried and it's not possible. And that's it. All right, I would say a huge round of applause but I don't know how that's going to work here, but I asked we can also open the floor for some quick questions, maybe we can take two or three questions I'll ask question first to get this rolling. So you reverse engineer this is there anything else you think would be interesting to reverse engineer and return adding support for Appium so this you showed the sort of value you can get out of the process and sort of the unique things you can bring by reverse engineering as opposed to like using the APIs that come with a thing. Do you have any other ideas for things will be interesting. I mean I have another project that I talked about today right so it's a go iOS that allows you to run XT test for example so you can use Appium for iOS real devices on Linux which is pretty cool. Also, I enabled some things like for example Xcode in recent version has gotten this device state simulation feature where you can enable, you know, on the device to G simulation like lower network speeds you can activate thermal conditions degrade the GPU and stuff like that. It works in Xcode, but you know it's always a little annoying if you have an Appium test and you want to do this actually. I mean you don't really want to go to Xcode and enable it there. And this is why I added it to go iOS so you can do it from the command line. So if you run your Appium test, and you can just basically run this command line tool it has JSON output so it should be super easy to use. And then you can tell the device to I don't know behave like it's 40 degrees temperature and toggle all the speed stuff. Yep. Cool. All right, well thank you very much for presenting. It's a little help for me to rush to find out I think okay I'm wrong is now here. That's a name I recognize. So let's make. I'm sorry I don't know the genderization of this name, but let's make him or her. The next presenter and get rolling with that. Can you do that for me nourish actually then last deep is already there. I think Rajdeep then Rajdeep and then we go to up now. You're on the clock, by the way. Okay. Let me share my screen. Okay, can you see my screen. Yes. Okay. All right, welcome everyone. So, I'll, I'll talk about jetpack compose and how it goes along with apm. So those who don't know what jetpack compose is. It's actually a new view framework for Android. So in traditionally Android we have activities and we inflate those activities now I'm talking about Android developers here so they, they use XML markup for defining their activities and then they inflate their activities with views. They're slightly there's a very good improvement there in, in jetpack compose. It's a new framework, which is a modern toolkit for building native user interface. Same as before we have used to build native user interface but it simplifies and accelerates the UI development on Android. What does that, what does that mean because traditionally we have to define activities and the views and the layouts in XML markup now using jetpack compose. We can do it using code and the code basically written in Kotlin. So with this, what it means code is, code is much more easier to handle than handling the configuration of XML files. So it's, it's easier in that sense that it can be developed very quickly. And also code is more reusable than, than XMLs, right. You can wrap the code and you can, you can, you can create modules out of it and same in jetpack compose, you can create composables which could be used to show on your screen. And you can create those composables and store them in your code repository and then you can compose more out of composables. So, think of it like when you are developing Android, developing a user phase for a game, right. There is no, there is no defined position of things there.  And because it's so, so nice and so developer, developer friendly, it is, it is getting a lot of ground and many companies have already started migrating their views on compose because it definitely gives gives them an edge over, over regular views. Now, since it is so popular, it's going to definitely be the future of Android use. Same way in iOS, you might have heard of something like SwiftUI, in case of Android, it's jetpack compose. Now, since jetpack compose is already out in the world and people are already people have already started building their apps using jetpack compose. And then we should talk about what is the testing support for it. Unfortunately, there is no end-to-end support in any of the available frameworks right now. And APM is also one of them. When I talk about no support, I'm actually lying. There's a very little support because in APM there are two options. One is APM's UI Automator 2 drivers. And there's a broken support there. Why I'm calling it broken is basically you can actually see the view hierarchy and you can find the element using content description or say text and you can operate on them. But whatever you will see in the hierarchy will be just a class, will be a view with the class android.widget.view. So there will not be like any text, edit text or frame layout, linear layout. Everything will be view because it's just a hierarchy dumped in terms of accessibility. It will be something like how does the end user sees your hierarchy and the content descriptions will be visible there. However, if you want to go with your APM UI Automator 2 driver, the support is going to be limited because you'll have to end up adding content description to each and every view that you want to be identified, which will basically mess up the accessibility of your application, which is a bad idea. So another option is APM Espresso driver. And as of now, there is no support in that APM Espresso driver. Now, since UI Automator 2 and Espresso are the framework provided by Google, which are being utilized by these drivers. Google has naturally provided another framework for Tech Compost Test Automation. It's called Compost Test Rule. It's basically based on instrumentation again. So what this means is we can actually instrument our application under test and use this rule. And that's what I'm currently trying to work on. So in the APM Espresso driver, what we do actually is we instrument our application under test and we create a companion APK, which is instrumentation APK for our application. And in that APK, the work is in progress for adding source code for end-to-end test support for Jetpack Compost Automation. As of now, the support is very limited and it is available in this GitHub request. And support is only for find element, click, and getting text. Also, there is a support for display. Now, you can see it's a huge PR with lots of command, which shows how I'm sure I am with Portland right now, but still trying to find my way out here. A lot of good review comments from APM maintainers there. So I'll fix them. After this is pushed, I'll request all of you who are interested to contribute in this repository for more actions. Not just find element, but also let's say for find elements for getting displayed selected. And then there are many, many, it's going to be a new driver in itself, inside a driver. So to summarize, that gives a quick overview. Two more sentences and then you got to wrap it up. Okay, yeah. So there is no need to, I mean, that's pretty much it. So that gives the current status of the support for Jetpack Compost Automation in APM. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Rajdeep. I guess if anyone has a question, raise your hand. I'll give you like 10 seconds to do that.  If not, I will move on to our next presenter, who I know less about than Rajdeep. So I guess let's go to Atmaram. Hello everyone. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. So this talk is a little bit different. This talk is not about APM or any test automation framework as such. But this talk is about day-to-day activity of tester, that is data creation. And I'm going to talk about one of the tool that I myself have been contributing as a open source tool. This tool is named as COR. And this talk is about using COR for automating test data creation. So you might have been creating test data for your day-to-day manual testing or automated testing. You might need to create bulk test data or you might need to do ad hoc test data on most of the scenarios while doing testing. And how this tool can help you over there. I'm going to show that. So challenges with test data, there are typically following challenges that we face with test data. Like ad hoc test data creation requires manually changing values in postman or curl request. So suppose you are using curl or postman. So this premise of this entire talk is we are creating test data based on APIs. So when you are using REST APIs for creating test data, you might be using postman or curl request for creating this test data. And many times we need to capture value from one API. For example, authorization headers or many times we need to capture some value like some ID or something from previous API and pass it to the next API. So that we need to do. So what we generally do in postman, we write some output script or input script and we capture those values. Many times we want to make multiple calls by just changing few values in the request. So sometimes what we want to do is like capture the value, make n number of calls and create n number of data. At times we want to iterate over response of arrays to make equal number of API calls. So like suppose when API gave you a array and we want to create that many requests and we want to create that many data. So these are all challenges associated with test data when we are creating test data through APIs. And overall it seems time consuming. And there might be many more things which you might have faced. So for the sake of simplicity, I am going to demonstrate a simple application within this short talk. This application I have created sometime back two, three years back for demonstration purpose. This application is shopping application. There are categories of products and subcategories of products. So what we are going to do is we are going to create category and we are going to create subcategory within each category. So these test data we want to create. I think we are not able to see your full video.  Okay, okay. Yes, perfect. So we are going to create category and we are going to create subcategories within it. So this is a category, this is a subcategory. And steps for creating same using APIs, we are hitting the API endpoint, API slash category. We are passing it a name and in response we are going to get a category ID. Once we create that category, we will get a category ID in response. And when we are creating subcategory, we will need that category ID to be passed for that subcategory to be created within the crack category that we previously created. So that's the simple use case that we are going to talk about. Now, how would you, how would you do, suppose you want to create category sometimes with one name, sometimes with other name. Sometimes you want to create bulk number of categories, subcategories. You will do all of these ad hoc things while testing, right? Now, what we are going to do is we are going to use a car, which is an open source tool. It has an IntelliJ plugin for running this tool. It has its own programming language called as a journey programming language. It is written in Rust programming language. So it can be run on Macs, it can be run on Linux, it can be run on Windows as well. So all the Rust binaries are compiled to the native binary. So this is a cross-platform tool actually. Right now, the binaries are being published only for Macs, but it could be compiled from sources. Binary could be compiled from the sources. And how car help here is it can automate sequence of API calls using scripts. And each API call can be designed using a request and response template. So you get a templating feature in this particular car tool. And you can capture values from responses using templates. Now, the way we capture values sometimes in some templating language or some using paths and all. Car has its own syntax for capturing values. You can capture arrays. You can capture many different values using those templates. One minute warning. Yeah. And resultant scripts are like command line utility. Okay. And golden rules for call is it uses same captured value correlate for filling subsequent request. And if some variables from the template is not known at the runtime, it asks it to user. So let's see the demo. So here is a simple script created in core. It will hit the post request for creating category. We are capturing value of the ID over here. And we are passing it to the next request. And when I run this, it is asking me value for category name because it is not finding it anywhere. I will say electronics. It is asking how many subcategories I want to create. I will create two. We'll say TV and mobile. All right. We need to wrap up. So I'll give you two more sentences and then we got to close this out and move to the next person. Yeah. Yeah. And that's how it has created a test data that that is just the last thing that I'm going to show. It has created a category electronics and TV and mobile. Yeah. So that's that's the thing that you can use any questions. I don't see any hands up yet. But you will be able to contact up from after this. I guess if you have any questions, we have about 13 minutes left in the session and two more talks to do. So I'm going to move straight ahead to the next presenter, Andre. So Andre, please, your time starts now. So I have only three minutes. I'm getting rushed. Five minutes. So you have until seven past or just 37 past period. Great. Thank you. My name is Andre. I'm, I'm from Estonia, from Europe. And I'm going to show you how to write really concise or expressive or readable or short automated tests in a film using library selenite. Just two minutes. So if you're writing some automated your tests, either for web or for mobile applications, you should always have several typical problems. Most of first of all, you have all these problems with flake tests and with verbal syntax. You don't need to write too much of boilerplate code. These are typical problems. They are always typical in selenium tests, web tests, and they are probably even bigger in mobile tests because mobile is lower and so on. And I have one possible solution for this program. This is a library called selenite, which I created 10 years ago and which got quite popular in web testing. So what is selenite? Selenite is a free and open source library which gives you a concise syntax or API to write readable and stable tests. More information you can find on site selenite.org or in Twitter. And first of all, I will show a test for web and then I will show how the same syntax can be used for mobile tests. So how the test for web looks like using selenite library. Selenite has actually quite a few methods, two free methods. The first of all, you need to use method open, which just opens the browser. At this point, selenite wraps up all that logic built inside of selenium. It downloads the driver binary. It initializes the driver with all those complex settings, options and so on. And for you, it's very simple. Just open your browser. Then using method dollar, you can find some elements and dot and call some methods like set well, click, send keys and so on and so on. There is plenty of methods. And finally, you can check some results. You can check that this element should get some text or some class or some values and attributes and so on and so on. There is plenty of features, but you can don't have time right now to talk about that in details. But shortly said, don't you think that this syntax is cool? I think it's cool. It's great because we have short syntax, we have really readable tests, which has built-in waitings, which solves most of flaky tests. Yeah, probably I should say that all these methods like should have text, they actually do contain waiting. You know, you do wait a little bit if needed, if the limit is being loaded still and so on. It has automated screenshots, smart error messages and so on and so on, quite a lot of features. And the good news is that actually Selenite can be also used for mobile, for testing mobile applications. There is special integration of Selenite with Appium on GitHub. And now I'm going to show how Selenite looks like for mobile tests. Tests looks like actually really, very similar, really simple. Again, using MetaDollar, you can find some elements by name, by its path, by whatever. And again, you can do whatever you can do with typical Appium elements, clicks and keys and so on. In this case, we see a test for a calculator in Android or in mobile. And in the end, we can assert the result, assert that some result field has about six. Since we have a little bit time, I can even run this test. I hope it will be fast. As you see, this is a real goal, a real project, it absolutely executes. No magic. Yeah, and as you see, this test is really short and simple. So yeah, I hope you see my Android simulator, which runs the tests and clicks some buttons. Yeah, so with just a few lines, just a few minutes. And you might ask, can you use some annotations, find by something like that, or in my tests to create page objects, to make them even more readable. And the answer is yes, you can. You can use all that Appium annotations that we typically use kind of Android, find by iOS, find by and so on. You can even mix Selenium annotations and Appium annotations all together, and even reuse the same page object for both mobile platforms and for web tests, if occasionally we want to do it. So typical page object could look like this. And then in Pest, you can write even more readable and concise tests. You can initialize page object using Selenite method screen, and just use methods or fields of this page object. And again, I showed the results in the end. That was the demonstration of Selenite, and yeah, overall the good news is that you can write concise and stable tests even in mobile applications. If you have any questions I can answer, or later you can get me in Twitter or whatever in GitHub, and I can answer all the questions. Thank you for your attention. Thanks, Andrei. All right. I'm going to check just in case it appears Qashon is not here. If you are here Qashon. We have time for your talk. Otherwise, we'll assume he's not here. And we have time for one more person can have five minutes in front of these 150 people. If they wish, I guess just raise your hand and zoom, right? Or something. I don't know if Pooja's around if she wants to sing to us again this year. I'm out for that as well. We'll give it a minute to see if anyone volunteers. Yeah, I am just promoting Anil. Thanks, Andrei. I'm going to... All right, Anil. Five minutes. And then, Nuresh, it's all right if we go over by two minutes, right? Yep, that's fine. Good. It's all yours, Anil. Hey, hi everyone. Can you hear me? Yes. Is my video visible? Yes, yes. Okay, great. Hey, thanks for the opportunity. Actually, I wasn't prepared, but I thought of sharing one thought with all of you. So, yeah, we talked about the technology. We talked about the selenium. We are talking about the EPM and everything, right? So, yeah, all this is good. I mean, we can achieve parallel execution. We can reduce the test time and everything. So, all things are fine. But when it comes to a testing, what I feel is, what we should be delivering is the product quality. And how we can deliver that product quality is, when we think from an end perspective and user perspective. So, that is, again, an important thing which we should... which all of you should consider. And even that is one case and we should be thinking out of the box. Yes, looking at the technology, that is one perspective which is fine. But again, if we can think from an end user perspective, what they need, how they test it, definitely we are going to find more and more bugs. And with that, what we did is, we actually... we started one initiative. Like, we were executing all these test cases through our automation suite and everything. So, we used to get a very little number of defects. But what we started as, we called it as a break the app. So, we as a team came up and we decided, let's break the app. Let's think out of the box and let's try to find out as many defects as we can. So, surprisingly, what we got is, through automation, we used to get hardly like 10 defects or 12 defects. From this, thinking out of the box, actually we could find more than 20 to 25 suggestions, not bugs, but the suggestions here. This is something which we can improvise in our app. So, we actually did a lot of out of the box thinking there where we actually tested our app against... when the network is actually very poor, how do we are mobile app response? That is something what we thought. The storage level is very low. And this is actually, these are the real-time problems which customer can face. So, there are people who actually have a device, the storage limit is almost full. That's like a 90% of the device is full. And at that time, how our app performs. So, these are the things actually we never thought. But we thought that these are the problems which customer can face and we could find more bugs around it. So, what I wanted to tell again is when we think out of the box and when we think from end user perspective, that is something where we can achieve good product quality and we all should aim for that product quality because we as a testers, we wanted to deliver a good product quality and that should be our aim. Yeah, so that's the small interesting story I wanted to share all of you. Thanks for this opportunity, Dan. No worries. Thanks to you and thanks to everyone else who gave a talk today. It was looking pretty grim in the first five minutes but we pulled it together and I think there's some good stuff here today. Cool. Since, I guess I'll draw the session to a close and once again, thanks everybody. Thanks to Nourash and everyone with the organizing committee for organizing this. I guess the conference is over, we're just in day one so I won't give the full like whatever. I hope to see all of you in person soon. Hopefully the next time we do this conference or signing conference, it will be reasonable for me to make it out there along with the rest of us and we can do this in person again. But hopefully it's trending that way at some rate or another. Anyways, that's all I've got. I was impressed with everything I saw today. I always enjoy going to India for a number of reasons that I won't go into right now. The amazing talks but the other things as well. And I look forward to hopefully doing this again in a couple of years or maybe turning up at Selenium conference next year or something like that. Thanks so much Nourash and everybody who organized this. And thanks to all the speakers.


a spontaneous addition of the Course in Miracles live, practicing the deep, deep, deep teachings of Jesus, basically from the Sermon on the Mount, Judge Not, let's keep you judged. So, Judge Not, those two words, wow, they can pay so much because that is the gateway to accepting the correction or accepting the Atonement and remembering God. So, yeah, I think another two words that I really like was be passers-by. That was, I think, from the Gospel of Thomas. But today, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the experience of starting to see that you cannot judge, not really that you should not judge, but that you cannot judge. You really aren't capable of judgment. Judgment is something that was invented by the ego as a way of bringing order into chaos. And that's where all the rules and regulations and mores of the world, the laws of the world come into play because they're all laws of judgment. And what Jesus is teaching us in the Course is he's basically teaching us that those who fail to forgive must judge because they must justify their failure to forgive. So, you can't really have consistent happiness and peace and joy if there's a state of judging anyone or anything. And I know some of you may have a question, well, how do you navigate time and space without judgments? Judgments seem to be necessary as far as moving forward or doing anything or accomplish anything. And basically, yeah, that self-concept of a doer or personality self is tied in to judgment. And the Holy Spirit's guidance and the guidance of Jesus is basically unwinding from that person, that personality, that mask, that mask of a world that was made to cover over the Christ's mind. So, I thought we'd take a little quick tour of some important ideas. Because, yeah, sure, the intuitive guidance is absolutely necessary. I think there's nothing more important. I know for myself, about 35 years ago, I started to come into contact with this intuitive voice. And then it became stronger and stronger and clearer and clearer as I followed it. And that voice, the voice of Jesus, the voice for God, the Holy Spirit, it just means everything. It just takes you to a life of living from the inside out, instead of trying to react and respond to the world, which is the human predicament. It's the human condition. So, in order to really see that it's impossible to judge and come into that state of just loving acceptance, accepting what is, let's start off with chapter 12, where Jesus says in chapter 12 in section one, the judgment of the Holy Spirit, understand that you do not respond to anything directly but to your interpretation of it. Your interpretation thus becomes the justification for the response. That is why analyzing the motives of others is hazardous to you.  To interpret that error is to give it power and having done this, you will overlook truth. The analysis of ego motivation is very complicated, very obscuring, and never without your own ego involvement. The whole process represents a clear cut attempt to demonstrate your own ability to understand what you perceive. This is shown by the fact that you react to your interpretations as if they were correct. You may then control your reactions behaviorally, but not emotionally. This would obviously be a split or an attack on the integrity of your mind pitting one level within it against another. There is but one interpretation of motivation that makes any sense. And because it is the Holy Spirit's judgment, it requires no effort at all on your part. Every loving thought is true. Everything else is an appealing for healing and help. Appeal. Regardless of the form it takes. Can anyone be justified in responding with anger to a brother's plea for help? No response can be appropriate except the willingness to give it to him for this and only this is what he is asking for. Offer him anything else and you are assuming the right to attack his reality by interpreting it as you see fit. Perhaps the danger of this to your own mind is not yet fully apparent. If you believe an appeal for help is something else, you will react to something else. Your response will therefore be inappropriate to reality as it is, but not to your perception of it. There is nothing to prevent you from recognizing all calls for help is exactly what they are except your own imagined need to attack. It is only this that makes you willing to engage in endless battles with reality in which you deny the reality of the need for healing by making it unreal. You would not do this except for your unwillingness to accept reality as it is and which you therefore withhold from yourself. So here's the key line. It is surely good advice to tell you not to judge what you do not understand. No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness. For truth to him has become what he wants it to be. So that's the key. It is surely good advice to tell you not to judge what you do not understand. No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness. So this is why the personal perspective of the ego, the filter of the ego is the filter designed to try to understand something through fragmentation through judgment. And when you really go deep, you start to realize and hear from the intuitive voice, the spirit that it's actually judgment that obscures understanding. It's judgment that obliterates peace of mind from awareness. It's judgment that gives you false sense of achieving some kind of conceptual understanding that actually is not understanding at all. There's a part in the course where Jesus says that peace and understanding go together and cannot be found apart.  And that is why you have to really, really, really be shown the impossibility of the judgment. The only judgment you want to follow and live by is the guidance. In that sense, judgment is evaluative. But if you're told where to go, what to do, what to say, when to say it, you know, all those things are handled by the judgment of the Holy Spirit until the mind can reach that leaping off point of just not needing to judge anything, basically just the acceptance of everything exactly as it is. And that is reality. That's where we open up to our experience of the light. He goes on a little bit later to say, only appreciation is an appropriate response to your brother. Gratitude is due him for both his loving thoughts and his appeals for help. For both are capable of bringing love into your awareness if you perceive them truly. And all your sense of strain comes from attempts not to do just this. So if we move into chapter 15, where Jesus is talking a bit about the Holy Instant, the Holy Instant is just the present moment and being present, like Eckhart Tolle talks about a lot. And this is Jesus's words for the present moment, the Holy Instant. The Holy Instant is the Holy Spirit's most useful learning device for teaching you love's meaning. For its purpose is to suspend judgment entirely. Judgment always rests on the past for past experience is the basis on which you judge. Judgment becomes impossible without the past. For without it, you do not understand anything. You would make no attempt to judge because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not understand what anything means. You are afraid of this because you believe that without the ego all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that without the ego all would be love. So basically it's clinging to the past that blocks the present moment. It's holding on to the past that keeps the mind in a fragmented analytical way of perceiving. And the next paragraph talks a little bit about this. The past is the ego's chief learning device for it is in the past that you learn to define your own needs and acquired methods for meeting them on your own terms. We have said that to limit love to part of the sonship is to bring guilt into your relationships and thus make them unreal. If you seek to separate out certain aspects of the totality and look to them to meet your imagined needs you are attempting to use separation to save you. So this is another key in the sense that if you cling to the past and the past is the ego's chief learning device then you cling to the belief that you learn to define your own needs and acquire methods for meeting them on your own terms. That's the belief in lack, the belief in scarcity and the learning of skills and abilities to define your own needs and acquire methods for meeting them on your own terms. That's what the mask of personality and the world is about. Making up false association, false needs and then coming up with the methods that you believe are necessary to achieve those those needs. It just puts the mind on a hamster wheel of survival and Jesus is telling us we have to start to realize that the ego judgments are originating by our desire for them in the mind and we have to desire the peace of God, desire forgiveness and the release of false beliefs and concepts to actually experience consistent happiness and joy and peace of mind. Nowhere is this so apparent as in the perception of relationships and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about in interpersonal relationships in terms of couples or groups of people like spiritual communities or groups of people, cultural groups or broader experiences with larger groups. It's all a misperception when the perception is fragmented and the section in the Course that really deals with this in the most direct way, the one that I found so helpful over the years to go back to is Chapter 17, Giveness and the Holy Relationship and Section 5, the healed relationship, where he's taking talk about the Holy Instant and the present moment will say and then applying that to reinterpreting the whole perception of all relationships and that is what the Holy Spirit does. That's how we go into the healed relationship or into what the Course calls Holy Relationship. He starts out that section by saying the Holy Relationship is the expression of the Holy Instant in living in this world like everything about salvation the Holy Instant is a practical device witnessed to by its results. The Holy Instant never fails. The experience of it is always felt, yet without expression it is not remembered. The Holy Relationship is a constant reminder of the experience in which the relationship became what it is. As the unholy relationship is a continuing hymn of hate in praise of its maker, so the Holy Relationship is a happy song of praise to the Redeemer of relationships. So key line in there without expression it is not remembered. That's why living on purpose in letting the purpose transform your perceptions of everything in the human condition, jobs, family, relationships, community, country, letting it transform every aspect of fragmented perception into a holistic view and that takes you toward the light. The Holy Relationship a major step toward the perception of the real world is learned. It is the old unholy relationship transformed and seen anew. The Holy Relationship is a phenomenal teaching accomplishment. In all its aspects as it begins develops and becomes accomplished it represents the reversal of the unholy relationship. Be comforted in this the only difficult phase is in the beginning where here the goal of the relationship is abruptly shifted to the exact opposite of what it was. This is the first result of offering the relationship to the Holy Spirit to use for his purposes. These ideas of transforming specialness into holiness, of transforming darkness to light, of transforming fragmentation to holistic perception and the unified perception perspective of the Holy Spirit. These have enormous resistance from the ego and that's why oftentimes people will say I just want to stick with the status quo. I just want to go back to the good old days. There aren't any good old days. The past is a misperception of reality and the release of the past and the experience that the past is gone and it can touch me not. That is where the healing occurs. So we see a huge huge amount resistance. I had a friend Dorothy who used to cook was in the kitchen at the foundation for A Course in Miracles in Roscoe, New York and she said they had to buy like six or seven times as much food every time Ken Wovenick would do a workshop on these these different chapters chapter 15 to 24. The resistance to letting go of old ideas and old concepts about relationships is absolutely enormous because the ego made these false relationships and false associations to block the light of Christ, to block the truth and so basically in this section Jesus is saying you need to really hang in there and you need to hang in with the faith that your perception is being transformed. That's also the purpose of studying the Course. It's the purpose of spiritual communities. It's the purpose of all relationships. And so Jesus says here in paragraph 8, except with gladness what you do not understand and let it be explained to you as you perceive its purpose work in it to make it holy. You will find many opportunities to blame your brother for the failure of your relationship where it will seem at times to have no purpose. A sense of aimlessness will come to haunt you and to remind you of all the ways you once sought for satisfaction and thought you found it.  It has been saved. And I think I will wind down here with one more paragraph from from this beautiful section the healed relationship and this is paragraph 9. You are very new in the ways of salvation and think you have lost your way. Your way is lost but think not this is lost. In your newness remember that you and your brother have started again together and take his hand to walk together along a road far more familiar than you now believe. Is it not certain that you will remember a goal unchanged throughout eternity where you have chosen but the goal of God from which your true intent was never absent? So how beautiful how beautiful that that everything can be transformed. You can't really understand anything by looking at the world through fragmented perception and the desire to understand with the filter of fragmented perception is is insane. It's ludicrous. You can't really look back on anything without using the past to judge the motivations of who you believed you were and who you believe they were and then trying to have the ego tell you what's good and right and what's wrong and what should be different in form and it's the perspective in the mind the interpretation of the events as we read earlier that's the problem as long as you're misinterpreting anything or anyone you can't know reality and you don't really need to do anything to to accept reality you can accept reality exactly as it is and that's the key we're finding in here you know that every time there's fear every time there's doubt it's because the ego is still valued and Jesus is saying you do not any understand anything about relationships anything that you personally individually want from a relationship you know blocks you from knowing the reality of of spirit anything you want from another person means you won't really see them for who they really are because the spirit is just give give give give all to all and when you get into get get get it's not pretty the ego gets in there big time so thank you for joining me for this little snippet of the live really understanding that we cannot judge it's impossible to judge anything and when you come to that acceptance and that realization you will only follow guidance in terms of what to say and what to do because you want to experience joy and following the guidance of the Holy Spirit and Jesus is experiencing joy God bless you love you


So, the first part of September is when we usually are expecting our first frost of the season here in Zone 3, Saskatchewan, Canada. So, when it gets to that time of the year, you start thinking about taking cuttings from plants, such as your coalesces, that you want to bring in, or bring in your peppers, or any kind of plants that you can try over winter indoors. And I also, you know, as you've seen in other videos, I take seeds from my petunias, pansies, snapdragons, whatever I can easily collect seeds from and save them for the following spring. So, every day when I'm leaving work, I walk past all these beautiful planters that the city has out on the boulevards, and they are full of all sorts of beautiful flowers, coalesces, potato vines, and different grasses. And so, as I'm, you know, taking cuttings from my own plants, I kind of started eyeing up some of the ones in these planters that I don't grow, and I thought they were really beautiful. So, I started, as I'm just walking by, going to my car, just grabbing the odd clipping off of the plants. And some of those were these potato vines, so they had two different colors, the green and then this deep purple.  So, that's what I've been doing with those potato vines. I also spotted some beautiful coalesce that I did not have that specific color. Again, it was a really beautiful deep purple. So, again, took a couple more clippings, took them home, put them in water. And now I've got about ten of these going. So, the other thing that I really thought was really pretty and I thought maybe I could just grab one stem of was some grasses. I think it's like a millet or a fox tail millet. I never did figure out what it was. But again, I just grabbed a couple of them and brought them home, left them in this bag all winter. And I've already kind of taken it apart, but it looks like, kind of like this. You can see that little wispy pieces, which I'm assuming have little seeds at the end. So, I want to try growing these grasses myself this spring. So, I just wanted to share that confession with everybody. I don't think that, you know, kicking the odd little snippet off of a public planter. It's not anybody's private planters that I'm stealing from. It was just kind of the end of the season.  So, I'm hoping this is okay. Give me your thoughts in the comments and let me know what you think. But we're going to get some of these things planted up and see if we can get them growing. Okay, so this is the container that we're going to plant up the ornamental grasses in. And it's basically just, I think, something that some mushrooms came in from the grocery store.  I'm going to have it in a tray so I can bottom water. So, like I said, I'm not sure if these are actually seeds that I acquired or if they were at the seeding stage when I picked this off the plant. But I'm going to just give you another close-up. They're little wispy things, which I believe there's some little tiny seeds in there. So, I am just going to try planting them just by poking that pokey end downwards into the soil. We will be pretty generous with the planting here. If we have germination success, we can always thin them out. But we will see what we get. If anybody has any success stories with planting grasses, I'd like to hear them. I've done it a couple years last year. I did ruby grasses, which I did start from seed indoors. They came up, but they weren't very strong plants and they didn't do really well out in the garden. They didn't really grow and look like I was hoping they would. Previous year, I tried Pampas grass. I learned afterwards that Pampas grass is a perennial that is not hardy to our zones here and it doesn't usually produce much flowers that first year. So, it didn't really work out very well for me here on the prairies. So, growing grasses from seed so far hasn't been very successful. I don't know because these were kind of acquired in a not so ethical way. Maybe they won't grow. I don't know. I will cover it with just another light layer of my seed starting mix here. As usual, I'm using a mixture of peat moss, two parts peat moss, one part perlite and sterilized and moistened with boiling water. And that is all I use for starting my seeds. Okay, so this will go under the grow lights and hopefully maybe before I post this film on my channel that maybe we'll see some germination, but we shall see. I will definitely keep you updated. Okay, so I've also got this 72 cell planter all planted up with more annual flowers. I've already done the planting. I didn't think you wanted to see me do that, but I just wanted to let you know what we got started here. So, I have some white snapdragons. And these are snapdragons that I grew two years ago, I believe, from seeds that I bought. And I've been collecting the seeds the last two summers and growing my own white snapdragons. Very easy to collect seeds from snapdragons because I don't have enough coleus. I have like four colors and then I found this one. You can see it's a really nice red, kind of roughly leaf. It's called the Black Dragon. So, I'm going to try to start this. This was $2 and there was probably maybe 20 seeds, super tiny. So, coleus is something that I really like to try and propagate. And maybe this fall, maybe I'll try collecting seeds. I've never done that with coleus, but something that's very easy to kind of keep going over the winter. And coral is another beautiful color of snapdragons I bought from a greenhouse two years ago or three years ago, you know, a six pack. I've been collecting the seeds from it the last two falls and growing my own. I've never collected seed from Portulaca or tried to grow it, but I feel like it should work. So, I took all my Portulaca plants, just cut a bunch of different colors. Kept it in a bag all winter and just collected the seeds this spring. And so, hopefully we have some germination. These are some seeds that I have bought. So, the Elyssum is supposed to be really good to grow in amongst your vegetables, like potatoes.  So, they're kind of a nice white plant that I think attracts good insects and maybe deters bugs from your potatoes. Not sure, but another good companion plant for the garden. And Lobelia, I love filling my pots with Lobelia and I never seem to buy enough from the greenhouse. So, I'm going to try growing some, also very, very tiny seeds. And if I can maybe try to collect seeds from them in the fall, I will. But we'll see, I got a couple rows of those going here. And the last thing I bought, because I just grabbed these off the shelf the other day, some Dianthus, which actually says it's a perennial. I'm not sure if it would be hard enough for Zone 3. It does say it is here, but perennials never do well in my yard, but it will make a nice annual flower, if anything. So, that's the last one that's in here. So, these are going to go under the grow lights. Germination varies from seven days. Some of these have a 21-day germination, but I'll have them under lights and humidity dome. And I will keep you updated on the germination. So, it's only been five days since we've planted up all these annual flowers and not too much is happening yet. I can zoom in here and show you that the porchillaca and the elisum has started to pop through. You can see a lot of tiny little seedlings coming up there. Everything else, not too much happening yet. So, I did Google how long it takes for these grasses to germinate. I looked up a millet and a foxtail millet grasses, and it is about seven to fourteen days. So, nothing happening much here yet. But I will keep you posted and updated on how everything is doing here in my indoor growing space. We have a lot more things to get started. Pretty soon will be tomatoes and peppers. So, I am hoping that all these flowers that I have going can move out to the garage in a few weeks. It'll be warm enough to put them in a sunny window. So, thank you for watching. Like, comment, and subscribe, and we will see you on the next video. Thank you for watching.


Tastes good like some food Parked up outside in our own school They knew me back with the OU The dog always finds his way back home and it's so true