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So, way back in March of 2019, I started making YouTube videos on this channel. And since then, I've made well, when I made notes for this video, 779 full length videos. And I don't know the average length, but I would guess it's about 50 minutes, maybe an hour. So, that's a lot of content. In fact, if my math is right, if you watched one of those per day, it would take you two years and two months to finish them all. Now, that if you've watched any of those videos, you know that's an awful lot of information to process, even at one video per day. From time to time, people will watch an older video, and it's a rare thing for some reason, and then they'll write me an email or put up a comment about how informative and important that that information was to them. And I've tried to constantly remind people to use the search feature either on YouTube. There's a little channel specific search window or to sign up for upwardthought.org which is free and we don't email you or anything. You can sign up for alerts and then you'll get notified if new content is posted but that's optional. But then you can use the search function and that search function is a powerful tool in searching all the books and blog posts and videos whereas obviously with YouTube you can just search videos and some people have taken advantage of that and a few people use it quite regularly. Now, to help draw attention to past content, I began releasing shorts recently, and we've been pretty regular with that. I think the goal was five a week, and I think we've been about there. On every short generated from a prior fulllength video, you'll see created by at Upwardthought at the bottom of the video as it's playing. And that's just an automatic shortcut. YouTube gives. It's not super obvious that it's a hyperlink, but if you click on that created by text, it will take you to the full video. And that's been one way that we can pull out little snippets that YouTube makes. There's an arbitrarily short time frame, time limit that you can do on those shorts from from prior content. But where there have been little snippets that have been interesting or valuable, we're trying to pull those out and post them. Now, we is we is the academic we, but it is more than me in this case in this case. So, it's it's been very helpful to have people send me the link where they found something interesting and then the timestamps and then I can quickly convert that over to a short. And the whole thing takes about, I don't know, three minutes for me to do. In addition to the shorts, there's been work in creating these playlists that are thematic. And so you can go to the for men playlist, for example, and you'll see videos that I have thought would be good for men to watch that that present information that would be useful for men. And there are dozens of these playlists. Now, I know that there are videos that I've created that have not been added to the pertinent playlists, and I know that there are possible playlists that aren't on the list. So, if you have suggestions for that, you can email them to me at upwardthoughtgmail.com. But all of these were intended to be tools to help people more readily access information subject to the time constraints that they are under. Now, I am also under time constraints, although I'm far less constrained than when I had two full-time jobs in addition to doing about 35 hours a week of this ministry. And now, at least in the winter months, I'm about at 70. In the summertime, I have to take a few hours per week, usually one hour a day and a little bit more on Saturdays to do chores around the farm and also manage my children doing chores around the farm. But nevertheless, even as little as I sleep, I do need to do other things. And most of those other things are writing the books that have yet to be published. And so with all of these ideas in mind, I just wanted to give a heads up that I will probably be changing this pattern of posting a full-length video every two days, which is on average exactly what I've done and exactly what I've done. Not on average, just precisely what I've done for quite some time. But in the beginning, I wasn't doing that. I might I I had published several in a day or I'd go a little while and publish a bunch, but this every other day rhythm is probably something that people have gotten used to. In fact, that's one of the problems is that some people have have gotten so used to it that they just take it for granted and they've given up trying to keep up. And so as I continue to focus my energy on these books, um, I invite you to make use of these tools that a few of you have, the search on upwardthought.org, the shorts that have pulled out some interesting and valuable information from the longer videos that hopefully link you back to those longer videos, the the books. I've also heard comments like the one that I paraphrased before about videos. I've heard those about the books. Oh, I went and reread this book and I can't believe how much is in it. It's been a couple years since I read it and I'm seeing all these new things that I didn't see before. But no one will have those experiences if they don't look into it. Right? It's one of these things where in life there are you could you could kind of generate a map of your life based on how let's see based on how worthy something is of your time and energy. In other words, what outputs do you get relative to the inputs that you put into it? And looking at life in this way is really interesting because what you'll find is very few things reciprocate the effort that you invest into them. Very few things and people by the way maybe the the personal application of this is the most important one. And so with these books and these videos and these blog posts, I think what you'll find, I hope what you'll find, certainly what I find and what some people have found is that there is value there that will match any effort that you invest into finding it and using it. And so I hope that uh the change in in in pace of videos does not surprise you. now that I've announced it and that you take the repose as an opportunity to better acquaint yourself with the material that has already been generated. Now to go through some some footnotes to this conversation that would be of interest to some people but not all. So I'm not reducing my time uh commitment. I'm shifting it towards books, which has always been the primary focus anyway. But some may ask why I'm doing this. I am plagued by a desire to accelerate the pace of publication. And in the time that I take in ministry, some some subset of that is in direct interaction with specific people. my friends. And what I have found is that invariably people quickly get to a point where they just need a much more substantial base. It's really fascinating to see what kinds of long-term limits exist in people's understanding and actions that can't be fixed without burrowing down to the foundations. not to wipe out and replace the entirety of their foundational beliefs, but sort of precision swapping out. And there's a lot to say about this, which you can probably tell just by how I've worded this snippet, but there's a chunk of help that can be given through written materials or videos, anything at a distance. I I would call these things long sword teaching of the gospel, but there is short sword teaching of the gospel, too. It's a hand-to-hand combat, house-to-house counterinsurgency kind of operation. And it really has to be persontoerson. And there are reasons for this, but you can't do one without the other. They both have to come at the same time because in the one you always hit situations where you need the other. So as a for example to illustrate this point if let's say that you read five of these books and of course I'm talking about the books that I've written but that's not a complete set. This would be true for for you know swap me out with with anyone else doing the same sort of thing. It's it's about the thing not the person doing the thing. So anyway suppose you have somebody who reads five books presenting ideas beyond the limits of what they've understood about the gospel. Okay. they are going to skip over a ton of what could be applied to their lives even if they are decent and honest people because they're just not going to see the connections at the level someone who knows and lives those things more fully could help them see. So that's the limit of the long sword um teaching. Now, now part of the problem with that is that our ideas of value are very different than God's. And so, as we're scanning through this book, let's say that there are 10 ideas, we might not even see five of them, even though we read it, even if it was written really well. The other five we might rank them in if we had to graph the value of them and compare them against one another, it might be a completely different graph than God would make. And that's actually likely to be the case. It's extremely likely. And so while focusing on what we think are the most important ones we leave behind, maybe the the most important ones are actually in the set we didn't even see. And so that's where the face-to-face interpersonal teaching takes over. So what's the limit there, right? Well, it turns out that in that you hit very quickly and very frequently you hit these things where you absolutely have to spell out the foundation and it's a book worth of argument and there's really no getting around that. And this is a pattern that I've seen come up again and again. And so right now, what's lacking in the toolbox is the books. It's not the videos. It's not the shorts. So much more information has been presented in the videos and shorts than anyone has gleaned. I'd say like in the best cases, maybe 10% has been pulled out, maybe. And so how can that be presented any better? Well, there are only two ways. Books, which is a fuller argument, a more careful argument, and face to face. And I don't mean that literal because we have digital, you know, but oneonone is better phrase teaching. And when you jump into that one-on-one teaching, you're going to need the books. And there there are things that come up again and again where you're like you know where well not you where I am like hey there's a book coming that has all of this in it and I really can't presented to you in less than an 800page carefully structured argument. It's just what it takes. So that's a little more inside information on how that goes. So until then, I invite you to spend more time looking at things that have already been published and applying them more fully to your life. And this is a new point that I haven't mentioned before in this video, especially to take the things that you find most valuable, whether you've heard them from me or not, it doesn't matter. the things that you believe, the ideas that you believe are most valuable and share them with other people. Share them in your own words or however best works for you, but get those ideas out there and find people who also find them valuable. That's something that's really not happening. And uh hopefully you find the shorts more sharable. But even if you don't, then hopefully you take up the invitation that I've issued several times now, many times now, to make your own content and share that instead. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to publish videos to the internet out in public, although that is a way to do it. And several people have done that and encountered great success. There are people out there who are now doing shorts and getting a,000 views per short. And the way YouTube does that is it'll push it in front of people who have never seen your channel before. That's the way the algorithm for shorts works. But maybe what this means is actually just to start teaching your family these things and your friends these things. And when I say these things, I mean the ideas that you believe that you have found great value in. Wherever they come from, it doesn't matter. And as this goes, many more people will encounter much better ideas. And that's not really happening in any measurable way right now. It's a it's very minimal because people are just hearing these things and saying, "Oh, that's nice." Or, uh, you know, I've watched 1% of the videos and I'm content with that. I have a good idea of what this guy has said. No. No, you don't. So anyway, those are my invitations to you and I hope you take them up and we'll see you on the flip