All right, good evening. Welcome back to those of you who are able to join us for our first session a couple of weeks ago. And for those of you who are tuning in for the first time, we're happy to have you. My name is Jessica Colligan, and with me again is Father Jerry Bloschek, who will be leading our discussion of A Pilgrim's Journey, the autobiography of St. Ignatius of Loyola. As always, I ask that you please keep your microphones muted while Father Jerry is speaking, just to minimize distractions. And we do want this to be interactive. So please use the chat, use the raise hand feature, whether you're responding to a prompt from Father Jerry, or if you have a question or a thought of your own, we would love to hear that. So we'll kind of monitor that and keep an eye on the comments and call on you too to come off of mute to ask questions if you'd like to do that as well. I just wanna quickly mention that tomorrow is Stag Giving Day here at Fairfield, and that's a day for our alumni, parents and friends to come together in support of the university and our students and our programs. And you are able to direct your support to an area of interest, like the Murphy Center for Ignatian Spirituality, Campus Ministry or many, many other options if you're so inclined. So we do hope you'll consider participating in that tomorrow. And now I will turn things over to Father Jerry. Thanks, Jessica. Already I see many names of my dear colleagues and friends, and I see names of folks who were with us two weeks ago, and I see new names that I don't recognize, and I wanna welcome you all. Let's begin with the prayer, but ever faithful and true. God of our ancestors, God of our present, God of our future, we believe that you are with us on each step of our life's journeys. Each of us are pilgrims.  Help us to travel our pilgrim journeys with confidence, with compassion for one another, with a readiness and a flexibility to adjust to what you show us, to what you reveal to us. Give us a desire above all else to do and to be what is true, to be and to do what is authentic to your desires and your vision for us. Bless each of us who are participating in this evening. Help us in this time together to be open to what you want to say to us because we truly believe that you are with us, that you are working in us and for us and among us. To you, oh God of mercy and compassion, ever faithful God, to you be glory and honor forever. Amen. Again, thank you and I thank Jessica for organizing. I thank Jessica for being my moderator too and for being my reminder that we did and we intend for this session to be interactive. And I apologize that I think last time I was blabbing on too much. And so Jess, I count on you to let me know when people would like to speak. We were looking, I asked you and I advised you to read the text of the autobiography and judiciously take a look at the notes that Father Talenda offered, but secondarily, but primarily to focus on the story of St. Ignatius. And we were looking at the section of St. Ignatius when he would, for this meeting, the section of St. Ignatius's remembrances or recital for when he was in, thank you Mary, thank you Mary Elizabeth Carmody, who assures me that I wasn't blabbing too much. Thank you. When you get older, I think it's wise to always check yourself, not think that everybody needs to hear your wisdom. So thank you everybody. We were gonna look at the section where Ignatius recounts what happened to him at Van Rysa and what happened to him as he undertook his journey, his pilgrimage to the Holy land. Before we get to that, I want to be sure that we didn't miss anything very, very important or that you wanted to talk about from the first section, which was St. Ignatius's encounter with that cannonball in Pamplona, with his recovery in Loyola, with his journey to the great shrine of our Lady of Montserrat. So I wanted to be sure we didn't miss anything. There was something I had meant to share with you. There's a wonderful, the Jesuits have a great, beautiful retreat and spirituality center in Van Rysa. And there's a young Cataloni and Jesuit by the name of Javier Maloney. And Javier reflected on this cannonball moment in Ignatius's life. And maybe as a prompt for our discussion tonight to get us started, I'll share with you a paragraph or two of what Javier Maloney offered from his own heart. And so as he thought about what happened at that cannonball moment. And as you know, of course, as I just said, it's the way Ignatius chose to begin his account. Not for nothing, right? He could have chosen a lot of other ways of introducing his story, but he begins with the cannonball. So Javier Maloney writes, how is it that we start this story with the defeat, with the failure, with pain? Isn't it often the case that our own stories begin with confusion? Where does this injury of Ignatius lead us? It is important to ask ourselves this question. Where have we ourselves been wounded? Or where do we still have to be pierced in order to approach the standstill that Ignatius experienced at Loyola and then later at Monresa? Don't forget that the cannonball was the divine means for Ignatius's conversion. Each one of us has sustained some shelling at least once in our lives or as many times has been necessary to redirect us and to remind us. That palm shell has been forceful and that wound has been deep, proportional to our distraction and our disorientation. Each of us and all of us in this pandemic need to ask what is the metanoia, the transformation that this cannonball of the pandemic and whatever cannonballs we experience personally, what is it that is happening so that we may stop and be more capable of responding to the voice of God? It would be a conversation in spiritual direction and a conversation among us all that would be worthy if certainly more even than one hour. But I just want to draw your attention to the fact that so many things in my life and in yours that you might be, or our lives as a church, as a community, that we might initially be inclined to think of as some huge crisis, some great tragedy that is throwing us off track are in fact a wake up moment. And I don't want to be overdramatic about this, but the wake up moment can be of all different sorts. It can be a diagnosis. It can be the loss of what we thought was the opportunity of the goal that we were orienting ourselves to. The refusal, I'm speaking as an academic now, the refusal of the major publisher to accept our manuscript that we thought was the work of our lifetime. It can be the collapse of a project. It can even be the end or the challenge of a relationship or a crisis with people that we love very much. It can be sometimes an attack on our character and a collapse of the status or of the arrangement we spent many years trying to put together for ourselves. So these cannonball moments are not necessarily moments that we have to say were in themselves good things. They can be unjust things. They can be unfortunate things. They can be tragic things. But the wonderful alchemy of God's grace is such that these events can be used by God if we are attentive, if we're open to stop us and help us realize maybe that there's more to our lives and that there's a great deal that maybe we have to let go of or priorities that need to be rearranged or maybe illusions on which we were building our lives maybe even false identities that we had very artfully constructed that are getting us nowhere. That's the case obviously with St. Ignatius. Let me just stop right there. Does that resonate at all with you? Does that resonate at all with you? Has that ever happened to you?  Certainly. That's why I'm in Fairfield right now. What happened Glen? I had a series of failures in my previous position which encouraged me to just see what else was out there. And so I applied to Fairfield as well as one other position in Connecticut that had virtually the same job description. I actually thought I had it in at the other place because I knew somebody there. They never called me but Fairfield did. So here I am, 20 years later. And Glen, I think it's fair to say and I want to put the words in your mouth but I think it's fair to say that for you given the range of your interests and your passions could you have been at a better place? No, I don't think so. Yeah. And for our benefit, God also sent you here for us, Glen. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? Have you had a cannonball moment? Thank you. Someone, I'm gonna observe anonymity. Someone says, yes, professional challenges, a young family with cancer. There's a wake up call. I mean, it is so, you know, Bishop Barron whom I think many of you know, Bishop of, auxiliary Bishop of, I think San Francisco or Los Angeles and a wonderful theologian and spiritual teacher says Christianity is so much a matter of seeing. And we have so, we so easily lose sight of who we are and what God is calling us, who God is calling us to be and to develop and very often in our stories and the story of Ignatius and in the story of so many of the great women and men of our tradition, the breakthrough, the great breakthrough comes only when our arrangements, I call them arrangements collapse. I don't wanna get too autobiographical only because I don't want to scandalize anybody or to lead you to try to track down whom I'm talking about. But for me, it was very significant at a certain point in my Jesuit life to really be unfairly, unfairly judged and to be treated in a way that felt like a betrayal. And I have to say that had that not happened, there's a huge, huge part of my own personal life and spiritual development that would never have occurred.  I began to think there's nothing now that anybody can take away from it. You know, you've tried your best and I discovered that I was with God. But before we go any further, anybody else wanna say anything on this particular topic or the beginning of Ignatius's conversion? How about the beginning of Ignatius at Loyola, during his conversion at Loyola? Is there anything else anybody wants to share about that before we move on? Okay. Now, what happened to St. Ignatius at Loyola? Please remember that what happened to St. Ignatius of Loyola, this extraordinary experience of God speaking to him, heart to heart person to person, happens while Ignatius is not a monk, not a priest, not a religious professional, if you will. It happens while Ignatius is a layperson and it happens as a result of getting his leg blown apart and it happens while he's lying in his convalescent in a hospital or in his family's castle. Now, in our long, long tradition of Christianity, both in East and West, of course, of course the spiritual leaders of our tradition have said, oh God indeed can share God's very self with devout souls. But here is this, but usually there were people who were in monasteries and usually they were quite exceptional people. Ignatius is not exceptional. Ignatius is a bozo. Ignatius is ambitious. Ignatius is, from the point of view of the world, a failed nobody. I mean Ignatius is the paradigm of a failed aristocrat.  Ignatius tells us the story that at that moment, God and God's sublime mystery and then God's tremendous mercy reaches out to him and communicates God's very self to him. So what is Ignatius telling you and me and anybody who reads his story, Ignatius is saying it is possible to have a personal intimate contact with this great mystery whom we name God. It is possible because God by God's very nature desires to reach out and connect and communicate and to give God's very self to the person whom God is searching. I don't know whether that strikes you, but I think a lot of people grew up thinking that this sort of experience that Ignatius narrates in his story, that belongs to the great mystics, to the exceptional people. There's nothing exceptional about what God wants to give us, which is God's very self. This is revolutionary in the way that most of us were brought up. We thought that there were some few, few, few, chosen souls to whom God wanted to have a special relationship. Ignatius's story is saying, no, there are no limits. It is the very nature of God to want to share God's very self. Glenn, isn't it your experience in spiritual direction? The people are astounded when they experience that. Absolutely, absolutely. So, and I'm always astounded that it's different for each individual person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The people who come to the Murphy Center are people who are so hungry for something more. They've been to church, whether they're Lutherans, Methodists, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Muslims, they're looking for something more. And somehow or other, they're suspecting, though maybe they were never told. In fact, they were told quite the opposite, but they're hungering for a personal encounter with the mystery of God. And because we come from this Ignatian tradition, our assumption, our operating assumption is that that is what God is looking for. That God wants to give God's own self to each person. In fact, later on, in St. Ignatius's spiritual exercises, I think I told you, it's a manual for coaches, for people who are accompanying others, who are seeking a deeper relationship with God. The spiritual exercises are all, if you like, the distillation of the experience that Ignatius is describing in the autobiography. But then when he distills them, we get maybe the undercurrent, maybe we get the meat of what Ignatius was experiencing. Listen to this. Ignatius says toward, in one of his exercises, it's for those of you who know the exercises, it's number 231 and following contemplation to attain divine love. Love consists in the mutual communication between two persons. The one who loves, gives and communicates to the beloved what he or she has, or a part of what one has or what one is. The beloved wants to give one's very self to the beloved. Whether it's knowledge or not, honors riches, see myself before God and be stirred to great gratitude. Ignatius is saying, that's the paradigm for what God does to us. If you're looking, this is Ignatius's experience, we were talking about this, Ignatius says, I was maybe painting him as a, you know, is really a rogue in his Caliwag, but he did learn something about love. He learned that real love is about love, that real love is about sharing your very self. And it's the best metaphor that he can reach out to use when he's talking about what he experiences and what he believes God wants to give to everybody, that God is the divine lover and that God wants to share God's very self with God's people. And that's not for the elite. There's nothing elitist about Ignatius' spirituality. It's the common woman and the common man to whom Ignatius assures us, God wants to give God's very self. I wanna share with you one quote.  This is Father Hugo, Father Karl Rahner, a great German theologian who had a great deal to do with what led up to and what gave a theological foundation for Vatican II. Still in Vatican II, whose message is still misunderstood and embattled by some people who would like to recreate the church of the 1940s and 50s. Father Karl Rahner wrote a book, Ignatius speaks to the Jesuit of the 20th century. So Rahner said, let's imagine that Ignatius was speaking to young Jesuits or even old Jesuits of the 20th century. Here's what Ignatius, Karl Rahner, this experienced old Jesuit, German Jesuit says. So these are Ignatius' words in Rahner's mind. Please listen, because for me it's a great summary of what happened at Loyola and what motivated Ignatius to have all of these quotes and quotes, spiritual conversations. Did you notice throughout the autobiography that Ignatius is forever talking about spiritual conversations? And they were all about helping people to be alert to how God was giving God's very self to them. So the core, the core, the core of all Ignatian spirituality is this confidence that Ignatius had, that God is a communicative God, that God is not closed in on God's own self, but that God gives God self, not only messages, not only mandates, not only orders, but as a lover, God gives God's very self to God's people. So listen to Rahner. I was convinced during my illness at Loyola and then later and decisively during my time in Manresa that I had a direct encounter with God. This experience, I longed to communicate to others. To hear that, Ignatius wants others to have a direct experience of God because it is possible because it's what God wants and because it's what the human heart desires and longs for, back to Rahner and not Jerry. This experience, I longed to communicate to others. All I can say is that I knew God, nameless, unfathomable, silent, and yet near, bestowing upon me, bestowing himself upon me in the fullness of his mystery. I knew God beyond all concrete imaginings. I knew God in such nearness and grace as is impossible to confound or mistake. So this remains certain. It is possible for a human person to know God. Now, Jerry now, not completely, not in God's fullness, but it is possible to say that I have authentically been touched by God, back to Rahner. And now Rahner is speaking to Jesuits. And that's why we have something like the Murphy Center. That's why people like Glenn and so many others who may be on here have been trained as spiritual directors. This remains certain. It is possible for the human person to meet God. And so your ministry must keep this goal in mind always at every step unwaveringly.  And so we live and become and are loved. And if we allow ourselves to be taken up by him are not destroyed, but given ourselves back to us truly, truly, perhaps for the first time. I'm sorry if I've spent so much time on Loyola because it's really, it's the beginning of what continues at Monresa. And it lies at the heart of everything that we try to do in campus ministry and the Murphy Center and everything that we do at a Jesuit institution. We proceed from the fact that God gives God self to us and desires to live with us and in us. Any, I'm gonna stop for a second. Anybody wanna say anything here and now about that? Hi, Father. Hi, how are you? Good, how are you? So just something that was very fascinating for me in the very last pages before he gets to Monresa, it's that he had the determination that he was going to Jerusalem. And on his way, he even bought clothes that he thought he would use once he arrived there. But as he continued in his journey and arrived to Monresa, it seems like he found somebody that needed clothes. And he gave up everything he bought. So it's just like, I know he was early in his faith and probably he hadn't had that commitment that later on he had. But how beautiful it is that he had in mind Jerusalem and that was his goal and that kind of led the way for what came next. Aura, thank you so much for sharing that because it's a great expression of what happens to the pilgrim. So, you know, so was Ignatius wrong when he thought that God was calling him to live his life visiting the holy places and spending his life helping souls in Jerusalem? No, you know, we know what we know at that moment. And then we respond according to what God and God's people need of us at that next moment, right? So he gives everything he has to that pilgrim, to that poor person, right? So think about this. Well, you know, it's toward the end for the end of the material we were looking at today. But is it was Ignatius mistaken when he thought that he was going to spend his life in Jerusalem? How is it? Was God playing with him? What do you make of that? The Dominican, the Franciscans throw out. They look at this guy, he's right. He has no money. He's talking about helping souls. So get in the hell out of here because we have to be responsible to the Turks who are controlling life in Jerusalem. So was Ignatius deluded? What happens? What do you make of that episode? Ignatius of the Holy Land. I think I was one of them. I mean, he just found a way for Ignatius to be engaged. And after that, he led the way, but it was just like a way to hook him up, if you will. I think there's one thing that's very important is that Ignatius wants desperately to be close to the places where Jesus was. And so the Christocentric aspect of Ignatius' spirituality is always dominant, right? Ignatius, something happened at Manresa, which we're gonna go back to. Something happened to Ignatius so that Christ is now not just on a pedestal. Christ is not some distant figure that somehow, I don't know, Ignatius, who knows how he imagined it or whether he imagined it or not, but somehow Christ is the one who does our salvation by dying on the cross. But, and maybe somebody was supposed to be imitated, but it was at Manresa that Christ becomes so real to Ignatius that he wants to know so much about him. He wants to follow the scriptures. He wants to go back and reread and pray through with his imagination, everything that this life of Christ that he had read in his sister's castle back in Loyola, that life of Christ, everything he had there. He wrote it all out and he wanted to go back to it. It grabbed his imagination and told him, this is for you.  I insisted before I left on going back to the Mount of the Ascension and I gave away my pen knife so that I could put my feet so that I could see the place where Jesus was footsteps were. I think he had to be abused at himself but he desperately wanted to be in that place where Jesus was, his heart was on fire. Something happened in Manresa. Okay, you remember among the great illuminations that he recounts in Manresa, there was a shift for Ignatius between Jesus who is somebody who is admired to someone who is alive. Somebody who's not just one more model like Humphrey or Francis or Dominic but somehow at Manresa, Jesus becomes alive and Ignatius is taken up now, not in wanting to die. I mean, think about that shift when Ignatius is in Loyola. There's almost no mention of Jesus, right? Do you remember? He's not talking about Jesus. He's talking about all I wanna imitate Francis and Dominic and the great saints who did really hot stuff who really did extraordinary stuff but not after Manresa. After Manresa, he just wants to stay in the holy land. He wants to be close to Jesus but something else happened in Manresa. Manresa helped Ignatius to understand that Jesus is not some distant figure from the past but a real live figure who invites Ignatius to get to work. That Ignatius now somehow and Ignatius later will say to people my whole concept, my whole vision of what would later become the society of Jesus has its origins in Loyola, in Manresa when I began to experience the call of Christ. Ignatius tells us that it was in Manresa that he began to realize that whoever Jesus was, Ignatius was numb.  He's had a miserable education. He's spent his whole life flirting and jousting. So he has had no education to speak of his Latin is terrible and that was the language of education. So Ignatius freighted all that away because he was interested in vanity and making a world for himself. So he hadn't paid much attention to Jesus. And now Ignatius begins to sense that Jesus not only is what the church told him Jesus was supposed to be but that now Jesus is alive and Jesus is calling him. Remember among the great illuminations he experiences Jesus present. Remember that? And Ignatius is accounts of what happens among the illuminations on Manresa. He has an experience of Jesus present and he keeps saying that he keeps encountering Jesus. So really what there's a breakthrough. Somehow Jesus is no longer, Jesus doesn't belong to the past. He's not locked up in the Tabernacle. He's not on a pedestal. He's alive and Ignatius encounters him. And even when he's going toward Jerusalem on his way back to Jerusalem, he keeps encountering these experiences of the living Jesus. But then in Manresa he also experiences Jesus as saying to him, I want you to be a part of my mission for this world which is not over yet. That's huge. That's huge. And we're talking about something that happened in the 16th century and most Christians haven't gotten it now. That Jesus is not some distant past figure but that he's alive and that he invites people into a relationship and that he invites people to share his work of bringing fullness of life to the world. Let me stop there. Questions, comments, protests, corrections. You all know about, you all have studied this. You think, please tell me what you're thinking. If I could just a comment. Sure, who is this? Who is this? This is Kevin. Hi, Kevin. I found that a couple of things happened in these two chapters that were interesting first. He had this realization that he wants to have a relationship with this personalized or unique relationship with God and that prompts him to want to take action. But then he seems to retreat to his traditional views that he will figure out how to get this done. And so he goes through asceticism and kind of the hubris of that. And he has all these theories on how it's going to go that he's wanting an outcome rather than a journey. Kevin, beautifully put, beautifully put, please go ahead. And so once he, and all these all along the way, these what look like obstacles are actually pauses to remind him there's a journey ahead. And the journey may take him differently. And I made the comment that, and he tends to give things away then. He puts coins on a ship, wherever it was. And he gives away his clothes. And it's always at these pivotal moments when his journey is taking a different route. Right. Interesting. When his journey is taking a different route. But you're right, Kevin, something is sparked. There's a new life in him, but you're right. He falls back to his old paradigms, right? And he falls back to the old paradigm of let me get this under control. Let me take care of this, right? Right. And don't we all, right? Don't we all until that sublime moment when, and it's not one moment, but we get on a trajectory when we begin to understand that this is about letting go and not about holding on. Right.  Yeah, I was warming up. No, the thing is, no. But all seriousness is- I had Don in class for two years, so I kind of know who he was. But the thing is the great trust that he placed in God, that he's very open, even though the courts changes his direction, whether it's going to the Holy Land, staying there, he's able to, with his trust in God, even give away stuff. He says, because, you know, that proves I trust in the Lord. He has this great open relationship and wherever he encounters, he takes advantage of it, either to talk about spiritual, in fact, he seeks people out. Of course, we never like to take a cruise with him, but the thing is, you know, he was- He'd pick up your tab constantly. But all seriousness is that I admired that because in all these encounters, he looked for opportunities to be Christ-like. His favorite book is The Invitation of Christ. He's reading that, and he's doing his best. And he's very adaptable because he's open to where Christ is leading. Don, beautifully put, beautifully put. All of those instances, and I think, look, remember, this book he assumes is going to be read by not only lay people, but the early Jesuits, who are going to be tempted to say, oh, God, we need security. We got to make sure we have enough money for everything. Ignatius is saying, come on, you have to finally trust in God.  And again, you talk about the long-term meaning and impact of Ignatius's story, how many of us are content with the fact that we're on a pilgrimage and that we haven't figured it out and that our lives are not all that we would like them to be and that we haven't reached the destination yet. But Ignatius is saying, that's the paradigm, the pilgrimage is the paradigm, not reaching the goal, but rather adjusting constantly to the new revelations, to the new experiences, to the new ways that God is both revealing things and asking things of you. But as you say, Don, you can do it because you have this confidence that finally the one thing that doesn't really seem to be steady, right? Ignatius is a, Ignatius is and was, and I think till the day that he dies was a narcissist, just like a lot of us, right? He's on a pilgrimage. He's always kind of construct, I mean, think about the scruples. What do you think about the experience of scruples in Manresa? That's a very important part of the story. What do you make of that? Elevyn Sansa has her handphrase. I don't know if we want to address that before we get into... Go ahead and say, you know, do we have some of the handraces who want to talk about scruples? All right, let's just do with the scruples for now. Then we'll come back and pick up the handraces. It looks like she just came off mute. If you want to go ahead, Vincenza, you can. Well, I don't know if that would, yeah, I wouldn't fit in with there enough, but what I was thinking about was in the early part of the chapter on Manresa, I mean, it's talking about, you know, coming to that relationship with God, and he notices noticeable changes. He goes to that whole period when he's tempted all the time by the devil, and he goes, you know, during the week, he eats nothing.  So he put himself back and forth, and I guess the scruples start in there too, where he was never satisfied. He always felt he didn't do it good enough. And finally, the confessor says to him, listen, you gotta stop. Stop, we can't have any more about this past life because, you know, you're kind of like doing yourself in, but I kind of thought that part brings it into right where we are today. I think that's, I see it as, this is the contemporary connection that Anishis brings to today's world because the whole idea of the temptations and being tempted at mass, that's something that those of us in different various ways of studying and learning about our faith, that drives me crazy.  And, you know, the secularism, the all the, I don't know, the turmoil that we seem to be experiencing is sort of like what he experienced and how we have to depend ourselves on surrendering to God, counting on confession, praying and doing all the things that he did, maybe not his level of asceticism. Vincenzo or anybody else, I think you're dead on, Vincenzo, what is the relevance of Ignatius' struggle? Remember to the point of potential suicide. Right. What is, is there a message there that Ignatius has for us? Why does he tell us that story? It's an embarrassing, it's a horribly embarrassing story.  What is Ignatius? What spiritual malady that is, is there a spiritual malady that we are still individually or culturally suffering, you know, that Ignatius' story can tell, can somehow address anybody? It says, I think it says that what I was going down that path is that no matter what you're doing, you know, it makes it contemporary. We are in the same situation today and we have to sort of do what he did, which is constantly seek out somebody that can help us understand whatever God is, help us understand how to deal with ourselves. And when he realized that, oh, I was going to commit suicide, that's a terrible sin.  So that to me is the contemporary connection to the term right now. Anybody else have anything to add to that? Go ahead. I kind of think that he was self-indulgent in this time period, right? Like it's all about him and his past and he's constantly mining for issues. And it's supposed to be about the future. You know, it's supposed to be about your future and your relationship with someone else. And when he finally gets to that, he suddenly, well, suddenly his scruples go away. Don, Don McCaffrey, Don Woody, are you there, Don? Can you say it? Don Ross says, I think Ignatius teaches us to avoid extremes and inordinate navel gazing. Don McCaffrey says, I think this is Ignatius experiencing it. This is not, that this is egotistical and selfish, self-centered. So rather than his eyes on God, his eyes are on his performance, right? This is very dangerous. Spirit, so-called spiritual people can be incredibly proud. You know, the whole project of their spiritual life can be an exercise in self-aggrandizement. My spiritual journey is my little, is my project. And it doesn't work for Ignatius. And then Ignatius has to say, and here's where Ignatius, the master of discernment, of thinking things through. Ignatius says, wait, let me stop here because I thought that this line of thought which I think Don McCaffrey said is perfectionism, I think you're right Don. Ignatius is saying, let me keep hammering myself. Let me keep fasting. Let me keep praying. Let me keep checking out every spiritual master on the, in the book. Where has it gotten me?  So then Ignatius. And I think, you know, people who know a lot more than I do can correct me on this. But I think Ignatius is like a real pioneer in self-awareness that Ignatius steps back and he says, wow, if this train of thought leads me to the point where I despair and where I'm so focused on myself and that I'm ready to kill myself, well, that can't come from God. Do you see? Right? Yeah, yeah, Vincent Vincenzo. Yeah, he thought Vainglory and drawing attention to himself was part of his problem. He's still stuck there, right? You know, Ignatius later has a very sharp observation. And again, those of you who have studied the exercises know this. Ignatius says, watch this. The enemy of our human nature is always on the prowl. The enemy is like an enemy commander who makes the circuit of a fortified city and looks for in this fortified city, where is the weakness in the fortification? Clearly for Ignatius, it was his perfection. Or what we would call probably some sort of almost clinical narcissism. But it also has a spiritual meaning. Ignatius wants to control and dominate his own life. And Ignatius says, look, whatever I thought maybe appeared as an invitation from God to perfectionism and to extraordinary expressions of fidelity that God has ended up with me focused more on me than ever before to the point where I want to give up my life, which I know is a sin. So this could not possibly have come from God. You see how Ignatius is watching and begins the kinds of rules for discernment of spirits that are all packed in that little book of spiritual exercises. And so we all have to, if I now jump into the application to our own lives, the quotes unquote enemy of our human lives makes a circuit of our temperament, of our personalities and looks for the place where there's a way to get in and to distort us. And for Ignatius, it was certainly his always this need to go over the top, right? To be better than anybody else. And so that's the way that that's the formula for his auto-destruction, right? So whatever it is in you and in me that is our characteristic and dare I say tragic flaw, that's where quotes unquote the enemy is looking to get in. If it's doubt, if it's fear, if it's arrogance, if it's a drive to be special like Ignatius, you name it. There's a way that the enemy will figure out a way to get in and turn that upside down. Let me, you know, let me stop there. Anybody else want to make any comments on that or corrections or observations? Especially those of you, not only but I want to make sure that those of you who have had experience in Ignatius spirituality, I have a chance to add or comment, please. I think like any other Christian, when we see ourselves in our lives, we realize that Christianity isn't easy. So it can be a little bit scary. So I think that's something that he experienced as well, especially if he read, you know, the life of many other saints, all the good things they did. And like just doing the self reflection, what I have done, right? Like I am so far from reaching any of the saints and that can be depressing, you know, if we, because we think that's something that we can do by ourselves, but we actually need God's help to be able to get there and it's a journey. But if we see the goal from far away, it can be really intimidating. Absolutely. And this is why Ignatius in his letters, nobody at his time in history wrote more letters than Ignatius. He spent a lot of his time, I spend most of my time either seeing people on email, but Ignatius wrote letters. And in his letters, Ignatius keeps warning people against discouragement. He says again and again, if somebody is trying to make progress from one place to another in holiness, discouragement is not from God. In fact, he says just the opposite. Listen to what Ignatius in his rules for discerning spirits will say, hold on here, let me get it. It's worth waiting for. Listen to this, this is extraordinary. And remember that this is Ignatius years later, distilling his own experiences to help other people. And all of these spirits will, let me just say, do you notice how his primary, this is before he's a priest, right? He's not a religious, he's not a monk. He's not ordained, but he has this ability to help people grow spiritually. And that freaks out the hierarchical church. By the way, because most people are not equipped to do that. But people are drawn to Ignatius because he has this ability to help people grow. And the fact that Ignatius hasn't studied theology is not ordained. It makes people very suspicious. But this is what Ignatius from his experience gleams, and this is the kind of wisdom, but I'm assuming Ignatius was sharing with the people of his time. In the case of persons who are earnestly progressing from the good to the better, the service of God, the procedure of the enemy of our human nature is this. To cause gnawing anxiety. Sound familiar, Alra? That's what you were describing. Gnawing anxiety. I'm not making enough progress to sadden and to set up obstacles.  Good people are inclined to give up and say, I'm not making any progress. I'm still as miserable and awful as I always was. That's kind of a scrupulosity or perfectionism. And that's where the enemy takes an initially good thing, which is a desire to please God and twists it into something that turns us in on ourselves, rather than out with greater confidence and peace and confidence before God and attentiveness to people around us. Let me just reiterate that in the major, so in this scrupulosity, Ignatius comes up with this principle that watch where things end up. They may start like a very good idea. Like, oh, I'm gonna struggle, I'm gonna be holy, I'm gonna get fast and abstain. And Ignatius says, look, if that led you to the point where you want to commit suicide, and maybe you were wrong to begin with.  So maybe there was something that was a miss from the very start. If at the end of it you become more self-absorbed, I mean, think of the number of holy people, so-called holy people, devout people that you know, who end up being bitter, sarcastic, cynical, and destructive of themselves and other people. Well, I don't know how they started, but where they got tells you that wherever they got started it was not from God, right? And you can also get people, I mean, from the other side who say, God is inviting me to greater freedom, and to greater accessibility, and to greater openness, and they end up being, again, utterly self-absorbed and self-indulgent. Well, the enemy crept in, right? The enemy crept in. All right, in the eliso, scrupulosity tells us to know that we don't control God and that finally the battle against scruples is the battle of saying, I'm in God's hands and my life will change and I will become who God wants me to be out of God's mercy and the strength of God in my life, not my moral perfectionism, not my clenching my fists and pushing and tugging for God to make me somebody who God probably never wanted to make me. The illuminations at Manresa remind us of basic characteristics of Ignatian spirituality. One, the centrality of the person of Christ. Two, the holy trinity, Ignatius, to the time he dies, never anybody masters the mystery of the holy trinity, but God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God constantly giving God's self and being present in creation. Maybe when we get together again for the next time, I'll double back and say more about, so one of these illuminations, especially the one at the card in there, gives Ignatius a sense of God's presence in all creation. He has that experience and he has an experience of the Creator giving the Creator's very self into creation. We don't have a lot more time left, so I wanna stop and just ask you, please, questions, comments, shareings, insights. Supposed to be a book club, not just Father Jerry Yammering. Anybody? How about those of you who have had experience walking with people in the spiritual exercises? Do you see resonating, Don, please? Yeah, I was just gonna say. Don was, Don McCaffrey, let me introduce Don. Don was trained as a spiritual director at the Murphy Center. And so, Don, thank you, good to see you again. Oh, thanks, Father Jerry. Just as it relates to scruples, it's so interesting that Ignatius apparently saw his own tendency to pride and perfectionism by going to the extreme of growing his hair and letting his fingernails grow long and the clothing that he chose. So he was trying to do everything in his control, it seemed, to fight that which he saw as a flaw. And yet, to your point about, you know, the enemy spirit finding the weak link, that was still there. That was still there and there pops up again as scruples. But he doesn't seem to recognize it. Right, right. Not early on, anyone. You're absolutely right, Don.  By the way, I think that's what's behind. I was gonna ask you what you thought about the serpent image that Ignatius is tortured by, the serpent who's covered with eyes. So Ignatius always wants to be seen. I think Ignatius, I think that that emerged. What do I know? Right, I mean, I've read every commentary that I can find, but nobody really knows what that serpent is about. Who knows, right? But I think the serpent is Ignatius, he's fascinated, he's riveted in his, again, narcissism, right? To use a contemporary term, his fascination with beauty and how he is seen. You think he were an Italian boy. He's a Spaniard instead, but how he is seen matters to him more than anything else, right? And so the serpent is, I think, kind of the symbol of, you know, his passion to be beautiful and to be seen. But to Don's point, he knows something about that, right? He has an instinct that that is gonna get him in trouble.  I'm not gonna take care of my hair. I'm gonna let my beard grow. I'm not gonna be clean. Even by those standards, I've got my nails drawn to be filthy. But he, but all he does Don is you're right. He just switches it to his spirits, his kind of narcissism just switches to, I'm gonna become a, you know, I'll be, I'll be an ascetic, right?  And I'm still gonna be self-constructing.  But what he's got to reach is the point where he says, that leads me to suicide. That can't be from God. And he said, I'd rather be like a little dog, you know, following somebody because this is not getting me anywhere. Ignatius reaches the point where he has to renounce and say, all I wanna do is whatever God wants. And I'm not in control. Do you understand, my friends, how destructive our passion and our illusion that I have to control my own life, that I'm the protagonist of my life? Crazy, crazy. All right, eight o'clock, how did we get here? How did we get here? Jess, what are we doing next? Where are we going next? Our next session will be in weeks on April 19th and we'll be covering chapter six through eight, which is pages 108 through 157 in this print version. Remember, don't get bogged down with the notes, use them insofar as they're helpful, but use the text to refer you back to your own experience and what it might be telling you about your own pilgrimage. The point is, does it help us understand more about our own pilgrimage? Okay. Before we see you again, it'll be Easter. So it'll be after Easter. So bless it Holy Week, blessed Easter. We'll be getting together during Easter week. That's all I look forward to seeing you then. God bless you all and thank you for being together. Thank you, thanks a lot. Have a good night. Thank you, happy Easter. Happy Easter. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.


Not the best place to review them would be by being in a pod myself. Hi, I'm Rafael from Hardware Sugar, the only PC shop in the Philippines with no BS warranty, and I just came from a trip from Singapore in which I spent several nights in a pod hotel and put the AirPods Pro 2 through its paces, while being in a dorm room style hotel with no soundproofing whatsoever. I want to give a special shout out to Beyond the Box Philippines for making this video possible by sending us this review unit. I'll leave a link in the video description to their online store. While it was provided by Beyond the Box, they had no say in the review process and gave us free reign to be as weird or as detailed as we can. Now let's get straight into it. I'm gonna be honest, when these arrived, I already made up my mind that I wasn't going to have a pleasant experience simply because I left behind the Apple ecosystem four years ago and I know that Apple doesn't play well with others. Nevertheless, I know they're still compatible with Android and I'm quite happy with my M1 iPad Pro and so I figured that they deserve a chance to prove me wrong before I invest in something like the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro. In fact, during the review period of the Pro 2, a study was published which revealed that they could be a more cost-effective substitute to expensive hearing aids for those who need the latter. It is an interesting article which also mentions that those who have impaired hearing might be more comfortable wearing these rather than an actual hearing aid because of the social aspect of showing the world that they are handicapped. I'll leave a link to it in the video description as well. I'll start this review a little bit different from the reviews given by other tech reviewers. Instead, I'll first focus on my real-life experience and feelings of the AirPods Pro 2 and then I'll drive into the technical stuff. Quick background because unlike my brother Anton who tests all things Apple, I was a big iPhone fan for many years. I lined up for the iPhone 7 Plus and the original AirPods the moment it released back in 2016. I love the AirPods version 1 and I even used it with my Galaxy Note 9 when I left the Apple ecosystem. However, I have now completely migrated to the Samsung part of the universe with the Galaxy Watch 5, the Galaxy Buds Pro, and pretty soon the Galaxy Fold 4. I was therefore biased to conclude that my next earbuds would have to be Samsung's, right? That was until I was just awestruck at what the AirPods Pro 2 were capable of doing, whether they played me my favorite lo-fi or nothing at all. I'm going to start off this review with the magic they bring to the commuter, the office worker, and of course the frequent traveler. And that is the magic of silence, an irony since the purpose of earbuds is to play sounds. Yet I couldn't help but not hear anything the moment I put these on. The active noise cancellation on this seems like it jumped five generations ahead of the Galaxy Buds Pro version 1. As someone who is not an audio file and who doesn't have the Buds Pro 2 or even the original AirPods Pro 1 for purposes of comparison, I can only tell you how I honestly failed the moment I put these on for the first few times. You might forget the term off noise cancellation and it's really kind of disturbing because I'm really really absorbed into the music when I have them on. Alright so one thing I can say about these AirPods Pro are that they really are quite definite to the extent that you can barely hear anything outside, actually quite disturbing. I booked Spacepod Lavender in Singapore for two nights thinking it would be the best place to try these out. It's a hostel with a shared room of six other people, however with the added benefit of entombing oneself to bed within a futuristic pod. That's with most hostels, there was a lot of snoring at night from other people and people opening up their suitcases at the dead of night, me being one of them. And so while the bed was comfortable, I'm a little bit of a light sleeper and all the noise sort of really gave me a hard time falling asleep. However, putting the AirPods Pro 2 over my sleep mask completely melted any form of distraction entirely and I was out like a light from 11pm until 9.30am without waking up once. The moment I woke up, all the action of the busy hostel was done and I just remarked to myself that I couldn't remember getting that good of a night's sleep in Aegis and I'm in a hostel. This is despite the fact that I'm used to staying in much more comfortable and private facilities when I travel. In addition to the noise cancellation, if you are the type of person who likes Linus who sleeps with earphones on, you might find the shape of the AirPods Pro 2 to be very compatible if you enjoy sleeping with a mask on or if you like sleeping on your side with one pod resting on your pillow. I found both positions to be quite enjoyable and comfortable. This is something I could never fully achieve with my Galaxy Pods Pro. They have a tendency to fall out of my ear if I sleep with them or even if I'm when I'm running. On the plane ride going back to Manila, I found it quite unnerving not to be able to hear the buzz of the engine and I actually took it out of my ear twice during the flight just to check if things were all right with the plane. I took it around the busy streets of Marathi and I found myself so absorbed in my thoughts through the music's deep bass created by the AirPods Pro 2 that I not only found it quite fun but also terrifying to walk around outside. The noise cancelling really dumps down a lot of the sound and everything seems very far away. You can imagine what might happen if you're so absorbed in your own world that you might absentmindedly cross into your death. I do most of my work from my desk set up at home and the coolest part of my man cave are the windows which are also the weakest part of it because unlike cement it lets in a lot of city noise from the outside. I always hear the banging of construction from the building not too far away and most especially the roar of buses beeping their horns. In fact you can actually hear this in my previous video where you can hear all sorts of dogs shouting. With the AirPods Pro 2 on it really feels like I'm in one of those claustrophobic glass rooms but with the benefit of obviously not having the confining part. When it comes to music quality while I'm not an audiophile I have been absolutely mesmerized with the deep bass and crisp beats that the Pro 2s provide. For sleep I listen to calm sleep stories in addition to the background sounds like river water and the like. I can say that as someone who has been using wired earphones daily from 2005 until 2016 and wireless earphones every day from 2016 till today this is and I hate to say this because I'm going to be labeled as an apple fanboy which if you look at my pc watch and phone I'm evidently not these are the best earphones I've ever had the pleasure of tuning out the world to. Let's talk controls. You can do everything through this crevice located on each pot meaning if you prefer activating things with your left rather than your right no problem. There are two ways to control your pot the first is by pressing down at the center of the crevice and the second is by moving your finger up and down the crevice. One of the best things which contributes to the seamless experience of coming in and out of my sound cocoon is the ability to switch from noise cancellation to transparency by firmly pressing down and waiting for a second for the switch to happen. It's actually quite fun to move back and forth just to compare how noisy the city is compared to the soundproof cocoon you make on the fly. These controls come as default so if you are planning to use these with an android phone such as what I intend to do when I pick up my fault for these will work seamlessly without the need of programming them prior with an apple device. Gone are the days of apparently just tapping on it in order to skip and hop back between tracks. Instead you can choose to firmly double press down on either pot to skip tracks or to triple press to go back a track. I like that there is a sound cue of a playful clicky tap which plays to signal that it is acknowledging your presses. However I would have liked the option to make double tapping my left pod go back a track and double tapping my right pod to skip a track. That's felt like a more natural experience as they used to allow the original airpods. I understand people may like this new method better however all I want is the option to revert to the old if I prefer that more. You can of course control your player by single pressing it to stop and to play again. The volume control of moving your finger up and down this crevice was originally very difficult for me to accomplish. I just couldn't get it to work at first. Now that I've mastered it I don't know how I got it wrong in the first place. Nevertheless I wanted to report that less techy people might be dumbfounded at first on how to activate it. Like I said earlier I'm not new to wireless earphones as I've religiously used both the original airpods and most recently the Galaxy Buds Pro but these are the first earphones which actually give you the option to ping individual pods and the case itself. There were at least four flights in the past 15 years where I dropped one pod somewhere in my seat and I spent an anxious 10 to 15 minutes trying to find and fish them out. This feature should come standard for all premium earphones because really if you lose just one of these it becomes useless for the rest. Using the ping function requires you to go to settings show and find my selecting either the pods or the case and then pinging. Gosh I wish Apple just made a dedicated widget for the home screen for this that would be really handy. Let's talk design. The case charges by a lightning which is very disappointing however it also charges magnetically if you have an Apple Watch charger. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to give life again to my six-year-old Apple Watch charger and I charged alongside my Galaxy Watch 5 now. The case also has a lanyard slot which is a welcome option for those who like rocking and exposed and with a cool case. My biggest complaint about the design of the case is that the magnets which draw the pods in are either less strong than the original airpods or because of the shape of the Pro II's they are difficult to fish out each time. I have actually dropped one of the pods and caused a permanent scar as you can see here simply because it requires a little bit of getting used to on how to fish them out safely and place them back in. One of the best parts about using the original airpods was how they just snap back in with very little effort on my part and then snapping the case shut like a good old fashioned zippo. It's actually better not to use two fingers fishing them out but rather to use one finger to slide each of them out instead.  It feels less premium knowing that the lid isn't fast and tight. Compare that to my now ancient original airpods in which the case isn't wobbly at all. You are also able to pull them out easier too with the original ones. If you only own Apple devices you don't need to worry about connectivity as the Pro II seemed to connect seamlessly with an iPhone and an iPad. It is however when you connect it to an Android device and back again to an iPad or iPhone that it becomes a nuisance actually. In short Samsung's earphones play better with others as I have always had no problem connecting them between my iPad and my Samsung Galaxy and back again. With these though you are required to hold down the back button of the case and then select them from your Android device and hope that they connect the first time around. I hate holding this button otherwise you will need to forget them and try again. This can be a really tiresome process which takes you out of the fun of the moment. I detest this button which needs to be held down. The Galaxy Buds Pros don't need any button pressing and show up and connect instantly to my iPad. Tell me to keep in mind if you intend to dual wheel different operating systems with these. Now we get to the most painful part of the review which is price. These are not cheap and most definitely only recommended to those who have cash to spare. At 14,990 pesos these are very pricey. Within this price range you can either get the Sony WF-1000XM4 or the Galaxy Buds Pro 2 for a little less. I actually had a chance to briefly use the Galaxy Buds Pro 2's at a Samsung store for around 15 minutes and it didn't provide the same wow as the initial 15 minutes I spent with the AirPods Pro 2. The Pro 2 also lasts an hour longer with noise cancellation on and you don't get the added functionality of pulse sound for the pods in case you misplace them. However if you ask me and you're looking for earphones which completely separate you from the world and it's time for you to upgrade you should really consider the AirPods Pro 2 as an option regardless of what device you're sporting right now. I want to give a special shout out again to Beyond the Box Philippines for sending these over for our review. Again I didn't want to like these AirPods because I've happily left most of the Apple ecosystem behind for years now and it's actually quite frustrating to be somewhat back in it so to speak. Of course this still won't convince me to go back to iPhone but this is usually how mission creep begins doesn't it. In conclusion the awesome noise cancellation, the crisp sound quality and enough bonus features which may win enough people over from other platforms makes the AirPods Pro 2 an extremely attractive Christmas gift to yourself. The noise cancellation is so good in fact that I warn commuters against using it while you're on the road for your own safety. It is easy to get lost in the zone because of it. If you're an Apple user this is a no-brainer option. If you're an Android user I recommend that you must religiously use at least one other Apple device so you can make use of the find my AirPods pinging functionality like me who carries his iPad everywhere alongside my Galaxy. The drawbacks of having poor connectivity with others and a minor learning curve with respect to the controls hardly offsets the personal cocoon these AirPods are able to create for you. In case you're interested in buying them locally I'll leave a link in the video description below but let me know what you think about mixing Apple and Android earphones with different devices. Have you tried out both the Pro 2s or the Galaxy Buds 2 Pros? Let us know in the comment section below what we missed out on so that you can help our viewers when they make their decision this holiday season. We also clean and repace GPUs.


From VOA Learning English, this is the health report. The United Nations Children's Fund is praising Ethiopia for reaching one of the millennium development goals. UNICEF officials say Ethiopia has reduced child deaths by more than two-thirds. Between 1990 and 2012, Ethiopia reported a 67 percent drop in the number of children dying before the age of five. Ethiopia's Minister of Health, Kesa Tiberon Admasu, says the country has committed to end all preventable child deaths in a generation by 2035. Diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria are the leading causes of death among children in Ethiopia. In 1990, the country's death rate for children under five was one of the highest in the world. The death rate has dropped from 204 deaths for every 1,000 births to 68 deaths per thousand births. Hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian children who might have died in earlier years now reach their fifth birthday. Ethiopia is one of four African countries to have reached a millennium development goal. The other three are Liberia, Malawi, and Tanzania. One reason for Ethiopia's success is its health extension program. The program employed 38,000 people to bring health care services to a large part of the rural population. Peter Salama is UNICEF's representative for Ethiopia. He says Ethiopia's plan can serve as an example. He says delegations from Togo, Guinea, and Namibia have come to study the health extension program. The United Nations approved the Millennium Development Goals in 2001. The goals were meant to get countries to pay more attention to issues such as fighting extreme poverty. As on the goal of reducing child deaths is slow in most countries, only 13 of 61 countries are in a position to meet it. For VOA Learning English, I'm Carolyn Presuti.


This can't be another instance of genocide. Israel believes it's right. I used to think it was wrong for Israel to be killing tens of thousands of Gazans with airstrikes and starving hundreds of thousands with siege warfare. But then Israel apologists informed me that some Palestinians did mean things to Israelis in the past, so now I support it. What Israel is doing in Gaza would only be unethical if everyone in Gaza were a perfect little cherub who'd never committed any violence or done anything wrong ever. I could see getting upset if the IDF was reigning military explosives on a giant concentration camp full of squishy, marshmallow-like beings made of pure love and conceived without original sin who do nothing but coup and sing lullabies all day. But in reality the concentration camp is populated by beings who are not nearly that perfect. I hear people calling this a genocide, but that's ridiculous. What's been explained to me is that the assault on Gaza is completely different from all the genocidal massacres you've read about in history because the Israelis believe that what they are doing is right. See, this time the ones who are carrying out the mass scale extermination programs and ethnic cleansing plans have reasons for doing so. As we all know, in a proper genocide the perpetrators have no reasons for carrying out their mass extermination programs and ethnic cleansing plans.   This isn't like that at all. You see, the Israelis sincerely feel that the population they are eliminating is very bad and they believe removing that population will make the land a much better and safer place to live. They see the Palestinians as a major problem and, unlike a proper genocide, they are simply trying to find a solution to that problem which will be permanent and final. So, when you see Israel apologists defending Israel's actions in Gaza, please try to keep in mind that they're just helpfully explaining that the Israeli government has reasons and motives for doing what it's doing and that it believes what it is doing is correct. If this were a proper genocide, that wouldn't be the case. You've seen what genocide looks like. It looks like Nazis rounding up Jews and killing them. Are the Israelis wearing swastikas? Are the Palestinians Jewish? No? Okay then. That proves this cannot possibly be a genocide because if it was, it would look exactly the same as a previous historical instance of genocide in every conceivable way. It's not even the early 1940s right now. It's a completely different time period. Like, duh. So relax. Everything is fine. This isn't a genocide. And if it is, we can read about it in our history books later on and be sure to get it right next time.


Hey, what's up everybody? I think she forgot to mention. I'm also single I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm gonna get kicked off of a slash already. Anyway, what's up everybody? My name is Benjamin. I'm from Tanzania. It's is in the East Africa Does anybody know where Tanzania is? If not, I will show you don't worry. We can go through it today together So this is my home This is where I grew up. Actually, this is in East Africa. So the Serengeti is in Tanzania That's my home. Anyway, that's not my family. This is but this is where I'm from. This is originally. This is Tanzania Anyway, so I'm here to tell you about a story about my journey in entrepreneurship and how I started the business and why I'm I even building a company and it brought you probably are assuming the same thing while seeing me speak right now Anyway, so I grew up in Dar es Salaam, which is in Tanzania and a British family sponsored my sister and I from K through 12 and that's the company I'm building and This was an eye-opening opportunity because it taught me about grace and favor and start to open up Opportunities for me that I felt like as an individual I never really directly deserved and a lot of us in this room are Maybe products of grace that are still in the process as well or people have given us opportunities Or maybe we felt like okay. I don't directly deserve this or somebody who's believing in me And this is the one of the first families that believed in me that gave me this opportunity to go to this international British school in Tanzania now why this comes full circle is one of the people was organizing slush Who invited me here to speak today also went to with me to the same school So it comes back full circle over 15 years later crazy now as I was going through school I used to get in a lot of trouble. I think I hold the record for the most suspensions of my school history Does anybody do the British syllabus like GCSEs or a levels anybody done those here? Great, so I want to show you my report card from 11th and 12th grade This is my report card over here, so if you can look carefully it says Benjamin Fernandez It says the school I was going to and you can see my grades geography C physics you business E math you now in the British syllabus is pretty messed up you mean the solo below F That means it's ungraded right so basically you suck So it's a nice way of telling you that but in a formal way of not saying you've directly failed But I failed and I didn't do well in school Got in a lot of trouble So I sat there at home. I have one sister what you guys saw earlier She's one year older than me and she was always top of the class and between our own family She was the first person in our whole entire family history to go to university Nobody in my family history has been to university before her so she had gone to America now Obviously because she's gone. I want to figure out a way. How do I get to that place as well? So I you know try to figure out, you know I asked a bunch of different schools to let me in and I got a probationary offer So then I went to America for the first time at the age of 17 This is when I was going The I know I look different, but I forgot my you know crown today, but you know, it's somewhere I'm you know, I'm sure you've all received those emails from an African prince, but that's me Anyway, so I moved to America for the first time. I never lived in America at the age of 17 I was always getting randomly inspected by the police at the immigration office all the time. I don't blame them It's the first time I'm seeing snow Freezing out here in Helsinki. Anyway, so America gave me an opportunity to really explore what I really wanted to do But during my time in career I began a career in television So I used to be a TV host in East Africa started hosting on local TV then went to national TV Television is what got me into payments. Now. How many of you've heard of M. Pessa maybe in this room So I'm best as a large more money service that operates across in eastern Africa now in East Africa alone over 365 billion dollars is transacted on mobile money, which means like your cell phone is your bank account I know it's sensitive to talk about cell phones in Finland because we're having a Nokia, but we can we can move on So the joke you tell your friends when you work in the in the industries when you don't know what to do If you life you go to business school. So at the age of 20, I got accepted to Stanford for business school It was the during the NBA program. So this is my first day on campus I had to bring some African vibes and during my time there at Stanford I've got to meet a lot of different people who are working in technology and they start to really open my eyes because as an Individual I never thought I'd be starting a tech company I never thought I'd be getting you involved in in doing some things like that But a lot of my classmates would really push me because I was really curious about the payment space on the global scale Like Benji, why don't you build this company? So that's what motivated me to go and start Nala and so after I finished at Stanford I went on to work at the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation. I was working the payments team So I was looking at payments across Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and sorry, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda not Rwanda Nigeria and Ghana. So during that experience what I started to learn was the payments ecosystem globally is growing But across Africa still massively broken. There's a massive opportunity for us to build many things I spent a lot of time in the field Interviewing many many different people to try to understand what are the pain points people are facing in the payments ecosystem and the space over there And this is how we began looking at Nala Across the world, $61 billion was sent to Africa and over 4.8 billion was lost in fees Africa is the most expensive continent in the world to send money to and it's also the lowest income region in the world So it shouldn't be this way. So the big question I asked myself is What can we do to reduce the cost of sending money or trading with the continent, right? It's the most expensive region in the world to trade with and because there's so many barriers to entry the trade costs will still remain high So what does this look like in the future? How do other companies for example today? We have a world of creators on tiktok those creators in Africa while they make amazing content can't get paid into their mobile Money wallets because they don't have credit cards or debit cards They have mobile money wallets and tiktok doesn't pay out to those wallets today, right? So who's enabling that environment for all these large? Organizations or businesses that are trying to trade in and out of Africa to make those payments So when we started doll up we initially right now we support the UK and the US We enable people to send money to five countries across the African continent and in the past year We raised 10 million dollars. We're backed by Excel We're one of the Excel's largest investments on the continent as well as Bessemer and many Angels who are actually here with us today in at slush such as Alex from deal Vlad the founder of Robin Hood in the US These are all some of our investors who've backed us But we have a lot of responsibility of things that we want to get done the continent is really big But it's also very complicated. It's very complex. The continent holds 1.3 billion people today in 2022 alone 41 million people left the African continent for opportunities in Europe the US the UK And many more migrants are starting to grow and more Africa is a very talented continent, but the opportunities don't always exist to everybody who is there personally This has been my journey I started the company because I believe that many people should not be paying these high exorbitant fees to transact and trade of the region I really care about now as we look at payments across the world in Finland or in the UK, maybe you can send transfers for free You can make trades for free that is in the case with many different regions around the world And so as we were building now that we start to ask ourselves What is winning like what a success look like a hundred years from today? We're trying to build the rails for greatness where many different companies can trade across the rails that we're building on the ground Across Tanzania today Kenya Uganda Rwanda Ghana are the markets We currently operate in on the African continent But we're seeing how can we scale up and manage more and more regions in the in the market in the last year We grew 800% in our payment volume from January till today We grown of our team from seven people to nearly 70 people today as we speak We just hired two more this morning and so the team is growing quite a bit of work to do But I'm not here to give a pitch I'm here to just tell you about our journey and why I started the company anyway payments in Africa 1% built My name is Benjamin Fernandez. Thank you so much for listening today. Cheers. Bye. Oh and let your friends know I'm single


Hi friends, I am Purva and today we will work out the following question. Show that the line through the points 1 minus 1, 2 and 3, 4 minus 2 is perpendicular to the line through the points 0, 3, 2 and 3, 5, 6.  Now let the direction cosines of two lines L1 and L2 be L1, M1, N1 and L2, M2, N2 respectively. And let theta be the angle between them then cos theta is equal to mod of L1, L2 plus M1, M2 plus N1, N2 and these two lines are perpendicular if theta is equal to 90 degrees. So this is the key idea behind a question. Let us begin with the solution now. Now suppose line L1 is passing through the points 1 minus 1, 2 and 3, 4 minus 2. Then let coordinates of point AB 1 minus 1, 2 and coordinates of point BB 3, 4 minus 2. Then AB is equal to under root of now by key idea we know that if X1, Y1, Z1 and X2, Y2, Z2 are coordinates of two points P and Q then PQ is equal to under root of X2 minus X1 whole square plus Y2 minus Y1 whole square plus Z2 minus Z1 whole square. So here we get AB is equal to under root of 3 minus 1 whole square plus 4 minus of minus 1 that is 4 plus 1 whole square plus minus 2 minus 2 whole square which is equal to under root of 4 plus 25 plus 16 which is equal to 300 root 5. Thus the direction cosines of line AB are 3 minus 1 upon 300 root 5 comma 4 plus 1 upon 300 root 5 comma minus 2 minus 2 upon 300 root 5. By key idea we know that the direction cosines of a line passing through two points P and Q are given by X2 minus X1 upon PQ comma Y2 minus Y1 upon PQ comma Z2 minus Z1 upon PQ. So here we get these are the direction cosines of line AB that is we get 2 upon 300 root 5 comma 5 upon 300 root 5 comma minus 4 upon 300 root 5. Now suppose line L2 is passing through the points 0, 3, 2 and 3, 5, 6. Then let the coordinates of point PR 0, 3, 2 and coordinates of point QR 3, 5, 6. Then we have PQ is equal to under root of 3 minus 0 whole square plus 5 minus 3 whole square plus 6 minus 2 whole square. This is equal to under root of 9 plus 4 plus 16 which is equal to under root 29. Thus the direction cosines of line PQ are 3 minus 0 upon under root 29 comma 5 minus 3 upon under root 29 comma 6 minus 2 upon under root 29. That is we have 3 upon under root 29 comma 2 upon under root 29 comma 4 upon under root 29. Now the angle theta between the lines AB and PQ is given by cos theta is equal to mod of. Now by key idea we know that the angle theta between two lines L1 and L2 whose direction cosines are L1 M1 N1 and L2 M2 N2 is given by cos theta is equal to mod of L1 L2 plus M1 M2 plus N1 N2. So here we have cos theta is equal to mod of 2 upon 300 root 5 into 3 upon under root 29 plus 5 upon 300 root 5 into 2 upon under root 29 plus minus 4 upon 300 root 5 into 4 upon under root 29. And this is equal to mod of 2 upon under root 145 plus 10 upon 3 under root 145 minus 16 upon 3 under root 145 which is equal to 6 plus 10 minus 16 upon 3 under root 145. And this implies cos theta is equal to 0 which further implies theta is equal to 90 degrees. Now since theta is equal to 90 degrees so by key idea we can say that thus the two lines are perpendicular. This is our answer hope you have understood the solution. Bye and take care.


a warm welcome to the 25th session in the third module of signals and systems. We have now gained some command on the sample and hold. The natural question is what about other kinds of interpolation? We had just raised the question in the end of the previous session. Let us now set out to answer that question. So, for example, suppose I did linear interpolation, by the way why would we do linear interpolation? Is it something that we do all the time in our childhood? What I mean by childhood is when we go to high school and you know we perform experiments and then we mark some points. We smoothly join the points you know we could join the points by a smooth curve or sometimes if we just want to use a scale we join the points with a straight line is it not? It is actually connect the dots as they say that is what interpolation is. So, very often we do this in high school, do not we? So, we have some independent variable here and you have some dependent variable and you mark some instances. Of course, let us assume the instances as is the case here to be uniformly spaced. At these instances we have certain values of the dependent variable. So, what is one way in which we get a feel of the curve? We just join them by straight lines, join the dots or you know fill in the gaps. Now, the question is how is this expressible in terms of systems? So, systemic description of this, what is it? Can I use the same kind of description that I had for the sample and hold? Can I think of this as a process of first doing an ideal sampling followed by some linear shift invariant operation? Give it a thought, let me give you the answer for the moment. You know, so what are you really doing here? You are passing the signal xt through an ideal sampler as usual and let us again take the sampling interval to be ts. Let us call the output xst as before and let us now pass it through a linear shift invariant system whose impulse response is, of course, we will call it xt, but the only difference is we have a different xt now. The xt is a triangle. You see what I am saying? Let us again reconstruct. We will call it xtl for linear, linearly interpolated. Let us sketch this for a typical situation. As usual, let us take a signal, a smooth signal if you please. Mark the sampling instance. Identify the samples. Let me draw xt first and showing xt in red and now what would happen when you pass it through the linear shift invariant system? Every impulse is going to get replaced by the impulse response and then you have these discrete impulses. So, you would essentially have these impulse responses duly shifted and scaled and then of course, add it together. Let us draw the shifted and scaled ones. Let us begin by drawing them in green. How would we express the shifted and scaled impulses? We would essentially have them to be x at the points n ts multiplied by the impulse response shifted to n ts for all in tj n. So, for n equal to minus 1, you have this one here. For n equal to minus 2, of course, it is outside the scope of this drawing. For n equal to 0, you have it here and similarly for n equal to 1, 2 and so on. So, these are the shifted and scaled impulse responses. I have shown them to you in green. Now, let us add the green responses. You see, look at it very carefully. Let us focus our attention for example, between minus ts and 0. Let us focus our attention here. What happens when you add two straight lines? When you add two straight lines, the result has to be a straight line. In fact, that is not at all difficult to see. We can prove it formally. Let us do that for a minute. Very simple. If you have a 1 t plus b 1, that is how you express a linear segment in time t and add it to a 2 t plus b 2. It is simply a 1 t plus a 2 t plus b 1 plus b 2. That is also a linear segment. Now, when you know that you are going to get a linear segment by addition, how do you need to find out what that linear segment is going to be? Look for two points. It is very easy to draw a linear segment. If I know two points of the linear segment, I know the whole segment. So, now, let us go back to the previous drawing that we had. As I said, let us focus on this part minus ts to 0 here. When you add these two segments here, which are now emboldening, what are you going to get? At this extreme, at minus ts, you are essentially going to get 0 plus the sample value at minus ts. At 0, you are going to get the sample value at 0 plus 0. You are essentially going to get these two points. So, I will show in red what you expect to get. In red, the linear segment that you will get is just a linear segment that joins them. And the same argument can be used for any other pair of subsequent points. So, you will agree with me that the consequence of what I have done is to join these points by straight lines like this. So, now, x LT is what I am going to show in emboldened or maybe I will say red with some crosses, crossed red like this. I am going to cross this. So, you see the effect, the whole idea of linear interpolation is really just again passing the ideally sampled output through a linear shift invariant system. How would we now characterize this linear shift invariant system in the frequency domain? Again, let us find out the Fourier transform. Again, instead of finding the Fourier transform directly, let us see if we can relate it to the previous one. So, suppose we sample, suppose we look at the whole circuit first. The only thing is we keep the hold only between minus ts by 2 and plus ts by 2. So, you know, you remember the hold was earlier between 0 and ts. So, now we hold, we keep that same ht, but move it backwards. In fact, we now call it a zero order hold and zero order refers to the fact that this is essentially a polynomial of zero order in t. Suppose we had this impulse response. Let us call it h0t to emphasize the zero order. Let us convolve h0t with itself. What you expect to get? In fact, I leave this to you as an exercise. Evaluate this convolution and verify, verify essentially that it gives you the same impulse response as what you need for a linear hold, for a linear what I call a first order hold. So, you know, this is called a first order hold. Now, it is a first order polynomial in the independent variable. So, zero order hold when convolved with itself gives you a first order hold and a first order hold essentially has piecewise linear impulse response over the time axis. Now, once we see this impulse response in this perspective, it is very easy to see the effect in the frequency domain. When you convolve a function with itself, you are multiplying the Fourier transform by itself. So, you can immediately write down the frequency response of the first order hold. It is the square. It is t s e raised to the power minus j omega t s by 2. Now, you know, please remember, this was the frequency response of the zero order hold, but as running from 0 to t s. And I need to multiply it by e raised to the power plus j omega t s by 2 because we have shifted it backwards by t s by 2. So, it is this response which is now squared. And as you can see, this would give us t s squared times essentially sine omega t s by 2 by omega t s by 2 the whole squared. Let us draw the magnitude. In fact, we do not really need to worry about magnitude in phase here because anyway the phase is 0. You know, it is essentially just the square. So, on the cycles per second frequency axis, you have essentially the square of a sinc function. Now, the sinc function starts with 1 and then it goes down, is not it? What is important is that the fall-off is going to be faster. So, you know, the sinc function has a maximum at 0. It takes the value of 1 at 0. So, I am essentially plotting the sinc part, sinc f t s part. And sinc f t s is always less than 1 in magnitude. So, squaring means reduction bringing below the sinc function. When you square a number which is less than 1, it goes down. So, it would look something like this. It will fall even faster. What is the good part of this? The good part of this, I mean, there is a good part and a bad part. The good part of this is that the side loops are now suppressed. So, you have lower side loops, the weaker side loops as compared to the original 0 order hold or the sample and hold circuit. That is the good part. So, you know, all those other aliases beyond the first one are going to get suppressed more. What is the bad part? The bad part is that, now look at this. The region between minus 1 by 2 t s and 1 by 2 t s also suffers a steeper drop.  So, you have gained that you have lost some of the aliases a little more strongly, but you lose because your equalization has to be steeper. There is less flatness in the original signal band. The signal has got the original signal band has got more severely distorted. We will see more in some of the subsequent sessions. Thank you.


Okay, we're back here live inside theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the ceiling from the noise. This is exclusive Silicon Angle coverage of O'Reilly Stratoconference in Silicon Valley. A heart of big data of innovation in Santa Clara, California. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. And we're joined by Todd Papayano, who's the CEO of Continuity. And welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me.   Last year you launched the company. Give us the update of what's happening because you guys have a great team. And still kind of quiet, but I'm sure you're making your moves. Give us the update of a press release that went out Tuesday. Yes, we did. Yeah, we launched a company towards the end of last year at Hadoop World. There had definitely been heads down, close to series A. So we raised 10 million bucks, which was nice. That definitely helped. Double the size of the team, brought on some fantastic engineers and developers. And we've been really focusing on the product. So the announcements this week were, we're announcing the public beta availability of our developer suite, which is a framework to enable folks to build big data applications quickly and simply, and the public availability, the beta availability of our developer sandbox. So folks will be able to come to our website and spin up their own version of the continuity app fabric, which is our runtime, cloud hosting platform. So it's pretty beefy. It's like eight gig, eight core, quarter terabyte. And so what we want to do is give folks the capability to be able to see the full continuity end-to-end app development lifecycle benefit. So you guys, when you launched in New York last fall, I mean, we love the launch position because really we were talking about data as a development kit. And here we're talking on theCUBE this week about data as code, which is kind of a riff on infrastructure as code. But it's not yet fully formed yet and kind of what that means, but it feels right in terms of developers want to advance this initiative. So you guys are targeting developers by giving them the tools that they need.  There's a huge appetite from developers. Yet it's all the talk is about distributions and a lot of stuff going on. So what is the developer mindset right now? What's the sentiment in the market for those developers? You're targeting them. What are you seeing for them right now? What are some of the, what's the sentiment? Good? Yeah, I mean, I think the feedback we've had has been tremendous. Since we launched the private beta of the developer suite that a ton of folks use it, we've got fantastic feedback on it. We've improved all the APIs. We've added Eclipse and IntelliJ plugins. We've improved user interface. I think the sentiment is, look right now, it's still really difficult to build applications on top of Hadoop. Yeah, we hear all this news about the distributions here and more distros springing up like weeds. You know, weeds, I should say. It's a growth market. I mean, Intel comes in. It's a big move right there. Big money players. Yeah, absolutely. The big guys are coming in. I mean, for us, that's good. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we layer over the top of the distros. So even for all of the Hadoop distros guys out there, they still, when they go to their customers, it's tough for them to build applications. We can come in and say, hey, for all of your customers, we can make their lives better. Somebody said in theCUBE this week, don't confuse a clear vision with the shipping product. And a couple of years ago, people put forth this vision of Hadoop applications. You just said, it's still really hard. What's the big roadblock? I think the roadblocks right now is that when you think about the distribution stuff, it's infrastructure software. The experience really, even from the distro guys, is still for a customer. You have kind of the homebrew computing club experience, they're going to take something from here and here and here and meld that together. What we do is we layer over the top of that and make it much easier for developers to actually code, deploy, and scale their applications on top of the distributions. And so they want simplicity and they want that with modern tools, obviously? Yeah, absolutely. Look, developers are smart guys, right? But they still like the niceties there. They want more of the visual studio, more of the Apple experience, right? I think for customers, what they want to do is be able to drive to business value and insight much more quickly. So what we do is we enable a much larger cadre of developers. It's not just the Hadoop distributed systems experts. It's pretty much anybody who can write Java out there to actually become a big data application developer. You hear that stat a lot for every 505 Hadoop deployments. There's one in production. Do you feel like you can move that needle? Absolutely, I think the reason that things don't go into production is right now, the general model is, you know, you bring in one of the distro guys, you end up doing a science project, you probably plow some log files in, and that kind of stalls out. Why? Because it's actually very difficult to then go and actually productionize the application. What we can do is actually help customers who want to take their initial science projects and actually turn it into something real, to operationalize the application. So who's coming by the booth here? What are they asking you? What kinds of questions are you getting, and how are you responding? We've had actually really great traffic by the booth. I mean, this has been a great show for us. I think the questions we get are, okay, when can I have it? I want one of those. This is really stinking cool. You're excited. Oh, absolutely. People see just how simple we've made it to build apps and deploy. They're very excited. We have a ton of interest. What do you think about the trend about bypassing MapReduce and putting stuff right on top of HTFS? So honestly, that was a green plumb's approach. You're seeing a lot of different techniques. We also heard from some of the in-memory guys talking about, hey, you know what? You can actually, MapReduce is not necessarily just batch anymore. You can actually write to MapReduce and make that real time. Is it just how the world view is? Is it depending? Is it? Well, I mean, I think it's a natural part of the evolution of the stack, right? When we think about where we are in the Hadoop ecosystem, we're like maybe two years in to the evolution of it. Traditional BI has been around for 30 years, right? So we still have a bunch of work to do. The green plumb approach and everybody here who's, to me, the flavor of the day of this conference has been, I have SQL for Hadoop. Okay, great. So you've enabled all the BI guys to do BI applications, but what's that next generation web logic or JBoss? That's us. We enable you to actually build real productionized, operationalized applications. They can cross the chasm with you guys. They can do the BI now and then you can cross them over. Okay, let's talk about the BI trainwrecks coming up. So we're going to, we predicted, we predicted, I predicted, I, not Dave didn't. I said, I predicted that the BI is going to go through a very quick, a lot of dough going to be spent on BI, but get the SQL today. And like the early days of BI, there was some trainwrecks, just natural evolution. What's your advice to folks who don't want to be the trainwreck and want to be the good guys? I mean, obviously there's some development involved. Any perspective on that? Well, look, I think there's going to be, the Accentures of the World and Consultants is going to make a ton of money. We know that, right? I think the benefit from people bringing to SQL, to Hadoop though, is that there is an existing 30 years worth of investment. And personnel. And personnel, people understand SQL. But those guys are actually very different to the people who were building JTWE apps last decade, right? So there was still a massive market there for people building operationalized apps, the business logic for what they want to do. SQL is fantastic for doing structured queries. And by that I mean, you can ask questions within a pre-existing search space. I think the major change we're seeing in big data is really a move from schema at read time, schema at write time to schema at read time. What that means is that you can now ask a ton more questions of the data that you didn't even know you had before. In the state of the art. Without a lot of work too. Without, I mean, some work, but not like massive schema redefinitions and whatnot. I think we've all heard of the, you know, kind of enterprise data warehouse trainwrecks. So people spend like, you know, six to nine months trying to define their schema and set that up and it's already out of date. The big move here is like, how do you actually like slash time to business value, slash time to business insight? Awesome, we 100% agree. Let's talk about those developers now. So let's those guys doing that development that you're talking about, what are they doing right now? What's the psychographic profile of that developer? I mean, I think that developer right now is they're sitting down in their IDE. They have a fantastic idea, big data idea. They want to actually get that, you know, built very quickly. We press the test ourselves on, can somebody actually like build an application quickly in like an afternoon or a day and push it somewhere and show that it works? What they're wanting to do is they want to actually take in, you know, the data, taking signals, do, you know, streaming analytics, do real-time processing and actually present, you know, get some answer out of the backside of it. Are you seeing any kind of preference on storage and how they're handling the data, any kind of out of the data management side of it's working? You know, not so much. I mean, you know, what we do is, you know, we've abstracted above both HDVSNH base and give people this high level of abstraction. So instead of dealing with like input and output formats on low level sequence files and T files and, you know, bytes all in HDVSNH base, you're really dealing at a high level that's more like, you know, hibernate. So for us, it's, you know, we have this data fabric components like datafabric.write object. Java developers much more happy about dealing with objects and object abstractions rather than like low level bytes and blocks.  So since you're funding, obviously you've got some more resources. So you're expanding staff, you're probably having more travel budgets, but talk to customers and potential customers. What have you learned since fall? The big aha that you can say, wow, this is good stuff going on that you can share with the audience? Yeah, I think there's two things. One, you know, I see kind of like two classes of customers. There's what I call the fast followers, right? And these are guys that we see in the kind of like online, social, mobile gaming verticals who have, they have a real pain, they have a problem to solve and they don't have the capability and wherewithal to stand up, you know, a team of like 10 to 15 Hadoop developers. They gravitate very much to our platform because they can just actually build applications quickly. In the enterprise, what I found is, and certainly in some of the verticals, maybe like retail and FinServe, they're really behind the curve, right? They're really still just doing science projects and we saw that analyst report come out recently about the troff of disillusionment. That's actually good for us. I mean, I think that's happening. I've been talking about that properly. I've been talking about that on theCUBE for a while. Yeah, you have. That's coming, right? It's kicking out now. Yeah, that's come now, right? So for me, I'm like, great, this is validation. It's perfect time to mark it for us. So you obviously worked at Yahoo. That is the thing. The other signal is all the whales are getting in. You guys were talking about this earlier, SAP pretty much sort of going after that space of Oracle. I don't know if it is, but eventually will be. What do you make of that?  I mean, look, I think all of the traditional data warehousing folks, all the traditional data guys see this move and I think they understand intrinsically that there's a shift going, but they don't understand exactly what it is, right? I don't see from any of the kind of like leading, kind of like BI data warehouse vendors that they get that it's the schema right, the schema at read time shift. They just know there's something big going on here. So they're plowing in, but if you look at their strategies, they're not that impressive so far, right? I do like the green plum strategy, right? I mean, they have, I think, put together a very nice product. It'll be nice when it's actually generally available. I'd love to see it and get my hands on it. But I think that the big data guys, the general data guys are saying, moving into big data and going, there's something here just like everybody is, but no one's really figured out what that is. And my personal perspective on it is, in the Hadoop ecosystem specifically, we have a ton of infrastructure, but we don't have actually any of those classic application patterns. In traditional BI, we got those over time. We got CRM or Salesforce Automation, Supply Chain Management. We still need those apps to actually explode up and kind of like take over in this ecosystem. And without those apps, this ecosystem goes away and it just becomes a storage engine underneath Teradata or Oracle, right? Okay, we're out of time. Getting the hook here, Todd. Thanks for coming inside the queue. Congratulations on your success. You've got a lot more to do. More build value still kind of plowing the fields. Good strategy. I think there's going to be a developer, massive onboarding of these new class of developers as well as the pre-existing kind of BI. Congratulations. Continuity, hot startup in Silicon Valley. CEO, Todd, be right back with our next guest at this short break.