Recession. That word is back in newspapers, on TV shows, especially on business news channels across the world. Why? They're saying that this is being caused by inflation. Inflation is so high that people have stopped buying things. Demand has dropped sharply and because when demand drops, what happens? Companies are unable to sell goods and services. So what happens? They cut back. They cut back on their output. They cut back on the number of people they employ. And because of that, the total output shrinks and the economy shrinks. That is what recession is. And mainstream economists and mainstream policymakers, they say that the only way to get out of this is to bring inflation down. But that process actually creates a bigger problem because when you try to bring inflation down by increasing interest rates and reducing the money supply, what happens? Companies stop investing. They stop hiring people. And because people now have less income, they buy less. This pushes the economy further into a recession. Some people argue that it's increased government spending which causes inflation or the printing of notes which causes inflation. And they say that governments must stop spending. They must go into an austere mode, spend less. And what happens? Investment reduces. Government spending reduces. And that is why the total income pie in the economy shrinks further causing further recession. All this is based on the way in which inflation is targeted across the world by neoliberal governments. Because the argument given for inflation is that inflation is caused by high wages. When wages go up, what happens? There's more money in the hands of people and they want to buy more and their demand increases. And when demand increases and supplies don't, prices go up. Another reason they give for high wages causing inflation is that corporates and companies, owners of companies, they have to pay more wages. The wage cost goes up and everywhere, input costs also go up and that pushes up costs. And what can these poor company owners do? The only thing they can do is increase prices. So the entire logic given to us is that it's increased wages and input costs which raises costs and pushes prices up. No one talks about corporate profits. Of course, there is one more reason why we are being told inflation is taking place which is disruptions caused by COVID and the disruptions caused by Russia's war in Ukraine which supposedly has completely destroyed key supply chains. There is no doubt that these have caused supply problems and this has raised the price of input and that increased inputs have raised costs. There's no doubt about that. But across the world, this has been used as a cover for corporates to increase their profits. Let us understand this. Let us assume that at the starting point, a company which produces shirts has an input cost of 50 rupees and a labor cost of 50 rupees. The total cost is 100. The company owner says, okay, I'm going to sell it for 120 rupees and make a profit of 20 rupees. Now, labor cost has risen to 70 rupees and input costs have also risen to 70 rupees. What happens? The total cost has gone to 140 rupees. Now, the company owner can no longer sell those shirts for 120 rupees because then they would make a 20 rupee loss. So what do they do? They say, okay, I will take a 10 rupee profit and increase this to 150. So prices have gone up from 120 to 150 even though the company owner has taken a hit on profits. That is what the argument is given that when costs go up, there's a limit beyond which company owners, corporates, capitalists cannot take the hit on profits and after a point, they start making losses. So at that point, they just withdraw from the business and that is what causes a problem. But wait a minute, is that what has happened? In reality, as I said, COVID disruptions, the disruptions caused by the Russian war has been used as a cover for increased profits. I said this is happening all over the world. There's a study in the US which says 60% of the increase in prices in the last one year in the US and you know there's been record inflation of there is because of markup by corporates because of the increased profits of corporates. This is what they've done.  Instead of keeping their margins and 20 and selling something at 160, what they've done is that they've sold it at 180. They've increased their profits and for a long time because of the media propaganda because of a certain amount of truth that input costs are up, that labor costs are up, people have accepted that prices are going up because there's a shortage. Prices are going up because there's a lot of demand and there's a shortage. No, there is only one part and actually probably just one third of the reason for the rise in prices, rise in inflation. Higher profits has caused higher inflation and that is what is causing recession now. Not higher wages, not higher demand, not higher money supply. This is not just true for the US or Europe. Look at India. There have been record profits in India in the COVID year and even last quarter we've had record profits. So, corporate profits are increasing at the time of inflation. Corporate profits are increasing dramatically while others are earning less. That is the cause for the drop in demand. That is the reason why there's not enough demand in the market and that is why we are going to face the danger of another recession. The answer to that is to limit corporate profits, to put a limit on the margins that corporates can get, to put price controls. But will that happen? Hold your breath but don't hold it for too long because you want to live. That's the show today. Keep watching, news click, subscribe to us, share this video and like it as well.


Hey tribe, so I am walking with my buddy here and I decided that it's a good time to talk about the 20, okay, let's let's let's make it right Two minute, okay, shoot two for 22 commitment We made it simpler and now still need to learn it. Anyway, this is a one-take video about me deciding to talk about motivation behind the two more 22 commitment I made over the years. And yeah, so I just wanted to talk about what motivates me to do it and hopefully that motivation will inspire you and kind of give you insights in how each one of us can motivate ourselves Hopefully and I hope it's not too windy for the microphone as I'm walking with my buddy here I quickly checked if the wind is not too much for the audio But well, we're aiming at not being perfect in this commitment. So I will simply continue While being pulled by my husky. Anyway, let's make this video valuable and talk about the essential things So first of all, I wanted to quickly reflect together with you there are dogs around here And my dog's growing nuts Because there's this big shadow dog Oh, I am wasting your time. Hopefully this is fun for you and I'm bringing you good emotions. So Okay, there's the big shadow dog. This is my husky. I taught him not to pull as much but Dogs are dogs. So all right coming back to the main point which we didn't start yet So first of all As the 2 for 22 commitment is slowly developing into a thing I had this consideration, you know, whether Whether we should do the Filming of ourselves each day or not. It's a tough decision because um There, you know, there's part of me which thinks Maybe It's too much for people. You know, maybe if we want to make this Right if we want this to spread you need to kind of keep it simple But the other side of me is also thinking We'll shoot if If it's too simple, then what's the point of doing this? And this is where I started thinking about motivation and You know, how do I motivate myself to post every day? To fill myself Whether I'm in a good mood or a bad mood to do that kind of reflection and what motivates me to Do the Two-minute will practice every day one way or another and a big part of me is actually the kind of knowledge understanding Obviously, there's myself, you know, I I become better I realized that I'm growing and developing But something that I was happy about For a long time in my life and I kind of realized that only In my later years that that's it's a thing To be honest, I don't even know how exactly that developed. I could only guess but Since forever I always felt Like I'm a part of the whole always felt like I'm A part of the community and part of the society that we're all kind of this one big mass Like an organism like, you know a body with Different cells. I never felt like I'm I never felt like I'm a separate part Uh Kind of a separate individual who needs to only care about himself And I think that always motivated me to become better for that Because internally I always add that realization that if I am focusing on becoming better Then the better I will become The more Other people will benefit from that as well Like if one cell in the body is a super cell Then the whole body kind of becomes better And that was always a huge motivation for me and it is up to today and I think that's One of the reasons I'm inspired and motivated to do the 2 for 22 commitment not only for myself But also for the realization that what I do matters and What I share matters and sometimes I keep saying this in the the tribe in the facebook group But sometimes it feels just like It doesn't matter what I do. It's like, ah I got only one like Or you know, there's only one comment. So nobody's watching nobody cares, but On one level you never know Maybe that one single person that clicked the like button. Maybe that was a game changer for that person Or maybe that person Got the right thing at the right time. Maybe he was having a hard day and And his day became much better and you just don't know about it Because you never got a chance to Hear that person saying it, but it doesn't mean it didn't happen and trust me From living this kind of lifestyle of always thinking about What kind of effect I have on others, whether it's a positive Impact that I have or not I had so many examples where I was surprised To what impact I had without myself even knowing Sometimes without even trying And one of such examples or many of these examples where where even like five years later I would meet a friend Who's just like, you know friend not like a student of mine or something when I used to teach martial arts or yoga And uh friend I'm really concerned. This is too noisy. So I think we're gonna Turn around and head back Because there's the motorway Next all right And there's motorcycle I think motorcycles are my curse. I think they're following me everywhere So let's continue and Yeah, so uh, I would meet these friends after like five years and And they would tell me oh, you know I'm doing this awesome thing and you know, they're they're they're like doing great in their career They're pursuing their passion their dream And I'm so happy for them and suddenly I hear them Sometimes not even telling me directly But shouldn't the others there's specific case like that ones Where the guy my good friend he was telling to others It's like, oh, you know because I saw Roku was doing his thing And then I thought I can do too And suddenly he started he became a programmer like a professional Programmer and a really good one Although he that's nothing like what he was studying. That's he was studying very different things Something with construction and he became great at it and only years later not even to me directly I learned that what I did that the fact that I pursued my passion Uh inspired him to do it and he never even told me Directly I had to hear that from someone else and I never knew I was always so happy about him and so Passionate about his achievements, but turns out I had an influence in it and Most of the time I wasn't even aware of it And I had other cases like that too where I would post something and I would share Myself doing something and I wouldn't think much of it But then later on I would hear a direct Explanation that actually that impacted that person And first of all that's such a cool feeling to know that what you do matters But also that recognition that Uh what I do sometimes matters without me even knowing I think it's an important one and something I have to keep reminding myself of all the time Even when I do this sometimes You know some some days I'm not as inspired and and to be honest some days. Yeah, I'm like Is this a good direction? You know investing a lot of time to try to make this happen and sometimes thinking like Should I really do it? Is is you know is this like there's a bunch of other challenges and whatnot and you can always you know find out Oh, there may be ticks around here. So we should go So you have those doubts, but then I would keep on pushing through and I would continue doing this and then a few days later I would Get a message of someone saying.  This is really worth doing so So I think that's kind of the main thing I wanted to share with you is that If you're having those doubts, you know, whether I should There's the shadow dog again My dog's being well pressure testing my patience No, I'm a patient guy though. So I'll show you the dog. Look shadow dog big guy Anyway, so yeah So my main point that I wanted to share is That if you're considering whether you should do it or not It's like why if you have those questions of why would I do, you know, like who cares? What's the difference? my my message is my main point is Not that I always remember that but I know Deep inside from my experience That it does matter not only to me not only because you know, I'm per se a public persona This is the these are the noises my dog makes So not only just because I'm a public persona and I'm always putting myself out there And on my main channel, I have some following but not just because of that Like with the new project, I don't have that much following, but I still realize Even if it's just one like Even if just one person saw it That may make all the difference. So it doesn't matter that whether it's me or whether it's you Each one of us can have that impact And if we have the chance to have that impact Why not do it? You know and as always This is another dog He's angry. I think Or he's saying release me Anyway, I'm gonna I'm about to finish this video. So So if you're having doubts Just remember that it does matter what you do matter and There's those two levels as well You're doing it part of it is because There's a chance you will make somebody's life better by just sharing your own process And the other part is That it's also work on yourself It's also no matter. No wonder it's a commitment You're also becoming better more authentic And I'm speaking from experience and kind of describing my own experience now you You force yourself to accept whatever You made like this video this one take, you know, usually that's not a youtube standard To have dog growing wild and all these noises. I should refilm this but Part of mine is having that battle of damn it Nobody's gonna watch this video, especially the first minute. You have to make the first minute. It's super interesting You have to give the point and all these thoughts and the other part of my brain is saying Joe, you know, except this This is this is fine. This is who you are. You don't have to be perfect every time So that's an awesome process And that's worthy enough to do on its own And I could continue But again, my youtube brain says don't make this video too long because nobody's gonna watch it Don't waste people's time And I can always make another one later But I hope that this contemplation does inspire you to reconsider whether you want to join the 2422 commitment or not And yeah, just basically you do matter what you do Even when you don't know it matters and even small actions small bits Can have a huge difference even without us knowing So if you can if it only takes you a couple minutes per day to do it It can have that impact on you and other others I think it's more than enough reason to do it Keep questioning


Dr. Bracky, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me back. So just to set the scene, we are entering a landscape of change when we pick up our story in the fourth and fifth centuries. Christianity is coming out of time of being persecuted. Now they're into a period of being tolerated and becoming more important in the Roman Empire with the rise of emperors like Constantine and then his sons after him. So we have a period as Edward Watts puts it, the final pagan generation. He puts it as a generation that had ideals and concerns increasingly at odds with younger counterparts. The often younger Christians rejecting the prestige of offices or philosophy, you know, like being a platonic philosopher orator and turning to things like monasticism as a viable option. It's milieu and flux or Hellenic and Christian influences sit in a sometimes uncomfortable but mostly semiotic relationship. Can you discuss what the world among inherits looks like for a little bit? One way to enter it is to think about some stories that monks tell and a lot of the stories that they tell are about them being young men and having to choose between following, say, a career in the military or government or following their father into some sort of business venture or working in a temple to the pagan gods or whatever and following a new kind of father, which is a more advanced monk. So sometimes you get these monastic stories where a young man is having to choose between these alternatives. And one of the ways to think about it is that a whole new career path has opened up for some young people, but it's still not one that is well-defined, right? If you were to decide to become a monk today, you would go to a well-established monastery and order and they would have whole procedures for dealing with you and thinking about what to do and they have handbooks and rules and all that kind of thing. But this was, of course, a time of great experimentation. I mean, sometimes think of them as dropping out of society, but they're really not, right? They're just taking a different role in society. And it's also a world compared to ours where the gods of the Roman Empire are not quiet and withdrawn and limited to people like you and me who are really like nerds about this stuff. They're all around still. It's just a world of new opportunities, but also one in which the future of religion and philosophy and so on is quite uncertain and people are having to kind of make decisions. These new avenues that monasticism and the clergy present were normally somebody from a middle class for lack of a better term would go into a civil service position or something in the government. These constantly going towards the monk and it's part of this dynamic negotiation going on between the different cultures. Yes. Not all monks were of the social level and so on where they're making these kinds of decisions. In fact, some of the early monks were also clearly young men who were just looking for something to do. And if you joined a monastery, an organized monastery, you were joining something that would make you work and give you a regime that you had to follow, what you could dress, what you could wear, when you would eat and so forth. But you would have a pretty stable and secure, if not luxurious lifestyle guaranteed for you for pretty much the rest of your life. There's also a kind of attractiveness in its stability in some forms of monasticism. People obviously did this for a lot of different reasons. Monks, they're very important. They're transitional ritual specialists and still sitting hand in hand with the dudes who are making your incantation bowls. These are the new kids on the block in terms of where people go for their holy guidance and their miracles and their prophecies where normally they would go to like a temple of misclop use. Now they can just go to, shouldn't you be the great, right? That's right. Obviously the church, the organized church with clergy, would like to be the organization that now provides access to, if you want to put it this way, spiritual power, to healing and exorcism and general well-being in one's life. But they can't control everything. And so, yes, these new kind of people emerge. Monks who, based on the fact that they live these extraordinary lives, which people find really impressive, means that they have now some access to divine power, to the spiritual world that most ordinary people do not. Or most ordinary people experience that spiritual world as just kind of active force upon them, something that they experience rather than as something that they can access and engage with. It's very fascinating in this period of time, and you do mention in another book, you paraphrase Jay-Z Smith, the whole concept of things are changing from, you have a centralized locus of sacred spaces to, these are more mobile, maybe in anachronistic sense, but more democratic ways of having access to the divine and their powers. What Smith points out, and other scholars in my world like David Frankfurter have built on, is this idea that as the traditional temple network in Egypt declines, so that there just aren't as many, the need that those temples and so on met is still there. But now what kind of happens is that these ritual specialists, we might call them enemies, might call them magicians, whatever you want to call, start to emerge as people who offer these kind of services in a mobile transferable way, right? So now you can do a certain ritual to accomplish X, Y, or Z, wherever you are, and the specialist can come to you. You don't have to go to a temple to have this done. Instead, you can go to a person and the person could come to you. And monks participate in this clearly. Church leaders don't necessarily like this. They would prefer to, for the churches, to be the headquarters now for this kind of thing. But just as we find, you know, things like DoorDash and Grebb Hub very helpful if people will bring the stuff from the restaurant to us. So too, I think people in Etiquity found the idea that someone was wandering around and helpful and so on. I love it. It's finding a way to mobilize salvation. Yes. Heck of a deal, right? That's right. Yeah, I was talking to an archaeologist, specialist on ancient magic and the Greek magical papyri, Dr. Kirsten Switzer. She was mentioning how, yeah, it's just this incredible time of flux and their closing Egyptian temples and these rituals, these people who would otherwise be priests, right? They're very well-versed in the Lord. They're very well-versed in the Paideia, right?  Who wrote the Onirocritica? Artemidorus. Artemidorus, right?  So, yeah. Yes. We have plenty of the Greek magical papyri, of course, that you can get in the volume that Hans Dieter Betts led when you can read these things. There are Christian and Jewish elements in those, but we, of course, also have a whole set of spells, as they are normally called, many surviving and Coptic that are clearly just Christian.  And they also will have elements that, you know, to use bad language, we would call pagan in them, but they are clearly Christian. And so the question becomes, who makes those? Who is qualified in late antiquity? We're talking from 4th to 8th centuries. Who's qualified to make those things? Because you have to be literate. You have to have knowledge of liturgical language and biblical lore and stuff like that. And there aren't many good candidates other than monks to have been the people who did this. Now, this is not the only... Obviously, we're kind of zeroing in on this because we find it fascinating. So they must have been doing stuff like this. I wrote an article recently on monks and cursing. Interestingly enough, I could find only a single curse where the cursor explicitly identified himself as a monk. But then the question becomes, who prepared these things for other people? And you still kind of think monks are good candidates. That brings up another point. He's not exactly the same. I think of somebody like the Nassian preacher who's very well-versed in cosmopolitan. This guy is very well-versed in the stoic, allegorical method. And he knows Christianity. He knows Judaism. He knows all the Hellenistic religions. I just imagine it's that type of person making them. And just because we're in Egypt, by the way, so this is Egypt, so a lot of it's going to be Alexandrian and Egyptian-centered. Just by virtue of the fact that these people are so well-versed in this lore, both demonic and cosmopolitan, I think that when they become monks, they're still a certain ambivalence. They, you convert when you're like 35 or 48. What happens to the last 25 years of your life? Do you forget about Homer? And do you forget about reading Plato? No, you still do the things that you did before, but you have to kind of reorient that. Becoming a monk meant not saying all the gods you used to worship and so on, and the literature you used to read, isn't real. Those gods are real. They just happen to be demons now. We've decided. You don't just cast aside your knowledge of that world because you've learned useful information about spiritual forces in the universe that are real. The conversion we tend to think of is, I leave the old behind and completely embrace the new. More usually when we study conversion as a phenomenon, it kind of means instead the old is reorganized and rethought of in light of the new. It's not left behind. It's thought of in a new way. Monks remain convinced that there are divine beings who hover around the Nile River, right? But, you know, we just think about those beings in a different way. We don't like have decided that they don't exist anymore. We're not going to worry about them. We're not going to think about them. We just have a new perspective on their significance and how to interact with them. Conversion is not leaving behind the old. It's really rethinking the old in light of a new commitment that you have made, I'd say. This really was an unprecedented time in history, right? This is a time when you have a completely new religion tolerated and eventually becoming an official religion of the empire. But you have thousands of years of Hellenic religion and these images and the divine as Edward Watts would put it, everywhere. You have a generation of people who just could not consider that the pagan gods would just go. When the self-definition that Christians used when they weren't the majority was that of a martyr, that of the athlete in the arena, the gladiator, right? As Christianity becomes accepted, they have to define themselves in different ways. This monk who is using asceticism and cultivating virtue, but also still like an athlete for gods. I didn't know if you could touch upon that a little bit. Who is the monk? I mean, what is he? What is his religious and spiritual identity? They couldn't just invent things out of whole cloth, right? Just think and say, monk. We all know what that is, which they didn't. So they kind of have to adapt older traditional roles and show how they fit into them. And certainly a major one that not all monks embraced, but some, and especially more educated churchy writers tended to embrace, was the idea that the monk is a kind of martyr in the sense that he is a combatant, someone who fights with Satan and spiritual powers, just like the martyrs used to fight with Satan and the spiritual powers in the arena when they were put up against beasts and so forth. And by far the best early example of this is the life of Antony, the always reputed earliest hermit. This life was written by a bishop named Athanasius who wrote it in the 350s. So the days of Christian martyrs at the hands of a non-Christian state is well past, right? But he kind of presents Antony in that way. He, Antony fights with beasts who are demons, of course. And he incorporates a lot of kind of traditional motifs and tropes from martyr literature to present the monk as such. Now, we should say that at the same time, this is very important, Christians really are, after Constantine, after it's legal and all this stuff, really appropriating martyrdom as a thing. This is when most martyr acts are written, most accounts of martyrs are written in the fourth century and later, not when there actually were martyrs. It's a kind of way to invoke an identity of vulnerability and the need to fight back even in a position where one is, in fact, ascendant and not needing to do so. You always ask, who's the super-Christian at any given time in history? For a while it was the martyr. Then it kind of becomes the monk. The monk is the one who best lives out this life. But he has to kind of take that martyr identity onto himself in some ways. There's a very important aspect to the self-definition through this concept of demonology, right? Especially with somebody like Athanasius and then later Evagrius and then Shnudi. They seem to draw from a myriad of sources, just the ones I can think of the top of my head are like Stoicism, Middle Platonism. Of course, Christian writers like Clement, Origen, very big in Alexandria, right? And Kiru, Bible figures, especially Joe. But then I found very interesting that I wasn't really aware of. As you mentioned that there are some Valentinian fragments possibly in there. And if you could just touch upon that. Most Christians had to think about the Christian's ethical life and his or her just being in the world in terms of cosmological forces and demons from the get-go. And part of this, you know, the most is the pseudo-Paul's letter to the Ephesians in the New Testament, which says our combat is with spiritual forces, the enemies in the air who are fighting with us and so forth. And these are demons and demonic forces. And what the author of Ephesians argues is that the Christians just spiritual life and their ethical life when they're deciding how to behave and so on. That's all part of this kind of cosmic struggle with forces of evil, right? Pretty much all early Christian authors who were at all thoughtful or philosophically inclined to had to think about what that means. And before the era of monks, it was origin of Alexandria who most thought about this, right? But the Valentinians did too, right? They too thought about how the negative spiritual forces in this universe try to prevent the Christian from achieving virtue. And it's definitely clear in some monastic literature, especially the letters of Saint Antony, this Antony that Athanasius wrote about also wrote some things himself, some letters. He uses some of these same ideas and concepts and terminology and so on that you find in some Valentinian literature for thinking about demons. Now, does this mean Antony was reading Valentinian literature? I have no idea, but it's there. And I think Valentinians contributed in some way to the way early monks thought about demons. The main idea that Valentinians contributed to this. For Valentinians, one of the big problems with our current situation is that we have lost a state of unity in which all human spirits and God are one. Demons exploit that loss of unity. They try to draw us apart from one another and increase division to lead us away from oneness and unity towards diversity and difference and separation. That's something we have to resist. That's demons want. The great Valentinian story is a kind of return to oneness, right? And this is the same kind of vision that we see in someone like Antony in his letters. He talks about originally we were one and we have lost that. We need to get back and the demons are still pulling us separately. That kind of way of thinking about demons and what they're doing and about what we're trying to reach, a kind of state of spiritual unity with other spirit beings and with God is a line one can trace from Valentinian literature into some early monastic literature. I don't think Antony or any other person would have seen that theme and gone, oh, I need to avoid that because it's Valentinian. They would have just seen it as something that makes sense, right? We know Valentinian literature was circulating in Coptic in the 4th century because there was Valentinian literature and the Nagamadi codices. The presence of those codices in 4th century Egypt tells us that these ideas and texts were known and there's no reason why monks could not have known them. So, yeah. Yes, the texts in the Nagamadi codices do not come with the danger titles that say beware. This is Valentinian literature. Not only is it possible that the people commissioned it knew and didn't care, but it's also possible they just didn't know. They're just reading this and it sounds good to them, you know. I kind of like that idea they were just like taking what was useful and it goes back to the whole formation of a person.  Those codices are a really great example of just that kind of world. You have so many things that you have platonic treatises. You have so-called heretical nostics. It's all something of value to somebody. There are other aspects of the demonology that are very interesting. They saw Job as a paradigmatic example for the monk. We see this nowhere better than obviously Athanasius' life, Anthony. And like many figures who get put up on that pedestal and created as an example, like you point out in the book, Anthony and his letters is not the fame Anthony refined in the way. This is something that scholars talk about a lot. And when you read the life of Anthony and you see how it talks about demons and then you read the letters of St. Anthony and how they talk about demons, which they do, they're quite different. In the life of Anthony, demons are definitely external forces that attack Anthony physically. I mean, he's left beaten and bruised and unconscious. He suffers terribly and he sees them and they're just scary external beings that visually appear and physically torture him, right? When you read the letters of St. Anthony, he's very clear that they are not physical external things. They are more subtle beings that are more internal and do not attack us. That is fellow monks externally. It's more about a division within the self that they're exploiting. People simply rejected the letters of Anthony as authentic and said, oh, no, they can't be by Anthony because one, Athanasius tells us in the life of Anthony that he was illiterate. Therefore, he could not have written letters and be there, kind of don't sound like Anthony in the light, but a very pioneering scholar named Samuel Rubinson back in the 80s really made a very compelling case that, no, we should accept these as authentic. Then the question becomes, what do we do with this difference? I don't spend much time worrying about the difference, but it does raise questions about the historicity of the life of Anthony. Why did Athanasius portray him in this way? And some people have said, well, then Athanasius probably didn't write it or whatever, but that's a whole different story. But I think the gist is, is that probably the Athanasius who wrote the life of Anthony didn't know about these letters. He hadn't read them, I would guess. But he knew that Anthony fought demons and so forth and that that was an important part of Anthony's spiritual formation. I think he, Athanasius, that is, created a kind of picture of Anthony that fit the biblical and martyrological and philosophical models that made sense to him, that is, to Athanasius. Biblical, that was primarily Job who is one of the few characters in the Bible who's really physically tortured by Satan, right? And then the martyr literature and philosophical, which is mostly for Athanasius' stoicism in this case. But of course, they're fine being stoic and blatantist at the same time and, you know, for different reasons. So he kind of really conformed Anthony to that model. Whether Anthony would recognize himself and his demonological views in the biography that was written about him is an interesting question. Definitely Anthony's view is simply in the letters more internal. His model tends to be more like Jacob who fights and then becomes Israel. So it's kind of more transformative. It's a different way of thinking about demons, and we find them both in literature associated with Anthony, either his letters or the life. Athanasius is also following kind of like a bi-way type way of talking about somebody. I forget who says this, but a person is more revealed and the things actually do, but in the little examples of how the actor... Like a lot of biographies in antiquity, you know, lives of virtuous exemplary people, Anthony doesn't change. He doesn't get better. This is not a center to saint story, right? Anthony from his childhood is virtuous and wonderful, right? And he has the same wonderful virtuous character at the beginning of his life that he has at the end. And so as you put it, the stories that are told are not about how, look at how he gets better and grows up and becomes more mature. They're all about exemplifying the perfect character that he has. One reason Job is a great model for Athanasius in writing the life of Anthony is that he's already virtuous and righteous when the story opens. That's the whole point because Satan is like, I've been running around the earth and no one's very good. And God is like, well, Job is, you know, he's already very righteous. And that's when Satan says, well, I can turn him, right? You know, give me a chance and blah, blah, blah. And Satan fails. He causes Job to call upon God and say, what's going on? But Job remains virtuous. And that's the story of Anthony as well. I'm not sure that Anthony or any human who's honest with themselves would recognize themselves in such a portrait, but that was not the point of ancient biographies. This is the time where by virtue of the fact that Christianity is so new in the empire, they have to compete with other games in town. So you have something similar going on in Unapius and his lives at the Sophists with the Neoplatonic philosophers. So these people are all in competition. Something you think of something like porphyries, life of Pythagoras, right? These Neoplatonists have their own holy men traditions and then monks have to compete with that. I was not aware of this, but like when I was going through your book, it gets really wild. By virtue of the fact that this is in Egypt, it's very strange to have these serious stories. But at the same time, they're fighting the actual Egyptian deities sometimes. It's almost like a Monty Python schedule. You have like these little humorous moments in these lives of the desert fathers like you talk about Macarius or you talk about Pombo where the demon is like trying to make him laugh. I was actually reminded of that really wonderful story I'm telling you at the Junker, I believe. He has an epistle where he talks about a haunted house and talks about the philosopher who lives in the haunted house and the ghost is trying to like scare him and the ghost is like saying, come here. And then the guy's like, he's reading this book. He's like, just one second. It reminds me of like in 1980s, like Hong Kong fantasy movie. They really need to make like a Wusha version of these neoplatonic and plastic stories. There's also that wonderful story where the satyr is just an Anthony and there's this satyr and he's like just scrolling Anthony.  I think actually a really good one is the example of Macarius who uses a mummy as a kind of pillow, right? Because he's like hanging out at night and he's in a temple or something and he needs something to put his head on and he finds a mummy case. And so the demon makes the mummy start to talk, right? So that he'll scare them. These are the kinds of things that they do. Anthony is confronted by a half man, half beast kind of thing. Anthony is trying to like make something and it keeps unraveling, right? He's trying to weave some map and it turns out this demon is pulling the stuff away. They just live in a world where all these like annoying beings are and they range in their issues with the monks from being really terrifying and horrible to being just irritating and often amusing in their attempts to bother the monks. They just live in this world just like people who spend time living in the forest or who live in rural locations.  They're just like, oh, yeah, that's a snake. He comes around here. I think the same was true and at monks, they went out and lived in the desert, quote, unquote. That's where the demons were and it's, you know, that's what you got out there. The concept of the city versus the desert divide the concept of the desert, the air, because the monk is the spiritual warrior that goes in and she invades the world of the demons and the home of the demons and pushes their lords of the air still. And you were talking about the Macarius story just there. And that's what he's doing is in the temple and just like hanging out, sleeping. Mosquitoes are everywhere this time of year in Ohio, but they also hang out in certain places. They hang out near still water. They hang out in your bushes. They, you know, and so, you know, they're just places where they're more plentiful. Right. And they like to congregate. Right. And this is the same case with demons in late antiquity. There are places they liked to hang out and certainly old temples. Well, certainly any operating pagan temple was just like, you know, demon hotel. Right. But like an old temple that's, you know, they would hang out there. They like to hang out near formerly sacred places like the Nile itself, of course, but also there might be a sacred intersection. Demons like to hang out there. They tend to much more active in the airspace kind of immediately above us because although they are spirit beings, this does not mean that they are immaterial. They are definitely made of very refined material, which means that they can be higher than us and they're not necessarily on the ground unlike us. In Egypt, it was felt like the desert was a big place for them to hang out. It's important to remember that for Egyptians, the desert is not way out there. I mean, it's visible, right? It's always the Egyptian strip of arable land along the Nile. The real desert begins with a very sharp cliff-like increase in elevation. And that's pretty much always visible. Most Egyptians aren't hanging out there, right? But they know it's there and it's a scary place and filled with animals you don't want to hang out with but also with demons. I think at one point there's a story where one of the Egyptian gods themselves just kind of and the monk has as like a usurp the power of the Egyptian god to take that place as a healer, as a ritual specialist. By far, the most important thinker about demons among early monks was this guy of Vagrius. He's by far the most important thinker about demons. Vagrius is extremely well-read and philosophical and definitely belongs with people like Yomblacus and Unapius. He's a big-time thinker, right? Very, very smart. And you read him and it's mostly demons mostly attack you through thoughts and he says there are eight primary evil thoughts that demons come after you with gluttony, fornication, blah, blah, blah. But then he tells a story where two demons toss a monk back and forth between them like he's a ball. So you're reading this guy who's extremely educated and normally thinks in very neoplatonic and very abstract and difficult ways and yet he tells a story where demons throw a monk back and forth. Yes, they all think that these things are real, not in the sense that like thoughts are real, but real in the sense that they have material existence and that they have power to affect the physical world. Just talking about Vagrius, I found it very interesting that she wrote an entire handbook. Like I'm adding demons. The main way that demons attack you is not by throwing you back and forth between them. I mean, most monks will not experience that kind of interaction with demons. The way demons come after you, according to Vagrius, is by suggesting thoughts to you. And so, you know, if you have a thought like I really hate my brother monk over there, according to Vagrius, that's really a demon suggesting that to you. So what are you going to do about it? And you could just say, oh, I'm just not going to listen. But far better is to refute the bad thought that comes from the demon with a good thought. And where are the best good thoughts to be found? In the Bible. So what he created was a book that's called Talking Back in English, but in Greek anti-Rutikos. So opposing speech was kind of what it means. And it is a list of almost 500 evil thoughts that the demons will suggest to you with the biblical passage that you can use to refute the evil thought.  Well, there's a biblical passage to refute that thought. And famously, he organized this book and therefore the thoughts it contains into eight books corresponding to these eight primary thoughts that demons can present to you. And they are gluttony, fornication, love of money, sadness, anger. They are the basis for what eventually become in the West the seven deadly sins. But they get transmitted by one of a vagrius's disciples who's a Latin speaker. He goes and spends time with the vagrius, learns about these eight primary thoughts, and he moves to Gaul, modern day France, and turns them into eight spirits of evil and eventually they collapse them into seven. It was basically a manual for spiritual advising monks so a young monk comes to you and says to you, I keep having this thought that I should acquire as much money as I can because you never know when I will need it. It's a very typical kind of thought to be presented with. And what do you tell? So you look up in a vagrius's book, you find that thought, you tell the young monk a biblical verse and the young monk every time this thought occurs to him, he's to say that biblical verse. This sounds very like, ooh, what an innovative, interesting idea. It's basically stoicism. The Stoics believed, right, as opposed to the Platonists, that our bad emotions, the passions in a bad way, anger, lust, and so forth, are really not natural to us. They don't arise naturally within our soul. Instead, the external world sends in all these sensory impressions towards us, to which we must respond. For example, the image of a very delicious piece of cake. And we can respond to that by saying, you know, yum, I wish to eat that. And in fact, I wish to have 50 pieces of that cake.  So it's all how we respond to these incoming stimuli, if you want to call it that. So these stimuli can be visual, like the piece of cake, or they can be an idea. Like that guy is bad. I should go hit him. They can be a concept. They can be whatever. In the Stoic world, these things just come to us, right? And we have to evaluate and decide what to do. But if we have kind of a bad feeling like that for the Stoics, the thing we need to do immediately is to counter it with a rational kind of thought or judgment, right? Like, yes, that guy over there is a bad person, but it would be better if I call the police and have legitimate authorities deal with him rather than that I should go and hit him myself. So you don't become angry. So it's easy for Christians to do, and this happens very early with like Clement of Alexandria, is to say these bad ideas that come after us are offered to us by demons, right? They are the source of these. Ephesians had said, Satan comes after you with arrows. What are these arrows? These arrows are bad thoughts. So it's kind of Stoicism put together with the Biblical imagery. So it can all be put into one package. They also liked to build on this Stoic notion of incoming negativity that you need to refute, was the language of the New Testament uses for Judas. I believe it's in the Gospel of John where the author says something like Satan cast into Judas's heart the idea of betraying the Lord, right? So you have this idea that the out there is Satan rowing into Judas, this bad idea. And what Judas needed to have done is come up with the opposing good idea immediately and just snuffed this whole thing out. But he did not. He let that bad idea linger in himself. And once he does that, that allows the kind of negative passion and sinful emotion of betrayal grow in him. It's a little bit Stoic, a little bit Biblical, a little bit kind of folkloric. Even something like the native Egyptian traditions and what we call for lack of a better term, magic of time. That's what I love about this topic because at first glance, it's just like, oh, it's a monk. It's a completely new thing. But no, they're really picking up from a lot of different disparate elements. I thought it was a great subject because it's really signifies what my show is about. Just to show that everything is not vacuum sealed in this period of time from each other. Christianity, Judaism, Hellenism, Roman gods, all this stuff, all these thoughts, low magic, high religion or whatever it's all, or high literature and low culture, it's all together, right? The pagan order and philosopher Libanias mentions monks. And for him, they are new. I mean, this is the important thing, right? The monk is a new thing, right? But nothing new is just new. Everything has to be built from other materials and other stuff, right? That's what's so interesting about studying religion in this period, right? Well, any period because it never stops, right? It's always the transformation that you're talking about is always happening. This period, it's just so dramatic because we see paganism and Christianity, but it's always happening. And so the monk is indeed a new religious figure that emerges in this time period, but he is not, we generous, made out of nothing. He comes from a bunch of different long traditions that are all kind of woven together to create something new. That's what makes it also interesting and fascinating, at least to me.  So my favorite part of the monk as a pastiche of his time is this concept that I actually talked to Dr. Christen at Switza about yesterday with the PGM, the concept of the helper. They have like an assistant or something, right? In Christianity, of course, there's this long tradition that we all have either a special angel assigned to us, which later Christians will call the guardian angel, right? We have an angel assigned to us. Other Christians said, yeah, we have an angel assigned to us, but we also have a demon assigned to us. So there we get that kind of thing you see in modern cartoons where you have a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other. That comes from paganism, right? Middle-claimedism. That's the Daimonians, right? Yes, exactly. Socrates had his own Daimon, right? But he had happened to be a god. He had a really, really good one, right? So there's this idea that we all have this kind of kindred spirit. One Latin term for this is genius, right? So people would worship the genius of the emperor, right? Because his genius must be really great because he's an emperor after all. And so you have this long tradition of us having a kindred demon and in Christian possibility, both good demon and bad demon, plus the idea that magicians, if we want to call them that, ritual specialists, often, in order to get things done, had to have a kind of demonic helper. Oftentimes, these demonic helpers were unwilling helpers, right? So you had to have a spell that would make them be your helper, right? Because they weren't necessarily interested in doing it. You had to make it happen. There are monks who, oddly enough, seem to have kind of what we would call long-term relationships with demons, right? They have demons who hang out with them and live with them. There's a kind of amusing story of one demon who kind of decided to hang out with this monk, but the monk's diet was so uninteresting that the demon decided eventually to leave, right? Which I don't really understand because I don't think these demons really eat much, but there you go. They did have a sense that sometimes monks had long-term relationships with demons that were kind of, they're like a frenemy. They kind of hang with you and you know who they are, but their job is to kind of contest you so that you stay in shape. It's kind of like your devil's advocate, right? Your person who's always there. And you also have stories of clearly monks who also have their angel with them. And you can tell whether a monk is good or bad about whether their angel is happy with them. Some monks have the gift of seeing the angels. If I'm a very special monk, I'm at the gift or charisma of seeing your angel visual being able to see. And I can see whether he's happy or sad with you. The story actually reminds me now that you're talking about that in terms of like the demon just trolling a monk.  He's not getting any reaction. It reminds me of this Clive Barker short story and books of blood willing one, but it's another podcast again. Dr. Bracky, I know we got to let you go. If you want to plug anything, feel free to use this time. Oh no, I have nothing interesting to plug, but I will say that on this topic, if you're into it, that book on talking back by Vagrius, yes, I did translate it and it's kind of one of my cheaper books and paperback. So if you're really worried about what to say when a demon comes and says something to you. Vagrius has your back. Exactly so. So there you go. Dr. Bracky, this has been fantastic. Thank you for coming on.


Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2016. Brought to you by Informatica. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Peter Burris, our next guest is Ash Parak, who's the Vice President of Marketing and Data Integration, Big Data, Data Security Informatica World. But what else do you have? Data, 3.0, no, it's data everything. Welcome back. It's data everything. Thank you, thanks for having me. So we love to have some of your customers come on and they're not really here to pimp up the testimonials but really more about the use cases and it's really clear and I love the comment from Yelana from George Washington University. We like Informatica because they are focused like a laser and it's my word, on data. Obviously data is the key. What are some of the trends happening around data? Can you just share your view of the macro landscape because everyone talks about data, you guys are laser focused on data and what is the big trend and trends you're riding? It's a great question. You, all of us were at Strata Hadoop World all through last year, the Hadoop summits, some of the other data management conferences, right? So we've been seeing a couple of these trends of all. You know, when people ask me this question about trends, what I really love about Informatica World is this, that isn't this really becoming the de facto data management place? I mean, you have the hype, you have the discussions around what's new in IoT and hey, I can actually track how my ski lifts are actually panning out. Is it really very busy right now or it's not with big data? But truly this is the place, this is the mecca where actually people who are involved in data management or really see data as an asset, they are truly converging and every single year this happens, so they listen to a lot of stuff which is a little bit out there, but they come back away to Informatica World and ask us, you know, how does a rubber meet the road? Get me more real about my data management projects. You know, Ashley, this is a good point. I want to bring this up because I, you know, Big Data SV is part of the Big Data Week with Strata Hadoop and our event at Big Data SV. We talked about this with a lot of your folks and also last year at Informatica World, my eyes were kind of opened up to Informatica. Oh yeah, private companies, kind of like that. I wasn't really sure kind of where you guys were, but I like to peg the line down the middle of the street and break things down into two sides of the street. Old way, new way, right? And you can almost look at the data warehouse industry and say there's dogma around old way. This is the way we do it. We've done it for years this way and then there's the new school which is the other side of the street, the new side, modern side, which is I say, okay, we have this. What do we do now? What do we do next? I think you guys are clearly on that new side. So congratulations, we can see that clearly. The things you talk about, the abstraction layer, moving data around, removing the friction. Absolutely. What is that key initiative? Because friction is a problem with data. You know, silos certainly are legacy infrastructure, subsystems, data, mobile devices, consumerization. These are the forces that are driving you guys to be modern. What makes it so impactful when you guys are so new and modern? So look again about being pragmatic and practical, right? I'll answer the question in this way. The way we look at our technologies and solutions, anytime we look at our new development, we always wear the hat of how is my existing customer going to reap benefits from this? So for example, big data, right? Is it a new paradigm or am I going to, you know, introduce something completely different to people who've been doing something in a traditional manner, right? There is never a right or wrong answer. There's a need for a data warehouse. I keep hearing these things around data warehouses dead, business intelligences that haven't we seen that for the last 15, 20 years, they never go away. Let's pray for a headline, but the reality is it evolves. Absolutely, it evolves, you said it, but it also evolves with a pragmatic way of approaching your business. There's a need for a data warehouse, there's a need for big data. You bring them both together, you answer bigger questions. And that's where Informatica is actually, you know, yesterday in Anil's keynote, in Jim's keynote and this morning in Amit's, I think what they spoke about was there's a natural progression. There's almost a maturity model, right? Once I start going beyond an individual's benefit, I start looking at a departmental need and then an enterprise's need and then I look at unification and how do I now standardize architectures across various ways of doing data management, right? That's where Informatica truly has been shining for the last, you know, many, many years. You talk about the dynamic, because you know, we've been following Hadoop, obviously since the beginning of creation, since theCUBE was kind of founded in the Cloudera office. It's evolved, the hype was there and also we've seen it kind of like, it's expensive, total cost of ownership's a little bit outside the realm of what people are looking at and what they want. Skill sets are hard to find, deployments are hard, so when you have something that's hard and costs more, it's usually not a formula for success, but yet Hadoop is not just Hadoop, it's big data in general. You guys seem to hit the intersection of those two. Talk about the challenges of traditional integration of data, leveraging my existing systems of data, systems of records, some engagement, but yet leveraging this Hadoop and then talk about what that means. I mean, share with the audience, if people think Hadoop, oh, big data's just Hadoop, store it, put it in the lake, put it into a pile, put it into a swamp or put there, too. How do I make it valuable? Somebody at Informatica taught me this. Data Warehouse teaches me or tells me, gives me answers about what widgets I sold in the past. Hadoop and big data, and you're right, it's not just about Hadoop, it's much more. It gives me answers to what can I sell my customer in the future. And this is really interesting, because if you're a CEO of a company, wouldn't you need answers to both those questions? So you really are talking about coexistence here. So you asked me a question about, hey, how do you balance these two worlds? Customers are truly in the traditional world. Let's take, for example, they're still looking to make their traditional data management, data integration, life cycles much more agile. How can I cut minutes or days out of my existing data flows? That's an example there. How can I go from manual testing to more automated testing? How can I be more proactive about monitoring my operational systems? That's a traditional world, it's still existing. I still want to do analytics, but there's also this new world where give me a bridge so that I can actually go from using my skills and my existing skills and my infrastructure to actually transcend these new barriers, right? Now is that an innovation strategy or is that bridge a migration or both? How would you look at that bridge? Most people look at the old side and be kind of stagnant. So like now you have this bridge to big data. Is that an enabler? This is absolutely an enabler. It's not about throwing something that's old out. It's actually leveraging what you already have. And then, as I think you mentioned it, right? It's augmenting what you already have with some of these new world concepts like big data and IoT, et cetera. At the end of the day, there's a data conference and it's always about data, right? So whether data big or small, you still need to manage it. That's foundational to what we do. What are the top conversations you're having with customers? Because obviously, you guys have great messages. Love the story. I think it's very relevant. Love the subtraction layer. You guys are talking about this intelligent data platform. I think it's very relevant because it spans a lot. What are some of the conversations with customers? Where are they in the progress of their digital journey? Are they advanced? So what are the trending top three conversations that you have every day with customers? Wonderful question. I'll give you an example. Large enterprise, and we typically work with, full scale of large enterprises or small businesses, doesn't matter. Big departments to enterprise level ICCs within the same company. I'll give you an example of a company where within one department, they were just trying to get started with their first few data marts. Forget data warehouses. They were right there. They were trying to get started with data integration. In another department with the same company, they were actually looking at putting data into a data lake. Now if you really bring everything together and you want to bring economies of scale, you're looking at a single data management platform that can transcend either of these paradigms. That's where Informaga comes in. So you can leverage familiar skills within the entire company without rescaling them to instantly go from this level of maturity all the way to the top. What's their core problem? Well, there are a lot of things, right? Agility, flexibility. Can I actually, good quality data? That's often the very tenet of everything they do. I need to govern my data well. I need to master it. These things are not going to go away on even if it's the big data world. So the number one thing that we hear is moving data around and opening it up. And most people want to hoard on the data and like hold on to it data. Well, how do you guys have that conversation with customers because freeing up the data is something that's an organic enabling real time, certainly speeds that up. But yet most of the data governance people tend to be like, no, don't share it. How do you balance opening it up with compliance and policy? Great question. So many years ago we came up with this paradigm and we worked with a number of the industry analysts around this and customers is managed self-service. There's a concept called self-service. There needs to be a concept and understanding around managed self-service where the business owns the data, defines the rules because they're the closest to the data, right? But it's IT who then takes the results of what business does to truly operationalize it to optimize it. Without the two working together you are not going to get success, repeatable success. And that's what I mean by true success as far as data management is concerned. Or governance. I'm going to push you a little bit on that. If we think about the role of data in the business, today it's consumed by a relatively small percentage of business decision makers. Are we trying to optimize what we're doing for that small group? Are we trying to open it up to more parts of the organization, number one? And number two, if we think about IoT just conceptually, we can imagine that there are going to be more systems as users than there are people as users. How do you self-service when you're servicing systems? So let's talk about both those things. Are we focusing on making the existing folks more productive? Or are we trying to extend this out to new folks? And we'll talk about the other one in a second. Great, I think it's a two-part question but it kind of answers one major paradigm. So first, the first part. Citizen integrators is what we've been working around for the last three or four years. Rev, it's basically now a data preparation tool. It's available across PowerCenter, Cloud, Big Data, you name it. That frees up, that actually democratizes data across the board for people who truly know data and are not that technical. Very excellent like features. Let me munch data together. Let me bring it together. Let me do some light profiling on it. Let me do some light cleansing on it. And then I'll feed it into you, my IT counterpart to go ahead and do something with that. That was step one. So truly freeing it up for another persona, right? This is not an ETL architect. This is not an architect. This is truly a citizen integrator, an analyst. Someone even higher level than an analyst. So that was one part of the question, right? The second part of the question which you asked me is about IoT and the expanse of data that's being projected through these kind of devices. Sure, so at the end of the day, what exactly is this? You can derive data from any of these devices, but what really goes on is once you collect it, what do you do with it? How do you bring meaning and semantics around that? That's the real question to ask, and that's where we come in. That's what's that? That's a real question to ask, the semantics and the quality. It's great to kind of collect data from thousands and millions and millions of these sensors and whatever else, but what's the next step? You really are trying to get to a particular decision from all that data. So it seems to me as though we've spent an enormous amount of time in the data industry focusing on the sources. Yeah. Access. Yeah, accessing the sources, moving it around, transforming it, formatting it, even just formatting it. Which is very important, which is very important. And not enough time thinking about the sinks. Where is the data going to go? Who needs to use it? In what format are they going to use it in? Both people and systems. And here's a thought. Does Informatica have to step up and become more of a leader in thinking about how people and systems ultimately will consume data as opposed to just how we're going to capture it and move it and transform it? Great, great thought here. In fact, they started getting bubbled up in the last try at Hadoop World Conference as well. People started coming to us and I'll answer your question indirectly and directly. People started coming up to us and saying, asking us real hard questions of, now that I have a Hadoop, now that I have big data, et cetera, what do I do with it? How do I start going from experimentation or a little sandbox to truly creating, you know, we may not love the name Data Lake, but truly getting those insights that we've, the promised land. What we actually told them was, listen, there's a journey. It's not about just taking a credit card and swiping it and setting up your little Hadoop server, et cetera, and then trying to create a sandbox and then using hand coding, et cetera, right? To get your data out of there. You really need to look at this as a systematic approach and you're absolutely right. We can do a lot more around driving thought leadership around this, but awareness is coming. People are already realizing that data, small or big, you still have to do the fundamental things that govern data, which is not just accessing it, which is the most important thing, getting the data in, but then governing it, qualifying it, certifying it, mastering it, blending, prepping. There's another question that comes up. Oh, you know what? I'm just going to use a self-service data preparation tool. It's a standalone one. I download it, I'll use it. I'm done. My big data is now certified. That's not true, because think of the word, self-service data prep, here's why. All the tools that are standalone today, without having the last mile in it, are only going to do one thing. First, it's self-serving. It's done for a single problem. It's not for repeatable results. There is no IT last mile there, where they actually take the results and operationalize it. There's no crowdsourcing. If you, me, and another 10, 15 of us really want to pay attention and actually provide input on a particular asset, a data entity, we just can't with those kind of tools. They're very limiting. Yeah, they're Excel-like, they're spreadsheet-like, they're very useful. I love the concept, but without it being part and parcel of an end-to-end platform that manages data, whether it's big or small, you aren't going to get the results that you need. So let's talk, let me see if I can take what you just said, because I agree with you strongly. The, I think I do. What percentage of users of the value, the data value that an informatic and related tools are going to provide are going to be consuming, looking at screens in what we typically think about self-service, versus consuming by having events or alerts or options or something else presented to them so that they're not sitting there staring at a screen, they're actually acting upon a recommendation. Because it seems as though we are focused in an enormous amount on the screen and not as much as we need on the recommendation and the action. Thank you for bringing that up. That was my third point, the distinction between standalone self-service data preparation tools and tools like ours, like our InfoMaker data preparation. It's part and parcel of the underlying platform. So I already told you about, hey, it's built not just for the self, it's built for crowdsourcing. That was one. The second piece that I talked about was operationalizing the results. And you brought up the third point, which is absolutely key. Here's where it lies in, where you want to use machine learning, artificial intelligence, et cetera, or the system to provide recommendations. Even your crowdsourced assets should be able to provide you user ratings and recommendations so that you have your next best steps. That's where we are going. In fact, we are already there with Dataprep. You are? Yeah. That's as part of, but don't forget, that's exactly the point I'm trying to make. Without the underlying metadata management that we have, live data map, et cetera, you really can't make a standalone data preparation tool, skip and dance. No, again, totally agree. And there needs to be some set of professionals that are responsible for making sure that that works, as well as some set of professionals that are looking at the screens and identifying the assets that would be most valuable by virtue of doing the self-service evaluation, and then turning that into insight into how these various assets are going to be moved around an organization and consumed. And it seems unless we're talking about all three of those layers and more beyond that, that we're presenting this as though it's going to be something simple. And as Jerry Held said, we talked about this in the first session, data is hard and it's always going to be hard. We can make it easier and we have to make it easier, but the most valuable uses of it, in many respects, will be uses when people don't even know that they're using it. They're just acting upon a recommendation. Well, that's the point about the operationalizing as key, I mean the standalone tools that operate in a vacuum, so to speak, is similar to siloed systems. They're only as good as their integration, right? So back to the integration point, if you have some insight that's not operationalized, there's no value, right? So not real time, it's a one-off. And to his point, without the metadata-driven muscle, you aren't going to be able to get this artificial intelligence, the machine learning kind of things like user ratings, recommendations, et cetera, which are truly based on human behavior or are helping you take that one last step or one last mile. Ash, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your insights and the data that you're sharing. Certainly, we'll operationalize it by broadcasting it live, which we are. Go to youtube.com slash SiliconANGLE for the videos. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, you're watching theCUBE live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2016. Hi, this is Chris Devaney from DataRobot.