Our guest this morning is a great honor. It's Dr. John J. Collins. Dr. Collins is the Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School. He has published widely on the subjects of Hellenistic Judaism, Wisdom, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and as a foremost expert on the topic of today's discussion, apocalypticism. He is the author of What Are Biblical Values between Athens and Jerusalem, Sears, Sibles and Sages, and the topic of our discussion today, the Apocalyptic Imagination. So Dr. Collins, welcome to the show. Glad to be here. As I was saying backstage, it's an honor to meet you again after 20 years, even though that time was brief. I apologize as a college student that wasn't as familiar with your work as I am now, and I didn't appreciate the opportunity as much then as I do now. So Dr. Collins, we're talking about a topic that has a very rich history, both in the precedents that came before it and the legacy it has today. So could you define what apocalypticism is? The word comes from the book of Revelation, which begins, say, this is the Revelation to John, and it's the Greek word for Revelation, apocalypsis. But it's not just any Revelation, it's roughly speaking the kind of Revelation you get in the book of Revelation. And it has a distinctive view of the world. And I would say the defining characteristics of it are that you can take a synoptic view of history. You can see history whole and the world whole and the world is largely guided by superhuman forces. And then there is a judgment coming. Now, in many cases and especially in the book of Revelation, the judgment will include the destruction of this world. And that's why a lot of people equate apocalypse with the end of the world. But that's really just taking out one important motif out of it. It's really more of a comprehensive view. And it's really a philosophy of life actually in itself. It's one where this world is passing away and where that which we can see is actually much more important than that which we can. You really emphasize that in the modern days we tend to look at the material world that we see every day and that we exist in as the truth. Whereas in the antique world, it was the exact opposite. The world is kind of a reflection of the divine world. We really have a kind of switch. In the modern world, we tend to think that if we talk about angels and demons, we're projecting. Whereas in the ancient world, they thought that was the real stuff. We're the reflection. Apocalyptic literature and the genre is a mix of different motifs, not only from Hebrew Bible, like wisdom traditions but also from the Near East. It emerges oftentimes in the scribal context. What were some of the reasons when we create this kind of literature? You touched upon some of them, like the unity and the way of looking at the world. But why such an emphasis on mythological language and motifs within the literature itself? That was really, I think, one of the things that shaped the modern understanding of apocalypticism was that in the 19th century, there were two sets of discoveries that had enormous impact. One of them was the recovery of the ancient Near Eastern myths, like the Babylonian myth, the Enuma Elish. And then in the early 20th century, they found myths from Eugarat, Canaanite myths. And in those Near Eastern myths, you typically get conflict between a creator God and forces of chaos, if we may call them that. And that stuff comes up very prominently in the apocalyptic literature. There was another set of discoveries, which we'll get to a bit later, I'm sure, of books like the Book of Enoch, books that had been largely lost to the Western world. And when people saw them, they realized that what you have in the Book of Revelation isn't really so exceptional. There was a whole genre of literature like this, which we weren't really aware of before the 19th century, or at least not in the modern West. The main point that you get from the mythology is the sense that we're not in control of this world. That there are bigger forces at work. But this was an idea that the modernity generally rejected. We like to think we are in control of this world. You might well argue that with everything that's been happening this summer, it's becoming, we're not actually in control. There are bigger forces out there. We may not understand them. These myths gave people a language to describe that. Now, why would people have recourse to those? I should say the myths originally were meant to describe how the world came to be. And in describing how the world came to be, you're also describing how you think the world works. The way people in the Middle East thought the world works was that nature is turbulent. The world is turbulent. There are all sorts of forces that are trying to cause chaos in the coastal area. They have this figure of shill yet of the seven heads, a seven-headed sea monster. And you can imagine how they would imagine that from the waves beating in against the coast. And then you have the thunder god come down at the mountain with his lightning bolt and in the myth, he kills the sea. He sets limits to the sea, drives it back. And in the candidate myth, the other great adversary is death. But then in the material we're talking about, this is all projected into the future. It's still saying that in the present, these forces are at work. Now, whether you call chaos the sea or you call it Tiamat in the Babylonian myth or you have the name Rahab or Leviathan, these are all kind of sea monsters. But the world is a turbulent place and you need divine help to contain that. Now, that kind of view of the world, I think, became especially appealing in situations where you obviously didn't have any control, especially in times of conquest. You get an upsurge of that kind of mythical material after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. You get another wave of it in more properly apocalyptic literature after the persecution of the Jews in Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanes in the time of the Maccabees. And again, you get a wave of it when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. In each of these cases, you had a loss of control. By the people who then turned to the myths to explain what was going on. Now, that again, isn't all of what you have in apocalyptic literature, but it's one important ingredient in it. And it's that sense of not being in control, the sense that there were greater forces at work here. I really think that it's important to emphasize the colonial aspect, the empire critical aspect that Karen King brought out in her book, Secret Revelation of John. She was, of course, talking about Sethian literature, but in the non-commodie texts, but these are subjugated, colonized people. And like you said, this isn't just Judaism that's doing this, this is native Egyptians. This is people who are being colonized, whether it be Persians, whether that be Macedonians, and they're kind of trying to make sense of the world. And like something like Enoch, with Enoch you have, of course, that cosmological speculation used to create a worldview, but also I like how they combine the cosmological speculations in the apocalyptic literature with the eschatological and mythological elements because it adds, as you say in your book, the sense that this has all been taken care of. God is in control, right? You know, whatever God you're talking about, right? Certainly something like first Enoch would be more speculative about the cosmos, the worldview, and then you find, of course, later with Daniel, and we were just talking about the mythological motifs, like with Daniel, it's very interesting because those all come into play. Daniel himself is a composite kind of mythological character. I kind of look at it as he's like Daniel 2.0. He's like Dan L. 2.0. It's like, you know, Percy Jackson in the Olympians, it's like you have these concepts that are old, super important and embedded in culture, but they're just updated for that time. Mentioned empire, and I think a huge factor in the development of Raika, the apocalyptic worldview, was the conquest of Alexander. Now, to some degree, you know, what of the motifs you get in the book of Daniel, for example, is the four world empires? And people were very much aware of this, that certain powers extended their rule to degrees that had not been seen before. The Assyrians were the first to do it. The Medes usually get credited as the second, but the Persians did a lot more, that is a much bigger empire, and then Alexander more again. And I think it was really in the wake of Alexander's conquest, that you get a kind of globalization in the ancient world. You know, you get the sense, the world is much bigger than Israel or Egypt or Babylon or wherever you happen to live. There is something much bigger going on here. You get that sense on the one hand that makes you interested in what we'll call the cosmos. That is the way the whole thing is structured and set up. And also you get a strong streak of resistance in the apocalyptic literature. What we call the apocalyptic literature usually comes from the underclass, although that may not be necessarily the case. In the Middle Ages, I think you get a kind of imperial apocalypticism, but you don't really get that in antiquity. It's largely reactive and largely resistance. Also, just by virtue of the fact that this is coming from a scribal kind of milieu, these people are very learned and lore. I think a good example, much later, third, maybe fourth century common era, is the Latinus Clepius. Latinus Clepius has a lot of apocalyptic native Egyptian skeletological elements that you see there. They talk about the closing of the temples. And I think that likewise, how those texts reflect the concerns of the Egyptian ritual specialist class, these apocalyptic texts, they reflect resistance, but also coming from a very learned perspective. These people know the scriptures. They know who they're talking to. They know who their audience is. Their audience is the people that they're there to guide. Often you see in the apocalyptic texts, the visionary is somebody who is also guiding the people along, ascribed. But I wanted to ask you if you could kind of go over what some of the precursors and contemporaries to the apocalyptic genre are. The most important one, probably, is one that's very difficult to talk about, and that's the Persian. And I started in this business about 50 years ago when people talked about apocalyptic in an Old Testament context. They typically thought of early post-exilic prophecy. Paul Hanson, who was one of my teachers and who just died earlier this year, had a book called The Dawn of Apocalyptic, in which he argued that it was people who not only had suffered the Babylonian exile, but then were disenfranchised when they came back, who then called on God to render the heavens and come down and hope for a new heaven and a new earth. And it's probably somewhere in that period that you get Isaiah, chapters 24 to 27, often called the Apocalypse of Isaiah, although it's just prophecy, really, which talks about the earth being rent asunder and then about a time when God will destroy death forever and slay the dragon that is in the sea. Now, that those are certainly motifs you will get again in the book of Revelation and to some degree, even in Daniel, but it's just that aspect of it. Now, you do not yet, I think, have the whole kind of view of history and of the physical cosmos that you will get, for example, in the Enoch literature. But it's one of the precursors of it, as you say. It comes again from this sense of powerlessness and looking to something bigger for superhuman powers to break in, thinking that you're already being subject to superhuman powers and feeling that you need superhuman power to counteract that. So you get that from the ancient myths. Now, do we have anything like that, strictly speaking, in Babylonian literature? Well, you know, you have, out of sometimes been called Akkadian apocalypses, but what they have typically is a prediction of long periods of history, which is one of the motifs that you'll get in apocalypses, but you don't get in the Babylonian material, the idea of God intervening to judge the world. And I don't think you get that really in the Egyptian material either. You get some relevant literature. You will get it in the Egyptian stuff more when the Egyptians had been conquered, first by the Persians and then later on by the Greeks. And you will get the hope for the restoration of national monarchy. There's a text called the Potter's Oracle from Egypt. But, you know, that's as far as it goes. It doesn't have a new creation. It doesn't have the resurrection of the dead. It's more a restoration. Whereas what you get in the really apocalyptic literature is total replacement and a new creation. Now, the one ancient people who may have had such a conception of the world were the Persians. And the problem here is that our Persian literature is preserved in Pallavi and dates from the early Middle Ages. Now, this, you see, isn't so different from the way things used to be with Hebrew before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Even to this day, we talk about ancient Israel, but we don't have any texts from ancient Israel. You know, the texts we have are typically from the Middle Ages. That's where we get most of our texts of the Hebrew Bible. Now, with the Dead Sea Scrolls, we can check some of that earlier, but we don't have Dead Sea Scrolls for the Persians. And that's why a lot of people are hesitant to speak about the Persians. And also it's a language that most of us never learned. So you won't usually find biblical scholars who know Pallavi and then, you know, can speak with any authority on it. And so people tend to push that off to the side. But what you get, at least like in the medieval Persian literature, what you get is something very similar to the full blown apocalyptic view of the world. That is to say, a long stretch of history divided into periods, and then at the end of it some convulsions, destruction of this world and resurrection of the dead. Now, how early that develops in Persia is a little hard to say. We have Greek authors who describe some of it and attribute it to the Persians. People are skeptical as to how much they knew about the Persians, but at least, you know, they had the idea that the Persians taught this. And so I think there's a pretty good chance that there was Persian influence, but it's very hard to document it. And for that reason, we usually tend to back away from it. It's hard to say, since evidence is so fragmentary and late, but like you say, it would make sense. And the whole point of the show is that I don't tend to put anything above the other. I tend to put all the literature from the ancient world together because I believe that everybody is kind of living together and learning from each other, whether that be unconsciously or not, just by virtue of the fact that you're being exposed to these different cultures.  So let's use this kind of mythology. It's kind of like getting back to the mythological motifs for a second. People make a big deal and kind of misappropriate these concepts. Like when we talk about the mythological views, like ball taming the serpent versus Yahweh, and they tend to go, okay, well, this is stolen from one. But what if it's just not that? What if it's just these people have a cultural milieu and a matrix that they see the world through? It's just in the air at this point. If I say something like I have a very Sisyphean beast, or I'm like a Prometheus springing fire, I'm not stealing from Prometheus or the myth of Sisyphus. I'm just using concepts that are in the air that we can understand. You know, to do that, if I then ask, you know, tell me the story of Sisyphus, you might not necessarily come up with it right away. People don't need to know the whole ancient stories. This stuff is still kind of controversial. If you take, in the book of Daniel, you have a vision of beasts coming up out of the sea, and then one like a son of man coming on the clouds of heaven and an ancient of days with venerable white hair presiding over it all. Now, you know, this looks an awful lot like the Eugiritic myths. In Eugarrat also, you have the white-headed ancient god, Ayle, Baal is the rider of the clouds, and you have Yam, the sea, and sometimes she'll yet have the seven heads or Leviathan as a monster coming up out of the sea. That seems to be the configuration. Daniel isn't trying to reproduce that. Daniel is trying to describe his own time. So did he know how this story actually went in ancient Canaan? Probably not. You know, he didn't need to know a whole lot of it. He didn't care. He wasn't interested in ancient Canaan. He was interested in getting some usable symbols. Now, the sea, you see, you get also all over the place of the Hebrew Bible. You get a rider of the clouds all over the place of the Hebrew Bible, but it's always Yahweh. And it doesn't seem to be Yahweh in this case. Now, in that particular case, though, I think there was a reason for Daniel to go to Canaanite symbolism. You see, the Eugarrat, where these texts were found, was in northern Syria. Now, the people who were attacking Jerusalem when the book of Daniel was written were Syrians. You know, it was the Greeks from Syria and Antiochus Epiphanes. And by all accounts in the book of Maccabees and also in Daniel, they introduced into Jerusalem the cult of Baal Shemem, Baal of the heavens. So it doesn't seem to me to be a huge stretch to think that the author of Daniel knew some of the imagery associated with Baal of the heavens. And what he's doing it then is kind of reversing it.  Here, the rider on the clouds isn't going to be Baal for Daniel. It's probably as I read it, it's the Archangel Michael. But in any case, it's going to be the God of Israel who is going to prevail. But he will use that imagery nonetheless and use it to subvert it. And this, I think, just makes an awful lot of sense. I would agree, especially with your assertion that it's Michael. I know Daryl Hannah has a book, Michael and Christ, that really made that great. Yeah, that's right. I really love. Let's talk about Enoch for a second. Everybody's here for Enoch, right? Enoch appears in the Bible, seventh from Adam, before the flood. And it said of him famously that he walked with God and then he was not for God took him. This was taken to mean that when he walked with Elohim, it was, he walked with the angels. And in at least by the Hellenistic period, this was understood to mean that he had laid around trip. He used to commute to heaven, who opened down. And then he was not for God, took him at some point, God said to him, why don't you stay up here?  And in this way, actually becomes kind of paradigmatic for what people might hope for. Because one of the big shifts in the paralyptical literature of the Hellenistic period, and you don't get this now in the early post-exilic prophetic literature, but you get it in Enoch and Daniel, the goal of life is to go to heaven when you die. This, I think, was one of the big shifts in Western culture. The Greeks had their own version of it, but over against the Hebrew Bible, this was huge. Because in the Hebrew Bible, your hope is to live a long life on earth, see your children and your children's children have fertile crops and animals and all that. You get to Enoch and indeed Daniel too. The hope is to shine like the stars, to get up there with the angels. That's a whole different ball game. Back to Enoch.  So they come down, they engage in all sorts of mischief, some of which indeed is fornication, as you might expect, but it doesn't stop with that. Now Matt Goff will tell you a lot more about the giants. Development taken over from Mesopotamian mythology. But in Enoch, then these giants, not only corrupt people on earth, but they also teach them things. And the things that they teach them are very interesting. You know, they teach them about astronomy. They teach them how to make weapons. They teach them the art of making up the eyes. Cosmetics. And the world was changed. Now, it seems to me that this is all an allegory for what happened in the ancient Erest when the Greeks came after Alexander the Great. You had a new culture, which was very different from the traditional Erestrian culture. You know, not unlike the kind of culture shock you have had in modern times with the spread of Western culture in the Arab world. Where you have, you know, the new Erestrian world traditionally had a kind of fear of nudity. You get this very much in the Hebrew Bible. You know, the body is something to be covered up. And then here come the Greeks with statues of Aphrodite and the like. And you know, it kind of blows their mind. And, you know, from the viewpoint of Enoch, this is not good. You mentioned Prometheus. Well, you know, Prometheus also brought down all sorts of skills to people. Some people think that the first Enoch is influenced by the story of Prometheus. But usually we think of Prometheus as a good guy who is bringing civilization to people. But Enoch saw this as the corruption of the world. And it's really the novelty of it. It's culture change. So the book of the watchers, the first part of a first Enoch isn't written in response to persecution. It's written in response to culture shock. To this eruption from the outside of the way it's told in first Enoch, if these are figures who come down from heaven, which, you know, the Greeks might as well have. They were coming from another world into the new East. And then the shock and then the earth cries out to God to deliver it and to purify it. That's how Enoch gets started. Interestingly enough then, it's the watchers who ask Enoch to go up to heaven and intercede for them. Now, some people like Martha Hemelfar but Princeton have always said that Enoch was to be the priest. But I don't think so. I think in fact that the whole point is that he isn't a priest and that this comes from people who felt the priest weren't getting the job done. And so what Enoch is as a scribe, which is to say, a lawyer. You know that he is somebody that they hire to go up and plead their case. And it doesn't work, but it leads to further interesting adventures for Enoch. So Enoch then becomes the mediator. And part of what comes out of that is, what do you need to succeed in this world? Well, you need a mediator who can go up to heaven and can come down and tell you what's really going on up there. Because that's what you need to know to survive in this world. I'm just getting back to what you were saying about the colonization of the East with the Macedonians and Alexander the Great. We tend to kind of romanticize this a lot. People who don't really read too much into it.  Sometimes we give it an overly romantic concept that it doesn't really have. These are people who are of the ruling class like these Macedonians and Greeks who are imposing their culture on native populations. And it's culture shock for everybody, not just Jews for native Egyptians, Demotic. Enoch is for me like the very first like scribe fan fiction because the scribes, just apocalypticism being like from the scribal culture. You kind of see this in the second Sophistic later. The scribes and people who are learned, they like to show off what they know, no matter what it is. Yeah, so like I can imagine like guys like Lucian, if he lived maybe 300 years before would be like writing these texts just because he'd find it interesting, to show off what he knew and also kind of subvert because that's what Lucian does in his own day. And we see that in Daniel, right? Daniel as a text, like you mentioned, Daniel has a very interesting transmission history since it's kind of two separate distinct parts. And the first part kind of presents Daniel as integrated into this kind of society. And then the next part is like the complete opposite with Antiochus Epiphanes, of course. One of the things that occurred to be there as you were speaking is, you know, when you get like in the modern world, you get the spread of Western culture in the Near East, you get two kinds of reaction to it. There were plenty of people who love it, who think this is the best thing that ever happened to us. Even if they may not want to say that publicly, they want to Westernize themselves. This also happened in antiquity. There were people who saw this as great opportunity. And this is actually what led to the upheavals in Jerusalem. Now, in the book of Daniel, interestingly enough, you see, which is fiction, no doubt, it starts out with these people who are deported from Jerusalem. Okay, how bad is it to be deported from Jerusalem? Well, for some of these people, it isn't so bad at all because they are then taken into the royal service. They're looking for bright young men and they learn the language and literature of the Caledians. And they don't have a problem learning that. And what Daniel then is able to do is beat the Caledians at their own game. Now, that's very typical diaspora literature. Every diasporic people, you know, including the Irish, have had that aspiration, you know, to master the arts and skills of the ruling class and beat them at their own game. And that's what Daniel is doing. And you see, the first half of the book of Daniel does not give you at all a bad impression, really, of the pagan rulers.  But then everything changes when you get to the second half of the book. And that changes because history had changed. You know, it was quite possible for upwardly mobile Jews to prosper under the Persians. And for a long time, say under the Ptolemies, and it was when Antiochus Epiphanes came in, then the things went sour. And the reason things went sour really was that he got into trouble with the Romans, or his father did. And they had to pay a huge tribute to the Romans. And that meant they were short of funds. They had the idea that there were funds to be had in various temples around the Near East, including the temple in Jerusalem. And that's what leads to all the trouble. And at that point then, certainly the imperial power isn't so benign at all. And that's a huge difference. Daniel two and Daniel seven, both have a similar outline of history. They have a sequence of kingdoms to be followed by the kingdom of God. But in Daniel, they're not so bad. They may be of decreasing value, but they're not really evil. Whereas in Daniel seven, they are. The fourth beast in Daniel, you know, the tramples with its feet. This was the Syrian war elephant. That's what's being reflected there. These mythological symbols and the language of apocalypticism seems to be really adaptable to different situations. Like a Daniel two versus a Daniel seven. They're similar kind of visions, but they're being interpreted different ways. Maybe Daniel two is a bit more Joseph and Aseneth in terms of Daniel's getting one over on everybody versus seven. It's how I guess the epiphanies is evil. So I want to talk about dreams because I always love this point you mentioned in your book. And I'm a big fan of Artemis Doris and his on Eurocritica by virtue of the fact that the cell kids and the Ptolemies were very, not only patronizing of the sciences and cosmology, right? But they're also hugely into dreams and dream interpretation. So what is the significance of Daniel being an interpreter of dreams? When we kind of think of these visions, we're thinking, oh, it's kind of like Paul was taking up, but no, these people are more often than not when you read these pseudographical and apocalyptic texts, they're having these experiences and dreams. They're being interpreted by an angel or in the case of the kings, by somebody like Daniel who's an expert in dreams who's kind of like the Artemis Doris of his day, I guess. So what is that significance? In ancient Israel, the prophets typically had visions and they usually wanted to deny that there were dreams. They said dreams are untrustworthy. Now, in Mesopotamia, on the other hand, dreams were good. Dreams are in fact where you are likely to have visions and come in contact with the higher world. And I think they pick up the valuation of dreams changes with the Jews in Babylon. And they adopt the Babylonian attitude. Also, divination gets a very bad reputation in Deuteronomy, but now Daniel doesn't have any hangups about it. But the dreams are really the only kind of divination that the Jews embraced. And I think it was because they were close enough to the prophetic visions that's understandable enough in a dream, things come to you. They're not products of rational thought. And you may skip from one thing to another, which is what they tend to do in these apocalyptic texts. People have spilled a lot of ink trying to find unity in the book of Revelation. Well, if you think of it as dream literature, that's the way dreams go. You're going along on one thing and suddenly you find yourself in the middle of something else. So I think that they came to appreciate dreams that way. Now, of course, it's a question then when you read an account of a dream in the book of Daniel, does that mean somebody actually did have a dream? There's no way to check it. It's an interesting fact that several of the apocalyptic texts describe techniques of disposing yourself to get dreams or visions. Enoch goes and sits down by the waters of Dan and recites something over and over until he falls asleep. Now, you can try it. Daniel fasts. You can try that too, I guess, if you like. My favorite of them is Forth Ezra, who has given a fiery liquid to drink at one point. Also at another point, he goes out and takes some of the flower of the field. This too is interesting. Now, of course, obviously fiery liquids can lead you to have wild imaginations and so can the flower of the field. So the people who wrote these texts evidently knew that, but I don't think we have any way of controlling when they were reporting a vision or a dream that they had and when it's literary composition. And also, I think it's hard to make a distinction even between the two, because if you have a literary author who has a fantastic imagination, in a way that person has to envision things. Is that a vision? Where do you draw the line between vision and reality, so to speak? I think there's a continuum there. That's a great point. Lucian didn't need to imbibe substances or take the flowers of the elder fast for seven days to write a true story, right? He just kind of wrote a really great kaleidoscopic, insane carnival. You see this concept. They're always doing these preparations with fasting, with visions. You even see this kind of carried over into the non-commodi text. If you look at something like Allogenes or Zostrianos, those guys are doing the same exact things. They're going out to the desert. They're fasting. And even Joseph and Asineth, right? Asineth has the conversion experience and she puts on the dark robe and stuff and she has the fasting and then she has the vision of the mouth with the honeycomb, right? So, yeah, same kind of thing there. As noted earlier, there are a multitude of reasons for creating this literature. I wanted to get into a very tumultuous time in the history of Judaism. Post-70 Common Era in the Fall of the Temple. This gives birth to perhaps two of the most intertwined and two of my favorite of the pseudepigraphical texts, 4th Ezra and 2nd Baruch. So can we discuss how 4th Ezra and 2nd Baruch react to the fall of the temple and use the mythological motifs? They're kind of giving two similar but at the same time different answers. Yeah, in fact, I am inclined to think that 2nd Baruch in a way was an answer to 4th Ezra. And 4th Ezra is the the job of the apocalypses. The glory of 4th Ezra is the way it questions the justice of God at the outset. It says, why did these things happen to us? Maybe we didn't keep your law, but were the Romans keeping it? Come on, you know, at least we kept some of the laws and some of the time nobody else was keeping it at all. In other words, it undermines the kind of answer that you typically got in Deuteronomic theology that the suffering is punishment for sin, for not keeping the law. And it says that just doesn't work. Then you have these long dialogues with an angel in which the angel is able to silence Ezra but not condense him. There were like three waves of this, but the angel does I think is distract Ezra by telling him the wonderful things that are going to happen. But then at the beginning of the next chapter, Ezra will go back to square one and read the same questions again. The turning point of the book is in chapter 10 when he sees a woman who is lamenting and he tries to console her, although it's not very consoling and says, why are you so concerned with yourself when we think of what's happening to Zion? Take the bigger picture. And then she's transformed and she becomes Zion transformed. And after that, Ezra doesn't raise any more questions. Now, I think that then what you get in the last few chapters is visions of what will happen at the end of history. And there are different ways of imagining it. And when it ends up in chapter 13 with one very much like Daniel seven, with the man coming up out of the sea and then taking a stand on Mount Zion, the idea is, things are going to be all right. Does that really answer Ezra's questions? I would say no. But for Ezra really does is say, you can't understand it. So since you can't understand it, just enjoy it. Look at the great things that are going to happen. Second Baruch, on the other hand, I think wants to defend the law. In fourth Ezra, if you like the bottom line is, oh Adam, what have you done? For even though the sin was yours alone, it affected all of us.  Adam was responsible for himself alone. And we have nothing now, but the Almighty and his law. But second Baruch never raises a question about the law. It says, no, the law is wholly just and good. And that's what you've got to stick with. What Ezra does effectively at the end is he rewrites the law. The books are gone. He has to rewrite them. And the beauty is second Baruch, the guy's like, no, no, no, no, no. But he rewrites it, he gets 70 extra ones. And unfortunately he doesn't give us a list, but I think it's safe to assume that he's thinking of things like fourth Ezra. Like a lot of these apocalypses, but the point in fourth Ezra is, you need more than the law. And I think in a way that's why he has Ezra do this. Ezra was the great champion of the law. For the historical Ezra, there was no question of needing more than the law. For fourth Ezra, there is. And you know, even second Baruch, while the second Baruch doesn't admit that you need more than the law, he's still trying to provide more because you still need these visions of what will happen at the end of history. To compliment us. What I loved about fourth Ezra is, my favorite books in the Hebrew Bible are things like Joe, like Ecclesiastes. I like the wisdom literature.  But like Ezra's still like, I have some questions. And I'm still gonna keep asking these questions. So he's really wrestling with God. You kind of in a way like look at him as like a Jacob kind of figure. He's really wrestling with these issues. And he's really trying to figure out like, well, this happened. And I don't see any big difference between how we act in the Roman Empire Acts. So maybe there's something more that needs to be happening here, like you said. And the end, the books are gone. He writes, rewrites the books. He has the secret books. We see this again, like in the Nag Kamadi texts as well. They're always writing secret books and they're putting them up on some mountain on the third heaven or heaven for people to find later. So yeah, it's just a really beautiful existential text. It takes this question that I'm sure a lot of people, whether you're a Jesus follower or an Orthodox Jew, very seriously, he's kind of giving an answer that I really like, don't get me wrong. I still love my mark. I still love some of the Pauline texts. I really think that 4th Ezra is really just like on another level in terms of that answer. It's really, it's saying, I think it's giving you the opportunity to say, things are under control, but you can still have questions. You can keep calm and carry on, but you can still like question these. If the Canon of the Old Testament were really inspired, they'd have included 4th Ezra and left out chronicles. I think all these examples, just really show the malleability, the adaptability of these visions and this literature to really not only sometimes, like as you said in the medieval period, prop up the status quo. This millennial kind of idea, this was ordained to be versus, the more questioning post-colonial aspects of something like a 4th Ezra. I think we've covered a good deal. It's been an enjoyable conversation. I love that I could talk to Dr. John Collins about our Temodorus solution and the same topic as 4th Ezra. That doesn't happen every day, but Dr. Collins, this has been an absolute honor. I wanna thank you for all your scholarship. I wanna thank you for taking the time to talk to me, to talk to the audience, to share your knowledge. The show and the canon that I'm creating here is richer because you have taken the time. And I wanna say I appreciate it. And I appreciate each and every one of you watching. Thank you, Jason.


Now what we'll do is I don't want to talk to you. We'll do a little Q&A And then also just as a reminder yesterday. We did did this the live show We did 10 minutes of Q&A and we did a twitter space is it was great There is a link in the description. You can check out the recording And it was good just to talk to people who are in the comments all the time but actually like talk to you talk to you and We answered some pretty That's a pretty good questions a lot of things that were going on that you can't really do here on youtube So you can check that out of the recording. It's like 20 25 minutes of that But that is it what we're going to probably be moving forward is that once a week We'll do twitter spaces. So instead of you typing to me and asking questions You can go to twitter spaces and actually talk to me and it'll be a longer format We can do whatever you want over there. So that'll be I'll start this week. So we just did on sunday We'll probably do it again Yeah, let's pick a day Thursday every thursday. We'll do it. We'll just do a long session over there Nah, no, no, maybe thursday or friday. You know what? I'll do a vote and you tell me which what days are better for you Thursday or friday, but that's it for today. So look like today's video give it a thumbs up consider subscribing A lot of things we talk about are very time sensitive, but that is it if you want to take off take off You've been here 12 minutes Not too bad of a day Now let's get into the little q&a and I'll answer all your burning questions the best of my abilities And we'll go from there. So It's out of here interesting day dig swimming Dave Hello vicki, please like the video. That'd be nice jt's here gary's here We can do a twitter space about when to do a twitter spaces des is here charles concanon Charles any updates on tax strategies for the end of the year. Yeah, we did a video Let me show you And And it was it was all over about uh tax loss harvesting wash trading A bunch of other stuff Let's see Where did it And just so you know youtube changed up some things so now there's different tabs videos live posts and stories When you look for for some things just know that the q&a we split the q&a that'll be in videos But Ah, here it is But for uh the live streams you have to click on the live stream tab. Ah, here we go. So charl answer your question charles. It looks like this so There's a video just called do this now if you have crypto losses in 2022 hint everybody does I mean if you realized or unrealized Do this before December 31st. It was about a week ago and we had on uh david Kimmer from uh coin ledger And he talked about uh things to do is for his tax loss harvesting It's it's a pretty easy process you sign up with coin ledger Which is free You don't have to pay for anything unless you want to run a report for your cpa or your accountant And you can see all your tax loss uh harvesting opportunities And when you take those then you can Offset some of your losses just so you know that as far as like income you can only offset up to $3,000 per year If uh you take a lot of tax if a lot of losses this year you can roll them over to next year in the year of that The year after that also, it's also a good strategy to take off uh losses Or to offset your gains if you have any From uh capital gains which are unlimited. So we talked about that check that video out and uh, what am I doing? Yeah, let's do this I'll copy it Let's see Tax Loss harvesting video Be right there. I'll drop it in the comments That makes things super simple for everybody trying to save you all time You're welcome. Okay. Yeah, please like the video I have buy into in a us in indiana. That's good Vicki's driving Driving and listening nothing wrong with that Wow 30,000 a month for a steal. It's pretty good Shrimps shrimp sound full force Hello We're not all george Happy monday I think I need bitcoin to 30x to cover my zillica spend Benny's here. Thank you. Benny for all things you do on twitter. I appreciate it. Let's see. Let me go up here Uh, let's see and nick is first shout out to nick for being a first Yeah, wow. It's amazing. I mean hopefully youtube notifies you Let's see Yes, like I tell you it's an early christmas present my my opinion Why is from pimping sats?  No, you can just buy satoshis And it'll be interesting as time goes on and we get to the price of bitcoin at some point being You know back to its all-time high of 70 or 69,000 then maybe it was 100,000 People will always thank themselves. I need a hundred thousand dollars to buy a bitcoin. That's not true You can buy as much as you want As much as you can get into that's why they have satoshis It's just interesting that in the future you're going to be able to see like wow a dollar only buys 2,000 satoshis man. I remember this video from 2022. It was almost 7,000 satoshis amazing or less Lemak says if finance does buy a voyager, what would be our haircut about 15? I don't know like these numbers some if you've got If you're buying it for a billion, let's just do some quick quick math here If you're buying everything for a billion And the total crypto held the time of the snapshot was one point Let's just say 1.3 So the total recover assets is 1.3 roughly right and then they also loaned out. I want to say 640 million roughly to three arrows capital and that was a loan That I like to give back so I don't know if they have to take that one back if they take a hit I guarantee I'm not going to guarantee anything actually But usually what it is is people would loan things to throw this capital thinking that they get all this great yield Because these guys were geniuses and actually what they were doing was Well, I don't know It remains to be seen exactly what they were doing because they're going to blame everything on san bakeman freed and ftx So let's just say 1.8. So you got 1.8 minus 1 billion You're looking at a you know 40 percent haircut roughly Correct me correct me in the math department but uh I mean I had zero percent or I had I had a hundred percent haircut yesterday. So not too bad How long you think spf will be locked out for I don't know if he's gonna chase It might be some minimal jail time I'm not sure Not sure how bad it gets I mean Look, uh, bernie madoff spent his entire life in jail after he got caught but it was I think he's he was going for I mean decades in jail So who knows Yeah Yeah, exactly. I'm happy with the voyage about now. Give me what's left of my crypto. I'll take it off the exchange What's wrong with that? I can see that totally Stephen says have to sell and buy back to harvard losses right now You don't have as far as like tax loss harvesting you just sell And that's it you take a that's tax loss harvesting when you buy back That's called wash trading and that is illegal in equities and securities thankfully to date um Gary genzler who watches the show all the time he There's no enforcement that says that things are our securities. He believes they are securities But until con which really gives him concrete evidence that he's just Regulation through enforcement Looks like someone got a case of the monday's office space classic Man, yeah, that sounds good R I Read joker. I think I'm starting a two channel advice. Yeah, it's super simple Uh, make sure that you have a schedule and stick to that Make sure you just show up and just keep uh keep going You're not gonna sound like yourself in the beginning It's gonna take you a while to find your particular voice You'll probably watch other people and just kind of you know Lump that all together But at some point you'll find the way that you do things And the way that you do thumbnails and all those stuff So the thing I can just tell you is that if you're gonna start it start it This is probably the best time to start it because no one's watching nobody's watching So you can afford to screw up like whatever.  Okay Maybe I don't know how that's pot. It's a green screen Let's see That voice in the pool again Hey tesla Yeah, I'm still waiting for my eat. I'm still waiting for my eat and my Five bitcoin that are setting on celsius right now Roughly Maybe it's four and a half. I don't remember Jeff's got a good point so far the only winners in celsius are the attorneys.  There was a great tweet. Let me pull it up Which shows you how much the lawyers are billing per hour? now this is from friend of the show simon dixon and uh The partners are billing per hour 1195 to 2245 Council a 20 a 20 21 25 Associates 685 and pair professionals. Wow 295 to 585. So that's just happening. That's our money As they fight this legal process because for some reason they just can't get it together to come up with a plan Which is amazing to me because block five did it within my 24 hours of them pushing out their Vancrepsy but uh, yeah, we'll give them till february so they can say oh, we couldn't do it. Sorry I'm not angry. I'm just a little perturbed Yeah So if I'm under any wrath ira me at $7,000. So yeah, I need to get my uh My iTrust ira and max out Which is a this is a pretty good time. I should buy things I need a coffee had a rough had a rough morning had a rough morning Went to go play a little volleyball on the beach here in portorico and nisla verde nice place And uh messed up my knee trying to do is do a little bit too much, but i'm okay That's why god created beer and sofa So you can if you have an injury easy just sit on there and do nothing I failed some mining. What's up? I know your channel a long time. So that's good A lot of people are actually stopping stopping. Uh, subscribe me to the channel and you know, the views go down the bear market. It's okay Like, uh, I show you I have lost But this is what it's this is just the natural cycle, you know so people People come and go and that's okay. Like it's kind of boring. Honestly It's my last Month or so I've lost about a thousand people subscribers and of course views are down too, but I mean It's it's like I tell you I tell people again. It's it's not It's not that It's not that the price action is killing people. It's the boredom that is killing people That's the big thing chopping sideways and going down one or two percent every couple of weeks is just boring as hell That's it Yeah, that's it. That's okay. I'll see him in the in the bull market hmm This is a good question Do you think the irs will be allowed to analyze ftx groups trading history for tax collection purposes from us citizens and us registered entities I think they do it already if it's ftx us um I'm pretty sure the reason why you do kyc and aml Know your customer and some money laundering putting your social security your date of birth or something like that There's because they're going to report that to the irs. You know, they already know So if you're an american citizen, that's just how it is sorry and Yeah, so they'll probably look at it, but there's a difference between ftx international and ftx us so trust me The department of justice is is greedily looking at all ftx definitely because if they want to look at and build a case They're going to have to look through the financials and when they look at the financials Guess who else is going to want to look to that probably the irs That's it Would you ever have the developers for ocular swallow? Sure. I just I've reached out to them a couple of times. No answer I've asked them if they could deliver here to portorico.  I'm good to go Now is the best time to watch crypto youtube potentially it could be I hope rob you will run Until our next bull run. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to be here till the next one I think I'll probably be doing dailies all the way until the next bull run and then the time when I sell and get out probably take I don't know like I thought I was gonna actually pull out A little bit earlier and start to do like once a week videos after this bull run But it's fun. It's fun to do these videos and again like what else am I gonna do, you know So I don't really need to work work And this is pretty interesting to do so I get to hang out with you guys all day or at least an hour a day Give me something to do Uh Let's not actually in the practice bot trading I just come for the view. It's a nice view Johnny says my wife unsubscribed for me this year. Thank god That's right And beardy says it correctly The military shot just taught me to show up Hmm should be a race team owner. I have no Inkling or no inclination to get into that And random says rob aren't you too deeply invested just let go of the best period coming to crypto So Yeah, but I mean like we're talking about videos or we're talking about doing videos Stuff like that like right now and we talked about it yesterday if you haven't had a chance to watch yesterday's video Which I personally thought was was pretty decent And it looks like this let me share It's this one It was the 2023 ROI outlook and for me. I just did a did a comparison between all the All the months for the four cycles and we took a look at the halving months the all-time high months the dip which is the The months after the all-time highs and then the resets and I was just showing people that you know in all honesty like This next year coming up will probably be the Probably one of the better years to invest because things are going to go down so low Just like it has almost every single time in the four year cycles and I just showed you that in reality in the past You could have had Like if if you would invest it in in 20 started in January 1st 2018 To the top of bitcoin 2021. It was like a it was like a seven and a half X But if you just would have waited until 2019 and invested janitor first went 19 to the top of 2021 it's like It's like a six and a half almost seven X is almost the same damn thing So it's like the year we just got out of was pretty crappy This next one we're gonna go into we're gonna see some I think some steeper discounts And this might be the one to get into again. This is just what I'm gonna do But yeah, just take a look at the data. That's that's all I can show you Okay That's it Well, he definitely got a deal on that 400 million cheap and the fdx was going to going to pay Yeah, we definitely got a deal dev sees you got a deal because yeah, that's right. It's 1.4 billion Let's hope this one goes through because if this one goes through then the next one and be like, hey, I'll buy you for 500 billion Or 500 million. That's it. Take it or leave it suckers That's it for today. All right, everybody. So thanks so much for stopping by. I'm gonna go head in and ice this knee And that's it. So I appreciate you guys. Thanks for coming by and I'll see you on the next one Obvious. Have a good day


Russia is preparing to seize power in Moldova through protests. Maya Sandu, president of Moldova, has confirmed that the Ukrainian side conveyed to her the Kremlin's plans to destabilize the situation in Moldova and that forceful actions involving saboteurs from outside the country, from Russia, Belarus and the Balkans, were being prepared. This is a short-term plan that involves sabotage, involving persons with military training disguised as civilians. They are planning violent actions including attacks on some state institutions and taking hostages, Maya Sandu said. According to Sandu, the materials transferred by Kiev contain detailed documentation of the logistics for organizing these sabotage actions. The plan envisages the use of people from outside the country for violent actions in Moldova. For example, the materials contain instructions for citizens of the Russian Federation, Belarus, Serbia and Montenegro to enter Moldova, the president added. Sandu also said that an attempt to seize power in Chichino is being prepared under the guise of peaceful protests. The president added that the security forces of Moldova are preparing to prevent these provocations and are keeping the situation under control. At the EU summit in Brussels, president Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukrainian intelligence had intercepted that Kremlin's plans to take control of Moldova after which the Ukrainian leader immediately passed all the information to his counterpart, President Maya Sandu. We don't know if Moscow was ordered to act according to this plan against Moldova, but we saw what they were going to do. We recognized in this exactly what they are already trying to do against Ukraine, against other states, in particular Europe. Nothing new, Zelensky said. Russia has repeatedly made sharp and rude attacks against Moldova and the Moldovan leadership in particular after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Among the latter, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergei Lavrov said that they are trying to make a second Ukraine out of Moldova, which was sharply commented on by the state's Foreign Affairs Department.


from San Diego, California. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live day two from sunny San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, joined by Dave Vellante. Dave and I have an alumni, a CUBE alumni back with us, Jeff Moncreef, consulting systems engineer from Cisco. Jeff, welcome back. Thank you very much, great to be back. Yeah, so we're in the DevNet zone. Loads of us going on behind us. This community is nearly 600,000 strong. We want to talk with you about StealthWatch. You did a very interesting talk yesterday. You said it had a couple hundred folks in there. War stories from real networks. War stories, strong descriptor. Talk to us about what that means, what some of those war stories are and how StealthWatch can help customers learn from that and eradicate those. Yeah, so it's called Saved by StealthWatch. It was a really good session. This is the third Cisco Live that I presented that session at. And it's really just stories from actual customer networks where I've actually deployed StealthWatch into. I've been selling StealthWatch for about five years now and I've compiled quite a list of stories, right? And it really, if you think about advanced threats and insider threats and those kinds of exciting things, the presentation was really about getting back to fundamentals. Getting back to the fact that in all these years that I've been working with customers and using StealthWatch, a lot of the scary things that I've found have nothing to do with that with the advanced type threat stuff. It really has to do with the fact that they're forgetting the basics, okay? Their firewalls are wide open. Their networks are flat. Their segmentation boundaries aren't being adhered to. So it's allowed us to come in and expose a lot of scary things that were going on and they were just completely oblivious to it. Why are those gaps there? Is it because of a change management issue? Are technologies moving so quickly? Lack of automation? Yeah, I think it's a couple of reasons that I've seen. It's a recurring theme really. Limited resources, number one. Number two, limited budget so your priorities have to shift. But I think a big one that I've seen a lot is turnover and attrition, okay? A lot of times we'll go in with StealthWatch and we'll kick off an evaluation and whatnot and the customer will say, I just don't know what's there, okay? I don't know if I have a hundred machines that need visibility or for a thousand. And I'm a StealthWatch cloud consulting systems engineer so the cloud world is really where I spend a lot of my time now. And what I'm seeing as it relates to the cloud realm is that it's exponentially worse now because now you've got things like DevOps and Shadow IT that are all playing in the customer's public cloud environment, deploying workloads, deploying instances and building things that the security team has no awareness of. So there's a lot of things that are living and breathing on the network that they just don't know about. And so the tribal knowledge leaves the building. How do you guys help solve that problem?  I actually have used that a lot since then. So thank you for that. Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah, but we come in and we actually, we turn the customer's network infrastructure, okay, whether it's on-prem or in the public cloud into a giant security sensor grid. And we leveraged something called NetFlow, which you've probably heard of. And it's essentially allowing us to account for every conversation throughout the entire infrastructure, whether or not it's on-prem or in the public cloud or maybe even in a private cloud. We've got you covered in that area and it allows us to expose every one of those living, breathing things and then we can just query the system.  We see everything, you can't hide from us because we're using the network to look at everything.  And that's kind of what I go into in my presentation also is how you can set these tripwires ahead of time to find things that are going on that you just didn't know about and frankly, they're probably going to scare you. One of the stories that you shared in your talk yesterday, talk about people really forgetting the basics a university that had a vending machine breached. You just think a vending machine in a cafeteria? That's right, yeah. Really? Tell us about that. What kind of data was exposed from a vending machine? Yeah, so that's one of my favorite stories to tell. We'd gone in and we'd installed StealthWatch at a small university in the U.S. And they had a very small team, okay? You can see that recurring team, limited staff and they really just had a firewall. Okay, that was what they were doing for security. And so we came in, we enabled NetFlow. We kind of let StealthWatch do its thing for a couple of days. And I just queried the system, okay? It's not rocket science, it's not AI a lot of times. It's really the fundamentals. And I just said, tell me anything talking on remote desktop protocols inside the network, out to the internet. And lo and behold, there was one IP address that had communication from it to every bad country you can imagine. Okay, actively.  What's it doing? And I was in the conference room in the university with their staff and the guy looked it up in the asset inventory system. And he looked at me and he goes, that's a vending machine. And I said, a vending machine? He said, yeah. And then I was like, okay, well that's a first. I've never heard of that before. And he goes, wait a minute.  You ever heard of one of those? I hadn't even. So for loss prevention, I guess universities and other public institutions that will buy these unique vending machines that are designed for loss prevention. So that the college students don't go around and steal or throw away the trays from the cafeteria. You have to return the tray to get a coin. Okay, there's a common supermarket chain that does the same thing with their shopping carts. And it's for loss prevention. So I said, okay, that's pretty strange. Even stranger than just vending machine. And I said, well, did you realize that it was talking to remote desktop all over the world? And he said, no. And I said, so can you tell me what it has access to? So he looked it up in the firewall manager right there and he said, it has access to the entire network. Flat network, no segmentation, no telling how long this had been going on and we exposed it. And StealthWatch exposes those gaps with just kind of old school knocking on the door. I mean, it really is. I mean, we're talking about fundamental network telemetry that we're gathering off the route switch infrastructure itself, obviously we're at Cisco Live. We work really well with Cisco Gear. Cisco actually invented NetFlow about 20 years ago. And we leveraged that to give visibility footprint that allow us to expose things like the vending machine. I've found hospital X-ray machines that were scanning all the US military, for instance. I find things in the cloud that are just completely wide open from a security ACL standpoint. So we've got that fundamental level of visibility with StealthWatch. And then we kick in some really cool machine learning and statistical analytics and machine learning analytics. And that allows us to look for anomalies that would be indicators of compromise. So we're taking that visibility footprint and we're taking it to that next level looking for threats that might be in the customer's environment. So before we get to the machine intelligence, I presume that cloud and containers only makes this problem worse. What are you seeing in the field? How are you dealing with that? We're in a landscape today where we've got a lot of customers that might be cloud-averse, but we've also got a lot of customers that are on the wide other side of that spectrum. And they're very cloud progressive. And a lot of them are doing things like serverless, microservices, containers. And when you think of containers, you think of container orchestration, Kubernetes. So StealthWatch cloud is actually in that realm right now today, able to protect and illuminate those environments. That's really the wild west right now is trying to protect those very abstract serverless and containerized environments. But yeah, we come in, we are able to deploy inside Kubernetes clusters or AWS or Azure or GCP and tell the StealthWatch story in those environments, find segmentation violations, find firewall holes, just like we went on premise and then look for anomalies that would be interesting. The security paradigm for those three you mentioned, those three cloud vendors and your on-prem and maybe even some of your partners, there's a lot of variability there. How should customers deal with maintaining the edicts of the organization and sort of busting down those silos? Yeah, so you think about StealthWatch cloud, which is the product that I'm going to CSE for. We're really focusing on automation, high efficacy and accuracy. We're not going to be triggering hundreds or thousands of alerts whenever you plug us in that's going to further bog down a limited team. They've got limited time and they have to change their priorities constantly. This solution is designed to work immediately out of the box, quickly deploy within a matter of hours. It's all SaaS based, so it actually lives in the cloud and it really takes that burden off of the organization of having to go and set a bunch of policies and tripwires and alerts. It does it automatically. It's going to let you know when you need to take a look at it so that you can focus on your other priorities. So I'm curious where your conversations are within an organization, whether it's a hospital or a university, what you're finding is in this multi-cloud world that we live in where there's attrition and all of these other factors contributing to organizations that don't know what they have, with multi-cloud edge comes this very amorphous perimeter, right? Where are those conversations? Because if data is the lifeblood of an organization, if it's not secure and protected, if it's exposed, there's a waterfall of problems that can come with that. So are you, is this being elevated into the C-suite of an organization? How do you start those conversations? Yeah, so it's not just the C-suite and the executive type structure that we're having to talk to now. Traditionally, we would go in with a stealth watch opportunity and talk to the teams in the organization. It's going to be the infosec team, right? As we move to the cloud, though, we're talking about a whole bunch of different teams. You've got the infosec team, you've got the network operations team now that are deploying those workloads. The big one, though, that we've really got to think about and that we've got to educate our customers on is the DevOps teams. Because the DevOps teams, they're really the ones that are deploying those cloud workloads now, okay? You got to think about, they've got API access, they've got direct console login access. So you've got multiple different entry points now into all these different heterogeneous environments, right? And a lot of times, we'll go in and we'll turn on stealth watch and we show the organization, yeah, you knew that DevOps was in the VPCs deploying things, but you didn't know the extent that they were deploying them. Lights up like a Christmas tree? Yeah, lights up like a Christmas tree and like a conversation I had last week with a customer, I asked them. I said, all right, so you're in AWS. Are we talking, do you have 50 instances or do you have 500? He said, I have no idea because I'm not the one deploying these instances. I'm just lucky enough to get permission and have access to them to let you plug your stuff in to show me what's going on in that environment. But yeah, they're in charge of securing that data. So it's quite frightening, yeah.  And then you're also bringing in machine intelligence. So what's the end game there? Is it automation? Is it systems of agency where the machine is actually taking action? Can you explain that? Right, so when the statistical analysis comes in and the anomaly detection comes in, it's really, that network DVR, all right? So we've got the data. So now let's do some really cool things with it. And that's where we're at actually, for every single one of these entities, and I do stress entities because the days of operating systems and IP addresses are going away. Face it, it's happening. Things are becoming more and more abstract. API keys, user accounts, lambdas and runtime compute. We have to think about those. So what we do for all these different entities is we build a model for each one of these. And that model, that's where all the math and the AI comes in. We're going to learn known good for it. Who do they talk to? How much data center received? And then we start looking for activity in that infrastructure as it relates to that entity that's outside of that known good model. So that would be the anomaly detection. And our anomaly detection, it really can be attributed to two different major categories. Number one is going to be, we're looking for things that cross the cyber kill chain. So those different IOCs as a threat actually manifests. That's what the anomaly detection's doing. And then we're also looking for just straight compliance and configuration violations in the customer's cloud infrastructure, for instance. That would just be a flat out security risk today, day one. Forget baseline in anomaly detection. It just should not be configured that way. Let's see, roughly 25% of Cisco's revenue is in services. What role does the customer service team play in all this? Do you interact with how do the product guys and the service guys work together? Yeah, so we've got a great customer experience team, customer services team for StealthWatch. And it doesn't matter if we're talking StealthWatch on-premise or the StealthWatch cloud, they cover both. And what will happen is we'll come in from a pre-sale standpoint, we'll do the evaluation, show good value. And then we've got a good relationship with the CX team where we'll hand that off to them and then we'll work with the CX team to make sure that customer is good to go. They're taking care of, and that's not, we've sold this and we're just going to forget you type scenario. They do a good job of coming in, they make sure that the customer's needs are met, any feature requests that they'd like or taking care of, they have routine touch points with the customers and they make sure that the product for all intents and purposes, doesn't lose interest or visibility in the customer's environment that they're using it, they're getting good value out of it and they're just going to build a relationship.  We're going to be with that customer cradle to grave. You know, Jeff, one of the things I didn't talk to you about at Google Next was, well, first I got to ask you, have you, you're a security guy, right? Have you always been a security guy? Yeah, security for about 20 years now, dating back to internet security systems, actually. The question I often ask security guys is, who's your favorite superhero? My favorite superhero, let's say Batman. Batman, I like Batman. So the reason I ask is that somebody told me one time that true security guys, they love superheroes because they grew up kind of wanting to save the world and protect the innocent, so just had to ask. Yeah, there you go, Batman. I'm sensing a tattoo coming. Last question for you, Jeff, is in terms of time-to-business impact, the vending machine story is just so polarizing because it's such a shocking, massive exposure point. Did they ever discover how long it had been open and in terms of being able to remedy that, how quickly can StealthWatch come in, identify these? Very quick to operationalize. So like the vending machine story, that's something that if you turn on flow and you send it to StealthWatch right now, we can pick that up in 10 minutes. That quick to visibility and value. Now, how long has it been going on? A lot of times they can't answer that question because they've never had anything to illuminate that to begin with. But moving forward, now they've got a forensic incident response audit trail capability with StealthWatch, which is actually a pretty common use case, especially if you think about things like PCI that have got audit requirements and whatnot. A lot of organizations, if they're not using a flow-based security analytics tool, they can't always meet those audit and forensic requirements. So at least from the point of installing StealthWatch, they'll be good to go from that point forward. So if they can find an anomaly that needs to be rectified in 10 minutes, what's the next step for them to actually completely close that gap? Yeah, so like with Cisco Identity Services Engine, we've got a great integration there, we can actually take action, shut off that machine instantly. Okay, we can shut off a switch port, we can isolate that machine to an isolated sandbox to VLAN, get it off the network. And then in the cloud, we can do things like automated remediation.  We can actually use lambdas to insert firewall rules. So if we find a hole, we can plug it. Very easily automated, the customer. Ship a function to it and plug it all. That's correct, yeah. Batman slash detective, I think you need a tattoo and a badge. I can work on that. I like it. Jeff, thank you so much for joining David and me on theCUBE this afternoon. It's my pleasure. Really interesting stuff, we appreciate your time. Absolutely. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's second day of coverage of Cisco Live from San Diego. Thanks for watching.


ahoy hoy and welcome to SCP memes where I go over memes taken from the dank memes from site 19 subreddit you want to see credits for all the memes you can look at the link at the bottom of the description there'll be a paste then anyway let's get started pattern screamers when they see pattern I don't know I've never read the article there's not really well no there is one now but there used to not be an article for it they just kind of like someone just made one but like the idea behind pattern screamers has always been very very fluid it could be whatever you want it could just be people screaming about patterns if you want entirely up to you scp memes wait it's all series one always has been yeah that's a problem I don't know is it that big of a problem you know now that I'm looking at this what is that the I have not I'm going to look up something hold on yep that's a flag of Ohio and that guy's arm mm-hmm now uh it's stolen from the wait it's all Ohio meme I just was like I thought maybe the meme had some sort of other original source but now I guess it must be from that because that's dudes wearing a flag of Ohio on his arm anyway more to the actual topic of the meme the uh I don't see okay series one is more meme-able because it's less involved there's plenty of stuff that gets memed from the other from the other series too but uh yeah the less involved something is I think the little bit easier it is for people to create memes about it memes are always supposed to be about simple shareable things it's the reason why what's the one the image only are I can't remember number I've never been very good remembering scp numbers even my own at this point it's just too many but um the one that's just images is probably as popular as it is because it's so easily shareable like you look at it and you immediately know what it is anyway nothing wrong with that the cogwork orthodox church reject modernity return to tradition the broken church I quite like modern entity I see no need to reject it church of max willism reject modernity embrace the future sarcasm reject humanity return to monkey yeah I don't really get the sarkis I guess they've been turned from I don't know are they still the bad guys I know the church of broken God has been redeemed from being mostly bad guys to now being a simple a very complex and often heroic group have the sarkis gone through that uh uh what's the word gosh it's it's it's difficult to really think about it like that what in fiction is similar that I know of uh where you take I guess Loki from the marvel universe from the marvel cinematic universe where you take something that's a a villain a clear villain and then slowly through steps as you make it more complex you turn it into a potential hero oh boy I finally found it after 15 years the scroll of truth object class isn't that important to the grand scheme of things and y'all make too big a deal out of it yeah I've said this before and I'll say it again object classes I mean a damn thing people like people like demand that it exists but it doesn't have to exist there's no reason for it to sv 682 an acid bath again seriously scientist facility guard another scientist another facility I mean if it works it works the real question is why they ever take him out what gives people feelings of power money status writing a successful cold post let me tell you something writing a successful I mean it may be the first time around maybe it'll give you that but I don't really think it does after that and because it just demonstrates how low the quality standards of the scp wake you really are when you get down to it that you can write something that has no feedback no community input at all you just write a thing and dump it on there yeah and most people will be like maybe maybe I need to be a little bit more maybe that's my problem I need I need a bigger ego so many people will say that's not the problem I need a bigger ego I need to look at it like no no no I'm just so awesome that everything I've is that good already Barak is in the house tonight please stop praying for my grandpa you're making him too strong he broke out of the hospital and the cops can't get him he's too powerful that's the origin of the old man right people just thoughts and prayers them into uh into monster hood that's a ticket I actually really really like this one because it's exactly the you know fanaticism is dangerous and destructive ignorance is sometimes preferable to the truth you can't change the world only keep it alive your life is worthless on a global scale and you are disposable forget all those messages wow cool humanity protecting speck ops they've got cool guns uh not to mention the uh the lessons about like authoritarianism and like the science run rampant in a in a society and a lot of the stuff no no no no they've got cool guns that's the important part I'm tired of off-site fans hyping up series one articles like there isn't a little decade of other SCPs to choose from what but at the same time it's not fair to discount those people who might not have a harder time reading extended narratives which is one of the current trend of shorter digestible articles in series five and six is good to see we shouldn't also be careful but we should also be careful not to over correct and encourage disliking long things on the basis of being long the fuck are you talking about is actually a pretty good point um but the important part is understanding that the sap wick is going to continuously evolve there may come a time when series one style articles become common and popular again they just aren't now you're just gonna learn to live with it SCP idea me object class a poly on me I mean I've said it before and I'll say it again uh if your object class is a poly on what that means is that you've spent too long thinking about what object class to choose oh right is this the right the guy I think this is also can and bright can and bright also can and bright dr bright being forced to kill his team but terrorists dr bright trying to kill hitler because someone said he couldn't yeah so is this the guy I think it is the guy I'll talk about that in a second yet another childhood star whose life has been destroyed by creative commons 2.0 excuse me his life was destroyed by creative commons 3.0 share like attribution pay attention I mean okay I'm gonna go dive into this because it's something I actually have opinions about first of all that image had to go that image was stolen from someone else who had a watermark on it and and actually cropped the watermark out this is plagiarism plain and simple when you take an image from somewhere else and then don't mention that you took it from somewhere else forget the copyright it's not even about copyright or license this is about the moral implications not the legal implications moral implications of plagiarism claiming that something is yours or through inaction allowing other people to believe something is yours when it isn't period that the scp wiki has a strong stance against literary plagiarism but any other kind of plagiarism they have a much much softer stance on and it makes no sense to me and but they've done a much better job recently and I'm not gonna sit like it's slow progress but it's progress they're getting rid of these stolen images and these plagiarized things it well the problem I have with it is is that they look at literally when they look see literary plagiarism they delete the articles but when they see image plagiarism they're like hold on a second they don't even delete the images immediately let's find a replacement let's make sure the author is okay with like seriously the author who plagiarized somebody else's work anyway the current image though despite the fact that it needed to be replaced the current image I said on twitter and I'll say it again here looks like uh scp 682 is trying his hand at becoming an instagram model that is a very specifically posed image we'll say I don't know like it or dislike it I just think it's a little too professionally done it doesn't feel like something that you just kind of like he's it doesn't feel like he's in motion escaping it just feels like he's relaxing on a beach somewhere and what is scp 001 fuck around and find out I guess I'm probably gonna have to blank out the f word there because the youtube algorithm detects it in text way better than it does in speech and also doesn't really care about it in speech past the first 30 seconds but but if it's on tech in text on a thing I'll get demonetized not demonetized limited monetization all right this is the one they had this the other one would the seals recognize Carl if his body was in the water let me just go over to this because I left it open let's see here I'm mainly doing this so that if big if I get into Sumerians videos I can prove it to my friends I don't really care if people use my means but I will take the that advice in the future so let me just look at your uh just your Reddit username here Papa Big Tasty well Papa Big Tasty's friends he made it and he made it by making memes about articles that I wrote or one is a tale one is an article that's how it works sorry because like I was like I saw this one was like yeah with seals recognize Carl if his body was in the water I don't know we'll have to find out but um yeah made by jack baron up uh yeah yeah yeah oh yeah really I mean like all you have to do to like get a good chance of getting one of these videos is fucking just uh make something with one of my SCPs and that's about it it's a good chance not an absolute chance anymore there's a lot of there's so many of them it becomes a little bit more difficult but yeah it's a pretty good chance pretty good shot SCP is the strongest or an SCP 682 is the strongest 3812 I mean there is no strongest in the SCP universe first of all because there is no canon and second of all because like what do you mean by strongest can it lift how much can it bench bro I guess that's the last one thank you very much for watching if you enjoyed the video please scroll down and hit the subscribe but I am really surprised there were no the rubber memes I think I'm probably gonna do a video on Thursday out why marketing to kids is wrong and what that actually means I remember in the video I did on was it Thursday I saw a lot of people on Twitter saying like just because or not even on discord just because it's animated doesn't mean it's for kids I ain't what I fucking said so feels like maybe you're carrying your own baggage around there I didn't mention the animation as part of a whole package it's what the animation the music the voice I'm only replying to this right now because it's it's such a strongly desired response but yeah the music the cutesy voice the cutesy mascot the animation style the specific style of animation and I said that in the video before like I said if you think hey wait a minute what are you saying animation doesn't mean it's for kids and I like I said I think maybe you've got your own baggage to worry about friends anyway that's it thank you very much for watching if you enjoyed the video please hit the subscribe button then hit the notification bell after that so you're notified when I upload new videos and then head on over to patreon.com forward slash d samaritan like everybody here on the screen already has including vivi and dr j redacted who have pledged at $100 and Morgan who has pledged at $40 it's nice to know that I'm not alone here and I'll see you all again on thursday


In today's guide we're going to go over the best Pokemon to use for the brand new 7 star Greninja event running now in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. But before we get into today's video please subscribe to the channel remember you can always unsubscribe later if you'd like to. So the Pokemon that we're going to go over in today's video are the best early builds for this event that are going to make it super easy for you to go in beat the Greninja solo in game and start farming the super valuable high item drops that you get alongside it once you've caught the Greninja as you are only able to catch one Greninja per save file. So the two Pokemon that we are highlighting today is going to be Slowbro, it is a Pokemon that we're bringing back that we have a lot of familiarity with from the Cinderace raid then that we did recently and using pretty much the same strategy as we used in that den. And the other Pokemon if you would like to use something a little bit different is Vaporeon. We'll start with the Vaporeon here. It is going to have the psychic terra type. That is one thing that I would say definitely try and get the psychic terra type it takes advantage of one of the big moves that we'll be using on it obviously a water type as well and give it the leftovers item then we are going to go over to the move set it is going to have a move set of fake tears, calm mind, acid armor and stored power and then an EV spread of 252 special attack and 252 defense. We know the Greninja is going to be predominantly hitting us with more threatening attacks from its physical side so boosting that defense stat is going to make a lot more sense and then obviously boosting the special attack make sure that you are going to be hitting as hard as possible. Fake tears is there as an option to reduce the special defense stat on the Greninja if it hasn't got a shield up and then the other options are going to be calm mind to boost special attack, special defense by one stage every time you use it and then acid armor as well which boosts your defense stat by two stages and then once you boost it up enough times with those two moves you are going to start launching stored powers off into the Greninja and then you are going to take advantage of your psychic terra type that you've got on the Vaporeon as well to further boost that stored power to get as much damage out as possible. You've got the ability water absorbed there and you're going to have a modest nature on this Vaporeon. Now Vaporeon is a really good option going in against the Greninja. I think it's a great option but it is not as powerful as the Slowbro and this is what brings us back to the Slowbro here. The Slowbro you don't need to worry about what its ability is, there's nothing really on the Greninja that you're going to worry about that would warrant any particular ability out of the three that it does have. Just pick whichever one you've got on your Slowbro when you've caught it. You've got obviously the psychic terra type because that is going to definitely help in this terra raid because it is one that is going to drag on a little bit longer than maybe some other ones but at the moment early game Slowbro is still the best build to go into this one. So just make sure you have that psychic terra type. Then for the move set I would advise going with the move slack off so we've got a former recovery eye and defense like we had in that seven star cinderace then boosting your defense two times every time you use the move, nasty plot boosting your special attack as well two times every time you use it and then again the same sort of strategy relying on stored power which does more damage based on the more boosts that you've got on your stats. So ideally the premise of this is going to be using three eye and defense three nasty plot and then launching off stored powers using slack off whenever required if you need recovery. The EV spread on the Slowbro is going to be max HP, max special attack, you've got a modest nature on the Slowbro as well just to maximize damage and again I would actually attach the leftover item to the Slowbro even though the Grinninger has got Night Slash and it is the one thing that you're going to have to watch out for because it does have a high critical hit rate and it will ignore any stat boosts i.e. the defense boost that you've got if it does land a critical hit. So that is something you're going to have to keep in mind whereas it might be better for you if you are having problems with that to rely on something like the Vaporeon that isn't weak to those dark type attacks going to take neutral damage from pretty much everything that Grinninger throws out at you if you would prefer then taking maybe that odd chance where you get a big critical hit and it ruins your day with the Slowbro but otherwise Slowbro is going to be the more consistent out of everything that I've tested so far going into these Grinninger raids. So once you've got your Slowbro built exactly like this or your Vaporeon built exactly like this you want to just find the Terrorade, the 7-star Terrorade event done in your game. As you can see we've got it right here and we can just go right in and then take the Grinninger on. I can talk you through how to use this strategy. It is a lot like the strategy that we adopted in the 7-star Cinderace event so we'll be using the same kind of strategy here. If you take the Vaporeon into the raid event the first thing you're going to want to do is set up your Acid Armours then go for 3 Carmines and then start firing off your Stored Powers. Obviously go for 3 Acid Armours, boost your defends out to the max like we're going to do here with the Slowbro and then tracelize when you can into your Psychic type and then take advantage of that further boost with your Psychic Terror type. Now we're going to go into the battle, Grinninger always going to go for a double team and then lay the Toxic Spikes down onto the field. The first thing that we're going to do is just set up an Iron Defence. Now there is an argument where you could potentially go for a Stored Power here and do that for the first two turns because Grinninger normally on the second turn at the end of it it is going to nullify all of our stack boost but it is pretty risky because it does put you in a bit of a precarious position where you can get taken out the next turn if the Grinninger decides to go for a Night Slash. So you can see we've got two Iron Defenses up here and they will be nullified but it will mean that the Grinninger if it does nullify our stat boosts here that for the rest of the game we should be pretty safe to set ourselves up completely. So we'll go for a Slack off here just to recover some health because the Grinninger might decide to nullify our stat boost but it's never really as consistent as I'm saying here. It's normally two, three turns in we should see it pretty soon and there we go. So third, third or fourth turn in. Now we're pretty safe to just go for these Iron Defenses again, we had to waste a few turns there and you can see the timer has started to tick down a little bit but we're still in good shape. See here we've got three nasty plots, three Iron Defenses, we are ready to start launching off these Stored Powers. We should be able to terastalize like I was saying, Stored Power all going well and this should be the end of the raid event and you can see the timer's just below half I would say and it hasn't taken too long for us to do this one as long as this does hit. Obviously you're going to have to consider this is something that's going to happen in these raid events if you haven't got clear smog or something like that but we do, we connect and that is going to be enough to pick up the knockout on the Grinninger and it is as easy as that all going well. There are just a few caveats where things can go wrong. Night Slash can critical hit, double team can be played more times than we've seen in this one and you can miss a lot more. So there are a few things to consider but at the moment after everything I've tested slobbrow is the most consistent thing to take into these raid events. Again, bit funny that it was the best one for Cinderace and now it's the best one for Grinninger but it does feel like it is the most solid option going forward in these raids at the moment. If there's better options of course we will update you on the channel with better builds and alternative builds that you can use. So I hope you found this video useful friends, have fun farming the Grinninger raid dens this weekend especially if you are using the slobbrow. Once again, kind of happy that slobbrow worked out to be a really good build because a lot of you will already have it from that Cinderace event anyway. But just copy the build that we've used here, it is the most consistent one. You've got the recovery with the leftovers and then you've got that slack off as well which is just going to give you a bit more security against the volatile kind of raid that this can be with double team knights slash crits and things like that. But like I say, I hope you found it useful. If you have, drop a like. Thank you so much. Subscribe to the channel if you're brand new for more Pokemon Scarlet and Violet content and I'll see you all in another video very soon. So until then friends, take care of yourselves and bye bye.


So one of the most important skills to use as a facilitator is the ability to ask the right questions in the right way at the right time. In asking questions, you are able to enforce your role as a process expert and maintain neutrality. So asking questions shows that you're focused on the participants and you recognize that they're in control. Yet you're able to take a step back and shift the responsibility to them so that they can take ownership over their answers and their decisions.