Okay. Let's take a moment to pray and then we will start. Could I request somebody to please lead us in prayer and then we can start. Prabhakar Rao, you want to pray? Yes, Pastor. Do you have any father? We praise you. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity. Father, lead us, guide us into this class so that each and every moment it shall turn into a good exchange of knowledge and wisdom. I dedicate Pastor Ashish and all the students, fellow students, countries and all the states. Give us a wonderful time ahead, Father, so that we can learn each side more than times, Father. And we can be built up as your image, Father, so that we can be utilized as your kingdom. I dedicate each and every one and all glory and honor to you. I ask this prayer in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Thank you. Okay. So today I think will be the final set of lectures in this course. We have a little bit of ground to finish on the signs of the end times. Then I'll just do a quick review and then we will leave the time open for any kinds of questions on the subject and that we will wrap up. And then the rest of April will be time for assignments. I will work on the assignments, put it out in the Google classroom and as well as the e-learning platform. So April can be used just to take, you know, work on the assignments. It's not going to be very difficult. Just three assignments shouldn't take you more than maybe an hour or two hours to do it. Okay. But you can work through it at your pace. So we were in this last section, we were talking about signs of the times. Our intent was to try and understand, you know, how close are we to the coming of the Lord to the return to the rapture of the church and the unfolding of the fulfilling of the remaining prophecies that are in scripture concerning the end times. And of course, we don't want to try to predict the date or put a, you know, a month and date or anything like that. But our intent is just to get a sense of, you know, how close are we, where are we in relation to the fulfilling of the end time scripture. So just to get an idea. So what we did was we are just enumerating various signs that kind of give us an indication of you know, this is how close we are. And just a sense of how close we are. But again, it's not for us to put a time or year and a date to this. So let us quickly review what we have covered so far. And then we will go through a few more signs. So this is section five, we are looking at signs of the times. We talked about Israel being formed as a nation, as a milestone, you know, it's like the flag saying the end starts now kind of thing.  And that's important because Jesus said one generation will see all the things fulfilled, all the end time prophecies, one generation will see it. So the question is, you know, are we the end time generation or are we at least close to the generation that would see these things. We just tried to do a little bit of calculation there again. It's not our attempt to predict a year, but just to get a sense of where we are. If we were to consider that one generation, what would be the timeline and we are pretty close somewhere, you know, in this range. Second sign is Jerusalem being captured by Israel, Israel gaining possession, at least a part of it. And then Jerusalem becoming the center of conflict for all kinds of reasons.   Nations like the UAE and one of the others, couple of two other nations who are now, you know, kind of building, trying to keep peaceful relationships with Israel. And so that's happening right now, while we are speaking. They are in Jerusalem, they are having, you know, conversations. The other Arab nations, especially Iran, Iraq, Palestinians are feel let down, you know, that there are some Arab nations neutralizing their relationships with Israel, meaning they're no longer being hostile. But that's interesting to see that we know Jerusalem is going to be a center of conflict. We are seeing some of these things happening. Where is all this going to lead? We have to see, we have to observe. The Temple Mount being ready to be rebuilt, which the Temple ready to be rebuilt is a very important part of N-Time Bible prophecy. The fulfillment of N-Time Bible prophecy, very important. And again, how it's going to happen, we will have to think about it or see how that's going to unfold. Number four, the possibility of a 10-region confederacy, whether it's the European Union or the NATO or some other alignment of 10 nations, who were part of the former Roman Empire along with, you know, there could be this mix of iron and clay, as we explained earlier. And that coming together is also a very interesting observation. The possibility of a global economic system and a global identification system, again, is very significant, very significant, because that's part of Revelation 13, the alignment of Russia, China, Iran and Turkey, you know, to see how these nations are aligning themselves, because they are mentioned there in Ezekiel 38 and 39, and see how all these nations aligning there in Revelation 16. We talk about the kings of the east. We, all the China's not mentioned by name. We think, you know, Russia, China are these big nations mentioned or referenced there in Ezekiel 38 and 39 and Revelation 16. So just looking at what's happening is an interesting observation. Peace talks with Israel on the plan to divide the land. You know, so Arab nations, for them, their plan for the Middle East is that the Palestinians should have their own land, the Palestinian state. Israel is not ready to do that. So no, we will not do it. So the Bible is telling us that at some point this itself is going to become the reason why nations are going to be gathered together in the valley of Jehoshaphat. That is the Battle of Armageddon. So this point about dividing up the land, and in fact, you know, right now, as we said, some Arab nations, you know, they want to have good relationships with Israel, but they are also nonetheless those nations still are asking for recognizing an independent Palestinian state, which Israel will never say, okay, too. So even though they want to have, you know, somewhat peaceful relationships, this is going to be what, as we would say, a bone of contention between those nations. So, and then of course the control of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is again a point of conflict. Another important sign is the church coming to maturity, which we spoke about. And it's truly amazing to see what God has done and God is continuing to do in the church among people. Don't worry too much about, like we said earlier, don't worry too much about the structure of the system. Look at the people, look at what's happening to the people. People are being changed. People are being built up. People are growing. People are maturing. So that's the beautiful thing that's happening in the church globally everywhere. God is doing a wonderful right. And number nine, this is where we came to. The ninth sign is that the gospel is being preached to in all the world as a witness to all the nations, you know. And this is again a very powerful sign because we are living in a time where literally all over the world, the message of Jesus Christ is being proclaimed in so many languages, like never before, never before. Now, I understand that on one side, there is the, you know, what we would say as the dead church, meaning the, you know, just the buildings and the form without the power. But yet on the other hand, there is the dynamic church, the living vibrant church, which is people are bearing witness for Jesus in all walks of life. It's really amazing that, you know, whether it's among the very poor or among the elite, the gospel is being preached and proclaimed in all the nations, the gospel is reaching. So we're going to move forward from here, look at some of the other signs. And many of these are obvious in the sense that it's in many ways self-evident. We are observing these things happening. Jesus said that there will be people who will persecute us for his name's sake, for his name's sake.  For my name's sake, but it'll turn out for you as an occasion for testimony. So, you know, how should we view persecution? One of the things we should look at it is an opportunity for testimony. But Jesus said, you know, before all these things, that means when all these things are ready to unfold, be prepared for increased persecution that will take place because of Jesus' name. So there will be increased persecution of the church that takes place as one of the signs. So, and we've seen that happen around the world. Now, when we say persecution, it doesn't always have to be physical and violent. That is part of it, but the other aspect of it is being brought before people of authority to give an account of what we believe. So there will be the prisons, the violent, but there will also be, you know, where the very faith, the Christian faith is being challenged, attacked. Those who hold on to the Christian faith are being ridiculed, mocked, looked at in a very negative light. And that is also persecution. That is also an attack on people, on us, for the name of Christ. So you have both forms of persecution happening, whether it's the physical violence or it's the more aggression in part challenging the truth we stand for and the truth we preach and proclaim. So both things are happening globally. So there's increased persecution of the church. Number 11 is deception. There arise in spiritualism and fall spiritually, something that's trying to take the place of faith in Christ. Jesus said it in Matthew 24. He said, be careful, nobody should deceive you because there will be many coming in my name saying I am Christ and will deceive many. So there are going to be many people who will claim I am the Christ. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to come and say my name is Jesus Christ. No, but they're going to come and try to take the place of Christ in our lives. So I am the Messiah. I am the one who's empowered by God to answer your and meet your needs and answer your questions. So the many will come. They'll come as though they've been sent by God and they will deceive many. They will deceive many. So that's something to be very careful about. So Jesus spoke about it. You know, false prophets, false cries, increase in spiritualism. So think about what the apostle Paul wrote in Christianity 4. He said, you know, the Holy Spirit is speaking expressly. That means he's speaking emphatically and he's also speaking very clearly. So there's no ambiguity to what the Holy Spirit is saying. What is he saying that in the latter times, some will depart from the faith, giving heat to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons. So there's going to be an increase of deception and wrong teaching, which is going to actually cause, which is actually demonic because the doctrines of demons and they're actually coming from evil spirits. But it's going to be able to draw people away from the faith. Just imagine, they're going to depart from the faith and this is going to happen.  They won't think twice about speaking lies. They're going to speak lies and hypocrisy and the conscience is going to be seared.  They're not even living by conscience. So the Holy Spirit said very clearly through the apostle Paul in the latter times, this is what's going to happen. And so you'll have a lot of these things going on and it's part of the signs of the times. Another interesting sign which the angel Gabriel gave to Daniel in Daniel chapter 12. He said, Daniel, I want you to close up the words, seal the book, whatever visions I've shown you, put it all together, close it until the time of the end. And it's until the end time. And then he gave a statement. He made a statement indicating what the end times will look like. He said in Daniel 12 verse four, many will run to and fro when knowledge shall increase. So there are two things the angel said to Daniel, people are going to run to and fro, which is another way of saying people are going to be moving all over the world. There's going to be, you know, an explosion and travel, people run to and fro. Travel is going to increase and also knowledge will increase. There's going to be an explosion in knowledge. So two things. Now, if we look at the way things have been going.  That's not what we are seeing. What we are seeing is it's more than just being exponential. So it is knowledge is doubling every day. It's almost or I would say knowledge or information. If you look at, you can look at these are dated articles 2018 and I'm sure we can get more recent information.  Then from data, you make sense of data, you get information and you get knowledge. And then from there, you know, if you process it further, you can come up with more discoveries and it drives businesses and so on. Anyway, so think about this, that every two years, there's like a 90% increase in data. And by 2020, and again, this is dated information, you know, 35 trillion gigabytes of newly created data. And then in 2025, there will be, you know, 175 zettabytes of data created around the world. And we're all contributing to this through our photographs, through stuff we post and write and release and all kinds of things. You know, this video is going, this, this classroom video is going to add to this data. It's, you know, we're recording it. It's going to go online and we will have added, you know, certain amount of bytes of data to this whole thing. So imagine, you know, every call and videos being produced. We're all contributing to this fulfillment of this prophecy that knowledge will increase. Right. And so what the angel told Daniel, in Daniel chapter 12, is being fulfilled in such an amazing way, such an amazing way. It's beyond an exponential, like I said, it's beyond an exponential increase year after year. It's just huge increase every year. The knowledge, the information, the knowledge that we are obtaining through all the data that's being put out there. So this is happening right in our day and time. It's being fulfilled. Some of the other things which, you know, may not seem so important, but are nonetheless part of the in science that Jesus gave, because these have been there all the time for many, many decades. For example, wars and rumors of wars. Yeah. You know, nation has been going against nation kingdom against kingdom that has been an ongoing thing. But what we can expect is a heightened increase of these just before the coming of the Lord for the church and the final, the final countdown. So Jesus said, when you hear of wars and promotions do not be terrified. These things must come to pass. But the end will not come immediately. I mean, these things are a build up to the end. They're leading towards it. And what will happen? Nation will rise against nation kingdom against kingdom. So we are witnessing some of this. And it's true, you know, it has been going on over many decades, but what we can expect to see is just a heightened increase of this. Same thing with the next, the next few signs are similar. Fear, hate, terror and despair. Jesus said, and on the earth there'll be distress of nations with publicity and men's hearts failing them from fear. So what are we going to see? Nations are going to be in distress. It's like we don't know what to do. We are at the end of ourselves. This is talking about nations. There's going to be despair. There's going to be hopelessness. And then also people are going to fail or give up out of fear. So that's also going to happen. There's going to be fear. And there will be hate, terror and despair among the nations. He also spoke about weather and geophysical conditions. He talked about great earthquakes. And, you know, I've just broken this up into two points, but it is given in one verse. Talked about great earthquakes. He also talked about famines and pestilences, which is our next point. Our famines and epidemics. And then he also said great signs from heaven. So things are going to happen in the weather and other in the atmosphere around the atmospheric conditions. And there also going to be famines and pestilences, that is plagues, pestilences and so on. So I know that these things have been happening throughout time. It's not something new. But what I want to say is that these things will increase as we get closer and closer to the day of the Lord. And the moral condition of man. Number 17. Lawlessness will abound. The love of many will grow cold. People will be cold-hearted. Second Timothy, chapter three. Paul says, you know, people be lovers of themselves more than lovers of God. They'll be hateful. It's almost like they have no more feelings in the way they relate to one another. So the very moral condition of man will get worse and worse as we get closer to the time of the Lord. And we can see that. We can see it. We don't necessarily need to spell out everything, but we can see these things happening. People becoming more and more depraved and hard and cold and how they treat each other. It's happening before our eyes. So these are all the signs that we could enumerate or put down and say, look, these are things that the Lord has spoken. The first set, the first half are definitely things that could never have happened before. They happen just in our day and time. And then there is the other half, which is like from 10 to about 17, the last seven signs, which have always been there. But what I would say is that the increasing in that intensity as we approach the final period of time, the tribulation and so on. So, you know, in the 17 signs, you have about 10 of them, which are definitely things that can only happen, could have happened only in the last 30 to, you know, our last 50 years. And then you have another seven, which have always been there, but the intensity, the magnitude of those things are, we can expect them to get to increase and so on. So, we are literally in the final countdown and it's for each of us, you know, to live in a state of readiness for the coming of the Lord and stay pure, stay holy, stay ready for Jesus. Of course, we must be busy going about doing what God has called us to do. And I just want to close here with this thought that, you know, we need to plan as though to plan and to think as though we are going to live out the full course of our lives. But we need to live as the Lord, the Lord is coming right now, this moment. So, how do you plan? How do you live?   That's the way you plan and prepare yourself. But you live moment by moment as though the Lord is coming right now. That means every moment I'm ready. If he comes now, I'm ready to go, no regrets, nothing unfinished in the sense of, you know, I'm ready. But the plan we think as though we're going to live out the full course of our lives and that's how we journey through every day. And that's a, you know, a happy paradox. It seems like opposite, but that's how we got to live our lives in a state of readiness. Let me take some questions and then we will do a quick review of all that we've gone through in this course. Just a quick run through. I'm not going to go into all the details because you've already heard all the details, but we'll just do a quick review of things. Any questions that we want to talk about before we get into. Okay. All right, so I'm looking at the chat. Christopher says anti-conversion laws. Yeah, that's an increased, at least for us in India. We are seeing that definitely a veiled attack on the church as well. Elisha's question, how should the church respond to these signs, example for false teaching and deceptions? Should the church be on lookers, as they say, as they are signs of the end and they should be do something about it. So good question, Elisha. So the Bible tells us that church, this is 1 Timothy chapter 3 verse 15. The Bible tells us that we are the pillar and ground of truth. The church is the pillar and ground of truth. I just want to make sure it's 1 Timothy 3 verse 15. So 1 Timothy 3 verse 15, be the pillar and ground of truth. The church is to be the upholder and the foundation, the mainstay of truth in our world. So how do we fight what is false? The best way to fight what is false is by amplifying the truth. So what is the church's responsibility? Keep proclaiming the truth, keep amplifying the truth. So we shouldn't waste our time pinpointing what is false because there will be all variations of false, falsehood and false city coming. We can't waste our time on pinpointing the false. What we should do is amplifying the truth, keep amplifying the truth because when people get to know the truth, they will recognize what is false. So we don't fight the truth by highlighting the false. We fight the false by highlighting the truth. So that's the responsibility of the church, keep amplifying the truth, making the truth clearer, brighter and better so that people can see it and understand it. Then they know how they will be able to identify what's false and stay away from it. Thank you very much, Besta. Thank you. Any other questions? Everybody's with us at the end times. We've gone through the signs. Any questions? Okay, let me just run through a quick review of things and then maybe that might trigger some questions. So let me just go ahead and share the screen. This is just a quick review, okay? So that it might trigger, okay? So I'm just going through the Word document, not the PDF. So basically what we did was we looked at the fact of the Bible's prophetic book. We talked a little bit about geography or history in geography. So the Middle East and other regions and then the geography, Israel and its neighbors. And then we went through a panoramic view of things that would happen. And then the fifth section was the signs of the times, okay? So when we started in the introduction, we just, you know, we went through some points as to why it's important to study about the end times. So we listed out, you know, some reasons why end times is important. We also, let me make it a little bigger maybe, we also discussed some of the key, you know, guidelines that we follow when we study the end times, so that we interpret Scripture with these guidelines. So we explained some of those points there. Then we started off in our first section that the Bible is a prophetic book. There are many prophecies in the Bible. We looked at some of them that were fulfilled, whether over hundreds of years or some even over thousands of years. Some very detailed prophecies concerning Christ have been fulfilled and so on. And therefore we say the Bible is a very reliable book.  These are all used synonymously, but depending on the context, it could be referencing different points along the end time calendar. We looked at Matthew 24, where Jesus talked about the signs of the end times, and we broke Matthew 24 into three sections that would help us understand what he was saying. And so we went through Matthew 24, which is also a paddle to look 21. So these were the end time terminology. We just listed out these key phrases in relation to the end times that we find in Scripture. So then we moved into looking at some geography and history concerning the Middle East and Israel and its neighbors. We talked about how the land was promised to Abraham, how the Arab scheme overtook almost all of the region around. We made mention of the Roman Empire that was there prior to that. This is of interest to us because it forms a major part of Daniel's prophecies concerning the end times. And we will look at that in detail when we study Daniel next year. So we made mention of these regions. And we also talked about how Russia is referenced. Kings of the East could be China and the region where the Battle of Armageddon will take place. The Jezreel Valley, the northern part of Israel, that would be the final battle. So we talked about some of the points of conflict in and around Israel. How this land was promised to the people, a little bit about their history. This is a table that you don't necessarily have to read but just to know. And the areas of conflict, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where the Palestinians are occupied right now. Jerusalem and the Temple in Jerusalem being big points of conflict. So we spoke a little bit about the Temple Mount and what has happened there. And we also mentioned, yeah, so that's just looking at pictures of Temple Mount. And the settlements that are happening in those areas that are being points of conflict. And these are things that have been spoken of Israel, Egypt and Syria in the days to come. So then we went through a panoramic view of the end time events. So we said that we are in the church age now. Next thing to happen is a rapture of the church. The church will be in heaven for a period of seven years. We talked about what will happen in heaven. The rewards, mansions, marriage supper, seven years of tribulation here on earth. Christ returns, the battle of Armageddon and then a thousand year reign of Christ. A great by throne judgment and new heavens and the new earth. So that's the chronology of the end times that we went through. Of course, we had a little bit more detail as we went through Revelation. So basically what we said is Revelation chapters one, two and three isn't here at the start of the church age. Revelation four and five is a picture of what's happening in heaven. Right after the church, Revelation chapter six through nineteen is what's happening here on earth. Mostly we are looking at what's happening here on earth during the seven years of tribulation. Revelation 20, Revelation 19 ends with the battle of Armageddon and Revelation 20 talks about this thousand year reign of Christ. Revelation 21 and 22 is the new heavens, the new birth. So the book of Revelation kind of outlines this whole chronology of events that have unfolded. So then we went into several details of these things here. And the last chapter is what we covered today, which is the signs of the times we went through. What are the signs indicating where we are? Okay, so let's see now. Okay, I see a question here from children turning away from God's word. What should be as parents to bring them back to God? I can just share a few of my thoughts. So one of the things that we can see happening in the world, generally speaking, is knowledge has increased so much and knowledge is accessible. So, you know, for example, if we go back in time, 30 years, we never had smartphones. We never had access to information on the Internet the way children do today. So for us, I mean, 30 years ago, our reference point or our learning, a medium of learning was very limited or the information that was being, that we could access very limited in the sense that it was either what we heard in school, heard at home, or maybe newspaper and television to that extent. Today, things are very different. Children have access to all kinds of information, good and bad, because of the Internet and then the use of smartphones and computers. So, information is constantly coming to them. So you can imagine, you know, 30 years ago, children would be taken to church, they would hear the word of God, they would be taught the things of God. And there wasn't any competing information, not much competing information to the truth that they were being told. Today times are different. To every statement of truth, there could be 10 contradictory statements that are coming to the child child from all kinds of sources, online, through the Internet, videos, celebrities. And it's all right there in their hands. So, the information overlord is impacting children and therefore children could be swayed by any number of things. It's not that the truth we are saying is no longer the truth. No, the truth that the church is teaching or the parents are giving the children is still the truth. But the problem is, to every statement of truth we are giving to our children, there are 10 more untruths coming through all kinds of channels, media, which are bombarding the minds of children. So, we have to understand that they are going to go through this period of time where they're going to process this information. 30 years ago, mom and dad would say, do what I say. And what I'm telling you is the right thing. And we didn't have an option, we just followed, because there was no competing information. At the most, you know, there would be a textbook in school or whatever. That's all. Today, the pastor preaches, the Sunday school teacher says something, parents say something, but children are also exposed to so much of other information. We can't stop it. We can't tell our children, you know, don't go online, don't use your phone, don't use your computer. They need it for, you know, all their work and activity and schoolwork and college work, etc. So, it's there, they have to use it. The only thing now is, it's going to take time for them to process all this information and arrive at their conclusion. And I feel that we should let them arrive at their conclusion. We can't do what was done 30 years ago where it says, you know, what I'm telling you is the truth, just follow me. No. Today, we've got to let people, okay, you want to examine the truth, feel free, you want to explore knowledge, feel free.  We can't stop that. We can't prevent that from happening, because information is there. So, what can we do as parents? Well, I think the most important thing is the life we live. It's the life we live. You know, on Saturday, on Saturday, this past Saturday, we had our membership class. So, you know, we do membership class every quarter for those who want to become members of the church. And I was just talking to people. I was just listening and people were spontaneously off their own accord sharing why they were choosing to become members of the church. Why were they choosing? They did themselves for sharing. And I wasn't going and asking, why are you choosing to become a member of all people's church? I wasn't asking that. They were spontaneously sharing. And very interestingly, many of them were sharing. And there were similarities. They were saying, you know, we see the lives, the pastors living. Not just me, but the leaders. You know, they're saying, we're seeing that. We love the simplicity. We love, and all of you are alike, and nobody's drawing attention to themselves. Nobody is creating an aura around a particular person. That's not what we're seeing here. We are seeing people who are just living simple lives and, you know, so, and I was hearing this from different, you know, people.  We are preaching sermons, you know, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday and all of that. But what's really impacting people, and I'm sure the word of God is impacting people, and I'm sure the word of God is an important reason why people are coming to church. But beyond the word, what's standing out in their hearts and minds is the life that these people are living. That's standing out. So what I want to share with us as parents also is that, you know, the biggest impact that we will have on our children is the life we live. If we model Christ, that will be a louder voice to them, louder than all the knowledge information that's coming to them, because we can't stop it. You know, at some point, they're going to go to college. At some point, they're going to, you know, they're going to be exposed to more and more information. They're going to stop that, you know, unless we send them to China or Russia. Sorry, I'm just joking there. But, okay, China and Russia, they would control information, but generally speaking, you know, knowledge is going to come to them. But what can be louder than knowledge and information? It's the life that we live.  It's a life that we live before them as parents and as, you know, as church people, as Christian leaders. Children are observing, and that is going to impact them, and that's going to pull them strongly towards God. That's a long answer to your question. I hope it helps to see. God bless. Thank you. All right. Questions? I see Divya and Shrikumar. Let's take them. Divya. Thank you. Thank you, Pastor. My question is from Isaiah 17. And where it says in verse one, an oracle concerning Damascus. See, Damascus will no longer be a city, but will become a heap of ruins. And it goes on to tell about Damascus. So I, has this happened, like if I'm checking this, like it's not, it's still inhabited. So is this something in the future? Or is it like, is it something that comes before rapture or where does this fit? Yeah, or has it already happened? Yeah. So some of Isaiah's prophecies, let me say, not all of Isaiah's prophecies are like about the end times. Those, there are prophecies that are near term. That means they, they are, they were to happen in that short period of time, meaning a couple of hundred years. Right. So he prophesied against many cities and nations that were around Israel. So like here and, you know, of course, we refer to Damascus and Ethiopia and Egypt and so on. So these were near term prophecies, which were fulfilled in that day and time as we see the sequence of world empires that came in. So there was, you know, when you go back in time, of course, there was Egypt in that region, right? We're talking about around the Mediterranean. There was Egypt. After Egypt came the, the, of course, Israel was or the people, the Jewish people, they came out of Egypt. They occupied their land subsequently for the Assyrians who came in. They dispersed or they attacked Israel to some extent, but subsequently the Syrians were the Babylonians or Nebuchadnezzar. They came, they dispersed the Jews. So the Babylonians came into power, but after the Babylonians came the Medes and the Persians over through the Babylonians, then came the Greeks. So in this process, so the, the Medes and the Persians, so you can look at Babylonians, Medes and Persians who are from that region, right, from Iran, Iraq, Persia, but then came after them came the Greeks. They came from the West and the Greeks over through these regions where the Babylonians and Medes and Persians. So Babylonians and Medes and Persians were basically from that region of what we know as Damascus, right, which Damascus would be modern day Iraq in that area. So the Babylonians and the Medes and the Persians, they were in that geography. That's where they had their capitals. But when the Greeks, they overthrew. So those were near term prophecies that were fulfilled shortly after, you know, in a couple of hundred years after Isaiah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Shrikumar, your question, please. Thank you, master. So my question is from Romans chapter two, and and the Bible says here Romans chapter two words to onwards now we know the God's judgment against those two such things based on truth. So when you a mere man pass judgment on them, they do the same thing. And if you continue to read, and when it comes to the 10th word onwards, but the glory, honor and peace for anyone who does good, first for the Jew, then for the Gentiles, for God does not show favoritism. Then the 12th word says all who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. And, and indeed when the Gentiles will not have the law by nature required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. Since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their conscience, also bearing witness and their thoughts now accusing now even defending them. So my question is, is this that based on the scripture, and the God is going to judge the people. Is he wants to say here that it means Gentiles also because of they fulfill the requirements of the law, they can also make heaven, they can also be accepted in the heaven. That's my question if they are not believing on Jesus or as per the, as per this, because he says that God is not a God of favoritism.  So what he wants to say, thank you, Pastor. So the answer is in the 16th verse. The answers in the 16th verse, where Paul says, in the day when God will judge the secrets of men's hearts by Jesus Christ according to my gospel. So how will people be judged, Jews and Gentiles? They'll be judged by Jesus Christ according to the gospel. So, and we will study this, we will study Romans chapter two in our third year, we'll go worse by worse. But what Paul is explaining to us in chapter two is there are Jews and Gentiles, and they are both standing before God as sinners.  He makes it a point to say very clearly in verse 16 that everybody will be judged according to the gospel. And he continues that thought in chapter three, you know, and you can look at verse 10, verse 14, verse 23 says, look, all of us, all of us have sinned. There is none righteous, not even one. So, Jew and Gentile are standing before God as sinners, and there is only one hope. And then in Romans three, he says in Romans three, 22, that we're all justified by faith through Christ. So, starting in Romans one, where he establishes the evidence of God and the sinfulness of man. Chapter two, both Jew and Gentiles stand condemned before God. The Jew, because he fails to keep the law, the Gentile, because he fails to live by the law of his conscience. And yet both stand condemned before God. The Jew cannot boast that he has the law because he's failed to keep the law.  That is chapter three. End of chapter three, the only solution is salvation through Christ. In Romans chapter four, the only way you can experience that salvation is through faith. In Romans chapter five, God gives it to us as a free gift through grace. So, it's a whole series of thought that he builds up, and it's so beautiful to study all of that. We'll do that in next year. Thank you. So, I was thinking of getting closing, but I see Avni's question. Jeremiah 31st chapter. Jeremiah chapter 31 verse 34. Yeah. So, Jeremiah chapter 31 verses 33 and 34. Jeremiah. So, the Old Testament prophets, prophesied about the New Covenant. So, Jeremiah chapter 31 verses 33 and 34. You also, I think it's an also an Ezekiel 36, but Ezekiel prophesied, right? So that God will, this is an Ezekiel 36 verses 21 to 27. And this is quoted for us in Hebrews chapter 10. So, basically, Jeremiah 31 is Ezekiel 36 of prophecies concerning the New Covenant, which God was established. And then in Hebrews chapter, chapter 10, I think it is. Let me see, chapter 10 or chapter, yeah, chapter 10. Now, verses 16, 17, the writer of Hebrews is quoting from the Old Testament saying, hey, this is what. So, Hebrews 10, 16 and 17 is a quotation from Jeremiah 31, 33 and 34. So, the writer of Hebrews is quoting from Jeremiah saying, look, Jeremiah prophesied that God will set up a New Covenant. That's what he's done. So, the answer to your question Avni. Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 36 on foretelling of the coming of the New Covenant, which is fulfilled in the New Testament. And Hebrews 10, 16, 17, you know, explains the fulfillment of the New Covenant. Now, first of my question is, it says that no man, more shall every man teach his neighbor and every man his brother saying, know the Lord, for they shall all know me. I just wanted to understand this part of this verse, 34 verse actually. So, see, in the Old Covenant, it was the priest who knew everything. And the people didn't know Old Covenant, New Covenant. God says, I will write my law into everybody's heart and mind. Right. So, that's see, like today in the New Covenant, every believer can know the Lord, can know what the things of God, not so under the old. In the old, only the priest knew, and others would come and sit and listen to the reading of the, you know, of the scriptures. New Covenant, God says, I will give them a new heart, and I will write my law in their hearts and minds. So, in the new, there's no more saying, you know, I need to teach you. In the sense that, of course, God has placed teachers and all that, but the point is in the new, every believer receives the knowledge of the Lord, unlike the old. So, that's the difference. He's a highlight. Yes. Thank you, Pastor. Thank you so much. Okay. So, we're going to close things here. I hope you enjoyed this journey. Next year, we're going to have a course on Daniel and Revelation. So, we will actually get into these scriptures and other passages we will read in detail, and that will help us strengthen our understanding concerning the end times. And we will close this course today with here. Just look out for the assignments that I will put out and you can do them. And, yeah, that's it. With that, we will end the course. Okay. So, could somebody pray with us and dismiss us, please? I know we've already taken 10 minutes extra, but there won't be the next hour, so you can have a long break. Okay. Good. Somebody close and we will dismiss. Okay. Avni, can you close, please? Yes, Pastor. Thank you. Father God, we are so overwhelmed by and with joy, Father, for what we have learned from our Father, the way you have taught us through Pastor Father, to prepare us for the day of your coming and whatever we have learned. We just want to say thank you, Father. Thank you for what you have taught us, the way you have led us, and Lord, all the blessings that we have received by receiving the truth that keeps us free, Father. Lord, let it process in us. Let it go and deep inside of us, Father, and do the work for which you have called us, Father. To produce that holiness and help us to walk in that holiness and righteousness that you desire to see in your children, Father, as you equipped us, Father, through your word. We are so thankful to you for every student who's been part of this journey, who's learned and being built up. We thank you for all the teachers who have made their efforts, Father, to teach us truth in love, Father, and as they have taught us, Father, to begin this journey of walking in your word, walking in your truth, help us each day, Father, to be led by the Spirit, and Lord, as we walk in you, Father, we may glorify you through our word, action, and deed. Let all things be done for your glory and for your glory only. We thank you once again for giving us this beautiful platform. We bless every teacher. We bless every student in the name of Jesus. And we once again thank you, Father, for this beautiful time of worship and fellowship and learning. We thank you and we ask this prayer in the precious and most matchless name of Jesus, our Savior. Amen. All right. Thank you, everyone. God bless you all. Enjoy the rest of the day, and I'll see you again tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you, Pastor. God bless you. Thank you, Pastor. Thank you, Pastor. God bless you. God bless. Thank you. God bless.


Good morning. How are you? Good. Oh, look at the wing mirror. Hey, look at that. Nice. Okay. Nice move. I don't think I could do that. Yeah, rock and roll. Rock and roll. Welcome back to our second navigation around the globe by motorcycle. We're here in the city of Almaty in Kazakhstan and today Andre, who is a local, who is in front of us, is taking us on a tour of the city. So we met Andre a few days ago when we took Bumblebee to get a service and to get our rear shock replaced. By the way, Bumblebee is feeling absolutely amazing right now. Like a new bike, really, like an absolutely new bike. So that repair was done at a motorcycle club garage. And the motorcycle club is called the Nomads Almaty motorcycle club. Andre is a member, so he came down just to come and see us, just to chat to us, make sure that everything was going OK with the repair.  So we have no idea where he's going to be taking us today. But we're just going to follow him and we're just going to see what we see. Yeah. Now we go to Medeo. It's up in the mountains, the skis. Almaty, Kazakhstan is good. OK, great. Let's do it. I can't wait to see what Almaty has to offer. We don't know exactly how long we're going to ride in the city today, but it's already 11 o'clock, so better hit the road. Let's go. Well, we're coming right into the city now. Look at all of this glass around. Looks like a pretty modern city here, actually. This part of the city looks really new. And you can see even on the road here, they haven't even painted the different lines here. To be honest, it is a little bit chaos. I mean, we don't know if there's supposed to be three lanes, four lanes, five lanes. Everybody's sort of just drifting around. Oh, look, Almaty Theatre. Yeah, it looks really cool, actually. Oh, look, they've got the Bellagio here. They've got a Bellagio just like in Vegas.  It is such a cool backdrop to a city. But hopefully we'll get a bit closer and we can show you guys. The nice nature. Oh, yes, here we go. We have mountains. And it's nice, the roads are becoming a little bit more open, more forested, more green. That's amazing. Such a big city with like two million plus people living there. But once you are out, you are kind of in the nature, you know, you're in the mountains. It's amazing. And look, they have a cable car system just here going all the way up into the mountains over there. I don't know where that goes.  All right. It's one of the biggest skating rink in the former USSR. Now it's the biggest skating rink in Kazakhstan. It still holds the world records for the. OK, so this behind us is the Medeo skating rink. And when it was built, it was the largest skating rink in the former USSR. And it is the largest ice skating rink in Kazakhstan. It was built in 1972 and during the 1980 Olympics hosted by the USSR, all the ice skating was done here, even though it's like 4,000 kilometers away. And this ice skating rink has really unique conditions that allowed it to set a lot of world records due to the altitude and the humidity. It means that it has like super, super slick ice. So it actually has the Guinness World Record for the most amount of world records set in one ice skating rink. So what do they call this? Pastila. It's a fruit jam dried. It's very good. Or you have. You can like rip it like this. Nice. Dried jam has then been sort of rolled out and then rolled up into a stick. With your tongue, you can do it like this. Maybe it's last year. I'm not 100%. So this is the start of the climb, hey? Yes, 842 steps. 842 steps. I count more always. So this behind us that we're about to climb is a big dam that was made in the 60s.  And then basically all the rock falls into the middle and that's how they created the dam. But they actually created this dam to stop mud flows coming down into the city because apparently just before they built the dam there was some really super devastating mud flows coming all the way down this valley and basically destroying a whole portion of the city. They built the dam not to store water, not to conserve water but as a big protection for the city basically. It says just check up on your health. If you're feeling all right, then we start. The heart. That's your heartbeat. Comfortable shoes you got. We go right, they go left. But nobody knows. No children without elders. Luckily I'm here to take care of you. No jumping just because safety. Sweetheart, don't even think about jumping. No alcohol, no sliding on rails. I don't know, maybe it's possible. Everything good? Perfect, let's do it. We didn't get a lot of exercise over the last year and a half so this is good for us, this is good. OK now we're hiding under a tree because it started to hail. We're just going to hang about here and see if it gets a bit better. 11 minutes later. So do you count? 2,000 probably. 2,000, 6, 7,000. We can make it to the top. We can make it to the top. That's it. You did it. Is this a tunnel already? Yes. Yes. So where's the gondola going? To the ski resort, it's over that mountain. 100. 100? For one? Just make one bite it in two halves. That's right, yeah, if you like it. Is it not nice? No, I like it. OK, you pick one.  OK, show me. No, no, they don't know how to do it. OK, so what is this? Kurt. It's dried milk with salt. Cow's milk or cow's milk? Dried cow's milk with salt. Salted. Usually it's milk gets bad, but not bad. OK, it's like it's sour. Yes, sour, yep, OK. Sour milk, dried. Dried sour milk with salt, yeah. With salt. OK, you can try first. No, you try first, my love. OK. This one is good. Because made for tourists, not so salty, not so sour. You say not so salty, not so sour. And she's like it's really salty and really sour. Yeah, really salty. It's almost like parmesan cheese. Yeah, yeah, it is. It tastes good. You like it? It has no expiry date. No expiry date. No expiry date. Wow. Thank you. There we go. Finish was walking. It's time to let these beauties do all the hard work from now on. Do you have a name for your motorcycle? Afrikančka. Afrikančka. What does that mean? African lady. OK. And this is 1100 Africa Twin. Yes. Year is 2021. Automatic transmission. I don't even have clutch. This is the handbrake. What? This is the brake. I can also change like this if I want to. And it's very comfortable. I like it. I mean, before I thought it was not a real motorcycle. But now it can do wheelie, no problem. Yeah, it can do wheelie anyway. So automatic transmission, still do a wheelie. There you go. All right, that's enough physical exercise for one day, hey? Climbed to the top of the dam and down again. And now I'm really hungry. So Andre said he's going to lead us to a place. And I'm excited. Oh, it's nice letting the bike take us around, isn't it? Yes, but I really miss actually doing some exercise. Now my whole body is like, my legs are shaking. My whole body is like. Totally. I'm exhausted, man. Yeah, a good sit down. And something to eat will be really good. So we managed to find ourselves an absolutely amazing lunch. It's basically like a Kazakh-style subway here. We've got ourselves a falafel six inch sub with cheese and tomato. And then on the other side, we've got ourselves a hash brown sub with cheese. They've got a UFO. And you've got a UFO photo. And they actually make it look like a UFO. Yeah, it is a little UFO. That's amazing. All right, I have absolutely stuff now. Oh, wow, OK, we're going through this little thing. Oh my God. Yeah, it was a lot. But it was nice. But then Andre said, guys, we probably got to make a move because he said that rush hour is going to be starting in the next half an hour. And he says a half an hour trip is going to turn into a two and a half hour trip if we don't go now. The rush hour of Almaty is absolutely no joke. In fact, that's why we did this trip in the middle of the day because it's pretty much the only time that you can get around the city. So yeah, anyway, we're going to be heading back to our accommodation now. Andre is going to be escorting us back with his supreme Almaty motorcycle skills. He says that motorcyclists in Almaty, they're a special breed of people, you know? They've learned an Almaty way of driving, which is basically all the cars don't care about you. They'll come up right next to you. And sometimes you have to kick their wing mirror. That's what he says. He says that's the Almaty way. I don't think I've ever seen a building so much made of glass than this one, seriously. Yeah, my God, that is absolutely crazy, especially with the sun, wasn't it in England that one glass building made a car burning? Yeah, and here is like massively hot and sunny here in Almaty. So I don't want to know how many fires that building starts. But anyway, it's been a super, super awesome day, getting a view out of the city in the mountains. Yeah, wow, the mountains here are so pretty. And just like learning a little bit about Almaty, this area here, it's really cool, really cool. If you guys want to hear some info about this city, then go to the previous episode when we arrived in Almaty. And there, I said some really cool stuff. Look, there's a tree on the balcony.  Yeah, I don't know, it's like really cool style. Yeah, but I mean, that tree is going to grow to like 15 meters high. But yeah, we've definitely found that here in Almaty, you have to be pretty careful about the cars, because honestly, they will drive like you are invisible. Like they are not very forgiving and not very patient.  And yeah, the traffic jams are already starting. Wow, look at this. That's crazy. That's crazy. So it was probably a good idea that we're heading back already. Whoa, look at this Range Rover. Wow. Whoa, that looks like a crazy car. Do not scratch it, do not scratch it, do not. Oh my lordy lords. Okay. Oh, I like it. See here. Hey, the important thing is that we didn't hit any cars in Almaty. Did you see this one car was like a Range Rover or something? Like really crazy expensive car. Electric Range Rover. I was like the whole time like, oh, don't, don't scratch this car. Oh my God. Awesome. See you later. So that's it from our day out here in Almaty. We hope you enjoyed the video. If so, please give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, share the video with your friends and family. Comment below. We will see you next time.


From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. Special coverage here in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier, we're here at VMware's Radio 2018. It's 14th year, it's annual.  It's like a sales kickoff for engineers as Steve Herrod, former CTO said on stage. Rajiv Ramaswamy's chief operating officer at VMware products, one of the groups here. Great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to be here, John. So Steve Herrod kind of coined it. It's like a sales kickoff for engineers which is like motivating, intoxicating, a lot of energy, a lot of good technical buzz going on. People are flexing their muscles, stretching their minds, creating their sparks of innovation. Totally. How do you guys do it? What's the secret sauce? Yeah, let me take a step back here. Innovation overall at VMware, it's part of the culture. It's not something that is just purely top-down but in fact, I don't believe we can simply drive down innovation from the top. It has to come from within. But what we do at VMware is culturally we have several set of activities that we foster that create this culture of innovation. Let me lay out a few examples of which of course we'll get to radio and why we are here. But everything from, you start with just tech talks. Anybody can bring a group of people together. We have weekly tech talks to talk about anything. They may be stuff that they're working on, that they want to get a broader audience for or they may be stuff that is far out that they just want to get an audience and communicate. So we have tech talks. We have our own version of hackathons, we call them borathons. We run globally at all our sites, 7,000 plus R&D engineers globally. We run these everywhere. And out of those, by the way, come great ideas. And these are typically one to two day kind of events that groups of people get together. They actually build prototypes. They code prototypes. The expectation is they have to show us something working at the end of those two days. And all kinds of cool things have come out of those. The next step there is flinks. If you have a prototype and you actually want to get customer feedback and you want to get ecosystem feedback in there, it's not a sanctioned product. But you can go out there and release it and have customers support that and test it for you. And finally, then we have sort of a more incubation type, what we call X-Labs, but it's actually now more of a centrally funded project that moves on and works on a particular topic. And last but not the least, this event radio. So the radio encapsulates the big tent event but you're talking about a specific process for innovation. Yeah, exactly. So it's organic. So I got to ask you one of the things I've observed over my 19 years living in Palo Alto and nine years covering VMware and seeing from founding as principles to now is there's two things that jump out at me. Engineering culture. Absolutely. And community. Yeah. These have always been kind of like the nine lies for VMware, you guys always been leveraging those two things. How do you guys do that going forward? Because as it becomes more competitive, you're bigger now, you got a process. So that's cool, I get that. How do you guys drive the process without sacrificing the engineering and the community? So let me tell you one thing that you should keep in mind. All of this is done on people's spare time, right? This is not their day job. Every one of these people engineers over here are doing this separate from their day jobs. And so they are motivated that what prompts people to come to VMware in the first place is the ability to work on interesting, difficult problems, particularly when it comes to infrastructure related. Our motto around our vision is around how software can really change the world. So there's a fundamental driven culture that. The passion engineers want to work on hard problems, change the world. They want to work on hard problems, right? And we foster that and we encourage them to do that. And they like it, right? And it's also the fact that in most cases these are not individuals, most of these, in fact almost every paper that you see here is actually a small group of people. And what I'm amazed at is as I look through the work that people do, a lot of the stuff, some of it may be related to what they're actually doing in their day jobs and that there's some subset. But a lot of it is actually stuff that is actually done completely different from what they do in their day jobs. And the X Labs is interesting because you have two tracks as we heard earlier. There's kind of like continue to incubate it further with some funding while you do your day job. Then it's like, oh my God, functions as a service. Let's fast track that, take a break, find someone else, you fill your job, or we'll do it and you work at full time. That is a full time job. Once we get to an X Lab, that is a funded incubation project that you are dedicated to.  And sometimes it'll be successful, sometimes it won't, and then they can come back. But you've got to ask the engineering question because all my engineering friends, we always talk about this. You hit the first one, which is, we're a company that solves hard problems. You guys check. And you've been voted a great place to work across the board. So great culture, I can test the culture is great. The second problem is all the engineers, oh, I didn't get picked, or who made the selection? There's also self-governance going on. So you have to manage the typical engineering reaction because everyone loves their baby. Yes. So it might not get picked for radio. But you know what? How do you manage that dynamic? So yeah, it's a competitive process, by the way. And we run radio, let me talk a little bit about radio right here. We run radio much like any world-class technical conference that ACM would run or IEEE would run. We encourage an open process where people can submit papers. We encourage, we have a committee that's actually sitting and reviewing these papers. Just like any other technical conference, some of them are going to make it. Some of them aren't going to make it. It's not a black box, though. It's transparent. It's a pretty open, transparent feedback, okay?  We actually give feedback. In fact, there's a whole process here. So first of all, this year, for example, we had over 1200 submissions and we picked 200. That's all we can afford. Think about the acceptance rate right there. That is on par, if not better than most top-notch technical conferences. So that's a very high bar. Okay, and by the way, the stuff that doesn't get picked can still continue. It's not maybe they'll refine it and do better next year. Maybe they'll continue some of it. Or join someone else in the team. Exactly, yeah. You allow for people to come together. People can come together and it is completely informal. We don't mandate who comes together. They can come together. And once they get selected, by the way, the other part of this is actually helping the engineers develop as public speakers and presenters also.  Here's an opportunity for them to actually go out and present their ideas to a broad forum. And we actually help, part of it is we help coach them and build them into good presenters as well as part of this process. So for them, it's a personal development experience. This competitive dynamic, by the way, is what actually holds up the bar and quality for radio. It actually has no negative value. It's not like if you don't get selected this year, there's a bad feeling or anything. You try again next year. It's a pride just to be part of it. And succeeding the bar is a big accomplishment internally. And frankly, by the way, out of these two or 1200 submissions or so, in addition to the papers that get accepted here, about 200 of these actually are invention disclosures that eventually find their ways into patents over time too. So there's other ways these things get moved forward. This is a social benefit, also a personal benefit to grow. Absolutely. And you get the patent option. And the networking that comes here, right? The most important part, I don't know if you saw the poster session yesterday. I mean, the energy in the room is just phenomenal. The people out there who are really passionate about talking about their work and there's people out there wondering and you meet new people. In fact, for me, in my role, what I enjoy the most is, of course, getting to hear what these guys are doing, but also helping them make connections. Because I sort of look at all of R&D and then, okay, somebody here is doing something. In fact, I'll give you an example. There's somebody who's figuring out how to do, the topic was called teleportation. But it really was about fast data movement, right? And so this was a team in our core virtualization platform. And then I said, okay, hey, there's another team there that's focused on hybrid connectivity. You guys should connect because they're actually building a product that could leverage what you do. So you make those informal connections here and then off they run. You know, it's interesting. Ray Alferro and I were talking about the confluence of these markets coming together. You guys started out and in data center, you get cloud, AI now, which is big data, and now blockchain. Really interesting stuff.  We're talking off camera and I have talked with some of your folks. You guys are already kind of eyeing that way pretty heavily and I know there's work going on there. But in the intersection of infrastructure, AI, cloud and blockchain and decentralized applications is a lot of really important stuff. This is the confluence. This is the where it all has to mash together, the mash up and security, IoT and data. Not big data or AI. Data hits everything. Security hits everything. IoT's hitting everything. So do you have to tweak your R and T focus? How do you guys manage these changing confluences? Yeah, so look, we are constantly adapting and evolving what we do. It's never static. I'll give you an example from recent times. So when we got into networking, we pioneered the concept of software defined networking and we came out and initially it was all about the data center, right? It was about how do we do and connect and secure applications inside data centers? And then we saw the world changing, right? Applications are moving out to the public cloud and then more recently applications are moving to the edge to your earlier point. And so what did we do? We took that networking mission, we expanded it to now include public clouds, include the edge and that's what we just launched recently. So that's an area where things are dynamic. Our innovation moves on as I do believe the edge is going to be one of the next big areas of investment and opportunity and security is pervasive across the board. So our vision now and compasses security everywhere, right? All the way from your mobile device to the edge to and branch off with us to the public cloud and to your data centers. Anywhere where you have applications running, data setting and users, you've got to secure that. What's the big ways Pat Gels is going to come on soon. He always talks about the ways of innovation. If you're not out in front of the next wave, your driftwood is famous quote on the cube years ago. You've got to pick the big ways out.  I know you guys are working on stuff. Are those the waves you're on? Is there a new wave that no one's seeing and how do you guys look at that? I think in general, I mean, of course it's all adjacent, right? Edge computing is adjacent to what we do in IoT. So that's obviously a big area for us. Telcos, for us, you may not necessarily think of it as innovation, but they are actually rejiggering how they do their entire infrastructure. And that's a great opportunity for us, right? So at the end of the day, there's two things, right? We have innovation and then innovation correlated also to what markets we can go after that are new and can drive incremental business for us. And so the edge and telco in our view are two big, big opportunities for us. You guys are doing a great job. World-class organizations, fun to watch. It's a pleasure to interview such great smart people here. Rajiv, you're leading the team. My final question I want to ask you for the folks watching who don't work at VMware. Describe what it's like to work here. What's the DNA of the culture? Explain the dynamic, because you have, it's like a kid in a candy store if you're an engineer. Explain what's going on. So I mean, the thing that I'm, I continue to be impressed by here and I've been here for two and a half years, right? Is the quality and depth of the engineering talent that we have and the willingness to work on difficult and interesting problems. And also share that across the board, right? There is no sort of, it's very rare that we have people sitting isolated that go off and do something. People are willing to share. We work as a community together. So that really, really stands out. I've worked at many companies and I have to say, no other company really creates this kind of culture of innovation where we bring all these people together. This event radio is absolutely unique. I have not really seen it at this scale anywhere else. It's a great use case of world class in a modern era. I think you guys have the secret engineering and community focus has been a key backbone. The other thing, by the way, I would say is engineers feel that their ideas are valued and they're actually used. Something that starts out in a very small way actually could end up becoming pretty, getting a lot of visibility. I'll give you an example. For Borothon last year or so, somebody came up with the idea of using a virtual reality headset to figure out how you can actually manage your entire data center using virtual reality and pick in place. That's great for working at home. It's cool, right? It was cool. It just came out of a two-day hackathon session and what did we do with that? Well, we did that. I took that and made it a demo center stage at VMworld, at all our V forums that we run across the world. And all of us, by the way, Pat and I said, we were all sitting out there doing virtual reality demos, built on that what a couple of engineers have done in two days. Great visibility now. That's not going to go into a product any time soon, I think. But, yeah. It's a cultural example of grassroots innovation. Sparks of innovation can come from anywhere. That's right. And some of this stuff, yeah. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. This is theCUBE's coverage here in San Francisco for Radio 2018. It's 14th year annual events turning into quite the showcase for flexing and also stretching the minds of the smartest people in VMware. Of course, theCUBE's here on the ground. I'm John Furrier, back with more coverage after this break, stay with us. Thanks.


SCP-788 is a creature resembling an African carp, labio-cubi, approximately 3.2 meters in length, and composed entirely of ultramethic magma, with a skin of cracked Picritic basalt. It is currently estimated to have a core temperature of approximately 1475 degrees centigrade, though its skin temperature is typically much lower. Examples obtained from SCP-788 have shown no differentiation or internal structure. SCP-788 has been observed with simple behavior identical to that of a typical water-dwelling fish. It does not exhibit unusual strength for a creature of its size, though its sheer size and mass can result in damage to its containment cell if it becomes agitated. SCP-788 consumes several types of ore and minerals, with a preference for iron and magnesium.


Aloha and welcome to this week's edition of Business in Hawaii. I'm Dayla Nyanagida, and we're broadcasting live from the ThinkTech studios in Pioneer Plaza in downtown Honolulu. If you want to tune in live, we are at www.thinktechhawaii.com, and there you may also subscribe to our programs or get onto our mailing list. The theme of Business in Hawaii is to share with you stories of local businesses by local people. Our guests share with us how they're able to build successes in our challenging business environment. In the studio with us today is Kevin Henry. Kevin is the volunteer engagement manager and encore fellow at Child and Family Service. Welcome to our show, Kevin. Thank you very much. You've got quite a ton of, in fact, you've got two titles. No, I can barely fit it on a business card. Right. So why don't you tell us about Child and Family Service? Child and Family Service has been on Oahu for over 117 years, and we provide over, I think there's over up to 45 programs now or more, and all of these programs focus on serving and assisting what I like to call vulnerable populations. Our slogan is, one of our slogans is from twinkle to wrinkle, and that we have programs that help infants, parents with small children, small children themselves, older adults, adults, people who are dealing with different types of challenges in their lives. So in some cases it might be more economic. So we have people that come to our donation center, our Eva Family Center, and actually shop for donated items. We have counseling for victims of sexual child abuse. We have a domestic shelter for survivors of domestic violence and alternative high schools. So we have a wide array of programs to really try and meet the needs of the community. So we were talking earlier and Child and Family Service is a nonprofit organization that's not directly affiliated with the Department of Health. Is that correct? Right. Even though we do have contracts where we have certain programs where we have contracted, we are contracted to provide a particular service. We also get donations, we get grants, and other funding sources as well. So you have a varied background, from radio broadcasting to, I understand, a very sophisticated position with the city of Belview. Sophisticated. I like that. With the city of Belview. I'll use that sometime. The city of Belview, Washington. So you said that you're familiar with Belview, Washington, as you were in the Northwest. So I worked for the city of Belview, Washington, a suburb of Seattle for about 20 years. And I helped create and manage the cultural diversity program for 20 years. And thankfully it's still going on and going gangbusters right now. And that involved really bringing different factions of the community together to promote understanding, collaboration, to ease tensions. One of the reasons why the program was seen as something that was needed was because the demographics were changing. So Belview was one of these cities that in 1970 was 95% white. Today it's more like 61% or 57% white. So there was this influx of immigrants, people of different nationalities, backgrounds, languages. And when that happens, there's a certain amount of isolation that can happen because people don't connect. So my job really was to put on events, seminars, workshops, cultural events to educate people about different cultures, to bridge those gaps, to also encourage and increase workplace diversity so that when people came to City Hall, they saw the people there as a reflection of the community, which was meaning that that would be a very diverse workforce. So I managed to fortunately apply some of those tactics and strategies to this position as well. So with your experience in cultural sensitivity, if you will, building that in the city of Belview, how do you compare that to Hawaii? Where are we? Hawaii is, well first of all, Hawaii is very refreshing. In fact, what's interesting is that I'm still very much in tune with what's going on in the mainland. And there's a lot of controversy and there's political stuff going on and polarization. I go on social media and people are unfriending each other and yelling and screaming and typing furiously. And I come to Hawaii and I go, oh, I mean, I've been here for four years. But it's like I talked to somebody in Hawaii and it's like, did you hear about the police shootings? And it's like, what? What's going on? People here are very diverse. I love the diversity of Hawaii. I love the Haloha spirit. I really feel, I'm not saying that there aren't issues between groups, which need to be addressed. But I really feel like in my four years here, I've been really very much treated as an individual. It's about relationship building and my background. It's not that it's not seen or recognized, but it seems secondary to making that connection on a positive level with someone. That makes sense. Absolutely. But I love the diversity here. And we are that diverse group. I think culture is paramount to our interests, not just in community and personalized but in business as well. So tell me about your two roles at Child and Family Service. First of all, the volunteer engagement manager. Volunteer engagement. What is that about? What is that about? Well, I am trying to engage volunteers and that means there are people out in the community. And by the way, we have offices on the Big Island, Maui, and Kauai as well, in addition to our main office on Oahu, and we have some facilities on Oahu as well. But there are people in the community that have value. There are people that have skills, they have knowledge, they have wisdom, they have time, and that's who I'm trying to engage because we have, as I said, from twinkle to wrinkle, we have small children, we have adults, we have older adults. All of these people can benefit from somebody spending an hour a week, 10 hours a week connecting with them, helping sort donations, helping talk to kids about careers, helping in a variety of ways. In some cases we have volunteers who they just want to help out by working in the office. They're more behind the scenes people. So what I do is go out into the community, go on social media, have meetings with people, do public speaking to various business groups, various other groups, senior groups, to tell them about child and family service and really emphasize how valuable they can be to helping us achieve our goals of serving the community and giving back to that community. What I like about the Volunteer Program 2 is that I like to say it's kind of a menu of different options. In some cases when you want people to volunteer you have one thing that you want them to do. Every Tuesday from one to five they sort out, they file something and then that's it. In a little room somewhere we have like 10, 15 different ways you can volunteer. You can volunteer one hour a week, 15 hours a week. It's really up to you how much time you have and want to commit to giving back your time to child and family service and the people we serve. So in your role you recruit volunteers for Oahu programs or? Mainly when I first started this program about, I guess it will be two years this summer. I focused on Oahu, I was trying to kind of take one island at a time. Now in the last three or four months we've been kind of branching out to some of the neighbor islands because what will happen is for instance with the thing that's going on with the volcano on the big island there was a need for volunteers to go and give out information, resource information to the residents there, certain areas. So the need has grown a little bit on the neighbor islands and so now that I've got kind of a core group on Oahu I'm kind of branching out to Maui and kind of seeing what they need in Kauai and the big island as well. The program I might add is split into two areas in the sense that anyone over 18 can volunteer but there's a special program called Encore which we'll get to in a minute which has a focus on engaging people who are over 50 to be volunteers at child and family service. So how many volunteers does it take to make your operation work? It really varies. It's kind of a hard question to answer just because it's a variable. The more volunteers we have the more we can do and we have volunteers that kind of come and go. I mean there's kind of a transitory nature to it in that I've had several volunteers in the last two years that have moved back to the mainland. Some of them are military so they're here for two years, one year, five years. So right now I think there's a core group of probably 15 volunteers that are basically based on Oahu and then there's a few on the neighbor islands. But a month from now that could be 20 or that could be 10 so it really varies. But we feel that even if we have one volunteer we're able to accomplish something even by having them come and help in the donation center because for instance we get so many donations that they start to pile up and it's like the staff can't even get to all the donations and so those volunteers play a really important role in helping facilitate how that donation center works. There are a number of nonprofits here in Hawaii and I'm sure that a lot of them struggle with the recruitment of volunteers especially with the low unemployment rate but the volunteers are crucial to making the services happen. Tell me about some of the effective things that you do to recruit volunteers. Well what I've found is that Hawaii is the same in some ways as my work in Seattle and Washington state in that it's really about relationship building. Now I think in Washington what I notice is that I think I could send out more unsolicited emails to people I didn't know and engage them. Here it's really about getting to know people. So very often I've gone out and spoken to groups. I've gone to like I remember going to a retirement center in Kapolei and talking to some of the seniors there about recruitment. It takes time to get to know people and I think there's a certain amount of trust and credibility that's built up so then when you start to meet some of the key people in the community they then refer you to other people unlike me sitting there just sending out random emails to these groups that I find on the internet and getting no response which is what was happening initially. I was sending out all these emails and it's like well nobody's emailing me back but then I wind up sitting down to coffee with someone and they go oh I got three volunteers for you right now and boom you know next week they're in the office.   So it's much like I think a marketing person who has a product to sell I mean if you run into you know if you're a car salesman and you happen to be in Safeway one day on a Saturday when you're not working and somebody says you know my car just broke down and darn it I'm going to go buy a new car the next week. Well if you're a salesman you're going to go whoa what's that you know hey here's my car let's talk about this you're not going to just think to yourself well I'm not working right now you know until eight o'clock on Monday. So I think it's having a certain mental frame of mind is that once you open the door and leave your house potential volunteers are everywhere just like customers if you had a business. Why is volunteerism important to our business community? I think for a variety of reasons I think that for one thing the volunteer group that I have right now is very diverse and I think it's really important that if like if you have a business for instance and you know I'm not saying you're not successful at your business I think having an influx and input from different perspectives from different people can really enhance you on a personal level but more importantly it can enhance your business because you're not getting tunnel vision I mean I've run into some businesses that are somewhat rigid not so much here but back in Washington and it's like well we've this is the way we've done it for the last 20 years and I said well have you considered you know changing your marketing strategy changing your strategic plan you know things like that changing the training that you have because if you look outside the world doesn't look like it did 20 years ago a lot of times so volunteers I think bring new ideas fresh ideas one of the things that we focus on in our Encore program which we'll talk about is having youth and older adults collaborate because sometimes you think well I'm 17 whatever I got to say to a 62 year old you know well we're setting up circumstances and programs by which those connections can be made and the benefits are are mutual I think of those types of connections right we're gonna take a short break but we're gonna come back and talk about the second part of your job as an Encore fellow this is business in Hawaii we'll see you back here shortly everyone I'm DeSoto Brown the co-host of human humane architecture which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. and with the show's host Martin Desbang we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live but other aspects of our life not only here in Hawaii but internationally as well so join us for human humane architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii are you tired of sleepwalking through life are you dreaming of a healthier wealthier happier you you're not alone and that's why thousands of people tune in each week to watch RB Kelly on out of the comfort zone Tuesdays at 1 p.m. make a change get the help you need and stop sucking at life hello it's 1 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon and I'm your host RB Kelly welcome to out of the comfort zone in fact this is business in Hawaii and today we're talking with Kevin Henry from child and family service we're talking about volunteerism and its importance to the business community I think there are benefits for the volunteers but as well as for the businesses tell us a little bit more about right one thing I was I was mentioning before we came back was just that sometimes volunteers are your future employees because in a lot of cases you when you have a job opening you you know go through the resumes you set up the interviews people come in in some cases you might know the person or have a good referral or whatever but if you have a volunteer you actually get to see them in action so you can see their work style even people at child and family service have start some have started out as volunteers and wound up being employed so there's that advantage of being able to see somebody and how they work and how effective they are and how they get along with the dynamic of you know your workforce so you can get you can get kind of a preview of what this person would be like as a future employee so that's another advantage to having volunteers in addition to saving money there you go so there I'm sure there are volunteers of all ages a lot of times in in in high school even in college we encourage students to seek out volunteer opportunities to device diversify their resumes and then you have those who have entered the workforce and then you have those in the the the older portion or the non-traditional workforce so volunteerism in each of these groups what do you have to say about that about like you for instance I really encourage you to do some volunteering because as you mentioned you know a lot of times I've gone like to Campbell high school and different high schools and talked about you know okay your senior you're going to be graduating you're going to start looking for a job you have a blank piece of paper as a resume so if you can put volunteer experience down that's just as valuable as paid experience especially if you can show that you were there for a while and what you were able to do in terms of the the duties that you perform and then you get referral letters so that when you come in for that first meaningful job or just any job really you have something on a piece of paper in addition it also provides networking opportunities again you know if you might be a 17 18 year old teenager you come to work for my company I get to see hey this person's really sharp they're bright they're punctual they're reliable and then when that job opening comes about you know six months down the road that's the first person I think about so it's an investment of time and I really want to encourage it I mean I know youth want to make money I wanted to make money when I was 16 but if you can make money and even if you're volunteering three hours a week rather than sitting there you know what playing video games or something like that doing something investing time into something that won't produce anything go and start networking and volunteering at a local organization you never know who's going to you know help you reach some more important goals later on it's not always watching over who you know who knows you right some of the other people like you had mentioned like nontraditional groups sometimes I spent a fair amount of time convincing a volunteer that they're of their value and what I what I mean by that is sometimes when initially when I meet with a potential volunteer they come in and I say well you know we're doing these career talks where we're talking with survivors of domestic violence about you know how to go into a bank and open a checking account they have they need to know that and sometimes the person's a little you know nervous well you know I've never worked in a bank I'm not an expert you don't have to be an expert you have information that's valuable if you were a janitor for 25 years you have something to give so sometimes the challenge sometimes is convincing the volunteer of their value because their whole idea of volunteerism is something that's maybe a little narrow and needs to be widened business people business people are great because a lot of times business people a lot of businesses have something built into their business where their employees are supposed to devote a certain amount of time to volunteerism anyway they tend to be the easier ones we've had business groups that have come and done like a cleanup and repainted the inside of one of our shelters for instance they you know travel around these groups and do that I think again some of the harder groups might be you know retired housewife you know because I've heard more than once well what do I have to get what are these teenagers care about what I have to say you know well just your life experience about like talking about dating you know or what what to you know look for in a potential you know life partner things like that one thing I will say about being older is that you've accumulated a lot of knowledge you made a lot of mistakes and if you can help someone younger than you avoid some of the potholes that you stepped in it's a win-win situation in addition it adds value especially with the older adults in the uncle program it adds it builds self-esteem on the part of the volunteer it adds value studies have shown that people that get retired or have retired a lot of times are more prone to depression you add to that like a spouse passes away the kids are all gone maybe you don't have grandkids you have all of a sudden you have this time on your hands you know you don't get up every morning and six o'clock and go to work and come home you have nowhere to go so it's it's a little scary for some people and it's a little depressing so there's a whole untapped market of adults and especially older adults who have that time they have the knowledge they have some experience and we really want to tap into that and it's also a win for the potential volunteer or encore volunteer as well so let's back up a little bit and tell me how the on-core program came about what were you were you feeling a need how did that come about yeah the uncle program is a national program all across the mainland there are on-core people all over there's organized effective we're part of a smaller group of ten nonprofits who all received funding to run on-core programs at our individual sites so there's an organization on back east on the mainland in san francisco philadelphia all these different cities down south I think I believe in houston we there's another organization down there where an on-core fellow was hired to recruit more on-core talent so it's a national program we also are very putting a fair amount of energy into just having people reconceptualized what a volunteer is because again I think people get stuck into this will of volunteers somebody who comes you know and files or they come and put the chairs away after the church service or they you know there's a very narrow view of that so we're really trying to even use like technology as a way to connect people so with skype being and things like that a program I'm hoping to get started is called skype a mentor so it means that the kids or the teens or the adults for that matter on kawaii in the neighbor islands we can set up a skype call where somebody can talk about a particular career you don't have to be in the same physical space to collaborate and benefit from information you might receive oh that's gonna be amazing yeah yeah so really well um so you're an on-core fellow how do you become a fellow of the on-core program well usually what happens is in the case of this particular it's called a gen-to-gen program meaning just intergenerational generation to generation so for instance if you had the answer question an ad could be put out so I'm at if I'm in Houston I have an organization I have a position for an on-core fellow to run this on-core program I might hire through a through a classified ad in my case I was already working for CFS so I was just kind of offered that position because it melded really well into the fact that I was doing community outreach anyway in some cases there might be some other more traditional ways of actually hiring someone but then once you hire the on-core fellow then they go out and recruit the volunteers however there's also an emphasis on finding employment for people over 50 so you might have somebody who's over 50 hey I want to volunteer for a while but ultimately I want to get a job so both could happen they could volunteer hypothetically for five months and then they could be hired by the same organization or perhaps they could just be hired by the organization and as a result of some outreach done by the on-core fellow who was hired that all makes sense hopefully so how many volunteers do you have in the on-core program right now all together all together oh I Hawaii and Hawaii I think at last count there was about eight we have about 15 volunteers and of the 15 eight or on-core so it's kind of split almost in half and I hope to increase that number it has been bigger it has been smaller depending on who's had to leave and you know different factors that people have had to deal with that have forced them to leave the island in both cases so why would folks over the age of 50 want to be interested in joining up as a volunteer for the on-core program well we were talking about this earlier and I think that you know there's things we mentioned the word passion there's things in all of us that resonate with us in some cases it might be the environment cleaning up the environment in some cases it might be making a difference in the life of a child some cases it might be helping organize an event we all have that somewhere my task is to find in those persons what is what pushes your button what do you have a strong enough passion about where you you would think I'm gonna volunteer my time there's usually something that everybody would do because let's face it we don't work 24-7 there's things that we do after you know we're home from work or on the weekends but what are those things you know a lot of cases it's more fun oriented but fun can can come through volunteering as well I mean so I mean this for instance the organizational access surf which goes out and helps people with disabilities go surfing and do things on the water you know and I went out there and it's like almost brought tears in my eyes because I'm thinking you know wow I for one thing I have nothing to complain about when my aches and pains you know I'm in reasonably good health and these here's somebody that has to is missing two legs but they're on a surfboard so I think that also on a personal level people can really be inspired by the people they meet especially if they're less fortunate you know I think it really helps your perspective in general when you see someone that's really overcoming a challenge I have one general volunteers who's who's legally blind she's 19 years old when she's a student at UH we're just about out of time but why don't you tell our viewers if they're interested in volunteering with the Encore program how they can reach you you can call<PHONE_NUMBER> or you can go to our website at childandfamilyservice.org we are out of time Kevin but I wanted to thank you for spending time with us today amazing program I'm sure there are a lot of nonprofits out there who are definitely looking at volunteer engagement and what they can do to recruit volunteers so thanks for sharing that with us I wanted to also extend a big thank you to our production staff amazing production staff here in the studio if you would like to be a guest on our show please email your information to shows at thinktechhawaii.com business in Hawaii airs every Thursday at two o'clock and we look forward to seeing you here next week


Europe is falling apart. Since 2008, we've been struggling under the burden of austerity. Too many people don't have jobs. If they do, they are often part-time and mini-jobs. With no security and low pay. Public services are being cut or privatised or both. People look to the European Union for a solution. But instead, this is your problem. They think they can take back control. By retreating into our own nations, regions and cities. But there is another way. We can change Europe together. We can make the EU a beacon of hope once again. We can solve the Eurozone crisis. We can put idle cash back to work. Investing in a green transition. We can create jobs where people live. So they don't need to move our way to survive. We can tame the power of the banks. So they don't rule our lives. We can stop people being evicted from their homes. We can democratise Europe. To put control in the hands of ordinary citizens. We can restore hope and build a better future. For ourselves and for our children. There is an alternative. We can start right here, right now. Welcome to DM25's European New Deal. Join us. Join us. Come to us. Join us. Join us. Join us.


Black people in this country face physical and economic violence every day and all of this is taking place in the midst of a stunning, though not surprising, lack of leadership from the highest office in the land. And so we'd like to take a moment of silence to offer those who've lost their lives to racism. If you'll join me.


The International Soil Moisture Network, ISMN, is a centralized data hosting facility that collects and makes available globally available in situ soil moisture measurements from operational networks and validation campaigns. Data collecting networks share their soil moisture data sets with the ISMN on a voluntary and no cost basis. Incoming soil moisture data are automatically transformed into common volumetric soil moisture units and checked for outliers and implausible values. The database contains data of 19 networks and more than 500 stations located in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia spanning from 1952 until the present. The ISMN is rapidly expanding and will become an increasingly important resource for validating and improving satellite-derived soil moisture products and studying climate-related trends. Potential networks are invited to enrich the collection by sharing their in-situ soil moisture data. This article was authored by WA Derigo, W Wagner, Aholansen and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.