From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio and happy to welcome to the program someone we've known for a long time but actually first time on the program also a Boston area native, I believe, Jim. And so it's Jim Sullivan who's the CEO of NWN. Jim, thanks so much for joining us. Stu, it's great to be here. I'm watching you guys forever and first time and happy to be here. So we've got a lot of shared history. We both, we overlapped a little bit at a company that some people might remember was EMC before it was the largest acquisition in tech history. You've worked for a number of companies. We've covered here on theCUBE, XIV, Actifio and the like. So tell us first, NWN, it's not a company that the vast majority of people are going to know of but good-sized company, been around for a while, Waltham-based, tell us a little bit about what brought you to NWN. Thanks, Stu, yeah. NWN is a solution service provider. Been around 10 years, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues, 1,300 customers and a lot of really incredible platform offering, service offerings. And so I was really excited to be able to kind of get involved with the company and begin to look at what we could do for the industry and for customers. All right. You talk about an area that's transforming greatly. I mean, tech in general, we say that the only constant industry is change. When you talk about services, you talk about platforms, that means a lot of things to a lot of people. Maybe explain a little bit the spaces that NWN plays in and where some of the core capabilities of the company are. Sure. If you look at, as you know this, a lot of everything for digital transformation is around the end user experience. So we all want to have great access to voice, video, clean network, the ability to kind of have this great experience to collaborate with customers. So NWN, really the core offerings, unified communications, which has really always been a core of the company, the networks underpinning those communications along with a contact center, collaboration, security. And so security really wraps around everything. And then those are the core areas where we are, but the core IP of the company is the platform that can manage all those environments as a self-service function that the customers use or that our contact center teams can kind of run. Okay. So when I hear the solutions that you're talking about, the thing that comes kind of front and center in the industry that I've been hearing about, it's the CX, it's the customer experience, what is the ultimate end users? How are they interacting with? As well as the employees themselves, if you've got people at the contact centers that are running things, how are you making their jobs easier? So how does that play into what you're seeing in the market and how NWN delivers offerings in that space? So everything's really tied together, whether you have a device, a phone system, everything's going to be tied into the network and required really high security. So the management platform that we have allows customers to have that ability to provision in a real secure fashion, a device that we can kind of deliver and manage the right phone systems that we can also deliver and manage all tied into a really secure network and it can be anywhere they want. It can be private cloud, hybrid cloud or hosted cloud is how we deliver it today. Yeah, there's the cloud discussion that's going on right now. I was at Enterprise Connect early this year and everything seemed to be cloud-enabled and AI-infused underneath. From a customer standpoint, they can get a little bit overwhelmed with some of the jargon that gets thrown out there. So help explain a little bit what solutions, what is NWN build, how does it fit in with kind of the big tech companies that they probably have relationships with and has been part of the channel for many of these products. Talk a little bit about that mix. Overall, we're going to deliver a solution for the customer in those areas, right? So in a unified communications area or a network area in security. And the solution is going to be required, some hardware, a lot of services, which is our people and then most importantly, this management platform which is going to be the management capability, the business analytics, the knowledge center that kind of pull off from everybody, right? So our focus is really delivering the solution, delivering it kind of a solution as a service. So the customer has the ability that it's not outsourcing, it's not managed services, but we're going to be running the service, but they have the ability to self-provision, interact with pulling all their own analytics, all their own data in their own environment. So it's a much more interactive relationship than kind of the old school managed services of the past. Yeah, no, I like that term solutions as a service because we learned the failings of just pure outsourcing. It was like, oh, can I get my mess for less? Well, no, no, you don't want your mess. What customers need is they need to be able to deploy something today.  Oh yeah, we'll get back to you in six months maybe and here's your new bill and how that changes. In the cloud era, I need to be able to deploy something today and stay flexible to be able to take advantage of new technologies, new innovations as they come along. How do your offerings help customers stay current and drive that innovation adoption? Right, so a huge part of, and we talk about this in a lot of industries, particularly in our old kind of infrastructure days, and that everything becoming more software defined is really everywhere or cloud offerings really everywhere. And with software, these changes are happening so fast. So the customer gets an environment that's stable and secure, deployed and managed by us. But as changes happen, our team and our kind of best practices capabilities allows to interact with their end users. So you kind of drive the adoption, which a lot of time it's marketing and training and making sure the new practices sort of happen because the efficiencies gained are huge. That's sort of one. And then two is it's beginning to get adopted, you're beginning to kind of roll that out across the entire enterprise. So the customer gets that end user experience which it helps with employee retention, really helps with business ROI. And ultimately the investments that they made are now being used and they're getting what they want. So it might be excellent line quality with great business analytics in a secure environment. But it goes back down to, is the network being utilized, all the software capabilities being deployed and managed and really what's the business outcome for the customer. So this world is very much less speeds and feeds or technology or all of that versus okay, where's the customer stand today and where do they want to bring the business to and what business outcomes they look into drive. The adoption services ensures that they get the business outcomes. All right, Jim, what industries, what geographies gives a little bit of kind of the scope and breadth of your team? Right, so it's 1300 customers. More than half the customers are really large enterprises, companies like Eversource. The other half of the business is Sled, state, local education. So Yale University, really big customer, state of California, we manage over 200,000 endpoints over 400 agencies. So really some huge scale, but it really maps to a great balance in the business of Sled and enterprise accounts. And you talked about cloud, do you have some of your own data centers? How do you play with some of the public cloud and customer environments? What's kind of that mix and what do you own? Yeah, so today, customers want to have like, I don't think they quite care, but they want to have fast deployments, really agile environments, consistent costs, really effective. And so for us, we able to provide that because we can provide private cloud on-prem in their environments. We can service any public cloud for these deployments. And we also have three data centers where we can provide a cloud solution for them or a hybrid cloud solution, really mapping, particularly in the enterprise accounts, as we know, they're beginning to learn like all public cloud, little scary, but if you get into a environment where you can have really a shop that has private clouds that delivers a hybrid cloud environment for them, much more flexible, much more agile for them. It's been a perfect scenario where the predominance of our customers are deployed in a cloud scenario, managed by us, but in their data centers and our cloud as well. Yeah, right, I think a really good point there. Customers are still sorting out where everything goes and you've got to have flexibility to say, okay, it's not one or the other, it's usually more of an and in helping customers move through what they're doing there. And for us, most of these environments are really mission critical applications that are going to be rolled out, whether it's the voice systems, which is really kind of backing the underpinning the whole customer experience. It might be devices as a service. So when we kind of talk about end user experience, it starts with really the voice, the devices, it's got to be really secure, which just becomes a kind of a compliance issue. And a lot of this is all tied together into the network. So the big differentiator for NWN is the ability that we can have the management portal that really manages all these five environments together into one seamless platform that they can pull the data from. Okay, so talked about, you've got team, you've got technology, you've got really important, you've got a lot of good customers, seems like you have a good relationship. NWN's going through a bit of a transformation here. Since you've been on board just a few months now, I've had a chance to look at the website and the biggest thing for me is, I'll tell you from the old one to the new one, the new one is simpler. I really kind of grasped much faster what NWN does. So maybe speak a little bit to what NWN of today, how that's different from how we might have thought of NWN in the past. Sure, NWN been around 10 years as NWN, but it had been acquiring companies and really has incredible employees, great customers, really loyal customers and big accounts that we're strategic to. But as we really went through kind of the assessment of what's really resonating with customers, we're able to really focus all the offerings down to these five core offerings that we've been talking about. And then really have the right investments around all the IP that we've developed and really wanted to put against those five offerings and then have the customer success teams be able to be organized around that. So the company has really focused on where 95% of the business was, the ability to really put all the wood behind the arrow for those environments and for our customers to really focus. And that's about a $50 billion market in the US. So that focus area is a big space, big opportunity for growth. And a lot of it was in the predominance of our 1300 customers, they buy one or two of these offerings from us and now the ability to really expand that. But so many of these customers are so happy, we're going to kind of take it, in those industries we're in, probably about five core industries, to really kind of take it to their peer companies and really expand it in that account-based marketing sort of kind of program. Okay, so five specific offerings, we've talked about a couple of them already, unified communications as a service, of course, we talked about contact center, we touched on devices as a service, you talked about some of the devices, security and advanced technology solutions. Maybe start with security. I think one of the most important topic being discussed, I look back at my career and 10 or 15 years ago, security was what I would call top of mind, bottom of budget. And today it is often a board level discussion, there are lots of dollars, lots of investment, lots of concern around security. So what piece is the security market that does NWN play in, what's good, what are you creating and what are you working with the ecosystem and where do we need to go in that space? So for unified communications, for the ATS practice around the supporting network and devices as a service, our security offerings are for those environments, right? And a lot of it is where there's a lot of tools deployed, but customers are really okay, once something happens, an incident happens, they have a tool that identifies something that happens, but a lot of the security will be really mapping those environments that they have a secure platform, but incident response is really where we're going to really be doubling down on. So something's happened in one of those environments, what happened and then how do you respond to that? That's going to be the big focus of what NWN has been doing and kind of what we'll invest more in, it's really incident response. Okay, great, advanced technology solutions, talk to us a little bit about that. So a lot of the core expertise in the company for years has been around the network, but then that really expanded with doing full hosted unified communications. So the company today can deploy any type of networking solutions for customers along with all the connectivity, so the bandwidth, any type of next generation networks like 5G, so all of that really tied together that you have the network, the right connectivity to kind of get to the right performance and then mapping it to the SLAs that have to go with the offerings of unified communications and devices of service, because everything's going to be intertwined and you think about any like collaboration technologies. I mean, how many times have we been in a meeting where a collaboration technology is not really working but the performance is not really there? It's not that software, it's something that was tied beneath that. So NWN can really bridge the two together to have that the right networking capability, the right connectivity, so you're getting the fast connectivity right away of what really matters to the end user experience, which is that collaboration system. Yeah, we talked a little bit about innovation. Where are your customers, what's exciting you that's helping your customers move forward and where are those areas that we're still struggling a little bit? I think back, I worked in the telecom and unified communication space back in the late 90s and by now we were supposed to have the flying cars with the ubiquitous video everywhere. And while FaceTime and some things have us there a little bit, sure I used my webcam way more than I did five or 10 years ago, but yeah, maybe speak a little bit to where we're having success and where we still need to go. Number one thing for me that I learned of one of the most unique assets that NWN has is the business analytics and data capability, right? So a lot of these environments have been deployed. We've got all these multiple different environments, but what I learned of the NWN capability is we have every piece of data of all those different environments in every customer environment. So we have the ability now with our portal and they've had the ability to do this, is really any type of function that the customer wants to learn more about in kind of an automated fashion that they can self provision this data themselves, we have the data. So it could be billing capabilities of really what groups are being billed. It could be any type of compliance. So what type of calls are being made and who's doing calls, any type of productivity for call centers of what capabilities we have. So I think the biggest thing to answer your question is, one, the NWN capability is all the business data that we have that maps across multiple industries to deliver best practices, but people have been deploying networks, deploying devices, deploying phone systems, but never really having the intelligence of what you're going to do with that data to drive the business forward. And so one, it's like, got to have the end user experience be like that's like table stakes where the end user experience is great, but now how does the business use the data of how all those systems are working together to really bring forward like, okay, what business decisions do we make to move forward in terms of what's working, what's not working, and it comes back to driving the right business outcomes. All right, so a lot of effort in the last few months, focus and execution, doing the relaunch here. Let's look forward a little bit Jim, as six or 12 months from now as we look back, what are some of the key KPIs, how for those of us on the outside, do we know that NWN is executing and meeting where you want the company to go? It's 100% about customer satisfaction, right? So it's the, as we continue to expand the offerings inside customers and then add new customers will be solely how we're going to manage the business. And that's really where it's at, as customers do upgrades with us, that the predominance of our customers long-term contracts, so as customers continue to do renewals and add new offerings and kind of new capabilities that we bring to the table. And as they tell their peer companies, which is people are really excited about being references for us, then we'll continue to add more companies into the mix and more customers and grow the 1300 to 2000. Great, and for potential customers out there, are there any of the kind of key things that you would call out that they said, oh, I've got this issue or I'm looking to do this kind of project. I want to make sure to have NWN on my shortlist. I see a couple areas, right? It's everyone, it's a $50 billion market. So everyone is dealing with unified communications issues, right, in terms of what decisions they're going to make. We're an expert in that space. The device is a service, you know, really, like we manage 200,000 endpoints with the state of California. So the device of the service is really a space that not a lot of people are in. A lot of people doing devices, but really as an end-to-end service, not really a strong kind of capability. And then the security requirements are for everybody. So I think for these solutions, then to have the right service people, the right network expertise. So that five areas is kind of the core space. And I think the biggest thing that I would say to customers is, everything's intertwined, right? So it's like you can have one person that's talking about one, but if you don't really tie it all together, that's where the challenges and the problems usually kind of come from. And we're also really sizable. Like the company's, you know, a lot of large customers, but the company's hundreds of millions of dollars with a lot of core expertise over the last 10 years. Yeah, so Jim, last thing, talk about the team and the culture, you know, talk about what you want to build on, what MDMA always has.  Sure. So companies, you know, national company, so we'll be hiring sales reps, solution engineers nationally and really kind of continue to scale that out. The service desk function that we have and really the customer success team is continuing to expand and really supporting the growth of the business and really kind of driving it. So those are really the key areas. The rest of the company, the people and the culture of the company are amazing. The passion, commitment to customer success, people have been here a long time and so they have a lot of experience and a lot of kind of passion for the company. So a lot of the changes we made all came from within side, right? So everyone really rallied to be like, hey, here are the things we're good at that we want to get great at. And that's sort of been kind of the big focus. And we have really strong presence in the Carolinas all over the Northeast, California, Texas. And so we're going to really look to kind of connect all those geographies together to have one national, you know, kind of powerhouse player across the country. All right, Jim Sullivan, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the progress and look forward to watching the continued growth of NWM. You're thanks, great to be here. All right, and lots more coverage here. As always on theCUBE.net, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.


listening library presents Who Was Mr. Rogers? by Diane Bailey. Read for you by Leon Nixon. Who Was Mr. Rogers? One day when Fred Rogers was in high school, his teacher asked him for a favor. Another boy, Jim Stumball, had gotten seriously hurt during football practice. He'd be in the hospital for a while. He was well enough to keep up with his homework, though, if Fred would take his books to him. Fred hesitated. He and Jim didn't know each other well. Jim was a popular athlete. He was a star on the football team, the basketball team, and the track team. He got straight A's. He succeeded at everything, and everyone liked him. Fred was not at all like Jim. He wasn't athletic or outgoing. Fred wanted to help out, though, so he agreed to visit Jim in the hospital. Fred was surprised at how well they got along. Jim was more than a good athlete. He was a good person. Jim and Fred became friends. When Jim came back to school, he spread the word. That Rogers kid's okay. Fred's friendship with Jim helped him become more confident and outgoing, and Fred was always grateful to him. Jim had shown Fred how one person can change someone's life. Years later, Fred did the same thing. He created and starred in his own children's television program, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. Fred used the program to help kids understand they were special just by being themselves. There were always welcome in Fred's world, just like Jim Stumbaw had made Fred welcome in his. Chapter 1. A Shy Boy. Fred Rogers was born on March 20, 1928 into a wealthy family in La Trobe, Pennsylvania, not far from the city of Pittsburgh. His father


Okay, in this lesson I want to talk to you about the kind of gear that I use. A lot of people ask me about my sound and how I go about getting the sound that I get. There's really not that much to it, to be quite honest with you. I've got a Blackstar HT5 metal here which I'm using and I can take you through some of the settings. We've got the reverb level which I've got completely off because I don't need it for now. The ISF which is basically the sort of British American sweep. I've got it leaning towards the right just for a bit more low end. I've got the treble just over halfway, the mid just under halfway and the bass is all the way up. That's pretty much how I set most of my amps up if I plug into anything but I'm sort of strictly using Blackstar gear now so this is pretty much what I'm using. I just use the 100 watt version of this like playing live or anything like that but I'm just using this and this is direct out straight into the computer which we're recording this lesson with. The volume isn't up that high but the main sole reason for that is so it doesn't pick up on the mic so you can get a true representation of how the amp sounds. The overdrive, I mean this thing's got quite a lot of gain but I am using two pedals with it as well. I'm using a Maxon 808. We've taken pictures of it so you can see how it's set and what it looks like and there's a noise suppressor which is a Boss NS2 and the settings have been taken a picture of as well so you can see how that's been set up. So straight from my guitar into the tube screamer, into the noise gate and then into the front end of the amp and that's pretty much it. I haven't got the overdrive set on the pedal at all. The overdrive is completely off but the output is all the way up and the tone knob is completely down the middle. So yeah let me just play a couple of riffs for you just so you can hear how this thing sounds and I'll play a bit of lead as well on the same channel. I might kind of change the EQ settings a little bit and maybe add some reverb in there as well just so you can hear how that sounds as well. So here's just some basic rhythm with the actual all the pedals on and the amp. Okay so you can get an idea of how it sounds. I mean it comes out like really great as well and the DI on the back of this head has got a 1x12 cab selection or a 4x12 cab selection for the emulated out. I've got it set on the 4x12 setting. It just to me sounds a little bit wider and a little bit more like just a bigger sound. If you want a kind of more focused direct kind of sound the 1x12 is pretty good for that as well. There's not a huge amount of difference between the two but I just prefer the 4x12 setting. Okay right so I'm just going to play a couple of licks lead wise for you so you can hear how this sounds. The only thing I've done, I haven't changed any of the EQ I've just added a bit more gain on the amp just for a bit more playability and I've added in some reverb as well just to give it a bit of atmosphere so let's see how that sounds.


Have a good morning, everyone. It's a warm welcome to those who were joining us on our web-streaming. The purpose of this press conference is to present you with the latest E.M.C.D.E, the European europole analysis of the EU drug market. This is an analysis that we do every three years. We started in 2013, and this is for the fourth round. Unlike in previous years, where the results were presented in a single report, Ond we've taken a different approach this time and we're releasing the findings gradually in a series of online modules. Today we're kicking off with the modules on cocaine and methamphetamine. So these modules are already online. You can already consult them and in the room you have the Wifi details if you'd like to connect. So it's my pleasure to introduce the panel. We're delighted to announce the two directors of the agencies. AMCDDA director Alexi Gwisdale, a'rまず cydanslif Viewer Ysgrifennie нет. First, I will give the floor to Alexi to begin his presentation. Thank you. Good morning everybody. Mr. Catherine, welcome back to Brussels. I'm very delighted to present this report together with Catherine de Boller. That's the fourth edition of the joint drug market report published by EMC-DDA and by Europol. It's the result of a very close cooperation between our two agencies and I had the opportunity last week in my visit to Europol to thank Catherine and the colleagues again. We have done a very good job the recent years and we have new projects and new challenges in front of us and today we are going to share with you the information and the reflections about some of those upcoming challenges. This report is different from the previous one. It's becoming modular, more interactive, digital and it's also structured following the structure of the work we do for the threat assessments for our contribution to impact and SOCTAR and it is using multi-data sources of information. Today we focus on two specific topics that are relating to the European stimulants market which is cocaine and methamphetamine and we are going to report different analysis on the other substances later this year. Cocaine has become now a very well established problem in the European Union. While we can say that methamphetamine is establishing itself in a consistent and dangerous emerging threat overall in the EU. Of course the size of the two problems is still different but we see a common trend in the increase both in drug production, trafficking and drug use. What is also important to notice is the important and growing role of non-European Union organized criminal groups, Colombian criminal groups in the case of cocaine and criminal organized groups from Mexico in the case of methamphetamine but also a growing role for organized criminal groups from other regions of the world in particular from the western Balkans and I think it's of particular interest if we look at the relationship between the EU and some of those different partner countries or groups of countries and of course there is a growing impact in terms of the production of billions of euros of profits. If we focus a few minutes on cocaine what we can say is that there is a high and the highest ever availability with high purity, low or stable prices. We consider that the affordability of cocaine has reduced by 38% so the cost to get access to cocaine is easier, 38% easier over the last years. We have a growing consumer market following the pressure of the offer on the consumer basis and we have at local level a growing problem with a small free-base market which is crack cocaine use also called free-base and that is characterized by high risk both for safety, security and public health. Together those events are shaping a different role for the EU in the international trade of cocaine trafficking and we also observe a dynamic European ports management with the growing use by organized criminal groups of secondary ports so the picture today is not only about Rotterdam or Antwerp but with plenty of other ports and you can even find some very good references and analysis in some podcasts or new papers. For instance, recently there was a podcast from Le Monde on the situation in Le Havre port in France and you have all the situation in other port like Marseille as you know there are a lot of challenges associated to drug trafficking and drug consumption in that city. It's not the only one. We see record seizures and of course what is more new in the recent years is the fact that we observed now in Europe the arrival of all forms of cocaine and the most surprising for me is the fact that we find cocaine paste and cocaine base that are being transformed on the territory of the European Union and those have not been detected through seizures but only through the seizures of the laboratories and I'm sure that Kathleen and the colleagues from Europe will share their analysis on that situation and as I said there is a growing impact in terms of risk for security and safety but also for public health. If we look at methamphetamine the size of the market is much smaller but it's fast expanding and actually there was an increase in the seizures on the territory of the European Union in the last years by 477% which is very, very important increase. We see an increase in the seizures but also in the production of methamphetamine on the territory of the EU with signals of increased use and I would like to flag the fact that until five, seven years ago the use of methamphetamine essentially under the form of pervitin was localized in Czech Republic a bit expanding in Slovakia and a few years ago for the first time through the wastewater analysis a laboratory detected some traces of methamphetamine use in Estonia and in Finland and it was a real surprise for Finland because there was no history whatsoever of methamphetamine use and following the following research that was done after once we can see that now there is not a big size but still a growing problem of methamphetamine use also in Northern Europe. Another characteristic is the industrial scale of the production and the capacity with the involvement of cooks chemists coming from the Mexican cartels and the development of crime as a service which means that traffickers producers and organized crime are providing a broad set of services that actually allowed to sell and equip any kind of laboratory for the production of synthetic drugs. That's a very worrying change and that it is very noticeable compared with what was the situation a few years ago and then finally I think it's important to mention that as we have highlighted and informed a few years ago there is a change in Afghanistan that started some years ago driving to the production of methamphetamine coming more directly from the plant Efedra or Efedrin and even if it's not yet fully documented we don't know if there are huge quantities arriving to Europe yet still potentially there is a possibility for the methamphetamine produced in Afghanistan to come to Europe why because it's very cheap to produce it and the yield in the production makes it easier to to sell and to use it directly so high again a high potential high risk for safety security and for those who have been looking at breaking bad or following other news looking at the situation in the US in Australia or in South East Asia I think one of the things we certainly don't know don't want is to have a real epidemic on methamphetamine use or crystal meth as for instance there is there are some pockets of use for instance in Athens so in a nutshell the situation we depict in those two analysis it contributes to the overall analysis we make which is that drugs are everywhere everything can be used as a drug and everyone can be the victim or the object of the the actor or know something someone having a problem of addiction to one or another substance and in this case we have a strong potential for those problems to be the perfect storm we have depicted a situation that is at risk especially for the vulnerable groups and the war in Ukraine certainly is not making the situation easier just because of its negative impact on the economy that in turn may have also an impact with the groups that are more vulnerable in the society so what can we do the report is presenting a set of recommendations for policy and action following an inline with the structure as I said for Socta and Impact certainly as more production is taking place in Europe both for methamphetamine and cocaine especially from cocaine paste and cocaine base we have a bigger challenge as far as precursors and the control of chemical precursors are concerned and I think we need to update our perception and understanding of the problem because more than ever when we speak about drugs in Europe it's not only about injecting drug users that for the moment represent still an important part of the problem but proportionally a smaller one thank you very much thank you very much alexie and now over to you Catherine the ball thank you thank you thank you alexies for the floor and and the colleagues ladies and gentlemen of the press it's an opportunity again to be here and as alexie said it's a tradition that a Europol and EMCDDA we work jointly on the evaluation of the situation of drugs in the EU and it's a tradition that we want to keep as long as possible the two markets that are presented today the cocaine market determines largely the drugs landscape in the EU and methamphetamine as alexie said is an expanding market for us law enforcement it is really an important to understand how these markets are developing to understand who are the criminal actors behind these markets and what can we do about it how do we have to tackle this how do we have to deal with this situation because as you understood it's a very difficult situation we are in we know now that almost 40 percent of the criminal networks operating at the international level reported to Europol are active in drugs trafficking and we expect that this will increase because drugs remains one of the most lucrative markets that are existing so for us for Europol and for the law enforcement community in the European Union it is a priority to to track to tackle drugs and I would like to start with a positive note step by step we are becoming more successful altogether in tackling the criminal networks behind never before there have been as much as seizures as the last four years seizures arrests and laps that we detected the operations you all heard about anchor chat sky and trojan shield have given us insights into the market that we never had before and in particular the financial transactions behind and the modus operandi used by the criminal organizations these insights they have also served as input for the reports that we present today let me outline some of the concrete insights we can take away from the reports that we present to you today and let's start with the home front and the worrying increase of the methamphetamine market in the EU the reality we all know is that the EU is not just a destination area in drugs trafficking it's also a significant region of origin and a region of transit and criminal networks they produce a very wide range of synthetic drugs in the EU which are distributed globally including for instance destinations as Australia and Japan we see an increasing number of drug laboratories active in the EU producing synthetic drugs and in particular methamphetamine the trafficking and the industrial scale production of methamphetamine is growing it's a growing problem for the EU as methamphetamine is a generator of many millions of euros of illicit profits for those trading in this substance the presence as mentioned also already by alexie of central and south american actors in the EU in synthetic drugs is a fact on several occasions multi ton quantities in methamphetamine produced in south america have been seized in the EU and most of the time it was coming from Mexico and what is also a very worrying trend we see is that specialized chemists operating from south america are also active in the labs here in the european union it highlights the international scale of the issue of the fact that it is dangerous and that it is highly profitable that we encountered this in the EU today it's also clear that it is a criminal service industry that is very sophisticated and it has grown and is still growing all the time some EU based criminal networks have specialized in and deal exclusively in the logistical supply chain and in the logistical services for criminal organizations for this synthetics drugs production or they are responsible for the transport or they are responsible for the recruitment of the people who need to work in the labs the industrialized methamphetamine market is an increasing threat to our society indeed not only from the viewpoint of the criminal actors but also the health impact cannot be underestimated on the cocaine market the seizures of cocaine were never so high in the past four years this shows that low enforcement activities are becoming more and more successful but drugs trafficking and the fight against drug trafficking is an uphill battle what do we see not only the corruption increased but in particular the corruption is more worrying because of the intimidation of port workers in our EU harbors more and more port workers are threatened by criminals in and around the ports or they are offered large large amounts of money to support the trafficking of drugs another worrying problem is the use of violence violence nowadays is a key feature for criminal organizations to make sure that they are the strongest in their business area the violence has also a direct impact on citizens on the streets because we see people dying on on the streets in the european union and lastly clearly visible is the waterbed effect when criminal organizations see that police interventions are more structured and organized in certain areas they replace their field of action they will always stay in the harbors where the volumes are big but they will also look for alternatives and that is what we see now we see really a waterbed effect towards for instance harbors as duncag or harbors in spain and italy even germany due to this effect what is helping drugs criminals is the containerized maritime trafficking they use the containerized maritime trafficking for the traffic of cocaine through the major harbors like rotterdam and antwerp and we see even with all the actions of the law enforcement community that this continue to grow and also increasing numbers in the smaller ports how do we approach this for us it's very important that we have to recognize that drugs cocaine methamphetamine that we systematically need to prioritize our investigations against high value targets which pose the hard the most important risk to our societies and we need to do this in the framework of international operational task forces so we need to work together and we need to put the people the investigators together to develop actions that are intelligence led to tackle the criminal groups behind in the drug economy we also need to go against the chief executive officers those who are holding the key positions in the criminal organization and we have to work on their money flows we have to trace the assets and we have to go through confiscation at Europol and the law enforcement with the law enforcement partners what do we do we recently re-established the drugs unit we did not have a drugs unit anymore and the aim is to pull the resources together and to pull our efforts together so that we really can focus on high value targets orchestrating the drugs trafficking and we are also developing a drug intelligence fusion platform at Europol it aims to synchronize all the efforts that we undertake in the European Union and with our international partners related to the drugs criminals international cooperation of course is key we have key partners globally that we can trust we have our partners in the united states of america the the drug enforcement agency is for us a very important partner we have liaison officers from colombia at Europol and colombia just decided to send extra investigators to Europol to support the operational task forces in the headquarters and soon we will have brazilian investigators also at the headquarters in the hake to support also these operational task forces and the last years we invested heavily in our data analysis capacities in order to make use of the information that we got out of the big operations like encrochette skyer cc among other sources we can say from a law enforcement perspective that a lot have been has been achieved in the fight against drugs but as the two reports show we we still have to go the way we are not there yet and we need to double down on our efforts it is clear that we need an integrated approach that we need a lot of information exchange and sharing not only at european level but that we trusted partners all over the world investment in prevention is of key importance and harm and supply reductions reduction is very important Europol is there to support the member states in the union and member states with whom we have an operational agreement for us it's a key priority it will remain a key priority and we are very happy with the cooperation with emc dda because it gives us good insights in what is going on on the drug market and also with them we can work further on this excellent collaboration and develop action plans to that to tackle the criminal groups behind thank you thank you very much thank you so we'll now open the question and answer session so the questions could be put in english and if we can focus on the content of today my colleague sonia here will be going around with the microphone yep so if there are any questions please end up or could you um state your media organization and to whom you're addressing the question thank you my name is in the beginning i'm internalist from mexico from a universal newspaper i would like to know europeals threat assessment of the mexican drug cartels how europe already is threat and about fentanyl what is the situation in europe and if fentanyl could be the next next next stage of mexican-dutch belgium collaboration okay thank you so good morning thank you for this question indeed we see a clear link uh europe mexico um mexican uh people drugs criminals from the cartels are active or active on the european soil chemists from mexico come to the european union um because they are specialized in the production and in the use of metamphetamyl so we use we see that they are active in the labs we had incidents with mexicans one dead two found on the streets in the netherlands for instance coming out of an explosion of a lab um we are worried about fentanyl we don't we don't see it yet uh in in a huge number on the european soil but we are worried because we know that the mexican chemists they are responsible for the production of them of the fentanyl for northern america so it is a worrying trend to us and we we have to look at the possibility that also here the production of fentanyl could uh could start yeah yeah what what i what i could add regarding fentanyl is that you probably know that the the situation in the u is different from the us for instance uh regarding the epidemic of fentanyl in fact on the territory of the european union fentanyl's we detected fentanyl's already years ago for the first time together with europeal through the european early warning system on new psychoactive substances so i would say we have had a first wave of nps uh belonging to the family of fentanyl's what we see is that uh and we will have a more recent analysis to be presented to you in june the 14th of june when we present the european drug report um and you will see that for the moment we see that uh the the evolution of the the arrival and the consumption of fentanyl is not as important as it was years ago now uh katlin said very well katlin said very well we have a huge potential for industrial capacity of any kind of synthetic drugs in europe so it doesn't mean that if there was an increase in the production of fentanyl there would be no clients for it so certainly we need to remain uh cautious and and to monitor and to continue the actions uh from the law and force community but for for the moment what is the drive in the us is an epidemic about the opioids consumption that was partly generated by abusive prescription of painkillers using containing opioids which is completely different uh so we we don't have reasons to be exaggeratedly optimistic uh but certainly given that the situation and the context are different uh for the moment we we don't see that as as a risk or a threat so important as the threat of methamphetamine morning chef portmans from belgian magazine trends you've established the role of the EU operationally within these two markets could you give us an idea of the EU's role financially is it a financial center within these markets or what role do does the EU or do EU member states play in in in those terms thanks from a law enforcement perspective for instance customs authority police authorities they cooperate together to tackle drugs it's a priority in most of the member states because it's also a priority at european level and these priorities are determined by the ministers of interior on european level so we can say that on european level there is a good cooperation and understanding in between the member states what we see at europeal we organize specific organizing actions related to drugs to the fight against drugs and we have grants to support the member states in in this fight against drugs at EU level the important development is also the port authorities they cooperate more and more we have for instance the port working group where you have the port of Amsterdam of a pardon Rotterdam antwerpen and Hamburg working together to have a good picture of what is coming in what are the threats where are the gaps in our system and who can we learn from one another and this is very important to europeal is also part of this and what we try to do is to have a good intelligence picture because before we start with operations we have to see what is going on and we can say that the last years our intelligence picture is much better than it was before that's why we have also these high numbers of seizures because we can work more led by the intelligence we gather as a alexis spoke about the western Balkan also with these countries we have more and more change related to drugs criminals and to import and export of drugs in in their region so when we have a good intelligence picture then we start with operational task forces it's always member state driven europeal supports with data analysis and then we decide together how we will tackle the different criminal groups behind if i can add they did a fantastic job at europeal and with the order of police forces with dyncro chart and sky cc and basically what it shows it's what together with europeal we say for years that we need to update the perception of what is the drug situation we face Catherine said in her presentation i did not mention to avoid to repeat but there is a growing problem of corruption in the EU and that problem of corruption among other things has been is reflected by the partial analysis of the huge amount of data they managed to collect through and crochet and and sky cc the problem today is to make sure that the member states will allocate the means to fight even better together against money laundering and also against corruption what what i think is extremely useful is to see if you look at the situation in the member states all the investigations that took place thanks to anchor chart and sky cc you have plenty places in all your member states where nobody would have ever believed that there were drugs or storage of drugs or production or trafficking and and it reflects that it is everywhere so as it is permeating the society also because there is a variety of substance use much more different and disseminated than before this leads to a false perception that injecting drug use heroin use is not so important so drugs it belongs to the past in fact the old drug use belongs probably partly to the past but we talk about the drug and substance use of today and of tomorrow and i think this is why the those terabytes of information that were collected through those those operations and the intelligent i would say the intelligence it may generate when they will manage to digest those mountains of information will need then to be used by the member states to strengthen their efforts and coordinate them even better but the collective tools exist and we have the EU strategy and the action plan that are supporting that what we what we also see is the real infiltration of the drugs money in the in the legal economy and that is really a problem because it undermines the trust in your societies it undermines the rule of law and but it's it's clear that this is happening at the moment that is why we also give a lot of attention to financial investigations because we need to link the two of them and we need to go after the money flows because remote coordination from drug kingpins at the moment is essential so you have the organizers in the united arab Emirates are in brazil for instance but the work is done here they stay of course there because for money laundering activities it's better they have good logistical hubs over there and they are out of prosecution in the in the countries so for them it's an advantage system and that's also something we discover this communication and this remote coordination through the big cases that are ongoing good morning Samuel Petruca for the Associated Press i think mr gosdale mentioned the highest level of purity for cocaine in your preliminary speech what are the reasons for that and does it pose an extra threat to public health okay thank you thank you very much for the question and i invite also my colleagues if they want to complement my answer do not hesitate because we have the the lead project responsible for the cocaine analysis and also the lead responsible for the for the report on metafetamin i think one of the fact there are many factors the the first factor i think is that since the the the opening of the peace negotiations with FARC between FARC and the and the colombian government years ago we have seen a dramatic increase in the production of cocaine in colombia so that's i would say that's that's a factor that that means from the origin of the places of production there was a huge increase what what i i know has also changed is that there have been improvement in the chemical processing and the yield of the culture and the production of cocaine so it's not only that they produced more but the yield in the cultivation and the chemical processes have made that cocaine there was more cocaine produced and and of high quality and and and and and then this means that as there is a huge quantity and there is no problem of unfortunately despite the huge amount of seizures and since 2017 they have only increased or a year on year what we see is that the the purity is not changing which means that for the moment we we don't know exactly you know the standard question we will never find the final answer what is the real size of the problem the real dimension but certainly the fact that despite all the seizures cocaine is still remain very pure means that probably there is no there are no consequences yet of the efforts of law enforcement that would mean that for the people who are using drugs they would notice that the purity has changed so that's one factor and another factor which i mentioned and and i expressed my surprise if i see if i look at the evolution in the recent years is the fact that now when laboratories have been seized not through standard or normal seizures we have detect on the territory of the EU laboratories that were transforming cocaine paste and cocaine base and and there the the the two risks that i see is first it it seems that it creates or it closer from some potential producers of chemical precursors this means that there is also potentially a risk in term in terms of public health because from cocaine paste and cocaine based it is possible to produce another variety of crack i i i mentioned variety because the crack that is used in europe is produced from from from the the salt from chlorhydrat while when it is the one that is used in latin america is produced from from cocaine based and cocaine paste which means potentially more crack available which is highly addictive and with the highly negative consequences for health so all together there are certainly other factors i don't know if loran wants to to add some elements but those are as far as i know the the main factors and and what is really amazing and that's what was presented also by catrin from the the result from the investigations led or coordinated by europe all is that this tent tent this trend for the moment is not even stabilizing so the which means we we need to continue to to be extremely careful uh and and and as we say in the analysis you can find in the report uh there is no simple question like why is it in antwerp or why is it in Rotterdam because the the it's like any commodities market i think one of the biggest change in the last five to ten years is that now it's circulating all over the globe in containers even heroin was seized in the port of hamster dam two years ago one ton in the container i think it was the first time ever and before nobody would have imagined that we would have 200 tons or 300 tons almost seized in one year because potentially that's such an amount of money and luckily for the moment there are not yet enough consumers to consume it so as catrin said we need to invest not only on safety and security but also in public health in prevention and that's one of the topics that was discussed by the member states at the council of the EU meeting of the horizontal working party on drugs two years two days ago there was a specific thematic debate on that um do we have any more questions yep the matriad o mesterlau gennals franspress to to follow on this particular topic um okay can we have an idea with maybe figures on how it it evolved the this precise question of transformation of of coke uh in the EU because we are usually talking about um synthetic drugs laboratory in in lambour for example in belgian or in the netherlands but is can we have a precise concrete idea on the extent that that took in the maybe in the last three or four years of this transformation of coke how many laboratories were there seizures in in in which countries of the EU okay first if catrin wants to answer but lorand then can give you the precise figures regarding the the laboratories and the seizures i can just say for the seizures for instance um we thought we had the record seizure in um 2020 because we the figures we received from the different member states we seized in the european union 214.6 tons in 2020 but now 2022 we see already until now the seizures got 240 tons so there is an increase in seizures but we also expect there is an increase in in the drugs market globally because it is um a very lucrative business and it remains a very lucrative business but on the seizures uh on the specifics related to drugs and the purity i am lor lanylai workers scientific analyst and the leader of the cocaine analysis so on the labs between 2018 and 2020 45 labs were detected in mostly the netherlands including 11 in spain and two in belgium cocaine labs what these labs were doing was transforming extracting cocaine from carrier materials such as plastic or charcoal um in which it was chemically integrated so d integrate the cocaine from the carrier materials and when you do that what you obtain most of the time is cocaine base and this cocaine base needs to be transformed into cocaine hydrochloride uh before it can be sold to consumers okay so um low enforcement in holland uh told us that at least 10 of the of these 45 labs that were seized in this three-year period had a capacity to produce 100 to 200 kilos of cocaine hydrochloride a day okay uh that's if you transform into weeks 1.4 tons a week um i'm not very good at mouth but it months it's six something tons a month of cocaine hydrochloride okay so it's a very very decent amount um the other information is also uh indicating that these labs in europe are sophisticated in the sense that they use equipment that seems to be of higher grade than the equipment used for example in colombia because the equipment is made here in europe most likely by people who previously manufactured equipment for uh the production of amphetamine and mdma and also meth uh in europe one two the chemicals used in europe come from uh as far as we know uh industrial grade uh uh producers of chemicals again a difference in colombia most of the chemicals that are used are made in illicit laboratories making precursor chemicals okay so and they do not reach the grade of industrial quality they are pretty good grade and they produce pretty high purity cocaine in colombia but in europe all these elements uh together with the presence of some colombian chemists in the labs indicate that probably production of cocaine hydrochloride in europe is results in a high quality product um on the purity question if i may adjust two things basically um a lot of cocaine is being produced incredible amounts probably historically very high amounts and because of the increase in the efficiency of the process that alexi mentioned all of this cocaine is very high but maybe not all but a large proportion of this cocaine is very high purity um and this is sold to a number of actors who are competing with each other to sell it on the market so obviously they have an interest in trying to sell the purest product the higher quality product so that's one factor explaining why purity doesn't stop increasing in europe another one which is more perhaps anecdotical but we have noticed that in the past the cocaine that was sent from colombia to europe or to the us was adulterated with other substances cutting agents such as levamisol for example right in the lab in colombia or in peru nowadays the cocaine that is seized in direction to europe or to the united states from colombia from south america in general is much less adulterated some of it is extremely high purity 97 98 purity it's a high purity this means that the latin americans have stopped adulterating the cocaine at the source and the most of the adulteration takes place here in europe in facilities dedicated to adulterating the cocaine but again because they are in competition they can't afford to cut it too heavily otherwise you know people would turn to another dealer who sells better quality product thank you loron one of the things i can add is that one of the of the actions we would like to to do more to develop in the future for the moment there is a partnership as kathryn mentioned with the dea including with their drug profile project in the future it would be good for the youth to have also the capacity to cooperate and to to develop to contribute to this work on on drug profiling and and as you can understand talking today about all those changes on the cocaine market and the changes on the methamphetamine market it's even more important than before to conduct profiling and to support profiling at u level because basically it would tell us much more even than before about the the production processes the chemical processes where those substances are coming from and of course in some cases what are the adherence and the risk for health and and second and last point what is what is also a significant change that i did not mention because we probably will further elaborate in june for the european drug trend report is the fact that poly drug use is becoming also a standard practice so you have countries where for instance you have an increase in the drug related death associated to cocaine use combined with benzodiazepines which is also something different uh that uh that uh until recently until some years ago i would not pretend it did not exist but uh there were no cases reported to us so this means the the the addictive behaviors are in any case also becoming more complex and therefore we need to integrate even much more the work on the on law enforcement the forensic labs the toxicology labs and and the potential impact and benefit of this information for strategic analysis but also for public health interventions okay thank you uh any more questions no no more okay um all right so thank you very much for that so just to let you know that in the room we have various experts who can be giving um interviews after the session along with the directors um we also have yan here who is communication from europeal so um come to me or to yan if you need an interview um yeah we have various experts who can help you with that so i think that's that's all from us uh we'll wrap up the press conference now um thank you very much to all those who watched on the streaming the streaming will now end and in the room we can have a chat and have a coffee okay thank you very much bye bye


Hello everybody, welcome back another quick mid-journey tutorial. In this one, I'm going to show you how to create consistent characters in version six. We're going to use some new functionality that just came out a couple days ago. And I'm going to show you how to do this in like two or three minutes, Max. I see lots of 15 minute videos. This is a quick thing to do. Let's go. Here's an example. Here's a lady, a picture I've got of her and then bang, I put her in there. I changed up some prompts and here we go. We've got her reading a book. Three of these four images are quite good, even though she's got a little bit too much of that plasticky look to her skin, but that's OK. Her image is also kind of a little bit plasticky.  And then here we go. Here's another example. The bottom left one's good. The bottom right one's good. The top right one's pretty good. I mean, they're all pretty good. And then here she is in cyberpunk style and it is her exact face. This isn't a consistent character. This is like a perfectly consistent character. All right. How did I do it? I'm going to show you. Start your timer. We're looking at a two minute process. First step, grab an image that you want to work with. I'm going to grab this image here of this redheaded lady that I've just saved here. I'm going to drag and drop it into discord here into the mid journey bot. And then I'm going to press enter. Once you've done that, you're going to have an image in here. You have to press enter or this won't work, by the way. It's a little weird. Then when you have the image here, right click on it and just go copy link. We're going to use that in a second. So we've copied the link. Now all you need to do is this forward slash imagine. And then we're going to go attractive. We don't have to do that even but redhead redhead lady reading a book. OK, so we've just got a prompt in there. So we want her reading a book. Now I'm going to hit spacebar. Then I'm going to hit the dash twice dash dash C R E F. This is character reference or C ref as they call it. And then I'm going to hit spacebar. And now I'm going to copy in that link I saved earlier. So I'm just going to command V. I'm on a Mac. If you're on a PC, it's control V and paste that in there. Now the last step is if I want her to be wearing the same outfit, then I'm just going to go dash dash C W space 100. What this means is it's just going to leave it as is. If I want the mid journey to try on some different outfits, maybe put her in a pink outfit and a blue dress or something like that, or just have some latitude to make some changes. I'm going to press C W dash dash C W and I'm going to press zero. So that changes her her dress, but it keeps her face the same. So let's just do it regularly. It's going to be dash dash C W 100. I'm going to hit enter and then watch this. And when I come back, you'll see what we got and we'll call it a day. All right, welcome back. So let's just click like I can already tell these are outstanding. I'm going to click on it here. Remember, this is the original image.  Bang, look at that. Look at this top left image. That is fantastic. The bottom right one is fantastic. The top right one is pretty good, but she's got a little bit of a vacant stare there. And the bottom left one is a little off, but those ones are great. I would just hit you for to upsample or upscale the fourth one. Upsample the first one. That is it, guys. That is how you create amazing, consistent, consistent characters in seconds. Thanks for watching.


I think sometimes even we've said, okay, so education is the enemy, I don't know that it is the enemy, a bad heart is the enemy, and the way in which we express that heart is the enemy. So let the enemy be the enemy and not put something else in this place. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode. Today we have Roseanne Ballman and Vince Beiler with us. This episode is a little different than what we've done in the past. In season three, Vince did a few episodes with us and we had various comments and feedback that came in from that. And we thought we should do a follow up episode to explain some of those things and dive a little deeper. So without further ado, let's jump right in Vince. Would you mind introducing yourself for everyone? Yeah, name is Vince Beiler, formerly of Lancaster, Pennsylvania area. I moved around a little bit since then. Right now, my wife and I, Lydia and our four kids, we live in Cambridge and I'm working on a PhD in Hebrew Bible there. And Roseanne. My name is Roseanne Ballman. I'm a nurse in Southern Ontario. I've been teaching nursing at a community college for, I guess it's my 15th year. So I've actually spent probably as many years in academia as out. Okay, fascinating. So one of the episodes we did with you last, Vince, addressed this whole concept of does academia affect our faith and how these things work together? Jeff from the UK sent in this comment says, I've been a Christian for 47 years. He lives in East Sussex in the UK said, I have a question on your source of information regarding the percentages of Christians in various places. And I think he was referring in your episode there about how you said there's a high, a high percentage or a higher percentage of Christians living in places like Cambridge or Oxford versus other parts of the UK. He says, I don't know where your statistics come from, but some of the percentages you speak of for Oxford and Cambridge just don't add up. Some of the youth coming out of school and going to university these days are secular with maybe a small percentage of Christian the fastest growing belief system in the UK is Islam. He doesn't really cite where he's what experiences he's talking from but I'd be curious, could you just clarify that Vince? Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a good point. And what I said was taken from somebody who just gave me a 10% figure. Of course, that's very low. That means 90% aren't church of the population of Oxford or Cambridge. But let's just say that it's it's 10% and elsewhere it's five that means it's higher than other things all things being equal details aside. The point wasn't really you know here it's more church here it's not is it's 5% is it 6% is it exactly what person plus academia equals less faith and that's just sort of the way we think about it. And that doesn't need to be the case nor should it be the case I understand why people say it's the case. But that's really all that's that was really the basis of my point. So really just addressing hey let's look at that assumption and not just say that that's the case unilaterally across the board. Think a little deeper about it is that is that kind of what we're trying to get out here. Yeah, I think we just need to call the question certain narratives and say this is just this is just the way things go it may go that way. There are other reasons that may go that way to I mean just personally I think a bigger reason for secularism is wealth than education. I don't think that argue they go in tandem but I think money has a lot of problems and of course Jesus talked a lot about money and he didn't talk much about education. Really that's the thing that he had a big problem with a lot of cases that in pride or two huge things. So you could challenge that and say well you know Jesus did it this many why don't you see we're getting this set the point is Jesus made some really strong points in these areas and we do well to listen to them. I think sometimes even we've said okay so education is the enemy. I don't know that it is the enemy of bad hardest the way which we express that hard so let the enemy be the enemy and not put something else in this place. Does that make sense. Yeah, that does know that's that's clarifying and helpful and Jeff if you're watching this thanks for your comment and let us know down below what you think. Yeah, it's it's good things to think about. Okay so another person and I don't believe this is a real name so I'm not even going to give it but they said I don't even know where to start such a troubling discussion. Sixth graders are unable to understand the Bible they say which I think is referring to one of the things you said Vince about at a younger age is there certain things we can't understand or sometimes we can have a overly simplistic view. And then this person goes on to say does he actually believe a 12 year old cannot understand anything in the Bible. Why are we determining what an age group can or cannot understand. And then I think they're quoting you saying we have a naive reading of the Bible what does that even mean what does simplicity have to do with anything.  We understand more as we grow. I'm not entirely sure what this person is getting at. But I would love to hear. Yeah, maybe yeah what what would y'all's response be that. Rezan what what do you think of this. I wasn't sure if we were sort of taking out of context what what Vince was actually trying to say in the first place. I had to think of the pilgrim's progress story, which I loved as a child. I understood the basis of the story. But as an adult I see a lot more connotations a lot deeper meanings more levels and so on. And I think about that in terms of children understanding scripture as well. They can probably understand the basic storyline. But it becomes richer and deeper with maturity and time. I don't know Vince is that sort of what you were getting at. Yeah, I like your analogy that Roseanne and I thought of when I saw this comment. My father was very fond of quoting Mark Twain on this point. He says it's not the supposedly Mark Twain said that it's not the parts of the Bible. He doesn't understand and bother him. It's the parts he does understand. So of course children can understand and again I don't think that was my point. I was I was basically saying what Roseanne is saying that sometimes nuance is a good thing. And we have tended to go into one camp, which is to say everything is simple. We flatten the biblical narrative into something that's easily compressed into it's tweetable, if you will. We do it a disservice in doing that because that isn't the Bible, of course. For the Bible that are perfectly treatable. But that doesn't mean you can sum it up that well. Any discussion substance can't be summed in a tweet. So if you want to say something well it's going to take some time. It's going to have some complexity. It's going to have some nuance. And even if it's simple, it's still that way. And of course we know that if the Bible is so overwhelmingly simple, why do we study it all our life? Why do we say that this is something worth studying for the rest of your life? What reading we're reflecting on if it's so simple? Because it's simple but it's not. And that's the deception and we shouldn't kid ourselves on that. I don't think I hear Vince in that suggesting that a person has to be educated or a certain age to start comprehending those things because we have people who their cognitive challenges lead them to force them into a simple understanding of things and I think Scripture speaks to them as well. So really this strikes me as more about understanding the bigger context and the nuance and being okay with the fact that the Bible is rich enough it will take a lifetime of study and that's a good thing. Am I hearing both of you correctly on that? Yeah, I think so. I think it's humility more than anything. I'm not a fanboy for education as such. I certainly don't want to be heard in that sort of way. But I think if our view is we have that one covered, it's a cocky complacency that I think really bothers me. That is an issue more than how much you know or don't know. If you're giving it all to God, he can work with that. If you think you've got it covered, that's a different sort of problem. Okay, so I'll move on to the next comment we had. This is from Matthew. He says this, so many nearly all quote unquote evangelical churches are nothing more than group therapy, i.e. six ways to defeat the giants in your life, he says. Going on to say they never interact with the difficult theological topics. So they send junior off to university and for the first time he is sitting in front of a well-dressed, smooth-talking professor who is bringing up topic after topic that the young believer has never heard address and he shakes him to his core because he has no foundation. We must address the deeper issues and show that there are answers. So he's not as much of a question but adding some perspective here. Yeah, what do you all think of what Matthew has to say here? Does he have a valid point? Many of our Anabaptist churches practice the idea of having some sort of instructional meetings for young believers connected to their baptism. And in those instructional meetings we attempt to give them some foundation.  So I don't feel like we're sending people out with no foundation. Perhaps what we don't model as well is how to take a new idea, analyze it, compare it to your foundation and decide what to do with it. Is it something that you wish to adopt into your paradigm? Is it something you wish to separate yourself from? Sometimes we don't model that kind of thing well, that you actually take an idea, analyze it and make a conscious decision about where it goes, whether it gets integrated into your paradigm or whether it's not something you want to be part of or whether it is. It's like examining the context and points of view and different perspectives well without automatically just... Yeah, this sense that anytime we run into something that we disagree with we just turn and run the other direction and never understand the broader context or the different perspective. And then, like this person is saying, you end up in college where you may not be able to do...  I think the caution for some people is that faced with a new idea a young believer might just swallow it, assimilate it, go with it or as you said, totally debunk it without even thinking about it. And so yeah, sometimes I don't know. Is it the foundation we're lacking or is it modeling how to work with new ideas? Because they're going to come up in or out of academia. You're going to meet at some place. Yeah, and these are things that will face you and you are going to have to face them and use your brain, I guess so to speak or reason through and pray through these things and work through them. Yeah, it's not always easy. Yeah, that's some great points. Do you have anything to add? Well, professors I've had, not all, they aren't smooth talking or well dressed. They come with different socks on and sandals. Sandals, that's what I've experienced. I've heard much smoother talking preachers than I have professors with the content. And so they're a bit of an acquired taste and they know quite a bit about their inner subfield. The bigger issue is they know a whole lot more than you do and your quick answer doesn't begin to plumb the depths. Are you supposed to address something you've never heard before? Sometimes, again, I guess it is advocating knowing some of these things. That's a really good point because there's sometimes there's this sense that well, clearly we're right because we have the Bible and we're just right and whenever we run into these people who disagree with us we should be able to put them in their place in too well-placed sentences and boom, pal, we have it all sorted. Maybe not in those direct terms but I've gotten that sense sometimes and I've always wondered where the humility is in that because there is so much that we don't know. I don't know, I'd love to hear you all feedback on that because just because there's things that we don't know doesn't mean there are some things we still should not go or believe or certain worldviews that we don't accept even though, yes, we're fallible and don't know everything. Where does that line end of understanding, yeah, we don't know everything but there are certainly some things that we need to stand on. I think there came a point in my life where I had to decide what my non-negotiables were in terms of my faith. What are my non-negotiables? Things I believe to be true and I'm not willing to negotiate on them and then everything else, yeah, you work with or tweak as Vince said or whatever and do the non-negotiables change over your lifetime? Perhaps in small ways. We all have to come to a place of this is truth, the best way that I can understand it in this moment. Vince, what do you think? I think I tend to view this as something that would continue where you can be way off in one field and completely isolated from all else and all their views. He extremely bolded me to somehow assume that my worldview, whatever it was, was automatically correct. I mean, because that is the standard of everyone in the world.  Why do we think it's the best? What we think is the best situation? Or we idealize that and we look at it off on one side, this is the only thing and nothing else is right or everything that came from is wrong? Yeah, I think that is helpful. So that was the last question we had for this episode. Thanks to the people who put comments in or sent us emails, gave us feedback on a previous episode we had done, which if you want to see the other two episodes we did with Vince last season, those will be linked down below and we love hearing feedback from you, the listeners and the viewers online. If you want more content like this, go to our website at AnabaptistPerspectives.org and we thank you for watching. Thank you for joining us for this episode. We invite you to join our monthly partner program. Monthly partners are key to the financial sustainability of Anabaptist Perspectives. Partners also gain access to bonus content including our exclusive podcast where we respond to audience questions and comments. Sign up at AnabaptistPerspectives.org


Hey, what's up guys? This is the rub ball. It's a soft textured rubber massaging vibrating ball for a targeted and more unique way to get a deep tissue massage therapy. I would say this is a hybrid between a foam roller and a massage gun. It's the perfect solution to have. It's very lightweight, it's compact, and it only weighs about a kilogram. It comes in two colors, black and this one, which is a turquoise, what they call greenish blue, and I think that looks really nice. So today I'm gonna give you a sample massage therapy using this vibrating ball, running through a bit about the specs and how to use it. So let's get straight into it. So first of all, I just wanted to mention that this can be used by anyone of all shapes and sizes, and you can pretty much target any of your muscle groups that need attention. So like I mentioned, it weighs a kilogram and you can use it for pretty much any area of your body and I'm gonna showcase a lot of samples for you as well. The one thing I'd also like to mention is that it has 4,200 RPM as it's maximum speed of the vibrations, which I think is amazing because a lot of the massage guns I've used, they max out at around 3,200. So this has three levels of speed. What I'll do is I'll showcase to you the different levels and right, so to turn on the device, you just hold down the power button, you'll see some LED indicators, you'll get one red and four green LED indicators determining the battery life. Now this can be fully charged in about two hours, but it will also give you two hours of usage on the maximum level and you can get more if you go onto the lowest level. So there's three lights that I've not turned on. There's level one, two, and three, three being the maximum 4,200 RPM and if I just showcase to you, this is level one. If you guys can see it vibrating a little bit, it's very quiet by the way. One thing I really like about this is that the noise levels on this is the quietest I've seen on any type of massaging vibrating device. If I go to level two, it's a little bit more stronger and then level three, you can see it's quite powerful and this is to really find those deep knots in your muscles that you want to iron out. So I'm gonna test it on level three as well, give you guys a showcase, but I'm also gonna show you what areas to use it on level one. One thing I recommend is that you should deplete the battery all the way down to the red zone before you recharge it. In the box, you get yourself the DC adapter charger which you plug in there and then you also have a user manual giving you some information about how to use this and how to massage different areas of your body which I think is very useful. So now let's go ahead and give you some sample massage therapy tips on this. So I have it on level one, you can use this on your arms. So if you just roll it or just hold it in place to vibrate your arm and just soothe out all of those tightness in those muscles and you can do that, you can just simply roll it, you can use the top of your arms, even on the side of your arms, including the biceps and the triceps. You can go a little bit faster to level two and just hold it in place and it feels very nice and it's very easy to do. Next, you can also use this for your lower back. This is perfectly fine to use on both level one and level two but if you wanna go a little bit deeper then level three would be absolutely fine as well.  Once it's on, then you can just clench like this. You can move side to side and you'll feel it and it will feel really nice if you do have lower back pain. Of course, if you have severe lower back pain then I would recommend you consult your physician or a doctor as well. This is by no means a medical device to fix all of your problems outside of just general muscle aches. As well as your lower back, you can actually move this to the top of your upper back. So just position it on the wall and then you can just either do little squats to iron those muscles or move side to side. Or even if you just hold your arm out like this and then move your arms to the right hand side you'll be able to twist those muscles to get a little bit deeper and hold the ball still. So very easily you can target various different areas of your back. The other key thing to remember guys is that if you are going to use this don't use it on the hard floor. Make sure you have a carpet or ideally a mat. So I'm using a yoga mat here as well. So I'm going to use this on lower part of my body and showcase to you on the soft mat how to use this for different areas of your legs. So let's take a look. If you do a lot of walking or you do a lot of running naturally your feet will start to ache and this is perfect to just place under the ball of your feet.  Ideally I would recommend moving from heel to toe like this and you'll really be able to get rid of that pain. And I feel like it's already doing a great job in that sense. Here's a way to target your calves just place it under and like a foam roller you just move backwards and forwards with your calves ironing out those muscles. Likewise similarly you can do that for your hamstrings just place it underneath there slide backwards and forwards for your glutes just place it underneath that get a nice circular motion or move backwards and forwards again you can even target your outer thighs and your hips by just placing it on the side of your body. For your quads you can do a couple of different things you can lie on top of it with your quads being rolled much like a foam roller so you go backwards and forwards or you can sit down turn the device on and just roll it on top of your quads or you just have it on a high speed you just hold it down and target the specific area of your quads that needs loosening. In addition to all of that you can also use it for your shoulders as well. You just hold it in place it vibrates everything and it starts to loosen those knots in those areas which I think is great and I probably will use it for this more than any of the other areas. Likewise you can use it for your rotator cuffs as well and even your chest area. So pretty much there's endless possibilities of where you can use this to get really good deep tissue massage therapy. So I'm pretty happy with this guys I can get around two to three hours of battery life in this it does have an inbuilt 2600mAh battery it does the job great I feel so much looser now especially in my legs I feel like I'm ready to go do another workout or I can go for a long run. This is the perfect type of thing to target any type of areas of your body and the size of this is perfect it's compact you just chuck it in your gym bag and you're ready to go and train. So that's it guys this comes in at $129 on the Rob Ball website I've got the link down below if you want to go check it out and if there's anything else you guys want to know make sure you ask in the comments down below otherwise I hope you subscribe I do tons of really cool gadget videos like this I hope you like this video and I'll catch you guys next time take care


My Easy ISO provides a robust software platform for driving growth, conformity, assurance, certainty, and sustainability. With My Easy ISO, organizations across the world automate quality, occupational health and safety, and environment management systems. My Easy ISO helps companies to enhance profitability, process control, product and service quality, customer satisfaction, and risk management. We offer an integrated approach to QHSE management that captures real-time data, provides up-to-date business intelligence, engages the workforce, augments collaboration, and improves performance. The manual way of managing QHSE ISO requirements is complicated and demanding and people tend to shy away from participating with optimum dedication. The result is higher risk, inferior quality product or service, process deviations, poor HSE performance, customer complaints, and non-achievement of business goals. My Easy ISO makes ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 4501 implementation, certification, and maintenance simple, easier, and effective. We offer an automated, always accessible, employee-friendly, collaborative, flexible, modular, and always audit-ready QHSE management system software on cloud or on-premises. API integration and workflow customization capabilities make this powerful QHSE software even more versatile, refined, and value-adding. With My Easy ISO, you save money, time, resources, and efforts through an efficient and result-oriented quality, occupational health and safety, and environmental management system. Employees can fully concentrate on their tasks while My Easy ISO takes care of all routine and non-routine compliance issues. Users of users across over 120 countries use My Easy ISO daily to augment their business performance with a robust and result-oriented ISO QHSE software. We are validated by all major ISO certification bodies and regulatory bodies like FDA globally. Our subscribers are certified to ISO 9001, ISO 14001, OHSAS 18001, ISO 45001, ISO 27001, ISO 170025, ISO 2200, ISO 13485, GMP standards successfully using My Easy ISO. Our customer success team with decades of technical and functional expertise supports the subscribers across the globe, round the clock. Be it your policy, objectives, process management, KPI, risk management, document control, non-conformity management, internal audits, competence, training, compliance obligation management, incident management, operational records, automated data analysis, or more, My Easy ISO will have you covered. Whether you are managing your QHSE system manually with tons of documents or using a suboptimal software to maintain your ISO compliant, My Easy ISO is the best choice for you. From the classic preconfigured off-the-shelf option to a pro version which offers custom workflow, approvals, forms, fields, and reports, My Easy ISO meets governance, risk, compliance requirements of companies of all sizes and nature across the industry domains. Automate processes and empower people for maximum productivity, optimum performance, and enhanced profitability. Simplify and improve your quality, occupational health and safety and environment ISO QHSE management system with My Easy ISO. Visit www.myeasyiso.com today to select one of our attractive subscription plans or start with a free 30 days trial.