Hey, what's going on guys, welcome to a new video. So every few months then I like to do a video on this particular topic because I feel like it's important, especially for those beginners out there who have perhaps tried dropship and or tried e-commerce and they're struggling and not quite seeing the results they hoped for. So I'd like to do a video like this one to kind of give across some realistic expectations, talk about some of my own struggles when I first started to hopefully make you feel a bit better about the kind of situation that your business is currently in, especially because of the times we live in with social media, it can be quite bad or not bad or it's just one of those things that it gives across false expectations, false realities of what reality actually is and not just in dropshipping, it can be pretty much any niche. So if we take the fitness niche, for example, people can take hours and hours and play around with different lighting and different angles to take that one perfect shot, but us being the consumer, what we don't see is those hours of work, those hours of trying different angles, different lights, and depending on how you stand and kind of hold yourself can completely transform how your body looks and it creates a false expectation or reality of what people actually look like on a daily basis. And it's the same for dropshipping, people posting, it's very rare you'll see people talking about these kind of subjects or these kind of topics about how they've failed, how they're losing money on a daily basis, but what people also forget is that dropshipping e-commerce is a business and it's just part of business.  It's important that you hear about these things, especially if you're gonna be going into a business with not a lot of money. So hopefully in this video, I can kind of address some of those problems. I'm gonna talk about the three core elements that you might have heard me talk about before to any successful e-commerce business, give you some steps and some actions to take to ensure you're doing those correctly, and ultimately then try and help you be a bit more successful or at least moved forwards in the right direction. Before we move forward then, I just wanna say a quick thank you to you guys, the support in my last video, which was the first video for a couple of months, got a massive amount of support. In fact, I think we hit nearly 100 likes, which is really good for my channel, so I really do appreciate it. Like I said, there will be a lot more content coming at these three to four videos per week. So please do me the favor then, if you enjoy this video, please do make sure you hit the like button. And of course, if you like my content, please do make sure you subscribe as well so you don't miss any future videos. And with that being said then, let's jump straight into it. So the first thing I wanna talk about is expectations. When you go into a new business, it's really good to have really good expectations, but they need to be realistic.  The amount of people who reach out to me is pretty crazy on Instagram, Facebook, just across all the different platforms, and they've been trying to sell the products for sometimes less than a week and they're ready to give up already after a week. So to kind of put that into context or when I first started, if you like, it took me at least three months. Go back, check out some of my first YouTube videos where I documented the whole kind of first few months for me, drop shipping wise, show you all the numbers, everything. But to kind of summarize, it took me at least three months before I started making any money whatsoever. And what I did and what I recommend to everybody starting this is to start really slow.  If you don't know what you're doing, it's so easy to spend two, three, four, 500 pounds and see absolutely no results. So just make sure you start really slowly. Don't get overwhelmed by how much you've got going on and just build things from there because if you're not making money spending 10 pound a day on ads, you're not gonna be making money when you're spending a thousand pound a day on ads. So I guess the first point or tips I take from this is be realistic, have big goals but just make sure you start slow and build up to them. Don't try and run before you can actually walk. The next thing I recommend too is the, now this might seem a bit kind of counterintuitive but sometimes if you're spending too much time on something it can be counterproductive or at least it is for me. You might have seen through not the different gaps of my YouTube channel of uploading videos. Sometimes it's good just to kind of take a step back for a week, a couple of weeks. Obviously make sure you're not ignoring any customers or any things that do need kind of taken care of but sometimes taking that step back from outside of your business kind of changes the lens in which you're looking at. You can look at your business from kind of like an external point of view as silly as that may sound and you'll start kind of maybe thinking a bit clearer. You'll get new ideas coming to your mind and alongside that as well just make sure you keep educating yourself, keep watching my YouTube videos and keep watching other people too and the more that you learn and the more you can kind of be thinking about drop shipping and developing your skills then the better you're gonna get at it. Another point I'd like to touch on is a lot of people forget this by the way is that drop shipping is a business. It has to be taken seriously and arguably it's also one of the hardest things you'll ever do. I guess a good way of looking at it is kind of like the stereotypical saying if it is a saying is that if it was easy then everybody would be doing it. So what you might consider is required to be successful at drop shipping. Realistically it's probably 10 times that maybe even 100 times that and a good way to look at this then it's a metaphor I've come up with before in the past but I feel like it kind of represents how difficult it is in reality is that the harder something is or the greater the reward that comes from something than the harder it is and the harder something is the more hours you have to put into it in order to succeed. So if we take a skill for example of learning to drive, getting your driver's license here in the UK the average person takes about 20 to 40 hours. If you're looking at about 20 pound per lesson all in all let's say you're looking at about 1,000 pounds up to 40 hours to learn to get your driving license and because 40 hours then isn't an obscene amount of time that most people can get hold of same thing for 1,000 pounds then there's millions of people out there that drive whereas if you were to bump that up and say you had to put in 400 hours and 10,000 pounds obviously that makes it a lot more difficult to achieve and therefore less people would be able to obtain a driving license. And it's the same thing for business the less hours that would be required the less money that would be required the more people would do it. Hence why there's not many business owners out there in comparison to people who work for businesses or work for companies. So next time you're thinking about giving up just kind of take a step back and actually think realistically about how many hours you've put in how much money you've put in and if you haven't put as much as say learning to drive in then perhaps you just need a bit more time. If you're at the point where your business is just completely draining money then just my advice would be to shut things down if it's seen zero potential so you've spent let's say three, four, 500 pounds and you've had zero sales then my advice would be just simply to pause absolutely everything go back to the drawing board watch some more videos on YouTube join some Facebook groups start asking some questions and just keep developing your knowledge about the business. And with that being said that kind of leads me into what I mentioned in the intro being a three core elements to any successful e-commerce slash drop shipping business. And the first one I'm gonna start with then is your Shopify store. So the biggest mistake I see people making is they do not get feedback on their Shopify store before they start spending money on ads which is a huge mistake especially if you're a beginner especially if you have zero experience with web design then you might not always be able to spot the correct things or the adequate things that need doing before you start driving traffic. If you don't have a Shopify store that is trustworthy that is professional looking, looks credible there's no two ways about it you are going to fail you could be selling solid gold bars 10 P to the pound but if nobody trusts your website then nobody's gonna trust you enough to be able to take that risk and actually buy those gold bars even though they're getting them for 10% of the cost. So just make sure that once you've built your Shopify store you can join my Facebook group for example anybody can go in there post their link and get feedback it's a really great bunch of people so do post it in there and you'll get some genuine feedback from there or every single week I do to subscribe to store reviews so just keep entering that and with any luck then I'll see your store and I'll be able to feature in a video and give you some really good feedback. The second core element then after your Shopify store of course has to be your product if you're selling a product that nobody's currently buying or doesn't have that desire ability then nobody's going to buy it. You could have the most professional Shopify store in the world you could have an awesome Facebook ad campaign but if you're trying to flog a dead horse nobody's gonna buy it and again your business is just gonna fall flat not gonna make any money. So when it comes to picking products then I'll give you kind of like the easiest two ways or not the easiest two ways kind of like the main two ways of picking products to kind of give you the best chance of success. Number one is trending or seasonal products. This is the strategy I've followed now for the past four years and the reason I do it is because I was gonna say it guarantees that your products are gonna sell but nothing is ever guaranteed in business. It gives you the highest chance of success. So for example, if you're trying to sell summer products in summer then it's a good match and the chances are people are gonna be buying that product. If you're gonna be selling say LED products like LED dog colors when it's really dark out from say four o'clock during the winter when people have to walk their dog in the dark then again it's a trending it's a seasonal product that is in demand and people have a need for it that certain time of year. So trying to sell those products sets you up to give you the best chance of success. And in terms of finding those products or finding information behind those products you can use tools like sell the trend which is the only product research software I use myself. There is a link in the description below and Google Trends as well and you can also use the AliExpress dropship in center. Have a play around with that. Again, I've done a tutorial video on that but they give you some pretty useful information and data too. And then the second type of product you can pick this kind of applies more to brands in fact because it comes under the category of like desirability. If a product is really desirable then lots of people want to buy it. So for example, if you were trying to sell Rolex watches for half the cost it's obviously a really desirable product because most people like Rolex watches because of the brand people know how quality they are people know how expensive they are so they're a desirable product. It doesn't just have to be watches of course it could be clothing, it could be Hugo Bass it could be Louis Vuitton it could be Gucci. It applies to any single niche and the single most easiest or most effective way to build desirability for your product is to use an influencer hands down if you ask me. The reason being is because influencers have audiences loyal audiences that watch them on a regular basis or engage with their content on a regular basis so they trust the words of that influencer. So when an influencer recommends a particular product instantly the audience or the majority of the audience is going to trust that influencer's word and therefore it makes that product more desirable. The third core element then that I want to finish this video on don't make this video too long this is kind of like a brief summary of what they are. If you want me to dig deeper of course just make sure you leave your comments below. I do read every single one so if there is one or two that keep cropping up I can make a video on a specific element but the third element then is your marketing campaigns whether it's Facebook, whether it's Google whether it's Instagram you have to make sure that you're tagged in the right audience you have the right creative that's going to get that attention across social media. Social media is a crazy busy platform and people aren't always on there to buy things they're usually on there to look at other things watch funny videos, watch memes talk to their friends, spy on their friends. So when they come across an ad that's asking them to buy something not necessarily in that buying mood so unless you have an ad that really captures somebody's attention and is really specific to them so they have that connection then they might not always notice it and therefore your conversion rate is going to be really low. This is why when you hear me talk about product selection I talk about it being a skill or picking products for a specific platform and I guess to kind of give you a good example of this then is if you were to advertise a sofa on Facebook and try and sell a sofa because of how expensive it is because of how broad it is it pretty much applies to anybody who has a house or a home then you're not going to get much success because it's such a broad product and nobody is really passionate or that excited about sofas or at least nobody I've met anyway whereas if you were to try and sell a sofa that was say had like printed dogs on or printed pugs on and you were to target people who own pugs then that particular sofa is going to get so much more interest and attention because it's different from normal sofas there's like a funky element to it there's a unique selling point and you're advertising it to an audience that has a passionate kind of not obsession but kind of connection with it people who own pugs own pugs because they love pugs so if they see a sofa that has pugs on that sofa then instantly they're going to have that connection the sofa is going to be more kind of stand outish and it's going to get a lot more attention basically and you're going to have a lot more success so that's kind of like a quick way of illustrating how important it is when you come to picking products and how important it is when you're targeting audiences and with that being said guys I'm going to wrap the video up there I have absolutely no idea how long I've been talking to this video could be 10 minutes long it could be 20 minutes long either way I hope you enjoyed it I hope you've stuck with me if you have thank you very much please do make sure you hit that subscribe button and hit that like button before you leave and then one final thing too if you are looking for a Shopify training program that comes with my full support and guidance amongst a few other different support resources make sure you check out my Ecom Academy there'll be a link down below in the description there is a callback service too so if you want to hop on the phone with me and just ask me any questions you want before joining we can do this and yeah that's that being said thanks for watching, hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one


Thank you. Everybody, my name is Ryan Emerly from Comcast, Senior Principal Software Engineer. And today I wanna talk to you about how Comcast is democratizing developer experience using Backstage.  So for some context, when I first started at Comcast about seven years ago, it was a little bit overwhelming. Comcast is a pretty big company. Lots of really cool internal products and services and APIs and platforms. But when I first started, it was like really hard to find anything. So I've kind of come up with this analogy of the dark warehouse, so bear with me. Just imagine this giant warehouse where you've got shelves floor to ceiling in hundreds of yards in every direction. And on those shelves are all the really cool products and services and APIs that you can use to build the next cool product. The only problem is in this warehouse, it's pitch black. And all that you have to light your way is a single flickering candle. So you're in the warehouse with this candle trying to see what's on these shelves. But all you can see is kind of what's right in front of you. So how do you find the things that you're looking for? How do you know what's available? How do you know what all the cool things are? So effectively, we need to know the people that put the things on the shelf in the first place. Hopefully they know where it is. And these people tend to be the subject matter experts. So here's kind of how it goes, or at least my experience. You have a project, there's something that you're trying to accomplish. And you know that there's some, let's say you need the billing service. You know it exists, you need to find the person that maybe knows where it is or how to interact with it. So you manage somehow to find this subject matter expert and they're able to guide you through the dark warehouse to that component. Great, now we know one path. We know how to get to this one thing. But we need other things in order to make our cool product. So we ask another SME, and then another, and another. And as you see, we start to illuminate some of this warehouse. But, and if this was to scale, there'd be a lot more black here. Of course I didn't have time to make it to scale. There's still a lot of undiscovered area here. But what's wrong with it, right? I've got my answer. I've talked to my SMEs, I've got the things that I need, I can move forward, what's the big deal? Well, so subject matter experts, they could be a team, it could be a person, it doesn't really matter. What if they're not available? What if it's a person and they're on vacation, or it's a team and they're busy? And I've got a deadline, I've gotta build something and I need these subject matter experts in order to figure out where this thing is in this dark warehouse. So it's not ideal, right? It's gonna cause delays, I'm gonna be blocked. But let's say everything works out, subject matter expert comes to me, it's like here, Ryan, take my hand, I shall guide you through the dark warehouse. They do, great, now I know. I know, one person, I know there's been a knowledge transfer from one person or one team to another. Not super efficient. What's more is now that I know, I'm gonna share it with my team, maybe and kind of propagate some of this knowledge, but I'm not the subject matter expert, they are. So now their system changes, my knowledge is stale, and the whole process has to start over again. And this is where we needed to come up with some kind of solution to start centralizing knowledge and that's where Backstage comes in. So Backstage gave us this magnificent foundation to start from. We had other internal efforts to try to build something similar, and we originally looked at Backstage before at its 1.0 release, and it wasn't quite mature enough for what we were trying to do, but we decided to look at it again, became a CNCF project, and it fit our needs. It was really a magnificent starting point for us. And this started to offload our subject matter experts. They had to do less hand-holding through that dark warehouse. And effectively, we began, as we began to centralize all of this information, we created basically a hub for our developers. So we thought long and hard about what to call this hub for developers. We came up with Dev Hub. So the reason I mentioned what we call it internally is because I'm gonna call it that, and I just wanna disambiguate vanilla Backstage from Comcast deployment and implementation of Backstage. So we have Backstage, but there's still some room for improvement as far as what we're trying to do. We're still not using our subject matter experts super efficiently. We still don't know what's available. Well, now we have a software catalog, we have tech docs and stuff. We do kind of know more of what's available, there's still this kind of support aspect that we are still relying on our SMEs for. What's more is that they're also not just producing documentation, they're producing valuable data that might wanna see in our development hub. There are also processes that these teams might have. Let's say that you're on an observability team and it's a platform and you want people to come and use it. The only thing is in order for them to come be onboarded, there's some provisioning that needs to happen. So there's an onboarding process. You need to answer some questions and typically what will happen is it would go into some ticket queue, someone would work it, eventually you'd come around to getting the thing that you needed. So what we're looking for to kind of get around some of this stuff or to improve the developer experience is first class integration with some of these other systems and services that we don't own as the Dev Hub core team. The Dev Hub core team isn't big enough to go out and implement all of these things from all of these different teams. There are thousands of teams. So what do we do? Well, this is where I don't hit the laser pointer and instead move the slider forward. It's where we democratize the developer experience. And in short, when I say democratizing the development experience, I think it's easy to think about making the developer experience everyone's responsibility. If you think about it, you build a tool as a software engineer. You necessarily want people to use that. You don't wanna build something that goes unused. That's kind of like a fate worse than death for an engineer to build something that no one ever uses. So how do we democratize the developer experience? Well, as I mentioned, Backstage is a fantastic platform and foundation. And we decided that we were gonna leverage the two main extensibility points. Plugins, which we've all heard a lot about today. They're fantastic and Backstage is basically just a system composed of plugins. But I think what kind of goes unnoticed, at least from what I've seen, are templates. It seems like the focus of templates is on creating a repository based on some code templates that then render out some final version that you can then go ahead and get started. It's a quick start. But we see it more as a generic thing doer. It takes some user input and can execute any number of actions. And those actions can be customized to be whatever you need them to be. So we think about that onboarding scenario. Let's say that there's some API that we can call that can handle the provisioning. Well, create a software template, ask whatever questions you wanna ask, and then create a custom action that calls an API. Now, users can go to that software template, click a couple of buttons and they've just, now they have self-service and that team didn't need to build their own self-service tool. They didn't need to build a slack bot that could answer a couple of questions and then provision something for you or send up their own service. So I think that software templates are a little bit overlooked and we're trying to use them as an additional extensibility point. So our initial approach to this was, hey, we're using Backstage and Backstage has tons of documentation. Go check it out, our extensibility partners and SMEs. Go read all of this documentation, try not to get overwhelmed and good luck. The only problem was they got overwhelmed pretty quickly so we realized that we needed to do something different there. We need to put some sort of guardrails in place and some process in place so that we can funnel people and get them to focus on what actually needs to be done and not spending tons of time trying to figure out how to even get started. So we formalized this process by introducing the Dev Hub extensibility program. Dev Hub extensibility program, when we set out with some goals, basically we wanted to encourage contributions. We wanted to make it easy and enticing for these subject matter experts or extensibility partners to create things. We don't want to make it difficult. We don't want to add more work for them. They already have plenty of work to do. We also want to gain some control over the intake process.   We also want to reduce duplication. We don't want multiple teams trying to build the same thing because there was a lack of communication and now we have to say sorry, guys, we already have something similar by this other team. And lastly, we want to reduce friction. We don't want the process of making the developer experience better to be a terrible developer experience. So we started out by introducing it a process, just a very simple process where we do some intake. We've got an intake form. We get to understand what someone is trying to implement. That will go through an approval process where we just decide, does this make sense to do now? Or are we, as the Dev Hub core team, building some functionality in that will make whatever you're trying to do easier later and we can say maybe you just hold off on that. And then if it gets approved and it hits into the development phase, well then, our extentability partners just they can start development. This is more focused on plugins than templates. Templates are a little bit easier, obviously. So, but the only problem is we need folks to be building it in Dev Hub. The version of Dev Hub that's going to be in production. We need them to see the plugin within the context of Dev Hub because building a plugin in isolation can lead you to believe that it'll work fine and then you go to integrate it in tire screech. Oh, that didn't work. So the only problem is that it's a little bit difficult to test against the production version of Dev Hub because it's the production version of Dev Hub. And what's important is that Dev Hub, as I mentioned, it's kind of a superset of backstage. Backstage is at the core. It's got its Postgres database. But we're talking to other external systems. We've got a really powerful federated GraphQL product and we use internally to bring together all kinds of disconnected data and connect them. And we have to talk to GitHub and we have to talk to other services. So it's not something where we can bring people in and say, just have at it here all of our secrets. Just don't mess anything up. We can't share those secrets. So what do we do? We need people to test in Dev Hub but they can't test in real Dev Hub. We could always have them deployed to our development environment, but that's minutes of time that would have to go for every iteration that you're making. We want people to iterate quickly on this and, again, reduce friction. So what we did was we introduced Dev Hub Lite. And I would share the logo that we created internally for this, but for copyright reasons I can't. The extensibility program, or I'm sorry, Dev Hub Lite, as you can see now all those little keys are missing. Basically is exactly, it's Dev Hub. It's the same code repository, the only thing that's different is the configuration. And then that configuration, instead of pointing to production Postgres database, it's pointing to a Docker container that has a sanitized version of production data in it. Some of the external API calls that we have from our upstream services, those are mocked out for the more consequential ones. And for our federated GraphQL, we've got a proxy in place that will automatically authenticate. And get how we don't really need because we've already ingested everything into the database. So now we have version of Dev Hub that folks can use that is very close, 99.9% the same as what is in production.  But this Dev Hub Lite was a huge success for us and it enabled a lot of folks to get much more familiar with how everything worked together and let them use common tooling. They could use VS Code or IntelliJ and put interactive breakpoints in instead of again working in a silo or in isolation. But not without its challenges. So we added some processes to help funnel people in and we added some tooling to help reduce friction. So now we have another set of challenges that we need to consider. We're now dealing as the Dev Hub Core Team, we're dealing with code that's coming from disparate sources from different teams of varying skill levels. They might not know how backstage works. They might not know about best practices for TypeScript and performance and might not know the difference between a back end plugin and a front end plugin and might accidentally include credentials in a front end plugin. We also need to ensure that the UI and the user experience is consistent. As I mentioned, we don't want this to be like the NASCAR car with all of the stickers on it. And we also need to consider support. Who's gonna support this? Not the Dev Hub Core Team. We don't know how these plugins are working or what they're talking to. Maybe they're talking to some upstream API and what if that thing goes down? We have no control over that. It's not something that we maintain or control. So we need to make sure that we are routing people to the appropriate sources for support if and when they need it. So to address the first one, best practices, what we did was we stood up a scanning service. And this is just a service that we wrote that can do some static analysis on the code that from the extension, our extensibility partners repository. It's a simple, it's a little CLI that can run. It'll send the code off to be scanned and it'll come back with errors warnings or it will let them know that everything's okay. Everything's okay. Can actually also package it up into an NPM package and help deploy it to an NPM registry. Also, we have a corresponding CI tool that does the same thing. So this allows us to insert ourselves into the development pipeline. It gives us at least a place where we can do some checks. It's not perfect, it's ever evolving, but at least we have now a little bit of control and as things come up and when we note different implementations, we're like, well, when we didn't like that, let's make sure that doesn't happen again. Now we have a place to put that onto the consistent UI. Again, this is a big one, we want it to feel like a cohesive product. So we created a Dev Hub UI library, which is basically just a wrapper around material UI, but all the components have been modified in such a way that we can enforce what we want in as far as the UI is concerned. We wanna make sure that the people aren't using make styles, for instance, they're not doing inline styles. This has the added benefit this UI library has and added benefit of being like Lego bricks where you only have a small bag of tools to use. You're not overwhelmed by, well, here you can do absolutely anything. Instead, it's here's your set of tools, now you can build a Dev Hub plugin, one that's gonna look and feel like it's part of Dev Hub. This provides a nice abstraction and allows us, again, a little bit more control there and enforces best practices as much as possible. What's cool about it too is that we can now use that scanner that I talked about and ensure that anyone that's creating a front end plugin is using our library, the UI library. If they're using Material UI directly or some other UI library or we detect inline styles, we can flag it. Now, it's not necessarily a, nope, you can't do that. It might be a, well, if you wanna do that, let us now make a PR to the UI library and we can add it there. It's not like, never, you can't ever change anything. And speaking of changing things, if we wanna change the UI, all we have to do is update this UI library and now all of the plugins that were built using it will benefit from those same updates. Now, to support, this is a big one. I think it's one that might get overlooked by some teams, some organizations. We've now started to democratize the developer experience. We're having our subject matter experts or extensibility partners that are coming in and they're building all these really cool things. But again, we don't have control over it and that's what we're trying to exert some level of control with the scanning service and whatnot, but now it's in production, now it's out there. What happens if something goes wrong? Well, all of our front end plugins are in a plugin boundary. And basically what that will do is it will provide some additional metadata on the front end that says, hey, here's some plugin support. Just so you know, this is a plugin. Here's who's responsible for it, how you contact them. Here's their Slack channel and so on. That will pop up in a modal dialogue and that will also be an opportunity to provide feedback for that particular plugin. So we can start to gather some information for our four-hour extensibility partners. Like, hey, we're seeing, this is the feedback that you're getting. And then they can take action and improve their plugin accordingly. We also similarly have an error boundary. If an error occurs, we'll say, sorry, an error has occurred, please contact this team. Please don't contact us because we're not gonna be able to help you. And then if things go catastrophically wrong, we have feature flags, we can turn things off temporarily if we need to. Again, we have all of these things coming in from different sources, which we want to enable, we want to encourage, but we need to have some level of control over our product. So I'm gonna bring this all together. I'm gonna kind of summarize where we're at and see how this democratization can lead to a better developer experience. So we have our subject matter experts. We want to leverage them. We want to avoid our knowledge silos. We want to avoid that one-to-one communication. We want, let our SMEs build these really cool things and share their knowledge with everyone, not just one person at a time. We want to reduce friction. We want to invite our subject matter experts in. We want them to want to contribute. It should be an easy process. It should be a fun process. Let's make the developer experience awesome and amazing. We should want to do it.  And so we need to respect our subject matter experts time, right? Let's let them get on and do some cool innovation stuff and let the developer experience kind of be just part of the process. We want to do all of this too while being thoughtful about the product. We want to have thoughtful contributions that make sense in the overall developer experience. We want to, again, to have a cohesive product and we want to do all of this by guiding folks with some unobtrusive guardrails. Basically, we don't want to waste the potential of our subject matter experts. We want to empower them. So if we think back to the dark warehouse, that's the first part of this picture on the right here. That's all the people at the top with the question mark. Well, that's all the people that had to deal with that dark warehouse. How do I find things? Where are they at? Okay, now you've led me through. Now I know where this thing is. How do I find the next thing? So on, it's friction. It's time spent where we're not building business value or we're not innovating or waiting. Not ideal. We started the democratization. Now our developers are in the center. They can see everything. They can access everything. They can self-serve. They can onboard. They can do everything that they need to do. They can see signals from various different systems. So you've got an observability system. We don't want to duplicate the Grafana in Dev Hub, but wouldn't it be nice if at least there was a status indicator of okay, warning, critical? And if you can click on that and then go in and see the dashboard for more detail. But if our developers are in Dev Hub, they can see that right away and act on that signal. So basically what we've done, gone from that dark warehouse to simply turning on the lights. That's what I have. Hopefully it's been useful and helpful to see how we've come to democratize developer experience and the journey that we're on so far. And it's one that we're continuing on and then continually evolving. So again, my name is Ryan Emmerley. If you guys look at the QR code, if you want to provide feedback. And all of my contact information on the bottom, if you want to get ahold of me. That's what I have. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ryan. Any questions for Ryan? One, two. Thank you, Ryan. I work for Adobe, our backstage, we call it Dev Home. Oh, nice. So I think we should talk. Yes, very nice. About Dev Hub Lite, is that an environment that gets built up for contributing teams, trying to contribute to Dev Hub? Like is it something that is short lived and per pull request, let's say, or? It's actually a local environment. So you're just pulling down the repository and it's just the configuration that dictates where to point things. So we use a make file to have all of our actions. So basically when a user comes in, they want to run Dev Hub Lite, they can just do a make run Lite. What that does, that will start up the Docker compose set of containers for that sanitized production database, some of the mock things and the proxy. It gets all that started up. And then it's just on their local workstation. That way you can iterate really quickly and not have to worry about deployment. All right, and my other question, are you, the repository where Dev Hub lives, like the code base, is that a monorepo? So contributing teams contribute directly to that repository or are they managing their plugins in like a multi repo kind of setting? That's a good question, yeah. So we have our developers, extensibility partners, whatever, they build their plugins separately in their own repositories because they own them. And then they build their, the NPN packages and publish them through a registry and then we pull them in as part of the integration process. Thanks. So not to sound like an interview question, but I'm over here. Okay, thank you. But once you decided to actually start expanding into asking for more contributions to the experience, what would you say your most technical and your most non-technical challenges were? The technical challenges are ongoing. It's difficult to have, you know, we're a small team and ultimately we want to review all of the code that's coming in. That's kind of what is unique about this is we've got these teams creating these plugins which is code that's ending up in our product. But we're kind of a little bit blind there. So that's why we've had to put in some of these processes and these technical, like you know, the scanning tools and whatnot. But so that's still kind of an ongoing thing. How do we ensure quality? How do we control what's coming in? Non-technically, I mean, just getting people to understand and see the value of Dev Hub. Again, we have, these folks are very busy. So telling them that this might be beneficial to you to add this functionality into Dev Hub is kind of a, not a hard sell, but it's one where you're gonna get a little bit of pushback at first, where they're just like, I don't really wanna do any extra work. Thank you very much. So yeah, so that's where we're at. But I think the biggest one is still the technical one because I'm kind of a control freak and it bothers me that I don't know what these repositories have in them, but that's me. Hi, I'm curious how many contributions you've actually had since like launching the program? Sure, yeah, the program is relatively new. We've had half dozen so far, so half dozen teams integrating their functionality with ours and it's been very successful. I mean, we have our CI CD team, we have a plugin which we're gonna be contributing back to the backstage community because one of our CI platforms is Concourse, which there is not currently a plugin for. So we have got a plugin for that and yeah, I've lost my train of thought, but hopefully I answered the question. Great talk, thank you. Over here on your right. Hello? Hi. I was curious about your choice to use backstage as like a general action runner, as well as just an initial setup. We kind of considered that and were nervous about trying to shove too many things all into one tool. Did you have any reservations? Are there any gotchas or is it something you isn't unalloyed good? Yeah, that's a good question. So the thing-do-or-action-runner part, I think it comes down to how you organize those. So we have, I forget what backstage calls it, but we call it the marketplace where you can see all of the templates there. And with Dev Hub Lite, we also added some functionality where you can point the template discovery thing to a local file system. So that also makes it easier so that people can very quickly iterate over their templates. There's also the template editor that's built into Backstage, which is super nice, but it can only do things that allow dry runs. So having it running locally really helps there. And trying to control the complexity of that so that there's not so many things in the marketplace that you become overwhelmed. I think that's gonna come down to how we organize that. And that's gonna come down to, we're gonna start to implement feedback and starring system where things that are more popular start to rise to the top to help control some of that overwhelmingness of things that come in. We're also thinking about, well, we're also going to be building a interactive template builder where you can just do it all from the UI. You don't need to write YAML so you can drag and drop UI components, even the custom UI components, drag and drop the custom actions that are available to compose those things. Because we wanna enable these, not subject matter experts to be able to come in and not have to learn all of the intricacies of template YAML to be able to do things. And I think that's really gonna open it up so everyone can come in and contribute. Even folks that have just been are used to Microsoft Forms should be able to come in and create even more powerful forms that can actually do something, not just collect data. Thank you. Thanks. Do we have time for another? I didn't think so. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's a wrap. That's a wrap. Thanks. Again, if you need me, I'll be around. You can talk to me. And also my contact information, you can...


Dr. Mary Ackerly, we are live on Facebook and I know we have a lot of our ICI friends watching and we have other people and we'll repost this on ICI websites or the Facebook page and then it'll be on my YouTube page so I know we'll get a lot of viewers because everybody wants to hear from you. I want to introduce you formally but just a little bit of housekeeping. If you have questions you can put them in the chat. I will try to keep a little bit of tabs as we're talking on those questions and answer them as we're going. We've got lots of new and exciting things to talk about today that you maybe haven't heard yet and then if you want to watch replays you can watch them here or I have a YouTube channel. It's just under my name JillKarnhand.com, all free content and interviews and we're going to have a lot of the ICI board members on those so be sure and check back there for reruns and other videos if you're interested. So I first want to introduce my guest Dr. Mary Ackerly. I just have such great respect for the hard work and effort that she's put in. She is the co-founder and former president of ICI that's ISEAI for International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness of which we're both been on the board and of course she's been the former president really, really has taken a great leadership role in this group and today I can't wait to talk about some of the directions where we're going, some of the new treatments and some of the new ideas that are coming out of this group. She's a classically trained board certified psychiatrist. She graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University, studied at NIMH, finished her residency at John Hopkins and was certified in psychiatry and neurology. She holds an active medical license in Arizona and Florida and she's a gifted speaker on many different avenues has been on the board of the certified integrative and holistic medicine and as I mentioned she was co-founder of the ICI and just recently retired president still on the board, still incredibly active. Mary, Dr. Ackerly, we are just delighted to have you here. So welcome first of all. Thank you. Thank you. And then second of all I always like to start with story so I'm going to just be quiet and let you dive in and kind of how you got to where you're at especially with interest to mold and linemen some of the more complex chronic diseases that we're seeing so much of nowadays. That's a really long story I think and it's a story of a journey and some of it I've talked about before about how I some have stumbled into mold beginning to treat some of Dr. Gray's patients who we all know is wonderful doctor and Benson for psychiatric illness that wouldn't get better and I realized wow it's not all psychosomatic that mold is real and that that is you know beginning like 2010-2011 where I saw mold is absolutely affecting their brains and it's real and it's not psychosomatic so I've talked about that. I think my journey begins like any healer really much much earlier and as you go and begin your own journeys then these things come and you do find them because I think like you Jill we're both curious it's the things that get me most curious in life tend to be the things I don't know the things I haven't solved so if I have people I'm seeing and I can't get them better I begin very focused on what don't I know because I really do feel like we can get most people better if you know if you ask the right questions so that's an important part I think of my journey of this curiosity but I think another part of my journey has been as part I don't talk about that much is that my father died when I was seven and it was very sudden and I was the oldest of four children and my oldest of like what was going to become 26 grandchildren I was actually the second and yeah so it's Irish Catholic and it's a very big loving family and my father died of melanoma and worked for two years during Korea in a metal van and he did the x-rays that shielding probably so there's no surprise he developed melanoma and in thinking about that one day I realized well I think I had a very early interest in the environmental impact of toxins on people so it was a very big shock of the sudden he was evidently in an experimental trial and the shock of learning this I was really was daddy's girl yeah has been with me for a long time and my mother's shock and trauma was I learned hypervigilance at a very early age of learning to expect only bad news and you know I kind of stumbled through childhood and adolescence trying to figure out what happened why did this happen and also trying to deal with my own anxiety what we now call I was looking for vagal balance and maybe in some of the wrong ways some of the right ways of learning to there must be some way to kind of feel whole again the way I know I used to feel the way I knew my family was and so I think that brought me through a lot of journeys in college I worked with Danny Goldman and Richie Davidson and was of course on consciousness and it's a sophomore in college it was the most exciting thing I'd ever heard it's like they were talking things I wanted to know about about God and spirit and consciousness and how our brains worked and this was very early since the 70s so Danny Goldman went on to write emotional IQ books and get everyone interested in emotional as well as intellectual IQ and Richie Davidson who is my thesis advisor is really well known for EEGs and monks and mindfulness and in fact I actually studied mindfulness like in 1976 I was in Barry one of the first mindfulness retreats and I can't say I fully appreciated where it would go but I've been doing mind-body balance forever not understanding the words but just knowing it wasn't normal to always go like this whenever you drove a car or the bell rang unexpectedly so you know I fast forward through medical school residency and getting board certified is the journey has been spiritual for me I have done a lot of spiritual teachings in Tibet and they were pretty special and come back and then sort of my own illnesses that not surprisingly when you look back with autoimmunity and thyroid feeling tired and depressed and people are sometimes surprised and say you know you don't have mold why are you interested in treating it and it's it is because I just saw it was real but if you I look back as like my residency I was kind of tired and depressed but you know I was living in a hundred year old home oh yeah we're renovating at the same time it had a basement for stories you know there was dust all over I found out later I'd had high lead probably from that renovation is very reasonable to think I was living in mold for a few years and that was part of my being tired and feeling depressed so I just grew up at a time when you know there weren't manuals for like how do you tell your daughter her father just died there weren't manuals like you're depressed in residency you know suck it up and get through not go look at your basement and do a dust test and send off a sample this was not the approach no that wasn't it um so and I think you've gone through that too is that we now take for common was not even thought of at this time yet you're experiencing things that you're trying to fix so um there've been certainly attempts and that's how as I learned with Hashimoto's lots of stuff about diet gluten functional medicine homeopathy is that I wanted to talk about something really my story which I find interesting is that last year or so I started something called vision therapy and it was um my eyes are really bad and I just assumed you know you have bad eyesight it's what you're born with yes you know bad eyesight and it goes with big hands and big feet and um morphine and stuff just assumed that's who I am and I um my progresses weren't working and some of my patients have done really well in vision therapy with Amy Thomas who is a member of ICI she's listening give a big shout out yes and they healed in ways I didn't understand their anxiety was getting better with getting new glasses so that really interested me but mostly I was hoping my glasses would work better and I went to Sear and she does some very unusual testing um she explains it as basically we have a visual map of the world in our brain and we have an auditory map of the world and they're supposed to line up and when they line up your eyes work together and both eyes are sending the same image to the brain and everything's fine and then not surprisingly in my case she found and she has you close your eyes and she rings little bells and you're touching at the minute it was done it will go laugh because it is so weird but you can just hear something and you can't touch it and you know it's real and then she puts on glasses and all of a sudden you can with your eyes closed and hearing it touch it but the glasses and my eyes are closed it's this whole idea of mapping and things working together is she said you know whatever is there there's some sort of trauma there and I got the glasses and I was on the way home wearing them and all of a sudden the whole trauma came and I remembered the story of of course it was my father's casket yeah and the death and it was just vivid and then I remembered that I was diagnosed as being really myopic after my father's death and it was you know I want to put this in perspective not to shock people whatever but it was a really pretty bad year it's two months before my father died Kennedy had been assassinated and I got off a bus and my mother and all the mothers are in a bus stop looking really scared of looking around for something that's going to happen and hustling us home and kind of telling us Kennedy had been shot and there was no like drone following Kennedy nobody knew what had happened it was just incredibly frightening then two months later my own father died very suddenly and then a couple of months later um my second grade teacher evidently went home from school and hung herself so it was you know significantly worse year for me than 2020 was to be honest been through this is it was traumatic and it was a great chuck to my nervous system and I remember that the school nurse called after all this happened and said you know your daughter's black and blue we didn't talk about abuse or something in these days just you know she's black and blue and she's kind of stumbling around and falling off things you should get her eyes checked into my mother was another one of those calls something's wrong and with great anxiety I was taken to the doctor who found you know I needed glasses and they were like coke bottles yeah but when just all this happened with visions area just you know you wear glasses you go to the doctor you fix it is when I realized my eyes weren't working and she has one pair of glasses and all of a sudden this whole trauma the whole memories are coming back is wow I had some enormous trauma to my nervous system because I was not nearsighted before this happened and to realize that you've affected your brain by trauma and that you can actually start to work with it has been very profound for me to realize you realize me why I had that much especially at this doctor under the healer yeah yeah I love that you're saying this because just recently I've done some work with a brain integration therapist which is again kind of in this strange realm of not allopathic medicine and she recommended the exact same thing and I have an appointment in Chicago with another expert that has done exact same thing in January and I'm going to have that exact same experience of what you're talking about and I know intuitively it's going to help I didn't understand I didn't know your story and I'm so glad what you just shared is beyond profound because we're going to have people listening and realizing these things that happen to us in childhood we were tough we kind of push them off but they affect our lifelong trajectory of our career of our passion for life and of our illnesses and I love that you're bringing that attention and sharing of your heart because I can't even imagine having like you said it doesn't this year to compels in comparison to that year for you yeah right when people ask how can you treat mold you didn't have mold is oh you're like yeah yeah and honestly I love that because it's trauma mold is trauma in another way same thing so it is and and that is one of the things we'll talk about because it is a trauma and I do have suggestions but there was I've been through about four different lenses and I think I may have to get another one but I think during lockdown in May I had just gotten another pair and again I'm having this kind of strange feeling of warmth really right here between my eyes and stuff and all of a sudden with these glasses I just had this memory of telling my father there's something wrong see a doctor wow and I'm sick he's laughing at me saying oh don't worry there's nothing wrong dear I'm fine it's totally well I know I saw there was something wrong and the experience of being laughed at and not taken seriously had just really shut me down and so to my own intuition in that area and it certainly has been coming much more forward of my recognizing it so I wanted to say yes do the vision I love what you're seeing here literally wrote an article recently about positions and training and how it's so brutal we almost have to shut down that part of our intuitive sensitive self because it is you know how it is the work hours the abuse that happens it is it is literally an abusive situation I think it's gotten better since we trained but I remember back and I blocked out some of those memories but all that to say a lot of the science we love science you and I I see I the group that we're in we are all and we've got some exciting news to share about science and research so I am a scientist first but the truth is we are also intuitive spiritual souls on a journey and that part when I've tapped into that part of myself that's where I get profound insight and wisdom for my patients and direction for my life and just like you're saying but we were told and taught from a very early age that that's not valuable and that's not okay and that's not legitimate and we were made ashamed of that part of ourselves and what's happening is you and I and many other doctors are starting to rise up and say no guess what this intuition that we have guides us and we use great science too we're not we're not you know saying one is better than the other but I find as I embrace that intuitive side I get these brilliant insights that only come from that place and same with you completely completely and I think learning I've the intuition never got fully shut off but I seem to manage to shut off both my normal and you know psychic eyesight pretty effectively at an early age um is that the intuition for me has always kind of been there but I feel my life as I use the word stumbling on stumbling through there's an intuition that guides me and it's something that I tell patients we're going to talk about you know the science and getting people to better but when I people ask me you know it's bad last week I've had like three people discover who are old time old people another leak and that's you know the first one's really bad but the second or third it it starts to get really pile up and lots of stresses we talk about and someone's asking me it's like I you know I can't do this is and she had at least you know decided to go into therapy and I said that's really really good because I've found in my own life and life of people that I watch go through these journeys is that if you can just find some way to listen to there's a small voice always that is guiding you to better help yeah and is looking out for you in some ways and has an idea of why this is an experience that you're learning something here that you need to learn and she was very open I don't say it to everyone but there she was someone who was open and just started crying of like you know it's like the possessions it's so heartbreaking to give away my children's toys at Christmas and stuff and she said but I know we are not material things we're not material in this event I said yeah I've said that to a lot of people that I don't remember any any religion ever saying that you take your you know Christmas tree with with you exactly and it's something you're learning experiencing and can let go of that's a profound gift and but that is the gift I think that you or I or people who are letting ourselves say yeah we have intuition we have psychic gifts how do you think we know mold is important going it's because of the research no the research isn't there and I'll tell you that it's because we have actually felt and seen this is important this one is is common and real and it's really getting a lot of people and probably got me and I know Jillian said it did get you is is it and it really knocks you because you're not looking for mold when you're depressed and tired so that is one of the gifts I think that when you ask how do people get through this and only we can show this is get over the fear of where there's a little bit more than we think we know that goes on and if you can just kind of listen to the part that's guiding you is is working with you and hoping you see a more spiritual approach to sometimes you're going to make it yeah make it this and you'll be in better shape exactly and you'll learn some important lessons well let's talk a little I see I you've been like I said the co-founder at the very beginning you've been president you've really shaped this great organization that's now starting to shift and change I want to talk a little bit about what's happening the exciting giving Tuesday share a little bit about what's happening and the research so we've said a couple of times yes the intuition is important but so is science right and I've shifted into chairman of the research department which is something I really wanted to do and at first I thought my thought it would be sort of more the grandiose brain you know I love the neural quantum brain and that's my interest long time and there has been some started along those lines but a couple of weeks ago it's just really it's been very fast we were having yet another long discussion on our forum about urinary mycotoxin testing and protocols for it and what it meant and how you would use these results and then which one was the best one and I just looked at it and I thought in a more free position because I'm not doing all the president duties and I just thought I'm so tired of everyone guessing at this and listening we have to listen to how people feel about these things is I just would like to know myself personally are any of these tests reliable right has anyone done split samples of any of these tests which is totally common in medicine is you have to be reliable and I have no idea if we send off split samples whether they're reliable at a very basic level I started thinking what do I want to know on what I call a consumer reports approach just sort of an independent verification by we are in professional society we are non-profit and we are in the best position to independently assess a test that I I've never seen more controversy yes over a test by various parties involved pretty nasty things said things done you know it's like wow in the absence of data and information there's a lot of emotion and so just to clarify really I've devised a I was going to say just for you listeners especially your lay persons the bottom line here is we rely on test in our clinical practice and we base our decisions on results and so if our assumption that a test is valid is not valid it changes everything so I just want to frame that and then let you talk about it because it really matters because we trust and we've had labs before the office and we find out totally bogus and it changes everything and it's really difficult to tell the patient this lab said they were legit and there's something that came out that it's not legit so back to you but I just wanted to share that what the results that we rely on do make a difference in our practice and we're talking about a test that is controversial even though we think that they're legit it looks so legitimate it looks so real and we base so many assumptions on it well if you show this that this has happened and this is in your environment and then you're hearing now this is the binder you should use its assumptions on assumptions and I am despite intuition very practical of life I know that it's very murky at the bottom and so the test that we've devised and we're working with the University of Arizona School of Public Health there and have been working with them actually for a year with the neuroquants to devise a you know well designed study that essentially is just going to send off what we call split samples from all the major labs and we're going to be doing more is we're going to be sending off essentially the same urine sample to all the different labs from our subjects meaning probably be you know great planes real time my maybe my Michael labs we have the money but the vibrant one too and we're going to in the same people show what the results are and to me that's another really important part of what I'm proposing is really open and transparent research is all the data will be available is when we get it we'll make correlations ourselves and make it available as graphs but we want to make it available to everybody because one of the things that's bugged me for a long time is you hear studies referred to all the time this is clinically shown to do this or in my study I found this and this is true and when you actually go looking for the data you may never find it or evidently it exists but you're not going to be given it or somebody did it there's just all these reasons you don't get to see the data and that's not great research so we want it to be open we wanted to be transparent and that's really important what I see eyes really about is just transparency of not pretending we know more than we know and trying to get people to think critically so essentially we're going to have five or six subjects not necessarily ill but not not ill mostly reliable people who will follow whatever protocol our membership votes on if they want to provoke with Glutathione and sauna that's what we're going to do if they don't want any provocate we're going to vote on what's the most popular most common and we're also then just going to add the diet piece because that is always you know why they're distored you know well it was food well how much food or how long did it stay so there'll be the food component everyone's going to do exactly the same but we're going to add at the same time for all these people is we're going to collect dust samples correctly with the garbage bags for 30 days so and send those off to two labs that do it so that at the same time we're sending off the urine we send off the dust samples and we get those back and checked these labs even agree we really think these must be clean it's dust right check those and then see is there any agreement at all with what is in their environment with what's coming out in their urine and that's the study it's pretty simple one it's really an observational study and we just want to do it cleanly correctly and be open and transparent and let people see for themselves is the are these things really reliable should we make all these conclusions is there only one that works here is it totally random and we're you know not seeing is to just give some factual basis for an area in which we kind of freely spend our patients money all the time I just want to shout out that you if you're listening to your practitioner you want to know more you can donate I mean I as a board member donated just because I believe in this and so you can go to ici.org and I'm assuming you could donate right from the website right Mary that correct yes you can and I want to say though is that I was overwhelmed at the response this is the lab you know what we've described this is what I'd like ICI to be is just transparent and open and giving information the best we can is last year we collected $450 which we're excited about yes you know this year we've actually collected so far and donations are still coming in $27,000 for $27,400 wow it's like ICI is here yes the need for this kind of information about the environment is overwhelming is there is what we were once saying in small you know corners yeah I think you might have mold it's kind of a woo-woo thing I know now we're like no this is oh and I see so many people yeah jumping on the train and talking about and then they'll reference you or I or would I mean so it's neat to be because then when you're the first few talking about it you risk sounding pretty crazy but it's valid in what's happening I don't know if you've seen this I'm sure you have now that people are sequestering their homes there's epidemics I don't know if it's just the isolation and the stress as well but I'm seeing more and more and more cases even more than last year it's just becoming I'm seeing it both ways for some people it's been really really nice it's been a COVID blessing in that their homes were clean yeah and they had made them clean and the problem was work and they're getting so much better in a clean environment where they have the time to devote so I want to point out there I have a number of patients this has been a complete gift is to be able to live in their home yeah others who have been on the fence because we both know the idea that your home it's going to require a ton of money for something that you're not sure is real it's not really popular and people who've been on the fence who now were forced to spend much more time in it who are getting sicker and sicker it's not the way anyone really wants to learn about this but it's become very clear it was real so yeah I have seen it both ways and a shout out to everybody is just realizing the people who got better like my clean environment has been so important the people got worse unfortunately is there's really a problem to do more well that's one of the things I wanted to talk about with some of the kind of new cutting edge things that you're really have been read up and shared with all of us on so I want to talk about VIP and then we will dive into cranial cervical instability which you seem you've definitely really really understand this probably more than most clinicians let's talk first about VIP so this is way back into your maker days we all learned about VIP and the value I'm just going to say my clinical experience has been mixed when it works it works but it doesn't always work so that there's a little I would love to hear everything you have to say about VIP and then I definitely want to talk about we both saw this recent study you've been following her longer than me because there's drug status from Israel on a VIP that is being used for COVID so let's talk about that Dr. Akeli. Right so I've been using VIP since I think 2013 and I've actually had really pretty good experiences with a lot of people if you and I'm going to say if you choose them correctly is first of all the lung issue is very real and VIP has been known to help with that since the 70s where when you relax the smooth muscle in the lung people can take deeper breaths blood pressure pots like blood pressure will go down but mostly more oxygen is going to get through the lungs and into the brain and it's very noticeable and so I've used it for a long time to help people where we think they've had subclinical pulmonary fibrosis or even clinical unfortunately pulmonary fibrosis and I've said you know I've had one person waiting for a lung transplant a couple more with very severe fibrosis who've all been helped tremendously by VIP the cognitive part can be a little more iffy and what I found is two things one in which someone who I was talking to today has been a long-term patient said you know when I took it it's like a window opened up and suddenly my brain was working again I could feel and see you know everything that had gone on but then you remember I got really pretty rageful and you know I sort of hit the wall which was surprising and I had you know this kind of weird gut issue that nobody quite figured out so I stopped it I said yeah let's get you back on because I think I know some of it now so I was the person who despite it always being said there were no side effects I'd say yeah you know I certainly have a population of people who get suicidal irritated dizzy nauseous with it with even one or two dosages it was right around that time I started finding out 2016 about mast cells and VIP yes and it was very clear VIP could make mast cells the hard days say worse and the people who were getting worse tended to be the mast cell elders downloads hypermobility potz patients so my experience was more histamine again years ago when I was still very if my experience was I had more histamine issues with it and I bet now if I would try it it wouldn't be the same but thanks for clarifying because there is someone just asking or chat other any side effects and it's just like anything there's there's two edges even though it has great potential so I told this woman you know oh yeah I have I used to talk about this sensitive people and I haven't seen these issues in a long time and why some treating mast cells much faster and putting people on ketotaphane or neuro protect or recognizing and it diets all the things we do for mast cells for histamine issues so when we do VIP they're not having this and I think in my mind I've proved it it was a histamine issue mostly in the brain and I wouldn't put people on it who have mast cell issues until they're feeling stable in which case they tend to often benefit the most again because of the pots like this autonomia issues it can tremendously help so I wouldn't be afraid of it I would just be working with somebody who doesn't go oh my god you know it's because not an oh my god situation at all um it stops within usually an hour or two especially if you know it's gonna could happen and it really can you can basically pretreat and I have followed it because I've had so many people on it through the FDA suddenly deciding they didn't have enough data to do to work with this and it's very insulting so one of the reasons I can get cynical is I have a patient who's waiting for a lung transplant three years off of it with VIP who went to the White House she you know really made a fuss as did the petitions and everything else the FDA didn't care about what all these thousands of patients with mold said um same thing but an Israeli drug company and you know I think recognizing as being very smart new VIP started using it right away for COVID which was a smarter response I think IV and they were getting people off the respirators right away with it so they got VIP vast tracked in about March I call it another COVID blessing where all of a sudden VIP went from almost the do not compound list where I had stopped recommending so we always knew it was going to be taken off to fast track yeah like overnight it's the same drug and it's not that's not rational okay that's drug money and very insulting all Americans who did pour their hearts out all the research which wasn't quite perfect you know so I'll get off my soapbox but it gets me angry that it happened so I've kept the number of people on it through this knowing the research was going on the use did research just came out it is still quite available as VIP what's being studied is a synthetic compound which of course you can do and make money off you can't make money off exactly so just to clarify because we have a few questions on you mentioned pretreatment I'm assuming neuro protect Corsatin catatophen you would either get them stabilized or pretreat before you do yeah yes okay and then and there's people who probably have to be out of mold yes you know it's always said if you're in mold you can't do it not really true and the whole thing about mark-ons if you still have mark-ons you can't do it well we'll be waiting forever for some people right right and then like you said it's kind of just the criteria that kept the the people that had the muscle activation which makes perfect sense now I have not seen the case or amylase be a big issue either which was originally the thing we were told do you check pancreatic enzymes yeah I don't yeah I do I'm you know I'm not going to miss it you know and mostly I think every time it's I've caught it before we went on it and it's been a diet issue an alcohol issue it's usually a clean issue I've never had to do some sort of work up for cancer or anything so that's the VIP story but it's a big one it's it is available and for mold patients I'm sorry it's gone through more drama than almost urinary mycotoxins and I sometimes wonder where where did I find myself in this land where you know crazy things to be crazy in rational sense happen to but let's talk about the we've got about 15 minutes left and I definitely want to talk about cranial and cervical instability this I've had a few patients you definitely are more of an expert in this than myself or probably anyone else on the ICI group but let's talk a little about what is it what you see with that how would you treat it how would you recognize it let's dive in a little bit to that issue yeah and again that's kind of when you say why are you interested it's like well that's really interesting isn't it had you thought about that before right so I think I've always been interested in the hypermobility and it came from the early VIP days which was you know I definitely had the most patience of the group of shoemaker I was working closely with shoemaker I had the most patients by far who were quote having bad reactions I could not get away with saying my patients didn't have side effects right and why was that for whatever reason and I think it's because I'm a psychiatrist perhaps because from my own history of trauma I'm okay with people not being totally rational it's it's not something that floors me at all is that people would be attracted and that's why they've been coming from Michael Gray and we continue to come as they figured I was sympathetic and I am and so the people that tend to have more of what we're going to call in the neuro psychiatric realm also we're going to have hypervigilance from their own you know elder's downloads soft college and issues and you begin to see as I did in others how often that's connected to mass cells to pots and dysautonomia how incredibly common dysautonomia is when you start to recognize it and so I've been following that for a long time and it's I've had a couple of patients before it was known who did get cervical instability operations you know you get basically steel put back here and I wasn't incredibly impressed at the results it's a very scary thing is to have a big piece of metal put there is essentially if you don't understand is that our brain you know and our skull ends right on the top top of our basically our cervical spinal cord but our brain stem runs right through and that's what carries the messages our brain stem from the brain to the rest of the body and that's where the bagel nerve is we all talk about but that's only one of 12 cranial nerves and they all have to do really with survival breathing things you don't think about sweating very affected in dysautonomias and all of us think about mitochondria nobody's thinking hey there's a structural issue here too is if it's really a very narrow passage way here that's coming from the brain to the spinal cord and you have a lot of impingement if I could show you of the spinal cord the little fat processes sticking out you have blood vessels running you have the bagel nerve coming out you have a bunch of other cranial nerves and a lot of people not just people with EDS but people who've had whiplash have a tendency to get a displacement of there what we call C1 and C2 which are supposed to be kind of really nice and straight is it tend to slide and they slide into the nerves and slide into the blood supply so as a doctor who is thinking about that it's it's not something we don't think like that and I think we should but I think I saw a couple of videos of people with dystonia where they're pretty normal looking you know like you or I and then they're asked to just turn their head and their blood pressure their blood flows being measured and as they turn your head you stop hearing the sound of the blood flow it's it's getting fainter and fainter and then all of a sudden they start they're shaking and the dystonia is like this and then they're asked to put their head up and it stops and really like pulls one off for me because the first thing was of course yeah of course that would happen and then I thought I've seen this a number of times it's always called it's a pseudo seizure it ends up in a psychiatric basket there's no nothing known to neurology that goes like that and then stops like that just by turning the head although if they thought yeah you realize it so that is the essence of what CCI is it's a weakness in some ways in the human body of this junction here between the brain and the brain stem and the spinal cord a lot of like data wires are being transported here through a narrow area and a lot can go wrong with the neck and mold seems to contribute to the ligament laxity trauma certainly contributes to it Ehlers-Danlos people are born with softer collagen and it's being more recognized and I've been trying to teach people like on the ICI list is to not call functional med functional neurological stuff is basically the new word for psychosomatic neurologists know they're not they're not supposed to call people histrionic meaning just all in the brain so they call functional and they treat them kindly and people get better and it doesn't seem as bad as you know saying it's all it's all histrionic but you have to remember MS was considered histrionic for many many years is that was a histrionic the psych stuff that you have dealt with as a psychiatrist now that we know mold and the effect on the brain and I mean chemicals mold environmental toxins how much of this is really like at the I don't know that there's any true depression without some trigger to brain inflammation and dysfunction of neurotransmitters right like it's so I think that a couple of other a couple of other psychiatrists who work the way I do have the same impression is the more you do this the more you test the more you work with patients wonder what is true psychiatric right is you I watch neuroquants they're so inflamed or we see the atrophies you see how common Lyman infections are and causing psychiatric illnesses and you really wonder you know is there a quote true psychiatric illness I have a story about that so I have a we have a colleague we both know I won't make any names lived in a home with massive mold her and her daughter got sick and and came to me to get improved and later they found out in that home that had stackie batteries there was two parts a newer part an older part there have been two homicides and a suicide separately in that home and they wondered like I did we don't know but we were thinking there has to be some correlation to this behavior and the mold in that house now certainly there could have been predisposed but that many in that type of framework and they found this later this history of this older home and and then we think about like our government buildings and our prisons and our schools and how many of these flat roofs are affected by mold and and you think about some of the society like again I think about prisons especially because they already have the hits against them with trauma and difficult childhoods and I have a lot of compassion because they're probably in multi buildings too and that's actually I have a few prisoners I've I've treated and paranoid quotes schizophrenic who turned out to be mold and is you know now maintained really nicely and and I wrote brain on fire like 2014 and probably twice a year some mother calls about their kid being hauled off for some sort of murder really violent crime and said there was mold involved is that would be on my more you know advanced research list is with the neuroquants the inflammation I see when I say that there's limbic dysregulation that's a nice word from sort of like the nervous Nelly and and things are bad all the time to feeling homo to rage real rage and rage can be homicidal and certainly we see it in marriages and people interacting and you know so that's there it's it's real and the fact that you can quiet it the hell by climbing down inflammation is is definitely another treatment approach and in some place I would eventually like I mean my vision has always been in someone's I'd like other psychiatrists to just know this is common knowledge and stop getting people in five psychiatric meds before the age of 20 treating something that should have been fixing the roof in the bedroom right I find that at the option right because you and I use medication we use psychiatric meds there's no problem there but we have to have we have to educate our colleagues to look for root cause because sometimes it's not a medication deficiency actually most of the time right well we just have a few minutes no and they're like oh go ahead that medicine made them worse yes it's got a powerful effect it's like a whole lot of neuro inflammation it went down the wrong pathway because of the massive inflammation and we can explain it to you so that is where eventually I think I'd like to you know be going with ICI and and I probably do have some good news to announce here that yeah is a little bit new but ICI it's kind of obvious this year we arrived I mean I'm taking some pride here and all of us the board we should have a nice Christmas party here is this is so far from where we started and so heartwarming to know that our vision has been shared by so many people now is is that I think there's we are working already with the School of Public Health at the University of Arizona and that's who's been working with the neuroquants we have one of the professors there who's also a member of ICI and who's going to be supervising what we do here is that I've been told recently that there probably is a big donor or push to be putting a full center for environmental illness at the University of Arizona which would be a center of excellence so ICI as a non-profit would be working very closely there to really train professionals including psychiatrists and neurologists too and that would just be you know giving a real twinkle in my eye here like yeah we can just like kind of get people and it's not just mold it is really you know the metal band with no shielding and x-rays it is the fire the smokes you and I were both expected uh affected by smoke this summer and smoke and how much that affects the brain and all the toxins and the super fun sites I mean it's just so overwhelmingly enormous how we expect people to be normal and function when their bodies their DNA their brains have been so affected by toxins without their knowing nobody ever really knows that they're being hit by a toxin I don't know which is why you don't even know what to do about it except what we'll call the psychiatrist and they'll give us something to quiet her down yeah this is such a great discussion we just have like two three minutes left but what are some things on the horizon I know we talked a little bit before we got on here about peptides anything else you see as like appending things that could be instrumental in our practices in changing patients lives that you're seeing coming up for us to watch and and look at on the horizon I think there are a lot of things I think peptides certainly have a ton of potential and people are using them and it is very helpful I think BPC I've you know we can talk about its effect on collagen and that's really something to think about with ligament laxity working to strengthen the immune system peptides I tend to like biohacking tools so I think methylene blue is a really really interesting med and being used by some of our colleagues to help Alzheimer's and seeing improvement now I think everything that we can talk about with what I call structural integration body work has the potential we've talked about visual therapy lymphatics manipulation which is what osteopathic manipulation craniosacral I think you're going to see a huge growth as people realize that feeling good is really a good thing for the body but there was much more going on so the fascia and how it's affected by toxins is is important in some ways almost everything we look at can probably be helpful because toxins just go like mold everywhere in the body and like you I'm very interested in trying to figure out what's the best thing we can do the most efficient the most helpful but I have to say in some ways some of the most helpful that I can do for patients and probably you is to just help them understand hey many many people have been on this journey and it is a journey and people have different journeys and there are support groups Tucson has the longest running support group and I make jokes because the founders who have been really faithful and have really really helped in the beginning there were some of my young you know newest patients there had a lot of what we call marital you know discord had set the stage for me understanding this was totally common 10 years later they're incredibly successful running company I like to tell people this is not permanent what you're going through and that's probably the point of all of this is if you're getting appropriate help and you can get an attitude of more than an attitude of gratitude but gratitude doesn't hurt an attitude of what am I learning what am I doing you know and not feeling like how horrible how victimized am I by this happening you're probably going to successfully navigate it because so many other people have is I think is really a take home here and there are going to be many things and many things we haven't even talked about yeah that continue to really help we're going to have to do part two because we just started scratching the surface this has been fantastic and first of all I want to thank you for sharing your heart and your story and that really touched me Mary just for what you've been through and it doesn't matter mold or not it's common to all humanity the suffering and when we bring that that vulnerability to our practice and say you know what we may not have exactly what you have but we are here to love and support and give you hope because we've been there we know what it's like to suffer and you and I are in the journey too so we're just doing our own thing and seeking healing so thank you thank you for all your insights thank you for your leadership with ICI I mean it would not be where it's at without you and it's only going to continue thank you for taking on the role of the research director I am just honored to have had this time with you and thank you thank you for all that you've done thank you Jill for helping get the word out because publicity and getting the word out to people is everything of just making it aware again and again hey there really is a group here that we're trying to do things um in a really just kind of respectful transparent way of we know this is real of trying to give you the best information give our clinicians the best information and teach people to distinguish between good information and okay information that might work and really poor information so all of which exist at the same time right right and for that for that that is a journey and you've certainly been on it you know you were on the board for a very long time it's like you know as and we are here and this is a glorious moment to just say you know the beginning gratitude from me to you but to everybody listening and we'll listen for having the faith in us to donate like this and to keep going when you know the last meeting someone said oh do we have the money to have you know our our staff who we um do this or something and I just looked in them said you realize we put out a whole conference and announced it with no money yeah really yes we can take this risk with donations and I love it thank you it was a lot more risk then yeah so uh and again thank you for your welcome and again uh we will post links of the things we mentioned you can find us on youtube and thanks again dr acoly I will sign off for now