Because I feel very blessed to have this conversation with you. How you define joy.  Ninety-five percent of the human suffering is all generated from within, self-help, it's called. Anxiety doesn't come knocking. You are becoming anxious. Hello. How are you? Karam, I was just thinking of consulting you how to get these girls like this for me. Oh, you know, I was just on Dr. Aiz like twenty-thirty minutes ago talking about hair. We did like a whole thing all morning about turning back the COVID clock on aging. So I did like a hot oil treatment and it was a whole thing. So that's why I look the way I do. I usually don't look this like glammed up for podcasts. I usually have on my regular stuff. Thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this. I feel very blessed to have this conversation with you. Very blessed. So let's get started because I don't want to take up too much of your time. So I'm going to officially do an intro and then we'll go from there and it'll be very, very casual. Okay. I don't know anything about me, but I've been on this journey since I was seven. So it's my whole life. It's everything. Okay. Okay. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of New Growth. I am your host, Nikki Walton, and today I am joined by someone that doesn't need an introduction. He's a rock star guru. He is the true guru and it's not the man. It's the transparency that's there that God can shine through. The love can shine through. I call it love, but we can call it joy. We can call it consciousness. Whatever you want to call it, it was before re-work. So thank you so much for joining me. It was amazing. Namaskaram, Nikki. Wonderful talking to you. Yes. So you are the beauty and I am the beast, is it, in this whole game? The beauty and the beast, no, I don't see it that way, not at all. So I share your stuff on Instagram all day, all of your videos, you're very relatable, very down to earth. A recent one, somebody was like, how do you feel? And you were like, how am I supposed to feel?  I'm looking for the love or the joy that's already in the background that's always already in the background. Some moments it's easier and other moments it's more difficult and when I'm really in that groove, there is no me and there's just that love, not even the moments, there's just that love, that joy. So I wanted to read a quote from Inner Engineering and just kind of get your definition of joy. This is the one that I pulled. I have lots, but this is the one I love the most. Joy is not some elusive spiritual goal. It is simply the background that is needed for any aspect of your life to unfold magically and wonderfully. So I just love to know, like, how you define joy. Well, if you could define it, it would not be worth pursuing it. Yeah, I love that. Because they've been calling it by different names, essentially it is life, if it's exuberant. In its exuberance, it may be joy, it may be blissfulness, it may be ecstasy, well if it's relatable, it may become love, these are all different manifestations of exuberance of life. Joy is not a philosophy that you take on. Like right now it's become in pursuit of happiness. Where are you chasing it? And why is it elusive? Because you think it's somewhere else. It's just that this life, when it functions in an exuberant manner, not in a depressed way, in an exuberant manner, that means if you open the cork, it is exuberant. If you close it and keep it, then it becomes depressed. So what is opening and closing when it comes to life? See, the fundamental thing is this, well, once you become a human being, what it means is all other creatures are instinctively bound by boundaries. Like you may not have seen this in United States, but if you were somewhere else you would see this, if you were in the wild you would see it. All carnivorous animals, let's say a dog, if you leave him outside, he goes on peeing all over the place. He doesn't have any urinary infection or problem. He's setting his boundary by his smell. So he's building his own little peakingdom of whatever.   Well, we are proving to be otherwise, that's a different matter, but actually we are the finest life on this planet, most intelligent, most refined, most capabilities in terms of our faculties, everything. So if this is the finest life, if you look at the longing of this life, what you would see is whoever you are right now, you want to be something more than who you are right now. This doesn't stop anywhere. Even if I make you the queen of this planet, I'm not thinking of that, I'm just saying, okay? That's rock, that'd be awesome. Even if you become the queen of this planet, you will not be fulfilled, you will look at the moon, you will look at the other planets, you will...  If I give you one galaxy, you will look at the next one because there is something within a human being, wants to expand limitlessly. So this is the fundamental shift that happened between animal nature and human nature. Animal nature is always trying to fix its boundaries because its only goal is survival. Once you become a human being, you're always seeing how to expand your boundaries because what you call as human begins to kick in only when survival is taken care of. When survival is in question, we are like any other creature, biological entities of food, sleep, reproductive needs and survival, you know, essentially. So this dimension of longing to expand is not about more, it wants to expand limitlessly. So the simplest thing is, if one is not identified with the limitations of one's own physical self, one's family, one's community, one's nationality, race, religion, caste, creed, whatever else, if your identity is not like a limit on your ability to expand, then life will be naturally exuberant. When it's exuberant, one form of its expression is joyfulness. So joy is not a practice, joy is not a philosophy. Joy is not your ideology in life, nor is joy coming down to you from heaven because this has happened to the world that all the beautiful things that human beings have have been exported to heaven. If you say peace, people say divine peace. If you say love, they say God is love. If you say joy, people will say heavenly joy. No, no, these are all human things.   If you put a limit on your identity, then you are willing with one set of people, you are unwilling with another set of people. So in this, it is carved and there is no exuberance to this.  You will even sleep joyfully, I'm saying. I love that. You know, thank you for saying that about sleep. I have heard and read that unless you are, unless that awareness that, unless you have that same awareness during sleep, you're not aware of that true awareness, you're not aware as that true awareness. Is that true? And if so, what does that look like? Because when I'm asleep, I'm asleep. No, no, when you sleep, just sleep. Don't try to do anything else.  No, I sleep. And then I wake up and I'm like, well, there was sleeping and I'm peaceful now, but I don't know what happened during that time. It's like unconsciousness. See, there are too many things, people coming to me and saying, Sadhguru, in which poster should I sleep? I said, at least when you sleep, give up all this rubbish and just sleep. Sleep like you're dead. That's how I sleep, apparently. Yes, that's how you should sleep.  If you sleep like this, your duration of sleep will naturally come down because you're sleeping deep because the body needs that maintenance time. At that time, don't try to do anything. When your car is in maintenance, go and don't start the engine, you'll kill somebody. Exactly. Let it be. Only thing is why these things have come up is, it is just that, see, awareness is again not an effort. It is like, see, what are you aware of, what are you not aware of, simply depends on what is the brightness of your awareness. So we can use the analogy like a light bulb. Suppose you reduce the voltage for a light bulb, it becomes dim, you know? So if the voltage is at a certain level, suppose you're in a room where there are twenty-five people, voltage is so low that you can only see two people. In your experience, you think only two people exist. But if you increase the voltage, you may see five people. Then you'll think, oh, there are five people. And if you put on the voltage full on, then you see twenty-five people. So your whole experience of life is dependent upon or determined by what is the voltage of your life energies. So don't try to be aware. If you enhance the intensity of your life energies with the right kind of practice, then you will naturally be aware. This may also seep into so-called unconscious states like sleep, that you become aware of that also. But don't try to be aware, all you will have is disturbed sleep. Yes, exactly. So in the beginning of my spiritual journey, it was very much like law of attraction stuff and I would try to feel exuberant. I would try to feel joyful. And over time, very short time, I learned that it did not work. And I would become aware in quiet moments during meditation or even just kind of sitting and doing nothing of a peace in the background that grew to become at times joyful. And a part of my mind would say, no, no, no, we need to be super excited to make some happen. And as time went on, I could see that that was coming from that lack, from that quirked being of if I feel super excited and I can bring something into my experience that is not already here. So the more I relax into that and recognize that it's already here, the more things have flowed in my life. I'm including this experience that I'm having by being able to ask you my questions and share my story. I feel that it is a manifestation of this very natural exuberance that's here.  I guess so. He's energy.  I see that reflected in the emails that I get and the responses I get from people. But when I feel not fill with this body necessarily, like not me purposefully being happy or fake smiling, but an inner smile that's just there. As long as I remember to turn to it, as long as I remember to become aware of it and kind of live out from there, even if Nikki's upset or nervous. I was I told you I was on Dr. Oz earlier today and I didn't even like really have a lot of preparation time for it. So to have that heart racing, but still be aware of peace or even joy in the background for me, it's like it's very anchoring. And I don't believe I'm deluding myself. So there are two Nikki's, that's dangerous. Oh, tell me more. Because I saw in your bio that you're also a psychotherapist. Therapist, yeah, licensed psychotherapist. I went to school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Two, two Nikki's means either your schizophrenic or your possessed. Am I possessed with love? Can I be possessed with love? Can I be possessed by joy? You can possess love. Why should love possess you? You can possess love, joy, ecstasy in your life.  These must be your greatest possessions that you're blissful. People think they have a car or a home is a big possession. No, the dollars are not the best possession to have. They're useful. They're useful to create a certain amount of comfort for us. But the best possession to have is blissfulness. You don't have to be possessed by it. Because, see, we are looking at these dimensions of life or aspects of life as some kind of quantities or some kind of commodity that we must have it. Happiness is not something that you will have. Joy is not something that you will have. You just can become happy. You can become joyful, isn't it? I have joy in my life. What is that? Have you, have you stored it in a balloon or a box or wave? I'm asking. There's no such thing as having joy. You can become joyful. You can become loving. You can become blissful. So, becoming blissful, becoming joyful, becoming peaceful, what does it mean? See, if your body becomes pleasant, we call this health. Everybody wants it. Body is pleasant right now. This is health. If it becomes very pleasant, we call it pleasure. If your mind becomes pleasant, we call this peace. If it becomes very pleasant, we call it joy. If your emotions become pleasant, we call this love. If it becomes very pleasant, we call it compassion. If your very life energies become pleasant, we call this bliss. If it becomes very pleasant, we call it ecstasy. If your surroundings become pleasant, we call this success. Only to create pleasantness in your surroundings, you need the cooperation of other forces and people because creating pleasantness in the surroundings is a skill of a certain kind. You must be able to put many forces together, otherwise it won't work. But pleasantness of body, pleasantness of mind, pleasantness of emotion and pleasantness of energies are 100% your business, 100%. There's nobody else involved in this. But right now, we have handed this over to so many people that somebody can determine, someone else can determine whether you are happy or unhappy.  It is the worst form of slavery. Somebody determines what you should wear, what you should eat, where you should be. This itself is called slavery. But if someone can determine whether you can be happy or unhappy, somebody can make you peaceful, somebody can make you put you into turmoil. This means you are deeply, deeply enslaved. This enslavement has happened simply because you have not taken charge of your faculties.  If your mind was taking instructions from you, would you keep it blissful or miserable? Absolutely blissful. Absolutely blissful. What sometimes what you want for your neighbor may be debatable, but what you want for yourself is 100% clear, highest level of pleasantness, isn't it? Absolutely, yes. So when this is the case, why such a simple thing is not happening?  Please. This is not really a story, this is what happened to me. When I was just 25 years of age, one day I was just sitting on a small hill near my native town. I don't know, you may not be familiar with India. A little bit, I've been once, but just to southern India, yeah, in Mumbai. Mumbai, okay. Just the wrong place to go. No, I'm coming back and I'm going northern India next time. No, I'm coming back and I'm going northern India next time. But I'm just saying that's not India. I'm doing north India next time. As soon as everything clears up, I'm heading back. No, no, you must come south. In south? Upcoming south? Yeah. Mumbai is not really south, it's somewhere central India. Further south is where we are and it's a more beautiful part of India. North is just plain, south is full of mountains and... Is it near like Goa? Yeah, Goa and further down. Okay, okay. I want to come to Goa. So this is a city called Mysore, where there's a small hill in the town and I was just sitting there and suddenly I realized, suddenly I exploded into a state where every cell in my body was dripping ecstasy. I realized if I just don't mess with my mind, I'm ecstatic. Yes. Then after a few weeks of this experience that it became such a profound experience for me and then I decided I was twenty-five years of age and I decided and made a plan. In the next two-and-a-half years, I will make the whole world ecstatic. Because it's so simple, you don't have to do anything. If you simply sit here without messing around with your mind, you're ecstatic. So on that day, the population was just 5.6 billion people. So I thought in two-and-a-half years I made a plan. How I will make the whole world ecstatic. See, now it's 39 years.  Well, people say we've touched around a billion people, but that's not my idea of the world. My idea of the world is 7.6 billion people. But it took me a certain amount of time to realize how invested people are in their miseries. They're so invested that even if you show them the greatest possibility, they don't want to leave what is familiar. Exactly, exactly. So why is this happening to the world? Why so much suffering? See, physical things that happen to us. There is war, there is famine, there is calamities. These are different things. Well, this causes physical pain. But right now, if you look at human beings, only about two to three percent, maybe five percent of suffering is because of physical causes from outside. Ninety-five percent is self-inflicted suffering. Physical situations can change. They need not cause suffering to us. Right now, everybody is suffering the pandemic. Those who got infected, those who lost their lives, those who lost their dear ones, it's a different thing. All others are suffering. What is it? They're all worried about the economy. They are worried about the future. They're worried about something. I'm not saying it is not an issue. All I'm saying is, see right now, what could happen at the most? Maybe in another six months' time or one year's time, we may have to live like how we were living ten years ago, or maybe twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, believe me, life was not very bad, it was good.  Maybe we will have to live like how our parents lived. Today, how many, for example, I'm saying, this is not against the beauty consultation, okay? For example, how many pairs of clothes your grandparents had, and how many you have or this generation has, if you look at it, it's probably five, ten times more, isn't it? Except for in this case, I have a uniform. I have a uniform. I don't buy clothes like that. C-shirts and skinny jeans. You're not good for economy then. No, I'm not. I do order a lot of food, but less clothes. So, essentially, when the caveman lived here also, he was also some... among them also some were happy, some were not happy. That is not because of the conditions in which they lived in. It is because the condition of their minds, their ability to use their own faculties. What is it that human beings are suffering if you look at it? Well, they are capable of suffering what happened ten years ago. And of course, they suffer what may happen day after tomorrow already. So, this means that they are not suffering life. They are suffering two most important faculties in a human being that is a vivid sense of memory and a fantastic sense of imagination. They are suffering these two things, which is most unfortunate because what essentially you're saying is, this evolution of my intelligence is my problem. Right now, human beings are essentially suffering their own intelligence. If you... if they had half the brain that they have, they would sit here peacefully, no meditation would be needed. If they had the brain of an earthworm, they would sit very peacefully. So, essentially you're complaining, why have you given me so much intelligence? We're telling nature, why so much intelligence? So, in Florida, people soak it in alcohol every three days. In the week, they keep it in alcohol two days. They put other kinds of chemicals, you know, to keep the brain preserved so that it's not working too much. Yes, that's exactly right. So, essentially you didn't... you did not figure out how to handle your own intelligence. Exactly. So, the fundamental thing is, you have been given the most complex and sophisticated machine on the planet. That is this human mechanism. But you are trying to blunder through your life without even reading the user's manual. This is only... this is the only problem human beings have. Outside problems, we will deal with them to the extent that we can. That's all we can do. But 95% of the human suffering is all generated from within. Self-help, it's called. Self-help. So, brass tacks, this is what I want to know. For you, and you might not experience anxiety or fear or worries anymore in where you are, but for someone that's on this path and if anxiety comes knocking at the door, how does this look in practice, you know, staying aware or staying aware as bliss, this natural exuberance, that's there even when the emotions are strong or the thoughts are heavy. Well, let me tell you a little story, okay? Yeah. This happened in southern India, further south than where you went, okay? They came to a local village, somebody came to a local village and they asked, how far is Isha Yoga Center, which is our yoga center? The local boy who was sitting there by the street side said, it is 24,996 miles. They said, what, it's that far away? He said, yeah, the way you're going, if you turn around, it's four miles. Yeah. So right now you're saying, anxiety comes knocking. Anxiety doesn't come knocking. You are becoming anxious. Why are you becoming anxious? Because your imagination is unbridled. Your memory is uncontrollable. It's running right within yourself. So essentially it's your inability to use your own faculty. Suppose it so happens, your hand became an independent state by itself and started punching you in the face. If somebody else… That's what the mind is doing, the mind is punching me in the face. If somebody else tries to do this, we know how to distance ourselves, we know how to go away, how to handle them. Suppose your own hand starts hitting you in the face, what is the answer for this? They will lock you away. You have to get control of your hand and not do that. Yes. Either your hand should take instructions from you or somebody will tie it down or maybe they will amputate it if it goes out of control, all these things. Right now that's all that's happening with your mind.  They're not taking instructions from you. All your faculty should take instructions from you. Only then they're worthwhile faculties, otherwise they're a big nuisance.  See, in my understanding of life, I feel intelligence is a solution for everything. But right now everybody is trying to prove intelligence is the only problem they have. So anxiety doesn't come knocking. You become anxious. You become anxious and then because you're in this practice, you recognize I've become anxious and then see what's also here or what is here. Instead of walking like you said, five thousand miles in the other direction recognizing what's here. Is that the practice? Is that what you do in a moment like that for people that are still dealing with that heavy mind? See all they have to see is the fundamental thing that they have to absolutely recognize is human experience is cost from within, pleasant or unpleasant. Whether it's joy or misery, both are cost from within us. What is happening from within us must happen the way we want. The world will never happen the way you want hundred percent. World will never ever happen one hundred percent the way you want. I'm saying your own family, if there are two people or four people in the family, they will never happen hundred percent the way you want them. If they happen fifty-one percent your way, you are the winner. No, I'm not talking with Alexine, I'm just saying. We are not such in that. Very, very happy. I'm saying if your life is happening little more your way than somebody else's way, it's great. But it will never, ever happen hundred percent your way. It's just not possible.  But this one life must happen your way, isn't it?  Absolutely. There are no quick fixes, there are no adjustments to make. You need to just understand this, human experience is cost from within. The seat of your experience is within you. You are not sitting there, that's a problem. You are not at an individual, that is the problem.  Right now the way pe... when people say my life, if somebody says my life, you're supposed to look, where is this life? Is it in the office? Is it in the bank? Is it in his car? Is it in his home? Is it in his wife or husband or children? Where is this life? Because he thinks all this is his life. This is not your life. These are arrangements you made to facilitate this life to happen in the best possible way, isn't it? Yes, definitely. You made these arrangements. To give you the most comfort. But now you're mistaking the arrangements to be life. Right.  After some time you think you are the chair. You know what happens to you?  That's a bad way to live. Right now that's all that's happening. With this... With this there is anxiety, with this there is struggle. If you clearly come to this place, what is you, what is not you? If there's a distinction, there's a simple process that we have set up, millions of people are doing this around the world today. It's called as Isha Kriya. It's free downloadable for anybody who wishes to do it. This is a simple process to create a little distance between what is you, what is not you. When I say what is you, what is not you, this very physical body is something that you gathered over a period of time. Isn't it? You are not born like this. You've happened. So what is this? That lot of food that you're ordering, I'm sure you're not eating that lot of food looking at you. I like fried, greasy, cheesy things. I'm doing better though. Maybe you're looking at them, you're not eating them, I can see that. So the food that you've eaten has right now transformed itself into your body and be like this. Where did the food come from? Just the soil that you walk upon is food, food became like this. Someday once again this will become part of the earth. So this is yours, this body is yours, but it's not you. Similarly your psychological structure, these are millions of impressions that you have taken in and it's formed itself in us, given itself a certain shape and a form and a quality. Now this is also something that you gathered. What you gather can be yours, but it will never ever be you, isn't it?  Got it. That little distance is needed. And is it a matter of remembering that distinction? See, if you make your life energies very intense, very intense, you will see naturally physical body and your psychological structure will move little away, it'll give you little space. It's like, see now I'm wearing loose clothes, always you're conscious that these are clothes. Suppose you wear really super thin, tight skin, tight nylon clothes. After some time you don't know which is you and which is your body. It becomes one with you because there is no space. So where there is no space, there is no perception of what it is. Because there is no perception, you don't know how to deal with it. It's like this, on this planet we went on arguing whether this planet is flat or round, flat or round, you know, this debate was going on and you know that Galileo stuff and all that. Yes, yes. This would have continued forever. But the moment we took off and we started flying, we could clearly see it is round. We went and stood on the moon and looked down, one hundred percent it was round, all right? What is it that gave us this perspective?  Yes, I love that. So it's the distance recognizing that you are not the body, recognizing that you are not the mind, still being there and seeing those, that energy come through and move through but knowing that it's not you. Does that sound near what you're saying? Yes, you will get to learn to use the body and mind to its best.  So what you're calling as anxiety, what you call as misery, any form of unpleasantness that generates from within you, either in the form of ill health or misery, essentially it means your own system is working against you. Right, right. Now that's beautiful. I love how you make everything very, very simple. And I also wanted to tell you that I'm taking neem in the morning because of you having been out for at least a month, at least a month now. So thank you. I tried to do the Sumeric too but gave me indigestion so I haven't been able to. Oh, there is a certain way to consume that. But neem is great. Neem is great, it'll bring certain transgressions to you and it will... Once you have neem early morning, nothing seems bitter through the day. Yeah, I take it every morning, it's the first thing I do. Neem is the first thing I take when I wake up in the morning now and it's been for at least a month, like I don't have much of a morning routine except for just kind of marinating as this love, you know, in that exuberance. And then I do a little reading and then I take my neem and then I get started with my to-do list or jumping into my phone. I stopped checking my phone and my newsfeed first thing and that changes everything. So just kind of remind yourself that you're not the person. Oh, maybe we have to say one more thing. I'm not the body, I'm not the mind, I'm not the phone. I'm not the phone, yes, because it's becoming... it's another appendage. So in the morning I'll say, not just I'm not this, I'm not Nikki, I'm not the mind, I'm not the phone. I like that. I think this is more important than the body and mind for a whole lot of people.   Yeah, absolutely. Not healthy, not healthy at all. It's better now that I've, you know, I'm not checking it as soon as I wake up and I have set alarms on all of my apps that shut off after an hour, but you put your own passcode back in to get access back to it. So it still takes like a conscious moment to be like, am I gonna re-access this app? And usually I do, but it's still a moment to decide. I can choose if I'm gonna continue to be mindless. But yeah, no, Niam has been an excellent addition to my routine. So thank you so much for that. Niam is a wonderful thing. It will also reduce the number of cancerous cells in our body. It has incredible benefits. It is one leaf that's found on this planet who has a very complex chemical system, nearly one-not-four to one-not-five different types of chemical compositions are there in that. It is a... it's a wonder leaf. So I'm glad you're in Florida and you must be getting some fresh name. Yes, I am, I am. There's a farm here, not too far in Brandon, Florida. And so that's where I get my name from and it's fabulous. I know that we're actually coming near the end of our time together and I wanted to give you a chance to just let my audience know where they can keep up with you at. Well, oh, well, I'm not good at this. You should only say these things. Hahaha! Maybe I'll record like a short thing at the end for us. We're here in Tennessee, on the border of Tennessee and Georgia near Macmanwell. This is where the Isha and Shoot of Inner Sciences is. And of course we are in southern India, a much larger center out there. And this is the place you must visit, it's very, very... it's an extremely beautiful space out here. And apart from that, of course, there is an engineering dot com and whatever else. There is a Sadhguru app, if you download that, everything is there in that. It's called the Sadhguru app, it's free downloadable. And there are various meditations that… guided meditations that one can practice from this. And also simple, very simple forms of yoga which are called as upayoga, which one can do or practice without any risk of doing it wrong. Because proper yoga must be done under care. Just doing it from a book or a video is not a good thing to do, but this is called upayoga, which are very, very simple processes that anybody can learn to do. So, as I said, now I'm kind of condemned to be a failure in my life that the entire world being blissed out is, you know, not happening. So, I'm only trying to increase my percentages, so tell them that, that, let me be a little better failure than what I am right now, but I'm a blissful failure, so don't worry about me. blissful failure, I aspire to be a blissful failure. I love that. Thank you, Nikki. Wonderful talking to you. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. You must come and visit us here. You must come and visit us at Tennessee. Oh, I am absolutely coming that way. I love Tennessee. I used to drive through the mountains all the time between Missouri and North Carolina. So, I'll definitely head up there. Do you all have silent retreats? I crave a good silent retreat. There's a 21-day silent retreats going on right now. You can join the three-week thing. I wish I was there. I think, yeah, I need that in my life. And whenever I feel the need to go away like to a cave, I remind myself that that exuberance that would be here where I am. We also have a cave. I didn't know that you're drawn to the caves. Anywhere that's quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet. But then, like I said, it's always like a constant reminder, even though you're not on the beach, even though it's not quiet in this house, because the two kids are yelling, the peace is here, the exuberance is here, and just identifying as that as opposed to the need for quiet, you know? I'm here till end of December. We'll be glad to see you when you'll come. Yes, I'll be there. Thank you so much. Thank you.


My research is about something called interoception, which means the connection between the brain and the body and how we monitor, for example, what our heart, lungs, or stomach are doing. So we research this connection between the brain and the body and we try to relate this to the way we make decisions and mental health disorders like anxiety and depression. The work we do in my lab is fundamentally interdisciplinary. So we deal with concepts from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and other areas and the interdisciplinary atmosphere of IS really appealed to me as a place where I could expand that approach. The first time I met Samia was during her IS Fellows presentation where she was presenting an overview of her work on cannabinoids and neurobiology, and I was really struck by the work. It was really interesting and seemed really directly related to what I wanted to do. So in the reception afterwards we started chatting and we found that we had a lot of common interests and that led to a really rich collaboration. I'm a neuropharmacologist by training and I am interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms in our brain that are associated with the development of stress-related psychiatric disorders. I met Mayak at IS in his six-minute seminar and I became immediately interested in the subject that he was presenting because it was how our gut feelings can influence our susceptibility to psychiatric disorders. And I work with neurobiology of psychiatric disorders. So I was immediately thrilled to see someone that was working in a field that was correlated. So there could be a room for a lot of interaction and collaborative work. Our ERC project is called Cannabodies and it's obviously a collaboration with Samia where we're using compounds such as THC and CBD, the active ingredients in cannabis, to see how they influence brain-body connections and interoception and also to see how they change the way the brain makes decisions. And the hope with that project is that we'll be able to generate new findings that can later guide clinical trials and different mental health disorders.


Our next conversation is going to focus in on a subject that's already come up a number of times, which is the environmental context. And you can go ahead and come up to the stage. In fact, the World Wildlife Fund's example has already been mentioned specifically a couple of times, and now we get to hear from WWF in particular. But first I'd like to introduce our moderator for the next conversation, Suzanne Goldenberg, who is a U.S. environmental correspondent for The Guardian newspaper. She's also the author of Madame President about Hillary Clinton's historic run for the White House in 2008. Suzanne has spent many years covering the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Chechnya, and has been an intrepid foreign correspondent elsewhere. So one of the things that I like about this pairing her up to have this conversation is that her journalistic trajectory covers some of what we're talking about here, which is coming home, the technologies have come home. And now we're looking at the application and the leveraging of this technology in the environmental context in this conversation that's entitled Nature's New Watch Dogs. Thank you, Suzanne. Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, as you might have gathered today, the conversation that we're going to have now with Carter Roberts and Robbie Hood is going to be focusing much more on the upside of drones than you will have heard about previously and specifically how these new technologies can be used to protect wildlife and to sort of prevent death, both of wildlife and of humans. Robbie Hood is the director of unmanned aircraft systems at NOAA, and she's overseeing this sort of coming introduction of drones in forecasting and their use at various levels to tell us more about hurricanes and other dangerous storm systems that are coming our way and also to talk a little bit about how this technology can be used for people who are at sea in instances of shipping. And Carter Roberts is the president and chief executive officer of the World Wildlife Fund, and I think he's going to be able to tell us in great detail about how this technology has been used or is already beginning to be used on the ground in places like Nepal to combat poaching, which is a war that so far the conservationist groups seem to be on the losing side of and hopefully this new technology can reverse that or even the odds somewhat. But I'm going to ask Robbie if you can sort of start off and talking about how this technology is going to be deployed and hopefully and how important you think it might be, particularly in the era when we've seen budget cuts at NOAA when it comes to forecasting. Right. Thank you very much. At NOAA, which stands for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, collecting data is what we do. The National Weather Service is part of NOAA, the National Ocean Service is part of NOAA. And being able to understand what's happening in all parts of the planet is really important and so observations are really important. We've got satellites and ocean buoys and rain gauges and radars and just about anything that you can think about. And so we're looking at UAS technologies as a way to, just another observing system to come into the bigger observing systems that we're already using. And so we're looking at very, very small hand-launched short endurance ones all the way up to Global Hawk as part of a partnership with NASA and being looking at those long range and long endurance capabilities. One of the things that we've been emphasizing is trying to look at technologies that are already being, that are already very well fleshed out, like the ones that are being used by the military overseas and how can we take those technologies and rapidly deploy them for scientific purposes. And I would say one of our biggest hurdles right now, we've heard of a lot of different things talking about the FAA and privacy issues, but for a scientific agency our biggest hurdle is the cost. UASs can be, every observing system is relative. Global Hawk is a very expensive aircraft but it's cheaper than a satellite and there are times when it could be very, very useful in helping us to get detailed information and far reaches over the ocean that we can't quite get to with other kinds of assets. Also the little ones, the hand-launchable ones or things that we can launch from a ship, being able to work with those using science dollars, science research dollars, that's what we're hoping is going to be one of the new frontiers that we'll be able to tackle is to get the cost down so that many, many more applications can be used by a wider variety of people. And Carter, we've heard that the World Wildlife Fund is really going forward with this technology in Nepal and in Africa, I believe, and what do you think it brings to the table from what you saw on your recent trip? Well, for the record we were not the group that was putting up UAVs over dove hunts in the southeastern United States. But it's interesting, just this morning I was getting a whole series of emails from the Central African Republic where rebel groups have overrun an area that's one of the most legendary areas for elephants and we fear that there could be a massive slaughter that's occurring but we don't know what's happening on the ground, this is one of the most remote places on earth. And so in our work we're desperate for more information and the wildlife trade issue has really exploded over the past four years. It's become a huge international issue in places like South Africa where four years about 20 rhinos were taken due to poachers. Over the past three years it's jumped to 150 a year, 350 a year, last year it was 650 and this year it looks like it's going to peak over 800 and it's become a huge crisis and the bad guys are extremely sophisticated. They have night vision goggles, they've got helicopters, they have all kinds of funding and resources and we need to up our game to combat what they're doing and so we're trying to do that in places like Nepal and Namibia and Mozambique and elsewhere. And Nepal, I mean you were using them from what I understand, you can use them to track gangs of poachers. What happens if they move across borders? What sort of complications do you get into there? Yeah well Nepal is a really interesting case because in Nepal, I want to do a before and after in Nepal two years ago I went to Nepal to collar a tiger and drive him across the country and re-release him into the wild and we put a $10,000 satellite collar on this tiger and released him into the wild and then watched the tiger move, establish his territory, maybe even mate and then we watched the collar stop moving and that's the point where we went out into the field, found the collar and there was no tiger, the collar was there and at this point the tiger is probably in a bottle of wine being used in China at some celebratory feast and that's not the way it should work and I was just there two weeks ago where we were collaring a horned rhino and I was with the head of the military, I was with the chief warden, I was with the scientist there we were putting yet another $10,000 satellite collar on this rhino but we know that there's got to be a better way, there's got to be a better way not just to chronicle the demise of nature or the loss of these animals there's got to be a way to have real-time data on the animals, real-time data on the poachers and then a software system that enable us to mobilize people to get to the right place at the right time and so we now, we just received a grant from Google as part of their Global Impact Awards that enables us to begin to test new technologies in practical scalable ways and so for instance in Nepal and in Namibia right now we're looking at using cell phone technologies to track animals so that you've got a chip with a rhino that can send text messages that instead of being collected by satellites can be collected by drones that pass overhead we can begin to use drones what are the costs of these technologies and how do they help sort of equalize the fields with the poachers if you use cell technologies and text messaging it's a fraction of what a satellite collar would be and then you can also begin to use drones to track poachers using thermal imaging at night because they're not active during the day, they're active at night and these are really remote places but the real game for us is the software system that enables us to take data from animals data from tracking poachers, get that information to rangers on the ground real-time so that they can intercept the poachers before it's too late that's the real game and ultimately not just track the poachers but track them back to the traders because the real game in these big criminal syndicates is getting to the traders that's the way we're going to interrupt this crisis by tracking them to the selling point yeah and sort of switching back and forth but Bobby, I mean when you're talking about the global hawks which are the big systems we have seen this sort of forecasting explode over the last decade getting much more accurate information about impending hurricanes and dangerous weather systems that we're going to see more of and with more intensity because of climate change so what does global hawk actually bring into the picture and how can that save lives, save businesses yeah, it's one way to think of it as a force multiplier for science every way we hook in different kinds of observing system, everything should be working together and what we're always looking at is what's the best resolution that will give us the information satellites are extremely good and satellites have improved our weather forecasting especially in hurricane forecasting fields but some satellites only pass over a storm once a day, twice a day and it takes a nice big snapshot sometimes you need to get in closer we know it is very famous for its hurricane hunter aircraft that it flies through storms but what a global hawk would be able to provide is a system that can go out and stay with a storm much, much longer it's got a longer range, it can fly for 24 hours so now we're able to fly over a weather system and actually stay with it a satellite will pass over once or twice or you may have a geostationary satellite that's going to take continuous pictures but still you will be able to get a closer look at a storm for a longer period of time and it fills that niche that we can't quite satisfy right now and in terms of privacy concerns, what sort of levels are we talking about? actually privacy concerns, we intend to abide by whatever the rules and regulations are defined by by our government system but right now it's like someone said earlier we don't use, any sensor that we're using now is something that we've already developed for a manned aircraft so we are only going to use UASs for scientific purposes so we don't collect privacy data now with our manned aircraft then we won't collect privacy data with the unmanned aircraft it's all about science data and presumably it's not the privacy issues that come into play so much as the sort of law enforcement issues that would come into play one year with a wildlife trade the places we're talking about in the world are extremely remote they're generally unpopulated the place where I was in Nepal has the world's tallest grasses it's almost impenetrable typically the only way you can move through that area is on the back of an elephant and so the privacy issues aren't that great because nobody's supposed to be there and what we're tracking is people who are entering the park typically at night and so what we're really looking for is the movement of poachers in really remote places in places where nobody's supposed to be there and so the privacy issues are almost irrelevant what kind of concerns do governments such as the governments of India and the governments of Nepal raise about the use of these technologies and issues of foreign control? our work whether it's Namibia or South Africa or Nepal starts and ends with governments because governments at the end of the day need to enforce the laws that are on their books they're the ones who need to catch the poachers and so we've learned a lot about engaging with governments around their air restrictions radio frequency restrictions, security issues on the ground and then of course a lot of the places we're talking about are in border areas and so when I was in Nepal recently we were also releasing garyals into the river the garyal is this incredible relative of the alligator with a very long narrow snout extremely rare almost endangered and we were releasing these garyals into the river and then the Nepal government had collared the garyals with satellite collars to track them and as they move the river we're on flows into India and a few years ago one of these garyals floated into India someone noticed the collar, noticed the radio antenna and the whole area lit up with accusations in Nepal spying on India using a garyal which is a little improbable but nevertheless in every single region that we work we start with that government and ends up being a government initiative and as we're piloting kind of what's the sweet spot in this technology in terms of practicality, cost, replicability we're also piloting how best to work with governments to address the issues you've raised I wanted to ask you obviously about international collaboration and potential friction One of the things, when we do scientific experiments we always have to get permission of the country that we're going to even with manned aircraft now so that part won't be any different One of the exciting things that I think is really interesting about UAS is that UASs are already designed they're generally designed to bring data back in real time and in my early part of career I worked for NASA and I participated in some hurricane research experiments where we flew aircraft through the top of hurricanes and there when you're on the aircraft you've got 40 scientists that you're talking to on headsets and it is an exciting experience but once I started working with UASs and we've done an experiment with NASA that looks at hurricanes, being able to sit in front of a computer monitor and have all that data come through to you and being able to chat with your local scientists across the country it really brings the science experience to a bigger audience and I think it's going to bring science data and science discovery to even greater populations across the world and to younger students so to be able to put a camera on a UAS and watch it fly through a hurricane is going to be the same thing I've seen in my career but to be able to provide that to other students and other citizens of the world I think it's going to be very exciting so there is a flip side to the privacy part is that we are actually making data more readily accessible to others And in terms of international cooperation or collaboration on some of these developments is there something you can tell us about? At NOAA we've been working with international groups basically a lot of the government agencies are working together to work with the FAA to get access to national airspace there are similar organizations in the international community for civilian air control and it really just depends on the country many countries right now are very open minded about bringing UAS activities especially for scientific research another area that's got a lot of international connection behind it is doing new studies in the Arctic so nine countries circle the Arctic and all those countries have interest in what's happening up there with climate change and sea ice change as new shipping routes open up or if there's oil spills and so there's already discussions at the international level about how could you share assets whether you share the assets themselves or you share the data through doing more experiments so there's a lot of discussion that needs to happen with the aviation authority side of countries but at the scientific level I would say scientists to scientists in other countries we're all pretty excited about working with this technology and do you encounter that level of enthusiasm as well as you go into Asian Africa you're smiling a little roofily I mean it's really you know some of the greatest parts in the world are in border areas because it's the way government's resolved boundary disputes it's interesting and the wildlife trade that I was talking about is inherently a global issue it's these criminal syndicates that move across borders quite seamlessly and the trade we may have a problem in Africa but it's being driven by demand in places like Vietnam and China and Thailand and so we have begun to work with governments we co-host kind of a what is the wildlife trade equivalent of Interpol called traffic Crawford Allen who's in the audience runs that program for us but this has become a huge international crisis and Secretary Clinton before she left called for a major intelligence review to work with other countries on sharing intelligence about this so that we can kind of unlock the mysteries of these very shadowy networks that operate across borders and often use the proceeds from selling animal parts to buy guns and other materials so this has become a high profile for the State Department and we're seeing much more collaboration across countries but we have a lot of work to do as you say we're not winning this battle yet have you had an indication yet from John Kerry how he sees this in terms of on his list of priorities at the State Department? you know it's interesting when he, Senator Kerry hosted one of the biggest briefings on the wildlife trade right before he left and it focused mostly on the slaughter of elephants in Africa and so I know that he regards this as a major issue to address we look forward to working with him on this and he's been one of the stalwarts on both on climate change and also on the wildlife trade issue and Robbie I wanted to get back to that issue of the Arctic Council what kind of information do these Arctic nations want to get out of the Arctic because that's this area that's really in play now with climate change it's basically joint understanding of what's happening in the Arctic but each country has its own, with some countries like Canada it's the economic zones and protection of their country most of them are all concerned about what would happen with more oil drilling and if there is an oil spill how would you even tackle that problem because it's going to be so much more complicated because of the harsh climate there also as new shipping routes, as the ice diminishes there's going to be opening up more opportunities for other ships to pass through there well if we can't predict the weather well enough ships could actually get stranded if things freeze up very suddenly so there's a lot of safety issues as well but I would say in general most, all of the countries are really interested in actually what's happening and then what the changes in the Arctic are going to bring to their country in the long run what would have happened three years ago had NOAA had this technology during the BP spill what would it have been possible to know about the size of the spill the flow rate, anything using this technology would it have added to the information? the BP spill was a little bit different because it happened in the Gulf and there were so many assets coming out there there were a lot of manned aircraft too but yeah, we're doing experiments within our agency where we're actually looking at putting different kinds of sensors on UAS so that we can fly out and get to regions that are harder to get to one thing, especially some of our colleagues up in Alaska they have oil spills all the time in Alaska because there's so much oil business up there and so we'd like to get to the point where we would have assets that are easy to use some of our smaller ones that are hand-launchable they're container-sized it would be nice to have those at NOAA weather stations or on NOAA ships so that if something happens like a, say, a derelict fishing net or some kind of marine debris is rolling in the ocean you can find it easier by using this asset that you've already got on the ship and you can fly it out over this thing and take a look at it same thing with oil spills, we can do better at being able to look at the size and actually detect exactly the extent of it as far as latitude and longitude as well what do you estimate the cost of one of those hand-held systems to be? we're right now, and this is not a particular plug because at NOAA we're looking at all different kinds of systems but we are making some investments in Puma systems which are hand-launchable but we really like those because they land in the water and a lot of the observations that we collected at NOAA are ocean-based so those kinds of systems normally run 300 to 400 to 500,000 that range, but that's three aircraft in a ground control station another obviously very remote area that comes to mind we would like to know more, is this specific garbage patch? I mean is there a way that drones could be used as eyes in the sky in that area and in what way? yeah, my program actually has a small project that we're funding that's actually looking at that and it's a marine debris the motivation for it was the debris that's coming in from the tsunamis and how that's affecting the Alaska coastline in Hawaii but also it's just being able to find these things one of the hardest things is especially with things like derelict fishing gear or fishing nets and other things that are lost to sea it tumbles through the ocean and it just gets bigger and bigger with time and it's really hard to find them so what we're trying to look at is a multi-tiered approach maybe you can look at chlorophyll streams with satellites and they're finding that some of the debris tends to go with the same streams that have the chlorophyll and then you could maybe take a ship out there and fly something from the ship to make it easier so we're always trying to look at how we can connect those observing systems to make them the most efficient that they can be and Carter, we've talked to this point about the sort of war on poaching the efforts to stop this well, there's still these endangered wildlife left and what other uses can be made of this technology in terms of just establishing a baseline on populations is it advantageous to use there is that an application you see going forward? Yeah, very much so there's a whole litany of animals that live in these remote places that we and others are using this technology to track their populations whether it's walruses in the Arctic or orangs in Malaysia or elephants in Indonesia just yesterday there was a piece about sandhill cranes in the United States that's all super important the other thing that's important for us is also tracking human uses in these areas so no matter which place we're talking about one of the greatest ways in which habitat is being destroyed is by conversion to agriculture and a lot of the biggest companies on earth and also governments want to eliminate illegal products from their supply chains because those are the ones that typically have the greatest impact so not just tracking the animals but also tracking the productive uses of land tracking deforestation by companies often illegal in some of these areas tracking fishing in parts of the ocean that are far, far away and being able to relay that information back to be part of a database so that companies can make decisions on purchasing based on what's legal, what's not and then also be able to have data to go after some of the bigger companies that are breaking their commitments so that whole array of monitoring animals also monitoring land use is enormously important and I think the lidar example that was shown earlier has been being able to track forests, track their size, track their carbon content track what's happening to them and track who is making those changes on the land is going to be an enormous part of our future work To what? I mean both NOAA and WWF have talked about deploying these technologies in the near future I think before 2015 but if you were to take us out to the end of the decade and given that the money is finite where sort of name three areas where you think both in sort of project area and geography where you think we can expect to see these technologies deployed on a more routine basis Yeah, resources are finite If anyone in the room wants to make a contribution to WWF in this work we welcome that One example would be Africa would be in the Congo where you have these deep intact forests The rule of law is variable where we don't really know we can judge from satellites kind of land cover but that's a very different thing than being able to track the movements of either animals or poachers or timber companies on the ground so I would predict that there would be a regular systematic use of UAVs in that area to develop information, bring it back real time to rangers on the ground to law enforcement officials on the ground and to us to be able to monitor the changes in that region and respond real time And do you think that's something that's going to be in the budgets of these governments or it's going to have to be something that will be done by international conservation groups? You know, long term it's going to have to be in the budgets of these governments You know, our role is more to assist governments than to do their job for them You know, at the end of the day when it comes to apprehending militias on the ground we can't do that You know, we can't raise a submachine gun and take people down in the forest We can't do that That's the role of governments but we can assist governments with technology, with training with understanding how to develop better monitoring protocols Another example would be I would say in the South Pacific where some of the richest fisheries on earth some of the most important coral reefs on earth there's a lot of illegal fishing that is being undertaken We're now working with some of the biggest companies on earth Bumblebee, Tuna, Starkist and others who have said we are not going to buy any more product that comes from illegal fisheries and every boat's going to have a barcode every fish is going to have a barcode and I predict that we'll see more and more use of technology to track fishing practices in those regions and have that play a role in the economy of things like Tuna and some of the biggest fisheries on earth and a third one I would say would probably be in the Arctic It's amazing how much of the Arctic belongs to the United States but most US citizens aren't really aware of what's happening up there and it's one of the last pristine places on earth It's changing in front of our eyes It's full of amazing resources We need real-time information to guide what is an exceedingly complex governance system up there and I think that's probably the, if you add to pick a third that would be it and I think the governments are beginning to construct a system to work with each other on the basis of information and make really smart choices up there Robby, where do you see this technology? My top three are very, very similar Being able to do better marine monitoring, polar monitoring and high-impact weather monitoring are the three big areas I think touching on what Carter just said one of the things we're excited about Puma systems and other systems that you can launch from ships is that we do a lot of ocean cruises to monitor coral reefs and activities in the ocean but also to look at climate changes, air quality, air chemistry and by taking a ship out, if we can add UASs to that ship and increase the distance that it can observe for a given ship, we're actually saving money and have something that we could use for rapid responses if a derelict fishing gear popped up or if there is illegal fishing ship that we can put that into action The third one is, I'm sorry, the second one is also the Arctic I think there's so much more we need to learn about the Arctic Satellites have done a very good job of taking pictures of what's happening up there but when you put all the satellite data together you get a very good picture of the annual things that are happening in the Arctic but being able to understand what's happening day-to-day and how it's affecting the wildlife and the local ecosystems if we could have systems that we could dependently fly up there and you think about it, that's one area where you're not going to fly a lot of manned aircraft up there because it's so dangerous so I think discoveries in the Arctic and polar regions are going to be important and then finally, high-impact weather we think that there's much we can learn about being able to forecast weather systems and not just fly something in a storm that's in your vicinity but actually get out over the Pacific Ocean and look at storm systems as they're developing and building into frontal systems as they come across the United States trying to catch storm systems early when they're first spinning up and getting high detailed information about them then we're seeing some very encouraging signs that we do think that we could actually improve hurricane intensity forecast on the five to seven day level by being able to look at the storm as it's developing over the ocean Do you see an area of overlap where conservation and atmospheric forecasting have worked together? Well, I do because I think one of the things right now with federal agencies civilian federal agencies and especially agencies that deal with the environment and science and conservation none of us have very deep pockets to invest in this kind of technology so that if we can work together we've actually had this conversation with USGS we have interest in the Arctic why not look at similar technologies are there ways that we can operate systems together and share information also we try to keep a very close touch with some of the other agencies as to who's investing in which kind of technology so if one agency is investing in that technology then I might invest in this technology and hopefully together we'll bring them together and make a more powerful system Of course there's interest in working together I was just reflecting that one of my kids just did a drawing of debt at work and it's got a tree with a gorilla in it and somebody's cutting the tree down and I'm like I've got my fists up and I said no, no, no, that's not exactly what I do what we do more often is to try to get information in the hands of government officials to make the right decisions because at the end of the day whether that tree stays standing in most parts of the world depends upon the government having the information but making the right decisions and so a lot of our work is about collaborating with governments getting the right data to them at the right moment in time so they do the right thing and as we know governments don't always do the right thing but I think if you get information in the right places at the right time it gives us a better chance I was reflecting on in the previous session the question about the Boston Marathon and we do not want to document the demise of nature that's not what we want to do for a living what we want to do is engage decision makers when there's still time to keep nature intact and I think that's the greatest challenge with this kind of information is how do we get it real time so we're not just writing another sad story but we're actually helping governments make decisions about effective sustainable development or whether that's catching the bad guys before more bad things happen in the future I thought in the time left to us that we'd open up to questions if people have any yeah, please Hi, Gene Kilby and I'm with a company called Arrow International you mentioned Mr. Roberts that the governments were cooperating in the Arctic for policy there, does that include Russia? Absolutely there is something called the Arctic Council which is a new it's a new entity that's been created by the eight countries that control most of the Arctic that are beginning to look at information based joint decision making and governance around a set of issues from species to fisheries to minerals to oil to navigation lanes and they're beginning to tackle those one by one and it's actually one of the more promising parts of the planet the Arctic, unlike the Antarctic the Antarctic has a very tight governance system built around it I think probably because it's terrestrial there are historic reasons for that the Arctic is just beginning to emerge this new governance system it's largely going to be about marine issues and the real issue is how do we put all that data on the table at the same time and then make smart choices where to fish where to drill for oil where to keep areas intact instead of making those decisions one by one and I think the next big meeting of the Arctic Council is going to be in Iceland and in the fall and I have high hopes for it but a lot of it depends upon data also with the Arctic Council that's looking at just at UAS activities for the Arctic is someone at the back Timothy Reuter, DC Area Drone User Group again I'd be interested there's obviously some social stigma attached to UAS and particularly the word drone and I wonder if you've had any pushback on the work that you're doing based on the associations that people have of these machines with warfare or surveillance either internationally or domestically, thank you yeah so I certainly were concerned about that our experience to date has been every time there's a story about the work that we do there's a side narrative about the dangers and all the rest but I think more generally what we have gotten is a positive response to the possibilities I think every time we launch a major initiative we think about the worst possible things that can happen we think about we want to make sure this public support supports from governments I think there's always been the question that you raised but I think overwhelmingly the response we've gotten has been positive largely because we're getting our head handed to us in this wildlife trade issue we are so outmatched technologically that anything we can bring to bear on this is seen as a positive step I would say for NOAA that question comes up a bit but not as much I think it's because of the kinds of missions that we're trying to do there's already a built in societal benefit to most of the things we do and so it doesn't come up as much we try to be sensitive that this is an issue for the whole community it's the same thing as with airspace regulation we're all in this together and we're all working to make sure that we're putting the best image forward what's just one of the things though if you're talking about the Kalahari desert the privacy issues aren't as great as they might be in downtown Washington DC and I think that's another reason why we don't get the kind of issues that you've raised and at NOAA what's in terms of the privacy issues what kind of altitudes are we talking about here well actually the things that we've flown and mainly our program has mainly funded demonstrations more than actual purchase but we're looking at things that could fly as low as 500 feet out over the ocean to get a better understanding of the boundary layer between the atmosphere and the ocean 12,000 feet 40,000 feet and then the highest would be the Global Hawk 60,000 feet so it completely depends on the application that we're looking at what kind of sensors the platform can carry and then how the data are going to be used when it's brought back and really it's what I try to tell people where it's an observing system and it's how are we going to use the data that defines whether we need to use an unmanned vehicle or not Hi, I'm William Angel I'm William Angel again given the WWF and NOAA's use of aerial platforms to collect data if you could use unmanned aerial systems to decrease the cost of information and data and surveillance how would that let you more effectively accomplish your goals the cost is one thing that we have to look at all the time and it's definitely at NOAA because we already have a lot of observing assets so with new technology we have to prove that we're as good if not better and cheaper than what's already on the table so we're running those cost numbers quite a bit if we were to buy a Global Hawk brand new we probably couldn't show that we were cost effective just yet because we're learning how to use it but we're partnering with NASA who's taken retired vehicles from the Air Force and modifying those and so actually our costing numbers right now are showing that we're comparable to some of the other aircraft the other thing about it though is one of the things a lot of what we do is say let's just use hurricanes as an example we have aircraft that fly a lot into you know hurricanes of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico one of the things that the Global Hawk could provide is now you've got a vehicle that you can take really far out over the ocean so now we can start looking at weather in Alaska and weather out over the Pacific and you can start moving that asset around from place to place we do that to a certain extent with our manned aircraft but logistically it's a little more complicated you know it's interesting the Global Impact award that we received from Google was really all about experimenting it was about experimenting with different technologies and trying to find the right sweet spot which would be simple, practical, repeatable, scalable and when I was in Nepal you know the guys on the ground there kept saying to me don't subject us to overly sophisticated technologies that we can't keep using in the field because there's such a range of technologies here and the simpler the better both in terms of repairing them when they crash or bad things happen and also for people to use them in very remote settings around the world the simpler the better and so I think that's our starting point is how do we get something that's simple, practical cost effective so that we can have lots of people using them in these very remote regions I think I've had the stops thank you both so much that was great