Welcome to another edition of RCE. Again, this is Brock Palin. You can find us online at rce-cast.com. You can find a link to all of our blogs, all of our Twitter, and our entire back catalogue of over 100 episodes on scientific computing, engineering, and other things. I have again here Jeff Squires from Cisco Systems and one of the authors of OpenMPI. Jeff, thanks for your time. Hey Brock, how's it going? Good, good, good. Before we roll into this, I do want to make a small announcement. I have a little bit of a different job opening available right now in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, developing using containers and container orchestration software for big data. So if somebody has experience with Docker, Mezos, Kubernetes, or anything like that, hit me up. You can find contact information on the website at rce-cast.com and let us know if you're interested in that position. All right, with that administrative note, let's jump right into it today. Today we've actually got three guests on here and we're going to be talking about the Sage 2 project. So gentlemen, I wonder if you could introduce yourselves. Hi, my name is Jason Lee from the Laboratory for Advanced Visualization and Applications at the University of Hawaii. Hi, my name is Dylan Kobayashi. I'm a student founder of Jason Lee. I'm a working force modification in computer sciences and I've been working with the Sage 2 project for about two years now. And I'm Luc Ranambou, a research associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago at the Electronic Visualization Lab. Okay, so we're here to talk about Sage. So I've been following Sage for a while. Can you guys give me an overview of what Sage 2 is? So Sage 2 as the name implies is the second generation of Sage. And what Sage was was essentially a piece of middleware that allows you to drive large display walls as if for one contiguous canvas allowing you to post visualizations and information onto those walls. Whereas Sage was all written in C++, the new Sage 2 architecture is entirely redone in Node.js and JavaScript technologies. So what motivated you to switch from C and C++ to Node.js? Because off the top of my head it would seem that C and C++ would be a much higher performing language and have better optimization possibilities than the other technologies you cited. So part of it was actually an experiment.  And in a little experiment we decided to write just a small piece of test code to see how well it performed for Sage-like tasks. And then we said, well, let's go full tilt and see what would happen if we tried to port the entire Sage architecture to it. And surprisingly it worked very well. And on top of that we get the benefit of leveraging a lot of the JavaScript infrastructure and a lot of the tools that this large community has already been developing. So what are some use cases then for Sage or Sage 2? Wow, let me do that again entirely. Let's pretend we're still on the break and I'm going to just start again. So what are some of the use cases for Sage 2? I mean, why would you buy a video wall and what are some things that you would want to display on it? The community of users that we work with typically have large amounts of data and they produce visualizations of them and just one picture doesn't give you the answer to the research question they're looking at. Usually it's a bunch of different images from different data sets and they're trying to put it all together like a giant jigsaw puzzle so that they can come up with whatever story is hiding behind all this data. It's very typical for users to come to a meeting room with the large state walls and start throwing information onto the walls and talking about them. Or they would form a little meeting where as part of a research meeting people would come in and deposit information onto the walls and have discussions. Okay, so most of the time when I see display walls being touted I'm always talking about how many megapixel it is and they always have one giant image of the cosmic background radiation or something like that but you're saying the most common use case is actually to generally have multiple images up there through time or different variables for the same simulation. What's the goal here? Is this a productivity boost for researchers or just a necessity? Yeah, it's both a productivity boost but also a creativity boost.  And you're absolutely right, historically large display walls were typically used to drive one giant picture at very high resolution and that made sense in the past because part of it was pushed by the HPC world where we had enormous amounts of data and we wanted to try to produce the best visualization possible using the highest resolution lens possible. But as people start becoming more productive and trying to use these displays they thought well why don't we have our cake and eat it too, throw both high resolution content but also lots of it because frankly there is just so much different types of data that they have to look at. Okay so let's jump back a little bit here. What exactly is the relationship between the University of Illinois in Chicago and the University of Hawaii at Manoa where you guys are working because clearly we have two groups of you on today. What is the breakout here? How do you guys collaborate? So I was previously the director of the lab in Chicago and I was professor at UIC before I moved to Hawaii just because the weather is so much more awesome here. And so this project was something that we began back in Chicago as far back as 2004 and so this is just a continuation of that project. Okay so you said in the past people were just driving large megapixel displays. There was another project that appears to be dead now called Chromium. Is there any relationship between Sage and Chromium, different philosophy, two people trying to do the same thing, what's going on? Yeah so Chromium was really an implementation of OpenGL over the network if you want to see it. The goal was kind of the same. You wanted to drive large display wall with real-time graphics and one approach was to basically send the OpenGL commands to the display nodes directly. But that's a model that Jason described where people were putting large amount of effort to drive the wall with one application, displaying a large simulation result for instance. And if you wanted to see the second simulation result, you have to stop the application and start another one or something like that. And when you compare to how you really work, that's not the way you work on your laptop. For instance, how many applications do you have open when you try to solve a problem? You have email, you have an office suite, you have a simulation package, you have statistics and so on and so on. So people do not work with just looking at one image or one representation. You want to see multiple images, multiple views of the same dataset or multiple dataset from last week or the previous run of the simulation and so on. So that was one goal of Sage was trying to let you show multiple dataset at once and leveraging those high resolution walls, not just for demonstration but for actual work. So how does this work? What is the architecture here? Do you have to have a dedicated server set up and you send the output of each application to the server who then projects it to the wall? So yes. So the Sage 1 model was really pure streaming. So an application was rendered on one machine and we were streaming pixel to the display nodes. And then when we saw the power afforded by the browsers, we changed that model and said let's try to do the rendering inside the browser. So now we have some kind of web server in the middle that manages all the resources but the rendering is done on the display side. So you talked about having multiple applications and the way you work on a normal machine. I'm sitting at my desk here and I've got my laptop with two 27-inch displays hooked up to it but I'm out of ports to be able to connect stuff. If I wanted to have more, could I use Sage just with my normal machine and have more email and more terminals and more things, does that work? Or you just talked about having a web server, does everything have to be a web app? Yes, I mean yes. One trader was to say let's try to use only web development tools to drive those display wall because we gain a lot by using the browser as a runtime system. So we leverage the audio API, the 3D rendering API and all the web APIs available and the tradeoff is you have to convert your application to web application. And when that's not possible, we use a lot of desktop sharing where you just push your laptop to the wall and using the same technology you see in Hangout or Skype desktop sharing and so on. Okay, so you have to be using some middleware that makes your desktop show up in a web browser to make it work. So I can have Matlab plot some giant thing on this but I'm doing it via screen sharing and then the wall is just scaling it up. Yes, that's the first step to show just the immediate content but then if Matlab generates high resolution images you take that image and drag and drop it onto the wall and see it in full resolution. Yeah, what we found is that sort of many science based applications have been moving towards a portal interface for their end users. In fact, even things like Google Docs or Microsoft Online where you're actually typing in your word processor or your spreadsheet directly into the browser itself within the Sage 2 framework we can actually bring those documents directly onto the wall now as part of the applications that you can show. Even many commercial vendors are producing historically very powerful and well used visualization tools like Arc or VTK. They've also jumped on the browser bandwagon and because of that we're able to take advantage of it and very quickly put those capabilities into Sage as well. So is Sage 2 then pure software or are there specific hardware requirements for the server side or the video wall side? There's no strict set of requirements. So currently we have a gaming PC actually that you can buy just from almost any of the major sites. For example, we use an LLMware and it's just a regular consumer PC. There's no special parts and it can run on that perfectly fine. If anything, the limiting aspect in this particular setup is the network because we need to transmit large amounts of data so the network has to support it. But if you don't have to worry about the network usage being particularly high then it'll work on a regular home network as well. Okay, hold on. I work for Cisco so I got to nail down what you're saying about the network here. When you're talking about a large amount of data are you talking about like 802.11G has a problem or does 802.11ac be good or are you better wired in for one or ten gig connectivity? What kind of bandwidth are you talking about here? So that actually depends on the wall and how it's used as well. So I can give an example of the summer I worked on a 40 gig Melanox network and the particular data they were using were high resolution they were peaking over 15,000 pixels by 15,000 on a small image. The really big images were close to I think a gig in nature but those had a very difficult time being updated at constant rate especially when they had two streams going and they sort of gave up on that idea but for the sake of having a constant stream of updates yes it really depends on what you're trying to show. Okay, so from what I just heard from you there 40 gig we're definitely talking a wired network for any kind of reasonable type of visualization. There's a bit of difference between different steps so if you are within the room between your laptop and the wall a wireless network is perfectly fine. It's when your application wants to access a large amount of resources and that communication is mostly between the stage two server and external storage for instance and that you can leverage whatever infrastructure you have and leverage high speed networks if you need to. So does the amount of data being transmitted to the wall then depend on the number of panels in the wall? No, it depends on your application. So if you're just showing pictures and PDF documents it's going to be using very little network. If you want to show 4k movies at uncompressed resolution for instance or very high resolution animation that's going to be using a lot of bandwidth. So it's really dependent on your application. It's like asking what bandwidth Windows is using interestingly there is no bandwidth used it depends on what you are trying to do. Could you answer that question? Yes, certain applications will actually be multiplied by the number of displays connected in terms of bandwidth usage. Is there a concept of developing your application to be Sage Native? Like one of the large scale visualization tools like visit or pair view where you could have the parallel visit server talking to the Sage cluster and not just be sharing your desktop from your laptop to Sage. Like does that concept exist? So we provide an API but it's up to you to port your application to do that partitioning of the data or the pixels. So we have a couple of examples. Natively Sage doesn't impose anything of that sort but we have explored both scenarios basically what Dylan did this summer we're trying to port five view applications being rendered on a cluster or just pushing pixel final images out of a simulation or something like that. Let me elaborate on that Dylan. So actually the pair view example is one that was occupying the 40 gig network. So what it did was Sage had a native app interface that would connect with a pair view web server that would then connect with a pair view server for data access and actual computation. So between the pair view and the pair view web servers they would do actual computation manipulation and then send it back to Sage through the app on the native resolution of whatever the user specified to view the results. And that one was example one that used large amounts of bandwidth because separate and distinct displays that need to be updated. And for the, yeah, that was the one with the high pixel revolutions. Okay so if you're doing everything in web and you're primarily really just letting multiple people screen share to one giant virtual screen it injects me if I'm doing the wrong thing. Do I have full support for things like DirectX or OpenGL or does that not even make sense because I'm really just sending images and that's happening on my laptop where I'm actually like rendering my app? So you can render whatever the browser can render. So the browser expose WebGL as a 3D graphics API that's one and otherwise what the browser can display are images like web formats specifically. So JPEG, PNG and GIF and then for video it's mostly MPEG4. So anything you can render to the browser can be supported in some way in Sage too. So 3D graphics is WebGL and otherwise images, PDF, movies and so on. Now as I understand it, Sage too also supports multi-location interaction. Is that correct? Yes. So can you describe that a little bit? So Sage too, so collaboration has been a big part of the effort in Sage too from the beginning. So as soon as you have a wall set up in one room you want to collaborate with people across campus and across a country or across continent and so on. So within Sage too we have support to share application and share assets between display wall of various size and resolution. So you can share documents, you can share movies and videos and PDF documents and on top of that we support sharing application where the application are synchronized between the different sites. So you can imagine the PDF document what you want to synchronize is a page number for instance. So when I flip to page three on my local document every site is going to see the page three of that same document. Okay, and so what we're really talking about here is two people with their own video walls and one person is driving the application that shows up on both walls. That's what we mean by collaboration, right? Yeah, and there is no master or no, not one person is driving the application. Once it's shared everybody has control of the application. Oh, so it really is like full blown screen sharing not just I need to use Google Hangouts because Google Hangout runs inside the browser and Google Hangouts has the ability for me to also give control. Sage actually has a little bit more going on. Yes, the application are synchronized through the server and there is server to server communication to ensure that we maintain the state of the application across this several walls. So you can synchronize right out of view point inside this really application. You can synchronize the page number or the time inside a movie player for instance. So does this have full blown video conferencing? I guess that means just start up Skype, start up Google Hangouts, start up whatever application you want and everybody will see everybody. Not really. That's not how we view it. It's always been fairly hard to support video conferencing or to trying to invest in developing video conferencing system. So basically we leverage whatever people want to use and whatever infrastructure they have locally. So when we work with Jason we use Skype or Hangout if people have life size or video conferencing unit they use that too. But at the end it's more often pushed to the wall through desktop sharing. So we do not enforce any video conferencing solution inside Sage2. Now that's interesting. You cited several different types of systems there. How do you handle the portability between those systems? So for example, if I'm rendering a movie to my wall locally and my browser knows how to render a movie type X but does that mean that the remote browser also has to know how to render movie type X or is there some kind of magic mojo translation that happens? The mojo is a standard that people... It's a W3C standard for browsers basically. So people have to agree that movies are mostly MPEG4 these days and WebGL is standardized and so on. So that's where we gain a lot using the browser as a middle way basically to do all the computing is that there's a lot of standards in that domain and so we can be sure that we can play, for instance, a movie MPEG4 in all the browsers. For communication, for desktop sharing for instance we use WebRTC as a standard to do the communication and so on. We want to do audio as a standard for the audio API and that's one of the main goals of using the web browser as a rendering engine is that there's a lot of standards and so you have a good chance that something runs here on my machine and across browsers and across systems. Do you guys have a video online that kind of demonstrates a lot of functionality of Sage and Sage 2? Yes, we have a series of videos on YouTube either on the VL site or Jason's Lava YouTube channels and we have a series of videos and most of them are published on our website sagecomments.org website. Okay, we'll include links to those in the show notes also so people can find those at rce-cast.com on the show notes to go along with this episode. Alright, so with the browser compatibility issues do you then have like minimum requirements for browsers because in the bad old days browsers were not all entirely compatible and I'm not really in the web area of things but I understand that things have gotten much, much more portable recently so are there minimum versions that you require or do you only work with Chrome or how does that go? We mostly use Chrome but we try to make sure everything works across all the system and indeed the browser has been getting much better these days so it's mostly HTML5 basically and the minimum requirement is to be able to run HTML5 with most of the standard. We don't track especially the version numbers of Chrome or Firefox or Microsoft Edge for instance but the core functionality of Sage 2 works across all the main browsers these days. Okay, so let's get into the scale of how Big Desync can actually go. What would you call the largest Sage deployment out there I'm guessing probably by the total number of tiles being driven or pick the metric of your choice? Okay, so I don't know exactly what's off hand but the thing behind us is 32 displays and that is for all of them are 4Ks so 3840 by 2160. It's a 256 megapixel wall driven by eight computers each display of the 32 displays is 4K in resolution. Jason has probably the highest number of pixels so over 200 million. At UIC we have a system with maybe more machines and less pixels or around 100 million pixels and 36 machines but more and more systems are driven by a single machine we're trying to push the definition of a Sage wall mostly around consumer technology meaning powerful gaming PCs and as many 4K screens you can plug into a single machine. That's what we see is the most deployable configuration to end users like scientists like a biologist or geoscientist and so on. Maintaining cluster is very hard and it's not in domain science-based tasks to do that or to allocate a grad student to maintain just a cluster so we are going mostly 4K TVs and gaming PCs. So if you're putting everything onto one PC and hooking as many displays as you can why even use Sage? Why not just open up your application there rather than share it up to there?  The benefit of that is the web server because the Sage deployment also includes the web server itself where you turn your system into inaccessible through the network and assuming that if you need to go through public IP or rather if you have if you have a public IP or public host name that routes to the computer then other people outside of your network is able to access it as well. Another way of also saying that is whereas a desktop computer or even if you've had a large wall running just native Windows you can indeed run many apps on it however the typical model is that you have one mouse and one keyboard that controls the whole thing. In Sage it's completely multi-user. In fact any number of people can simultaneously launch apps, drag and drop documents onto the wall simultaneously and they all have their own mice. You can actually see many little mice pointers running around and they can all move content at the same time. What we found was that we had to do that because as the windows grew bigger and bigger to cover the wall it was just impractical to use Windows because Windows was just not designed to support apps for extremely high resolution. You would open up dialogue boxes in Windows and it would appear on the far right-hand side of the screen, you click on it and another dialogue box would appear on the far left-hand side of the screen and the mouse is flying back and forth trying to deal with it. We completely redesigned our Sage user interface so when you click on the dialogue box the dialogue box actually pops near where your mouse is. All the apps have their own menus that are close to them so you can quickly access it as opposed to having your mouse back and forth across this 256 million pixel wall. Here's a question that we ask a lot of our guests. What is the strangest use of your project that you've heard of? Like somebody is using Sage in a way that you hadn't really anticipated or planned on but it works for them. Sage has a web browser aspect now that's fairly recent it's only been in since the last part of 2016. One of the things I've been doing with it is because I need to test cross-site usability I'll actually open a Sage display client within the Sage display on a different site so I can see what the other site is doing while I'm doing the remote session synchronization. Naturally it's supposed to be able to mirror mode but it's very rare to have a mirror mode active within a natural Sage display of a different site. Another thing I've seen done is that professors one predictor one had a Sage server running in his office and it wasn't high resolution but the reason he did that was because for his lectures rather than using the standard AV equipment in the room while he would use the projector he would open the browser, connect to his own server so that all the students would then be able to connect to his server back in his building rather than just have a static lecture where he would be stuck with screen sharing literally from the cord video output of his laptop. Otherwise as a funnier project I run Sage 2 on a Raspberry Pi at home just as a picture frame so I have my pictures being pulled off, something like Flickr and so on and I just rotate pictures maybe changing picture every 30 seconds and so on and in the lab we use basically Sage 2 as an information display so we show the weather outside we show the webcams and so on. I think Jason was showing the surf on the beach so as an information display it's a great utility. What you do is you have the Sage wall setup and then you can connect to it with your phone as long as you have internet connection so depending on what you're doing you have the Sage wall setup and then someone goes out in the field takes pictures and then sends them back to the wall especially depending on you're trying to find something like which beach you're trying to find the seals or something. So what's coming into future for Sage? What's coming down to Pipeline? So now that we've got this infrastructure up one of the things that we put up towards the end of last year was an app store you know people because they're starting to develop apps for it we like them to have the opportunity to share it with the Sage community. Sage is only as strong as the apps that can enter it and because everything now is in JavaScript it's become easier for people to contribute. We want to see initially most of the apps that people are going to be posting are essentially open source because you know this was an NSF funded project everything we distribute is open source. If the community decides that hey maybe we can start doing monetization and individual app developers might want to charge some money for their apps you know we're actually open to that possibility too. If it sort of encourages people to develop more apps for it. So you mentioned the commercialization aspect of it. Are you looking to do any commercialization of the core of Sage itself like deployments and support and things like that? Yeah we've actually licensed Sage already to a couple of companies. One of them is in Brazil I believe and the other one. I forget which one it is. The UIC technology manager knows the details of that. They are actually applying it to their own very specific niche markets. One of them is like monitoring of energy power plant basically operations. But yeah it's available for licensing certainly. We don't have the time because we're spending so much time developing Sage already. We don't have the time to say spin off a company to drive this. But it's encouraging that companies are coming to us now saying could we potentially license it to turn this into a product. So what you mentioned that this is open source do you have some kind of free for non-commercial usage kind of license or what license do you distribute it under? Yeah it's a license from the University of Illinois at Chicago. So it's basically free to use as long as you don't make money out of it. And then if you want to sell Sage to installation for instance you have to get a license. But otherwise it's open source. And the source code is on a Bitbucket site or something like GitHub. So it's open you can go and download the source code and send full request and bug reports and so on. Okay well Luke, Jason, Dylan thank you very much for your time. Where can people find more information about Sage and download it and get involved? So the main site is sagecomments.org and everything is available from there. Okay Thank you very much guys. Thank you. Okay All right


Well, hello, everybody. There's lots of new folks today. So I'll introduce myself. I'm Mel Hauser. I use Shiba pronouns and I am executive director here at All Brains Belong Vermont. And we're welcome, welcome to Brain Club. Let me share screen. Here we go. So this is our weekly community conversation on everyday brain life stuff. And so, and for those of you who've not joined us before, we every month have a different theme of what we talk about. And so this month's theme is neurodiversity and culture. Sarah, are you getting those participation pop-ups? Yeah, and I'm saying admit all, admit, admit all. And I don't know what to do. I don't know, it's not letting Sarah in. Yeah, I've hit admit twice now. Okay, all right. It's, I'm sure we'll figure it out. Anyway. I'm back in. Oh, fantastic, I hear it. So, if you'd like closed captioning for tonight's program, depending on what version of Zoom you have, you'll either see live transcript CC or the more dot, dot, dot. And for matter, you can choose show subtitles. And you can also do the same and choose hide subtitles if you change your mind. So we're gonna go over some ground rules because last month at Brain Club when our theme was about creating neuro-inclusive spaces, ground rules were an important theme that came up a month long. The idea of knowing your access needs where access needs are defined as anything you need to have full and meaningful participation and experience and to know or at least respect everyone else's access needs. Although it's hard to respect an access need that you don't know about. So we create a space where it is normalized to talk about what we need in a space. And related to that, there is no right way to participate. And what that means is that you can participate with spoken speech. You can participate in the chat box. You can participate by observing. Sometimes folks try and say, oh, sorry, I'm not participating. I'm cooking dinner. Well, you are participating because you're here. So there's no right way to participate. And as it comes to access needs, for many people saying that explicitly upfront is an access need. So like Luna, my five-year-old, sometimes she'll resist going to a thing. I'm not going. And I'll say, Luna, there's no right way to participate, remember? This is a place where there's no right way. And she says, oh, now I'll go. So anyway, the attitudinal norm is an access need for many people. That's why we include it. And of course, because we're all gonna have different brains, we're gonna have different access needs. And sort of acknowledging that and acknowledging that sometimes those access needs are going to conflict and that's inevitable. And so having a plan for course correction is okay. So we'll proceed through that. So that was a slide from last week. So anyway, the last thing that I'll mention is that a word on language. So tonight you'll hear me and maybe other participants using identity-first language as it relates to neurodivergence. I am autistic. And for me, that is part of my identity. That is not the case for all autistic people, but it is the case for me and many of our participants. And so sometimes when identity-first language is new, it can sometimes be like, ooh, that's new. So that's the idea. Is the idea that for many people, language reflects paradigm, the way that we're seeing the world. And when we do not need to necessarily separate things from our identity, that comes out in the language. And I think you'll hear that play out tonight. As I said, all forms of participation is okay and all forms of communication are okay. You know, in addition to, as I described before, chat box on muting and shouting it out, using emoticons, reactions, mixing, matching, whatever you're comfortable with. And safety, safety comes first. And so affirming all aspects of identity, and as I said before, respecting and protecting access needs. And so another slide from last week, we talked about how a safe space requires that a shared goal of not only meeting our own access needs, but not violating other's access needs. And so the last part of ground rules that I'll cover, because sometimes this term is unfamiliar, is that of a content warning. A content warning is an important part of neuro-inclusive space. You're welcome to share your truth, whatever you feel safe talking about. But just keep in mind, if there's something you're talking about that you personally experienced as distressing or traumatic, please let others know about it first by announcing the name of the topic. It's called a content warning. And try to keep those topics with content warnings as brief as possible so that participants who, they can listen with informed consent or they can turn their sound off or leave the room for a minute or two. And we'll type in the chat box with content warning over. And we may need to redirect the topic of conversation to protect other's access needs. Okay, we're gonna start. All right, so neurodiversity and culture. A few months ago, we had a whole theme, a whole monthly theme talking about the double empathy problems. I don't know if you remember that. May you remember that? I don't know if you remember. Where it's not that there is one correct type of social skills, communication skills, but it's about miscommunication being the result of a mismatch of worldview or a mismatch of communication styles. And in, which July, we took on the theme all month of bridging the double empathy problem in relationships, education, healthcare, employment, just about seeking to understand all the perspectives. And I think this is the natural progression of that. Because when we think about culture, we're really talking about the customs of a group of people. They're the norms of social interaction, behavior, communication, attitudes. And whenever we are encountering someone who belongs to a culture different from ours, sometimes those norms may be different from ours. And this is not a big deal. We celebrate that, we celebrate that diversity and we seek to understand it. And that works out. And for lots of people, neurodivergence that is the way that, you know, that one's brain is wired to think, learn and or communicate is actually a culture. And often it's not talked of in that way. Sometimes, lots of times in fact, the message is given either explicitly or implicitly that there is one correct way to socialize, one correct way to behave, communicate. When really it may be an issue of culture. So I shared last week, I'm gonna keep using this slide because I love it so much. I used this slide from a training I gave to some therapists a few weeks ago about neurocultural competence. And I said, hey, Luna, she's five. Luna, what should, I'm doing another neurocultural competency training. What should I tell the people? And this is what she said. She said, mama, person.  Yes. Yes, Luna. There's no right way to be a person. So I thought about any number of ways that we could have taken tonight's brain club. And I thought about like getting really specific about some of the cultural trends in many, not all, but many neurodivergent communities. But then I remembered the long game. At ABB we often talk about the long game and often throw a hashtag behind it and post it everywhere. We really wanna think about that of inclusion, right? Like creating spaces for people with all type of brains to belong. And so, I really wanna be moving away from an us versus them paradigm, right? And really just promoting safety and connection for all people. Because I think Luna says it best. There's no right way to do most things. And so since connection is the pathway to health and we want everyone to be as healthy as possible, remembering that there's like any time that there's like a default behavior, a default way of communicating, a default way of like being in the world, a default way of writing an email, a default way of like attending a Zoom meeting, like that's not going to make all people with all types of brains feel safe and connected and therefore it's not healthy. So I think that with that introduction, I'm gonna play a video. Actually, what I'll say first is that some of you have been, we started Brain Club back in January. And when the format has evolved like a lot over time, but I'd say lately we're getting into, because I think when something loses novelty, we change it up. So lately the ABB staff, when we find ourselves having an interesting conversation at a meeting, we're like, this should be a Brain Club and we record it. Anyway, so we're gonna do another short video clip. So this is a conversation Sarah and I had, let's us Sarah Wilkins, our community programs coordinator. Hi Sarah, I'm gonna play our casual conversation. And this video is, I was gonna say it's about, no it's exactly nine and a half minutes. I know because I just made the video five seconds ago. Anyway, so while this is going, feel free to keep the chat box going and then we'll have plenty of time for conversation. But we can start the conversation now in the chat box. All right, here we go. I never remember the motor plan of getting out of this box in time. Here we go. So you were saying something about not feeling alone. Yeah, I feel like that is something that comes up a lot with the ABB community as feeling like people have found their tribe and feeling less alone in their journey, whether it's as a parent or as an individual connecting people with one another and making people feel less alone. Yeah, like I think that connection is a path to health. No one tells you that though. And so like when you're in it and you're alone, you don't know that the reason you feel so terrible, one of the reasons you feel so terrible. Actually, you know what? If I have to unhide self view, show self view, okay, because then it can be like a conversation. So like when you're in it, when you feel terrible and you don't know why you feel terrible and if you're gonna make a list of all the things about why you feel terrible, being alone might not even be like on that list because no one tells you that connection is part of health. It's in fact like the important path to health. Right, right.  And if you didn't have that back in tribal times, then you could not survive. And so I think having community is, it's a deep wired part of our brain to need to belong. Yes. And when we don't have that, there's a part of us that feels like it's, you know, just super isolating and I think people just need that for safety. They need to feel that sense of belonging and community. And I think that's what people find when they come to all brains belong. Today I attended a virtual talk by my professional idol, Dr. Virginia Spielman who's the executive director of the Starr Institute for sensory processing.  But some of the things she said were things like, self needs other in order to become. Wow. And she talked about like self-actualization, part of that is communal actualization. It's like part of the development of personhood. And she talked about skills for the job of living and the skills for the job of living are doing, being, becoming and belonging. Wow. Because I mean, this is how people lived for so many years in hunter gatherer societies, right? Like I've heard Dr. Gabor Matay say that, you know, this the ideal environment for a child to grow up in is a hunter gatherer society. That's what the research shows. Totally. Because being around the community, having aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and neighbors and friends and, you know, having that community around, you know, around a family provides well less stress, you know, on all the responsibility falling on the parents, for example, if it's parents with children. And it's just, you know, it's just the way that we're wired to be is to live in community and cooperate with each other to each have different roles that we play.  And this myth that we live in, you know, a world where we're supposed to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and live in an individualistic way is really toxic. And, you know, just a world that, you know, ABB is providing a space that is much more in tune with sort of where people started with communities and bartering and sharing and, you know, taking care of one another. Totally. And I also think that in societies where groups were collective, like all doing the thing together, like that's also missing.   So the idea of that you would meet someone through your shared interests and like do the thing, the thing might be talking about a thing that you care about, but you're still doing the thing, doing it together with other people who are, you know, interested in that thing.  And so like a lot of times, you know, there'll be like social skills groups or like something like that, which are often, you know, like, giving the implicit message that like, you don't have any social skills because there was one right way to have social skills and you don't have it. So like there's that. But it's also like not how people make friends. Yeah. So it's, so I think back to, so I think back to when Anna House presented at Brain Club and was talking about like, okay, so like where do you meet friends? Like how do you even get started? And it's like, you have to figure out, you have to first actually figure out what you love. Yeah. So like then you can find people who love what you love, but if you don't even know what you love because you're so dysregulated, like it all just, and then I connect that to like the Hannah Bloom Brain Club two weeks ago where it's like, okay, well, here we were thinking about like how as parents, do we signal safety within like the culture of our households? And like what came out of that? I was like, as an adult, I am so rarely regulated. And Hannah was like, I think she was surprised to hear me say that. I was like, no, no, I am so rarely regulated. Yeah. So you like have to be regulated in order to know what you love in order to then do the thing you love and be connected with people who love what you love. And you're not regulated if you're not connected. It's like this vicious cycle. It is. So at least to come and connect as the path to health and regulation, like that's like another starting place of like, all right, well, let's talk about the journey. Let's talk about regulation. Let's talk about these things that, they're relevant to my life, at least start there.  Yeah. I think like you've talked about, people have to feel safe and they have to feel that sense of community to even access that part. Because I think a lot of people, they're just, they're burned out by life. And so they maybe aren't in tune with what brings them joy. And so being in an environment that talks about access needs, not just for some people, but for everybody that everybody has access needs. And so normalizing that and allowing people to discuss, openly like what their access needs are. I mean, that's something that a lot of people have talked about with ABB that they never had, they didn't have language for that before. Right. They didn't know what that, they didn't, yeah, they just didn't, and they didn't consider that they maybe had access needs or that other people might as well. And just having, coming to ABB and having the language for what their experience has been up until that point, which, for some people, it's in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and you've not had language to go with some of the feelings you've experienced throughout your life. And so having language to put to that is the first step and feeling safe and having community. And then I think you can get to like, well, what are we passionate about? What can we connect on with other people? Any thoughts, just resonating with anyone? I was just about to type in the chat and then I'm so happy that I don't have to type in the chat and can talk because I hate typing. But I was so glad that you shared your access needs. Thank you, yes, I'm so happy to talk but I'm not gonna show my face because I'm in my PJs and my dog is being crazy. Anyways, I wanted to say yes to that idea, that access or that vocabulary and language is so key to being able to create community because it's so key to be able to express ourselves and to be able to articulate the emotions that we feel on top of the experience we're lived. So I just wanted to say yes to that. ABBs taught me so much language and vocabulary and just ways to think about the same, the problems. So yes, I just wanted to say yes to that, yes to the vocabulary, yes to the language. Thank you for that. That's amazing, right? You know, like I didn't have a language for this for like almost all of my life, right? So just, and I think now I was having this conversation not about neurodiversity and access, but about a different topic, but like the analogy I think will be apt is I was telling my husband, I said, I think that little kids when a narrative is not provided for someone's experience, they tell themselves, we tell, we told ourselves a narrative to fill in the gaps and almost always the narrative that a little kid comes up with is I'm broken, I'm defective, it's my fault. And I think that like, you know, as an adult, like unlearning the narrative of like, there is a correct way to do the things and it's not me, like that is real.  And then it's really like, it's all okay. I mean, I think what we're bumping into is just feeling like this world is made of systems and the systems are not designed to accept our child or even interested in truly understanding like what his access needs are. And it's demoralizing, I guess. I don't know what the right word is like frustrating, you know, like wanting the culture to be there and feeling like, yes, we are, you know, I just, I guess, like maybe we just, if we think of ourselves more as like pioneers because nobody's done this before and hopefully in a hundred years we'll look back and be like, yeah, those folks that were like on the forefront of increasing access and just changing the way that neurodiversity is talked about and thought about, like that's, you know, they were on the right track. So I don't know, I just, sometimes I think it's just hard to even crack into this, you know, to crack into anything like, because it's really just not designed for people that don't fit neatly in that little box. So my two cents. Totally, thank you for naming that thing.  And if you don't name the thing and then have someone else be like, me too, then you don't, you think you're the only one, like dealing with these dysfunctional systems. It's a, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, like of all of the many layers of privilege that I have, like one of them is that I actually, and I spend more of my day around people who get it than people who don't anymore. That was not the case a year ago. And so it's, I think it's about, like, you know, anytime I have these conversations with even people who never, like not the people from the Brain Club, but like people who've never thought about this before and like aren't living this, this isn't relevant. But anytime I like name the thing, people are like, oh, I never thought about that. Like nobody's like, oh, well, that's nonsense. They just really, I think never thought about it. So, I mean, yeah, reading the chat, what has changed for you now that you're around people who get it? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Let me think about that. I would say I am, I guess I'm more able to discern safe versus not safe. That's like the single biggest difference. Like in a world where everything is pathologizing and everything is not me. And everything is like, this is the way it is.  And I get a limbic response and I notice it and I, you know, it depends on what role I'm in.  That's what's different.   That's what I think's different because I didn't know it was possible. I like wanted to imagine something was different, like that something different would be possible, but I really, I really had no idea. It was like the ultimate experiment of like quitting my job and serving a nonprofit and like all that, the ultimate experiment. I wonder, you know, because I think that for, for, for, hi Amy. Hello. And I guess I'll stick with, I'll speak and I'm sorry to cut you off, but this was bringing up a couple of things for me as people were talking, but are you familiar with the Lakota Circle of Courage? For some reason, your sound is gone. Let me do something. No, no, no, no, I was, I was still muted. Yes, yes, I was very recently learned about this. I'm doing a Lens Fellowship and that actually came up in my, in my, in my course two weeks ago, but I, yeah, but say more, say more. Well, it was just the ideas of, and we tried to do this at Lairway, even though there were like the pressures above to be properly documenting stuff in like an ABA style or what have you, but we were really focused on the, and I'm totally forgetting one of them, I think, but it's belonging, generosity, mastery, and then I think autonomy is the fourth one. Well, the problem is the other one's independence. Independence. Okay. Yes, okay. It's important. I think over the course. Yeah. But the other piece about the Lakotas that was very interesting is they did a, they had an official ceremony basically for giving the colonizers and inviting colonize, the descendants of colonizers to start learning about their culture. And one of the concepts that I thought is very fascinating is their belief of the child is always right in their approach to upbringing children. The two parallel thoughts I'm having because I'm a dual processor too. It's almost like what you're doing here, what ABB is doing is unpacking some old damage that's been done as far as like old truths that we used to know and live by that got taken away, mostly through colonization. But the other thing as a moment of being a history dork, which hunts, the original witch hunt was an attack in Scotland, the first one that was really documented. It was an attack on a local healer and bidwife that had a lot of power in the community. And it was more about the church and Western medicine coming in and trying to, and taking that power away from the women that were healers, that were parts of the community and very accessible to their communities. So. Yeah, you know what that is, I'm gonna say, but there's so much that's really interesting about that, you know, I think that learning, you know, like, you know, if you can zoom out and, you know, I remember being as a little kid and being taught the theme that history repeats itself. And like, having a, you know, the predictability in many ways of, you know, for good or for really not good, of kind of the predictable aspects of human behavior, learning from, you know, like, you know, I think that, you know, your example of the circle of coda as a model, like such a powerful model of like, of what works about believing in the wisdom of children. Like, yeah, that is the key to the universe. And, you know, to be able to learn from all kinds of cultures that I don't belong to, that have really important messages and models that can be applied to all kinds of things. That's the whole point, I think, about being curious about, and like, it's so clear that there's not one norm. And I think to your second point about like, yeah, it's a, when we talk about this at Green Club quite a bit about like, when someone tells someone that they're wrong, that they have brain rules, that they have to change what they're doing, because the way they're doing it's not right. It's completely a predictable thing that there's gonna be this limbic response. No one necessarily talks about it in terms of brain science, but like, yeah. Which is why I think that it's, we try to not be saying like, hey, systems, you're doing it wrong, but like, this is really just about, oh, great, we've learned new things. We've learned the neurodiversity paradigm and the big scheme of things is relatively new. We've always had different brains, now we have language for it. And when we really, I think in a community that is motivated toward the pursuit of inclusion, how could it not involve paying attention to neurodiversity and access, as opposed to like, change in the system, Mia, thanks for your patience. Sorry, I didn't see your hand. You're in my periphery, so I didn't see you, sorry. Yeah, I was gonna say that I actually have found that in principle, I think that a lot of me has always believed that, okay, these people are in the wrong, but it's like it feels like, well, but they have more power over me because they can, because they could, these systems could abuse me or deny me access to things. It's like that was very much my sort of, it's like, even if we do believe, even if I did recognize that they were wrong, it's like, but they could overpower me anyway sort of thing. Yeah, and I think that, I don't know the best way of saying this, I think that it's about, it's so hard. Like all of this is so hard. And I think all we can do, I'm just seeing Sarah's comment in the chat, I think that just as connecting with other people who get it, I think is, not just from a shame reduction or like a reality checking standpoint, but it's like, hopefully it actually strengthens your resolve to discern what environments to move toward. And again, there's like so much, there's so much, the intersectional layers of privilege versus oppression that play into that. And there's not a right answer. But it's sometimes when I think about, sometimes people like adults share the stories of feeling broken, defective. And then when you think about like the messages as that young children often get, how could people not grow up feeling that way? There wasn't like, are we surprised?  So a seven year old that we know said that their teacher hates them. What do you mean?  Well, no, I'm always told that I'm not doing the thing. I can't stop talking, I never stopped moving, I'm never doing the thing, I never do what I'm told. I'm like, well, anyway, it was just, when you really think about it, that's not, that's a systems problem. So many times stories are told by like, this person said this thing. We all have ways that make us feel safe in environments that are dysregulating. You know, so a lot of the norms that really relate to having order in a state of chaos. So a lot of like the compliance based brain rules are consequences of a dysfunctional system. It's a different spin on that story than I usually tell.  And someone's like, it's not hot, it's not loud. And like decades of that, it's, you really lose, you can really lose touch with intuition. And it's, there's so much unlearning that goes into like reducing that brain body disconnect. Oh, thanks, Mia. Oh, I don't know that I can download to this. It's not letting me download. Is there a web-based link, Mia? Hi, Dave. Hello. Hi, yeah, go for it. I didn't realize I was on mute. So in, you know, there was, the theme is about culture and like, something that someone else had mentioned, you know, about, or it was in the video, the hunter-gatherer culture and stuff like that. And that was, I think, my generation and, you know, post-World War I or whatever, you know, the idea of the nuclear family that can just survive all the things by themselves, you know, is I think a similar theme in kind of how society has designed education, you know, like a one-size-fits-all box. And to me, I think the feeling of culture is, and a lot of what ABB is about, is about bringing education to, you know, there's no one right way to teach a first grader, you know, like, or a third grader or, you know, someone who's in college. And some of the things that I've seen, and I'm sure that you've seen with patients is when you come across like a school system that is like, oh, we've identified this thing and we identify that their learning needs are different than others, I'm like so ecstatic, as opposed to like them just getting like, kind of like lost in the weeds. And I think that's a shift that's happening in education. I know that there's like a lot going into training teachers and things like that. And I think that's a huge, moving forward is gonna be a huge part of, like I suppose advocacy might not be the right word, but like promoting neurodivergent culture kind of starts with how we educate children. Right, and I think that, you know, even better than that would be, you know, universal design offering everything in flexible multimodal ways that, you know, for everyone because I think what ends up, you know, and it's not of any fault of any individual, it's the way the system is currently set up in, most public school systems is that in order to qualify for differentiation for the way your brain learns, you have to fail. And at least here in Vermont, that was pretty close to being improved and then a big setback in terms of legislation changing, changing that about defining kind of the requirements to be able to access supports. But that's I think the next step would be like to really accept that neurodiversity and diversity of ways in which our brains learn is to be expected. This is common, which is why universal design is best practice. You know, I can say in my medical education experience, there's one way to learn a lot of the things, like, okay, so you will, you know, if you're gonna learn a procedure, you will see one and everybody can imitate the thing they see, and then you go do one. Like you can just see it and imitate it, like that was the default. That's not how my brain learns. I always felt like really, really bad all the time as a medical student. I had no idea about dyspraxia or, you know, that like one in 10 people at least is not gonna be able to learn a motor skill that way. Reading the chat, Emily says that the school system is waiting for kids to fail before stepping in as a common theme in Massachusetts. Yeah, I think, you know, and from a systems perspective, it's like, well, anyway, there's systems.  I think that alone, you know, goes somewhere. At least that's my hope. Well, I think what's cool about it too is that it triples the other parts of your life. So if you learn it in a safe space, like all brains belong, like understanding the idea that everyone has access needs and you understand, like it's a safe place to explore concepts and have words for things you never had words for, I think then when you're in other spaces in your life, like you said, you can either just exit if it doesn't feel congruent with what feels good to you or just know how to advocate for you or your child's access needs.  There's other people who are in this situation and feel the same way I do. Yeah. For those of you who are new to thinking about neurodiversity and access, you know, like has what's your experience been with like the either the rewriting of old narratives or what Sarah said, just like the applying of, you know, one narrative to other worlds that you exist in. Mel, I have a thought. Go for it. Because through this conversation, you know, I'm thinking about, I'm constantly thinking about my relationship to my experience and I think it's part of who I am. It's part of the work that I do and I've been thinking a lot. Hold on. I've been thinking a lot about whether or not what I know or believe is true because it's attached to a world rule or a brain rule. And I'm a therapist and that's a lot to unpack. But that kind of awareness is really powerful but it's also unsettling. But in my experience, those things that unsettle us are usually the things that teach us the most. So that's where I am. So that's where I am, wading into a pool. Totally. So, you know, in many ways, I think that when one's professional training in a paradigm is, you know, like you train for so long in a paradigm and then to see the mismatch between your experience and your training and then it's so hard. And so I think that, you know, in, you know, I think Sarah and I, we are constantly, like there's all kinds, I mean, like we've come a long way, I think, of unlearning a lot of our training but like even daily, there's something like, yeah, I don't know, is that a brain rule or a rule rule? I don't know, but there's a lot of brain rules.  And so by the way, that's like ABD jargon. Like we made that those terms up.   But it's not like an objective law of physics or anything, it's not a true world rule. So, you know, something like to be polite, I must make eye contact when someone's talking. Like that is a brain rule, but it's not a world rule. But like, you know how many times are like kids told that?  Anyway, just it's very similar.  We all have brain rules. And the purpose of a brain rule is to keep you safe.  You can know something as a brain rule and still keep it. If it serves you and if it doesn't serve you, you might choose to make the new brain rule or let it go or something.  Hi, Mia, go ahead. I think a lot of us like who think like a lot of other people make out that our brain rules don't keep, don't work for us like, but basically like, I think what I always like to make clear was that it wasn't my brain rules that were harming me. It was the people who were excluding me because of my brain rules. And it's like- Right, it was their brain rules. That's what, that is much more common.  I think our brain rules keep us safe. I think that other people's brain rules very commonly hurt other people. And it sounds like that was your experience. Yeah, and it's like, a lot of people would tell me to take therapy, a content warning study, a lot of people would tell me to take therapy so I could overcome my brain rules. But actually it wasn't my brain rules that were the problem, it was their sort of, yeah. Yeah. It was theirs, yes. And that's so common, right? So in a traditional, I don't wanna say traditional, in a lot of, maybe Matt can help me with my language, in a lot of mental health, or like the default mental health paradigm, it's to say that in all cases, it's your thoughts that resulting your emotional experience. When there's so much more that goes into that, it's sensory processing, it's vibe, it's everything. Amy, I can for sure show you how to raise your hand, but you also don't need to do the zoom raise hand, you could just raise your hand, but if you wanted to use the zoom raise hand, which I never do, but if you wanted to, your menu might say reactions at the bottom, and then raise hand is a choice on that menu, but you never have to use that button. You could, you can do what you did, it's just to type in the chat, you're trying to raise your hand. There you go, raise your hand. I'm not very good, I don't know if I'm unmuted, okay, I think I am. I'm not very good at the chat reading it, or, which is hard to admit or typing in it, but I wanted to say one thing when you were asking new people, people who are new to identifying as autistic or neurodivergent, I had an interesting thing, I'm trying to access a medical procedure and my therapist wrote out a response based on a conversation, so I had, so then I was able to bring that to Sierra, who then helped me with the prompt of going to the doctor, so I was like, okay, I had these two prompts that were like so helpful, and what was interesting was, as I was asking my questions, I got the answers I really wanted, but I kept getting laughed at, but what was so cool was because I had the prompt of the support from, you know, like my therapist is neurodivergent and Sierra, who's like helping me navigate how much to share, to access the service, I just didn't see it as a problem with me. I just was like, there was just a question of like, I wonder what's funny, but I was like, oh, maybe there's just like nervousness of someone not being used to someone, accessing their needs or getting prepared of having an expectation of what I should expect in the consult, and then I went to, then I had to call the insurance company to figure out like, will this be covered? And that's when I didn't have a prompt for that. It was like everything went downhill for me, and it was like, I can't even get this, and I don't even know how, and you know, I was like, it went from like excited to like, so then I just brought it back to my therapist today, and they were like, oh, this is how you can navigate that. And I realized like having this community of just like having a prompt to begin with can then help understand the difference between like, say how we can access our needs here, translate the difference between someone who wants to, you know, help us access our needs or not, and then go, oh, maybe I need to figure out an insurance company who actually wants to help me and give my money to those companies. And so that's sort of like my new idea of like kind of reframing where I actually even put my resource of who actually wants to help me, whether that's a restaurant or, you know, a school or anything like that is like, we get to say where we put our energy is kind of what is coming out of this conversation for me.  And I'm so proud of you for like about like, how far you've come in your journey in such a short time really, to be able to like, the moment that you can blame the environment instead of blaming yourself, like that is, that's a game changer. But it's sort of like because I have these two people. I was just gonna say it's just, I think it's partly because I feel bolstered by the community, right?  If you don't feel comfortable or safe, but you could say you have sensory processing or you're, you know, are really sensitive. And so just like reframing that. And so to have that voice in my head really helps me navigate what's on the other side of whether, you know, I'm safe or not.  That's amazing. Oh, that warms my soul. Right, so like the whole point of community, right? Like connected to other people. So not only, you know, I think your story is also, I think an incredible model for like the whole culture of interdependence thing. Like whenever, I forget who I was telling this to earlier today, I was like, most of the time if I have like, you know, a stressful situation coming up or like I have a conflict I have to navigate, I definitely reach out to other people to like give me ideas for what to say. Like people write my emails for me a lot. Like, I mean, this is just, that's okay. Reena Chad, yeah, me is saying, I've been in my environment since being a child but lots of people told me I wouldn't progress if I quote get and take responsibility, right? So, you know, that's a brain rule. Someone else's brain rule. It's so hard. It's so hard when you get these messages and so many, so many people get these messages.  Because lots of people say lots of stuff and when you repeat something that someone else has said, you like, sometimes don't even question it. Yeah. And, yeah. And, you know, your next comment about power, you know, I talk a lot about power with my five-year-old because I think it's really important. Sometimes the only, you know, the only time the only concept of power is power over and people seek out power over other people but that's not the only power. So, Luna's like, why do you owe me? Anyway, so, you know, like the power of connection, the power of community, right? Like that's why we watch a lot of My Little Pony, the magic of friendship and connection. Where like the people who are seeking power over others, they don't prosper. And, you know, or they prosper in like the very short term and it's hard because in real life, short-term, medium-term, long-term, it's not, it's the damage of short-term power over is so, can be so damaging and so traumatic. And I think that I'm hoping, hoping that we see is that, you know, the power of connection can facilitate healing. So, I was gonna say, I totally agree with Kavis, it's like they don't, they always make out that the problem is our reaction to our environment instead of the environment, like, oh, if you were a stronger person, you wouldn't let it affect you, right? Right, right. And it's as opposed to framing strength around asserting your access needs, strength around, you know, self-awareness when really, a lot of times we talk about that, you know, when, for so many diagnoses, you know, in particular autism, right, is that these are autistic stress behaviors less than the DSM. The idea being that you're not gonna see these, these particular described behaviors until someone is profoundly dysregulated and a lot of people are because of the environment and that's entirely missing. So with that 707 wrap us up, I really appreciate everyone being here and participating in all the many ways that you've participated tonight. And we look forward to seeing you next week. I forget what next week is, what's next week? Anybody know? The A, oh, I kind of remember what the topic is. No, I just saw the Ableism. Ableism. Oh, perfect. All right, well, I will see you for, sorry me? Do your clocks go back next, this week? Oh, I never, I sort of, so like this is the first year I think I probably feel comfortable necessarily naming this. I never have any idea when the clocks go back. I always reverse the direction. I have like my memorize fall behind spring ahead or something, so I guess we're going back. So do you like to see things? Is that, is that this weekend? Yeah, it is, it is. Thank you, Mia, that's good information. Yeah, because today it's actually an hour earlier for me because my clocks went back just the weekend just gone. So. So, and then we go back next weekend and then it continues to be the midnight time for you again. So for this one week, well, I'm glad you could, I'm glad you could make it. I'm sorry it becomes midnight again for you next week. Yeah. All right, thanks everybody. Bye.


Let's go over to our man, Mr. Teddy Kegstad. As we do each and every Wednesday at 40 past the hour, you can reach Teddy every trading day, folks, at forex-trading-unlocked.com, that website is forex-trading-unlocked.com. Teddy Kegstad, what's going on, brother? Well, it's a good day to talk about the currencies. They were kind of quiet right before we came on the air with you here, and now I was suddenly got some breakouts, like in the US dollar candidate, it just exploded to the upside. Oh, yeah, that's a beautiful thing. Let's take a look at that, baby. So what do you think's happening there? You know what? I think it's been consolidating for the past two weeks. I think they finally got a little breakout. I think this was building up. You can only go sideways for so long. I mean, it's been, yeah, good, I think nine, 10 sessions are pretty much staying within a 50-cent range. And now we made a higher move high. But I think it's because we have a little bit of mixed dollar news today now that the coronavirus seems to be stabilizing. So I think you're seeing dollar strength in a lot of your minor crosses right now. Boy, boy, I can't see it on the chart. Can you tell me where that bar moved? No, I joke. We got it up to quite a move here. That is a monster move, huh? So in the foreign currency market, a move like that, is that, I know we have to speculate on that, is that basically a large player coming in all of a sudden saying, okay, in this case, they're going to sell the Canadian dollars. What makes something like move that quick? I mean, is it just a crowd coming in simultaneously selling? You know what? I think it is. I think it's some sort of fundamental where there's some sort of rotation going on. I mean, we have the Davos thing that started this week. Yes. There's really nothing fundamentally or technically going on to drive the Canada out of this little range that it's been in. It was just tightening and winding. Right, right. Pretty amazing. I think it stops, got hit, and all of a sudden, there was just a volume there and that kind of pressed it. And if you're looking at that chart at TFN and folks, this is counterintuitive when you're looking at the currencies, okay? So as this goes higher, that's a weaker Canadian dollar versus the U.S. dollar. And that's what we're talking about here. So it's pretty, it's pretty wild when, you know, you look at these charts, right? That in the currency market, Teddy, do you know what I mean? Because we train the equities of futures.  Sure. Right. Exactly. And I think this is right now still a corrective phase. So I think it might be a blow-off rally. Because if you look at like the pound today, all of a sudden, now that market's been going sideways. We have the Brexit deadline next Friday, or next week on the 31st. So with that coming in, you would think it would be going sideways.  And I think the one you really got to look at for traders right now is that I think this Canadian is going to, now that it finally broke out of this range, you're going to start to have some swing trades develop, you know, which is kind of nice. Okay. And the year old man is just laying there, isn't it? I mean, that thing hasn't done a thing. Well, actually it sounded, it was at the lower end of his consolidation today. Yeah. It's the Italian woes, you know, because think about this. Today you have the pound that's very strong. You have kind of a mix, the dollars index is stronger today slightly, but you have the pound that's railing very nicely. So it's really, that's being all offset. The Euro itself is only, I think, down eight pips on the day, something like that, which is very nominal, you know. So, but I think that the new woes with the Italian government and with things that are going on there, that's going to start to weigh on the Euro US dollar trade. Well, that makes sense. We haven't heard of the Italians not paying their bills for like 20 years. So this used to be a big thing, Tom, that the Italian, it was always the end of the world. First the Italians were going to get down, then this, if I've learned anything over the course of years, like none of these countries go down. Do you know what I mean? But that's in the news today, right? I mean, that's what we get. And it seems to be always in front of spring time when this starts with Italy or Greece. It's always right after the first of the year, right before spring time. Yeah. Isn't it? It's wild, man. I mean, if Greece, if I learned anything, if Greece didn't go down, that was supposed to be the end of the world. What was that, nine years ago? I mean, that was supposed to be like everyone was broke. Yeah. They were crucifying the Greek people for having a good time in their villages. And then it's like, okay, man, you know, that's over, you know. They're going to like you. They're going to have to get you on Greek TV, man. Well, I love the Greeks. You must, I know. I didn't, listen, when I was a kid, I'm not kidding. They got quite a debt load over there for their GDP. I'm not kidding. When I learned how to move in the streets of Boston, man, all, it was Greeks that took care of me, man. They showed me how to sell food.  They had the new head of Deutsche Bank. And he was talking about, you know, how they're with the negative interest rates in Europe, especially and with the corporate bond yields. This is eventually going to be an appetite for destruction one day when it starts to turn.  He's like, the public is lending out $100 to get maybe $98 back in the future at best. And that's where it's at right now. You were talking about this morning, right? Yeah. Jamie Dimon was out there in an article saying, you know, the one thing I fear is negative interest rates because basically to surmise it, that's not the way things work, man. He's like, I will never lend money to get less money back. Right. And it's just that simple, really. It really is. It really is. Right. Okay. Well, you know what? Traders have been talking about this literally for now 20 plus years. We've been saying as rates got lower, especially as when the treasury bonds got above par value. I kept saying, telling people, I'm like, how is it that all these economists are such genius trying to sell the public something that's worth less when it comes due? Right. It doesn't make sense. And they sold it. That's the thing. Yeah, and they sold it. And they sold it. The only reason they teach you in school, like I said this morning on the show, the only reason you're supposed to save is so you can consume more later. Right. You know, you either consume or you save because you can have more later to consume. Right. You don't save so you can consume less in the future. Because otherwise you should be consuming now. You know, it's safer to consume. Right. The fundals, you know, economics, poof. Man. Talk about blowing that up. Yeah. Okay. Sure. You got to get to the yen, man. What's going to happen here? Okay. We've been laying here. I think it's right now it's floating under these new highs. And I think it's basing. It's just going to be no matter what the dollar index does, I'm a bull with the US dollar yen right now. Yeah. I think it's going up to about at 112.5, 1 to 113. Definitely over the next month and a half for sure. You can see it, man. It does not want to get back underneath this 109.71. It's so close, but I saw it struggling yesterday. And that number, folks, that's kind of like a benchmark. Because it broke out of that area. And as Teddy's saying, 112 is the move, man. And that's what's happening. But I do have, I have a tiger trade for you. Remember last Friday when I filled in for you, Tom? Yes. One of your people wanted me to look at the peso. So I looked at the peso. And I've been watching the US dollar versus the Mexican peso. And I'll tell you what. That thing, he was looking, he was asking about, is it ready to buy? Did Carlos call you? You know what? I'm not sure who the caller was. I haven't been on this call. I'm going to be awesome. We have a lot of guys down at the border coming. That's awesome, man. OK, cool. So, but yeah, I'm very bearish the US dollar peso. Like it's kind of funny. I was in Mexico literally almost three years ago, like to the date. And that was when the peso was around 21 pesos to the dollar. And now I'm looking at it. It's, you know, right around, it's what is it? 1867. That's strong. And it looks like it's going to start tanking in a big way. Like if you got no anyone going to Mexico over the next year or two, I think it's going to get more and more costly for sure. I think the peso has a good chance of getting down to 16 pesos to the dollar. That's so cool to know, man. Because the monthly does not look good at all. It looks like it's just ready to just fall over. That's so cool, man. So you're going, and when Teddy says that, that means a stronger peso, folks. That's the bottom line. 16, you're looking for that to break that whole consolidation. Man, if it breaks that consolidation, oh yeah, I can see 1558, you break the consolidation. And to bring it along, right? $1 used to get you 21 pesos, which is great. Now $1 gets you only 18. $1 might get you 16. You can see how more costly it becomes. That's if you get a good conversion. That's right. Carlos made a lot of money by, he was buying that real estate at 21, or 22. There we go. Probably. Teddy, thank you so much, man. You have a great one. Safe one. Stay long. We look forward to speaking in next Wednesday. Thanks, man. Thanks, Teddy. Take care. Stay right there, folks. Tommy and I are coming right back.