Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everybody, welcome. Thank you for joining us today here at Davos Agenda 2021. I am Ryan Patel and honored to lead this session on designing connected and sustainable value chains. Someone who sits on different boards across different industries help scale globally and is a frequent guest on the news, especially in breaking down the future trends to each of us. At the heart of all this is the ever important value chains. COVID-19 is accelerating the change of global value delivery models with unprecedented consequences for manufacturing and value chains. For the new data, powered ecosystems, the latest approaches of circularity in manufacturing. How can we redesign value chains for greater productivity and innovation? So as I mentioned today's theme, we're going to focus on what is the need, opportunities, challenges, and potential disruptions. I am very excited and honored to introduce these four great leaders who are going to be joining us today. Carlos Brito, CEO, Anaiso Bush-Inbev, Pamela Koch-Hamilton, Executive Director, International Trade Center, Jim Fitterling, Chairman and CEO of Dow, David MacLennan, Chairman and CEO of Cargill USA. How's everyone doing? Great, thanks for having us. I'm telling the audience right now you are in for a treat. We are going to try to make it moving and try to get a lot of questions in just as a reminder. The first 30 minutes is open to all the public and those that have joined via top link, the panel will be followed by a more interactive discussion with all of us then. I'll give a notice at the end again. So let me jump into it. Carlos, I'm going to come to you first. If and how did 2020 illustrate the need for more connected, resilient, and sustainable value chains? Well 2020 was an impressive year for sure. I mean everybody had to to review its operations and try to figure out how to operate and all the restrictions. We're a global company operating all continents. We sell our products in more than 100 countries and we're very deeply connected to our communities. We're a global company but our business is very local. 90 plus percent of what we sell is totally connected to communities and therefore for us for the communities it's critical that the communities thrive and they continue to develop because that's where we we have our business and our colleagues are part of the community. So we're also very connected to sustainability and I think this year last year 2020 proved that we have no other planet. This is the planet we have. There's no planet B. And if we don't use resources in a circular way, in an efficient way, there'll be no resources left or there'll be no planet left for our kids. So I think this is something that became very obvious. We are very, our sustainability is very connected to packaging, to farming, to water, and to energy. Those are all things we use to produce beer and therefore things that can have an impact given our footprint around the world. I think what became clear this year to your question is that collaboration is key. The problems in the world face are very big and they require a multidisciplinary approach and collaboration is key to their approach. So this time people are talking about the green recovery. We're all very glad to hear that because we have to rebuild. If we have to rebuild, let's rebuild it better in a more equitable, more fair way, cleaner, using resources in a more rational way. And I think the biggest barrier to this, the big promoter of this collaboration, the biggest barrier is the siloed approach. For example, in our business, most of the water we use is in the farming, is in our farmers, our suppliers. So if you only look at the four walls within our breweries, we're not tackling 80 percent of the water consumption that happens in our business. So that's why for years we've been collaborating with our farmers and also suppliers in general because again it requires a village to really get to that circular economy. Well you mentioned Carlos about the community piece and I think that's really important when you're re-looking at yourself as well and all the different pillars. Pamela, you know I know the center focus and the work you do is around SMEs too, small, medium enterprises. Can you kind of talk too about how you are seeing, how that was illustrated in 2020? Not sure if we lost Pamela. I know we had some a little bit difficult issues but I will integrate her back when she comes back in online. But Jim, I'll come to you next. You know, I'd love to ask you kind of what initiatives you've been taking to connect. Do I hear Pamela back? He has some, sorry I'm having some internet issues. I mean the Caribbean, sorry, sometimes that happens. Yes, sorry, you were asking me something? Yeah, no worries of course. It's a technology. You know, in the SME community, the small business, medium enterprises, I know you do a lot of work in there. Can you kind of share a little bit what you've seen for how 2020 illustrated for that community and how, you know, how the connectivity, as Carlos mentioned, of collaboration was important? I think one of the main things when we talk about sustainable value chains and making value chain work is the fact that, as Carlos mentioned, collaboration is critical simply because we have to do unprecedented things in an unprecedented time. And this time is significantly unprecedented for all of us. So what is it that we need to do? I think we need to look first of all at how to make the value chain system more reliable, something that we require special partners like ITC have done. So the first thing you need, Pamela, I think we might have lost her again. Sorry to the audience. I know we're working through this. This is live. And so we're fortunate to have each of these great leaders with us. So we're going to keep moving forward and we'll integrate her right back when she comes in. Jim, I want to come to you. I know you as a company last year, you guys had faced on to COVID and these initiatives. Can you talk about the strengthening collaboration in the value chains? Kind of what are the key success factors for you and the initiatives that you've highlighted? Yeah, like Carlos mentioned, we have a big global footprint and we have supply chains that extend around the world and they're very interconnected to the food and especially packaging areas, health and hygiene areas and also the industrial markets. They all saw some challenges last year. I was concerned when we went into COVID and lockdowns and less travel that it would be difficult for us to implement some of the projects that we have around the world. A great example would be like our projects in the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, where we're working on waste reduction as well as circular solutions on a local basis. But I was pleasantly surprised that the use of digital tools like this allowed our people to actually be more productive. They met more frequently. I would say the depth of those communications was better and we made a lot of progress towards getting our head around metrics and targets and challenges that we need to be able to drive this forward. And I believe that metrics is a key part of it as being talked about in a big way today because our system, our capitalist system is driven on profitability and everything is driven towards profitability, low cost growth, market value cap, ad. But sometimes that's not what we're trying to solve for. If we're trying to solve for less CO2 emission or less plastic waste, that takes different metrics and you're trying to change consumer behavior. These are big challenges and a profit metric alone isn't going to help do that. So I think we made tremendous progress on our own commitments but helping the whole value chain understand what needs to change in order to make sure that we are not only profitable but we have a better environment to live in in the future. I think Jim, you said perfectly a trend that people should be paying attention that metrics and benchmarks in the future will be changing as you mentioned of the way how we hold all of us accountable and how you do business going forward. David, love to, you mentioned something about the food system being resilience, resiliency. Walk me through what that meant to you when I saw an interview that you did that you mentioned that and maybe talk a little bit more about how the redesign of this new model or what did we learn from last year that you think that we're going to keep going forward with? Yeah, thanks, Ryan and happy Tuesday to everybody on the call. I think that if I look back on 2020 and especially the early months of COVID as it spread from China to the rest of the world, the word that you mentioned, Ryan, is most appropriate I think is resilience of the food supply chains and it's resilient because the people are resilient and certainly in the early days of lockdowns and things closing down across the world, we were concerned, are we going to be able to get food to where it's needed, to where consumers want to have it? And certainly you saw spot shortages and retailers and especially in the western world where there are certain things that you couldn't get. But I think if I think about 2020, it's number one is the food system is resilient. It worked and with a few exceptions where we had to shut down some of our plants and some stores were experiencing spot shortages but by and large food was able to get where it was needed despite in some cases pressure to open up facilities by local governments, by national governments to make sure the food supply chain that people were continuing to be fed. Secondly, I think it draws attention and both Pamela and Carlos have mentioned about partnerships and that we have this connected supply chain. Now, you know one entity can feed the world by itself. It starts with the farmers, the most important part, one of the most important parts of the supply chain goes all the way through to the retailers of food service to where people consume their food. And so I think it brought attention amongst the world's consumers the complexity and all the interrelated parts of the supply chain that need to work on a day-to-day basis. I think people may have taken for granted where does my food come from? How is it produced? Who is in the supply chain? And I think that has been one of the positives. And then finally sustainability can't wait. There was no pause on sustainability initiatives on what we are doing in terms of regenerative agriculture in terms of water supply, water conservation, soil resilience. And so I think that's the third point, Ryan, which is sustainability continues to be the presenting issue for the food and egg supply chain this year in the years to come. And certainly it did not pause because of COVID. Well, thanks, Dave. And you know, I think that's important because I think you mentioned sustainability didn't pause. So then how do we move forward? We got to put some data behind it, right? The ecosystem as a whole really needs to understand of how are we actually moving forward because of what happened in 2020. And Pam, I think you're back on. I'd love to ask you how ecosystems really powered by data maximize the productivity and innovation across value networks. How have you seen that play? To the thing, it's not allowing me to unmute. The guy's asking me a question now, but hello. Sorry. Hey, we can hear you. We can hear you now. I'm sorry. This is just a nightmare. Sorry. Pamela, it's okay. Don't worry. It's perfectly fine. Love to hear your insights on this. Okay. So can you repeat the question while I'm on it? No problem at all. I was asking, David was mentioning about how sustainability hasn't moved. I mean, he's going to move forward. And I'm saying, and I think everyone here agrees that data is going to be behind it to ensure that we are moving forward even further. And I wanted to ask you how you've seen kind of, you know, how have the ecosystems as powered by data to maximize productivity and innovation for the future across value networks? How are they going to play in? All right. Well, the first thing is that we're going to look at how do you, you know, make sure the data is siloed. And I think that's part of the problem. You know, we have issues from the Minister of Finance to the pineapple farmer in Sri Lanka. And how do we get them all to be able to utilize the data in a way that is important and that facilitates global value chains? One of the things that we have done at ITC is we've earned the trust of over 100 standard setting bodies. And we've created one global repository of 250 standards displayed in one site, which is the sustainability map. And we also have worked with technical working groups for VSS and sustainable standards. And part of the data issue is also we need platforms. And that means you're going to build trust, harmonizing standards, making those standards work for all companies, big and small. And that's a trust building exercise. And those platforms cannot be just businesses or governments or industry experts, you know, talking in silos. It has to be a coordinated approach across all three constituencies and then transparency is built on the ground. So for example, one of the things we actually did with the World Economic Forum in 2019 was to explore how the sustainability map could provide a transparency and traceability platform capable of visualizing blockchain-based supply chain traceability data from multiple companies. The pilot was part of the initiative of WEF's platform for shaping the future of advanced manufacturing and production and created in collaboration with Everledger and the Lensing Group. And it turned out to be work very well, you know, managing data privacy, mapping businesses involved in relevant value chains, etc. I think what's also important as part of this data initiative is having the kind of inclusive toolbox that erases the divide between developed and developing countries. And one of the big things that we've seen over the last year, particularly in relation to the value chains is the issue of ensuring that businesses, especially MSMEs understand that they have to not just make a case, a business case for traceability, circularity, and harmonization, but see them also as stepping stones to global value chains. And I think that's going to be very important. So I just wanted to make those points. So those, Pamela, that's great. And Carlos, I see you shaking your head and I'm coming to you. I'm coming to you because I started hearing Pamela speak about the macro pieces and going to micro. I want to ask you, and feel free to chime in on Pamela's comments too, but like, you know, when you mentioned your four pillars, the pillars you mentioned at the beginning of this talk, you know, I think a reduced reuse, recycle, re-manufacturing, this is not easy.  Can you share kind of the struggles too, the success and struggles, because it's not easy, right? Well, in terms of reuse, re-manufacturing, recycle, in our business, more than 50% of what we sell is a returnable packaging. So packaging that will travel 20 times, 30 times, glass bottles or kegs, right, that are reusable. On top of that, we're also taking one, single use plastic out of our supply chain. So for example, in six packs of cans that you have those rings of up top, we're taking those all off and using cardboard solutions, you know, that are recyclable as opposed to single use plastic that will end up in beaches and oceans and all that. And we're also using blockchain, as Pamela said, to trace our bottles. So in Colombia, for example, every day, one million bottles go through the street, okay? We try to make sure that most of those bottles that are not returnable will find ways back in terms of recyclability. In order to do that, you have to work with the people that collect those bottles, the co-ops, that will get the bottles from these people and put together in a truck load. And we're using blockchain to give them also a financial identity as a bottle picker. And in terms of our circular ventures, what we're doing as well is with our byproducts from Brewing Beer, you have multi-barley at the end that has very rich in protein and fiber. So we're now, we just announced two weeks ago, a venture that we've been investing for five years that now has scale to turn that back into the human food chain. Before that, we're selling that to feedstock. But now, of course, we're able to get those proteins separated and put it to better use for best use, back into the food chain. So those are just some examples of things we're doing to try to have our business being one of circular in that we use something, there's a byproduct, that byproduct finds its way again with the value added back into the chain as opposed to go to landfill. No, great. No, thanks. I know Dave and Jim, you guys have similar views. Feel free to jump in. I think the one thing I would add to Carlos' comment is when you're looking at an economy and a use of materials and designing for circularity, you also have to think about the overarching goal of climate and CO2. And energy is a big driving force for that. So one of the reasons plastics are very popular and is because they have the lowest CO2 footprint and they're the cheapest product to make in the world. They're also one of the cheapest to recycle. So you can make plastic or paper or glass or aluminum or steel and it can all go to a landfill. What's the lowest life cycle assessment of all of those materials? And I think that isn't necessarily, circularity alone isn't necessarily the only measure of that. You've got to look at the CO2 footprint and there's really not as much good life cycle assessment scientifically out there as we need to drive this forward. And so we have to think about all these things together and that's one of the things that we're trying to do. And for example, plastics waste doesn't have to end up in the environment. But our consumer behavior over decades has been a linear economy. We use something once. It doesn't matter if it's plastic or anything else. We use it once and we throw it away. How do you drive the behavior to not throw it away but to recycle it? How do you drive the system to have an investable value in it so that that product comes back? Is it a deposit on a bottle or a can? We've seen that when you do that, you get 95% return rates and you can have a pretty good source feedstock for creating that circular loop. So there are a lot of things that have to come together to make it happen. And one producer alone can't make it happen. It takes a lot of collaboration along that whole value chain. Ryan, I'll pick up on something that Carlos and Pamela were talking about relative to blockchain data and technology. And that is transparency in the food supply chains. And as I mentioned a few minutes ago, consumers I think are much more aware of the connectedness of the supply chains around the world, starting with the farmer, to the manufacturer, to the transportation companies, and ultimately to the places where people consume their food. They want to know where is it coming from? How was it produced? Who was in the supply chain? What companies were involved? And were the products being sourced on deforestation free or sustainably produced lands? And so one of the things we've been doing in the last couple of years in our cocoa supply chain in Western Africa is implementing not only blockchain technology, but also data monitoring and very specific data around where is the cocoa coming from? Using technology to have surveys to understand how big are the families that are working on these farms? Are there farms where there may be a higher likelihood of child labor, which is completely unacceptable and we will not do business with anyone that is practicing child labor? It allows us to map where deforestation may have occurred and also cease to in business with any small farms or large farms for that matter, where deforestation is occurring. So I think one of the things that has occurred since the advent of COVID, but was already occurring is transparency and the use of data to trace supply chains back to the farm so that people can have a much better and clearer idea of how is it produced, where did it come from and how did it get to my table? Well, each of you already beat me to the punch. I was going to ask each of you to give me one actual item. Each of you gave me what you were each action will moving forward, which I love. And part of what I've heard and also maybe the struggle is education, right? I mean, I don't know if someone wants to take a crack at what I'm going to ask is, oh, Carlos, this is already before I even asked it. I think, Jim, you mentioned like, hey, this is, we got, it can't be just from one person, all of us. Well, we've been talking about getting everyone collaborating together, but how do we educate the individual if we're going to change the behavior? How are we going to educate the leaders to educate the group and the cultures around that? Carlos, you want to... Yeah, I go back to what Pamela said about small and medium businesses. Six million, we have six million retailers that was service around the world on a weekly basis. The vast majority of them are family businesses, small businesses, mostly run by women. And sometimes single head of the family. And we have a big role in educating them in terms of to avoid the digital divide. Because this pandemic exposed all the gaps they have to compete in today's world in terms of digital, not being banked, not having a bank account and all that. And we're very busy because they're 90 plus percent of our customer base. And we're very busy in the past few years trying to provide them solutions so they can have apps to connect with customers so they can have a business even in lockdown periods that they have a more efficient way to connect with us and a way to manage the inventory, working capital and so on. We're also giving them banking services with our digital wallet. Because sometimes these people work day and night so as to see at the end 20 percent of their bottom line go to banking fees, 25 percent go to banking fees. We can reduce that by 90 percent by providing the digital wallet and payment services so they can avoid those fees in many countries. So we're trying to provide them ways so they can be successful because they import not only for their families because that's the only thing where they get their money from but also for communities because they give credit to a lot of people that live around them in the community. And that's the only source of credit for a lot of these people to buy during the month until they get to a paycheck day. Yeah, Carlos, I want to add before I get to the last question, Pamela, I want to get your insight real quick if you can on that, if you have a point of view because I know you're seeing it dealing directly with the community and what you're talking to them about. Yeah, I really wanted to chip in on this so thank you for giving me the floor after, Carlos. The whole issue of accessibility is critical, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises. And one of the things we've seen which is really a major concern for me is over the last year during COVID, what we've seen is that there's been a lack of connectivity for a lot of digital platforms have become even more important. E-commerce has become critical. And so it's important that they have the ability to access the connections that enable them to do business. One of the things that we've been working in through our sustainable agriculture initiative is the collaboration on the farm sustainability assessment. And that was developed by over 80 SAI members. And so the suppliers and farmers and external stakeholders all worked together to try to create a unique platform which is used by leading food and drink companies to source sustainable produced agricultural materials but also to work with them to create effective and efficient supply chains. And I think the whole issue of digital platforms and digital connectivity is going to become even more critical as we move into the next phase of what's happening with COVID. Smaller countries have had significant issues with digital penetration. And if I could make one ask of the huge companies out there, how can we help countries developing countries, especially in some of your large suppliers like in Africa, increase the digital penetration level? Because it's not just about apps and mobile connectivity. It's also about connectivity at the household level. Since so many women are involved in agricultural production, since so many women are dependent on it to feed their families, the issue of digital penetration is a significant problem. It's only 18% in all of Africa and 11% for least developed countries. How do we address that issue? And how do we increase the ability to engage in the digital space? So, that's fine. To Pamela's point, I'm sorry, Dave, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead, Tim. I'll wait. Oh, I think to Pamela's point, do you have a very developed economy in the United States and post COVID with the ability, the need to try to have to deliver education across the country? It's exposed a lot of gaps from a social standpoint and households being able to access. So, this problem is universal. I think it's a problem that we have all through the world and more pronounced in developing economies. And so, the ability to educate and reach out, have broadband accessibility for everyone, have everyone be able to have a computer at home so that they can make a living has been a big move forward. And you'll see it's part of an infrastructure discussion on a bill that needs to go through in the United States here. So, it's a common platform for everyone globally. And I'll pick up there. And it's so true. And to Pamela's point, and I'll go back to the example of cocoa farmers in West Africa, all our payments are done digitally through their phones. And the vast majority of the payments are done to the women of the household. But it's a very important point that's talked about the resilience of the ag and food supply chain system. But it starts with the farmers and those communities. And we've got to make sure that those communities are resilient. And we have seen during COVID times that the vulnerability in developing countries and in agricultural communities is much more pronounced than it was pre-COVID. And so, I think whether it's our company or anybody on this call, we've got to continue to invest in farmer training, investing in the technology, and that's in the support of those communities. Otherwise, the food supply chain and the ag and food supply chain system will break down at the very beginning if those communities and the farmers don't have the appropriate support. Well, I feel like this conversation can continue to keep going. I know we're running out of time. We've got a minute left. And all you just started about inclusivity is going to make a difference, right? Being inclusive is going to make an impact.  It's called Ryan's Lightning Round. I guess this is Davo style. In one word, describe the theme, what does connected, resilient, and sustainable value mean to you? Carlos, you're first. Collaboration, no plan B. Pamela. Inclusion. Jim. Power. Uplift date. And Dave. Farmers. Well, I want to thank you all here on the panel. I thank you for your candor insight. Thank you to the audience. Like, I really do appreciate you all. And thank you all.


Hey Aaron just what did you see from Tanaka today? What what were you looking for and what is it next for him? I thought he was strong You know fastball had had life to it. I thought the stuff was pretty good And I thought it was just an important step of obviously getting back out there and facing hitters You know, I think you can end up throwing 20 pitches. So I was really encouraged by what I saw You know now he'll he'll go on his five-day and the plan will be you know throw a bullpen in between obviously and then Throw and scranton, you know, hopefully up to you know, whatever it's 30 35 40 pitches and then potentially be in a position to To join us Thank you. Mm-hmm. Take the next question from Sweeney Murdy Aaron I wanted to follow up with you on something that Aaron judge talked about he said last year after losing game six in Houston After you addressed the team He told them don't forget this feeling and use it as fuel I'm wondering what you can recall from his Speech to the team and what you remember about the circumstances and the feelings behind it.  Yes, but even my it was such a life raw moment and The closeness that existed with that team You know the belief that all the way to the end we were gonna win. I felt like was Was how everyone felt so the the cruel ending of it all You know, I do remember judgey, you know in his way in a strong way Saying that to us and I think that just added to the to the to the sting to the you know, how real that moment was and and I Always feel like you know fallen down does add another log to the fire and You know, certainly that was the case and I feel like in spring training and now in summer camp I'm witnessing that fire burning burning strongly with these guys Yeah, there's been so much obviously it's happened in the last several months But do you think that that message is still stuck in your team's head? I do absolutely It's a hungry group I felt that way a year ago I continue to see signs of it I've seen that throughout this year already in spring training and now summer camp signs that Mentally this team is where where they need to be heading into the regular season Thank you, Aaron. Can Dave it off you can unmute you have the next question Hey, Aaron Breaking of camp is always a moment this day. I just thought making that turn towards the season How much of your brain I was focused on the normal exciting for our baseball season versus The coronavirus preparations and and and the risk you guys are all about to zoom here Yeah, I mean the one thing I would say is that this three weeks has been Has been good and and and obviously getting to play some exhibition games and one on one away from home Definitely has served as you know kind of a learning experience and and and a dress rehearsal for the season So I think by and large guys were able to get into somewhat of a routine about how it all works and You know how get how we get into the field how you eat meals every day How you interact with each other how we have to set up meetings and things like that so I Feel like in that way it's been valuable and I feel like I feel very much that You know, we're ready we're ready from a baseball standpoint and and and I feel like our focus Not only is on that but we'll be We'll be I don't want to say easy to be focused on that But we should be fine and in and locking in before last night's game You know several Giants took a knee including gave cap or what did you think of that? Is that something you guys have talked about and would you personally consider doing something like a did last night? I did see it and a number of guys there and what I would say to that is I'm supportive of that You know this this country allows you to express yourself in many different ways And that's one of the beauties of it. So I respect how anyone wants to demonstrate and and Whether it's in protest or whether it's in solidarity Whatever the reasons may be I have no issue with that and support that And and if that comes our way as a club, I'll stand behind You know whoever has a strong feeling about it one way or the other We've talked a little bit about it. Yes You know and we will talk a little bit more about things that are planned You know for opening day and beyond when we get together again tomorrow and meet in DC So we'll see where it leads


Welcome to today's sales enablement training. Today, we are really pleased to have with us Priyanka, who has been in the cloud native space for quite a while and talking to us about cloud native transformations. So with that, we'd just love to pass to you, Priyanka. Awesome, thank you so much, William. So I will start sharing my screen and presenting, if that sounds right. Okay, Google Chrome share and present. And present. All right, well, that's the last slide. We're done, bye. Okay, so again, thank you everybody for having me. Thanks, William, for that lovely intro and I'm excited to be here. Today, we're going to talk about the cloud native ecosystem and I'm going to focus on the people, the personas and the purchasing power that they have. So this stock is very different from the one that William gave, I think, a few weeks ago, which was focused on what is the cloud native transformation that the industry is going through. At the end of my presentation, if people want an overview of how cloud native came about, I'm happy to do that. Actually, before I get into the rest of my deck, I wanna do a quick poll. How many people want a brief history of cloud native? How should we poll people, I'm trying. Any thoughts, William? How can I get a sense? I would say go for it. Let's do a brief history of cloud native. We have a few chats that are saying yes. Okay, cool, cool. All right, thank you, folks. So let me introduce myself very quickly and then I'll get into cloud native and the details of that. So I'm Priyanka. I serve as director of cloud native here at GitLab. It's officially cloud native alliances, but I've started just saying cloud native because I'm involved in things from talking to other companies around DevOps for alliances, presenting at conferences, organizing ice cream trucks for fun things we do or being involved in the serverless project and bringing that functionality to GitLab. So it's a mixed bag of responsibilities that I have. I really enjoy it and I'm grateful to have found a job that leverages all the good I have and doesn't make me do the things I don't want to do. So it really works out. I'm on Twitter at Priyanka. I'm always there, please feel free to follow me. I love new followers. So the thesis for today's talk, I'll get into the cloud native history in a second, is that with the advent of cloud native, engineering leaders are now empowered to procure and purchase software that helps them ship faster and reliably. These engineering leaders are different from the usual high ticket item buyer and an understanding of their persona is critical to success when selling DevOps software. I'm going to focus our talk today on the champion persona. So in the GitLab handbook, there's the buyer persona section, which I will link to over here. This section has a bunch of categories, so things like directors, VPs or the CIOs or the CISOs. So we call them the buyer. I differentiate people who are not CIO, CISO type people into the champion persona. They may or may not themselves be the buyer, but they definitely will be able to have their direct boss sign the check. So it's anyone who has overview of multiple teams and their productivity in an organization. These people, I call them the champion because they can get us any vendor like GitLab or any other or even open source project, a foothold into the company and a pretty sizable one too, but they are the critical starting point. You have to get them bought in or it's just a very uphill or a very slow land and expand model. And by the way, I'm talking about this persona based on my experience with all these companies and the observability space. So this is one person's perspective. I found it useful when I engage with the community and I hope you'll find it useful too, but by no means is this the comprehensive persona guide or anything like that. All right, with that disclaimer. So as I said, these people can be anyone who has overview of multiple teams and their productivity. So titles are also varied. So it can be a director of engineering, VP platform, even like a systems architect, senior manager, sometimes even team leads. Depends on what is their purview and how do they think? Something that's interesting that Cloud Native has enabled and alluded to this earlier is that these people themselves or their direct boss can cut million dollar checks without needing to heavily involve the CIO. Of course, you still need to go through procurement. There's no way around that once you're in the large six, seven figures, I'm sure you guys know this better than anyone. But it is possible to get these folks to write large checks. So this makes this persona even that much more credit important. When we think about this champion persona and it's good to understand what's their responsibilities and how do they get promoted, right? So what I've seen is that they tend, as I said, they tend to lead multiple teams and have insight into cross-organization productivity challenges. They're promoted for shipping fast and reliably and for introducing systemic improvements that enable that. So usually they get really excited when they feel they can introduce large scale improvements and ship faster more reliably every day as a company because that's what makes them, shows them to be the leader that they are in their organization. So I'll talk a little bit about these folks based on my understanding of them. Again, it's a one person's perspective. One second, I need some water. Okay, sorry about that. Okay, when we think about the self image of these folks, their primary work persona in their head is that they're a technologist. They're not a business person, they're not a buyer, they're not a manager. They're a technologist and they take pride in that. They always want to be on the cutting edge and know the latest. They're usually very well compensated and they're aware of it. But they're fairly humble and down to earth in general about socioeconomic factors which personally has made me really enjoy these interactions because there's no fru fruness. It's more just like, let's be real, let's talk about our interests that happen to be technology. Sometimes they can be a little intellectually, I would say, elite elitists just because they're operating at a level of understanding that many folks in their jobs never encounter and then they have to deal with very complex problems. As a result, their brain is trained to handle a lot and they value intellectual vitality in the people they talk to at all times. So where to find them? So I have great success when I talk to these people on Twitter. DMs are way more effective to reach a busy person than emails or LinkedIn in mail, God, things like that. But that said, it's a fine line so you don't want to be DMing left, right and center. You have to have some contacts, some conversation going, et cetera. They're often checking out the hacker news front page. I don't necessarily think all of them are that involved with the show HN, new on HN stuff but the front page is quite important, excuse me. They often go to very specific kinds of meetups and small group events. So there's a meetup called Papers We Love which is all about people really but predominantly technologists coming together and people sharing their favorite paper and why they like it. And when I say paper, I mean like academic or industry papers on software development, cloud computing, things like that. Being involved in these communities and being able to converse there is going to take you from 10 to 100 really fast. Partially because you'll have to read a paper or two and once you've read that, you'll be that much more comfortable in this space. When I first got into observability with LightStep, the first thing I did was read the Dapper paper which was about Google's Dapper tracing system. Describe the architecture and all those details and frankly, you really don't need to be an engineer to read that. Some technical knowledge is helpful but once I went through that paper, I had up-leveled my knowledge in just that one experience so much. It kept helping me for the next two years as I worked in observability. A few good papers to look at are the Google file system, anything you can find on Kubernetes and orchestration, maybe after this call I can search up some of the cool papers and share with you guys. I know a lot of the observability papers but we need to look a little bit more on the Kubernetes side so I'll research and send some your way. Then there are some small group Kubernetes events where people, it's like maybe maximum 50 people and it's maybe a meetup or a company organizing it and inviting like-minded companies. And then there are these small group events hosted by technologists like Brian Cantrell. There was something he did in San Francisco a few weeks, months back, which attracted a lot of folks who want to be on the cutting edge and think deep about these things. Another place you can find these people are workshops and I don't mean the generic, like learn how to go workshops at conferences but rather a lot of open source projects will bring people together for, so in the Kubernetes world, it's the special interest groups in observability. It's the context propagation, I forgot what they're calling themselves these is, context propagation, what was it? Nevermind, there's one where they're trying to decide on the wire formats. So places where decisions are made in small groups, those kinds of workshops, you'll find really high-end technologists. Then in the physical, in the large scale conference world, KubeCon has always been the mecca for these folks. Monetrama is a good one specific to observability but it has a lot of senior people showing up there. So yeah, that's another thing I should mention. When we think of these conferences, KubeCon or trauma and blah, blah, blah, you'll have some systems developer who's been working for five years but you'll also have the director of platform who's been in the industry for 20. It's really a democratizing field these places because everyone's interested in the technology. As I said, the self-image of these people, the primary self-image is technologists and so whether they're an individual developer or they're a director of development, they're showing up to these places. Some other conferences are Strangeloop, PromCon, GrafanaCon, SRECon, GopherCon, just a list that I know is good. I put here, there's definitely more. In general, if it's a systems conference, it's a good bet. And you know, something I noticed in the last few years having been in this space, when we started out, the first conference, when I was just entering space into 2016, the conversation was very Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes, like what is Kubernetes, how do you use Kubernetes, that's around. And that's still going on, but then I thought 2017 and early 18 was very much the year of tooling. So everybody, like so many tools like sprung into the ecosystem and it was a discussion on how do we do metrics, how do we do logging, how do we do this, how do we do that? And everybody was talking about one special way. And that's something that's consistent, that's been consistent in the general DevOps ecosystem is that people have been talking about individual ways of doing things, which may be very, very cutting edge, but they haven't often talked about scale. And now, since the middle of 2018, I've noticed that folks are discussing just how many tools there are, how tooling is too fragmented, how we really need to think like enterprises when we're building our tool chain, it speaks directly to the GitLab story. It is so perfect. I couldn't have made it, I couldn't have manufactured it better if I tried. So we're in a really good place. This is the right time to talk about what we do. So going back to this champion persona, these folks appreciate conversations about the ecosystem, the latest trends or less monitoring, et cetera. They tend to be straight shooters and appreciate when people empathize with their struggles. Two years ago, it was how to make sense of the Kubernetes thing. Last year it was all the point solutions and this year it's like, oh God, we have too many tools. And then they really appreciate demos and technical knowledge. Now, when I say technical knowledge, many people get scared, right? That, hey, I'm not a systems engineer, I haven't spent 10 years in this space, how am I gonna do this? It's actually okay to not know how to define the function and write the code yourself. My experience has been that what's more important is the strategic level view. You need to understand the ramifications of various technologies and tooling and how that impacts people's lives in a very technical way. Like, okay, this is how your workflow will be impacted. This is how the data you collect will be impacted, that kind of stuff. But you don't need to have the experience building those data sets, building those tables, all of that. So I've found it really welcomed when I share my thoughts on how to set up your observability stack with people, even though I may not be developing every day. People actually appreciate the sort of panoramic viewpoint. They definitely don't like pitches that sound can. Now, keep in mind, your pitch can be, like, you know, some one main thing, but you have to cater it to the person so you're empathetic. Anything that sound can, anything that's like mass marketing, mass email, they're just too busy to even, they can filter it pretty quickly. And so they're not being rude, they just don't have time. So yeah, so that's the champion persona. I've spent a bunch of time talking about it. I'll quickly move on to my personal engagement strategy with these folks. So when we, as I said, this is one person's experience and this is what's worked for me. I have worked hard to understand the space and understand these people and the technology that they operate with every day and become a peer in a way. As I said, I don't need to be coding every day to be a peer. I talk about the cloud native ecosystem all the time. This is, I think my third talk of the week. It's too much, but it seems like there's a lot of demand. And I talk about like various things, people, struggles that they have. I tweet about it. I retweet other people. I engage. Basically, I consider myself a peer in this space because I'm contributing to the conversation. I try to teach people something new and that comes from talking to disparate end users at all times because there's always a nugget of information that you can delight people with. I try to always be up to date and I do that a lot via Twitter and also by keeping up the newsletters and all of that. Being credible is really important and so citing references, the exciting where I get my information is more than half the battle. So you need to make sure you know who said what and what paper that was in, all of that kind of stuff. It sounds harder than it is. You read five papers and you're good to go. And then the other thing is always be ready to demo at moment's notice. So I'll give you an example. I was once in Austin and I walked into one of the companies that I said before's office just to chat about observability with one person. That was my expectation. I walk in, there's actually a team of 10 sitting there, everywhere from a director to an intern and they're like, okay, we are ready to get going with open tracing if you can convince us that we should do it. And I was like, oh, cool, all right. And so I talked through the concepts a little bit and then I saw them listening, but not really buying as much. And I was like, okay, you know what? Let's just go and do a demo. And on moments notice, I pulled up my computer, I had an engaging demo that I had built with the team and we walked through it, they saw and result of like, I was showing traces with open tracing and people instantly got it. And they were really impressed that I was able to show and tell both at the same time and they are actually a really large open tracing user at this point. But had I not been ready for that demo or for that large crowd, I don't know what the result would have been. Then the other thing that I tend to do is help as much as I can. I contribute generously, GitLab in general values, co-contributing, building together. And I expanded beyond the company to the ecosystem. And a lot of times it's doing things that you don't have time for, but it always pays off. So I'll give an example, one of the, so Yeager, I have spent a bunch of time working with Yuri and he was like, hey, can you write my case studies? And I was like, no, I have a really busy job. I can't do that. And he's like, okay, well, can you help at all? And I pushed back quite a few times, but they said that they really wanted someone who understood the end user and observability to just guide them through. And so I was like, okay, well, it seems like this is important. So I'll support in one, in whatever, in how much ever time or the weekend I can give you.  Why don't you come and talk about GitLab? And myself, Mike Walsh and Patrick Carlin ended up doing a presentation there. So this is one case where it was very quick, I guess, but in general, building Goodwill in the industry will get you so much. Oh, sorry, am I at time? Yeah, I think there's a lot of great content. What we might need to do is invite you back to chat some more. Oh, shoot, it's 9.25, I am so sorry. So what would be great is I'll give the recording a pause. So we have this content recorded. I do wanna say that in the YouTube video, I will link a copy of Priyanka's slides. I will also send a link to the Handbook page, which will have all of the slide content, it'll be in the Handbook. And that will be in the description of the YouTube video that I will publish.


What's that white ball globular thing on the floor?  I'm Rick and you follow us on Instagram and Twitter More juicy content The dryer ball We're reacting to a trailer good dryer ball.  Yeah, I think it's his It's a Netflix film. I believe I don't know anything about it But I believe what happens when a small town cops summon to investigate the case of extremely powerful local Yes, and then I saw Glad I liked it, but I didn't watch it. I saw he put this on his Instagram Yeah, he did so I saw I went and it started to open Yikes get out of here. How far is he willing to go into the darkness to search for the truth nois very far He'll go beyond the darkness, but if he's playing a good guy, that's exciting. Yeah Don't get to see that a lot But like he told us He wants to play the good guy and get the girls. Yeah, I got the good guy gets the girl. He's so funny Anyways, all right, that's our best friend Noah Here we go Oh I love her She's in second I can't see the break, too. The one who has Samrita, people don't hate her. People make her jealous. I guess it's a dead end. The cabinet is broken. The gun will be fired. And no one will hear anything. It's just a case. A man has been killed. His wife and lover have been killed. They didn't even know. Munna is still young. She must be very upset. If you don't get married by tomorrow morning, then you'll see. It's very important to understand the situation here. We don't want to spend too much time on this. If you tell the truth, then we'll be able to do something. We won't be able to do anything, sir. You don't know what you're doing. You're making your head spin. And if you don't go crazy this time, then you'll go crazy, because we really don't know where to start. We don't want to worry about it. Even if the man is on a holiday, we'll do it for you. It's not that easy. We don't want to worry about it. What will the inspector do? Who can kill him? He'll leave both of you. Who could it be? Don't be more brave than us. Be more friendly than us. And we don't know anyone like that. Remember the seasons? Oh, is it? Is it the monsoon time where there's a lot of releases on those particular dates? I mean, I know we're technically in monsoon in regions, but I don't know if that's why July 31st is that high? Yeah, I've seen a lot of stuff coming out on July 31st, because I think that video one comes out on the 31st as well. Yeah. But it looks good. It looks really good. It looks, one, all the actors. I mean, it's going to be good. Because she, what's her name? Radhika Apti. We've seen her quite a few times. We've loved her every single time. Every time. We saw Radhika Apti. So Sacred Games, Andahan, that short film that we saw her in, which was really, really good. She's in less stories as well. I was so upset. This is a spoiler. If you haven't watched Sacred Games, cover your ears until I tell you to come back. So hold on. Cover your ears. We were so upset when she dies in Sacred Games. Okay. You can uncover now. And yeah, I mean, the bottom line is this could have been an awful trailer and we would have been disappointed. And we would tell you. I mean, just if we loved Nawazuddin, if it was a bad trailer, we would tell you. It's not. It's a good trailer. But he's one of the actors that if he's making a film, we're watching it. Yeah. Bottom line. And that looked really nice. Really good. It's directed by Honey Treyhan. Honey Treyhan. Honey Treyhan. Looks like he's a casting director and a director. Casting, casting, casting, casting, casting. Okay. I don't know if this is his debut. Tumbad. Oh, he's a casting director for Tumbad. Which is interesting. How often does that happen? It doesn't happen a lot here that casting director can go to directing or cast something that they act in like Absek did for Patholog. You know, it doesn't happen a lot. In Hollywood films, casting directors are casting directors. That's all they typically do. I wonder if this is his debut as a director. Could be. But it'd be very cool. He's casted a bunch of really popular stuff. He's casted with a... Suntree. Yeah. Sushant. Tumbad. Hindi medium. He did the Commando films. Yeah. So he did a good job. Wow. Yeah. So he's done quite a bit. And second unit director. So he was an AD. I wonder if that's in India because it's not... There's certain positions that you'll be in that it's almost a rite of passage. You do these and then you can become a director. Right. And you kind of make your dues. I wonder if India... Because the guy from Sushant's last film, the Dil Pachara, it's his director debut. He's a casting director. The director. Is he really? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. He's a huge casting director. Well, I'm trying to remember what Absek said to us in that regard. Yeah. It seems that there is definitely a connectivity with casting directors directing and acting in ways that it is not that here. No. Casting directors here are casting directors. And it's a big job. It's a huge job and it's all they really do. And then they establish themselves as casting directors and that's really all they do. But I love, I particularly love actors being casting directors. Yeah. That's spectacular. So the film follows a small town cop to investigate the death of a politician which gets complicated by the victim's secretive family in his own conflicted heart. Interesting. The trailer kind of looked like that. Yeah. And I'm excited to actually see... We've seen him, obviously, in the Salman Khan little Pakistani girl movie that I can't pronounce. Yeah. When he played the reporter. You've seen him in not a bad guy role before. Yeah. And he obviously did amazing. And I think the man could do amazing in anything he does. But we've never seen him as like the main... I don't believe, unless I'm wrong, that he's not particularly a bad guy. No. Like this is, it looks like this role. I'm not saying it's the exact same character but it would be like him, you know, playing the lead, I forgot the lead officer character name in Pato Lok where he's the main... Oh, yeah. The protagonist. Yeah. The protagonist. Not the actor's name, the character name. Yeah. Like actually kind of the trailer almost reminded me of what's that film that just came out this last year with all those people. Craig. Oh. Knives out. Yeah. Yeah. It almost reminded me of that. Like a murder mystery. Yep. That one looked a little more funny probably. Yeah. That one has a lot more humor. I know you watched it on the plane. Yeah, it does. But this one did look like... But it looks like that. It's a murder mystery for sure. For sure. You can tell. We've got a broken thing. We've got the, you know, Mr. Mustard with the pipe in the library. It's almost like a... Earfun role. Yeah. Like in Talbar. Yeah. 100%. But agreed. Nawazuddin can do anything. Just let him do it. I love that he's in a place in his career where he can choose the things he wants to be doing. And he wants to do different stuff. Yeah. He doesn't want to be known as... Even though he's like, I can do the bad guy and I can do it amazing and you all know that. Yeah. But that's not all I want to do. No. I want to play everybody. It's very much... And he said this and it was obvious by, you know, what he said and what we know about him. He loves like the choices Al Pacino's made. A lot of Al Pacino... People want to know Al Pacino as the heavy dramatic gangster guy. That's his most famous characters. But Pacino's done everything. He's done all kinds of roles. He does stuff on stage like Robert De Niro. De Niro does all kinds of roles. So, I bet that's probably... De Niro is probably more versatile than Al Pacino. He is. From my liking, as far as the versatility, I find him to be more versatile for sure. Taking nothing away from Al Pacino. But I have a feeling that's probably what Nawaz is going to be known most for his heavy... Gangs of Wasp. Gangs of Wasp or Roman Robert 2.0. His iconic heavy dramatic roles. And then he's going to also sprinkle in there all these other things. Oh, we saw him in... Keep you guessing. The lunchbox as well. What's the film that we saw the trailer of where he played the quirky, weird... I don't know if he was a priest or some member. And it was comedic. It was Houseful 4. Okay. Does he just have a little part in that? That's why we haven't watched it. Okay. I think it's a little... I want to see him do like a... a tripathy kind of thing. Like I'd like to see him be in street in that role. Well, he kind of what? I guess he wasn't that quirky. Yeah, I want to see him do something. I want to see him going to Oxford Territory.  That's what I want to see you do. I want to see him in a big Bollywood number. Yes. I want to see him do everything. The only thing we've seen him do was that in... Devty. Where he was Elvis. Right. Yeah, he was Elvis. When you didn't realize it. I didn't even realize it was him. But that's like the only thing I've seen him... I would like to see him do the big song and dance as Gaetung Day. Yes. Good stuff. We like nois. We like nois a lot. Anyways, this looks great. That's all you need to know. Let's do it. Use lifetime. See you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.


Welcome everyone to this session on the human brain. This one is called Deconstructing Mindfulness, and it's obviously a topic that a lot of people are interested in these days, and I think we have a great session prepared for you. Our two speakers are Richard Davidson. He's the William James Enviolus Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, Weisman Center, good, University of Wisconsin-Madison in US, and also Tom Insel. Tom is the Director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, and all that that implies. So we're going to have a chat about this, and actually we will be taking questions, so if you have some feel free to join in. But Richie, I thought we should start with you. Tell us what we're talking about. We're deconstructing mindfulness. Let's reconstruct it and talk about what we're talking about. Well, mindfulness, actually to quote my dear friend who is one of the experts in the audience, John Kabat-Zinn, has said that mindfulness is paying attention on purpose, non-judgmentally. That's one definition. Mindfulness is about being present in the present moment, being fully aware in the present moment, being able to absorb and to process all of the information that is accessible to an individual in the moment that each individual has, which is just the present moment. It is the only moment we really have. And one of the ways to think about this is to contrast mindfulness with some of its antithesis, such as mind wandering or mindlessness, a recent study published in a prestigious journal, Science Observed People in the Real World. And they queried them with text messages and asked them several questions. They asked them three questions. This is in a group of several thousand people. One question was, what are you doing right now? And the second question was, where is your mind right now? Is it focused on what you're doing or is it focused elsewhere? And what they found is that, on average, the average American adult spends 47% of her, his waking life, not paying attention to what they're actually doing. And mindfulness is really about bringing our attention back to the present moment and not getting carried away by our thoughts or our emotions, which often hijack our attention and bring us away from this present moment. Now interestingly, in this study that I was referring to, the third question they asked was how happy or unhappy are you right now? At the moment the question was asked and they found that when individuals reported that they were not in the present moment, they were less happy than when they were in the present moment. And so there is some association between reports of wellbeing and happiness and being in the present moment. So I'm very intrigued by this notion of attention because as you were speaking, I was imagining my children, as they sometimes do, sit in front of the computers playing a game and their attention is exquisite.  Tell me the difference between that kind of attention and the attention you're talking about. Yeah, it's a great question. And what I would say is that the kind of attention that you're talking about, we would say is stimulus driven or stimulus captured attention. And in fact, this is something that's been studied in the laboratory. People, in addition to playing video games, people put themselves at great risk to focus their attention. There have been studies of rock climbers, for example, who engage in activities that have been described as producing flow where there is a feeling of being completely in the present without distraction and where a momentary lapse of attention can actually potentially be lethal. And the invitation in the work that we're describing is that it is possible to actually be in the present moment without engaging in those kinds of extreme activities. It's possible to cultivate this quality in one's waking life all the time. One doesn't need to be playing a compelling video game or being involved in a engaging task or rock climbing. We can actually educate our attention. And this is actually something that William James, more than 100 years ago, said so eloquently in his two volume tome, The Principles of Psychology. And if I can just quote William James, he said, the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. And he went on to say that an education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about. That's what William James said. And I think if William James had some contact with the traditions that we're describing today, I think he would have instantaneously seen that these are vehicles for educating attention among other things. I haven't forgotten about you, but I wanna ask Richie one more question. What makes this topic right now so gathering so much attention is people have begun to see this as an avenue to all sorts of healthy lifestyle behaviors and health and wellbeing, however you want to define it. What part of that equation interests you? And is that what you're studying in your lab? How this, I mean you can describe this behavior, but the interest seems to be for its positive benefit. So what do you study there? It's a wonderful question, Joe. And if the impact of mindfulness practice was restricted to the periods of formal practice, it wouldn't be very interesting. It would be like taking a drug which then had its effects dissipate. We're really interested in the longer term consequences of these practices. And so there is a lot of scientific research that's now going on to investigate its impact on wellbeing, to investigate its impact on certain aspects of health. And this work is really at a very, very early stage. And I think it's important not to over promise and oversell the state of the research at this point in time. There is still a lot to be investigated, but there is some evidence to suggest that these practices may be helpful in reducing inflammation. These practices may be helpful in treating as an adjunct certain psychiatric disorders such as mood disorders and anxiety disorders. But again, the evidence is still in its infancy and we still have a long way to go. Okay, so Tom, having brought the health aspect of it into play, the National Institutes of Mental Health presumably has some interest in this among other approaches. Where do funding agencies sit in terms of their interest in pursuing this as a tool to better mental health? Before coming, I thought I'd better get educated about this topic as I know much less than Richie and many of the people in the audience. So I did what we all do. I went to PubMed to see what was there. 498 publications as of last week on mindfulness slash meditation and brain. So there's a lot of research going on. Now our interest on the mental health side, in addition to whatever people are working on with respect to immunology and health, other aspects of health, we're really thinking a lot about issues around depression and anxiety. And I think what gets us there actually was introduced by Richie in a very clear way that if you think about what is depression, what is anxiety, it's a lot of things.  But in terms of subjective experience, people when they're depressed are mostly locked in the past. They're ruminating about something that happened that they can't let go of. When they're anxious, they're ruminating about the future. It's that anticipation of what they can't control and they angst about what might happen. What Richie talked about was how to focus on here and now. And if you could train yourself to do that in a way that was rigorous and would be able to continue after the moments of training, just as you've said, that begins to sound like a very important vehicle and a very important part of what it takes to recover from these are really debilitating disorders. So that's where we come from Joe. We sort of think about, can this be an adjunct to everything else that people are trying as part of a recovery process? And the evidence while it's still accumulating is pretty good. It's always hard to tell because there's a kind of publication bias. You tend to see people publishing work when it's positive and less likely to publish when something doesn't work very well. So you have to be a little skeptical when you look at those 498 papers. They're almost all positive. That doesn't sound like reality. Nevertheless, that's the way science moves forward is by collecting that kind of information. What would you, I mean, would you care to speculate on the reasons for the long-term benefits if it's not something that's just in the moment but that it carries forward? Is that something that you would have an explanation for? Because I can ask Richie too. Yeah, so this is a great part of what I think we can get into a little bit. And again, I'm going to turn to Richie to get some of the details. But, you know, Davos has had a tradition of, especially this year, focusing on the brain and also focusing on mindfulness. And so here we are, bringing these two things together a bit. And of course, the question you're asking is, is there something about this training that changes the brain that has lasting effects on brain function and then lasting effects on the mind? And the evidence there is actually pretty interesting. Again, I think you have to be aware of the publication bias. But one shouldn't be too surprised if you learn to juggle or you learn to play the piano or you learn another language. Anything that requires acquiring a skill changes brain pathways long-term. And you can see that happen within an individual. So there's every reason to think that mindfulness training or any kind of contemplative training would do the same thing. And in fact, the evidence is really pretty terrific for that. There are differences depending on the kind of practice that you do. There are different pathways that are affected, depending on whether you're really focusing mostly on internal states. And then you get these interceptive pathways that change and they change long-term. If you're focused more on an extra-acceptive, on listening to your sensations and your body and what's coming in, that actually changes a different set of pathways. But the data are really quite interesting, just as with any other kind of motor skill learning, this kind of what we call metacognitive learning, learning to watch your own mind, learning to actually be introspective in that sense, does have an impact on brain pathways long-term. And there's every reason to think, therefore it may also carry over into all the things that you do when you're not in the training session itself. So I can understand why a neuroscientist would be drawn to this problem, but what drew you to this question of what's happening in the brain as it's changing because of mindfulness? Well, in terms of my own personal story, Joe, really what honestly drew me was meeting people who were engaged in this practice, whose demeanor and whose presence, whose warm-heartedness was very infectious. These were the kind of people that I wanted to spend more time around and for the most part, they weren't the people I found in the academy. How can that be? What academy are you talking about? Just to be clear. Okay. You're not naming names. All right. So that drew me initially and I learned more about it and then my life changed quite dramatically in 1992 when I first met the Dalai Lama and he challenged me and he said, look, you've been using tools of modern neuroscience to study anxiety and depression and fear. Why can't you use those same tools to study positive qualities of the mind? And it was really a simple question and there was no good answer I can give other than it's hard. But when we first started to study fear and anxiety, that was hard too. And I think most neuroscientists would agree that we've made at least a little bit of progress on understanding the brain mechanisms that underlie fear and anxiety. So that was a wake-up call for me and an invitation to begin work in this area. And if I can just go back to give a very specific example to follow up from Tom's comments, a really good example is with pain. This is something that all of us have experienced with physical pain. And there are some wonderful experiments that have been done on the application of mindfulness and pain. And so just to give one simple example, in the laboratory we can use a thermal stimulus, heat, to produce extremely realistic pain and deliver it in a way that's very safe. And we can present a cue to a person after she or he experiences this pain initially and the cue indicates that in a few seconds you will be zapped with this very intense heat stimulus which will produce physical pain. And then the stimulus goes on and then there's a period of recovery. So we have three periods here, an anticipation period, a period during which the painful stimulus is delivered and a period of recovery. And what we find is that when we present the cue which tells a person that she or he is about to get a painful stimulus without any pain being delivered, the networks in the brain that we know respond to pain begin to activate immediately. And it's as if they were presented with the actual painful stimulus. In individuals who've engaged in long-term mindfulness practice, there's very little change in the brain until the actual stimulus is presented. Then there's a very big change. And then in this recovery period after the stimulus is delivered, the untrained individual continues to show reverberation in these networks that are pain responsive. It's as if the pain is continuing. But among the long-term mindfulness practitioners, they go back down to baseline very, very quickly. So this is an issue that Tom and I have both been speaking about. There is a very dramatic change in the anticipation period and in the period where a person may be reflecting on the past. And so the mindfulness practitioner is showing an appropriate and large response to the stimulus itself, but is showing very little activity in these bracketing periods. And it turns out that the activity in those bracketing periods, the anticipation and recovery periods, account for a lot of subjective distress and unpleasantness. Can I add a great example? One that might even resonate more with some people here is that you don't have to be apparently a long-term practitioner or a monk. A wonderful study was published last year, I think it was in JAMA, or it was in JAMA psychiatry, looked at four platoons of marines in the US and four platoons who got eight weeks of mindfulness training about four hours a week in class with homework and then a control group of four platoons that got none of that and got some other sort of non-descript didactic work. They went through basic training at the end of eight weeks, they went through an intensive stressor as part of their overall training. And the question was whether mindfulness would have any impact. And actually, when you look carefully at the data, it doesn't have an impact on heart rate or respiratory rate, all those things go up a lot in both groups. It's the recovery phase, really striking and the immune response to this stress that's really strikingly different. And in this case, they actually did neuroimaging and found different degrees of activation of particular brain pathways. Again, what that means is open to debate, but that's after eight weeks. And men who were not looking for this but were assigned randomized to receive it, so it, again, the effects aren't huge, but they are significant and one wonders whether longer training, people who may be more incentivized, whether it would make even a greater difference. Actually, I was gonna ask that something along those lines, is there a difference between the mindfulness as practiced by monks and the Dalai Lama and the mindfulness that you would ask a human subject who wasn't involved in that kind of training to perform? Are they essentially the same thing? It's just the duration of experience is longer or there's something different about the research version of mindfulness versus the religious tradition of mindfulness? Well, I would say that they share fundamental similarities. Obviously, there's a huge difference in dose, so to speak, but they share fundamental similarities. And I think that there are many wonderful examples of mindfulness practice being taught in a completely secular way, but in a way that captures, I think, the essential ingredients that have been practiced by these very long-term practitioners of the sort that you described. So I don't think there's any fundamental difference in kind. I'm gonna turn to the audience in just a minute, but I have one more question and that's a sort of a philosophical one. How important do you think is it to know what's happening during mindfulness or what the effects on the brain of mindfulness are? In other words, it works for people who practice it and are favorably impressed by it and you can operationally describe the decrease in heart, you know, in anxiety or other things that you wanna measure as a positive outcome. What's the value of knowing, okay, the prefrontal area or the cingulate or the limbic system is involved? Where does that get you? Can I take that, because we get that question a lot as a funder and we do support some of this research. And so I start from a rather cynical perspective, or a kind of anti-neuromaterialist perspective. I don't think showing a change in the brain is either necessary or sufficient for a subjective experience, right? So I don't think you need the brain studies to validate or to falsify whatever it is that people experience when they're going through the training. But the two things about the brain that every person with one should think about, the first is that unlike, in contrast to virtually every other organ of the body, this is an incredibly metabolically active organ. It's 2% of your body weight and it's 20% of your metabolism. 20% of your oxygen consumption, 20% of your metabolic demand is in the brain. So it's like your heart would be at a very, very high rate. That's what your brain's doing at rest. And one of the great discoveries of the last few years with neuroimaging is the very high level of activity in the brain at rest. There is no true resting state. In fact, what happens with the intentional engagement is often you slow that down.  Unlike virtually every other part of the body, there's no regeneration. And what makes that is that we live a long time. So that means you've got to have cells that are going to hang around for at least 80 years. Our cells really aren't built for that for the most part. That's not the way human biology has been geared. It hasn't been geared for those very long time scales, especially when there's a huge metabolic demand. So I guess a question you'd ask is, is there some way to give a little bit of relief to an organ that is always in demand, especially when it's mind wandering, especially when it's at rest. Because what we think about as rest for the rest of our bodies is actually a surprisingly demanding state for our brains. And if this is some way, and I don't know that it is yet, that's where my cynic comes out, but if this is a way that just for a few minutes or even in a more chronic way for 5% to bring down that very high demand state, maybe that's useful and good to know about sometime fairly soon before you hit that 70 to 80 year mark. But now I'm curious, are there studies that show that blood flow to the brain decreases or oxygen consumption decreases during a state of mindfulness, do you know? There are studies which show that there are changes in blood flow. Interpreting it however in the sense that Tom described as giving the brain a rest, I think at this stage is still open to question. I think the question that Tom poses a very important one. But if I can just add one other thing, I think that there is another reason why the study of the brain is potentially very important and that is that one of the things that we're learning in many areas of medicine and it applies to this area as well, is that it's very likely that one size does not fit all. And I think that it's, we really know very little about how to prescribe individually in a way that can maximize the effectiveness of these practices. We don't even know for example, if a person practices for 20 minutes a day, is it better to practice in two 10 minute sessions? Is it better to practice in a single 20 minute session? Is it better to practice in 10 two minute sessions that are sprinkled throughout the day? We have no idea. And there are ways in which the study of the brain may be informative to help make more individual prescriptions if you will based upon individualized patterns of brain activity. And so that's something that is being pursued now in current research. Well I said I'd like to engage the audience and I do and I will take a question but before I do, can I ask how many people in this room have tried some form of mindful meditation? Okay, so we have an engaged audience. Okay, yes sir, I think I'd like to know. My question is basically when you say practice a state of mindfulness, what is it you're referring to? Is it just breathing? Is it meditation? Or if you could just talk a little bit about the state of practice of mindfulness. Well one can be mindfully aware of anything. So what we're really talking about is dedicating one's full awareness to the present moment and it could be awareness of the breath, it could be awareness of external sensations, it could be awareness of thoughts, it can be awareness of emotions but the idea and the invitation is to become aware without getting carried away in the narrative, being aware in this flavor of non-judgmental kind of awareness. And so there are many different ways to practice and we do not yet know from a scientific perspective what the differences among these objects of focus might be and again there may be important individual differences in what may be maximally helpful for any given person. Yes, go ahead. Hi, I'm curious as to whether there's any research that's going on in attention deficit disorder or ADHD, particularly in the pediatric population and whether there's any studies going on in this group and whether that might be something useful in lieu of medications. Yeah, I can speak a little bit to that. If you were trying to find a group that would be the most challenging to get through this kind of training you might have just mentioned it and it's very difficult for children who can't focus to be able to do this all the more important to make this part of what you ask them to do. It's one of the situations where it might be interesting to think about actually using medications to help them do the training and then be able to wean off the medications once they get to a point where they have more of what we would call cognitive control or there are lots of ways of describing this but the ability to actually rein in impulsive thoughts rein in the kind of wandering that Richie talked about. The evidence right now is pretty good. I mean, there are now examples of that and there's a lot of interest actually in developing devices providing a kind of neuro feedback for kids and turning those into video games that would allow kids to be able to get engaged and learning cognitive control. It's not too difficult to understand that if there's a neural signature as we're suggesting to this process that you provide a lot of feedback around when that signature shows up with an EEG and then kids would learn that the same way they can learn to control heart rate or breathing rate. So that's still I think in the experimental phase but it's promising and it's one way to look forward to having not maybe instead of medication but in addition to it's part of the toolkit that you could offer. And if I can just follow up on that, the Gates Foundation recently gave us some funding to do exactly what Tom is describing and we've developed a video game that's targeted for middle school children to teach them simple skills of mindfulness in a game-like format. And we've been rigorously investigating that in a randomized controlled trial in a way that you would investigate the impact of a pharmaceutical both on aspects of attention as well as on the dose of medication that they're taking. And so this work is ongoing now. So I don't have any findings I can report but there's enough out there I think to warrant serious scientific scrutiny of this possibility at this point in time. Yeah, I should just add one thing. Last year when we had a similar conversation Goldie Hahn was here and talked about the work her foundation is doing not so much for ADHD but for children in general they've taken a similar kind of training for third graders into eight states and they have done a fairly large-scale study which looks at improvements actually in academic performance and there's something there. So if you're interested the Hahn Foundation is probably the leading edge of what's being done on a large scale. They still need to do a very large scale randomized controlled trial but the evidence is beginning to show up. Patients have depression which is very common amongst women particularly. Does mindfulness training work better with the medication or less? Because you're doing something which helps the depression. Any medication that commonly use ones and this mindfulness actually work in synergy or it works against it. So I don't know evidence about doing a specific comparison of plus minus as an augmentation you may know more about that. Yeah, I don't think there's been a study directly addressing what you're asking. There are good data now on mindfulness-based cognitive therapy with depression and the best evidence suggests that if these interventions are given to depressed patients when they're admitted there is good evidence to suggest that they decrease the likelihood of relapse and that's where the best evidence is on the application of mindfulness practices in depression. In terms of the synergistic use of these practices with medication to the best of my knowledge those data don't yet exist. It's a good question and it's something we should actually think about. We don't ask people to train for a marathon when they've broken an ankle and you try to get that fixed and then you expect them to train. In this case if the training itself would help the healing it would be worth knowing but when people are severely depressed I think it's gonna be very difficult for them to practice cognitive control until they can get to a point where they've got at least some control some handle over the anxiety and despair which is because this is a really, really tough illness but the idea that you could then bring this in and certainly cognitive behavior therapy has been shown for years to be highly effective for even moderate and even severe depression but whether mindfulness could add to that is still, I think, unproven. I've got a question back there. Would either of you think we're at the point where you could make the case that mindfulness training ought to be a part of education in the way that physical education is part of education or literacy training? Well, I'd be happy to take that initially. From where I sit I would say absolutely yes. I think that we talked a little bit about attention and going back to William James I think training attention is the building block for all other forms of learning. If we're not paying attention to the information that is being presented it will compromise our ability to acquire any kind of knowledge and so we've just published an initial paper where we have done some of the things that Tom was mentioning that Goldie Hawn is doing where we've developed a curriculum for preschool kids and we believe we can start this early. This is kids four and five years of age where we teach them simple skills of mindfulness and also of kindness and pro-social behavior and this was part of a randomized controlled trial where we randomized kids by classroom and we see very substantial gains after a 12-week curriculum and after a six-month follow-up in these children as a function of this kind of curriculum including grades that are being assigned by their regular classroom teachers. So I think that there is definitely a role for this but I also wanna emphasize that the evidence at this point in time is very, very meager and I think that we need to do much larger studies in much more diverse samples before this I think will get incorporated in a more widespread way. David, the only thing I had to add is because I completely agree with Richie's statement I suspect good teachers do some pieces of this already. Ask students to get centered, take a breath, let's focus, put away the cell phones, put away everything. That's part of what we're talking about. We put a label on this and it sounds sort of magical but actually this is what all of us do to some degree. I think by labeling it and structuring it we can maybe do it far better. I sometimes think about this like learning to play the piano. I mean any of us could probably go in and be able to pick out something but this is about probably doing that in a more formal structured way and certainly education is one of the places where this kind of attentional training is gonna be extraordinarily important. I think it always has been. We just haven't perhaps given it the same kind of moniker. I'm just thinking maybe we should try this with the U.S. Congress. It seems. I just, one question, can you overdo it? Is there a limit to it? Do you have any? Is there too much mindfulness? I wonder it's like having too much with a video game where you're doing such a good job that you notice that the world is going, no nevermind that's not true. I think that there are contraindications. I think that Tom mentioned patients who are severely depressed or psychotic patients. I think that if one is not careful in those situations there are situations where any amount potentially can be deleterious and so I think it needs to be applied judiciously. In terms of in normal samples, whether there's too much, I think that what you would hear from a long-term practitioner for someone like the Dalai Lama is that he's in the present moment all the time, 24-7. I would say that there's no such thing as too much in that case. It's really just being utterly present and appropriately responsive and it comes spontaneously with a certain level of training. So I guess for those who are kind of new in this space, I would just caution against self-absorption and narcissism, which there's a little bit of that at Davos, so I can probably safely bring that into play here.  You want to do this as a vehicle to being open and to being attentive to others and when it becomes a way of tuning out and only attending to oneself, I'm not sure that's progress. And I should just say that when this is taught in an authentic way, when a person sits down to practice, she or he invokes the intention that they're engaging in this practice primarily not for themselves but primarily to be of benefit to others. It is with this altruistic motivation, which is something really important. Yes, go ahead. I'm a physician at NYU. It's really interesting. Everything you've been talking about is so fascinating and I think that within the community, there's just more and more sort of general knowledge about meditation and mindfulness and I hear it more and more just from people coming in and your talks about treating depression and anxiety with it, but I don't find there's lots of resources for people to just really, for them to go to to learn how to do this. And I was wondering if you could just speak to, as this evolves, are there, what kind of practitioners or what kind of teachers or people could you, aside from like a psychologist or someone that you could seek out to to learn how to be a more mindful or how to meditate better type of person? Well, we have in the audience, John Kabat-Zinn and whenever anyone asks me where they should go first, I always tell them John Kabat-Zinn and mindfulness based stress reduction. It really, full disclosure, I've been very good friends with John for more than 40 years, but this is probably the most well-investigated method of teaching mindfulness in a secular way that we have. And it is done, in my view, very authentically and very carefully. And so, and it's very easily accessible. It's taught at virtually every academic medical center in North America and in Europe. And so, I think it is a very good place to start. Having said that, there are also many other resources. And at NIH, if you go on to the website of, I forget what the new name for it is, it used to be the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It's now- Alternative and Integrative Health. Thank you. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Which has a non-pronounceable acronym. Yes. So, on that website is a whole set of resources related to meditation that is presented in a scientifically framed way. And I think that that's another great resource to go to. Yes, sir. When we be talking about mindfulness, it is being about meditation where you are trying to control your thoughts and focusing them or bringing them to a stillness. What about mindful action? Where the thought is in one moment and the action is a few moments later. So, how do you practice the thought of being in mindful action? You know, I would say that you can be aware, you can be mindful of thoughts, you can also be mindful of actions. And one of the ways in which mindfulness is taught actually is through movement, through action. Mindful walking, for example, is a very commonly taught practice. And so, it is not necessary for a person to be still to learn, to bring mindful attention to whatever he or she might be doing. And in fact, when we teach this to young children in the classroom, it doesn't resemble your stereotype of what a mindfulness instruction might be for an adult. The kids are moving a lot. That's what kids do. And so, the invitation is to bring mindful awareness to what they spontaneously do, which is to act. Any question? Go ahead. I'd just like to share with the audience an experiment we're doing. We started about eight years ago. We now have a million children in middle and high school. And the focus was to do a test to see if mindfulness training and metacognitive skills, pro-social skills, works. We are in 11 countries. We have a million children in the test. And what we found is with children at that age, teenagers, it's very important to link mindfulness training with some other concepts like leadership, ethics, altruism, and so on. So it makes them less self-absorbed and it actually gives them a reason to lead from within rather than looking at an internal process as something in itself. And by that connection, we're actually finding a tremendous response. So to give you an example of that response, at one of the schools we're active in right now through our foundation, the student body elects its leaders. And they have now started to elect leaders. The principal called us and said, we've noticed a change in the last five years. We're doing this program. It's a continuous program for the entire school. It's not a 12-week intervention. It's a continuous program through the entire school period. And they said the children are now choosing their leaders, their school leaders and their student leaders. They're looking for different types of leaders. They're no longer choosing the most popular boy, the best sportsman, et cetera. They're looking for people that are aware, conscious, pro-social, and have ethics and altruism in the way they will lead. It's an interesting little outcome. Thank you. We only have a couple more minutes and I wonder if I could put John Kabat-Zinn on the spot here since his name has come up. Having heard this discussion and having been involved in this for a long time, where do you, what do you feel hearing this about the direction that this field is going and where it might take us? Well, I love it. I think it's wonderful to be having conversations like this. I think it's really important to underscore what both Richie and Tom have said that we don't want to get too far out ahead of the data and begin to sort of talk about mindfulness as if it was the next big thing to hit the planet. I think that's the best way to destroy what's deepest and best in it for the long haul in terms of its potential promise for humanity. So I think there's an enormous amount of work to be done to study it of the kind that Richie and his group are doing and many other groups as well. And that of course, if you plot the number of papers in the scientific literature over the past 30 years on the subject of mindfulness, it goes along at a very, very low rate, some years no papers at all. And then about the late 1990s, it starts to go up. And then cognitive, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy came into play and a whole bunch of other accelerants, which we can talk about, including the neuroscience. And then it's now going exponential. I think the funding needs to follow a similar curve. I imagine that it is, although I don't know that. And the kind of rigorous science really needs to be applied to it so that we can be very confident in what we're talking about. On the other hand, I do think that there are certain elements of this that are totally commonsensical and something like titrating the medication down and the meditation up. I mean, we're talking about one change of consonant in the English language. And there's something about it that's tremendously appealing. We've seen this in the clinical domain for many, many years. People actually, in concert with their physicians, not on their own, actually going off their medication for pain, for anxiety, for depression, and so forth. As they begin to learn the self-regulatory elements of mindfulness and discover that the things that used to be symptomatically problematic for them no longer are arising at the same level, I would ask Tom a question. It struck me that you said that as we age, we only get a certain complement of neurons. And I'd love to take the opportunity to ask you about neuroplasticity and what is known at this particular moment about neurogenesis and the laying down of functional new neuronal pathways within the brain, maybe in the hippocampus or in certain regions. Is it actually true that we don't lay down any functional neurons in the brain past the age of two or three? Tom, I'd like you to answer that question in 15 seconds, if you possibly could, because we're just about out of time. It's a great question. But if you can give the short answer, at least we have to wrap up. Yeah, so other than in a very few areas of the brain, neurons are not born, as far as we know, and those that are small in number. But the brain's changing all the time, not through new cells but through new pathways and new connections. All right. Well, I think we'll have to leave it there. This has been a totally interesting session, and I thank you all for making it so and participating. Let's thank our panelists. Bless you, John.


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