You are listening to the number one fitness, health, and entertainment podcast, this is Mind Pump. Now, you know, we're going into the winter season. It's cold. It's dark. And we just realized this, 20% of Americans start to get a little depressed. There's a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD is the acronym. And it's quite common. So in today's episode, we talk about the natural ways you can help alleviate your seasonal depression.  Legion makes some of the best high-performing supplements out there. They're great for people who want to build muscle, burn body fat, get faster, become more athletic. Some of our favorite products are Pulse, their pre-workout supplement. Really good. They also have an awesome whey protein. Everything is naturally flavored. No artificial flavors at all in any of their products. And because you listen to Mind Pump, you get a discount. Go check them out. Go to buylegion.com, that's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com, forward slash Mind Pump, and then use the code Mind Pump for 20% off or double rewards points if you're a returning customer. Also this week, if you buy a $100 Mind Pump Apparel gift card for a gift, you get a free maps workout program of your choice. So if you're trying to buy gifts for anybody, a $100 gift card at the mindpumpstore.com will get you a free maps workout program of your choice to give away as a gift. Now if you're thinking for yourself, you can also check out some of these bundles we put together for different types of people. Let me go over them with you real quick here. The first one is the beginner bundle. It's called the new to weightlifting bundle. It's a nine month exercise program all laid out for you. The next one is for those of you who are intermediate lifters. It's called the body transformation bundle. And the third one is for advanced lifters. It's called the New Year Extreme Intensity Bundle. All of these are about nine months of exercise program with video demos. We'll tell you what exercises to do, how many sets, reps, the whole thing. And they all come with one year of free access to our private forum. Go check those out at mapsdecember.com. That's maps, M-A-P-S, December.com. Hey, did you guys know, first of all, do you guys know what the acronym SAD? Have you heard of this? What it stands for? No. No, SAD. SAD. Seasonal Effective Disorder, or Seasonal Depression. That's a thing? Yeah, SAD. It's an actual diagnosis. Well, you guys know this, I'm sure that people tend to... Is that the real meaning behind SAD? Or is it just like something they attached to it because, you know, it worked? No, I think SAD existed before the acronym. Okay. But then it was smart. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. So, Seasonal Depression... What are you thinking, Justin? Yeah, I know. I'm just saying. So I had to think about that for a second. Wait a second. Wait. But Seasonal Depression is a real thing. I looked this up. I didn't realize it was this common. 20% of Americans suffer from Seasonal Depression, at least a mild form of it. I mean, that's millions and millions and millions of people that notice enough changes in the way that they feel emotionally to report it. Okay.  There's a lot of factors that go into this, right? In terms of just, you know, the holidays and Seasonal things and, you know, maybe you have a lost loved one or, you know, like it gets darker earlier, like the days are shorter. Yeah, like it just seems like there's a lot of compounding factors that lead into that. There is. And the further away from the equator you live, the more people get affected by it. And it's really tied to the rhythms of the sun and the seasons. That's why they call it Seasonal Depression. I'm somebody that I would say that I noticed this for myself. I love the sun. You guys know this. Yeah. Summertime for me is my favorite. You guys have heard me. How many times have you guys heard me say I don't like the winter? Yeah.  It's because when it's dark, I do notice a change in my moods a little bit. So I'm one of these people, but I don't realize it was 20%. I train a lot of clients like this, too. Now, what does that say for the opposite, right? I feel like wintertime, November is my favorite month. Because I mean, snow is amazing. That's not why.  You know what I'm saying? It's the greatest month. I'll come at him. Yeah. Not because it's about me. No. It has nothing to do with that. I like the weather around that time. I sleep the best. I don't have allergies at that time. Great sports are happening. I make good TV is going on. It's just for me and I like winter sports. I'm into those things. I can put my flannels back on. Yeah. I like the fits. You know, I have terrible calves.  You know what I'm saying? There's so many things that make that.  One of the positives you could focus on is what we're trying to say. No, you know, I didn't look that up on the flip side, but I do know a lot of people like that, that love the winter and stuff. But there's a bigger percentage of people that, again, will report that they have mild forms of depression that get lifted when the season changes. Now, I would imagine that's closely connected to the same things that drives the suicide rate up in places like, I believe Washington, which is like the number one state. That's what they say, right? They do say that. Because they have the most rainy days, the most dark days, like cloudy days. Constantly cloudy. That's what they say. And now I've had clients that have talked about this. Well, they'll say that, you know, when it gets dark outside, it makes them sad. They don't feel as energetic. When I looked this up and did a little research, women and younger people are more likely to notice the effects of seasonal depression. Why do you think that? Not quite sure. Although as we go through this, we might be able to speculate a little bit as to why it is. I mean, there's a few theories. The prevailing theory has to do with how serotonin and melatonin are disrupted in the body, right? So the sun goes down earlier. People's sleep schedules tend to be thrown off a little bit. And melatonin starts to change. And as a result, it affects serotonin.  Right. The happy feelings. The happy feelings, right? So again, this is kind of a big thing. And look, we noticed this in the gyms as well. I noticed this in the gyms. When it gets cold, less people work out. Yeah, it's sparse. Yeah, you notice that right away. You're not calling in or canceling. It happens a lot more frequently. I wonder if that's why I have a little bit of a bias towards the winter too, because I grew up working in the gym. And so I like that there's nobody inside there. Because it is nice. Yeah, I'm trying to think of like, you know, why do I not get as depressed in the wintertime?  So I know like you're all about the summertime and not a fan of the winter at all. And I do know that I've had lots of family, friends, clients that are connected to me that during the wintertime it's a very real thing. I'm trying to like add up, why is that not for me? I also tend to, you know, and here we are right now again, getting ready to get back in a consistency with dieting. Yeah, you told me you tend to get lean in the winter. I do. Opposite. And I never planned it. Just like, oh, this wasn't planned, right? All of a sudden we just decided we're going to start meeting each other here at 8 o'clock in the morning and training together. And now we're starting to do that. And here it is in the middle of December into December that we're doing this. And it's like, this is kind of how it's always played out for me. I don't know why. It's interesting. But I do notice it in the gyms. And it's funny because you would think that people would be more motivated in the winter because you're not outside as much. There's less activities to do outside, so you're more likely to, you know, I would think want to work out, but no, gyms slow down in the winter. Even before Christmas, you know, you start to see it in October already. Now all the things that we're going to allude to here in a minute as far as like what we're talking about that contribute to this, is there an order or is there one that stands out more than the other? I know like they all can result in this, but are there certain things that they've done and said, okay, this is for sure the number one factor than there's other factors? It depends on the person. So when you read the studies, because we're going to go through five ways that you can help yourself with this, it depends on the person. So as we go through them, and if you think to yourself like, oh, I already do that, then that's probably not the one that's going to help you the most. If it's something that you tend to lack in, then that one may have the biggest impact. At least that would be my guess, right? So the first thing you can do, and this is one of the more traditional therapies, is sunlight therapy. Now you think, well, you know, it's dark. What do you mean by that? Well, what they do is when the sun is out, go outside, get as much as possible, open your sunroof in your car if you have one, maybe not the whole window, but at least the part that covers the sun, open your blinds at home, sit next to the window, just because there is less sun, but you can make up for it by being exposed to it a little longer. So although it's cloudy, you're still getting some sun. And by the way, a big reason why people may be feeling sad has to do with the fact that the sun's rhythms, that's what they're connecting with. Have you done any reading on what they recommend for like the average amount of sun time? And I know this is gonna be different, like based off your skin, right? So like some people can handle your skin tolerance, right? So how some people can handle the sun for hours, some minutes, but is there like a generic average everybody should spend? I don't know. Now here's the interesting thing. With light therapy, they've even done what are called light boxes. So a light box is a light bulb that puts out a full spectrum of light. It's not even the sunlight. So it's not like they're getting a tan or anything. It's not a tanning bed, but people will feel much better. It's literally just light, the spectrum of light that you get from the sun that makes people feel better. Well, I noticed that from, so when we first started working with Juve years ago, and I know today's not even like a Juve commercial, but this is so true. I mean, I remember when we first started messing with them, I was using them the most in the wintertime because I wasn't getting out in the sun. And I'm gonna say huge difference in it. And maybe that's what it is, is when there's that much of a discrepancy. Like in the summertime, sure we're in this building a lot. I don't get as much sun, but I'm still getting more sun than I get in December. So I would always notice if I would, three times a week, if I got in there three times a week, 20 minute shots, always notice a difference in my energy levels and how I slept. Yeah. I used to have a client that this was a big deal for her. And even if, what she used to do is, and she didn't, she obviously moved to California, which you train with me, but she lived on the East coast that really had seasons. And I said, what would you do when, because it's over here in California, it doesn't rain that much. It obviously doesn't snow or rat. And she said when it, unless it was snowing or storming or whatever, she would still make herself go outside and go for a walk. And she said that made a huge difference with her. Even, even though it's overcast, you get some sunlight. Well, I'm thinking back. I remember when I was in Chicago, I really struggled. And I thought I attributed it mostly because I was like away from home and it was like a totally shell shock, you know, culture like they actually had real seasons and it was freezing. And, but a lot of it was me just staying hunkered down inside. And I wasn't getting outside because it was just like, I just didn't, I didn't acclimate to it yet. And it took me a good like two, three years before I finally was able to like, you know, bear the elements there and figure it out. But I guarantee like just seeing, even if it was foggy, that made a massive difference in my mood. Yeah, that's true. I forgot that you went out there. So you notice a difference because of the change. 100%. Yeah, definitely. Now the next one is a very powerful one, especially if you don't do this, which is exercise. And we're going to get into more of the specifics, but exercise alone has been shown to be as effective as antidepressants for mild to moderate forms of all depression and in, in studies and may act in studies actually show that it may actually be more effective in the long term. In fact, exercise, they continue to review this. I think one of the reasons why they don't necessarily recommend it is because people tend to not take the advice, but they're starting to make this like a first line treatment for people with just depression. Not just seasonal depression, but your typical types of depression, which is really hard to do though, when you're in that, right? Like there's, I mean, So we get up a move. Right. It's already hard enough for people to be consistent with, you know, strength training and exercise, right? It's even harder when you're already find yourself in this position. And so, and this does remind me of when I kind of went through this a couple of years back on the show and I shared, you know, the key is really is to start small and build on that because it's tough. If you're already in this, if we're talking to somebody right now and this is resonating with them, and they're like, man, I'm in the thick of it. I'm super depressed. I'm watching TV all day long. I don't want to get up and do anything. And then you're like, Hey, you should follow maps at a ball. And it's like, wow, it's such a leap from where they're at right now. And so I would recommend just, you know, start with like the first one, which is like the getting out there and getting out in the sunlight, go for a nice walk, you know? And if an hour walk is really long for you right now, start with 15, 20 minutes and break it up multiple times a day if you can. But then that activity, you can start to build upon that. So start with a little bit of activity more than what you're doing currently now. And then slowly start to build a weight training routine. And even when you start building a weight training routine, there's nothing wrong with the weight training. When you're talking about health, right?  It's like, you just want to be mentally healthy right here. There's nothing wrong with you doing Turkish getups. Like one of the last episodes we did not long ago where we talked about some just skill workouts for a day. Go in there and just squat or just deadlift, like getting that movement and getting going with something and then you could build a much more robust routine later on. Yeah, I had a client years ago whose daughter just, she just would not get off the couch or whatever. And she's like, can you work with her? And I said, yeah, absolutely. And so we did structure something similar to what you're saying, Adam. So the way I did it actually was, is we negotiated, right? So first I was like, can you do a 30 minute walk and can you be consistent? And you know, no, I don't think so or whatever. So eventually what we did is I said, okay, here's what I want you to do. For the next week, I want you to, they had a long driveway. So let's say I want you to walk out to the mailbox once a day. Just walk out to the mailbox and come back. And when you do it, write it down for me. And then that's what she did. And then the second, you know, after we did that for a little while, I don't remember how long it was, but she did that for a little while. Okay, now I want you to walk to the mailbox twice a day. And we slowly but surely worked up to three 15 minute walks a day. After she started doing the three 15 minute walks a day, she started, because it does have a profound effect on how you feel. Here's the interesting, you know, kind of weird physics of activity. You feel bad and down. So you don't want to exercise, but the more you move, the more you want to move. So it's very strange, right? So you think... Movement promotes momentum. It does, right? So when she was doing it, you know, 15 minute walks three times a day, next thing I know, she comes to me and says, all right, you know, what other kind of workouts can I do on my own? And she started to add it up herself. So think of that yourself. If this is you and you're feeling really down, know that the movement itself will make you want to do more movement. Getting started is the hard part. Once you start to move, the body starts to produce these feel-good chemicals.  And you start to want to move a little more. Some of the best strategies for that are, like I said, you make a really small goal. It can literally be as little as... Whatever it is for you, it can be very individual. It can literally be, I'm going to walk down the street and back. That's all I'm going to do. I can commit to that. So that's all I'll do. And then increase it. One of the best ways to make it a habit is to attach your movement to something you do daily anyway.  So maybe you say to yourself, I won't eat lunch unless I walk for 10 minutes. Or after dinner, before I eat the last, whatever, I'm going to walk 10 minutes. If you attach it to things you already do, it's more likely to be a habit. Once you feel up for it, or if you already feel up for it, lifting weights is one of the best forms of exercise for this because resistance training positively affects the pro tissue hormones, testosterone, growth hormone. It makes your body more insulin sensitive. When your body's adding tissue that's very active, like muscle, your body, it's getting the signal that you're healthy, right? Because if your body's not healthy and if it's stressed, it reduces muscle. If it's building muscle or it's getting the signal to build muscle, it's like, oh no, we feel good. As you build muscle, you start to feel better. So resistance training, if you feel good enough to pick your form of exercise, I would say pick that and focus on the compound lifts. And you don't need to do a lot of it, even twice a week of four exercises. Squat, overhead press, bench press, in a row, and you're really, really good. Keep it super basic. I mean, even if it's a bit of a stretch, going from walking to then lifting weights, even if you do a few, a handful of body weight exercises and just start with actual mechanics of it and getting your muscles to express and to stretch and contract, that's going to be a big step for you. Your body is going to provide that kind of feedback, a rewarding feedback for that, which then you can build upon. It's all about really like sparking it, getting the momentum going. I like going outside and walking because now you can get part of the sun, you can get fresh air. I mean, all that makes a humongous difference for your body to feel in a different environment. You just combine the two that we said, right? Sunlight and exercise. Now you got two birds with one stone or as they say, feed two birds with one stone. Make sure you say that. We're now PC. Yeah, so PETA doesn't get angry. But you do those two things in one, you'll get the dual benefit. The third one, this one sounds silly, but it actually makes a huge difference and that is to stick to a schedule. We don't realize just how much our schedule gets dictated by the sun and how the sun looks outside and whatever. Try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every single day. Now they've shown in studies that this maximizes melatonin production. This improves our sleep. I think what we tend to do is we tend to sleep a particular way Monday through Thursday and then Friday night, Saturday night, it's a totally different schedule. And then we have this kind of sleep hangover come Monday and Tuesday. This may be one of the reasons why people hate Monday so much because Friday night, Saturday night, they went to bed super late and they slept in and now their circadian rhythm was off and the circadian rhythm is very closely connected to seasonal depression. So stick to a schedule, give yourself a bedtime and a wake time and they find that that makes a huge difference in your wellbeing. And get up when the alarm goes off the first time. I can't remember what I was... I was reading something and they were talking about how much that improves your mood and productivity for the day by not snoozing. Did you know that? Yeah, there's a big... They did some study on it. Oh, I believe it. Yeah, I read it a long time ago and I remember going, oh, that's wild because I know at the time I was snoozing my alarm a lot, right? So that reminds me my roommate in college would snooze like 20 times and I finally unplugged it throughout the window. I was that dude. I was this guy until I read that. Like, I can't remember what it was. I wish I could remember exactly what the study said, but I do know that it made a very good case for why you want to get up right away as soon as that alarm goes off versus snoozing. It really sets the tone for the day. In fact, a little sidestep here. Sunrise clocks are great for this. I was going to mention those. Yeah, they make a lot of them now where you set your alarm and then let's say it's at 6.30 a.m. At 6.15, it looks like a sunrise. It slowly starts to glow and by 6.30 it's fully bright. It fills up the whole room. And what you find is it's actually quite effective. So you can have the option to make it make sound at 6.32 so it can also go off. I don't even do that. Just the light turning on makes me up naturally. Because they have like birds chirping. It just sounds like things in the morning that are everything sort of waking up. It is. It's weird. It sounds like something that's not that big a deal, but I started using that and it was just having the light on and gradually coming up with such a better experience waking up. Totally. And here's another one with schedule. In my experience training clients and I'd love you guys' feedback, people tend to work best with simple rules. We could talk about all complexities of diet, but oftentimes if I told my clients very simple rules, especially to get started, it was a lot easier for them to follow. And one of these rules is to schedule your nutrition and saying something like, okay, don't eat past 7 p.m. Now there's no magic, really no magic about eating past 7 p.m. It's like after 7 p.m. all the food turns into body fat or anything like that. But what I notice with my clients is the majority of the bad, crappy food that people would eat tended to be after 7 or 8 o'clock at night. And so when you gave them a hard rule like that, then it was like, no, I'm not gonna eat past 7 and it was easier for them to stick to their nutrition. I found this same thing and I know you guys teased me before on the show was the Tupperware thing. I mean, if I made my, if I gave my client a, like if I said, you could eat it as long as it just came out of the, it was portioned in the Tupperware. So we get like these, you know, similar to what you got over here, Sal. Like you can only fit, you know, five to 700 calories of food inside those Tupperware.  Just portion it out, put it in there. You got to eat it out of there. Just simply telling them that versus giving them all these crazy calorie rules or weighing your food or telling them they can't have this, they can't have that. I just made them portion it out like that and see their food.  It's like a rule, right? Yeah. And that's kind of like a, like scheduling, like we just said, like you're scheduling nutrition, there's a time or this is how much I'm going to eat. Believe it or not, this makes a big difference. People tend to overeat in the winter, probably to compensate for feeling kind of down. But then that adds to it, right?  Then the bad food makes you feel worse. That makes you want to eat more and it becomes this kind of endless cycle. And then to your point of eating sort of past seven or later, I've just found that, even the slightest bit of activity, maybe like adverse type of digestion that I'm now trying to sleep with, is going to interrupt that whole thing. And then it's like I'm paying for that the next day. Totally. Now the next one, this one's interesting, okay? They found in studies, they did studies on people with seasonal effective disorder and they found that when they supplemented with vitamin D, a significant percentage of them saw a dramatic reduction in their seasonal depression. Now this goes along with studies I've read on vitamin D and how one study said as much as 40% of Americans are become deficient in vitamin D during the winter. This may be one of the reasons why illness spikes, why there's an illness season, why people tend to get, there's a flu in a cold season and some people think it has more to do with declining vitamin D levels because people aren't getting as much sunlight. I know in some countries that don't get a lot of sunlight, supplementing with things like cod liver oil is a staple in their culture and this is because cod liver oil is high in vitamin D3, which again, this is an important supplement. So if you're sad in the winter, you might want to try supplementing with vitamin D or at least get your vitamin D levels tested to see where you're at. Aren't they connecting this with COVID right now too? Oh yeah. Like the percentage of people that are getting hit by COVID hard are super low, right? There was one study I read that showed that 80% of people in the hospital with COVID were deficient in vitamin D. Yeah. And I know it is with the flu. I know when people get the flu, the symptoms are way worse when vitamin D levels are low. Isn't that some of the theory behind why we have a flu season? That's what I just said, yeah. Is exactly due to that. Absolutely. So I would test your vitamin D, see where you're at. You may be surprised, like I said, I read one study that said as much as 40%. That's huge of an essential micronutrient like vitamin D. Now, cod liver oil, one of my favorite supplements to take. You get the fish oil, plus it's got the vitamin D in it. Or you could just buy vitamin D. And you also get it from the sun. So this is one of those things that you go back to the original point that Justin made about, you know, getting out with activity and walking out in the sun. So you get so many benefits just from doing that. So this is another reason why you should do that. And here's what's interesting too, is that, so like me, use me as an example, right? I think I get some sunlight, probably not as much as I should. I'm relatively, I have like, you know, darker skin. So I probably need more sunlight to get the same vitamin D benefits as like, let's say Doug or Justin. So I supplement with 5 to 10,000 IUs of vitamin D on a regular basis. Usually 5, 5,000, right? I've been doing this for a long time. I get my vitamin D levels tested and I'm in the middle. So I have to supplement with 5,000 IUs of vitamin D3 just to be in the middle to have good vitamin D. Well, I told you that's what happened to me when most people have to be deficient. Yeah, I had to bump to 10,000 because I was doing 5,000 consistently and I tested still below. So I wasn't even in the middle on 5,000 a day. So I mean, I highly recommend getting this tested. I think that that's... It's an easy test too. And vitamin D, low vitamin D is connected to low testosterone in men. It's connected to depression. It acts like a hormone in the body. Does it affect like the strength of your immune system too? Huge. It's a huge part. Exactly. That's why, like we said, people with the flu, people with COVID, people with really bad colds tend to have low vitamin D levels. So this is an important thing to get checked out. And again, that study that I read about people who took vitamin D who had seasonal depression, a significant portion felt much better. So it may be that a lot of people feel sad in the winter because their D levels just get too low. Now, the last one, this one is... I feel like it's an obvious one, but we need to talk about it in its diet. Look at your diet. I would not be surprised if the reason why a majority of people feel crappy is because their diets are crazy. Well, yeah. I mean, look at... You're right in the middle of Thanksgiving to Christmas time. When you come off of Halloween first, Halloween is just like a candy rush. Right. From the end of October all the way till January 2nd, it's alcohol, candy, sweets, pies, cakes. What's a tradition that gets in the way? Yeah. And you know how it is too, right? You go to a family event. I'm sure it happened to you guys when you guys went for Thanksgiving, even with all the small, intimate Thanksgiving that everybody had this year. Still, I think we cooked the same as if we were cooking for 30 people, you know? So there's leftovers like crazy.  Katrina says, okay, I'm going to throw this out. Now it's been here long enough. And I was like, yes, please do. It's been driving me crazy sitting in the refrigerator tempting me every day. And I feel like I have a lot of self-discipline. And I'm like, I can't imagine the average person that already struggles for motivation to work out and struggles with... They feel depressed in the wintertime. And then you've got all the feel-good foods inside your refrigerator. It does make you feel temporary. Yeah, it's like you can sit down, you can comfort yourself a bit with it. So it's just another thing that sort of gets in the way of progress. Processed food consumption goes up a lot in the winter. A couple of reasons why. One, we're not growing as many fruits and vegetables depending on where you are in the country. I remember traveling to Ohio and it was in the winter. And I went to the grocery store to buy fruit. And I looked at the fruit and I'm like, oh my God, this looks terrible. And I forgot that in California, we have so much access to fruits and vegetables year-round that around the country in some places, people just don't eat it as much because it doesn't look as appealing. So processed food consumption goes to the roof during the winter. I didn't know that. Processed foods, we've said this many times, encourages you to overeat. One of the best things you could do to yourself from overeating is to cut out heavily processed food, eat whole natural food. Now, there are winter natural foods, winter squashes and certain other vegetables that you can eat during the winter. Meats are all unprocessed, right? Steak and beef and lamb and chicken and fish and that kind of stuff. Eggs are all unprocessed. Stick to whole natural foods. You'll naturally consume less calories and over consumption calories just makes you feel crappy. Doesn't this seem weird that this is what you're recommending and it's probably how we all naturally evolved? Before we had all the stuff, the technology that we have today and advancement with science with how we can grow strawberries in January if we wanted to, that naturally as humans, you would probably eat a lot of fruits and veggies and things like that in the spring and summertime and then in the wintertime, you would naturally move to these animal fats and high fats, high protein type of meals. That's exactly what people are deficient of around this time. Absolutely. I would even guess that in the winter we probably evolved to go through periods of fasting just because food might be hard to find. So fasting for some people might be an option with this. Omega-3 fatty acids. Eating fish is a great source of this. Omega-3 fatty acids are great for reducing inflammation. Inflammation is strongly connected to mild forms of depression. You can also supplement with Omega-3 fatty acids. It's really easy to take fish oil and you'd want to take about 4 grams or more a day so long as you don't have a blood thinning disorder on blood thinning medications. And that should be enough to kind of help control the inflammation. Now where are you at with Omega-3's and if you're eating a highly processed diet and you're eating over-consuming? Because I read an article years ago that said that, you know, if you are eating tons of processed foods and over-consuming and so you're in taking a lot of the 6s and 9s that they out-compete the 3s so you could supplement with fish oils all you want and the cells not going to uptake it because it's competitive with the 6 and 9s. I think what that's really highlighting more generally is that you're not going to make up for a shitty diet with supplements, right? So I don't think, and that's a good point, like if you have a crappy diet buying a bottle of fish oil isn't going to do much for you. That's why I wanted to share that, then highlight that because I know, supplementing with cod liver oil and Omega-3 are like the easy things, right? And what I don't want people to take away from this conversation. They're eating burritos. Right, right, and then just like, oh, make sure you listen to Mind Pump, take our Vitamin D and our Omega-3. You may as well throw it in the trash if you're not doing the big ones or the get out in the sun, walk, move, you know. Have a good diet. Right. Now Vitamin D is different though. If you're deficient and you eat a crappy diet you still benefit from taking Vitamin D because you need that. But the Omega-3 is probably not. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. Come find us on YouTube, Mind Pump podcast. You can also find all of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump, Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal, and Adam at Mind Pump, Adam. With consistent use of MAPS anabolic, how long should it take of dedicated person to lose between 75 to 100 pounds of fat? Oh, with MAPS anabolic you're looking at 30 days problem. We would have sold our own teeth. We would have sold a lot more programs. You know what? Could you lose?


So thank you very much for the invitation. It is incredibly well timed since we really just launched ourselves to the public last week with our first report. So this is a great opportunity to look at some of the sort of the longer term issues surrounding the council and I will actually say a little bit about the first report as well. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the role of fiscal councils hopefully in preventing the kind of problems that arose in Ireland, the particular design of our council. I'm going to talk a little bit about our first fiscal assessment report and then look to the challenges facing the council. So the starting point is really the principles of good fiscal policy and the first thing I want to stress is that we really are looking at it from a macroeconomic perspective. We're not sort of getting into the issue of what's the right size of government which is something that really beyond a council these are very much sort of political decisions but in terms of good macroeconomic fiscal policy management in terms of the size of the deficit and the debt really that is our space. So there's a I understand that most of you here are economists so you'll be sort of well aware of the very active debate in the economics literature about what good fiscal policy is and sort of a starting point for many of the discussions is this idea of the irrelevance of deficits which would surprise non-economists. So there is a sort of belief in the certain conditions that really deficits and debt really don't matter and this is an idea associated sort of most recently with the Harvard economist Robert Barrow. But the reason it's sort of useful is that when you see the assumptions required for deficits not to matter you realize that deficits are likely to matter a great deal. So the assumptions required that people have sort of infinite horizons that capital markets work perfectly. There's no concerns about the government not defaulting and so on. When you relax these assumptions you see that deficits and debt can matter a great deal. And I think there is a growing consensus about what good fiscal policy is or some sort of broad principles of sound fiscal management and these principles are that you have a stable fiscal system which could be sort of captured by tax rates being reasonably stable over time. We don't want to tax rates to have to rise a lot in the future for instance to pay for the cost of an aging population or higher healthcare costs. So for reasons of intergenerational fairness but also just for reasons of economic inefficiency we want a reasonably stable system not only for tax rates but also for benefits rates such as sub pension rates so that people can sort of plan for their retirement and sort of believe that those pensions will be there. Another important principle is that we need to maintain creditworthiness something that would have been sort of taken for granted up until quite recently but we certainly need to manage fiscal policy to make sure that creditworthiness is retained and finally that we need to have enough fiscal space to engage in counter-cyclical fiscal policies when needed. So this is sort of I think a set of principles that sort of broadly agreed within the economics profession in terms of what sound fiscal policy management is but and this is not meant to be in any way specific to Ireland the literature has very much focused on the idea that there are political biases of various kinds in the making of fiscal policy that will often move us away from these principles of sound fiscal management and these biases can take various forms many of them can be sort of grouped as resulting from conflicts of interest of various types there's the common pool problem where various interest groups control or influence spending in particular areas and don't worry about the the externality that their push for spending has in terms of the need for higher taxes or potentially higher deficits to pay for that spending so you basically have this collective action problem that leads to essentially excess deficits in the economy you can also have short political time horizons governments are only in power for a certain length of time and not surprisingly not going to be that concerned or as concerned about what happens when they leave office so again you can have this bias towards deficits and debt accumulation you can also have strategic deficits I don't think this is a big issue in the Irish case but I think it's a huge issue in the US case particularly when you have administrations of different ideological leaning following one another so the Bush tax cuts could have been seen as an effort to actually constrain future democratic administrations by having big deficits building up debt and making it harder for future democratic administrations to maintain spending so this can again lead to a bias towards deficits and debt and finally there is the fact that people are not equally well informed you could have the government been quite well informed about what it needs to do but dealing with a relatively uninformed population and then if you have various sort of populist media media or populist politicians can make it very hard for the government to stay in power doing the right thing but you could also have a populist government sort of willing to sort of exploit the fact that the population is not fully informed to pursue policies that may be good politically in the short term but not good for the for the longer term so all of these sorts of conflicts of interest lead to this this bias towards deficits and debt and then I think very importantly there's an additional political problem that again the economist among you will be very familiar with this idea of time inconsistency and the commitment to problem associated with it and it comes really in this context from the fact that default is there as an option but expectations of default lead to a higher risk premium and they can maybe lead to come to market exclusion completely and there's a danger of falling into this bad equilibrium where the markets come to expect default push-up interest rates and because of the higher interest rates default actually happens and the the reason this is sort of stemming from a problem in politics is that if governments could actually commit and really convince the markets that default would be an absolutely last resort they could avoid getting into this cycle of expectations becoming self-fulfilling but because it can't make those commitments they these expectations develop and you can sort of fall into the kind of traps that we've been seeing at the moment so a starting point is that under democratic politics again it's nothing iris specific there are problems with the formulation of fiscal policy and then the idea is that fiscal institutions of various kinds can be designed to improve fiscal policy sort of moving us towards those seven principles that I talked about earlier and the institutions can be really fiscal processes sort of strong departments of finance that can solve this common pool problem that I talked about before the literature shows actually that strong departments of finance don't tend to work that as well in the context of coalition governments so the new institutional innovation of actually having both coalition partners being sort of part of finance with this new department of public expenditure and reform seems like a sort of very good innovation in terms of dealing with that sort of moving in the direction of meeting term frameworks and sort of longer term commitments to good fiscal policy and there's a movement around the world towards this idea of fiscal charters that really allow the government to really commit to pursuing sound fiscal policy management so there's been important innovations in countries like New Zealand, Australia and recently the UK in putting these fiscal charters in place and I think this is something that could be considered I think will be considered in the context of the upcoming fiscal responsibility bill here. Another part of the fiscal institutions is to put in place fiscal rules that really raise the costs of pursuing bad fiscal policies because to pursue the bad fiscal policies you essentially have to break the fiscal rule and there's just more attention drawn to the poor fiscal performance of the government. A problem with fiscal rules however is that the ideal fiscal rules require a lot of flexibility to deal with shocks that hit the economy that maybe need to pursue counter-cyclical policies to deal with the recession so it can be very hard to see if the fiscal rules are really being followed when you allow for the flexibility around that rule so there's been a little bit of the satisfaction with fiscal rules as a way to solve the problem and so there's been a move in the literature and actually around the world in terms of actual fiscal policies to increase the role of what I refer to here as fiscal agencies sort of model a little bit on the idea of independent central banks which have sort of very clear objectives and are considered to have sort of to provide sort of a good balance between rules on the one hand and the need for discretion on the other and often fiscal agencies sort of focused on the implementation of fiscal rules that combination where they complement each other can be a particularly good combination so fiscal agencies can take really different forms fiscal authorities would actually give the agency powers over fiscal policy for instance the power to decide what the deficit should be and that's again somewhat like an independent central bank that has the power to actually set the interest rate but I think there's for the most part a consensus not a complete consensus but sort of a reasonable agreement that in a democracy the nature of fiscal policy is such that you don't want to delegate to an independent agency even for something like the deficit that these are there's disagreement first of all in terms of what optimal fiscal policy is and these issues are intensely redistributional and for that reason these are decisions that should be made by elected representatives not appointed officials so then there's this idea of a fiscal council which is sort of a soft version of the fiscal agency and the idea is that the fiscal council would be more advisory really focusing on assessing and importing in terms of its analysis into the fiscal policy process but ultimately recognizing that these fiscal policy decisions are decisions that have to be made by by governments so the basic rationale then for fiscal councils would be on the one hand better analysis so identifying what good fiscal policy is or what appropriate fiscal policy is and also to try to reduce these various political biases that I talked about before essentially by raising the costs of running inappropriate fiscal policy there are varieties of fiscal councils around the world they really go back to the 1940s and fiscal council wasn't called a fiscal council but very much functioning as a fiscal council in the Netherlands the the US put effectively a fiscal council in place with its congressional budget office in the 1970s they've also been important councils operating for some time in countries like Belgium and Denmark and in recent years there's been growing interest in fiscal councils so the UK has put a fiscal council in place Sweden has done so Slovenia Canada so they're becoming a more and more accepted part of the overall fiscal architecture around the world and they come in in very different forms and do very different things often responding to different problems that exist in different countries so in the case of the UK which is the one we're probably most familiar with here it's a it's in the news a lot so they had this new office of budgetary responsibility it is responsible for actually making the government's macroeconomic forecasts and budgetary projections so there was this concern that that process of making forecasts and projections have become politicized under the the previous labor government and so they got that particular responsibility which is actually a very resource intensive activity they also have the role of checking the consistency of government policies with the government's own fiscal rules interestingly they're not mandated to provide an assessment of the overall fiscal stance so they don't have this normative role on the other hand in Sweden without going into the details of what the Swedish fiscal policy council do they do have this normative mandate to actually assess the appropriateness of the fiscal policy that the government is pursuing so our mandate is actually more like the Swedish mandate we are not given the the job of actually making the government's macroeconomic forecasts and budgetary projections but we are given the the job of assessing the the soundness of of those forecasts and projections and the the methods being used to actually produce them but what's particularly distinctive about our role is that we do have this normative element to our mandate to assess the appropriateness of the overall fiscal stance that the government is pursuing and with the new fiscal responsibility bill and eventual act that is meant to be the bill is meant to be published by the end of the year there will be new fiscal rules put in place and part of our mandate will be to assess the consistency of the government's policies with those with those rules and the minister can also add additional jobs to to the list as well but hopefully he won't for the moment because we still are quite small so the council who are we so the idea was to bring international expertise into this so the council was made up of Sebastian Barnes who is a long-term fiscal expert or an expert on long-term fiscal issues in the in the OECD you probably know Alan Barrett who was the editor of the quarterly economic commentary for some time but also his main research is very much looking at long-term fiscal issues. Donald Donovan again many of you will know who is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Limerick and formerly a deputy director at the at the IMF there is me and the chair of the council and we've also Roshina Sullivan who is a professor at Smith's College in Massachusetts and has worked a lot in the area of monetary policy on the design of good institutions to make monetary policy work better so she brings a lot of expertise in terms of institutional design. We have a small secretariat headed by Dermot Smith who's on the common from the from the central bank and you can see our resources are fairly thin given the quite extensive mandate that we have and I can assure you everybody is extremely busy. I should say that the council are essentially volunteers these are in addition to our real jobs the non-public sector members of the council receive a small stipend but the members of the council that actually work in the public sector which is myself and and Alan do not get compensated for our work here. So in terms of delivering on the mandate so that we can actually do what we're meant to do and play the the important role that fiscal councils can play the what I see as being critical is that we have to have the technical competencies to do the analysis credible analysis and and to bring that to the public so we're building those technical competencies competencies at the moment. I'm a little bit concerned that we really don't have the resources and the resources haven't planned for us to play the role that we we need to play so that's something that I think that will have to be looked at critically is the perception of our independence that's our independence from finance there's a balancing act here in the sense that we need information from finance we need data we need to understand methodologies but at the same time we absolutely have to prevent any sort of capture of finance of the activities of the council so we keep our interactions with finance to an absolute minimum and very much sort of based on sort of technical questions and given that independence is is so critical we also have to think about accountability but we want that accountability to be as divorced as possible from finance itself so for instance we will be making appearances before relevant to rock this committees we're going to be having peer review of activities and so on to actually have our first appearance before the joint rock this committee on finance public expenditure and reform next week on the first report and public visibility will be absolutely critical which is why I am very happy to do events such as this so we are a public watchdog and we're not going to be sort of working through back channels to finance in terms of our assessments there are going to be very much public assessments and we try to get off to a good start last week by getting as much sort of public visibility to our first assessment report as possible so the permanent design of the council will be determined in this new fiscal responsibility bill so we're just currently operating on an interim basis and we're one of the things we're doing at the moment is really trying to figure out how we need to be designed to ensure that we have the resources that we need to function properly that we are independent we have this public visibility and so on so key outputs we will be reporting at least three times per year we will have these biannual fiscal assessment reports we will also have an annual report which will probably be more focused on on longer term fiscal issues and shorter supplementary supplementary commentaries as required since the response to the budget and response to the publication of the pre-budget outlook and so on and at the moment we're working very hard in terms of our input into the fiscal responsibility bill which is following on from the department of finance discussion document which laid out that the government's plan in this particular area and we'll be reporting again publicly in terms of our advice for the design of the bill shortly the real value of the council is for the for the long term to prevent the kind of crisis that we're still trying to find a way out of so it really is a surveillance role to make sure that these vulnerabilities that led to the crisis are not allowed to occur again but we're also sort of importing into sort of the medium term fiscal strategy and that's really what our first assessment report was all about this is a sort of a critical moment in the making of our fiscal policy there's going to be a new essentially four-year plan as part of the pre-budget outlook T-shirt was actually talking about the the timing of that looks like it's going to come out in early November so we actually accelerated our activities a bit to make sure that we could get our first assessment report out early enough before the decisions were made so that we could actually have an input into the making of the medium term fiscal strategy as you know the Troika have been in town so lots of decisions are going to be made sort of around now or probably have been made but I think we were able to get in sort of early enough that our analysis could actually have some impact in those liberations so how am I doing on time okay so I'm just going to say just a little bit about the the fiscal assessment report itself so again this was sort of mainly focused on on what the government's median term fiscal strategy should be and in terms of the existing fiscal strategy we took as our starting point the stability program update that was published in April which really lays out the government's fiscal targets so you see here the projections for the debt to GDP ratio that it would sort of peak in 2013 and then we come then start coming down but still remain at a very high level well over 100% of GDP by 2015 and really the strategy is a set of targets so you've been hearing a lot about the target for next year of 8.6% general government deficit with the plan to bring that deficit down below 3% of GDP by 2015 and this last line shows the discretionary fiscal adjustments that will be required or estimated to be required to actually hit these targets so the another number that's been in the news a lot is the need for a 3.6 billion adjustment in 2012 and there's been sort of debate about whether that would be enough to hit this particular target of 8.6% of GDP so one of the things we did in the report is to assess the budgetary projections themselves in terms of whether they seem to be to be valid we found that they were sort of broadly appropriate at the time of the SPU we could find no sort of obvious biases in the way those projections were made since then we know that the extractor returns have been pretty close to target but there have been a number of developments since the SPU was published including the reduction in official interest rates which is substantially reduced the average interest rate and outstanding debt looks like for this year alone will reduce that average interest rate by about three tenths of a percentage point and by more than half a percentage point between 2013 and 2015 and that again is the average interest rate on the total outstanding debt including the official and non-official loans also the anticipated cost of bank recapitalization has been somewhat less than was projected earlier in the year so it looks like the cost to the state of the bank recapitalization is now going to be about 3.5 billion less because of greater than anticipated loss sharing with junior bondholders and also the success of Bank of Ireland in actually raising private capital and then there has been also developments in terms of GDP 2010 GDP was revised upwards but the growth for GDP for 2011 and 2012 the projected growth has been revised downwards which is the big sort of negative in all of this so most of these developments have been positive the downward revision of growth in particular in relation to the softening of global growth prospects has been has been negative so really what we're what we're doing here is just allowing for these post-SPU developments and not that we're making really alternative projections from the government but in order to be able to assess their fiscal stance we really needed to know where things stood at the moment given these developments and it's a sort of a pity in a way that much of the coverage last week was sort of focusing on different estimates that we've come to in terms of what's going to sort of happen in terms of these key fiscal variables out over the next number of years to 2015 that was simply where the main media focus was so we've developed what we call a fiscal feedbacks model which allows us to make these projections so it's sort of based on the SPU but allows us to run sort of alternative scenarios through it to see what the effect of alternative fiscal policies would be so that's where these results are coming from so when we allow for all these various developments we estimate that the deficit would be 8.8% of GDP next year if the government still followed its plans but very interestingly if it if it followed its plans it would still actually hit the 2.8% of GDP target for 2015 so the problem is really just really a problem for for next year missing the 8.6 target for 2012 when we put all these things together the government is still on track to hit the target of getting the deficit down below 3% of GDP by 2015 so the additional adjustments required to hit the 8.6% of GDP target essentially an extra 400 million in adjustments bringing the overall adjustment required for 2012 to to 4 billion but again this is not really the I think the main value of the council it but it's just that we needed to know where things stood at the moment as we looked at the overall fiscal stance itself so in terms of the assessment of the fiscal stance which we're taking here to be the actual targets for the general government deficit out to 2015 and particularly that target of bringing it down below 3% of GDP so it's clearly a difficult balancing act in terms of these principles of good fiscal management that I talked about before on the one hand the public finances need to be rebuilt the debt is still incredibly high and falling quite slowly there are as you know huge funding vulnerabilities both for market funding and official funding I'll talk about that more in just a second and then of course we have to be concerned about the effects of austerity on the economy which we believe will be will be negative for the economy so we don't believe in this idea of the expansionary fiscal contraction that austerity actually increases growth so the real trade-offs here and identifying the proper fiscal stance is is really a matter of judgment and a difficult balancing act but the big question we're asking ourselves is there an argument for more ambitious targets this graph just shows the fragility of our debt sustainability on current plans it does look like we will stabilize the debt of GDP ratio it will slowly begin coming down if nominal GDP growth is one percentage point less than forecast it will still stabilize without a substantially higher level about 120 percent of GDP if nominal GDP came in two percentage points less which is conceivable you can see that the the debt we sort of remains on an explosive path certainly over the period that we're looking at here also if we do if we follow the the current strategy once we get essentially to 2015 the debt will be on a very slow downward path so even by the time we go out to 2030 we're still far from the 60 percent master target for the debt to GDP ratio so we'd be continue to have huge vulnerabilities over this period and also putting a big burden onto future generations in the process so this essentially assumes that the primary surplus that's achieved by 2015 is held constant so there's sort of no further fiscal adjustment beyond that point and we're assuming a one percentage point gap between the between the interest rate and the and the growth rate there are also huge funding vulnerabilities so a very uncertain external environment the European crisis resolution policies are still very much in a state of flux and what we see is that there's increasingly sort of a distinction made between countries that are considered insolvent particularly Greece and countries that are considered illiquid which for the moment really the list is Italy and Spain and then Ireland can kind of fall but in one group or the other and it's still very much to play for and depending on which an analyst is talking they can actually lump Ireland in with Greece and possibly Portugal and other analysts say Ireland is being more of a sort of illiquid and the way the policies are shaping up is that the illiquid countries will get the backstop that they need which will be critical to getting back into the market while default will essentially be imposed in countries that are considered to be insolvent and we can certainly see Greece going in that direction so there's a lot to play for and there is a huge return to really being on the right list in terms of the country that's considered to be illiquid and will get the support that it needs to avoid default I won't go into sort of issues about default but I think that would be incredibly costly long term to the to the Irish economy credit worthiness is just a very valuable asset to an international trading nation such as Ireland that would be severely damaged by any sort of official default so there's a lot to play for and it just increases the return to following a strategy that both convinces markets that Ireland is a good bet and also keeps the official funding in place so that even if we do need an additional program after 2013 that funding will come without debt restructuring being imposed upon us and the anticipation that debt restructuring will be imposed upon us will mean that we wouldn't get back into the market so again you have this sort of feedback effect working through expectations so again I think this these funding vulnerabilities sort of movies in the direction of doing a bit more being a somewhat more ambitious in terms of the fiscal strategy that has to be weighed of course as I said against the negative effects of austerity so for this report we reviewed much of the literature and the size of fiscal multipliers this as you probably know there's huge uncertainty about that but our literature suggests using sort of the best studies that are out there that under current Irish conditions multipliers deficit multipliers what while positives in other words cutting the deficit will slow the economy they are likely to be relatively small and also this idea that fiscal adjustment will be self-defeating in the sense that as you engage in discretionary fiscal adjustments that the because you slow the economy so much that the deficit might actually go up we don't find evidence of that and the most basic evidence is that the deficit is coming down in the Irish case even as we pursue these these big discretionary adjustments and even as domestic demand has actually been declining for reasons other at least in part other than the fiscal adjustment itself so maybe we could go into that more in more detail in questions but this idea that fiscal adjustment is actually self-defeating in its own terms is not born by the evidence so our basic assessments is that the current fiscal stance being pursued by the government we consider it to be a defensible policy it's within the range of what we consider appropriate fiscal policy stance this is not obviously inappropriate again this is the goal of getting the deficit to below three percent of GDP by 2015 we see no case whatsoever for relaxing the targets and that's not just because of external commitments made very much the credibility of the government is now around at least meeting these targets and on balance and this was the main recommendation of the report and one that certainly didn't find favor with everyone but on balance when we put all the various principles of good fiscal management together we see a strong case for more ambitious targets and actually bringing the general government deficit down to one percent of GDP by 2015 which would effectively sort of eliminate the underlying structural deficit in the economy by that point so this will put the debt ratio on a strong downward path and I'll show you a graph of that in a second it gives us a certain degree of insurance against shocks and I think it would be a timely signal of political capacity for a coalition government and this is not meant to be any negative comment on the present government but any new government and particularly any new coalition government there will be doubts about its actual capacity to make the difficult choices to impose losses on specific groups and going a little bit further sort of even in the upcoming budget I think would be a strong signal that it has the capacity to see the adjustment through which was largely behind our recommendation that even in the upcoming budget that the target be moved from 8.6 percent of GDP to 8.4 percent of GDP beginning that process of moving the overall deficit down to one percent of GDP. Again I do understand the criticisms from the government as easy for us to say this to throw out these numbers when you're sitting at the cabinet table and having to make these very difficult decisions to find an extra 400 million of cuts so I absolutely see that but I think again putting it all together that the returns to these additional actions are quite high so with the amended stability program update these adjustments I talked about made and with the revised targets we see that based on our simulations we would get the deficit down to one percent of GDP by 2015 and you can see here the overall discretionary adjustments that would be required to actually do this in the context of the model that we're using so that's the key here and very importantly the primary deficit would actually be a primary surplus of close to five percent of GDP by 2015 under the current plan the primary surplus is only 2.9 percent of GDP so even though the actual debt numbers don't look dramatically different the key is I'll just skip this this diagram is key in terms of even if no additional fiscal adjustment was done the economy is on a much steeper downward path of the GDP ratio and even though it still takes a long time to get it below 60 percent of GDP we do sort of reach that sometime before 2030 but it's just a very different time path so we will have essentially achieved an awful lot more by getting to this larger primary surplus by 2015 so maybe I've just just mentioned here what this means in terms of additional adjustments overall there would be 4.4 billion of adjustment required in 2012 and substantially bigger adjustments than planned for additional years as well so these are the overall additional adjustments that will be required both to essentially both as a result of the amendments that we made to the stability program update itself and these more ambitious targets so somewhere we have the first report then the basic projections were fine we really didn't see any problem with that we do believe that the 2.8 percent target for 2015 is still achievable but based on our estimates the 8.6 percent of GDP target would not be achievable for next year without additional adjustments but the basic message the basic recommendation from the report is that there is this case for more ambitious targets in terms of bringing the deficit target down from 3 percent of GDP to 1 percent of GDP so next up for the council we're now working hard in terms of our input into the fiscal responsibility bill and given that it needs to be published by the end of the year and of course Christmas comes before that and everything this being a lot of pressure put on us to produce our input quickly so we just drawn a breath from getting the first report out and we've had to turn to these these other incredibly important issues very quickly of course we're going to be engaging in ongoing fiscal surveillance including of the upcoming pre-budget outlook and the budget itself but the most important thing that this first council hopes to do is to bequeath an actual strong fiscal institution that will be a sort of an important pillar of islands fiscal policy architecture so that we build up our technical competencies that we really develop this reputation for independence and that we're firmly established as a public watchdog and the the public is aware that we're there and trusts us to be keeping a close eye on fiscal policy development so if we can achieve that as a first council we will feel that we have done our job but very much look forward to your question thank you very much


The strangest of stories at times can be true, so please cast out your doubt for a moment or two, and I'll tell you a tale of a time long ago and a kingdom that fell to the waters below. Yes, there was a time back before time began when the gods had influenced the marvels of man. In the name of these gods, there sprang forth a great nation whose advances had lit the world with aspiration. Atlantis the great so noble and wise as the gods did create, Atlantis did rise, its capital city a sight to behold, had temples of ivory and silver and gold, a paradise island of gardens and grace, no land known to man was a nobler place, their people were blessed with such beauty and health, and their nation progressed with their virtue and wealth, yet sometimes the greatest of things have a cost and sometimes such virtues and grace can be lost. In time it was said that the beauty had died when their hearts were corrupted with arrogant pride, Atlantis the great having all they would need became hungry for more and were tainted with greed, so they took to the sea with their lust to gain more with their pride and their greed they set sailing for war, all the might of Atlantis brought fear to all foes, they lay siege and they conquered all whom they opposed and only one nation was stood their attack. When the strength of great Athens had driven them back, Atlantis the wicked no longer the great were ungrateful of all that the gods did create, Atlantis the hateful no longer brought joy, so as gods can create they can also destroy and deep in the night their foundation did rumble, their towers were toppled the temples did crumble, a divine cataclysm as if gods were to say all gifts we have given we now take away and they threw down the heavens and pushed up the sea until Atlantis, oh Atlantis was no longer to be, yes the greatest of nations was wiped from the earth for they fell from great grace and forgot their own worth.