Hello, my name is Ben Joseph. This is the Judge Ben Show. This is a program in which I interview guests about things that concern legal system in Vermont. This is the first time I've done this remotely. So if I stumble around please understand that I'm not quite used to this. I'm sitting in my home computer trying to look into the camera and look into what I'm seeing on the screen. My guest today is Dr. John Brooklyn. Dr. Brooklyn is a physician who does a lot of work in Burlington and has dealt with a lot of people with drug cases. So Dr. Brooklyn, how long have you been in Vermont? I have been here on and off since 1975. A little break to go back to medical school in Rhode Island, but essentially I've been practicing here since 1992 after I did my residency. Wow. Wow. Are you working mostly in the Burlington area? Three days a week in the Burlington area and two days a week in St. Albans. Wow. Okay. And during that time, have you had patients who've had drug problems? Well, in fact, most of my work tends to be with people with substance use issues. Since 1992 when I graduated have been working in the field of addiction medicine. Wow. Studies looking at the use of buprenorphine suboxone to treat opiate addiction. I've been involved with studies treating cocaine, nicotine, but routinely as a general practitioner family medicine doctor, I routinely take care of people who have the spectrum of substance use issues. Yes. Wow. Well, then we're talking about thousands of people you've dealt with who have these problems. I have. Yes. Many thousands. That's really very interesting. Well, just to get right to it, I want to go back to my topic outline to see I don't forget anything. There was a recent radio report that over 100 people had died in Vermont in the last year because of overdose. Do you think that's accurate? Well, for the last three or four years, we've had about 100 to 105 cases of what are deemed opioid overdoses because of opioids. I think what you may have been referring to is this year with the coronavirus, we've actually seen an increase in people who've died from overdose. So I'm not surprised at all based on what I know from firsthand experience and all the issues that have come about from coronavirus isolation, drug use, drug access. It's kind of a twin pandemic as we're calling it these days. Oh, really? So you think COVID has caused an increase in the number of people who died because of substance abuse? Yes. It's a fact in the state of Vermont and nationwide. There's probably a 30% or 40% uptake this year. And the belief is kind of three from what patients have told me. Some of it has to do actually with the excess stimulus money that was presented to people who used it to buy lots of cocaine or heroin. We also know that because of the drug supply not coming up from Mexico, which is our typical access point for heroin, there's a lot more fentanyl now. People have told me all kinds of stories about funny looking powders that they've been sold. So I think that there's a real change in the market forces where previously you might have known who your supply was. And now it's becoming the supply chain has been affected in many ways. And so people are using things they're not familiar with, a lot of despair, a lot of things happening. And so unfortunately we've had, we've seen that. However, we haven't seen a reduction in people seeking treatment. So one of the things I want to make sure listeners understand is that opiate use disorders is adequately treated with suboxone and methadone. And all of the programs in the state have remained open and have continually taken people in. So it's not because of lack of access to treatment, but more use patterns amongst our population. Wow. Well, so would you say that the COVID pandemic has caused an increase in the number of people you're seeing with these problems? I'm not so sure it's an increase. I think it is, in many ways, magnified the problem for many people. I mean, let's face it, many people who end up using substances do it out of despair or emotional distress and deaths of family members, lack of good jobs, difficulty in being isolated. I think it's a natural incubator for people to feel despondent and perhaps increase the amount of their use. We've had people who've been doing well for a while who've relapsed and begun to use more and begun to use dangerously. So it has definitely had an effect on the psyche of the population in general. And you see more and more of it in the substance use world. I've, for a long time, I've thought that the inequitable distribution of wealth in this country is an underlying cause of substance abuse. Do you agree with that? Well, I think that it does not discriminate. I have taken care of well-to-do people. I have taken care of people who grew up in poverty because, remember, the human brain, once it's exposed to opioids, sometimes gets changed in such a way that people cannot stop. So people like you or I who were given pain medication by a physician, perhaps, and we were prescribed for too long, we could theoretically also develop a problem with substances. And so certainly we know that people who have had adverse childhood events are more at risk, but it does not discriminate in terms of who ends up being affected by it. By adverse childhood events, you mean sexual abuse? Well, sexual abuse, physical trauma, emotional neglect, poverty, bullying, you know, a variety of things that happen to children at a very young age that in many ways affect them as they age and many times drugs make people feel better. Well, I think you mentioned OxyContin and some other medications that are used as painkillers. Is that right? Yeah, OxyContin in the 90s and the 2000s, it was just rampant in terms of its use around the country. And it's interesting, many of the people that I talked to, I always like to know how old they were when they started. And it is so common to hear that people as teenagers read a prescribed painkillers by pediatricians or orthopedists and they would continue for a period of time or they had access to friends and families pills recreationally. But clearly that fueled a significant uptick in the number of people with opioid use disorder, probably by four or five fold. Four or five fold? Yeah, I mean, typically the data showed in the early 90s for decades, there were about a million daily heroin users. In fact, during the height of the HIV epidemic, that was a number that was bandied and banded around was about a million daily heroin users. And after the uptick in prescription opioids and the wholesale pharmaceutical marketing of them, somewhere around five to six million people ended up being opioid dependent because of painkillers. So the numbers grew exponentially after the introduction of those medications. I've been told repeatedly that manufacturers of OxyContin really promoted its use. Is that true? Yes, I believe so. It was a wonderful article in the New Yorker a couple of years ago about the Sackler family and it really exposed their techniques of education and manipulation, the different benefits that they gave to doctors. In fact, a number of years ago, I think when Bill Surrell was attorney general, I think a law was passed. I know a law was passed in Vermont, which limited any pharmaceutical company from if they gave a doctor more than $25 or $50 and something or other had to be declared as a public record. I remember a couple of years ago, it was a little embarrassing to find out some of your colleagues who are getting tens of thousands of dollars in dinners and trips and all these different perks from the opioid manufacturers. So it was a helpful strategy to perhaps publicly shame some of us into not taking the lucrative offers, which obviously affects the way that we prescribe. Given samples of medication or you're given some kind of a benefit, it just fuels the prescribing by docs, even though it may not be indicated. And then we just recently had that federal settlement, which showed that people were being steered towards prescribing OxyContin that was orchestrated by Purdue Pharma. I remember reading that article you mentioned and the Sacklers and the staggering amounts of money that they made. I mean, they literally made billions, as I recall. Yeah, and there's some beautiful parts of the Metropolitan Museum and New York and wings of other museums around the world that they have philanthropically donated to and now it's all called into question. Yeah, well, do you think that these prescription pancreas like OxyContin should be made available without prescription that people should be able to buy them if they want them. That's a really interesting question and I'll tell you why I was watching a movie the other day and someone was in Mexico, and they wanted a prescription and the pharmacist said oh no it's over the counter you don't need a prescription for it. So I know that in Canada even Tylenol with codeine you can purchase without a prescription so certainly we in the United States don't take that position that these things should be made available. But I think the experience in other countries it would be interesting to see whether people are any more likely to become users when it's over the counter I think you know my training and my upbringing is that you need to very closely regulate the drugs that will put people at risk for having difficulties. But again, I have to say I'm biased by my education in my training and I'm not super familiar with what does happen in other countries where they are less restricted. The judge I certainly go with a lot of people who've had endless grief because of substance abuse and you know I've been involved in treatment I order people into treatment programs as a condition of release and it was remarkable how successful that treatment was. So maybe you think there's some hope for this it's not it's not all futile. You know here's the interesting thing if I prescribe narcotics pain medicine for you. You go to the drugstore and you say my doctor gave me this is a legitimacy around it and for many patients. The doctor kept prescribing long after the person needed it and the person became physically dependent. So that dynamic drove a lot of people to becoming physically dependent.  Maybe you buy three or four of them maybe you take a few and that would be it. You wouldn't necessarily have somebody in authority saying it's okay to take these. And so you wonder whether the dynamic of that has made things worse by being prescribed versus having it widely available and you take it if you need it and if you don't need it you never go and near it. I mean that's it's a plausible explanation but I think what you're saying is that we have a nation of drug takers and people who like to medicate and so and you've encountered people who have opiate use problems and I take care of thousands of them and treatment is very very effective with methadone or suboxone is very very effective for for taking care of people whose brains have been altered by being exposed to opioids for a little too long. Well my impression is that as part of the treatment if there's some kind of counseling or some kind of contact with a physician or someone who's trying to help the person that that's a real plus. It's not just a question of being given pills. It's a question of being told that being encouraged to overcome the addiction. Do you buy that? Do you think that's true? Well I guess I'm going to challenge a little bit when you say overcome the addiction because when it comes to opioids and probably alcohol the brain is in many cases changed in some ways permanently. Wow. You can't cure it. We can help correct it but I have taken care of people who my treatment has failed to help them. I've given them methadone. They continue to use opiates. I've given them suboxone. They continue to use opiates. They've been put in jail. They come out. They continue to use opiates and I look at it like I do cancer. There are some patients I've taken care of who've died of lung cancer despite being given chemotherapy. It's not an absolute. We have to think about substance use disorder as being manageable but not curable in the case of opiates and alcohol. When it comes to cocaine, methamphetamine, there's no medication that I can give somebody. We know that there are certain therapies and treatments that work but not everybody's going to take them and I'm sure even in your case you remand people to treatment. You send them to prison. They come out and they may continue to use despite all of those negative effects. So it's baffling sometimes as to why some people get it and some people don't and I don't have an answer as to why it doesn't happen all the time. Well in my experience, I put large numbers of people into treatment as a condition of release and there was a study done retrospective to what had happened. And the first 172 people I put into treatment, three years later they were checked up on and 80% of them had stopped using. And this was for what substances though? I think that matters. This was for painkillers, OxyCotin and large amounts of THC of marijuana and 80% stopped. And then there was a part of the study they took a group of 300 defendants, same drugs, same high dosage of experience and in that group there was no treatment. But they had an 84% recidivism rate in the three years following their first contact with the courts. So I think there's something, I don't think it's futile. I just think it's something that should be paid for.  I'm just hoping to find answers to help people. I think your experience is such that we do know that people are able to stop using cannabis at a much greater rate than they're able to stop using opiates on their own because people don't tend to get sick. And we also know that heroin really is different than painkillers in terms of how it changes the brain. So there's got to be subtleties and nuances. But it sounds like those results were pointed towards the fact that treatment does work. I think that's the bottom line and getting help through counseling and therapy in addition to medication certainly can increase your likelihood of remaining abstinent and doing well. And so I think your results bear that out. Well, I'm just, it makes me think we just got to try harder. It's because I think the social cost of these problems is staggering. The number of people who lose their jobs, lose their families, harm other people. I think I've been seeing that there's more fentanyl being distributed in connection with heroin. Is that true? Yeah, it's almost impossible to find fentanyl-free heroin. Almost every powder that someone is using, whether it's supposed, I don't even call it heroin anymore. I say some opioid, some white powder that has opioid in it, it's almost exclusively fentanyl. There's very little heroin. We're finding it a lot in cocaine now, fentanyl. We're finding it sometimes in methamphetamine. We're finding it pressed into look-alike sedatives. It looks like you're taking a sedative, but it's really fentanyl that's been pressed to look like a benzodiazepine. And so it's very, very dangerous. People are very scared. They don't know what's in their drug supply anymore. It's a real tragedy to see how many people are using and dying because they just have a great difficulty in being able to determine how much is in it. Where does this fentanyl come from? It's been coming predominantly from China, but I was listening to a report the other day that said that the U.S. and China have somehow brokered a deal where China has been restricted on sending fentanyl to the United States. I mean, clearly you can still get it, but what's happening now is apparently it's being routed through Mexico. So fentanyl is now coming from China to Mexico and then making its way into the United States or coming through Canada into the U.S. Previously, you could import it into the U.S. right from China. In fact, it was interesting. They said you could even go onto the Internet in broad daylight and order fentanyl and have it shipped to the U.S. That's how brazen some of these distributors were. Now I think a lot of those sites, or at least I've read, have been restricted or cut down. And that's predominantly where my understanding is where it's coming from. Is it something that's instantly addictive? Is it something that causes an aggravation of someone's condition? Well, it's highly addictive. It's a very powerful opiate. They use it in anesthesia all the time.  It's very fast-acting. It is certainly a drug of desire because it works very quickly and gives an intense euphoria, so people really, really like it. But the problem is that under conditions that it's not monitored, if you get a powder, you're just at the whim of some backyard chemist making it up as he goes along, as opposed to a U.S. pharmaceutical company that's giving you a certain amount of fentanyl in the IV that you're getting. So I think that's really the danger. A very small amount of fentanyl is enough to get an entire city supply for a period of time. You don't need much. You can walk in with a small fanny pack full of fentanyl in an entire city could be using that amount as opposed to kilos of heroin, which you need. Oh, it's that much more powerful. That much more powerful. Absolutely. You take a pen, the tip of a pen, you don't need much more than that to get an effect from it.  So, you know, when we restrict pills, people then turn to heroin and, you know, you don't get heroin, you're down to fentanyl. It's really astounding. Well, what do you understand by, you know, there's these public articles that are written about talking about decriminalization, legalization. Do you think there's some best way to try to manage this distribution of these addictive chemicals? Well, I think I've come to realize over the decades that our brains are wired, you know, we're sort of, our brains are wired for novelty. Humanity has advanced through new ideas and finding new things, but for many people, they're just waiting for the next new thing. The difficulty is, I don't think it should be a crime. I don't think you should sit behind bars for doing a drug for experimenting. I think what happens is that people become so frustrated with citizens' use, depending on what it is. They get behind the wheel, they drive drunk, you know, you're so aggravated, we put them behind bars because we're angry at them and maybe that's a reasonable approach. But I think that criminalizing it has not solved the problem. However, making treatment much more widely available and without stigma, to me, helps answer the question about, well, what do you do for people that are using substances? And I think it was Jim Douglas that talked about, or Peter Shumlin talked about the three-legged stool in Vermont.  But putting people behind bars or charging them with criminal offenses wasn't part of that three-legged stool. So from my perspective, people are going to do what they want, they're going to try different things, and if they get in trouble, they should get help. But not necessarily make it legal, but also not necessarily make it criminalization. So I think a decriminalization policy is not a bad way to go, at least from where I sit as a physician. I haven't sat in a courtroom as a judge, but that would be my perspective is to put a lot more effort into prevention and education and then treatment. Well, what I have found is, well, the experience in Vermont is that 80% of the people who are charged with DUI 1 are never charged again. They stop. Okay. They learn. They've been arrested, they've been brought in, they've had to look at someone like me, so sorry, and they stop. No, they stop. And it's the 20% that get arrested again that go on.  And then, you know, they're killing people. Yeah. More than 10,000 people a year die in the United States because of alcohol related crashes every year. Yeah.  Yeah, it is. And I think what happens is that we haven't done a good job of identifying those people. And, you know, there's actually some pretty good evidence-based treatments for alcohol use disorder, but if there's no follow-up and no ramification for it, people tend to stop. And we also know that there are some people for whom alcohol is just a toxin for them and they're going to spend the rest of their life fighting that demon. And the issue becomes, if you have someone, and I mean, I have patients who are given the Alka sensor in their car and they have somebody else blow into it to get the car started. You know, there's all kinds of ways around these things and it's a shame. But I think for some people, no matter how many consequences they have, they won't be able to stop. And as you say, for most people, one consequence is enough. But, you know, one deadly crash is one too many. Yeah. You know, we have fairly liberal alcohol laws. Some countries, the BAC is 0.04. Yeah. In the U.S., it's 0.08, it came down from 0.1. Yeah. So, you know, we're pretty generous still, unfortunately, with our alcohol use and our driving. Well, when you deal with someone like this, is the treatment usually, I mean, is there medication and counseling? What do you think is most effective? Well, we know that for people who have alcoholism, the alcohol use disorder that, you know, the use of anti-abuse clearly will stop people from drinking. If they take anti-abuse every day and they drink, they'll get sick. There's another medicine, naltrexone. That's an injection. Once a month, it reduces the amount that people drink, reduces the cravings. There's a couple other medications. They have to take them every day. They can do counseling. I think if you're really going to be serious about it, you have to have, you know, some pretty solid teeth in this. If you're really going to help people not drink, maybe they need to, you know, again, wear some kind of an alka sensor on a regular basis. And if something gets detected, there's a result. There's also all these fascinating studies that continue to be done to try to untangle why people can't stop drinking, what happens in the brain. And still, I got to be honest, a bit of an unknown as to why some people just can't stop. And we still don't have enough tools in our tool bag to help every person who's got alcohol use disorder. But some people do stop. Most people do stop. I mean, even under the advice of the physician, a lot of times, you know, you say to somebody, I think you've got a problem with alcohol and it's affecting this, this, and this. Just that simple little bit of advice with some work. People will significantly reduced the amount of alcohol that they drink. Absolutely. Well, I've always thought that probation was often successful. I would put someone on probation in one of these cases. And I would never see him again. You know, now some of them like the probation officer come in and say he's done this, she's done that, and you don't have to deal with it. But I always thought that the threat of incarceration often will deter people from abusing substances. Do you think that's true? I think, you know, knowing humans like I think I know humans, I think the fear of punishment works. It does work in many ways.  It's the common law called specific deterrence. I like very fancy language. There's also general deterrence. Yeah, it's an example that other people will look to and think we're better not do that. You know, that kind of thing. But it's it's just hard. It's just hard. Do you think there should be education about this in schools? Do you think children should we talk talk talk to about this? One 13 year old should be given counseling. You mean be taught about substances? Yep. I think it would be good to have people have a better understanding of how their brain works and how drugs work in the brain. I'm not talking about project there. I'm not talking about scaring people. I'm just saying, giving some information. And the other thing that I've been always interested in is, you know, doing a decent amount of screening in very young children to understand, are they at risk? We have ACEs, adverse childhood events that's going to put them at risk as they get older for substance use disorder. And how much attention do we do we pay to that? You know, we talk about takes a village. You have counselors in schools, you have teachers in schools, they see kids that are having difficulties and problems. The resources aren't always there, especially in in states like Vermont, which is, you know, not necessarily resource rich. And we do have people that sort of fall by the wayside and end up turning to substances. And you wonder if you would intervene early and perhaps had some alternatives, whether or not you could have prevented them from from moving on to substance use. I take care of a lot of people that are fathers and mothers of young children and the fathers and mothers I'm treating for drug and alcohol use.  What do you do to, you know, do you do you worry that your child's going to turn to opioids or turn to alcohol? What kinds of strategies have you employed? And it's always interesting to hear the different points of view about how they struggle with what to do and how to, if possible, prevent their kids from ending up like they did. Do they try to counsel the children? What practically, what advice do you give them? Well, I think what I've said is, you know, first of all, have you ever, it has the conversation about drugs and alcohol come up in your family. And I'm not a fan of necessarily telling war stories to your kids like, oh yeah, when I was your age, I was getting, I was doing this and that because I think sometimes kids think, well, dad or mom did it, it's okay if I did it. I think really exploring with the kids, you know, what they know about substances, whether their friends are using, what's it, how do they feel, you know, when they're around this person, do they think that they might want to try it? Do they know much about it? And really trying to help the parents educate the kids versus pretend they're in an AA meeting and they have to share all the dirty details that they had because I'm not so sure that's helpful. And then if it looks like the person, the child, the teenager is starting to drift off, think, well, what other, what pro-social activities can we do together? How can I perhaps spend more time or do more things? How can I step in as a parent and say, no, you can't go to this house unsupervised or you can't go with this person here and, you know, act like a parent and try to protect your children from what inevitably is waiting around the corner for them? If the parents are using substances, you think it makes it more likely that their children will do that? I do. I do. And I think it's a risky situation because they're not paying as much attention as they could. And obviously if a child sees a parent doing something, it immediately legitimizes it.  They might find your pipe and, you know, it's only a matter of time. What are you going to say when they confront you about that? What are you going to say? And so those kinds of conversations we have a lot and it gives people things to think about as they continue to use. And in many cases, people will make a decision to stop using or continue using, but then, you know, have a conversation with the children at some point. If it does arise, it won't always go well.  And I have parents who are still smoking in front of their kids and I've just baffled as to how they do that, although they do try to, you know, not smoke around their kids smoke outside, but they get grief all the time from their kids. Like mom, dad, why can't you stop?  Well, what are there any additional resources that you'd like to have in dealing with these people?  You know, fortunately, our state has put funding into transportation, getting people to clinics and doctor's offices and all that. I think that from my perspective, we've done a very good job. I mean, we're the envy of the nation when it comes to treating opiate use disorder. We've got more people per capita in treatment than anywhere else in the United States. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, we have the hub and spoke model, which is trying to be replicated around the United States. Alcohol use is actually kind of on the rise with COVID. I think that, you know, the isolation is really doing a number on people and I'm concerned that when we come out on the other end, there are an awful lot of people who are going to struggle with the amount of alcohol that they've been consuming. And I think the other thing that's going to be really important is to make sure that we keep training our physicians, our nurses, our social workers to be good when it comes to screening for substance use, because people will hide it. They won't want to talk about it. There are people who return to use or embarrassed. And so having people feel comfortable talking about their drug use and alcohol use, I think, is really important. Otherwise, it's a hidden. You don't know about it. Well, just, just, I think I certainly agree with just what you're saying. My question is, where do we find, is there an agency set up? Should there be like a counseling branch of the courts or how would this work? Well, I guess if you think about it from a court perspective, we have, I think we have three drug courts now in the state. I think every, I think every county should have a drug court, and I think the federal courts, I think there's one that's, I think Judge Sessions has a, Judge Crawford, I think one of them may have a drug court of sorts, but I do believe that all counties and all our federal jurisdictions should have drug courts that support people being on medication assisted treatment if they need it. I do believe that diversion is much more valuable. I know our Attorney General believes that, you know, diversion is much more important than criminality. But I don't know the mechanics of the court system to know why we don't have more, you know, why we don't have a drug court in each county. The resources around that I'm just not familiar with it.  I mean, I do, I will say I have lots of people who I take care of who end up back in behind bars. And in Vermont now, if you're on methadone or buprenorphine up until two years ago, you often had to come off of it. And you went in and you were detoxed in jail. And now treatments continued. And that's been an amazing change. But I'm always baffled. And perhaps you can answer when I have somebody, it looks like they're doing pretty well in treatment. Their urines are negative.  And then they suddenly go back to jail, they get violated. And I guess I would ask, well, what's the cost of that incarceration? You know, what's the value of putting someone behind bars? What's the cost to us? And if we had more money that wasn't for incarceration, but more for keeping people out and perhaps figuring out a way to get them to do what they're supposed to do, would that be a way to save money for more treatment versus incarceration? Again, I'm not sitting in the probation officer. I don't know if probation officer says, hey, you can't go down to that person's house or, you know, you've got to be in by six o'clock at night or you can't lose your housing, all these different things that sometimes can be very challenging for people. And if they don't achieve them, they end up going back to jail. Well, is there an alternative to that in terms of a shifting of costs? I would ask that question. Well, and also I think it's very hard to generalize about this. Each case is unique to its facts. Each person has a different history. You know, sometimes people have been through probation and counseling over and over again, and then they do something really dreadful. And so they're punished. Not because, I think, speaking for myself, not because it's fun to punish people, because you think you just have to do it. You know, you just have to. And frankly, some of the most rewarding things I've experienced as a judge is when people come back to me and tell me, you know, you put my kid in jail, thank you. Yeah. You know, I remember one case was extraordinary, where, you know, the kid was fixing my garage door, and I make a long story short, he thanked me for putting him in jail. Oh, my God. The first time you met me and put me on probation. The second time I did something really awful, and you put me in jail for nine months. And they looked me right in the eye. I said, Judge, that was eight years ago. And since I got out, I'm not using drugs. I'm married. I've got a four year old son. And then he looked me right in the eye and said, thank you. Uh huh. So it's just not all futile. Yeah, right. Not all futile. And I think we just got to, we just can't be vindictive about this. I think that's really important. What I was trying to answer was, is there, you know, the resources? Is there, are there some cases that perhaps are not as, to the extent that you're mentioning, but a relatively low level re-infraction, someone goes back to jail? What are the nuances of that? I never really know. And, and you're right, some of them are complex, but you wonder whether or not there are some opportunities still that exist in the system, perhaps to divert some of those people from going back. Well, I think, I think the answer is, my comment would be, you try to exhaust all the non-jail alternatives. Yeah.  You put somebody in for 30 days. You don't say, oh, probation failed, it's two to five years to serve. That doesn't necessarily, that doesn't sound good to me. Right. Well, look, we've, we've run, we've got almost an hour, my friend. Oh, why? You're terrific. I want to thank you for what you're doing. Well, thank you. It's, it's terrific what you're doing. And I think it's a, it's a great thing you've done. And I hope you can keep it up. God willing, me too. And thanks for having me. It's been enjoyable. Okay. And I want you to understand, if you've got something that comes up that you want to tell the world about, call me and you'll be on a judge bench show. Okay. Thank you. You're someone I would like to speak to more than once. And I want to thank the people who have looked in today. I hope this works out. This is a, this remote screening is very different. I wish we were in a studio face to face, but we've got to do the best we can under these difficult situations. Yeah, noticing the light guy didn't come to my house because all of a sudden it's dark in this room and I look like I'm just, I look like you're doing fine. I didn't think about the lighting. I probably have too much light, but whatever. Thanks again, John. Thank you very well. You too. Stay safe.


YouTube team keep it clean. What's going on is saying Raven here with another video and in this video Why can't all news be good news? Unfortunately for the Steelers after experiencing and extruciating a very very tough tough tough loss Very very tough loss in the game against the New England Patriots And he probably an even bigger loss that they suffered was that of their wide receiver The best wide receiver in the league Mr. Antonio Brown himself They just said that Antonio Brown He is done for the regular season his season his regular season is over. They said he has a partial partially torn calf muscle a partially torn calf muscle So he won't be playing in any more games this regular season But on the bright side of that on the bright side of that oh before you get into the bright side Let me introduce myself because I don't think I did that Can't introduce myself from but if I'm coughing Me I mean great and this is my YouTube channel engraving vision I'm a Ravens fan and even though I'm a Ravens fan as you can see I got a Steelers jersey on and I respect every single team in this league so any in any video any given video You may see me with another jersey from another team, but that's because I love the game of football I enjoy the game of football and I respect the game of football so If you are Steelers fan make sure you subscribe if you a Ravens fan make sure you subscribe Well, if you just love football like myself make sure you subscribe because it's the perfect place for you And after you subscribe turn your notifications on so you don't have to miss not one single video not one at all And after you do that make sure like my guy Ryan Mallet says Leave a like on the video because it is completely free But anyway, I was talking about the good news the parts that the part that's on the brighter side of things with Antonio Brown missing the in the rest of the regular season. They said the hope is for him to come back during the playoffs So once Steelers are in the playoffs Then the hope is that Antonio Brown will be back and be ready by then because he doesn't have to get surgery on his partially torn calf muscle um, so with the calf muscle Because I know just when you when you get a hamstring you can't run right, but if you got a muscle that's actually torn um Partially torn completely torn, but partially torn is obviously better than completely torn so shout out to Antonio Brown for having Some great calf muscles some pretty strong calf muscles because they didn't completely tear So that's a good thing you got to look at the bright side in this situation because you do miss them for these next two regular season games um, but it's not like with the the last two regular season games Like it's not like the Steelers absolutely need those now say for instance if the Patriots lose Did the Steelers have a chance to actually get the number one spot? I believe they would if the Patriots lost but the Steelers ended up winning um, because the Patriots are one game over the Steelers Um, so if Patriots lost one and if they lost two and the Steelers won two then the Steelers could go on top, but either way, um So they actually all can still be playing for something um, so because I was gonna I was gonna say well Maybe they might not need them as much in these last two games, but they are in the playoffs That's that's already taken care of the hardest part is already out of the way.   It's not a um a it's not gonna take him out for the playoffs He's so he'll be out there. They the hope is that he'll be there for the playoffs So Antonio Brown, it ain't over till it's over It's like I said Steelers are actually in the playoffs Steelers are in the playoffs So the hardest part is out the way So now you just got to hope that one of the best guys on your team can get healthy So he can contribute to your team when y'all do have your home playoff game So Anyway, I just thought I'd come on here and let y'all know so Antonio Brown again He's gonna miss the last two games of the regular season His regular season is done, but he should be back for the playoffs. So Steelers will have that arsenal They'll have that uh that weapon in that arsenal and they'll be ready. I'm sure they will be anyway. Appreciate y'all. Thank you Um, yes, Aiden. We did talk about that final call Um, if you talk if you're talking about the touchdown catcher wasn't a catch wasn't not a catch We talked about that a lot in the last in the highlight video So make sure you check that out. Um, and we went in the detail in depth on that and all that good stuff So I appreciate y'all. Thank you for coming through. Make sure you subscribe if you haven't already Turn your notifications on if you haven't already and leave a like on the video if you haven't already So thank you with you Ravens fan.  You're patriots fan. You're just a fan of football period Make sure you subscribe turn your notifications on leave a like on the video and you can follow on twitter Snapchat and instagram all three are engraving bits. Appreciate y'all


Have you ever wondered if your crush feels the same way? The longing for clarity and signs of mutual attraction is a common experience. Thankfully, psychology experts have identified several indicators that suggest both parties are crushing on each other. With that said, let's delve deeper into the tell-tale clues that will hopefully help us better navigate the exciting, yet sometimes puzzling world of attraction and romantic interest. Unconscious mirroring. Subconscious mirroring is a strong indicator of attraction. So next time you talk to that special someone, check to see if you're both mimicking each other's gestures, posture, speech patterns and other mannerisms. This is a positive sign you're both romantically interested in one another. Playful allure. Flirting is a playful way of expressing interest and attraction. And when both parties are crushing on each other, you may notice subtle, yet intentional flirting behaviors. The most common example of this is playful teasing, which is often a way for us to test the waters with someone. Create a light-hearted connection or relieve romantic tension. And when you're crushing on someone, you're likely to find each other's jokes and banter, particularly amusing. So if you notice a continuous exchange of smiles, giggles and woody comebacks, it's a strong indication that there's mutual chemistry and attraction. Breaking the touch barrier. Physical contact is an intimate form of connection that signifies a desire for closeness and can be a potent sign that the attraction is mutual. And two individuals who are crushing on each other often seek to break the touch barrier and initiate physical contact even in subtle ways. It can be a gentle touch on the arm, an accidental brush of hands or other simple subtle excuses to get closer. What matters is that if you're crushing on each other, you and those around you will begin to notice an exchange of more frequent and more casual touches between you and that special someone. Intensified communication. Do you find yourself constantly reaching out to each other? Be it through text messages, phone calls or social media, frequent and enthusiastic communication outside of regular encounters is another good sign that you're crushing on each other. As it suggests, a strong desire to stay connected and share your lives. When you both find reasons to keep the conversation going, often spend hours talking to each other and are usually reluctant to say goodbye, then it's a promising sign that your crush is mutual. But hey, let's take a quick break from decoding the complexities of mutual attraction. Are you enjoying this video so far? Let us know with a comment, like and subscribe. Now, let's dive back into the fascinating signs of mutual attraction. Fascination and engagement. Aside from how frequently you talk to one another, the quality of your conversations also matter. Because when you're crushing on someone, their words and experiences become captivating to you. If your crush exhibits genuine interest in your life, actively listens, remembers details about your conversations and asks follow-up questions, it's a strong indication that they are not only interested, but also care about you on a deeper level. This is because mutual attraction often leads to a desire for emotional connection and understanding. Seeking opportunities for bonding. Finally, actively seeking opportunities to be in each other's company demonstrates a genuine interest in getting to know one another better. So if you and your crush frequently find ways to spend time together, whether it's joining the same social gatherings, attending events together, or simply hanging out one-on-one, it's a sign there's a desire to deepen your connection. Crushing on someone can be both exciting and nerve-wracking, but recognizing the signs of mutual attraction can help alleviate some of the uncertainty. Don't be afraid to take that leap of faith when the moment feels right, and if you like this video and want to learn more about this topic, we also have a video on how to subtly attract your crush. So psych to go with, what are your thoughts on this video? If you found it helpful or valuable, let us know with a comment, like and subscribe to support our work. Thanks for watching.


Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering.conf 2017, brought to you by Splunk. Welcome back to the Washington Conventions that are the Walter Washington Convention Center and our nation's capital as our coverage continues here of .conf 2017. We're here at Splunk along with Dave Vellante. I'm John Walls and I'm kind of coming down the home stretch, Dave, there's just something about the crowd's lingering still. Show floor still has that good vibe to it. Late second day hasn't let off yet. Well, no, remember the show goes on through tomorrow. Right, right. Some of the events tonight, I think. I don't know if the band's- Yeah, right, but hanging out, partying tonight. But you can tell the Splunkers are alive and well. We have Terry Ramos with us who's going to join us for the next 15 minutes or so, the VP of Business Development, Apollo Auto Networks. Terry, good to see you, sir. Good, really appreciate you having me here.  Thanks for joining us. You've got a partnership now. You've synced up with Splunk, so tell us a little bit about that and then we'll get into the customer value after that. But first off, what's the partnership all about? Sure, so we've actually been partners for about five years, really helping to solve some customer needs. We've got about several thousand customers who are actually using both products together to solve the needs I'll talk about in a minute. The partnership is really key to us. We've invested a ton of time, money, effort into it. We have executive level sponsorship all the way down to sales. So in the field, we have reps working together to really position the solution of customers, both us and Splunk, and then how we tie together. We're the number one downloaded app for Splunk, by far, that's a third party. So they have a couple that are more downloaded than us, but for third party, we've done that. We develop it all in-house ourselves. For customers out there who think the app's great, I'll talk about the new version coming. I'd love any feedback on what should we do next. What are the next things we should do in the app? Because we're really developing this and making this investment for customers to get the value out of it. What about the business update for Palo Alto Networks? I mean, can you give us the sort of quick rundown on what's going on in your world? Sure, I think most people know Palo Alto Networks has done pretty well. We just finished our FY17, finished with about 42 and a half thousand customers. Revenue was, I think, 1.8 billion approximately. We're still a very high growth company and been growing the product set pretty well. From products next in firewall, all the attached subscriptions, and then we've got things like the endpoint traps now that's really doing well in the market, where customers need help on preventing exploits on the endpoint. So that's been a growing market for us. It's the hottest space in the data center right now and everybody wants to partner with you guys. Obviously, Splunk, we got all the big shows and they're touting their partnerships with Palo Alto. What do you attribute that sort of success to? Customers, truly. So I run the partnerships for the company. If we do not have a customer who will be invested in the integration and the partnership, we don't do it. So the number one thing we ask when somebody says I want to partner with you is, who's the customer, what's the use case, and why? And then if we can get good answers to that, then we go down the path of a partnership. And even then though, we're still pretty selective. We've got 150 partners today that are technology partnerships, but we've got a limited number of Splunk's, a big one that we really invest heavily far more than the others. Far more than just an API integration, the stuff of getting out to customers in the field, the development of apps and integration, those things.  I love you, you love me, let's do a press release. So what differentiates that Splunk level of partnership? Is it engineering resources? Is it deeper go to market? Maybe talk about that later.   I think the value that we've done with Splunk that we've really drawn out is, we've built this app, so BD has a team of developers on our team that writes the app for Splunk. And we have spent four years developing this app. We were the first company to do adaptive response before it was called adaptive response. So you see something in Splunk, you can actually take action back to a firewall to actually block something, quarantine something, anything like that. The app today is really focused on our products, right? Threat, end point, wildfire, things like that, right? So it's very product focused. We're actually putting in a lot of time and effort into a brand new app that we're developing that we're showing off now that will ship in about month and a half, that's really focused on adversaries and incidents. So we have something called the adversary scorecard where it'll show you, this is what's actually happening on my network. How far is this threat penetrating my network and my end points? Is it being stopped? When's it being stopped? And then we've got an incident flow too that shows that level down to traps prevented this, and here's how it prevented it. And then if we go back to the adversary scorecard, it ties into what part of the kill chain did we actually stop it at?  Well, Splunk gives you great access to that data. What we've done is a app on top of it that's a single click. A sock guy can say, here's where we're at. Here's where we've blocked it. Yeah, I guess I've been talking to a lot of folks over the last two days and we've got a vendor right over here. We're talking, they have a little scorecard up and they tell you about how certain intrusions are detected at certain interval, 190 days to 300 some odd days. And down here, talk about a scorecard that tells you, hey, you've got this risk threat and this is what's happened. I mean, so I guess I'm having a hard time squaring all that up with it sounds like a real time in examination, but it's really not because we're talking about maybe half a year or longer in some cases before a threat is detected. Yeah, so as a company, we've really focused on prevention. Prevent as much as you can. So we have a product called Wildfire where we have tens of thousands of customers who actually share data with us, files and other things, files, URLs, other things. And what we do is we run those through sandboxing, dynamic analysis, static analysis, all sorts of stuff to identify if it's malicious. And if it's malicious, we don't just start blocking that file. We also send down to the firewall all the things that it does. Does it connect to another website to download a different payload? Does it connect to a CNC site, command and control site? What's that malware actually doing? And we send that down to the customer, but we also send it to all of our customers. So it may hit a target, right? The zero day hit one customer. But then we start really, how do we prevent this along the way, both in the network and at the endpoint? And so yeah, there are a lot of people that talk about breaches long-term, all that. What we're trying to make sure is we're preventing as much as we can and letting the sock guys really focus on the things that they need to. A simple piece of malware, they shouldn't be having to look at that. That should be automatically stopped prevented. But that advanced attack, they need to focus on that and what are they doing about it? Yeah, the payloads have really evolved in the last decade.  I mean, think about it. They don't even know what it was in the early 2000s. So I wonder if you could talk about how your business has evolved as the sophistication of the attackers has evolved from hacktivists to organized crime, the nation state. Yeah, so it has evolved a lot. And when you think about the company, 42 and a half thousand customers says a lot. We've been able to grow that out. When you talk about a product, something like Wildfire that does this payload analysis, when we launched a product that was free, you'd get an update about every 24 hours, right? We moved it down to, I think it was four hours, then it was an hour, 20 minutes, and now it's about five minutes. So in about five minutes, we do all that analysis and how do we stop it? So back to the question is, when you're talking about guys that are just using malware and running it over and over, that's one thing. But when you're talking about sophisticated nation states, that's where you've got to get this, prevent it as quickly as you possibly can. So if we're talking about customer value, you've kind of touched on it a little bit, but ultimately, you said you got some to deal with Splunk, some to deal with you, some are down to dealing with both. So into the day, what does that mean to me? I mean, that you're bringing this extra arsenal in. How am I going to leverage that into my operations? And then what can I do with it better, I guess, down the road? Yeah, I think it really comes down to that. How quickly can you react? How do you know what to react to? That's, I mean, it's as simple as that. I know it sounds super simple, but it is that. If I'm a sock guy sitting in a sock, looking at the threats that are happening on my network, what's happening on my endpoints, and being able to say, this one actually got through the firewall. It was a total zero day. We had never seen it before, but it landed at the endpoint and it tried to run and we prevented it there. Now you can go and take action down to that endpoint and say, let's get it off the endpoint. The firewall is going to be updated in a few minutes anyway, but let's go really focus on that. So it's the focus of what do you need to worry about? Do you know what a zero day is? You've kind of, yeah, I mean, it's the movie, right? Explain, no, no, it's the movie because of the concept. Because of the idea. Zero day means no, there's been zero days of protection, but you can explain it better than I can. Yeah, zero day means it's a brand new attack. Never seen before, whether it be... So unique characteristics and traits in a new way to infiltrate in something that's totally off from left field. And when you think about it, those are hard to create. They take a lot of time and effort to go find the bugs in programs, right? So if it's something in a Microsoft or an Oracle, that's a lot of effort, right? To go find that new way to do a buffer overflow or heat spray or whatever it is, that's a lot of work. That's a lot of money. And so one of the things we focus on is, if we can prevent it faster, that money, that investment those people are making is out the window. So we really, again, are going to focus on the high-end, high-fidelity stuff. So the documentary called Zero Days, but there was, I don't know, how many zero day viruses inside of Stuxnet, like four or five. And you may be used to see the antivirus guys would tell you, we maybe see one or two a year, and there were four or five inside of this code. And it's the threat from within. One of the threats, if I recall correctly, was actually they had to go in and steal some chip at some Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer. So they had to have a guy infiltrate, who knows, with a mop or something, stick a, you know, hit a break in, basically. And so these are, when you see a payload like that, you know, it's a nation state, not just some hacktivist, right? Or even organized crime, doesn't necessarily have the resources for the most part, right? It's a big investment, it is. Zero days are big investments because you've got to figure it out. You may have to get hardware, you have to get the software. It's a lot of work to find that out. And there's a lot of money in the black market. Sure, I mean, you can sell those things. So that's why if we make them unusable fairly quickly, it stops that investment. So we were talking with Monty Mercer earlier, and he was talking about, and his comments this morning, keynotes about you could be successful defending, right? I mean, it's not all bets are off, we're hopeless here, but it still sounds as if in your world, there are these inherent frustrations because bad guys are really smart. And all of a sudden you've got a whole new way, a whole new world that you have to combat just when you thought you had enough prophylactic activity going on in one place, boom, here you are now. So can you successfully defend, do you feel like you have the tools to be that watch at the gate? I'd be a liar if I say you can prevent everything, right? But it's just not possible. But what you've got to be able to prevent is everything that's known, and then take the unknown, make it known as quickly as possible, and start preventing that. So that's the goal. If anybody out here is saying they prevent everything, it's just not true, it can't be true. But the faster you take that unknown and make it known and start preventing it, that's what you do. Well, and it's never just one thing in this world, right? And now there's much more emphasis being replaced on response and predicting the probability of the sense of severity and things of that nature. So it really is an ecosystem, right? Which is kind of back to what you do. So how do you see this ecosystem evolving? What are your objectives? Yeah, I think that from my standpoint, we'll continue to build out new partnerships for customers. We really focus on those ones that are important to customers. So we recently did a lot with authentication partners, because that's another level. If people are getting those credentials and using them, then what are they doing with them, right? So we did some new stuff in the product with a number of partners where we look at the credentials and if they're leaving the network going to an unknown site, that should never happen, right? Your corporate credentials should never go to some unknown site. So that's a good example of how we build out new things for customers that weren't seen before with a partner. We don't do authentication, so we rely on partners to do that with us. And as we continue to talk about partnership and BD, we're going to continue to focus on those things that really solve that need for a customer. Well, I don't know how you guys sleep at night, but I'm glad you do, and... No, they don't. That's how it is. What do you mean? I'm glad you don't. It is 24-7, that's for sure. Terry, thanks for being with us. Thank you very much. We appreciate the time. I'm glad to have you on theCUBE. theCUBE will continue. Live from Washington, D.C., work.conf 2017.


Okay, there was absolutely no panic. There was absolutely no reason to believe that this is nothing more than a market that is consolidating its recent run. And that's exactly what it is. And more important, technically, we just basically... Welcome to Access to Trader, the number one community for those who are committed to taking control of their trading in order to achieve success, profitability, and longevity. Thank you for joining us. Here's Dan Shapiro to help you find your edge, master your process, and own your future. Hey, guys, meeting everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Access to Trader.com Nightly Wrap-Up Show. Hope everybody is doing okay. I'm a little bit under the weather. I was kind of fighting a cold here kind of all day here.  Good consolidation day today for the NASDAQ 100. Again, we've been talking about every single day, the last thing you wanna do is start buying very, very aggressive overextended charts. It was pretty much known every single day. Again, as we talked about, we wanna concentrate on names. They're just coming out of channels, names that are trying to confirm either middle or 52 week highs with a lot of volume. And we're trying to stick to those. And again, remember what we talked about? If the stock is up six, seven, eight days in a row, the value is from six days ago. The value is not today. And we saw a lot of names today really get pulled, but not in a way that, oh my God, these are red flags as a market reversal is gonna go lower. It's basically what we started talking about for the last two, three days. Again, be careful of the names that you choose to trade because again, there's a difference between a breakout, right? There's only one breakout on a chart. There's a difference between a breakout and a continuation. Chart breakout happens in the middle of the channel, right? In the middle of the channel taking out a longer range, two, three, four weeks. Continuation play comes out over here. And again, the further you get away from a daily chart breakout, quote unquote breakout, the higher probability it can pull in. And that's exactly what happened today to NASDAQ 100. Again, if you were actively trading the market today, again, there was no fear, okay? There was absolutely no panic. There was absolutely no reason to believe that this is nothing more than a market that is consolidating its recent run. And that's exactly what what is. And more important, technically, we just basically tested the rising five-day moving average. And again, if you do believe in the theory that the five-day moving average is the shortest term sentiment, then you can see exactly which structurally we did properly today. We tested the five-day moving average and we bounced. So that's very, very bullish. And today was one of those situations that you didn't need to be in a lot of names. Again, we covered, you know, Tesla yesterday. We kind of magnified the chart. You know, and that was the trade of the day. It really was. And, you know, we talked about for the last several days that this range is very, very tight.  And the more important part was we started talking about the last several days how much aggressive call buyers we saw, you know, going for the 450, going the 460 calls. So it was very, very important to kind of understand the dynamics of the trade.  But more important when all other names started pulling today Tesla got stronger. And not only did it get stronger, you started seeing really aggressive call buyers come in. When I mean call buyers, they weren't going in for $12,000, $15,000, $20,000. They were going in for mid six-figure bets on the 460s, the 470s, the 500s. We saw multi-million dollar bets being laid in the same expiration, in the same chain. And again, once you start seeing that really aggressive call buying coming in, price action follows very, very aggressively. And what happened with Tesla, again, I know a lot of you guys really love Tesla and I know a lot of you guys really hate Tesla, but technical analysis, technical analysis, not only that we reclaim this 449 level, we took out the 462 level. If you follow me on Twitter, you kind of see I was tweeting out these levels all day. So we took out this 462 level. This is now the highest close, literally in this whole formation. Tomorrow, if we could confirm this whole linear regression line, the next level should be this 472 level, ultimately 490. And once you get into these levels here, the 500 area, then again, you're talking about blue skies. But again, most important part for tomorrow is number one, it has to reclaim today's price action. Again, there's always a lot of catalysts. You got earnings coming up next week. So that's kind of, I just wanted to kind of break down what we were talking about on Tesla for today's session. Also, it really woke up a lot of the electric vehicle names, right? NIO, talking about a stock that had a big day today. The stock traded 383 million shares today, just an absolute aggressive move here. It's spiking after hours. If you saw, I kind of tweeted this out, any break above 27, just because it was the high of the day, stock right now is trading in the 2740s. So you had a lot of really big speculation money, a lot of names that had the big, recent run-ups. They arrested, that's all it was. If you look at the big players recently that had their big runs, Amazon rested, kind of mirrored the five-day moving average, just what like the Qs, even Apple that again had that big run into the event. And again, when we talked about the event got sold, again, did exactly the same thing, back tested right to the five-day moving average and held. So structurally, we are fine going into tomorrow's session. That's the most important part. As long as the Qs do not give up the five-day moving average, and that's gonna be a very, very important test tomorrow. If the Qs start losing this whole 289 level tomorrow, then again, we're having a different conversation for tomorrow night's video. But for now, again, you have to give the bulls the benefit of the doubt. Once we start coming back into this macro range here, that's when we can have a whole shift in dynamics of where the market can go. But for now, again, you have to give the bulls the benefit of the doubt. So again, it's not how many trades you put on, it's how many trades you put on properly. And we really identified the proper names today, and it turned out to be very, very good.  The reason why I said 450, 451 and not 449, there was a linear regression line around 450 and a half. So we wanted to make sure supply got taken. Once it started taking out those levels, that opening range high of 452, again, just an absolute explosion in Tesla shares. And you can see here, here's the whole first candle here off this 451, just one really, really aggressive and put in a high of roughly 466. Again, really, really big move on Tesla. Excuse me, Nivedia never got to the 574. ZM never got to the 521 level. I caught Netflix pretty well. They got upgraded today by Goldman Sachs. I think it was a 650 or a $670 price target. Big move here out of that 563 level. So here was Netflix, right? So here was Netflix, here's the whole 563 level. You can see the first big move went all the way up to 573 before it sold off. Crowd never got to 55. RKT, again, got rejected at 24.  Again, yeah, here's the Goldman Sachs upgrade, the 670 level. Tesla, again, 462 on deck. Again, that was the big number there. Any close over 462, like I said, goes into 500. Again, the 500 weekly coal buyers stepped in as well. And again, you had a really, really good move. So again, it wasn't one of those days that you had a lot of names really exploding, but the names that did confirm did very, very well, and that's the name of the game. So guys, for tomorrow, again, I wanna give the bulls the benefit of doubt. Again, if you guys look on tonight's watch list, I do have a lot of names that just kind of rested today and yesterday. So we wanna make sure that they confirm properly.  I wanna kind of relax tonight and just kind of get 100% for tomorrow's session. But we are bullish for tomorrow. We will be watching for those levels on the queues. If they hold again, maybe we can start getting moves back to the upside. Guys, have a great night. I wish you all the best. Stay healthy and I'll see you all tomorrow.


Very nice. I've never had a bell. All right. Yes, please. You're right. I can show you. What I mean is, for any anti-symmetric matrix, there exists an orthogonal one. Well, I chose even-dimension here, because it's our case and it's easier with anti-symmetric. It'll be true anyway, but it's just easier to state. Where you can bring the anti-symmetric matrix to this form. And the way you do it, you prove it, it's very simple.  That's why I meant, oh, that's that job. And then through this very, very simple matrix manipulation, algebraic property, you can prove normal-mode decomposition in general. Yeah? Yes. So we wanted the, then again, the spectrum of this state, so that we can understand how the spectrum of any Gaussian state works. And we managed to boil it down to the spectrum of this exponential, which in turn means, but this represents a bunch of Hamiltonians which are given by as omega j xj squared plus pj squared. Yeah? So this is the standard harmonic oscillator and you all know how to, do I have a half? Maybe not, maybe yes, who knows, but yeah, there's a half, even in the standard definition. Yeah. So this, and so up to, well, h bar is always equal one. Oh yeah, I didn't even talk about h bar, but there'll be an h bar in the very first time. So you all know how to diagonalize this.  They come in as many modes as you like, but in the end, in the end, do I have an expression for this? In the end? Yeah, I mean, there's nothing else to say. We just have to exponentiate this. Okay? So essentially, yes. No, okay, so the way it goes is any, so this is a definition of Gaussian state. Yeah? So yeah, I'm saying, I'm saying, well, I'm not saying anything because this is a definition, but then if you want, you can also prove, you can prove later that we can prove later, but this is just something that's very, maybe not today, but you can prove that these are all the states with Gaussian-Wigner function.  And I'm saying, though, something else. I'm saying that, you know, because diagonalizing this, this is just a function of h up to normalization, so diagonalizing this is the same as diagonalizing this, and diagonalizing this means that you'll have a displacement, so first a symplatic, so a second-order operation, then a displacement acting on top of it, well, and then a central Hamiltonian which is given by a tensor product of, no, actually a sum, sorry, a sum of these Hamiltonians. Okay? That's what we're saying. That's the path.  Yeah? So we found the eigen basis, and the spectrum will be just given by exponentiating, so the spectrum is given by, to be more specific, a tensor product, obviously, of e to the minus beta omega j because of the way we decided to write down these variables, times nj, and then you need to take, so these are the eigenvalues, and the eigenvalues are products of this over all possible nj's. Okay? Yeah? And, yeah. But this specific exponentially decay spectra are then a property of Gaussian states. Okay? And this is something that I do in the notes as well. Let me get rid of this beta. I wanted beta for other reasons, but I can just put xi, j, absorb all the betas in the eigen frequencies of the Hamiltonian. Yeah, because it is irrelevant, so. And then, so that's the spectrum. We could then, in principle, determine entropies, but one thing I want to do is there's a more, so obviously this will boil down to Gaussian distributions in the end, right? So they can be mapped into. And like any Gaussian function, all of these parameters, which are, you know, the eigen frequencies, the first moments, and the s, which is in the end, then just expressed as a 2n times 2n symmetric matrix. Yeah? They can be encoded in other, more operational parameters. And which I'm going to do now. Blah, blah, we know what symplatics are. So, so, I don't need this anymore. So instead of describing the Gaussian state with all of those parameters that encode h and therefore the state through exponentiation, you can use more direct operational definitions. And that would be, so first moments are just simply the, you know, expectation values of this R. And surprise, surprise, it takes two lines to see that, essentially, the expectation, if you don't have any displacement, the expectation value will be zero, because you have odd combination of canonical operators acting on even, and it's very simple to see that they're always zero. But the displacement just displaces it. That's obvious. And then there's a covariance matrix, which is in its symmetrized form. It will be given by, transposed. So, by which we mean, again, the anticommutator is taken in the outer product sense, like here. So we want to do all possible pairs of X and P's and anticommute them and get the expectation value. Yeah? So this thing, now, yeah, I'll just give you a very brief idea of how to go about it. And it will be that. So the state, raw, which I wrote before, is dr and then s. And then e to the minus dr. Did I say everything right? Yeah, with a half, I forget. Over the trace of raw, I don't care what it is. I mean, we could calculate it, but I mean, it depends with it. Oh, the product. This is a tensor product, eh? The tensor product in Hilbert spaces become direct sums there. And this is something that we're going to see. So this is a tensor product. Over all j's, these are all the normal modes. And there's some symplatic acting on the Hilbert, some representation of a symplatic in the Hilbert space and then a displacement there. Now, when you take this sigma, if you put that raw in here, what's going to happen is that you are displaced. So this dr will just displace the commutator. Yeah, I can take this dr there and act everywhere. So that's not going to do anything essentially. It will just get rid of this, shift the first moments, yeah? And this is the reason why then the first line is true. And then, so, let me write it down. So this is the trace of blah, blah, blah. And then there's dr, dagger s s j e to the minus psi j half x j squared plus p j squared and then s dagger dr. Okay, so then I can bring this one that way and displace this commutator, which means I just end up with the vectors without the shift. And then I do the same with s, s dagger. But the beauty of this is that s, so that's why this formalism is so effective in this situation. I put the s there, I act with the s on this one, but what will the s do? Something that I didn't write explicitly down before, but we established is that this meta-plastic correspondence means this thing, that s acting on all of this, and let me say that's an s dagger, I can't decide any convention I want at this stage, it's going to be s r. Someone must be kind of lost because I explained this very badly on purpose, not on purpose. Yeah, see? So, yeah. Okay, so s was a 2M by 2M matrix? Yeah, exactly. So this is something that I said at the beginning and I kept it too implicit, I know. So basically what we show in this very part of the blackboard, unfortunately, like in the previous lecture, was that when you evolve through a quadratic Hamiltonian, she's also gone, but you will map, so the action of a quadratic Hamiltonian, so essentially this action, there could be a minus plus, I always get this wrong, but never mind. Yeah, so this action, that's an operator, this action, that is this operator, and by this action, I mean this action acting on each single canonical variable in the vector, yeah? This could be u, the time evolution operator, exactly, yeah, but I call it s because it's a symplectic, incidentally. Acting on each single x and p, x and p, x and p in this row will give me, we saw that it will give us e omega h, let me forget about the time, there's the time there, but I dispense with the time, I absorb it in h, and times the original one, which I call sr, because that's symplectic. Why do I? Yeah, because it's convenient, because this s is the metaplectic representation in an infinite dimensional Hilbert space of this 2n times 2n transformation s. Through this mapping, yeah? Let me state this once more.  This is without hack, yeah? No, they're not the same. So one is the metaplectic mapping through this procedure. This is a 2n by 2n matrix that says how the canonical coordinates were shuffled by this operation. That's why these operations are linear, because they always end up being like a linear function of the others. The new canonical operators will be a linear combination of the original ones, yeah? Okay, so that's how that works. That's why I'm writing these sort of things, but this is a really powerful statement. So this is a vector of operator. I act with the same unitary of all the elements and the effect of this action, which is the time evolution, is what happens in Eisenberg picture. The effect is that I combine them linearly through this other s, which is a 2n times 2n matrix, whereas this is an infinite-dimensional operator given by that, which is very simple to write down in terms of x and p, some exponentiation of x and p's. And see, the link is that this h, the h is the bridge. This h is the same as this h. It's a 2n times 2n symmetric matrix, please. This is the time to ask questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could just put a t there and there. This will also change. No, okay, so there I'm just saying there is one that diagonalizes the h. This is instead a general statement that through the same h, you can define an infinite-dimensional operator that acts as a time evolution operator and a finite-dimensional matrix that will also describe compactly this same time evolution. So this is one statement. The other statement is that there's always an s that does that, okay? So this is something that generally is good to know, like if one is a physicist or like working in these areas. Yeah? So now you see how powerful this is because I can then... So this formalism is very, very effective because I can now, yes, through that, through this correspondence, what I'm going to do is you see, the action of these on these operators, regardless of the fact that there's a commutator and all, is just going to be that... So let me write it down here. So s-dagger are transposed s, it acts on everything. What's going to give you is s-r. Well, you just have to think a little bit about this one, maybe, but... And then I can take it out. So without even getting my hands dirty with any of these s, I'll take it completely out of the equation, out of everything, actually, here. These are just numbers, not operators, so the trace acts on the Hilbert space level. So this is s times the trace of r, rt, and times, you know, the other... But this operator is a very simple one. Yeah? Okay. So the action... d doesn't do anything on the second moments, it just gets rid of these, obviously, shifts. That's easy. S will reshuffle them acting by congruence in the end. So here we are defining the second moments of the state, second and sort of statistical moments. So the expectation values of xp plus px all second order combinations. And as in a Gaussian distribution, we expect it to describe the whole state. And they're also, like, immediately accessible. If you do quadrature measurements, you can reconstruct these parameters. So hence the interest. So this thing there. So then I just need... We would just need to determine these quantities on this tensor product. It's very simple. We can do it separately for each mode, because this is a local operator, like, tensor product of local operators, acting on each mode separately. And there's no combinations. And here, I'm going to just give you the result because it will take... This is very tedious. I mean, it's also fairly straightforward. And because what we're going to do is we're going to need to evaluate the expectation value of this and on...   So one would need to go... I don't know. I don't think you want me to do this now. I mean, it's all in the notes, and it's just... It takes the transformation to... You have to go to ladder operators, rewrite these things. What do you want? Do you want me to do this? Or shall I give you the result? Yeah. So the result is just... Well, you can follow it pretty easily. The result is just that this tensor product at the Hilbert space level would transform into a direct sum in phase space where Gaussian states are described. This is a general property which makes these treatments very simple, in a sense, like... Experian. So this is going to be s, always. Acting on a direct sum of nu j, nu j for all j from 1 to n, as transposed, where nu j is 1 plus e to the minus psi j, psi j. This is the psi j. It comes from summing this geometric sum and their derivative is pretty simple. There's nothing mysterious there. So we determined that the covariance matrix... And this could also be... Well, but this is the covariance matrix of the most general Gaussian states. Along with the first moments, which are completely separate, it also encodes all the degrees of freedom that we need to describe the state. There's... In fact, these nu j, they are the simplistic eigenvalues of the covariance matrix and they are related to the simplistic eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian that define the states through this relationship. This was beta times them, but never mind. And likewise, the other parameters are in S. Yeah? Not likewise, but the sides. And... Okay. So essentially, we decomposed the state and one thing that we can do now is decide... Okay, so one very interesting fact is that not all covariance matrices, physical covariance matrices, yeah? As I mentioned, this is yet another way to describe Gaussian states and it's a very efficient one, because these two parameters, the first moments and the second moments, they are directly accessible in a lab, so you can describe the state through this. And if you put them... If you then go to the Wigner function representation, these parameters will be the covariance matrix and first moments of the distribution or what you get as the Wigner distribution. Okay? But... So now, something that I mentioned before when I referred to quantum key distribution is that there is, of course, an uncertainty principle. Now, one could express uncertainty principle maybe in a more sophisticated way as entropic relations, because in the end, they have to do with the entropies of some distributions, in a sense. But the standard, more traditional second moments approach, which is the first layer of, you know, uncertainty that you can ever define is perfectly fine here. And so because everything is defined in terms of second moments, so uncertainty. And this will also be very useful later on to discuss the entanglement of these states. Yes, let me define this tau as yet another matrix and it's given by... So at this stage, the state could be Gaussian or not. Okay? This is no assumption of Gaussianity needed here. Maybe with a 2 in front. The reason why I put a 2 is that this is equal to Gaussian. So to make multi-mode statements, this formalism is definitely the most effective. Okay? So, you know, this product, even in the outer product sense, is given by the commutator. So twice that is given by the commutator plus the anti-commutator, of each element. But then of course, this is sigma and this is plus i omega. Because this is just a constant number and that's the trace of row. Right? Now, then consider an operator which I'll call square root of 2. Consider the operator O which would be square root of 2 y, sorry, y dagger, y is a vector it's a complex vector and that's r. This is a scalar product. And then, what do I want to say? So, the trace of let's say o dagger must be positive. Right? Oh, dagger is positive, row is positive. Yeah? This is tau. This is the matrix tau. Well, this means but this statement means that the matrix tau must be positive semi-definite. Yeah? Because this is true for all for all vector y. Okay? And so we get the uncertainty principle. This is really very compact. This is the uncertainty principle then. Let's see. Yeah? That's the most general second-order expression. This is due to, well, in various stages, but to Robertson and Schrodinger. It's from the 30s, in slightly different forms. And let's see whether this is actually the uncertainty principle that we all know, right? So in a first, so single mode case, yeah? Single mode case, what happens is, yeah, so the covariance matrix let's, let's like first moments are irrelevant and we see y in a second. But the covariance matrix is given by, so there's the anticommutator of x, x which is what's the anticommutator x squared? So this is delta x squared. Okay?  And so if the state doesn't have xp correlations which is something, an assumption which is often made. So say this is zero. Sigma plus i omega is just this. Yeah? So now this is a two times two matrix. We have to check that it's strictly, well, that it is semi-definite, positive semi-definite. What do we check? Trace and determinant, okay? Trace is positive. Nothing to say about that. So this is equivalent to determinant being positive which is four delta x squared delta p squared minus one plus one. Yeah. Thank you. What am I doing? Yeah, I was seeing something was wrong but I never found it. All right. So that's your uncertainty principle. Yeah? Delta x delta p greater than h bar half. We have to put h bar back. Yeah? So, but this is the most general form on any number of degrees of freedom. Yeah? And we found it with one line well two, two lines. Yeah? We're going to need this big time. Remember that this is, now we're going to fix this idea and then we'll use it later on because time-wise we're doing fairly well. Remember that we used the what do I say? Like we used yeah, we used the positivity of raw here. So this is a consequence of the canonical commutation relations and the positivity of raw. That's always the case for uncertainty principles. Yeah? Now, yeah, there's that too but first let me just say one more thing. So, now one final or a few final comments on how to manipulate Gaussian states. Something a bit more optical slash technological in some sense. So, first off there's the first moments and it's not like the first moments can carry information. So, for instance teleportation we continue as valuable was that first demonstrated with first moments. They are significant, they are relevant and you can use them for again, quantum key distribution of course. So, it's not like we don't care about them but also first moments we so, first moments can adjust to the will with displacement operators, okay? Those D that we wrote before. But those D's let me remind you, they're like that. So, they are generated by amiltonians.  Omega is just the matrix that describes couplings by who cares. So, they are generating by linear terms in X and P's. Okay? Which means that we could rewrite them as a tensor product of local terms. Because, you know, operators pertaining to different L2 like modes they will commute. So, I can just exponentiate the tensor products of exponent of yeah, exponentials would give me the exponential of the sum. So, this could be rj transposed omega 1 in the sense that this is omega 1 for a single mode and rj. So, they can be adjusted at first moments can be adjusted at will through local unitaries. So, no for instance quantity that is so, no entanglement property can never be affected, depend on first moments. Because I can apply a local unitary and set them as I like. So, there will be a bit less interesting and we're going to drop them for the rest of the lecture because I don't think they'd be specifically relevant. That's the first thing and how you do this could be applying a classical current or this is also the way you shift this fields for instance if you have a system in a cavity like a Fabry Perrault or any cavity really any optical cavity you feed it with a laser to change the first moments. It's a pump and with a strong classical field typically. So, that's how you do it in practice. So, so much for first moments. Now second-order operations instead the ones that apply this symplectic s that are behind these Hamiltonians, they're a bit richer and they will change they will let you, for instance they can create entanglement and squeezing as we are about to see. What are those? They are yeah, let me start with something formal. So, singular value decomposition of a symplectic it sounds like I'm about to say something awful, but trust me on this one. If you do a singular value decomposition you're going to find this and let's comment on this because there's all the building blocks that are used in practice. So, where R1, R2 belong to the intersection between O2N and the symplectic group. That is they are both orthogonal and symplectic. So, they preserve the trace for instance of sigma. So, they don't change the free energy, the energy of the free Hamiltonian. They're called passive operations and they are in fact realized on an optical table through essentially sequences of bin splitters and phase shifters. Phase shifters they change, they are like pieces of plastic that change the optical phase with respect to a fixed reference. For ions you just have to wait a little bit of time and they will keep like rotating in this frame and or bin splitters that just semi-reflectant mirrors that will mix modes. It's easy to get, there's a simple theorem that you can prove. It's the same theorem that you use to prove that you can do any unitary with two qubit gates and single qubit phases by using the very same theorem because as it happens, I just mentioned this, they're not that important but it's important formally if you have a work in this field in this subarea. This subgroup this is the maximum compact subgroup of the symplatic group. This subgroup is isomorphic to UN to the unitaries as it happens. It's very easy to see and to prove and so these operations can all be done with phase shifters so which are simply this cos phi sin phi so it's two-dimensional rotations for a single mode and bin splitters bin splitters are slightly more sophisticated, they involve two modes and in our notations maybe they'll be relevant later so I'll mention them. In our notations this is what they look like well I could have found a better way but never mind, I want to be very explicit. So that's a bin splitter basically they rotate axes and p's in the same way for the two modes and building this with this on all modes and this within any pair of modes you can build any of these R1 or 2 and then we are left with Z and Z is a squeezing operation Z is so you can prove that the these are the singular value of a symplectic and they come in pairs of inverses and this is a squeezing operation in the sense that if you apply this Z on a covariance matrix like this, which is balanced you're going to make, you're going to amplify this noise and suppress the other yeah, so that's what squeezing is and by a squeezed state we mean a state oh by the way, the vacuum state in this formalism has covariance matrix sigma equal to the identity and this is the only this is a pure Gaussian state Gaussian state is pure if the determinant of sigma is one, if and only if okay, so then this is a squeezer that and you can build up any symplectic that's how you manipulate and one thing which is also very interesting and very useful in practice is that tensor products as I already mentioned at the Hilbert space level they are always direct sums for Gaussian states so if you want to take the partial trace for instance and you have a big sigma with billions of modes you just have to take the submetrics pertaining to your mode of interest yeah, you do a pinching and so it means that sometimes you mean want to prove like I don't know say you want to prove what is the situation under this and that regime that not better specified but that gives you the optimal cooling in optomechanics say you want to cool down the mechanical mode then if you are in a Gaussian regime you can just look at the determinant of the mechanical mode and minimize it this will give you the lower now I didn't really go through this because it's quite a lot too but it's not that much after all but the determinant for a single mode state the determinant of the covariance matrix embodies encodes all of the entropies so if you want to max the optimal cooling you want to minimize the determinant and you can see well I don't know it's not that simple but now but it's quite easy you could have found the expressions for entropies based on these parameters that we have they all depend on the symplatic eigenvalues because we saw that this symplatic eigenvalue of the covariance matrix in the end they are also the ones that determine the spectrum of the states yeah so ok, based on this introduction maybe later I can mention a couple of things more of in order to I want to rely this a little bit to the phase space picture of characteristic functions and the functions that you're probably most of you will be very familiar with but and then I will go on and just want to give you an example of how to study entanglement in these systems and then we see how much time we got left towards the end thanks a lot for standing this


Welcome to Geneva for the AI for Good Global Summit 2019. I am delighted to be joined by Evert Hasdack, he's senior manager and AI expert at Steloid. Thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure to be here. Now you're here to present your research and your research is all about bias in AI models. What can you tell us about it? What would be the key findings you're going to share with the audience? I think the most important thing to realise is that when you use AI, or machine learning, which is a component of AI, if you use machine learning, then any biases that you find in your data is reflected in the models that you develop. So it's not the algorithms or the people that programme the algorithms, it's the data that you've collected and it's important to realise that. Rarely is the data collected with the purpose of machine learning. The data is typically collected with the purpose of registering the actions that companies do or that governments do. As a matter of course, and therefore this data reflects all the biases, be they human, be they systemic in those systems. And if you're not careful, these biases will turn up in the models that you develop. I think that's a very interesting point because quite often when we talk about AI and ethics, we encourage programmers or the people who build algorithms to be careful in their approach, you are saying that you need to take great care of the data you use and how you do it, the process as well. Exactly, I think the data is the key to these models, it's the basis of these models. And in fact the models are no more than statistics basically, very complex statistics, based on this data. And it's important that you realise that when the data contains these biases, it will turn up in the models. If the models are any good, you'll find those biases again. So it's important to check the results of modelling afterwards, not just before you start, but afterwards to verify that the models are not biased or if they are biased to deal with it. Can you share some concrete examples with us of data being used wrongly maybe, or in a very unethical way, willingly or unwillingly by the way? Well there's a famous example that I like by a researcher called Rich Karawana. He built a model to predict whether people would die from pneumonia. The model was very good, it reflected, it was better than most doctors at predicting whether people would die of pneumonia based on their medical history, all kinds of measurements that they would do. But they also found that this model would predict that people with asthma have very high likelihood of surviving. And that doesn't make sense because asthma is a respiratory disease. Then if you add pneumonia to that, it's not 2 minuses make a plus or something like that. But the thing is that people with asthma are treated generally much more intensively than the average patient. So they go to ICU, no questions asked. And that means that they fortunately have a higher likelihood of surviving. But if you were to use that model to then do a triage and decide whether people go to ICU because they're at risk or not, then people who now always go to ICU would not be selected to go to ICU. And that would be detrimental for them. So this is not evil, this is not some kind of societal bias or anything like that. It's just a bias that comes from the system and you have to be careful of that. And the thing is you can't always know that the machine learning system will pick up on it. You have to check afterwards for those kinds of things. And that's a very important thing to do. It can be a fairly elaborate thing, but fortunately the statistics are not that difficult. OK, now to sum up. I haven't mentioned the fact that Deloitte is actually one of the sponsors of the AI for Good Global Summit. So what would you like one of the key outcomes to be this year? So one of the things that I think is really important is that people realise that this is an important issue. That's why also as Deloitte, we're sponsoring the AI quality mark together with the Foundation for Responsible Robotics. I hope that people become aware of this. I also hope that they sign the petition for the quality mark that we've put online. That would be the ideal outcome for this part of the conference for me. OK, Evert, thank you very much. Thank you.