So a couple of things first, I just want to thank everybody for coming up to talk about Zero Trust in the cloud. And the other, I apologize if my voice breaks up a little bit during the talk. I'm fighting something off, but thankfully it's not COVID. So today I'm going to talk about Zero Trust in the cloud and how WebAssembly is a key enabling technology for that. So I wrote a book called Programming WebAssembly with Russ. I wrote Cloud Native Go, ASP.NET Core. My books haven't always been on the right side of history. I wrote a Windows Phone 7 programming book. So I created an open source WebAssembly project called WasmCloud. I co-founded Cosmonic, which is a company that's built on top of WasmCloud for managing WasmCloud distributed applications. I'm typically the most paranoid person in the room, which I guess goes hand in hand with being concerned about security. I'm a big WebAssembly fan, but I'm also practical. So while I think WebAssembly solves a ton of really important problems, it doesn't solve them all. And there's my GitHub address. I've got some other contact links at the end of the slides. And this is, by far, my new favorite quote. Runar Bjarnasen, the guy who co-created the Unison programming language, posted this, and I've been stealing it from him ever since. So I want to go from the lowest level WebAssembly technology, so that's the file itself, the virtual machine, and how that enables security. And then I'm going to take a journey from there to run times, and then to above that level to capability security, and then finally we'll talk about some distributed system security, and which parts are enabled by WebAssembly itself, and then which parts are add-ons enabled by open source projects. And if you look at my amazing art skills, you'll see that the green stuff is open source add-ons, and the purple is stuff that's enabled by WebAssembly on its own. So you've seen and probably heard in keynotes and some other sessions how buffer overflows, buffer overruns, things like that are pretty easy attack vectors, and one of my favorite qualities of WebAssembly is that they're simply not possible. You physically cannot buffer overrun in a WebAssembly module. You can't write code that uses system calls. You can't write code that branches to a location that wasn't there when the file loaded to begin with, and in many cases where C and C++ would crash with undefined behavior WebAssembly modules will do what's called a trap, and they will fail to run. And if there's one thing you take away from this session, it would be to click on that YouTube video. It shows a buffer overrun exploit in the original Legend of Zelda game for the Nintendo, and it's by far one of the most fascinating exploits I've ever seen. So if you go and watch that video, then I feel like my work is done here. I'm sorry it's not a shortened URL, but I figured at a security conference nobody's going to click a shortened URL. As I mentioned, the WebAssembly modules have control flow security as well as module security, so you can't create arbitrary pointers. You can't dereference memory that's invalid. There's a number of other things that are prevented by the simple fact that you cannot tell a WebAssembly module to jump to an arbitrary location. You can't have it read past the end of a buffer and then treat whatever's beyond that as code. Linear memory and the code being executed on the stack are two entirely different things that you cannot push together. So I've divided this particular sample into two highly scientific categories, worky and no-worky. So the working sample is, this is Rust in case you're curious, basically this is an add function and the no-mangle there tells the Rust compiler to export that function. At the primitive level, WebAssembly can only exchange numbers with the host and so anything where you need to exchange robust data types, at least today, you have to figure out how to do that on your own. There are some standards coming that will hopefully help make that easier but that's pretty much how it works. So let's see if I can show what this looks like. So these are all the export functions from the WebAssembly module. This is a, it's not actually a WebAssembly language, it's just a textual representation of the byte code. And so you'll see there's a couple of them that Rust adds for you. But the two that are important are memory which is the linear memory block shared by the host and the guest and add and that function is the one that we created. And I don't actually have any tricks up my sleeve. I just, I measure my typing speed in typos per minute so I wanted to make sure I didn't make you suffer through that. So you'll see I just added, I just called the add function with four and four. The wasm time runner reminded me that that particular call interface is not currently stable so it might break. But I got eight and so that's, that's all good. So now let's see what happens if I try and create a malicious actor. In here, this is also Rust but and it's no mangle so I'm going to export the add function. But here I'm going to attempt to read a file and write to the console and then finally just add the number. And again, I'm just running using wasm time to run it and you'll see that it trapped. It failed to invoke add and you'll see, you will see that unreachable thing an awful lot. And generally what it means is you've attempted to execute code that doesn't exist. So in this particular web assembly module, it's not using what's called wazzy so it doesn't have any instructions for accessing the file system. So when the Rust linker created that module, it just placed a bunch of unreachable code, unreachable macros where the real code should be. So that's the basics of level level module level security. All right. So the next thing I want to talk about one level up from the web assembly module security is run time security. And every web assembly module requires a run time. Regardless of what magic or smoke and mirror shows you've seen, all web assembly modules need a run time. So whether that's the browser or node v8 engine or as you saw wasm time.  First is that host memory is off limits. No matter what you try and do from within a web assembly module, you cannot access the host's memory. You're basically given an isolated sandbox playground vector of bytes and that's it. That's all you can use. The host has its own memory isolated elsewhere. The host supplies the implementation for imports. You saw that I exported a function called add, but if I needed to import something like the ability to access a file, it's up to the host to supply the implementation for that. And what that really means is the host now has the right of last refusal for all operations that that module wants to execute. There are anti forgery checks. So depending on the run time, you'll see a whole bunch of security that prevents the module itself from being tampered with at run time from outside and some run times will compile the web assembly module into machine code when it starts up and that's also a configurable option up to the host or the run time. So there's another standard within the web assembly community called WASI and it stands for the web assembly systems interface and its original design was to close that gap and give web assembly modules some access to system resources. There are a lot of blog posts and even documentation that kind of steer you toward the idea that WASI is basically a web assembly version of POSIX that is not the case and thinking that can actually get you into some trouble. Like I said, the WASI modules are allowed to do certain types of IO, but again the host gets to refuse or grant access to those. If I want a web assembly module that's compiled to WASI to read a file or write a file or do any kind of disk IO, the run time itself needs to pre-approve that file. So when I start a web assembly run time I have to tell it this directory or these files are available to the web assembly module and if I don't tell it that the web assembly module will not be able to access it. So with that I'm going to take a look at a WASI demo and again the categories here are worky and no worky. So we'll take a look at the worky one first and you'll see that there is a print line statement here and in a WASM32 on regular WASM32 unknown target you would be unable to do that. You don't have access to standard out. So but since I'm going to use WASI I do have that ability and you'll see that the target, the rest target here is WASM32 WASI. That's crucial. If I had left that as WASM32 unknown I wouldn't have been able to run this. So here you can see that my web assembly module now wrote to standard out and still performed the math. So now let's go to no worky and see what a malicious actor might try and do. So here it looks pretty much the same as the other Rust code except it's reading from a file called food.txt and I'm going to print the file's metadata here and then add some more you know highly efficient debug statements right there and again the run command is the same. It's just executing against a WASI target. So now again remember the unreachable that I mentioned before. It failed to invoke add and there's also a big panic and this is the important bit which is that it failed to find a pre-opened file descriptor through which food.txt could be open. I don't want to go into too much detail but the WASI API allows for descriptors to be accessed and read from and written to and but they don't have the ability to create their own. So the host has to pre-create a file descriptor in order for the WASI module to be able to read from that file. So next above WASI we're going to switch from the regular Web assembly standards to WASM cloud, the CNCF open source project and that sits on top of WASM time and provides a number of extra features the probably the most important of which is capability security. So I mentioned that for a WASI module you might get a descriptor and you can read from it and write to it but you don't really know why you have no one really knows why you have that descriptor. When you build a regular microservice, a regular application running somewhere without Web assembly, your security policy might grant that thing access to sockets but what it really ever does is allow you to declare why it needs that socket. So the WASM cloud runtime lets you sign your Web assembly modules so that you can declare that one of them needs an HTTP server or a message broker or a data store and the WASM cloud runtime is responsible for vetting that you're allowed to do what you claim you're allowed to do and then actually stitching together the Web assembly module with the capabilities that it needs. So in this Rust code here you can see that there is a key value store I've called increment on the key and I've sent a request on a message topic called security dot day but what's missing there is pretty much everything so there's no connection strings there's no secrets there's no URLs and more importantly you don't even know which key value store you're talking to nor do you know which message broker you're talking to so at runtime when you are in your inner developer loop on your laptop you could use a whole bunch of in-memory things but when you're in development you could use one key value store and then in production you could use Redis or Cassandra or whatever and you don't have to recompile or redeploy your code and that is specifically designed to address things like the log4j vulnerability where in current development models I have to compile all of my dependencies into my deployment unit so my log or the the choice I've made for how I log that's built into this thing that I'm deploying even though you know I might only have four lines of business business logic in there and so Wasm cloud is designed to let me strip away all that write pure business logic and also be confident that these modules are secure so here's another example where it receives an HTTP request and returns an HTTP response but nowhere in there does it say what port it's running on or even if it's running in under a unit test so Wasm cloud embeds JSON web tokens inside the web assembly modules so that we can verify them in isolation and verify them offline. One of the big things that I wanted to be able to do was take a look at a web assembly module and decide whether I should let it do what it wants to do without having to consult the central authority you know if I need to talk to Docker notary or something else then what is the how do I define my security logic for when I can't contact the authority and so this one allows me to access that stuff without potentially without even having network access so this is all right so again I have a workie and no workie if I inspect the claims in this one you'll see the account this is the issuer the module that's essentially the subject um each one of these web assembly modules is issued cryptographically and you can see that this one is allowed to use the HTTP server and the key value store and if I were to look at the no workie you'll see that it has HTTP server but it doesn't have the key value store capability so at runtime the wasm cloud host will reject any attempt by this module to access any key value store and let's see if I can hear exactly how to do this sorry it's not wrong it's JWT only okay so you can see when this was issued which was Monday January 30th the issuer and the subject these are these are ED25519 keys they just have they've been encoded in a way that makes it so that they're double clickable and I can tell from the first character the purpose of the key so the first character here is a means it's an account key first character M means it's a module key and I'm keeping the in the hash of the module so that I can verify whether it's been tampered with and here's the list of capabilities that it's allowed to use so the next thing that I want to talk about is cluster security so when running everything on a single machine offline your security risk is much much smaller than when you're running a big distributed system in production and wasm cloud allows you to form self-healing clusters of wasm cloud hosts that are running your modules and so because these modules are so small you can tell it to run a module on one host you can move it from one host to another you can scale it from one running instance to a hundred all of that is done through the distributed systems functionality so in a wasm cloud cluster every host has a key pair and each host only trusts a certain set of public keys so for any given wasm cloud cluster the hosts have essentially a trust list of which other hosts they they will allow to communicate with and so a an invocation whether it's an actor calling whether it's a web assembly module calling another one or whether it's a module calling the key value store those invocations are also signed and each one of those also contains a jason web token and so anytime a wasm cloud host receives a request to execute something from a remote entity it can verify that it came from a well-known host that it hasn't been tampered with that the host is one of the ones that's allowed to communicate and you can even add extra policy so that you can verify that certain issuers are allowed to exist or allowed to communicate but other ones aren't that comes in pretty handy when you want to set a policy that'll that forces you to use different signature identities in dev and prod so you don't accidentally deploy something destined for dev to production and sorry I kind of went through a little bit fast on that one but if you have any questions feel free to ask kind of covered a lot so um more than I've been answering questions about wasm cloud security web assembly and I believe that qr code is for session feedback uh wasm cloud can run anywhere you can spawn the host process so you can run it as a you can run that host as a you know as a javascript inside the browser tab we have an elixir otp host that we use for the cloud back in there are smaller hosts that we're planning on building that are you know targeting you know like esp 32 devices things like that our host runs on raspberry pies one of my favorite demos is one of my colleagues brings up a wasm cloud host on a raspberry pi and you can see it we'll see if this actually notes itself wi-fi is low and also unreliable anyway when he starts the the host running on the raspberry pi you can see it show up in the network and you can basically treat it like an empty vessel you can send compute down to that raspberry pi so it'll run inside kubernetes it'll run inside anybody else's cloud it'll run in a browser tab basically runs wherever you want to start that runtime yeah um so if you there are a number of performance ones if you go to the our website you'll see some specific measurements but a web assembly module that has business logic in it that was built using rust can be two three hundred k in size or smaller and so when you think about like the startup cost for a particular piece of compute you're not starting up a giant docker image you're not starting up a one gig jvm so there are some startup advantages there are scaling advantages so i can take that one module and run a thousand copies of it across 10 hosts and now i'm i'm automatically spreading the load across those any other questions yeah yes uh so the capabilities are embedded inside the file itself um if i were to i don't have a uh a decent tool to to show the the explorer of it but wash is the wasm cloud uh cli and you can use that to get information on what's inside that module so if i don't want the jwt and i want the user friendly information this is what i get and you'll see that you know there's it has all the usual benefits of adjacent web token like valid before date and expiration and so on and wash will do it yeah um if you're using one of our templates to build one of these modules you can just type wash build and it automatically signs it with the information in the tomo file that's there i think i saw one other hand yeah um so it is um in general we tend to prefer the let it crash uh methodology so if that actor tries to do something that traps uh when it hits that trap we're just going to dispose of the actor and then bring another another one back uh because they're so tiny and they're already sitting the bytes are already sitting in memory it it costs us you know a few microseconds to bring it back after death um and then uh an attempt to use a capability that it's not allowed to use that doesn't actually crash the actor we just reject the call and log the error message any more questions all right thanks very much


Military forts and outposts have a long and important role in Wyoming's history. Fort Casper is no exception. The original outpost was named Platt Bridge Station and is located near the First Mormon Ferry Crossing and later the Gennard Bridge. The site was also a Pony Express station prior to the Army occupation in 1862. The Army's primary duty was to protect the telegraph. Calling conflicts from the Sand Creek Massacre, troops from Platt Bridge Station were sent to escort a military supply train in July of 1865. The escort was led by a Lieutenant named Casper Collins when they were attacked by Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho right after crossing the bridge. Five troops and Collins were killed during the conflict, known as the Battle of Platt Bridge. Later that day an additional conflict occurred when the train reached the fort known as the Battle of Red Buttes. Following the death of Lieutenant Casper Collins in 1865, the outpost was renamed Fort Casper. In 1867 the fort was deconstructed and salvageable materials were moved and used in the construction of Fort Fetterman. So the next time you're in Casper, take the time to visit Fort Casper and take a step into the past. From the University of Wyoming Extension, I'm Brian Sebade, Exploring the Nature of Wyoming.


I want to stop down and thank anyone that's watching right now that volunteers that this mob called fish care There are a bunch of volunteers that help deliver fishing Educational programs to the fishing community and they talk to fishers about the need to protect and preserve our resources for future generations I love that Alan has been a fish care volunteer for ages and he loves it I started fishing at the age of six many years ago in England and became something of a passion Don't get towards retirement age, and I knew about fish case I got an interview did the training and nine years later on here So it's really important for people to keep up to date with what the current rules are a few ways that you can do that is by Downloading the SA fishing app you can visit the Purser website or you can bring 1800 fish watch and ask questions through there It's really important to keep up to date with the rules as they do change quite a bit with the science and everything


The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Ramita, Deremi Amanda, says about 34.311 trillion Naira revenue was generated by Ramita platform into the Federation account between 2015 and 2022. It is closed during the investigative hearing on alleged revenue leakages through Ramita platform and non-compliance substantively with standard operating procedure and other allied service agreements held at the instance of the House Committee on Public Accounts chaired by Honourable Bami Dele Salam, while dismissing insinuations that Ramita imposed additional fees, apart from the approved 150 Naira, which represents 10 percent at current exchange rate on the revenue-generating MDAs. Mr. Atanda disclosed that a Ramita payment gateway platform provides additional technology services to the Federation at no cost, despite paying in foreign exchange for hosting the platform on cloud-based platform, while ruling Chairman House Committee on Public Accounts Honourable Bami Dele Salam underscored the need for physical appearance of the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, CBN Governor and Accountant General of the Federation before the Committee on Tuesday, 20 February 2024. Having been in the picture for this number of years, we think that there can be increased public sensitization and enlightenment in respect of revenue collections, so that citizens are not misled to pay government revenues into accounts that may not belong to government. We think it will also be helpful for citizens to be informed about the channels of convenience, which includes agents everywhere to make payments to government. We also believe that in the face of the revenue challenges our country is going through, it may be time for the Forex Collection component of TSA to be activated because government does not just end in Naira. For the past eight, nine years that TSA has been in operation, the focus has been mainly to fine-tune processes around Naira collections. The question on whether anything could have been done to ensure that the earnings of government through your own platform increases more than this, other than increase in the fees payable because you may want to go there and say we should increase We don't want to put more bodies on net areas but we want to know if there are other kinds of interventions you think should have been put in place and then please, I want to ask the time revenue leakage, is there any probability of leakage of revenue through your payment gateway, is there any percentage of probability of revenue leakage and let me contextualize Is it possible that an agency that is supposed to charge 1,000 Naira for a service gives the payer a lower charge to come and pay, does that have a way of recognizing that no if you are paying for maybe a particular service with the FCT you're supposed to pay 25,000 Naira and then an official there says go and pay 19,000 Naira, is there anything on the platform that prevents this kind of on the handling, having been in a big hello hope you enjoyed the news please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates


almost all of them have reported no loss at all to their 20 minute power, right? None at all. Some have actually reported a slight increase in their 20 minute power because they're much more stable on the seat and almost all of them report an improvement in speed at their 20 minute threshold low because of the aerodynamics advantages, right? So welcome back to the 28th edition of the RCA Training Tips Show where today we round out another bike fitting series with expert bike fitter Neil Stambry who's been fitting road cyclists for around 10 years in conjunction with being a sports physiotherapist. So mid-foot cleat position. This certainly wasn't a topic that I brought to Neil nor was it a topic that you, the audience, brought to Neil. It was actually Neil himself who wanted to talk about this and here's why. This is a topic which no one, almost no one, when I suggested to them when they come in for a fit for whatever reason, almost no one's ever heard of it. So it's good to do a video on this because it is quite, from a biomechanical perspective, it's actually quite a logical thing to think about when you're cycling. So Neil, he's gonna break down for us both the pros, such as comfort, aerodynamics and speed and the cons of riding with a mid-foot cleat position and how you would go about getting the cleat into the middle of your cycling shoe. Now Neil has kindly confirmed he'll be back for another round of bike fitting videos. So if there are any hot topics that you, the audience would like us to cover in the next round, please put them below and if you wanna ensure you don't miss those videos, please don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell. Now before Neil gets into it, I'd like to remind everyone that the Uplevel Road Cycling Course, I'm gonna be reopening the door to that, program very shortly, which is gonna be a beta program. If you're not aware, the Uplevel Road Cycling Course is for road cyclists that are keen to take their performance to the next level and for those interested in being part of this beta relaunch program, I have an invite going out to my email newsletter list next week. So if you wanna jump on my email list, put a link below, alternatively, you can download my free ebook which will automatically put you on my email newsletter list. So let's get into it. So look, mid-foot, technically speaking, strictly speaking, mid-foot is where you divide the length of the shoe by two, measure out from the nose or the back, put a line and you put the center of the cleat on that line, so the middle of the foot, right? Have you ever done that? Absolutely, yeah, I actually rode mid-foot as an experiment for 18 months, many, many years ago, and I quite liked it. Yeah, I had no problems. What about walking around at cafe, is it a bit weird to walk on actually? Like a seesaw, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it is a little bit odd to walk on, but that should be the least of your worries. But the idea behind mid-foot is that as the cleat goes a long way back, the foot becomes really inherently stable on the pedal, right? So you're producing downwards force on the pedal and there's almost no effective of anchoring or loading of the rear of the foot to drop the heel, that kind of stuff. So if you've got a person who's an extreme heel dropper, like myself, riding mid-foot just stabilizes their foot to an unbelievable extent and that can then reduce further issues, further up the kinetic chain, right? Knee pain, whatever it is, lower back pain, instability, numbness of the feet, that type of stuff like we spoke about in one of the other videos. Now, when the cleat goes a long way back like this, there's a point where it gets a long way back and somewhere between there and mid-foot, it's basically the same. So when the cleat is far enough behind the regular kind of cleat positions that we see with road shoes, it for all intents and purposes becomes mid-foot, when it gets close enough to being mid-foot. So the idea behind it is your foot is very stable, your calf musculature, which would otherwise be used to stabilize the foot on the down stroke, just basically switches off. It just doesn't have to do anything during the stroke, which is great, but it has its downsides. So the upsides of mid-foot, when the cleat is a long way back, your leg is effectively significantly shorter.  But if we gave you a mid-foot cleat position, your seat height would have to go down probably 30 to 40 millimeters, which is quite substantial. Let's say that you're doing a time trial or a triathlon. Each centimeter that your head goes down, the bars can go down the same amount to keep the drop to the bars the same. So your frontal area, which you present to the wind, is reduced to the lower your seat height, right? So the aerodynamic gains for time trialing and that kind of thing can be pretty significant. Switching the calf off has some benefits, particularly for triathletes. They can get off the bike at the end of the bike leg and their calves are fresh, because they haven't had to do anything, so they can run more effectively for the first 10, 15Ks if they're doing an Ironman or something. They can get off the bike and their calves are much fresher. So that can be pretty important, right? Now people would say, well, you're not using your calf, you're not getting all of the muscle energy delivery to the shoe that you can. For steady state threshold or below threshold efforts, it seems to make no difference. And this is extremely unscientific, but in all the experimentation I've done with it over the years, both with myself and other people I know who have ridden midfoot, almost all of them have reported no loss at all to their 20 minute power, right? None at all. Some have actually reported a slight increase in their 20 minute power because they're much more stable on the seat and almost all of them report an improvement in speed at their 20 minute threshold load because of the aerodynamics advantages, right? So if you're doing a steady state time trial, pretty good, right? Downsides now, the downsides are that when you get out of the saddle and you're using your calf to spring, it doesn't feel that nice. It feels choppy, you're kind of a bit blocky at the bottom of the stroke, that type of thing, because you can't use your calf to attenuate the bottom of the stroke and spring naturally, right? So out of the seat feels a bit odd. You also do lose a little bit of your ability to accelerate really rapidly. And we spoke about this a bit in the cleat position video, yeah. As the cleat goes a long way back, it can be a slight detriment to your speed at which you can reach your maximal power output. Strangely though, the actual outright wattage that the rider produces in a flat out 10 second or 20 second effort doesn't seem to be affected a lot, but they seem to get there more slowly. And for crit racing and road racing, that can be a bit of a problem if there's a lot of surging efforts in the race where you have to change speed rapidly. Mid-foot's not ideal, yeah. So the other benefits of it are, seat goes down, aerodynamics get better. It does help if you've got foot numbness that's really persistent. If you've got circulatory issues in your feet, it does help a lot. If you've got oddities, if you've got like one foot that's significantly bigger than the other or a big leg length difference or something, it can help to stabilize certain types of riders and reduce other issues because it takes the foot's lever out of the pedal stroke. It just kind of deletes that section of the biomechanical puzzle. In terms of attaining mid-foot cleat position, there's a couple of ways you can do it. The way that if you want a true mid-foot, most of the time what we still do is I actually modify the bottom of the shoes and you can only do this with certain shoes. We couldn't, for example, do it easily with your shoe here because of the design of this channel that's cut out in the middle. But essentially what we'll do is we'll create an epoxy, out of like epoxy resin block in the center of the arch of the foot and we'll usually then sit a speed plate, base plate on it and this is a bit further back than it would be. But you can see how there'd be a small gap between that and the shoe. You fill that space up with epoxy and it's a bit convoluted. I use a blue tack dam around it and pour the epoxy in through the top with a speed plate, base plate on it and then re-drill the holes and put some new captive nuts inside the shoe to hold that in place. You can't really do it with a three bolt like a Shimano or a look cleat because it needs to sit curved on the bottom of the shoe. So we create an epoxy base for a speed plate, base plate in the center of the arch of the foot and then screw the base plate straight on. These extender plates have the ability to move the cleat a long way back. So you can't really ever get full true mid-foot out of one of these but it'll get it so far back that most of the benefits will come anyway. Your seat will go down a fair bit, the calf will be reduced a lot but it won't really ever go to a true mid-foot if you use one of those. With three bolt pedal systems, this system that a bloke in Switzerland is making is the best one that I've ever seen. This is a three bolt version of that. Does the same thing. The three countersunk holds here are where this bolts onto the bottom of the shoe and then you can see he's got a triangle here and a triangle there for two more rearward placement positions of the cleat. One of them is 12 millimeters further back than standard and the other one is 24 millimeters. So that'll give you a fair bit of rearwards translation of the cleat. These are made by a bloke in Switzerland as I mentioned, really high quality and I have no great affiliation with them except to say that they're the best off the shelf version of moving the cleat a long way further back that I've ever seen and they're really high quality, very strong that type of stuff, very well engineered. And so these can be used if you really don't wanna go to speed place to do this. These can be used to move the cleat back and then back a long way. And again, you may not get to a true mid-foot but once you get 24 millimeters, an inch further back for those American viewers, it becomes most of the benefits of mid-footer there already once you get that far back. So it doesn't technically have to be a complete mid-foot position to give you most of the benefits of lack of carp engagement, better circulation through the feet, lower front end, lower seat height, all that stuff. Not so good for sergi bunch riding but if you're a time trialist or a triathlete, endurance rider, yeah, yeah, Ordax riding, that type of stuff, yeah, ultra endurance stuff. I'm in the process of convincing Abdullah, the winner of the Trans Am, the vegan Melbourne boy who rode across North America in 16 days or something to win the Trans Am in the process of convincing him that moving to something like mid-foot will have serious benefits for those long sub-threshold steady-state efforts. And yeah, for that type of riding, man, there's almost no downsides. Well, the aerodynamic gains alone at solid power outputs that you might do in a time trial or something like that are often well worth any slight negatives that you might perceive like the choppiness out of the saddle and that type of thing, yeah. So that's mid-foot in a nutshell. It's a bit of a weird one but it shouldn't be as weird as it is. It should be more common than it is, yeah. And people should recognise that this is a possible thing that you can do. Even if you're just using off-the-shelf stuff and you don't wanna go drilling holes in your shoes, even using a speed plate, extended plate, or something like the patrocleats here to get the cleat a long way further back can do some pretty cool things, yeah, yeah. If you had another bike that was your endurance bike and you had another set of shoes, you could quite easily have two positions, yeah? Absolutely, yeah. And they'd be, depending upon how much of it, like I dropped my heels a lot so when I went to mid-foot, my seat height stayed mostly the same but if you're a decent tow pointer or something, you'll need to have the seat significantly lower and thus the bars lower at the same rate, yeah. So you need another bike, essentially. But a lot of people do, they have their endurance bike for going out for long days and they have their bike for bunt riding and if they do crits. Absolutely, yep, yep. It's a nifty little trick and it can have some serious benefits, yeah. Yes. Good, excellent.


Take tries. Yanovsky's made a decent start, so has Liguta. Waffendon on the inside right here. Waffendon now goes right, but Liguta's got the lead. Waffendon is second. Yanovsky is third. Here comes Freddie Ligwood. Ligwood's in the mix, putting the pressure on here now. And Waffendon is under all sorts of pressure. Yanovsky charging through. Liguta right in front of me up top. And the battle is up for second. Yanovsky's got it right now. And here comes Ligwood on Waffendon as well. For Hartam Liguta, what a start it was. He's cleared off. He's going to win his first four free. Freddie Ligwood and Waffendon really tearing it up for third place. Yanovsky's come through into second. Waffendon now relegated to the back. Ligwood working big time. He's going to get 16 world championship points if he hangs on there. But for Hartam Liguta, this is going to be a career defining moment. His first four free win. And will lead the world going into tomorrow night. Yes, he quite right, Kel. This man deserves it, the most consistent rider of the night. And Hartam Liguta of Russia wins the opening Grand Prix of the 2020 season. And his first ever Grand Prix victory in his career. It is 30th appearance tonight. Congratulations, Hartam Liguta. What a night for Hartam Liguta. Really has been in a class of his own. 62 seconds flat. What a time in the final. Really show the clean pair of heels.


My name is Elon Washington, I am the executive chef for your Tennessee Titans. So what got me into cooking was at a young age I grew up in Europe. I lived in Germany for five years and I was able to travel to various different countries and try different cuisines which really fueled my culinary career. Elon's been great for us, I mean she's an accomplished chef, she's easy to get along with. What do I do with my hands? I am Beatrice Beaucheme and I'm a lead cook here at St. Thomas Sports Park and so it's really exciting to be a part of this team alongside with her and we get to do such fun stuff all the time. We source our foods as local as possible, produce, we stay on trend with what's seasonality. I couldn't be more happier to have Elon be behind the scenes and out in front of our cafeteria for our players, our coaches, our entire organization that beats in there. So in a week I could go through about 150 pounds of protein easily. During training camp I think that could jump up to about 300 pounds of meat per week. Any dietary restrictions or nutritional ads that our players might have or want, she's right there to try to help assist them. Everybody is pretty particular as you might imagine and her attention to detail to make sure that everybody has stuff served exactly the way they have it, the dietary restrictions and just a friendly face. My favorite player on the team would have to be Derek Henry. He gives me the most challenges throughout the day. Derek's definitely a goofball. He comes through once he gets to liking one thing on our menu, he kind of sticks to it every day. Also around lunchtime when he comes in he just screams the word sandwich. That's his favorite thing to do is just scream sandwich and our staff knows exactly what that means. Also slowly on their rise is Ola Denny. So he's changed the dynamic in the cafeteria when he comes in. He's bright, bubbly, just brings a lot of charisma to the team. But we just like to cater to players like that, you know, not just Derek but if there's something particular that they want or need for their diet we just make sure that we like to cater to all of them. Which player eats the most? I might have to circle back to Ola Denny on that one. He's here for all meal periods. I do see him slip into our coach's dinners at night. I'd have to say the best part about this job is working for Mike Ravel, John Robinson and Amy Adams. They have created such an amazing program here and it's such a family-oriented organization that I couldn't ask for a better team to work for. Tighten up!


It's been such a long time that I've been to a meat man. I actually got the car out and everything. It's actually my first one. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah, I haven't. Wait, this year? Yeah, this is my first one, too. First one. Like, I've never been to a car meat store. Oh, first one, period. Oh, welcome, brother. Period, yeah. Welcome. Oh, OK. Let me correct myself. First one ever. Well, enjoy yourself. Make sure you look at everything. There's definitely a lot to look at. We got some big YouTubers over in that direction. You know what I mean? Oh, I appreciate it, man. I appreciate it, man. I appreciate it. I found out about meat. I was watching y'all, you and Fat Cat. Oh, the free smoke. Free smoke. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the free smoke. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I appreciate it, man. I appreciate it. Shout out to Fat Cat because he hooked me up with, for my mid-monthly release. Oh, OK. I got him, I hit him up in his embassy. He wrote me back. Word. Word, yeah, man. But yeah, man, we appreciate that. And we definitely appreciate the support, man. Rail to Reels over there. Yes, sir, man. In the front. Hunt it off. First person do a bun out. What's going on? How y'all doing? How y'all doing? You doing all right? How you doing? Man, chillin', chillin', man. Chillin'. First car meet ever. Who? Mine. Yours? Yeah. No, man, you don't get out. Nah, that's awesome, though. None's really been popping off. That anniversary. It is, it is. I know my car. Yes, sir. I'll do this, man. Yeah, that's nice, man. It's hoping if you want to take a look inside. I didn't realize this car was yours. I got you, man. I got you. Yeah, I didn't realize this one was yours. This is nice. Yeah, yeah. This is basically the successor of that over there. You know what I'm saying? Got the bigger brimbo's and everything. Yo, F.A. Green, right? Yes, sir. Do you have a social media or anything you want to shout out? Yeah, BearPost. Well, B3AR, P-A-W, 545. That's my Instagram. Go ahead and follow me if you guys want. Yeah, man. Make sure y'all go and check them out, man. Beautiful car. Thank you. You good? Yeah, it's my first time seeing them in person. Steer the shoulder or whatever you want to do. Straight up, straight up. Yeah, man. Yo, but what happened in 2019, though?  I was going to talk to him. Big train. No, but you know what? My cousin was about to buy a 19-year-old car from Mr. Rickson. And then he went to find one that had to stick to this one. All right, man. And he had no HID. He had no HID either. You know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying?  You know what I'm saying? Okay, nah, that is hell.  That's him, even if it ain't him. All right. That's him, even if it ain't him. That's him, even if it ain't him. That's garage-driven's brother right there, wide-bodied brother. We knew they were trying to make they were trying to make their little interests. Yeah, it's all good. They lay interests. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Mariachi band coming playing with me, I can't do it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right.   Ain't X1 ain't needed to meet one. Niggas are spoiled out of hands. Hey, hey. Yo, what's up, guys? More people are filling in. More people are filling in. Yo, what up? Long time no see. Got the whole family out and everything. Say hi. Y'all getting on. Yo, I got a dog, too. We got to meet up. Seriously. Yeah. Is this a dog? Oh, he's young, young. Uh, you tell me. Okay, I have a Doberman. Mine is, uh, 42 months now. Real quick, brother. Just shout out to the Instagram and all that good stuff. Instagram and YouTube is also HumbleBeast345 that represents the 5.7 and newest to my edition is going to be a 3.6 price of 300. Nice, nice. Make sure y'all go check them out, man. The damn music about to have me demonetized, but it's all right. Go. He a monster. He didn't come out to Dallas in April. If he can work, yeah, he go. That's where he's going. That's where he's going to see everybody. The showdown part three, really. Part two, but part three. It's humanology versus dump master. But then everybody else eat it, too. Yeah.    I'll talk about that. If I could get my man to move the trailer. No, she may have more to hide. I know. I see you. You're mastermind. You're braver, man. You're braver, man. Yo, but that event, it's the third time they're going to do it. It's always lit, man. All day long, the people that do like road racing, they do regular racing. Or everybody's racing. I'm not going to do one next time. But everybody just make videos like this. Thanks for tuning in. See you in the next one, man.


This study aims to examine the relationship between web-based social factors and obesity behaviors, specifically focusing on social media. A systematic review was conducted, resulting in the identification of 10 types of web-based social factors that impact an individual's weight loss journey at varying levels of web-based social structure to social media users' connection to the real world. The study found for levels of interaction in social media, with gender being the only factor found at the individual level and affecting users' web-based obesity-related behaviors. Social support was identified as the predominant factor that benefits users in their weight loss journey at the interpersonal level. Understanding the effectiveness of these factors is essential to help users create and maintain a healthy lifestyle. This article was authored by Chuchinli, Addisoji Adamali, Yaron Gu and others.


Welcome to TFNN. Hi Tom, thank you, how are you? I'm doing great.  So tell us, Danielle, you know, I was, of course, I've been down here 25 years when I was in Boston, you always had a closing attorney and it was an attorney. When I came down here, and Danielle folks is my real estate attorney, she's fabulous, okay? The bottom line I wanted to put her on though, just for the aspect of coming right across the country is why you should have an attorney. But even in Florida, in Florida, well here, in Florida, I mean, what happens is that you just have title people, right? So talk to us the difference in Florida, a title person versus having an attorney on your side. And I know you have a title company also, but talk to me about that difference. Yes, so the difference is essentially I can do the same thing a title company can, and they can almost do the same thing in a attorney can when it comes to a closing transaction, but not everything. You know, if the transaction goes 100% smoothly then a title insurance company can close it according to plan. Yes. Unfortunately, you know as well as anybody, not every transaction is a smooth transaction. Right. Sometimes there's those surprises in the title work that you didn't expect, and you need to fix those items. So I think that's probably the main reason why I recommend going to a real estate attorney with every transaction is to get that protection, to ensure that you can close and get those items fixed. I know a lot of title companies can tell you, hey, you have an issue here, you need to fix it, but they don't have the ability to actually help you fix that problem. Yes. You know what I mean? Yes, no, we both know I definitely know what you mean. Because what does happen folks when you do a lot of transactions, something's always gonna, not always, okay, but the bottom line when something does come up, you're talking about big money, if you're buying or selling a house and it's very important to make sure that it's done correctly. So what are some of the bigger issues that you see in your transactions that people, no matter where they are in the country, should always be looking at? I think number one, your deed. It's the most important document that you're going to sign. And a lot of people just treat it as another document. Yes. If it's not executed or prepared properly, you might not have the title that you expected to have. Or more importantly, what I see a lot is it won't include non-homesed language or marital status. And so when you go, you know, when the buyer goes to sell the property in, you know, 10, 15 years and there's an issue with the deed and to them fixing it 10 to 15 years from now is much, much more difficult than making sure it's correct at the outset. No doubt.  Are they won't set up an LLC? And all of a sudden, you think you're buying this off a trust, and the fact of the matter is it's never been registered. So can you talk to us a little bit about that? We've run into that a few times. They say it's a trust. So it's like, okay, where is the trust, right? I mean, but if you can speak to the audience, that'd be awesome. Yeah, so it's a little bit different depending on if it's an LLC or a trust. But yeah, absolutely. People will create what they think is a trust or actually, let's go with an LLC first. They'll create what they think is an LLC or corporation, but they didn't actually register it or it's dissolved. If they didn't register it, then it becomes a huge issue of who actually owns this property. That LLC doesn't exist and it never did. And it's not in your name individually. How do we fix that issue and make sure that you are the owner and can sell it? So that's a major issue. For sure. And what we've seen before is into a trust. A trust is a wonderful avenue to buy and sell property, but you need to make sure that the deed is done properly so it goes into the trust properly. If not, it goes into a trustee. And as you've seen, if it goes into the trustee's name individually and that trustee has any judgments or anything, it can attach to the property. So now you thought you had owned a property in a trust, but it's actually owned by this trustee who shouldn't have any ownership interest or any beneficiary interest in the property and any of their judgments have now attached to the property. Yes. Now folks, this part here is gonna save everyone a lot of money, okay? Talk to us about the title company, the title insurance and owner's insurance. And if you can explain to the audience the difference. And when you see this one, folks, let me tell you something, whether you're gonna do a refinance or anything like this, okay? If you can just explain how an owner's policy works and what the difference is, you know, like when I'm buying a place and I refinanced it or whatever, so how they can save money. Yeah, so your owner's title insurance policy is extremely important. And I don't think a lot of people understand that when they purchase a property. Your owner's title insurance policy is based off of the sales price. And it's something that you have for the entire life of ownership of the property. It stays with you. So it's a one-time small fee and you keep it forever. Now, what that does is when you own a property and you have an ownership and owner's policy, it protects you to make sure that you do own that property.  Well, you make a claim on your title insurance policy and they step in and protect you and they fight against that individual and say, no, you don't own this property. We're gonna protect your interest. And if that means that they have to pay this person off or they actually have to go into litigation, they'll do either of that. They'll hire an attorney to represent you and make sure that you own your property. What's also great is if you get a loan, if you get a loan or if you sell the property shortly thereafter, you get a discount on your title insurance policy as long as you have the owner's title insurance policy. So there is a lender's title insurance policy as well. There are two different policies. Owners protects you as the owner, lender protects the lender and ensures that their loan is in first lean position. If you don't keep them together, let's say you buy a property cash and you want to refinance it after the factor if you wanna take some money out for construction purposes, you'll still get a discount on that second lender's title insurance policy if you have your owner's title insurance policy in hand. Which is huge folks, okay? So the key is, just as Daniel explained, get that owner's policy because if you keep it, if you refinance it, you're gonna get a discount going forward. Daniel, thank you so much for the education. You have a great one, safe one. We look forward having you on again. Thank you, Tom, have a great day.


Thirty-six years ago, the first float conference that ever happened was in Denver, so we've in many ways come full circle, and Tom Fine and I were having dinner last night and talking about that first float conference where the keynote speakers were John Lilly and Jay Shirley. Did you imagine that? And having this in the background, I think, is a perfect format for this event, commemorating the full circle here in Denver. So today I'm going to give you guys a few updates. I feel like every year, the past few years, I've been dumping a lot of data on you, so I'm not going to overwhelm you with data this time, I promise, but I am going to give you some updates. And I think one of the important things to recognize as we're going through these updates is research is a constantly evolving process. Whenever you get data, then the next step is replicated, right? That's part of the scientific process. And I think we're starting to get there as a field of floating. Now I come from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it was really weird getting off the plane yesterday because it's a direct flight. Normally, I would get off in Denver and then catch my connecting flight to Portland. I almost accidentally went to a Portland flight. But it's great to be here, and we're celebrating actually a major anniversary of floating. Does anyone know what happened 50 years ago? And it's linked to floating intimately, the first man on the moon. How many here knew that all the astronauts in training and the rays to the moon were also floating? So in 1957, after spending a few years with Dr. John Lilly at the National Institute of Mental Health, Jay Shirley moved to my state of Oklahoma and built a fully immersive float tank in an 8-foot vat of water where you're connected to breathing tubes and wearing maybe one of the scariest helmets I've ever seen, floating vertically for many hours at a time. And as you can imagine, not many people volunteered for this research study. But lo and behold, NASA was actually doing confidential research that never got reported in all the astronauts in training to the moon.  And a book came out not too long ago called Promise the Moon. And the female astronauts were actually outlasting the male's two-fold in Dr. Shirley's float tank. Many of them could ask, you know, 10 or so hours in this environment. The males were getting out at about five hours. So I always think if NASA was taking this data seriously, it should have been a woman on the moon first, not a male. And there he is. Dr. Shirley and his room, you could kind of see a tape recorder. That tape recorder note was actually just recording people's stream of consciousness. He was a Freudian, and he was just listening as they would sit there for hours talking to themselves in this vat of water. So we've obviously come a long ways since those days in floating, and we're very lucky to have people like Glenn Perry, who moved us away from this design of the float tank into what we all know now. But there's another moonshot I want to present today, and it involves this moon. It's actually a dwarf planet. Does anyone know what this is? It's floating in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It's a little dwarf planet called Ceres, that's right. And you see that, you see this little area of light-colored brightness. That's one of the world's biggest pools of magnesium sulfate. So I think to myself as Elon Musk is getting ready to try to fly to Mars, if he could just go a little further, maybe he could drop us off on Ceres with some water and we could have the world's biggest float pool. So here's the moonshot. It's this idea that we all have knowledge and experiential access to this unique technology of floating, but the world of medicine, the world of science has mostly not heard of it. We're still in the early days. And so this idea of a float research collective is really about trying to establish a science of floating, and to do this with a whole collection of researchers. And obviously this could be a major educational resource for the float industry. And as part of this collective, there was a website that came out last year, clinicalfloat.com, and it contains a repository of all the peer-reviewed studies that have come out in the domain of clinical floating. So it's just there as a resource for other scientists, for people who are just genuinely interested in floating to learn about it. But beyond that, we need more researchers. And we need more replication in our research. That's the essence of science, right? As you do an experiment and then someone else somewhere could replicate it. And anything we do at my institute will have to be replicated. I don't think anyone in Western medicine is going to take work from one individual laboratory and assume that it's just going to work. So this is actually a very important part of disseminating the researchers, getting other researchers to actually try out the experiment again. And then as a long shot, every day around the world, there's probably thousands of people floating in your centers. Imagine if we could collect thousands of data points. That would be really exciting. We could learn things at a much larger scale. So one of the things that I'm most excited about is the past year has actually changed the landscape for the research collective quite a bit. So we have my lab in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And most of our focus is on mental health. We work with patients who have anxiety and depression, women with anorexia nervosa, people with PTSD. At the same time over the past two decades, research has been happening at Carlstad University in Sweden. And their work has really focused on stress related pain, burnout, insomnia is a new area of study they're heading in. But for the past 20 years, that was it. There really wasn't a lot more research happening in the world of floating. And as you can imagine standing here, it was quite lonely. You're sitting on series. No one else is studying this. Well, let's go through what has happened over the past year. To me, one of the most exciting things is another full circle. Dr. Tom Fine has convinced the powers that be that floating needs to come back to the University of Toledo. And over the course of the next year, he will be building a new float clinic in the hospital. And their studies are going to really focus on addiction and chronic pain, amongst other things. And Hanover in Germany, Florian Bisoner, is actually studying floating in patients who have chronic pain. And he's scanning their brains. And there's a clinical trial that's been going on for the past two years. And hopefully in the next year or two, he'll be able to finish that. And I'm going to try to get him to come out to this conference. This year, you're going to hear from Dr. Josh Hagen, who just opened a float clinic at West Virginia University. And one of the areas he's going to be studying is concussion and TBI, which I think is a very low-hanging fruit, yet absolutely no empirical research yet in this population. So we're finally going to get data looking at this. When I was at RISE this year, float STL had been avidly reaching out to Washington University. And they've established a collaboration to study mindfulness in floating. And that study is just getting ready to launch. Chapman University in California just built a brain institute. And they're very interested in studying floating. They have a float tank. And they're going to look at this in terms of consciousness and also brain processes. Lydia Codwell at Ohio State spoke a few years ago about some of the research she's doing with exercise science. But I'm really excited this year. We got Dr. Matt Driller to come out from New Zealand. And he's going to talk about the elite athletes he's been floating and how it's helped with performance enhancement and recovery from exercise. And then I just heard last week from the folks at Float Milwaukee and Andy Larson, who have reached out to the local researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin and have just received approval to do a study at their center looking at trauma and PTSD. So in one year's time it went from being very lonely on this Planet of Ceres to look at, we actually have the beginnings of a collective of scientists who are trying to study this, trying to understand its benefits and doing quite a range of different types of research. I think this is to me maybe the most exciting update I have to report to you this year. Now all this research, keep in mind, is happening within the context of what I think is really a cultural experiment. All of us are living as human guinea pigs, right? Being the first generation exposed to smart technology. How many of you have looked at the data from your phone to tell you how many hours a week you're using it? I see a lot of people who are scared to look at their use data. Well, guess what? A lot of us are actually on our phones more than 40 hours a week. Could you have imagined 10, 15 years ago before smartphones came out, I would tell you this story that in the next few decades there's going to be this little box that you're going to hold and for about a full-time job each week you're going to just be interacting with it. Would that sound weird? Well, we're doing it. And in many ways floating, I would say, is the antidote to this crazy cultural experiment that we're all undergoing. And the ramifications of what's happening with technology we just don't know yet. We're learning. Each year a World Happiness Report gets published and I always like to read it because what they do in this is they go around the world and they give the same measures to different societies and they try to understand each country in terms of levels of happiness and they also try to look at what is happening to happiness over time in society. And so I just want to share a few slides of data from the World Happiness Report of 2019. So this is the first thing. Over the past decade, as you could see, internet use has just spiked. But at the same time the amount of hours of sleep that we're getting the amount of social interaction we're having with real people not just virtual people in our social networks and our actual happiness is plummeting. They looked at over 150 different countries and looked at the change in happiness over the past 10 to 15 years and they ranked it. And guess where the United States is? Our country. We came in a 112th place. We're right behind Zambia in a few countries ahead of Afghanistan. So if you had to summarize how the state of happiness is in America I would say we're not doing too well. Zambia in Afghanistan and we're right in the middle. Meanwhile, anxiety and depression is escalating. It affects over a quarter of the whole population. It's the leading cause of disability worldwide. The World Health Organization actually came out last year and stated so. Three quarters of patients are not getting treatment. Only about half are improving with the current treatments. And the outcomes are not great even with the best gold standard treatments. Suicide has risen 30% since the turn of the millennium and in teenagers and millennials the ones who are using the technology more than anybody else suicide rates have doubled in the past decade. This is scaring a lot of mental health professionals when you see these suicide changes. When you ask the millennials what are the biggest problems that your peers are facing? 70% of them said the major problem is anxiety and depression much more so than bullying and drug addiction and alcoholism. It's anxiety and depression. And then when you look at what we're using to treat anxiety and depression it's often drugs and these drugs are highly addictive. Benzodiazepines, alcohol, opioids, ketamine these have become how we treat anxiety and depression and in many ways they've become a replacement and everything that's happening right now in our society with the opioid crisis is intimately linked to this story. Over half of the opiate prescriptions go to people who have mental health issues. It's all linked. So it's within this context that last year I presented some ideas and some theories about how floating could help and we received the first NIH grant to study this. And this is it. This is the grant we got investigating flotation rest as a novel technique for reducing anxiety and depression. And it wasn't just me. I wrote the grant but we have a great team of people who are part and parcel of this research and without them none of this could happen and in fact you're going to be hearing from Flux probably tomorrow talking about some of the work he's been doing and he'll be actually spending some of his dissertation really focused on the data in this grant. Now in terms of grants you have to understand this is how research is funded in America. If you don't get grant money you can't do research. It's our bread and butter. So the fact that NIH was willing to finally support float research after 60 years of other scientists trying to get grant money. I think this is a major change which means other researchers could now come into the field and the door is open. They're willing to support this research to understand the benefits of floating. And all of the research we're going to be doing in this grant takes place in our open pool. This was an absolutely brilliant work from Colin Stanwell Smith from FloatAway who spent about half a year living with me and his wife Ginny as well helping me build this laboratory to study floating in patients who normally would never try this. And I could tell you had I not gone the route of an open pool I don't think a single patient with severe anxiety would have even tried to be in my study. This was the key part to getting the patients to actually float is you have to get rid of the enclosure. I have nothing at all against float tanks that have enclosures. I think they serve a great purpose. But I think what a lot of people don't recognize is it creates a huge barrier to entry. A lot of the patients just refuse to float if there's an enclosure.  If you have an enclosure you're going to have a major barrier to entry. Now when you do a clinical trial you have to have a good control condition. Everything is based off of this. And so we've been devising different ways to quote unquote control for the effects of floating. And I don't know if any one control condition is going to be perfect but the one that we're using in this study involves what's known as a zero gravity chair. You could buy these and relax the back stores. They're very comfortable. And more or less what we're trying to do is control for the effects of simple relaxation. What are you able to do in the comfort of your own home if you're laying in a nice environment you have minimal pressure on your spinal cord you're alone in a quiet and dark room and someone's distracting you and how are the benefits of floating any different than that? So that's the control condition we're actually using in this study. Now we call it the float chair and part of the reason is we're trying to control for the expectancy effects. We want people to actually view this as part and parcel of the treatment. But unfortunately it's not exactly like floating, right? So you're not fully controlling for the expectancy effects. But last year I had the opportunity to meet folks from Italy who have designed I think a very interesting modality that involves dry floating in this zero body bed and it's a thin layer of PVC material on top of a bed of water heated to the same exact temperature as the water in the float pool. And instead of being like a water bed where you're kind of on top bouncing around you immerse into the material and it gives you the feeling as if you're floating. And in many ways the only difference between this if it's in say a room that has reduced light and sound and properly controlled temperature the only difference between this and the actual intervention is are you immersed in the water or are you on top of the water? So I think this has some potential benefits as a control condition but once again it's a highly active control condition. You're doing a lot of the same things that floating involves minus the act of being in the water itself. And we're going to start exploring this in the clinical trial as well. So in terms of the grant we have two primary aims and NIH viewed this grant as sort of a stepping stone to a much larger grant which is known as an R01. So an R34 sort of gives you enough preliminary data to support whether it's worth pursuing this at a larger scale level. So the sort of questions they want us to answer are very basic questions. Determine the feasibility, the tolerability, the safety and the impact of preference for delivering floating in a future randomized controlled trial. They want to know can patients with relatively severe anxiety and depression tolerate floating multiple sessions? If they could, okay great news, maybe we could actually do a large scale clinical trial but show us that they could tolerate it. Show us that they're not having adverse events while they're floating. And that's a key part to getting money and funding to do the larger scale study. And then the secondary aim which is obviously the question that we're most interested in is really about the efficacy of floating. What happens over the both short term windows of say one to two days post-float and then what happens in the long term when you follow these patients six weeks and six months later are they still feeling some of the benefits of floating? So those are the aims of the study, that's it. And the way we set this up, it's about a two to three year clinical trial is there's three arms. We start with 75 patients, they go through a baseline procedure and then they get randomized to what I call the prescribed float group where they get six sessions, one hour session each week. We also have the prescribed control group, the zero gravity chair, same exact setup as the float condition. And then we set up a third group where we call it the preferred group where they get to dictate how long they float for up to two hours and how frequently they float for. So if they want to float every day, they could do it. If they want to float every other week, they could do it. It's up to them and it's going to give us some sense in this patient group what is their preference. So before we set up the larger scale clinical trial we could first learn what is the patient's actual preference. We don't know yet. And so as you can see it's a relatively small clinical trial in a hard to reach target population. I could tell you working with patients who have severe anxiety it's very difficult to get them out of the house. A lot of the patients I work with have agoraphobia which means they have trouble leaving their bedroom. Anything outside of their space of comfort is going to be anxiety inducing. And so we have to find a way to actually get them to come out and float at least six times over the course of six or so weeks. And that's a key part of the study. That's one of our primary outcomes. We have a pretty strict set of inclusion and exclusion criteria for the study. And we are allowing people who are currently in psychotherapy or currently taking medications so long as they're stably medicated. And we are excluding for people who have relatively severe psychopathology so we're not letting people in who have say bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. And all of these people are naive to floating. They for the most part have never floated before. And we're collecting a whole slew of measurements but let me draw you to the main ones the primary and the secondary outcomes. How many sessions out of the six float sessions do they actually complete? That's the primary outcome. Once to see can these patients actually tolerate six flows? What kind of adverse events are happening and how does that say differ from our control condition? And what is the dropout rate? So my sense is if we could answer those three outcomes in a positive manner, NIH is actually going to be willing to support a much larger scale trial to look at efficacy which is really what all the other measures are starting to get at. And I didn't want to just measure self-report. I figured you have a really hard to find group of patients that are oftentimes resistant to other types of treatments.  And we're also going to be collecting biosamples. This is going to be part of a fluxes dissertation. And one of the neat parts of this is there's so many things you could do now with blood that you couldn't do even five years ago. So one of the things is we're not just going to be measuring sort of baseline inflammation across CRP and various cytokines. But we're going to be challenging the blood itself and exposing it to what's called LPS or endotoxin. So we'll take a blood sample, we'll put it in a tube that's coated with this challenge and we could actually see how the immune cells are reacting to this. So we could actually test two questions. Does floating affect baseline inflammation? And does floating affect the way your immune system reacts to stress? And I think that latter question may hold a lot of interesting data that really explores what floating is doing. We'll also be collecting cortisol measures and then I'm sure a lot of you are interested in this but we'll be collecting magnesium and looking at not just the effects of a single float which is what a lot of our earlier studies did but what happens to magnesium levels over the course of many floats. And it's a pretty time-intensive study. This is an individual sort of graph of what a subject's going to go through when they're in this clinical trial. So in total, it takes about 33 hours of somebody's time to complete this study. And they float for six sessions, they have pre and post measurements and then they also get follow-up at six weeks and six months. And so normally when you go into a float center if you were to say purchase six float sessions how much would that cost at your center? So you're hearing numbers anywhere from $300, $400. The patients in our study don't pay anything. We're a non-profit research institute, we care about the science of floating but we actually pay them $250 to do this study because they're going to be collecting a bunch of blood work, they're going to be doing various tasks and they're filling out a lot of questionnaires. So that's also part of this is they don't have to pay, we're actually paying them to do this study. Anyone want to volunteer? Got to come to Tulsa. And we're going to answer other questions too like does floating enhance interoception? Does it increase your distress tolerance? Does it reduce markers of inflammation and stress? Does it increase magnesium levels? So above and beyond some of the basic data that we're getting for NIH, we're going to begin to start exploring some of these other issues. And I would say it's going to take probably about two to three years to complete the study and maybe next year we may be able to give you a peek at some of the preliminary pilot data that we've collected in this. So I want to kind of shift gears for a second and go back to something I presented on a few years ago which is our initial work trying to understand how floating is impacting the brain. And actually one of the things that struck me about Glenn and Lee's talk is they were talking about the default mode. And you could actually see, there's the default mode right there and right there. Those are the two hubs of the default network. And we've begun to explore how floating actually impacts the state. And we're working on a paper now. I can't tell you too much about it but it's a major follow-up to the presentation a few years ago. And maybe next year I'll be able to present on this. But I do want to give you an update on another imaging study we did. And remember the way we set this up is it was all unhealthy subjects. We started with a group of about 50 participants. They had their brain scanned for about 90 minutes and then they were randomized to either float in the pool or float in the chair for 90 minutes. And over the course of several weeks they had three float sessions to just acclimate. We didn't want to scan their brains right away because then we'd be just basically measuring novelty effects, right? So what they did is they had three sessions to acclimate and then immediately after the third float session or the third chair session they had their brain scanned again. And we did this task called the monetary incentive delay task. And essentially what happens in this paradigm is you're presented with a little circle and then it could say something like $5. And that means that if you press a button fast enough you're actually going to win $5. And at the end of the study, they would do multiple rounds of this, we would pay them. So you're actually winning this money. It could also say something like, you know, minus $5 which means if you don't press the button quick enough you'll end up losing the $5. Or as a control condition it could also say zero which means even if you don't press the button quick enough you're not going to gain or lose any money. And then this triangle comes on screen and that's when you're supposed to press the button. And if you do it quick enough you could get the money. So that's how the task works. Really trying to look at what's going on in the brain as you're anticipating the receipt of an award. A reward. And the area of the brain that seems to be most responsive to this is very deep in the middle and it's called the nucleus accumbens. It's highly rich in dopamine. Nearly every drug of abuse will activate this area as will anything that's rewarding, whether it's food or sex. And so previous work that's looked at this has found that at those $5 rewards where you really up the ante where the nucleus accumbens really starts to activate. And so the prediction was quite simple. Those who would float in the pool condition would show further enhancement of activation within their nucleus accumbens. So boy this must have been three or four years ago at the float conference. I presented some of the early data on this. We now have more or less the complete results and I'll take you through it. And just keep in mind we're doing the brain scans to see and post float. We are not scanning the brain during the float but if anyone knows how to do that come see me. I would love to. We just don't have an MRI machine that's compatible with the float tank. Not yet. But Colin could potentially resolve that. So let's start with pre-float. What's going on? So there's the nucleus accumbens. We extracted the signal from the specific region of the brain and we look at it separately in the left and the right hemisphere. So I'll kind of be presenting that. And just as a color code the green bars represent what happens in the nucleus accumbens during the $5 reward anticipation and the white bars are when they didn't have any money to win on that trial. So that's what it looks like pre-float in both the chair and the pool groups and essentially there's no differences. At baseline both the chair condition and the pool condition as you would expect is finding a significant activation within the nucleus accumbens to the $5 reward. So let's move to post float. What we found post float actually supported the hypothesis. A significant increase in both the left and the right nucleus accumbens to the $5 reward condition above and beyond the people in the chair condition. And when you look at say comparing this to the loss condition when you could lose $5 there was no difference. It was really specific to the positive aspects of the reward. It wasn't changing from pre to post float for the punishment side. So let me just kind of show you that again. You see a significant enhancement post float to the $5 reward and essentially no change to the negative $5. And when you compare the self-report ratings post float and look at a measure of happiness on the ponus essentially what we found is the degree to which floating improved your happiness was correlated with the degree to which your nucleus accumbens signal was being elevated post float. And the opposite was actually happening in the chair condition. So I think this is really fascinating data providing some really clear evidence that floating is impacting an area of the brain that's highly involved in reward processing and in motivation. Patients who have say severe depression have what's known as anadonia. It's one of the worst symptoms of depression. Things that are normally pleasurable no longer bring you pleasure. And when they do the same exact task in the MRI scanner with people who have depression guess what happens to their nucleus accumbens? It's blunted, it's barely activating and after they get better with treatment you start seeing the signal rise. So I think there's some evidence here that we're impacting this very deep circuitry that's involved in our sense of positivity in reward processing and in motivation. Now moving into the body one of the things I presented last year is this highly significant reduction in blood pressure especially diastolic blood pressure within 10 to 15 minutes everyone we've ever tested seems to be dropping anywhere from 10 to 15 points and we're not seeing anything like that in our control conditions. And so one of the things we started to explore is does the degree to which your blood pressure changes in the float actually relate to how it's affecting your emotions and your mood and we did find an association that I think is interesting. Flex is going to present a lot more about this tomorrow but to just kind of take you through this this is all the data points of blood pressure that we gathered and what you find in this left graph is as diastolic blood pressure drops so does your state anxiety and in the right graph as your diastolic blood pressure drops your serenity increases and so when we looked across all the different measures that we collected whether it be heart rate, heart rate variability or things like blood pressure or even respiration it was the blood pressure signal that seemed to be relating most heavily to changes in anxiety levels and serenity and so we're getting ready to write this up now and try to understand how the bodily changes are actually impacting the emotional changes. I think this is important though about two years ago they changed the definition of hypertension it went from 140 over 90 to 130 over 80 which means millions of people who are mostly healthy are now going to have a pretty severe diagnosis you don't want to have hypertension it's one of the biggest predictors of cardiovascular disease and stroke so if it's true that you could drop say 10 to 15 points and your blood pressure is you know in the 130 over 80 range you could take someone who's hypertensive and bring them into a normal tensive range and instead of having to medicate them which is what's happening right now in our population at a massive scale people are on blood pressure medications it's one of the biggest drugs in the market you might be able to do this naturally so is there any evidence to support this? well you could go back to the 1983 meeting and I bet you Tom was up here talking about this research where he took a group of patients who had hypertension floated them continuously for four months and found that four months later they were no longer hypertensive and if this could be replicated in a larger sample I think this could be a very useful way to envision floating for more than just people who have mental health issues there's a lot of people who have hypertension and that's a low hanging fruit and the blood pressure effects of floating I could tell you are the biggest effects that we're seeing in our physiological data there's another thing that came out actually just a few months ago it's known as the ICD-11 this is more or less the Bible for doctors around the world it lists every single medical condition that's out there and the symptoms that are involved in it and for the first time the ICD-11 put burnout as a condition and for those who don't know what it is this is their definition a syndrome conceptualized is resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed characterized by feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion increased mental distance from one's job feelings of negativism or cynicism related to the job and reduced professional efficacy you know I talked to my colleagues in psychiatry and psychology about burnout and some of them actually laugh and they say well isn't that life? is that really what life has come to? we all have to live in this burnt out way and some of the clearest data we've seen from the Swedish group is floating could really help with burnout so now that this is listed in the ICD-11 someone could get a diagnosis and insurance companies starting in around 2022 are going to be able to reimburse for burnout that's an exciting moment potentially for floating and I really believe that the sooner insurance companies get data to support floating's benefit the sooner they're actually going to be willing to pay for everyone to float at your centers could you imagine all those weekday floats during the say mornings or afternoons where the tanks are normally wide open right? you're going to have patients with pretty severe disabilities and medical issues coming in to float and they're not going to have to pay anything and that could be five or ten years away you know two months ago I actually got a chance to visit Australia and I was really fortunate to have Tony Basil there on the left who hosted me she's the head of the float therapy association of Australia and then some of you might remember Nick Dunn and he was here a few years ago at the float conference but I got a chance to actually see floating in Australia and I could tell you they're even more ahead of the game than America the disability organizations in Australia are already reimbursing patients who are floating in fact I met a patient who had over two months of float sessions completely covered retroactively because of their disability and so I think this is sort of a preview of what is going to happen in the future more and more of the medical providers and the health insurance companies are going to start reimbursing for floating but once again that is all contingent on the data we have to show floating is effective and the whole trip out to Australia was really centered around the international mental health conference where they invited me to come give a keynote talk and once again Australia is extremely progressive because there hasn't been any mental health conferences that have invited me in America to give a keynote talk but what I can tell you is they were very open to the idea that floating could help their patients and a lot of the patients are sick of the medications that was sort of a theme I learned during the trip so maybe we could actually look to Australia as a model of what could be happening already in America we just need to accelerate it a little bit and so I had an idea I said you know maybe we could start creating studies that could really leverage the potential of floating as an effective intervention above and beyond say medication and the one medication that I keep thinking about is really what I would say is the harbinger of what's to come it's what I refer to as the next opiate crisis benzodiazepines these are drugs like Xanax or Ativan or Valium that are prescribed at a monumental level making billions of dollars a year and over the past decade the number of benzo prescriptions has doubled and as of last year one in eight Americans is taking a benzo now I have nothing against a drug that could help you feel better but guess what one of the main side effects of benzodiazepines are you're physiologically addicted to it in other words you could be taking the drug exactly as your doctor prescribes it and then when you try to get off of it you cannot just like with opiates right it's the same issue the immense physiological addiction and it's very dangerous if you try to come off cold turkey you could actually die you could have delirium tremens you could have seizures so we're giving people prescriptions at a monumental rate of a drug that's just like the opiates and I could tell you a lot of the overdoses that are happening now with the opiates are often people who are both using the opiates and the benzos together and when you ask the patients who are taking benzos and misusing it meaning they're taking it more often than a doctor recommends or taking it for a longer period of time why are you doing that this is what they say 46% say they do it because they want to feel relaxed and they want to relieve muscle tension 22% is to help them with sleep about 11% is to help with emotions does anyone in this room know of some modality that could help relax relieve muscle tension improve sleep is there something else that might be able to do this that won't cause you to have an immense physiological addiction well I presented data last year showing that in this group of patients many of whom had tried benzodiazepines floating could significantly drop their state anxiety levels into a normative range and that was a single float session and then we followed them for about 24 hours and even a day later they're still feeling the benefits with the typical benzo it's usually about 4 to 8 hours later where the anxiety starts reemerging so what an interesting idea we could do a head-to-head study where we take the same patient and we float them or we prescribe to them a standard benzodiazepine and we track their anxiety levels pre-to-post float or pre-to-post benzo and we track it over the course of several days and when we get that data now a doctor could go to a patient who's struggling with anxiety struggling with sleep and say, you know I could hand you this prescription pad and you could take this pill or here's an alternative that doesn't require something that you could potentially get addicted to that will have the same effect and I think it's those sorts of studies where you do head-to-head competition within the same subject something known as a within-subject crossover design that is going to get western medicines to start taking floating seriously but in order to do that study we have to fund it and I could tell you Big Pharma is probably not very happy about funding this study so over the course of the next year one of my goals is actually to start raising money to actually conduct this study would that be something you guys would be interested in helping with? To me these are the sort of studies that are so quintessential because until you do those head-to-head comparisons the average doctor is going to say oh it's probably just a placebo it's probably snake oil it's probably one of these other things out there that helps people they think but it actually isn't helping them at all well if you could show them objective data in a head-to-head competition something that is beaten the placebo like a benzo then you could actually start convincing the doctors so my hope is over the next year or two we'll be able to raise enough money to actually do this head-to-head study and with that I'd like to thank my colleagues who I work with every day I want to especially thank Dr. Kalsum my partner in crime and all of this research and I look forward to the future of float research thank you


Ibadan land, the Oba Mohud Olalekon Balogun has crowned an elevated Asian 34 bales in Ibadan land to ownership status during the coronation program held at the Ulubadan Pallas Ojaba. The event also witnessed the crowning of bales by the elevated high chiefs and commissioner for local government and chief tensi affairs, Honorable Shegun Olalewala. Two months ago, the first aspect of the program was held at the Asian Tamapo Hall when former high chiefs and members of advisory council were crowned as Obas, combining their age-long titles of high chiefs with royal majesties. The elevation and crowning of 34 of bales from various communities and six local government councils of Akiele, Lagelu, Egbeda, Onara, Edo, and Oluyole is in line with the state chief tensi law as amended and a bold step in restructuring Ibadan. In his address, the state governor, Inginia Ulushei Abiodu Makinde, represented by the Honorable Commission of the local government and chief tensi affairs, Honorable Shegun Olalewala, congratulated the newly crowned Obas and admonished them to see this elevation as a higher calling. While congratulating the new Obas, Governor Makinde charged them to be good leaders to their subjects. In Ibadan, we hollow protocol and order. The process was taken to the Ohio State as an assembly by the governor of Ohio State. So it was the Ohio State's assembly that gave assent to this process. That the land grabbing that is going on around, it is food that can bring a name to it. And by the grace of God, as it's reaching its success in your tenure, it's saying that you should allow peace to reign in your domain. So also, it's usual of security, there is no crime without people knowing that they stay. It's saying that you ground leaders on us today. These people are living in the midst of you. And if you identify them, you won't be able to create their people out. As Neurocolon now, it takes responsibility. You have Elijah, you have Elemeda, you have about over 30-something people now taking responsibility of their domain. That concerns you that over to 2.0, we are moving towards... NEWS OPDATES