So I was wondering if you could start just by telling me about your background and what made you end up working with cryptocurrencies and blockchain specifically. My name is Jota Steiner, I'm the CEO of Parity. I started this company three years ago together with Gavin Wood who was one of the original co-founders of Ethereum and I myself used to work for the Ethereum Foundation looking after security before the launch of the Ethereum platform. Before that I have a background in applied math so I spent quite some time at Uni, worked a bit in consulting after my PhD and then got more and more interested basically at around the time of the Snowden revelations interested in like what's actually happening online, what's happening to our data, like how does this all work and I ended up reading a lot, accidentally came across Matesave which was an early project in the space as well and then saw people discussing Ethereum in that context about four years ago, like how to use it for access management of data and then yeah met the Ethereum people this is how I got involved basically. So it's all started with Ethereum for you then. Yeah I mean I had read about Bitcoin and it was like interesting to me like from a math perspective and but I didn't I only realized like the potential when I came across these discussions of like what can you actually do with Ethereum already like this level of abstraction yeah. So why don't you next tell us a bit about your relationship with Ethereum both personal and business of course we want to hear about Vitalik. Back at the time I got interested in like what can you actually do with it? Like this whole data perspective was interesting but then also around the same time I met Jesse Baker who was just starting a company called Providence where she looked at sort of trying to create like a Facebook for product products like bringing transparency to supply chains that was sort of the idea like what's the history, what are the people processes behind products and we started to speak about like how could you use blockchain in a particular Ethereum and I ended up sort of doing this and working for the foundation on security so working with external researchers making sure that certain tax scenarios analyzed in a bit more detail before the launch of the platform so that's what I did like initially but then basically why working on Providence realizing that really the technology isn't there yet where it needs to be in order to go mainstream and so out of that frustration Parity came out so as a company where we wanted to further work on the fundamental technologies and push that forward so which kind of nicely ties back to my math and science background so being able to push to push the technology on that end pretty pretty good fun. And so what's Parity doing now that's new because I'm just doing Googling before this I saw that you guys have the polka dot blockchain platform now. Initially we started with a clean slate implementation of Ethereum when we started Parity just to like basically taking all the learnings from the early days of Ethereum and coming up with a new implementation and then over time like through different projects that we did and the different discussions we had we understand more and more like what it is that is needed to to bring the technology to a state where it can actually be used. Initially the ideas involved a lot around just pure interoperability like few years ago the discussions about private chains and public chains started so it seemed sensible it also seemed sensible like as a way of optimizing scalability like think of when you have parallel chains where certain clusters of transactions are being processed like and then you have interoperability between the chains that's one way of scaling a system right but then over time like things like scalability sorry things like governance became also more of an issue and and we really started thinking about like what is sort of the next level of abstraction that we need to bring to this technology in order to make it much more general much more easily to adapt to solve for these issues and and that's why Polkadot or the technologies around Polkadot sit right now so substrate is a technology that we are that we just released in a POC state there's a testnet it's a very general framework for spinning up your own state machine so if you think of initially you have Bitcoin with with a platform that way you could do payments basically if you want to think of it in that way then with Ethereum you you got this like general platform for building decentral applications and then now with with substrate you get a framework for spinning up your own decentral platform so spinning up your own Ethereum your own your own Zcash your own Bitcoin and and because they all use the same framework framework by default they interoperate and and that's that's where where that's the problem that we are trying to solve at the moment it's like very technical engineering basically creating these frameworks like peer-to-peer technology and networking and like they are all sorts of elements and it's really not that easy to build them all together that they work yeah okay so this might be kind of a stupid question I mean I understand everything you said because I write about crypto a lot but to our YouTube audience or to people could you explain what everything you just said in like one simple sentence you know like what does parody do what does polka dot do so what we're doing at parity is coming up with a fundamentally new way of building online services so the way how the web has evolved and applications on the web is everything we do every service we use we always have to rely on centralized servers where all our data is hosted where there's like an authority that decides on like how does the service work what happens if there's contention like it's it's always like push to them or like they they are in charge they have the authority to decide and and what we're trying to build is basically a system where there's much more agency on the user side where there's less of a divide between service provider and the people that use the services so that it really becomes a much more open much more much more peer-to-peer way of interacting with each other where we don't have to go through Facebook through Google but instead have like seamless interacting with like our friends or whoever we want to interact with that's like web 3.0 that's how you 3.0 yeah yeah the next level of the web yeah so how long do you think it would take before we actually would enter the web 3.0 era because it took us a while to get to web 2.0 so do you have like a time timeframe for that with Pocotot specifically we're aiming to release Pocotot at the end of next year now that doesn't mean we already see applications I think that that's gonna be a gradual process I mean there are things you can use already to make your applications more the central more peer-to-peer there's some solutions for having interoperability like cross-chain transactions I hope that over the next few years we're going to see the first implementations applications that fundamentally use this a lot of what we have to solve evolves around usability and user experience and this would probably still take a bit also there is sometimes like an advantage in having systems a little bit centralized because you can have a massive efficiency gain in certain cases and and we still haven't found out like where we have to make these trade offs like how central how decentral should things be because if a system is completely decentral that also means as a user I have a lot of responsibility and what are the right ways of putting in redundancy so that when I lose a private key like which is the access to my wallet like I still can move the cash or the money I have in the wallet so what would you say to someone that says you know I don't know what you're talking about this web 3.0 I like using Facebook it's comfortable it's familiar I don't care if they take my data I have nothing to hide you know what's your argument to people that would say that if people don't don't see like what the underlying mechanisms are that make systems like Facebook really not like the perfect systems to intact with but I guess like the recent revelations around Cambridge Analytica have shown and in particular have shown the governments how powerful these platforms have become which like the hearings have shown like there is a lot of spotlight now on on all the services to come up with answers and like because like governments via the interference that that come through through these services and I believe we're gonna see regulation that will play in favor of decentralization to a certain extent and we've seen that in Bureau Borready like with GDPR so the directive on data protection although there are some questions around like how this intakes exactly with blockchain I believe like on the political side there's a there is a lot of will of making sure we don't give power to quasi-governments that are completely unregulated bringing up the data privacy bill I know some blockchain companies have expressed problems with it because of the whole right to be forgotten and the whole point of a blockchain is that nothing is ever forgotten so how do you see that contradiction playing out so I think we I mean I hope that we'll see clarification from regulators and from lawmakers over the next couple years like in principle I see that like the people that believe in blockchain technology and the people that were behind the GDPR have a have a huge set of common goals basically giving power back to to the users and at space basically unfortunate that the drafting of the GDPR came just before blockchain became a thing and so it became way too specific in the way it was drafted I mean politics can be slower but I would hope that people will recognize the the potential of the technology and therefore I don't know create sandbox boxes or like actually find a way of just leading to more clarification so what do you think is maybe an example of a country or regulatory framework that they're doing everything right does that exist yet I mean Switzerland was interesting because it's like it's a small country like small countries have it easier right or like easier because then they've always like struggled with retaining maintaining relevance and so they had to be more agile and adapt to changes in the environment much more quickly so I think we're gonna see a lot of regulatory innovation or like regulatory competition between countries which helps entrepreneurs to a certain extent but then only so much as like this is all global like this is technology that we're building for the entire web so even if you're complying in one country that doesn't help you necessarily so still it gives you a lot of assurance yeah I'm not sure whether I've seen anybody who does like everything right but it's it's quite good that the fact that people are mobile these days and they just move around wherever they can build their business has led to regulatory competition so this next question is changing the subject a bit but I saw you retweeted the other day kind of a mean about women in crypto where the media is shouting where are the women in crypto and there's a woman in crypto shouting back like I'm right here and they're not listening so I'm sure like my question is how many times do you get asked about what's it like being a woman in crypto I get asked frequently like my perspective on this and what needs to be done and then I guess my frustration with that topic comes a lot from often those discussions are very nuanced but then in the end all that gets printed is like just a complaint like there aren't that many or like the top like the main topic of the article is then all the Lambo's and I don't think it's helpful like I believe it's more helpful to just talk about the work that people do and like see that as like I don't find it as inspiring if I see people just like driving their Lambo's either like that wouldn't have been the reason why I would have come come in and work in crypto but instead like seeing people that just work in the space and becoming like interested in the topics that's why what I believe should be talked about my next question is about the Ethereum and the frozen wallets that happened well a while ago but it became a news topic again in April because there was the Ethereum proposal to reverse the hack and it ended up being or not the hack to reverse the freeze and ended up being voted down and I was wondering if that's something that you guys at parody are still thinking about how to get the Ethereum out of that frozen library or if it's kind of like it happened it's done we're just moving moving forward so we're still I mean there are a lot of efforts in with any Ethereum to come up with answers like how to fix the issue of like governance just in general and the reason why governance is an important thing is because have if you have like an answer to this like it's easier to to come up with ways where you decide on like contentious issues like whether you want to like do a hard fork or whatever to to unfreeze the funds so and I believe this is a fundamentally needed debate because we haven't figured this out yet like how do we actually want to want to govern decentralized systems and that's what what we are trying to work out with the community I do believe if you want to encourage innovation in the space you need to make sure you don't discourage discourage experimentation like the optimization that led to the to the freeze was a very sensible optimization back at the time it became clear it will be an issue like transaction throughput the cost of transactions and we made an optimization that would lead to less cost if you deployed a wallet and the truth is like the tools that we need in order to write smart contracts safe smart contracts aren't there yet and so not not finding an answer to like and and the parent the wallet freeze wasn't the only issue that happened where people lost access to their funds like there were other issues and I still hope that we find a solution where where like bugs in infrastructure that led to people losing access will be fixed in a in an adequate way today during the tech crunch fireside chat with Vitalik buttern he mentioned something about recovering frozen Ethereum funds by doing a soft spoon and I was wondering if you could explain what that phrase is if I even got it a soft spooning isn't exactly a way of recovering like what you do with a soft spoon is you basically use whatever the current state is of a chain say theorem like who owns how much ether what is the state of the contract and whatnot and use this as a starting point for a completely new chain so and then obviously you have all freedom to propose also changes to that state and in that case what you could do is you decide to fix the buggy buggy library contract and so all of a sudden that would become accessible again so basically in a new chain maybe maybe like an Ethereum 2 that's proof of stake based you would start with a clean state where all known bugs are fixed and that's what what falls under or like some solutions like this is what's called a spoon like you just take sort of the state as as inspiration for the state of a new so you're like scooping it up in a spoon yeah okay got it what is the normal day in your life look like oh what's a normal life I mean it's a mix of like all sorts of tasks like meeting the team there's like a lot of a lot of travel going to conferences speaking meeting with partners I mean I guess there's no typical day but yeah I mean the company also has changed over time like we're by now around 50 people and so we need to find answers like how we scale our company internally as well and yeah that's that's the topics that coin telegraph like subscribe and hodl


Welcome to Piranormal Episode 6. This time we're going to be talking about sleep paralysis. And as we jump in, we have most of our co-hosts with us together. We have Trey Strickland and Doug Overmeyer's with us. Brian Goddawa has graced us with his presence. Doug Van Dorn and of course Natalina. So welcome back everybody. Just chime in. Merry Christmas. That's sort of an inside joke because Natalina, why don't you tell everybody sort of what you're dealing with today? Well, we have had about two feet of snow in the past 48 hours and I'm just barely here on the show by the skin of my teeth because I've been trapped in a pile of snow for several hours. So it is beginning to look a lot like Christmas over here in North Dakota. Yeah, which is real by the way. It is a real, it's a real, it's not a militarized zone. And your teeth aren't shattering so you're in good shape. Yes. All right, well sleep paralysis, we decided to take a look at four articles and I'm just going to mention those for listeners. This is going to be in no particular order. They range from 1999 all the way up to 2015. But one is titled, The Identification of the Transmitter and Receptor Mechanisms Responsible for REM REM Sleep Paralysis. And that's from the Journal of Neuroscience. The authors are Brooks and Peaver. Then we have two authored by, I'm not sure how you pronounce this last name, it's C-H-E-Y-N-E maybe Shane or Cheney. I guess you could see either of those. And then one of those two has a few co-authors, Roy Furr and Newby Clark. But one of the articles is entitled, Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations During Sleep Paralysis, Colon, Neurological and Cultural Construction of the Nightmare.  And the second article by, we'll just go with Shane here, is entitled, Situational Factors Affecting Sleep Paralysis and Associated Hallucinations, Colon, Position and Timing Effects. Now those two articles again authored primarily by the same person. There's going to be a lot of overlap there. The second one that I just mentioned, Position and Timing Effects, really deals with the body position and like the time of night when sleep paralysis typically occurs. And then lastly, we had an article by Anne Cox entitled, Sleep Paralysis and Focal. That was from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, an open journal that is freely accessible on the web. And I should mention the two Shane and articles. One was from the Journal of Consciousness and Cognition. And the other was the Journal of Sleep Research. So we have four different journals, different aspects of sleep paralysis. And I think it's probably good to start off this discussion by asking all of you, and then I'll go last, have any of you ever had sleep paralysis? Can you tell us about it? I have. I was thinking about this and leading up to the show because initially I was going to say that although I've experienced sleep paralysis, I've never experienced the really kind of scary things that usually come along with it. I just could recall waking up and being unable to move but seemingly fully aware. And that in and of itself is a scary sensation. But as I was thinking about this, I recalled that when I was quite a bit younger, I did have this series of instances where I had waken up. I woke up in the night and I couldn't move. And I remember, I thought people were screaming at me loudly, screaming directly into my ears. And I was so scared and I couldn't move. And I also was trying to like, I was very young. So I still, you know, lived at home and I was trying to scream for my parents and I couldn't actually make any words come out. And so that heightened the scariness. And I remember my eyes kind of darting around the room, trying to figure out who was screaming at me. And this happened to me a number of times, but I have kind of forgotten about that. But I think that would qualify as a sleep paralysis and auditory hallucinations or whatever they were. But I've never experienced like the full, you know, seeing things and, and, you know, feeling the crushing pressure on my chest or anything like that. But I've experienced it kind of on that level when I was younger, more of an auditory thing and just the paralyzing fear along with the actual bodily paralysis. It hasn't been something that's been an ongoing issue for me, just kind of some isolated instances. This is Brian Goodell to add to that from my own experiences. Yeah, I've found this very fascinating because of the fact that it sort of explains a lot of the things that I have experienced as well over the years. And I guess we'll be talking about the several different major categories that they fall into. But the one that I've experienced most was the intruder version, which is this notion that fear, you're being watched, maybe an evil presence or at least hostile presence, that kind of a thing. And I definitely have experienced that over the years. But mostly in more recent times, it always ends up with me. I'm in the supine position, and I am looking up at the smoke alarm in my, in my bedroom that has a little teeny green light. And I go and it's so funny because like every time I go through the same process of who is that watching me? Is that a government worker? Is that an alien? Is that a demon? Is that a, you know, and I go through the process every time. And it's very confusing until I finally sort of become more woken and I realize, oh, it's a smoke alarm again. Why do I always keep thinking it's someone watching me type of thing? It's kind of amusing in some ways. But yeah, so that's been mostly what my experience has been. And that's like once every, I don't know, maybe four months or five months or something like that. Wow, that's pretty frequent.  That's what I was thinking too, that totally explains your books, man. You know, and that is more than a joke because I do believe that that might actually have some effect, you know, because if you're if you're trafficking in thought patterns that deal with, you know, whether it's the demonic or just scary things, I do believe that that can put your mind in that category thinking, you know, you can become a little bit more paranoid. I'm the kind of person who walks down the street and I'm thinking of movies I've seen when I see people do things, you know, and I'm like, honey, don't do this because I saw this in a movie, you know. And so it kind of does consciously come into my world. And I actually do think that that may be some of it, you know. Yeah, when I walk down the street, I'm thinking about either my wife or my pug. I haven't seen either of them in movies. Well, I mean, like, you know, like we go, we I live in a condo. So we go down to the garage and it's sort of like, watch yourself, look around, make sure there's no one in the garage who might attack you because and of course, LA in LA, it's not an it's not an unrealistic. We actually did have people steal cars and break violent people break into our cars in the basement. So it's not unrealistic. But I definitely I think more about those things. And so it doesn't it wouldn't surprise me that they it comes up more frequently in my dreams or whatever. How about either of the dogs? So what Brian just said is interesting to me, because this is a DVD. Because, first of all, I mean, I tend to think that I think about some pretty weird things. And Brian's kind of my hero. So I've been watching more horror movies lately. But I actually, I mean, I might be able to remember one or two instances sort of like Natalina where I've had a I couldn't move, I wake up and I can't move. But I've had nothing of what's what Brian described. I haven't heard anything. There's been nothing but that seems supernatural or strange. It's just like I just couldn't move, which like she said, it's terrifying. But there's nothing more to it. So it's curious that Brian would would make that comment. And then I'm, I'm kind of making the opposite, I guess, I don't know. Yeah, this is the I've never experienced any of these situations. Oh, that's interesting. This is true. I have a handful of time. And it is pretty scary. I remember everything and just fighting trying to make my muscles move. It hasn't happened in about 20 years, but I have had a handful of experiences, only one that felt demonic in a sense that I was sleeping, I was on vacation, and I woke up, I was paralyzed, and I felt like something was trying to kill me. And it felt like my conscious was kind of fading out. So it was like getting blacker and blacker and blacker and blacker. And as it got blacker, I fought more and more and more just to get my hands to move. And finally, sure enough, I was. And that's the only time that it was actually ever scary in the dark since the other handful of times is just I woke up, I couldn't move. And it was just I took everything in my brain to just move your hand, move your hand, move your hand and try to fight it. And it's the most weird sensation to be awake and not be able to move anything into it literally took everything brainpower I had to move my hand. And that wasn't as scary as much as that one time. And I've only had one episode that it it felt scary in nature. And, you know, I have no idea what that means or what it is. But I have experienced it and it's not fun sometimes. Yeah, I can remember this. I can remember having this experience two times. And I it's probably happened, you know, more than two times, but that I distinctly remember. And it hasn't happened for, in my case, you know, over 10 years. But I could tell you where I was both times, you know, the situations and whatnot once was in college where I was not lying on my back. So according to the literature, this is a little unusual.   And in the, in the one instance, the one when I was in college that which would have been the first one, at least that I recall, distinctly, there, I did have the sensation of something being on top of me. So you have this pressure. But, you know, I just, I don't know why, because I can't remember ever doing any reading about it or anything like that. But I just sort of knew, okay, there's just something going on here that, you know, I didn't think it was sinister. I didn't think it was supernatural, even though it was kind of freaky. I just thought, well, I just need to go back to sleep. And that'll be that. And, and basically, that's what I did. But, but it was very real, you know, the pressure was real, the immobility was real. But I was completely awake. I'm looking at the wall, you know, on the side of the bed, and I'm looking around. I mean, I, I'm fully conscious. But I can't move. So it was, it was very strange. And the second one was a little, a little more frightening.  But I, again, I kind of knew what was going on. Like I had the memory of the other one.  But it was, it was really uncomfortable. That's the way I would describe it. Now I've had one of my kids, and I'm not going to get any more specific than that, have what probably I'm not quite sure after reading the articles, it probably does fit into the sleep paralysis category. But there was the paralysis, the immobility. And, you know, my, my kid told me that they not only felt a presence in the room, but thought that they saw like a shadowy, you know, kind of presence, and also had this sensation of floating. And that comes up in the journal articles as well. I've never had that. But again, there was an example where somebody I, I know lives in my own house, you know, has had this happen. And, and that's, that has occurred two times, kind of not, not real close together. But it hasn't happened for a number of years.  And so that they're not, you know, too alarmed by it. You know, because I, I'm not willing to completely exclude, you know, the supernatural from these things.  And we, we let, you know, my, my child know that we were doing that. And so that I think seemed to help now. You know, I don't know that, that there's a connection, a necessary connection. And I'm being pretty deliberate with my wording here. I don't know that there's a necessary connection. In fact, I would sort of be skeptical of a necessary connection between sleep paralysis and, and supernatural activity, although I think there could be overlap. That's sort of the way I, I think about it. But why don't we, for the sake of the listeners, I think they might also find it interesting at how our, our articles defined sleep paralysis, because you get a bit of a, a range here. Now the one on folklore, you're going to get a folk lorry definition. So in the summary, Ann Cox writes, sleep paralysis is a relatively new term to describe what for hundreds of years many believed to be a visitation by a malevolent creature, which attacked its victims as they slept. Again, that's a very, you know, folk lorish, you know, kind of definition, something that's more clinical. One of the Shane articles, sleep paralysis is a transient conscious state of involuntary immobility occurring immediately prior to falling asleep or upon awakening, and is classified as a parasomnia associated with REM rapid eye movement. The other, the other articles are going to have something like that. Again, very clinical. And this one hints at the connection clinically with rapid eye movement, that, you know, that stage of sleep. So I'm just going to throw it out here and ask two questions of all of you. What did you find again, interesting, stimulating, questionable, whatever adjective you'd put on it about the research? And also, what do you think? Do you think there's any relationship at all between sleep paralysis and, you know, a supernatural, you know, demonic sinister presence? Well, I was thinking about this as I was reading the articles and they seem to all kind of share the common thing that this is a physiological response. It's that, you know, there's not a whole lot of analysis on whether there might be a supernatural component. So they kind of all seem to agree all seem to agree on that. And it's very convincing. I found it very convincing in the various articles that there's probably most of these instances have to do with it disrupted sleep patterns and stuff like that. I kind of came away from it because I did a show a number of years ago about the phenomenon of spectrophilia, which is really closely linked to sleep paralysis. And it's kind of more getting into like the incubus succubus thing. And a lot of people experience it a lot of for a lot of people, it goes so much farther beyond just that sensation of a presence or or pressure, you know, they experience that there's literally a person there and and having encounter with them. So I kind of came away from this with my supernatural worldview very much intact, but convinced that sleep paralysis is a thing that is probably largely, you know, natural, but that perhaps, you know, a say a demonic presence could exploit that vulnerable state or mimic it. But, you know, that would probably just be anecdotal and maybe not any way to prove it. But it the articles were very convincing to me that a whole range of things from auditory hallucinations like what I experienced thinking that someone was screaming at me to actually seeing a presence that that all can be pretty well explained by what's happening in the brain in in in those instances. So I don't see any reason to discount that it's a natural thing that happens to a lot of people, but that perhaps there could still be this supernatural component where of of more just like exploitation, because how how much more vulnerable can a person be if their body is literally paralyzed and yet they're fully conscious, you know, so that's kind of where I was at with it. For anybody else, I'll follow that again. This is Godawa. Yeah, I had the same reaction, the same response. I've never really considered it my experiences to be supernatural. I know I go through the process where I think they are because you're waking up and you're you're not fully, you know, cognizant and of your senses and your intelligence and all that. But by the end, I realized they aren't I've seen shadows as well. I've seen shadow figures looking at me. But as I continue to look at them over time, they end up being Oh, that's the pillow in the corner, you know, or that's literally the the something standing up, you know, that that's already there. So as I as I read this, you know, this is another one of those cases, you read these descriptions, and they're mostly neuroscience and materialist explanations like Matt was saying.  Like the brain could be functioning as a interactive mechanism, it could be functioning in response to something, right? And so in general, the reductionism that's going on in these articles of reducing it to neuroscience factors and chemical factors. In general, it's a fallacious philosophical factor. However, this would be one of the cases where I have to begrudgingly agree with the materialist's assumptions and say, however, in this case, it does seem to explain a lot of the, you know, factors of experience that I've experienced what other people say. There's it's very difficult to believe that there's this mass supernatural thing occurring, you know, throughout all cultures and time and such. I find that very difficult to believe myself. So in this sense, I would tend to agree with the general assumptions that there are natural explanations for these phenomenon. Yeah. Yeah, I mean two important things out of what you just said.  So you didn't do it right.  You know, so on the one hand, it is kind of, you know, at least to my thinking a little bit odd that you would have that as an explanation when there's such consistency across cultures and time, you know, like why would that be if we're dealing with intelligent supernatural beings, they could do what they want. You know, why do they have to follow a template? So that's one thing. And the reductionist thing though, I think is really important because, you know, to put it in really simplistic terms, if your model is materialism, that consciousness is a thing produced by the brain and nothing more versus some sort of filter, well, your brain is essential for consciousness to be experienced and detected and operate kind of like a radio, you know, capturing the radio waves. It doesn't, I like the radio model because it doesn't produce the radio waves, but they're undetectable without it. So if your brain is instead a thing that filters consciousness or makes consciousness known, that's a totally different model and consciousness is separate from the brain. Depending on which one of those perspectives you follow, you're going to parse the data of something like sleep paralysis quite differently. And you can tell you're right. As you read through the articles, it is a very reductionist model. It's only entertaining these, not just these things, but it comes out in a few places. Consciousness in general is just a product or a byproduct of this thing we call the brain. So if you're operating from that perspective from the get go, you're going to be sort of conditioned to not entertain any other possibility, or even if it's not a cause and effect, any other, like Nat was saying, supernatural exploitation or some sort of involvement, even peripherally, that's just not going to be on your radar because you've adopted a materialist model, whereas someone who doesn't, you know, could, these other things could be part of the picture, but again, not a cause and effect sort of thing that anybody else will your feelings and push back or you got one of the different direction. This is Dio, one of the Shane articles, the one in the consciousness and cognition journal hints at this worldview assumption coming into play. And I'll just read a couple sentences from it. Shane wrote that the major function of the central nervous system activity is a generation of coherence and meaning. So like your brain will take its input and generate a narrative. And actually that kind of reminded me of an article we read for the EVP, which also talked about dream theory, where your brain, you know, will just try to put together a narrative based on the input around you. And that narrative may or may not be accurate. Well, this hard Shane goes on and says, look, you're basically says your brain will conceive a narrative based on input of either exogenous origins, which is input from outside your body, or endogenous sources that mimic exogenous input. So and she goes on to argue that the causes of sleep paralysis are a cascading effects of inside and outside. But what kind of struck me about that sentence or about that idea is if a spirit appears to you, and well, let me be more even more material. If someone enters the room right now with a gun pointed at you, your heart's going to start racing, you're going to have adrenaline, you're going to have a hard time breathing, and you're going to have heightened senses. These articles treat it like, well, yeah, these are what's going on. And that's just what your body's doing right now. Whether or not it kind of ignores the fact it kind of ignores that the reason your body is going through this. Now, one of the articles says, well, it's doing that because they're sleeping on their back, or there's something going on with a neurotransmitter being muted, or it's just, you know, they're trying to go into REM sleep or coming out of REM sleep. And so at the meantime, the ears are picking up some sounds, and they can't really breathe because they're laying on their back. And so therefore, the brain's constructing this narrative, while that might be true, or there could be a spirit in the room doing something to the person. And so it's, I'm kind of in the overlapping theory where I think a lot of people have a hard time sleeping, especially transitioning from one type of sleep to another. And also, but some of the more heightened experiences, I mean, some of these people describe the situation as rape. That's just, it seems inconceivable to me that your brain's picking up stuff on the inside and outside, and you know, I watched a movie about something and not sleeping well. So I'm dreaming about getting raped. I mean, that's pretty horrific. And these people who suggested, this article is one of Shane's articles, it was very clinical. And then the very, almost concluded with, oh, by the way, some of these people describe this as rape, which was very unsettling, you know? I was like, man, that's kind of like, you want to tell, that just sort of undid some of the clinical, maybe Shane was trying to remind us that this is a significant thing, but Okay, you'd have to ask yourself the question or ask them the question. Why would the brain process this set of stimuli as rape?   Right.   So yeah, that again, if you're, if you're, if you're a researcher or if you're a person, you know, who, who may or may not have experienced this, if you believe that, that again, consciousness is not inextricably tied to the material and not just a, not just a thing that, that this material organ produces, if it's actually independent, well then it, it being external again to what's going on inside of your head, that's on the table. You may not be able to know, well, is it a part here in this case or what role or, you know, you may not be able to parse that at all, but it's still on the table because of a non-materialist worldview.   I mean, to me, I, again, I don't think, I don't really hear any disagreement, you know, among us that, that there's, there's some point of overlap here.   So, I mean, I, the articles to me, I want to hit Trey, you know, yeah, but I just want to throw this out. The articles to me, and I think we've all sort of hinted at it. If you read through these things, it's pretty clear that, you know, clinical studies have established that this happens to people, you know, in REM stage, either, either, you know, going in or coming out. And it's also pretty clear that there's at least a preponderance of people who experience this have had disrupted sleep patterns or they're under stress or something like that. That would, of course, disrupt sleep patterns. In my case, that, that's exactly true. One, it was in college and I, you know, worked, I had a night job and an early morning job. So, I wasn't getting a whole lot of sleep. The other, the second instance is when I worked third shift in graduate school.  So, that, that, that makes a lot of sense to me, or at least I fit the profile really, really well in those situations. So, again, I would say, yeah, that's been established. And then the one article, I'm trying to remember which one it was. I think it was the, the Brooks article.  I mean, you could, you know, they made a really good case for we know how this works. We even know where it works in the brain. And we know, you know, biochemically what you need to turn off and turn on again in simplistic language and how that would work in terms of brain chemistry and biology.  So they, they could, they could isolate it really well to brain chemistry, brain region, REM sleep, all this stuff. And so I would agree with that, that that's pretty compelling. If that wasn't the case, you should not have those, those kind of precise results.  They might, they can do that. Yeah. Can I ask a question? This is very relevant to what you're talking about. And that article you're referring to the Brooks articles heavily, you know, a lot of medical languages, hard, hard to follow. But did, I was under the impression that that, that they were, their studies were drug induced, which, which means, isn't, wouldn't there be a qualification on the fact that these are all artificially drug induced states that they were able to achieve, but that doesn't necessarily make it natural. You know what I'm saying? It kind of makes me question. That was the disconnect because they're, they're using drugs, you know, that, and they're not using like artificial drugs. Hey, what will LSD do here? I mean, they're using chemical components. You know, again, I'm not a scientist.  So they're, they're using that stuff to produce, you know, the, the results that would, would mime, you know, sleep paralysis, but, but you're right. They don't know what the mechanism was for turning that stuff on or off. And so you could ask, well, okay, now you've reproduced it, but are you sure that this precise set of chemicals is what is producing this, that the brain is actually using the stuff that you decided to use, even though obviously it could, because that's where we got the stuff from the brain. So yeah, I think that, that that's a, that's a legitimate question. It's a, it's a, it's a loop. It's an open end in their work and also why the brain would decide to do that. That, I mean, they don't, they don't necessarily have a, a terribly precise answer for that either. I had two thoughts in reading that article. I jotted one of them down right next to it. I thought it was bad for these rats. For one, I mean, I can't think of it. Somebody was going to, somebody was going to bring that up and well, but it told you what, like when they, when they decapitated the rats, I'm actually looking at the page now. I just flipped over to it. It says under deep anesthesia and then they have the chemical names and the milligrams. Rats were decapitated. Brains removed and placed in chilled 4% pate of formaldehyde.  I kept thinking of the secrets of Nim, you know, like no wonder the rats are mad. Oh boy. But the other thing I thought of, and it was not specifically addressed in any of these articles, and maybe we can address this topic in a future episode was, um, what, basically the pineal gland is sort of famous in the paranormal community for being some sort of spiritual something or other. But biologically, we know that it regulates, it releases hormones that regulate sleep and also sex hormones. And so I was kind of curious, maybe we can investigate this at some point that I wonder if there is some correlation people perceiving a spiritual component, a sexual component sometimes, and certainly is all related to sleep. If that's all related to, to something going on in that part of the brain, it's just, it's just sort of just a, a weird thought at the rock. Well, we, I mean, I'll try to track down some stuff on that. I'm sure the materialist were here, he would say, yep. That would be the answer to that. And again, if you, if you're, if you're presuming, and again, it's not just a, a faith statement.  If you're taking that perspective, you'd say, well, you know, maybe there is something, you know, in other words, you leave the door open, that, that gets on the table because of the, the, you know, the different perspective on the whole mind body thing that, you know, people have or have or don't have. So, you know, and I'll try to look, look up and see if anybody's done anything on that. Trey, we haven't heard from you. What, what do you think? Yeah, I like the Shane's paper about the position and timing effects. You know, laying on your back during sleep paralysis was reported to be more prevalent in the middle and the end of the sleep than at the beginning, suggesting that sleep paralysis episodes at the later times might arise from brief micro arousals during REM, possibly induced by apnea. So I think maybe a lot of people are waking up mid-sleep, mid-REM sleep and who knows what their brain is in the midstream dreaming or what not, trying to wake up to catch a breath. So that whole sensation of, of, of, you know, something choking you or on your chest, you can't breathe might simply just be apnea and perceived as something demonic in nature. And, and, and we even had a listener, Eric emailed us about his experiences and, and he echoed kind of what I'm thinking. And I think that alluded to it that the supernatural, who's to say that the supernatural cannot, can't take advantage of the situation.  So, you know, that was making me think of that a little bit.   It had a, it was a short article, but it had a lot of good cross-cultural stuff in there about people who, you know, wouldn't necessarily know anything, you know, scientifically that could help them process whatever experience they were having. You could, you could see where they could be totally conscious and unable to move and struggling, you know, to take a breath or, you know, they start to panic and all these things could sort of combine and then be processed as this, you know, attack, you know, I think in demonic attack, that sort of thing.  I think most of it is explained either by, you know, sleep paralysis or some other, something else, you know, going on inside the brain, but, you know, I think you could have a couple, you know, instances, again, things that, that I've at least read about that just seem to be a bit beyond that in terms of what the person relates and frankly beyond, you know, the, these articles.  But since I brought it up, what do we think about not just the whole connection of this? Because one of the, I think one or two of the articles, you know, mentioned, you know, the alien abduction thing in relationship to this, the old hag, you know, thing comes up all the time with this, but I think a couple of them mentioned the alien abduction syndrome. So what, what do we think in light of this, you know, this might be a bit of a curveball and we might want to, you know, reserve it for another episode.  So what do, what do we think about that in relationship to this, you know, what, what we read for this time? Any thoughts? Well, you know, we're all familiar with Chris White and he's got sort of a whole sub ministry dedicated to stopping sleep paralysis. And his claim is that in pretty much every case that he's encountered, he has found that calling on the name of Jesus does stop it. And then there's other people like Joe Jordan and, and, you know, they would kind of in relation to the abduction phenomenon would say that, you know, calling on Jesus to intervene will stop these experiences. And, you know, some could say that that is just maybe, you know, that's where we find our comfort. So calling upon the name of Jesus can maybe put us into a more relaxed state. I suppose that would be the, the, the clinical explanation for it. But Chris White will go so far as to say that he recommends even non-believers to call on the name of Jesus and it will stop these experiences from happening. So that would sort of negate that. And I don't know how many actual case studies he's followed, but he tends to be a pretty level headed guy, you know, I'm sure he's looked into this, but I was thinking, gosh, wouldn't it be interesting if one of these studies was open minded enough to say, okay, let's try this in a handful of people in the midst of having this experience if we, you know, suggest to them to specifically call upon Jesus to intervene and stop the experience and see what would happen. That's kind of what was going through my mind. Because I, even during the course of this conversation, I'm fluctuating back and forth because I know in just my own research when I did that show on spectrophilia, there were so many cases and, and Doug Overmire alluded to this where people go so far as to consider it to be rape. And of course you could take that into even into the alien abduction thing where people think that they've been, you know, impregnated by aliens or whatever. That seems like such an intense thing to discount as, as just, you know, hallucination. But then at the same time, I'm looking at this Cox article, the folklore article, there's instances like they cite this community of Hmong men in East Asia, where they like had this unusually high percentage of men who were actually dying in their sleep, very similar experiences to the classic sleep paralysis thing where there was, you know, inability to breathe and, and all of that. But it was actually, they were dying. And the article says that even now the Centers for Disease Control statement holds that there's no actual, the cause of death is unknown. Like they can't completely explain it, but it tracks with sleep paralysis. So to me, that would indicate that gosh, it must be able to get pretty darn intense if you can actually die. Like dying from fright, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. So that's where I keep fluctuating back and forth because my, my, my supernatural worldview wants to say, well, if it's that intense, then obviously there's this other explanation.  And it does say that, you know, stress was a catalyst, probably in this particular community. Um, so I can see it, I can see it relating to the abduction phenomenon. I can see it related to the demonic attack phenomenon. I can see it relating to all of these things in a, in a, in just the very clinical way that they describe sleep paralysis, but I would just be so interested to see a study where they included that calling on the name of Jesus. They probably never would, but it would be so interesting to see if that's, if that actually yielded results like Chris claims that it does. Yeah. I mean, I, I know Chris, you know, probably not as, as well as some of you, but, um, and this isn't, this isn't in any way a comment to impugn, you know, Chris's integrity because I think he has high integrity, but I'm a little dubious, you know, when it, when it comes to, to this sort of thing because there hasn't been a large sample study and I'm also wary of it because all you need is one or two to falsify it.   Well, so what happens if you get one or two believers that say, well, I did that and it just didn't work, came back? Well, the reason I'm wary of it is, is to me that, that takes us into the whole faith healing thing. Then the problem is you. There must be something wrong with you because you didn't get this resolved over here. Your faith is lacking. Right. Your faith is lacking. Maybe you have some secret sin. It becomes really, and again, I'm not saying a researcher would intentionally do this, but, but even if they were passive and then they said things like that in the person's mind, they can be manipulated by that sort of response in a bad way, you know, that it's going to, it's going to really damage, you know, their, their walk with the Lord or their Christian life or their doctrine or whatever. So I'm really wary of this kind of approach because it is falsifiable. And, and I don't, I don't really care so much that it's falsifiable because I want to know if it's A or B. I mean, that's just, that's me. I just want to know if it's A or B. Yeah, you can have Christians who would, you know, again, my concern is the effect it has on, on other people. Again, in a negative way, go ahead. Yeah, you could have Christians who don't even really believe that much in the supernatural realm and say, well, I don't think it's going to work. So that's just, again, that's priming, that's a perfect example of priming the audience, you know, I've had people, I've had, I shouldn't say people, I haven't had very many, but I had a few people written into the website, my ministry with these things and I sent some prayers and one person replied back that, hey, it worked and I'm an atheist. I don't know what to do with my belief system, basically was her reply. I don't know what to do with that. Theologically, I think I'd be curious if someone said, well, pray in the name of Buddha and see if the same thing happened. I mean, is it just part of, is it just organizing your thought pattern? Or is it really a supernatural thing? Or is it some experiencing a physical healing? Like maybe it's not a supernatural presence, but it's a physical thing going on. So God releases healing. I don't know. It's hard to, it's hard to do scientific studies on, on. Yeah. And I would, I would even be a, again, a little, a little more blunt. I think it's, I think it's theologically dangerous.   I mean, there are very few people who are going to deny, you know, that sort of thing. Well, if that's the case, then, well, hey, maybe, you know, invoking the name of Buddha or Jesus or something else is going to have a psychosomatic effect that will help, you know, take away or ameliorate this sleep paralysis problem. I mean, so, so then what if it works for them? You know, it, again, it just, it's sort of taking a, a kind of nebulous cause and effect kind of relationship, like what is, we know what the effect is, but what really is the cause, you know, it's taking that and then sort of superimposing it on theological thought, which again, I'm very wary of that in, in really both directions. And so I would be one who would challenge, you know, Chris and Joe in a good way. Again, I'm not doubting that, that this actually does, you know, help people and people, you know, have the outcome that they want. But I want to see a large sample study.  Well, then what do you do? You know, so I'd like to see it done, but I'm wary of it. It makes me think of the problem, too, of using like, this is a little off topic, but like using near-death experiences to prove heaven, because once again, there's probably just as many people out there who have NDE's where they go to Nirvana, or they encounter Buddha, or, you know, all of these different kinds of things. So then does that disprove heaven? You know, I think that's a really good example, because you look at NDE's and there's, there's two, there's two things you can take from that. Oh, this tells us exactly what heaven is like. Or, well, there are things about these things that really strongly suggest a disconnect of consciousness from the brain. Those are two related, but quite different, you know, assertions, different ideas. One is going to be really theologically problematic, because you're not always going to have the same description, and you're going to, it's going to be colored by various things that are floating around in your head from religious content. But the other is theologically helpful, because, you know, it sort of validates a non-materialist approach just more generally. You know, so yeah, I think that's a good example that you could, you could do the same kind of parsing with this. And if we're too categorical about what we say is happening when a person does this or that to stop sleep paralysis, that's, that's pretty edgy. I mean, again, that, that's something that I'm very wary of because of the effect it'll have on people and what, what opponents of good theology might do with it. So I'm, I'm just suspicious of that. The whole enterprise, even if it, if it could be done, I think we'd find out that we really can't say the things that we're saying about stopping sleep paralysis, if we actually did that kind of research. I wanted to put something out there, it's a little bit controversial, sort of related to this, came to mind reading the article about the position where Shane made the argument or I thought compellingly defended the position that most people who have sleep paralysis are in the sublime position. And in sort of piggybacking off NETs earlier thought that maybe sometimes spirits exploit these situations for whatever purpose, tear or whatever. And this is, this is going to be sort of a hyper spiritual interpretation of this. So it's just with that assumption, what is it about the sublime position that that is conducive to a spirit maybe attacking somebody and I couldn't help but to think that about yoga and some people and I'm all over the place on yoga and so don't take this as a position statement. It's just, I'm just throwing it out there. It's just spaghetti. I'm throwing on the wall and if it sticks, it sticks. If it doesn't, it doesn't. But some people consider yoga, you know, it was from the Eastern religions and had a spiritual component. Some people today even say, even argue that the positions that people do when they do yoga are conducive to spiritual influence. Now the people completely discount that. But you know, I'm not taking a position, but I just kind of wonder is that maybe there's a connection, maybe, I don't know, maybe not. But it came to mind when I was reading the articles, if that makes any sense at all. I have so many disclaimers in there, I'm not sure I said anything. Yeah, I don't know a whole lot about yoga. I have never attempted it, nor will I. But anybody have any thoughts about, you know, body position? If that's a big deal in yoga, anybody have any experience researching that or doing it? That sounds like a no. Maybe we should, that should be the topic of one of the next shows. We can give you homework, Brian. Let's see if those dreams and those movies all. You do that for a couple months and then tell us about it.  And that would, that would be my assessment as well. I don't think there's any necessary connection here to the supernatural world and sleep paralysis. Because I do think even though they don't necessarily know why the brain does what it does when, you know, they don't have all of the answers as to what triggers this, the articles to me, you know, do satisfactorily demonstrate that this is a, this is an issue of brain activity, you know, brain chemistry, even, you know, body position to some extent, especially if there's an apnea element to it. I don't, I don't really find any major holes, you know, in that approach, you know, even though, you know, they're going to admit that we don't know exactly, you know, how, how the brain decides to do X, Y, or Z. But they can, you know, it can be replicated, it can be observed in conjunction with, with REM sleep in a clinical setting. And to me, that, that sounds pretty persuasive. So anybody want to add anything to that or detract from it? Yeah, I've just been thinking the whole time that you've kind of got, we're doing a show on sleep. You know, we haven't been talking much about the sleep part of this, just the paralysis part of it. And it seems to me like the kind of the three main articles, the clinical articles, are dealing with the paralysis part. So they can test that, and they can, you know, you can do all those kinds of scientific things with it. But you can't really do that with the idea of sleep. It's more, it's more metaphysical than that. I think Brian was kind of getting at this a little bit earlier. When you read about the, the Lilith and the Hag and all the kind of old ways that people thought about this, they were dealing with it more, I think from the sleep part than they were from the paralysis part. And so they're trying to explain the paralysis because they have this view of what sleep is that's very different than what a materialist view of sleep is. Get into that a little bit. I mean, do you think, do you think they did that because they don't know, they don't know the biological mechanisms behind sleep or something else? I just think there's something mysterious about what sleeping even is. I mean, we can talk about it in physical kinds of ways, I guess.  But, but what is sleep really? And why do we need sleep? And why is this something God has given to us? And another thing that came to me to, I was thinking of is why, why is it that so many times in scripture, God is coming to people as they're dreaming and sleeping. It's not all the time. Sometimes it's the middle of the day, you know, but oftentimes you got the night visions and those kinds of things. I just think that there's something about sleep itself that scientism can't fully explain. And it's not capable of doing it because I, I don't think that it's a purely physical activity. Yeah, I mean, it, well, it does have to do with, you know, obviously it's related to consciousness.   So if you're, if you're at number two, then all, then what you just described, you know, is, is a, is a valid idea. There has to be something more to this than purely, you know, pure biology, pure brain. It's not the, it's not the fault of the, of the three articles that are dealing with it from a medical point of view. It's just that that's, that's what they're limited to. They can't really really deeper than that. Right. And they're probably not even either inclined or even kind of, the question would not occur, you know, to, to even raise an investigator or, or ask, you know, try to, you know, factor into the discussion. Yeah, I think the, the ancient mindset did not separate supernatural from natural, like, like we're trying to do in sort of a post enlightenment era. I've been thinking, of course, we're approaching Christmas and I've been thinking about, you know, the Christmas story and like when the angel appeared to marry with news that she was favored, it didn't really faze her that an angel appeared to her. It was that she was favored. I mean, the favored part was like, Oh no, what does that mean? But the angel appearing was not, apparently didn't, wasn't a shocking. And I think it's because she just, you know, okay, it's like, that's because angels are supernatural and natural and just like the sun is supernatural and natural and that ancient perspective. And so I kept another sort of random thought. I have random thoughts reading these articles, was something that Tolkien said, I think he was talking about myth, but he sort of compared it to like when you drink, when you eat soup, and you enjoy the soup, don't get caught up with where the soup came from, like, you know, don't look at the bones that's, you know, how you just, you see the soup out of, because that kind of runs, kind of runs it. Well, these guys in these articles are certainly trying to, that's the scientific process for biology, trying to narrow down to which neurons are firing. And it just seems so, it is, it's very clinical. And the ultimate, and the one article I mentioned earlier concluded with, you know, just how horrifying these, these are just to kind of remind us that, yeah, we're looking at the bones that produce the soup, but keep in mind, the soup is pretty horrific in this case. Yeah. Yeah, or, or again, the old sausage, you know, how sausage gets made, you know that. Yeah. No, it's the same idea. Yeah. Well, this was a good, good discussion. I'm not quite sure where, what we want to do next. Again, I have a list of possibilities, but if you want to, you all want to let me know, you have a vote in favor of something by all means do that. Otherwise, I'll pick one out of the hat again to focus on. So thanks for everybody that showed up.  He has a bit of a health issue, not serious, but something that was debilitating that he couldn't be here. But thanks to everybody else for taking the time. And Nat, thank those who rescued you from the snow.  Yes. Yeah. Well, and you have a, have a good rest of the afternoon, you know, dealing with dealing with the snow. I don't miss that at all. Yes.  So that's awesome. Oh, well, yeah, be warmed and filled. That's all I can say. Thanks everybody. Thanks. Have a good afternoon. Talk to you guys.


All right, what to cover my boat roof with? I think I've decided. I think I'm gonna use four sheets of this four by 10 smooth aluminum plate. It's two millimeters thick. It doesn't have the diamond texture on it, which I would have liked. However, it will fit all the way across without a seam. And I want to coat the top, paint it with something. So it'll be nice that these ones are covered with this plastic garbage. So what I'm thinking is, I take four of these sheets, put them on there, then pull the plastic garbage off, and then paint them as soon as possible before they start oxidizing. And I'm thinking I will use this stuff, epoxy chemical resistant, or epoxy chemical resistant. This is the part. Securing part, this is the other part. Right, I've had these for a while, component A, component B, right, okay. I'm just gonna mix a little bit of these together to make sure, you know, it's still in functional condition. You'll clear it. Hey, stay back.  This has not been mixed in quite some time. Yeah, I mean, not a long time, but it definitely needs to be mixed up. The epoxy is supposed to last a long time when it's stored though, so there's a good chance it'll be good if I just mix this part up. The other part looked like it was okay. That's not wet. Yeah, once I get it all mixed up, it'll be white. That smells really bad. It does smell really bad.  I'm just gonna do it.  That's more like what it's supposed to look like. Should be the same amount of each one. Hey, dry time to the touches three hours, re-coat four hours, cure seven days. So if I wanna put more than one coat, I have to put one coat on, wait four hours and then they can put another coat on. So I guess we have to leave this sitting here for like three hours before we can really see if it's hardening. This is gonna be a pretty time-sensitive operation. I need to get four sheets of metal on the roof with enough rivets to hold them in place.  I'm gonna maybe presume I need to do two coats and maybe after the first coat I'll sprinkle some sand. Then four hours later I can do a new coat. So I should be able to do all that in one day. I'm definitely gonna need a nice, sunny, totally not raining day and then preferably not rain for the next couple days, at least a day. Six rivets in that one. Next. Okay, operation is mix two parts epoxy in this container which I think will not melt from the epoxy.  Then take some sand which is right there, throw a few handfuls on the epoxy, move to the next one. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Right, okay. Well, you can put that in the bottom. All right. Still have blue skies, no rain in sight, good thing. I did test this epoxy yesterday and it appears to have hardened today. It takes according to the can and it did seem to do it this way. Takes three hours before you can touch it without it sticking to you, four hours before it's solid enough to recote. And it wasn't really kind of solid until this morning and I did it yesterday. And it takes seven days for full cure. So I'm gonna have to not go on the roof for a full week. All right. Now up to the roof, calm, quick and precise. That went amazingly smoothly. Nice. What's that? Yeah, you can come on the boat right now. So now in a few hours, I wanna come back and go over this whole thing and hopefully stick down all that sand. I mean, it's pretty stuck now, but yeah, just go over it all. And I have plenty of epoxy I used. These may be half of what I have on this. A little bit less than half. And this epoxy I got for $10 a gallon. I got a few gallons a few years ago from a guy who was done with some big project and getting rid of it. Stuff's, wow, stuff's really expensive if you buy it, new, not from just some guy. Oh, it's great, it's not, look at that. Oh, it's not even too hot now. I think the epoxy is helping already, just having the white color. Oh, great, let's put a fingerprint up there. There is another thing I wanna do in here. I need to grab these floorboards down there. Oh yeah, I need all kinds of floorboards and stuff. Now with the roof, I wanna put some caulking above all these pipes to fill in all the little spaces like that.  So I figure if I run a bead of caulk along each one of these, it'll fill in any spaces like right there is a space. Right there, it doesn't need it, but you know, yeah, fill in all the little spaces. On all the ones where there are seams, there's actually epoxy coming through. So that's gonna fill in the space. So maybe I need to check if silicone caulking, which is what I have. I bought it last time I was in town. If silicone caulking will interfere with the epoxy at all if they'll mess each other up. I can definitely do the ones where there's no seam. I don't know, maybe I'll just do it anyway and see if it's probably gonna be fine. It's only been an hour. This is already pretty solid. I bet I could go over it right now. Yeah. Probably just because the heat made it cure faster, I'm guessing. Problem is I just put the caulking under here and along all of those. And I don't wanna stand on it until this stuff is totally solid. And I hear a two year old yelling, Jamie washed my bomb, so I better go do that. All right, I wanna apply more epoxy to the entire roof without actually standing on it this time. Nothing to stand on over here. I could stand on that boat. It's 10 feet across, three meters. So if I'm on the edge, I should be able to reach the middle. If I, you know, reach. You know what, I think I have an idea. I totally have an idea. I have a thing, a thing over there that I can stick in the boat. Oh, it's not gonna fit over here because this thing's in the way. All right, maybe if I just stick a ladder sticking out and I can stand on the end of that. You know what, maybe I can just King Kong off the side. Yeah, I can reach that. I can reach it. I'll just have to monkey bar along the side here. And from there I can reach. All right, I can reach everything. I think of all the stuff I've built here. Possibly the most important is the thing that I have that sprays water. It's, you know, where I get my water out of. Water comes out of the water tank and comes out of a kind of like a hose nozzle and squirts out. So whenever I have to wash a kid's bum I just hold her bum there and turn it on and like fire hose it off. That's it. Okay. Right now, my oldest daughter is cooking lunch, cooking some plantains. And I got Captain America over here. Let's get that roof-free pan. Oh, was that the most elegant procedure I've ever done? Hanging off the side of the boat. I'm near the mess, but got it done. Okay, that's, whew. Now hopefully it doesn't rain in the next few hours. Looks like it probably won't. Weather usually comes from that way. Hopefully it rains tonight though. It hasn't rained in a while. We could definitely use some. Whoa, what a cool boat. I mean, this was a cool boat before. Oh, the really cool boat. Ooh, plantains and cheese. Thanks to whoever sent me this cheese. Thanks, man.


Statistics and Excel. Exponential distribution in seconds. Roller coaster line example. Got data? Let's get stuck into it with statistics and Excel. You're not required to, but if you have access to OneNote, we're in the icon left hand side. OneNote presentation 1576. Exponential distribution in seconds. Roller coaster line example tab. We're also uploading transcripts to OneNote so you can go into the view tab, use the immersive reader tool, change the language if you so choose, be able to either read or listen to the trans. First, a word from our sponsor.  Like this CPA thinking cap, for example. CPA thinking, CAP, you see what we did with like with the letters, and this CPA thinking cap is not just for CPAs either. Anyone can and should have at least one possibly multiple CPA thinking caps. Why? Because based on our scientific survey of five people, all of whom directly profit from the sale of these CPA thinking caps, wearing this CPA thinking cap without a doubt, according to the survey, increases accounting productivity tenfold. Yeah, at least. Yeah, apparently the hat actually channels like accounting energy from the quantum field ether directly into your head, allowing you to navigate spreadsheets faster. It's kind of like how in like the matrix when Neo learns kung fu, or at least that's what the scientific survey is saying, so get one because the scientific survey participants could really use some extra cash. If you would like a commercial free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com. Script in multiple different languages using the timestamps to tie in to the video presentations. One note desktop version here and prior presentations, we've been thinking about how we can represent different data sets, both numerically using calculations such as the average or mean, the quartiles, the median, and pictorially using the box and whiskers and histogram. The histogram being the primary tool we visualize when thinking about the spread of data. And we can describe the spread of data on a histogram using terms such as it's skewed to the left, it's skewed to the right. We're now looking at functions or formulas that have a smooth curve or a line related to them, which oftentimes can approximate actual data sets in the real world. And if we can approximate our data sets with a line, that would be great because it'll typically give us more predictive power over whatever it is we're looking into. In prior presentations, we looked at families of these types of formulas, these curves, including the uniform distribution, the Poisson distribution, the binomial distribution. Now we're looking at exponential distribution. Now the exponential distribution often has a relationship to the Poisson distribution. So oftentimes we're going to kind of flip the question around when thinking about a Poisson distribution to the question that we'll be thinking about with an exponential distribution. So oftentimes with a Poisson distribution, just to set the groundwork, we're talking about in business scenarios, line waiting situations where we ask questions such as, what's the likelihood that so many people will be arriving within some interval of time, like one minute or one second? For example, we also had a problem not over time, but over distance, such as how many pot holes would show up in a mile of road. But we're going to now look at our time example. So if we think first about like the Poisson, and then we'll kind of convert that to the exponential for a line waiting situation for like a roller coaster ride, for example, x is going to be the arrivals during one minute. And we're going to say that the mean is going to be 3.25. So the 3.25 is the mean arrivals within the timeframe distance of one minute. So this is going to be the Poisson distribution, not the exponential. This is just the starting point. If I was to graph this out, x is going to be equal to the arrivals during one minute. So what's the likelihood that zero people arrive in one minute? We're going to say that that's going to be the 3.88 according to our Poisson dot dist function, which is going to be taking the x, which is going to be this is we have a range here, a spill that we're taking. That's why the hashtag is there comma the mean 3.25. And then the cumulative, it's not cumulative. That's why it's going to be a zero because we're looking at just the zero. We did that all the way down. What's the likelihood that one person shows up in the one minute time frame, the 12.6, what's the likelihood that two people show up the 12.48. If I wanted to know the likelihood of having zero to three people show up within the one minute time, I can then say is 3.88 plus 12.6 plus 20.48 and so on. So we looked at that in a similar presentation in our prior practice problems. And we can also look at the the curve would look something like this. So here's our Poisson curve. So now we're going to say, okay, well, now we want to ask a different question and say the minutes between arrivals. So now we're getting to our exponential distribution. So now we're saying, all right, well, if there's going to be a mean of 3.25 people arriving within a one minute time period, what's the what's going to be the mean minutes between arrivals. So to see how we kind of flipped it on its head, we're looking at the minutes between arrivals. Well, that means we can take the the the 3.25 divided by one hold on other way around one divided by one minute divided by the 3.25. And that gives us about our point 30769. So there's about 0.3 minutes between arrivals. Alright, so now we have the question. Okay, so that that makes sense. Do I want to be talking about this in terms of minutes? Or do we want to be talking about it in terms of seconds? Remember, whenever we're looking at time, it gets a little bit confusing because we're base 60 in time. So we got to be thinking, okay, I do I want to do I want to convert this into seconds and be talking about seconds? Or do we want to be talking about minutes in this case, we'll convert it to seconds. So the mean second arrivals. So we're going to say, alright, I'll take that number times 60, 60 seconds in a minute, that's going to give us the 18.46. So now we're looking at this in terms of seconds, it takes about 18.42 seconds between arrivals. Alright, so then we can look at the x now being for our exponential distribution, seconds between arrivals, as opposed to the x for our Poisson distribution, being the arrivals during a one minute period. So now we're going to we can ask questions like, okay, well what if x was less than or equal to 60, 60 being seconds, so that being one minute, we can use then our exponent dot dist function, which looks a lot like the Poisson dot dist function x now being the 60 in this case, and then lambda is going to be one over this 18.46, the mean, the mean seconds between arrivals, and then comma the cumulative versus non cumulative. In this case, we want it to be cumulative, because I'm adding everything up the probability between zero up to and including the 60. Okay, so we have that now, we can also plot this out. So if I have this, this is, these are giving us my rows and my rows for the exponential. Remember when I plotted this one out over here, this this rows function, I could just make this 012, and then copy down the rows, or I could use a sequence. And if you use a sequence, then that's why these two numbers are here, because that gives you a little bit more control to change the numbers that you want in the sequence. So for the exponent dot dist, we used 120. So if I go over here and do a similar thing, now with the exponent dot dist, x now equaling the seconds between arrivals, we can then use our exponent dot dist function, which is going to be exponent dot dist x is going to be in this case, the zero, but we copied it all the way down. That's what the hashtag is for. So it's going to spill. It's going to be a spill array comma one over over this for the lambda. And then then the cumulative this time zero or not cumulative. So it's not cumulative. So then we have the seconds between arrivals, what's the likelihood of zero 5.42 seconds, what's the likelihood of one second between arrivals, 5.13, two seconds between arrivals, 4.86, three seconds, 4.60, and so on and so forth. So if we were to plot this out then, it would look something like this. So now we have it. This is the characteristic, you know, look of an exponential type distribution. And sometimes I feel like the line waiting is a little less intuitive to fully understand. We'll take a look at an example next time, the example of like a radioactive decay declining for some reason that gives me an image, which is another exponential distribution situation oftentimes in another realm of like science and whatnot. But but that usually draws, gives me the picture of this. But the thing to keep in mind is that if you have a Poisson distribution, and you flip the question around, then you should get generally this this exponential, which will give you a characteristic curve that looks like this. Now in future problems, this is just another look of the curve. So you can get a fancy fancy curves within Excel. So we'll practice formatting those curves in Excel if you want to work through the practice problem in Excel. So so we'll and so we'll also take a look at another practice problem to try to get a better intuitive sense as to why and these line waiting situations would this happen? Because because it doesn't sometimes it doesn't make complete intuitive sense, you know, at first. So we'll try to we'll try to break that out a little bit more in a future presentation. And we'll also take a look at it in terms of minutes. And instead of in terms of seconds to get a feel for the minutes versus the seconds. The other thing to keep in mind is that if you were to ask a question, such as what's the likelihood that you're going to get that you have zero up to two, you would think that you can you can just sum up the the percents. But I don't believe it may not be exact to do that in the exponent dot dist situation as easily as you could have done it with a Poisson situation, possibly because of the curve of the exponential distribution, possibly needing more complex math in order to do that. So therefore, like calculus, right? So therefore what you would need to do then is use if you're asking that question, you would need to use the cumulative function. So so in other words, if I use the cumulative function to ask the question of the likelihood of zero to three, I may get a different answer than if I just summed up these four numbers possibly due to the curvature of the exponential curve.


Hey James and it seemed like you got ahead of guys and you just weren't able to put them away. Something that has happened to you several times throughout the course this season. Why do you think you have difficulty with with 2 strikes. Yeah, it's definitely been kind of the theme of the year for me getting way ahead getting 2 strikes 2 strike hits. You know that's where I'm not putting guys away 2 strikes. I'm still kind of like processing today and everything but I think part of it could be maybe just showing more looks like they know I'm going to try to finish them up with fastballs up. That's where some of the damages and they'll just kind of like foul everything else off. If it's in an area that they're not looking for. So maybe it's you know, adding my curve ball more to righties throwing more sliders again to lefties stuff like that just to give them some different looks Just how defeating is it because you are so close and then you're not able to finish. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's frustrating. I feel healthy. I feel good. But you know I need results and I put us in a for on hold there right off the bat. I didn't get out of the first inning. So it's embarrassing. It's humiliating. It's tough. Tough day at the office for sure. Does anything need to change mechanically or is it just a matter of like you said mixing things up and pitch selection. Yeah, I think mechanically I'm in a fine spot like I feel super healthy. I feel like it's coming out of my hand fine. So I think it comes down to just execution command. You know, making the right pitch at the right time. Hey, Janice and do you feel like any of your struggles can be attributed to a guy coming off his second Tommy John surgery shaken off cobblers or at this point is just execution. Yeah, I don't know.  Keep getting better.  But for me like I feel super healthy. I feel like I'm in a fine place. So I don't think that has as much to do with it. You know, I've thrown a lot of quality innings in the big leagues before. I know how to do it. So I wouldn't. I wouldn't say it has anything to do with my elbow. If anything, I should be thrown better because I feel healthier than I have in a long time.


If you live in a house with a basement, the chances are you've had a radon test. But what do the numbers mean, and just how safe or dangerous is it if they're below or above the recommended exposure level? Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas. It's one of those substances that it's pretty much impossible to avoid as it's constantly being produced by other materials in the Earth's crust. And because it's radioactive, it has the potential to cause lung cancer if you inhale it at high levels for long enough. For most of us, this isn't worth worrying about too much as we can't avoid breathing small amounts of the gas. But if you're living in an area where there are high levels of radon, it can be an issue. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an exposure level where radon doesn't increase the risk of cancer. And because of this, radiation protection specialists recommend levels in homes are kept as low as you can reasonably get them. But what does this mean if you find yourself living somewhere with high radon levels? In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency recommends you take action to reduce radon levels if they're above 4 pico-curies per litre. The World Health Organization is a little bit more conservative here and suggests you do something about it if the levels are above 2.7 pico-curies per litre. The good news, though, is that for most people, it's not too hard to get indoor concentrations below the EPA action level. But if you are stuck with high radiation levels, how do you know what the additional risk is? To get a handle on this, we need to look at the chances of being killed by this invisible gas. Each year in the US, around 155,000 people a year die from lung cancer, and of these, something like 21,000 deaths are associated with radon. Many of these, though, are also connected with smoking, separating out the non-smokers.  This is a serious number of deaths, but because of the number of people living in the US, the actual risk of dying from radon exposure in any given year is not that high. On average, something like 9,000 people out of every million in the US die each year. 500 people out of every million die from lung cancer, and 70 people out of every million die because they've been exposed to radon for a number of years. But when you only consider people who don't smoke, only 10 people out of every million die from radon exposure. Another way of looking at this is to ask what the chances are that when you die, radon was the cause. And here it turns out that when you pop your clogs, there's around about a 1- to 2-in-1,000 chance that radon will be to blame. It's somewhat comforting to know that if you're inhaling radon, the chances are that something else will kill you first. But this doesn't answer the question of how much safer you'll be if you reduce your radon exposure. Here the science is a little unclear, but research suggests that there's around about a 4% increase in your chances of getting cancer from inhaling radon for every 1 pico-curie per litre increase in your average exposure. This is over a lifetime of exposure though. A few days or weeks inhaling high levels of radon isn't that risky. It's the day-in-day-out exposure over tens of years that's important. Using this estimate of risk versus exposure, it turns out that if the average exposure level for radon was increased by 2 pico-curies per litre across the United States, we'd expect something like 5 additional radon-related deaths per million people each year. Likewise, if we reduce the average exposure level by 2 pico-curies per litre, there'd be 5 fewer radon-related deaths per million people each year on average. In other words, small increases and decreases in exposure do make something of a difference, and this is why it's important to keep your radon exposure as low as you can possibly get it. But if you're just over the recommended levels, it's not something to panic about. And if you're below the recommended levels but can't afford to go lower still, it's probably not worth worrying over. That said, it's always worth taking radon seriously and taking action to keep your exposures low if you can. For more information on radon safety, do check out the links in the blurb below. And as always, stay safe.


The ULCCS, as you know, began as part of the anti-caste movement nine decades ago and has against all odds not only survived but actually thrived. Its very existence is an act of heroic assertion of what is possible. Documenting the saga of ULCCS which is what Comrade Thomas Isaac and Michelle Williams have done is a remarkable job, essential. I would like to congratulate them and I also like to congratulate Leftward Books for actually bringing out this volume. This book, however, is not only a discussion of the story of ULCCS but it also raises very deep theoretical issues. In fact, its very title is suggestive of the theoretical issues it raises. That is, is it a possible alternative? Can cooperatives be a possible alternative to capitalist enterprises? As a matter of fact, in the preface which is titled possible communism, that actually is it the case that within the cooperative movement we actually have the embryo of a communist society? Can cooperatives, for instance, if they get generalised across society as a whole, give rise to a society which we call a communist society? It is a wonderful quotation from Marx on this question in the preface itself. One obvious answer which would be given to this and commonly given is that no, it is not possible because within the cooperative itself over a period of time you would have the development of internal contradictions because of which there would be schisms developing within the cooperative entity, cooperative enterprise, cooperative movement itself. As a result, it would tend to reproduce within itself the kind of contradictions that we find within a capitalist society. Now this book is a resounding proof of the fact that that is not necessarily true. As a matter of fact, one of the main conclusions of the book is that this view that the cooperative movement necessarily develops contradictions within itself that tend to polarise it is a view that does not hold for ULCCS and there is no reason why this view should hold generally. There is, however, a second point which needs to be made here that suppose that capitalism is not only private ownership of the means of production. Suppose we actually had a society in which all entities were cooperatively owned or all entities were actually owned by the state on behalf of society but managed by cooperatives that still would not make it a socialist society that would still reproduce a number of features of capitalism as indeed Yugoslavia did. Capitalism is not only the private ownership of the means of production but capitalism is also commodity production. Commodity production necessarily fragments people, necessarily fragments the working class. I'd like to recall an incident here in the late 1970s after the emergency when George Fernandez as you know he was a leading figure in the anti-emergency struggle. He was a leading trade unionist of the time, General Secretary of the All India Railway Men's Federation who took a played a major role in the historic railway strike, became the industry minister in the Janata government. Being the new industry minister he thought he should do something as far as the working class is concerned. So he proposed workers participation in management of enterprises to be generalised as a rule to be kind of applied across the country. And then this idea was presented to the various trade unions and to Fernandez is a great surprise. Somdred B.T. Ranadevi was the president of the CITU, rejected it outright. He said nothing to it. Because he said that workers participation in management in a capitalist setting where necessarily enterprises are fragmented and where commodity production prevails actually forecloses the possibility of class unity of the working class. As a result he completely kind of vetoed it and of course Fernandez was very surprised. So there is a problem about looking into the cooperative movement as such in the context of an otherwise developing socialist state. In the context of a socialist state that's coming into being, looking at the cooperative movement itself within a world of commodity production as in some sense transcending capitalism is actually an incorrect idea. But then does it mean that there is nothing about cooperatives? It is certainly true that the cooperatives can actually have a democratic structure within themselves but to the extent that they relate to one another in a world of commodity production they actually tend to fragment the working class and as a result they do not necessarily capture the essence of socialism. It's at best a syndicalist move not a socialist move. But then does this mean that actually cooperatives do not represent a forward march? Certainly not. They do represent a forward march in a way which is brought out very well in the book. They represent a forward march if I can put it in terms of language which I would like to use in the sense that they represent a bulwark against primitive accumulation of capital. What we witness today in societies like ours is capitalist production, supplanting petty production, assaulting petty production, squeezing petty production, displacing petty producers be they peasants, be they fishermen, be they craftsmen and so on. Now of course if they are to remain viable in the short run the state must come to their rescue but if they are going to remain viable over a longer period of time then they must be able to obtain the economies of scale they must be able to obtain the introduce the kind of technological changes which are necessary for them to be viable and this is possible within the context of a cooperative framework. If you for instance have harvester combines being introduced in the context of capitalist farming then they displace laborers but if you have harvester combined being introduced with laborers cooperatives owning those combines then what the laborers lose by way of wage income they make up by way of profit income and what is more while their incomes don't suffer they actually have greater leisure. So the cooperative movement has an enormous role to play as a bulwark against the process of primitive accumulation of capital and this is something which can even take the form where cooperatives can even be involved in the process of investment in which case the kind of displacement of peasants and so on that we see all across the world including in China and certainly in India its effects could be minimized, negated, obviated if you have for instance peasants cooperatives themselves setting up industrial projects. This is why the fact that cooperatives can represent in the context of a development of socialism they can represent a transition from petty production to higher forms like a socialist society is something which actually makes capitalism quite strongly opposed to cooperatives. There are at least two very obvious reasons for it, one is that cooperatives are a way in which petty production can survive can prevent primitive accumulation of capital. This animosity was very clear for instance in the wake of demonetization, demonetization not only dealt a heavy blow against the petty production sector but demonetization as Comrade Isaac wrote at that time was actually a big blow against the cooperative movement in Kerala which is the state with a very developed cooperative movement. In fact one of the major differences between Bengal and Kerala and this has implications for the divergent fortunes of the left movement in the two states is that in Bengal the cooperative movement is virtually non-existent while in Kerala the cooperative movement is extremely powerful. There's a second reason namely that you know that it is important for capitalism to prove that you cannot do without capitalist property. If you can have a society in which property can be organized along different lines then that is something that represents an existential threat in a conceptual sense to capitalism and therefore they are always opposed to the public sector for instance, vilifying the public sector day in and day out and likewise they are also opposed to other forms of property, other forms of organization like cooperatives. Now issues like these are raised in this book. The quality of an outstanding book is when it makes you think about deep issues and this is certainly one such book. I'd like to congratulate the authors and the leftward books for bringing out this volume. Thank you very much.