Well, hey everybody. It's another live with Dr. Jill and my special guest, Sonya Hunt, who I will introduce in just a moment. I'm so excited, as always, to be here today with a friend, colleague, author, and someone who I think you'll really enjoy hearing from today. Something very practical that many of you have dealt with, or if you haven't, you might have a child or a loved one who has food allergies. And we're going to dive into that topic, and Sonya is going to share not only the book that she's written, absolutely amazing resource for you, but also just the tips and tricks that she's learned along the way. One thing I love is story, because I know that in my own journey, a lot of my own education and medicine didn't come from medical school. It came from my own journey through Crohn's and cancer and food allergies like you, Sonya, and mold illness and all these things. So some of my most precious teachings and things come from that experience. And I know Sonya has a lot to share from that perspective as well. Before I introduce her, just a little background, you can find me at JillKarnihan.com. There is 10 over 10 years of free blogs and resources there, loads and loads of information, all free. So if you want to find out more about mold or Lyme disease or food allergies or mass selectivation, you can find it all on my website. If you need any products or services, Dr. JillHealth.com is where I have my retail store, all kinds of things like histocyst for mass selectivation or histamine blocker for DAO and food. Those can all be found at that site. And if you haven't heard any of the lives before, we are going on 90-something episodes and they're all available for you for free on iTunes or YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. So thanks for joining us today. I want to introduce Sonya. She is a food allergy activist, TEDx speaker, best-selling author and tech marketing executive. She's a mentor to global organizations focused on social impact and creator of three to be a holistic health and well-being program that guides people on how to be healthy, be safe, and be well to thrive in life. We totally have this in common, Sonya. Her first book, A Net Job, How I Crushed Food Allergies to Thrive, is a prescriptive memoir detailing her journey to become food allergy free in an Amazon number one bestseller and number one hot new release. Her life work is at the intersection of humans, health, and technology, creating products and services that drive impact for people on the planet. Her platform helps people of color manage and overcome food allergies. And she's a driving, conversations on mental health and food allergies. Oh, so relevant. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, fearless, foodie and proud first generation Indian American who currently resides in San Francisco, California. So awesome to have you here and to talk to you, Sonya. Hi, thank you so much. It's so great to see you and I'm so honored to be here. Thank you. You're so welcome. Yeah, I thought your story was so relevant. And I asked you before if it was okay to share that what we met through a mutual friend who's kind of a business negotiator and he knows everybody and he's like, you've got to meet Sonya and Sonya, you've got to meet Dr. Jill. And so you came to me for some care at the beginning. So we kind of met that way, but just have really great respect about what you're doing in the world as an activist and an author and all of this stuff. What I want to do is start back with your story. Like where did it all start? And you have quite the story. So tell us a little about how this all came to be. Yeah, absolutely. So I was diagnosed with severe food allergies, environmental allergies and asthma around the age of three. So the trifecta I always say that nobody wants. And we learned, you know, the way that you don't want to learn. I ate something, had an immediate reaction. I'm in anaphylaxis, although, you know, I'm so young, I have no idea what's happening. My parents had never seen that type of a reaction before. They actually never had even heard the word food allergy before. They came, you know, they were born and raised in India and came to the States when they went to college. So my siblings and I are first generation Indian American, you know, kind of eating Western food. And we just had no idea that inside my body something was going on. And so it was at another dinner party that my parents had where, you know, a snack came out, tried a peanut butter and jelly. I'm taking a few bites and boom, it's like hives and anaphylaxis. And, you know, luckily, many people at the party that my parents knew were physicians and had seen something like this before.  But it started this entire lifelong like four decades of what I call like I've lived in inflammation for four decades, right? I know you understand that. And my allergies, my food allergies got more and more as I got older, they got more severe. And I've been on the ER table almost dead four times in my lifetime. I've been in the ER hundreds of times for, you know, emergent, but non-anaphylaxis incidents. And in 2008 was when I had my latest, I should say, you know, anaphylaxis incident. And it was the worst, worst one that I have ever had. And I, when I left, finally, you know, was released from the ER that day for a full one year of my life after that night, I had hives all over my body. Wow. So the toxicity, right? Andal, can you even imagine like having huge welts all over your body for an entire year? And I went through like every possible emotion, you know, again, that you could go through. And that's when I really said to myself, you know, whatever you're doing, apparently is wrong, because here we are again. And, you know, I just need to now get to the root of why this is happening, what's really happening. And I want to have a North Star to age healthily while getting rid of these, you know, and that was in 2008.  And during that process as well, I was introduced to you. And I, you know, together we started to have conversations around gut health. Is there a relationship with food allergies? What does that mean?  You just have to like pause here because this is really clarified for people listening. We deal with a lot of IgG food sensitivities that can be present that can cause delayed reactions like achiness or headache or brain fog, or even rashes, but it's delayed. It's rarely, if ever, anaphylactic. It's not supposed to be anaphylactic. We're talking about true IgE. We're talking about the classical like people can die from this. And you clearly were close to that several times. And I just want our listeners to know there's a difference. I treat both. But what we're talking about is actually true in blue.  But that's one reason why I wanted to have you on is because I think a lot of people just like for me, they think Crohn's is incurable, right? And I am cured.  There's no, there's no cure. There's nothing that you can do about it. And that's why I'm so excited to have you on today, because you have really reversed this and made a change. And we can talk about the deep dive of some of the things you did to do that. But this is something that most people have been told or have heard that is lifelong, irreversible. Some people grow out of it, but there's not like any control that we have over it, right? And we're saying that's not true. That's not true. Even even I felt all my life, right? Because I was always told, what's true today, right? We don't know the exact cause of food allergies and there is no cure. So when you've heard that since you're three, you're just like, Okay, there is no cure. So I have to either learn how to live with this.  And so it was my whole life was only focused on my physical body and making sure that it could withstand another attack. I never looked at holistic health. Never. Yes. To that first, before we talk about the solutions, and I would just like to know like one or two, or even just one experience, I can't imagine as a child, like this really, because it's, you can't breathe, your lips are swollen, your body's rushing out. How did that feel? And do you remember any specific incident of time when you were taking the yarn? Like you had to be terrified. Oh, yeah.  I was in lecture, I was walking to lecture.  And by the time I got to class, my throat was like, closing up and I hardly had any air. But I'm in 300 person lecture at 8am in the morning. And of course, there's like the cute guy sitting in front of me as well. It's like totally mortified. And I got up and went to the water fountain, tried to like have some water and it just wasn't happening. And I think like I was already turning blue and somebody was like, Oh my God, she's like something's happening. We need to call 911. And I was rushed off to the emergency room. And it was so it was embarrassing. I was never allergic to bananas before that. That was incredibly scary to learn that any random food that I might try or I've eaten before could all of a sudden have this reaction. Oh, because yeah, this is something new. It's not like there was an end and like he said to be in a large and I'm just thinking like myself as you're telling it just being with that many people alone is kind of like there's a little claustrophobia and then to have like, yeah, there's like so many layers there. I can't imagine. Wow. So so then from that was college and this is actually the last decade and a few years that you really started to reverse it. When was the first point where you thought what if there was something different or you first had the thought that you were going to maybe go down a different path to look for answers? Yeah, so that was in 2008, you know, that emergent situation. I was in the hospital for about three days. And that's when I was like, you know, having all these conversations with the universe lying there.   Everything and you see, you know, watch.  But just to make sure you're going to make good on this, we're going to give you a hives for one year and see what you do. Right. So I mean, now I look back on all of that. And I'm just like, oh my gosh, but but that was really the time where I felt like, how could I be here again? And it was so it just like broke me down across like all areas of my world that I was like, I refuse to be in this position again. And there was some fire like in my soul that I was like, you know, I will figure this out. I will write the, you know, find the right people who believe that I can figure this out, who will help me on this journey, we will get to the bottom of it. And I saw it as my life's work. Yes. Right. Because who knows if it would happen, who knows when it would happen. And so in 2010, after like I healed from all that anaphylaxis, and I started to really just put my story out there and tell people like, because I hit it my whole life. I never used to talk to people about all of this. I was super embarrassed and shameful. But in 2010, I just said, I'm just going for it. And it was a process of a decade to get to where I am now. And it was a lot of testing and tweaking many, many different things. But there's so much learning that happened. So I love because what I hear in you is the thing I hear in any patient who's successful at overcoming illness. And I've been there as well. Number one is there is a deep fire within. I will figure this out somehow. Almost a desperation, right? Like I was there too. I remember with cancer and Crohn's and mold. Every time I got to the pit of despair and like, there's no hope. I remember that feeling of like, no, there's this like fire inside. I'm going to figure this out. And then again, any patient knows they might visit 5, 10, 20 doctors and get either no answers or get put off until they really find it. So you do need a lot of persistence and a lot of belief that you can, that you actually have. So I wanted, if you're talking to you out there, no matter what you're dealing with, what kind of illness, you can figure it out. And just I believe that just that desire alone, that prayer to God, the universe, wherever you're at in the hospital, I've been there too. That ignites the people and the resources to start to open up for us. So it's actually that first little instinct or inkling that we maybe have hope and that maybe we can figure it out and that we start to shift towards, I'm going to do whatever I can to figure it out. That opens the doors for people, resources and things that we need to come across our path or for us to seek them out. And even like you and I meeting or all the other talk to you in your journey, I feel like that desire really starts the process. And so again, I want to just encourage you if you're listening and feeling hopeless about any situation, you can overcome, you can overcome anything. But it starts with that desire and that will to survive. I always think that as almost the stubbornness, I got, I've got a German Swiss heritage and they're kind of like stubborn stoic. And I don't always like that at all. Like, but the truth is that that creates this fire and drive. And you obviously have that too. Yeah, I know. And I'm so glad that it came out, right? Because it was like dormant for all my life. But then, you know, that fire came out. And, and I just almost like immediately said to myself, you know, I can't do this, I will do this, like I truly will figure it out. And I, you know, taking that pressure off of like, this is a goal and seeing it as my life's work became like it took a lot of pressure off because I tend to also like add all these things to my plate. And then I'm like, Oh, God, I got to do this now. And I was like, I don't know if this can happen, but we're going to give it our best shot. And I won't stop until I figure it out. Yeah, yeah. And hives, I didn't have a year, but when I started doing maltreatment, I did detox binders and I had hives for at least two or three months, end to toe. So I also relate to that in a little fraction of what it was horrible. Like, so good. So from there, from in the hospital bed to obviously an author and being passionate on this and actually really healing yourself, where did the journey start? And tell us a little bit about that journey and the levels. And so, you know, I have an amazing allergist that I've been with a long time out here on the West Coast.    So, you know, yes, like this is great, like you're taking ownership of your health, right. And we want to be on this journey with you. And then also talking, you know, to my parents, I was on, as you can imagine, my entire life, so much Western medication, right.   So I just felt very, you know, foggy. And again, the things that I probably gave into history means multiple kinds and steroids, I mean, to calm them. So everything that those kinds of medications, they calm, they put a wet blanket on an immune system, but they don't say, why immune system?   Exactly. Exactly. So it's all about suppression. Right. So here I was like suppressing. And I said, like, you know, to my mom, is there some healthier way where I can maybe take different kind of medication that's not making me feel this way. And that's where coming from India, you know, we started talking about Ayurvedic medicine. And, you know, we pulled into this, you know, support team, as I call it, of doctors in Ayurvedic MD, who also started to get involved with my situation, with the food I'm eating, how I'm exercising, what I'm putting onto my body, ran a lot of testing, what medication am I taking. And you know, in Indian Ayurvedic medicine, you know, they do believe that in situations like this, there's just a ton of fire and toxicity that's in your body that's trying to get out, which is why it manifests as hives on your body. And so some of it is like, you've got to let all of that come out before you start to heal it, which is not what I wanted to do. But, you know, for the first time, I had to say, okay, we're going to trust some people coming into this process. We ran everything by kind of both sides of the house, the western, the eastern, and we started down a plan. And eventually that's how I got to functional medicine as well. And, you know, because there was always this question in my head about the state of my gut health, and is something going on that's causing or exacerbating my allergies?  So I want to hear about some of the things you found.  So we all have like a bucket we're born with or that we have a capacity for and depending on genetics and environment and how we were raised and the foods we're eating and the air we're breathing. Sometimes our bucket has a lot of margin, and we do pretty well. And we all have some toxic load that's I mean, our bodies are created to detoxify. So to me, it's like you can't get rid of toxins, but you can number one minimize exposure. And I would say simple things like clean air, clean water, clean food, like go back to the basics and literally 80% of our toxic load is from the air we breathe. So just getting air filtration or kind of clean air sources or clean food or clean water can be very, very much a part of the solution. But that toxic load as it starts to fill up and overflow, one of the things that can manifest is sensitivities, allergies, hives, this basically it's like our system that was created to defend us against invaders and bad things starts to turn on us and react to things that are normal every day, like peanuts or whatever. So to me, that's a sign of an overactive immune system. And then we say, well, root cause, is there an infection? Is there a dysbiosis of the gut, meaning abnormal microbes that are putting out excessive toxins? Or is there other toxic exposure? Mold can be a trigger for some people. But something in you or anyone who's suffered from this has triggered their immune system to be a little bit irritable, like overreactive. Yeah, absolutely. And we when we work together, you know, in the beginning, we started looking at all this, even like, you know, is there a mold exposure in my home and things like, you know, getting an air filter. Those are things again, like the focus with food allergies for me was always just on the food. So I had all these other things that I wasn't even considering. And even with the food as part of this process that I went through, I, it was almost like I learned to eat again, right? Because in the testing, you know, that I've done over the years, we started to get a real understanding of my genetic predispositions from the family.  So that I wasn't even considering. So it wasn't just eating foods that were safe. It was, is the food that I'm eating that is safe for my allergies actually good for my body? Or is it causing an issue somewhere else in my body? And a lot of that was going on. So I really like my first, first step, you know, even that I have in the book was all around changing mindset around all of this because I just had to get my head in a different place because that's so real. Go kind of go to where someone's listening to like my son, my daughter, my friend, myself have allergies. How do I change my mindset? Give us some of you. Yeah. Yeah. So, so what works for me, and I talk about this in the book, you know, I started off by defining and I'm big on like journaling or whiteboarding or yellow stickies, right? Like whatever works for you. And I just drew like, what does a healthy Sonia Han look like today? What is that?  Is she, you know, have clear skin? Like, what does that actually look like? And then what does she look like 20 years from now? How is she aging? Right? So I literally started drawing this out and thinking about it. And I went very, very like deep into, you know, just like I was saying, like, you know, weight and skin and function. Like I always grew up with seeing older folks have that pill box. Yes. I call the old lady pill box.  So these are things that I wrote down and I was like, here's what I want. And here's what I don't want. Right. And, and of course, like we all like have stuff as we get older and all of that. But I just knew that I didn't want to be on medication on my life. You know, I knew that I wanted to, you know, not deal with other things that would be difficult for me to get rid of. Like, you know, all of a sudden, because I was eating really badly, like gaining a ton of weight. So I kind of strategize this all out and defined it for myself. And that was kind of like one big piece. The other big pieces did a ton of research on stories of people who have completely transformed their health. And there are, oh my God, so many amazing people out there that similar to me, they had something that was going on. And they, you know, just put a stake in the ground and said, I'm going to do this. And I started to read these inspirational stories and how did they do it? I started to visualize and put together, like literal yellow stickies on my mirror in my bathroom of what I wanted to achieve in all of this.  So there are a whole series of these little steps I call micro steps that on a daily basis, I started to change behavior. And every time I was like, no, I'm tired. I don't want to do that. I would go back and look at like that vision board and say, but here's where I'm trying to get to. So, you know, it was like a series of all of this for the mind to get the mind also in a healthy space and in a growth mindset, because I think for a long time I was in more of a victim mindset. Yeah.  I'm not shaking anyone because I've been there too. Yeah. It's so easy to be like, oh my gosh, even for me, I've realized there's a lot of people who've had cancer and they kind of live as I'm a cancer survivor.  It's so not associated with me because I've never identified with like, and again, I'm proud that I'm a cancer survivor and I don't mind talking about it, but I don't identify with it because that's right. You see that we can get stuck in and then we lose the growth. I love talking mindset. I love that you're sharing these really practical tips because I also couldn't relate to, I remember right after my divorce, a really low point in my life and I started just walking and meditating and I wanted to come up with some sort of kind of a mantra that would just help me remember the things that I wanted to put forefront and the vision of who I saw myself to be in 10 or 20 years like you and this it may sound silly to you listening, but I literally every day would say every day and every way I'm stronger and healthier, wealthier and more resilient, younger and more beautiful, I will overcome all obstacles, I will outlast all adversity, things are turning in my favor and for three years, probably every day, multiple times a day, and I literally had like no quotes in scripture to go with one. So there's a longer version that includes all and I can say it outright, but it would literally like when I and it was some of this work on NLP and subconscious mindset and growth mindset and all these things and what I remember learning, which is what we're both saying is our subconscious mind is really kind of just takes orders like it's just an order taker. It's very simple and anything that our subconscious believes, it will bring to pass. That's all that knows how to do. So usually it's our subconscious that thinks we're sick or we'll never get well, that sabotages our wellness, but program our subconscious through repetition, reminders, through dream, through meditation, through prayer, we can actually reprogram it to believe. And for me, there's no doubt in my mind, I believe stronger, healthier, wealthier, more resilient, younger, more beautiful. And the funny thing is at the end that more beautiful, I was ashamed of even saying that. That's so vain.  I just want to be more vibrant and healthy as I age. Yes, that's exactly. I'm going to throw that one into and even my ex-husband the other day, he asked me, he's like, Joe, did you get plastic surgery? And I've never been like that, right? But I'm like, do I look younger than I used to? He's like, yeah, you do. I mean, the transformation on my skin from, you know, all of this has been unbelievable, right? Even even my friends asked me like what you're doing something, right? And I'm like, yeah, I actually for the first time have true joy in my soul. And that was even joy with allergies. Like I found joy in allergies. I never knew if my allergies would go away, right? And so, so, so grateful and lucky that, you know, to go into remission. But, you know, I just had to find purpose in it. And I was without purpose. And that's why that mindset piece, like the meditation, the visualization manifest, I'm so with you, all of that I did. And I just said to myself, like, there's no amount of juju that I will not do. If it's good juju, like, what is it? Tell me what it is? Like, and I would go ask and interview people, you know, who I was inspired by. And I would say, what are you doing? You know, like, I'm trying to transfer my health, what are you doing? And I'd write down like all these like this person is doing this, I'm going to try it. And again, it's like, every day doing these little, little steps, it didn't feel burdensome. But I could feel all this weight coming off of me, and especially off of my the worry off my head. And then I was able to make start making conscious decisions. Yeah. Oh, this is go deep into this. This is making me so happy because I so relate. And I also think people need to know, I take supplements, I exercise, I do the things that we need to do to be healthy. But this piece right here has the most power. Yeah, that's you up for everything else. And what you mentioned about joy, I remember, right after my diagnosis of breast cancer, not knowing if I was going to live or die and having that same feeling of like the purpose that I had the mission that I had, I didn't know the outcome. And now I know. So it's easy to look back just like both of us, we can look back. Yeah, we're healed. But I remember in the moment, like literally not knowing if I had six months or six years or less. And still knowing there was purpose and joy in that time. Yeah, I think that's so important to because right now is a tough time for we were just talking before, like, life is crazy. If you're listening out there, and if you haven't had a crisis, it's coming because we just had fires in our community, many thousands of people lost their homes. And before that, like I'm my 17 year old puppy died and like just things that are tough. And I'm okay. But it's like life is hard right now. And yeah, out there listening is there's a lot and we expect COVID to be over and it's not. Yeah, but it's relevant because it's still okay to find joy today, like in the midst of your hardship. From right now, like this is where you find the joy. This is where you find it, you find it in the pit. Because if you can find it there, you can find it anywhere and it will take and take you where you want to go. Absolutely. And that incident in 2008 was my pit. And I just said, no more, no more. And you know, and put together all these things, you know, holistically that I wanted to do. So some of it was mindset. You know, some of it was like creating a support team of different type of people. You know, we talk about expanding awareness to other forms of healing, functional medicine, and, you know, Ayurvedic medicine, you know, I learned there's a chapter in my book called cooking consciously, right?  And one of the biggest things in this whole process was also, you know, there is a voice inside me. I always suppressed it just like my allergies.  My true self needs to come out and tell people that I'm struggling with this. I need help at times, you know, here's what's happening. And that just ended up learning how to advocate for myself.  And all of these things like that I document in my book, it all led to remission. It wasn't like one thing did it. It was doing all of this stuff over a long period of time and consistently that led to it. Love it. So mindset, conscious cooking, asking for help, being authentic, trusting your intuition. What about practical things like, again, you and I talk about gut health or supplements and you don't have to go deep. But what were some of the practical things from just the physical functional perspective that or are you vetic that felt like they were helpful? Were there specific herbs or protocols or maybe just a little bit of overview of that? Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I will say that probably all my life I've also been taking the wrong supplements. Oh, yeah. So some of them, so we have like two sides of our immune system, TH1, TH2, and there's actually TH17 and Treg and all kinds of things in between. And now with COVID people know immune system side of kinds. But what you just said, I'll just emphasize, you can take, like for me, I know I'm TH1 dominant. So if I take a Stregolus or certain herbs, they actually make me worse. So I think that's what you're saying is certain things activate that and make you more, your immune system maybe more aggressive. Is that what you're Absolutely. And so when we discovered, right, leaky gut, you know, in my situation, it was like, okay, like a one a day vitamin wasn't going to help, right? So it's coming, you know, with, you know, your lead, figuring out what are the right set of supplements to start to heal that. And then also because I'm thinking about genetic predispositions, I'm thinking about type two diabetes, you know, I'm thinking about as I get older, you know, what are other things I might have to deal with. The supplement piece and completely overhauling that again, with your lead has been like tremendous. And I think also, like a lot of what you see on my skin as well, like shining has led to that because in the past it was just like taking a one a day and it might work for, you know, other people. But I think for me, like, everyone's body is so unique. You know, with Ayurveda, they had different kind of herbs, but also a big part of Ayurveda was the food that I was eating the times where I was eating, right, the amounts of food that I was eating. And then there's all kinds of other practices to release toxins, which some of them include massage and who doesn't love that as well, right? Yeah. So these were areas that I never spent time on before because I was always just focused on don't eat things with nuts in it. Where I started to now open my mind and this concept of bio individuality, right, and personal medicine, that's essentially, you know, what we've done now. And I'm not actually taking any medicines. It's all herbal supplements. It's all things that are great for me. And, you know, I will, I think, always keep Epi-benadryl on hand just in case something ever ends up happening. And I really believe in those tools, they've saved my life many times in emergent situations. But I really moved down the path of holistic, you know, products. And so even if it's the food that I eat that is farmed to table that's grown from a local market, that's as much as the supplement is having joy in my life as a supplement, love in my life, right? And all of it come together to me. I look at all of them as supplements, not even necessarily just say an herbal supplement I might put into my body. That's great because so true. And I love that you've said so many people, you know, they're this one a day multi and I would say 90%, maybe 80% of my patients, that's not the right thing because either you shouldn't have copper and iron and molybdenum or, you know, something in there you shouldn't have, or I find like with B vitamins is a perfect example. I take my B separately. Like I take a very high dose of B1 and B2 and then I don't take much of this one and more of this one. So I actually very much do that for personalized, like you said, for different people because we all need different and some people need a much higher dose of one or two of those things and you can't get it in a multi. So right, right. And prebiotics and probiotics were huge for me as well. Yeah. We'll just talk briefly about that because often what happens, people think a toxic load is external. We said clean air, clean water, clean food. That's absolutely true. But people don't realize as a lot of the toxicity can come from inside if your gut is leaky or if you have dysbiosis. So say you have overgrowth of bacteria or fungi or something in your gut, those things will produce toxins from the inside out and they can also contribute to toxic load. So what you said and what I've done too in my life is to really deal with that leaky gut and that toxic load from within through either antimicrobial herbs or probiotics or prebiotics or things to kind of get that balance back. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. What else of any other chapters in your book that we're missing as far as Key, we've really hit on a lot of high points. Is there anything else that we didn't talk about that's been part of that that's really significant? Yeah. No. I mean, I kind of, so this three to B program to me was like, think of it as themes in your life, right? Mantra, be healthy, be safe and be well in all aspects of your life, right? Again, because now I was thinking holistically. So in Be Healthy, there's like three steps that starts off with changing mindset, finding a support teams, finding right support teams, then to be safe, there's three steps and be well. And so two of those steps like the Be Healthy and Be Safe, those are really focused on like inward work, right? Really figuring out what's going on, really trying to get to root cause, having the right support system, starting to think about things differently. And then when you go through all of that, the Be Well, which is prosperity, was taking it all into the world and letting your true self shine, you know, helping others. So I built this, I never wanted to build it because I'm not a medical professional. So I didn't want to say if you do one plus two, you're going to have three. I built it purposefully as embed these themes into your life and you absolutely will get healthier because we have a ton of research that shows what meditation does, right? What cooking consciously like will do for you, et cetera. So I really love that, you know, I feel like in the allergy space, there's really nothing like that, right? It's kind of embedding these themes into your life and your holistic health will start to get, you know, get to get stronger and cleaner. And, you know, the hope is always that you'll be able to own your allergy situation, right? Have your North Star like I did, but really be at it every day so that you can transform your health in many ways. Love it. Love that. Because so applicable, really, so you could read this book if you had any number of illnesses and stole a lot of really important information. That's what's so powerful and amazing. Love your story. Love what you've shared. Love that we went to kind of the mind, body and some of the foundation. And one of the things that I think is probably most important is the purpose thing. The really like when you were there in the ER and it turned out to like internalize and become a purpose. And if you're listening out there and struggling with health, if you can find some sort of meaning of purpose in the suffering and transform and then like you said, you've taken it out into the world. And when you do that, it changes everything. It really, really does because it's more than just like a chore. Every day when you get up to, I have to do this. Oh my gosh, I must, whenever you hear should, must or have to, you know, you're probably on the right wrong track. Yeah. Because it comes from not that there's a hard days, but it should, it should come from more of a place of like the joy that like I get to, I get to take care of myself. I get to do this to change my body and change the world. And I hear you saying that. Yeah, absolutely. And one of those tools that I always had was a food allergy card. And I, it basically like I got rid of my business card and I just used that. And that was a starting point to meet all these new friends that I have, even in the restaurant industry and chefs.  Here's what I'm dealing with. Can you feed me? Yeah. And then if you came like this amazing conversation of like, Oh my God, my mom has this allergy or my son has this allergy or I'm dealing with this. So these are all just tools, right?  And that starts to lift that burden as well of what you're living with every day. Yeah, that last thing that basically what you're saying is when we are authentic and and you alluded to it earlier, it's hard because I think we are set up to put on a mask. Everything's great. I'm fine. How are you fine? Right. But it's kind of like taking off that mask and saying, I'm struggling with this. Can you help me? I'm suffering. And it doesn't mean again, for me growing up, it was like needy was not good. So I didn't. Yeah. So I had to relearn how to ask for help or how to say, you know, I'm suffering here. Can you help me and share and be okay with it? And that's part of the journey, too, because we need and in fact, if anything has transformed us during this pandemic, we need community. We need isolation is another disease. It truly is. It truly is. So yeah, yeah, I hope that, you know, these small tips, you know, and I think they're really easy to start on every day. There's, you know, it's not like you have to put a gazillion dollars into any of this, right? You can literally start with mindset change today after this Facebook Live. I love it. So where will find you? Where can they get a copy of your book? Tell us more about how to get in contact with you. Yeah. So Sonya Hunt.com, S-O-N-I-A-H-U-N-T. That's where you'll find all my links to, you know, Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. And my book is sold on Amazon on Barnes and Noble. It's in some local bookstores as well. So that's really exciting. And I read every single email that comes through. So if you have any questions or if you just want to chat, you know, send me an email. I'd love to talk to you. And yeah, I, you know, we're, we have a newsletter as well that you can subscribe to that goes out monthly. And there's a lot of great information on allergies, on holistic healing, products I find, recipes that I give out, things like that, because I'm a big foodie. I love it. I will include all of your links. Wherever you're listening to this, look below and you will see the links or out in the chat, whatever, we will make sure and include those. Sonya, it's such a pleasure to see your journey. Thank you. And even been a little tiny part of it. I'm just honored. Oh, so grateful. Yeah. And to see where you're going and just the wonderful book that you've written for people. And thank you today for your bits of wisdom. And I love this because I never really know what to expect. I kind of let it flow. But I love where we went with mindset and some of these issues because truly they have as much or more power than any supplement or pill or medication. Yeah, no, thank you so much. I'm so grateful.  And you have words of wisdom in my book. So anyone who's going to buy my book, you can actually read Dr. Jill's words of wisdom that are in the book as well. Thank you, Sonya. What a treat. I sure appreciate it. Have a wonderful day. You too. Thank you.


So I'm Peter Bergen and thank you to the brilliant Daniel Rothenberg, Rosa Brooks and Rob Johnson for their discussion of some of the themes that I'm going to discuss with Sir Lawrence Friedman. Sir Lawrence Friedman has been a professor in the war studies department at King's College since 1982. He's really in many ways the dean of the study of war and he has written a number of books including strategy which we're going to discuss now which is by the way is available for sale along with a lot of other books in the sort of book shop we have outside those doors over here. And he is also writing a book which he's completing which is actually called The Future of War so we thought that that would be a useful thing to discuss as well. So you know a basic question is what is strategy and does it change over time? Well so strategy is something that people do and part of the objective of the book was to look at the way that people have conceptualized strategy over time and if you just follow the literature people didn't do strategy before the late 18th century because the word wasn't used they talked about the art of war or something else but clearly they were doing something that we would recognize as strategy and it's essentially how you make your choices about dealing with the problems at hand and trying to create a better situation than you might be expecting just looking at the resources you've got and the resources your opponents have got. So I talk about strategy as the art of creating power which is basically the ability to extract from a situation more than you might reasonably expect but of course it can also be if you get it wrong the art of subtracting power a bad strategy means that you just get into a mess. Well let's consider then what I think was one of the great strategic failures of recent history which was 9-11. I mean Bin Laden had a theory of the case that by attacking us on 9-11 the United States would pull out of the Middle East and all the American backed regimes would then fall. I mean he had a strategy it was just a very bad one he had a tactical success just as Pearl Harbor was for the Japanese but you know it led to their defeat so to what extent I mean people have strategies most of them appear to be pretty bad. Yeah so strategy is very hard and it's often disappointing but you have to do it anyway because you've got to take some decisions and you can't just give up. So what you're trying to do is work out causation you have to have a theory of causation. Bin Laden example you've given Peter and written about so well is a clear one. He thought looking back at Somalia and Beirut if you hit the Americans hard enough they just ran away whereas he didn't quite understand if he hit the Americans bang in the middle of their major cities they may have a slightly different reaction and you thought people might have been able to tell him that so it was a bad strategy but it's strategy isn't a single event it's a process it's a series of adjustments and so on and so he had to work out another strategy after that strategy to that and couldn't find a much better one but others learned from it and developed it so the importance in all of these things is not to think about strategy as a single product but it's a process of constant adaption and evaluation and reconsideration of events because new possibilities open up and even as some others are closed down and I think one of the problems with strategy is you hear so often demands for better strategy we must have great strategy as if there's some sort of magic ingredient that if only you inserted into the body politic wise decisions will be made were only foolish ones made before but it's actually very difficult because there are lots of moving parts lots of different players and if you fix on something say this is our strategy you're going to be disappointed because somebody else A knows that and B has got their own objectives their own interests and they're going to come in and frustrate what you're trying to do so it requires this continual reflection and adaption.  So what did you mean why did you begin the book with that? Well partly because I'm old enough to get away with it. I think I mean I like because it just captured a very base point which is part of what I'm following is that strategy is not a plan involves plans involves planning but it isn't a plan by itself because a plan suggests a sequence of events that is going to reach a defined objective and I want to get people away from that idea and the other obvious quote is the more professional one is Von Malker's no plan survives contact with the enemy it's the same basic point. So first people should accept that whatever they think is going to happen it'll be different and they need to prepare for that. Secondly not to think in terms of a defined end. It's a strategy policy it's a soap opera one thing leads to another you think you've achieved the victory but you've just got to a new stage and then you've got to deal with the new state. So it's really just a reiteration of the point I was making before of the importance of recognizing that once you're engaged in an encounter with other actors you're not in complete control of the situation. One of our fellows at New America Scott Silverstone who's here and teaches at West Point is doing a book about preventative war and sort of the the temptations and obviously in 2003 we had a classic preventative war in Iraq and you've been engaged in the study of that war as an official capacity. So I mean preventative wars do they ever work are they are they are they are they part of a strategic plan that makes sense of a just generally sort of fizzle and fail. Well I mean there's lots of what needs to distinguish between a preemptive war and the preventative war preemptive is you think you're about to be attacked and you do something about it and you can say Israel in 67 was preemptive in that way and if it was it was successful or actually Argentina in in 82 believed it was preempting something the British weren't actually going to do but it and it wasn't successful. So that's preemptive preventive is saying well we think there's going to be a shift in the power structure so unless we act quickly then in a few years time 10 years time we're going to be in trouble and you know one example of that I mean one factor is one of the factors in July 14 the Germans the German view that Russia was going to get stronger and if they didn't move quite quickly it wasn't the only factor obviously but it's one of the factors there. So I think statesmen women have views of changing power balances and that will give some urgency to their moves but the trouble with preventive war is you're turning something that's a possibility for the future into a reality now and if you're not absolutely sure that you are the stronger one at that particular moment then you're going to get into trouble anyway I think it's a sort of thinking you can still see that sort of thinking at quite local levels but for great powers I think it's one hell of a couple and you can you know you just look back at these these we see the books now on the rise of China and how you need to deal with that now you know 30 years ago you have similar books on the rise of Japan and how we did have to deal with it now and you know you're grateful that nobody took much notice of it 30 years ago because it's it's this very sort of crude formula way of looking at the shifts in international balances. We've talked today about drones and bioengineering and other sort of exotic you know new forms of warfare do any of those let's assume that they happen and are important going forward do any of those actually change strategy I mean you meant in your book you talk about I mean maps the invention of useful maps obviously had an impact I mean is it what do you see in the future might actually change the way we think strategically well what what's happening is options are being created that weren't there before presidents can do things that they couldn't have done before and they may seem very tempting things to do even useful things to do drones obviously give a president options to deal directly with a source of threat I think there's so technology I mean technology matters it's silly to say that the war whether you talk about its character or not is not being changed by new technologies I think one of the difficulties we have is to assume that the way that we see these technological possibilities is the way that others see them the obvious example from you know the moment in in Vietnam where the first smart weapons were introduced the possibility of more discriminatory attacks became a way by which we think so up to that point certainly going back back through Korea back into the Second World War we had been responsible for indiscriminatory attacks on big centres of population all of a sudden we couldn't have the excuse that we there's no other way of doing it during the Second World War the US Air Force of the Army Air Force the RAF if they experimented to try to be do the tactics with more precision they just suffered heavy losses so I think little heart but if it in inaccuracy of bomb aim led to it in more immorality of war rain you just attacked large population now we don't have to do that and so over time we actually get offended and quite properly so if large numbers of civilians are killed because it almost seems like a callous act but that doesn't mean to say that other people think the same way about about how they might use this technology if you wanted to use the same technology precise technology you can use it to kill a lot of people you can pick your targets to do that as well so we shouldn't assume that new technologies mandate a certain form of warfare they just increase your options to fight in different ways if you still want to kill large numbers of innocents you can kill large numbers of innocents probably more efficiently than before but we have an option not to do that and I think it's the interaction between the technologies and the strategic culture and the overall political context in which you're operating that changes things it's not technology driving it by itself so in 2003 we overthrew Saddam and then we made them later we overthrew Gaddafi and under a different administration yet not seeming to have learned the kind of lessons how common is that because you thought that you know something that was readily recent would inform the decision that took place in 2011 the understanding that vacuums create opportunities for other groups yes he would I think that I mean I think as explained earlier part of the problem with Libya is and I think you can argue with Syria as well is everybody got terribly excited in 2011 Arab Spring popular movements like we got excited about the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and so on without thinking through necessarily how this would work out and we attached ourselves to very big political objectives on the assumption that the people would achieve this I the overthrow of Gaddafi and then the overthrow of Assad and then in both cases but very starkly in the case of Libya we found ourselves in the position where the good guys who were going to overthrow the bad guy were about to be overwhelmed in Benghazi so there was a panic because the initial defeat of our foreign policy was going to appear with a massacre of people who we'd encouraged to act without very doing very much to help them so that so I think part of the problem with Libya was it was a conflict developing or a role developing not as a deliberate act of foreign policy but it's an act of panic by and large in Europe rather than in the United States and then you suddenly find well you you know we're just doing that as a humanitarian thing to protect a massacre but you know the war's going on so you know gradually with the help of a UN resolution that the Russians hadn't stopped when they might have done you're able to do more but we were always sort of behind the pace we weren't controlling it and I don't think people had thought through if you're having a big militia-based war we know from the past that these things blur into criminality they blur into warlordism and it's very hard to control but if we were going to do something we would have needed I think to put people on the ground much more you know the sort of tied debate about boots on the ground and so on is right in a very basic sense if if your war is about political control it's in the end about control of territory and if you're not controlling the territory there's a limit to what you can do and you just have to accept that that's a limit to what you can do or you have to put in the far greater effort than at the moment people were and certainly in 2011 people were prepared to do why is there so much so much optimism about war as an instrument of policy when there's so much evidence that it usually doesn't achieve its aims it's a good question I mean war disappoints it's you look back at history and you know it's not the case that war never achieves anything war achieves things by and large defensively that is you know if we look back at the second world war which most people think of as a good war it just was a good war it was because we were we were responding to somebody who believed war could re-change the map and re-change the the whole character social character of Europe and the rest of the world so we fought back and that was a good war to achieve that but in the end and then the end it created other possibilities for a different sort of international order so states exist now because of war that wouldn't otherwise have existed but the fact of war and this goes back to the previous discussion is most of them don't end you know if you look back at the history since 1945 you know take two acts of partition in 1947 in Palestine and in the British Raj my country being responsible they produced a series of wars which are not quite over because they left sufficient contested territory and uncertainty that you could never solve it so people believe and you hear this often enough that enemies can be eliminated and removed but they keep on coming back because you can't remove your enemies and the old days in which sovereigns would go to war because of a particular dispute and have an understanding about how sovereigns dealt with these matters once it was over their past once you had popular wars it was very difficult to bring them to a satisfactory close so the French Revolution changed everything the French Revolution well the French Revolution first encouraged the idea of mass armies led to the mass armies and the Napoleonic Wars I there's a French Revolution that changed a lot arguably it was the one in 1871 because it was then that you have the important moment when having been beaten by the Germans the French don't give up so you've had your battles I'd sit down so but the French don't give up and you have this debate between Von Mulcher and Bismarck about what to do about Paris and Von Mulcher Bismarck's worry is that if he doesn't get this over quickly then the French will bring in allies and it'll start to change and Von Mulcher doesn't think this is how it doesn't want to be given orders by Bismarck apart from anything else this is the moment when the operational art comes in and the idea of this operational level of war at which politicians should stay completely clear of it's the military responsibility anyway Bismarck didn't believe that and he got his way but I think that was the moment when Von Mulcher at least realized the importance of popular will as a real problem for a professional military army and you know one response that which you can see in the in the German General Staff's initial response to colonial wars and then even following through it into the First World War is that civilian populations do are a target or a legitimate target so I think I think that was the those you know just step back a second if you're going to use war as a political instrument you've got to feel that you can use your armed forces decisively and you can contain it socially and both of those conditions which are interdependent have become increasingly qualified over over time. Is there a sort of specifically Western and in fact specifically American form of strategy? Well American strategy was always you know there's these two great figures from the interpreters of Napoleon Klausowitz and Jomini and American strategy was always much more influenced by Jomini than by Klausowitz and Jomini was a great believer in the decisive battle and you know you can trace the influence of Jomini through the elder man and the younger man and you know the idea the idea that you can have a clash of arms which settles the political matter. And this was taught at West Point? It was taught at West Point and I think it's still a very strong influence on American thinking. Is it right? No in context. For all the reasons I'm saying it's very hard these days to have decisive war and I think it's the problem of the idea of the operational level of strategy from which politicians are excluded which goes back to Vietnam and grumbles about micromanagement and so on leads to a belief that there are things that the military do which are quite separate from the things that the politicians do and it means that neither side is pretty well informed enough about what the others are up to and I think that was some of the early discussions this morning. So I mean it's not wholly wrong because if you're a country as powerful as the United States then there are things that you can do that others just can't do and you do have enormous capability. I think one of the things you know it leads to is actually I'm not sure the Americans sorry this sounds terribly patronizing to an American audience. I don't think Americans always appreciate that it's your raw power that makes the difference. You know all this stuff about the Revolution and military affairs and all this clever cunning ways that you're going to use new technology. You know the basic thing the US has got is more firepower than anybody else and that's why you keep on winning is because you know the enemies can't really cope if they want to stand up as a regular force against the United States they can't cope so that's why they go to guerrilla warfare and militias in the end. But this Germany's sort of decisive you can see that in the debate between which Kennedy won at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Curtis LeMay was looking for a sort of first strike against the Soviets right. Well to the influence at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis was still career and the belief and the military irritation at the idea of limited war. So the conclusion that the political military establishment had reached as a result of career was that you had to accept there are certain things you may have to fight but you couldn't go the whole way because it was just too dangerous in the nuclear age which is not an unreasonable conclusion to reach. But the military didn't like it because again limited war went against the ethos. So you remember Kennedy had received during the Laos he was called it Laos because he didn't think the Americans could go to war for a country called Laos. During that crisis he kept on getting proposals that involved a tactical nuclear weapon. So he'd lost confidence and also because of the bad pigs he'd lost confidence in military advice. Actually if you look at what the argument between I mean that they barely met during the Missile Crisis and they had more meeting but if you look at the argument between what Curtis LeMay was proposing and what Kennedy was proposing LeMay wanted preventive war. I mean he just thought this was the opportunity they've laid themselves open let's get them now take your chance deal with the issue whereas Kennedy was much more conscious of the risks of escalation and you know fearful that the wrong moves would lead to some sort of nuclear catastrophe. So it was about it wasn't just a question of the different views of risk it was also a question of political objectives. And there's a final point of course that one of the reasons that LeMay was irritating many people on the hawkish side of the debate then is because what the Air Force was proposing for an airstrike on Cuba was a massive attack lots of sorties and the Dean Atchison's who were prepared to have a go you know we're looking for the quotes and quote surgical strikes so there's also you come back to the ethos of massive force leaving nothing to doubt as being the right way to go about fighting a war as against those who are trying to think about more politically sensitive ways of using your force and achieve your objectives without creating worse problems. So your writing a book on the future of war how do you go about it. What I don't try to do is predict the future of war so it's about the history it's about the way people have thought about the future of war so it starts which I'm sure Rob may know about this but most of you want the famous book called the Battle of Dawking which came out in 1871 so related to these events that I was describing before which in which describe the genre of books on the future of war which is essentially to make a polemical point that if we don't prepare ourselves properly before we know where we are the Germans will be in Dawking and we'll be having where is Dawking near Guilford. You know where Guilford is, it's the last place you'd expect to fight a war. It's not what they do there and so that opened up a genre of literature on the future of war that is essentially designed to act as a warning not as a prediction but act as a warning so that if you don't follow the advice of my book then you're going to get into trouble so and you know more recent things well I mean Pete Singer knows all about this but there's more recent example other example would be General Hackett's book on the Third World War which you know if we if only we increase our defense expenditure to 3% of the NATO norm then this war that's going to come in 1985 will win but if we don't then we'll lose it it's that that finer balance so that a lot of the writing on the future of war is that one of the things that interests me is the interaction between the this sort of literature and reality and one of you know the most famous example is H. G. Wells's book the world set free in which he introduces the idea of atomic bombs you know atomic bombs are called atomic bombs because of that book because Leo Tzilard the scientist in 1933 had that book in mind when he was reading about the scientist Rutherford's dismissal of the idea that there could be a chain reaction that would lead to so much energy release and you know the links between Wells and the scientists and Szilard and so on are quite close so that's the start but just to sort of where it goes on to I guess it's also a challenge I mean you had Stephen Pinkie here last year it's a challenge to Pinkie's view as well I I don't believe there's a science at work here I think that the is a challenge to the view that if you look at the numbers carefully enough and you're really good at statistics you can work all this out because you can't what you need to do is to understand war as part of a historical stream put it to keep it in context and the fact that you've now got statistical techniques that allow you to compare very different episodes in military conflict between separated in time and space it doesn't really help you very much you need to look at the history so it all goes back to honor interest and fear facilities on what the city is a good a guy to this is as many others and we have time for some questions but not that much time so keep it brief we'll start with Harlan Ullman very good to see you and listen to your elegant appraisal of history I'd like you to comment about transformation of strategy in this sense I've argued for a long time during the 20th century we were spoiled with kind of a binary system of strategy World War One Central Powers versus the Allies World War Two Cold War and now we're in a much more complex environment take for example Syria you've got God knows how many participants all with virginly a divergent interest in views so how do you use strategy and apply it in a sensible way to a situation such as Syria or is this just a sound bite that is not going to lead to any kind of a satisfactory solution I don't think there's a there's certainly no satisfactory solution to a problem like Syria if something's got to that state you know the idea that you can suddenly rewind and go back to 2011 when there's so much so many weapons around so many factions created so much bitterness so much brutality I mean that's that country is now scarred so if you're trying to which is no reason to say that we don't try to do what you can be the first step is to be realistic about what's happened to Syria the second step is this basic problem in a conflict like Syria that once you've decided on your enemy which we have by by and large then you've got to realize that other foreign policy objectives may go by the wayside in trying to deal with that you can't achieve all of your foreign policy objectives at once in the Middle East everything you go in one direction makes it harder in another direction so you know and if you try to balance it all then you may achieve nothing so it you know these are real quantities and the why in the end strategy is an executive function somebody's just got to make a decision and say this is what we do but you've got to recognize there's going to be the result is not going to be very good I mean in situations where my enemies enemies also my enemy you know you can't you can't work your way through everything you know look at the relationship now between the Turks and the Kurds and ISIS and so on and Russia how where do we stand on all of that what's our view I mean the end Turks of Turkey's our ally but it's not a simple situation in which there's an obvious thing to do and it's what you know unless you have got a grip on these conflicts at a very early stage which is a difficult and bold thing to have done but unless you do that then you've got to accept you're moving around in a very fluid and difficult situation channel then here you Richard Ponzi with the Stimson Center Professor Friedman you brought up the end of World War 2 the emergence of a new international order appreciate your thoughts on the emergence of the future of war the topic of today's discussion as it relates to the future of the global collective security system set up in 1945 in particular by our two countries in the Atlantic Charter does it need to be radically overhauled given the types of conflicts today in particular the changing nature as it relates to the shift from interstate to civil war well I'm the Atlantic Alliance NATO is one of the great achievements of the post-war statesmen they were all men and it's played a vital role NATO is essential the American Alliance system is the most important thing the United States does and it's one reason why we don't talk so much about interstate war because it resolves a lot of the basic issues of conflict what what are the situations in which you see war become more likely it's often when alliance relationships are in flux when alliances have been formed and reformed and so on that's what was happening before the first world war so the great thing about NATO particularly as it exists and it takes certain things out of the equation the reason why we're not into Cold War 2 is because all the allies that Russia had when it was the Soviet Union and our members of NATO you know they haven't got any allies China hasn't got any allies not to speak of so and the United States does but maintaining that alliance network is one of the reasons for international stability so if you're worrying about the future of war and you're worrying about nuclear proliferation and other things actually what you're doing a lot of the time is worrying about the ability and the readiness of the United States to sustain its international networks now this isn't particularly a system that's necessarily going to be great at dealing with civil wars and the other sorts of conflict I think you need different sorts of international collective security arrangements to do that and I think one of the one of the problems we've got at the moment as partly as a result of what happened with Iraq and Afghanistan is that sort of appetite that appeared to be developing in the first decade of this century to engage humanitarian interventions right to protect I mean that has been knocked out of us because it just seemed to lead to grief no thanks but actually some of it was quite successful and I think part of the challenge I think for the coming decade is whether we can work out how we engage in a number of not all but a number of these sort of interstate conflict you come back to the point that the basic you know the best guide to future war is past war and the best way to get out of the cycle conflict trap people have called the past war is to is an external intervention so I think that's that's a challenge and you know the feeling that we just didn't do it very well and we didn't do it very well in the last decade means it's a greater challenge than it seemed it would be well thanks a lot of freedom for a really brilliant presentation discussion thank you sir


Okay, folks, sorry for the delay, let's get started. It's an honor to be able to present this session, Powerful Data Science with Project Jupiter and Drupal at DrupalCOT. The talk is going to focus on the specific technologies mentioned there. It's also going to look more broadly at some significant transformations underway in the very concept of what is complete, high-quality content in increasingly the data-centric world. My name is Mike Nescott. I'm Director of Cloud and DevOps Solutions at JBS. At JBS, we do a lot of work with Drupal and web development. We also do a lot of work in research and statistical analysis. So we have a special interest in the intersection of these different disciplines and specifically in the growing field of data science. We are headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area. We do a lot of work with the U.S. federal government. But we also have offices in the Bay Area of San Francisco, Atlanta, and we have people working throughout the world for JBS. I'm currently based in Seattle right now. The takeaways of this presentation, first of all, there are continuous improvements in our ability to collect, process, analyze, and communicate data. We can extend our existing content management systems to benefit from this enriched data, specifically by using tools available through the Jupyter Notebook ecosystem and languages that are strong in data science, including Python and R. And finally, we'll see that these tools are relatively easy to learn to get up and running to engage in data exploration and content development. The term big data has almost become cliche, but several studies have shown that in fact we are producing more data at an impressively exponential rate. Behind this explosion in data is a vast array of expanding data collection and processing networks that span from the outer edges of the universe down to our own personal bodies. This data, along with these processes and capabilities and networks, along with our improved ability to process data and having more people that are trained in data science has led to the rise of data science. The term data science actually dates back a few decades, but the modern coinage of the word has been attributed to a gentleman named Drew Conway who developed this Venn diagram of data science, which depicts it as the intersection of math and statistics, programming, and substantive expertise in a particular area related to the data under consideration. Within data science there's been a lot of progress recently, specifically in machine learning, and within machine learning, which is closely related to artificial intelligence, there's been a lot of attention focused on a family of machine learning algorithms that perform what is known as deep learning, using vast networks of layers of virtual neurons to extract value and make sense of large streams of data. Within the last few years we've seen impressive advances in speed recognition and image recognition. Deep learning is a core part of cutting-edge products like Amazon Echo, and it's being used prominently in services like Google Search now. So with the rise of data science and the availability of data and our ability to make sense of it, we are living in an increasingly data-driven world. Data science now has a big role in many fields that previously were considered to be relatively low-tech, such as farming and the humanities. Data science and machine learning is an integral part of more and more applications, and data science is bringing a more prominent role in content development. This is a pyramid called the DIKW pyramid that is related to a model that's been around a while that looks at the process of taking data and then extracting information from it and making sense and content from that. Historically, the view has been that you have a lot of data, maybe, but much of it is wasted, you know, it's noise. You end up with a relatively small amount of useful content from that data. With the rise of data science and the advances in machine learning, we can imagine the shape behind the model being transformed quickly. So the new situation, the new model perhaps, is that more data is content and more of our content is data. Related to data science and machine learning and content development, there's been a lot of attention paid recently to applications such as chatbots and the use of natural language processing to construct conversational interfaces. There's perhaps been more widespread practical application to this point, however, using natural language generation to create automated news stories and automated reports in areas such as finance and fantasy sports. The data driven world, however, is not necessarily a utopia. Algorithms are being used in great many fields now and there's been several studies that have shown that a lot of these algorithms have biases in them potentially that can do personal damage to people in the criminal justice system, people buying homes, people applying for jobs or having evaluations performed on them in their current positions. Another problem that has become evident is that data science is becoming increasingly used in medicine and other sciences but these fields are still heavily reliant on the existing body of knowledge, often contained in research journals that date back years. And over the past few years, a number of individuals have taken major studies that are published in these journal articles and have looked at the documentation on the process that were used. They tried to replicate the results and found out they couldn't do it. They came out with different findings. This has led to what some have called a reproducibility crisis in science. Solutions to some of these problems may be available, at least partly, from the collection of open movements that have emerged over the past few years, specifically open data and open source software. If the code and the data that are used to create the algorithms are freely available, it becomes much easier to test them, to detect the biases that may be in them to eliminate those biases. It also becomes easier to collaborate and build upon the algorithms that are high quality. It is the quest for a development platform that is capable of working with open data and can be used in pursuit of reproducible research to produce high quality computational content that has led to the rise recently of the Jupiter notebook, previously called the ipothon notebook. It initially only supported Python, since it has expanded to support more than 40 languages. This is basically the anatomy of a notebook. It consists of a web application that provides an interactive interface that can be used to weave together text, mathematical formulas, executable code, interactive widgets, and rich media. The basic format of the notebook is it actually JSON, which gives the right mix of simplicity and functionality, allowing this platform for rich media to be easily shared in different formats and to be version-controlled using Git. And to have GitHub be used as actually a content distribution and content presentation platform for notebooks. So I'm going to actually briefly demonstrate a few examples of the Jupiter notebook that I have stitched together by cloning other notebooks from GitHub and then extending and mashing them together. So I am running these notebooks in Docker containers. Docker offers a great way to get a Jupiter notebook up and running to be able to begin exploring what the platform has to offer. There's a wide collection of specific data science notebooks available on GitHub that include not only the basic Jupiter notebook application but also a lot of data science tools in different languages pre-installed. So first of all, this is a notebook that uses open data that's available from the World Bank. Specifically, they have a data set known as World Development Indicators that show the socioeconomic progress of different countries over the years in a number of areas, health, education and welfare, for example. And what this notebook does is basically show the process of taking data from the World Bank data set, importing it into the notebook that is known as a data frame, using Python tools to process the data, to visualize it, and then to output the graphics in a dynamic format. So what I'm going to do is basically from this command from the toolbar of the Jupiter notebook, I'm going to run all the cells in this notebook. What's going to happen is that these cells, as you can see which combined text and data are going to be used, are going to execute in sequentially from the top of the notebook to the bottom of the notebook. And at this point, the data is being pulled into this data frame structure in Python. We can begin to explore the different statistics here. And then on the fly, we have these graphs generated. We can then, if we want to, take this, you know, modify this notebook here at iGitHub. We also have capabilities here of downloading it into PDF or HTML format for important to another type of content management display system. Next, I'm going to look at a notebook that is involved in an area that is a specific interest of the team we have at JBS. Okay, and so this is a, we do a lot of work for a government agency called the National Institute of Aging, which is part of the National Institute of Health in the federal government in the United States. And specifically, as part of that project, we developed an Alzheimer's disease clinical trials database. I found this notebook out there on GitHub that takes Alzheimer's disease data, related data from a study that looked at the early diagnosis of the disease and it applied different machine learning algorithms to that data. There is a article related to this subject material in the clinical trials database that we made, we built for the National Institute on Aging. And so what I did was take the notebook, pull in some content from that, the National Institute on Aging site which we built on Drupal 8, recently migrated it from Drupal 7. And in the Drupal 8 application, we used the new services friendly views support for outputting JSON, created a simple web service, and then here is the Python code that consumes the data from Drupal and is used to display it in this notebook. In addition to displaying the content from Drupal, what this notebook does is pull in that data set that has a group of data from Alzheimer's disease patients, normal controls, and it runs different machine learning algorithms on that data set. Okay, so there we go, sorry. Had cut-in activity problems for a minute there, switching out to the internet. But here are the statistics then and a chart that compares the performance of those different machine learning models. And there's a link here to a notebook that was developed by, another notebook that was developed by a researcher at the National Institute on Aging, a gentleman named Murat Vigil. And he is part of a project that is bringing together a consortium of research centers to find better ways of detecting what is known as preclinical Alzheimer's disease, of finding evidence of the disease in its very earliest stages. And what this notebook displays is the process used in, that's going to be used by that consortium, in extracting neuro-image data from MRIs and CT scans. It's going to display the different methods that are used in constructing this data. It's often essential when you're looking at scientific research in being able to look at the process from the very onset when the data is collected, because there's a lot of decisions made early in the process in terms of how to deal with missing data or data that's not clean that have potential implications down the line for the actual results. So when we look to being able to arrive at a world where more of the research is reproducible, it's essential, if possible, to be able to distribute this type of computational content along with the journal articles of the future. Just take one final look at a notebook application that is also involved in the world of health. And this is looking at a model that was developed to examine the process of disease spread and how immunization can aid in halting disease spread. Specifically, this is a model that will consider such things as, you know, if a disease is spreading in a population. What percentage of that population is vaccinated? How deadly is disease? How quickly do people recover? And then the focus is on disease within networks of social interaction. A lot more scientific research is now focused in areas such as the look at social networks to see how the interaction of individuals has impact on health and well-being of individuals. And this uses some Python tools, including a network analysis tool called NetworkX. And as we run all the code in the notebook, what we end up with is an interactive widget that allows us to explore how that disease affects the population over time based on the parameters of the model and based on the interaction of the network. So you see here, without going into too much detail, that there's 50 people in this network under consideration. They have each of them 10 connections. What we can do is potentially, if we're in the process of exploring this model and evaluating it, let's say we increase the size of that network to 500. And then we each one of those people, let's say, we say they have 20 connections. We can go back at this point in the code, rerun those cells. And what we're going to do is have that widget reproduced with the new parameters attached to that model. So you see we have a lot more nodes in that network. And we can then look at how that process plays out in a wider social network. Okay, as far as how we can integrate tools like Jupyter and languages like Python and R with Drupal, we can simply link content pieces to each other. We can, as we saw, bring in content and data from Drupal as a service. We can, as we saw, convert the notebook into PDF or HTML and attach it or import it into Drupal. A lot of folks are using the iframe to display notebooks within Drupal. This is an example of a notebook that is part of a blog that's maintained by a researcher on the open-scholar Drupal distribution platform that's used in many universities. The notebook is part of a broad ecosystem, which we saw includes GitHub. Notebooks posted to GitHub are rendered dynamically, automatically with a few limitations. And we saw that Docker plays a big role in the Jupyter ecosystem. A lot of researchers are now distributing, along with their research studies, notebooks either in the notebook format or embedded in Docker containers. Jupyter has become now a big role as a data science IE platform in all the major cloud service systems, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, Azure. There's a data science social network called Kaggle. Notebook is the central part of that. It's being used in executable books, in journalism. This is a notebook that was distributed by a media firm in the United States, along with a news story analyzing the Twitter behavior of a U.S. public official. I won't name that person, but if they were presenting here, the talk would likely be titled Making Drupal Great Again. The notebook is being widely used in academia and in learning. The examples we looked at used the Python programming language as a programmatic interface in the notebook. Python is quickly emerging as one of the leading languages in data science because it's relatively easy to learn. A lot of scientists who aren't programmers by profession have adopted Python. There's been a lot of package in the area of data science developed in Python. It's got an excellent package management tool. It's relatively easy to read, and there are even vibrant sub-communities within science that have developed among Python. The neuro-imaging notebook we looked at included some very specific Python packages just focusing on very aspects of neuroscience. Another language that's popular in data science that can be used in a notebook that's relatively easy to adopt to and has ISR, which was developed specifically for data science. It was born out of the world of statistics. A lot of scientific and statistical-related packages developed around R. It's possible within a notebook either to run a notebook on a specific language or you can actually mix different languages within a single notebook using a concept of what is known as cell magics. The person who's given credit for creating the Jupiter notebook, a gentleman named Fernando Perez, uses it as a tool for accelerating the pace of scientific research. Historically it's taken a long time when someone has a new idea to get that actually published in a journal article. There's a long laborious process in place for taking a scientific idea, writing it in a journal article, submitting it and getting reviewed. The notebook as part of an open agile content publishing workflow, potentially would help accelerate that process. You can envision a situation where you have a notebook that's developed by a researcher in a lab or by an investigative reporter. It's pushed into a data or code repository so it becomes immediately available for evaluation and for collaboration. Eventually it's published alongside a notebook in an open access journal. This new model also leads us to consider then with the rise of data science and the popularity of the Jupiter notebook if there may be a new model emerging for scientific content and content general in a data-centric world. The idea here is that high quality, complete content in the future may not only represent the text and the graphics and the references to the data and the methods that were used to produce that text, but also the whole computational environment that were used to create it becomes part of the core content itself. This is a concept that's only beginning to emerge. It's going to be very exciting to see where this develops in the coming years and very interesting to see how we in the Drupal community can use this productively alongside Drupal itself. With that, I'd like to thank you for hanging around so late and attending and invite you to complete devaluation on this session. Thank you very much.