Many different roads to go down. Hyperledger is working, of course, with Enterprise and we have, James can speak a little bit to blockchain agnosticism and Justin, of course, to ETH2 and the General Ethereum Roadmap, but I'll give everybody a moment to introduce themselves beginning with Brian. Okay, I'm Brian Bellendorf. I'm Executive Director of Hyperledger which is a project embedded inside the Linux Foundation which has been around for about 16 years and we're all about trying to figure out how do you make open source projects that deal with plumbing with infrastructure sustainable by building not only communities of developers around it but communities of corporations that realize enough value, just enough value that they realize they need to feed back in and make this kind of flywheel go, whether it's operating systems or cloud computing or blockchain technology and that's kind of where Hyperledger comes from. Okay, James. My name is James Kresswitch. I'm a co-founder at SUMA. We work on cross-chain interoperability, particularly between Ethereum, Bitcoin and other chains that weren't designed for this. Typically, we're trying to hack in interoperability where it wasn't meant to go. I'm Justin Drake, a research IDFM Foundation. I mostly focus on Ethereum 2.0, all layers of the design and one of these is the light client and how friendly we are to others to be a light client. Okay, so to kick things off a little bit, I think it is important to understand where everybody is looking into the near future to then figure out what needs to be done for us to work a little more closely together at least to communicate with one another. So, to Brian, to educate folks here who may be more familiar with ETH2 but less familiar with where Hyperledger is headed, can you chat about the grand vision? Grand vision. So, it's four years ago, right? Ethereum was still kind of a roadmap, a plan, it was before the ICO. Bitcoin had arguably taken off and been interesting and enterprises were starting to pay attention to it but had a lot of concerns, right? Partly the regulatory bit, partly proof of work, partly like this sense of where is this technology coming from? And to a lot of us, it sounded very familiar, right? It sounded a little bit like 1998 when the term open source was kind of defined but even like the years before that where projects that were built by communities of developers working together actually is how we got the internet, how we got SMTP and DNS and HTTP and those kinds of things. And so, the Linux Foundation had started to hear from different parties, both big corporations but also companies like Blockstream and even Consensus and others that there was something interesting here, something very vital, something that built upon a history of distributed systems that goes back a couple of decades, right? But had a fresh take on it and it was worth trying to figure out where can we meet up between enterprises that have problems not so much with programmable money but partly with decentralization, you know? This move to the cloud and the move to kind of two or three providers is great if you're a shareholder in one of those two or three. We kind of lousy for every other enterprise, right? So where could we meet that up? And really it was started with that idea and a bunch of the companies that came together kind of pooled some projects they'd been working on, some code from IBM that they had called initially internally open blockchain and then it was called Fabric, code from Intel, that was kind of an R&D platform called Sawtooth and code from some other places like digital asset and it was kind of like, let's put this in a pot. Let's actually, because everyone's concerned about tokens and ICOs and things like that, let's kind of distance ourselves a bit from it, not from tokenization as an approach to kind of doing digital assets but from the proof of work kind of bit and from kind of the speculative financial instrument kind of bit of it and let's just see are there other use cases to apply this to from the way that banks send payments to each other to supply chain traceability to all sorts of things. And so that initial body of code didn't include anything in the Ethereum space but when I joined in May of 2016, the project was kind of launched 2015, May of 2016, one of my first trips abroad was to DevCon 2 in Shanghai and I'd been following the Ethereum space, I actually talked to Vitalik and Bo Shen when they did the road show for the original ICO and I was like, there's something important here, there's something urgent here and there's certainly this kind of enthusiasm from the community that I hadn't seen since the early days of the web. So I always felt like we needed to have some sort of relation, some sort of bridge to that community and while we built up this ecosystem around fabric and around sawtooth and saw that start to get used in production systems, I realized what we were also doing was educating the market, educating the enterprise world on what really blockchain technology could be. Even if we were having them take these kind of baby steps forward into just building partially distributed systems, some sort of minimum viable centralization was kind of built into all these networks. Now fabric is in a lot of different places, right? But it was still very clear that we couldn't just be about fabric, we couldn't just be about one technology, one core, it had to be about a family of technologies and so now in 2019, the kind of vision around hyperledger is, can we be that ground that explores that entire spectrum from permission to permissionless blockchain technology, whether it's down in the weeds at the protocol layer at the, you know, how do you forge these DLTs to what are the different smart contract engines there to the cryptography layers, cryptoscriptography, to all the way up to end user interfaces to the explorers, to the kind of dapps and those sorts of things and really focus it on how do we get all the enterprises in the world to adopt this and take this for granted the way that all of you take plumbing for granted, you know, that you turn the spigot and you get hot water, right? And that's a multi-pronged effort that's gonna involve a lot of things. Now though, we have a lot of new firepower from this community on our side with the Hyperledger Basie Project, which started just over a month ago, another project called Avalon that builds off of the Trusted Compute Framework from Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and it's really exciting and I think that for the next year our focus at Hyperledger is gonna be in kind of hybridizing and synthesizing all these different pieces we've brought together to take advantage of all the really smart people and all the really smart architectures that have been poured into this body of code. Gotcha, thank you very much. So to Justin, a bit of a brief overview. Serenity has been something that everybody's been waiting for since the names were sort of released with our Testnet Olympic and Frontier, Homestead Metropolis and Serenity. It's changed forms many times, but now we are just months away from phase zero. The design framework is very clear. Could you speak a little bit to what the grand vision looks like both for permissionless, for scalability, privacy preserving elements, phase two and beyond, a little bit about Serenity as an overview for those here who may not be as familiar. Okay, I guess in the context of interoperability, the big thing that we, the big thing in Serenity is sharding, right? And here is the idea that you have multiple blockchains and they're kind of homogeneous and so the idea is to try and, even though we have this asynchronous communication between the various shards for scalability, this we're trying to minimize the cost by having these fast cross links between them that share all the crypto, share the networking and share consensus. Yeah, I mean the other part in terms of interoperability for EVE-2 is to be a very good player in the ecosystem. Arguably EVE-1 is not friendly to interoperability like our proof of work is kind of hard to be verified on other blockchains and we've made all sorts of research to one, make the cost from a bandwidth perspective as small as possible, but also the computational cost as small as possible and that's one of the things that's unlocked through proof of stake which is the other big component of Serenity and just to summarize how our strategy here is basically to use committees. So we have this large number of validators, let's say a million validators, we have an honesty assumption, we assume for example that two thirds are honest or one half are honest, we sample using randomness, a much smaller committee and then we ask this committee, okay, can you attest to where the Ethereum system is at right now? And so it suffices for another blockchain to just verify these attestations and one of the big tools that we're using here is BLS aggregation and so if every attester is signing to the same message, you have this really nice aggregation which makes verifying these attestations extremely cheap. So we're at a point now where running an EF2 Lite client is probably cheaper, it's cheaper than running a Bitcoin Lite client. Gotcha. So now I'm going to kick to James. We see this kind of rounding out, right? So Hyperledger began as a, Brian said, minimally viable centralized nature, we're spread out over the spectrum to sort of see what works. With EF2 we have the grand vision, but of course still having a large ecosystem creating some subset of standards that work together regardless of where they're implemented. Can you speak a bit to the work that's been done that you've worked on through both SUMA ideas and development research that's taken place through TUSD and so on and so forth, sorry, TBTC. So where Hyperledger kind of explores the trade-off space and hasn't decided where it fits, it's trying to serve as many purposes as possible and help other people build. EF2 is trying to build this homogenous unified ecosystem. SUMA, rather than trying to make every chain the same, rather than trying to explore as much of the trade-off space as possible, we're trying to take all of the chains that exist that have users today and turn them into a unified heterogeneous ecosystem. So take Bitcoin and Ethereum and Cosmos and ensure that those can all interoperate together and provide tools to private chains like Hyperledger projects to interoperate with public chains efficiently. So we're kind of at a slightly different point in the trade-off space than EF2. We're trying to be everywhere, take everything that's different and bring it in so that it can all work together. I'm gonna follow up, sorry, go ahead, Jess, go ahead. I was just gonna follow up here. There's kind of a spectrum of friction and barriers. So there's like a single chain where basically the friction is kind of a synchronous you know, cross-contract communication that's the lowest barrier to entry, but still there is some friction and this is why we have standards like ERC20. And then kind of the next layer of friction is homogeneous sharding. And then the next layer of friction is, if you think for example of polka dots where they have a unified unification that the consensus layer, but they have non-homogeneous parachains. And then the next step is things like Cosmos and Sumer. I think that's fair to say. So this is actually a great transition here. The public projects have become to, have began to over time emulate each other a little bit more. And I think that this is somewhat true as well for some of the hyperledger projects. I don't believe it was intended. They've just seem to have found the same design framework as having generally represented a correct answer in some sense. Have you seen, you mentioned one large coming project in the space, Cosmos as well, polka dot Cosmos. Somebody spoke backstage to work that IOHK has done also in a similar area. And of course, East 2 is now working within a framework of homogeneous rather than heterogeneous, but still the same approach. So I shall run back to Brian with this to sort of round it out. What are enterprises looking for in, obviously looking back to the base question of why not use a server? There are certain things that blockchains offer, right? And a lot of that is the openness, the permissionlessness, it's just doing it with the same level of, the same feature set, same capability throughput. What are enterprises looking for specifically that permissionless systems haven't offered and do they see answers in these design frameworks? So Joe actually was here just before our session talking about his view that the world will have lots of different ledgers, some of them very public facing and some of them fairly private amongst collections of organizations, right? And that's for a number of reasons, some of them technical, some of them kind of business oriented. The technical reasons may fade over time. I mean, right now, I'd say there's an advantage to permissioned ledgers which actually can be public facing. For example, the Sovereign Foundation is using Hyperledger Indie to build a public facing but permissioned blockchain ledger around digital identity, right? And there's all sorts of things in Indie that are highly tuned to the pairwise identifiers approach that they take, that everything from the consensus mechanism to the data structure on disk to everything. So there's some performance characteristics that perhaps the F2 architecture, perhaps other architectures that arrive, close the gap on some of those from performance and other kinds of points of view. But I think there's still gonna be some business constraints. So for example, being able to say that all the nodes on this network agree to be bound by GDPR, right? Or agree to be bound by saying, hey, we're going to put text on this network that for the purpose of efficiency, we're going to encrypt minimally. And if you try to decrypt it or you try to discover some data that you're not supposed to have access to, then there's a legal constraint that kind of constrains you that you assign a contract and agree, I'm not going to divulge this data, right? Or other types of business arrangements that are actually better to express in human contract form between the parties around some common kind of governance entity than purely through smart contract mechanisms. Again, those might fade away as some of the ability to manage confidential data and things get better and better on the public ledgers. But there's a spectrum here, there's trade-offs. And I think we are going to see this heterogeneous world of unpermissioned public-facing and private-facing blockchains to two independent dimensions for the indefinite future. I don't know that that ever converges on one. So a question for both James and Justin. To James first, interoperability with private chains or permission chains, is it functionally viable? Is it a two-way road or are there constraints there? Typically the way interoperability works is that we have one chain checking the consensus process of another. So when you want to have Ethereum inspect Bitcoin transactions, you have to actually import Bitcoin headers into a smart contract. So obviously we can do that within a private chain validate a public chain's consensus. That's like trivially easy to do. The other way around, we can't really do with any sort of security. For a permissioned chain, the consensus mechanism is usually a federation of signers that can do whatever they want. And so validating that on a public chain has essentially the same security model as an oracle is we're importing information about this chain but we're just trusting the signers to do it. So this may be useful in some cases but I would suspect that we see it as a one-way road most of the time. Okay, I have the follow up for Justin was sort of similar. I don't know if it's a solution in any sense but I've heard the idea kicked around a little bit of using execution environments and this is far off in the future, I understand and that research is nowhere near done but there was an idea, maybe you could speak to a little bit about it, maybe slotting those in for some of these larger permission pieces. I think it was Vitalik mentioned in a panel not that long ago. The use of, I guess the question is about use of, potential use of execution environments to help bridge that gap. Any, could you speak, I guess first to execution environments themselves so those who are less familiar with them and too about their potential capability. Right, so execution environments are kind of a layer of abstraction which allows anyone to kind of graft their business logic on top of the consensus but in a much more low level way than a small contract. So you can even like think of it as programming your own VM and you don't have the overhead of the VM as a starting point. And I guess this could be helpful in the context of private chains that have a road map to become more and more public over time. And as you mentioned, maybe these private chains they don't want to have to deal with tokens and have to deal with permission, security in the permissionless model and instead they just want to reuse an existing working secure blockchain. And so one model here would be to just drop their existing consensus that they've tested in the private world and then drop it in to an execution engine or you could also drop it in as a polka dot power chain. That would kind of be a similar thing. But regardless, having some universal standard or at least one that is used widely seems to offer a great deal of benefits over time. You have ideas on things that might fit into a decent standard stack. We spoke about briefly, I hope I'm not preempting just commentary in future but could you outline a little bit some of which we spoke about not too long ago about what fits into that stack, those pieces being worked on now, elements of standards. I mean, if you're going to slot in to an execution engine or going to slot in as a polka dot power chain then you want to try and express your consensus in wasm because that's what these two systems will be doing. And it will also be helpful if you express the application layer itself in wasm because it will all be one system. I mean, if you want to do something more ambitious and have your own blockchain, your own consensus then it is helpful to try and converge on the blockchain standards that are emerging at a lower level. So at the networking level, at the cryptographic level so for example, at the cryptographic level you could use SHA-256 for hashing, a BLS-123-T1 for signatures, that's a great starting point. For networking, you can consider the P2P as a great starting point. If that's part of your more ambitious roadmap. So go ahead, James. The subject of using execution environments for permission systems, I think Brian made a really interesting distinction between public-facing and private-facing as an additional access to public and private or permission and un-permission, thanks. So using an execution environment to create a permissioned but public-facing system might be useful. It gives public verifiability without necessarily public participation. Right, and if you want to be public but also have privacy, it's in yet another dimension, then you need to start getting fancy with zero-knowledge proofs maybe. So I'm gonna come back to Brian for something a little more macro but related. So the innovation, and this might be something you disagree with to some extent, but a lot of the innovation is taking place in the public space. Especially, I mean all of this was born out of the open source, this of it. And it changes quickly, right? So we could speak to the research being done by EF researchers or around the Ethereum space to IBC or so on and so forth. I guess the question that I would ask is what specifically are some of the member organizations interested in and what could potentially be done to help connect them with those that may be building toward that future? For example, and a couple of quick examples, would it be if they're interested in privacy-preserving elements like ZK rollups so that they could protect their customer and consumer information while offering something on a public network with that level of security, would they be interested in funding research or lending developers? What are they interested in and how can they drive toward making it a reality? So in technology movements, there's kind of a boom bus cycle of ideas that get tried and then eventually as a space matures, things kind of whittle down, right? Into here's the architectures, the concepts that actually seem to provide the most value for the least amount of lines of code or the least amount of complexity, right? And I would argue in 2016, we didn't know what those are. I'd say I'd argue in 2019, we still haven't figured out what that final set is, right? And so innovation can't just be about, hey, we've come up with a new idea. It should be about how do we systematically try to map the solution space, give those who are passionate about these different ideas the free reign to kind of build their own kind of roadmaps, decide which parts of that problem they want to tackle first, which ones they're happy to say, here's a one dot oh, right? Here's something that now I'm comfortable with you using my software completely without my involvement to track digital assets. That's like a big kind of like threshold, right? But let's try a number of these experiments. Let's allow Darwin to kind of play, allow those that succeed to keep iterating and going forward. But the real question is how do we make sure to make sure that good ideas that are embedded inside of the projects that don't achieve that kind of critical mass don't just get lost or don't get kind of dismissed because they haven't have the wrong brand on them, the wrong license, the wrong set of characters around them. How do we use that as mulch for the other projects that do continue to go forward and move on? Which was at least our rationale inside of Hyperledger for having this kind of greenhouse metaphor for these different projects, right? And some of them have turned out very well, like Hyperledger Indy, which again, hyper focused on identity, has been able to like go and not have to bother with upgrading the entire world every time they want to try to invent some new topic or throw away an experiment that they did that didn't actually turn out well, right? And other projects like Hyperledger Quilt, which has been our implementation of the ILP standard, which just kind of failed to get anybody excited about it, right? I mean, I'm following closely stuff going on at IDC and with Cosmos and that sort of thing. I think that's great. But that was the experiment we tried and it's still alive. You can all go check it out still and use it, but you have to be able to like be willing to take these experiments at risk. And I see our role as being very much about provide that space, allow people to evolve but put these projects kind of on a conveyor belt to a one dot oh release and eventually something that conservative organizations, who don't like to upgrade every month, who don't want to necessarily worry about a hard fork forcing them to have to upgrade systems tomorrow, right? Or even at a pre-planned time, six months in advance, like they want to be a little bit more in control of the rate of change on their networks, right? How do we get them comfortable with the idea of using this technology when it's appropriate, when it's not appropriate, right? And kind of provide training reels for these organizations so they can eventually get caught up to the more forward leading organizations like those of you. Gotcha. I kick to Justin. The, coming off of this, there are, I've heard some talk of larger organizations in the public space that are replicating efforts, whether it be research, LAPDB, WASM research. So coming off of what Brian's spoken about and then flipping the question on its head, there's to some extent a million developers aside, limit on mind share of those that are able to develop at the core of the core, right? What would you find beneficial from, let's say both enterprises and other public blockchain ecosystems in regard to interoperability or collaboration, collaborative efforts, to help both be able to produce what they're looking for and to avoid replication of efforts? Right, so I mean, after this panel, I have a whole talk on collaboration. And there's many things we can do. We can try and focus on low-level components, which are very modular, things that are designed to be reused. We can try and, at the legal level, try and avoid things like bad licenses, even bad open source licenses. We can try and avoid patents. We can try and avoid things like trademarks and NDAs. We can also be open from the get-go, at the risk of being a bit more chaotic and messy, try and open up your doors so that we can all learn from the mistakes, because some teams, what they do is that they spend two years working on something and then they ship something perfect, but it's a lose-lose because they could have gotten feedback earlier on, and we could have learned from their failed experiments. It's an interesting thought. So, James, on that note, there are specific projects that enterprises have given to the public blockchain space that are open source, taking nightfalls, an example. Do you see them as, they are beneficial, and we thank them for their work, I'm sure. Are there elements of that that I guess we could work with more closely together to make sure that they're beneficial to the space, so they have upside, downside? I definitely think so. So, nightfall is an interesting example because it's a cryptographic system, and it's very difficult for non-cryptographers to interact with or to understand how to reuse components of. But I think, as far as the IBM blockchain and the blockchain and all of these huge enterprise blockchain processes, we haven't seen a lot of useful code fall out of it. We have people like the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, EIA, whatever it's called, working with enterprises, trying to serve their needs and ensure that they give back to the community. But I can't think of any enterprise-driven applications on chains that I've actually used. So, IBM has like 40 full-time engineers releasing every line of code that they write on fabric as soon as they write it. Okay, so that's great. And there are about 40% of the total IP going into fabric, so there's another bundle of people outside and other companies, Y-Way, Deloitte, others that go into fabric too, so. Perfect. So, I wanna catch up with you about fabric. We could do a better job telling you all about that. Yeah. So, digging back into technical interoperability, the work that's being done on the public side, I guess we'll speak to first. Justin's outlined a few of them. A few others have been brought up on stage, like IBC work, Privacy Preserving Elements. So, I'd first like to kick to Justin to hear a little bit about what those leading areas may be. And I'm going to then come back to Brian and figure out our different standards, similar standards being worked on in the enterprise space and how can they begin to share that work where even it's being open-sourced, apparently it's not being communicated to the best possible, you know, and of course, comes in blockchain. I know, it's a limited number of people. So, leading areas of potential technical and operable focus, what are we looking at as of now? I mean, one trend that I'm particularly excited and is leading the way forward in terms of like hands and interoperability is a cello and coda. So, they're going down the snog-based light clients and they're bringing in a very sophisticated machinery, you know, recursive snogs. One is like the fully recursive in the case of coda and then in the case of cello is like one level of recursion. And I think this is great in terms of minimizing the cost of interoperability because at the end of the day, you know, when you have a very flexible virtual machine like wasm, then in theory, you can be a light client for any other blockchain, but in practice, the limiting factor is just cost. And by cost, I mean the gas cost in transaction fees. And so, there really is a big engineering effort to be done to squeeze that cost down to almost nothing. And these projects are leading that. Another kind of interesting consequence, potentially, of the snogs approach is that it could be kind of a common language for all the various light clients to speak because every blockchain has a different consensus. And so, every time you build a bridge between two blockchains, that's like a custom ad hoc build bridge, which requires a lot of sophistication. But maybe if we can, you know, encode these algorithms in circuits and then abstract away all the complexity in a snark, that might be one way to move forward. Okay, and a quick, sorry, James, go ahead.  The main thing that they're useful for is making updates of expensive things cheap. Unfortunately, when we're running a light client on chain, the amount of updates is still linear in the frequency of the reads. So if there's a lot of people reading the system, your snark-based system will converge back to just updating once per header rather than skipping a bunch of blocks. Right, so one of the additional benefits of snarks is that you can combine some of the application layer logic. And one of the interesting pieces of application logic, which actually is kind of between consensus and application is going to be the Merkle paths, the witnesses. So generally speaking, you have data on one chain. You have the route. The light client is responsible for moving the route over and then the user is responsible for moving the data and the witness. And in practice, the data is a fraction of the total cost in terms of data. You have the Merkle paths are just much bigger. And so there's this idea of using snarks for witness compression. You can take all the witnesses for all the data and compress that down to 200 bytes and then even include that in the route update. But yes, I agree that if you're going to do very frequent reads with low granularity, the overhead of the light client starts disappearing and then you have these other overheads but they can also be subsumed in the snark. Great, but we have to plan for the worst case scenario because combining a bunch of snarks into one, aggregating snarks is an interactive off-chain process. Right? Well, in the way that chains work right now, you have transactions in the mempool and then you have a block producer that will batch everything. And then that entity that's already there doing the batching can also go one step further and do a snarkification and compression. Yeah, can also or must also. Can in theory, but in practice, must if the cost starts too high? I find this helpful in whether it's done in a hallway or on stage for us to really press each other and break things down. So to Brian, it's a very similar question. Leading areas of research that you've been seeing in all different areas of hyperlegious focus is some of this beneficial that you might bring back and how might what's being worked on in camp be communicated back to the public sense. Some degree. I mean, so Project Avalon, which is just launched is a project with consensus, Kaleido, Microsoft, Intel, iExec, a couple of other companies are here to try to look at how do you manage and distribute? Let's see if I get the bullet point right. It's coming up with short descriptions, these projects is really hard, but it's how do you manage off-chain secure non-clave types of resources as a way to optimize and simplify certain transactions that otherwise would need to be a lot more expensive to perform around providing confidentiality to transactions and other types of things. So it's something that implements the trust to compute framework definition that the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance has been working on. There's a lot of interesting ideas there and it's still earlier days and it's still more of a raw R&D kind of thing. But I also wanna say a lot of what enterprises need right now is a system that provides immediate settlement around a common system of record with everybody being able to verify this is the right order of transactions, implementing prevention of double spend, being able to implement confirmation logic in the form of smart contracts or chain code, whatever they wanna call it. And through that you can solve a huge number of use cases that otherwise require parking a central server and having somebody run that and this is a way you can get rid of Swift, you could get rid of a lot of these counterparties that today require a lot of trust. Sometimes it's earned, sometimes it's not, right? Sometimes it's just mandated and this is what's driving a lot of the enterprise interest in blockchain technology today. So I kinda feel like sometimes a lot of the really thorny work and hard work that is being funded by the EF and that is being worked on by this community is going to matter quite a bit down the road with these enterprise blockchain networks when they have hundreds or thousands of participants operating exactly as peers, right? When they have a lot of sophistication, a lot of hostile actors on the networks that they have to try to algorithmically prevent. Today you can make up for a lot of that with forms of human governance that operate at smaller scale but still provide enough of that guarantee and frankly enough of this is still the right to fork since everybody has a copy of the ledger, if they disagree they can go their separate ways and that provides enough of a check on tyranny. I will say sometimes being too early is just as bad as being wrong. I've seen a lot of both internet startups as well as standards efforts that try to define a world and solve problems long before their world is ready for them. In the early 2000s there was a bunch of standards work around OAuth and open ID that tried to essentially say if we're gonna build a decentralized social network here's all the building blocks to do it and they're all relatively finished. It just turned out that Facebook took off and everybody went to that and there was both no funding as well as no momentum behind independent implementations of all these underlying technologies and so I think we just have to be careful about going too far down a rabbit hole that doesn't have enough end user validation and enough momentum to make sure that we're not solving problems that don't actually end up being problems by the time the world is ready for that software. Does that make sense? We have just a couple of minutes left so we've spoken over the last almost 40 minutes about different efforts on the research end for bringing this whole ecosystem together whether they are on the private end or on the public end. In the last couple of minutes I'm gonna ask a question that I'm personally curious about. We've seen things again in their design framework come much closer together over the last few years. I used to know 2015 or so what might this look like in four years, right? You figure we're probably there a little bit sooner than we are so on and so forth. What does hyper ledgers going down the line to close? What does, hopefully if you can about 50 seconds what does it look like in four or five years when these systems are developed? Is it all too different from the public space and what does the public space look like? My hope is that there's a handful of technologies that people can pick up and deploy without thinking twice that there's an API they can use and not worry too much about what's going on under the covers but if they need to it's open source they can drill in and figure out what's going on and fix things if they need. I do see us pretty much sticking to being a place where software gets built and leaving standards work up to folks like EEA or the EIP process or other groups kind of thinking about how do you get agreement between parties about kind of the protocol layer but when you want to come together and simply get better leverage on the precious time that it takes to put software together that's why working together in any open source community makes sense and that's what we want to keep doing for the next four years. Thank you. So what does sumo look like in four years? I think that depends a lot on what the whole ecosystem looks like in four years. At sumo we try to work on the chains with the most impact. Today that means Bitcoin and Ethereum, Cosmos and Polkadot are up and coming and there's a handful of other chains that are interesting. We've started working with private chains as well. We've worked a little bit with like Quorum like just playing around with it. I'm hopeful that within four years we'll have a better idea of what the space looks like and we'll be running multiple cross-chain relays and multiple ecosystems. Justin. Well, I'm hopeful that in four years we'll have figured out a scalable interoperability within the context of Ethereum and the homogeneous chance but also hopeful that we'll be working very closely with components that fit for example in the web-free framework. So decentralized storage at scale for example has a nice complement to decentralize the computation and data availability. Also looking forward to interacting with the most vibrant pockets of activity. It could be Polkadot, it could be Bitcoin for example and then using for example Cosmos as bridges. I'm just, it's very hard to predict the future but I'm quite excited regardless. I look forward to seeing where the vision goes maybe OpenSocial is not dead yet. Thank you all for participating and look forward to the rest of the day. Thanks so much.


Welcome to Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill, your go-to podcast for the most cutting edge insights in functional and integrative medicine. I'm Dr. Jill, and on each episode, we have thought leaders, innovators who are at the forefront of medical research and practice, our mission to empower you with knowledge and inspiration aiding you on your journey to optimal health. Today, I am absolutely delighted to introduce a neighbor and friend and colleague, Dr. Scott Scherer is a board certified internal medicine physician, certified to practice health optimization medicine and a specialist in hyperbaric oxygen therapy. He is also COO of Transcriptions, a smarter not harder company. His clinical telepractice includes HOME, which is the health optimization medicine and its foundations alongside integrative approach to hyperbaric oxygen includes cutting edge and dynamic protocols, comprehensive testing and targeted supplementation, personal practices, synergistic technologies, and so much more. And we're gonna dive into that. Welcome, Dr. Scott today to the show. Thanks for having me, Jill. Yes, neighbor five minutes away. Yes, it's so crazy, because we didn't know this. I knew about your company, I knew about your products. And then you're like, I'm just down the street. Do you want me to stop out of the office? I'm like, yes. So we... Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, because I'm relatively new to Colorado. So it was great to have a veteran in Colorado and as they say, give me a little bit more about the low down. If I can reveal, you were an ex surfer, right? You're kind of like your California boy? I was in California for a while. I wasn't much of a surfer, let's be honest. Okay, that's right. But I wasn't California. No, it's cool because I kind of give off that surfer vibe sometimes to people, but I'm not a surfer. I always liked the beach. Like even when I was in medical school, I used to wear sandals all the time in Baltimore.  I went to UCLA for undergrad. So that California does run deeper than I'd like to in some times. I give off that Midwestern vibe somehow, like... We all give off the vibes. I grew up in New York, so I don't know how much New York Violet give off anymore. We're all just like this Mishmash. Well, I'm glad to talk to you today and speaking of backgrounds in California and New York, tell us a little bit about, I love a story. I love what drives us to get into what we do. So obviously you're doing, we're gonna talk about your specifically what you're doing now, but how did you get into medicine? Tell us a little bit about your journey. Did you always know you wanted to be a physician? So my father's a chiropractor. He's been a chiropractor for over 40 years in New York. And so I grew up inside of his practice seeing what he was doing. And as you likely know, Jill, before there was functional medicine or integrative medicine, they were chiropractors. And chiropractors did everything and he still kind of does everything. He's been changing his diet, doing different types of exercises, bringing in new technologies, like doing everything from the ground up from a dietary perspective since I was, you know, before I was born, really. And that starts even before that when, you know, from his upbringing, et cetera, et cetera. But in general, I grew up in that ecosystem. And so it was an interesting conversation. I always love science and I really gravitated towards it being in his practice and had a conversation with him, probably before I went to college, definitely before I decided to go to medical school. The idea being, you know, what should I do dad? I really like what you do. Should I be a chiropractor? Should I be a regular doctor? What should I do? And I kind of decided on conventional medicine because I had this really high-minded idea. It was very high-minded. It still is, where you could bridge this chasm between alternative medicine as it was called then and conventional allopathic medicine. And could I find a way to do this that really felt like it could do something to move the needle on health, move the needle overall and how I could help people? So I ended up to go into medical school in Baltimore at the University of Maryland. I graduated and did my internal medicine residency. It's kind of my fastest way out. That was kind of how I thought about it. Like I can get a good, broad education from there. I could really figure out what I wanted to do. And in medical school, I learned about hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And it was interesting because it was a very novel technology in some ways, but it had been around for such a long time. And I knew that there wasn't that many people that knew a whole lot about it. So I was like, wow, I really like this technology. I could really learn it very quickly and know more than most people. That's a cool thing as a young doctor. And so I got involved in creating like an integrative approach to hyperbaric therapy. As I finished my internal medicine residency, I started becoming medical director of various hyperbaric practices. I created my own telemedicine practice where I was consulting with hyperbaric patients across the world and hyperbaric clinics across the world where I would help with protocols, I help with development, integration of various technologies inside of hyperbaric therapy. But there was something missing from it really. There was a missing sort of foundational piece because I found out very early on that if I put people in a chamber too early, that they wouldn't do well if they had a lot of chronic medical issues and you can resonate with this, I'm sure. Chill in your practice and how it works. If you start things too quickly, you might be doing the cart before the horse kind of deal. And so I gravitated towards another practice that was being run by or started by a friend and colleague his name is Dr. Ted Otracoso. And Dr. Ted created this thing called health optimization medicine. And it's a foundational approach to health. It's similar to functional medicine, but a little bit of a different perspective, more perspective on health and focusing on optimizing health and kind of leaving disease to the side for the moment. And that became like the foundation of my practice and still is. And so now I have a telemedicine practice where I do health optimization medicine as that foundation. I've been medicine as sort of my specialty upon specialties. And then we have a for-profit company called Transcriptions that make products that help me along the way with everything that I do in my patients and my practice. Wow. First of all, I knew I liked you, Scott. And there's something so similar. I had no idea. This is why I love getting to know my guests on the podcast. So I grew up with my primary doctor, chiropractor, Dr. Vernon Mann. And he had had polio and he was like bent over. So he was like the funniest version of a chiropractor. But his heart was the most hugest healer. And I literally grew up with basically, I go for preventative visits to him. He was my mentor. He was my like epitome of healer. And I wanted to go and be a chiropractor. And I remember it was so similar to the conversation you had with your dad and in your journey. I was like, you know, Dr. Mena and I really want to be a chiropractor.  And he was older when I met him. Sure. There was a lot of persecution with the AMA and the chiropractor because you well know, right? Yes, absolutely. And my mentor, Dr. Mena, went through a lot of, you know, difficulties because of our dichotomy of healthcare, which is sad because you and I know this like all one thing in a way of how we heal. Oh, let's just say like he literally was like, Jill, you're too smart to be a chiropractor, which again, no offense. I have some of the most amazing friends and smart chiropractors that is not a, but he had been through the persecution. And it's so interesting. You said your goal was kind of like, what if I could do something different? I went in, I finally was like, well, maybe I should go to medical school. Like it was an afterthought, right? And then when I started getting acceptance, I'm like, maybe I could be a doctor. You know, like that was so in that, like my thought process of holistic medicine and keeping ourselves well. I literally remember probably at 10, the chiropractor gave me this like nutrition book and same thing. Chiropractors were the original holistic, like take care of ourselves, eat good food. Yo, geez. And I was fascinated like really food could change our lives and our minds and our bodies. Yes, yes, yes. I love that about your dad because that was so much my journey. And then when I went to medical school, I was like, well, what if I could go in and actually like this big goal? What if I could transform medicine, right? Yeah, small goals, the small ones. But I love that because it sounds like both, I mean, your dad clearly was a mentor. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. He used to say back in the 80s that food was the most powerful drug that you could take. And that was just unheard of at the time. It was not even in the realm of possibility. And so he was definitely, I think, in the same boat to some degree as your mentor in the sense that if you wanna have licensure to do, you know, quote unquote, whatever you wanna do. Then become a medical doctor and then figure it out from there. But as you said, I have tons of very, very, very smart parapartic colleagues. And I love what they do. Part of it than me, right? Like that's what I respect so much because to me, I literally like adore and admire because they went through so much more difficulty, especially back in that generation than we ever will. And that's part of I think why you and I probably chose, for me, it was the same thing if I wanna do medical missions international or any sort of things, sadly, our standard system reimburses the best for an MD or DO. So I clearly, same path as you, but so fascinating because it's quite similar. That's so cool. We wouldn't have known that probably unless we had a podcast together. So I'm so happy to hear that's awesome. And then this type of medicine, again, I always learned this health optimization medicine. I love it because it's so aligned. It sounds like where I'm at the complex chronic healthy for reverse disease. You're over here like, how do we actually perform and how do we live well and how do we like really, really thrive in that health and not just like get up every morning grown another day, but really, really feel our very best. And I'm so excited to talk about that because I think not only myself but my patients, a lot of people listening wanna really know that. So let's start with hyperbaric because I've got so many questions for you. First of all, let's just talk about what would be like some of your, I'm sure anyone could use it, but what are some of the biggest indications, the biggest game changers, what kinds of people would benefit the most from hyperbaric therapies? Yeah, so when it comes to hyperbaric therapy, I often say it's not, if you need hyperbaric therapy, it's when. Most of us can potentially benefit from it. It just depends on when that time is going to be best. I mean, really what we're doing in hyperbaric chamber is we're immediately doing a bunch of things. We're decreasing inflammation. We're reversing low oxygen states. We're releasing stem cells, which are the baby cells in our body that can make new cells wherever they need to go. We're fighting infection. We're increasing the immune system function overall. We're increasing blood flow overall too. And then over the long term, you're creating new blood vessels and tissue. You're decreasing inflammation over the long term as well in tissues and various types of pathways that are involved in inflammation as well. And those stem cells can mature and those infections can get better and the flow can get better. So it's a matter of understanding what the reasons are honestly, Jill, because I think when, so when it comes to like an acute trauma, acute inflammation, acute stress, hyperbaric therapy is fantastic at mitigating all of those things very, very fast. And it does it in a very much synergistic way with the body and just kind of doing it more efficiently honestly, depending on where in the body we're talking about. So if it's the brain, for example, the brain only has a certain amount of capacity to heal because it has to prevent itself from swelling. If the brain swells, we're in a bad situation. So hyperbaric therapy with more oxygen at play can help reverse those low oxygen states. So if you had an acute heart attack, acute stroke, acute traumatic brain injury, acute spinal cord injury, there is data that hyperbaric therapy can help in those cases. Now, please go to the hospital first. Of course, there's been crazy doctors in the hyperbaric community that just put themselves in chambers with strokes and things like that, of course. In general, most of them from the Midwest, I have to say, but anyway, or Texas, but you're not surprised there. But in essence, really what it comes to down to for me is that if the physiology aligns with somebody that could potentially use hyperbaric therapy, that's what I'm going to consider it. But, and this is the big but, if they have a chronic issue, if there is something long-term that's going on, a long-term goal or a long-term inflammation, chronic inflammation, chronic infection, chronic fill in the blank, it's often not a good idea to go into a hyperbaric chamber right away because if you don't have the machinery available in your cells to make energy well, so what hyperbaric therapy is doing really is getting more oxygen in the system, okay? If the body has a lot more oxygen in it, what's going to happen? You're going to make more energy, but you're also going to make more energy byproducts or reactive oxygen species or inflammatory molecules or free radicals or whatever you want to call them. What the body has to do is it has to neutralize those free radicals by creating an antioxidant response. And if it can't do that because you're already chronically inflamed, you're already antioxidant deficient, you already have a leaky gut, you know, fill in the blanks, et cetera, et cetera, you're not going to do as well in the chamber and it might not be a beneficial for you over the long-term. So that's where the health optimization medicine piece came in for me is that, well, what am I doing to truly optimize the cellular foundation of my patients? Can they make energy well? Are we getting energy or are we getting oxygen to where we want it to go? Are we detoxing from the energy that we're making? Is our neurotransmitter ecosystem optimized in a way that you're going to optimize the function of neurotransmission when you're inside of a hyperbaric chamber? So all these kinds of things kind of hit, it was all very obvious to me when I was in clinical practice and realizing if somebody went in with Lyme disease, for example, and they had a significant, you know, heart-simer reaction, significant detox symptoms, they couldn't move for three days after getting out of a chamber, that wasn't really conducive to their healing. I even found that toughing it out in these kinds of situations because that's what a lot of hyperbaric clinicians told me that I needed to do initially, like have them tough it out and they'll get better over time. Some did actually get better over time, but the problem was that three, four months, six months later, they were back to the way they were before because it was just not a conducive process to put them in a chamber so early on in their process of getting better from Lyme. And so those are some examples of kind of what brought me to more of a foundational approach before just doing hyperbaric therapy and more of these chronic related indications. Hey everybody, I just stopped by to let you know that my new book, Unexpected, Finding Resilience Through Functional Medicine, Science and Faith, is now available for order wherever you purchase books. In this book, I share my own journey of overcoming life-threatening illness and the tools and tips and tricks and hope and resilience I found along the way. This book includes practical advice for things like cancer and Crohn's disease and other autoimmune conditions, infections like Lyme or Epstein Bar and mold and biotoxin-related illness. What I really hope is that as you read this book, you find transformational wisdom for health and healing. If you wanna get your own copy, stop by readunexpected.com. There you can also collect your free bonuses. So grab your copy today and begin your own transformational journey through Functional Medicine in Finding Resilience. Okay, that makes so much sense. And I'm so fascinated. I have a few follow-up questions. My own experience was probably just a shortly after my really bad mold exposure. I was so toxic. I have had underlying Lyme and co-infections. They weren't maybe active, but I completely crashed the one time I tried hyperbaric. And I'm sure my thought was two things, that reactive oxygen, like you mentioned, these free radicals are created with oxygen, right? And oxygen is a great thing. But if you have all this cytokine inflammation, you're gonna drive it into the inflammatory pathway. So that makes so much sense. But you're just really clarifying, and I'm sure I'm repeating this for our listeners because I'm sure some people as well. So you really don't wanna be in a chronic state of Lyme or mold or inflammation and go in there and do it intensely because that was probably. Now, my other thought is I've read some research on nitric oxide production, which is so crucial to blood flow to every area of the body. And as we age, we diminish. Is it true that hyperbaric chamber? I think I saw a study that definitely increases nitric oxide as well. So just to quickly kind of just put a little bit of an emphasis on the Lyme and the co-infections and the chronic illness. It doesn't mean you can't go into a hyperbaric chamber. It just means that you have to be supported through it. And having a good idea of what your foundational cellular machinery is going to be able to handle. So in previous cases, I used to give people antioxidants before they went in, if they needed. And that's kind of paradoxical on some level because the way hyperbaric therapy actually works is by creating this oxidative stress in the system. And that stress causes these changes in your DNA and how it's expressed. So that's called your epigenetics. So you want that, but you don't always want it that much because what's also happening other than that free radical piece that we're talking about is that you're also getting die-off of bugs. So if you have bugs that do not like high-oxygen environments and you go into a chamber, you're gonna get that die-off. So do you have the ability to bind those bugs and get rid of those bugs? Yeah, with the garbage, right? With the garbage, exactly. So you have to be able to do all those things. So I almost always refuse to actually put a person in the chamber if they don't have like a limelight or a doctor or a chronic complex medical illness doctor that's helping support them along the way. Otherwise, I've just gotten burned too many times and it's not fair to the patient, obviously. So I don't want to mention that. That's because I do think, like you said, I feel like anyone could benefit. It's really, is there any contraindications? Let's talk about that. What would be like absolute or temporary contraindication besides what we talked about? There's only one absolute contraindication and that's if you have a dropped lung or attention pneumothorax, which is when one of your lung cavities is filled up with air and you can't breathe, but you'll most likely be in a hospital for those kinds of things. So relative contraindications or if you're pregnant, you're not supposed to go into hyperbaric chamber, but the chambers are indicated for carbon monoxide poisoning and pregnant women have gone into chambers for decades without any problems, the babies are fine, et cetera. So if you are a COPD patient, so if you require oxygen before going to the chamber, if you have severe asthma, if you have severe cardiac disease that's not controlled, if you have an ejection fraction less than 35%, if you have how well your heart is pumping basically, if you have uncontrolled seizures you don't want to go into chamber because the oxidative load or the extra oxygen does cause more potential brain excitability, but in essence what you're really doing here if you're doing it well is you're looking at dynamic hyperbaric protocols, like you might have to start somebody at a milder pressure and then drop them deeper into pressure as you're trying to get more effect systemically because more neurologic pressures are milder pressures, so less oxygen, less pressure, and more systemic pressures or deeper pressures overall. Oh, fascinating. I could talk to you for hours on this. So, yeah, a lot of things to talk about. And so that then- You asked me about nitric oxide too. I forgot about that. Yes, oh yeah, yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah, so what's interesting about nitric oxide is that what hyperbaric therapy does, the deeper you go, the more vasoconstriction you have. And this is actually because you are mildly depleting nitric oxide initially. And this is because what those free radicals are doing is actually they're making nitric oxide less active and making it more inert. So you get mild vasoconstriction actually. And this is not actually a bad thing. So if you've had a traumatic brain injury, for example, you have a lot of swelling in your brain, unfortunately. So what they do is they open up your skulls that let the swelling out, but they also notice that if you put somebody in a hyperbaric chamber, you decrease their risk of death by half by just three hyperbaric sessions. And the reason why that it's doing that is causing a vasoconstriction, but at the same time, you're getting more oxygen into that tissue because you've diffused so much more oxygen in circulation. So despite that vasoconstriction, there is more oxygen flowing is what it comes down to. So now over the long term, there is an enhancement of nitric oxide, okay? And this is because of some of those epigenetic things that are happening and new blood vessels that are forming in these tissues. But in the short term, you're actually having a mild depletion of it, but in my cool sort of integrative way that I always look at ways to mitigate that. And you can think about using nitric oxide boosters and things like alargenine or niacin, other things to help vasodilation, low-level light therapy helps as well. There's tons of things you can do to help mitigate some of that depending on what you're going into the chamber for. Okay, but I'm having a big ah-ha because post-COVID and even before, I'm treating a lot of people with this thing called the triad. And it's this combination that often occurs together, mass selectivation, dysautonomia pots and hypermobility or Euler's Danlos symptoms. And this all relates to the mast cells, the inflammation, all that. And what happens vascularly, again, you're gonna know this because your internal medicine background is there's a kind of a collapse of the circulatory system at least on all of the extremities, right? So there's like the lack of- This is inducible nitric oxide, yes. Right?  And I actually had this last year after COVID for a couple of months where I was really low blood pressures. And what you're saying is something like hyperbaric could probably help that as well, right? Because you're gonna actually constrict and get that, because that INOS pathway can be reactive to reactive oxygen and infections and inflammation, which actually makes us vascularly collapse, right? Exactly, yeah. So the inducible nitric oxide is the key there. So we have different types of nitric oxide. We have the endovascular nitric oxide or INOS and that's in our vascular system, that's the normal. And then you have the inducible nitric oxide. And that's the one that gets released with inflammation, with stress, with infection. And that's the one that mostly gets impacted by hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And it's the same one that gets impacted by methylene blue, which is really kind of a cool combination there. Well, that's a perfect transition. Okay, this is starting to make sense except that I never thought, because literally one of the reasons I brought you on the show and I wanted to really talk about methylene blue, your company and all that good stuff is because for me, this POTS decided to know me stuff that I had since COVID was dramatically shifted by the small little doses of methylene blue. And it's because of this, but I did not know that hyperbaric could do the same thing. So let's talk about methylene blue. There's so much to talk about. First of all, do you wanna give us a little bit of the history? Cause this has been around a long time. And I think one of the things that's so puzzling to people is this is an industrial dye, right? But it has some really profound benefits and lots of research. Do you wanna lay the framework a little bit about why it's potentially a really positive thing? Yeah, so the brief framework on the history for me personally in the background is that the nonprofit organization that we have called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice. This is a educational company. It's training practitioners on how to optimize health as I was alluding to earlier and I'm trained in this. As we were learning, as we were creating this whole process and this program, we knew that we needed to create a for-profit company to help people right now on that health optimization path. Some people have a long way to go and it can take a long time to get there. And Jill, you work with the most challenging of the challenging and how long it can take people to truly see the benefits of the work that they're doing. So we created transcriptions, the company, to help people right now along that path. And the first compound that we really started to dive into was methylene blue. And as you were mentioning, methylene blue has been around a long time. So a little bit of a history. It used to be the dye that we used to dye blue jeans, blue, and then somehow in the late 1890s, they figured out that high doses of methylene blue treated malaria. And it was the first drug that was registered with the FDA back in 1897. And it's a- Like the original antibiotic, right? Yes, the OG because it was the only antibiotic, only antimicrobial available, excuse me, really until the 1950s. And there's great stories about World War II pilots going to the Pacific theater and having to take methylene blue tablets with them as a preventative for fungal infections. And they had songs about urinating blue because back then, and that's one of the things that we still know now that methylene blue, when we take it, it concentrates in our urine. And so we urinate blue as a result of taking it. Now, really high doses will make other secretions also blue, but we're not really talking about those kinds of doses for the most part, but it came out of favor in the 1950s because of antimicrobials coming around. But it was a primary treatment for urinary tract infections, for fungal infections, for viral infections. My colleague, Dr. Ted talks about how in the Philippines, they used to have methylene blue lollipops that they would give kids when they had viral infections coming on to prevent the viral infection from propagating, et cetera. So it has that history. And then in the 1950s, the first antipsychotic drug was derived from methylene blue called chloropromazine. And that's because methylene blue also has something called monoamine oxidase inhibition. This means that it helps or prevents the release or prevents, sorry, the breakdown of neurotransmitters, dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. And so as a result of that, it gives people a mood boost when they take it. And initially it was used in a way where it was actually compounded with antipsychotics so that they knew the psychiatric patients were taking it, the antipsychotic because their urine would turn blue. But yeah, now we know that it has fantastic properties on its own. And it's been studied now in depression, in bipolar, in other mental health disorders to help as potentially as a standalone treatment or as something that could be used in combination with other therapies. And then the final part of the history is that in the last couple of decades, we now know that methylene blue is a fantastic mitochondrial enhancer. And most of us know methylene blue from if you were like you and me in medical school, we would look at stains in biochemistry and methylene blue is used as the stain. And where does it stains? It stains your mitochondria. And so we know that it concentrates in mitochondria. And where do we have our most mitochondria?  So why are we having such huge amounts of infertility out now? Or brain fog or brain problems, heart issues or exercise-induced fatigue? It's because our mitochondria aren't working well because 95% of us have poorly functioning or non-optimal functioning mitochondria. Makes so much sense and that's how we get to know one another. Because like Scott, what's this thing you're making? It's really cool. I want to know more about it. Now again, granted, you can get it from company pharmacies and that. The one caveat I would say, which we've talked about and we actually have the data to share if people want, the purity of this matters, right? Because if it's just the industrial form, it could be containing heavy metals or toxins. And your company in particular is very clear about the... Tell me just a little bit about that so people listen. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so this is a really good point. So Methylene Blue is still found in fish tank cleaner as well. And so you can, and a lot of people that are, people that like aquariums, there's a word for this, I'm forgetting, aqua people, whatever it is. They love aquariums, like they'll use Methylene Blue to actually treat the fish and treat the water as an antifungal and as an antimicrobial. The problem with that is that's industrial grade, Methylene Blue. And industrial grade has up to about 11% impurities and that could be mercury, cadmium, arsenic and other heavy metals. And so you wanna make sure that you're getting the cleanest stuff possible. So the first thing you wanna make sure is that you're getting a USP version. A USP is pharmaceutical grade, but unfortunately that's not even good enough because USP can even be contaminated. So it took us another eight months to launch our company back in 2019, 2020, is that's how long it took us to find a clean source of Methylene Blue. So we publish everything that we get. We publish all of our testing. And I mean, as you know, I'm a clinician. And so we wanted to make sure there's three other docs on the team, including me, that we were giving our patients the cleanest stuff available. So we go through the end of the earth. We test every batch that we get. We have given away batches. We've thrown away batches in the past. I mean, we've, you know, thousands of dollars in things because we just wanna make sure we have the cleanest stuff possible. And it's a really big deal because you can buy stuff on Amazon, but they don't come with a C of A, which is a certificate of analysis. You have to ask for it. Make sure that you're asking for it if you are looking for it from other sources. Yeah, I'm so glad we're talking about this because I think it is so common.  I have seen it in my own life and lives just yesterday. I have a patient who's on oxygen, chronic bceosis. She's in her late 20s. She's a young woman and she's been disabled and in bed. And I've had her on methylene blue for the last six months and she came to the clinic. She's getting ready to go to Europe with her mother. Like it is a game changer for her. And it's been doing a lot of other things for a lot of years. And this is the thing that really took her to the next level. My thought is as we're talking, I bet she'd benefit from hyperbaric as well. Possibly, but now that she's much better, right? Now she's a bit more supported. So the way I think about methylene blue here is that there's a spectrum of dosing. And I think that's what you were alluding to. Let's talk about that. Go ahead and dive in. Because there is a lot of literature out there that the dose quote unquote should be of methylene blue somewhere around one milligram per kilogram, which would be about 50 to 70 milligrams for most people. But I find that's usually a very high dose for most people. And I often find that very, very low doses can go a long way. And there was some interesting studies that had been done in Alzheimer's patients actually. They did a study where they actually compared eight milligrams twice a day to 50 milligrams twice a day to 150 milligrams twice a day. And the people in the eight milligrams twice a day did much better. That was the placebo group. And the reason why they used the eight milligrams was that they wanted everybody's urine to turn blue. And this is actually, there's a lot of parallels to this on hyperbarics, but we can talk about that another time. But it's very difficult to do studies when things turn colors or you have pressures and things like that. So, but interestingly, right? This lower dose did the trick. And I think the reason for this Jill is that what methylene blue really can do is support in enhanced mitochondrial function. It's got this really cool capacity that's called electron cycling. And what that means is that it can actually help donate electrons, which in this case in the mitochondria helps you make more energy. Even if some of the parts of your mitochondria aren't working very well, you have all these protein complexes, it can actually bypass those. It can support them. And it help you make energy where you need it to make. And at the same time, when you make energy, we were talking about this on the hyperbaric side. You're making free radicals. And you have to have the ability to neutralize those to help keep the system be efficient. And if you don't, the system is going to be inefficient and it's going to break down. But what methylene blue does is it directly can act like an antioxidant. It can actually pick up these electrons. And then at the same time, it actually induces in the system, your pathways that increase antioxidant production, specifically glutathione through something called the NRF2 pathway. And so, but what you need here is something that could be supportive most of the time. And then it's not the only thing that you're doing as a clinician. You're using methylene blue, at least the way I think about this is that as a supportive, while you're also doing other work to enhance and to regenerate mitochondrial function. So you're giving and you're optimizing vitamins, minerals, and nutrients. You're optimizing gut health. You're working on neurotransmitters and hormones. And if you're doing all that, at the same time as you're giving some methylene blue, you can start off with really low doses and see these profound benefits, which is what I think you've seen in your practice. Yeah, no, this makes so much sense. And so years ago, I've been using it. It is indicated a lot of the doctors who treat chronic Lyme and tick-borne infections have used it. It's especially good for bartonella, which is a tough treat. We often add that in, but we would start at 50 and go up from there. And I'll just tell you, there's a side effect, you know this, well, methyl hemo-globinuria and all these different things so that we'd have some real issues with dosing people up inside effects. And since I've just really reframed that and started with the lower doses. And I'll just tell you personally, for me with a POTS dyscedenomia, this was the biggest thing that transformed my symptoms. And I was doing like eight milligrams every other day or every third day, like that small, just tiny little bit, wouldn't even need a daily. And it transformed. So I mean, I could probably do eight milligrams twice a week and be okay. It's just phenomenal. And to me, that was such a game changer and eye opener. And again, that's came from your product because it comes in a milligram but quartered. So you can do like a quarter or a half or whatever. What made you think about, was it the studies with the low dose? Cause I felt like that's a real game changer. And it's also more safe for the average person to try versus like a 50 hundred. I think the research shows above 50 was when you're really gonna have side effects and interactions with SSRI drugs and things like that, right? Right. So we started off at the low dosing because of the work that was being done on Alzheimer's and the cognitive literature, somewhere around the 16 milligram dose, seemed to be the sweet spot for neurologic optimization. And so if that was the case, we said, well, why don't we start at this dose? Because it's extremely safe. The side effect profile is next to none overall. And you're right. As you get to above about 50 milligrams, and so our company has a professional line and we have something called Tro Plus Blue and that's our prescription strength or our professional only methylene blue trochee for that reason or for those reasons. Now, as far as SSRIs go, so we talked a little bit about MAOI inhibition earlier and how methylene blue was the drug that the antipsychotics or some of them first came from. The risk of having an SSRI alongside of being on methylene blue at the same time is something called serotonin syndrome. And this is extremely rare. It's actually never been described with oral methylene blue before, only IV at very high doses. So honestly, Jill, I don't worry about it very much, but I do worry about some of the oxidative load that happens at the higher doses of methylene blue because what happens actually, as you get to a higher dose, you're gonna get more hydrogen peroxide production. And hydrogen peroxide is something that our body makes. It's a way that our body fights infection. It's a way that our body helps stimulate antioxidant pathways to make something like glutathione, like I said earlier. That's not a bad thing, but you do have to think about, does your patient have the capacity to neutralize the hydrogen peroxide that they are making? And that in somebody that has chronic infections may not be the case. So we'll often do, at least in my clinical practice, and I've worked with a number of Lyman literate docs and that are doing Bartonella work and et cetera, they start off at eight milligrams. And I'll titrate their dose every five to seven days until I get to a dose that we're having a positive effect. And then depending on how they're doing, keep them on seven days a week for month, two months, but we're always trying to see what we can do about coming down to that dosing over time. But I think the key is titration and the key is understanding that the risk, really with the higher dose, is going to be more of the oxidative load. SSRIs are important. You have to be thinking about that, but only in the context that people might feel a little more uncomfortable with the extra serotonin around. And you also have to think that if you have a little bit more of norepinephrine around, so that's something that also can be interactive if people have high blood pressure, for example. I do find, and this is kind of with the pots, it's kind of be helpful, right? But in some people that already have high blood pressure, you have to be a little bit careful with your dosing to go slowly to make sure they don't have any elevations in their blood pressure when they start taking methylene blue as well. Wow, this is just so great and such good information for even the general public, because again, I feel like it's really safe at these low doses. And I've had actually, I've been doing this and doing methylene blue for probably a decade, but I've had much better results with the low dose. Like to me, it's a danger and safer in that sense. So you'd recommend starting at like the four or eight, which again, you can quarter, make sure you tolerate it. And then my thought, a couple of thoughts, first of all, I think there's some research on combining methylene blue with red light therapy for the brain. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so there is a really great researcher out of the University of Texas, Austin. His name is Francisco Gonzales Lima. He's done a couple of podcasts over the years as well. He's done notices research and his main thing is methylene blue for Alzheimer's and Alzheimer's like disorders. So he studied it in Alzheimer's in animals. He studied in traumatic brain injury in animals. The challenge with methylene blue gel, as you know, is that it's off patent. So it's not something that has a blockbuster drug at the end of the rainbow, but he published a really cool paper looking at low doses of methylene blue. So less than a milligram, less than 0.5 milligrams per kilogram. So around that dose of like about 25 milligrams or so. And he did this in combination with red light. So, and the red light dose was around 660 nanometers. The cool thing about methylene blue and red light is that under optimized or relatively normal conditions, they're both going to donate electrons to what's called complex four or cytochrome oxidase in your mitochondria. So as a result of that, they're synergistic and they're both going to be enhancing the capacity of your mitochondria in your cells to make energy. So if anybody's done this, and I certainly have it, I'm guessing you have too, you can take the methylene blue and then go out in the sunlight about 30 minutes later or maybe an hour later if you swallowed your methylene blue and you'll feel this sort of rise in energy.   And so I have a bunch of elite athletes that I work with that are using methylene blue along with obviously their other training program to help with their endurance while they're in the sun. And of course, red light panels do this too. Amazing. So I'm gonna share a little secret here in public that I haven't ever talked about before. But one of my favorite things is taking the lotus methylene blue. I have a device that goes in the head and does red light to this brain and nose cytochrome plate. And sometimes I'll even add a mitochondrial peptide to that mix. And it's amazing. And it's funny because we talk about this, there's not a high. It's just like a wonderful, good, healthy energy. It's just like, mm, I feel good. You know those days where if you're out there listening, hopefully most of you have had these days but you just wake up and it's gonna be a great day. You just feel amazing. And that's because they're natural neurotransmitters. Maybe you had good deep sleep or you know, whatever happened or you just got home from vacation. But that's the kind of thing we're talking about. It's just this really good, sustainable energy where you're not crashing, you're not. Exactly. I like this because granted, there's all kinds of natural highs too, but this isn't really a natural high. It's just a really healthy state of being, right? Yeah, I like to call it an elevation. You just kind of feel like this rise. And then some people, if you're pretty well optimized, what you may actually realize is you take it and then the day is over. And you're like, well, how was my day? Oh, I didn't get as tired in the middle of the day. I was able to have more conversations. I ran further at the gym. And I have some of my patients that will refuse to not work out with Bethlehem Blue because they can keep their heart rate up longer. One of the things that it can do is actually can be just like oxygen at yourselves. So even if you have less oxygen around, it can actually take the place of oxygen or it can compensate for low oxygen levels. So if you're coming to visit us, Joe and I in Colorado, and you're gonna be at altitude for the first time in a while, Bethlehem Blue can potentially help you. If you're on an airplane, for example, you're pressurized to about 8,000 feet. So for Joe and I, that's like nothing because we're already at five or six here. But for somebody at sea level, that's 8,000 feet is a lot. And so you're gonna get low oxygen up there.  And so what is Bethlehem Blue gonna do there? It's going to compensate for that. It's going to give you more energy capacity. It's going to give you more detoxification potential as well. So it's a great, great thing to have a supportive, especially with travel. So it's a big jet lag hack. We have a full blog on it on our website to talk about the protocol that we've developed. And it works, actually works flawlessly. I mean, you can add in certain other things, of course. I mean, this is not the only thing you wanna do, but it can certainly help significantly along those processes. I love that. I'm a traveler and I really, really love travel. I know you are. We're a lot of the same conferences. I know, but that's an aha for me. I'm like, oh yeah, I remember going to Australia, I had a whole protocol that did holy hack jet lag. And I did and I really was very impressed with, you know, the ability to do that, but this is gonna add to that and super exciting for those of you listening. You can give that a try too. So in our last few minutes, what do you see as, I mean, you're in this really health optimization world. I love it. Our world's very much overlap. For sure. Methylene blue has been really a game changer. And first of all, just thank you for helping to be on that team to develop and to get it out in an easy way and a safe way and a way that's tested for the public and general population. If you're listening and no matter where you're listening, you'll be able to find a link to get your own. And I'll mention this now, I'll mention it at the end, but the code Dr. Jill will give you 10% offs you that you guys have graciously given us a code to share. Of course, of course. So you guys can get a discount on your order. But let's go back to the final thing though. What do you see as up and coming, either new technology, new ideas in health optimization, maybe things just to be keeping on our radar? Well, Jill, this is like, this has been awesome. It's always good to hang out with you. I think what I've been more focused on recently is actually the GABA neurotransmitter system. And this is because GABA is our most powerful inhibitory or relaxing neurotransmitter. And most of us, I think we discussed this when I had you on my podcast, was most of us are in fight or flight most of the time. And the challenge with that is that depletes our GABA system. And GABA is really important for relaxing the brain and relaxing us. People that are GABA deficient have higher levels of anxiety, higher levels of stress, depression. They have sleep problems. They have multiple issues. It's associated with mental health disorders like schizophrenia and OCD and even systemic symptoms like tremors and blood pressure and like so many different things. And so what I've been really interested in recently and this goes along with I think just society in general is that, and then transcriptions my company is also very involved in this is like how can we modulate the GABA system and take people off that threshold? This is actually a file that my father's description of people that were always so many, so many of us are just over the cliff and we can bring them back off that threshold. That's where we can start healing. And so this goes back to my work in hyperbaric therapy. Like if I want people to be in the chamber, I need to have them relax so they can actually heal in there and not like watching John Wick number three or something like that, right?  It's the same deal. Like when we're trying to heal, I think that the real key for all of us is to get more parasympathetic or more rest and digest. So I've been really looking into the world of how we can modulate the GABA system. And the hard thing about the GABA system is you can't give GABA itself most of the time because GABA itself is not something that can get across the blood brain barrier very easily. It's kind of cordoned off. It's a big molecule. So what can you do? You can use herbals like Kava, for example, or Valerian root, or you can look at something called agarin, which is this ingredient from the psychedelic mushroom amniota muscaria that gets across the blood brain barrier. It doesn't cause psychedelic experiences, but it helps you as a long-acting GABA agonist, something that increases GABA. But on the health optimization side too, what are your glutamine levels like? What are your glutamate levels like? Do you have vitamin B6 and magnesium? Because these are all really important to enhance and to support the GABA system. If anybody's had MSG at the Chinese restaurant or Asian restaurant in general, you'll have this experience of headaches. Like I'll get them. My father gets them for three days. And this is because you get this overabundance of glutamate from the monocytic and glutamate. So you're having a hard time converting it because glutamate in the brain gets converted into GABA. So that's a long, that's like its own thing. But in general, like I'm really excited about modulation of the GABA system and increasing the ways that we can modulate and be more parasympathetic and more relaxed more of the time. Awesome. So this is super exciting. And I know obviously we talked about Methylene Blue, yours website, Trosscriptions.com, right? And if you're listening and want to get that discount on your first order, you can use the code you guys have graciously given me to share. And that's just Dr. Jill. But this also lends itself to mention the other products because you guys have some of these other things available. Why don't you tell us real quickly what else that is on that site? Sure, yes. So on our Methylene Blue side, we have a combination with nicotine caffeine and CBD. This is our blue canotine. This is for focus. This is for productivity. This is for three to five hours of really trying to get it done kind of deal. It's great for targeted focus. And then we have Trocom, which is our anxiousness and stress relief. It's something you can use during the day. It has Cava, CBD, CBG, both non-secoactive. And something called nicotinolgaba, vitamin B3, attached to agaba, it lets it get across that blood brain barrier. Fantastic for stress relief. And then we have Trozi, which is our sleep formula. This has eight different ingredients in it for comprehensive sleep modulation, helping you fall asleep, stay asleep and wake up feeling rested. Number of things that are working on the GABA system. Also working on a slow wave sleep with something called Corticepin, which is a fantastic mushroom derivative and then five-HTP and melatonin. But Jill, but this is the big but with all of this. I'm a clinician and you are too. What I truly care about is that all of these products that we make could be hopefully just temporary solutions for you while you're doing the hard work. And we know it's hard of trying to optimize over the long-term. And so that's always the framework for me is that, I guess I have a product company, we make supplements. I think they're fantastic. But in the end, my hope is that you can only use these things when you need them and not hopefully you don't need them all the time. And then if you're doing the work of optimizing mitochondrial function and your gut health, your toxic load, as you say, et cetera, then after all of that is said and done, hopefully you don't have to, you need our stuff all the time. And only when you're traveling or when you're not sleeping well for a couple of nights or your immune system is messed up because you're not sleeping because you have a baby at night that's crying or whatever it might be. But we're there for you. But I think hopefully in the long-term, you don't need us as much. And that's completely fine with me. Thank you for bringing this great information to the world. Thank you for just the clinician that you are.  Thank you again. Likewise.


Malakong bagay ang tricycle. Merong tricycle, araw-araw may papasok sa iyong yung service sa iskwela. Gagawin marami kasi ang magagawa sa ano yung sa tricycle. Here in the Philippines, we call it a bright store which you can buy a piece by piece of any commodities. We also have a small canteen as you see. I also get money in buying some of the medicines of my father.