Welcome to the fifth and final part of prepping for a special project. By now you all know that the special project was a photo shoot in which I was having my picture taken for some work for Yahoo Small Business web hosting. I needed an unfinished canvas for the photo shoot, which is what led up to this whole process. I finally decided to paint the face. And this final video is me working on the large canvas before, during, and after the photo shoot.  Then there'll be some images of me still shots of me in the studio space where the shoot was taken, actually working on the canvas, standing in front of the canvas, one of me on my lunch break, and my jar of brushes, which they just found fascinating, that were on the table. I just thought the photo turned out so cute, so I included it in here. Then when I finally got home the next day after everything was put away and set and done, there is a footage here of me finishing the canvas. So I hope you enjoy and I'll be back at the end. Out and defining the shapes and the colors and this style of painting honestly came out of nowhere. I didn't see this face coming in my work. I have no idea. This isn't where I intended to go with it, but I love the results nonetheless. The finished big canvas and maybe the small one will probably be up for sale at some point in my Etsy shop. If you're interested, email me, my emails in the description of the video below. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please leave them here on the video in the comment section. And don't forget to experiment, to play, try new things. This was very much stepping out of my comfort zone, but I can't be happier with the results. The crew and everybody from ready state marketing and Yahoo and everyone else who was there, including the photographer and his crew, were just fabulous and couldn't be nicer people to work with. If you need web hosting services, check into Yahoo Small Business. I'm not just saying that. I've literally been with them for years. I can't even tell you how long it's been so long, way longer than I've been on YouTube. So anyway, if you need services, check them out and see what you think. That's it for today. Don't forget the most important thing. Go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it, and I'll see you later. Bye guys.


Also at work This next exercise is the shoulder press. We put the dynamite around your Door now turn around so you have your back against the wall or against the door And now it's just like you are cheering for your favorite team Next exercise is to let pull down.  All right This next exercise is for our shoulders. We're gonna do some shoulder rotations.


business. All right, here we go. Hey, what's up dudes and dudettes? It's Drew here from the anxious truth back with Holly. What up, Pals? Hi. We are going to tackle chapter nine of the Claire Weeks hope and help for your nerve hope and help for your nerves book. What's it called in Europe? Hope piece from nervous. You have a different name there or I think was it peace from nervous suffering or is that just completely I'm not sure but it's out there under about a billion different names, but it's all this. It seems seemingly all the same book. Anyway, hope and help for your nerves. We've done the first eight chapters of this over the course of like the last three years, like it wasn't even born yet when we started. Yeah, I think yeah, I think it's for three and a half years. We're graduating university when we finished the last chapter. I'm quite sure. Anyway, we're going to do chapter nine today. If you guys do not have the book, hope and help for your nerves. You can find it anywhere or you can go to the anxious treat dot com and follow the bookstore link. There's a link there where you get it. Making it easy for people. And yes, it would make a couple of bucks for the channel and we'll buy Holly in a camera. So please look at this blueness that I'm in. What's going on? It's very warm and yellow in this room. I don't know what's happening.  Not good. We believe you. We've all seen you. You're not that blue. So chapter nine in the book is all about it's kind of talking about how the she talks about set back. She talks about the fear of it's not going fast enough. All those things. So it's a lot of things that we hear about often, like in the Facebook group, where people are like, Hey, I'm doing it now, but how come it's not getting any better? Or I was doing so great. And now I'm not. What's going on? They keep going backwards. She talks specifically about that. Exactly. Yeah, this is this chapter is called being yourself again. And it's the it's so this is for people that are like a little bit further along now. And they're actually like into where they've been able to put into practice the sort of face in and accepting or surrendering, you know, and the sort of letting time pass. But this is more maybe about the letting time past it. I think so. And by the way, we should probably say if you haven't seen the first eight videos in the series, if you go to the website or go to my YouTube channel, whatever or the podcast, you'll see, watch the first eight before you do this one. So this is about your right. Now you've understanding what's going on. You know what it is and you know what you're supposed to do. You're starting to do it now. And how do things start to change or not change is what she's really addressing. So I made some notes as we went. And the first thing I highlighted is right at the beginning of the chapter, she says, Now it is almost certain that despite your new approach to your illness, your symptoms will continue to return for some time, perhaps at first as acutely as before you read this book. So like you have this blinding flash of insight. Oh, this is the way. This is awesome. And then you discover like, Yeah, but I still feel the same way. Yeah, we see this come a lot, right? We get a lot of people saying this constantly, constantly. And she follows up because I think it's all kind of the same quote. She finds she wrote that after she's talking, she was a doctor herself. And she says she often finds that after talking to what she called a nervously ill patient. And there's a lot of old language in this chapter too. They leave the room and they're all happy like, Oh, this is it. I, you know, I see the light. I know the way. And then, you know, a few days later, there's all the crest falling disappointed like this, but it doesn't work. It's not working. Yeah, because all their symptoms are still there. And the thoughts are still racing. And you know, exactly. So I mean, those are my first two things that I highlighted, which are your parents. Yeah. So a lot of that is about managing your expectation when she says that it's not do not expect to be instantly cured. Do not expect to find instant relief because this is so important, isn't it? Because if you're doing it just so that you feel relief, it's almost like completely defying the whole point of it. You're not trying to face and surrender and let it all happen to you so that you can feel better. You're trying to do that so that you don't add anything, add anything to it. So you're not adding that fear to it. Right. You're learning to do it with the intention of feeling better. It's not you kind of missing the point. Exactly. And I think that's what sets so many people up. I mean, number one, everybody wants to feel better right away. So I think we could all understand that. But it's that, you know, okay, I'm going to accept my anxiety. I'm going to accept these symptoms. But I'm I still don't want to accept that I have to have them be there. I want to make them go away as fast as possible. And you have to be super honest with yourself. If that's really what you think this is going to do, then you're going to set yourself up for this this disappointing thing that she's talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And what is the goal in the end? Not to make it go away, but No, but to be you can't change it, you can just change your reaction to it, right? It's it's understanding that you're not in any danger. And so that you don't add that fear to it, which keeps you perpetually in this, you know, fight or fly and sense highly sensitized state. But what's so important to learn is, or to realize is that when you're in that sensitized state, it does it takes a while, even if you're doing it bang on correctly, what you should be doing every single time takes a long time to be able to come down from that level of like sensitization. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's what people forget is like you're learning to experience those things without being afraid of experiencing those things. And that that takes a while like so and you're what you're giving yourself as repeated experiences with a positive outcome that says I was sweating and dizzy and felt like it was gonna faint and all of those horrible things and those I thought it was gonna go insane. And I didn't do anything. I just let it all happen. And I turned out okay, I didn't I didn't none of those bad things happen. And you need that repeated experience to say like, Oh, I guess I don't have to be afraid of that. So in the end, that's that's really what's going on. And she actually addresses that. She says it's enough at this stage to wish to be unafraid. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, me too. Like it's okay. Everybody wants to be not afraid anymore. That's totally fine to want to not be afraid. But the only way to learn to not be afraid is to first be afraid. He does know it away. Yeah, I wish that you won't be afraid enough.  Like, right, you have to just go through it and sort of keep seeing that nothing happens to you and that actually there is nothing to be afraid of, you know, and that that is what teaches you that. And then through that experience, you actually sort of become not afraid of it, even if it seems impossible that you would one day not be afraid of this, because it's so frightening at the time. But if you just this is where we talk about the leap of faith, right? If you just sort of put your trust into it, and say like, Well, I just want to not be afraid. So I'm going to just trust whatever one says and go through this and try not to add any fear to it. And then if you keep doing that and keep doing it, you realize that nothing bad happens by by letting it do its worst, you know, right? So you can't just decide to be not afraid, you have to learn through experience to be not afraid. And the experience is being afraid. And nothing bad happens. And like, Oh, okay, I didn't have to be afraid. So people say that all the time. But how can I just ignore it? It's so scary. Yeah, it is. I know, I know. It's so yeah, it's super scary. Do it anyway. Like, and she's saying this, that's really what she's saying. So I don't know, you got anything else to add before we go into the next chat, the next thing she talks about was the next bits of a contentious issue. But yeah, there was one thing she wrote something really nice. I don't really like analogies a lot of the time, because they're not the actual thing you're talking about. So you're very flawed. But this is a really nice analogy that she did right. She said, So what is this people when people like I said that even if you're doing it right, and you're doing it right every time, and they go and like, but well, I'm still not better. I'm still feeling it. Am I doing it wrong?  It's not like as soon as you cross that line, you just instantly stop, you have to like run it off at the end, until you can actually stop, you can't just, Oh, I got to the end.  And you know that it still takes a bit of time even after you've crossed the finish line, you know, that's what she said.  And I would even like, that's really, and yeah, I'm, you're right about the analogy thing. But if we run with run with that part in the pond, a little bit more, we could say that like, the this isn't even, she's saying like, you know, the realization of what this is and understanding, Oh, now I know what it is, now I know what I have to do. That's not the finish line. That's, it's almost like a series of races. So that's that's the starting point of the next race that you have to run now. Yeah. So yeah, it's never that just learning what it is. Yeah, it's not the end of the race. There are multiple events happening here. You got to do good at all of them, right. So the next one, and you and I probably disagree to a certain degree on this next thing too, which is good. I like it. So she mentions now, before we get into it, though, and I think we could both agree on this, you have to remember that she was writing in the 1950s and 60s. Yeah. So things were a little bit different. And you could tell by the language. So the very first it's called the front line of battle is this the subhead in the section, she says, Do not think I expect you to do this without the help of sedation. I've even called it sedation back then, you know, it's so it's all it does, doesn't it? Like, you know, but that's what they said back then. So it's totally fine. She's talking about the use of what she calls tranquilizers, which is reasonably accurate. But again, it's dated today. And, you know, 2019, we were talking about the use of Benzodiazepines, like at a van or Xanax and that sort of stuff. Yeah, as a pen, right? So, right, there's a zillion of if it ends in AM, it's it's one of these pretty much clonopin kind of applies to.  I respect your your view on this. You have a different view than I do. We don't really have a different view. You have a different experience. Correct. And your experience is as valid as mine. So Yeah, well, just my experience, where I came from, I came from a Benzo place. I was on Benzos for a long time, all through my sort of anxiety career. And and and in loud me, well, it didn't. But I felt like it did. And maybe it did in some ways, you know, I got I got myself to that point where I wasn't hiding in my house and sort of hiding in my bedroom suffering from anxiety. I was going out and I was working and I was traveling and I was flying and I was going all over and moving to different cities by myself and really sort of like getting out there and live in life, but with sort of crippling anxiety and panic attacks at the same time. But I don't know if I would have done that if I didn't have, you know, because I was taking it a lot, you know, it was like every time I went to work, I was taking like Valium and stuff to get myself out the door or you know, and stuff like that. So I'm not saying that's what helped me. But certainly I'd by the time I came to this approach that we talk about these accepting and the facing, I'd already done a lot of the work already. So I wasn't like agoraphobic. I was but I was making myself get out and do stuff anyway, partly just through sheer necessity and partly through just like sheer determination to not like be made sort of to stay. I just thought because I thought this was something I had to live with my whole life. So I was like, well, if I have to live with it my whole life, I'm not going to live in my bedroom because I had it from when I was really young, like 11. So it didn't not be different.  I grew up with it. So I had a very different experience of that. So yeah, so I used I did use Benzos a lot to get myself out. You know, every time I was flying, every time I was doing a lot of things, you know, I would I would take it and it and I managed to go out and do stuff. So by the time I came to this approach, I had done a lot of that hard work because we meet people on this journey and when they come to us and you know, they find this approach. They're still, you know, locked in their bedrooms and in their houses and they can't go anywhere. And it is really tough and very daunting. So me, I'm sort of on the Clare Weeks, like, if it helps you get out the door, if it helps you do stuff to learn that like you can actually get out of the house and do stuff and and go there. If taking some like a tranquilizer, if taking a Benzo like helps you to do that so that it helps you in your learning process, like I'm totally like whatever makes it easier, like do that. But just what I will add is that I only actually got better when I stopped taking Benzos because every time I was taking one, I was reinforcing the sort of false belief that I the feeling anxiety and feeling panic was something to be squashed and sort of controlled and held down so that I could just about get through something. I was white knuckle in my way through life. And so it was only when I actually went to when I sort of realized all this and came to this sort of like approach and stuff. I realized that my taking my taking a Benzo was a form of avoidance because I was trying to avoid the anxiety. I wasn't facing it and I wasn't letting it do its worst because I was trying to keep it down. You know, I was trying to like keep just about on top of everything. If I take a tablet I can just get through this. So that was my so it was only when I stopped taking Benzos and you know, I tapered it and I did carefully and gradually. It's only when I stopped taking them and was suddenly faced with that thing of like, I'm going to go out the house without any tablets on me. And if like a panic attack comes to me then, oh my god, like, I'm just going to have to go through it. And it once I did that, I mean, then it worked like recovery came to me quite quickly because I'd already done so much of that work. I only had a little bit more to go. Yeah. But I had to do that huge step of, you know, I'd been on Valium for 22 years and I had to sort of suddenly learn to do everything that I was doing without it. And that was crazy. But you know, that's what that's how I got better in the end. That's how I got better. I think it's just a side note of encouragement for anybody that's listening and is taking those medications 22 years. And like now you don't take them and you're healthier and have a good life and like you're functioning. So yeah, so many people get so afraid like, oh, I'm addicted to them now. And yes, addiction is an issue with those. That's true.   So so on the top side of that, we should also mention though that she was talking about tranquilizers or what we would say is Benzos now. She was not talking about antidepressants. They didn't exist when she wrote these books, right? So that's important. And that's two different things. And we can talk about that maybe in its own video one day. But there's two schools of thought on this. And I and I understand the concept of I can't even go from my bedroom to my living room. So how am I supposed to go out the door? So I'm going to use Valium or whatever it is in small doses. And I could say small doses only when needed with the intention of not using it. Like yeah, that is right. And I can understand that approach. And for some people, that's a valid approach. That's okay. The other the flip side of that is and this speaks to the antidepressant thing to for people who are involved in behavioral therapy, they will say if you take away the symptoms, then what are you learning? So you just to be aware of that, right? That's why the intention always has to be I'm going to take it this time, but I'm going to really try to do it next time without it or as soon as possible without it, which is fine. And the other thing that you might look at is okay, I can't even leave my bedroom to go to the kitchen without having a panic attack. Well, okay, so you don't have to go to the mailbox or the supermarket or the shopping mall or on a world cruise.   It would mean slower starting, but that's another way to do it. Maybe without without the meds. But either way, but also just as well, if there's that person that maybe like can't leave their house or something, but through necessity or just sometimes because of life, like you have to do something that's way bigger than your just, you know, I mean, like, that's when I'm like, if your doctor's described it and said take it when you need it, I would just say we'll just take it and go and do the thing that you have to do. I do. I understand that somebody who's completely homebound leaves the house, you know, and we see them every day, or like white knuckles their way through five things that they can do. But now they have a wedding to go to. It's two hours away. It's an all day affair. You know, that one time use, because that wedding could turn into a really horrific experience, otherwise and it could be a flooding thing. And so there are places where this stuff can be used judiciously as a tool. I don't just find myself singing the Walker Brothers, like make it easy on yourself. Just like, like life's really hard, like you don't have to make the hardest thing all the time, you know, sometimes should maybe just make it easier on yourself whilst trying to do with something really difficult. Exactly. And now with the just very quickly, I don't want to get too far into the antidepressants are different because antidepressants are a long term thing. They're not an event by event thing. So she was not talking about that. And I don't want anybody to confuse the fact that, you know, Dr. Week said it's okay to take meds. She was not talking about Prozac and that and and Paxil and those and those things. That's different. And in behavioral science circles, that's even more hotly debated, because when you start to take an antidepressant and it knocks everything down after 10 days or two weeks, if it does, if it works for you, then what exactly are you working on? You don't. And that's the note. That's the people who say like, well, I they worked great for me. But here I am in this anxiety group, still unable to go to work.  Anyway, so that's what she was talking about there. That's probably enough on that one. But I agree. The way you used it is probably perfect. And sometimes I mean, not really, but yeah, well, I think, and when I think we first met, you were you were just I'm guessing you were just at the tail end of that. We remember still five, six years ago. I just stopped taking them. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But you it was pretty quick before your tone changed, like almost immediately. Suddenly, you were like better quickly, which is great. So let's move on to the next thing to actually in a cup. Yes, the rapid recovery thing. She mentions that. So let's talk about keep occupied. This is this is a thing. Yeah. And I see this a lot, especially in the group. And by the way, if you don't know, we're talking to the Facebook group, there's a link in my every where there's a link to join the Facebook to go and do it. So it's ever get in it. Just join the crowd. So she says it's essential that you be occupied while awaiting cure. However, I must warn you against feverishly seeking occupation or to prevent to forget yourself. So there's a fine line between like, I need to be busy all the time to distract myself from this thing that I hate. It's not what you want to do. And just sitting. So sometimes I see people that have been dealing with this for such a long time, they start to see this new way. They want to do it. And essentially sometimes all they wind up doing is this. So the only occupation they have is recovery thinking about anxiety. Exactly. Like and you see people who get stuck with like, well, every time I feel anxious, I'll go out for a walk. That's fine. But there has to be more to life than waking up and wondering how you're going to recover that day and just walking around your block. So it doesn't matter what it is reading music, you know, puzzles are volunteering somewhere whatever it is, some occupation, because you have to try and live the life I would say especially occupation that means that you have to interact with other people is really good. Yeah. Yeah, it is. I just think it's good for you in general, you know, I would agree with that 100% and I think it's also you're almost pretending in the beginning and that's OK.  I don't want to I'm terrified when I'm there. It makes me feel awful, but you're almost pretending to be a recovered normal person again.  And if your housebound today, you're not going to go and get a full time job in a city 45 minutes away. I get that, but it is important to do more than just and be completely consumed with. Well, this activity that I want to do right now, if I want to do a puzzle right now, was that recovery? Is that the right thing? Should I do that? Am I not allowed to do that? The doctor, we say anything about doing puzzles. Like it's a I understand why people get trapped that way, but it's important to recognize when you are in that pattern and try and break it. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so one of the key words that she says in this little paragraph about keeping occupied and the difference between being occupied to avoid anxiety, because obviously that's not, you know, sort of helpful, is the word meanwhile in the meantime, in the meantime, like, I'm gonna like, you know, I'm working on my anxiety and I'm trying not to avoid it. And I'm trying to accept and surrender to it. But in the meantime, whilst I'm doing all this, I'm gonna like do some other stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And it's that word like in the meantime, which is very different than like, I'm going to do this stuff. So like, that I don't have to think about anxiety, do you know what I mean? Right. While I'm, while I'm like accepting and dealing with my anxiety, I'm also going to cook dinner. Or I'm also going to take a walk and buy some veggies or whatever, whatever it happens to be. And we say this a lot, like life is exposure, can be exposure. So sometimes, yeah, yeah, just the act of the way. So that's super important. They'll get trapped in that like, all I do is think about recovery, read about it, talk about it, being on the forums and you know, like you got to do more than that. You really do. Yeah. So let's talk about the quick recovery thing, which was, I think, great that she mentioned it. Yeah, you were a good example, I think. Yeah. But like I said, I've done a lot of that work already. Yeah. I had a long time to work on it. Right, right. Well, I think we've both seen people around over the past few years that have this experience. And it's great when it happens. It's possible. What, like the quick one, the quick one where they even they've been at this for years. I know one particular person she might be listening and she lives in Pennsylvania. She might know who she is. Just months ago, she was in tears, couldn't drive her son a mile away to school.  And she started doing it religiously and relentlessly. And within like two months, like she kind of got most of her life back. So that can happen. Yeah, it's possible. I had a friend that was he was in just, you know, total like crisis mode. He sort of had to quit everything he was doing and move back with his parents and, you know, in his sort of late 30s and stuff. And and and he just didn't know what he was doing at all. And he didn't really understand even particularly what was happening to him. And I remember just talking to him on the phone one day and sort of like very quickly, like realized that, you know, he was having a complete like anxiety panic sort of, you know, melt down and was now suffering from panic disorder. And and all literally I was maybe on the phone for like an hour and a half. And by the end of that phone call, he was like, better. And I spoke to him, like, you know, like two weeks later or something, he had now like gone and moved somewhere else. And he was doing great. And like sitting this was maybe two and a half years ago. And he's been doing great ever since. And he just said, like it just sort of clicked with him and he just realized what was happening and what he needed to do about it. And just the understanding of it, clink, clink, clink, you know, he obviously like still had set backs and stuff. But he got it and he was just like, Oh, this is what I have to do. This is what's happening to me. And it was just like it was just amazing to like see it was just so incredible. I've had I had two experiences with panic disorder bordering on agoraphobia in my life. And the first time it ever happened when I was a sophomore in college in 1986, I had that experience. I read this book. And within a matter of days or a week, boom, I was good to go. And I that came back to bite me later, because I didn't actually have to do all the work and learn it. I just sort of like, Hey, this is cool. This made it all better. And I never actually learned the process. But it's possible it happened to me the first time. The second time it wasn't that way. That brings us on into the next bit that she makes, which is about the, is this the next bit, the set back? No. Yeah. The next is what she likes about quick recovery, which is quick. And then she says gradual recovery is the next one. So she, yeah, she gets there. Setback is after that. Oh, yeah, sorry. When she talks about gradual recovery, and I had a highlight this just because it was adorable. Like it's so 1950s, like get out there in the fresh air, take a stiff Constitution. She says with good food, she actually mentions. Oh, yeah. I know it's like, Oh, that's so cute. I'm not poo-pooing good food. Everybody should eat healthy, of course, but I found it so fascinating that she literally wrote that like physical physical exhaustion made delay recovery. But even here with good food and peace of mind, you're going to be okay. Like just have already soup and everything will be great. But I was kind of cute. But she uses this thing like the strength and a limb may depend on the confidence with which it is used, which is super. We see this all the time. And honestly, that's just believing what your anxiety is telling you what your thoughts are. Like, Oh, I can't possibly do it. I'm if I do that, I will fall over. I can't stand up. I'm dizzy. I will faint. Most common thing we hear. Like, Oh, really go stand on one foot. Tell me how it goes. And people stand on one foot.  Maybe I'm not really dizzy. And it's like, Okay, that's what she's addressing here. Like, I think she's addressing the idea that the fear that you feel will tell you not to do certain things. And so you think you can't. And until you do it, and then you discover, Oh, I actually can do that. She gives that really interesting example of like a woman that was going to the gym for three years after she was, you know, recovering from nervous nervous illness. I'm saying it just like off the table. Yeah, like she did. Yeah. And and the instructors in that gym obviously didn't really sort of understand it very well.  And so therefore you must because you've suffered from nervous illness, you've got to be really careful on your muscles. And they sort of like implanted this weird belief in her that she she had to take it really easy. Otherwise her body wouldn't be able to take it. And then Dr. Week said to her like, No, no, no, it's just confident. You just got no confidence about using your muscles like use them. They're absolutely fine. And she was like, really? And then she went down and then she started like working out and stuff. And then like, she was just amazed at how much she could. She said she couldn't believe she was like, I only thought I couldn't do these things. But I could do them. She actually said, I mean, this is evidently a quote from the woman. It doesn't seem possible that wrong thinking could have kept me so weak, but it has.  It's like, Oh, did I overdo it? Like, I feel badly today. So I must have overdid it yesterday. And it's really almost no such thing as overdoing it. Like, go do more than like do more like do that again. So yeah. And then you learn like, Oh, there is not such thing as overdoing it. So yeah, although do you want to clarify because you do talk about the flooding thing and I think that that's what overdoing it is. That's true. So flooding and this does come up a lot. It flooding is contextual, right? So it depends on your particular situation.  That's a flooding experience. But if you are going like into recovery now and you say, Hey, today, all right, I'm going to take a walk. I'm going to take another walk that I'm going to practice driving that I'm going to go with, you know, my my wife to the supermarket for a half hour and do the shopping and help cooking. And at the end of the day, you say, Hey, I did all these cool things. They're all within your zone. They're achievable. And then maybe the net it's always the next day when somebody says, Oh, and they're so elated that day, I did all these things. It's awesome. And then the next day they are like back to Oh, but I have anxiety again. Did I overdo it yesterday? No, yeah, it's fine. Do those things again today. Yeah.  Right. You're sore or something like that. It doesn't work that way. Yeah. Yeah. Doing those things is the positive experience we talked about in the beginning. You need to do those things again and again and again. You cannot overdo it. There's no such thing. Yeah, I think coming from my own experience, I was talking about when I was white knuckling through my life, I'm just trying to think if anyone else is doing that sort of thing that I did. I don't think flooding exists in that context because I would go anywhere and do anything, but just have a hellish time kind of doing anything if it was going to the pub to meet my friends, if it was sitting on my sofa watching TV, if it was flying across the world, like it, it was just panic attacks everywhere. When you're living the way you lived, I think the way you describe it because I didn't know you back then, but there is no such thing as flooding because you never build a safe bubble. So flooding is when you take your safe bubble, which is really not necessarily physically a thing, but just situational and you explode it instantaneously and like 10 times bigger than the bubble. You didn't have that. You were still out doing stuff, traveling the world and doing gigs and do all this stuff. So yeah, you didn't. You never made a safe zone. You weren't helping yourself, but you never made a safe zone. You know, I think I was just I never had a safe zone. So everything was like an unsafe. So just briefly, like one good question. I think people would probably be interested in so many people who don't know what this is, especially if they started as a child and you've mentioned that you can go all the way back to childhood with this thing. They didn't even know what it was and they say like, well, I just thought that this was the way people were. Do you ever have that? Like this is just normal to be afraid and anxious and like tied up in knots all the time. Do you ever think that until you figured out that it wasn't normal and you could be different? No, because when well, yeah, probably when I think back to before when I had like, because basically I had a huge panic attack out of the blue one night when I was 11 and sitting watching TV with my parents and I just went. And it seems like and I know this is impossible, but it seemed like it lasted for nine months like nonstop continually. Oh, no, I wasn't at school. I was just, you know, and so I knew that that wasn't normal. OK, absolutely.  When I think back to before that, you know, I was like really afraid of things. And I think I ever thought things a lot and put a lot attached really weird significance to things.   So there is. Yeah, what is what is normal? Anyway, this is all philosophical now. But the next thing she talks about, she calls it. She she entitles a little section and we're actually almost done at this point. There's not much that much more left, but she calls it the old forgotten sensations. And she's essentially addressing that thing and just to bring it into the modern terms that we hear from the people that we deal with every day. I've had such a good two weeks, which means 99 percent of the time means. Is that that? Did that was an S setback? Oh, I just did that. No, I didn't. Oh, were you doing it? I was drawing like a big S. Oh, like we need to get you a illustrator, a setback thing. She does. She talks about setback in this, the return of the symptoms or the old familiar feelings. And that's that thing that's like I've had such a good week and I've had such a good week usually translates to for most people. I wasn't feeling that anxious. And that is great. There's nothing wrong with that. Like that's a good life to have, right? But and then they feel anxious again. It's like, uh oh, it's a huge setback. I'm back to square one. Obviously I'm broken. She talks about the specific thing when the sensations that you haven't experienced for a while come back. That could be in two days or a week or a month or five years. Doesn't matter when she talks about this. And she talks that sometimes people struggle so much with the setback because it feels so much worse because it's contrasted against like the brilliant like peace and sort of like hope that came with that good period.  And like all that sort of hope enters your world that hasn't maybe been there in so long. And so that when you go back to how you were before because it's not just an instant cure as we've been talking about. Yeah. So it will go back. Then it just feels so much more hopeless and lots of people. She says that lots of people say that like they just feel like when they hit that sort of depression of like going back to it again, they just feel so hopeless. They're like, maybe I'm just not cut out for this. I just don't think I can handle the, you know, the clock. Clearly we hear like I'm clearly doing this wrong. I don't know what it is. You know, I'm never going to get better. All those things happen. But I think one of the key indicators, somebody asked me a friend of ours the other day said, what did you do when you had those feelings that said, well, this is I'm never going to get better. No, they actually asked me, how did you deal with those thoughts of like, what if it comes back? And I was able to answer that and say like, I never worried about what if it comes back? Here's the difference. So a good period that precedes the setback, quote unquote setback. If the good period is this is a really good time because I don't feel those things that I hate, then just be ready because they're going to come back and just know they're going to come back and look at it as a chance to practice. The real measure of a good period is, hey, I feel pretty good today. But even if I didn't, I'd be all right. That is what defines the actual good period. When you get to that part, there is no such thing anymore as a setback.  So if it returns, it returns. You just keep doing the things that you're supposed to be doing. Yeah. She says, I highlighted this. She said, like, well, how do you respond to a setback? And she talks about the person who like, oh, feels it again and immediately goes back to the old safety stuff. Like, oh, I was feeling so great. I was out. I was doing stuff today. I'm so anxious. I've stayed in bed all day. Like, she's literally says, never do this, nerd buzzer. Never do this. Never let the unexpected return of panic, whenever it may strike, even if it comes years later, never let it shock you into running away from it ever. Never run away from it. Right. Never run away from it, whether it's a day from now, a week from now, a month and out, or 10 years from now. It doesn't matter. Never run away from it. And I think just to clarify that you can never engineer out your humanity so that an initial flash of fear will always happen. It happens to me. Probably happens to you. It happens to every human being. Yeah, you can't engineer away the first fear, the flash of fear. But you can. It's not what happens in the first two seconds. It's what happens in seconds, three to 10 that determine everything else. Right. So even when it comes back, you have to stop for a second, have that flash of fear. Oh, my God.  What am I supposed to do? I know what I'm supposed to do and then do it. That's the only response to that. That's the only possible. The only response that you can have is that. Yeah, yeah. I really like, I mean, I don't always get that right. But what I do make sure I do is that I don't repeatedly get it wrong. Thank you. Right. Because she said like the last line pretty much of the chapter or one of the last lines is that you may falter, but you will never be completely overwhelmed again. And like that. And I just feel like, yeah, because so I just want to talk quickly about the she talks about the worst setback of all because I love this and I have experience of this as well. Is that she says often, so you know, like the road to recovery is not completely linear, right? Like so you go like good, bad, and you know, but eventually like you'll sort of make you sort of climb your way out of it through going through and practicing and learning and learning and doing it again and again where your brain starts to realize you're not in any danger and all of that. But she says this sometimes happens and it's usually when people are so close to being fully recovered that they have like just the mother of all setbacks where it just feels like they go back to square one maybe even further. And this personally happened to me as well. Do you like I was I was doing really well. I like recovered in the thing I started recovering in like October came completely off the valley and by like November, December I was like really like learning how to be like drug free. January went on holiday to South Africa. February found out I was pregnant and just went, oh my God. And I just like, you know, I planned it, but I just lost it. I just it just shocked me. I know I was just in so much I just was like a person just in shock just going and I just sat on my sofa for what felt like weeks. And like I wasn't even a gorophobic before and I somehow went back to square one. I went back to taking Valium and I was pregnant at this point. It was just terrible. I remember this against all the doctor, you know, against what the doctor was telling me to do. And I was just freaking out. You know, I was just absolutely just, you know, I lost it. I went beyond. I was like a minus square minus three never minus square one, you know? Yeah. And and I was just like, well, this is it.  And like I said, it wasn't even like I was like like that before. Like I was going out and doing stuff but just having panic attacks and I just froze. I just couldn't even get off the sofa. So it wasn't like that long though. Yeah, no, it was about two weeks. Yeah, right. And I remember texting you and you saying like, you're fine. Just do the work. You know what to do. Just do it again. Just go out the house and do it again. And that is when I read Claire Weeks. That's when I discovered not discovered, I rediscovered weeks and, you know, all that stuff about floating out the door. And and I just sort of did it. And then I was like better. I was like fully better within like, I think about two weeks. I was like fully better again. And so I had so having been like, oh, I think I'm completely recovered to like and then drop even further than I was. And then to come out again using exactly the same methods. It wasn't anything else. You know what I mean? It was just facing and accepting not avoiding the panic, not avoiding the anxiety, understanding what it was just to then like just sort of flow out of the cave. So like easily as well. And now it's four years later, or three and a half, four years later. And I'm fine. You know what I mean? Like, and I just have so much confidence now. Like I because we see people that have like done really well with the recovery, but you can tell there's this fear of like, but what if I go back to how I was? What if it, what if it comes back, you know? Right, I know you can't hear this because you don't have headphones on.  Sorry for your listening. Is it Fransky snoring? Oh, Fransky is snoring. I'm like, what is that? It's so loud in my headphones. You could see me adjusting my gain and stuff. I'm like, mate, am I picking up a truck or something? Oh, that's so funny. I think it's a dog snoring. Yeah, it's her snoring. It's so regular. I'm like, what is this? Just discovered in my life. Oh, I don't hear you around with that snoring. That's fine. Now we know what it is. Who cares? Oh, I love it. Anyway, I'm sorry. I got sidetracked by that, but I think, yeah. So yeah, we get people that are doing really well with their recovery, and you can see it lurking in the back of their mind. What if it comes back? Right. And so I say, let it come back. I said, let them have the setback because once you come out of the mother of all setbacks, and for you, possibly, because you'd already recovered when you were at university, right? And then it came back to you years later. I mean, in some ways you could call that, like it's just a really bad setback. Yeah, it was like an eight month or year setback. Sure. Yeah. But having come out of it twice, using basically the same methods, do you know what I mean? It sort of reinforces the method of just like, I really have no problem if it comes back because it's not gonna come back now because I'm not gonna get overwhelmed by it. Absolutely no fear that it will return now. So that last, which doesn't happen to everybody, but it happens to many people, or some people at least, that mother of all setbacks right near the end before you kind of turn that corner, it sort of has to be. Many sports teams on the way to winning a championship will lose in the finals first, then they come back. Yes, like to use a sports analogy for everybody, all these sports. Many of the greatest teams experienced that last setback. They got all the way to the end and they lost the big game, they lost the final series, then they came back a year or two later and they won. I was watching a film about, I can't remember a baseball team. And they would know these. And then, but when they came, he brought in a new management method anyway. Many sports. It's a quite famous film. Yeah, and in sports all over the world, like that's a common thing even in team sports, like you almost have to learn how to deal with the adversity that one last time.  So yeah, it's a thing. I think like often the best boxes are ones that have then had like a massive defeat, right? And it's the comeback that's so much. That's exactly right. But you know, just to, you know, we're a little longer than we usually are, but I think it's okay because it's good stuff. Do we hear the setback thing all the time? And I, somebody has said that, and I started using it too. I don't remember who coined that and I'm sorry, but like you can't unknow what you now know. You don't, you don't forget, like you don't unlearn all of this stuff. So there really is no going backwards. There's no external process that just comes in and wipes you out. It's not a wave coming in that you get a tidal wave. Essentially it's just life. And she talks about that. Sometimes there's strain, tension, like she actually says some strange, some tension. So whatever it is that you hear. I think if you're under a lot of stress, it can definitely, you know, get your nerves all jangling and ready sort of sense size. She even mentions this. She even mentions it. But in the end, even when that happens, and you're right, especially people who are new in this process of recovery, like I had somebody this morning that actually mentioned, I think, you know, an over full plate. My plate is so full right now. And she feels like she's going backwards. It's a health anxiety thing. But I'm like, well, no, you're still, you're new to this. You're two months into it. That's not a long time to learn these new competencies and confidence.  But in the end, you didn't unlearn. You didn't suddenly lose it. No tidal wave came in and wiped everything away from you. You just had a different change of circumstance. You felt some different things and you started acting the old ways again, which is in the end a choice. And I know that people hate sometimes when they say that, but it is a choice. So you just, you just, you fell into a little bit of a bad habit for a week or two. And then you changed it. Yeah. You know, when I found out I was pregnant and stuff, like, you know, that sort of decline into just sitting on my sofa, like, like, I just, I could have got up and got out, but I chose to just, I just chose to sit there. Was my own doing. And I did not, and I did know all this stuff and I knew it and I'd done it. And I did somehow forget, but just as soon as I actually, I didn't forget it. I just stopped doing it. I just stopped practicing it. Do you know what I mean? And then as soon as I did it again, I just went whoop. Yeah, because you still knew all the stuff. You had those experiences. Yeah. Exactly. So that's, I think it's super important to think about in setback. Like it's not an external thing that happened that wiped out all your progress. Like, no, some things changed. You felt some stuff you didn't feel like and you just went into some old habits, whether they'd be mental, cognitive, emotional or behavioral. Like, all right, no problem. The good news always is that even in a setback, you are still in control of the process. It's still not an external thing that is like going to outside of your control. So that's always a good thing. I honestly encourage the mother of all setbacks. I encourage it. I'd say I like, you can see the confidence in the people that have gone through that. Like then it's just like, no, now I'm bullied. Yeah. There's one person in particular, she's in Ireland right now. I think you probably know who I'm talking about. She went through it. Yeah. Not too long ago and you could see it happen, but she is just on fire now. Like just in the group that you invite, she is now like a different person. I didn't, she's listening right now. But so what else are we up to here? I think we're almost done here. She talks about memory, how memory could kind of stir things up. And then she goes, one of the things that I thought was interesting was how she talks about and going in search of the old sensations, which I'm not sure. Yeah, so I went backwards just a little bit, but I want to bring that up. So she literally writes, you may sometimes go in search of the old sensations to try yourself out, thinking it too good to be true. I don't know if people necessarily are searching it to try themselves. Some people do that. Like let me see if I can make that happen again. Yeah, and that's great. That's actually not a bad exercise to do. Do it, go ahead, try and feel bad, like if you can. Because I think that displays, that's a sense of confidence and almost like, all right, I'm willing to try to see if I can make this crappy stuff happen. So it's not a bad thing. You're learning, you're honing your skills, you're learning some confidence there. I think a lot of people wind up looking for the old sensations because of that thing where they're just, they're not there yet. So they're still worried that it might come back. Like it's some monster that's stalking them. What if it shows up today? And they're worried, because they've spent so many years like trying to hide from it. And now it's like, well, what if it, if you're still worried that it can get you, then yes, you will find yourself looking for those things. You're not trying to get them, but you're always looking for them. People talk about it all the time, like, I don't know, I've had a couple of really good days. Why am I looking? Why am I scanning and looking to see how I feel? Well, because you're nervous that it's gonna come back and get you. That's why. So I think that looking for the old sensation sometimes is something you choose to actively do to test your recovery, which is great. Sometimes it's just an indicator that like, oh, I guess I'm still afraid of this. That's all right though. It just means you're still learning. Nothing wrong with that. It's all good. Yeah. It surprised us. Yeah, I thought it was worth bringing it up, but I think we pretty much covered the whole shebang. No? Yeah, I think just it's important to mention that she says that like, you know, so even once you've recovered and in all this that, you know, like the flash of panic and it's that the flash of panic can be so intense and so, and it really can hit you even years later. Yeah.   So like, it's just worth mentioning again that recovery is not the complete absence of any anxiety, that it's not the absence of any panic, that it can still hit you at some points, you know, and I don't know, like, I think some people are more prone to it than others for just a whole myriad of different reasons and some people are just kind of anxious people and do you know what I mean?  I don't know, you know, it happens to me when I'm really tired or it's stuff like this, but if you can deal with that panic and not be afraid of it and not change your life or not even sort of think about it. I mean, if we didn't like, sort of help people in an anxiety, I honestly don't even know when I would even think about anxiety these days. I would almost never think of it. That's true. That's absolutely dead on track. I feel like I never need to have to talk about it. Yeah, even if I'm feeling anxious, I just pay it's just like sort of like a, oh, great, now I feel anxious and I've got to go to work. Like that's a drag, isn't it? It's just a sort of annoyance. It's like, it doesn't even register anything more than just like a... Right, it's like waking up with the flu or being caught, you know, have a cold like, ah, really? This isn't ideal, is it? But never mind. And it's interesting because the times that it will happen for me, it's, I actually, this is gonna sound crazy, but sometimes, if I really am honest about it, the presence of anxiety for me is almost a positive mechanism. It's the thing that tells me that even I have a limit of like sleep deprivation and projects and like all that stuff. And it's like, if I'm having that, that usually tells me like, oh, I guess I probably should sleep a little bit more. And like, that's when it's gonna hit me. But it's like, all right, no, there's that alarm. I guess I gotta do something now or get some sleep or like... It is a friendly reminder that you're only doing it through. Right, right, that you're not a machine. Like, even though you might act like one. So you're all out of anxiety.  No, it's just like... It'll make me angry. The few times that I've even felt compelled to tell someone how I felt, it's always because I'm just pissed off at myself. Like just, I need to tell you about a human being that kind of messed up here and I'm not sleeping and I'm just, yeah, now I feel like crap. So that I said it. I've had it when I've been really ill, like I had kidney stones. I was actually eight months pregnant at the time. I had kidney stones and like, so I was having all these really strange symptoms and then like my body just started having panic attack and I'm just like, great. Now I can't even tell what's the symptom and what's the thing. So I was just like, I don't even know if I'm feverish because I feel really hot but that's how I feel when I'm anxious. It was just really annoying. It was just like, just get lost panic attack. You've been really unhelpful at the minute. I need to know what's actually wrong with me. I'm pregnant. Like a kidney stone's really now, really. Yeah, and cause I didn't know it was kidney stones at that point. So obviously I was just like, oh my God, there's something really wrong with me. And so just then the panic attack to jump like piggyback on that. I was just like, don't need you right now. This is really inconvenient. Yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it. All right, I think we've done chapter nine. That's good. So we went a little longer than we usually do. But if you're hung in this whole time, thank you. I keep getting reminded, I'm obligated to say if you're listening on iTunes and not on YouTube. But you know what? If you're watching it on YouTube then hit the thumbs up or something or subscribe to the channel. If you're listening on iTunes, like give us like a five star rating or something or write a review. And thanks for coming by and joining us. Give like thumbs down on YouTube. I don't understand that. Just here's my 10 second YouTube brand.  It really is. I mean, it's the second biggest search engine on the internet. Great stuff. Like you can learn all kinds of things on YouTube.    So there you go. If you don't like it, I guess thumbs down if you want, if it makes you feel better. Anyway, all right, thanks for coming by guys. And we'll do chapter 10 maybe in the next week or two if we can. Yeah, yeah. With your best. We will finish this book one day. All right, I'll see you later. I'm gonna stop recording. Stop recording.


Hi, I am Ryan Hunt. I work at Mozilla on SpiderMonkey, specifically on the WebAssembly team, and yeah, that's all you need to know. Hi, I am Conrad Watt. I kind of wear two hats as a research fellow at Peter House, which is a college of the University of Cambridge. I do WebAssembly research with a specific focus on programming language theory. And then I have another hat as a co-chair of the WebAssembly community group, which is the main standards body for the core WebAssembly virtual machine. Hi, I am David. I work on the JavaScript core team at Apple. Lately I have been working on the WebAssembly baseline compiler in that, but I have worked with both WebAssembly and JS in the past, and I guess mostly on compiler optimizations. I am Adam Klein. I work on V8 at Google, focusing on WebAssembly and JavaScript standards. The last couple of years I have been focusing mostly on WacomGC and pushing that over the MVP line. Fantastic.  You mentioned baseline compilers. Do you mind letting us know what those are in case people aren't aware? Oh, yeah. If you are not familiar with the concept of a baseline compiler, I guess just a general introduction is that whenever you are running WebAssembly in a browser, it is getting compiled in the browser runtime. In order to make sure that starts up quickly, we usually run it through several different compilers with increasing amounts of optimization. The baseline is the first one, so it compiles really quickly, so you start up fast. It doesn't necessarily run the fastest, though, in terms of the final code. Does your baseline compiler have a special name? I know of a few others that are in the ecosystem. Yeah. Like a lot of the JavaScript core compilers, it has a fun acronym name. It is BBQ for build byte code quickly. Our higher tier is OMG for optimized machine code generation, and then sort of unrelated to that, we also have the Web template framework. I feel like I need to share Mozilla's once, because so far we have two tiers. We also have a baseline tier and an optimizing tier. And the story was that our optimizing tier was called Baldr, which I don't remember the origins of that. But then the person who wrote our baseline tier called it Rubaldr, and I'm told it's a really funny joke in Norwegian, but I don't know what it is. How about V8? V8 also has a baseline compiler called Liftoff, and then an optimizing compiler called Turbofan. Yeah. I think the compiler landscape is really vast. There's a lot of innovation for WebAssembly specifically in that space. Are there any cool projects that you think are worth highlighting right now? I'm going to open it up to all of you. If there's any new things that you're trying out or experimenting with, I think we would love to hear it. I mean, going back to WasmGC, that's the thing that we're currently heavily invested in. There's an origin trial right now, so people are experimenting with this in the wild, and we're excited to be moving in lockstep with SpiderMonkey on having engine implementations aligned with each other. And so that's the main thing for me, that WasmGC allows you to take managed languages like Kotlin or Java and compile them to Wasm while making use of the garbage collector that's already in the Web VMs, and so that's super exciting. Yeah, I think that's going to be huge for the WebAssembly ecosystem, letting us bring new languages that previously didn't compile WebAssembly online. How long has WasmGC been in the works? Oh, sure. I guess I'll give this a go. So we've been talking about it for many years. I think you may have remembered, if you were following the standards process, that back in 2018, we were very excited about the idea this was just going to be, if not around the corner, then at least coming in the next few years. And obviously, there are a lot of things that went wrong in 2020, 2020, 2021, that I don't think we all need to relive. But now I feel like we're just about at a place where it really is around a corner, which is quite exciting given the promise of being able to compile new languages to WebAssembly. I think it'll be quite exciting to get away from just the C, C++, Rust angle and see what Java can do on WebAssembly, for example. And like with many things in WebAssembly, it's a big group effort to make this possible. There's engines implementing the stuff and people working on the spec, but there's also language tool chains that have been experimenting with us and applications using those tool chains. So it's really many layers to make it possible to experiment and vet these ideas and see that we're getting the benefits that we expect. Yeah. And I think that's the reason why there's such a long lead time on a lot of proposals is because it starts out like as a twinkle in someone's eye, like this would be a great thing to do. And then it kind of gets thrown out to the community group as an idea. And there's usually a lot of discussion with that. And then there's a lot of work to kind of pull together like a group of people who would say, like, I would commit some time developing this in my WebAssembly engine. And then some tool chain folks who would end up using it too. And sometimes you have to break the chicken egg problem a little bit because people in tool chains don't want to do things if the engines aren't going to do it. Engines don't want to do it. Tool chains aren't going to do it. And so sometimes it takes a bit of effort to figure that out. And then there's usually a feedback loop then where tool chains started doing something. And they say, Oh, this was a great idea. It just doesn't work. So you have to tweak it. And it just takes a long time. But hopefully the end result's pretty good. How often do you feel that an implementation works in one of the runtimes but not in the others? And how do you resolve those differences? So when you say works, do you mean like it is implemented or like, are you talking like web incompatibilities? Like, yeah, I would say it could be, could, could run and could work in that one runtime. Maybe it's not necessarily implemented yet, but they see a path forward and somebody else says, that's going to be terrible. It's going to just, it's just going to destroy all of our performance gains. Well, I think so. So I'll say just on the web compatibility thing of like how many times when people implement features and like ship them, usually so far, just the nature of things, I think we've been pretty well interoperable across engines, which has been very nice. In terms of like different browsers having different opinions on standards about whether this is a good idea or not. I don't think that's been the largest issue. Sometimes there's usually like, I think there can be agreement that things are like good problems worth solving, but some of the details about how to solve them can change. And I think that's the most common thing that happens. And there is sort of like this, at least so far in the WebAssembly community group, like a nice implicit set of things. Like, these are goals that we want core WebAssembly to have. And there's been broad agreements, so we're not fighting too many philosophical wars. It comes up sometimes, but there's been a good amount of agreement on things like predictable performance and avoiding the need for like really heavyweight optimization things. Even though it's never been formally agreed upon, but it does seem like there's good agreement on those things. Circling back a little bit to Wasm GC, are there other proposals that interact with the Wasm GC proposal itself? I know there are many others that are in flight. Conrad? I guess I could talk both about proposals that are currently interacting with Wasm GC and proposals we would expect to interact with Wasm GC in the future. In terms of proposals that are interacting with Wasm GC right now, I think exception handling is pretty inextricably linked with that, given that a lot of languages that have interesting exception behavior would also want to use Wasm GC as part of their compilation strategy. In terms of features still to come, the one I hold close to my heart is threads. Right now, the threads proposal for WebAssembly is effectively entirely disjoint from Wasm GC. And it's really only facilitating languages that are able to compile into linear memory in order to do multithreading. But the dream would be one day to make these proposals kind of talk to each other so you can have languages using the GC proposal but access the objects allocated through that proposal in a multithreaded way. And that's certainly something that's on the roadmap for a post-minimum product version of threads as a future proposal. I haven't heard anything about stack switching yet. I'm just going to like stack switching. Anybody? Well, yeah, if you were going to ask like what the next big thing that I see, I mean, multithreading would be one and probably stack switching would be the other. This is another place where I think it's going to be really valuable to find partnerships with languages and language tool chains. A little bit of background stack switching is a would be addition to core Wasm that would serve as a basis for a bunch of different asynchronous primitives and various languages. So in Go, there's GoRoutines. In Kotlin, you have co-routines and Dart has async await. All those things could be made more efficient in the format, so smaller binaries and hopefully more efficient at runtime if there is support added to engines for stack switching. And so that's something that we've been experimenting with like a precursor to with JavaScript promise integration in V8. And that's currently available behind a flag. We hope to be able to use that same basis infrastructure to implement core stack switching, but there's still a lot of work to be done to see what the surface area of that thing looks like. And then like I said, I think it's going to be really important to work with language implementers to see what constraints they have and what works better for different languages. Yeah, so Wasm GC is going to let us bring more languages to both browsers and any other WebAssembly runtime. Stack switching kind of the same thing, bring new different types of primitive types. Wasm threads proposal. Thank you Conrad is going to let us do threading inside a core Wasm module and that's huge. Are there any other big standards or proposals that are in flight that I'm missing here? I mean there possibly could be. I do want to think another thing that's worth calling out to is like whenever we think about standards at Mozilla around WebAssembly, I feel like there's sort of two tracks that sort of intersect at times. There's like for linear memory languages with C++ and REST and then there's this future GC thing and we're super excited about the GC thing too, but there's been a lot of proposals really about like making the linear memory languages like a much more mature target over time. So there's been a lot of work done on SIMD, relax SIMD and memory 64, multi-memory and there will probably continue to be new ones as time comes up. So that's also another really important area that we care quite a bit about. Tail calls is also a thing too, although that's also sort of a weird intersection. Like linear memory languages can use that but also it's like much more critical for certain GC languages as well. And some of those proposals that I mentioned are like not far off from shipping, they're like Phase 3, a lot of implementation work's been done but it's not quite ready to be released yet. So hopefully we'll be able to finish that up soon. Yeah and I think as a general trend of how we're thinking about extending WebAssembly in the future, there's still a conversation we're having about a kind of conceptual split in the way we deal with WebAssembly proposals. There are some WebAssembly proposals like GC that kind of assume the existence of a very powerful virtual machine under WebAssembly and then you're exposing their capabilities of that virtual machine as WebAssembly instructions to help with compilation. And there's a whole other genre of proposals like SIMD that are much more about tunneling down to the hardware without assuming there's some kind of intervening VM giving you a lot of capability there. And I think as we continue to think about future WebAssembly proposals often there will be problems that can be solved with either one of the two general ways of thinking about a WebAssembly instruction set. So the example I'm thinking about now is memory mapped IO. You can either assume you have a big VM underneath that knows how to allocate buffers and talk to them and then you're just exposing that capability to WebAssembly and that's kind of like a web view. Or you could assume you're working in a more constrained environment where you maybe don't have that and then you'd want to solve this problem in a different way with a different feature set. And working out where to draw the line, where to put the capability and how to express it in WebAssembly is a conversation we're still having and I don't think we have an easy answer as to where the right thing falls in each case. Yeah I think that's the tension that comes up is because like the high lofty idea is like what if we could do both? What if we get something that works for both of them? And I think that's what we often shoot for but sometimes you do have to just say no we can't do both we have to pick it. And so far it hasn't been the case but I do think the further we push along we might run into that a lot more. It sounds like you need multi-tiered compilers but for standards right? Okay I love it. Now Conrad you mentioned tail calls. I think it would be helpful if you described why we would want tail calls, what did they enable? And then you know I think we can't really assume that most people know about the CG phase process. So once you finish that can you tell us a little bit more about what phase three means? Okay so what are tail calls useful for and then what is the CG phase process? So the high level idea of a tail call is that in a particular pattern of calling functions and moving control through between different functions you'd really want to reuse the space on the stack for the call frame to ensure that as a result of calling functions repeatedly recursively you're not overflowing the stack in a situation where conceptually you don't need to. And there are a lot of so it's not so much a feature of languages so this isn't the feature that's necessarily facilitating different languages being compiled to WebAssembly. It's more about a style of writing code in those languages and an assumption about the cost model for those kind of code that we're not necessarily accurately replicating in WebAssembly right now. So there are a ton of source languages that assume if you syntactically call a function in a particular position you're not going to get a stack overflow. And so long as a function at the source level is turning into a function at the WebAssembly level well then you get into an issue if you call between WebAssembly functions and you do overflow the stack. So that's the kind of thing tail calls facilitate. It's about a different cost model of function calls and a particularly useful one given the assumptions certain source languages make about the resources that are taken up every time you do a call. I don't know if anyone else would like to give a different perspective on tail calls before I go into the CG phase process. Sounds like that's good enough. So in terms of the CG phase process the key driving concept behind every stage of discussion in the CG is consensus. So the idea is we're not just having a vote and then you have a 50% plus one result and that's the thing we have to go with no matter how many people are unhappy on the other side. Really our ideal scenario is a situation where no one's objecting to a proposal going forward or if they are objecting it's only on minor grounds and not because they don't want the proposal to go forward because they think it's totally the wrong idea. So in some sense you could think of the default position as being well if people don't agree nothing moves forward and that's kind of reflected in each stage of our phase advancement process. So we go from phase one to phase four and phase one is essentially does someone have an idea that we think is feasibly something in the scope of WebAssembly that could exist in WebAssembly and there can be a lot of disagreements on the particular way this problem is going to be solved but so long as in general we think there's something that can be discussed and there's some solution that could be arrived at. Generally it's pretty easy to move your proposal into phase one without anyone complaining about the specifics of it. Phase two to three is where things get a little bit more involved. With phase two we generally expect you to have a pretty precise description of exactly which instructions you want to be part of your feature and exactly what their behavior is going to be and phase two is generally where we apply the test of do people in the committee as a whole as a community think this particular approach is the right way to solve the problem that we agreed we were generally interested in looking at at phase one. So that tends to be the real test of phase two given your specific design for how to solve the problem do you think do people think this is the right approach even if maybe you've not actually completely implemented it yet at the design level do we think it's correct. Phase three is generally where we start acknowledging that there is a complete prototype available for a feature and at this point it can be just one web engine or one other engine it can be behind a flag but so long as there's pretty much one feature one implementation that people can look at as an example of how this feature should be implemented if there's a test suite if there's a fairly final description of exactly all the corner cases of how the feature works that's what we consider to go phase three and then phase four is full implementation so that's two web engines its unanimous consent effectively to unflag it and have everyone just have this thing exposed on the web in other environments and that's really the point of no return if you get to phase four you're basically going to be in the language forever because we have very strict backwards compatibility requirements and at every stage when we're talking about well does this proposal advance from phase one to phase two phase two to phase three phase three to phase four we are announcing ahead of time there's going to be a vote on this so that everyone who cares can turn up and when it comes to a vote we ask people do you agree with this direction are you neutral or do you not agree and generally we hope there's only a very very small number of people ideally zero are saying not agree because of groundwork we've been doing in terms of discussions beforehand we generally don't like to call a vote on any point of the phase advancement process if we think it would be contentious the point of the vote is not to force a decision that we're unsure whether it's going to pass or not it's effectively to acknowledge a state within the community that everyone's comfortable with and put a marker saying this is actually what we're happy about so the ideal situation is that while we put a high bar on phase advancement each time we're not really having the vote unless we know it's already going to pass and generally the hard part is the conversation that happens before the vote so that we know everyone's happy with where we are and where we want the feature to be thank you Conrad that was an excellent answer I am going to ask all of you a question which is what is your favorite application of of WebAssembly it could be a demo an app a specific use case know that probably each of you are going to duplicate probably one so think of at least two and to give you time to think of it I wanted to highlight what you had mentioned earlier Ryan about SIMD I think that type of advancement in WebAssembly meant that we are now able to say just about everybody in this room yes we're all in wasm cons we're all really into WebAssembly but also everybody on the street that's walking around probably use WebAssembly that day because it's in so many different use cases we're blurring our backgrounds because we're all usually you know now after the time period that you mentioned a lot of us are now all virtual online and we're blurring our backgrounds because we're working from home and you know it's it's Google Meet it's Zoom it's it's it's it's everywhere so most people don't realize they're using WebAssembly and so what that means is that there are so many cool applications and so I'm going to start with you Ryan and then let's go down I appreciate you giving me time to think about this I know that you had mentioned that you were going to ask this and I was preparing things I put a little to do like okay do some research because I know there's like a lot of I always forget about things and then I didn't do it so but two things I can think of here one of them I think is really cool is called Ruffle which is a Rust program which does like flash emulation in the browser and I think that's just I I think that's a cool many different layers of things I love Rust as a programming language I love that compiles to WebAssembly runs in the browser and I love that it solves a problem of like flash emulation and I like I just I love the idea of emulation too so I think that's a really cool one um another one too and this is like one of the first use cases WebAssembly is just running like Unity programs in the browser and like seeing like 3D graphics and things like that you know like I don't I don't usually play games in the browser or anything like that I just think it's incredible that we can do that so those are two two broad things well I'll just give one just to minimize the chances that I'm gazumping someone else's one one of the things I found are really nice and the appropriate use for WebAssembly even in its early days was image processing and manipulation in a website and one of the reasons I thought this was nice was because it's kind of turned out that a lot of the ways people use WebAssembly is you have a big end-to-end app that kind of paints one pane across the whole web page and you're just in WebAssembly world and in WebAssembly rendered world for the entire time you're in the website but another thing we had always kind of hoped WebAssembly would be used for would be if you have a whole website but one particular part of that website is doing some very intensive computation that's the part you can swap out for WebAssembly and suddenly your entire life gets better and I think image processing is one of the places where that's turned out to be absolutely true and I think we've seen a lot of websites where you now have all of these upload an image and it gets compressed in the browser using WebAssembly or re-encoded using WebAssembly and that's exactly the kind of thing I hoped WebAssembly was going to be used for when I saw the story of how it was going to make intensive computation on the web possible so that's my example yeah well I had two examples that I thought of and the first one was ruffle and the second was unity so and I couldn't think of anything that I liked quite as much I might just go into I think a little bit of why I think it's so cool which is that like WebAssembly essentially functions as this like basically like co-processor almost like a GPU or something for the web like you know something like an emulator you might be able to cobble together with JavaScript certainly people have but WebAssembly just makes it that much easier and you know in terms of just sheer performance especially once you know you have these instructions like SIMD that go pretty much directly from WASM to hardware instructions like one to one in a lot of cases then it really opens up this massive use case of yeah like you can run Unity and you know Unreal and other engines in the browser and I really think it shouldn't be understated how like absurd that is like that's wild that's possible and it's all just because there's this like really nice close to the hardware mapping now and that's where I think like WebAssembly like really impresses me okay so I should I had the most time I should have the most elaborate answers here I have actually more than two I'm trying to figure out what to talk about but I'll start with you know one that was a big deal for for me over the last five years which was Photoshop and you know there's a couple things I wanted to say about that one piece is just that it was you know it is one of these things like getting 3d games or something running we're just having it is this major shift for people to say oh this is actually a thing that can be on the web but one of my favorite things about the story of getting Photoshop onto the web was sort of in the development process seeing how they didn't just say okay we'll take Photoshop and make it and just like compile the whole thing with the UI to the web you know there was a whole web team that that worked to you know do a web components based UI um they thought a lot about like how being on the web would change the workflow how it could be you know link based and um and and how things that you know we got to this point actually where I where it was loading faster than the native app did and yet it still seemed really slow and so you know the we spent a lot of time on loading because the expectations for the web are different and it was fun to see a team and the company that was had this really old product that was used to working on that in a one context try to bring into another context and you know we're have to work to fit it in and then doing that going through that process with them and as someone who is you know working for WebAssembly as part of the web web is the like key thing for me and so that was that was fun to see um the the other thing I would say is the the thing that excites me about WebAssembly yeah there are examples now but I think building on some of the kind of the same things that folks just said the thing that the reason I'm still excited going forward is because I think this is a way to to enable the web to grow stuff that we haven't thought of so image processing is one you know we're seeing a lot of stuff like third backgrounds using client side ml and we're not I don't know what the next one is actually going to be that's really going to be good for users but there will be something and I'm happy that that thing is happening in an open standard that works across browsers so we don't have to do this via a proprietary thing you know I think of like the video tag in in html as the kind of thing that I want to enable whatever that next thing is whether it's the metaverse or I don't know but like I think WebAssembly is going to be a key part of making it possible to do stuff we haven't figured out how to do on the web and do it in a way that works across browsers yeah I love that answer I think there are so many different things that we haven't seen yet but I think over the next year we definitely will WebAssembly hit MVP I want to say in 2017 I want to see some nods okay all right we got that date right and then in 2019 that was when it became the official language of the web you guys hate that huh fourth fourth language of the web I said that wrong I get the I get the Snickers now I'm sorry what if I said that on purpose I didn't though believe it it is the official language the official language of the web thank you okay so I think now we should probably open it up to get a few questions from the audience if you're okay with that okay I see one hand back here Apache TVM that uses it so so I don't know a lot I don't know anything about Apache TVM in particular there's a ton of I mean the you know ML space is moving very fast right now I know there's a lot of questions about yeah how what the right way to layer this stuff is how many layers we want to build whether those layers are going to be in the browser I think I don't I don't really I do I do think that WebAssembly right now is a really important piece of this and I think it goes into the being able to bootstrap this and experiment and do that stuff in user space before we have to make decisions about you know working with other folks in W3C about whether there are things we do want to build into browsers that that are you know higher level that sort of builds on extensible web manifesto stuff from from years ago that's my thought for now and we're gonna and we're continuing to add stuff so simd and relax simd both were heavily influenced by by machine learning use cases and I expect more of that getting access to fast things in the CPU and one other pieces that were there's also a speaking of sidecars web gpu is a piece that's being used a lot in this space and so in in chrome and v8 we're thinking about how we can better interact with gpu either through you know lower overhead calls ways of of sharing the memory space so we don't have to do copies that's the way I mean at least from the v8 perspective that's how we're thinking about ML I think from the chrome perspective and the product web platform there are interesting questions about can we add something higher level do we have other questions hey yes so this is like a area that has had a lot of history in terms of like proposals and I'm not probably the best person to like go over all the different iterations of it what I can just say is like from Mozilla's perspective there's the very first thing is like today if you have web assembly and you want to call a DOM API you can already do that with a lot of tool chains like if you're on rust you can use wasm buying gen I think with M scripts and you can use an M scripts and thing and so it's already possible to do a lot of this stuff and we've also done a lot of performance optimization to make when you cross between javascript and web assembly as fast as possible and so there's a couple angles that when I hear this question I wonder is it is it ergonomics like is it that the tools are painful to use is it performance that these tools don't like the cold the code that they have isn't fast enough or because it's not to my knowledge something about expressivity because I think you can use any API today from what assembly so when it comes to ergonomics I have not heard anything that makes it sound like this is something that's really pressing and then when it comes to performance I would love to hear more data on that so that's been sort of my stance on it and I think we could totally add new features to like web assembly to make it easier to call DOM things but they need to be motivated by like especially performance because it already seems like it's something that's feasible today so in particular my understanding of this is that one of the key bottlenecks for DOM interaction web assembly is string manipulation which is a topic that I think everyone here is aware we've been talking about quite extensively in web assembly ways to make string manipulation especially in interfacing with JavaScript faster so it's an active area of discussion especially over the last couple of months and GC is the first step towards this and we know more will come in future yeah it's a little bit I mean it could also be like a chicken and egg thing like if I don't know if there's people out there who don't even try and do this because it's just so terrible that they don't even try or I also don't know if it's just actually it's just fine and so this is an area where like I always appreciate community engagement and there's it's kind of hard because the avenues for it that I know of is right now is you can file like a bug for Mozilla you can file an issue for Chromium or by the kid or you can like show up to like the web assembly standards process which is almost sort of like a alien culture if you've never been around it before but yeah I appreciate anyone reaching out with like you know real concrete things of like I want to do this and it's really slow because it's something like web assembly specifically does and so that'd be really helpful yeah so feedback and joining the community group is a great way to get involved but all of these projects are also all open source or open standards and I think that's really important to highlight David do you mind mentioning where the people could get started with what you work on as in like if they wanted to communicate with WebKit in some way wanted to contribute yeah um oh gosh I probably should have looked at the full like documentation for this there is if you go so WebKit is fully on GitHub you can see all the WebKit source including JavaScript core which as part of that contains our web assembly engine as part of that we have some documentation on how to contribute you can also reach out in terms of there's an open source Slack that I believe is linked from there and we all you know on my team and you know other other people on WebKit I'll check that pretty often so I think if you want to reach out probably that Slack is a good place if you want to contribute I mean we have like we have a public bugzilla you can look through there you can ask on the Slack if there's anything in particular you want to contribute to and there is there is a bit of a process that I don't remember all like 100% of the details for for you know getting a little bit more status in terms of like being able to commit more freely but uh yeah you definitely can so if if any of you are interested in contributing towards you know WebAssembly features in WebKit it's definitely open do we have any other questions from the audience if not I think we just finished exactly on time so good work everyone thank you