Hey, what's going on everybody? My name is John Hammond. Welcome back to the YouTube video is still showing off the juniors CTF Who's going on this past weekend? And in this video, I want to show off that six strange tales web challenge So it was worth five hundred points initially and all of them keep fluctuating because of how they're keeping track of the scores But the six strange tales a lot of the CTF is based off of the Gravity Falls show As I think just a pun or a joke for that I don't know. That's just what they tried to theme the CTF off of so regardless and showing it off The challenge prompt here is no real prompt just some weird cryptic messages But it says grungles and what's the secret of the six-fingered hand? Which I guess is the grungles stand character. He has six fingers Can you see these codes when the six-fingered hand touches them when the gravity falls it gets opens How should we read the secret left to right right to left maybe upside down blah blah blah? so this is What we are presented and it's not an image or at least we can't click on it like view anything. Can I view image? Okay, cool. I can view image sweet. Oh God I closed the page my bad Little control w doing a little preemptive stuff with the control w Let's get back to it Access token All right now. We're back in action. Sorry about that hiccup didn't mean to hit control w there I thought it created a new tab for me so this is it and How do we read this from left to right or right to left? This all looks like like a bunch of text that it doesn't look like a cypher doesn't look like any base 64 things or anything And I've it's kind of hard for us to copy and paste anyway because it's an image however, this is again a web challenge, so I wanted to view the source this web page and challenge prompts flag here Which is apparently some red herring which pissed me off because I'd like submitted this I submitted with quotes I submitted it as flag equals and all this and that again was not the flag You can keep submitting this like until the cows come home, but it didn't do anything And we all yelled at it on the telegram like the RC channel that they set up for it. It just was bad Okay, I see this JavaScript here though and this JavaScript is what peaks your interest because this image that they take the source of is The image that is displayed, right? That's that's that now. I can actually control of you so it draws this and loads it and I notice this test here if my user agent is gravity falls and I try to set this up I try to just copy that user agent and I opened up tamper data to try and view this page again So I would start the tamper Get my thing here and I'd go and change my user agent to gravity falls Hey, okay, I Do it for all the other following ones just to like I'd say because I just wanted to make sure that it would actually go through Even with like Google's weird things So I tamper through all of those Google fonts and stuff that they needed to grab But there's no change in the image when I thought there should have been considering it's supposed to replace What I'm assuming is the color to like 1.5 like it's replacing all these zeros with a 1.5 jazz so Regardless that didn't that didn't really work for me. So what I ended up doing was I actually just copied this script and recreated it Actually, yeah, I'll take the whole canvas because that's really what we need here and I'll fire up sublime text Bring this down and what I did is I had created a juniors yeah recreation dot HTML and And Creation once we viewed this I pretty much got the image again. So I recreated it. Okay Now I can actually remove that JavaScript line to test if my user agent's gravity falls refresh the page now Okay, so now it does it so I just kind of forced JavaScript Hey completely regard that conditional for some reason it wasn't working when I tried to change the user agent So whatever let's just skip it I'll bring this down exact. Sorry Now I have these strings here and I have six strings one two three four five six and I'm assuming I'm assuming this is our flag really really hoping so What I did is I concatenated them. I tried them with spaces. I try them without spaces I thought it was a joke in that how should we read these from left to right or right to left I tried all six of them from right to left I tried all the characters reversed Reverse from right to left and I tried it upside down You know like maybe reading vertically this thing starting first and this and this and then this and flipping that Like we're in reverse again with reverse characters and all of that stuff the fault that I had was Because this was an image When I'm hand typing them all out. I literally just try to translate it Oh showcase what I have here What's it called? It was called six-fingered in hands, right? Yeah, I had these pieces But my oh Was a zero because I had to type it by hand. I had the wrong Like hand it like translation which was stupid and dumb And I was really really pissed off that it took literally forever for me to get that But that was the problem All you had to do was remove the spaces and it's it's in the correct order already But because you had to like hand copy it you couldn't type this out Unless I mean you could try and do this with tesseract to automate it again It would have issues and there's already so much other shit that's visible here because of all these other like great out Things it was just really hard and dumb and obviously I'm still salty about it but that ended up being the flag you would submit that and 500 400 points whatever the case may be However, it was very cryptic and You know a little bit of a strange challenge from the six strange tales. So that's it though I want to show it off to you guys. That was the solution What I did was just taking out that conditional JavaScript getting it to actually highlight these things for me and then Making sure I had the correct zeros and O's and all the numbers the actual translation correct and removing the spaces and they're Concatenated and that is our flag again. No flag format. So, you know All right. Thanks for watching guys. Hope you enjoyed this one And I'll be showing off some of the other challenges as we as we move along here the lost code So cool. See you in the next video


be sure to make it short so we can all get to the beers probably seen this graph when you came in it's obviously not entirely true not even really true actually this is a good point of departure for conversation so by time it's called you ship it you fix it and it's going to be a whirlwind of advice or experience that we've gathered over the last couple of years hopefully you'll be able to avoid some of the pitfalls that we we ran into so how many of you guys work in an organization that looks like this where operations is totally separate from development see if you guys yeah so you've probably run into this problem where the workers wrote some crude they give to us people it blows up it's actually pretty bad problem and the problem is sort of this developers write the code they give to the apps people if something breaks apps people get paged and they have to figure out if they can fix the code or they need to wake up a developer and it's kind of you know the problem is accountability here if you know that someone else is going to be paged when your code breaks you're just gonna write slightly worse code than you would if you were gonna get paged if the thing breaks this is true nature I guess so we've employed a policy of if you ship it then you fix it and a prerequisite for this to be useful is that if you build it and you ship it so you ship it sorry you build it you ship it you ship it you fix it so you're accountable for the whole process the whole way from building code to actually making sure it runs in production so is this develops those are just point what develops is everybody's kind of not in agreement about what it is so I Google it and this is there's a lot of different opinions on what developers these are some of the ones that kind of were mentioned the most I guess and that's pretty good I like them so empathy makes a lot of sense empathy across departments trust and respect and working towards common goals and breaking down silos in the organization that all makes a lot of sense so this could be what develops looks like in a modern organization you've outsourced most of the hard cooperation stuff to rack space Amazon the local etc and then you have developers you can't see but down there is a developers and there's perhaps also an office person and they're working together and they're doing development but also web operations so this is an example of what develops in modern and modern organizations could look like so let's say you already got this DevOps thing figured out you bought some deluxe for the team everything is good what can you do now to actually improve the situation you got all the key points to be found is that you need to increase transparency and that means you need to be able our developers need to be able to figure out what's going on and one important way to do that or good ways to do that is to make sure that the developers have the tools they need so good tooling is really really important making sure that developers have access to the best tools they can find and that all the workers have access to this to these tools and here's an example it's pretty pretty small up there on the screen but the idea is that an hour and I happened and you log into a system you can see a stack chance you can see who actually wrote the code you can see when it went into production so this is a snapshot of upbeat and it's a way to increase transparency so the part is you can see exactly who wrote the code and when it went into production another example of increasing transparency is this this is a screenshot from our slack link and what happened here is that Benny who's a great guy you accidentally broke the bill and then it tells him to start doing push-ups so he has to do 80 push-ups now because he broke the bill and baby doesn't like it so it's another way of increasing transparency and making everybody aware of what's currently going on here's a screenshot from the link which is also great tool and this shows performance for a revocation and making sure that everybody can go in and see how their code is performing right now it's extremely important to making sure the developers care about performance so a big part of this is making the information accessible to developers it's how to get to this information they will usually just don't go and get it lazy there's another example of a way to increase transparency make sure everybody knows when new stuff goes into production people will be aware of what's going on in production to actually get a ping that something is out in production another screenshot from our second one and that was a little bit about how you can increase transparency and how that affects accountability in the organization now I want to talk a little bit about releases and sizes of releases and frequency of releases so you can either do big releases this isn't even a big release by some standards but by our standards this is a huge release it took six weeks to prepare this release and it has 77 commits a bunch of changed lines there's only two people involved in this release so that's a good that's a pretty good metric this is a small release six minutes from the commit was was made to the production only one commit and only one one person in this release so the idea is that if you make small releases it's much easier to figure out who broke stuff because few people are usually involved and what happens is that if you have one one developer release and you find yourself in this scenario where there's a release that's suddenly causing us you can go in and and see immediately who knows how to fix this besides that there's a bunch of good reasons why you should be doing small releases for example developers love to put stuff in production it's a great feeling when you finally put things into production so you'll have happy developers if you do small releases but there's it's a huge topic and I encourage you to go on and investigate even more so you ship it you fixed it you build it you ship it whereas where I like to say from from Amazon you build it you run it which is sort of a relation of that and running it here could mean a lot of things we usually try to make sure we have to run as few things as possible ourselves so we like to buy services so other people will run it for us but still you know you get the you get the point you're responsible for the code you write okay now to something a little bit different do you know this person just let me know what I should build and I'll build it and a variation of that is we know how systems work if we're really good at our job we also know our users users think so this is an example again this is Benny he caught this quickly he's a great guy there's a nice nice spec here we're changing how timestamps look in our products and it's picked up pretty rigorously what it should what it should look like now there's this thing I've highlighted where it says if the time is more than a year ago it should include the year as well and that's two ways you can interpret this if it's more than a year ago from the time it should include the year or if it's the same year that should not include the year you know what I mean so it's either 365 days ago or just within the same year so you got this really extensive spec but he still went to ask the product guy what exactly do you mean by this and it turns out that the most obvious interpretation of this was not the one that the product guy meant so it's a way to what I'm getting at is that developers shouldn't just be these code monkeys who get specs throw at them then start to start to code right developers smart people we usually have a good idea about how things work so why should we just stop at dev and ops it's great that we're trying to break down the silos between the development department at the ops department but why not break down some more silos so also break down the silos between the developers and product development or the product team and break down the the silos between the development developers and the customer support team and you can probably imagine a way you can go if the developers have more insights into what's going on in the organization in general the kinds of protocols are coming in what are the thoughts from the product development team on how things are going to look in the future actually that's it so in summary devops new owner maybe there's a lot of good little good ideas if you can increase transparency in your development team you'll have better accountability and in the end you'll have better code and everybody will be able to sleep more which is great you can use to increase transparency and affect the culture in your team and you should try to break down silos not just between development and operations but between many of the departments in the organization that leads to better products and better solutions that's it some of this was slightly maybe controversial I'd love to discuss it with you guys girls I'll be right there so yeah come talk to me


about amazing talent yani sa uti ya kutuwa nyoka pangoni hey i tell you and that is the beautiful and talented elsi gach and she is in the building right about now we'll get to know her she'll get to sing for us yani i'm sure you unuta kuskide yo sa uti piya we lazima tu siye hey auto tunes pale hey i know lazima lazima welcome to the cdlc thank you how are you doing i'm doing well thank you for having me thank you for coming yes so before we even go on can you do an acapella for us of that of vumi liya oh my god so beautiful thank you anyway how does it feel having such an amazing voice i don't know i don't know how is one supposed to feel i just i just feel blessed i can say feel blessed yeah so kindly introduce yourself to our audience and tell them what you do and here yeah so my name is elsi gach i'm a musician and fashion designer i studied fashion design and marketing at kenyata university and then i started music a long time ago i did it like seven years ago uh it was a political song it was called usi to let it down yeah and uh during that time i was still a student so i didn't have enough money so i decided let me put it on pause kido go let me hustle hustle and then when the time is ready and have the funds i get back yeah so it has taken a seven-year journey now i'm back yeah it's a long time i live with me liya yeah i can say i've reached the place where i'm seeing the lights at the end of the tunnel yeah yeah okay so yeah so um other than in in that period of seven years other than you trying to finance your music career what other input did you put in to better your music career to better my music career did you take any classes yes i did i did a lot of vocal training i was actually right here at kenyakudan sabatoa did the vocal training some piano classes along that period of time i joined uh the choir at jubilee christian church uh for three years and that's where now i was able to even mold my uh some writing skills in the gospel area because uh i wasn't doing i was doing love songs and the political songs yeah so i wanted to really be mentored and learn more about the word go deep into it learn about praise and worship so by the time i was feeling nice i feel i'm qualified and i'm ready and i'm blessed to be able to now pursue gospel music yeah so then i started with vumilia and then later and we're talking about that in a short while but um you said that your first song was a political song and you were doing love songs why did you decide that i need to make a change or to make a change maybe it was life's challenges you know life's challenges draw you closer to god because you're looking for hope and guidance and direction and then now it just felt like you know uh i think i'm i'm feeling more called to sing gospel music that's the only reason why i decided now to focus on it i'm an artist and you know we and still a human we still go through periods of love relationships and you get inspired sometimes to write love songs so i can say i'm really done with it just that right now i'm focusing on singing the word yeah um it's not many artists who take time to take classes and you know make their but you know vocal classes yeah writing classes most of the artists are kitchen talent you just go in yeah you know so do you think or would you advise artists to take the classes if you can if you if you have the finances to take the classes and take classes to also have better some writing yeah every talent needs to be sharpened every gift you have you have to sharpen it whether you have to read more about it or do even if it's youtube videos training you know you have to find avenues where you can sharpen your tool and never just feel like umefika you're you're always developing and growing and you should appreciate that journey because it makes you better yeah so i would really advise everyone to not take it like uh you know i am gifted and relaxed you have to be even more sad because you're gifted and you have to make sure that you are at your best at all is yeah so what do you think about gospel artists these days you know they do music with circular artist i know this like a whole judgment for gospel artists we judge them different than we judge the other people yeah but what do you think you know we are having artists doing gospel with genget on artists less right in center and you think we are heading in the right direction in that industry i think i mean we shouldn't be too judgmental i feel like people are too judgmental and then of the day everyone is a human uh a gospel artist singing with a gengeton artist that's just getting uh the word reaching a huge audience yeah there's no bad thing about that as long as they're praising god and they're lifting him higher whoever it is they're doing it with it's okay yeah it is getting you the word of God to a huge audience and not limiting it yeah yourself so yeah that's how i feel about it would you do it uh i it has to be like of course it can't be like a really out there gengeton secular artists was jitwak whatever you know we have to be at least somewhere where we can mesh yeah and not compromise the word and the message yeah so i'm not close to it i'm open uh you open to it see if we mesh yeah all right um as a fashion designer before we even get to um what is that one mistake you see people doing when it comes to fashion whether guys or ladies okay guys also they can make fashion they do a lot yeah you can get caught my one rule is um be simple keep it simple don't don't overwhelm yourself with everything studio bungles up to hear see earrings simplicity is the best yeah you can choose if you're wearing big hoops no necklace you're wearing a statement necklace like tiny nice studs or something yeah yeah so keep it simple and you'll be you won't fail when you're simple okay all right where the whole wardrobe i know so let's talk about when we were yeah what is when we were all about when we were is uh it's a praise song it's lifting god higher and uh saying that you know he's the alpha and omega he's everything is worthy to be praised so it's really just a praise song yeah after to me bumelia sasa tuna sama thank you god thank you god we lift you higher yeah all right so if you want to do a collaboration today with one artist that you admire who would it be one artist i really love i have so many aki i love i love joice omondi alice kimansi yeah units njeri ivelin one zero i really love them but if i was first to choose right now one i would say nipi opportunity na joice omondi would be so honored why yeah i love her voice i love her music yeah it it touches me and i love her her melodies the way her music is i enjoy it yeah okay you never know maybe someone is listening out there yes she might have heard yeah so after we knew lewe what is coming up next album yeah i'm still listening a couple of singles uh i have a new song coming out called siwizi billa wewe yeah so it's also just uh saying like you know i can walk through this life i've done this and that but at the end of the day i realize siwizi billa yeah yeah so that's my next song hopefully i can release it by August yeah this coming right okay so thank you so much for coming through um kindly share social media handles okay and tell the people where they can find your music yeah so you can find my uh social media handles are lc gach on twitter youtube uh facebook and instagram lc gach and subscribe to my youtube channel and like my videos and yeah follow in shout out as we wind up uh in a shout out i'd like to say hi to my family and friends and all my supporters thank you so much i really appreciate it it keeps me going please don't stop yeah all right and the million dollar question is dating amast oh is dating amast is dating amast i would say dating is good it's the time where you get to know someone uh will you get to know whether you have the same values interests the same direction so that you don't waste time if you you don't just uh end up with someone who don't watch the same things don't like the same things yeah you're not compatible like we said so it's it's it's good to do even in getting a job you have to go for an interview so that they can see if you can fit in so so the same thing we should apply with your personal life yes you have to enjoy that person so clearly you're not an advocate for arranged marriages i am scary you wouldn't you need to know where you're going i know where you're going staying here to pa and then what forever and ever no you need to know where you're going yes umeskia after interviewing with the entire you connection with my friend Rengia Derek so kindly remind the people social media platforms again you just kill is a umenu liwa yes please follow me on instagram twitter facebook lc gach and youtube channel is also lc gach all right so thank you so much for coming through and wish you all the best in your music thank you so much for having me i hope i can come again and again yes you're welcome i mean you're welcome we support a hundred percent Kenyan music over here amazing talent nice yes so up next is uh something nice okay up next is Uinuliwa by lc gach


Alright, here's some interesting facts around nutrition. Many of the negative effects that have been associated with sugar and even fat are really attributed to when you overeat them. In other words, when you look at a diet that is low in calories, even if it's high in sugar, high in certain types of fats, many of the negative effects are actually gone. So you might wonder, well, why then do we attack sugar and fat, and why are they connected to poor health? Well, here's why. Sugar, fat, and salt, salt is another one, together make food hyper palatable. So if you observe populations that consume a lot of one of them or all of them, what you're probably looking at are people that just over consume in general. Alright, so let's talk about this a little bit. Talking about human behaviors again. That's it.  I think everybody knows that though, right? I mean, I think that's become, when we first started. I don't know. There's still lots of thoughts out there that sugar is like the cause of all obesity. Yeah. You know what, in this, okay, and this is what's interesting about it, right? You can find studies that find that diets that are high in sugar cause more problems, inflammation, higher rates of cancer, Alzheimer's. You can find studies that show this with certain types of fats as well. And then there've been studies where they have people eat a high sugar diet, but the calories are low, or a diet that's high in saturated fat, but the calories are low, or like keto diets, when those first came out and became popular, people eating tons of fat in low calorie and you saw blood markers improve, health improve, and so everybody's kind of confused. And yet we still see these studies that connect these macronutrients, especially salt also, that connect these macronutrients to poor health. But really it's about over consumption and sugar, fat and salt. This is very well known. Those three are the three main components that make food hyper palatable. And what we've done in modern times is we've really figured out how to engineer foods with those flavors through either real sources or chemical sources to make them so hyper palatable that you overeat. And so what's interesting, sugar consumption has actually dropped over the last maybe decade or so, and yet people are still getting more obese. We're just eating too much. That's the big problem. It's really difficult to curb cravings when you have all those flavors to consider. And I mean, there's still a lot of people out there that literally seek after foods based on their flavor alone. And that's really like the amount of thought and effort that put into a lot of the meals that are created, where when you add sugar in the mix, it really does sort of perpetuate this craving, this longing for more sweet things in the diet, which then the calories really start to add up before you know it and it gets away from you. So how do you feel about like health and wellness experts that demonize sugar when you see them post about it? What goes through your head right away? Well, you have to know, too, that in the context of overconsumption, which is pretty much everyone, I mean, on average is overconsuming. That's the biggest point right there. Yeah. Right. So do you think it's good or bad or a different advice when you see something like that? Well, two things. First, health and metabolism are way more complex than what I might have just presented. There's a lot of complexities there, right? But the truth is, like what I said earlier, overconsumption really is what results in a lot of these negative effects. Now, I don't demonizing sugar, demonizing fat, demonizing salt because a lot of it has to do with overconsumption. I think people might get the wrong message and so they'll say, oh, I got to avoid sugar, but then they'll continue to overconsume and then not understand why their health is poor. Now, I think if you educate people the right way and say, here's why sugar compose issues. Here's why certain fats compose issues. Here's why if you combine those things with salt, it can pose issues.  Well, I'm a little conflicted by it because it does immediately sort of address a lot of issues like in people's diets, if you start just focusing on removing sugar because of just what follows up with that. So to demonize it, it's kind of like, that's not the whole story, but it does help at least address kind of like one of the biggest invaders of bad habits that tends to kind of stack the dominoes in that direction. I'm with you, Justin. I'm conflicted when I see something like this. Like we have our friend, like Lane Norton, who loves to like just destroy the wellness space that likes to do posts like this. But then I also know from experience, like I'm sure both of you, that if I had a client, there's been many times where all I did was, don't worry about anything else. I just want you to reduce your sugar from this many grams to this many grams, right? So I have them track their food. I kind of see where they're at. And I see that they're grossly over-consuming in general, but primarily a majority of those calories are coming from sugar. And I also know the behaviors around sugar. And so I know instead of getting into all the nuance and science around what exactly is going on with their body inside by them eating over calories or sugars, I can just go, listen, right now on average, you're eating 90 to 110 grams of sugar a day. I want you to cut that below 50. So let's try and manage that below 50. Don't worry about anything else. We'll get there later on. And instantly I can see a huge difference many times just by doing that. So I feel torn when I see that advice coming because the truth is that advice probably helps a lot of people. But then I also understand where Lane is coming from because he's right in the context of low calorie, you could literally, you could eat 500, if you're a maintenance calorie, let's say. Yeah, so long as you eat your essentials, right? Let's say, well, yeah, even if you weren't doing that, say somebody is 100 pounds overweight, their maintenance caloric intake. So for their body to stay the same is say, let's just say 3,000 calories, they technically could eat 2,000 calories of ice cream every day and live off it and they would lose weight. Yeah. And you would see blood markers improve you. That's right. You would actually see all the health markers improve in that time period. But would you guys ever recommend somebody eating 2,000 calories of ice cream? No, because you cannot remove how foods make you feel, the kind of cravings that they produce. So yes, you would lose weight. Like there was this one scientist that in order to prove his point, I don't remember his name, but in order to prove his point, he went on a fast food, processed food diet, but kept his calories low, made sure he ate his essentials.   Here's the deal. Can most people do that and also feel good, stick to it, not feel like they have tons of cravings? No. So you can't separate the behaviors and how you feel from the, I guess the physiological, what happens to my body effects from eating this way. So I think it's all important, but I do think it's important to understand because here's what happened in the 80s. In the 80s, we were sold in the 90s even. We were sold that it was fat. Fat is the problem. So what did food manufacturers do?  So what did they replace the fat with? Sugar. They added lots of, when I was a kid, there were aisles of fat-free, low-fat foods, but in order to make them enjoyable to eat, they increased the sugar. Did obesity drop in the 80s and 90s? Did health improve in the 80s and 90s with the reduction of fat coming out of the food? No, it actually kept getting worse. Well, I have like two thoughts and this is in the context of keeping that amount of calories low and being in a deficit, but still like including a lot of sugar in your diet. I'd be curious to see if there's still this sort of degrade in your teeth, if there was like a rotting in your teeth, and also too, how that affects your insulin if you're just inundating it constantly, even with sugar, even if it's at a low calorie volume. Yeah, that's a good question. And like I was saying, it's more complex than what we're talking about. But if you look at the negatives of sugar that are connected to sugar, you do reduce, dramatically reduce a lot of them just from cutting overall calories. And this is true for all the demonized stuff. The best studies that I can think of are these, are the ones that show that, and these are the best studies that they've done because they're controlled, because a lot of these other studies are observational. For example, we notice that people that eat a lot of sugar are more obese, have higher rates of Alzheimer's, have higher rates of cancer. The problem with that is what I was saying earlier, which is they're probably seeking out more hyper-palatable foods, and they're probably all over-consuming as well. So is it the over-consumption or is it the sugar? So the best studies that I've seen are the ones where they've taken people, and they've actually, and they're crossover studies, meaning they'll take the groups, cross them over to see if the effects still exist. And they'll take these two groups of people and they'll say, okay, you over here, group A, you have unlimited access to whole natural foods. And group B, you have unlimited access to these heavily processed foods. And they'll even make sure that the macro breakdowns are extremely similar. So the foods all have a similar protein, fat, carbohydrate breakdown. Then they'll, and then they'll observe them. So they're literally in a lab, they can't do anything else, and they're observed. So they count the calories, the scientists are watching, what are they eating, how much they're eating, it's up to them, they can eat as much as they want or as little as they want. Then they'll take the groups and they'll switch them. Now they'll take B, put them in group A's room and take A and put them in group B's room. So it's an excellent study. And they find, on average, people consume 600 more calories a day when they have access to heavily processed foods.  And that's from heavily processed foods. And remember, heavily processed foods are foods that food scientists have literally engineered to be as palatable as possible. So it's like comparing an apple versus like apple flavored candy, right? It's grapes versus grape candy. Like I can eat so many apples, but I bet you I would overeat apple flavored, apple jacks or candy far more because they've added things to just really tip it over the scale of hyper palatability which causes you to overeat. So we're looking at the wrong things, but that doesn't mean we still shouldn't look at those things. We still look at sugars, some kind of fats and salt but not because each of them are evil, but rather what's the relationship with those and overeating and then let's educate people on this and help them create behaviors around over consuming. The truth is that people don't necessarily want, I mean, they may say they wanna be educated but nobody wants to go through the effort of learning. It's like they want the quick, just tell me, can I have sugar or can I not have sugar? Can you print it out and I'll follow it? Yes or no? It's just they want the 15 second clip. The trick is to figure out what's the easier answer. It's obviously gonna be very complex. In my experience, the best results I ever got were people where I just simply told them to try to avoid heavily processed foods and then go ahead and eat normally. And that would typically result in, now you're not gonna get shredded doing that. Then when you start to get shredded, you have to like count calories and all that stuff. But people would get to a relatively normal body weight if they followed that advice. That was the easiest one for me. I don't know, what about you guys? You guys find something? Yeah, no, I did the same thing but even the sugar one that I said, that was, I had a lot of success with that. I had a lot of clients that ate well over 80, 90 plus grams of sugar and not coming mostly from fruit, mostly coming from processed foods. And just giving them a number that I wanted them to manage under. And I knew that that would indirectly affect calories just like the stain away from the processed foods does the same thing. We're not telling them to count calories or reduce their calories, but we know inevitably what ends up happening because we know the behaviors around those types of foods. So I had a lot of success with just limiting people from eating that much. Yeah, and just adding more fibrous type foods and green leafy type vegetables in there, like just adding that in and starts to turn and change the palate a bit. Well, that's what naturally happens. Yeah, and then it just, it follows suit to that. And then just trying your best not to drink calories because it happens like a lot of my clients didn't realize how many calories they were consuming so quickly just by drinking them. Hundreds, hundreds, sometimes thousands. So that's like a thousand calories of soda. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I still, I mean, we just so in the, let's see here, what's the, what are we, December something, right? So we're in the first week or so of December. And I, every, I don't think I've made, three days in a row since Halloween that I haven't had some sort of candy, pie, cake, ice cream, something. And since it's been introduced before Halloween, I couldn't tell you the last time that I had any of those things since Halloween, those things have made their way into my diet so often that I don't think I've strung even three days of one of those not being in the diet. And I know that it's available now. It's in my house. I know that I've, I've, you know, I've opened up, I broke the seal, you know what I'm saying? I've had it now. And now I, at night, I find myself craving that. It creates a feeling that is hard to resist. The best example I can think for myself is this, right? If you put a bowl of plain peeled boiled potatoes in front of me, I am not gonna overeat them. But if you slice them, fry them, cover them in salt, by the way, adding calories. So you're adding, you're making them more calorically dense. I'll overeat the hell out of them because it does something to my brain that makes me want to continue eating past the point of being uncomfortable. This is also, by the way, why artificial sweeteners have not done anything to solve the obesity epidemic. You know, artificial sweeteners are sweet, but they don't have calories. There are no studies that are not- Outrageously sweet. There are no obsoles- So studies will have people live their daily lives, replace sugar with artificial sweeteners, and nobody loses weight. It's not because they didn't reduce calories. You could, you can very easily reduce calories with artificial sweeteners, but the problem was they would reduce the calories by having these artificial sweeteners, but then because they're so palatable and because they're not coming with calories, your body actually makes you want more food, they eat more. So they make up the difference even though they've cut out the sugar from their sodas. This is why it's a terrible- For most, unless you're controlling and counting every macronutrient, which nobody does, it doesn't result in weight loss for anybody. Now, do you think the cravings, the overeating, would you attribute that to chemically what's happening inside of my body more or that it's attached to some old behavior more? Which one do you- Because I look at like Katrina, she doesn't have the same problem. She can literally, we can have a candy bar in the freezer or something, and she can break a piece off of it for the next six months. Like that just, that would never happen, especially one that I like. Or maybe she, maybe it was one I don't like, I would even do that, it was something that I- It's like an Almond Joy? Yeah, it's something I'm not really into that maybe. But if it's something that I like, like same thing with like a little pint of ice cream. She could get it out, she could take two or three bites, put it back, that thing will last a whole damn year in there. If it's in my, if I open it, it's gone, it's done. I'm gonna- I think it's both, I think it's all the above. It's so complex, and here's the problem. The problem is in all of human history, we've never been presented with this problem where we have all the food, all the potential flavor combinations, all available, all cheap and all fast. 24 hours. So here's the problem. We are now in a position where, and dare I say, the solution is like, you almost have to go on a spiritual journey, literally, to create this different relationship to food. In the past, he didn't. There wasn't an issue, because I could eat all the food I want, just don't have it. The issue is I gotta find it. Now it's everywhere, it's cheap, it doesn't matter. Nobody starves in Western civilizations, modern ones at least. Obesity kills way more people. So now it's almost like I have to develop this relationship with food where it's like abstinence, discipline, valuing food for lots of its different value, developing balance. And you never had to do that before. So I think it's both, Adam. I think it's the behaviors, how you connect to food when I'm stressed, when I'm ever since I was a kid, I would eat food now when I'm stressed as an adult, this is my coping mechanism, or it helps me forget things, or when I'm sad, or every time I watch a movie, this is how the types of foods I like to eat, or this is how I connect with people. Or I never learned to enjoy food for its other values, aside from its palatability. Like it's a completely different problem, and it's very complex. So I 100% believe or know that it's both. The question I think I have is, which one is more powerful? Because back to my point with Katrina, it doesn't seem to affect her the same way. Now I tied mine back to my childhood. I've told you guys this before that, there's always four to five of us kids in the house at all times. We didn't have a lot of stuff as far as, we didn't get tons of treats. So it was a big deal if mom came home with a quart of ice cream, it would be a big deal if we had one thing of Oreos, and you got five kids and two adults that are fighting for it. Yeah, we're all fighting for it. And so I knew that if I went to get it, I would over-consume it because I knew that it was probably the only time I'd get it. Like one thing of Oreos, you got seven people eating out of it. So you learned to binge. Yeah, I knew that I couldn't just have two and then come back three days later, because three days later it would be gone for sure. So when I went in to get it, I got to get the serving size that I want because I don't know. And so it created these habits and behaviors. Now what I don't know is, did those habits and behaviors also do something chemically inside of me that made me even more attracted or addicted to the foods? Which one should you focus on? I think would be the way to ask your question. And I think it's behaviors all the way.   And I don't, I need to eat sugar. By the way, this is not true for most people. Most people who say this, this isn't true. It was very few people this actually happens to.   So I think it's the behaviors that if you had to focus on anything, it would be that. I think that's the biggest, in my experience, at least that's where I've had the most success. Well, it's the most controllable, right? Once it's ingested, I can't do anything about what's happening inside of me chemically. It is what it is. But I can make the decision, whether I put it in my house or if I do have more than one bite. I actually would do things where I've tested that. And there's times like if I go to the store and I go, hey, I'm gonna intentionally buy this treat that I normally would. And then I'm also gonna make sure that I don't eat more than one or two at a time. I've been able to do it, but it just takes so much effort. If it's like what's happened to me right now is all these treats have landed in my house without really actively making that decision. Like if I go grocery shopping and I go, you know what, it's been a long time since I've had some ice cream. I'm gonna get myself one little pint. And when I get it, I'm just gonna, I'll wait till a really hard workout day before I have it or I'll just, I'll chip away at it slowly. If I do that with that intention, I have better success with it. But if it ends up like what's happened right now where it's like, here, take this extra red velvet cake. Oh, here's this pie. And I open the refrigerator. I didn't even know how it got there. And then my stomach's already craving something. That's why I opened it and looked for it. Boy, is it, it's hard for me. And I'm aware of that. So I can't imagine how many people that are not that self-aware on how easily this sneaks up on me. My favorite tip for that, because you just said it right there, you're aware.  That's the key. I think the key is to become aware. And then if you are aware that you have a challenge with a particular food or type of food, what I would always recommend, and this was very effective, and I do this with myself even, is you just create a barrier between yourself and the impulse. Because an impulse is literally do acting without thinking, right? Or acting in a less aware state of mind. That's what makes it an impulse. So what you do is you make a barrier. So what I would do with myself, and again, I would recommend clients do this as well, and it works so well, is I'd say, okay, Mrs. Johnson, if you have chocolate in the house, you know what a struggle it is. It's hard for you to just have one piece. You end up eating the whole box. Here's what I want you to do.  So what I would tell her is I'd say, you can have chocolate, but you have to drive to the grocery store, and you can only buy yourself a single serving. So you can eat it, if you really want it, you gotta get in the car, drive to the grocery store, and then buy a single serving. Now what does that do? What it does is it creates space between you and the impulse, which allows for, doesn't guarantee, but it allows for awareness to step in. So now as I'm putting my shoes on, I'm getting in the car, now I'm thinking like, do I really want this? You know, I probably don't. Like why am I doing this? I'm grabbing whatever, or sometimes you get it, but oftentimes that awareness, that space allows awareness to jump in, and then it stops the impulse. So that's a strategy that I would use all the time. I use that for myself. So like potato chips, they don't, they don't ever in my house, but does that mean I won't eat them? No, if I really want them, I drive to the store and I grab myself a small dish. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here, or you can find other clips over here, and be sure to subscribe.


Welcome back to the lectures in animal physiology in NPTEL. So, we are into the last lecture of section 5, which is the 10th lecture. And in this lecture, we will be talking about autonomic nervous system. What really is autonomic nervous system? To start off with, let us do some situation or aspect, which may help you to appreciate it better. So, think of it, you are walking in a lonely or walking in a dark street in the night or you are sitting in your room studying late hour of the night.  You all of a sudden get scared and subsequent set of events, which take place like you know try to escape or you feel scared and all of a sudden the blood flow enhances in your body and you lose the sensation of thirst or urination or anything. And all over there is some kind of a panic, we are scared. What is that reaction? What kind of circuits regulates that kind of situation? This falls under something called autonomic nervous system. In day to day life, if you think about. So, how many times we really use conscious thought processes? Well, you are studying, you of course use it. You are crossing the road, so you have to ensure the buses are not coming or the motor vehicles are not coming. So, you are at a safe distance from them, you have to cross the road. Other than that, most of the time we do not even know that we are being controlled by our own system in a autonomous manner, in an automatic manner. Something like you know, we do not decide that we are going to get urination. We do not even command to tell our digest system that you digest our food. We do not tell the heart that you beat. We do not decide the secretion of the hormones. They all happen. They all happen in their own course in a kind of as if within this whole system of ours, there are inbuilt circuit, intrinsic circuits which ensures that all our day to day events takes place without even we giving any command. They are involuntary. I mean we have no command or control on all those kind of things. So, this is exceptionally essential for you people to understand and we will talk about that how the nervous system really deal with this kind of actions. Let us take another situation which will help you to appreciate it much better.  In other word, somebody is lying in the hospital and who is not responding to any signal or anything and yet doctors are unable to declare this person dead. And there is always a kind of debate or controversy over this. Shall we give this person some kind of injection so that this person dies or like you know. There is lot of debate over it and is euthanasia allowed in this kind of situation or not. Though this person is brain dead, he or she is not at all responding to any stimuli, but yet his heart is beating and the defecation is taking place, urination is taking place and all these events are taking place. Then what is that coordination? So, this is the zone of autonomic nervous system. So, now let us get into the way we will talk about it is that. We will talk about the circuits involved in it, the autonomic circuits and we will compare with it with the other circuits which does not follow the autonomic system. Then we will talk about the classification of autonomic nervous system which falls under parasympathetic and sympathetic systems and we will talk about some of the situations and I promised you that the cardiovascular control and all these things and we will talk about the neurotransmitters which are involved in it and how that circuit functions in this section. So, let us start with our section 5 and lecture 10. This is nervous system and within nervous system, today we are dealing with autonomic nervous system. This is what we are going to deal with. Within the autonomic nervous system, the first thing we will do is kind of draw out a classification of all of the nervous system what we have already talked about which I termed as technically somatic nervous system and A N S as autonomic nervous system. So, this is also called A N S. So, whenever I have drawn the circuit of autonomic nervous system, let me. So, this is basically in the somatic, this S stands for somatic, somatic nervous system. So, this falls under conscious thoughts and plans whereas, in this section we talked about I talked to you about persons with brain dead. I give the example of that I talked about other functions. So, let us what all A N S is controlling is this just an example.  And here I wish to highlight that during 1960s, if a person would have been suffering from gets an heart attack, most unlikely was that you could really either you know recover this person or the life expectancy used to reduce very sharply. But today almost 50 years down the line, these are not a big deal when after 100 a couple of heart attacks people survive. Because now we have reached to a point where we can intercept the control circuits of the nervous system or in other word we could intercept the autonomic nervous circuits which regulates the cardiovascular movement, the blood flow, the blood pressure and the cardiac excitation and all these things. So, these are slowly under the pharmacological intervention. So, there are series of drugs which could bring down your blood pressure. Essentially what they do is that they target the autonomic nervous systems and especially they target the receptor for the neurotransmitters which regulates your blood pressure or under unusual situation there is increase in blood pressure and how to bring that down. So, these are and this particular system of autonomic system is of extreme important from pharmacological perspective. Now, what we will do in the next slide we will compare the autonomic nervous the structure of the autonomic nervous system and the structure of the somatic nervous system. So, whenever I drew it so this side on my left this is basically somatic nervous system. So, this is the side view of the of the brain and the spinal cord. So, I have drawn like this this is this is the brain here is the and here imagine this is the target tissue. So, I have always mentioned that you may have two possibilities you may have higher motor neuron which is synapsing on the second series of motor neuron which are lower motor neurons and they are synapsing on the target tissue and this is how the circuit works. This is the basically a very simple way of defecting it. So, these are the higher M n motor neuron these are lower or somatic motor neuron M n you have talked about it. So, now what about the autonomic nervous system again the same drawing the spinal cord in the brain. So, there are two options here what happens is say for example, there are certain specific neurons which are sitting out here. They send out signal and out here you have in the ganglion I should told you that there are ganglions around it. So, in the ganglion there is another set of neurons which take the message to the target. So, this is the target and in other word. So, basically what you have if you compare these two. So, here what you see is from level 1 level 2 and this is the control level C l here essentially what is happening 1 this is the level 1 which is getting of course, the signal from the brain higher even higher centers from the brain. This is level 2 there is another bifurcation which is outside the system. So, possibilities are there say for example, if you look at it if it is a reflect circuit then it will be like this a signal reaching here. So, just with 1 level of processing the signal comes back here the processing is not at 1 level there are 2 level of processing. In other word this essentially the signal will go like this from here it will come back to 1 level of this thing and this is the second level of it and this second neuron which is involved is called ganglionic neuron and the message is coming like this ganglionic neuron. The first neuron which is giving the ganglionic neuron a message is called pre ganglionic neuron pre ganglionic neuron. This particular ganglia is called autonomic ganglia. Ganglia is basically a series of neurons which gathered together at one spot autonomic ganglia. There are within the ventral horn there are spots there are zones which are called autonomic nuclei of spinal cord or autonomic centers autonomic control centers which are mostly regulated by pacemaker cells of the nervous system autonomic nuclei of spinal cord. So, this is the basic geometry of the somatic nervous system and here you have A, N, S autonomic nervous system. So, if you look at it in a simple way if you look at it in a simple way. So, in case of somatic nervous system here is the target tissue a signal reaches a processing signal comes back fine. There is a possibility that this part of the signal may go up to the brain and comes back fine and in the case of A, N, S it is slightly different. I will show you the complete circuit signal reaches hit upon a center from their signal comes to the ganglia from the ganglia another set of neurons bring the signal back to the target. It is slightly more longer root out here. So, now this A, N, S is further subdivided into two parts and come in depth, but before that I will draw the circuit one is called sympathetic and other one is called parasympathetic. These are the two classes of autonomic nervous system from here what I will do I will draw the complete circuit. So, that will kind of help you to appreciate the whole process. So, let us start like here these are the somatic sensors. So, somatic and visceral receptors. So, the receptors present in the digestive system within the viscera of the body. These receptors are sensing some kind of a change and these are transmitted via the sensory the sensory information are sent via sensory neurons. These are the sensory neurons and this is the sensory information sensory information. Sensory information these are all part of the peripheral nervous system. This is the classification here and this is the part of the central nervous system. This dotted line separates the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous. So, this is the schematics to which you have to understand from here the possibility of the sensory information is to either it moves to a reflex circuit like this or it goes directly to the higher centers of the brain via the ascending pathway if you guys remember I taught you the ascending pathway all the way. So, the signal is moving like this from here sensations moving like this moving like this one option to the brain one option. The other option is that it bypasses it does not go to the brain all the signal reaches here which is mostly in the case of the in the case of the reflex circuits from here the signal is being transmitted to something called a pre ganglionic neuron via inter neuron or may be some other neuron. Now, this pre ganglionic neuron now synapse on a ganglionic neuron. This ganglionic motor neuron these are also called motor neurons technically speaking they are the they reaches the target which is visceral effectors visceral effectors among the visceral effectors you have blood vessels cardiac muscle smooth muscle which is part of the digestive system and then you have the adipocytes of the fat cells. So, this one is your pre ganglionic neuron and the second one is the ganglionic neuron. This is the circuit of the n s and there are major reflex which it controls is falls under visceral reflex. We have talked about the stress reflex arc this is another form of reflex which is called the visceral reflex essentially this is the one which regulates how the food are getting digested in everything. And these neurons which are the pre ganglionic neurons are under the tone of another set of neurons from the higher center specially from the hypothalamus which will be touching in the endocrine system. It is I will just show you where exactly hypothalamus this is basically the higher centers which are controlling the motor commands they issue the motor commands and set the tone or set the pace for this. So, this is essentially is I had to kind of highlight this this is essentially is the territory of the autonomic nervous system with the command from the higher centers. And even sometime these commands from the hypothalamus comes without even getting any sensory information. So, this is all falls under a n s or autonomic nervous system. Now, we will talk about here couple of things which is worth mentioning is a couple of things which is worth mentioning is that please remember the post ganglionic parasympathetic system. So, this could be sympathetic or parasympathetic and I will come to just for it just gather this information parasympathetic fibers. So, this going back. So, this is essentially is the sympathetic and the parasympathetic control out here these this circuit falls under two categories sympathetic and parasympathetic. So, post ganglionic parasympathetic fibers also releases. So, the neurotransmitter involved is acetylcholine I mentioned it also because of a reason the major neurotransmitter is acetylcholine and it is effect could be inhibitory or effect could be inhibitory or excitatory. This is the first thing you have to realize here sorry second thing is that most post ganglionic sympathetic fibers secretes. So, we talked about parasympathetic that they secretes acetylcholine, but most post synaptic sympathetic fibers secretes neurotransmitter. So, now you might realize that how important are these neurotransmitters they are the ones which offers the functionality to the nervous system nor epinephrine or epinephrine nor epinephrine or epinephrine and the effect could be effect is mostly excitatory. Now one more piece of information which from that circuit we obtain is all pre ganglionic autonomic fibers which includes sympathetic and parasympathetic release. So, this is acetylcholine always remember this if I go back to the circuit out here out here this pre ganglionic fiber this is the one of interest this pre ganglionic fiber out here this is the one whether it is sympathetic or parasympathetic this exclusively releases acetylcholine just remember this it is the change is after this irrespective of this pre ganglionic fiber will always release sympathetic or parasympathetic into the circuit all pre ganglionic autonomic fibers sympathetic or parasympathetic releases acetylcholine and the effect is excitatory this is very very important effect is excitatory I exclusively want whenever you draw the circuit just keep this in mind this is very very important. So, with this we will move on to the sympathetic division what the sympathetic division means. So, sympathetic division sometime is also called fight or flight fight or fight system generally the sympathetic system prepares your body for height and level of somatic activity. So, in other word prepares your body for height and level of somatic activity in other word.  So, if I put them all together in terms of like you know for you to understand.  So, here comes the control system your heart rate goes very very up. So, then your blood pressure goes up these are the control systems of the heart rate and so in other word what is happening the sympathetic system we are talking about sympathetic system which is secreting in other word if I if I again go back to the circuit if this is the pre ganglionic neuron and here you have the ganglionic neuron and the signal is coming like this and with the higher centers setting the tone for it. So, this is the pre ganglionic and this is ganglionic and we are talking about the sympathetic system. So, now when we know that this only secret acetylcholine with a irrespective of sympathetic and this one the ganglionic has option to secret nor epinephrine or epinephrine. So, now and this is the target tissue say in our situation let us imagine the target tissue is cardiac heart or cardiovascular or blood vessels. So, essentially what is happening when this sympathetic circuit is activated out here this is all like activated sorry this this is confusing this is this is all all activated when this circuit is activated. So, automatically the secretion of this epinephrine and nor epinephrine by this neuron release leads to the increase in the blood pressure and cardiac output or heart rate. Now, if you have a drug which could target this somewhere or other you could block the secretion of epinephrine or nor epinephrine essentially you can control that control your heart rate as well as your metabolic rate as well as your blood pressure. So, blood pressure goes up urinary function is compromised it goes down your activate energy reserves of your body body and activate the sweat gland. If in your day to day life you try to correlate this situation you will find exactly that is what happens when you get scared or you are concentrating heavily on something this is exactly how the sympathetic system comes into play heart rate increases you respire really fast energy reserves of body starts getting activated likewise. Now, simultaneously so we I told you that this is called fight or flight situation. The next thing is let us talk about the parasympathetic system let us again redraw the circuit sympathetic system. So, if you redraw the circuit. So, these are the higher centers of the brain which are controlling here is the circuit. So, this is secreting acetylcholine A C H and this is the pre ganglionic neuron and this is the ganglionic neuron which also secretes in the case of parasympathetic only P S I am just showing it as P S also secreting acetylcholine. So, in the case of. So, this is one comparison you have to realize in the case of sympathetic system it was the epinephrine or nor epinephrine if you go back couple of slides back. So, this was nor epinephrine or epinephrine and in this situation at both the level it is acetylcholine acetylcholine. Whereas, in the other situation at this level of course pre ganglionic it was acetylcholine, but at this level it was epinephrine or nor epinephrine. So, what essentially is that this is also called arrest and repose as against if you remember as against fight or which was sympathetic sympathetic and here we are talking about the parasympathetic system which is P S what all happens first of all it stimulates visceral activity. In other word your digestion increases promotes secretion along the secretion along the G I track or gastrointestinal track this conserves energy then it enhances digestion brings down heart rate brings down blood pressure just opposite of what happens in the sympathetic system and it increases the salivary gland secretion and increases stomach contraction and metabolic rate goes down. Metabolic energy expenditure metabolic energy expense goes down and blood flow to the digestive track increases that you can figure out in the digestion in terms of blood flow increases out here and blood flow increases and it stimulates urination and defecation. Now what is essential here to understand is this. So, how it modulates its signal. So, this is the preganglionic neuron and this is the postganglionic this is the ganglionic neuron and this is the target tissue and in both the situation. So, it is secreting acetylcholine here also it is secreting let us put it red it will be easy for me to explain acetylcholine here also it is secreting acetylcholine. But, essentially there is something very interesting about this acetylcholine what happens is this acetylcholine which is secreted here and I told you this is all the time the preganglionic one is excited. But, for this acetylcholine which is secreted on the target tissue there are two receptors for acetylcholine. So, here is the situation you have to this is something new which I have not discussed before this. So, for one neurotransmitter there may be multiple receptors that does not mean that if I have acetylcholine out here the receptor will be always same there could be varied kind of receptor and based on the receptor type and based on the binding kinetics the output result will be different. So, in the case of acetylcholine there are two major receptors one of them is called nicotinic receptor the other one is called muscarinic receptor. So, the nicotinic receptor got its name because on the on the. So, just for your understanding I have just introduced this thing once again. So, the receptors are likewise. So, if I blow up this image it will be something like. So, let us redraw this for understanding for better understanding sake. So, here is the target tissue here is the target and here you have the ganglionic system and this is the parasympathetic system out here. So, this is the ganglionic one ganglionic neuron and this is the pre ganglionic neuron P g and at this level it is secreting acetylcholine showing by green here also it is secreting acetylcholine. But the difference lies here there are two kind of receptor like this these are the receptor on the surface inter disperse with another kind of receptor. So, now the I call that as. So, this one I call that as nicotinic as nicotinic receptor and this one is muscarinic receptor. How they got this name muscarinic and nicotinic receptor because nicotin which is found in several sources nicotin binds to these nicotinic acid these receptors and muscarinic it is from one of these mushrooms one of the poisonous mushrooms it is the muscarinic that particular compound binds to them and based on that they got their name muscarinic and nicotinic acid receptors. So, the secretion of this acetylcholine binds to either to the muscarinic or nicotinic acid receptor and based on that they are rest of the actions rest of the activities takes place. Similarly, which I have mention is I just kind of flipped out from my mind while talking about the sympathetic system yes. In the sympathetic system out here this epinephrine or epinephrine I talked about the receptor for sympathetic system includes alpha receptor and beta receptors and within beta you have beta 1, beta 2 and few more are there and alpha 1 and alpha 2 and few more are there. These are the receptors for the epinephrine nor epinephrine which are secreted as a part of the sympathetic system. Whereas, in the case of and one more thing I will add apart from epinephrine nor epinephrine sometimes sometimes some of the sympathetic system works with acetylcholine as well as nitric oxide NO and acetylcholine sometimes, but those are very rare even when they act with these those kind of receptors. So, coming back where we were the nicotinic and muscarinic receptors. So, muscarinic effect of muscarinic is fairly long lasting as compared to the nicotinic receptor they are short term effect and muscarinic effect could be either excitatory as well as inhibitory depending on the context inhibitory. This is a completely context dependent situation apart from it always there is one thing which people have to appreciate that most of these organs are innervated it is a dual innervation. In other word say for example, this is your heart again coming back. So, this is under both sympathetic and parasympathetic control sympathetic and parasympathetic. So, you have a balance between the parasympathetic system and the sympathetic system. So, which ensures the proper functioning of the of the heart all the time. So, this is something all over our body all the organs are most of them have the dual innervation of sympathetic and parasympathetic which dictates how the signals are being transmitted. So, with this I will close in with the autonomic nervous system to summarize the autonomic nervous system autonomic nervous system is the one which ensures the autonomous functioning of our system which are not in our voluntary control in voluntary your heartbeat moment of the bolus moment of the food across the digestive system you do not say that now digest or secrete this acid that acid or that compound to ensure the food gets digested. The urinary system reproductive system and other secretory systems they are purely under the autonomic control which does not need your conscious thinking or does not need a decision making. This is all completely controlled by a certain group of pacemakers which are sitting at a very specific area of the brain called hypothalamus. I told you that I will show you where hypothalamus is situated. Hypothalamus if this is the site view of the brain is somewhere out here is a hypothalamus and underneath there is something called pituitary and will come to all these things. So, out here somewhere hypothalamus is situated hypothalamus. So, this is a master neuro endocrine gland this master neuro endocrine gland essentially regulates the tone or offers the tone to the autonomic nervous system and from hypothalamus it controls the autonomic centers along the ventral horn of the central nervous system. So, whenever a signal comes a sensory input comes and if it is an autonomic sensory input it needs an autonomic control. Then the sensory input enters into the ventral horn, but instead of going to other centers it hits upon the autonomic center and from there there is a pre ganglionic neuron which comes out and reaches the ganglion. From the ganglion it transmit the signal to another set of sympathetic ganglia sympathetic neurons or sparas empathic neuron which carries the message to the target. So, there is a breakage of information and this is all done to ensure that this is separated out from the somatic nervous system. And if you go back and see the first slide where I started one slide back if you look at it. So, these are the centers which are regulating which is in the hypothalamus which is regulating which is setting the tone out here and then on from here the signal reaches here. So, this is all the ganglionic zone from here it is the motor. So, this circuit the nature of this circuit and the kind of neurotransmitter involved decides whether it is a sympathetic or parasympathetic. And parasympathetic is the one where at both the level at this level at this level the secretion of neurotransmitter at this level at both time it is acetylcholine which regulates it. In the case of sympathetic at this level it is of course acetylcholine, but at the second level out here it is not epinephrine or epinephrine apart from nitrous oxide and other things. Sympathetic is the one which is also called fight or flight and parasympathetic is the one which is called rest or repose it is kind of bring down much of your. So, sympathetic on one hand make your system very excited parasympathetic on the other hand brings it down. And it is the interplay of balancing act between the sympathetic and parasympathetic system which ensures our normal functioning of the body. So, with this and with the control what I highlighted about the sympathetic and parasympathetic control of the art I am closing on the nervous system. So, next we will start with the new section. Thanks for your attention.


The presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, ADC, Dume B. Kachikou has described the victory of the all-progressive Congress APC Bola Tinubu in last Saturday's election as well-deserved. Mr. Kachikou also alleged that all the four major parties, namely the APC, PDP, LP and NLPP, committed fraud during the election. Bola Tinubu won the poll with 8,794,726 votes while Atikua Buwaka of the People's Democratic Party, PDP, came second with 6,984,520 votes. Peter Obey of the Labour Party, third with 6,101,533 votes. The three candidates won 12 states each. Mr. Kachikou polled 81,919 votes in the election. Well, joining us to discuss the ADC stand on the just concluded elections and plans for the coming governorship elections is the vice presidential candidate of the ADC, Ahmed Buhari. Welcome to the program. Good to be here. I was more comfortable trying to call you Ahmed B. Is that all right? Yeah, for many people who are not comfortable with President Muhammad Buhari, we're just shortening my name to Ahmed B. We don't want to call Buhari at all. I say that it's a name the way you have, although no, but many people don't have Nyambo. That's why I find very interested and it also makes a lot of sense above the rest. It's fine to call me Ahmed Buhari. Many people nickname me as Ahmed B for the purpose of comfort. No, the reason to calling you Ahmed B was not because it sounded Buhari. Buhari is a good name, isn't it? So Ahmed B has a ring to it like you're more friendly, you're very close to the people. You have a nickname I can call. I don't know the nickname of President Buhari for instance. Baba. Well, congratulations on your bold outing in the last election. Yes, thank you very much. It was really good. Well, you were inspired by political happenings around the world from what I saw about you, what is happening in France and other countries where young people are thrown up. They are now on the throne as it were and you came back to Nigeria here. How would you see the political landscape in Nigeria? You think we have reached that point where people who aspire like you, young people who are coming to the helm of affairs can have that kind of chance that we are seeing in other countries? I think it's a process. I think compared to 30 years ago I can still remember exactly what the political terrain seemed like. You only need to make a declaration and get killed the next day maybe. Your family could be kidnapped. You could just hear people say they are pulling out of the race because certain threats have been sent to themselves and their families. And so if we are in 2023 now and a lot of people are just all in the race regardless of all of those kinds of fears and I think we are actually progressing. With regards to my ambition, I remember it all started in 2016 when I came out of the most younger slimmer. My beards were still softer and then I said to the whole world that I was going to run for the office of the president. To be honest with you, it was born out of a lot of things that happened differently and I was really upset with the way our so called leaders were running the affairs of the country and then I had a business going on and most of the things that we felt the right policies would help us achieve were not being talked about at the helm of affairs. And I said if the only thing that I would achieve would be having healthy conversations that can sort of redirect the narratives around the political elites, then we will do it. We ran for that election, we ran to the end, we did well, I'm happy we did well. And then in 2019, in the middle of 2023, I got calls from different presidential candidates inviting me to be a running mate and I said, oh wow, so we did something in the last election. Eventually I decided to settle with Dubebe Kachiku and it's interesting that we came fifth after the big four. Okay, that's very interesting. But did you settle with Dubebe Kachiku because of his person or what the party had to offer? So I listened to all of the candidates that invited me for this conversation to be a running mate and I sort of warmed up to maybe more. I think there was this lot of passion and desire to see something happen differently. From the beginning of the collaboration, all of that was vibing. Unfortunately, we were dealing with a party that also had a different agenda. And so while we were thinking of getting to the polls, the party was thinking of who we were going to eventually deal with when it comes to negotiating with a mix of money. This is what the party has always done. And that really gave us a huge setback. That's very interesting. So what are we expecting from you as a person? My principal and I did make very, very clear comments about our future. And it's going to be service to humanity, service to the nation, having conversations that would help direct a generation of people who I believe without trying to believe to anybody. We have a problem with processing information. And so it depends on who is saying it. We just take it to town without necessarily breaking it down to understand it and know how well to use it, if we should, why we should and how we should use such information. And I think we are committed to working with the rest of the country to ensure that these things have been addressed. Necessarily as political office holders or as individuals? Like I said to everybody, I didn't plan to be in the race in 2020-2030. In my bed while I slept, I got this course. And so we will see how it goes. Okay, so what's your general assessment of the just concluded elections? We just talked about your principal saying that every party rigged it, but maybe we'll just hear your own side of the story. He also said that this is a lesson to religious leaders who use the pulpit as a space for political discussions. And I think he is important on all of those things. I think Nigerians have never been divided like we are right now on political matters because we allowed religion and ethnicity play a major role in the decisions that we made through the process. And I think it's extremely wrong. I think, like I said, the generation must be focused on the kind of information that we receive, decipher it properly so that we know the kind of, so that we know the next moves to make. Which regards to the rigging. I just sort of randomly stumbled upon in 1979 video, when NPN won the election in 1979. It was a show Shagari, the image of the president. And there were three other parties who lost, and they came together to announce that they were not going to accept the result and that they were going to go to court and it was rigged, it was massive rigging. But I'll tell you something. Every single space you find, where people control, they always rig. The results that came out from the southeast is something you don't want to look at twice. It's like 97% in a space where you have other parties. People say people were chased out of the queues, people were driven away except they were going to vote for certain parties. The same thing happened in Lagos because the legations fell, this was their space.  And if you say these things happen in Kano, I'm not going to argue. We saw young children voting in Kano. Similarly, we saw young children voting in the southeast. So, generally, our election pattern has always been heavily misguided and controlled by, you know, whoever takes hold of the space. I think that what Kachiku was just trying to say was the election was between a formidable APC and a divided PDP. Everybody on the other side used to be part of the PDP. Kuang Kuo Su was part of the PDP. Atchuka O'Berker was part of the PDP. Pito was part of the PDP. When they pulled out, divided themselves, there was no way they could actually have beaten Tunibu. Tunibu might not be liked by certain people in certain age categories and social status, but you go to other places, he's been celebrated. He's loved by a lot of people in the north. And it is campaigned by, first of all, you know, clearing out the whole Muslim-Muslim ticket with Khan and some other top Christian bodies that were against the Muslim-Muslim ticket, and they never said anything about Muslim-Muslim ticket again. And then the next stage was, let me campaign from where I'm the weakest. And he started campaigning from Northern Nigeria, introduced himself to them, picked some of their strong stakeholders, and before he knew it, he was an accepted figure. Before he knew it, they not gave him the vote. Look at the vote pattern. In 2019, APC made 15.7 million votes. In 2023, they're making 8.7 million. They lost 7 million votes. That means a lot of people were not happy with the APC. However, because the divided PDP had gone in separate ways, they were unable to put those numbers. They would have given them about 14-15 million votes to defeat the APC. Okay. Well, you did well in the last election.  What are we looking at for governorship? What prospects do you think the APC has in governorship? We have a fantastic candidate in Lagos, Fonsha Doherty, well-spoken, highly educated, an excellent gentleman.  You know, the euphoria is largely around the existing APC governor, the Labour Party, Gobernatorial candidates, and obviously the PDP Gobernatorial candidates. They seem to be the top three that everybody seems to be talking about. And when I look at all of them here, I'm thinking in my head, what makes them, what makes one of them different from the rest? You know, try to understand where we're headed. Are they all the same? Are they different? And if you look at it critically, Sean Waldo, I've always said it, is a product of the Lagos Godfather system. Except you are anointed, you cannot become. And so, I mean, that for me is something I want to stop. I love and respect mentorship. When you bring Godfatherism into it, do I have to call you to tell before I make a decision after you have actually taught me what to do in the years past? So I don't want that to continue in Lagos. The next candidate, who is the Labor Party candidate, who used to be in PDP, lost the primaries in PDP, and he was asked to move to the Labor Party by Bode George, and then he went to the Labor Party at the time when I think they had this chaos between another candidate who said he won the primaries, who was the bona fide guy, and I think the case is still in court, the Supreme Court or so. That's a different matter. But I think what is most important here is now that he's in the Labor Party, I am seeing a Bode George who is a chieftain in the PDP saying, yeah, that's my boy. That's the one I support. And I'm saying to myself, somebody calls the Lagosians, or why would we move from one Godfather to another Godfather? Everybody knows in Lagos, Tindall is the Godfather of the APC, or the Godfather of Lagos, and for the best times I've known, Bode George always wanted to become the new Godfather of Lagos. So it's a tussle, and all of them have got a puppet there. And then I looked at the third guy, the PDP guy, and Jando, I remember his biggest scene in the PDP was because he didn't listen to Bode George, who wanted him to make Rhodes Vivo, who lost in the primaries to become his running mate. And he said, no, I'm not going to choose that as my running mate. I'm going to decide by myself who my running mate is going to be, and that was where they fell out with Bode George. And so Bode George asked the guy to move to Labo while Jando had to pick Funke Kendele as his running mate. For me, that was brave, that was strong, and I respect that. It means that we probably might, if we're thinking very deeply, get a governor for Lagos State that is not controlled by any bloc, or Godfather, or persons. So you think someone can stay in the PDP and not be controlled by... Well, we've seen it, we've seen it, because in the PDP, the PDP, original PDP structure, wanted other people, like the other Dohati in PDP to become the Gobernatorial candidate. And I remember when he was able to, you know, manoeuvre his way into the PDP and actually to clean the ticket. It made a lot of PDP members really upset that this guy that we do not know, this guy that doesn't seem like a guy we can control, would not be able to allow us, you know, get the way we want to get it. So things like that I respect as a young person, and I'm hoping that Lagosians, beyond the euphoria of maybe Peter or B, which obviously is what I think Reservoir is hiding under, the same way Shawolu is... the euphoria around Shawolu is that Tindubu pick team and everybody has to follow. I think these things are very pertinent and I think Lagosians should think deeper. I am from Punta Uwara, a very small town in Niger State. I lived there for 16 years, yeah? I don't live here anymore, but anything that concerns Lagos concerns me, because this is the first town that made me the man I became. And it's important for me to pay close attention to the happiness here and render my advice where I think it's necessary. And I think very important to note is that we are running mates as well. I remember when Jadok picked Funkie again, I felt that was also very brave. Number one, this woman in my opinion who naturally exists in a space where women have to walk 10 times harder than men to succeed. And then we're hearing today that she has the highest grossing movie in Nigeria. I mean, that's somebody I respect. That's somebody that's hard-working and when you look at her antecedents coming from, based on family background, you cannot say she's from a wealthy family. She's not from a blue blood. She's from the ground. And then that pushed me to find out more about the Abdulaziz Jando guy. And clearly, this guy used to cook food for his mom, you know? And then recently I saw his wife, resultant neighbor, I didn't even do well at all in this result. He made some Fs. And then I called him. I called somebody who is in the PDP, and I said, I'm just hearing that your guy did so badly. I spoke to him. He said some of those days he was actually walking. And sometimes he doesn't even come back home until in the night. There was no electricity for him to even study. But look, most importantly for us to notice, despite all of those challenges, he could rise. He could rise. He could rise in the private sector. He's been in the public sector. And I think based on his, an employer of labor, I just think there are deeper things to be really watching out for. There are some things that you've just said that I never knew existed. But let's leave that now. This is Lagos. Like you said, you have an interest in Lagos. Lagos made you who you are. But whether you have come to Lagos or not, like they always say, is the commercial capital of Nigeria. When Lagos sneezes, the nation catches a cold. That's what they say. So we need to get it right in Lagos. What are some of the things that you identify in Lagos that need to be addressed? We don't know who is going to be governor, no matter what we say. But there are things that the next governor needs to look at. We have to decentralize the center.  And that is because once you go past Ikeja, so I came into town on Monday and I've been privileged to move into places like Agege, further into Agege, like places like Gatankoa, into Mushi, down deep into Mushi, mile 12, and what exists behind my 12th, Apapa and what exists behind Apapa, everything you see is just color. Once you go past the first two streets inward, you will be shocked at the living condition of the so-called legulations that we think are doing all right, in comparison with those that live in this other half of the city. And my biggest fear and worry is that as much as they keep coming every day into the city to fend for their selves and get their daily bread, the worrier some thing is that a day will come when they will explode. Nothing exists there. There are no roads. There are no tap water. I'm talking of a Lagos that is saying it's making about over 70 billion naira in revenue every month. You need to see a commensurate level of development on ground. It is not happening. It makes me wonder if indeed part of the resources being generated has been diverted somewhere else. But in all honesty, I think those people living in those areas are the real concern that whoever becomes the next governor should really address. And that is the only way you can get the real progress that you want with regards to the traffic, with regards to proper taxation, to avoid multiple taxation, which regards to so many other things. I think we should decentralize the center. I think we should be more focused in those suburbs and make sure that they have the basic amenities so they don't influx the city all the time. They don't need to be here. They only come here because they want to survive. Yeah, with Lagos, Lagos capital is in Ikeja. Yes. Go past Ikeja and see. I told you Ikeja stops at Ikeja. Go past Ikeja. I know you don't know the place. Go to Gatangpoa and see. Well, I've seen all those areas. I understand what you're talking about. Some grows and glows of Lagos is what we are looking at. Some things that we can give them a pattern in the back and say, OK, you have done well, but you can do better. But the things that they really need to do, let's say security, let's say education, let's say traffic, let's say health and all that. How would you rate them in various sectors? So again, with regards to education, during the last debates in Lagos, I listened to the three main guys that presented themselves, Fushun, Fushun Shadohati of the ADC, the Labour Party candidate Rose Vivo and Abdulaziz Adidiran Jandoh of the PDP. And one thing that was very clear in that debate was when the question of out-of-school children was asked, everybody said some things like, we're going to get them out of the street. We're going to get them jobs. And then when the PDP candidate responded, he responded in a way that I didn't expect. He said, I would have conversations with churches and mosques to see how they can use their free hours to accommodate children in those facilities where we start making plans for the long term. So in the short term, we would have children that use the church's premises for education. I would get teachers employed to teach them while I get the same children in some mosque areas so that they can teach them. And then as that is all going on, we're now building up. And I felt that was really commendable to involve those sort of bodies to be part of this growth for these people. And I think it's a process. And I think it must be progressive. And I think the other thing I said from the beginning with regard to young people's inability to process information has to do with the fact that when I hear something, I want to ask how and they now have to put aside by itself where the reality is on the ground. Is it possible? I live in the city. Can it be done?  Is it by giving them money or taking them where?  It's a process. These guys have a lot to do. The same way when the Al-Majiri system was about to be eradicated in Northern Nigeria by former president Gulak Jonathan, I felt it was a great idea. But these guys were taking off the streets and pushed into some dormitories who talked even in syllables. How do you want to run the space? Fantastic idea, but the how was missing. And so after the government went out, nothing could happen in the space. The boys went back to the streets. Unfortunately, a government came in place that didn't even make it an agenda. Sad. It's sad. Really, really sad. But you just struck something about continuity. Yes. Because if there had been continuity from that, the next government would have provided at least syllables to the people that were dumped somewhere. To be fair to the EPC government, there's been a lot of continuity, especially on the federal level, a lot of continuity from the previous administration. We've seen rail lines completed. We've seen BVN coming to fruition. We've seen certain policies and programs that were started by the Jonathan administration and completed by the Boharis administration. We can see implementation and see it working, which means we have to give that to them. However, for the ones that might not have been able to be controlled, probably they didn't have the framework that anybody could use to help continue them. I think all of those things are also things that are needed. Do you think that's a good enough excuse? It is good enough excuse, because for example, if I come in and I see that you've started a project and I'm asking for the manual, where's the manual? Where's the program design that you use? I don't have it. How do I sweep it? Because I cannot understand it. I don't know where it started from. I don't know where it is now and things like that. People, politicians can easily give excuses like that. And that is why it is important for us to put everything in proper perspective. I think people keep seeing a lot of things with regards to why the country is not working. Is it the right president? Does this one say sensational things and all of that? What I think is very important here is the civil service structure. Everything that the executives and the legislative and the judiciary bring on board, the civil service structure is unable to implement, simply because the corruption starts and ends there in reality. Which is why I keep saying we have to move from a salary incentive system to a welfare incentive system so that as a civil servant, I know that if they are getting into the civil service, I can start paying for my rent to own house.  Of course, health care, full health cover, go to the ministries today. You see posters of people, John, Shuaibu, Abraham, Lincoln, they're all looking for $200,000, $300,000 for medical care. Go back after one month obituary, obituary, they're gone. Well, okay. Well, now let's go back to politics and youths we're wrapping up now. So let's just take this, maybe a one-off now and finish. You've become a model to youths who want to go into politics. You've learned some lessons and a lot of people after the last election may be discouraged, whether we like it or not, they'll be discouraged. But from what you've seen and we're hoping you're going to continue being in a political space, no matter how. We're hoping that. So let's just hear you talk to the youths. What do you think they must do to continue to function in that space, in that political space? Yeah, I think more than anything, I'm really proud of young people. I've seen them find a voice. They've found a voice as a collective.  I call them their youth.  You're not even up to the age of a youth leader. I call them the new tribe. I call them the new tribe. I call them the guys that we really need to look out for, especially with how we can free ourselves from these shackles.  Don't just discard it. Listen to it. Hear their points out. They might be right.  What you're supposed to do is not to discard the older but to marry them together and see which is superior. I want us to be a generation of very smart people, not just full of fellow people. Otherwise, we'll get it wrong. What a way to wrap. We've been talking with the vice-presidential candidate of ADC, Ahmed Buhari, and it's been very enlightening and very, very interesting talking with him. We would like to say thank you for coming on the program today. It's good to be in your studio for the first time after about five years. It's a nice place. It's a beautiful place, bigger than I thought. I thought you were in the corner but you were in the space. Thank you so much for coming on the program. Thank you.  Stay with us.