Good afternoon. It is my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Marcia Saxton. Dr. Saxton is the Director of Research and Training at the World Institute on Disability and teaches disability studies at the University of California, Berkeley. As a leading investigator within this field, Dr. Saxton brings sensitivity, compassion, and a disability rights theoretical framework to challenging conversations. Her work has reframed the conversation between medical professionals and persons in the community who identify themselves as disabled or as Dr. Saxton identifies them as disability consultants. She has written on the history and present use of eugenics in articles such as disability rights and selective abortion and prenatal diagnosis and pregnancy options. Her regular interviews for national media illustrate her ability to confront uncomfortable and ethically challenging topics with sensitivity and compassion. She has published three books, two films, and more than 100 articles and book chapters on topics including disability rights, women's health, and genetic screening issues. She served on the Ethics Committee for the Human Genome Initiative. Dr. Saxton received her doctorate from the Union Institute in Cincinnati. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Saxton to the podium. Oh, wait a minute. Tech, I need tech. I don't have my, where is he? San Francisco where I come from, the San Francisco Bay Area. Beautiful Golden Gate Bridge. I have this on here. Thank you for caring about these issues and for inviting me to talk with you. I will offer a perspective that's less often heard and central to the issues that we're discussing. I will discuss people with disabilities in relation to reproductive technologies. This conference asks us to consider how innovations in reproductive technology challenge us to think about what it means to be human. I get a kick out of that tag phrase, what it means to be human, often mentioned in discussions about genetic technologies. What are we asking ourselves? Can we be true to the best aspects of our species, Homo sapiens? This is not quite, this isn't working. Anyway, I'm going to try to wing it until we can get straightened out. Where is our guy again? Maybe you should just hang out here with me. Half of the text is not visible. That's it. It's nice to have you here. My big question is about what it means to be human. Can we work together on our planet with humanity? Humans seem to have really different points of view here. With reproductive technologies, it's the moms who are the most often challenged to think here. Here's a loving mom, thinking hard. Oops, wrong species. But like all moms, she loves her offspring and does the best she can to be a good mom. Okay, here we are, Homo sapiens. Oh, no, it's guys with weapons. How's this? Better? People with disabilities find ourselves in a tricky position regarding reproductive screening and editing technologies. We are the humans who define who embody the dreaded impairments that genetic engineering wants to avoid. We are the ones potentially screened and edited. Some might assume that disabled people want these technologies. Some do, some don't. Why wouldn't everyone want to be cured? These technologies are complex for people with disabilities and our families. I can't truly represent the disability community, though I'm sometimes asked to do so, like here at this event. The views in this population are as wide ranging as any broad population. I'll try to do justice to this range of views, but I'm not going to pretend to be neutral here. So, who are people with disabilities? We come from all social classes, ethnic groups, ages, genders, sexual orientations and lifestyles. The definition of disability used by the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA, passed in 1990, is this. Those who have substantial physical, sensory, mental or emotional impairments that limit major life activities. Here is President Bush, the senior, signing this bill with his famous quote, let the shameful walls of exclusion come tumbling down. This population in the United States is estimated at about 60 million people. Most disability, disease and early death is caused by war and poverty. Worldwide estimates are around one billion people with disabilities, about one sixth of the population. These pictures show disabled people all around the world. Some people identify as having a disease or chronic illness with a possibility of cure or change. Some disabled people have stable conditions without prospects of much change over time. There are no clear lines between these groups. Everyone with a body has the potential to join this group, especially as we age. My work is supporting this worldwide movement for human rights with research, teaching and advocacy. We have a lot to do and we have made great progress. It can be hard having a disability somewhere between inconvenient and devastating. There may be suffering, pain, medical treatment, surgery, all kinds of side effects of medications. There may be early death. What makes it much more difficult is the oppression. You want to go somewhere but the transportation isn't accessible. If you can get there, you find out there's no ramp or the elevator is broken.  Told you don't belong, kept in a separate classroom, assumed you can't do the job even if you have the skills or there's no interpreter or captioning or the handouts aren't accessible for the blind people, assumed you're cheating on your benefits forms. Told you're too expensive, too much work, assumed you are asexual, you can't or shouldn't even want to date or marry. Or you're forgotten in the flood.  Most non-disabled people mean well. It's not their fault that they don't know how to get past the awkwardness, fear of saying the wrong thing, being patronizing, asking intrusive questions or keeping distant. But, well, ow. Ancient people's attitudes about disability come from fear that God's were punishing individuals or families. Early people tried to explain mysteries of human life with superstitions, passed down eons of generations, resulting in stereotypes still around. Positive stereotypes, view people with disabilities as saintly, or heroic or innocent, which also objectify disabled people as them, not us. These stereotypes are stuck in place because we're not talking enough about disability. Shhh. Don't ask, don't stare, don't talk about it. In the 1950s, I was a little girl in the classroom with metal leg braces. I had surgery at Shriners Hospital to correct my leg weakness from spina bifida. I missed my family but I got to connect with other kids with disabilities. I grew up wanting to change the way disabled people are viewed and treated. When I was 14, I decided to get information about my sexuality. I was raised to think of myself as a typical girl, but because of my disability, I wasn't sure what to expect. Could I have children? Could I enjoy sex? My mom found a doctor and expert in the field. He examined me and I asked my questions. The crassness of his answer stunned me. He said if I were to marry, my vagina could please a man, but I shouldn't consider pregnancy because I might produce another one like myself. I still hear this from disabled women and girls. Told the same thing by doctors. My late husband Mark was a wheelchair user, an activist in the disability movement. Strangers would sometimes approach Mark in public and say, you handicap people are amazing. He would smile but inside roll his eyes at this well-intentioned but demeaning assumption that disabled people can't be expected to do much at all. So just being out and about was amazing. The disability community is amazing, but not in trivial stereotype ways. I work in a beautiful building, Ed Roberts campus in Berkeley named after our famous leader. There's a mural of the 1977 protest at the San Francisco federal building. 200 demonstrators with disabilities occupied the building for 26 days. This forced the officials to sign a federal law that had been put on hold for years, nicknamed Section 504 which prohibited federal contractors from discriminating against people with disabilities. This was in 1977. The language of this law was modeled on the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting racial discrimination. The disability community has organized thousands of campaigns and protests against discrimination including dramatic, effective civil disobedience. We've handled the political process well, active in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and other powerful laws now copied around the world. The ADA prohibits discrimination in employment, government, public accommodations, inclusion in schools at all levels, transportation and telecommunications. Some of my students in medicine and social welfare signed up for my courses thinking the courses will be about helping the handicapped. They soon find out that they are learning about a successful worldwide movement for liberation from oppression. We have a long way to go to fully implement the ADA. We must continue to fight for this law. It's being challenged in Congress now. Why has society made this such a steep climb? There's a back story here. In the late 1800s fear and superstition about disability along with distortion about inheritance made its way into public policy in the form of eugenics ideas and practice. Eugenics is a fake science that tried to improve the population by controlling who gets to have children. This tree was the eugenics symbol. Their slogan was eugenics is a self-direction of human evolution. This is a pamphlet of that era. Eugenics believed that human flaw like being poor or committing crimes were inherited. They thought desired traits such as intelligence, musical ability and good character are also inherited. They wanted the right people to have children and the people with the bad traits whom they called the socially unfit not to have children. These ideas were put into laws. Here's an old poster for the public describing eugenic ideas to quote unfit human traits such as feeble mindedness, epilepsy, criminality, insanity, populism and many others run in families and are inherited in exactly the same way as color in guinea pigs. If all marriages were eugenic we could breed out most of this unfitness in three generations. It goes on to say selected parents will have better children. This is the great aim of eugenics. This is Carrie Buck and her mother Emma. In 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court case Buck versus Bell allowed the forced legal sexual sterilization of a woman chosen for this case, Carrie Buck and then thousands of people to follow. All labeled feeble minded and then sterilized. The case inspired the famous comment by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. What is striking here is that Carrie Buck was not feeble minded or cognitively disabled. She was poor and she had been raped. Carrie's mother Emma, Carrie herself and Carrie's daughter Vivian, the baby that resulted from the rape were assumed to be disabled. The fear of inherited disability was so strong eugenics saw disability where it didn't exist. Between 1907 and 1937 more than 70,000 surgeries were performed in 32 states, mostly on young, poor, uneducated people assumed to be feeble minded or people with physical disabilities to prevent their having children. This is the Lynchburg Colony, this photo where thousands were sterilized in Virginia. Eugenics was carried to the extreme during the Nazi Holocaust. They got their idea from the United States. I'll come back to this point. We'd like to believe that this horrific era is past. Many worry that these ideas persist. For the last 40 years, expectant parents have been offered prenatal tests to detect disabling conditions in the fetus. If a genetic flaw is discovered, the mother is offered an abortion. It gives the mother a choice. Studies show that women get pressured to use prenatal testing as the responsible, healthy, right thing to do during pregnancy. Some families want this option. But other expectant parents may feel blamed if they decide to raise their disabled child. These reproductive options are sometimes called the new eugenics. I'll come back to this point as well. Let's come back to the president at the moment now. It is my great pleasure to have worked with many hundreds of people with disabilities in all kinds of organizations. This beautiful center where I work, Ed Roberts Campus, houses a dozen disability organizations, centers for independent living, rehabilitation, sports and fitness, a child development center, telecommunications services, a medical clinic, services for the blind, a law center and my agency, the World Institute on Disability. Many disabled people are reconsidering our unique bodies and ways of being as good. Not shameful, not to be hidden. We're not just interesting or okay or valuable diversity. Our bodies are artful, sexy, beautiful. This is a picture of an integrated dance group called Access Dance Company. I went to my first disability pride march over 25 years ago. We've grown in our pride. One of the breakthroughs in the disability community in the 70s was in reframing the problems of disability. Here's a chart developed by the field of disability studies to explain. This has helped us rethink the solutions to the real problems. You'll see in the columns in this contrasting models of disability on one side the medical deficit model where disability is defined as a deficiency or abnormality compared to the social model definition which is disability is a difference from typical or average. In the medical deficit model we see that being disabled is a negative thing, inherently bad or sad. Disability resides in the individual body or person that's flawed. The remedy for disability related problems is cure or what we call normalization which is trying to make the person look as normal as we possibly can. The agent of remedy is the professional, a medical professional or social worker usually who helps or fixes as much as possible. In the social model the problems are described differently. Being disabled in itself is neutral, a quality or feature of many humans. Disability resides in the interaction between the individual, the environment, and the society. The remedy is change in this interaction. For example, creation of access, accommodations and exclusive policies and practices and the agent of remedy can be the individual, him or herself, a disabled peer, an advocate, an assistant or a technology which changes the interaction. The world community of disabled people has created the United Nations Treaty, the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities signed by 160 countries. Guess which one of the countries hasn't fully ratified this? The United States? That's another story, another conference. Why aren't the fantastic successes of this movement common knowledge in every modern history book? It's because of the medical deficit model. Much of the public continues to believe that before we can have good lives we have to get cured. Hollywood is not helping.  In this film, sorry about the spoiler, a handsome, rich young man with a flamboyant lifestyle becomes quadriplegic in a vehicle accident. He's deeply depressed and wants to end his life. His family hires an adorable young woman, his caregiver and the couple have a romance. Yet the young man persists in his suicidal thoughts and in the film, heroically, yes, bravely achieves this goal. It's sad, but then the final scene shows the young woman smiling wistfully about his suicide as if it really turned out fine that he died because disability is intolerable.  But with mentors and peer counseling and great new assistive technologies like cool wheelchairs, screen readers and voice activated computers and assistance from other people, disabled people can have good lives and do great things. A few films and HBO series are trying to challenge these stereotypes. The progress is slow. With disability, you may not be able to do everything by yourself. This is one of the strange benefits of disability. Our culture's illusion of rugged self-reliance may have to be interrupted with some connection and help. Does disability have something to offer us as a society? An example is the wheelchair ramps and elevators instead of stairs. Benefits everyone, moms with strollers, the piano mover, the caterer's cart. But really can there possibly be anything good about disability? Often the experiences of disabled people are thought to be about those people. But sometimes they apply to everyone. For people with asthma and allergies to environmental toxins, we use the metaphor canaries in the mines. In the old days, the canaries put in the mine shafts, alerted miners to toxic levels of gases.  Our increasingly polluted environments in our increasingly polluted environments, people with chemical sensitivities alert us to address pollution before none of us can breathe. Habin Gurma is a lawyer and an author. She's the first person who's both deaf and blind to graduate from Harvard Law School. Did I catch some of you thinking that's amazing? Well, it is. Not because she's disabled or went to Harvard. That's nice. But because she's a human being. Human beings are amazing. On her website, she writes that people with disabilities drive innovation. Disability creates a limit. Limits inspire new inventions. One of the first typewriters was developed in Italy in the 1800s by a blind astronomer named Wanda Diaz-Mersed who developed a non-visual system for studying stellar radiation called sonification. This helps her sighted colleagues who need non-visual ways to find patterns and huge amounts of visual data from stellar photos. In the early years of my work in the disability community, I had an epiphany, a big insight. I attended a conference in Germany about the independent living movement where disabled people are supported to live in the community. The 40 of us worked together to develop a non-visual system for studying stellar radiation called sonification. This helps her sighted colleagues who need non-visual ways to find patterns and huge amounts of visual data to live in the community. The 40 of us were quite a collection of different bodies and ways of moving and communicating. One beautiful young woman named Elka was just completing medical school training. She had no arms. Our group included people with crutches, walkers and wheelchairs, blind and hearing impaired. We had fun laughing and sharing our stories. One night we viewed a documentary about the impact of the Holocaust on disabled people. 120,000 people with physical, mental and emotional disabilities were killed first as practice for the final solution, the killing of 6 million Jews and millions of others. We were all crying as the old newsreel described disabled children and adults as miserable, their suffering as in human, the cost for such unworthy life as an enormous burden on society. I realized the German people better understood the extremes of eugenics. The next day we took a break from these painful issues at this conference. The entire group went on an outing to a local village to sightsee and taste the restaurant fair. We broke up into small groups to explore the town. Later in the market plaza I noticed the startled glances of the local townspeople. Maybe they thought we'd escape from the circus. But for me, I felt a liberating sense, a belonging to the whole world's community of different people. We were such a rich collection of experiences, perspectives and skills. No matter that the world couldn't appreciate our contributions, our unique value in the scheme of things, we were made all the more valuable about it. We are the world's best kept secret of coolest people. Spaces like Ed Robert's campus shown here enable us to find each other in a workable location with access features for people with physical, visual and hearing disabilities. We connect with each other and educate the public about our lives with visual art, theater, music, dance, song. Because of the common themes in our lives, we've created our own culture, which we probably call disability culture, with an emerging set of values that cross lines of country and language, like interdependence, solidarity among disability categories, celebrating all aspects of our lives besides disabilities such as race, ethnicity, class, genders, age. We find humor about everything in our lives. Our community has many comics, some in wheelchairs who call themselves sit-down stand-ups. This is Josh Blue, a popular comic with Ribble Palsy.  Some deaf people use hearing technologies, but many reject tests that screen out babies that could become deaf people, which could threaten the deaf community's existence. Does the broadest disability community want this new gene editing technology? Many individuals and families are hopeful, yet many feel jaded from the promise of cure, often exaggerated by the media, put into scientific grant proposals that promise cure just to justify funding basic science or the fascination of new technologies. Those who are connected to our community say we want good healthcare and needed services. We may imagine a cure someday. Wouldn't that be great? And yet we prioritize our rights to social inclusion, to removal of barriers to public spaces, accessible transportation, education, employment, to connection and acceptance of who we are just the way we are. In Iceland, Down syndrome is almost eliminated. There is not agreement that this is good. Sociologists Kitty Felker interviewed mothers of children with Down syndrome. They reported that before their babies were born, clinicians stressed the horrors of life with disabilities, while the families themselves described the satisfactions of raising disabled children. Sociologist Diane Beeson studied attitudes about genetic interventions in families. Some expressed reservations with the idea of admission standards, which seems to have the effect of reducing humans to their DNA. Here's Lydia Brown, one of our champion leaders of disability pride and a brilliant scholar. But are some disabled people or families defending our existence as a valid population because we're stuck with being disabled and what the heck other position can we take? Among other oppressed groups such as people of color, poor people and gay people, their inherent characteristics have been used as justification for mistreatment. Perhaps this has changed or may, we hope. With disability, once options may be limited, but hurtful stereotypes distort the public attitudes and how disabled people might internalize these perceptions. So it's difficult to know the true impact of disability on the individual's life experiences. Here are a few of my coworkers at the World Institute on Disability in a visit with Judy Heumann on the right. Judy is one of the most widely recognized disability rights activists in the world. Isn't it ironic that this population of people has fought so hard for a sense of pride in ourselves? We live in a tremendous time of success in achieving access and inclusion, civil rights protection and wonderful new assistive technologies and also a time when other technologies propose to eliminate this constituency. Yes, we might feel a bit defensive. The New York Times has this past year run a wonderful weekly column on disability. Here are some of the titles to lure you into reading. There's the link. They are revealing titles. For example, disability and the right to choose. The subtitle is, I'm pro-choice but aborting a fetus with a defect should not be a given. Here's another. Why is our existence as humans still being denied 27 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act? The myth of disability sob stories. The idea that we play up our impairments to gain unfair advantages is damaging. Trying to embrace a cure. The genetic illness my children have may soon be eliminated but what will be lost with it? Stories about disability don't have to be sad. I am not what people expect an eighth grader with a disability to be. I am happy. If you're in a wheelchair, segregation lives. As a black woman, I am keenly aware of being ushered through back ways, sketchy hallways and side entrances. Another mental illness is not a horror show. I discovered I was someone's idea of a ghoul or a zombie. In this New Yorker cartoon we see talking elephant heads growing on a potted plant. One says to the other, the scientists never stop to ask if they should only if they could. Other speakers, here we will explore the dangers of off-target mutations and unintended unforeseeable mistakes potentially caused by CRISPR-Cas9 and other interventions. Such mistakes as has been mentioned could have permanent impact on future generations. The unspoken messages of CRISPR-Cas9 are, it's not really eugenics if we just want to help selected women have healthy babies. Can we just employ a little eugenics to eliminate what we're sure are the worst baddest of the human defects? Isn't it worth the risk experimenting with the human genome to try to eliminate the clearly worst traits? We need to ask, can there be safeguards against crossing the lines of health into charged categories like skin color, facial structure, body size, hair and eye color and intelligence? Government regulations are suggested as a way to control for these dangers. Do we really think government regulations could hold any lines with the extremes of hate and fear of difference now exposed in our world directed at every marginalized group? Here are my recommendations. Banned germline editing on human embryos in the U.S. as is in most other countries. Conduct worldwide public dialogue to educate everyone about ethical concerns. Address the social justice issues of disability and disease in medical schools and training in genetic research. Seek out the voices of people with a full range of disabilities. All health professionals must adhere to high standards of unbiased prenatal counseling. Parents and teachers, raise issues of disability with your young people. Young people, raise disability with your parents and teachers. They need your help and understanding with these issues. For everyone you know, help each other get past disability as being about those people. Encourage everyone to get to know ordinary, cool, disabled people living creative lives. Fear of disability is not about them. Fear of disability is about fear, exclusion, limited connection with disabled people. Tell them fear of disability is about you. Get some help with that. So what does it mean to be human?  Disability like everything else about being human requires us to live with resilience and connection. Imagine our world where we've gotten so beyond our fear of difference that everyone is welcomed, not despite our differences but because of our differences, because we value difference. A world where everyone is welcomed as the first priority. Let's go for that world. So thanks to Dr. Saxton and Dr. Korn for those two talks. It turns out we're just about on schedule.


Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're welcome to Fix My Mix episode 33. Can you believe it? The show where we're all giving our ears some practice listening to each other's mixes and seeing if we can come up with some suggestions for how those mixes may be improved before people release them. I'm getting my birds waddled today aren't I? I cannot get it arrayed today. If you do release your music after getting a fix for your mix then you should release it through DistroKid, the sponsor of our show. There's a link for them in the description down below and if you follow that link and join up with DistroKid then you will be able to get a 7% discount off of their already cheap price which is very nice indeed. Lots to talk about in today's show actually I was having a great conversation with our guest off air before we came on. All the best conversations happened before and after the show for some reason, don't know why. But anyway we'll get on to that in a moment. I just want to say hi to the wonderful people who are here in the chat. First of all we have Pete Johns from Studio Live today. I was just over and I only, sorry Pete I only caught a little bit of your show this morning and during that little bit of your show you were talking about how basically you can't be bothered with lots of vocal comping and just use the presets. I love it. I'm going to tell people something completely different on today's show but I love that attitude. I love the vibe. Don't get too stressed about things folks. Have fun with it. We have Kevin Parrott here. There's several people that come on this show in the live chat every single week and I'm so glad to see that because aren't we all developing or what I'm growing through the show. It just gives you the chance isn't it to listen to lots of mixes and sort of develop your critiquing of a mix as well aren't they. Doug is here. I'll talk about Doug in a moment actually. We'll get back to Doug. Nice to see you here Doug. We've got the Mixed Club in here. Always nice to see the Mixed Club here. We have Neil Picard. We have a new name to me I think here. Hi nice to see you here from Sussex in the UK. Smart Arts Inc. I read that as Smart Arts Inc for some reason. Maybe he's. Anyway Keonra is here. Coffee in hand as always. Thank you for being here Keonra. I see that your Songtember's going well. Check out Keonra's channel for updates on Songtember. Yeah it's great to have you here folks. Do remember the people in the live chat play a very very important role in this show. I'll just a quick hello to somebody else there as well. Omni Collective Creative. You could see you play you play a very very important role. Sometimes even if it's for me and my guests it helps us to confirm that we're hearing certain things about mixes by the way. So it's you know it's very very helpful that you're taking part. Right. I'm glad I've got a guest today because I've got a feeling I'm going to get confused about a lot of things. I'm going to get distracted about a lot of things. A lot of things going on here in Creative Source at the moment. I mentioned Doug earlier because he rightly put a post in my Kate Walk Facebook group early on a few hours ago to congratulate the group on becoming a year old today and really really amazing that time's flown by. I'm so glad that this group has grown so quickly and that there's a really sort of active community there. But more so this community the community in there has got a great vibe too. It's just got a really really helpful respectful vibe in there. You know we have the odd issue very very rarely. Most people in there you know conduct themselves in a great way. So it's a great place to grow to learn about Kate Walk to learn about you know music production in general and I'm very very proud of it indeed. It's a year old and what I'm very proud about it one of the reasons I'm very proud about it is I wanted to create a group that had that kind of vibe that was you know very creative very nurturing especially to people who are new to recording. I wanted that and one of the reasons I wanted that is because I'd sinned that occur in another group on Facebook and that was the home recording studio zone and that group is founded and owned by the God himself of that group. Ricky T Brown who is my guest today? Have you ever been introduced as God before? Uh no. There you go.  Yeah well rumor has it. Yeah well well if you want proof of that check the Bible yeah check revelation. Yeah because we're not we're not doing that here we're not doing that here. It gives a Jordan. Jordan gives a very detailed description yes so you need to check it. Okay okay never ever bring religion up on on on a show on a channel. This is what I should have stuck to it. Anyway let's continue with the show um Ricky you've been a busy boy haven't you? You were right. First of all that t-shirt basically says your life at the moment doesn't it? Yes I love Fados. He does. You're right in the midst of this project of yours at the moment. You were telling me earlier about your vocalist what did she send you? Gee yeah she's wonderful but um mixing um her songs or songs she's vocal geez we got lots of tracks lots of lots of tracks man and you know what that means when you got lots of tracks. I don't think there is any shortcuts to some of this stuff if you want to get a good product you know I was talking about this on last week's show but well it's probably me it's probably me that I'm a bit slow with it all you know but um you look you can take that many tracks. You can take the Pete Johns approach which is nothing wrong with this by the way but Mr Mr Johns if you're still here um he's he's like I can't he bothered with lots of takes just try and get things in one take if you can all right and he likes to go that sort of free flowing uh sort of approach which is cool. Me I'm more in uh in the camp of I don't want to do 20 takes and pick the best but three four maybe five right but the fact is if you start doing that there's work involved isn't there you've got to do some editing of those I like to chop out the any background noises and things you get in there you start melodining all of it that takes time you know organizing it all getting the phrasing between them nice you know yeah so um Julieta in case you are watching or you're gonna watch this I love you babe but you've given me enough work enough work well this is what collaboration's all about it's about pushing people pushing people past their limits I probably sound like I'm stirring now I'm gonna no no it's it's it's as you could see I love so yes oh yeah it just takes time yeah it just takes time I've been mixing this one for the last month honestly oh you see oh oh odd it off odd it off not solid odd it off yeah Pete says he can't decide um if he's just lazy or just rock and roll I know Pete Pete is not a lazy guy but he doesn't like to fuss over details that's the thing about it is just just just sling it in yeah well no and there's something to be said for that isn't there's very much something to be said for that because we we do sometimes get bogged down in detail so I'm saying oh Pete Ricky I need to introduce introduce you to each other he's been working on this one for months Pete is this apparently this this this mix I think you need to find a compromise yeah yeah maybe yeah yeah yeah it could come in handy on this one actually yeah I like to get your you need to get what you've done so far on this show fix my mix and see what everyone's got to say about it actually that's that's that's an idea yeah well well in actual fact the one I'm working on now um yeah I'm getting it up on BandLab tomorrow so yeah oh give me a link give me a link I sent I sent it to you a few weeks ago didn't I I sent the mix to you and said yes you did listen to this that was terrifying I was like oh god oh god somebody's gonna give me an opinion on my mix now see now you know how I feel yeah and you keep threatening yeah yeah we're going to turn it around on on the guests there like they can put their stuff on there I've got some great feedback from you and Pete and and Dan and and people on that it was one of those situations it wasn't so much that I I couldn't judge it but I just cared a little bit more about it than than than I usually do so I wanted some other people listen to it anyway let's move on and have a listen to some mixes folks don't forget to take part in the live chat here um I'm very interested in what your ears are hearing with these mixes now um the first one that we've got up today first one I want to say to people this is an example of a cover song happy I'm happy to have cover songs on the show don't mind at all doesn't have to be original material um and this was one where in actual fact we just find this I I actually followed up and I'm normally too lazy to do follow-up emails but I actually did a little bit of a follow-up on this one to confirm a few things about this mix but I'll this is so I've got two emails to read out but I'll read you the first one then we'll listen to it and we'll talk about so um uh dear my hope you're safe and well um thank you very much Andre this has been sent in from Andre I don't know his surname or the group's name or I didn't know at the time anyway um anyway uh here's a bit of a different one from you lots of brass guitar and percussion etc it's an instrumental song I'll let uh Ricky just read out the title of it um yes um I've got a confession to make oh you can't see you can't see the screen can you I can't see you this is like a podcast to you isn't it all right so you don't you don't know what I'm doing at the moment then do you no I've no idea I mean I could see me but I could hear you folks I can't see you Ricky can't see you can't see us folks all right anyway so Ricky um this is um Henry Mancini cover uh the inspector theme okay so there's no vocals in this let's just let's just it is um I hope you like it I created all the arrangements on keyboard and asked some friends to play it's a worldwide collaboration guitar and bass from Brazil bass from Nigeria and I'm from Australia okay let's have a listen to this should be interesting Lord you know what I don't listen to these whole tracks before I play them on the show for the first time I maybe listen to the first couple of seconds I get yeah okay I read the email I you know I don't listen to the whole thing so that's the first time I've heard it all the way through I've got to tell you it's it's the wee hours of the morning here in Perth Western Australia and that woke me up what's that you Ricky yeah man I was just looking at all the comments coming in man the love it's getting some love isn't it it's getting some love being given to this and uh completely deserved um sometimes you you know you you hear a cover and it's you know you just feel like well it's a bit of a it's really a facsimile of the original but no this was just so well done to so well done mate didn't put a foot wrong at any point in this and uh I love that little bit of slap bass flourish wasn't that got me that yeah I was like yeah that wasn't expected yeah that wasn't expected but um fantastic job I was thinking with it I didn't know if the arrangement was um because I'm not familiar with the different versions of this I've heard this theme I've heard the original so right away I was like oh there's definitely something different in this arrangement to the original arrangement even though they kept the essence of the energy I don't know whether another arrangement's been done at some point and whether Andre and his friends have uh emulated or copied that arrangement I don't know but if if um uh these guys or if Andre came up with this arrangement then I'll say well done very very good arrangement carry on it Ricky I mean I'm interrupting yeah yeah um yeah yeah what can you say I mean it's supposed to be fixed my mix but yeah why try and fix it if it ain't broke man um this was just so good it was different to the original mm-hmm but he's he's captured the right elements I mean the brass arrangement it was excellent and I'm not sure whether he you know that was like all played live or if he was using you know some there's some good brass plugins out there that can give you that kind of thing well I actually emailed him about that because um yeah I've talked a bit about brass recently because I've criticized a couple of mixes recently which have had brass on them because I wasn't yeah didn't think they sounded that great but I tended to say to people that I thought there's more to do with the brass plugin rather than the mix itself they say they tend to even obviously most of them are sampled instruments but for some reason they tend to sound a little um synthetic or I don't know this yeah I think it's more about the way it's used you know I mean if if you understand what what all the articulations are yes you know a trumpet and how that's played then yeah you can do something really convincing but so when I heard this and I thought well this is the way I want my brass to sound it when I'm using brass right this is why I want it to sound so I emailed him but I've got some bad news this was not a virtual instrument this was some real brass so he said yeah it's really well recorded yeah the brass is played by a talented musician and producer his name is San Lima and he's from Brazil he did the trumpet solo as well I sent the concept idea and idea of my keyboard with virtual instruments I left two or three stems of the virtual brass to give him a boost but he sent me more than 10 stems to give a big band vibe the guitar player is also from Brazil he's super versatile virtuoso in rock and jazz brought in Brian sets of style to the solos yeah the bass players from Nigeria very precise and creative and the rest Andre did all himself drums percussion piano and keyboard everything's electric he said I'm a drummer but here in Sydney it's impossible to have an acoustic set so I tried my best to make it sound real yeah drums were killing it you know oh it was all cool it was all good this is fixed my mix though and it's very easy to say with this that there's just no problems with it there isn't really and the only thing I didn't like and a lot of people loved it I could see in the comments was the panning on the trumpets I explained myself so there was some very there was a couple of very noticeable parts where there was a very hard panned trumpet from the left and then it went to the right yes I don't mind that at all as a creative thing that was it was fun I just wouldn't do it quite so hard to me it was all completely in one ear and not the other or if you are going to do that what I would do for me this is what I'd try on that a little bit because it was a nice bit is perhaps have um that trumpet completely in the left but have all of its reverb or something in the right just to give a little bit of a sense of space because if you're a trumpet player in a room even if he's all the way over on the left hand side of the room up against the wall there's still going to be some reflections that you're going to hear on the right hand side of the room just see what I'm saying now it depends if you want that or not whether you're trying to get realistic or not for me I would have liked to have felt that I was more in a space and that yeah that trumpet player was over there in the room and that other trumpet player was over there I would have liked that and you may have felt that a little bit more if it wasn't quite so hard panned or as I say maybe balanced out with some delay you say that you say that Mike but um some themes that are mixed for television for example they'll do exactly what he's done there where you would have like a trumpet line one bit will come out on the right and then the second part come out on the left and that kind of thing it's not unusual if you're mixing it for um for film and that kind of thing those things will happen now if you were mixing it for a record I think maybe then um you might take a slightly different approach you know maybe similar to what you just suggested but um it didn't sound unnatural to me not enough for me to say well I think the you know the panning could have done a little bit more work I mean I don't feel like that about it it was really well done and when I was listening through the cans of course um yeah everything that's kind of where it was supposed to be and it was really dynamic and things happened where they were supposed to so it's like yeah I'll take your point Ricky but you're wrong I mean obviously you're wrong yeah I know it's your show yeah and this is the point about it this is very very very important thing to remember with mixing things right you know this is where your artistic interpretation comes in very much and and what you're looking for what your goals are um it's just something to be aware of of the different effects that you could have by different techniques you've you've got to go down your own road come to a decision can't please everyone um but you know there's not too much so let's be honest with it it was a very well mixed track there's not much to fix here so the only thing we can really say is um is that well done really great fun somebody said play it again I may do that right at the end of the show I reckon that would be a fun outro for the show today let's keep that in mind so um I think we should hear talking about the fact that um this was a cover version um you can actually release cover versions people often ask this can you release cover versions on DistroKid and yes you can I've released cover versions on DistroKid um you have to pay a fee so on DistroKid like everything else uh that you upload if it's your own material you pay that $19.99 a year and you can upload as many songs as you want you could do thousands of songs if you want folks upload it to DistroKid $19.99 and you won't have to pay a single penny more but when it comes to covers you have to pay and from memory when I did it I had to pay a dollar one dollar per cover per year okay so look I've goodness me so that's cheap if you want to have you yeah that's all you have to pay to use someone else's material strange you know what Ricky I just want to say on my system here sort of back in system I've got here I've got two Ricky T Browns yeah that's one there you are I don't know which one of you I don't know which one of you to have can can you kill one please I'll kill this one I was how are we going can you see now or I can see you now yeah you can see oh good oh good yeah good job you couldn't see me earlier than that with what I was doing anyway I can't middle finger anymore all right I'll get rid of the other Ricky T Brown all right then so that is my DistroKid advert for today so folks don't forget if you do sign up for DistroKid can do covers cost you a dollar per cover per year and just so you know it takes out a lot of the complication with it as well you don't have to be applying to use the cover or you don't have to be seeking permission from individual DistroKid does all of that stuff for you all right you just upload it takes a little longer than usual because it takes them some time to do that okay so my experience when you upload covers it can seem to remember it took about a week or something before it was approved I think that's fine I think it's a very good no it's very very good and then um yeah you get your music covers or non-covers out to the world iTunes where are we what's the places now Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Deezer, Dozer, Bill's a Bozer I don't know they're all TikTok, Flipflop there's so many different places now I sound like an old man don't I let's have a listen to another song shall we um I am going to I'm going to our next track you can now introduce it can't you Ricky yes because you can see the screen I'll just pop that up while I load the song up right the next song is by David Ola and the name is Leave It In Ruins here we go look I'll read out sorry I'm having technical issues here I'm trying to have you cover for me so this is uh this is from David Ola he said hi I made this track for fun playing around with some free instruments it's a dramatic orchestra track and almost every instrument I used was free I'm a beginner producer and I'm taking digital audio arts at university soon I'm glad this is good timing because I did a another video a couple or two or three weeks ago I did a video about a free orchestra it's called The Free Orchestra from Project Sam that's a great little plugin yeah so I did a video a couple of days ago well I wanted to take a look at a range of different free orchestra plugins which are available there's a few available it's amazing really when you think about the work that actually has to go into creating some sort of orchestra plugin the fact that there's things you can get some of them for free is kind of remarkable really and I won't say which one was number one but um I'll let people watch the video for that check out my channel for that folks but um so it's great that people are making use of these plugins and people make some great music we have a lot of people on the show here who use free plugins for different things and you can definitely get some great results so let's have a listen to this from David I'll leave it in ruins can I go first I'm gonna go through all right um uh god this is this is a useless show to watch isn't it this is a useless blooming show fix my mix crikey folks I wish I'd listened to more than a couple of minutes to some of these songs before I let them on the show because there's not much to fix about this there's not much to fix about this one again this is the second one in the road oh my god I'm trying hard so I'm trying hard to find something wrong with it and I'm reaching at scores even I'll reach at scores if I want to never mind everyone else reaches at straws um uh what do you say the only thing I could find my one little note was nothing to do with the mix at all was the piano there was some little inaccuracies in the piano just in a couple of places of the playing it was just a little bit sloppy maybe the piano was a tad too loud a tiny bit there's no issues with this I hope I haven't taken away all your talking points rookie go no no no right this is somebody that's just about to go into um music college yeah apparently so yeah wow um doesn't need to go he's no no well no he'll only get better if he goes if he does that um but my gosh that was so good I mean I've done you know a few tracks in this genre and um I'm I'm listening to what this guy can do already um it's really quite amazing you know you you can hear that straight away being put on to you know being a a theme for you know kind of like dark subjected kind of program you know like vampires and shit yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah it takes it took me somewhere immediately with that and I was completely drawn in by it um yeah a lot of Mike says it's it's a hard one to um well Mimo says um Mimo says pick up the repetitive piano um I'm not sure where Mimo's going with this mate so what do you mean no that was for my teeth that was for my teeth that's the glue that's the glue for the whole track I'd say Mimo um so I can sing it even yes exactly it's the motif um just just there was one pop space in there and I thought oh maybe that here to pick up your point on the last track was the padding of the strings I think I thought I thought when the violins came they should have been in the middle because they were dominating the space at that point in time it wasn't like it was an accompaniment so I felt that it should have been in the middle at that point but beyond that it's it's bloody good I've been listening if I came up with that I'd be well pleased with it yeah it's the sort of thing that I would come up with for a demo if I was got a new plug in to show off and my problem is is that um I go long strings I'm coming up you know I've usually got an hour to create a little piece of music like this to demonstrate a play I'm going right as soon as I hit any kind of staccato strings everything becomes Game of Thrones I was dun dun dun it's very everything's Game of Thrones-esque that's the trap I'm falling or Marvel or Marvel that's the hardest thing about creating these pieces of music is is actually being different in any way right that's there's a little bit of a sameness to it and not criticizing this for that but yeah and then again your goal is not to be different or noticeable your goal is to support you know a piece of a piece of cinema or something like I assume with a piece like this you know so different if you were using the same arrangement and instrumentation but this was not for film or television whatsoever and this was a purely an orchestral piece there may be something like that piano could be deemed as a little too repetitive just for a sitting and listening to I would like to see it evolve from where it was it wasn't particularly long piece so it's okay but maybe it could evolve you know yeah you were talking about the you know the the repetitive of the piano kind of thing and there's composer who did the theme for Game of Thrones and Westworld I think his name is Ramsey Zhwadi I think his name is and he's a genius and if you listen to his themes they have a repeating piano and coat going all the way through it so I don't know that he was way off the mark in terms of saying we're not way off certainly yeah I mean what's the glue what's the glue melody for this track and that that cycling arpeggio on the piano is the thing that links everything you know I think you've done it really good you know I love about this type of music yeah is that this is never about being a virtuoso instrumentalist of any kind right you could have very rudimentary keyboard playing skills yeah produce wonderful pieces of music like this I don't know if you ever watched the youtuber Guy Mitchellmore I love his channel he's crazy and YouTube tells me things like this in the background it shows me what other channels people watch that watch my channel and I know that he's in he's always in the top two or three I know lots of people who watch this channel also watch his I don't know Guy at all but he seems like a wonderful person as well he comes off really nice in his videos but I love watching his creation process it's some similarities sometimes you know when I'm going at it for all of us really you know I mean you just have that flow in this year but again a lot of what he does is he lays down some quite repetitive motifs to as the glue for the whole thing and then the other instruments are more color around that motif you know and color and dynamics I guess through the range yeah I've watched a lot of his videos bike Guy Mitchellmore is actually the son of a famous BBC TV presenter that's right yeah Michael Mitchellmore was that yes he used to do the holiday program if you remember yes yes well that's his son and actually Guy Mitchellmore was a BBC he used to be afternoon regional news he used to work on the BBC and then he then at some point he left that and went straight into music composition kind of thing so there's there's quite a story behind him but he's mad as a hatter we've got a correction when you watch his videos you know we've got a correction here Cliff Mitchellcliff Mitchellmore that's it Cliff Mitchellmore isn't that's correct thanks for that we stand corrected we do yes Cliff Mitchellmore yeah good stuff there I really enjoyed that piece music I think we're just another one of those ones David Ola I think you've got a very promising future ahead of you as Ricky says you can only get bed I'm sure when you go off to uni you'll learn more about the craft of arranging these things and and all that but you've you've got the basic talent you're halfway there by the sounds of it let's hear something about DistroKid you want to release your music via DistroKid there's just a couple of things you need first of all the music itself here's mine in my door cakewalk and I'm exporting it to an uncompressed wave file for best results now the other thing you'll need is some artwork I just grabbed an old photo which I'd taken on the beach chucked on some text here and that's what I call art then I went over to DistroKid and I just have to fill in this extra easy form it's a no-brainer form you get helped all the way through with little hints and things you can't really do anything wrong you just go ahead and confirm a few things about your music and then you just have to actually upload the artwork and the song itself and DistroKid takes care of the rest it's going to send it out to all of the best platforms so that people can hear and buy your music I'm praying Ricky I'm praying God you're praying for a dud I'm praying for a dud no you're praying for a dud I'm praying for a dud I'm saying please I'm praying to God and praying to God she's not responding to me anyway uh yeah so let's go on to the third track uh Fat Fox out of touch this is something uh yeah out of touch we've had Fat Fox on the show before long time ago um so the they said in the email we wrote recording to produce this ourselves at home and will soon be releasing it through DistroKid good choice method vocals recording at home made booth moving blankets and PVC pipe a very good solution in my opinion I have to say a reasonable solution in certain circumstances guitars are PRSD DGT through a line six helix a lot of people give line six a lot of hate but let's see if we're going to into a Tascam us 2000 audio interface Tascam never use their audio interfaces ever but they always look good the specs and everything I had one of those um the 2000 bloody good interface yeah bloody it's like a firewire interface or something it's from that sort of era isn't it uh no it's a usb if I recall but um it's a really good really really good really good the only reason why I've stopped using it is because um they stopped updating the drivers it's it's a brilliant box it's the thing manufacturers if you're listening you've got to keep those drivers going for a long time please we don't want to be abandoned in the middle of a project yeah bass is a blend of di amp simulator drums are programmed into the door with some software keys and synths are a blend of program software synths and uh di levels please please let this be a terrible mix so that we can critique here we go yeah Mike your homework yeah your prep sucks today I have to tell you it sucks if this is one of those tv shows where one of the judges stood up and gave a whatever they they do well slam dunk or something like that what's her name again what's her name the group uh fat fox uh that was um this actually I don't think this was without uh some critique ability actually but anyway but Ricky you go first mate if you're going to criticize this this one you're looking for stuff really well yes yes and we are looking for this man I'm partial to this this kind of um rock and um they they nailed nailed nailed this one down because you know the arrangement um whether you're talking about the drums or whether the guitars I mean yes I thought the intro was a bit quirky with the right left thing going on I thought that was a bit quirky but once you got into the verse man it's like all right all right all right and then the chorus nice with our fat guitars coming in um and then the it never let you get bored of it because I mean even like the time signature changes towards the end of the track went went double time and then they went into some funk man you know I was doing a slow motion and they double typed it that's what I was in there you know um these guys they're brilliant they're brilliant I would buy that as it is yeah so I think any changes to it is merely about taste yes oh absolutely yeah it's not often that you get to well not on this show anyway it's not often that you get to hear um um tracks so well done so well thought out you know they they crafted this mix and I've got to tell them you know listen guys if you're watching you got a new fan today back was just brilliant blew me out the wall up well I agree with you almost on everything there and I really enjoyed it I mean certainly like uh it's just the energy it's so this is almost like what's different what all of us struggle with to be honest with you where um I mean there's complications in recording live bands to be honest with you uh you know bleed and phase issues and all that so don't ever think that just recording a live band is easy but the great thing about recording a live band is you get the energy of a live band so what most of us wrestle with in home studios these days is um how do we recreate that energy when we've multi-tracked everything you know when we've gone through the slightly tedious process of one thing at a time um if nothing else this track showed it could be it can be done because the energy was there of a live performance in my mind I was totally convinced that that's a band playing together yes yes it's very very good from that point so yeah like because can I just say one I like the vocals very much um very Debbie harry esque kind of a delivery there blondie kind of a delivery in there which I really like sort of laid back um the only thing with that is it's got to be right on top you know so those very interesting um choppy guitars that were going left and right uh just here in there I felt they were masking the vocal a little bit however the vocal could come up just a tad all those guitars uh could just come down a tad or cut out some frequencies in those guitars for vocals I it's on my headphones it could be different listening experience different just there was a there was a little harshness to those guitars at time like right just could be deemed as just a little bit harsh somebody suggests I think it was Doug that maybe they could have a little reverb echo on them so yeah maybe try that I would try that as Ricky says this is all grassman straws this is all very much there these are things you could try you could try them and then maybe it won't work out and you'll just keep exactly what you want but I felt that they were just a little piercing at times those choppy guitars not much I want to say that um people we've talked so much on the show about programmed drums and there's always this debate about whether programmed drums are any good and whether we should have uh um you know real drums this was one of the best examples I've heard of programmed drums it was just very very very very good guys if you're programming drums you know I I say don't use I don't like to use um you know with all the drum plugins you'll get these preset sort of rhythms and things I'll use them sometimes early on in the track just to get things going but I believe program the drums maybe not everyone can do that but if you can program the drums and then take care on the details and then you can get something like this because I promise you that when they've programmed these drums they've spent a lot of time on them a lot of time on nuances what they've spent time on okay um and that's the result you can get but I don't think there's any shortcuts to it I don't think it's something you just check them out I think um can I ask was one of the members are they an actual drummer themselves and they haven't actually said um okay I wouldn't surprise me um it sounds to me like a drummer knows when stuff's supposed to be played and those those um roles you know they they were in the right place and and captured the right energy when they were played and um it sounded real it really did yeah yeah if you hadn't said that it was programmed I would have thought that that was um yeah we got a nice drummer on this one um Andrew Kofi saying um you need to be a drummer to program drums properly I'll take your point Andrew um if you're not a drummer then you need to have like really studied uh drums probably I think working in a band um it helps you a lot so if you've spent some years you know as I did with with a band and you get to know you know what it's like to be in room with a drummer and how they work and how they think and you know um but yeah if not and and you know spend a lot of time studying drummers and and what they do um it's very very important but it's all about nuance it's it's all about there are uh some roles that um particular drums play as well that you know you probably need to understand you you need to understand what it feels like just through observation when that drummer goes from using a hi-hat in the verse to going over to the ride symbol in the chorus or whatever is how that changes the dynamic of a song um understanding how drum kits work like it's like any other kind of virtual instrument it could be you know what we were listening to earlier which is like orchestral piece we all got orchestral libraries are fingertips now but you need to now listen to orchestras and see uh how different you know what what role does the uh viola play as opposed to a violin for example generally in an orchestral piece so um it's it's you can't just get the plug in and think it's going to do all the work for you you've got to understand i have an understanding yeah yeah um uh what a great show really though in terms of this one was the classic thing this one was a classic very hard for us to get classic very hard to get our teeth into much here and i just got better and better i feel a little high you sure you didn't do this on purpose no i didn't i feel a little unkind in the sense that you know these some of these pieces of music receive more critique than they deserve or criticism than they they deserve by a long shot but no thanks to the people who sent it in if you're i want to say at this point if you're creating music and you want to send it into the show and you're suddenly nervous about sending please do send it into the show um try and uh take when you hear things like this which are very very well done just take that as encouragement as this is what's possible but we all start at zero and we all have to evolve through practice um over time so so it's very very useful i think for you to send your music into a place like it's very brave but it's also very useful you will get some constructive criticism from myself my guests and more importantly also from uh the lot the people in the live chat as well um so so don't be nervous if you're suddenly thinking oh my stuff isn't up to scratch i won't send it in after all please do send your music in um if for no other reason to give us a role give us a purpose in life yeah give us a job give us a job please but no um as as uh mr. Ozzie's saying here i feel today was very encouraged into all the music producers nice change it's true though you know it's nice to hear what's possible isn't it with with some fairly simple tools um you know i mean some people i think the last uh the group in their fat fox for example they were using quite a nice microphone in neumann 102 but the fact is they didn't it's not like they've got a massive studio it's not like they gave me a list of you know compressors and eqs that they've got yeah yeah there's it's they've got you know if you can get one or two pieces of nice gear to help you along along the way fantastic but to be honest with you if this was as i say recorded with a neumann 102 if it had been done with a road nt1a or an audio technica 80 2020 it wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever to this song because it was a good song it was good arrangement just a good song yeah you know so it i can't there's no way there's absolutely no way that if they'd used the 200 microphone on this song it would have been any worse i'm sorry to say this because i want people to follow my affiliate links and buy the expensive microphones but it's true all right let's you know i've got a date to go on today uh means to be off on a daytime date together so i have to make sure i'm on time uh finish up show i just want to say next week um i am back but not with fix my mix i'm having a week's break from fix my mix we are going to do featured artists remember the old featured artists live show different emphasis we're going to do featured artists and just kick back and listen to some music from the community without really critiquing the mix and things and i've got marlin on next week from um from white sea studio not white sea white noise studios oh my god i've got the channel name wrong sorry marlin yeah marlin's on next week um uh from white noise studio so um he he's always fun to have on i've asked him to bring his best sarcasm to the show because i find that marlin's sarcasm is infectious make sure you have your chain mail best on because you're going to get so as Doug said isn't that what it was today it was really done really next next week is the same show no i did ask some uh some people in my facebook group uh yesterday yesterday for me anyway to post links to their distro kid links just the music they've released um and i had a quick listen to a few there was quite a few posted in there i had to listen to a few already and this is really really good stuff on there actually really really impressive stuff coming out from the community so looking forward to that uh next week i think we will actually finish off with that uh henry manchini uh theme there the first thing we had on there so ricky i'll leave the final word to you any words of wisdom before we go yeah thank you for joining us this week for this classic episode of fix my mix and see you all very soon bye


She has a gift. She has a belief that all people deserve a quality education and she brings that. She will not let any barriers stand in the way for any of her learners. Jordan, it's not just about trying, it's doing. She has an idea and it's innovative and she does it and gets results. You just have to support her and Jordan runs with it and she gets things done and nothing's too big for her to take on. Jordan is unbelievable. So Four Directions is an academic program with a cultural focus. We've moved to a somatic focus for each year and that has really allowed us to create kind of a common energy and a common goal for staff and students together. You know that learning is it has such a significant impact for students. Inspiring me daily. They show up and they're willing to try. They are resilient and strong and courageous.


There's a ton of starchy foods that are not only safe to eat on the gundry diet but are actually good for you. And these are what are called resistance starches. These are sugars that we don't digest very well, but the bugs that live in our gut love.  Green plantains, green bananas, are resistant starches. Heakumup is a great resistant starch. So the more of these starches you use, the better. Also, the starches in millet and sorghum are quite a great starch because they're a resistant starch. So don't be afraid of those either. Plenty of starches on the Plant Paradox program. For a single video, click on the left to watch another great video and don't forget to visit my website for more of my best tips because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you.


Concept knowledge maps are a visual note-taking system that have several advantages over other note-taking strategies. These may be called patterns, mind maps, or concept grids, but for this video we're just going to call them CK maps. A CK map starts off with an anchor represented in this method by a line across the page. Instead of writing sentences, CK maps use key words or key phrases to organize information. So write this key phrase along the main line. Off of this line, sub-concepts or sub-categories can branch off. It's kind of like the trunk of a tree. You are going to draw new slashes off the main line that will help you organize the information into categories and subtypes. These are like the branches off the trunk of the tree. You can also subdivide the branches to twigs and leaves. Thus, the CK map shows relationships between things. Relationships are captured by the nodes or points between the intersections of the lines. This of course has a similarity to point form notes when taken in an outline format. So if a CK map is just like an outline, why would you use this format instead of a point form note? First, it's faster. You don't have to write as many words to show the relationships between things. Just draw another line and add some key words. Second, you can add material anywhere in the tree. You don't have to worry about not leaving sufficient space to add the indents. Third, you can do things with a CK map that you could never do with a point form note. For example, you could link different parts of the tree structure together. You might do this to indicate similarities between concepts while differences branch out. You can then use a very free-floating approach to taking your note. Fourth, CK maps are very good for tangents where a point form note is really not that helpful. Just draw another tree beside the first somewhere on the page. If you find that they are related later on, draw a connection between them. This is really helpful for when professors tend to wander around their topic and don't have a tightly organized approach to the topic. There are some disadvantages to CK maps. The first being, it's not a permanent note. If you leave this note for weeks or months, it may not make any sense to you when you come back. This means you have to review this note within the 24-hour period after making it in order to re-establish or establish that memory trace. So what can you do with CK maps? Well, CK maps are great for lectures, especially fast-talking professors. Second, they make great chapter reviews. Something that's very quick, very fast to help re-establish that neural trace. Third, they are a fast method for creating an outline for an in-class essay. I never share strategies that I've never used myself. In this case, for two years, I used nothing but CK maps in a biology program. And it worked. I got A's. I hope you find this method useful as well.