So, I'm going to talk about a language for financial contracts on blockchain. So, the idea is that there's been previous work on describing financial contracts using programming concepts from programming languages. What I'm going to show is how we've adapted that work to work on blockchain. We've got a language Marlowe and we have a tool meadow that allows you to interact to visualize what's going on with your Marlowe contract. I'll give you details of the language and what we can do with it. And I should stress, and I think this is true particularly of the presentation about Marlowe, this is work in progress. We've been doing this for a while. We've got to a stage where we're very pleased to present it to everyone, but we've got a lot of plans for things in the future. And those I will talk about at the end. So, let's get started. I think the best place to start is in the 1950s. If you think, if you look back and Phil was talking about the history of computing before there were computing machines, I'm going to take it a bit further forward. Look at the first, this is the first business computer. It was a Leo computer built by the Cambridge team for the Lions Cake Company. If you wanted to program that, you had to learn the machine code of that machine. Very low level instructions, and what you could do with that was simply code that machine. When the next machine came along, if you bought a computer from a different company, you had to learn a completely different language. So, you needed specialists to write programs for that sort of system. So that's not ideal, and it spurred the development. Though there is resistance at the start, you'll never be able to write efficient programs using these high level languages that were developed around 1960, Fortran, Algol, and so on. And they were developed to help program the computers that we see there. Often the compiler would be tied to the machine, but you were able to write a program. And perhaps with some ease, you're able to move it to another machine. But you still had to be a coder.  And really, that's the situation today. If you take out your MacBook or whatever and you want to program for it, you write programs in C++ or Java or maybe Haskell. And the situation is similar when you look at Blockchain. If you want to write programs to run on Ethereum, you have to use Solidity, a general purpose programming language. So you need to code. That immediately restricts the availability of these systems for general users. And it's a bit like the distinction between coding on a traditional machine and using something like Excel. I think we bandy around the figure that there are 10 times the number of Excel users than there are coders. And I think we could foresee a similar thing in the Blockchain world, that we would have general purpose languages like Solidity, like Plutus, that will allow us to write anything, code anything for the Blockchain. But what we've been trying to do is an experiment to look at something different. We're saying, let's look at the people who are actually using the language or potential groups of users. Look at a particular domain and try and express things in the language of the domain, not the language of the Blockchain. And this general approach is called, in the jargon, a domain-specific language. So you build a language that reflects the terminology, reflects the applications of that particular field. And so it's closer to the user. It's focused on the user, not on the technology. And people have been doing these things for a long time. You see them in different areas. And you get a whole lot of benefits from this sort of approach. One nice thing, if you look at a DSL in an area which is error-prone, to say the least, by designing the DSL in the right way, you can rule certain errors out from the start. When you've got your language, because it's working in a more restricted domain, you can analyze your programs, your contracts or whatever more easily, and you can make more accurate analyses. And you can design special purpose tools. So if you're focusing on something specific, not general, you get a whole lot of benefits from that. And just the final thing to say about this, a DSL is a language. So in some ways, we can have our cake and eat it. We can take our DSL and embed it in a general programming language if we wish. Use a few features from that. I'll show you something of that a bit later on. But also because it's what we have our programs, we can execute them. But also in the world of financial contracts, we could give evaluation of a contract. We could look at how we might simplify a contract. Is this contract the same as this contract? Because we're expressing them in that specialized language, we have those sorts of possibilities too. So I hope what I've done in this first part is give you a motivation for looking at DSLs in this space. Now what I would say is that financial DSLs aren't new. People have been looking at these for about 20 years. There's a model for this, worked by Simon, Peyton, Jones, particularly, but others have followed on from that in using constructs of functional programming to describe financial contracts. And what we've, our contribution here is to take that work and say what are the implications of putting these contracts onto blockchain? And I thought just to give you, in order to animate this a bit, I'll give you a simple example of a contract and then we'll look later on at how it gets modified when it gets onto blockchain. So the characters in these traditionally are always Alice, Bob, and in this case, Carol. Alice has some cash, Bob has a cat, Alice wants to buy Bob's cat, but Alice and Bob don't trust each other. So how can they, but they do both trust Carol. Carol's a mutual, a mutual friend of theirs, and they both trust her. She's, how can we work it that the money gets transferred to Bob only in the case that Alice, Bob gives a cat to Alice? Well, here's a model. Alice puts some money on the table in the contract, if you like, and she waits. She says, does the, am I getting the cat? Hello, behold, yes, she gets the cat. At which point she can see she's got the cat, she's happy. Carol can see that. So the two of them, oh, sorry. I mean, Bob can see that she's got the cat, he's given the cat. Carol agrees with Bob, he's given the cat, and the money gets transferred to Bob. So Carol and Bob here agree. Carol sees that Bob has done what he should do, so he gets the money. If we backtrack, whoops, what's the other situation? Alice puts the money on the table, she waits. She waits, the cat is sitting resolutely there, and she says, right, okay, Carol sees she's not, she's not got the cat, she and Alice agree, she gets the money back. So it's a simple, what's called an escrow contract. So we've got these two alternatives, either Carol can see and concur with somebody, the cat has been transferred, or she can see, the cat has stayed with Bob. So how can we turn that into a contract? The answer is, there's a bit of simplification going on in the examples I show you, but broadly, this is the contract we might expect to see. And in particular, the things I highlight in pink here are the things that allow us, these are the building blocks of the contract. We have an option to say when this condition becomes true, do what the contract here says. So we can wait for a condition to become true. We have a choice here, and what the choice says is, well, depending on what, whether this is true or not, we do the first contract or we do the second. But what's nice about that, you can see, I talked around the diagram before, I showed things moving around. But this gives you a concrete description of what should happen. So we have this language with a small number of these combining forms, when, and choice, and pay, and so on, that allow us to build a contract like that. Okay, so that's the second ingredient. We've talked about DSLs. We've talked about financial contracts. The third ingredient into which fits into this picture is just to tell you a tiny bit about the Cardano platform, just in case you're not aware of what that looks like. At the basis, we have the Cardano settlement layer. This is the blockchain with a very simple settlement layer. We're not doing complicated transactions. We're not doing complicated programming. It's not a general-purpose programming platform like Ethereum. It's the level at which settlements take place. And for those of you who are aware of this distinction, it's a UTXO-based layer, not an account-based layer. So it's like Bitcoin rather than Ethereum. It's as simpler conceptually. And Manuel will be talking a lot more about this afternoon. So we have the Cardano SL. On top of that, we have Plutus. There's Phil explained in the first lecture. Plutus is a stripped-down. Plutus Platform is a functional programming platform for writing operations over that UTXO blockchain.  We have time. We have random numbers and so on. And we have wallets belonging to people who have accounts containing Aden. And what you can see is that Marlowe fits in here. It Marlowe fits on top of Plutus and provides this special-purpose access to special-purpose language for designing financial contracts. And those contracts can talk about things in the real world, the price of oil, a random choice. And it can interact with users' wallets. Now just to stress, I mean Marlowe is... And it was designed to fit into this stack, but you could also see it fitting into other stacks. You could say, let's run it on top of Yelle, on top of the Cardano computation layer. Run it on a side chain, for example. Or indeed, you could see it running on an entirely different platform like Ethereum. It's a general purpose in that sense. Marlowe contracts can be implemented on top of a number of different platforms. But the one we're concentrating on at the moment is running on top of Cardano SL. OK, so that's given you the three ingredients. We've got the idea of a DSL, we've got the idea of a financial contract running on that DSL, and we've got the Cardano platform. What does it mean to take a contract and run it on blockchain? What are the implications of saying, we're leaving the legal world, we're leaving the world of lawyers and fiat currency, if you like, and we're moving to a world of blockchain? So a typical contract in the old-fashioned sense is one which describes what should be the case. It says Alice should pay money to Bob, et cetera. But if Bob doesn't pay Alice when he should, Alice has recourse to the legal system. She can sue him. What can we do to replace that? What we can try and do is build mechanisms on blockchain that will make sure that the right things happen. We can build contracts which will enforce themselves. So that's one aspect of moving things onto blockchain, which is very nice, get rid of the legal system. There might be disadvantages to that, but you can see in certain areas, if we can factor that out, that would be a good thing. I suppose the other thing, a note of caution, if you like, is the other thing that happens when you look at cryptocurrencies and you're thinking of running things on blockchain, these things are designed not to allow you to spend the same money twice. That's a good thing. If you have money in your pocket, you can't spend it twice. The problem is that a lot of the financial system depends on you spending money twice. The whole notion of credit allows you to spend money you don't have. So if you move to this self-enforcing model, take the completely radical approach, then credit and so on disappear. So I think you need then external providers of credit and so on and so forth. So it's not without complication in that regard. But we do hope that what we have to think about at the moment is concentrating on the first, trying to see how we write contracts in such a way that they're going to be self-enforceable. And there's a very nice phrase that I think is has been accredited to Buterin but potentially to other people. This idea that you have what's called crypto-economics. You're putting together cryptology to cryptography to make the past irrefutable. One of the key features of distributed ledger technology is that the ledger can't be changed. It's there forever. So the past is protected by cryptography and then you use financial incentives to shape people's behavior in the future. So it's that combination of... which makes it intellectually, I think, a fascinating area to work in. And I think the other point to make here, and this is one that becomes crucial, you'll see a bit later on, is that there are two things we need to do in order to shape behavior. We need to make sure nothing bad happens. Obviously, we don't want money to be spent twice, but the blockchain will support us in that. If the contract says money goes from Bob to Alice, it should go from Bob to Alice and not from Bob to Carol. But we equally well have to avoid walk-away. We have to prevent the situation where some money gets put into a contract. And I can see nothing good is going to come out of this for me, so I simply walk away. We have to design things in such a way that once somebody has signed up to the contract, they are incentivized to carry on... to carry on participating. Or the contract in some way ensures that their walk-away can't subvert what is meant to happen. So that's something to bear in mind. Bad behavior we don't want, we don't want to be able to sub-sent themselves. OK, so Marlowe, I can finally talk about Marlowe. And in a nutshell, OK, this is perhaps for... slightly more technical. We've implemented Marlowe. It's a Haskell data type, so it's an embedded DSL. It's embedded in the Haskell programming language. We've got an executable semantic, so it's completely formally specified by writing a Haskell program what this language does. We've got an implementation on the Cardano Mockchain. So as it stands, the implementation of Marlowe is the biggest Plutus contract working on Mockchain. Because effectively what we've done, this is Alex, who's on the Marlowe team, has written a Marlowe interpreter, if you like, as a Plutus contract. If you remember, you could see the fill was showing the two sorts of code, the code that runs on-chain, the code that runs off-chain. What we have is the code that runs on-chain, and that enforces that Marlowe contracts on the blockchain are enforced. They only do what they do. We've got some work on analysis for these contracts. We're doing some work on proving properties of the contract. And we've got a simulation in this system meadow, which I'll show you a bit later on. And what we have to think about... I'm not going to say a huge amount about this. It's something that's on the agenda for the Plutus project and for Marlowe in the next few months. It's thinking about how we deal with oracles, observations, things coming from the real world. How do you generate random values, for example? You want a source of randomness. How do you incorporate that into a contract? One simple way of thinking about it is that you can model an observation simply as a value that has got a signature that is agreed by every participant in the contract. And that provides... In the end, that's what a... It will have to be whatever mechanism you use. It will have to be a mechanism which is trusted by all participants. So just saying to participants, you must sign this off in some way, is not a bad approximation of reality. But I'm not really going to say much more about that. The things I really wanted to talk about are twofold. In order for contracts to work, in order to make sure that contracts don't fail, we require people to commit cash upfront.  So you say I'm going to put 100 ADA into this contract. If everybody else involved simply walks away, you will get that money back after a finite time. So our commitments say you commit for a finite period. We need to, as I say, we need to avoid walk away. But if you think about it, a contract can't require you, contract running on blockchain, whatever, can't require you to make a commitment. It's not that the modality is just wrong there. So we can't require a commitment. We can only ask for a commitment. And so when we ask for a commitment, if I ask for you to commit 100 ADA for 20 blocks, I have to give you a timeout. I have to require you to answer within a finite amount of time. Not only are our commitments bounded, but the time we wait for someone to make a commitment is itself bounded. If you like, we're not... Running the contract on the blockchain doesn't make anything happen. It's important to... It makes nothing happen off the blockchain. What it does do is allow things to happen. So it's permissive. Instead of making a payment, what the contract will do is allow you to claim the payment. So it's a... If you like, you're pulling stuff out of the contract. The contract is not itself pushing things to happen in the real world. So commitments, if you like, this is the summary of what we have done to the traditional contract languages in order to make them work on blockchain. So here's our escrow contract. Remember, we've got a when. We wait for a decision, and then we make a choice. How does that vary? What do we do differently in our language? Well, first of all, we only wait for a finite time. But what we're doing here is we're saying, when this happens, do this. But what if this never happens? Does the contract live forever? Potentially, there's no reason it shouldn't. You could program it to do that. But we want expressly to rule that out. So we have to think about each of our constructs having this timeout added to it. So we say, that happens up to block 90. So there we've got our... So now we're saying, we've up to block 90, when this happens, we do this. What happens if we get to block 90 and that hasn't happened? What we have to do is provide an alternative. So we provide the alternative that says what happens if we get to that point and we trigger this at timeout if we've not triggered the when. So we add timeouts and we add extra actions to our contracts, extra contracts to be executed when timeouts happen. So there is our... There's our escrow contract, but we have to do something extra. And I have to shrink this because it gets a bit bigger. What we have to do is put around that some sort of cash commitment. And here you can see Alice... I remember Alice was wanting to pay 15,000 ADA for her for the cat. So in executing the contract, we put that commitment around it. And what have we got in here? We're saying this contract says wait for Alice to make a commitment of this amount. It says make the commitment up to time 100. After that it can be redeemed. You can get your money back after 100. But it also says this is the time you wait for Alice to make the commitment. So we only wait up to block 10. Alice hasn't made the commitment by then. What we do is whatever sits there. So our commitments have this... Our commitments have themselves, these two timeouts and this remedial action here. So what we've done, as I say, is we've taken the constructs from these previous approaches and just embellished them with these timeouts and added the notion of a commitment. Okay. I can show you Marlowe here is the... What I'm showing, I should say, this is formerly version 1.3 of Marlowe. It's the version that's reported in the paper that we've published about this. It's the version that's implemented in Meadow. We are already looking at adding one or two constructs. But you're seeing a consistent presentation of here of what's in the paper, what's in Meadow. So what do we add? You can see we've got this commitment to cash. We've got a way of redeeming a cash commitment. We've got a way of making a payment. So here what we're saying is we're making a payment from one person to another of a certain amount of money. That payment can happen if the person doing the payment is being made, claims it within a particular time, otherwise you follow this contract. Again, with the timeout, it's a very remedial action. And we're able to combine contracts together like that. And that's pretty much it. It's a small compact language. If you read Haskell, you can see it's pretty standard Haskell. And I've just added a couple more examples. This is a very simple futures contract. I think of Alice and Bob put in, committed a certain amount of money, and then effectively at the delivery date, depending on how the spot price relates to the forward price, then certain payments are made. I've grayed out the bits here, which are to do with timeouts and remedial actions. So if you like, the real functionality is in the colored part. And you can see that we've had to add these things. And there's a question that we're thinking about. How easy is it to take a non-blockchainized contract and turn it into one that works on blockchain? That's something that we're thinking about at the moment. So we've got a simple futures contract there. This is a deposit incentive contract. So Alice commits 100 ADA, Bob commits 20 ADA. If Alice chooses during the period up to 100 to get her money back, they both get the money back. Otherwise, if you reach the point 100, Alice gets her money and Bob's. So it's a very simple sort of, we call it a deposit incentive. She's getting a reward for locking her money up for that period. And the reason I put this up is I'm going to show you how this works in Meadow in a few minutes. Okay, so I think I've shown you that. Now let me say a tiny bit about what it means to embed Marlowe in Haskell. I was playing a tiny bit faster and loose earlier on when I showed you this contract. Because in fact, these things like majority, chose and redeem original are not things that are defined in Marlowe. They're things that we've chosen to use the embedding in Haskell to define. But I think the way to think of these is that they are effectively abbreviations. We're saying here's a name for a little bit of a contract. Or they're simple templates. Here's a name for a very simple function or template that generates a contract according to one or two inputs or arguments. So we're taking, we can just use a very small part of the functional language Haskell to make our contract look that much more readable. So for example, we might pay chosen might be the fact that the majority have chosen the result pay. And we might have that the majority choose an option X. This is the template, this is the function. If two of Alice, Bob and Carol have chosen X. So we're able to build up a top level contract just by writing some simple names, simple naming of contracts and simple variable contracts to give us the top level result. So I think you could say okay, you're using half your users because you're writing programs. But I think what you think of here is we're just writing abbreviations. I think we're staying within an area of safety. This is a sample of one, but I was travelling up on the train at the weekend and sitting next to a friend who's a journalist and he was saying, what are you talking about on Tuesday? I said, oh, it's this. And I showed him this contract. He said, oh, I can understand that. He said, it's a bit like the sort of formulas I write if I write something in Excel. And I said, I'm going to quote you on that. Because it's, you know, he didn't, I didn't offer him 20 quid. There was no incentive, no financial incentives to get him to say that. So I think what we are doing here is working at a level where we're writing denotational descriptions of simple contracts. An obvious way of building up a complicated description is to add some simple abbreviations. Okay, so we use embedding. Now, what are we doing for time? Okay, let me say a bit about implementation. Because we've done a number of different things here. We have inside Haskell, you can run, we've written a small step semantics for our DSL. So you can run that in Haskell. If you're comfortable with doing things in Haskell, that's fine. What we've also done is build a tool that allows you to understand more visually what a contract is doing.  I know, I'm going to show you this. Let me just describe a tiny bit of what the layout is here. On the left, we have a block representation of contracts. So what you can see here, for example, these are all the contracts, possible sorts of contracts you can write. And in each of these holes, you can put a certain sort of, some of them require money, some of them require observations, some require other contracts. So you can build up complicated contracts like this by assembling these blocks together. It's a visual rendering of this, of the Haskell data type. What you can see in the top right-hand corner is the Haskell representation of that. And if you prefer text blocks, you might think, whoa, that's a lot more readable. But we're providing facilities for both kinds of things. Also here, we've got facilities for stepping through understanding how your contract is going to behave. And I will show you that now. I hope. Okay. Now, this is a bit more, I've blown it up a bit. So what have we got here? We have got, okay, with some of the abbreviations removed. So Alice has become one and Bob has become two. They're just abbreviations for, they're enumerating the participants. So what we have ways, you can see here, you can convert from the blockly to code. You can convert code here to blockly. So we're able to move between those two forms. What else have we got? Well, what else we have is, you can look inside the contract and perhaps we don't want to do that particularly, but we'll see what happens. But we can provide input and in order to help you step through your contract, we can tell you which inputs you can, we make sense to write. You can, there's a manual that you can choose to put in whatever input you like. But we're saying, actually, the sorts of inputs you want to make are these. So let's add, let's say at this step, we want to do this action and then we can execute. And what happens there? You can see the contract, you can't see, the contract has shrunk if you look at the top. We now got a smaller contract because we've executed the first commitment. We've advanced by one block and then let's make another commitment here. We'll say do that action. You'll see the current block will advance to two and you should see the contract up here will advance. So the contract is simpler now and we're getting different choices. We're getting different choices here. So let's choose, should we choose zero? What's the choice going to be? So you can see we have expanded that out and I'll show you how we can deal with this expansion problem in a second. Let's just make the choice of one. Let's add that action and then execute. And now what have we got? You can see the contract here is now perfectly readable and we can see the contract up here is readable. And what this is saying is that we're going to redeem both the original commitments because we made a choice before the contract expired. We were waiting 100 steps if you like. So what we've done here is we're going to redeem. We're allowing both participants to redeem things and that's the end of the contract. The contract is exhausted now. So what you can do is you can design your own contracts. You can execute a single step through them using this visual interface. But the one thing I haven't shown you, which I want to show you now, is that I talked about doing this as an embedded contract. And what we can do is we provide an embedded editor. Oh! Now, this only works if you run the web server. So excuse me for... Oh, okay. Oh, no. Right, okay. Let's... Right, okay. I set this up in such a way that I would be off the internet. And of course, if you don't run the local web server, your demo doesn't work. Right, I will not try and recover in real time. But what you are... Let me explain what you could do here. You get an editor for Haskell. Within the browser, you're able to convert that Haskell, that embedded contract, into a pure Marlowe contract and then execute it in Meadow. Oh, the nightmares of doing... I maybe do it after the end of the talk, but let me crack on with the talk. Where are you? So we've seen that you can do... You can interact with your contract in this way. Ah! Right, okay. Let's carry on. So we've got this in-browser simulation, and we can convert. We can go right from a Haskell embedded contract through to pure Marlowe and then through to an interaction. Good. But I think the thing we're most excited about is that one great thing about... When it was announced there was going to be Plutus Fest, it's surprising how much a deadline moves the project on. I think both the Marlowe project and the Plutus project. There's been a lot of checking in on the repositories in the last few weeks. So what we have on the mock chain, this simulation of the Cardano settlement layer, is that we have a single Plutus script that will run every Marlowe contract. That's running on UTXO. That's a real stripped-down. It's an extended UTXO. It's stronger than Bitcoin, but it's way simpler than Ethereum. You know, you don't have all these processes and, you know, potential race conditions and everything else. It's a very simple, functional model. And what we have is this contract language running on that. And as I say, it checks that the contract does all it should, and it checks that it doesn't do anything else. And it's been... It's the most complicated Plutus program so far, because it's effectively a universal machine for this small language. We can do some analysis. We can ask questions like, these contracts are all finite. As you probably guessed, because we have time-outs, we can ensure that the behavior that each contract has is finite. And that's, I think, no due diligence would allow a financial institution to issue things that weren't finite. I mean, there's quite... There's a lot of restrictions on what sort of financial instruments can be produced, perhaps not enough in the light of what happened ten years ago. But the fact a financial contract should be finite is something we can take for granted. So we're able to do... But they may be big. We're able to do analyses using automated techniques like SMT solving to check whether a contract can do something bad, for example. Can it make a fail-a action? And so doing that checking, we can guarantee that nothing bad happens. Working programs, what are we thinking about? We're thinking about what templates can we produce? What do traditional financial contracts look like when we put them into Marlowe? When we put them onto blockchain with the restrictions that we've designed into the language. And we're very pleased to be working with business analysts, because it's not something that we... This isn't something that we can do as programming language researchers. It's not our... It's a way out of our comfort zone, but we will be working with people to make sure that we get the right set of contracts running on... templates for contracts running on Cardano. We need to think, and this is one of the things that will be happening in the Plutus world as well as the Marlowe world, we have to think about how to charge for running a contract. What sort of charge do we make? Do we make it simpler if somebody uses a template which is already on the blockchain? What happens if people use libraries that are already on the blockchain? There's an interesting set of questions around how you shape behavior of users by the way you charge for executing contracts. We need to think about that. We need to think about syntax. We can write contracts in this format. So Alex has been working, one of the teams has been working on this. It's a parenthesis-free syntax, which there will be certain programming communities who will be happier to see this than one which is parenthesis-heavy. Sorry? Possibly. This looks like Ruby to me in regard... But let's not argue about contrary syntax. It's always a good thing to argue about. We've added one or two constructs to the language that I've shown you. We've added a simple version of a while loop, which complements the when and just some things that allow us to write simple definitions within Marlowe itself.  How much are we going to leave as part of the embedding? That's a bit of work we need to think about. We're working on formalizing the semantics of this. Pablo's doing a long way towards having a formalization of what's going on and proving results in that formalization. So not only can we say... The analysis I was talking about earlier would say for this contract, can it generate a failed pay action? What we can do if we use theorem proving is we can say all these contracts, all this class of contracts will have this good property. And also we need to think... There are questions about how we... This was something Phil showed. There are two components to compiling a contract. We've done the difficult bit of putting the on-chain, getting the on-chain code to work, but we need to complete the work on wallets. And also there are questions about, as contracts get bigger, this is something Agilos alluded to earlier, there are questions about whether we might put some parts of a contract on the main chain, the Cardano SL, but other parts of a contract might sit on a side chain running Cardano CL. So these are all questions which remain to be resolved. Thinking about, I said this earlier, adding commitments and timeouts automatically, trying to find default ways of doing that. And completing that integration with Cardano SL. I think I'm overrunning my time, so I'm going to, whoa, oh, that's the trouble with cutting and pasting, that wasn't meant to happen. You might ask the question, why is it called Marlowe? And I thought I would answer that question. Christopher Marlowe is a very famous playwright. He's from Canterbury, as is the language. And he was somebody who died young. He lasted nearly 30 years. If Marlowe lasts 30 years, I'll be happy. But he was also somebody who was entrusted, he was a playwright, but also a spy for Queen Elizabeth I. So he was someone who was entrusted with valuable secrets. So we thought, Marlowe's a thing that was made in Canterbury and you will entrust perhaps with your valuables at some point, so hence the name. To conclude, this is what we've done. We've got a user-focused DSL. We can provide analyses. We can provide guarantees via formal proof. We can do smart user interfaces. And I think as a final point, I'd make the point that we see it as a proof of concept for other DSLs. We've shown the model that you can, we've shown that we can work successfully with a model where we run these in a very lean way. We have a single Plutus contract that executes all the Marlowe contracts. Of course, we might. It might be better to compile, sing individual Marlowe contracts than something else to look at. But we can see this as a proof of concept for other DSLs. I think the nice thing about DSLs is that you don't have to do everything. So I think what we've done is explore a design space here. We've learnt some general things, but there might be other languages. Do you want to build a DSL for games, for example? That would require other components like committing to values, secretly committing to a value. And you could build a DSL to do that. We see there's lots of scope for doing interesting things in this area. And I don't think we're not at all wedded to doing it all in one language. The more we have, the more we have the better. So I think on that point, and this has worked, I've said this already about what we're thinking about for the future. So I think on that point, I will conclude. Thank you very much. Yeah, I was looking at the GitHub repo because I was going to throw it into our app generator for fun before coming. Right. And it's like 80 megabytes for JavaScript files. Right. I'm just curious where all that weight's coming from. The thing that didn't work, let me go back and make that work. What we're doing is we're running the Glasgow Haskell compiler inside a browser. Oh, sorry. We're running the Glasgow Haskell compiler inside the browser. So we have a JavaScript. We're running GHC inside GHC.js. Yes? Faye. Faye. But yeah, so that's what we're doing. So it's the embedded editor in Meadow that is doing that. We made a design decision in building Meadow that we didn't want to require people to download anything. But in practice, I think what may well happen is if you're using Haskell heavily as the language in which Marlowe is embedded, what you will do is just do your development in your ordinary Haskell environment. So you don't need to do the conversion from embedded Marlowe to pure Marlowe inside the browser. And that will strip out a whole lot of stuff. So that's the short answer. Is WebAssembly going to be on the radar for dealing with that issue specifically? I think you'll need to talk to people this afternoon. I mean, I know because we have, because IOHK used Haskell heavily, I think there is some thought about trying to put investment into the GHC.js community. But I know there's also, there are also people looking at compiling Haskell's WebAssembly. And that could be, and I think the Ethereum people are using WebAssembly for a future. I think I heard the gossip to that effect. So it may well be that WebAssembly becomes a big thing in this space, yeah. Okay, yes, one more. So you said you have Marlowe interpreter as a putus smart contract. Is there any intention, at least right now from IOHK to have the ability to write a Marlowe smart contract and then have that compile the putus? Yes, yeah, that's something that we'll think about. But given this, the Plutus Fest was coming up, we thought the quickest way to get it working is to have the interpreter. I don't see any reason, yeah, I think we'll try that. I mean, I don't know how it will compare in terms of efficiency or size or... I mean, because again, there are these, and this technology we've not really thought about. There's a question about how long contracts live on the blockchain. And it may be that if you compile them, they can live for a shorter period. I don't know. But I think there's a whole set of questions about the engineering of this that we've not quite... Yeah, yeah. There are no firm dates in here, but there will be a lot... We hope there'll be a lot more by mid-2019. But I was told, make no promises about timelines ever, and particularly not in public. So... Right, okay. But 2019, a lot can happen in a year. Thank you for the presentation. I'm working for an IT company, and we have a bank that has clients. But I would like to know, who are the clients for Marlowe? Is it an analyst, or you compare it to people who code with Excel? But do you think it's for the same type of client? I think there are two questions in there. I think the intention is that it's for people who are not coders. But I think in terms of specific business areas, I think that's something that we're exploring over the next few months. Because I think it's easy to say, blockchain is a solution. What's the problem? And I think it's a matter of finding what sorts of contracts will... It will make sense to look at in this way. So I think I don't have an answer to that. What we've been looking at is ensuring that we can provide a variety of contracts to people. So it's a further vision? It's a... We're working with business analysts that IOHK have employed to develop particular markets, to look at particular markets where this will be applicable. And then I think that will help us focus what we're doing. Yeah. So in a sense, it was speculative. It was technology... We've done a technology-driven development so far. We've got the technology. Now is the time to have a bit of business pull, I think. And when you are going to develop the business stuff, is there a partnership that's going to be... I can't comment on that. I don't know. Just because I'm not... I do the research here. I'm sure there are opportunities for partnering. Okay. Yeah. Oh, okay. Gerard says yes. Okay. Good.


The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence and severity of fibromyalgia among hospital visiting patients in Pakistan. The results revealed that 33.3% of the participants had fibromyalgia, with females being more than twice as likely to have fibromyalgia as compared to males. Additionally, the presence of diabetes, anxiety and rheumatoid arthritis, but not other comorbidities, advancing age and increased BMI were found to be significantly associated with FM. Furthermore, over 70% of those diagnosed with FM had been previously diagnosed as having musculoskeletal pain and 66% were on long-term onset therapy. Multiple regression analysis showed that FM severity was not influenced by comorbidities, marital status, education or economic status. A unique finding was a later age of menarchy and menstrual irregularity being associated with more severe fibromyalgia symptoms. This article was authored by Muhammad Ali Arif, Fibha Syed, Ralph Niazzi and others.


everybody we are live and you are in for a treat today I am you always hear me to say I talked to friends and that's what I do but today today is a really special day because these are two of if any of you have ever watched Anne of Green Gables one of my favorite movies and books of all time there's this thing called bosom buddies bosom buddies or or just sacred friends and these two women they're beautiful professional incredibly experts in brain health but more than that they have the heart of functional and integrative medicine and their dear friends in line and I am so excited to be here today with them today we're going to be talking about brain health and I will be trying to watch the feed on the side so if you guys have questions or comments or anything you want to know put it in the feed and if I don't get your questions we can go back later all three of us and we can pop in and answer your questions so feel free to comment add questions whatever you want to do in there and just a little housekeeping in a minute I will introduce both of my friends to you formally but if you need to find us you can find us at my website is Jill Carney hand.com you know where to find me also brand new YouTube channel where this will be played afterwards and if you just search my name on YouTube you'll find that and you can subscribe and Dr. Gadza her website is Suzanne GadzaMD.com is that right Suzanne? Yeah my GASTA integrative neurology. Okay thank you thank you thank you GASTA integrative neurology.com right and then Dr. Rusk I believe yours is your name right Eileen Naomi Rusk.com and the clinic healthybrain.clinic. Healthybrain.clinic and I'll put those in the comments so you don't have to remember that this is recorded so you can come back and watch it anytime if you like it please do share because I think we're gonna have some great tips on brain health and you know we talked a little bit forehand on what we're gonna do and I want this to be like you guys were sitting in on the coffee shop and us just talking about brain health so it's gonna be fun and casual but hopefully with some really practical tools for all of you so before we start I want to actually introduce these beautiful women Dr. Eileen Naomi Rusk on the upper left corner is a co-director of the healthybrain program in Colorado she has so many credentials so many things she's worked on so this intro won't even come close to doing her justice but what I love most is I'm gonna just talk from the heart and she is someone who is so science-based and yet intuitive and has really been an advocate for decades on trauma and the brain and trauma and illness and I love what she brings to Dr. Godz and I as more traditional allopathic doctors in the sense of understanding hope there goes a earring right out of the ear so she brings to us a lot of really great insight on how to help the nervous system change and how much that affects health and illness and I know as I've gotten to know her when I see patients now in the clinic they're so often where we reach a threshold of wellness and ability to get well and I always think of her it's like I have her sitting on my shoulder saying Jill have you thought about trauma because there's often a component of trauma to these illnesses like auto immunity and brain health and we'll dive into that today and then Dr. Godz she was in San Antonio and she recently moved here and we are so happy to have her in Colorado and she is a functional integrative neurologist which a lot of times my patients will ask for specialists like rheumatology gastroenterology neurology and the one to functional or integrative trained doctor and it's actually hard to find great functionally trained specialists so we have such a gem here with Dr. Godz both of her and I really believe in the power of immunoglobulins and hopefully we can talk a little bit about that today so go to their website they have so many more credentials than I shared but I love to get the personal bit in there and Dr. Russ let's start with you I'd love to hear just a little bit about your journey into brain health and neuropsychology like how did you get started what got your interest going your story you know what I look back first I'm so happy to be here it's fun it does feel like a little coffee clash so thanks a lot for inviting me you know when I think back I think of a pivotal moment in my own life when I was really electrocuted actually I was in a cabin in Northern Ontario I was young I was in my early teens and lightning struck the cabin I was in and it was partly in water and I remember that feeling of electricity going right through my body and the next few days were actually horrendous I guess I dissociated I didn't know it at the time I hallucinated a bit and I felt at that time I was kind of reconfigured in a way and it it led me to try to understand really more about how the brain works and how mental health works because that hallucinating for a few days was not fun so that was a pivotal moment for me a watershed time when I think I found my faith because I have a deep spiritual practice as well which I consider actually an important component of brain health so that's what integrated by my interest in science I actually became convinced I learned more about brain health at that time and I was very very young so I became a neuroscientist then I became a neuropsychologist interested in integrating brain mind and body but there was always a spiritual thread when that day when I was hit by that lightning bolt in that cabin I was like I found faith I remember that was kind of one of my first big prayers so that's a small story oh thank you so much for sharing isn't it funny how often the trauma suffering very strange experiences are the drivers to push us in a direction we maybe wouldn't have taken otherwise I don't agree that your gods I'd love to hear you as far as how did you get interested in neurology and even medicine way back then as far as medicine then neurology how the specialties goes tell us a little about your journey well I do want to thank you Jill for this opportunity for us to gather to share but also this incredible opportunity to work with both of you to try to change the lives of patients that are struggling so much so thank you so much both of you well you know I started off becoming a coach and I never thought I was smart enough to be a doctor and maybe I'm not I work really hard though I went to pharmacy school got my pharmacy degree and then said no I want to become a doctor and I remember going to speak to the Dean of the medical school and I said Dean Pastano what can I do to get into medical school I want to be a doctor I want to help people and he looked at my transcripts and he said you have a snowball's chance in hell of getting into medical school so the reason I tell that story is you know I think the reason I'm here today is it's it's God's grace it's the power of the universe it's how we are drawn to be and to do what we are called to do and live out our lives purpose so and I got interested in neurology I did love neuroscience I love the brain but back then you know neurology was the specialty of diagnosis and adios but I would be I'm happy to tell you that that has changed and then going into integrative neurology hasn't been a very long journey but I just began to see that we have to find other ways to help people got interested in root cause and a lot of because of you which how you help my daughter heal from a mold related illness and what I learned from you really brought me to where I am sitting right at this moment I'm very grateful and so my I feel like you too are some of the biggest blessings in my life because one thing I see in both of you is just the humility and the the thing is the more we know the more we realize all of us that we don't know right and yet you both are so beyond brilliant in what you bring in the dedication and how you view the patient and I know we all like when we're sitting in front of the patient to me that that is the ultimate humbling experience because the cases that we see are so complex and if you're listening out there and you're suffering or you feel hopeless I know one of the things we all talked about even before and I'd love to hear your comments on for those people who are listening and feel like whether it's the pandemic that's caused a lot of disruption in their life or whether they're dealing with a brain illness or a neurological illness or another type of autoimmune disease or toxic mold or Lyme disease or any of these things it's scary to be unwell and to not know especially I've found personally when my brain wasn't working I literally prayed to God with tears rolling down my face and said God can take anything please don't take my brain and I know if you're listening some of you can relate to that and thank goodness somehow he protected me and I've had times of brain fog and word finding and all the things that you might be experiencing but let's talk about that for a moment about the feeling that these people listening might be friends family or you as a listener if you're suffering what can we do to give hope and courage you want to start Dr. Gaston well yeah I've always said and I'm probably not the one don't quote me on this because I'm sure many people have said this but I've always said without hope no one could survive and that what is missing I believe in a lot of medical practices we have brilliant colleagues with brilliant physicians but it's the power of the heart and I think that's one thing for sure the three of us have is we are very heart centered and when our patient sits across from us I really think that that is a powerful healing force that is remarkable because maybe that's just the foothold that they need maybe that's just that one little piece that they can hold on to is I know Jill that's how people feel when they come in your office and Dr. Rusk in your office as well but absolutely we are in a time of that we need this more than ever Dr. Rusk we need love more than ever and I feel the same way about both of you I love sending patients to you and working with you with patients because I know they're taking care of really heart mind soul spirit and just being seen and just being held in that way is incredibly healing for people to know that there are people out there who really hold love and see their unique gifts qualities wounds and help turn those wounds into healing into their own wisdoms that they can then share that's that's how I feel when I see patients as well and you both do such a great job of that like I said I feel the same as like I know that when we share collaboration with patients I know that they're going to be so loved and taken care of and I know like Suzanne and I we recently had a gentleman that we both saw and he literally I think you asked him about what brings you joy and he wept and he said this poor man is lost hope and we are hopefully going to do some things that will give him hope again. Dr. Rusk any experiences or patients that come to mind we can obviously keep it confidential but just an experience that would would kind of bring this home as far as giving hope or or even some practical things you could do when you see someone like really really at the end of their rope. Yeah it's hard to talk about specific patients but yesterday a patient said to me that she felt actually I shared this with Dr. Jill yesterday a patient said you know I feel like I've only met a few really really special people in my life people who've come to me from the universe from God from source in a way and they they introduced me to Dr. Jill and they introduced me to you because you're the one who's you're the ones who are going to buoy me to hold me up and to usher me through this you're the ones who've given me hope again and I think it's true that a lot of our patients are at their wits end they've seen sometimes a hundred providers we've all seen patients who've seen a hundred providers who can't really get to the root cause or haven't looked for root cause yet so I feel in that way too we're willing to investigate we're willing to do the deeper study and more importantly we're willing to take the time to see all of them and and be on the journey with them so it's it's personalized it's beautiful and I'm so so grateful to work with you it's like finding sisters. Yeah I agree it's it's all sisters thing. So let's talk about practical you know again like I said I know I always my brain is my most precious organ so I and people I think take it for granted because we think about oh I got a scab on my arm or I got a heart issue I think we they forget and they also forget which will dive into this the brain is connected to the body which means if you have inflammation if you have auto immunity if you have infection if you have toxic exposure any of these things your brain it can be affected and what I found so let's dive first into say we're let's talk about like subjective cognitive decline that's a fancy word that we medical people use for when you have some memory issues or you have some you feel like you're not quite as sharp as you used to be and I would love both of you to kind of let's talk to the general person who's having some trouble what would that look like when should they be concerned to come call one of us or another doctor in their life what kinds of signs or symptoms would you say hey these are serious take them seriously Dr. Godz let's start with you what kinds of things would you recommend hey go see someone about those things well I always say that time is the essence when it comes to neuroplasticity and that we shouldn't wait until we're having a big problem right to try to do something about brain health and I just don't agree with when a patient says oh honey it's just I'm just getting old and I think we should have vivid vibrant movies memories into old age you see it in the blue zones right the people that live in the blue zones live in into old age and are not developing dementia so I think we should be concerned if we're not a short term memory of course word finding is probably the most common thing but every single day we should be working on improving memory we work we work out the exercise we want to have our bodies be fit we should be also creating a protocol for brain fitness when I was in neurology you know years ago we were taught that the brain was you got what you got it couldn't teach an old dog new tricks right and that if you had a stroke if you got a mess if you had a traumatic brain injury so sorry too bad diagnosed adios but in the 90s which was the decade of the brain that radically shifted and now we know that no that's really not true the brain really can heal itself and that that's my goal in this next decade of my career if God gives me those years is to really give people that hope that you may have been suffering for a long time but there are definitely things that we can do to improve your brain function we can build better brains every single day I love that because that is the core message of hope and I know like I'll talk just real briefly about some of the practical and then Dr. Rusko and I know next from you what kind of tips could people do to improve brain health and this could be simple lifestyle things I know we're all a big fan of simple and I've said this probably almost every time I talk but I think like we start with clean air clean water clean food I remember hearing Walter Korean quote maybe a year or two ago before he passed away that 80% of our toxic exposure environmentally is air nanoparticulate so from fumes and gases and and then of course in door air quality with like mold and other chemicals like off-gassing on the cabinets for meldehyde fluorine laminate fluorine there's so many things and people think oh new house I'm gonna be great new house is sometimes the worst for off-gassing the chemicals and then your old houses have mold so really thinking about air quality clean air clean water so drinking pure clean water out of non-plastic containers and clean food and again food is like oh does that really have to do with brain health I always feel like that's a foundation and I never have a one-size-fits-all diet but what I like to do is blow people's minds plant-based paleo because people think of this like bacon and butter paleo and I eat paleo diet but I am a plant-based eater I only need three times a week potentially I don't need any red meat and not everybody has to have this diet but I feel like the plants are so critical there are some people who get by with not a lot of animal protein and that's okay but I do find adding the eggs the fish clean you know grass for a free-range chicken also really critical for most people what do you guys think let's talk real quick about diet and then dr. Ruskin want to get to you about the special tips what's your opinion on diet dr. Ruskin what kind of a diet would you say is best for brain health you know plant-based diet is is data driven and best for brain health if people can get their guts assessed and get a sense of what's going on in their microbiome do they have parasites pathogens fungus candida I feel like that there's so much very very strong literature now on the the health of the gut and the impact of the vagus nerve which is that very long snaggy nerve that that travels from the gut to the brain and the brain to the gut very important people think about it as a as really a highway the highway between the gut and the brain and there's so many ways to stimulate the vagus nerve and in positive ways for both emotional health and and for gut health and for brain health so I know that wasn't your question but I just want to mention that as it pertains to perfect but also Vegas what what could they practically do for that because I get that question all the time what do I do for the vagus nerve well I know the two of you are hysterical because you always have gadgets you're the gadget girls this gadget well I really wasn't raised in the world of gadgets I was raised more in the world of what can we do in terms of social engagement in terms of cognitive strategies in terms of behavioral strategies and so you know the social engagement network as the vagus nerve there's a ventral and dorsal part of the vagus nerve and so social engaging in a very calm and loving way engages the vagus nerve humming engages the vagus nerve singing does to singing in community does to there's a one of my mentors Peter Levine who's one of the fathers of modern trauma therapy has a sound that he uses he may not have developed that sound but he says it's the voo sound so humming or vibrating this area is very very peaceful for the nervous system and stimulates the vagus nerve you guys have gadgets because I know Dr. Gas to actually just gave you one which I tried which I really liked so let's think about how we can combine these things these traditional social interaction cognitive behavioral trauma release strategies to make the vagus nerve healthy which directly ties to gut health and then directly ties to brain health and all the other ways and I want to actually go back to an important point about subjective cognitive impairment if that's okay because Dr. Gasti you answered that question really beautifully and then spoke about neuroplasticity but I guess my answer to the question even though you didn't ask me particularly is that I feel like it's important not to wonder people wonder and worry and worry and wonder for ever so long and no I don't think cognitive decline is part of normal aging and we know from a data-driven definition lexicon point of view there's subjective cognitive impairment that probably many people who are watching this have maybe experienced at times we have subjective cognitive impairment when we're like super anxious when we're super depressed our thinking isn't right because there's this very beautiful relationship between how we think and how we feel so sometimes you're you have subjective cognitive impairment as you age and it stays that way goes away or what's the word it modifies day to day that doesn't then lead to the next stages in progression which ultimately can lead to Alzheimer's disease but certainly don't necessarily the next stage is mild cognitive impairment which sometimes leads to which sometimes leads to dementia but the best way to find out is to get assessed to see a good neuropsychologist and just get some data get a baseline get baseline data don't start once you're really impaired so that's kind of a call for an invitation for everyone to sort of just get get serious about your thinking and nurture your your mind and care for your brain in that way by getting diagnosed I love it and I love that you're here Dr. Russ because Suzanne and I both you know allopathic model we haven't been taught to give all the respect that's deserved to your field but I love that you've taught no it's so important I love what you've taught us because we realize the critical component of a neuropsychologist in the game in the assessment and I know both of us like we couldn't do what we do without you because you give us that assessment and you can recommend a neuropsychiatric evaluation and some of the other tools and then even just the practical stuff like you said whether it's humming or breathing you bring this integral part and I love that with the Vegas nerve you're right we have gadgets I ran over to get one I'll show you in a minute so you can all laugh at me but but what I was gonna say is some of these things are free and really practical you don't have to have a couple thousand dollar device to do it so I love that Dr. God I want to give you a chance to chime in on Vegas nerve and food because the practical things what would you advise your patients with some sort of cognitive issues on diet first and then they go nerve or any sort of practical tips I wouldn't change the the recommendation that you have I love it you know we know now a healthy gut means a healthy body and a healthy brain leaky gut means leaky brain the blood brain barrier is very affected by gut health and we know that some neurodegenerative diseases maybe all for sure Parkinson's disease probably begins in the gut and then travels via the Vegas nerve to the brain so absolutely diet is the foundation of health and so is exercise you know movement increases some neurotrophic factors BDNF it's kind of the miracle grow for your neurons sleep is so important and nobody most people don't get enough sleep you can say I'll sleep when I die but you really will die younger I'm afraid and sleep disorder breathing is also very common as you age so we've got to know what our oxygenation levels are and I agree with you too it is the perfect storm that brings down the brain it's never one thing and Dr. Bredesen has shown us that right that it's the 36 holes in the roof it's your environment so it's your epigenetics it's your diet it's your gut it's how you handle stress it's your relationships it's all of those things and that's why it's so complicated they'll never be a pill we know that for Alzheimer's disease so we have to be taking these steps and following these foundations of health early because we know that Alzheimer's disease there are 30 million people in America suffering not from Alzheimer's but from cognitive impairment it probably begins at least two decades before presentation yeah so if we could get patients in our office in the 30s and 40s I get so excited when I do get these younger people and I tend to have a practice more in deep toxicity issues so chemical toxicity heavy metals and definitely mold which is so toxic to the brain I want to specifically talk about mold but we'll table that just for a second I'm getting so many fun ideas as I hear you guys talk because I want to talk about trauma too so I want to talk about trauma we'll come back to that we'll come back to mold one little thing on the diet when I mentioned a paleo paleo if you don't know is grain free again not everybody needs to be grain free a lot of people can tolerate like quinoa and rice and some of the non-gluten grains I recommend nearly 100% of my patients go gluten free dairy free sugar free alcohol free that's kind of a baseline for my patients because I see so many inflammatory complications from those foods those foods actually have the ability to create gluteal and casey amorphine which acts like a drug on the body if you have a permeable gut so because I just think that's a pretty simple basic thing to do in the beginning I'll usually start there and I wanted to mention one of the reasons I think paleo is so successful is not just because it's grain free but because grains are the most kind of common food source contaminated with mold toxins and I actually think part of the reason we see such success with paleo diets is the fact that you're actually eliminating a major source of mold in your diet let's talk trauma like I'll just show you really quick this is my gadget be a light and I won't put this on funny I like so if you can see a little red lights those are stimulating my mitochondria in the brain I use this I used to use it every day when I had mold now he's it maybe once a week if I have like I probably should have used it before this interview and I wouldn't be so silly but anyway that's all the be a light if anyone wonders and you can get those they're kind of expensive and I don't think you all need them there's other ways like Dr. Rusk and Dr. Godz said that you can that's not a vagal nerve stimulator just to be clear that's our red light therapy that goes right through the skull there's a piece I didn't show you that makes it even more funny right after it goes right up your nose and there's a light that shines right into my brain but I'll tell you what just me personally that's an alpha be a light has really when I was in the midst of mold I tried a lot of things like binders and clay and charcoal and stuff and that device actually for me really really helped to turn on my brain without a lot of with no drug or chemical effect and it doesn't work that way for everybody but we have studies on red light and do either one you want to comment on the red light in the brain I know you've both seen all the research yeah and I don't know Dr. Gast if you have any violites in your office but we do we have the gamma they have one now that's an alpha and gamma you know I like to use that again as like a tertiary thing I feel like all the things in people's lives internal factors that are root causes for dementia or cognitive problems external factors that are you know that are that are root causes as well I like to deal with those first and I considered this like a tertiary treatment even though it's so super fun but yeah we use the gamma for patients who have Alzheimer's disease or any type of neurodegenerative illness and I don't know the indication for other neurodegenerative illnesses but I do know about it for Alzheimer's disease and there's some very good data now actually with Parkinson's disease as well so I like to pair it with cognitive stimulation one of the neuroplasticity exercises I like to pair things for to optimize neuroplasticity I like to pair something like photobiomodulation with cognitive exercises or pair meditation with exercise or cognitive training after you've oxygenated the brain and increase the brain derived neurotrophic factors then to exercise so that's another brain health tip that I think people can can take into their lives think about pairing things I love it and I know if you notice she threw in a word there it's called biophotomodulation that's the name of that the technical term doctor got any comments on biophotomodulation or any other like vagal nerve stimulation anything technical that's fun and progressive but you may be more advanced well I remember one time you sent us a picture of you wearing your device while you were driving to the coffee shop I thought that is so smart just she's a time saver the other day I had a mask that looks like a Friday the 13th movie and the V light I'm like I'm going to walk the dogs and I don't care what people think of me and my neighbor she looked at me and I don't know what I was thinking but I think my neighbors think I'm a little crazy but it was fun to see the reactions oh your dogs love you well it's an exciting field photo bio modulation I think we're just scratching the surface and and what this may offer so I agree with both of you the neuro gamma device and the studies that they via light has done may reducing amyloid plaque reducing neuro inflammation so I totally think we should keep it in our toolbox you know breath work also is an easy way for to reset your vagal nerve I mean anybody can do that they treat train the Navy seals that on day number one is how to do breath work so but definitely it's important because you know I think COVID has cast upon us it may be a tsunami upon a tsunami now we were already dealing with high levels of neurodegenerative disease neuro psychiatric disease and Dr. Rusk and you and I have talked about this is that are we ready for what will what COVID will bring so all of these all of these tools are going to be very very much needed very needed and you know it's interesting with the vagal nerve one thing that people may not be aware of and I was actually surprised in understanding this recently tick-borne infections and viruses can actually infect the vagal nerve and so we often years ago I would see a lot of cases of small intestinal bacterial liver growth in Lyme disease or chronic infection and I knew that there was a correlation but I didn't really understand exactly how that worked and now I'm understanding that or Likia and certain forms of Borrelia and certain viruses like CMV can actually infect the vagus nerve and the vagus nerve it deals with the motility of the small bowel and so if you have that altered motility due to the infection in the nerve you have a stagnation it's like a pond that has no outflow and then pond scum builds up and that's when you get this overgrowth of things in your back in your small bowel then that affects your digestion and ability to get nutrients and causes all kinds of things creates some toxic waste that goes to your liver and then can go and have problems with the brain so it really is a cascade of events and you wouldn't necessarily think like what does Lyme have to do with vagus nerve but a lot of patients who have Lyme disease co-infections other viruses they actually have a lot of vagal dysfunction and so we're treating the gut but I love that we're talking about the vagus nerve because a real root issue is the vagal nerve dysfunction so I love that we're talking about that. Dr. Rusk you're an expert in trauma and I love that again you've really brought an awareness in my life to this and there's two types of trauma there's the trauma like a concussion like a physical trauma but there's also the psychological trauma and I'd love for you to dive in and I'll just frame it because I'm just really simple and especially the way I started I thought oh I'm fine I had a great childhood no trauma right but I want to frame it for you listeners because often you can have a great childhood wonderful parents and we all have some trauma and that could be your perception at a certain age of a some sort of a situation and how it affected you and how you felt about yourself or the world or whatever but I'd love Dr. Rusk if you want to talk just a little bit about trauma in the brain because I feel like this is a missing piece in functional medicine. Yeah I will I will speak to that just a little bit I guess I want to say that we all have adversity and we all have challenge and some people in the field call them microtrauma some people call them microtraumas and macro traumas big T little T so I think Dr. Jill what you were speaking to is yeah we all have family members maybe parenting that we had when we were younger maybe even birth trauma experience that didn't really jive with our own individual nervous system and I think I'll start there sometimes of course it can be more extreme sadly with children who are neglected which is a big type of trauma and people don't often look at neglect but but being forgotten about and not being seen I think that like both Dr. Gazda and you Dr. Jill agree that one of the biggest healers is to see people yeah and sometimes they've come to us just to be seen or their longing is just to be seen I think that's true for all of us so sometimes neglect and childhood can can actually leave the imprint of a very big trauma and I think a new relatively new field that I've been interested in for several decades is intergenerational trauma or ancestral trauma because we do carry imprints both physiologic in terms of illness states in fact I was just reading an article today on any myalgic and cephalomyelitis and the impact that that it brings with it an ancestral piece sometimes so I think it's good to just consider that we are just one link in a long chain and that sometimes we do bring trauma with us as well yes from early childhood so I think a lot of functional medicine and integrative practitioners should have a trauma-informed eye on their patients and some tools and also just for for listeners and for everyone to be more sensitive to our reactivity how angry we get how sad we get those can all have roots and trauma and trauma yes directly in fact it impacts the gut directly impacts the brain and the relationship and conversation between the two yeah and again I feel like functional medicine does a great job of looking for root cause so toxicity or infection or inflammation and they give credence to trauma but to me it's it's not just a side thing it's maybe one of the most important things we could do it's like the soup I see it as kind of like the stew that everything else brews in the immune system our inflammatory reactions the permeability of the gut it's like the stew the soup the broth that everything kind of stews in that somehow a blind spot sometimes yeah I'm gonna actually share a thing that you sent me right before our it's just like a beautiful diagram of the whole functional medicine view of the brain and trauma and then I'd love for both you to comment because they get a little much no it's beautiful fun hopefully you can also can you guys see that yes I won't leave it up for a long time because then you can't see us talking but um Dr. God's I you've just seen this now I'm sorry to put you on the spot but you're an expert isn't this a great way to look at this from Dr. Rusk and I would love to know any comments on this but I mean this really gives us like an overview of how we're looking at our patients and then Dr. Russ too I love for you both to comment on this great diagram Dr. Rusk this to me is the perfect storm right here it's all of these things that can lead to neurodegenerative disease or brain health reasons so I mean we could talk for an hour on each one that's right they're individually equally as important depending on the patient mm-hmm and let's use an example I mean I think that if we look at this model as doctors as Dr. Gaston says they're all relevant but some are going to be bigger or stand out more with certain people so some listeners might be say it might be like oh I'm very toxic I have a lot of toxins in my environment and that's really what's leading me to have my cognitive or brain health issues or put me at greater risk for brain health issues later on some people might say oh I've had I had a patient this week had maybe 13 head traumas that's going to kind of be the the lead magnet that is the focus that any of us will focus on as we look for root causes and I want to give credit to our mentor certainly a mentor of mine and I know yours Dr. Bredesen who really helped take make us look at the bigger picture we all felt it we all knew it but it's this approach that I think was inspired and you know fertilized by him looking at brain health from a functional medicine point of view and he changed things around with his aging paper in 2014 I think that was the date of that yeah and great recall and thanks for sharing you know what this first of all this is great I was so glad you shared it because I think it really gives our listeners a visual of the kind of like what we're thinking when we see them and how we're really looking at all the pieces of the puzzle and we like you said we may start what I always do is like oh my goodness there it might be a major infection or there's mold in the house so we'll start with those big players and then kind of as those things get resolved go into the mixture well sleep is a pretty big player food is a pretty big player so at the same time we're looking at all those factors and it's not a magic pill it's literally how many hours of sleep do you get for night what are you putting in your mouth for food and water it's really and it's kind of exciting because you don't have to pay $10,000 for a pill you actually can just change your diet and get some traction on your brain health and to me that's exciting because it's accessible to everyone it's really really accessible yeah so let's talk in the last few minutes what about resources no I know Dr. Rusk both of your websites are loaded with resources and I'm going to be sure that in the notes and in the chat box here we will have all of those websites but any favorite books that you recommend for patients you mentioned Dale Bredesen's book if you look at Bredesen on Amazon you'll find it what's the name of his book the end of Alzheimer's is this first book I think there's another one coming out though yeah his second book just was released I think it's called it's a program yeah Bredesen the Alzheimer's protocol or something like that definitely recommend those two Eric yes I just want to say Jill and Naomi I think what we're dealing with we are living in the 21st century of immunodeficiency and it's shocking to me how impaired most people's immune system is I mean COVID showed us that right you know why why should you get COVID obviously you were immune impaired for some reason it just wasn't bad luck but even look at autoimmune disease one in five Americans has autoimmune disease now that and and this new disease pans and pandas neuropsychiatric disease that and even a new specialty now psychoneuro immunology that's right that we have really got to get our immune systems healthy and this is more important than ever before and it's really because we live in such a toxic environment our immune systems are just totally overwhelmed and yes it's stress and yes it's trauma travels it's all of these things and knowing all of these things is truly how we can help people heal I love that and I love that this way I always say we're swimming in toxic soup and I always compare 20 years ago when I first started doing functional medicine we don't patient come in with Hashimoto's or menopause symptoms I do a little hormone work maybe a slight change in diet take out gluten they get better I don't see that anymore period it's really scary I really feel like people need to be focusing on you're the first person who said it it's simple enough clean air clean water clean food and I also like to say clean thinking I mean how our mindset is so important in this equation and we sometimes forget because we are in a toxic soup we also have choices about you know our thoughts yeah well you know that's a great way to kind of wrap our last you know five to six minutes or so let's wrap up with stress and the stress effect first of all I'd love if you guys have any studies or ideas or just background stress people like yeah everybody's stress right what what how does that affect our bodies and our brains because I think this isn't talked about enough Dr. Gasta you go first yeah go ahead rest you're the expert I am not yes yeah but I'll just briefly say you know stress is as bad as smoking you know it's really it's something that needs to be greatly recognized and again not to not that this is a discussion about COVID-19 but I think stress and fear are now at a higher level collectively across the globe and if we don't deal with stress then we are that's a great way to bring down your brain no question about that Dr. Ross can you comment yeah stress science has revealed that it has an incredibly impactful effect on our immune systems our cardiovascular health our obesity and and of course our brain health there's a very interesting new paper on how we think negativity negative thoughts it's actually I think a 2019 paper on patterns of negative thinking I just wrote a little blog on it and increases in amyloid and tau some proteins that are markers for the development of Alzheimer's disease so what was found was that patterns of negative thinking and just a quite a recent paper patterns of negative thinking as opposed to positive thinking and I'm not suggesting that you change your mindset and you change your thoughts automatically because that's a superficial not possible thing override to do we are who we are we have to be compassionate and gentle with how we think but to become more aware of our thoughts because in this paper what I was saying was that they showed in patients who didn't have Alzheimer's disease or any diagnosed neurodegenerative illness there was an increase in amyloid and tau if you both know the paper I'm not sure in people who had negative thoughts repetitive negative thinking so I think our our mindset our thoughts hold so much power and that's why I'm a firm believer in getting to know your mind nurturing your mind managing your mind with things like breath work mindfulness practices prayer manages your mind to settles focuses and is allows you to have some empowerment over what you think include that in your everyday neuroplasticity protocol I love it what about like I would love to know I know very always is it's funny because I'll get calls at the office what washing machine to use Dr. Jill and like who cares what washing machine I use but you want to know for you too and for me what do we do what do we do to combat stress what do we take so I'm gonna give you guys the opportunity to talk just briefly about like mind-body things and then if there's any like basic supplements that you wouldn't go without or basic practices what's your daily practice that you would never never or you you know really try to incorporate that your God said do you have any tips or things that you always try to make sure that happen every day for you well now that I'm here in Colorado I can say I'm so grateful that I can get out in nature every day there's something incredibly healing about the connectivity of nature and realizing that every little living thing matters good sleep don't call me after 10 I'll be in bed I'll be asleep Dr. Rusk I love it one night out in the crew and can you guess that is I love to the ends of my every every ounce of my being I'm a giver I guess my weakest link is self-care I need to do a better job of really nurturing myself but supplements oh gosh vitamin D3 now vitamin C cursitin omega-3 making sure my vitamin D levels are good a few others but those are probably the ones I would mention and having friends like you yeah Dr. Rusk what about you what are some daily tips that you do and then if there's any supplements if not that's okay too well I want to remind us that everything Dr. Gasta said was in this matrix of brain health really even even to the point of being able to rely on friends what I do I really need to move my body and I need to move my body in different ways and I need to do I love to do yoga and I love to walk and just be in nature and attune to the rhythm of nature I think that's what's most helpful to me to attune to the rhythm of nature and feel the kind of the rhythm of the earth I think that slows me down enough I take supplements I love my family I love my friends and you are the dearest and closest to me I pray I read a lot of sacred texts I try every morning to make sure that I I thank the universe and I thank all those mysterious forces for bringing me back into my body I say a special prayer after I wake up so those are some of the things I do I really really eat well and cook a lot I love feeding other people yes it reduces my stress I have to tell a little secret because people like these fun stories so sometimes Dr. Russ cooks for me and she gives me these containers they're all glass so there's non-toxic and on the lid she'll write special dinner and like one time the first time I happened I cried because you know how special that makes you feel when someone writes in permanent marker on a gift meal on her special glass dishes I literally was like this makes me feel so special that you wrote my name on it in permanent marker and she does she's a great cook and she that's one way she loves people is to feed them I and I've been privy to it because I forget to feed myself and she's like sweetheart are you eating today so I love it because you really do love people well that way have I cooked for you Dr. Gaston I guess she's so I've enjoyed I also realized that I have methylation issues in my family so I'm kind of I mean I'm pretty aware of certain familial issues speaking of ancestral physiology that I carry so I take a really good methylated complex and D3 I take K I have a little bit of heart heart disease early heart disease familial again so I take a lot of omega-3s C quercetin some lysine sometimes those kinds of things oh good these are fantastic yeah yeah oh and I would just echo sleep for me is like number one I can do anything I can be super human not really but you know if I get a good night's sleep and what's funny is years ago when I was so sick before you with Crohn's and all that and even before that when I didn't know I had celiac and I was eating gluten I needed like eight or nine hours of sleep now I can get six and a half or seven as long as I get lots of deep in rem and I get plenty like two hours or so I can actually feel really great six or six and a half or seven hours because the efficiency is so good so I think over my lifetime I've gone from you know probably very low efficiency at nine hours same amount of rem in deep now I can get six and a half or seven and like squeeze it in but you really need to look at not just the total time we I don't know most of us have an order ring which is a ring that tracks our sleep that's a great device there's other ones out there but this one's really cool because it can show you deep and REM and it can show you your heart rate variability which is a whole nother topic we'll have to come back to it can show you respiration rate your activity during the day I love it and I literally wake up and like how did I sleep even though I should know because I wake up I think a little coffee is good and I drink really really clean mycotoxin free coffee in the morning I love a spetal alkaline because it's a precursor of my favorite neurotransmitter a spetal choline and some is I'll combine that with herpazine which prevents the breakdown so I have more you know focus and concentration and then like they mentioned B vitamin vitamin D zinc minerals for me I tend to deplete in minerals because I don't absorb well so I love minerals and in some of the basics some of the basic detox stuff would be anesthetical cysteine and lipoic acid and milk thistle and glutathione and not everybody out there will tolerate all those and I don't recommend just getting everything we say you really need to individualize and there's no amount of supplements that can outwork a poor diet or lifestyle so that's why we didn't talk a lot about pills because everybody wants what supplement should I take for the brain and it's not that easy that's right so thanks for not thanks for not doing that because really it's a whole it's a whole life we can alter and change for positive neuroplasticity it is and I want to honor your time so we'll we'll close here in a minute but any last part in words of wisdom or hope giving to our listeners today I would just say that life should be good it should be full of joy we should have vibrant health it should be this constant state of enrichment we're always learning we're always growing and we're always loving more deeply and honoring our true sense of purpose and why we're here thank you that is so well said dr rusk I think that's a great that's a great summary of brain health because brain health is really lifestyle health emotional health mental health and so often we don't look like those and I want to invite people to really start thinking about their nervous systems and what they want their well how they want to feel how they want to think and I feel like that's not something we're taught about yet we're not we're not taught much about paying attention to how we feel but start just becoming more self-aware how we think how we how we feel and know that that's kind of the basis of beginning to take care of brain health yeah wonderful well said well thank you both so much for joining me I know we're gonna do this again sometime so you guys stay tuned and if there's things that you want to hear more about more topics more questions send them in because I will be sure and hear you so thank you both today for your time thank you so much for tonight so bye y'all bye