It's the final week! It's the final week! It's the final countdown! Jesus Christ! No, that wasn't it. I think you've done that almost every time. It's the final countdown! It's still horrendous. You know what it is? It makes the commercial ineffective.  You know what it is? It's like when the needle skips on your record.  You need to tell me... I like your reps though. I need positive reinforcement or else I'm just... Are we killing the dream? I just can't lie. The final countdown!  No, he's right. Adam, you have a very nice mustache. Just say nice things. This is true. You can do that. Just say nice things about other stuff. It's the final week for the MAPS Super Bundle and RGB Bundle promotion where if you enroll in those you get forum access for free. Next month, the forum is going up in price. Once you enroll, you're in for life but the price is going up next month.  This month you can get access to just the forum if you want. You can enroll in that at mindpumpmedia.com or you can get it for free by enrolling in either the RGB bundle which is MAPS Enabolic MAPS Performance and MAPS Aesthetic or enroll in the MAPS Super Bundle which is all of that plus MAPS Anywhere and MAPS Prime so basically it's either nine months of exercise programming or you get the whole shaboodle I just made that up. I like that word. Which gives you basically everything you need for incredible fitness performance and health and enroll in those you get the free you get the form access for free mindpumpmedia.com Alta Stefano, Adam Schaefer and Justin Andrews Are you going to commit to that mustache like that? What? Are you going to commit to that? Commit to what? The... The ends? Twisting out of the ends? What do you call that? There's the name for that. Uh, villain. Handlebars. No, these are handlebars. Yeah, that's like, um... It's kind of like a... Let's find out. ...thirties... You know. I just did it for... It's very old-timey. I just did it for fun but then I was looking at my phone so you guys see how nice it is? It's all shiny. And I inadvertently gazed upon my reflection.  On accident. Bro, you're a...  And I looked and I was like... Always be gazed. I was like, who let that handsome old-timey guy in here? And I'm like, that's me. You know what? Like, constant gazer. That should be your new name. He was searching... He was searching for approval from each of us and nobody wanted to give it to him. I know. He's like, hey guys, hey, hey. Hey guys, you see anything? That's like, what dude? Why you keep looking at me all weird? Like... Making twisting motions right here. You see this? What is it called? It's a handlebar, bro. No, it's not a handlebar. Yes, it is, motherfucker. Even when you twist it. Yes, bro. Okay, let me... Don't do that. I'm on... You Google twice and then all of a sudden you start talking in certainties. It is! Google says it is. It's right here. It's the first one. I'm on... Hold on a second. I'm on the art of manliness which is a legit website. All right, they are. And it says how to grow a handlebar mustache and it's showing you how to wax and twist out the ends. And you tease it out like that. And it's called a handlebar mustache. What you have, I think, is called a hammer stash. Ooh, hammer stash. Yeah, I think it's called a hammer stash. Really? If I'm not mistaken. Is there like a... It sounds like a wrestling movement because it goes down like that.  He got them in the hammer stash! The hammer stash is like the whole Kogan mustache. Let me see. It's called... No, that's not it either. I don't know what it's called, dude. Well, if you think of it like a motorcycle...  You could argue this, right? Because if you think of it like all handlebars, they have like monkey bar ones. They have straight handlebars. So they're both handlebars, right? But they're just done differently. You have like the old-timey style. I don't know what you call it yet. I'm looking it up right now. I just got... This is beautiful. Like hoop, hoop. Alright, here we go. The Tate Fletcher stash. Here we go. Tate's the only one I know that still does that. Tate has like five million things going on with his beard. He does. He does. I like it. I like... A little bit envious. Yeah, so you have the... Definitely. Oh, they got funny names here Did he have a mustache like yours? Or motorhead? That's a motorhead mustache that you're trying to get. Motorhead. Yeah. Lamy. Yes. Mine is kind of... Yeah, rest in peace. Mine is... I don't know. I've always referred to it as a handlebar mustache. Well, only because they grab on it and do things with your face, but it's not... Whoa. I don't think that's the actual name. Yes, she does. Honey, are you even getting into our personal life? Yeah. Suffocate me, babe. It's the Jowl Enhancer. I don't want to be able to breathe for 30 seconds. Oh, my God.  I just figured that out. I could do this, and it really gross. That's so gross. I'm going to bust that out just randomly. You know, it's my favorite when you do the predator. Oh, yeah. I just added some digital stuff. You went too far. Yeah, sorry. That was good, dude. That was a good movie. It was. The predator was good. Do you remember kids that used to do that all the time, that noise? That's definitely a 90s noise. Right? Yeah. That used to be a thing. Fuck, that's weird. I didn't know noises were like in style and out of style. You're right. Yeah, like they stayed in a time capsule. That was a 90s noise. Yeah. Remember, everybody used to do that. Everybody used to do that. I don't know. Whatever. You did it? Sal, you're not good with noises and stuff, though. At least you get me. I was part of the cool groups. But you know what? I'm not sure.  Probably what the nerdy kids did over on the... Shit, I hung out with both camps. Hold on a second. I'm guilty. Yeah, you have an excuse. He was stuck over this.  Don't know why? Don't sell me.  You can't make sounds. Google it. Oh, that's what it is. You can't make sounds. Oh, he's insecure because he can't make the noise. Because he can't sing. It's all related to singing. Okay. It's easy, bro. Right now, I want you to hold on. My lack of hanging out with you. Let's see right now. I want you to make... Influence my lack of sound strength. Okay. It's easy to put me wrong. All you got to do is make a robot sound right now. Hold on. I'll probably fail. I've never tried to... See? Yeah. He can't do it. Yes. That was amazing. Make it sound like slamming a door. Like slamming a door? I kind of believe that one. I believe that one. Well, see, part of being the cool kids is you can... I don't believe that one. I don't believe that one. I don't believe that one. Well, see, part of being the cool kids is you can...  Come on, give me another one. Good job. Yeah, yeah. Dang. So, you know a movie I watched the other day? Thunder and lightning. That was amazing that you guys need to go watch? What? Beauty and the Beast. Oh, God. You're tasting movies, bro. You are...  You are losing notches every time you mention a movie on this show. Listen, 50 Shades of Grey, Beauty and the Beast. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.  I told you guys that. The fact that you would even go and taste movies.  No, no, no, no, no. That's what I thought. You're going to sell us on Beauty and the Beast right now. You know why I don't believe you?  No, no, no, no.  Yes, it was. Because... I'll tell you why. Because you didn't... You don't like Westworld. What? I didn't say Westworld. You're eliminated from my... Yeah, dude. I didn't say that like Westworld. His, your taste is like... You do need to... No, no, no. Give me some of your favorite Netflix series. Wow. I was watching, yeah. Wow. Great show. How could you? I know. That's especially the stuff that you're into. That doesn't make sense. We talked for like three hours last night about all the... That topic we had last night with Don... Maybe that style was bored. I'll give you... I'll give you a benefit of that. What was so special about it? About what? Beauty and the Beast. Just the... The artistry of it was gorgeous, the singing, the performances. It was a great story, very emotional. It's the story of a girl falling in love with a beast. I mean, I'm sold. Who's cursed. And... They have the little candle guy that's like... Yeah, and he turns out to be a prince. Oh, wow. Yeah. It's a really good movie. Interesting. I've never seen a premise with that before. Ever. It's a really, really good movie. That's very original. What's her name? Who plays Beauty? Emma Watson. Is that her name? She was brilliant. Oh, Emma Watson. Yeah. Pervert fucker. Excuse me. Yeah. Yeah. Adam, what are your thoughts on Emma Watson? I don't know anything about her. I don't know.  You know who she is, dude. I don't. Yeah, you do. If I showed you a picture of her... Yeah, if you showed me a picture of an actress that's popular, yes, I would know that way, but I don't know names. I just don't. I'm not a celebrity chaser at all. Celebrity chaser. I'm not... I would be sitting at a restaurant with someone like... I love those names and athletes right now and the fucking... Totally different, bro. Sports. I collected baseball cars and she was a kid. Yeah, that's a celebrity. That's a celebrity. Adam's more of a cleat chaser. Yeah. You know, I think... He likes jock. Yeah, he likes sneakers. This actress. Emma Watson. Remember she was in Harry Potter. Yeah. And now she's... She's all groans up. Yeah. So what are we asking? What are you asking me about her? I don't know. What do you think about her? She's not my type. That's your type. Yeah. That's a way She's not pretty. She's not pretty. That's not my type. Not enough to know. Not enough to remember her name. So anyway, so check this out. Yeah. In Beauty and the Beast, there's all these people freaking out because they're saying that there's like these gay undertones in it because you know Gaston, his best friend in the cartoon or whatever? Of course. He's in the movie. In the movie, he's obviously... It's not outward, but you could tell he's got a thing for Gaston and that they probably hooked up at some point. Wow. Yeah. It's spicy. And anyway, it's like you really have to like do it to think that way, but there's all these parents are like... Oh, no. It's like, no, really? It's not that big of a deal. No, did that never happen? It's real life. Yeah. It was that big. Yeah. I understand my bubble. But it was good. I hope you guys watch it. Okay. I hope you guys check it out. Fair enough. Yeah, sure. Sure. I mean if... When's the last musical? Here's the thing, brother. It's okay. Yeah. It's okay to admit some of your weaknesses and you just are not a great movie critic. No. It's not one of your strengths. It's not one of your strengths and it's okay that that's not one of them and that Justin and I probably have a movie. Beauty and the Beast, the movie now, is one of the best movies you've seen. Sal gets to pass because he has a daughter. It makes sense. You can give all the passes you want. You're just not good at it, bro. It's not one of your strengths. So you should probably stay away from talking about the movies on air here because then you're going to direct to half a million people in a direction and they're going to stop listening to us because they're going to stop listening to us. Don't take your girlfriend out of the movie. We just got sponsored by Fandango, too. This is not good. If you like good stories with emotion and power and singing and dancing and dancing. Right. That's enough said. I mean, enough said. It has all of those elements. You know it's going to happen. And it was already done in a cartoon. Yeah. What's going to happen right away, too, because I said that like the forum will be on fire. All the Sal lovers. All right. Oh my God.  All 27 of you identify with him. Yeah. Why are you guys counted? Yeah. Why do you guys make a voice like that? You make high voice for just dramatic purposes. Those are the type of people that would love to go watch that. I could say, I love musicals. They talk like that.  I don't know. I don't know, man. You guys don't like musicals? No. You don't like musicals at all? No way. See this is the problem. No, I can't keep up with all of it. There's a part of your brain that's undeveloped. Like this is the thing that you're creating. Musicals are taking a lot of talent and art. Oh my God. I just swabbed all over my mic. Again? Yeah. Jesus. It's a mic. You know what? I don't like when, oh no, this one's not. I can appreciate the talent, dude, because I do have a musical background, but I do not like musicals. So you've never seen West Side Story? All of a sudden, hey, we're singing now and you thought we were just going to say something, but we're singing. Yeah, I did.  Sure. What about, God, what's that recent one? Oh, let me see Rob. You didn't watch that? Yeah, I have. Did you watch that shit? Yeah. Did you cry? No. Did you cry, Justin? Of course not. Yeah, you did. I don't cry at those things, dude, but I'll take like my wife to go see those things. I don't cry. What makes you cry? Just, you know. Tickle tussle. Yeah, tickle. Good tickle. Yeah.  For reals? No, I don't know. I feel like I don't know when I would cry. I cry like weird things. It'll just, something will hit me and it doesn't necessarily make sense. Like a sunset or something like that? Yeah, yeah. Like a sunset. A rainbow. Yeah.   I need that.  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I've seen you cry on air. Oh, you can tell me. Several, exactly. Several times. Hey, let me tell you. Just in Ren's story, if you don't, if you don't get choked up a little bit this season. Oh, see, now that's the stuff it makes me cry.   You're not a good human being if that doesn't lie down. That's true. If you don't get emotional. We'll call you out on that. You're not human. We can't be friends. Like that's just how I feel. But if you go to Beauty and the Beast and it doesn't tickle your tummy like it does Sal's, you can be totally normal. So don't feel weird about that. That's totally normal. It's more weird that he really enjoys things.   All right. The irony is this guy, the audience should know that like Sal turns down like these epic events and concerts and, you know, March Madness, sweet 16 games that would watch Beauty and the Beast. Yeah, exactly. That's the point that we're trying to make here. Boring. Yeah. Give it to us, Doug. Bring on the bear. Quas Today's Quas being brought to you by Chimera Coffee. It's the only coffee that is infused with all natural nutrients for a cleaner, calmer and more focused buzz without the crash. Click the Chimera link at mindpumpmedia.com and input the discount code to check out for 10% off. It's the motherfucking quas. The eagle has landed. All right. First up is Mal Frieder who is asking for you to elaborate on your greatest weakness is your greatest strength statement. Well, let's first correct that. Well, we never said that. It's opposite. Yeah. Your greatest weakness is not your greatest strength. Your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness. Okay. So finished out the rest. Yeah. That's the first part. And in contrast, what do you think about focusing on your strength and ignoring your weaknesses? Okay. So let's first address the first mess up of this. Yeah. Why don't you handle that one? Your greatest weakness is not your greatest strength. Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. And the difference is that what happens to us is we, whatever it may, and you could take this and it applies to, I feel like almost anything. You could even get into sports with this. But, you know, with business and your communication skills and your mindset and think of the things that have made you really, really successful, whether it be your drive, your intensity, your attention to detail, whatever that may be. And if you can separate yourself and pull back and actually look at that as a whole and ask yourself that, okay, so 90% of the time or a majority of the time that I have applied this, it's made me successful. But typically, it's also the same thing. Not typically all the time. It's also the thing that ends up getting you in trouble. And it's really tough for people to reflect and see that because it's their strength. Because it's your strength, you tend to just go like, well, this is what I'm great at. Like there's, I don't need to focus here in my life. I need to look at all these other areas that I'm not lacking on. And I'll give you an example with myself when this really came together for me was I'm very much so a go-getter, outspoken, vocal.  And that's such a great, and I allowed people to kind of feed that in me. And it continued to propel me. And it did. Like I saw a lot of success as a young kid and I was in leadership roles at a very early age in my life. But I also didn't realize that it could also hold me back. And because that was such a strength that I was continuing to fuel it so much, I didn't have this objective view of it either. I wasn't able to look back and go, wait a second though, how many times though did I speak too much?  And we could go all day long on, you know, the, and what happens when we are so hyper focused in one area, something, something's got to give. It's inevitable. Because if it's going to be that good, like you're going to put that much emphasis on that one thing, you have to, I mean, it's a balancing issue. Like you have to let some things go to the wayside. If you're trying to be the most well-rounded person ever, that ever existed, you're not going to be the strongest person in any one of those avenues. So it's just, it's an inevitability that, you know, something that you're so strong in and then you pour more effort in towards that, you know, you're going to have something that follows up that may get you into trouble. Well, here's the way I look at it and I'll use an easy, simple analogy. You know, let's say you're, one of your strengths and fitness is that you've got really good one rep max strength or you've got really low, good low rep strength. It's like your favorite thing to do. So that's all you do. All you ever do is that. So now it's become your weakness. Not in the sense that your one rep strength went down, but because you're so good at that and that's all you're good at, you end up hurting yourself. Your body forms to that. Yeah, you develop imbalances and so that's a very simple analogy, but that can be, you can take that and apply that to everything.  If your strength is in, you know, your organization, you can become fanatical about it and it could take away from everything else. But that's why the, that's why the reverse of this doesn't work because, you know, your, your greatest weakness is not going to be your greatest strength. Yeah, I just messed it up. Yeah. Well, it's just like, well, that's why we had it addressed at first. I mean, and I'm sure that's probably, this is a girl who you said, Doug, it's a female. That's probably why she asked this question in the first place was if you thought that's what we said, that's backwards. Your greatest weakness is your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. So now you're fostering a negative thing.  Like if you have something that you're really, really good at, here's how it can become a weakness.  Well, let's say, you know, someone like Adam that encounters a situation where he's not an effective leader. It's just a challenging situation. Here's what can happen with that. It's your strength. You think you're so awesome at it. Now you're being challenged with it. And a lot of people then avoid that situation because it destroys their perception of themselves.  You're struggling with that particular subject.   So, there's a lot of ways there. Well, this is, this goes back to, we talk a lot about awareness.  I mean, it doesn't have to be just, you know, working out in fitness. It's just these levels of awareness that, and I just wrote a post literally today in regards to this. So, if you want to get more into this and we could talk in depth about that, that post and what this pertains to. So, but then the next part that she gets into in contrast, do you think about focusing on your strengths and what does it say? What do we think about focusing on your strengths and ignoring your weakness?  I don't think that you just are, just naive to it or just totally disregarded. It's about mindset and mentality. And when you have a strength, you know, that's where you want to spend 80, 20 rule, like 80% of your time should be put into fueling the strength because obviously it's a strength of yours and the more energy you put into it, the further it's going to take you. The 20% of that time is, could be spent on the awareness piece and reflecting on that it's not the end all be all also that, okay, and also being able to look at it objectively and say, hey, this is a strength of mind. It's getting me this far. This is where a majority of my time is spent. But then also being able to step away from yourself and say, you know, where can this also get me in trouble? And always thinking like, and I love the, and I don't remember, I believe my buddy Mark was the first one that ever, you know, said this to me about desired outcome. And I believe desired outcome comes from Napoleon Hill if I remember correctly. And that's anytime I get into a situation, regardless of it somewhere, something that I'm really good at, I try and stop myself first and go, okay, what's my desired outcome? What do I want to come out of this situation? And then try to take steps to lead me in that direction and be able to step out of myself and look objectively and say, yeah, I know this is my strength. Yeah, I know I'm really good at this. But this also can be something that can be overwhelming for somebody or can get me in trouble if I'm not paying attention to it. You know, the thing that makes humans kind of, well, there's a lot of things that make humans special. But one of the things that makes humans special is our ability to specialize. And the more advanced we become, the more specialized our skills become. Let me give you an example. When the first cars were invented, there was one guy that built the whole car. You will not find that today. You will not find one guy that designs a car, puts it together, does everything, does the brakes, makes the tires, does all the things to make a car today. Instead, you find people who specialize in their particular area.  The guy that makes tires makes tires far better than the guy who knew how to make the whole car could make a tire. So humans are very good at this. This is what makes this pretty awesome. And so you want to focus on your strengths in that regard and that. You're going to find more value in getting really, really good at the stuff you're naturally good at and the stuff you enjoy getting good at. Because then you're going to get great at it. Focus on getting good at things that I hate and things that I'm not naturally good at. That's great and you'll bring them up, especially if they're taken away from your quality of life. But if I make that my focal point, you'll never be great at it. I'm never going to be great at basketball. I can get a lot better if I practice and I devote a lot of time to it. I'll be way better than I am now, but I'll never be great at it. I'm good at talking, so I'm going to focus on talking. One day I get great at it. And that's one of my strengths. And so when we say focus on your strengths and not so much on your weaknesses, that's what we mean. When you look at the things you're good at and typically the things you're good at are things you enjoy doing, if you focus your time and energy around those things, you're going to come out pretty amazing. First of all, you're going to learn way more and way easier. We've speculated before that this is kind of the future of education. Totally the future of education. We will start to... We have the abilities now to test kids and find things out at an early age. Or even what they're interested in. Yeah, exactly. I think it's really just the exposure and they'll naturally sort of navigate in that direction. I feel like we're on the pace to kind of create more of these channels to then allow kids to go further into that subject matter and to get really great at it and build a community around that one particular subject matter. That wasn't even available when we were going to school. We had to be this almighty, balanced, know every subject and have just a basic understanding. We know a little bit about a lot of things as a kid growing through the education system. We all have liberal... Liberal... Can somebody help me? Liberal? Thank you. Arts degree. No, if you...  Okay, so let's look at athletics, for example. In the early days of the Olympics, not the early, early days of the time of the Greeks, but let's say like the turn of the century, you had athletes... What they thought the best athletes were was these well-balanced athletes. So if you were in shot put, or if you threw the javelin, or if you ran long distance, or if you were a weightlifter, they all looked kind of the same as the belief was that a man, that was about 5'9", 5'10", 160-something pounds or whatever, that was the perfect athlete and that was who we were looking for to do these individual sports. Well, now you go to the Olympics and you look at a shot putter and a long distance runner and a weightlifter and they all look very different because they're so specialized in what they're doing and they've become so great at it and they perform... And those are extreme examples, of course, you listening aren't going to ever become so great that you're world-renowned at what you do. However, you're success... You're much more likely to be successful when you do the things that you're good at and you get great at them and you try to learn the things you want to learn.  It's almost impossible. There's a lot of friction there that you have to overcome.  But think of all the things you like.  I'll never forget when my son was... He might have been four. He was real young. He liked Thomas the Train which is like these little trains that you... They all have names on them. My son knew the names.  He knew all the names of the trains. He knew everything about them. There were trains that were twins. They were called twins and they were identical. At least what I thought was identical. He knew which one was which. And this was all because he liked it.  There's no way I could have made him learn something like that had he not been super passionate about it. That's how I was with baseball and the stats on players. I could tell you what college he went to. How many years he's been in the pros. His average batting average. Batting average. Yeah, totally. When you're into something like that you immerse yourself in it and it doesn't feel like work for you. And then you become amazing at it. Yeah, and I think that's the message behind all this. I know I threw numbers at like 80% of your time.  But the bottom line and the idea and the concept behind it is that you don't want to get hung up worrying about the things so much that you're not good at. You don't like doing. Find the things you're passionate about. Find the things that you enjoy doing and pour your heart into it.  Like she says in this question that they both contrast each other but they don't. They're actually connected. They're actually both parts of the same equation. And if you read the post that I just wrote about that's exactly what it's about. It's the same thing. You focus on your strengths and make them great but also be aware that your greatest strengths can become your greatest weakness. That's it. Our next question is Ben Burdett. How to deal with panic attacks anxiety and depression in healthy ways using exercise, nutrition and meditation. Beautiful. So let's start with meditation. We'll work backwards with meditation, nutrition and exercise. If you guys don't mind. With meditation something that I learned relatively recently with meditation and I've heard people call meditation a practice and I didn't really know what that meant. I just thought it meant like doing it regularly but it literally is like anything. It's like exercise. If you've never meditated you're not going to go in the gym and do a one hour intense workout. It's just not going to work that way. Number one, your body's not going to respond well. Number two, you're not going to know what you're doing and you're probably going to hurt yourself. And number three, it's not going to be enjoyable. Meditation is like that as well. So if you're not meditating now you're not going to start with a seven day a week 45 minute a day meditation practice. It's just not going to work that way. You have to get good at meditation and that takes a while. So when you start with meditation start with small increments. Five minutes time it. Five minutes a day you know five days a week or six days a week. Start with that when it gets and you'll know when it's time to bump it because you'll want to bump it up yourself and when you bump it up in five minute increments. So that's how you want to utilize meditation and in terms of how to meditate there's lots of great apps out there that can walk you through. Brain FM is one of our favorites and there's a guided meditation sequence on there where the guy will actually walk you through a meditation but really the nuts and bolts of meditation is just about being absolutely present and so one of the easiest things you can do is just focus on your breathing and literally think about your breathing as you're doing it which puts you where you're at. To me that like this is close to home for me because I feel like we're all trying to incorporate more of this in our lifestyle and it couldn't be further from the norm or easy for us just so you know. So as we talk about this I'm not talking like I'm an expert I'm talking about like a motherfucker that struggles with this and it's tough like it's a tough thing for me to do and I've tried lots of different things like I've messed with the lights and you know listening to music before and I've used the brain FM app personally for myself what has helped me more than anything else is what Sal just said there in the end is just focusing on my breathing it's such a simple technique you're not I'm not like overwhelming myself with a thought like I need to get into this deep meditation like I need to get like I think some people they put so much pressure especially if you're someone like me who doesn't like doing that stuff has a hard time settling down and then people tell you you need to meditate you need to meditate and so then I go to meditate and then I feel this pressure of I need to get into this Zen like feeling right and then I'm like I'm not fucking doing it happening I suck at this I meditate hard yeah right really though get into it quicker and so you know I remember the like first few times that I found myself trying to do this that I was trying to work at it so much and it's like this shouldn't feel like work it's in fact it's supposed to do the opposite right it's supposed to calm you down and lower your heart rate and and get you into this like totally meditative state but you know for people like myself I feel like I have to take gradual steps to get to this level of it being very easy for me so for me right now it's literally just worrying about breathing like because that to me I think is is was like mind-blowing it was like the simplest thing ever that okay 10 times like literally don't just start with 10 10 breaths can you take 10 breaths where you taking deep in through your stomach so really deep breath as deep as you can through your stomach and then you hold it for five seconds and then you release it as slow as you can for five no five to six seconds right and you do that 10 times over and just pay attention to how you feel and then you can progress on that like anything else you know then you could sit in that maybe you keep breathing like that and focus on that for 10 minutes 15 minutes 30 minutes you can do this while you're walking you can do it while you're driving you can do it while you're laying in bed just that watch the watch the calming effect that it has and start with that and then you can build upon that and start to add other tools other things other methods longer periods and like anything else I I mean I would say this is a skill too you know I think we talk about practice we talk about the deadlift and the squat being one of the most complicated things to do as far as mechanically for working out I would argue to say that getting into a you know flow state or meditative state is very much so a skill and you've got to practice it and there's lots of tools out there and you know here's something else with it you can't chase it you're not going to chase that that state it kind of happens to you so so rather than thinking of chasing this goal think of allowing yourself to go into this perfect state to where that it ends up just coming to you breathe yeah so yeah yeah breathe now as far as nutrition is concerned panic attacks anxiety and depression are all closely related number one avoid stimulants so if you're all stimulants take it take a cup of coffee then go into meditate probably be a tougher yeah I would say avoid avoid stimulants completely so that includes anything that contains caffeine it includes re eliminating sugar or reducing sugar process foods tend to be very stimulating for those of you that disagree with me it's true if you eat process foods or sugars for example you see a dopamine rush you see all these it's stimulating in the sense of the type of chemicals and hormone reactions that you get from them so bring those down increase your fats and your proteins and eat whole natural foods lots of vegetables this will help get your body out of the physical state of panic anxiety and depression and by the way there is a physical feeling of panic anxiety and depression and there's an emotional mental feeling of panic anxiety and depression and they're very closely connected I can give someone a drug that will induce a physical feeling of anxiety so if I gave somebody a beta 2 agonist drug which is going to make your heart beat fast and make you sweat and make you feel particularly anxious you will then your thoughts will manifest in that direction you will then start to get that mental emotional feeling of anxiety as well because now you're like why is my heart beating my hands are cold like you start to connect the two so one of the best ways to interrupt the anxiety and panic attack and depression that you may have that may be from mental and emotional state maybe going through a very tough time is to get rid of the physical feeling of it when you get rid of the physical feeling of it it makes it easier to deal with so with nutrition avoid all stimulants eat whole natural foods don't eat any foods that are too spicy anything that's stimulating you want to avoid things that are more bland again whole foods well cooked vegetables more fats more proteins that'll help bring your body's system of what do you think about fasting here's the thing about fasting so fasting can go both directions right because it's considered a stressors but it has some benefits to it it can be very stimulating for some people it can actually cause problems however if your anxiety and panic attacks and depression revolve around food it may actually help because it may actually teach appetite control clean that system out fasting that's going to be on an individual basis but as far as this overall nutrition avoid those stimulants avoid sugar avoid processed foods and that'll put your body in a better state to where it's not going to feel like fasting that well I was maybe jumping ahead but I was thinking in terms of if I was to flip and put a priority on each one of these as far as a practice to kind of apply like say you're somebody that is dealing with anxiety, depression and the real issue is that you don't want to be alone in a room by yourself like with all these thoughts and then all this negativity just like pounding you as you're still whereas like one thing immediately I think to just move and do that in a therapeutic way where I'm not adding the movement as a stressor but it's more of a release of all these thoughts then to kind of channel me back in to be able to calm down to then get into a meditative state I don't know if that makes sense I think I use this what you're saying exactly to a T you know I guess when I was probably in my 20s I'd laugh at this oh my god if we were talking to ourselves in our 20s we'd be like what the fuck happened so I get that right so I know obviously we have an audience of all ages so I'm sure the younger guys and girls are kind of like whatever guys because I do now I go on walks all the time and I actually all by myself or with the dogs I will put my headphones on and either have a book or some music that's really easy to listen to or sometimes nothing I'll just take off for a walk and it's amazing how much that settles me down and I actually do weird stuff so like while I'm walking instead of focusing on breathing in this area I'm actually paying attention to how my foot touches the ground and how my feet grip the ground when I walk you're making yourself present just completely present in something so simple as walking outside and it's very therapeutic for me it's very relaxing and I actually stop thinking about all the other shit that's going on in my day in life and I'm literally just thinking about the way my feet are touching the concrete as I'm walking in my gate and it totally settles me down and that's why too I think people don't realize that meditation doesn't necessarily have to be this sitting Indian style in a dark room in this like Namaste position like you literally can do I do it in a chair you can do it however you want sitting on a boat out in the water kind of floating that's really man I love that too I'm a lake guy for sure so my best friends and I we'd go out sometimes we'd go out I remember we used to do this when we were younger didn't realize how therapeutic it was until I got older but we'd go out on the lake and we wouldn't even talk to each other the three of us would be on the boat and we would just be laying there and just absorbing the sun and letting the waves of the boat and just kind of rock back and forth like when I fly fish and I was in the middle of this river and just listening to the river and just the way that the water makes you know all these specific noises and you just get lost in all this sort of distraction stimulus that that really helps me a lot and as far as exercise is concerned with this you know again exercise by itself by the way when they test it head to head against like SSRI drugs for mild to moderate depressions as effective and in some cases in some studies has been shown to be more effective in the long term in combination with an SSRI I'm sure if you have issues with depression it's probably an incredible combination but with exercise you know again go into your exercise and train properly and this is going to be very different from individual to individual so if you're you know already pretty fit you can go in with a certain type of intensity and improve your performance but make sure and keep a mind that you know you're training for balance if you're not fit it could be something very easy like walking is great yoga is great resistance training can also be very relaxing also I want to make sure I communicate that like you can go into a gym and you can lift weights you can put your headphones on get into your space you don't have to lift like a maniac but you can lift to become very connected to the movement and your muscle so you're going slow you're connecting to what you're doing you can feeling the muscle work it's another form of being present because while I'm doing that while I'm doing a curl or a squat and I'm focusing on the movement and I'm creating tension with my feet and I'm feeling the muscles that are working and I'm trying to get more connected to the exercise I'm becoming very very present I am here right now feeling what I'm feeling and that makes exercise I'm glad you went that direction too because I feel like you know lately the tone of our podcast has been this fucking hippy crunchy topics here and I don't and I think that's because we feel that we're really the extreme the opposite we're really the opposite so this is something that we have to put in practice in place but there's many ways like that that can be you can still be trucking away at your goals and lifting very consistently and allowing that to be a therapeutic process because I've definitely referred to lifting as my church that's why I like to do it alone that's why I like to put my you know big old beats headphones on and drown out all the other sounds and it's really just me and the weights and it's not about so much about crushing it although they can turn into a session where I get after it but it's like Sal said it's really about connecting to the weights and my movement and paying attention to how my entire bodies are articulating any sort of movement pattern so and now one last piece of this couple supplements you can try and use if you're suffering from panic attacks anxiety and depression cocaine methamphetamines no no no short term maybe no long term I thought Doug listed that and I'm reading that long term passion flower is a very effective herb for anxiety panic attacks and depression it's it does modulate GABA which is a neuro transmitter in the brain and GABA deficiencies lead to feelings of anxiety and paranoia and all that kind of stuff so passion flower a very nice herb it's not one you use all the time every single day you can use it you can use it for a decent amount of time but it's not one you use every single day chamomile is one that you can use every single day chamomile tea is very very mild in Europe they prescribe it to children even that's something you could drink every day and that also gives you kind of a nice sense of my girl uses like a shroom tech thing to I don't know if that's what do you use that well there's different kinds of mushrooms yeah I'll you know what since you're listing off things like that along in those lines I'll make sure Doug puts in the show notes to send a link over there I know you got something to make sure that's in there excellent now before we get to the next question or remind the listeners mind pumps 30 days of coaching for free it's still for free and it's available mind pump media dot com all right Doug arm power 12 is asking about static hold training well that's Justin's hey my wheel that's what's that what's he out just in general what is it amazing talking just isometric training in probably yeah okay that's the whole question though like just static hold is it and why what's the relevance of it okay I don't know that's I'm just reading into it but yeah this is something that wasn't really a big a big part of my programming for Intel just you know maybe a year two ago and I just really started to understand further how connected we are based off of our you know how the brain communicates to to recruit muscles and this this entire process I was just like blown away when I started to apply just the simplest of techniques like gripping the bar harder or doing a static hold where I'm I'm just squeezing in that position and now when I go through the actual rep I just noticed that my body responds and I get strength in that portion of that movement just by doing a simple thing like that and I'm like wow that was really effective you know that was really effective to apply that before I max out or before you know to teach if there's a part of a movement I feel like you know my body man it is not it is not producing that way I can't kick like that or I can't pick my leg up in this position like why well I hate using the term like mind muscle connection because it's I know so I was avoiding that I know you were but it I feel like it's the best way to get people to kind of understand like what is happening when you do that is there is there's this neurological connection that you are intensifying when you do these static isometric holds and it's crazy that you know it's an important piece to teaching someone how to train properly because the body doesn't work this way when you grab a weight and you drop it on your chest or you push it over your head or you throw it on your back and you squat down and get back up the body is always going to choose the easiest easiest path it's going to go whatever it doesn't know muscles it doesn't exactly it says get this fucking thing off my back above my head yes by any means I can't speak today with the fuck what is that you know what I need to get back to the library by any means necessary I got your back yeah so you know it's something that I think a lot of people overlook when they train you see someone do a chest press and overhead press and you just mimic it but not a lot of people really pay attention to how you move and you know a lot of it really is that yeah you're not really connected to the entire movement right so this is another sort of aha thing for me when I go to to take a more serious tone to specific exercise like the squat the bench press like these things where my entire focus before that was okay I got a general idea of what kind of movement I need to produce however I just need to slowly incrementally like load at a progressive kind of a loading sequence right that's all I thought about was well you know if I load this much maybe maybe I'll try like to add five on each side you know next week and I'll just like progressively overload this process however like that's not even half that's not even a fraction of the intent that I needed within that specific movement like if I can get my body even more involved and get strong in and break it into like all kinds of different levels of angles in my elbow how much my my feet are driving to create even more force to get like it's just like if you think about it logically and you start to understand that if my body doesn't have to prioritize stabilizing everything and stabilizing my body while I'm doing this one particular movement if I can just sort of you know get that accounted for now I can really you know get get my chest and get my shoulders and everything else to respond with a lot of strength well static static training or isometric training is hugely lacking in today's training models now this isn't always the case isometric training was a very big part of strongman training way back in the early days this was a big part of their training now if you want to see some incredible feats of strength look up some of these some of these circus performers they did things that will blow your fucking mind like one arm bent press with 180 pounds on one hand and these are guys that are 170 pounds and they're lean they're not these massive you know huge bodybuilders or whatever and natural this is before creatine even you got to understand that there are three types of muscle contractions you'll learn this in your first personal training certification and it's true muscles can contract concentrically eccentrically or isometrically they are three different skills that's why there's three different contractions they're not the same see I got confused I thought they were just explaining what you do with a muscle and you lift weights and you kind of hit all of them and yes they do bleed into each other but they are three different types of skills and I learned this the hard way when I first way back in the day went and trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu I had very good concentric strength because I lifted weight so I could contract a muscle like fuck I could throw things no problem well when you're on the ground in Brazilian jiu-jitsu there's many positions that are isometric when you're holding someone in a position when you're tying someone up when you're putting weight on them when you have them in a triangle choke or a regular rear naked choke or a guillotine or an arm lock or whatever it's isometric you are holding it and let me tell you I got exhausted very quickly because I didn't have that skill I never trained in isometric training on that note when you talk about carryover and functional and real life isometric is probably it's easily one of the most frequent it is how many times do you hold shit yeah when you carry I mean I was carrying two you know 30 pound bags or whatever of dog food and well I wasn't curling it why I did it you know I was holding it you know in an isometric position and you know most the things that we do in our daily activities there's a lot of things that you're just holding in position you are you know it's a skill and it will contribute to the other skills of concentric and isometric training the good news about isometric training is this here's the plus side of it it doesn't create much damage okay so concentric contractions and eccentric contractions create more damage eccentric contractions create the most damage yeah four times but isometric contractions don't create that much damage so they are fucking amazing tools to add to your routine so I can add it to my routine and unless I'm already training in my absolute limit it's not gonna take away from too much of my recovery ability but it's gonna add more frequency more volume and it's gonna add a new skill that's gonna bleed over to my concentric and eccentric primes at neuromuscular connection even more I'm telling you know Bruce Lee was a huge huge proponent of isometric training he had incredible feats of strength that were isometric for example he could hold a barbell a 90 pound barbell at arm's length for 40 seconds it's crazy just straight out he probably couldn't curl it for that many I don't anybody can do that with a 45 pound bar right and it was because he trained isometric he knew the importance of having that to be able to just have that tension to be able to generate that type of tension now that tension has carry over has carry over to all your lifts has carry over to the way your body feels I noticed when I do isometric training I feel solid I feel tight you can modify your isometric training so that if you have a sticking point for example if I have a sticking point at the bottom part of my deadlift I might just put a bar on the floor with a weight that I can't lift and just isometrically lift it just kind of lift it without moving it but just try and lift it and try and hold in that position or I may just intrinsically create that tension and don't lift anything and just put myself in that position and just create lots of tension like these are all methods of ink of training that particular type of strength or I can get it a squat I can get into a bar unrack it and just stand with it and just stay tense as well let's why don't we go around real quick then since we were talking about this what are some of your guys or your favorite isometric move that you've incorporated over the years for me right away what comes to mind was an overhead press and holding in that position that's great one that to me I've seen so much great carry over it's helped me a ton and and now I kind of like will incorporate it sometimes too within my workout so like I'll go pretty light you know and I'll do an overhead press and I'll literally just hold and stabilize the weight for like 10 seconds over my head just and I'm really concentrating on my entire posture my feet into the ground how I'm holding the weight my scapula being retracted and stabilize man I've seen huge strength gains from that and like overall good posture from that because of having to hold that and stabilize over my head so for me that's been a staple isometric hold or move that I've incorporated on a very regular basis in my routine that's one of my favorites too but I'll do it typically with a kettlebell like one arm kettlebell and I'll hold it up there and just stay super tense but same overhead principle or because this is typically a weakness of mine I'll get into a squat and I'll sit at the bottom of the squat and just stay there super tense and then the last one is just heavy ass carries like a couple of heavy dumbbells or kettlebells just stand I don't even have to walk sometimes I'll just stand and just irradiate my entire body just to strengthen both my grip and my tension yeah one of mine was definitely like holding at the bottom of the squat however I would press the stick up into the squat cage and just that alone to get my upper body and more involved in stabilizing I found and just I could increase muscular tension like more so because I had direction with it and it just man did I notice that when I could get into depth and sit really nice and low in that position and I felt like I never felt like you know when you get too low like your body kind of oh it kind of freaks out because you don't you're not you're unsure if you're going to be able to get that kind of force on demand that you need to dig back up out of that position and man I felt not only did I feel comfortable I felt like very confident I'll do another one to add to that is another common one I use is I'll get like a band and I'll wrap around like a pole or what about that before I'm getting ready to do bench and I'll do a row and then I'll get in the row and I'll just really squeeze and retract my shoulder blades and just intensify that position really really hard you know holding that for a good 10 15 seconds plus and then I'll go into my bench press and it really helps with me staying in that retracted position before I go so it's another way that I like to incorporate isometric holds yep our next question is from bh33rs you often talk about fasting correctly what are some examples of fasting gone first one that comes to mind right away is people that go you forget to eat and you just die well that is that's too long of a fast you do it wrong if you die you went too long I think the number one thing I see people doing it wrong or making a mistake is going into it with the intention intentions of I'm trying to do it to lose weight like that's their goal I heard fasting is really good and it can help burn fat and they heard these because that's a great way to turn it into a needing disorder yeah exactly it's how people market it it's what I fucking hate about it you know take something really really good and you know or turn it into anabolic what's the other one anabolic fasting like you're using it to build like get the fuck out of here it's for health purposes you should be looking at health markers you're looking at how you feel how you sleep your energy levels headaches your appetite control those are the things that you're supposed to be paying attention to from fasting so if you're fasting with these intentions of it's going to build more muscle by doing it or that's the gimmicky shit that's the shit that they try and market so that's why my pump is here that's it so with fasting here's something that I've seen actually a few times now and this is more true with women than you see with fasting there are individual variances in terms of your how well your body will be able to fast especially when you first do it and I've had some women contact me and tell me that they were you know my well irregularity my period started losing hair I'm getting like these cold my hands are getting cold and these are all stress responses and with those people I tell them that they're fasting too frequently or too long because what's happening especially for women is your body is thinking about being fertile and if you fast for too long too frequently it thinks that there's no food around and it's going to make you unable to have children so it's going to cause hormonal changes that and that's why some of these women are not having their periods and stuff so that's one of the the biggest ways I see people doing this wrong is they go too hard or too fast or too often and their bodies just aren't good at it yet or they look at fat they look at how one person fast and say well that's how I should fast there's going to be some individual variances I mean you could fast simply by skipping a meal I mean that's a real easy one or you could do like a 48 hour fast which is a little longer one now you've got some some new stuff that's coming out like the fasting mimicking diet by Dr. Valter Longo which is the preliminary results from that are fucking mind blowing in terms of how it's you know improving people's health and how it's you know in animal studies reducing cancer and doing all this crazy stuff so that's another example of fasting but really fasting correctly is fasting correctly for your body if you start to notice negative effects from it well using it like you guys have said for health purposes and like to enhance your health is so important because I mean I I've noticed too like even some ladies that have mentioned that I don't know if fasting is good for me and I look and look how lean they already are and noticing that like the idea and the intent behind it is to get even leaner already that's a problem for me but I know that you know you're pressing boundaries you're making it into a stressor as opposed to you know working with you exactly so and we do have a fasting guide very inexpensive one that kind of breaks these different ways that we think will work for most people because there's a lot of different ways to fast but we highlight the ones that we kind of approve but again it's not for everybody if you're super deconditioned and you're eating really really bad and you're you know you're in bad shape fasting is not the first place you should go you should probably look at your nutrition first and start moving first and use fasting a little bit later on and again I want to just echo what these guys have been saying it is not a weight loss method people sometimes do lose weight fasting as a side effect but really the benefits are all have to do with the health components of it go to mindpumpmedia.com and sign up for 30 days of coaching it's absolutely free also go to youtube subscribe we put up a new video every day every single day you'll get a new exercise trying to give you guys as much free shit as we possibly can right now it's crazy it's insane I don't know how we do it but we do it's youtube mindpumpTV also find us on instagram at mindpumpradio that's where you can ask us questions and then we might answer them in our Q&A episodes you can find my personal page at MindpumpSoul, Adam's page is at Mindpump Adam and Justin is at Mindpump Justin Matt's anabolic, Matt's performance and Matt's aesthetic nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs with detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos the RGB Superbundles like having Sal, Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers but at a fraction of the price the RGB Superbundle has a 30 day money back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com if you enjoy this show please share the love by leaving us a 5 star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing Mindpump to your friends and family we thank you for your support and until next time this is Mindpump


I'm Andrew Cross. I'll talk today through the components in our software stack and talk to the IBM Quantum Experience and the language that we use to communicate with it. And I mean, before I begin, what I'd like to do is give some bounds on the problem that we're interested in solving, you know, the scope of the software that we're trying to write. And, you know, so where we are today, we're sort of in this realm of simple demonstrations on small numbers of qubits. And we're moving in this direction toward larger systems. And these are systems on which we can run small circuits. We can do approximate computations. But we're very far from, you know, a universal fault-tolerant quantum computer. So our goal is to write software that targets this kind of space. And the purpose is to enable research so that we can continue to move forward and to look for advantage where there's advantage to be found. So solve problems with these small quantum processors. Okay. So in a little more detail, our goal for this software stack, we're going to plan for continued improvement of these devices. You know, right now we have five and 16 qubit devices. You've heard other announcements. And so we're planning for these to increase in size and capability and fidelity. And we want to build software tools so that we can continue working with these devices in the near term. So we'd like to look at things such as short depth circuits, investigating algorithms, looking for advantage. And we're going to be in this era of pre-fault tolerance. So we'd like to explore ways to mitigate the errors that we see in these systems. So we need a framework so that we can conduct experiments, can run simulations, and we can analyze the data that we get back. We'd like this interface to be independent of the back ends, because again, we're going to see new back ends in the future. We're going to see new simulation methods. We're going to see new ways of analyzing the results. So we'd like to be able to grow into that. We'd also like to create an infrastructure for rewriting the algorithms that we send, the circuits. And at the very least, you know, if this is meant to be back in independent, we need to take the algorithms and schedule them and map them on to the hardware that we have. So we need an infrastructure for that, and we plan to include that. And then over time, from where we are now to where we plan to go in the coming years, we'd like to expose lower level control interfaces so that you have more control over pulse timing. You have more control over the process of mapping onto the device, more control over the pulse shapes. And we'd like to also move in the other direction as well, so expanding in both directions, introduce some higher level abstraction so it's easier to program. All right. So as a touchstone for this whole talk, I'm just going to keep coming back to this block diagram. So what this is, this is, you know, this is not exactly what's going on, but it's a high level organization of the pieces of the software, as we would imagine them. And it's modeled after how you would think of a quantum compiler. Okay, but we're really going to focus on the right hand side, the lower half of this process. All right. So, you know, on the left, you have the quantum algorithm. You have some high level description of it. You have the results you'd like to get. And at some point, you generate quantum circuits, and these are stitched together by some kind of classical control. At the moment where we have a limited set of classical control, I'll talk about that later, right? But these quantum circuits are then transformed in some way, and they are sent through an API. On the back end, on our systems, these are, you know, converted to pulse sequences. They were on in the experiment. There's a set of controllers and whatnot. And these process results come back through this API. And you can request those results and then analyze them and then continue on. So, of these components, right, the quantum experience is everything behind this API. So, the hardware, right now, the, you know, the software that takes the circuits and maps them to pulse sequences. And then there's the API. There's our open interface language. This is something that will be familiar to people who have been in quantum computing. You know, it's a list of gate operations that you can apply to our system. And then this quiz kit software is built around the circuit abstraction so that you can write circuits and transform them and send them to the back end and process the results. All right, so I'll keep coming back to this picture as we move through these pieces. And I'll start from the right and move to the left. Okay, so I'll start with the quantum experience. And so just to say, so the quantum experience went online about a year and a half ago. And in that time, we now have more than 60,000 users registered. They've logged in from all seven continents, from many universities and colleges and learning institutions. People have run almost 2 million experiments on the devices that are there and have posted many papers to the archive as well investigating the system and what it can do. For example, just to explain what's in this picture, right, these highlighted regions are regions where people have logged in and used. These are countries where people have logged in and used the quantum experience. And the dots I think are learning institutions, educational institutions. So as part of the quantum experience, we've been trying to create, trying to engage with a broader community of educators, developers, students, researchers who are interested in using these devices and learning from them. So we've been traveling and engaging with students. This is an example at USQIP at the Institute for Quantum Computing. Chris Wood is working with students to run examples on the quantum experience. This is a community like a forum that's available on the quantum experience website where people from the public who've requested accounts and researchers, I mean everyone can ask questions and answer each other's questions and we also do our best to moderate and answer questions that come up as well. And here's an example from, I believe from last year on the MIT edX quantum computing course run by Ike Chuang. Where one of the extra credit exercises was to go and look at mapping circuits on to the quantum experience, the five qubit device. All right, so I'd like to say a little bit about what the hardware is that you're controlling. I'm only going to talk about, I'm just going to highlight a few things. If you want more detail, definitely come to Micah Takati's talk this afternoon or at one of the breaks corner and experimentalist and ask them questions. So what you see here is, this is a four qubit device and in these pockets are the single junction transmon qubits and just to give you an idea, right, the qubit transition is five gigahertz. The second excited state is slightly offset by this anharmonicity. Just to give you an idea of the kinds of parameters that are in these systems. And these devices are coupled by coplanar waveguides. So those are these blue and other colored features here. The blue resonators act as buses that couple neighboring qubits and the yellow act as input and output, you know, readouts and drive lines. All right, so the devices that are used in the quantum experience, again these are single junction transmon devices. T1 and T2 are about comparable. They're about 50 microseconds. In fact, you can see all of this if you go to the quantum experience you can look online at the interfaces. But these are the single qubit and two qubit gate fidelities around, you know, error around a percent to five percent. These are the measurement fidelities. And all the devices are some kind of planar geometry. So the five qubit device looks like this bow tie and these are the interactions that are available. Here's a picture of it. And this is the 16 qubit device. So it's a dual rail, two lines connected by edges. This is a picture of the device as well. So these are the five and 16. The five qubit device is available on the graphical interface. And the 16 you can access through this software stack through the API. All right, so good. All right, so I just say a few more words about what the gates are in the system so that when we see them later, you know what I'm referring to. All right, so we need single qubit. We'd like to have arbitrary single qubit gates and then some entangling gates so we can implement universal digital computation. And, I mean, here's how these are implemented. So generally we want to apply something in SU2, some single qubit gate that's arbitrary. We decompose this into Euler angles. So z, y, z rotations. And it happens that these z rotations are easy to apply by adjusting the phase of a carrier. So they are very accurate and fast. So it helps us to decompose the pulse sequence into something of a form where we have this z rotation and then we have some single calibrated gate that we apply in between these phase changes. So that's how these are implemented. If you just want a z rotation, then you can apply this gate. That's instantaneous and there's no pulses, right? If you want to apply something that's a power 2 rotation, then you can apply this gate. That's one pulse. And then if you want to do something in general with two pulses, you can apply that, right? The two qubit gate is a what's called a cross resonance gate. And, I mean, for this talk, what's important about it is that it's directional. So there's a control qubit and a target qubit. And there's one direction where this gate is faster than the other. So that's why we do that this way. And in practice, if you're interested, I mean, this is implemented by a sequence of pulses that correct for some slow fluctuations, right? So this stands for this frame change, this z rotation. This stands for a drag pulse. And this stands for a flat top Gaussian pulse, something that's stretched out. All right, so that gives you an idea of the one and two qubit gates in the system. All right, so if you go to the quantum experience website and you don't even have to log in, actually, but if you look at the top, each of the back ends, the devices are listed there. This is the latest back end in the sense of having a new topology, a new layout. All right, so this is the 16 qubit device. This is the picture of the mask. Now you know these are the CNOT directions. And what you can also see is the last time the cali... No, I grabbed this in October, but this is calibrated in the morning and evening, I believe. Maybe it's calibrated once a day. Anyway, you can see the latest calibration there. And then the results of that calibration is characterized by randomized benchmarking. So there's a single qubit gate error across here. This is cutoff. There are 16 qubits. Readout error for each qubit. And then the multi-qubit gate error. So these numbers are consistent with what I said a few slides ago. If you want even more information about each of these back ends, it's all available on GitHub. So you can go to this URL. And what you can find are, you can find each device. You can see who's contributed to this device, its history, information about, say, in this case, how the readouts are multiplexed, how the gates are implemented. And over here is an example of how the... how the crosstalk is characterized in the device. Okay, so please have a look at that if you're interested. All right. So those are the devices that are available on the Quantum Experience. And now we'd like to think about programming them. So we've chosen an intermediate representation of our circuits that is, you know, it's based on a Quantum Assembly Language type description. This will be, I think, familiar to many people. The model is that you have some register or registers of qubits. You have some set of classical registers. I'll say these, just conceptually, these registers are somehow close to the machine so that you can interact with them and feedback from them eventually. That's what... These aren't meant to represent all the classical memory you're ever going to use in your Quantum Program. They're meant to represent something close. This is a picture, by the way, from the Quantum Experience, from the composer where you can take gates and drag and drop them and construct a circuit and then run it. So I'll just say, you know, here are these U1, U2, U3 gates, the single qubit gates. And this is the two qubit gate. And the rest of these are constructed from these or from doing nothing. And there are some other instructions for... Well, I'll come back to these later, right? There's a measurement and there's a way of controlling the timing. Okay. All right, so a little bit more detail. Since this is a tutorial, eventually I'm going to get to the point where I'm showing you lots of code. So we'll kind of start going in that direction. This is an example of a program that's written in open chasm. So it has these features, right? It has Quantum and classical registers. It has some way of including definitions of gates. And then, right, it's just instruction after instruction, together with what it acts on. And what it... So there are a couple of things that I can point out that are maybe interesting or different from other assembly languages. One is that it has a way of hierarchically defining gates. So here's a Toffoli gate. It's defined in here, right? And it's put here, but that's constructed from, you know, C-nauts and T's, as you'd expect, and those are constructed from U's, right? And it has a mechanism for measurement and feedback. So measurement says where to put the result, and then based on the values of some register, you can apply operations afterwards. Now, at a high level, what this is meant to express is data dependency. You know, do this, then do this, then do this, and here are the inputs I need to do the next step. There's no explicit timing here. The timing happens later at a lower stage. Philosophically, we want to separate Quantum and classical processing as much as we can. This is meant to describe all the quantum computing, and the classical processing should be sort of encapsulated elsewhere. So right now, that's very simple. There's just this if. But in the future, this is sort of the way we'd like to think. And we'd like the language to be agnostic about the hardware that's on the back end. So just a general circuit description language. We are open to discussion, extension. This is open chasm. So, you know, please let us know if there's something you don't like, you want to change. We can talk about it. The specifications are all online. All right. And maybe, yeah, I'll just say, I'll just highlight a few more things, right? This is how you make gates hierarchically from other gates that you've already defined. There are some syntactic things like, you know, in some algorithms, it's quite natural to apply Hadamard and parallel to many gates. So there's a way to do that. This applies to every qubit in this register. And there's this, so this barrier instruction says, you know, it says don't cross this line, right? So if I have an optimizer that's walking through this circuit, what it's going to do is it's not going to combine these two x's into identity, right? It also affects timing. All right. So that's chasm. And now I'd like to start moving to quiz kit. I'll start first with the API itself. So I'm also going to focus mainly on the Python implementations of these components. So I'll talk about the API and then I'll talk about the SDK. All right. All right. So the idea is that, so there's a web API, it's a REST API, and you submit requests to it like the back end I want to use, the set of circuits I want to run. These right now are given as chasm circuits. And how many times to run each of them? It's pretty simple. So you submit this request, right? It's processed, sent to the appropriate back end device. It gets processed further, right? The experiment runs. It comes back. There's queuing. There are other things here that I'm not going to talk about. And after some time, the result comes back to you and you can request it. And it includes the probability that you see each outcome string, how long it took, other kinds of information. One of the important pieces, though, is that it gives you a collection of data that corresponds to the calibration, the most recent calibration before your experiment, which is always good to have and be able to combine with your results. You can also make requests like, you can ask for a lot of information about each back end and some information about the queue. This is all authenticated based on tokens. You go to the Quantum Experience website, you ask for a token, and then you use the token to access this. I'll give an example in just a little bit. So now some code. So this is what it looks like if you just want to use the API. So bare minimum, I want to run something on the device. I want to talk right to the API. So in Python, you can import this module that has the methods in it, construct an API object. You give it the token, you give it the configuration. So this is the URL of the Quantum Experience. I'll show it to you later. And this is some long string of characters. Once you've created this API, you can say what back ends are there. And it's going to send back a dictionary of back ends. You can look at the names of these. So for each back end, let's look at its name. As long as the back end is available. So back ends may become unavailable if they're being calibrated or if they're taking down for some other reason. So you can check that. And this comes back and it tells us that two devices are available. This is 5 and 16. And there's an online simulator. And if we want details, we can go into this back end dictionary and look up one.  For example, one of the more important pieces of information is how the qubits are connected. So this has pairs of qubits on which you can do a two-qubit gate. So now if you want to directly use the API to run a circuit, here's how you would do it. You need to generate the chasm code. So here it is. This is code that makes a bell state. I have two 5-qubit registers. I apply Hadamard to one of the qubits, a controlled knot between that qubit and another one. And then I measure them both. Specify the back end, how many times to run this experiment, and then it goes. And you get back a blob of data. And I mean, this has a lot of information in it, but what's important to follow up now is the ID of this job. So you can grab this, put it in this call, and check whether or not it's done yet. So that's it. And then when this is complete, you can go and retrieve this, and this will contain all the information. It'll contain what was run, when it was run, calibration data, everything. And among all that data, one of the things you can ask for are these counts. So for each time through this circuit, we get a string, an output string, so the value of this register C. And so this is returning the value of that register C and how many times we saw it out of the total number of shots we requested. All right. So that's great. So you can run quantum circuits, you can run them through the API. Maybe you don't want to work with the API at this level. What if you want to do something that's more complicated? What if you want to optimize your circuits first and send them in? What if you want to use a higher level language to construct your circuits? It's not very easy to program to this API. We'd like to build on top of this. And so that's what we're doing here. We'd like to... Yeah, I'll just continue here. So let me go into some of the details. All right. If you're interested in downloading this and trying any of this for yourself, everything's available starting from here. So if you go here, you can follow from these links to any of the information you need. So just to point out, all open source, it's on GitHub. There are tutorials, documentation, and a link to the quantum experience directly from here, as well as how to get started. Now, I'll go through this in more detail in just a couple minutes. Let me highlight a few of the places you can go from this landing page. So there is documentation for this software. It includes how to get started using it, as well as documentation of the code itself. So whatever level you're interested in looking at this code, you can do it through the documentation. And we've included some of our thinking in terms of how we have currently organized the code. The software is developed openly. It's all on GitHub. You can see our process. You can see who's contributing to this and the things that are currently being worked on through pull requests. We've been very fortunate that people outside of IBM have been interested in contributing as well. The flow is essentially, if you want new features, you would open an issue and we would discuss it. You can submit your code on your own fork through pull requests. This is a relatively standard way of doing this. You can see some of the files in the project for more details about how to contribute. Now, I've focused, and I will continue to focus mainly on the Python, but in this project, you can also see we have a Swift implementation of this code and a JavaScript implementation as well. So if you're interested in using other languages, you can. All right. All right, so the SDK is, the Qwiskit is organized around a quantum program object. And this program object is a collection of quantum circuits that are all somehow related. So the way in which they're related is that the quantum program has a set of quantum and classical registers associated with it. You create those. And then you build circuits. And then you can run those on some backend, get the results, and bring them back. Okay. In the process, you may rewrite them to run on some target backend if you have a limited connectivity. All right. To do that, there is a component that, that rewrites the circuits. We've taken to calling this a trans compiler, and the reason we do this is that we want to emphasize that our goal is not to go from a high level language all the way down to the lowest level code that can run on our system. We want to rewrite chasm to chasm, sort of going horizontally. So limited scope right now. We want to take our input circuits and we want to make sure they run on the backend and we want to make sure we eliminate as many gates as possible before we do that. Okay. Among the back ends it includes simulators as well. So this is, the simulators we have are also part of this project. All right. So how do you get started? All right. So you can, you can get two, two components from the repository. One is a set of tutorial Jupyter notebooks. So you can grab these directly from GitHub and download them. And then there are two ways that you can download the, or if you're interested in, in writing code or looking at the code, you can, you can grab it from GitHub. Or you can simply run pip install and you'll get the latest stable version of it. Okay. So then if you want to get started, if you have, say, Anaconda installed and Jupyter installed, then you just install quizkit and then start Jupyter. And if you want to use an online device, so if you want to use one of the quantum experience devices, there's one other step you have to do. You need to go to the quantum experience website under your account and get the API token there and then substitute it here. So you put in your token and put in the quantum experience URL. Okay. These are also in a file called Qconfig in the, in the repository. You can fill them in there if you like to. All right. So now I'll walk through in the last, in the last part of the talk, I'll go from start to finish and a couple ways of looking at what comes out of that example. All right. So the first thing we need to do is make this quantum program object that will encapsulate everything we're doing in this experiment. All right. And this has methods that are generally, you know, they're in the category of, you know, constructing these circuits and manipulating them. It lets you import and export to this space with backends, obviously. Anyway, so this is what it looks like to get started.  This is the name that will appear in the chasm text and this is the Python object to manipulate it. Similarly with the classical registers. All right. So then this is what it looks like to create a, build a basic circuit for a bell state. So make a program, create a two-qubit register and create a classical register for the results. Now we have all the objects we need. Now we can create a circuit bell that we'll use to build up the circuit. And on this object we can apply gates that, so these gates live here, they live in something that we call the extensions. And you can, if something's not there you can add new extensions and they add new methods on to these circuit objects. All right. I'll say more about it in a second. But this had a hard C knot as you'd expect to make this state. Now we'd also like to measure it and we may want to measure it in several different ways. So let's begin by measuring it in the Z basis. So we'll make another circuit. It uses the same quantum registers and here we just measure all of Q into all of C. So let me just say the extension. The short answer is that everything that is in the, if you click advanced on the quantum experience all the gates that are there are in this extension. It's more or less what you would find in a quantum computing textbook. So the single qubit gates that you familiar with like Clifford plus T these are the U gates that are fundamental in our system right now. Two qubit gates. Toughly, measure, reset. Reset is not supported on the hardware right now. And then there are a few other construction methods and this will grow. Right now it's relatively basic but you can take a gate, apply it and then invert it. And you can add classical controls to the gates. This will work in the simulator but again not on the experiment. So that gives you some idea of what's there. I believe the three qubit gate the three qubit gate should work through the through quiz gate. So because it will be I'm sorry? Yeah, I believe it should. So it should be mapped down to two qubit gates and single qubit gates and then those should be mapped onto the hardware. Alright, so we've constructed these circuits. How do you get some more information? There are some methods to access this right? So you can say what circuits do I have in this program? What registers do I have? What classical bits do I have? Things you might need to know. And if you want you can ask for those circuits back in chasm form and they come back in essentially the same way that you program them. They're not rewritten in any other basis. Okay. Alright, so for this Bell example you want to measure in more than the Z basis because you want to see that these qubits really are entangled. Alright, so to do that you may want to measure say in the X basis. So we can create a new circuit to measure X apply Hadamard to that register and then measure it. And now we can take these pieces and compose them. So there's a plus operator that acts on circuits so you can begin to stitch together more complicated circuits from these basic pieces. So now we build the two circuits we're actually interested in running. Make the Bell state measure it in the Z basis make the Bell state measure in the X basis. Okay, now we want to run it. So we say well what back ends are available. If you just type this without setting up anything what you would get back is the list of local back ends. So on my machine this is two Python simulators and a C simulator. Okay, and if you set the API and you make the same call add it to the list. This list will be all of the online back ends as well. So the simulator that runs remotely and the quantum experience devices. You can ask for the ones that are the online back ends. So now let's run the Bell state example. We set up the API again. Now in this step we're going to say is how are the qubits connected. So give me this map of couplings. So ask for the back end configuration get the couplings. And now we say run the Z measurement circuit and the X measurement circuit in one job. Put them all together and send them through the API at once. And here's how the qubits are connected on this QX4 device. Run this a thousand times for each circuit. And this will go through the API, it will come back. This call is blocking, but there are other calls that will submit everything and you can come back later and check. And so after a while you can ask this result object for the results for each circuit. So in this case measuring in the Z basis we see some output like this from this 5 qubit device. And in the X basis we see this. What you can notice is that most of the outcomes are 0, 0, and 1, 1 as you'd expect for a Bell state. And these in the middle, these are errors. Similarly in the X basis you see something just like that. So you see them correlated regardless of the basis you measure it. All right. So I mean I alluded to this earlier but this instruction we wrote down from 0 to 1. But the hardware, this gate direction has to be from 1 to 0. So what happened? I mean what happened is that when you called execute it called some code that rewrote the circuit for you. So in the original chasm there was a Hadamarder C knot from 0 to 1. And now the 1 and 0 labels just got flipped over here. And the relabeling happened on the measurement. So that's an example of this rewriting that we're working on. Again the goals for this piece are to map the circuit on to one that can run on whatever back end we have in the future or now. And also to try to eliminate instructions so that we have more accurate results at the end. All right. So now we can run the experiment. We can look at these histograms. Oh sorry go ahead. You have a question? Yes. It usually is more complicated. Yeah. Does this actually do a graph getting or does it do something to the future? Yeah. I'll say a few more words about what it does but yeah it's right now. Right now what's there is not close to optimal but it works for any layout graph. I'll say more about it in a second. All right. In the experiment let's run a simulation. Now in the simulation of course we can ask for the state. We don't have to take shots. So if you'd like to do that what you can do is you can take the same circuit you don't have to do any of that again but you can just change the name of the back end. And whenever a shot is set to one here it will just compute the state vector or the unitary or whatever the mathematical object is that you want from that simulator. And then you ask for the results and in this data in this case for this local simulator it will give you an array that corresponds to the quantum state. This is 0, 0 and this is 1, 1. You can do the same thing if you want to know the unitary operation that you applied. So in this case it's very easy to read but it's there. Both of these Python simulators they'll work for small circuits. We have coming quite soon some C simulators and at the moment if you also need a very fast simulator you can use the online simulators as well. So there are there's a tools module in QuizKit that includes some plotting and includes some other useful functions and we'll be extending this but let me just give an example from here. You can construct the density matrix corresponding to that quantum state from the previous slide and then plot it. There are a couple different ways you can view it but this is a pretty standard way of looking at this. This is the city plot. So you can see the main diagonal of the density matrix 0, 0 and 1, 1 and then the coherences. All right. So I'm going to take two slides just in case you're curious just to know what's underneath what's behind this there are four representations inside QuizKit for quantum circuits and we move back and forth between them as we need to and in the future I'll say what these are first and then I'll make my comment. So the main input representation is chasm text and when this is input it's parsed. You get some syntax tree corresponding to the grammar of chasm and then from here it's a project. And this is just a hierarchical list of gate objects. It's not too surprising there are instructions and there is a hierarchy of objects so that we can manipulate each of these instructions. When we want to rewrite the circuit it's very natural to take the circuit and express it as a directed graph. So something like this you have a bunch of input qubit nodes you have nodes for each gate and you have output nodes to express the circuit when you need to rewrite it. Right now we move back and forth between these as we please in the future our focus is going to be to go to this representation stay here and move over to this representation or others that we may need as we rewrite the circuit. And just to comment on what's underneath this mapping process right now this is what's here this is what passes it's just four simple passes and it gives you a circuit that will run on the device this can be improved but here is what is there so we take the input chasm we expand all these gate macros so now it's written in terms of C knots and these U sub J gates this goes to swap insertion algorithm it uses a randomized greedy layer by layer algorithm to apply the permutations between these layers and then this introduces some redundancy so we try to clean that up a little bit we remove runs of C knot gates and then we optimize runs of single qubit gates that come from this and that's all we do this last method attempts to minimize for each run of single qubit gates give you the minimum number of pulses to implement that gate the way we're moving hopefully you'll see this in the coming months we have a more modular framework something that we can build on and extend and use for our research alright so in the last couple minutes just want to talk about some more advanced things you could do with quiz kit alright so if we wanted to characterize the state coming out of the experiment one way to do this is with quantum state tomography and in that case we need to append many different measurements after building and of course we're doing this in a higher level language like python so we can just write the functions we need to automate all of this and put them into our set of tools so some of these tools have already been written for you you can find them again under here there are tools for quantum characterization and validations example here is state tomography so you can use these methods say what qubits you want to measure build some state tomography circuits for your bell circuit and right it's going to create this array of create the bell state and then do the measurement that you need underneath right this is all python scripts you can look at the source code to do this alright so if we run on the so here we're running on the simulator right but we can take these tomography circuits and just run them and ask for the counts and these are all the results we get from running those tomography circuits each one a thousand times or something like this and then there are methods here that will let you put that data in a form that can be processed and then put it into a fitter the details of which are in this code you can look and obtain an estimate of the density matrix and then plot that you can do this just as well changing the back end to the experiment alright so there are many other examples that you can find online not just a bell state and it's possible to run relatively complicated things through the API to help you with this there are some tools that are part of the SDK they include things for visualizing states and analyzing them they're helpers for optimization and quantum chemistry QCVV and there's a collection of 24 jupiter notebooks at this site and they illustrate how to use the SDK they illustrate ideas from verification and validation near-term applications and quantum games there's some things you can do I guess I'll highlight one of these you can measure T1 for yourself you don't have to believe what comes out of our calibration you can measure T2 you can violate bell inequality just to conclude this is our interface for experiments and simulations our goal is to enable our own research, enable your research enable educators and students and we're looking at applications in this time period before we reach fault tolerance so that is our goal right now we have a growing software stack we're going to keep building tutorials, keep adding examples and plan to use this for quantum experience and access to other devices it's a completely open source process so you can expect to see new releases periodically and we have ongoing projects right now to improve pieces of our infrastructure improve our simulators visualizers change our back end interfaces things like this so if you're interested now or at any point in time you can go here and have a look if you'd like to contribute code and if you'd like to participate in discussions that help us define our next steps with this we have a Slack channel that you can join it's if you'd like an invitation you can go to the quiz kit landing page and there's a link right at the top that you can click to join and come talk with us on this community alright with that thank you is the simulator purely unitary or does it include noise and decoherence? yeah so the question was does the simulator include noise and decoherence so the current simulators that you can find online are ideal simulators but very soon we will be making available a simulator that includes noise such as de-polarizing noise and T1, T2 yeah unitary errors yeah there's a question here what's the circuit size limitation? yeah so I don't have off the top of my head the hard limitation I I mean I've run benchmarking experiments with many hundreds of single cubic gates through the API and I do know that near 42 cubic gates I was able to run through the interface as well but I don't know the hard limits to that we could try to talk offline other questions? can you say something about gate parallelization and the barriers and the timing and stuff? so right now I believe that when you submit a circuit and it's scheduled the goal is to maximize the volume so two cubic gates that can run in parallel will that may not be always what you desire but I believe that's what happens other questions? let's thank Andrew again for the tutorial


Good morning everyone, my name is Robert and this is Step. Today we are going to talk about something we are all familiar with, smartphones. What do you think of when you see this? Smartphones are bad for you. That's what many people think, but we are not so sure. That's right, so we are going to talk today about the impact of smartphones on human health. I am going to give you some brief background on the issue and explain the negative impacts of smartphones on our health. Then I will bring up some of the positive impacts that smartphones have had on human health since they were invented. After that I will give you a quick summary of our findings and we will answer any questions you may have on the issues.