Welcome to another edition of RCE. Again, this is Brock Palin. You can find us online at rce-cast.com where you can find the entire back catalog of over 100 episodes about high performance computing, research computing, and other topics. Again, I have Jeff Squires from Cisco Systems and one of the authors of OpenMPI. Jeff, thanks again for your time. Hey Brock, how's it going? It's getting to be hot in the summer here. I don't know if it's hot up there in Michigan, but it's certainly hot here in Kentucky. Yeah, the humidity has been the issue here. It's like swimming outside sometimes. You would think it's hotter than it really is. Fantastic. Well, let's distract ourselves by talking about something interesting then. Okay, so today we're talking about something that was actually on the proposed list for a long time, but we only reached out to them recently about NetCDF. And we have Ward and Russ here with us to speak to us. So guys, why don't you take a moment to introduce yourself. Okay, this is Russ. I was one of the original authors, developers of NetCDF at Unidata with a guy named Glenn Davis. And he was tragically killed in an airplane accident in about 1999. So after that, I supported and maintained the NetCDF library and utilities for several years and developed a proposal with NTSA guy named Mike Folk to NASA to develop NetCDF4 and recruited and hired some NetCDF development team members, including Ward, and wrote some blog entries about NetCDF. And I am passionate about it still. My Colorado license plate has been NetCDF for the last 10 years, which is one of the geekiest license plates anybody has. Great. This is Ward. I'm a computer scientist. I worked with Russ for several years on NetCDF before his tragic retirement. NetCDF has become a passion of mine. My background is computer vision and machine learning. But my work with NetCDF here at Unidata has been very interesting. It's something that's easy to be passionate about. So what is NetCDF? Well, NetCDF was originally developed to kind of provide a standard interface between data providers and data users for scientific or a oriented data and metadata and for portable data that was machine independent and platform or and application independent. So the simple view is it's a file format and a data model and some APIs and freely available software that implement the APIs. So you can read and write NetCDF data. And together, those support the creation, access, and sharing of scientific data. There are some complications to that. There's lots of different APIs and NetCDF is involved over the over the three decades of use so that it's now actually got some variants. But users usually don't have to worry about all those complications because of version compatibility and transparency. We've always developed NetCDF to keep it backward compatible with previously written data and previously written programs so that when new versions are released, things don't break. And so I think, well, let me just mention a few of the APIs that, language APIs that support NetCDF access originally C and Fortran and then C++ and Java and more recently Python. And then there's also R and MATLAB and Ruby interfaces. And there's lots of third-party software and utilities that can sit on top of NetCDF for data analysis and visualization and management. So what does the CDF part stand for in the name? Okay, well, the whole thing is network common data form. It was not really format because we weren't really emphasizing the format. We were emphasizing the API originally. We wanted to be able to change the format underneath without people having to change their programs, but we wanted to still support all previous versions of the format. But people often called the CDF common data format. And actually there was an original software from NASA called CDF and theirs really did stand for the common data format. And we met with them and used some good ideas. What they had was a Fortran-only library that only was meant for Vax and VMS machines. And we thought there were such good ideas in that that we wanted to extend it to C and make it portable for other machines and also create a single file format for it. Because the original NASA CDF was a multiple file format to store multiple variables in different files. So that's where it originally came from. Now you mentioned network is part of the name there, but in the same breath you also say files. So which is it or is it both? It's really both.  But the network first of all means that there is a network format originally based on Sun's external data representation, XDR, so that you can access data, the same data on a network with machines that have different architectures in different ways of storing numerical and text data. And also there's remote access to net CDF data using what's called OpenDap protocols, OpenData access protocol. That's been developed quite extensively with net CDF so that you can access data out of huge archives remotely, small amounts of large data sets efficiently through OpenDap protocol requests. That's all underneath the API so it's really no different than accessing data on your local machine except you give an URL instead of a file name. So net CDF is probably best known in the climate and other earth sciences community. How did that, what historical artifact existed that caused that to come about? Well, I'm in the historical artifact guys so I'll take this question too. When it was first released, it became an ad hoc standard for sharing scientific data and metadata among modelers in climate, ocean and atmospheric science communities because it was at the right level for representing that kind of data. It had simple abstractions for variables and dimensions and attributes and those three things were very important because you have a variable like temperature on a three dimensional grid and dimensions like latitude and longitude and time and attributes like what units or the data in were natural abstractions for the output of data models and for earth science data. So it was a good fit to represent multiple variables on shared grids and even had the right abstractions to represent shared coordinate systems. There were other reasons for its popularity then mostly these things were written in Fortran these early models and C was becoming more popular. But you know these Fortran and C users didn't, we're seeing the disadvantage of using Fortran I.O. or bite oriented C libraries to write scientific data because it made their data not portable across platforms and languages and that's the F just provided an efficient portable language independent I.O. APIs for Fortran and C users and it had some other desirable properties too. The data was self describing and it had metadata about the data in it. The file included ways to represent metadata. Of course, it was portable. It was scalable, which means that a small subset of a large data set could be accessed efficiently. You didn't have to read through all the preceding data. You could append data to a net CDF file without copying the data set or redefining its structure. So that was efficient adding a little bit of data to a big data file. It was remotely accessible as I've mentioned through these open depth protocols and this guarantee of compatibility with backward versions of the software made it a good thing for thinking about keeping archives of data. So I think those those were the most important things later on. There was this development called CF conventions for net CDF metadata that became an international standard for representing metadata in output of models and forecast models and simulation models. So that was also very important. Okay, so what exactly then is the relationship between unit data and you car and net CDF? What was the cross pollination there? So I'll jump in and answer this one. So you car is the managing organization for the National Center of atmosphere atmospheric research. You car being the University Corporation for atmospheric research. You car maintained several community programs, the UCP programs of which unit data is one and we have several other sister organizations, all of whom support science and scientists in our community in our particular ways. So unit data is primarily supports the community through development and maintenance of open source software net CDF being the most prominent software package that that unit data maintains. Yeah, let me just add that that unit data has been around for about 40 years or 30 years, sorry, providing data software tools and support to this community of the unit data community, which is a bunch of universities also. Okay, let's continue technology a little bit and I'll jump right into the probably maybe a little bit controversial one, which is you mentioned backwards compatibility, but then there's net CDF four and its relationship with HDF five. Can you talk a little bit about what the thought process there was and what you're trying to do there? Net CDF four, add some of the features of HDF five in a backward compatible way because it's a layer on top of HDF five that also supports the previous versions of the format before HDF five was used through APIs that simply have extensions there's no there's no incompatibility with previous versions. Basically, we saw that HDF five from Illinois had developed several advanced features like compression and and data chunking and we really wanted those and so we didn't we didn't really want to develop yet another format. We thought well, why don't we try to make try to kind of do a merger of net CDF and HDF five by adding some more APIs and using their storage layer underneath and that way we could get some of the advantages of HDF five without creating yet another format and all the all the work that would involve and it sort of worked. I mean, we had HDF five group worked with us and they had to add a few things that weren't there and we had to represent some some things that weren't there with kind of artifices that were built on top of HDF five. But the result was pretty successful. The net CDF four preserves the common characteristics of those two formats and takes advantage of the, you know, the widespread use and simplicity of net CDF and the performance and generality of HDF five. Yeah, I would add that in my experience, the net CDF four, it refers to the enhanced data model and enhanced file format. It doesn't necessarily mean that net CDF three has been deprecated or has gone away at all. net CDF three is now the refer to as the classic file format and classic data model and is still actively maintained and developed. So the numeric naming convention can occasionally be a little misleading I've found. Yeah, I think that's right. I think they're actually about equally popular now, even though it's been 10 years since we developed net CDF four net CDF three is still very popular. So given a lot of the functionality exists in HDF five. Why would someone choose using net CDF versus using HDF five directly? Very good question that basically many users of net CDF four think that its data model and programming interface are simpler. So it makes using net CDF and programs shorter and easier to understand than the equivalent HDF five programs. And that's not because it does exactly the same thing as HDF five, but has better interfaces. It's because there's this tradeoff between simplicity and and power and net CDF four intentionally doesn't implement all of HDF fives complexity and power, but only a subset of the most important features. But but there is another important difference. That's not the only thing that is simpler and easier to understand. It's it's it's net CDF support for named shared dimensions. This is an abstraction which was never part of the HDF five data model. And so net CDF variables that share a set of dimensions have this way to represent a shared grid or shared coordinate system that's that's not anything that's naturally provided in HDF five HDF five is more serves as a container for all kinds of things and doesn't have the conventions for for representing shared shared grids or shared coordinate systems. So that's responsible for probably one reason people use net CDF four, or even net CDF three, instead of HDF five when they when they want that capability and they want as simple as interface as possible and they don't need all the stuff that HDF five has to add to that answer. The other thing that the HDF HDF five libraries lacking is the ironclad backwards compatibility or archiving promise where we will never release, you know, net CDF will never release a version that cannot read data written by old versions of the library. And that is not a promise you get if you're if you are using HDF five directly. In fact, we encountered something along these lines. I want to say to middle of late last year with HDF five where we the the two current net CDF developers had to scramble to mitigate some changes in the HDF five library which would have potentially broken backwards compatibility that that was their highest priority for for several weeks working around this change. So in addition to everything Russ said this net CDF provides this promise to give scientists confidence in archiving their data in that CDF directly. Okay, so just to put that completely plainly, if I download net CDF today and install it on some modern OS with a modern application, whatever, I can read with that one installation of net CDF data sets that were written 1015 years ago with net CDF version one. Is that correct statement? Absolutely. Okay, it's not just that you can read the same data. It's that if you have old programs that that created or read that data, they will also work it, although you may have to recompile them and relink to the new library to to keep them working. Sometimes they'll work without. I mean, if it's format change that underneath, you definitely have to relink to the new library, but you don't have to change a character of the program. All right, let me go on a slightly different direction here. Being an MPI guy, have an MPI related question for you here. There is a project out there called parallel net CDF or P net CDF. But there's also an MPI enabled version of net CDF. Is there what's the correlation between the two? So I'll jump in with P net CDF if that's okay, Russ. Sure. So parallel net CDF is an independent third party project maintained as a collaboration between Northwestern University and Argonne National Lab. And it works with net CDF three, the classic library data model and file format, and it provides parallel IO, which was not native to the net CDF three code. So I assume you mean the native MPI with net CDF and parallel lib HDF five. So when the HDF five library has been built with parallel IO enabled, the net CDF library at configure time before compilation will actually probe your HDF five library to see if it contains the parallel IO operators. And if so, parallel IO is just enabled and available through net CDF. Your which which is great because it lets your program which relies on that CDF achieve parallel IO without really having to change your code. It is just inherent. It's used automatically because the underlying lib HDF five IO is parallel enabled. Okay, so this is MPI underneath the covers to affect the parallelism. What about the other way around? Has anybody done the MPIO APIs with net CDF underneath? Not that I know of. Same here. Not that I've heard. I think MPI is kind of a lower level library than net CDF. It doesn't. It doesn't deal with abstractions like variables and dimensions and attributes and so I'm not sure an MPI program could make that greater use of net CDF underneath. So a file format is only as good as the ecosystem that can read it. What are some of the other common tools people use with net CDF going from their simulation code to their visualization to archiving? What are common tools that understand a net CDF that people use? I'll take a stab at this. The library from the software that comes from Unidata comes with three important generic tools that have lots of uses by themselves for conversions and abstract extractions. These are called the NC Dump, NC Gen, and NC Copy. But there's lots of other tools as you can guess from the format that's been around for this long. If you look up net CDF software on the web, there's the list of, I think it's over 80 freely available packages now that have been adapted to access net CDF data and visualize and analyze and manage it. And there's some commercial packages too. There's about 25 or so licensed packages that use it. And that's really too many for new users to have to choose from. But they can look at the descriptions and try to figure out what might be useful. But there's a few large third party collections of tools that are especially suited to NCO. And I'll just name those now. NCO, which are the net CDF operators from Charlie's Ender and his group at UC Irvine. NCL, which is the NCAR command language. It's a bunch of really good graphics and analysis tools and a kind of a interpreter language that that deals with the variables and such net CDF variables. And then there's one called CDO, which is the climate data operators from a group at the Max Planck Institute for meteorology in Germany. And they each have their own particular strengths and the large collection of users. So it's hard to say much more about them. You'd have to have to use them to see what or look at them more carefully to see which one's most suitable. There's lots of other single app applications for doing browsing and net CDF data. And NASA has has some packages that are very good general mapping and analysis packages. That's about all I want to say right now about that. Well, I sorry, go ahead. I would also say just from talking with our users and community members, you know, for non developers, people who just want to work with net CDF data, the big three packages company out of California, Esri has software that is commonly used for visualizing data stored stored in net CDF format. MATLAB is another commercial software. We get a lot of questions about or just that comes up in conversation. But then also free tools like R and Python, both of which have net CDF hooks, as well as the inherent visualization capabilities of those languages are also very broadly used. But as Russ said, we maintain a list of just dozens and dozens of commercial and open source packages that speak net CDF. Yeah, and you're mentioning that Python, I have to throw in one more thing here too, because Python's model for multi dimensional data is well, it's very compatible with net CDF data. And this package in Python called X array X, A, R, R, A, Y, X array developed by Stephen Stefan Hoyer is an open source project that that really brings a power of pandas. Using net CDF data pandas is another popular package in in Python. It provides in dimensional variants of the core pandas data structures and and in member it provides in memory representations for net CDF files. So it's really quite quite a good package to look at if you're going to be doing your programming in Python and you want net CDF access. Well, so that brings up a related question here. You listed off a whole laundry list of languages that the net CDF APIs are available in. How did you go through the typical quandary of exposing functionality in different languages? Are the bindings as close to identical in each of the languages or did you take an effort to, you know, like support Pythonic things in Python and see things in C and, you know, try to emphasize the strengths of the particular languages? And could you cite an example? Well, for the modern interface, so for the modern interface is the modern API bindings. Unidata maintains three directly, the core C library, then the Fortran and C++ APIs, which are just separate libraries with hooks back into the core C library. We also help maintain the Python bindings, though that is not a project we spun up from scratch. All the other languages of which there are many like are, as previously mentioned, Ruby, Perl, if you like, any number of other languages actually come from the community. These are bindings that we had zero involvement with creating. And for the most part, they exploit the features of the languages in which, for which they're intended. So we don't try to make everything look like the C interface. We originally tried to do that with a Fortran 77 interface, but later on, for example, when Fortran 90 came along, a user contributed a binding there that really exploited features of Fortran 90 that weren't available and was much more comfortable for Fortran 90 users. And similarly, the Java interface and the mental model you need to use it is quite different from the C Fortran or Python interfaces. And it's very javonic, if you want. It's not like Pythonic. It was written by a sophisticated Java user. And so it knows about the idioms of the language and the way you represent things. I should also apologize to the Java team for forgetting that the Java bindings are also maintained internally. Right. So what's coming into future for NetCDF? Okay. Unless Russ wants to jump in, I'll answer this. I know nothing. So right now, the next step that we're looking at in the short term is extending the compression capabilities. Currently, we leverage Zlib through hdf5 to achieve per variable compression in the NetCDF enhanced file format. But libhdf5 provides a an interface for for adding in additional compression plugins, so to speak. My colleague, Dennis Heimbigner, has written an API that will let us leverage this. And we're also designing some experiments to provide compression results to our community so that they can kind of see what they can achieve with different compression schemes. Beyond that, with cloud computing having exploded the way that it has, block storage is something we would like to be able to leverage with NetCDF to be able to read from and write directly to block storage such as that provided by Amazon and other cloud providers. And beyond that, largely we will be responding to the needs of our users because that is our user community is who we serve and what they need is we try to get there at least before or at the same time as them. I guess I'd also say see the NetCDF GitHub site. I think NetCDF jumped on GitHub sooner than hdf5, for example. I think they still may not use it, but there are so many good developments and going on there and so many users who have been contributing that the future is somewhat being driven by what people contribute and how it proves to be useful and how popular it is. So I think there are some plans out there. Pull requests are welcome and encouraged and any reasonable feature that is pitched and implemented and submitted via pull request will be given full consideration. Let me ask another forward-looking question which you may or may not have answers to, but what do advances in hardware mean for you? So faster CPUs, the advent of SSDs, faster access to storage, faster networks, do you use native network APIs, all these kinds of things that give acceleration possibilities to the underlying hardware. Are there opportunities to use that in your implementation? Well currently, the faster the underlying storage is to access the quicker the API that the library can retrieve data locally. If we are talking about data stored remotely and accessing it via OpenDAP, the OpenDAP API advances in network speeds and the underlying technologies and hardware there, we will see better throughput. The NetCDF library is a storage medium. It's not an analysis medium. There aren't any operations to go, for example, request a matrix decomposition on data stored in that CDF and because it's really primarily just file I.O. and a data model, there's nothing for increased CPU speeds or GPU accelerated programming. There's nothing for it to really do that would benefit NetCDF at this point. I would point out though that the SSD availability is actually kind of important if you're using, if you're doing compression and chunking. Because when you rechunk, if data is written in a certain order and you want to commonly, most commonly, have people read it in a different order and there are huge data sets. For example, you have something that's that's stored with all the data at each time and you actually, the users actually want to take out time series at each point. It's often that's about the worst case for accessing data that was written one way and you want to read it in a different way. And SSDs turn out to be very helpful for that rechunking of data to try to get it into a way that's that's not really, really fast in one direction in one order and really, really slow in another order, but that is kind of pretty fast for any way you want to access it in along any dimension. So I wrote a blog about some experiments with SSDs and how they could improve very, they could, you could create huge improvements by rechunking your data and the best way to rechunk it if you knew how it was going to be accessed was to use SSDs rather than spinning disks just because you get much better performance for the kinds of things you need for rechunking. If you have lots of memory and you have SSDs, but that's about as far as we went with that. So what about licensing? What license is this library distributed under? So I'll let you answer that one, Russ, for historic purposes and then because and then I'll have something to add. Sure. Okay. So Unidata NETTF software from the start was NETTF-C and Fortran and Java interfaces were under a simple MIT-style license. We actually wanted commercial applications to be written with NETTF just to support it as an ad hoc standard. So we didn't really want to put any restrictions on its commercial use. It should just be open source and that's the sort of thing that MIT-style license gave us for open source. Later on there were some issues about whether to use a GNU library license, various versions of that, and a thing NETTF-Java for example is available under multiple licenses including the live GNU license and the MIT-style license. Okay. So adding to that, so yeah, NETTF as Russ described is currently licensed. Open source in the sense anyone can use it for anything which is how we would like that to be and that is how many other Unidata products and projects are licensed as well. There has recently in the last 12 months been a push to adopt one of the big licenses, one of the more commonly known licenses, like a BSD3 clause license instead of what we have now which is effectively a BSD3 clause license, but whatever the license changes to the spirit will remain the same. It will be free to use for anybody be it commercial or open soft projects with really no limitations on how anyone uses it. Yeah, I guess an Apache license was another consideration which I'd forgotten about too because of the patenting issues but we don't think there's any patenting issues with NETTF and so we as far as I know decided not to use any of those Apache licenses. Yeah. Are you going in a slightly different direction again here? What's the largest data set that you have heard of that NETTF is used for? So I sent an email out to our community mailing list when recently asking this very question and the response I got was someone who had a single single-digit petabytes, it was two or three petabytes of data stored in that CDF. I think that was even single files that were stored in there were there were several petabytes right? Yes. Because there are archives like for example the IPCC climate data is multi petabytes I believe from the fifth IPCC report but that's stored in millions of files it's not all just one unit. So this person was just having a single container for petabytes. Yes, I was impressed but that is that is correct Russ it was in a single file. And then an offshoot of that question that we like to ask a lot of our guests here too is what is the strangest or the most unexpected use of your software that you've seen? Something that when someone tells you that they're doing it and I go okay wow we never thought that would be a use case? I have an answer for this but I'm curious if Russ has one as well because he's got the broader view. Well I know that Ed Hartnett who's one of our developers always used to claim and so did Rich Signal actually that they did their taxes in the CDF because it was so convenient but I'm sure that was a joke. There is some use of NetCDF in some standards for storing what is it some there's an instrument that does spectral analysis of chemicals and they use nothing to do with meteorology or climate and the standard is based on NetCDF but I guess that's not very strange. So the use case I'm thinking of is several years ago we had a supporting mail from a gentleman who wanted to store all of his Linux system configuration data in that CDF and had some very good questions about that and I was happy to help although he really never answered my question of why would you do that but I'm that's none of my business I'm I was happy to help him. In that same vein there have been people who became enamored of NetCDF and said well why do I need relational databases I'll take my relational data and try to store it in NetCDF and that really kind of contorts the data model and it's not NetCDF is not ideal necessarily for the kind of stuff you store in relational databases it doesn't follow that data model at all and and you really have to contort things to do it to do that very well I think generally if something is well suited to relational database management system go ahead and use those or but for something that's closer to scientific data observational data or model data NetCDF might be the way to go. Okay so you mentioned before we started recording here that you were one of the original authors of of this package here could you give us like the two or three minute history of NetCDF how did it come about and how has it gotten to where it is today? Sure in 1988 actually we had some meetings among folks from NASA and the CDF format I may have mentioned and then some people from the University of New Mexico who had developed something called Candice and and a guy from a image processing company all to talk about issues with developing something like CDF that for Unix and for for other languages anyway the out of the meeting came the desire to develop our own software for this and not try to use the NASA stuff and we have support from the National Science Foundation who were the primary funder of unit data so we just developed this in 1988-1989 and that's when the the NSCF version one came out in 89 it was beta version 88 and that gained a lot of popularity until about well actually all through the 2000s we talked about getting together with the HD of five folks but we were certainly competing with each other and cooperating with each other but we still were two separate developments and then in 2010-2011 we thought of maybe making a proposal to I'm sorry I have to go back and change the dates in 2003 we actually got together with the folks from NCSA that developed HD of five and tried to submit a proposal to NASA to develop this kind of merger between net CDF and HDF five that would put an HDF simple layer on top of the HD HDF five underneath as a storage layer and that was funded by NASA and it's a it's supported basically four years three or four years of development that never would have happened without that that grant which involved work both from unidata and from HDF folks so we'd like to thank them then there's just been so many contributions from the community of users everything from bug reports to actual big code contributions like for the Portran 90 or the Python software some of the other language software so we're very grateful that the community has provided so much of what net CDF is and why it's still useful okay well thanks a lot again for your time guys where can people find out more information about net CDF and get involved well a great place to start is at the unidata web page which is unidata.ucard.edu from there next you can go to our github page which is github.com slash unidata slash net CDF-C and from that landing page you can find links to the Fortran C++ etc other landing pages as well as a lot of information about net CDF at the high level the philosophy and then the nitty gritty API details finally through the unidata web page we maintain several mailing lists and joining a mailing list or browsing through the 30 years or so of archives is a great way to find out more okay thanks a lot for your time thanks guys


Whenever you open your heart and share your thinking, you know that people are gonna judge it. Instantly people moving to judgment about you.   Which is why I said up front, I have one on, I'm okay with it. So all of us are subject to that in this world, social media has kind of put this out of control, the judging on appearance thing. So to step up and open your mouth and open your heart is by definition vulnerable. I still think it's worth the journey and the experimentation to find an appropriate level for you.  I've seen it done badly and thought, I don't want that. It needs to be authentic to who you are. And...


I'm gonna talk about one of my least popular topics, and that is selling and getting clients.  That's all you want. You don't want to do any selling, selling feels like a icky thing to do. But what I hope to do in this video is to shift your perspective a little bit on the idea of selling. And I think it'll make such a big difference for your business because you probably have noticed that sure, you get started in business and you ask your friends, family, colleagues to sign up or to refer business to you, but you also notice that that runs out pretty quickly after a while and you still want more clients. You still need more to stay in business. And so you have to sense, yeah, I have to learn how to sell, how to market myself to stay in business. And yet you start learning from salespeople and marketers and you say, yeah, it's just not what I wanna do. It's just not from my heart and I get it. And this is why I quit doing that years ago when I shifted my business, that's a different story. But let me share with you a couple of definitions that hopefully will start shifting things for you. Number one, and I wanna thank my colleague, Gil Friend, GIL, friend for sharing this. He said, marketing is simply sharing what you love with the people you care about. And I love that so much. Marketing is simply sharing what you love with the people you care about. Brilliant, there's so much there to unpack. And I'll introduce my own definition. Authentic selling is simply making ourselves available, making our product available to the potential customers who are eager for that product. And I'll make it more simple. Authentic selling is making ourselves available to the people who are the most eager, okay? So what that means is when you are writing your website if you have one or writing on social media or making a video or speaking on a podcast or inviting someone to your product or service or program, when you are doing any kind of selling, I hope that in your mind, you use your powerful human imagination to imagine the ideal customer or client and what kind of person is that? If you wanna comment below with how you describe it, but I want you to imagine the energetics of that person. Sure, we could talk about, oh, they are this age range and they're this kind of profession or they have these kinds of interests. That's great, okay? Demographics, psychographics, et cetera. But now I wanna talk about their attitude towards you, which is I think the most important thing, okay? Because over time, the demographics of our audience will shift and the interests of our audience will shift at least slightly. But the energy and the attitude and the approach of your ideal client towards you will always be like this. It will never be like this where they're like, convince me that you are worth hiring or buying from. That's so many of us have that kind of person. We don't even realize that that's the kind of person in our mind. We don't even realize it. This is why we hate selling. Well, I don't wanna have to sell because selling means I have to contort myself into some inauthentic shape to try to persuade someone and to make my services so small. And so I just, I don't wanna do that. It's so restricting and limiting and constru... Yes, I agree. Well, who are you thinking of in your mind that you have to do that for? Instead, the ideal client, here's their energetic approach towards you. They are eager. They're leaning forward to say, I have heard of you or even if they haven't heard of you, there's something about you. I just saw you and there's something about you.  And then you start talking about your service in a very natural way, in a way like you're talking to someone who is very eager and they're like, oh yes, please tell me more. This is the kind of thing that I've been thinking about. The kind of thing that I've been dreaming of. This is the kind of thing I really need help with or the kind of experience you provide is exactly the kind of experience I didn't even know how to put into words. Thank you for describing it. That is the ideal client that I want you to imagine whenever actively imagine it.  I'm so bored or I'm so impatient. I'm like, oh, you gotta make it so interesting and make it perfect and you gotta dig into my pain and all that stuff. I was like, no, my ideal client is already leaning forward. They already enjoy my presence and all I have to do is whisper and be natural and be genuinely service oriented and caring and just my natural caring self, that's all that's needed for them to say, yes, I wanna sign up. So I hope that this is helpful. I hope that this shifts your idea a little bit about selling and marketing and just authentic selling.  I hope this is helpful and thank you for joining me.


So you want to be a front-end developer in 2021? Well, you reach your eye video. Let me explain This video was brought to you by digital academy You're number one source to learning programming fast and get to that six-figure freelance salary you desire Our courses include our secret project course our freelance Kickstarter our pipeline course and our interview Programming course and much much more So if you haven't already go ahead and click the link below to get to our free Seven-step freelance guide so that we can help take your career to the next level. I'll see you guys in the course All right guys, let's jump right into the problem here And then why you are having problems with front-end development and give you some expectations and some reality So that we can set your a of your expectations in order and you don't get any surprises We're gonna bring that here to you So a lot of you guys your number one problem with development is you don't have it It's not your skills in your experiences front-end development is It's competitive in certain markets and you may need to change your approach a little bit Maybe start on the back end or the front-end a little bit more to eventually get to that front-end development because front-end development It's way way way more competitive than the other two and It's have less jobs relatively speaking of the other two I want you guys to give you some strategies and expectations on but before I get into this Share your experience the problems you're having some of the roadblocks You are having as a friend an aspiring friend and developer either trying to get a new job Or just to get a raise in your existing job share your experience below that started conversation And we can really come up with a custom solution for you guys that being said guys The takeaway I want for you guys here is to start where your local market has the most jobs It's gonna do several things for you and we're gonna talk about them But if you had to take away one video Study your local market see what type of development jobs you want and customize your learning experience and your Text stack and your knowledge around that that's gonna get you way farther and Just learning any and everything about development being an expert at something that you can't even get it So that being said guys if you haven't already go ahead and sign up for my seven step guide links are in the description box It's gonna really help you guys take your skill to the next level Get you Closer to that front-end development job that you want or just being a freelancer links below in the description And if you already had picked up my free seven step guide go ahead and buy some premium courses That's gonna also help you guys with that being said guys. Let's jump right into this thing guys You got three different types of development. You got the front-end development back-end development database development I know there's more but these are the three we're gonna focus on these are the most widely Ranks development jobs you can get from a typical market that being said out of the three Front-end development is the most competitive. It's the most attractive. It's the one that everybody's going after even the experts So obviously it's gonna be more competitive, especially if you don't have any experience you don't have any knowledge of the Industry that you're trying to get in it's gonna be a lot more difficult that being said is logic It makes logical sense. So maybe start on the database or the back end and then eventually work your way to a front-end development just because you're applying for a back-end or Database development job don't mean you're gonna never do any front-end work It's just that what you're gonna be primarily working on and you can always work your way to Desire development platform that you want But the key thing and the hardest thing is to get your foot in the door Get that experience that first one or two three years experience Then you can write your own ticket from there Experience matter guys you need to get it as fast as possible in the local market union so that you can really start to be a Priority or top applicant for that particular job guy. It's very important that you guys do that just like I'm doing here guys If you haven't already noticed, I'm finally moved to my new place still doing a lot of work Just try to get my office up to up to up and going You know, there's a lot of stuff you guys don't see I got to do it's not exactly how I want But I'm trying to get started. I'm bringing you guys some good content Eventually I'm gonna get to the point where my office is gonna be exactly how I wanted everything gonna be dialed in and I'm gonna bring you I'm always gonna bring you guys the highest quality content But it's gonna be doubting into exactly what I want but until then I'm gonna have to really navigate things Maybe have to put stuff in place temporarily Maybe do some things that I normally wouldn't do on a one-off basis to get to my desired State the desired goal. That's the thing you need to do a front-end development guy Database development really good option. You guys need to try. That's what I do I'm not more of a gooey make things pretty kind of guy I like the data because that's the most important thing of the business that drives the business process that gives Company competitive advantage So if you able to leverage the data Modified let them access it really take that data make sense of it in a way where it can take the company to the next level You got options there guys and the good thing about the data is at the end of the day when you start to Publish that data to the end user starting to get into that front-end Starting to really showcase that data in a way that makes them make their decisions faster giving them a competitive advantage And put you in a position even though you started off as a database development Do those that front-end projects and eventually once an opening come up exclusively in the front-end you have those Options available for you, but it all starts by Attacking problems developing problems that that company have so that's a Another strategy for you guys back in the same strategy as the database guys There's a lot of back-end processes procedures all that stuff that has to be maintained created That actually facilitate data going to the friend in the back-end the NBC model all that stuff is critical to making a software development application work tied into that whole Software development stack got opportunities there guys a lot of people don't even think about it like that Very to the front-end. They don't get the job They don't get the call back and they get frustrated and they end up creating a lot of opportunities out there for you guys To do that so at the end of the day guys you have to find out your local market Take it one step at a time Find something that a company's who eager to hire a new developer with know There's no experience or low experience who need to work your way to your desired goal That's how the strategy is gonna work guys. That's how I got started. I just started off that I had to actually Take two steps back actually start off and help this before I even started off in Being a developer and I eventually work my way up and I can work anywhere I want to you guys gonna have the same Opportunity so at the end of the day guys do you agree with me comment below? You disagree me comment below also guys come like I told you guys earlier We're gonna be doing a lot of good content bear with me I got a few more housekeeping things I got to do and I'm gonna be bringing you guys different types of content more behind-the-scenes more V-log type of day-to-life kind of stuff mixing it up You kind of give me you guys a lot more visual of being a software engineer But at the end of the day guys you have to start somewhere Learn that first job and get to that big six-figure salary use desire. So if you haven't already Go ahead links below To my seven-step guide I'll put a link here on the screen for you guys like subscribe to the content having additional questions comment below and At the end of the day, we're gonna bring you guys a good content. I'll see you guys video face


Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. You know, with everything going on in the world right now, it's not uncommon to feel anxious, restless, and depressed. The good news is there's actually hope. You can feel calmer, happier, and more well rested all by making simple changes to your day-to-day life. In fact, my guest today has written an entire book about it. On this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast, I'll talk to psychiatrist Jodi Skilikorn. Dr. Skilikorn recently released her new book Healing Depression Without Medication, a psychiatrist's guide to balance mind, body, and soul. In it, she presents her approach to tackling depression and other mental health issues the holistic way. With that said, Dr. Skilikorn, welcome to the program. Thank you. It's nice to be here. So let's address the elephant in the room right off the bat. The title of your book suggests that you think people shouldn't be on antidepressants or that you are anti-medication. Is that how you feel? Well, the title of the book suggests that there's other ways to treat depression besides just medication. And these are often overlooked, just like the elephant in the room and someone will show up in an office and complain of feeling sad or anxious. And many physicians, not all of course, will immediately will ignore the elephant and immediately start asking for a checklist of symptoms and fail to ask, you know, what's happening, what's going on in your life, what's looking for, you know, circumstances that might make those feelings perfectly normal.  And there's so many different reasons, but too often these don't get addressed and instead they're just given a one-size-fit-all pill and sign out the door. Yeah, you know, I think I'm actually in the same playbook as you. We've got to really kind of find the underlying cause of all this. Absolutely. For instance, I will take a heart patient, who's recently had a heart attack and a stent, and I'll keep them on a statin drug at that point with the idea that once I correct everything that got them to the point of having an heart attack and a stent, they're probably not going to need a statin drug, but I'm not anti-medication.  Right, exactly. And I too will occasionally put people on meds, although I find for the most part, I don't need to because there are so many other options. But if necessary, I will. And lots of my patients are come to me on meds. They come to me on multiple meds. And so lots of times we work on decreasing them or reducing them.  And that's their choice. You know, ultimately it's up to them. It's what serves them. But I do feel it's important to give a full sort of risk and benefit analysis, right? And actually offer other alternatives, which is really what we're all supposed to do as physicians, regardless of the diagnosis. Yeah.  One that feeling abnormal is the new normal. Can you, can you elaborate on that? Yeah. So currently one out of seven Americans, one out of four women are put on these medications. And again, too often, it's just because of very normal responses to very normal events. So right now, for example, lots of people are anxious. In fact, I just read, I think anxiety medications are up by about 38%. And right. But the reality is, is that's a normal response. And one of the best ways to manage anxiety during this time is to learn skills to manage the anxiety, because it's going to be part of our lives for some time, versus just numbing the symptoms, which doesn't really solve the problem or address, you know, the issues that are going on, which in this case might be, you know, kind of distorted ways of thinking or, you know, for each person is different, but different stories and feeling that the whole world's not safe, or feeling whatever it is, but addressing those specific issues rather than just quickly medicating it. Well, I think that's why alcohol sales are doing extremely well right now. Exactly. Right. And that actually, that's not solving the problem either is if it does eliminate the symptoms temporarily and may create a bigger problem down the road, down the road. So I think that's one of the reasons I really wanted you on the podcast right now is okay. And I agree with you. Anxiety is absolutely normal right now. And I see so many patients who have normal depression. They lost a spouse, they lost a loved one. They lost their job. Yeah. So help our viewers and listeners. What steps can somebody take, you know, proactively to deal with this under these circumstances? What do you tell them? You can take steps. You may not, there's not a lot of jobs available right now, but there actually are a lot of jobs that are created because of this as well, right? New services that are new ways of doing things, and sort of creatively coming up with, you know, a way to fit into the niche of what's going on right now, rather than just focusing on what's wrong, focusing on what you can do. So taking control over what you have control over. Secondly, just acknowledging the feelings are real, and they're valid. And you have a right to them. And and then what can you do? What can you do next? And so what you can do next are simple things like just breathing, for example. And I know someone's just lost their job. The last thing they want to hear is, Oh, just take a breath. I get it. However, what happens when we're breathing short shall a breath into the chest is we're sending a signal to the brain that there's a threat right here right now.  But right here right now, you're actually safe, right? None of those catastrophes have yet happened. Right. This is presuming the person has basic shelter and all of this stuff, right? Otherwise, that's a whole another set, then you need, you know, support and community services and all of that. Right. But but just starting with the breath is one simple way. So it's when we breathe short shall a breath into the chest, it sends a signal to the brain to that limbic system in the brain, the fight flight freeze and that threat detector, basically saying there's a yellow or orange alert right here right now.  And yet our brains receiving a threat signal that there's a threat. Right. And so if we can start to breathe into the belly, then we can activate the vagal nerve and the vagus nerve winds up to the brain, the limbic system and says, Hey, right here right now, we're okay. And yes, there's things we have to worry about in the future. And there are things we need to plan for. But right here right now, we're safe. And that allows the brain then to to pause and step out of that fight flight freeze. And when we're in that fight fight freeze, what happens is the frontal lobes of the brain essentially get turned off 80% of the blood drains from the frontal lobes into the rest of the body in order to prepare to deal with this crisis, which is not helpful for finding a job, we're not going to find it by going into fight to flight. But if we can activate, if we can calm down the limbic system and reactivate the frontal lobes, we can then think more clearly, so that we can take the steps we need to take to find it, you know, to figure out what we're going to do next. But when we're in that limbic state, we can't, we can't think clearly, we're not able to really see the big picture and take those steps. Does that make sense? Well, it does to me. But okay, so our listener has two screaming kids at home. I know all about that. So tell me, you know, practically, okay, the kids are screaming, and I don't have a job. How am I going to find 30 seconds or a minute to take a deep breath? How do you do that? That's the most important time to take a deep breath. So you don't take it on your kids. I've, trust me, I have two kids that they're not screaming anymore, but they're bouncing basketballs, while I'm trying to talk to patients online, and they're coming in constantly and interrupting. And that's when you need to take a breath, right, to step out of that fight, nothing.  So if I'm angry, nervous, scared, now my child's going to be nervous, angry, and scared. And so they're going to, we're just going to feed off each other, and it's just going to be that much worse. So it's kind of the idea of put your own gas mask on first, right on the airplane, I have to stop and pause. And just it can, you know, even if it's just three deep breaths, I mean, isn't that what we teach? I use to teach that to my kids, right, just pause and take three deep breaths, you can always do that. There's always time for that. The another good tool in those moments is exercising, especially if you have two active screaming kids, right. And and if you're looking for a job right, exercise is such a great way to release anxiety and such a powerful way to for depression, especially because I think of part of depression is really stuck energy. It's everything's just stuck and hopeless. But when we move, we start to allow our bodies to free up some of that energy. And it just ended increases neural transmitters in the brain, it increases neuroplasticity in the brain. And we get that, that rush of just feeling good. And that can happen just walking around the block or taking the kids out in the backyard. And, you know, even if it's snowing. Yeah, or like I say, get a dog. Oh, dogs are perfect dogs, especially if you live in a place like Ohio, right? He's my dog is the only reason I get myself out in the winter. No, that's exactly right.  The only reason to go outside is because your dog wants to. Yeah, otherwise, just shelter and yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it's these simple steps that really can shift. In fact, there was a study that showed as far as exercise that even one hour a week, which translates to nine minutes a day, which means that even the woman with the two screaming children whose homeschooling can get fine nine minutes, even if it's with them running beside her or walking beside her or exploring the neighborhood beside her or whatever. But just nine minutes a day can decrease the risk of depression by 44%. All right, yeah. Yeah, I want to go back to something you just said and reminded me, we were talking off camera that you know, I trained in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the University of Michigan. One of my mentors was the head of pediatric surgery, Arnie Corrin. And he one of the most important lessons he ever taught me was there's there's going to be disasters in the operating room. And I was a children's heart surgeon, and he was a children's surgeon, and there's nothing worse than a disaster in a child. No, and disasters happen. And he said, when that happens, you you have to slow your breathing down, you have to take a deep breath. And you you may be crappin in your pants.   No one will think. And it will be a disaster. And you're absolutely right. And right. So if you're, you know, the kids are screaming, blah, blah, blah. I think you're right. The way to take control that situation is help yourself first, put your mask on first. And his advice stayed with me my entire career. And he's absolutely right. Yeah, it's like the pilot of an airplane saying, we're gonna crash. Right. I mean, right, you're in danger. It's true. But going to that place is not going to help you. Yeah, or anyone else. Yeah, great advice. Okay, you also challenge the idea that mental health issues are a symptom of your genetic makeup or a neurochemical imbalance. You tell me more about that. Because I agree with you. Yeah, so there's been 50 years of research. And so far, they've been unable to prove that theory. And even the very founders of it, we're very skeptical of it and said this is just a piece of a much larger puzzle, right. But there's been lots of evidence to show that that's not the case. And in fact, as far as specific studies on neuro transmitters, right, so all of our medications are based on increasing levels on the idea that they're low. But the reality is, is if you look at studies, basically a quarter of the population, whether depressed or not depressed have low serotonin. And a quarter of the population, whether depressed or not depressed have high serotonin. And the rest of us are in the middle. So the reality is, we don't really know what normal is. And often, you know, if you have somebody that's on the higher end, and you give them these medications, it can be very dangerous. And so we're not really, we're not checking, we don't really have a means to do that, we're just assuming making this assumption. And so it can be a rather dangerous assumption. But more than that, it's a stigmatizing assumption, because the idea is that the brain is broken. And that's not what the literature shows. In fact, the brain and the other false idea is that the brain is static and not changing as if once broken forever broken. And again, that's not with the literature shows, our brains change with every thought with every action, they're constantly rewiring themselves. But we it appears to be static because most of us most of the time are sending the same message over and over. And so it keeps rewiring in the same way over and over. But if we change the message, change the behaviors, change how we were responding, we start to change the structure of the brain. And by doing that, we're also changing the neurochemistry, right? So it's not ever a fixed thing, it's constantly changing with based on what's going on our lives. So for more anxious, it is going to be disrupted. And constant but constantly, our body's always looking for balance. And so it's as it's disrupted, it's also trying to find a new homeostasis. And often the medications can disrupt that process. When you also talk about the placebo effect of using medication. Yeah, how often do you think that happens? Pretty much with all medications. Anytime any doctor is talking to their patient and offering it, there's the double placebo are really powerful social belief in the medications that medications fix everything. And our relationship with the patient and our telling them that and that relationship acts as a placebo as well.  But the reality is it's powerful. It changes our brain. And if you take it changes our brain in the same way as the actual medication. So what we need to be doing is activating the placebo effect, whether we're giving medications or whether we're not giving medications, but really offering hope. And that's part of the problem with the that neurochemical, you know, the idea of neurochemical imbalance is that what we're really offering is really telling people is basically they're a victim of their biology. And then you would ask kind of backing up a little bit, you asked about the genetics. And again, right, there's no evidence to show there's there's predispositions for sure. But there's no evidence to show that there's any particular gene that predispose that that leads to depression. Again, it's mostly epigenetics, right? It's the influence of our genes and the environment together. In fact, there was just a study done just I just read it last week in the American Journal of Psychiatry and they actually looked at it was a study done in Sweden and they use the National Registry and they they looked at 666 siblings and half siblings. And they were all considered at risk in the sense that they had at least one parent that had depression. And so what they were trying to see is if this is more, you know, environmental or genetics. And what they found was is the kids that were actually ended up being adopted out of the household had much lower risk than the ones that stayed in the household, unless their adoptive parents had history of depression, or there was some other big trauma. And that's where most of research is pointing is that it's really comes down to chronic inflammation, just like every other disease, just like all this stuff, you know, you see and and the inflammation that results from that and the biggest links are with adverse childhood events. So early childhood traumas because they change our brain and they change the structure of the brain, they change the nervous system so that the world does feel unsafe and in the brain is more reactive to even neutral threats. So these early childhood, you know, traumas could be things from, you know, a parent having depression and not being emotionally connected, or it could be a divorce, or it could be a parent in jail, or it could be physical, sexual or emotional abuse. So all of these things change the chemistry and even 20 years later, studies show result in increased inflammation down the road. And so again, looking at that the work then really is to rewire the nervous system so that it's not as reactive. Let's go to rewiring the nervous system. You're you're obviously trying to get to the roots of depression. Okay, teach us how to rewire our nervous system. So again, we're coming back to the breath as one, right? So that's one simple way the breath and mindfulness, right? So becoming really aware of what's going on in this moment. So that could be the breath.  And what they found was that 20 minutes of focusing on the breath, so a mind, you know, a breath meditation for as little as six to eight weeks actually changes the structure and function of the brain. So that that that limbic system that fight flight free system is less reactive. And the connections in the brain are there's better connections in the brain. So it's less likely to get a hijacked. And so the breath is again, one really powerful one and again, exercise as a powerful one, it changes our brains as well. It changes the structure and function of the brain just as much as meditation does. Other things that can change it are especially getting into the body. So things like yoga, and, and chikung and Tai Chi and those kind of mind body forms of exercise that really allow us to start to understand the body more and be more in tune with it and not be disconnected or scared of it. So as you know, my area of interest is the gut microbiome and the gut brain connection. Yes. And so food. Yeah, so food is a huge one, right.  So the fatty process, sugary diets have a 50% greater risk of depression. And studies now have been done both adults and adolescents showing that even changing it just a little bit can really shift our mood in a really significant way. Yeah, I'm more and more impressed that there's so much information a normal gut microbiome provides the brain of really about the status of the outside world. And years ago when I got interested in lectins, there were fascinating studies of injecting rats with lectins in their perineum and perineum. And these rats would get so anxious and depressed that they wouldn't seek out food. And they just cower in their corner. And yeah, so even, you know, even just got dysbiosis and lectins and leaky gut will do a lot of this. Absolutely. Getting back to genetics for a minute, we measure the MTHFR mutations and all of our patients.  And there's a lot out there on social media that anxiety and depression I'm going to blame on the fact that I have a mutation of one or more of my MTHFR genes. And I can't do anything about it. And that's why I'm depressed. And 50% of people have at least one of these mutations. Yeah, it's a huge number. It's a huge number. So the fact that so many people have these mutations. What do you tell somebody that says it comes in says, look, you know, this is why I'm depressed, I have this mutation. And so there. Well, one, if they really believe that, so if that's true, then starting them at lmethophole should start to help. But all the other, but part of it is we need to, if they can't if they're stay homozygous, and they can't sort of clear out the folic acid they're getting or or some of the that's in a lot of the process foods again. Right again, so these things like exercise and even saunas and ways to detox are going to help as well. But the point is we still have the power to change these things, right? Just the genetics itself isn't a life sentence. And it may play a role. But I have frankly never seen it play a full role ever, right?  And it can be an important piece. And I too look at it. But it's a piece. Great. But I have had people tell me that as well.   And I think homocysteines are a very useful way of seeing how many methyl groups we're providing to them. And there's wonderful different sources of methyl groups. And yeah, I do, we, we do try to maximize that. But I think you're right, it is, it is a piece of a puzzle. But I think your observation is great. If people think that this is the problem. Maybe we need a new way of thinking in addition. Yes, absolutely. Okay, let's come back full circle to the corona pandemic. People are going to go back out there. They're pulling back their restrictions. How do you, how do you think reentering life is going to affect people? Are you seeing that already? Well, it's just starting to get talked about here. So I guess I almost don't know because I was really intrigued by the split among my patients in terms of the pandemic. I actually found that lots of people with really severe anxiety actually did better. Because in a way it was like acknowledgement, like, we were all we're all anxious, right? It didn't no longer felt like a pathology no longer felt they some of them were like, wow, I'm not broken. Like we all have like, we all have a breaking point. We all have things that makes us anxious. And they actually, I'm not even seeing them, right? I used to see them frequently. And they're fine. They're really doing okay. Life is great. Yeah, right. And yeah, yeah.  And so some people are actually thriving in this period. And of course, other people aren't, and are incredibly anxious. And so I don't know how that will play out when with coming back into as things open up. But I would still say the same thing, which is we can only control what we can control. And again, to stay focused on the here and now, not all the things that might happen or could happen, or how long is this going to end? And all these the all these questions we don't have answers for, right? But to really stay focused on, okay, how can I keep myself safe now? And how can I keep others safe now?  You know, you bring up a great point. And I've talked about this with other folks on the podcast. This is an opportunity to think about a new career choice, if you've ever, you know, thought about it. And I think your idea, there are people who clearly do much better from home in a non, you know, surrounded by lots of people. Is this something if, you know, you're one of those people to say, you know, I really do well working from home. And maybe I should consider something, some career in that. I mean, I think this pandemic has offered that, right, a different way of learning lots of things about ourselves, right? What's really important to us, what we do miss, what we don't miss. I know for myself, I'm, I'm really enjoying not being so busy, not driving here and there and always trying to find things to do for the kids. We're just kind of here and we go hiking. And that's really our only option. And we play games and we play tag football and we play board games and things we really haven't done in a long time, because, you know, we're always busy, going somewhere and doing things and going to play dates and doing all these things. So I think there are, I think we all have to look at our own lives and what, you know, appreciate what is beneficial for us and what maybe pieces we want to keep and what pieces we're going to be so grateful to be done with.  And we've touched a lot of those. Are there any effective supplements to help people with depression? Yeah, so my favorite go to as a starting one simply because it's it's so relative safe is turmeric curcumin. It's been shown in studies to work as well as phyloxatine Prozac. Yeah. And so it's a powerful anti inflammatory used for all kinds of chronic diseases. And I find it highly effective. It's actually been shown to boost neurotransmitter levels. It's, you know, as long with the inflammation. So I like to start there because it's safe and because it's effective. And I always tell people again, amplifying the placebo effect, right, the research showing it works as well as the antidepressants. And so a good place to start. And I think safe for really anyone to try. Another one I love, especially for the more anxious kind of depression is theanine, healthy anine. So the amino acid and green tea. Again, incredibly safe been used for thousands of years. But it really has been shown in one study was shown to work as well as alprazolam. I don't think anyone who's actually taken alprazolam would agree with that. But for people that haven't taken it, it has a very soothing effect and also can help with sleep and concentration. So I love that one. And one I think is really important, especially for us here. For those of us in the middle of the country is omega threes. I think it's important for probably everyone.  And if we don't have those omega threes, right, the brain just can't function as efficiently. And that's a huge there's lots of research showing that omega threes are highly associated with, for example, postpartum depression, but also suicidality and in particularly violent suicides. So those are sort of the three that are routinely recommend. The other one if someone's just struggling. And for the short term is magnesium magnesium has been shown to to quickly improve mood, although it doesn't last. So as soon as you stop taking the magnesium, the symptoms tend to come back. But it can be very effective in the short term to feel better and get a boost and start to then use you know, do these other skills and do these other tools to kind of boost your mood yourself. Yeah, that's all actually great advice. And that brings me to the next question. And how do you have a protocol to wean people off of antidepressants? I know I do. Talk, talk about okay, someone comes to you and, you know, on an antidepressant or an anti anxiety and says, I don't like this. Most people once you get them off of it, say, boy, I can my brain didn't work right. And I'm sure you've noticed that too. So how do you do? How do you do it in your practice? Yeah, just a comment on your last statement, about 75% are grateful that they got off even if they have a hard time getting off. So it's huge. As far as getting off. I mean, it's sort of case by case, obviously, but I go very slow, especially the people I see there. They've often been through withdrawal before. So we go incredibly slow. And at the same time that we're slowly decreasing, again, using mindfulness, using the breath, using things like EFT, emotional freedom technique, but tapping as ways to manage the anxiety that comes up, because there's so much fear, especially for people that have been on them for so long. And I think the fear plays as much role in the withdrawal symptoms as the actual medication, I think it's they amplify each other. And so I really work a lot with sort of calming the fears and giving them some control over the speed of the process. So they, they feel empowered in the process and know that it's really their, you know, their choice, but to keep sort of cheerleading, encouraging them to keep going. And then just listening to their bodies, right, their bodies are, as I don't really have a protocol, because it really is listening to, you know, if side effects come up, then we slow everything down. But if things are going well, you can go a little quicker. And if, if people are really struggling, sometimes I use Sammy, yeah, to as a temporary stop gap to help reduce the withdrawal symptoms, and I find that's actually quite effective. The other tool I love to use if I can convince people to do it is actually acupuncture actual puncture helps the withdrawal symptoms so much. There's a protocol the NADA protocol, which is used mostly on the coast. I don't know. Are you familiar with the NADA protocol? But it's, yeah, it's just five needles in the ear. And it's used primarily for street drugs. However, withdrawal is really the same whether it's prescribed or a street drug. And it's, it's, it's highly effective. And so I, I will do regular acupuncture on my patients or encourage them to go get a full acupuncture with an acupuncturist. But that's another really effective tool. So you mentioned Sammy, tell our listeners what that is, because I think it's a great supplement. Yeah, so Sammy is, it's sometimes we actually normally get in food, we eat it. But often when we're stressed, it gets depleted. But what I love about Sammy is that, unlike most antidepressants, it's the precursor to all the neural transmitters. So it allows the body to decide what it needs. You give it, right, we give it the precursor and then it, if it needs more serotonin, it can get more serotonin if it needs more neural print efforts. So it allows the body to provide what it needs rather than assuming again, that this is what you need. And I'm, you know, giving a medication that's going to force it in a direction that may not be the best fit for your body. And it's even a methyl donor as well. And it's a methyl donor as well. And yes, I do use it for anyone who comes and tells me that they have, yeah, with, with MTHFR genetic mutations. You know, something you said when we started, I do see a number of patients that we can get off of these, but there's a, there's a number of them that we get them down to a little tiny dose. And we can't go any farther.  And you mentioned that, and I think that's, that's a good observation. There does seem to be a place for little tiny doses in some people. Yeah. And I think that's also when, when I see that, that I think a lot of it is fear based as well. But I know I had one guy, he was a pharmacist and it took three years. And I don't even, I couldn't even do the calculations he was doing at like how he was mindlessly going down. And I would just kind of left it to him. I'm like, okay, as long as we're moving in the right direction. And, you know, it took a long period of time, but he just smidged my smidge because he was so sensitive to it. And I do think he was truly sensitive and he was really scared. It was both. I think, yeah. And something you just mentioned before this, I often talk about how you find a good doctor. And I keep telling particularly women, you've got to keep looking for someone who's going to listen to you, who's actually going to believe what you're saying, and take you seriously. How do you recommend finding the right therapist? Because quite frankly, there are a number of psychiatrists that say here, you know, have a drug, that's what I do. Yeah.  And, you know, that might not be who your best friend connects with, you know, so really finding someone you trust and to kind of trust that. And ideally, I, you know, to find someone who can teach some of these skills, right, the mindfulness and the breathing and some of the lifestyle changes and not just talk. Because I think we need to get out of our heads too. And some some therapy is, I mean, it has its place and it offers support. And sometimes that's what people need. But I think when there's bigger stuff going on, especially if there's traumas and things like that, I think some of the more mind body stuff is, is, is kind of is critical, really. Well, that's all we have time for today. You have been very useful, Dr. Skillicorn. Where can people find out more about your work, number one, and your book, of course? I, my website is jodeskillicorn.com. And then on Facebook, I have two sites, Dr. Jody Skillicorn and Mindful Psychiatry. Yeah, very good. And, you know, one other thing you mentioned, are there sites to find functional medicine psychiatrists, holistic psychiatrists, or any hope for that? Yeah, well, I'm actually on my website, I have a huge list of resources. Perfect. That's what I need. All right. All right. So thank you very much. And stay safe out there. Yeah, you too. All right. Thank you. All right, it's time for our audience question. Ashley M. from Instagram. My husband and I have COVID-19 and hoping you have some advice. We've read your book and love it. I have Crohn's disease and want to try your methods. Please let us know what we can do. Well, number one, I'm sorry, you've got COVID-19. I hope you are some of the people who do not have a lot of symptoms from this. We have to remember that the good news about this virus, if there is any, is that the vast majority of people will either have very limited symptoms, no symptoms. And by far the vast majority of people will not die from COVID-19. We always have to remember that. On the other hand, I do see a large number of people with Crohn's disease or who have had Crohn's disease. And quite frankly, my method works great for Crohn's. I don't want to brag, but it just does. One of the key things right now is to get your vitamin D levels up. People with Crohn's, in general, don't absorb vitamin D very well. Most people with Crohn's, I have to start them on 15,000, even 20,000 international units of D3 a day. And I need to get your vitamin D levels above 100 nanograms per milliliter. And it may take some effort to do that. The good news is the Cleveland Clinic Heart Lab and Quest now say that 150 nanograms per milliliter is normal. It is not toxic. Finally, labs are catching up. There's now three studies of humans that show the lower your vitamin D, the more severe COVID-19 is going to be, and the more deaths and the higher your vitamin D, the exact opposite. The less severe COVID-19 is and the less deaths. Three now monster human studies that prove how important it is to have a high vitamin D level now. So please try the book. Let me know. I'll be listening out from this is a this is a solvable problem. Now it's time for the review of the week. Following my episode on the coronavirus Korea on Apple podcast wrote, I am so grateful you share this info with us. I have posted it to my own social media in hopes that people will stop panicking and take your advice to your the best. Well, thanks a lot. That's why I keep doing these coronavirus podcasts. There's just a lot of bad information out there. There's a lot of disinformation. There's a lot of panic. And you know, we got to keep calm and carry on with good advice. And thank you for letting me know you pass this on. That's why I'm doing it. Okay, that's it for the Dr. Gundry podcast. We'll see you next week. Stay safe out there. Before you go. I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcast because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you.