Live from Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Insight 2015, brought to you by IBM. Now your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin. Welcome back to IBM Insight, everybody. This is theCUBE. theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is, I think, our fourth year at IBM Insight. IBM's big, big data show. IBM doesn't use that term. They call it analytics and it's done a tremendous job of taking this giant portfolio and then building a leading, the leading, actually, analytics business in the industry. Harriet Freiman is here, she's the vice president of marketing at IBM Analytics. Harriet, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, so the show here is big. I think bigger than anyone we've been to. A lot of great energy. The solutions expo is tremendous. The keynotes this morning were packed, the general session. So you must be thrilled. Yeah, it's a fantastic audience here. And we just came off our advanced analytics keynote this afternoon where we're talking about the advances in Watson analytics. So the smart data discovery tool as well as our new release of Cognos. So Watson analytics is just permeating all parts of the business, the healthcare business, the cloud business, the analytics business. Talk about the impact that that little sort of experimental program with Jeopardy has had on the company as a whole. Yeah, it's really delivering on the promise that we talk about around the cognitive business. And where Watson analytics comes in, it's really looking to bring that smart data discovery to an individual on their PC to get instant insights into data. Whereas before they really could get access to the data but how do they find the causation between data points versus just taking a look at sales data, finance data. So Watson analytics really allows them to have that natural language question and have the processing behind the scenes find the interesting stuff in the data. It's such a big idea as a marketing executive. You've got to love the fact that you can actually produce such a capability. You know, it's not like a little point product that's a platform that can touch every part of your business that can change lives. What are your, can you comment on that as again from a marketing perspective? Well it's always fun in marketing to have a great portfolio to be able to market and something that really makes a difference to people's business. So with Watson analytics and with what we're doing with Cognos around our business intelligence, it's great to market what has always been promised I think in the BI market for many years which is self-service analytics for all. So as we're marketing both the capabilities around Watson as well as the capabilities in Cognos, it's kind of a delight to say, you know, what we were talking about to give insight to everybody to make better decisions is really coming to fruition. IBM has grown its analytics business largely through acquisition. I think you've got 25 acquisitions. You've got a lot of different great brands, SPSS, Core Metrics, Cognos and the like. Is Watson going to evolve and do a kind of a assimilation point for all of those umbrella? Yeah, what we look at is as we talked about the cognitive business and Watson really being the cognitive computing engines of that business. We're looking at how our analytics business really expands companies' ability to really understand what the data's turning them, learn from experience of working with the data and put that into practice. So we can do that with dashboards with reports as well which is help people understand there's insight to be gained from data, there's value to be gained from data and so you can apply it through being a learning company with or without having a cognitive system itself. I'm going to take data, I'm going to apply analytics to understand patterns and I'm going to apply that to my business and then I'm going to learn from the feedback loop and just keep learning, learning, learning and that's what a cognitive business is about. So the BI business historically, it's been interesting to watch. I mean I remember when it was called decision support, right? And it's put on a lot of promises, 360 degree view of the business, predictive analytics and it didn't live up to those promises and then you have this whole Hadoop movement come in and they're going to live up to those promises and then you realize, wow, they actually can't live up to those promises without the traditional data sets and are those two worlds coming together? Is that the way that we should be thinking about this to actually fulfill on those promises of the last 15 to 20 years? Yeah, I think we always had the chicken and the egg right. You can't have great analytics without great data and what's the use of great data unless you have great analytics so you really need both together. I think the promise has always been a great 360 degree view of customer actually requires being able to get your arms around the data itself, reconcile it, make sense of it and then it requires great analytics and a way to deliver it to the people who can use it in their business, be they in call center, in service, in sales. So the promise has always been there, it's the fact that we need to put it all together. We need to put together the data as you said, Hadoop and relational data all together inside and outside the firewall. We need to be able to make sense of it so bring those entities together, do master data management, make the data make sense as you pull it together and then have a great way for people to understand it, consume it, apply it in their business. So Cognos was obviously a huge acquisition, Paul was mentioning, many of them, Ambuj Goyali, I think we used to tell you it's one of his favorite. And I think it was rather large, it was about a five billion dollar acquisition I believe and then IBM has sort of supercharged that entire business. So how has Cognos evolved and where are we today? So as I came in through the Cognos acquisition many years ago when IBM acquired us, I really have seen it just develop and expand from the day that we came on board with IBM. It's really expanded in a couple of ways. One is that we have expanded Cognos capability to get at all types of data. So you mentioned Hadoop, so now we know that in order to deliver a rich understanding of what's happening in the business, the Cognos reporting capabilities need to access all of that data. And so it does, it can access relational data, data and appliances, Hadoop data, data on the cloud. So really expanding the corpus of data that can be put into a report and consumed by business. The second big investment has been where BI was always thought of as an IT-only tool. Now I ask IT for a report, they have a report backlog, some months later they may give me a report, it's not quite what I wanted. That whole world has changed now, which is really bringing BI we imagined into business people's hands because they want the right to be able to model data, be able to author reports, distribute it, share it among their colleagues. So it's been an exciting journey as we've really taken business intelligence really to the next level. So what's the role of the big spark initiative that IBM announced a couple of months ago? Vis-a-vis all of the analytics products. Does Spark act as kind of a pre-processor for the capability of the value of those point products add or how does Spark fit in with them? Yes, so with our Spark investment we announced our commitment to Spark back in June and since then we're really looking at it as well what we coined the term, the analytics operating system. So we see it as that foundational layer that's really going to speed up the speed of analytics as well as be able to apply algorithms to a much bigger corpus of data than you traditionally would have in a statistics tool for example. So since then actually today we announced that we now have 15 solutions built on Spark across our analytics and our commerce portfolio. A great example is we re-platformed data works which is our ability for business to do data wrangling as part of their Watson analytics work process. So we see Spark as really an enabling technology for ourselves and then we've committed a significant investment back into the Spark community to keep enhancing the core fundamental capabilities of Spark so that everybody in the ecosystem can take advantage of that. I wanted to, he said something just a minute ago, BI reimagined, I want to pick up on that theme because again the BI world used to be insights for a few and then they were very productive, a very productive few, right? They had a huge impact potentially on the company but you now hear things like we heard this morning about citizens analytics and the likes. So and you have the BI for Hadoop vendor du jour sort of attacking the old business, you got the Viz guys attacking that business as we said before, it's still critical but so what does BI reimagined mean? That means more agile, it means simpler, it means embedded into the workflow of the organization I wonder if you could describe that in some more detail. Sure of course, so when we look at business intelligence I totally agree with you, it's really a tool that IT used to develop reports or dashboards that were then delivered to the corner office, the C suite for them to understand how my sales trending, what are my financials looking like, what's my production yields sort of reporting like and that's great but that's kind of left a population that was not served which was really the business users who wanted to find insights for themselves and that's really where the desktop discovery tools kind of were born which was to satisfy that need out there that was not being satisfied by BI. When we're looking at reimagining BI we're looking at serving that community too which means we have redesigned the user experience of business intelligence so that those people out in the business can author their own insights, can distribute their own insights and we've taken the learnings of how we designed Watson analytics and that user experience into the BI portfolio too. So let me give you an example. So for example, I'm looking for data I want to report sales by product and by region. I would have had to in the past have IT build a model for me of that data. Now with reimagined BI I can be in the business I can simply type in sales product region it's got to propose the data so I don't need to know where the data is stored it could be in Hadoop, it could be in relational it's got to propose what data might be the most relevant to me. I can hit a button that says propose model it's got to model it for me in a way I go so I didn't need to be a data modeler I didn't need to know where the data was stored so now I'm much more empowered as a business person I don't need to offload that data into a desktop tool worry about data silos, fragmentation of the decision process. I've now brought REI to that underserved population. So you've essentially, what you've described is you've got a library of models and the system chooses the right one and fits for me is that right, did I understand? You actually have a library of data sources and then you can build different models across those data sources. So you mentioned that there's a dashboard tool de jour over here for Hadoop, over here for maybe another file system, et cetera. Well that's great if all your data sits there. What we've done with BI is we said let's make that invisible and then you can pick data from any data source and bring it together into a single report. We had Ritika Gunnar on this morning talking about governance and what you're talking about was sort of democratization of analytics and everybody having their own tools, ability to manipulate data. I mean that has to proceed from a solid foundation of data governance. How well prepared are clients in your experience to proceed in that direction you're talking about, to have that data really well hardened and bulletproof? So there's a couple of steps. I believe that clients understand that there's a need to have integration and governance over the data sets. The challenge is the kind of maverick use of data that happens in a company. So it's both a tool in on technology as well as a corporate culture of how you're going to treat the data that you have in your company. So where Ritika talks about the fact that you need to have a data reservoir, you need to have data warehouses, you need to have governance over that, we also need all of that governance to go all the way through to the end consumption of data. So where we've imagined BI is to say you need that trusted source, it may sit on a server or many servers and you need to make that available to everybody to self serve. And their first call to BI shouldn't be can I download that data into a tool myself because the minute you cut that cord, your governance is gone. Now clients are starting to understand that because they're hitting that as their data discovery tools start getting hold in the business, which is there's as many copies of data as people in the organization. And so one way to tackle that is to say, no, I need to bring them back into the fold on the government data and do that in a way that doesn't compromise their self service. So the big data meme sort of exploded around 2012. My, at the time, my 13 year old with joke, you know, I'd say good morning Pilar and she'd say morning daddy hashtag big data. And so I remember in 2012, when we came to insight, it was interesting to observe what IBM had done with this sort of bespoke portfolio of assets is put them together. And I said at the time super glued it to the big data meme, changed the language around analytics and business outcomes and is now dominating that business or will dominate that business was kind of my prediction. And that's exactly what you did in my version. So let's talk about your portfolio that you've got purview over. So there's information management, there's BI, the predictive analytics, database is in there as well and data integration, is that right? So there's that, that we're once sort of these bespoke toolings. Talk about how you bring those together and bring them to market and message them. Yeah, yeah. It feels like there was an evolution that happened in the marketplace, which is as you said, it was almost like IT had a shopping list. I'm going to go shop for BI. Now I'm going to go and shop for predictive analytics. Now I'm going to go shop for a database. Now I'm going to go shop for integration. And really that's great to have capability coverage. But in order to actually get insight from data, you need to be able to be fluent in all the types of data wherever it resides. You need to be able to put that data into context which requires integration, master data management. And then you need to be able to deliver that analytics and insight capability to everybody who needs it. Both through a dashboard as well as embedded into applications. So we really saw the opportunity to help our clients get value was to put them together and integrate them in such a way that you actually look for what business questions you want to answer. You don't shop by capability anymore. So the great thing when we look at how we market that is we can start with the business outcome or the client value and work back from there. Because different types of business problems require different combinations of the capabilities. And you find, there's an old saying, it's better to have overlaps than gaps. Do you find that you have more overlaps than gaps or do you find that you still got big gaps that you need to fill? I think the language, we need some more English words and we need more words in the English language because when we say I need to get at data, I need to integrate it together and I need to deliver it. You could say that about Hadoop, right? Because it does that. You could say that about a relational database. You could say that about a business intelligence tool. So sometimes people get, it appears like there's overlap because there's only so many limited words that we have to describe what we do. But it's the use cases that will prescribe which part of the portfolio we use. So at the Strata Hadoop World Show this year, there were three or four big themes that emerged. One was really about the data in motion in real time. We talked about Spark earlier. The second was the data, the database, the file system, that sort of plumbing. And the third was sort of complexity. Everybody sort of choking on Hadoop complexity. Spark helps, but Spark's complex too. So it seems like you guys are trying to take all of that stuff and just make it invisible. Start with a business outcome and say, okay, you need real time to service this business for crime fraud. It's going to require some real time nature or maybe it's micro batching or whatever technology you use. Is that the right way to think about it? That you're trying to hide that complexity? And how do you hide that complexity? Yeah, exactly. If you take the analogy of a car, everybody drives a car, but we don't necessarily have to understand how the engine works. When we buy the car, we don't open up the hood and take a look and have everybody explain every single piece part and how they all work together. And that's sort of our destiny for what we're doing with insight, what we're doing with the solutions we build, which is yes, it has all those capabilities inside it, but you don't have to be technically savvy enough to understand what that is. You just need to know that it does what you want it to do for your business. So our intent is with data management, to hide all the complexity of different data containers behind the scenes, using big SQL or ways to access and make that transparent. Then with the analytics, we're looking to make the analytics transparent. So whether you're using an algorithm written in Spark, you're using an algorithm written in R, it doesn't matter, you're looking to have an algorithm applied to find patterns. But the way you would hide that complexity over the last 15 years is a big services engagement. And that's changing, am I understanding that right? I mean, you're changing that, you're driving more software into the platform and you're doing it with APIs and less of an emphasis on leading with services, more of an emphasis on leading with business outcomes and then mapping the technology to that. Is that fair or is it still very heavily services led? Yeah, we definitely lead with the business outcomes. As we look to support hybrid cloud environments, some of that technical complexity is made invisible because of the way that we use cloud. So you don't have to worry about deployment and moving into production. The other thing we do with our services is we're much more focused on how are you going to apply the data that you have, how are you going to apply analytics to actually change your business. So our services is much more in discussion of how are you going to make this impactful for your business versus the bits and bytes of how do you install it, configure it and deploy it. But who on the back end is going to do that dirty work? And who do you see in the companies you work with? Is there a specialized data function emerging within the CIO's organization? Is it independent? Is it independent of IT? Is it too important to the business? And who do you recommend do that back end plumbing work? That's a great question because we always used to talk about two populations in a client, business and then IT and how business and IT would work together. We actually see a third leg of the stall happening which is around the data professionals. So that's all the way from a chief data officer to a chief data scientist to data engineers to application developers to implement those insights. So we see this third profession emerging in our clients. Now what's interesting is when they report into the IT organization, they're more centered on data management integration governance. When they report into the business they're much more focused on applying analytics for business outcomes. But you're absolutely right, there's this third data savvy profession that's really rising in importance and you see a lot more appetite in clients to get that data savviness as a population in their companies. And at this point you don't see any pattern emerging for where that function lives in the organization. Is that so? Correct, we see two distinct patterns. In IT, to better manage the data. In the business to better drive an outcome from analytics. Do you see, is the CDO a coming role? Is that a high growth function within the big corporations you work with? It's definitely a function that is pretty much becoming established. They're called chief data officers or chief analytics officers sitting at the table helping with the business strategy of how to apply data for a difference in the business. Is that something CIO should worry about? I don't know if they would have to ask a CIO that question but definitely the CIO role is shifting much more to how do I provide the IT infrastructure as a service provider and then the CDO is taking that role with the data and analytics. We'll wait to see how it falls out. One of the sort of C level question I think it was about two years ago that Gardner forecast the chief marketing officers would spend more than CIOs by 2017 on IT. Are you seeing that really happen? We're definitely seeing that the business side, the CMO, the VP of sales, the chief operations officers driving much more of the decisions around analytics and data. The other thing that we're seeing is and I think IDC actually quoted this, is the rise of the profession of data science. It's outpacing the rise of IT. Yeah. In terms of growth rate. In terms of growth rate, yes. You presume. Interesting. Harriet, I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. We got to leave it there. The last question is sort of when you think about Insight 2015, think about all the developments that have occurred over the last, say, four or five years. How would you sort of summarize where we are today? What's the bumper sticker on Insight 2015? The bumper sticker on Insight 2015 is as its name infers insights to outcomes. You talked about big data five years ago. We're really shifting from being data hoarders and worrying about how much data we have and what type it is to being Insight hunters, which is how can I get the insights I need to make a difference to the business? And that's where the business value is. Harriet, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you. It was great to see you too. All right. Keep right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE. We're live from Insight 2015 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.


You and every woman Every way women have hidden talents just like you do at home Sometimes it's knowing how to fold the laundry And sometimes it's singing that high note Even if it's in the shower Every way women celebrate tomorrow's stars But we have a few talents too What are you keeping from us?  Yes You bake I had a business other than my other business But when I first started I used to bake You know what your hidden talent is You have a lot of business Every time I talk to you Like, oh I do voiceover I do voiceover too I do t-shirts And it's all type of stuff So that's really cool I love that you have all these hidden talents I speak French That's one of my hidden talents You feel taught Well I wouldn't exactly say self-taught But it's always been a passion of mine I think I was French in the past life Or you know, a person in a course somewhere But it's always just been a part of me What is the best way to learn French Because I've been trying to learn French The best way to learn French Is to live in France If you can't live in France No, but no, truly I moved to France for six months And I started dreaming in French Beautiful moments when I woke up And I thought, wow, I truly understand That said, I am very out of practice And it takes some good French wine To really get that accent I took French in college And I remember Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait I can talk to that I took three years of high school French I did YouTube French I try and speak Spanish But I just say French words And try and make them sound Spanish Which I think a lot of people do When I try and speak another language Or English words And try to make them sound French Oh my gosh, this is terrible You know what I say, road trip to France But what are you hiding from us? I cannot sing, I cannot dance Yes, none of that But I can pick up on your habits And I can start talking like you And I can start moving So you're an impersonator I can impersonate people And all the time That is true Right now I can't do it right now But usually I can't do it Okay, Stacey Stacey, right now Well, Stacey, I have to be moving Stacey, Stacey is different But you have to have something about you If you have a way you walk Or you do something I'm an observer Yes, I can pick it up on it Madison? Okay, so mine I grew up in a military family So mine is I can call Cadence and march A battalion Okay, we'll take those marching orders And come back after this break More every way, woman You can do what? I can march a whole battalion That is insane Oh my, what? Are you an every way woman Coming up next, more


I'm Zhao from Zhao Tong University in Shanghai, China, and the Rutgers University in the US. So he's going to tell us about community ecology of the human gut microbiota in disease and health. OK. Thank you, Professor Zhou. And also, I would like to thank the organizing community to give me the opportunity to come to join this very interesting conference. This is my second computational biology conference. The first one was in China, 2004 in Kunming. And most of the speakers were Chinese or overseas Chinese professors. But at that time, Terry Hua was there. At that time, I was the only speaker talking about bacterial community. But now we have a whole meeting devoted to microbial community. So this is really wonderful. So I changed my title from a multi-omics approach dissecting the microbial community function to this understanding community ecology of gut microbiota just because I have been inspired by so many talks talking about the gut community. So I would like to share my thoughts with you. I also would like to thank my team, particularly in Shanghai, and also my collaborators and founding agencies. And I have been blessed with a wonderful team in Shanghai. And we know now gut microbiota can contribute to our phenotypes in disease or health just because when they grow in our gut, they produce various bioactive compounds which can get into our bloodstream, circulate, and regulate our genes, impact our immunity, and modulate our metabolism. And more than 100 years ago, Professor Matiniakoff already proposed that toxic compounds produced by gut microbiota may be driving aging and aging related diseases. Chinese medicine also believes that fecal toxicity is driving all kinds of diseases. Now we know neurotoxins, carcinogens, and immunotoxins. So all kinds of toxins have been identified and studied in various systems and have been shown that they can get into our bloodstream either through the enteroheptic circulation or more often through partially impaired gut barrier. But from a microbial ecological perspective, we know gut microbiota is just a microbial ecosystem. And the most important question as a microbial ecologist, I would like to answer is, who does what in the microbial? And if you look at, if you borrow concepts from macroecosystem equality, we know that ecosystems are providing benefits to human society. So each benefit can be considered as an ecosystem service. And so gut microbiota must also provide all kinds of ecosystem service to benefit human host. And many of such benefits can only be provided by gut bacteria, such as production of short-term fatty acids, which we do not encode in our own genome. And we must rely on our gut bacteria for that kind of function. And we know from macroecology, species are not equally important, like in a closed forest, tall trees are the so-called foundation species. They are the species, when they grow to a certain abundance level, they close the system, they create a very unique inside environment, which is structuring the whole ecosystem. So we would like to know whether in a healthy gut microbiota can we identify such foundation species. And we also know that in macroecosystems, species are not independent from each other. Different species form different functional groups, which can be called guild. And the members of each guild, they increase or decrease together, they thrive or decline together. So we would like also to know if in a gut microbiota ecosystem, different bacterial populations or species, they form different functional groups or different guilds. So these are the ecological questions that we would like to ask. But if you look at the human gut, it's just a walking bioreactor. It's a chemostat. And the nutrients we're constantly putting into the system are from two sources, diet and also host. The non-digestible and undigested dietary components that have escaped our digesting absorption will inevitably be used by some kind of bacteria. So this is one source of nutrients for sustaining our gut microbiota. The other source is from the host. From the mucins we secrete, or from the left cells of the column. And also some other secretions, like bioacids. So it's a combination of diet and host derived nutrients, which are sustaining the gut microbiota community. We know that the human body is already very complex. Adding to that complexity, now you have a microbiota, which is also very complex. So how can we tackle this super complexity? And in addition to this very complex system, we also needed to ask the causality question. So there are so many evidence that's published that disease people have a different gut microbiota or other parts of the microbiota from healthy people. But the microbiota changed because of the disease. All the disease happened because of the microbiota change. Taking our egg, this is always a very fundamental question when you study gut microbiota in health and disease. So we argue that even though it's a complex microbiota system, we still to need to follow caucasic populace for identifying the causative agent of a particular infectious disease. But we need to consider the polymicrobial and ecological nature of gut microbiota. So first, we need to do microbiome-wide association study. We should identify all the members which are positively or negatively associated with the disease or with a particular health phenotype. And then we should isolate those associated members either into pure cultural or into defined consortium. And then we should put this into a germ-free animal background and see if we can give the right environmental condition, see if we can reproduce the phenotype. If we can, then we should understand the molecular mechanism. So only after we complete all these cycles of research, maybe we can claim that gut microbiota plays a causative role and which members can be used as both biomarkers and also as drug targets. But before we do that, we should realize that strings are the functional units and the living units, functional units of bacteria. Because by definition, strings within the same name of the bacterial species can share up to 30% of genomic difference. We know that the human and mice only share 10% of genomic consequence difference. So that's why we need to go down to a string level to understand the causality and the ecology. So how can we tackle this complexity? If you look at my post address, it's exactly the same information but written in English and Chinese. In Chinese, you start with the country, the city, the university, the building, the room, the family, and then the person. It's top down. But in English, it's the opposite. You start with the person, the family, the room, all the way up to the country. So English speaking people are bottom up people. Chinese people are top down people. Well, it's not just the language, the culture. The way we do science is also different. So this top down thinking and bottom up thinking, if you look at all the parts, you can understand all the parts of an engine, but you still do not know how the engine works and whether the engine has any problem or not. But when you put all the parts together, you have some new functions emerge. It's so-called emergent functions, like noise, exhaust gas, and the vibration. So to understand a whole, one must study the whole. You should look at the emergent functions, try to understand the complex system. And so in Chinese, the medical doctors, traditional medical doctors, they do exactly the top down approach. So they never divide a human body into different parts, but they measure emergent functions at a whole body level. Like look at your tongue, they'll touch your pulse. And then they have their own principles to do pattern recognition and diagnosis.  They do everything they can. And then they read the changes of the whole body level emergent functions to decide what to do next. And eventually to help you recover your health. But we know this is all empirical. But in modern day engineering, you can mount thousands of sensors to a running engine. And you can do online monitoring of the health and problem diagnostics of your running engine by focusing on vibration noise and exhaust gas. But can we do this to human body? Yeah. And if you look at urine, fecal matter, and blood, these are the three windows only a live person can have. But so these are the emergent functions. But they contain all kinds of biological information, which can be profiled and quantified and analyzed captured by using all kinds of omics technology. So if you do molecular profiling of molecular level variations of these three windows over time of a cohort of people, either natural progression or disease development or responding to any type of treatment or intervention, then you may be able to identify patterns, signatures in these three windows, which are associated with a particular phenotype you are interested at the whole body level. So how can we do that? One way is to correlate changes of gut microbiota with metabolites in their environment. So this is a proof of principle study we did with Professor Jeremy Nicholson from Imperial College and also several other groups in China. So we collected a urine and fecal sample over a monthly interval from a seven member of four generation Chinese family. And then we analyzed the microbiome variations intra-individually and the intra-individually. We also analyzed metabolites by using NMR-based metabolomics in the urine samples. And then we do OPSDA modeling to do two-way correlation analysis between these two data metrics. So in this proof of principle study, we identified that 10 members of the gut microbiota each showed association with at least one urine metabolite. This particular member, fecalobacterium prosonitia, showed eight associations, six positive and two negative. So this is the indication that if you were a postdoc, I would ask you to pick a bacterium to study. You may want to study this one, because this may have the widest impact directly to human metabolism. So this was highlighted when it was published in early 2008. It was highlighted by Nature Reviews microbiology as a platform technology for finding out who does what in the microbiome. And yesterday, Dr. Nilsen gave a beautiful example of using this approach to identify potentially some k-bacteria impacting human insulin. So I would like to, with all these concepts and methodology, I would like to focus on obesity and type 2 diabetes to give you two examples for understanding the community ecology. We know that from many publications from Professor Jeff Gordon's group and many other groups, gut bacteria may play a very important role in development of metabolic diseases, obesity, or type 2 diabetes. But we still need to identify the key members which are causatively contributing to the disease or to recover of disease. The approach we use is to change the diet of a disease group of people and see if we can change the phenotype. And over time, we collect urine blood and fecal samples at different time points before, during, and after. And then we do molecular profiling of changes in these three windows and correlation analysis. See if we can identify any potentially important members of the gut microbiota which are potentially contributing to the disease or to recovery of health. How can you change the gut microbiota to a healthier structure? Well, we learn from traditional Chinese medicine. Because Chinese medicine has a very long tradition using food as medicine or medicine as food. So in China, you have an officially published list of plants by Ministry of Health of China. And plants in that list can be used as common food by everybody. But they also have been used as medicine by Chinese doctors for thousands of years. So after more than a decade of study on these plants, we realize that there are two kinds of ingredients which are very important in those plants. One kind of are non-digestible but fermentable carbohydrates. Mainly various plant polysaccharides. And the other are various groups of phytochemicals. So they can be used as nutrients of beneficial bacteria and they can also work as a protectant for beneficial bacteria. So we developed about seven or eight years ago, we developed a dietary scheme which can satisfy the, provide a balanced nutrition to human but also provide enough nutrients for the microbiome. So this was featured in this article, science news article. So if you are interested, you could read that. I give you this case study. So N equals one clinical trial. So we focus on this young man, 175 kilograms. BMI nearly 60 and he was on this dietary program for 23 weeks and he lost more than 50 kilograms without exercise. So just this diet for about six months and he lost more than 50 kilograms and he recovered from type two diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia. He was almost hyper everything before but then he recovered after 23 weeks and losing 51.4 kilograms. And he also had a reduced inflammation and reduced lipopolysaccharide biting protein indicating that toxin, indotoxin which can induce inflammation produced by gram-netic obtuse pathogens are decreasing in their load. And so we did a very simple PCR DGGE fingerprinting and over time. So you'll see three bands representing three major populations at the baseline disappeared very quickly and remained almost undetectable through after the clinical trial. We cut out the DNA and identified the DNA sequence to them and identified as members of enterobecta, genus. And these genus contain 10 species. They all can induce sepsis. So they are opportunistic pathogens gram-negative can induce inflammation. And we also did a metatonomic sequencing at the baseline nine week and 23 week after. And we found genes involved in genes involved in synthesis of lipopolysaccharide. Quite a few of them reduce their abundance. So then we did, we isolated several hundred putative colonies of enterobecta genus and we run co-migration against the baseline DGGE fingerprinting. So any colony which can migrate to identical position to at least one of these bands will be kept and characterized. So eventually we got strings, a predominant string enterobecta colloquial B29. So we focus on this particular pathogen. And then we inoculate this pathogen into germ-free mice and give germ-free mice either high-fat diet or normal to a diet. Professor Jeff Gordon group and many other groups already showed that germ-free mice cannot become obese. Even you give them high-fat diet. But after you're colonized with a whole gut or a normal microbiota, and then they can become obese and insular resistant. And when we give this a single pathogen isolated from this obese donor, it can also become obese. And it can develop a lot of visual fat and insular resistance, fatty liver, inflammation and Professor Jeff Gordon's group identified a gene in the gut which is necessary, the expression of this gene is necessary for burning stored fat. But it was shut down by whole gut microbiota and only can induced by hunger.  And they also found that the whole gut microbiota actually can up-regulate genes in the liver for transforming glucose into new fat, ac1, phas and the PIPA gamma. So all these two groups of genes regulated by the gut microbiota as identified by Professor Jeff Gordon's group can be regulated by the single pathogen. This is probably why, because the colonization of this pathogen in the gut prevent the host from burning stored fat but encourage the host synthesizing new fat from glucose. So that's why they can accumulate such excessive amount of fat in the same time period. This is an example, this was published in 2012. And in the past five years, we have been working with Professor Philip Gerhard tried to identify the molecular mechanism. So we already, we did a mutation in LPS synthetic pathway and removed most of the pro-inflammatory activity of the LPS and then the mutant lost all the capacity for reducing obesity, fat liver and everything. So there's no obesity related development if you mutate LPS. We also did, we mutated the ptolecular receptor four and derived the germ free mice. If you give one type, no obesity. So only when you have LPS endotoxin and ptolecular receptor four intact and cross talk with each other, induce inflammation, you have all the phenotypes downstream. So the molecular interaction between the LPS and also ptolecular receptor four, maybe the first molecular event leading to all the downstream phenotypes. So this is an equals one study. We only focus on one single case. But we also did a clinical trial with a genetic form of childhood obesity. It's called the predivary syndrome, PWS. Children with this disease, they had a defect region in a number 15 chromosome from the father's side.  So they were very small and undernourished before winning. But after winning, when they start to take solid food, they quickly develop a hypophesia. They are hungry all the time and you cannot satisfy them with any amount of food. And it's very difficult to control their body weight growth. However, when we work with Gondong Women and the Children's Hospital to do clinical trial with mobilo-obese children, we accidentally found that one-third of the children in our program, they were actually PWS patients. They were genetically obese, but they responded very well to the dietary intervention of their gut microbiota. Like this particular boy, 14 years old, 140 kilograms heavy. And he stayed on the program in a hospital for 285 days, reduced to 83.6 kilograms. He continued the intervention at home after 430 days. He was 73 kilograms. So he lost about half of his body weight, only undieted, no exercise, and recovered from other metabolic problems. And so eventually we recruited... It's a genetic problem. They don't grow much. It's a... He didn't help that. Only helped with... No, he's this type of children. They don't grow much. By the age of 14, they already mature. So they don't have the potential to grow that much. But... So they... We recruited 17 children with PWS, and they stayed in the hospital for three months. And then same mobilo-obese children without genetic reason, simple-obese children stayed in the hospital for one month. So at the baseline and the end of each month, thorough medical checkup for medical phenotypes and also collection of urine blood and fecal samples. For one month in the program, they lost about 10% of the unusual body weight. And three months lost about 20%. And they recovered from... So they have improved glucose homeostasis, lipid profile, and liver function. And they also have significantly elevated inflammation. And then lipopolysaccharide, binding protein also significantly reduced. And then we transplanted the baseline microbiota and three months after microbiota from the same person to germ free mice. The baseline microbiota can induce inflammation in the first weeks. And then after that, they start to accumulate more fat. So the baseline microbiota can induce inflammation and can encourage more excessive accumulation of fat. But after intervention microbiota, they do not have that capacity. So this is the indication that even diet itself can improve directly host health, but it also changes the microbiota. And the changes the microbiota may have also partially contributed to their metabolic health improvement. We then did a metabolomics analysis of the fecal water sample. And they showed a significant shift before and after intervention. And mainly you see a lot of carbohydrates increase in the fecal water and many bacterial metabolites decreased. And then we analyzed the short-term fatty acids. They are the products from fermenting protein or fermenting carbohydrates. So we see a relative increase of acetate, but relative decrease of isobutriate and isovalerate. This is the indication that after we changed the diet, bacteria shifted from fermenting protein to get energy to fermenting carbohydrates to get energy. And the side products are changing from detrimental and becoming beneficial. And now we would like to understand the string-level changes of the gut community. So we did a metagenomic sequencing of all the samples, inter-individual samples and the intra-individual samples, because we dramatically changed the diet. So we induce a lot of changes, variations of the members of the gut microbiota. And so we would like to see the detailed structural changes. And then we used the canopy-based algorithm introduced by Professor Dr. Nielsen and yesterday. So we identified a little bit over two million non-redundant microbial genes. And after co-abundance analysis, we got 20,000 co-abundance gene groups. And 376 of these gene groups containing more than 700 genes, so they are each is potentially a bacterial genome. 161 of these are shared by more than 20% of the samples. So they are potentially the chromosomes of prevalent genomes. And then we did assembly of the genome based on each keg and we get 118 high-quality draft genomes. So they meet at least five of the six criteria for the American Human Microbome Project reference genomes. So the quality is almost as high as when you do pure cultural sequencing. So now we would like to see the co-abundance relationship between these genomes to understand their ecological relationship. So out of 161 co-abundance gene groups, genomes, we can delineate them into 18 potentially guilds. Each colored group is potentially a guild because they increase or decrease together. But if they are connected with red line, they co-occur. If they are connected with blue line, they could exclude. Our dietary scheme significantly promoted this group of bacteria. They increase their abundance dramatically after the new diet. And the three members of this group are from Bifidobacterium genus. And particularly Bifidobacterium pseudocantinolatum, these particular species had the highest number of negative correlation with the members of many other guilds. And those negatively associated are potentially pathogens or producing some detrimental compounds by looking at their genome. And so we hypothesize that our dietary scheme probably promoted this group of bacteria as the foundation species. And when they grow to a high abundance level, they produce a lot of things like they acidify the gut and they also produce many antimicrobials so that the gut environment becomes favorable to beneficial bacteria, but unfavorable to many detrimental bacteria. So this actually restructured the whole gut microbiota. If we do guild level abundance analysis, you'll start to see correlation of different guilds with individual human phenotypes. So three guilds showed a negative correlation with disease phenotypes. And nine guilds showed a positive correlation with disease phenotypes. And six guilds didn't respond to this dietary intervention. So now the major, all these 161 high quality draft genomes, they can, they amount to more than half of the total sequence we get. So that means they are prevalent and also dominant members of the gut ecosystem. So now they are organized into this skilled ecological structure. And blue-arrowed ones are potentially beneficial and the red-arrowed ones are potentially detrimental and the others may be neutral. So I would like to comment to that the currently many data analysis in a microbiome field is the so-called taxon-based analysis. So you do a genus level, family level, all the way up to final level analysis between disease and health. But this is a problem. Why? Because bacteria, they form functional group, they work together not based on their taxonomy. So if you look at the members of the guild, some guild they have members from four different phyla. Some have members from one phyla. So they work together based on the function, not based on their taxonomy. So if you do taxon-based analysis, you introduce a lot of noise. And also, even in the same species, like in fecalibacteria prosnitia, we assemble the nine genomes, but they are in four different guild. So that means members of the same species, they don't behave the same. And so we need to go down to a string level. We look at this particular boy. In the first 105 days, we had multiple time points sampling. If you look at the genus level, you'll see a lot of variations. But there is a steady increase of bithidogenes. But if you look at the species level, nine species identified by the only pseudocannulatum actually showed a substantial increase. And then we isolated five strings from these species, from one single sample from this person and five strings.  You can see the five strings, they share 1,520 genes in their core genome. And they don't have much difference gene number wise. However, during the first 105 days, they showed a different response to the same dietary intervention. So this is a really a string level function. And one of the strings can actually be used as probiotics to alleviate high-fat diet induced obesity in mice. And how much time I have? Okay, so I would probably just quickly go over the... So we also analyzed the u-ray metabolites and we also found significant shift before and after. And then we identified the significantly changed the metabolites. So 14 metabolites significantly changed. So five of them actually promoted and the others reduced. Among the nine reduced metabolites by the dietary intervention, four actually are co-mortabolites by the host and also by the gut bacteria. So what happened was the gut bacteria ferment lipid or ferment protein into potentially toxic metabolites. And then these will get into the liver and the host liver will further modify this and adding sulfate or other groups and they become water soluble and they coming out of the u-ray. And TMAO has been known to induce asroscrosis and significantly reduced. But we don't know which bacteria actually convert calling in a diet to TMA. And then TMA get into the liver and become oxidizing to TMAO. And then TMAO can promote asroscrosis. So we don't know which bacteria are potentially doing this conversion from calling dietary calling to TMA. And then if you take the 161 high quality draft genome and this 13 metabolites changed, you do your correlation. You found among 118 high quality draft genomes, 31 show the positive correlation with the urine concentration of TMAO. Among these 13 actually have the two genes required for converting calling into TMA. So these 13 bacterial genomes are potentially the potential key bacteria for promoting or contributing to asroscrosis. And we are now isolating the bacteria and try to demonstrate the mechanism in germ-free mice. So it looks like that when you change the available nutrients to the gut microbiota, so you change the resource and there is a guild level response. So it's not a random individual response. You'll see a guild level response to the resource change. And you can actually dissect and establish that structure. And the most important thing is the foundation guild and also guild which are potentially beneficial or potentially detrimental. It's possible to identify them and for forming new hypothesis and to do further molecular study. So I would like to finish by emphasizing that foundation species is different from case stone species. So case stone species is this piece of stone which is not necessarily the major member but it's very critical for holding the whole structure. But the foundation stone is the piece of stone underneath the whole structure. So I think the potential species we identified they are not important for one particular guild. They are actually important for holding the whole healthy structure. So I think the most important impact of a microbound study to human health is that we have a new window to assess and monitor human health. Anything you do to human body to either to a particular individual or to a large number of people, you can just assess the response of the host by looking at how the gut microbiota respond and how they are metabolized and also other antigens which can interact with the host also changed and connected that with eventual organism level phenotype changes of the host. So this is the most important way a new methodology for assessing and monitoring human health. And so this can be applied to a large scale of people and also can be used to understand either a complex intervention like Chinese medicine or a complex intervention like a new diet. You can understand the molecular level response. So I would like to finish with this theoretical model. Genetically, we may live up to 150 years. That's our genetic potential. And so if you analyze the molecular level changes in urine, blood and the fecal and also other medical phenotypes and then you use all the data to quantify the health at any given time point. And if you do that throughout the lifespan, you may get a trajectory like this. So this is the ideal trajectory.  Right?  But most people have a trajectory like this. Roughly 50 years old is a turning point. Before that we are okay. After that we are going down the hill and eventually end up in a hospital with one or several chronic disease. And modern day technology can keep a person alive for many years even though he was paralyzed. But if this decline of health after mid-age was due to our genetic defect, we still don't know what we can do. But if genetic defect only increase the risk but the actual manifestation of the disease requires environmental triggers. And the toxins produced by gut bacteria may be the most important triggers. And then we have hope. Because we know gut microbial community is plastic. And we can change the community back to a healthy status and monitor that to make sure that you remain in this region until the last day.  Okay.


We're back and I have my little buddy with me again, and he's coming along pretty well. He's starting to settle in I think that Many times you'll end up with horses that are athletic and along with that comes a great deal of energy and Curiosity and that's actually a good thing if you know what to do with it now. There's certain instances where This one can be a little bit overly sensitive to girth or things near as flank things near as hind quarters and I'd like to show you some ways to Work with work with him and see if we can get him less sensitive to things around his flank and girth So let's get started For me it's in the little things and It might start with just brushing and Not brushing him in the cross ties, but brushing him In the arena where I'm able to influence his Position I can support an idea or discourage an idea Maybe I'll cause him to think about me a little bit more Right there. It seems to feel good. I think he wanted it on his neck And I take note as I've brushed down towards his flank. I take note Look at his face. I Tend to have soft eyes open field of vision field of view So if I'm brushing his flank I'm not just looking at his flank, but I'm aware of the whole horse including his head and neck Supporting the idea of nose between the shoulder and keeping your head up This is looking okay looks to the outside. Maybe I make it more interesting I might stand up lead forward and Possibly tap with the curry comb where your leg would be It's not any worse than somebody using their spur and Then when I bring my posture down he halts now I realize that I talk about this a lot this idea of bringing the horse's life up directing it and Then bringing it back down Being able to bring his life down Equally as well as we can bring it up. I Don't want to have an imbalance there. There's some horses that have So much life people aren't able to get that horse to bring their life down and that becomes a problem Then you've got the other case Where horses just aren't able to get their feet moving and get forward and free up for the person for the human This is looking pretty good Being able to brush him standing still being able to brush him on the move. I'll just help him a little bit there The tail swishing is definitely telling me there's some sensitivity He's flinching less than he used to I'll see if I can help him get that forehand over I'm just gonna hang in there a little bit till we get that. That's good. We'll see if we can just keep Keep his nose straight attention is on see if we can walk Keep walking and keep brushing So I call that brushing on the move So anything that your leg would do or That your body would do we want to do on the ground So he understands the human the humans the same I'm the same person down here as I'll be when I'm on his back If I stand tall sit tall in the saddle, we'd like him to get moving and if I relax and settle in Maybe we come down to a to a halt Some horses get stuck in the feet. It's a nervous they're nervous inside but on the outside their feet get jammed up or stuck and a flinchy horse oftentimes isn't very free moving in their feet Anyway At least while they're flinching and so with that in mind walking forward While we're brushing it's pretty important now this grooming for me is More a mental exercise setting the stage for what's coming later Maybe even a little bit of a pattern Patterning a little bit of a behavior of coming with me coming forward Stopping when I stop It's just as much a mental exercise as It is to trying to get the long hair off and the mud off of him in fact, I Don't know that there's a time that I wouldn't be mindful of the horse If I'm in his if I'm in this, you know with him We'll get this other side the flinching a little better Tail-swishing it's okay. We'll take him Take a hard brush Give that a try He's really a nice horse and he he is curious And that's great curiosities You need to have this Now as I turned towards him notice I keep my life up and I might brush with his life up And then let him settle to a halt. I'm always able to bend his nose towards me If his nose is able to come to me The thought of you know kicking out or something probably won't be there at least it won't be directed at me Always able to get to the horse's head and neck when I'm at his side That's looking all right Does he want me to brush his forehead a little bit We'll read his expression and Brush his neck. He of course he wants to look away right now. Good. I brought him back to me came back to trying to also And still a sense of Relax with me now is your chance to to relax. Let's get forward Up we go forward good bring him to me Posture comes down my arms come to my side. I might get a slightly slouchy. So does he You can look at me. You can look at me.  It's looking okay some tail swishing still especially when I asked her forward and then he sort of Sort of to ring his tail a little bit more But maybe I keep brushing now until I see that tail start to settle to a halt He's still swishing it right. I'll just keep brushing Good when I walk he's walking. I don't know that he's aware of his tail You know, I obviously He does it in such a way that it's almost, you know, it's it's pretty much like an involuntary thing But eventually maybe he'll understand he'll relax He won't be so tense perhaps that that response there I'll walk away that tail swishing might might go away now as I as I was walking away I stepped behind him and I could hear him just sort of lick and chew and I wasn't even I Was looking sort of soft eyes looking at his neck But I could tell he was just looking and chewing right there. I might walk away. So it's not gonna be perfect We just want to get it better Also, the idea that when I reach under your barrel When I reach under his barrel Are you okay with me down there because he swishes his tail quite a lot But are you okay with me down there because I'll be reaching down there when we put saddles on you Here's a good chance to walk away Now you might not get that tail perfect to where it's just still that's Big let big let down there where he relaxed and settled He might he might swish his tail for some time It's interesting because if he swishes his tail now when I'm brushing If he does it when we saddle him and we girth or cinch Chances are when we're riding and we sit up and use a little leg aid. Maybe he'd swish. We'll see about that One pattern that I see people get into is for human comfort Convenience they set they'll saddle up in the cross ties and Their horse has got its heads, you know tied up with with the cross ties and the horse doesn't really have a lot to Like they can't really move that much. I mean they can move their body their head of course doesn't move very far and what happens is The human is unable to reinforce what they want to have happen in the cross ties So you go and you brush your horse's flank They kick out with their leg. What do you do most people just yell at their horse at least the ones that use cross ties and Let's say you'd go to tighten up your girth So that horse feels the squeeze under its barrel around its Around its girth area feels the squeeze and then all of a sudden it bites at the cross ties. It gets stiff Its muscles get tense Not a good state of mind and it bites at the cross ties and then people don't seem to have a problem with that But then when you go to ride your horse You wonder why that thing doesn't really want to get off the forehand and it gets forward and it stretches out its nose Every time you use your leg So everything it's in the little things that that's what adds up to be the big picture. All right, let's move on There's so many things that we could use There's so many objects and things that we could take and get our horse used to I I have a the flag is It's nice. It works well and I Just don't want people to think that we we live with the flag in our hand all the time It's it's not something we live with but it is part of a part of my main some of my main tools that I use with my horse and He's seen the flag a time or two, but there's lots of different positions. We could use the flag right now I'll just present with the handle. I have other videos that you can look at to Introduce your horse to the flag. I'm a little nervous on that side I'll see if I can what while he's under pressure see if we can get to that hind quarters and have him offset Then cross those hind legs a little bit Bring it under We'll just bring this front end through a little bit send them off good Good. I want to think about the the mindset that we were in When we had that curry comb Now he sees the flag and he's thinking that It's something he should be nervous about and I don't want him to think that because If he's nervous with the flag, he's he'll be nervous with with me Let's just see if we can just settle in for a second. Good. There we go. Good Good and he moved forward. I'll just keep it on him. He's flinching. He wants to it's almost like a bug landed on his back It's amazing. We're how horses with the muscle control that they have again probably when he's flinching and then voluntary type Almost a reflex But what's funny is when he's relaxed he won't be in the state of mind to elicit that response I hope that makes sense now rather than getting into the Rather than getting into the conditioned response aspect of horses and all of that Types type of you know psychology and stuff, which is fine. It's there But I want you to think about getting the horse to be comfortable and calm and relaxed Aware of the human all of this is something that the horse can do and It's about them being mindful and thinking and feeling For us and that is something that if they're in that state of mind You're not gonna have all of that twitchy Nervous Behavior responses a little forward motion. He's got to find that hind leg. That's a good step That's a good step. We'll switch sides good rub there Good, and I'll just switch and bring the flag up this way to notice. He got a little nervous When I brought the flag to him. I'll stand tall bring them forward notice. It's by the flank It's where your leg would be. I'll help him move out a little bit Just making it a little bit difficult for him to stay right here. So the way I used the flag was Little pressure to say it's difficult to stay here But if you walk forward you'll walk off you'll move off of that So I want the horse's awareness first The horse to become aware of me and then pretty soon the mind will start to actually work for us And it's not about Desensitizing for me. It's more about mindfulness intention the horse becoming thoughtful of us and trying to get the job done for us before We get firmer. This is looking good if you notice that I'm when I'm moving my feet and Standing tall with my hand up That would definitely indicate to him walk So when you notice that I'll get relaxed and bring like right here bring my arm down relax my posture That would mean halt.  I could bring the flag up in the air. I could bring the flag under his barrel Where your leg would be? And if I will bring that front end through here a little bit a Little further notice where I use The flag there we go. We'll get it done. There is some tail-swishing There's some ear pinning Because he's not comfortable But if he if he thinks for us if he thinks for me It won't get to a place where he needs to to get that way there It's a little change. So he trotted and that was sort of his way to to relax and Take that excess energy and put it into something now. We'll walk away. He'll Offset the hind legs Stepping the inside hind leg under when I turn towards him will halt Might bring that front end through just a little bit Bring that flag up. It's getting much better much much better Now I'm at the point where I'm bringing it under his chest and that's something you have to be careful doing in fact Don't go right to the flag anyway You can work there slowly. I don't think the flag is that big of a deal though as some people make it out to be Though I have imagined. There's many horses that get pretty Nervous about the flag and that's probably true And then there's a lot of horses that I see that are nervous about bits and the rider So you'll have to decide if the flag is for you now just to show you it's similar Just to show you Wouldn't matter if it's a flag if here's a here's a polo mallet It's kind of like a little foot I'll show you what I mean a little leg Now the polo mallet's different But I can take that and I can press in Come right past come to the hind quarters Step up step over Come across the hind quarters. Look at how I'm using that on. Let's step that left hind leg under Notice how I'm using that With a little more pressure, but I'm using it where Your saddle your thigh or knee your leg might be Getting in there with it. Look at that. No tail swish right there. That's pretty interesting. Oh the other side I came I came to his right side quickly And he told me he put his ear back with that look of skepticism. There's a big flinch You couldn't see but I was down by the girth Now I'm working. I'll turn so you can see I'm working this area a little longer. I'm staying in there until The mental His mental awareness comes to me. So perhaps I'll get to the mental Alert aware side of the horse More of the conscious side of the horse And pretty soon look at the flinching will be go away So although I do realize That people are training The t-word training the reflexes of the horse. That's fine and dandy, but what about The mental component the part that your horse can actually Understand if you get to the high buddy if you get to that part of the horse You won't have to be thinking so much about training and repetition and mechanics And we'll do other videos on that as well, but notice I'm using the The little foot the polo mallet. I'm using it with a little more pressure pressing in there and He's looking okay with that. I mean the tail's going and I don't need to get it perfect in one day Little flinch.  I'll walk away His Ear was back on me. So he was a little nervous I don't know if you heard that but he let down right there Again, doesn't have to be perfect if you try to get things perfect. You'll probably never be happy And your horse surely won't be happy with you Be back in the picture in just a second He's looking at it a little bit different He's looking at it with a a bit of curiosity more than he normally would the reason being It's a bigger saddle pad than he's had before What's going on here big square pad interesting He's not used to that Take it on take it off in my mind. I'm thinking about him standing still that looks great Let's go forward. His hindquarters are in a slightly awkward position. So let's go forward And offset that right hind legs step the hindquarters under And then I'll halt with that pad up on his back maybe He'll find the halt in just a second. I'll just stay stay with them. That's fine. That's just fine Just like the flag the curry comb a whip If I stand tall and lead ahead He might walk forward. That'd be great. We want him to we want when I get lively.  All right. I'll be right back That looks pretty good. I don't have to work on that too hard or too long Although he is looking at it up there I notice on a lot of our youtube videos. There's not People are nervous to write comments and people People don't uh, they don't really want Necessarily do that and when one person writes a comment then more people write comments and don't be afraid to write a comment Or ask a question Because we'll definitely check our Check our videos for that type of thing. All right, so I did drop my rope there just to get reorganized now what I have here It's kind of funny. I have a a western saddle with an english horse and although He's not destined to be He's smelling it Although he's not destined to be A western horse perhaps carrying The saddle could help him with his flinchiness and some of his sensitivity And you notice he's swinging his head and he's looking now I might just turn And Try to get him so you we can see in the picture here in the screen We'll turn And rub and you might smell it from Behind me and then I might just see if I can get a little movement in there without moving my feet And then I'll just swing it set it let it go down now You notice I'm by myself I don't have a lot of help right now And that's better. That's a good thing because If he's not able to do this with one person if it takes Two people one person to hold him from the front side Maybe he's not ready for it Same thing would be true with mounting. We'll drop our our cinches There we go Elm come back to me Settle in It's good It's very good relaxing now Because he's he's let's turn so you can see what i'm doing here Because he's so quiet. It's nice to take our time A little bit here and I realize that That saddle's shifting slightly. No big deal. I'll just reach up and reposition it and that's part of life. That's good good See if we can bring that forehand over just a bit good all right I've got my my cinch strap sort of ready here You notice That I'll reach under with my left hand that puts me more up towards his shoulder and less towards his His hind legs now. I will drop my rope Everybody has slightly different techniques. This has worked for me. I've made it this far without Too many issues and This is the way I do it notice he's a little snorty, but I'll just lift up a little bit and It'd be nice if I would watch him breathe I can see his ribs expand and contract and if I were just gentle I I could look and I could probably just tighten up snug it a little bit when he When he when he exhales But I don't have to do it all at once. I don't have to tighten up that cinch off all in one All in one shot now the back cinch cool deal never I would I would venture to say That if I Had to take a guess he's never had a back cinch on before Being that he's a track horse now with that saddle up there. He goes. I don't want to back up With that thing behind me. He's got to almost back up into that scary saddle making adjustments I'll get my rope more Ready to go here just tightening up my Back cinch a little bit, but it's it's still loose on him. It's not it's not Um So tight yet. I don't want to scare him I don't want him to What happens is when horses walk off then they breathe in and their rib cage rib cage fills up with air And all of a sudden they feel that girth and that cinch and they go, oh, where did that come from? This looks pretty good bringing him to me In fact, he almost looks more relaxed with this saddle than he did without it which I think that's a good thing go forward. All right I'll tighten up my saddle and Maybe three increments or three stages Before I ride So that it's not all at once and that's another thing about the cross ties Where is your horse's mind when you're cinching or girthing your horse when you're in the cross ties? It's probably not on you back there It's probably on the horse in front of them in the cross ties in front of them And I see this at barns and I always think that you know, maybe people are wasting An opportunity there All right, let's get some life going and we'll see if we can get him moving up into uh into a trot So I'll stand tall.  He might there we go. He might feel that a little bit I keep him moving forward I'm pretty calm about this He'll settle in You could hear his breathing a little bit So at the walk he was pretty okay with it, but then bringing him up. There's a little change Bringing him up to a trot. Well, that was a little more Energy Of course, he was breathe more then he'll settle in notice the tail still tight, but That back cinch isn't really tight yet It's it's loose That front cinch is pretty is fairly snug He's got to work Work that out a little bit He will he'll get look at those ears and the eyes. He's looking back at it He's he has to realize that that thing I'll bring him to me here He's got to realize that that thing it's going to follow him around a little bit Now I'm going to tighten up that front cinch a little bit more which And We'll send him off or the other direction We want him to just that saddle obviously doesn't feel like a part of him yet It will It's not about running them fast either cannering fast yet. It's I'd like him to he's offering the trot to me But he's feeling that saddle and that's Why you see his hind legs look Uneven like this. He's feeling that back cinch See So when we ride him and we leg him there's a good chance that he Instead of lifting his back up or going bending Or going forward perhaps he gets tense Braced and doesn't go forward The other reason why you saw his hind legs look a little short on one side is because he was preparing to To canter you can see that see Disunited canter right here. Let's work on that again Now there's a lot of straps that hang. It's not just the front cinch and the back cinch Let's get united here in the in the canter there. I sped him up and got that hind end going easy, buddy Here he's going to bring back bring him back to the trot and just a second here. They're good He's trying to canter there.  Let's try that again doing a few more Doing a few more circles here Until he gets united in that canter Trying to help encourage that hind end to change here a little more action motion tail stiff So because he's stiff we're we're not quite getting that That hind lead Let's try that again. And so we do get it Flying change in the rear All right, so i'm happy here. I'm happy now. He's got the lead. So now let's trot Let's bring everything down So the reason That I was circling as much as I did there was looking for that united Looking for more of a united Um an actual canter and not a crossfire Now his veins are popping out a little bit, but he's going to settle in It's good Yeah Help him relax and come to me draw him in We're going to check that saddle a little bit here Reach up Move that saddle around a little he's looking at it He's really a good guy It's really a good guy. He's legitimately he was nervous about that Saddle we're going to take that back cinch up a click Up a notch see if we can back up into it When they're just standing they don't feel that back cinch as much as when they break and do a canter or That type of thing good job, buddy He doesn't have to he offered a trot and I just relaxed. I thought walk and sure enough. He came back. He looked at me. See like right here Now I think trot here We'll get a trot going good Look at him look back at that saddle now western saddle Uh, the stirrups move around a little bit, which is why it's on him. It's good. No problem Ready to bring him to me because he's He's he's thinking He's calm. He's thinking Good I let him settle in It's good So think about this if he could carry that western saddle And handle that back cinch There's a really good chance if this feels like a part of him There's a really good chance that a horse could accept Your leg aids much better Now I realize we're not going to ride him in a western saddle very much But I just like to do this with some of my horses So that I know I could do it but also Let them carry that mass and that bulk and that heavier saddle So That's looking all right to me. Good boy. All right. He's mindful real mindful right now So I guess you got to have a little bit of a show there. He's still kicking up those hind legs a little bit Still feeling that saddle Now there was a bit of preparation that that I've done With him with ropes around the the barrel I didn't get to that today In the video Good looks nice looks nice. All right. Oh lost his lead there, but I'm gonna take it I'm gonna take that look how free He got wow Let's come closer to the camera Turn halt He's looking to me. Let's give him a little chance to just settle in. It's really nice Really nice Now that back cinches is it's not tight, but it's fairly It's fairly snug See about his his legs a little sensitive Picking up those legs.  You're a really good guy see if I could Swing that stirrup stand tall swing that stirrup As and I'm not really bumping him In fact, it bumped the back cinch if anything so I swing that I swing that that stirrup When I want to convey life and movement to him That looks all right Let's try our other side We'll swing that stirrup. I'll I'll stand tall See about stepping them over a little bit Good And just see if he can handle that swinging stirrup and I'll swing that stirrup now until he comes up into trot And I'll let that go now. I'm purposely letting it bump sort of bump that back cinch Which is oftentimes what happens when we use a back cinch Horses frequently they're just getting when you use your leg Or some people use the spur in a western setup oftentimes you'll see a back cinch nicked up and Many times that's where the horse is getting Feeling it is in that back cinch. It's not about feeling that discomfort under the belly anyway It's about knowing what the human wants being aware of our intention. That's looking really nice That's looking really nice now in theory If I weren't doing a video There'd be a good chance that'd be my point where I'd be getting on I'm going for a little ride but I wouldn't mind before we do that I wouldn't mind One more canter, but we will change our direction and we will actually go To the left just stepping back Drawing him to me Good we'll stand tall lead that front end through. Let's step forward Let's see about a canter to the left here Just uh picked up his off lead changed the front didn't get the rear changed got the front Got a flying change there in the rear He said he thinks to himself this is scarier when I'm cantering because this thing is chasing me, you know there we're all disunited in the canter Now the repetition here Is to get him balancing better at the canter I'm gonna leave it at that To the left here. I'm gonna bring my posture down the trot will come through Make a long a step way out of that center So he's not jamming around and slamming around with his hind quarters and then we'll halt back up Take that forehand through the new Canter I'm curious How he is on this right Right side carrying there we go Ears came back he had a united canter still does this looks good kind of lost that rear a little bit Some tension in there, but not bad there. Let's trot before we lose that that hind lead that hind end All right, that's quite a bit better. In fact here where he's looking and chewing and he's really Starting to free up a little more So that's looking Pretty nice Looking pretty nice We'll have other future videos In terms of circling and that type of thing, but Just realize that sometimes When your horse is unbalanced on a let's just say a lunge line um Or a longer rope Then you know, it's a chance. It's an opportunity now There are situations where it might work might be advantageous for you to ask for a a flying change But it's a chance for your horse to figure out where he wants to put his feet how he needs to get it done and I've had quite a few horses that are That are pretty nice, uh um I get some flying changes lunging, you know, they look kind of unbalanced on the lunge line over time They develop a flying change so that Because they missed their lead Maybe that's an opportunity for you to To work on balance Flying change or maybe even simple changes for some of you Ideally I like how he's really letting down ideally I wouldn't Want to have that many circles because What's he thinking while he's doing those circles But it's the way it worked out today. All right, so this will be interesting. I'm gonna just drag Coming back into the picture here With my trusty my trusty steed trusty mount I don't know here. We are And I'm mounting block Oh, I'd better wear I'd better put my helmet on or I'll get in trouble Making these videos. We're really trying to show you straight through Not only because we're lazy and it's less editing, but I want you to see a session all the way through with with horses that we work with And I'm just looking at my reins I realize sometimes it's uh It's not always so interesting when I'm going back and forth, but just the way it is All right, so To the mounting block I go And he's not looking at the mounting block. He's he's looking at something Something maybe out the door or in the corner. I'm not sure but we'll just let him find this Yeah Yeah, he's pretty sharp Pretty sharp guy He goes that's that's what you doing jack Just thinking things through now. I'm gonna ask him to go forward here Just to make sure he remembers how to bring his life up and walk forward when I bring my life up I think He wanted to stay And settle I think he said I hey I settled there Good job. Good job I'll bring him back through here Excellent How are you? You're good I didn't mention in this video. I didn't mention he used to be a racehorse, but I I don't know some people find that interesting. I You know, I think about that I think about what is What were his old experiences in life that that's the significance to that to me but other than that I'm not going to do anything that different Because he was a racehorse and that nothing nothing drastically Different at least at this point although I will say I Will say oh, I've got so many wires for the mics and things cameras Uh There's one thing that I do think about though and that is All these straps, I hope they're adjusted for me. It's my I use the saddle for lessons. We'll we'll make this work. So I will say that The poor race horses they they don't always have a great opinion of the of the snaffle bit because they were Taught to drive forward push off that bit push through the body into the hind legs and I've watched jockeys run down home stretch and they're riding with contact While they're driving with the whip with the with the crop or their bat whatever it's called in racing. I don't know and So the horses learn snaffle bits They learn this feel that's a first resist And then maybe they give And they were ridden with snaffle bits With a lot of stress and and concern So now what I want to do Is just see if I can start directing him more and more mainly on a long reign with my With my torso my headlight on my chest I've got sort of this wedge shape in the ring right now that I I have to ride in so that I can be in frame With the video, but the main thing is is that he gets free and forward my first couple rides I focused more on his hind quarters But right now I'm actually feeling I'm feeling great just letting him sort of go and look if I look to the right I would like him to look to the right. Let's bring him up to a little bit of a trot here What I'd like to do is stand tall. I like to sit up Tuck the seat open leg go for a spook We'll come back around there all right now He's on a long sort of a long reign and yeah, it happens sometimes He's spooks and looks at something good now. I want to bring well bring his life forward Bring his movement forward his attention in front He's looking at that corner. What if I just put my hand on the down on his neck. Oh, you made it All right. Good.  I know I have an idea of where I'm going to go so I direct I let him find it Now maybe sometimes we slightly come off that point. So like Maybe he didn't make it quite into that corner yet. It's okay We'll come back and I'd like to come to the corner and walk. I like to come into here And I like to find a little walk here Here we go. I'm thinking about it. I'm changing my seat. Here's a walk I helped with the rain a little let him look into that corner a little bit I know a lot of people that ride horses, but they're uh And they can jump They can maybe even hand gallop a little in a field But I know a lot of riders that have a hard time just letting go and just Putting those rains down They have a really hard time and when he spooked in the corner Did I pick up on the rains at all? And maybe I directed his head a little bit but for the most part I just sort of went along with So there is this balance between Guiding so left turn let him find it to direct him and then sort of be a passenger Now I'll direct again. We'll change our direction Work my way towards the corner. So I'll direct him here Help him a little bit. I'm looking focusing my hands are way off to the side because it's a rope halter And it's what I need here. I'm helping a little bit. I'm saying find my Find my line In fact, we'll come into that corner here Now there I directed him all the way into the corner. So I had a hard time letting him just go We got it, but I had to help him to get here. He's looking out the door Yeah, those are jump standards, you know about those probably or at least you will someday good smelling each one of them He's really a curious horse. I like that I'll I'll sit up tuck my seat open like go forward Here I'm trying to just stay in the center with my hands Trying to just direct a little bit and let him find it. Let's trot sit up open leg Go for a little trot here. He's carrying that western saddle carrying me Look at just kind of letting him find this right turn Here we go straighten out left turn That that head will draw around to the left. Hopefully I know he's tall and his head's up and he thinks We need to get on beat. We need to get our a consistent rhythm at the trot Need consistency here Trot trot trot good. There you go Change direction. Oh, he he's thinking about that corner Let's go in there. Yeah, that'll work. We'll come into that corner now He got curious and I said, all right You you can go into that corner and I will go to go back to work now Let's sit up But I still asked him to go into the corner. So although here. He said there's another corner. Uh-huh Heads up Security curious Nice job, though, buddy feels good faster trot here How fast can you trot post fast trot fast? I'll post slower In a second here to trot slower Trying to not use that much rain I have no idea if uh, I'm way far away as far as uh, your view of me. I don't know Change direction here. I'm gonna get get closer down that rain here a little bit And I'd like him just to walk and let's get soft again And pretty soon instead of his head being so up and out We'll start to get Him soft softening and get him supple good And now we'll go back and see do you remember how to step that haunch over that looks good Once I get it The first ride I work on the hindquarters a little more on a horse like this But as I go I don't need to work on that hind quarter so much that that was nice Move the hind quarter as well. I want to draw him to the left So what I'm looking for is for him to get free and start to follow My my focus my where's my chest where where am I looking so pretty soon I want him to follow those those things around and I'm not looking for Um a lot of precision at this stage of the game I'm looking for Free movement and I really want him to get good at trusting me and turning and turning loose So that's really what I'm going for now at this stage in the game, but we're not that far along with him really And normally what I do at this point is I open up the overhead door that I have In the corner And I normally ride them out and I ride them around my property And right now we just had a ton of snow and