Thank you. Thank you, Sivran. So, a hand of animation. So, I wanted to do the short amount of time that I have to talk a little bit about hands and how to animate hands, how to pose hands, and whatnot. And I've now created, like, series of talks where it's the something about animation, and I had a problem with the name because this doesn't really fit, but nothing else did. So it's like, and everything sounds a bit awkward and weird when it comes to words that describe hands. But anyway, also, I have a short amount of time. It's gonna have some caveats, so it's just gonna be more about the basics and maybe like little tips and tricks if you want to animate hands. Also, what am I mean by hands? Like the kind of average five-fingered humanoid hands. There's a lot of different ones. Who am I? My name is Hjalti Helmusson, and I've animated a lot of stuff over the years. I'd say probably the like the shot that I've had like the most intricate hand animation now that I look back and I'm actually looking at it. The one at the like bottom left behind me. The one kind of the with Victor has the headphones putting in on and then this shot where he's playing around with a cassette and putting it in. It's probably the most complex little hand animation thing that I've done. Funnily enough, only shot in Cosmos Landermat that has motion blur because it was the first one we did and then we realized, oh, we can't afford all the motion we had. It's too much. So anyway, here's a lot of different hands. These are my coworkers and this is very interesting, the diversity of different types of hands. Like, you know, there's certain things that I can do that somebody else can't do when vice versa. Also just the ratio and the size and whatnot. And I want everybody to have like a little handy tool for your own little demonstration during the talk. So, you know, you can, everybody, if you have at least one hand, you can use it. Otherwise borrow from a neighbor or anything.  Yeah, I didn't explain it to my neighbors as I did it. So if you just try, for example, making a fist, everybody does it kind of differently. And I actually, it's kind of alarming to me to see some of the fists that are kind of up there to the left. Where if they were to punch something, they would just immediately break probably the index finger, whatnot. Everybody does it a little bit differently. But I need to be a little bit vague about all of these things and a little bit generic, because I have to go kind of for the average, not the outliers. Also, you have all the different animation styles. And that's where it gets really insane, because kind of, you know, by doing some kind of a cartoon, you're making an abstraction of the idea of a humanoid hand, for example. And they all look very different. My favorite one being at the bottom right, of course, is just the idea of a hand. And that's it, you know, it's super simplified. So, but I have to show something and I have to work with something. So I'm going to go with something you might see, like a style, art style that you might see in something like How to Train Your Dragon or Frozen, something like that. And I'm going to use a character that we've been working on and making at the Blender Animation Studio. And it's, she's called Rain, and she has, like, these are kind of the main, these are the only bones that I'm using right now to animate. And we got, like, three for every finger, and then we got the wrist bone. I'm just kind of throwing that in there. And then I want to put a little bit of an emphasis on those kind of four bones that are inside of the hand. Those get often forgotten by rigors or animators, especially, like, beginning animators. And I want to kind of put an emphasis on it also. So there's the idea of kind of the curve of the hand. Because sometimes you have a modeler or a rigger and they work together and they just make this really, and this is an extreme case, this really flat thing. And it looks super unnatural. And it's not really the way I handle it. And I'm going to throw away the idea of a style. Oh, it's a style. Yeah, throw that away. And because we're kind of pointing at something that is stylized, but it's a little bit more realistic. So if you just play around with those four bones, you immediately get that sensation of a curvature already. And if I just kind of flip between them, you can see it, like, races the appeal a lot. And similar thing, if you wanted to make a fist, and this is kind of an extreme case, I see kind of beginning animators doing this a lot, where they just immediately, they take that flat hand and they just immediately curl those fingers in. And then you're left with these weird gaps in between. And I like, I call it forking, like it because it kind of looks like a weird fork where all these spaces are in between where they shouldn't really be. So you should really just, like, slam those fingers together, get that nice little curvature there. You can kind of flip between, see the little difference. So, yeah, the kind of point is also, just don't forget about those kind of four.  That's what your hand looks like on the inside. It's just like a hunk of skin and meat and bones on the inside, a couple of tendons.  And then the first thing you want to do is just kind of relax the hand. And so, posing that, let's say this were kind of the default pose that I would be given. And then I wanted to relax it. So, I would like, you know, curl the fingers in just a bit, not too much. And tuck the thumb in a little bit, maybe move the wrist a little bit. It kind of depends on the angle, of course, because he's kind of dangling there. The, you know, you can see already there's a huge amount of difference between, like, being a bit tense and being very relaxed. A thing that I just want to mention that I see a lot of beginning animators do is that they think that there's this rotational correlation going on with the kind of last joint of the finger and the second to last, which is, you know, you can do that, but you have to have, then, a very tense finger when you do it. And it just kind of relays the information of tenseness. So, on the left, there is the same amount of rotation. The one on the right is the one I did, which is just lowering it a little bit. And so, this is what a hand looks like if you did that for all of those fingers. And it doesn't look really relaxed. So, if I just kind of flip between, you see the difference. So, it's something that I hope that people will start learning not to do it. It's also why I'm trying to make Riggers stop making those, if you want actual high-quality animation, by the way. If you want to make, they make, Riggers make these, like, long-ass bones here and then they have, just to have, like, a cheap version of it. They, you're supposed to, like, rotate them and then scale them. And if you scale them, the finger curls. But then you always have it, like, in the same ratio, whatever, and it just looks always weird and it's kind of cheap and I don't like it. I don't know. A handy pose, if you don't know what to do with a hand, because the hand can, you know, it's saying something. If you have a pose, if you have a splayed hand or if you have a fist or whatnot. Let's say you want a relaxed hand, but you feel like this is too limp. A really good pose, one of my favorites, is just this kind of relaxed curling of the fingers and resting the thumb on top of the index finger. And it feels very nice and very natural. Whether you're doing it, like, here or down here, it's very nice. So moving on a little bit from that to kind of applying pressure to the fingers. So if somebody wanted to, like, animate, I don't know, like a pose, a Spider-Man pose, something like that, they might do something like this where they put all their fingers flat on the surface. And it doesn't give the sensation at all of weight or any kind of pressure being put on it. So just by pushing those last joints, because that's really where you get the kind of idea of tenseness or weight or any kind of pressure being put on it. So you kind of flip it in between. By the way, just as a little side note, just like with any kind of posing, you're doing it towards the camera. So in this case, it's all the same pose, but just a couple of different cameras. I just want to show you, like, different angles. And out of these different angles, like, the two on the right are pretty nice. Like, they complement this pose quite nicely. The one on the bottom, whoop, am I doing it? Yeah, okay, the one on the bottom here, it's not as nice, but it's okay. This one is hideous, the one on the top left. It's really hideous. Like, if I were animating towards that shot, I would just be rotating the hand or moving a little bit to the side. Hands also, they can potentially grab a lot of attention. We use it a lot for gestures and whatnot. So this is something that is also a rule of thumb when it comes to photography or whatever, is that the subject you may want to be considering if the subject is giving the camera palm of the hand or the back of the hand. It's grabbing a lot of attention away from the face, especially if it's splayed, that's a lot of attention being grabbed from the face or from wherever you're supposed to be looking because you're the one controlling the focus of the viewer. So just as an example, look how much it's grabbing the attention of the eye and it's just competing with the face. In some cases, you might want to do it. And of course, because I'm talking about animation in general, these poses can be momentary. So you might have a thing where somebody says something and to put an emphasis on it, their hand goes outwards and kind of goes back in. So it's a momentary flash and it may work, but maybe you're talking and you keep talking like this. And it really, like the viewer has no idea where to look. The shape also of the hand, because when you're doing any kind of animation or cartoons, because of this rule of thumb of your you're abstracting a little bit and simplifying the shape and detail and complexity of what a hand is or what a character is. There is that idea of you still have the five fingers. And back in the day, they used to have like create hands that are like Mickey Mouse hands or like four fingers or whatnot. They did it for budgetary reasons, but there's another reason why you would do it still today, which is stylistic one, because the more you're abstracting the body and all these things, if you're just left with a hand that looks like a normal hand, the overall thing looks weird because then it's level of simplicity, a very, very, very complex hand. It's really weird. So how do you kind of fight that? How do you how do you take this thing that has like, it looks like a fork. If you just look at the kind of the silhouette of this thing, it looks like a weird fork. How do you simplify it? And the way it's kind of classically be done and the way I kind of became aware of it is with Disney films. So I kept calling it kind of the Disney pose where you kept like kind of grouping the fingers together and kind of kind of gluing them together. And you'll see this in a lot of Disney films. Of course, this is this like predates Disney by a lot. So if you talk to a real artist, they might call it the Renaissance fingers or some kind of I don't I've never found an official title for this, by the way. But it's a very handy thing to learn. So let's say we have some kind of a default hand and we by the way, I'm so I'm going to go over all the ways you can be gluing these fingers together. And I'm doing it in the order that I love the most and then the least. So just so you know. Okay. So the one I love the most is this guy. So the middle finger and the ring finger, they have this slight love affair. Every now and then they'll bump up against one another and they really like have this tendency of kind of gluing together. And no matter the post, even if it's like a straight on thing or a little bit curly or whatnot, it feels very nice. Then you can kind of pull in the index finger. What really is happening also there is just the fact that the pinky is a bit of a rogue. He's not on the like the knuckles. It's not really on the same level as the other knuckles. So he has this tendency in every given post to kind of be left out. But you can kind of rein him in and then you get kind of this mitten thing, which can look really weird if you just keep doing it.  And it kind of feels like it's not going to compete with any other complex shapes that you have going on. This guy here where you're kind of gluing the index and middle finger, it might work a little bit better if it's a little bit curved and then you're kind of pointing at or gesturing at something. When it's flat on, you can kind of take it or leave it. This guy here especially works more as a curved thing. But I've seen it being used quite well, just in a regular post. It's okay. It's not my favorite. The least favorite out of all of them. I'm really sorry to say because I'm a Star Trek nerd. It's the Spock because he just, it just looks just visually the shape. It looks like the mass of the hand has been cloven into two parts or just, you know, if you have it in your animation just briefly, it just gives the gist of like two hunky fingers together, like two really massive fingers. So it's not very nice. So now that I've told you about this kind of gluing of the fingers technique, you'll never be able to see your favorite film again without seeing it constantly. I didn't, you know, I guess until now I didn't realize this was a kind of a secret or whatever technique, but it's yeah, it's use it, please. I want to talk a little bit about the interconnectivity also of the fingers, because it's very hard to move one finger and not influence some of the other ones. And if you have really simplified, you know, Mickey Mouse thing, you might do it and it might work fine because it's like flat shaded and you know, super simplified, but just as an experiment, can you all just try for me? Just can you just do this pose? Just really simple. Just do this pose and the next pose I'm going to do, I'm going to ask you to just replicate that also. You ready? Okay, replicate that. And you're not allowed to use your thumb to help. So I'm guessing it doesn't look like that at all. It looks more like this. It's like the other ones are kind of coming along with it. It's really weird when I see something that's supposed to be a representation of a more of a real hand that kind of on the scale and it just looks broken and looks weird. Let's let's try another one. So let's say we have kind of a fist. Okay. So we're going to replicate this. Okay. So the thing is I'm going to allow you to use your thumb, but the thing is you're not allowed to move these guys up. If you're not allowed to move those guys up, then it's going to look like that. This is very hard. It's very hard. The kind of nice, you know, the nice exceptions to this is, you know, the index finger, just because he's on the end, he has a little bit of flexibility, but in particular, the pinky. So with a little bit of help from the from the thumb. And if you're allowed to maybe slip up a little bit, you can do a lot of stuff with your with your pinky. That's very cool. So this is a very technical term. So I'm going to go from a fist to a splay. I could have used some Latin terminology, but I'm not. So I'm really just kind of right now, I'm animating this going from one post to another. I mean, I'm just kind of fixing it just a little bit here and there, just so it doesn't intersect and it feels kind of nice, but I'm really just going from this to this. And what I want to talk about is, well, you could do this. But what if you led with one finger rather than just everything at the same time? So maybe the index finger feels a bit different, right? Okay, so it and it feels natural still. It like, and if you do it yourself, it feels natural. And if you try with your pinky, that feels really natural. So if you try with your middle finger, it actually doesn't feel as natural and it feels kind of weird. Like you're really forcing it to do it. So, you know, there's like three really great ways of doing it, you know, that feel more natural, which is like everything at the same time, which, you know, given the speed, a lot of these I'm animating them kind of slow, like nobody really does it this slow. But or leading with the index or leading with the pinky. But is it the same way the other round, also a technical term? Let's say we go down. So we're making, we're taking like a splayed hand and we're going down into a fist. Um, even before I talk about that, there's two, two general ways of doing a fist. So this one, which is kind of the inverse of what I was doing before, if you did this, you kind of had to do it in two moves because if you did this, you now have to tuck it in. So it's kind of two moves. But if you curl your fingers before, now you can do it in one move. So it's not the same on the way out as the way in necessarily. So I'm going to stay with this. So let's say I now, again, lead with the index finger. It's, it's actually really weird, uh, if you, if you lead with the index finger in this case. So it's not the same coming out as coming in. Uh, but if you flip it and you go pinky finger first, it's super nice. It feels really nice. It's really the most instinctual way of doing it. And it doesn't mean that, oh, you're not allowed to do it in animation or whatever, but do it the other way. Like do whatever you want. It's fine. But, um, at some point you start wondering, like, well, why does it not feel like a real hand? Why does the gesture doesn't feel as nice as it should be? Well, maybe because you're just breaking all the rules and it just doesn't feel like a hand anymore. Um, grabbing things, if you're grabbing an object, in this case, it's like a flat cylinder.  You want to tuck them in, uh, if you're holding something like an apple, for example, then of course it's going to follow the curvature of the hand and then they're all going to have some space in between. But in this case, uh, if you do it, this is kind of weird. If you want to have some variety, you can maybe pull the index finger just a little bit out and it should be fine. Um, also there's not one way of holding something like this. Let's say it's a staff or a piece of pipe or something like that. It, your hand is very malleable and it's always like readjusting itself. So you might be holding it like this. And if you have, for example, a staff and you're just kind of walking with the staff, uh, you might notice that you're constantly kind of shifting the angle in which you're holding the staff. Um, and it, you know, you can get away with this, by the way, I'm just kind of blending it from one to another. But if you want to really go fancy and make it readjust itself, then you might want to do something like this. And in this case, um, it's different from one post to the other. And it's probably a favorite example that I animated. It just feels very nice. Uh, so moving on to the thumb, the thumb is a bit insane because there's so much stuff going on. But, uh, in like, I had to like read a little bit about the technical aspect of it. Uh, so there's really just three basic kind of main movements of the thumb. There's the flexion and extension. There's the annoyingly named abduction and abduction. It's like think science, uh, for naming it so similar. And then there's the main one, which is the opposition. And that one is really like what makes us greatest primates or whatever. Um, it's like grabbing things and manipulating things. Um, given all of that, like with all of this, you have a lot of freedom of movement with a thumb. And it's very flexible. Uh, but up until last week, I learned that I was like, it's not as flexible for everybody. So, um, on, on the right, uh, on the left here is me and I always thought my entire life that you could make a watertight seal with your thumb or any finger in general. Um, and then on the right is my coworker, Julian, who modeled and designed the carrot.  What do you mean? It's just like a real thumb. And we're like comparing thumbs. Oh, uh, they're not the same at all. Uh, so, so there's a level of artistic freedom going on there.  It's just a couple of bones that are just kind of going around until they hit each other. Uh, you shouldn't be surprised by that.  Like the wrist does nothing. It's kind of lazy. So really what it does is that it kind of goes up and it goes down almost one, 180 degrees, not quite, not fully. Um, but the thing I really wanted to point out is from kind of the sideways. So let's say you want to rotate it, you know, in the direction of the pinky and in the direction of the thumb, you can't really go a lot towards the thumb. It really just stops. So, um, what does that mean for animation? Well, it just means that what if you actually did it, it would look like this. And it really looks like a broken wrist. And I keep seeing new animators doing this. And it's really, it really annoys me and irks me. And I think I was guilty of it back in the day also, where you're holding something and then like it goes too far and it just looks broken and you can't figure out why, like what's wrong with the pose. So just to recap everything I just said, um, remember the curvature of the hand and use those four bones that are inside of the hand. Um, the, um, just be careful about when you're like trying to relax the hand, that last joint, it really plays a role into your perception of how relaxed it actually is. When in doubt, you can go for this very nice kind of relaxed thumb rest pose. If you're showing any kind of tension or you're pushing up against something with fingers, you really want to play around with that last little joint because it really gives the impression or the shape of, of, you know, pressure being pushed. They, the hands are really a tension grabby. So be careful that you don't flash the hands constantly when they're not supposed to. The, I would say there's a bit of a love affair going on between the middle finger and the ring finger and just remember that the pinky can be a little bit of a rogue. There's, there's a lot of connective tissue going on in between every finger. So just be aware of that, that it doesn't feel really broken and or unnatural when you pose it. You can decide.  If you have, if you have it weird and it's like first one, second one, third one, fourth one, it's going to feel unnatural also.  Grabbing things, you're constantly manipulating things as you're grabbing them and holding them and moving them. So if you just, you know, if you're just beginning to animate and you go, okay, I take up a glass and that's it. I never touch that thing again. And then I, now I do my entire scene and I'm always holding it exactly the same way. That's not how we do it. It feels very unnatural. Thumb is insanely flexible, but just test with your own thumb and don't make assumptions about your own thumb. Just maybe, like, take a kind of an average out of the people around you or, I don't know, use artistic license. And kind of at the end, the wrist, please don't break it. Please, please, please don't break it. And you could go like 45 degrees here, maybe a little bit more depending on the situation, but don't go in the other direction. Okay. That's it. Thank you so much.


Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Stop humming that song! I can hum if I want to. I know you can. I'm asking you to stop. Well, if you're asking, then I'll stop. Thank you. Stop humming that song! I can hum if I don't want to. I know you can. I'm asking you to stop. Well, if you're asking, then I'll stop. Thank you. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that really amazing? So, that, what you just seen here, it's no other than Grease Pencil. But after a refactor, actually, it is. It was possible before, but there are many new features that are coming up in a complete rewrite of the way Grease Pencil is drawn and the tools behind it to allow for more, for better performance, for faster playback, scrapping to make the overall experience a lot better. So, if you go to code.blender.org, you're going to find a blog post wrote by Antonio Asquez, the main developer of Grease Pencil. And you're going to see here, I'm going to go through it. You can go ahead and read it a bit more, like, step-by-step, because it's really, really fascinating when they pulled out because the Clemence Foucault, the developer of EV, team up with the Grease Pencil team to improve basically every aspect of it. You're going to see the draw engine refactor, for example, which is the thing that draws the Grease Pencil on the viewport, together with the overlay system, with any other part of Blender itself. So, previously, the old draw engine wasn't really designed to draw, like, to the objects, because Grease Pencil was just basically an annotation tool. So, thanks to this refactor now, Grease Pencil becomes, again, a first-class citizen, and it can even respond to lights. You're going to see here that the lighting in the scene, in the object, like your lights, they also affect the Grease Pencil objects. Not only that, but the way the color management, for example, is handled in Blender now also affects Grease Pencil objects together with anti-aliasing problems that have been solved. Macaways are also issues with Grease Pencil that should be no longer an issue. Then Blend Mode, Color Mixing, and Mixing, basically the whole Mixing 2D with 3D. It's just crazy, but not only that, it's not only about improving the performance itself and the blending of Grease Pencil with the objects in the viewport, but also a mask system. There is a new mask system, the way it worked before it was a bit limiting. It would always mask whatever was underneath in the layers below. Now you can actually combine the masks, so it's a lot more flexible, and the issues, the anti-aliasing and the weird artifacts that they should no longer be an issue anymore. Effects, the lighting effects, for example, the lighting effect is now replaced by actual lights in the scene, but the other effects have been improved for performance. Blur should be much faster, pretty much every effect got rewritten from scratch to allow for more performance. Performance is like the word of this refactor, I think, but it wouldn't be a refactor without a new feature. You know how to explain it in the meshes where you can just paint colors and textures on top of your object depending on how density geometry is? Well, now you can also do that in grease pencil. Up until now, if you want a lot of colors in your scene, you will have materials. It will be for strokes, one color per stroke. Very limiting. That's no longer the case. You can just color any color you want. It's crazy. The amount of freedom you get with this improvement is huge. With a lot of colors, you have to organize them somehow. The palette also has been improved. The improvements go from making them easier to use with a better UI, but also tools such as extract palette from an image. You have an image that you like the colors and extract the palette from it. You can also import from Krita Gimp or even Photoshop. Convert materials to vertex colors just so you can work around if you were used to using materials but you think it's a better workflow which I think it is to use vertex colors instead because it feels a bit more natural more like 2D software would do. You can also convert those. Super nice. This is insane. Let's go full screen because this is just crazy. Look at the comparison between the old on the left in 2.82 and the new one on the right. FPS has been... It's hard to measure how much faster it is. It's just a lot faster, depending on your scene, but the complex scenes shouldn't be an issue anymore for Gris Pencil. So, yeah, scrubbing also when you're animating, scrubbing back and forth also should be much faster. The first time you hit playback your first playback you're seeing also should be faster. Memory management you name it, anything. Then faster drawing of strokes. Yes, this is when on Windows especially when you were drawing super fast that would lead to artifacts, some rough corners. No longer the case that has been improved thanks to new shaders and the narrow strokes or more like hard edges when you have edges that are a bit too pointy to acute angles now they are also having so thanks to new shaders. It's like all over the place. Then sculpt and weight paint tools become brushes. This is mainly like a cleaning app the whole system. When Gris Pencil was added in 2.4, really back in the days the tools it was an annotation tool so you could sculpt for example and weight paint in Gris Pencil but it wasn't really made for that. It was just like a hack on top of a hack of a hack and no longer the case this has been completely rewritten so here you're going to see you're going to read more about it and basically now there are real brushes that you can append or link just like you can do with regular brushes in Blender. So what happens to your old files your old Gris Pencil files well they should work mostly but there are a few things that you might have to look like manually fixed for example light objects sort of the light effect modifier make your lights yourself make some little adjustments but I think it's really worth it to go through that or just start anew with the Blender 2.83 for new Gris Pencil projects because it really if your scene was simple maybe you wouldn't notice the difference but if your scene is complex it's just better to start or just run and see what's missing, what's not maybe it just even looks better out of the box fixes in the draw engine but yeah the team had to go through the question shall we keep the old hacks around or just you know the spring cleaning and just start fresh and actually they I think they did the right choice start fresh and lay a good foundation for the future so yeah this is a patch is not currently as of today on master yet on the actual master branch but it's a patch it's a big patch and the developers basically have to go through all of the changes and it's it's really hard to review something like that because look at the list of changes is huge it's a factor so it might take a few days or a week until that is available for everyone in the master branch you can try the patch but I will just wait a few days and then we can talk about it even in the next few days so yes amazing improvements go read the blog post because he has all the right information all the details I missed a few points but the big thing here is to thank the community for all the hard work the developers have been doing all over blender not only on the grease pencil team but especially in the grease pencil team so here you see like the grease pencil they have been working as an artist giving feedback to Antonio who is the main developer working on this Clemence Foucault is the developer of Eevee he took over the complete draw engine refactor and it's insane the amount of work that went there but it's a good foundation for the future and all the tools like the palette and pretty much everything else in grease pencil is coded by Antonio so he actually wrote this article so he doesn't say think myself but I think we owe him a huge huge thanks for really pushing the limits of what blender can do in 2D, 3D, 5D who you name it so thank you Antonio for taking the time for working on this and giving the tools to the artists to crazy things such as the last splash screen in blender 2.82 or all the artwork that you can see here there's also here some credits and this insane let's look at it again I love the pirate here so yeah crazy times we are living in thank you for watching and I'll talk to you again in the next video bye bye


But this is kind of what I look for, okay, right? So you see the top of the channel's highs, right? Top of the channel's highs was 124.50, right? That was Friday's highs, right, 124.50. The low for the last couple of days has been the five-day moving average support of 117.50. Everybody see that guys, right? So you have night, you have 24.50 to the upside and you have 17.50 to the downside. So you have a measure potential of 129 to the upside of a 124.5, 125 build and you have a measure potential of 108. Initial measure potential of 108 if we start building below 17.5. Obviously the value is to the downside because you have only five points to the upside and you have not only 11, you know, in the nine, 10 points to the downside, but then if it starts building, then you have a $100 price potential as well.


Word Coming But all there it looks like, yeah This is it Oh, how did I die? There's a kitty behind us Push this kill It's all 5


How is everyone on Slush Day 2? So great to be here with you guys. We're going to talk about the future of growing our food today. There are going to be about 10 billion people to feed on this planet by 2050. And already, farming and growing our food supply is responsible for more than one fifth of greenhouse gas emissions. So growing food and the issue of climate change are inextricably linked. So from assisting small-scale farmers to the future of creating a hamburger that's never been alive, we're going to talk about what the future of food looks like today. So back in 2014, you originally thought of Verdun as a mobile app to help farmers. How has it evolved into the tech-based platform that it is today? Well, conceiving Verdun involved looking at the sort of situation of agriculture, especially from where I come from, West Africa. And the evolution happened from building a precision farming mobile application to actually scaling it down to smallholders who do not necessarily have access to smartphones or even broadband to start with, and making it in a small little chunk that they can understand and use in functional decisions on the farm. So farmers are able to text commands in, and they get resources like financial information. Yes, so rather than your normal GUI, now we have farmers using text and voice. And it's a huge thing now, looking at even Google's next $1 billion, customers probably coming from that segment of people who do not have access to either smart devices or computers or smartphones. And largely, the farmers use text and voice to get information. Yeah. And at Meetable, there are so many companies getting into this alternative meat space now, but what is unique about the process that you guys are working on? Yeah, so I'd like to get back on what you said earlier, saying making a hamburger that was never alive, but it actually is alive, right? We're using cells, and cells are alive. So what's really different about us is the cell type that we use. We're using a very young early stage in the development cell type that is very prone to grow at large scale, very easy to scale up. And what we have done is in collaboration with a spin-out from the University of Cambridge is finally being able to unlock the potential of this cell type. It's because they were very hard to control. They are very hard to grow from a real stem cell into an adult muscle and fat cell. But together with the University of Cambridge, they've developed a technology that would allow us to differentiate, which means turning from a stem cell into an adult cell within an unprecedented time, like five days, 100% efficiency. And to compare, the current status quo is doing this in 60 days and only 10% to 15% efficiency. So finally, we're coming now into an age where we can make the promise of stem cells a reality. And that's what we're working on. So what are some ways that Verdant is able to make these farmers more sustainable? Well, sustainability is at the heart of what we do. We want farmers to grow food with a full sense of economic, social, but also environmental value. So produce more with less effort, with also less ecological damage. A lot of the farmers that we have been working on prior to now had no access to any form of financial or otherwise management. And they basically grow what they can eat and can sell locally, which means they end up subsisting on it or probably not even having enough surplus to sell. So what we have been able to do is to get them to conserve resource and to get them to get more output from few input. And that for me is the basis of all sustainability if you look at what they're able to save and the profit that they're able to make and even the yield that they're able to maximize. Okay, and just out of curiosity, how many people here would choose to eat a burger that's been grown from a single cell? Raise your hand. Nice, nice, that's a lot of nice potential customers, huh? So, obviously for a regular burger, you have everything that goes into raising a full cow. It takes about three years. Right. So you have all of the water, the food, the land resources that go into that. But outside of those aspects, how does creating meat from a cell in a lab contribute to or mitigate the ecological impact? Well, if you're looking how many resources are going into raising a cow, really from the birth, feeding it, there's about 15,000 of liters of water necessary to get a kilogram of beef. And the conversion rate from grains to beef is 25 kilograms to one kilogram. And this also goes into the growth of the entire animal, right? You need to keep it alive. It has a body temperature. It roams around and this all costs energy. It has internal organs, which we're not using. And you can very well imagine that if you have a cell and you're putting nutrients in to create more cells, the conversion rate is much better. You can do this in a building. So you can actually make meat inside of a city instead of transporting it from their surrounding areas in. You only need the tank where the cells are growing in. So the amount of emissions, the amount of resources necessary is diminished by almost 90 to 95% on all fronts. So it is so much better to be doing this, just growing the cells in a suitable medium. And basically this is what Winston Churchill has speculated on in his paper called 50 Years Hands, where he said we'll be growing meat only the parts that is necessary in a suitable medium. We're a bit late because he thought we might be done in 50 years. And it was in 1932 when he said this, but we're working on it. So we're trying to make this statement still a reality. And what is the future of producing meat look like in your mind? Is meatable going to replace the cows that are being grown on farms now to be consumed? If you imagine that the current meat market is $7 trillion, so replacing this in the coming years is, I think, delusional. So I think you can just see it as a more diversification of proteins that people can look for and eventually hopefully diminishing the amount of cattle that are being grown right now. But I think it will take a long time before we really get rid of all the animals. And I don't think that's necessarily a desirable thing. I think complementation would be key here because from a grain perspective, you said it like, I read recently China eats more beef than the United States of America and the per capita meat intake in China is about 59 kg as opposed to 30 years ago when it was just 9 kg. So you are dealing with people who currently probably have no beef and you're giving them an alternative. So imagine a situation whereby, yes, there's cattle, but there's also beef, I mean also culture beef because to be honest, it's not gonna be enough. We need many more alternatives. Right, we need everything. We need plant-based, we need insects, we need culture meat, we need to reduce our meat intake because the problem currently is so big that there's not gonna be a silver bullet that helps everything. We need to really tackle this problem at multiple fronts and to make sure that it doesn't get out of hand, especially what you said about China, that now the middle class is getting more wealthier and you can really see a nice correlation between the amount of middle class or wealth growth in the land and the amount of animal proteins that they take up in their diet. So I was also curious, I'm wondering, so how would you think that the Nigerians would view cultured meat if we would bring this to the country, right? I'm not sure, get a lot of hands like we did at Slush, but definitely, I mean, you're dealing with people who have no much protein intake, so it's like saying, okay, do you have meat? No, how about take this? So it's a viable alternative. I definitely believe that you have a market, even though... Right, good to hear it. So you're working now with about 10,000 farmers and they're mostly growing crops rather than raising cattle. But how are you equipping farmers, especially in these developing nations, who will first feel the impacts of climate change to deal with the changes that are coming? So farmers are, I think, the most prone to the tangible parts of climate change that not necessarily everybody in this room experiences. They go through, you know, the floods and the droughts. You know, they are at the receiving end of climate change. And a lot of what we've been doing is to get them to see that this is part of a larger kind of chain reaction. And to do that, you can't necessarily just start dropping papers and academic research on people who have probably no education. So a lot of what we've been doing is to introduce products like index-based, weather-based index insurance that sort of tries to peg their farms to either adverse weather or drought or flood, you know. And there's a lot of interest in that they want to be safe because they do see the irregularities. This year the rain starts early, next year they start late. Sometimes there's a flood and sometimes there's a drought and they're suffering, you know, they are at the receiving end of it, so. And they also have a hard time securing finance as well, right? And insurance. So how does Verdant connect these stakeholders to the farmers themselves? Yeah, so the key part of what we do is to help small holders. And small holders here, I'm referring to farmers who have maybe two hectares below. So really small pieces of land and they depend on it. Their families depend on it. So what we're doing is trying to make them more visible. These people are mostly financially excluded, which means they have no form of bank accounts, no form of access to insurance or any other type of finance. So what we're doing is to put them in a database and go to a bank and say, okay, here's a bunch of customers. Here are customers who need agricultural credits, agricultural loans who need other types of financing. And that is basically what they need because for a small holder to leave their isolated, remote location and go to a brick and mortar bank is nearly impossible. And that's why they've been so financially excluded for so long. Yeah. And so obviously you are on board with the cell grown, the cell needs meat. But what do you say to the skeptics who might be opposed to that idea at first? Well, there is a nice thought experiment which I think a lot of people cannot get around. So if I would present somebody with two hamburgers and one was made from a real animal, right, with all the negative effects of the methane admission and the resource, the pollution, and the other one was made with cell culture and I would switch them around and I would feed them to you and you wouldn't be able to tell me the difference being one or the other. What would you choose? It seems to me like a very obvious choice, right? And if you have some sentiment of really thinking like, well, I really want an animal involved in the production of, I mean, like a live animal, yeah, that's unfortunately a market I cannot tailor to, but I do think that once you have something that is indistinguishable from the real thing, I think it's very easy for people to adopt it. And how long will it be before consumers can try a meatable burger? Well, we think we'll be at a demo stage, meaning we have a small scale production method validated in two and a half years and after that, of course, we have to scale and that's really important because meat is so cheap nowadays that if you cannot do this at the tons of kilograms, then the price will never be on par with real meat and we really think that's really important for adaptation. So then next, another two and a half to three years for a pilot plan where you can expect this product in exclusive retailers, in restaurants, high impact events. And I think also think that in this growth stage, you also can get more people accustomed to the idea. So once we finally have a flagship plan that is really on the scale that we want to, that you have a nice base of people that are adopting this new form of meat and that will be another three to four years. So about eight years, we think this could be in supermarkets for everybody to buy it. Eight years for a shelf, yeah. At a reasonable price. Yeah, and speaking of scaling, from a global perspective, how do some of the concepts that you're using in Verdant to help these farmers scale to other countries and how could these data insights be applied to help sustainable farming across the globe? So I think we started in Nigeria, all right, but the problem we're dealing with is almost global because you have farmers not only in Africa, but in Asia and even other continents that are isolated, that are not visible to markets and to finance and especially to good agricultural practices to core knowledge that makes them produce better. So I feel as soon as we're able to fully demonstrate the power of using agricultural data at such a small scale, then we would have demonstrated to the world that you could get small holders to produce almost at a par with mechanized agriculture, which we believe is the only way currently to produce 70% more food for the 10 billion people you spoke about. And if you look at it, dealing with small holder farmers, empowering them to produce better is actually healthier for the environment in that you do not have the greenhouse gas emissions at least not at the stage or the proportions that we're talking about when we speak of mechanized agriculture. And also if you look at the capacity or the potentials for using environmentally healthy alternatives like organic fertilizers and manures, it's easier to do that with a small holder, family type agriculture than a large scale farm that once profit at all costs. But you really believe that if you give these farmers the data, that's more important than increasing the infrastructure that they have access to. I believe the data has to come first. Infrastructure is key, but it's useless if it's on a bad decision. So I keep saying this, bad data leads to bad decisions. Now imagine what no data leads to. Imagine a situation where you build a railroad or an airport to transport a commodity that farmers grow. If the market doesn't want that commodity in the quantity or the quality that the farmer grows it, then your infrastructure in terms of the railroads and the airports you build are practically useless because no market will take the commodity in the quality and quantity that the farmers are growing it. So I believe infrastructure is key, but data come first. So sorry, I had a question. So how do you get the farmers to provide you with the data and make sure that the data is good? So yes, it's a two way thing, but first we provide the farmers with data, but in terms of small holders, say in Nigeria who use local languages, they have a simple way of getting in touch with us, as simple as texting a three letter word like W-E-A for weather information. And then we know your geographic location, we know exactly where your farm is, then we give you data tailored to that specific geographic location. And if you texted us about a pest or you phoned in, then we'll take the information and we know exactly where your farm is and all the heavy lifting could be sort of done for you. And in the near future, we probably have an artificially intelligent mechanism to do that, but currently we have people helping with that. Amazing. So you're equipping these farmers with data that helps them make better decisions, know about the demand so there's less waste, they have better sustainable practices. And they're able to produce more to feed this growing population. That's great. And as we've mentioned, the demand for meat is increasing as well. So in countries where there's these emerging middle classes that are asking for more meat, how do you see meatable fitting into filling that demand in the future? Well, I think it's much easier to get into a market where people are not very accustomed to having an overproduction of meat. And this way, if you substitute it with something else, it becomes like the standard, right? When you just have go to the supermarket, there's always has been a cultured meat section where you can pick your meat from. So it doesn't need to insert itself in between the shelves of the supermarket to start with. So I think it will be easier adopted when you're doing this from the start, educate people from the start. I do believe this is very necessary to tell people the difference between meat from an animal and cultured, why it's better to pick this choice and have people drawn to it from the start. And this way, yeah, just creating already a market where there was none before. And could you speak to how lowering the number of livestock being raised would affect farmers growing crops in Nigeria? So yeah, I mean, this is a very crucial matter because there's currently competition in grain production. Some people want to take farmland. By the way, the global crop land under cultivation is about currently 12% and we have a limit. We should not go beyond 15% of crop land globally. We are at 12%. And if we are going to ramp up agricultural production, especially in grain, we definitely need to cultivate more land. A lot of people subscribe to that school of thought. I don't. I think we should use the land that we have to produce more. But you said something, what does it take to produce a kilogram of beef? 25 kilograms of grains and soybeans. So exactly, so that means 25 kilograms of grain is in competition in terms of being either used to feed a starving family or to feed a cow that will give you one kilogram of beef. So you can imagine, there's quite a scenario here and I definitely believe innovation like yours in Agritech would definitely lower the demand for grain, going towards feeding animals rather than being consumed by them. I heartedly agree. And how do farmers fit into MediPulse mission? Well, actually we're trying to help farmers in a way that the bigger farms currently where they have thousands of herd to lower that amount and they can take better care of their animals. I think organic farming is wonderful and we definitely think that we should keep doing but we're really trying to combat the big, huge mega farms where their animals have poor lives, where they're standing in mud and in manure and have a terrible infection rate among the animals and need antibiotics to stay healthy for their short life that they have. That's the market we would try to mitigate. The organic farms is wonderful but you cannot feed the planet through organic farming. It's just not feasible. So this is how farmers fit in. They can reduce, hopefully reduce their herd but still have an increased amount of money per cow because I think through subsidies, the cost of meat is way too low. The real cost is paid in environmental burden. So we hopefully can raise the price of meat to make it more reflective of what it actually costs and have farmers take better care of their animals and their environment where they're in. So this way, helping them. So in addition to the environmental benefits, you've also mentioned that you can add nutrients to the meat as you grow it and you can prevent diseases and prevent those antibiotic effects. Could you speak to how that works? Right, right, so there's two things. So one is the antibiotic issue. It's not necessarily bad to give animals antibiotics. It's just that their natural occurring bacteria become resistant to these antibiotics and might cause infection in the population. Our method is completely antibiotic-free because you're using a sterile environment where you can grow these cells in. They need to be perfectly happy and clean, only providing the nutrients that they need to start growing. So no antibiotics needed. The other thing is that we can decide what to give these cells, what type of amino acid, what type of salt, and really control the process of what nutrient value the final product will have. So we can have meats in the future with higher protein content, lower fat content, different types of fat, different types of flavors, and really customize the final product how we want it to be as a form of personalized nutrition. Having elderly, having special diets, having athletes with special nutritional requirements, really customizing the meat and redefining what meat can actually be in the future. Yeah. So we're going to take a couple questions from the audience now. So how do you create a business out of a social cause like food waste or the environmental impact of food production? I think business is the greatest avenue for change, and I believe that if you're able to identify a genuine problem that affects people, then you're definitely solving a social problem. And what you have is a social solution. So it's incredibly powerful to identify a problem at the minute level to actually see what is wrong, to find the pain points, and to, no matter how simple or complex it is, as simple as giving data and as complex as growing meat in a lab, you need to be able to answer that question, you know, to provide a remedy for that pain point. And once you do that, I believe you have a social enterprise. Do you have anything, Dad? Sorry, can you repeat the question? How do you build a business around a social cause? But it's not really a social cause for us, right? It's more a food production system that you're inserting yourself into. It's not really a social cause. At least I don't view it as such. I really think this is just an environmental cause that we're looking into, and it's much easier to make a business around an environmental cause than it is about a social cause, I think so. I don't know if you agree with that, but... Well, I don't agree, I... Great, great, tell me why. I think you are solving a massive social problem. You know, there's a lot of people who, because of this problem, do not consume beef and feel, you know, animals have a right and feel animals should not be treated as such. And they're right, because when you see the conditions in which beef is provided on our tables, I mean, the journey it takes to get there, it's perilous for anyone to experience. Now, think also of the protein need of the world. There are a lot of people who do not have access to a balanced diet simply because all they have is grain. They actually have no access to meat. That is a social problem. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, I can see your point. That's great, actually. That's a new insight for me. I was really doing this for the environmental reasons. Mainly, I still like to enjoy some meat once in a while, but I really feel ambivalent about eating it, right? I know it's bad, but it's just... For some reason, it's very hard to kick the habit. You can see it is also in the population. I think the latest numbers in Western society has been five to eight percent of people are vegetarian and vegan, so combined. That's very few people, right? Yeah. That's very few people.  People, if you ask them, say, oh, well, do you know about the problems that it's causing? They know about it, but they still decide that it adds so much value to their life that they consider eating it. So quickly to wrap up, when you're working on solving big, huge problems like how we're going to produce enough food, how we're going to mitigate the impact of climate change, how do you combat that kind of founder burnout or depression when you feel like you're not moving fast enough? What is it that inspires you to keep going? Well, for me, it's been the typical entrepreneurial journey with its typical ups and downs, and every time I go down, I remember that someone actually has to do something. And if, in 10 years, you're able to look back and see that, you know, you were at the hem of, you know, the scratch that started the brush fire that changed the world, then you would have been fulfilled. But if you allowed the downs to take you down and be nowhere in 10 years, then you wouldn't have had a mark on the wall. Yeah. And that gets me going. Oh, it's easy for me, because I'm super passionate about science, so I can finally do something where I can do extreme potential good for the world and practice science and be an entrepreneur. It's basically a dream come true for me, so every day I get to go to work. It never feels like I'm going to work. Being here is a privilege, and every day I feel privileged being able to do this work, and actually I can pay my rent by doing this. It's just amazing to me. That's the dream. Thank you so much to both of you for being here, and thanks for joining us today. Enjoy your second day of Slush. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great.