Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Peter Klossy of GTA Resources and Mining, of course, a well-known investor Intel contributing editor. How are you today, Peter? It's PDAC. I'm thrilled. I'm having a great time. Speaking of PDAC, it's my understanding that you are the main buzz. GTA Resources is the main buzz at PDAC. Can I just ask you, what have you done now, Peter? For about two months, we've been working on a project, and we were able to announce it this week. We are the first company in Canada to do a flow-through crowdfunding. Okay. I've heard of crowdfunding, and of course, we have. We've got David Drake on our team, and of course, flow-through. Okay, but how have you put these two together? I don't understand. At the end of January, the Ontario Securities Commission passed amendments to the Securities Act. I know it's a little boring, but they brought in what's called crowdfunding, a colloquial term for access and capital from smaller investors. There are certain rules that have to be followed, but if you follow the rules, you can raise money from new sources. Those new sources can now access opportunities that they couldn't access before. So that's crowdfunding. We have flow-through for which we thank Ned Goodman. Ned Goodman created the popularity of flow-through. Flow-through is under the Income Tax Act, you get a credit when you invest in a certain kind of company, and that provides an incentive to invest in that company. In natural resources, if you invest $100, you can get $100 credit on your income tax, and depending on what province you're in, you get an additional credit on top of that. So we have married that concept of using the Income Tax Act as an incentive, and married it to crowdfunding as an incentive, and we're the first company in Canada doing flow-through crowdfunding. Okay, and this actually is very exciting to me as well. Can you tell me how much you're trying to raise here, Peter? We're looking to raise $250,000, which is not a lot of money. We probably could have raised it from some of the investment funds and contacts of the company, but we're looking out to the future. We needed to expand the capital base, and this to us seemed like a brilliant way to do it. And so kind of the sales pitch to those of us out there interested of course in crowdfunding is what. You invest in GTA resources, and we're going to drill some holes and try and hit gold, or what's going on here? Now the main use of proceeds is to explore. When you raise flow-through capital, it can only be spent in the field. One of our properties is called the Borden Lake Eastern Extension, also called the Ivanhole Property. Now because there's an Eastern Extension, you might expect there's a Western Extension, and there is. The Western Extension sold for over half a billion dollars last year. And Corp bought it for 526 Canadian million dollars from Perlb. That's the Western Extension. We own the Eastern Extension. So we will use the money that we raise on this flow-through to go explore that property, do some diamond drilling, take some assays, report the results. The West half sold for half a billion. Let's see what value we can prove up on the East side.  Can you tell us what the minimum investment is for someone participating in this crowdfunding slash flow-through deal? The way we're doing it is at a higher level of compliance than is said in the statute. Under the statute, you could invest $1 as long as all the other rules are met and be considered a valid, proper crowd funder. So Peter, I have to tell you, I'm in the buzz. I'm part of the PDAC buzz here for GTA. I'm excited about what you're doing, but I think part of the reason why I'm excited is I know the team at GTA Resources, and for those out there at Investor Intel who may not know your management team, could you give us a quick overview? Sure. We take our responsibilities to the shareholders very seriously. It's your money that we're dealing with. We never forget that we are just stewards of that capital. To that end, we only have 33 million shares outstanding. The company has never done a consolidation of the stock. Yet we have four excellent mining assets we've been able to build the company to that level. Our CFO is long experienced in mining, is fantastic at compliance, and keeps the company on the straight rails. Our chair is Berksboro Verde, very well-known mining and finance figure up and down Bay Street. Our chief executive officer is Wayne Reed, a very well-known name in mining. We have part of what we call the Newfoundland Mafia being the Stairs family involved, and they're good friends with Mr. Reed as well. Bob Dois is our VPX and anybody in Northern Ontario in mining knows Bob. We have a fantastic team that works extremely well together. We reach out to embrace First Nations, we embrace local communities, and we've been able to pull everybody together into a successful team. So what's the timeline for this raise? It's going to take us about a week to get the paperwork done. There are certain things that have to be done in accordance with the law and working with a restricted dealer or an exempt market dealer to make it happen. We expect to be live in about 7 to 10 days. Okay, so can we have you come back and say two weeks to let us know how this crowdfunding, being the first crowdfunding flow-through deal in Canada is going? Absolutely, and I expect that you'll hear a lot about it. There's been a lot of buzz. My phone's ringing off the hook with people asking for an explanation, so you will be hearing about it. And as soon as I finish this interview, I'm going to give Peter this $10 and figure out how to get my money into this crowdfunding deal. Peter, thank you. As always, it was a pleasure. Thanks for your support. Always nice to see you.


Why does Tears of the Kingdom have the same Hyrule map as Breath of the Wild? While the Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom expands the game world of its predecessor by exploring skies and caves, all of these new areas have literally been built on top of the existing Breath of the Wild topography. This is actually part of a larger experiment in Nintendo game design that started all the way back in Wii Sports Resort. According to longtime series producer Ijiya Numa, the decision to stay in Hyrule, not travel to a different land or do an unrelated game with a new Hyrule map was made at the earliest planning stage. He said, Although the previous title, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, has its own conclusion, we started to come up with new ideas that we wanted to bring to life in this already realised version of Hyrule. So our direction in making a sequel did not change. World director Takuhiro Dota has explained that this was an idea that originally came from Shigeru Miyamoto. Nintendo has long looked at ways of exploring familiar settings and environments from new perspectives. He said, When I was working on the programming for Woohoo Island during Wii Sports Resorts development, I remember Miyamoto-san saying that he wanted to turn the actual stages of games into characters. What he meant by that was to create one island and use that as a base to add various kinds of gameplay in different games. The idea of having new discoveries in the same setting was striking to me. I'd been wanting to try this idea with other titles and I suppose this game would leverage that kind of approach. While this was an interesting avenue of exploration for developers, it was not without its challenges. Many fans have wondered why if Tears of the Kingdom simply reuses assets and environments from Breath of the Wild, the sequel still took so long to complete. The simple answer is that the team were doing far more than putting a new coat of paint on an existing game. Said art director Satoru Takizawa, I keenly felt that implementing something new into the same world was actually harder than creating something from scratch. Although it is the same world, we want to make sure players experience it with a new sense of wonder. So to achieve that, we had to take a world originally made up of things we'd designed to fit it perfectly and then bolt a new layer of surprises on top of it designed from a different perspective.  While the goal for Breath of the Wild had been to break boundaries in the Legend of Zelda formula, this time the developers wanted to see what typical sequel conventions they could do away with. For a team that had made multiple previous Zelda games, this wasn't easy. They kept falling back into familiar patterns. Said Aonuma, the word deja vu cropped up many times during development. We were supposed to be making something different, but the various things we made gave off a similar impression to what we'd done previously. But as development went on, we'd look at the game as a whole and sometimes discover that those things suddenly took a different shape because of the new elements we'd added. Until then, we were anxiously trying to change things up, but at some point we realised that some of them were already as they should be. While the team initially fought these repetitive tendencies, they eventually learned to embrace them. They came up with a name for this specific sense of Zelda deja vu, the great mundanity. The sense of doing something familiar but in a new context became the driving theme of the game. Said Takizawa, by the end, the definition of this great mundanity became clear. So even if a team member approached us about a deja vu feeling, we felt more comfortable asking them to intentionally keep something unchanged. The nice thing about sticking so closely to what had come before was it gave the developers the opportunity to revisit ideas that were simply unfeasible the last time around. Dota has explained how they were able to add greater depth to the existing Hyrule in a way that wouldn't have been possible if the team had started afresh. He said, Actually, the previous title, The Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, was originally developed for Wii U, so there were restrictions in development. There were a lot of ideas we wanted to implement during its development, but we made clear decisions on what we wouldn't do in that game. For example, we decided that it wouldn't involve flying. Then Aonuma-san kept saying, if flying is out of the question, I want to dig underground. And we'd respond, oh no, please don't make us develop that too. Before The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, we began by compiling and implementing ideas we couldn't include in the previous title. We wouldn't have been able to do so had we made a completely new world. So developing in the same setting as the previous game was significant in this sense as well. Thus, the team were able to build upon what had come before to create something both familiar and wholly unique. The moral of the story is that great things can happen when you take inspiration from the things you already love. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. Unless you're playing Tears of the Kingdom, then you might need to reinvent the wheel.


The underlying goal is to catalyze the emergence of beneficial general intelligence.  Making a decentralized AI platform that's owned by everyone and no one, and can't be controlled by the power elite is one aspect. Making compassionate, loving robots that can be meditation assistants, elder care workers, teachers, and carry out other good works in the world. This is another piece of it. The use of our AI technology to try to cure aging and disease by analyzing genomic and medical data. It's a lot of different projects, but actually they're all connected together in a common core. Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyan. We are at the Transformative Technology Conference. It is fantastic here. There's so many diverse, brilliant minds. We are now sitting down with Dr. Ben Gertz. Hello. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for coming on to the show. Really appreciate it. And Ben is known as one of the world's leading AI scientists. SingularityNet, Hansen Robotics, Decentralized AI Foundation now, Alliance. You're working on so many other projects. And he has four kids, which is nuts. However he ends up doing this is crazy to me. I don't know yet. We'll have to figure it out.  Where were you born? How did you pick up your interests? Tell us about that. Well, I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to American parents. My dad was there doing his sociology, PhD work on Brazilian student politics. And when I was pretty young, we moved back to the U.S., to Eugene, Oregon. So I sort of grew up among the crazy hippies of Eugene in the late 60s and early 70s, which probably left a mark on me. My dad was a Marxist sociologist at that point. My mom was very involved in anti-war protest movement and then the women's rights movement, civil rights movement, all these things. So I sort of grew up in this social change type of ambiance. My grandfather, my mother's father, was a physical chemist. So he taught me a lot about science and sort of sparked that interest in me. His sister was a physicist also. And so from an early age I had an interest both in advanced science and in changing the world for the better. And I got interested in science fiction very young from watching the original Star Trek with my dad. And that's where I first got the idea of AI. It was a little robot in the original Star Trek, which was like zooming through the galaxy. And then Kirk and Spock had to deactivate it by presenting it with logical paradoxes. And I thought that made no sense. I was like three or four years old. I'm like, if this AI is so smart, how can it be full about these childish paradoxes? But it piqued my interest. I started reading science fiction. Sometime around 73 or so I encountered a book by Gerald Funberg, a physicist called The Prometheus Project. And he said within a few decades, humanity is going to create superhuman AI, molecular nanotechnology, and human immortality. And then the choice will be whether we develop this purely for materialistic purposes or for spiritual advancement. I was maybe seven, eight years old. I read this book in the local library. I'm like, well, that's interesting. Why isn't anyone talking about this? And so then I became more interested in AI and psychology and Buddhism and time travel, life extension, biology, physics, all sorts of things. And eventually in my late 20s, I got a math PhD. I graduated college when I was 18. Got a math PhD at 22. And shortly after that, started working on AI. And quickly realized that it was a big job to build a general intelligence, but seemed like a feasible and possible thing to do. And started pushing on that, started trying to build AI systems with potential for general intelligence in the mid-90s. Had an AI startup in New York in the late 90s, which sort of rose and fell with the dot-com bubble, was in DC doing AI consulting for companies and government agencies from its 2002 through 2011. And all the while sort of developing my ideas on how to build general intelligence further and further, as well as doing research in a whole bunch of different areas that we probably won't talk about today, like life extension biology and the science of the paranormal and lots of weird stuff. And is that with OpenCog? OpenCog has been a project since 2008. So there's been a series of AI systems I've worked on, which had sort of common principles, but each one advanced further and further. So between 97 and 2001, we had an AI system called WebMind. And then in 2001, we started a company called Novamente, which is an AI consulting company. And we built a system called Novamente Cognition Engine. In 2008, we opened source pieces of that to form OpenCog. So OpenCog formally started in 2008, but it was built on some software ideas that have been developed a long time before that. So we've been trying to gradually work toward artificial general intelligence for quite some time. And then, of course, I moved to Hong Kong in 2011. And why did you make that move? I fell in love with the Chinese woman, basically. Yes, that's it. It was kind of a crux of it. That's it, yeah. Well, that's the real crux of it. But a lot of other things fell into place also. I mean, I got... The reason I started going to Asia is in 2007, my friend Curzio Vasapoyo drew me an economic chart proving to me that the US was going to go bankrupt on September 25, 2008, which was right around the time Lehman Brothers went broke, right? So we sort of had the idea that there was going to be a financial crisis. So I started getting some contracts to do AI for companies in Japan. We're talking to a Korean university friend of mine. Wow, you were working your anti-fragility in advance. Yeah, yeah. That's so cool. I started looking at some Chinese universities. Now on this tour around China, two things happened. I met Rui Ting, who's now my wife in Shaman, China, where she was doing her PhD, and I met a guy named Gino Yu in Hong Kong. We applied for a research grant together and got a research grant in Hong Kong, Pali Yu, for some open cog research aimed at video game characters and robots. So there's a woman and then there's a research grant. Sure, yeah. And on the other hand, my kids, who I'd been raising in Washington D.C., were growing up and going away to college. So it was sort of a time when it was convenient to make a move. And I was also getting a bit worn out on the U.S. military intelligence industry, which I mean, at that time was sort of the best and almost the only way to get paid as an independent AI researcher. And I mean, I'm grateful for having had work to do for Northrop Grammar and SAIC and so forth, ultimately for government clients.  It let me support an AI team in Brazil while doing some AGI R&D. But around that same time, the AI ecosystem was developing further. It was becoming possible to make a living doing AI for things other than military and intelligence. And so I moved to Hong Kong. Which your parents would be like. Let's get away from it. I mean, it was mostly good-hearted, well-meaning people in D.C. that I worked with who really felt like they're protecting the world from bad things. And they are protecting the world from a lot of bad things. So there's an amazing number of nasty things that almost happen and are averted by intelligence agencies. Which is when people say, oh, the military budget is so big. And I'm like, but there's a lot of things that we're safe here because of that. There's a lot of things I didn't agree with there. Totally. But there's also a lot of good that was done. And I mean, the world is a complicated place. But on the whole, I'm happier now not working on that. Right?  I did a machine learning-based hedge fund. I did this research with Gino. And then I had a good friend named David Hanson who was in Texas doing humanoid robotics. I introduced it to some people in Hong Kong who ultimately got him funding for his company. He moved to Hong Kong and brought Hanson robots to Hong Kong, which is a beautiful place to do robotics because across the border in Shenzhen, you have the world's hotbed of consumer electronics manufacturing and hardware generally. So I became chief scientist of Hanson Robotics. Love it. And at that time, David was creating the original Sophia robot. He had a bunch of other cool robots before that. Give us a time. Stampus is 20. Sophia was launched in 2015. I think the original sculpture might have been 2014. Okay. At that time, he had some other robots. We were experimenting with first Robot Einstein and Philip K. Dick and Bina48 and so forth. So then we decided it would be interesting to use the open cog engine as sort of a beefed up control system for the Hanson robots. And we started working on that in 2014. And now as of the last month, we're starting to really use open cog within the Hanson robots in public appearances and so forth. It was a bit of a journey to get there just because we'd never used open cog for a real time control thing before. We'd used it to analyze genetics data or to analyze stock market data for the stock market. We'd used it for research and advanced machine reasoning. Controlling the robots was the first time we'd used the open cog AI system to control a real time system, which required a lot of changes. And David and I had a lot of common interests. I'm a common interest in the benevolent singularity in Philip K. Dick. We also had a common interest in making a robot mind cloud, like a cloud based framework for storing the knowledge of many, many different AIs and robots so they could all share information. Which became singularity. Yeah, yeah, and that grew into singularity. I mean, we could see that, you know, Ethereum based smart contracts and the blockchain and quantum computing should all feed into this. And then I met Simone Giacomelli, a young blockchain guru from Italy due to David Hanson basically introducing me to a friend of Simone's who then brought Simone to Hong Kong. And when Simone and I met, we immediately saw how to create the singularity net. That was May 2017. Then we raised some seed funding for that in July 2017. And then did a whole bunch of publicity and software development and concept refinement. Did a token generation event, token sale in December 2017. And now basically that's been going full speed ahead. We're launching the beta of the Singularity Net, you know, blockchain based decentralized AI mind cloud project in February of next year. And we're now, we're doing a spin off of Singularity Net called Singularity Studio aimed at basically building enterprise software applications for pharma, fintech, IoT and so on, leveraging the Singularity Net platform. So this is now exploding in all different directions. I mean, the underlying goal is to catalyze the emergence of beneficial general intelligence. And this just has a bunch of different aspects, making a decentralized AI platform that's owned by everyone and no one and can't be controlled by the power elite is one aspect. Making compassionate, loving robots that can be meditation assistants, you know, elder care workers, teachers and carry out other good works in the world. This is another piece of it. The use of our AI technology to try to cure aging and disease by analyzing genomic and medical data. That's another aspect of it. I mean, I started doing cloud based machine learning for longevity genomics in 2003 before it was possible, before it was popular rather. And you know, now we're progressing much further with that. So it's a lot of different projects, but actually they're all connected together in a common core. Totally. Okay, so I love it because this is what I care about so much and what a lot of people really care about in the field of being really proper, adequate, loving, caring stewards for Earth. So we have a general intelligence, a benevolent one that nobody owns, but people are able to access and contribute to. And then we have a benevolent robotics, loving, caring robots that can help society move forward. And then also just understanding all of this beautiful data within our bodies and then increasing our longevity, really staying healthy longer. So these things are just, I love it. I love it. I'm so happy you're doing it. I can't believe you're able to balance all of this stuff. And also when you first started talking about you being a kid, I was, you know, I don't really know that many people when they're like, you know, when they're three and seven, when they're starting to really unpack these really interesting, I guess, ways of seeing the future that excite them at that young of an age. So I would also really like to see more young kids have that sense of youthful inspiration that you had that catalyzed you to finish your PhD when you're 22 and start companies and build the future. So, okay, I guess let's start by asking you about the convergence of all of this is fascinating. It's multidisciplinary. A lot of people see it that way, that it's so nuanced and intricate, multivariate. So how do you figure out where these things overlap and how to, because, you know, you know way more about AI and machine learning than of course me and even a lot of people that even, that are even in the field. How do you know where to allocate resources for like how things overlap and so you don't have to build it twice? Well I think I tend to have a fairly abstract point of view on things. I mean my PhD was in math and I always tended to philosophy of mind and metaphysics and so forth. So I tend to look at the more abstract patterns binding everything together and so from that point of view these things that appear different are not that different. I mean the AI system and then the economy in which singularity acts on the human body. I mean these are all complex self-organizing pattern systems and if you look at things in this more abstract sort of pattern dynamics point of view then the commonality is even more apparent than the differences and of course computer science supports that. It can be the same data structures and algorithms dealing with all these things. I mean of course to do real things in the real world there's endless amounts of nitty-gritty issues and compromises that need to be made because even though these systems are in some sense of common organizing principles and dynamics I mean if you're doing bioinformatics you know you need to hire people to know the nitty-gritty molecular biology if you're doing robotics I mean you need people who are good at connecting the anchor from the motor to the inside of the robot's face. So the biggest sort of leap I made in my life probably was from being a theorist trying to understand everything to trying to build stuff and do stuff which rapidly verged into leading teams building stuff and doing stuff because theory you can do as one guy just sitting there thinking and coming up with one idea after another but at the level of complexity of modern technology there's only so far one guy can go in programming a complex system or building a piece of hardware or analyzing a biology system. So that was entrepreneurship. It was a big leap from theory into entrepreneurship and sort of technology leadership and that probably has not increased my overall happiness level I would say. So you want it interesting and tell us about that. But it has been exciting you know I mean and it's very interesting you're making real stuff and of course there's a level of understanding you only get by engaging in making real stuff that you'll just never get by sitting and theorizing. I mean not to minimize the value of what you get by sitting and theorizing. I mean I love the philosophy of Kant and Nietzsche and all these guys who sat and thought and went down a certain intellectual rabbit hole as far as it can possibly go right? That's really cool. On the other hand by engaging in groups of people and by engaging in the physical world with complex technologies I mean you certainly gain a different sort of understanding of things so it's been super interesting. But I would say I keep saying after another one or two more years of this I'm going to take a step back and focus on theory and pure research again but it keeps not happening because there's more and more interesting and amazing stuff to build right? Yes. It's cool how you go through heavy theory, heavy entrepreneurship back to looking to do heavy theory. I'm still doing both but I do theory in odd moments here and there and that is a limitation because sometimes you just need to spend like a few months, like 15 hours a day bearing down on some conceptual thing and I don't have time for that right now while running these different projects but that's I mean I can't complain because these are all really amazing things so I mean maybe within a couple years there's enough stable management in place for the various projects I'm doing that I can step back and spend like two thirds of my time on theory again or something. And one of the biggest keys for you then is to find people that can do the work as well as you can or as close to as well. A lot of people who are much better than me. Even better. A lot of people. I mean we have loads of amazing software engineers and my programming skill has degenerated since I've been doing other things for so long and of course in biology we have people who have just comprehensive knowledge of the human body at all different levels whereas I know a decent amount of biology but I'm not at that level and of course David Hansen and his team not only have more technical knowledge of robotics, David has this amazing artistic flair for creating systems that can connect to people right and that's been a really interesting thing so I saw how some people were just connecting to this Sophia robot on an intuitive almost animal level and I mean that's where I thought well let's try having her be a meditation guide or something because it seems like can we leverage this spooky connection that some people feel to the robot to grab people and then push them in the direction of positive growth and consciousness expansion right but I would never have thought of that if not for engaging with David Hansen and his technology which is based on his background in film and arts and narrative and a whole different part of the universe than the things that I was used to Now how does when you're talking about this abstract thinking that I love so much to, it's multidisciplinary it's calculating a lot, it's synthesizing calculating, analyzing, synthesizing information I love that style of thinking then to take that and then go and build something practical into the world that brings value There are a lot of intervening steps actually Tell us about the other things That's a challenge, I think the approach we took with OpenCog was sort of like having a high level theory of how a mind should work to have human like intelligence within restricted computational resources and then sort of going bottom up saying what could I build using available data structures and algorithms that would then satisfy the constraints of this high level theory So it wasn't so much that we started from the high level theory and built down, which I tried but didn't get anywhere or didn't get far enough If you start with a high level theory then you try to design up but you're constrained by matching with a high level theory So you're sort of going in a way bottom up and top down at the same time And I think in biology it's sort of the same way like to combat aging you need a systems understanding of aging and now things are going wrong in different parts of the body different levels of the body, how the different systems are interacting but then if you're designing a therapy you're probably still poking like a small number of genes or molecules but you want to poke that small number of genes or molecules in a way that fits in with the high level understanding that you have and if you don't do that you're just going to make a localized remedy rather than really help So for example, you can look at aging it like the extracellular matrix the molecules in between the cells and the body in between the organs this gets stiffer as you get older and older and from a systems you can see this is very important because this is where signaling happens in different parts of the body the contours of the extracellular matrix correlate with acupuncture pathways so there's a lot of systems understanding that tells you why the ECM is important but then if you want to fix that then what do you do? Well, okay, why does it get stiff? There's these cross-linked proteins for example there's glucosapane molecules so we're working with Christian Schaffmeister a temple university to design like another technology based molecular scissors that have spiraligomer molecules to cut the cross-linked glucosapane molecules so there you're starting with Christians nanotechnology like what can you do with it which will be valuable in the context of this systems model of aging so you got to start with the whole system and start with what your particular tools can do and find the middle ground where they meet That thought process is actually extremely important a lot of people come in with a vision for how they want to change the world and then I'm always like amazing vision like what are the short-term steps to get there and then it's also important to see how does the vision meet the short-term steps in the middle that's really cool Ben, I like that a lot run us through right now there seems to be a lot of artificial intelligence that is coming into the world and how does one accumulate that into the general intelligence singularity net and then how do people access the general intelligence how do they apply it to their practices Yeah this is a complex story unsurprisingly so I mean we can really look at what we're making is a I guess a network of networks of networks in a way but of course human life is that the brain is a network embedded in the larger network of the body embedded in the larger network of society embedded in the larger network of the ecosystem so AI has multiple levels like that also so I have the open cog system whose knowledge representation is a network a weighted labeled hypergraph and there's multiple AI algorithms acting on this common knowledge graph such as some neural nets for pattern recognition a logic engine to do with abstract knowledge and reasoning evolutionary learning which evolves and creates new things and these all act together on this common knowledge graph which then has a goal system associated with it and can try to choose actions that it thinks will help achieve its goals given the current context where the understanding of the context and the actions is given by all the knowledge in this graph right so that's open cog which in itself is very complicated and we worked on it for a long time and which I think is quite good at generalization and abstraction we're still working on optimizing it but I think the core is there the singularity net is a platform in which multiple AIs maybe based on quite different principles can be networked together so they can all talk to each other they can all communicate share data with each other so these AIs can provide services to outside users they can be used in the back end of various software products and websites but the AIs can also outsource services to each other in complex patterns and so that's another level of network right so I think you need some AIs in there that have a fundamental power of generalization and abstraction like open cog does but this can then work together with simpler types of AIs to coordinate together into a network whose intelligence in a way is greater than the sum of the parts so you can look at that sort of like how different organs in the body are networked together and they each have their own intelligence but the whole obviously has more coordinated behavior than the sum of the parts as well then we're also working on something called the DIA the Decentralized AI Alliance and that's an alliance of different decentralized AI projects so SingularityNet is ours which networks together open cog with a bunch of other AIs but then there are other projects like Ocean Protocol which is a blockchain based decentralized data network there's Shivam which is a decentralized network for genomics based AI there's Deep Brain Chain which uses blockchain for fast training of deep neural networks across many machines so we want to network together these different decentralized AI networks into a sort of network of networks so that's why we have a network of networks and all these levels it's complicated but that's what we see in nature and I think in different ways that's what we see on the internet already so I think that's the right way to think about it that doesn't mean you don't need core generalization and abstract reasoning algorithms in there and in some ways you could say these are the crux of it for AGI but all the other parts are important too I mean just as in your cortex there's certain micro-circuits that are really good at abstract learning and reasoning but if you just put these micro-circuits in a vat they're just going to abstractly reason about their own abstract reasoning in sort of vacuous loops it's by putting them in the network of the brain which is the network of the body of the society of the ecosystem that you're getting you're really giving these abstract learning circuits the ability to prove their worth yes, yes okay I liked how you were describing it it finally started coming together more for me and I like that and hopefully for others as well okay now when you feed a when you're feeding open cog which has the ability to abstractly reason when you're feeding it a to-do of some sort how does it parse that and make sense of what it needs to do within its framework to bring about the result open cog can ingest a lot of different types of knowledge so I mean there's a language parser where it parses out English language now into nodes and links to try to represent the semantics of that English language it doesn't always work but sometimes it does and you can also take computer programs like little list programs or something and import those and then they turn into nodes and links and it's knowledge base we also have specialized data importers for types of biology knowledge for example or accounting knowledge and so forth when you import the data it goes into the whole and it's organized into buckets, nodes, areas not buckets it's organized into nodes and links which all connect to each other so not never the buckets no it's not partition but then there's the reasoning engine looks at the nodes and links that came from data including vision and hearing as well as databases and language and the reasoning engine takes those nodes and links that came from the outside world and builds new nodes and links and that's how you add to it and then reasoning does is takes empirical knowledge and then generates new knowledge based on the empirical knowledge and then when you're adding the knowledge and then you're trying to get an answer of sorts from that how does it compute there's a tool called the pattern matcher in OpenCog so if you want to find a collection of nodes and links matching a certain pattern you submit a query and it searches the whole knowledge base to find things matching that pattern and then there's the logical backward chainer which if you give a pattern it tries to find things that approximately or probabilistically match that pattern and so if you're asking a question somewhere or another that question is turned into a crisp or probabilistic pattern matching query that goes against that whole knowledge base okay and then now we're getting pretty deep in the weeds that's really important adding the knowledge making the query and then getting some sort of results and this is what I want to do a little bit is the roots is the deep roots and then also then I see the OpenCog with the SingularityNet able to work with the different AIs yeah so I mean if someone makes a great AI for say recognizing patterns in videos or say for importing data from accounting spreadsheets or something you want an easy way for that to feed knowledge into an abstraction engine like OpenCog and so SingularityNet makes an easy way for different AIs and by all sorts of different people to connect together and if someone else makes a different reasoning engine with different strengths and weaknesses relative to OpenCog that can be there in the SingularityNet also then some application could consult two different reasoning engines and decide which answer it likes better or one of the reasoning engines if it gets stuck halfway through doing reasoning it could ask a question of a different reasoning engine it could help it get unstuck right with the potential to having different AIs able to compete with and consult each other within a common network Interesting compete and consult with each other in the AI networks interesting and then the decentralized AI alliance gets in there as well so this is more new this is your newest that's new we announced that a few months ago but we're still forming it I mean the idea there so projects are using blockchain related technologies to make decentralized AI networks that are owned by the participants and democratically controlled and they have different focuses so I mean SingularityNet is a pretty generic framework for interconnecting AI is now deep brain chain for example is a decentralized network that is really fast at training deep neural nets and Shivam is a decentralized AI network that's specifically gathered from the genomic data from people stores it securely and then does some analytics on the genomics data right so we don't need to replicate everything they're doing we just let an agent a node in the SingularityNet talk directly to a node in the Shivam network or deep brain chain so if a SingularityNet needs some neural net strain really fast it may outsource that to deep brain chain if a SingularityNet is analyzing genomics data and wants more genomics data ask the Shivam blockchain hey do you have any data filling these criteria that I could use and then the AGI token which is within the SingularityNet ecosystem can be automatically converted on the back end into a Shivam token to pay for that and then of course if you have reputation and rating like if one guy has written a bunch of great AI in SingularityNet he has like a 4.5 star rating then if he starts to do something in Shivam he should get a high rating by propagation from SingularityNet so you can have both sharing of data sharing of currency and sharing of reputation and ratings among different decentralized blockchain based AI related networks and I think this is how you can build an alternate AI ecosystem that can really take on the tech giants whoa that last part yeah there's a lot to be done and it's not just building the tech it's coordinating a lot of people with different philosophies and incentives also yeah that's right I love when a query is sent in you're not even then limited to what open cog and SingularityNet has then you can access access a whole bunch of other networks yeah that's right I mean that's how AI should be shouldn't be swallowed off it should be networks connected to other open networks and learning and growing from each other won't the Google's and Apple's and Amazon's of the world of Facebook's won't they die if they silo themselves and centralize themselves it remains to be seen I mean I think it's not important to me that they die but I think they won't be the dominant factor they didn't die when mainframes became less important there's still business niches for them they saw a lot of mainframes to banks they do services for big companies but they're not dominant anymore Wang computer died though so I mean I don't say that Google, Microsoft and Facebook will die what I say is they will not own the majority of AI anymore and you know what niches are best for them to occupy that really remains to be seen yeah interesting so then the giants could turn into niches because the giants could also turn into companies selling AI services on decentralized networks right I mean there's a lot of possibilities I mean as Microsoft is morphing into a cloud company right so I mean a company that's sufficiently agile their brand name persists but they can completely adapt Microsoft is offering Linux on Azure all over the place instead of Windows so I mean we're not opposed to any particular companies it's more the centralized modality of organization that we're trying to get rid of I mean what history suggests is some of the leading companies will find a way to adapt to the production of the industry and some won't find a way to adapt and they'll disappear I mean I have my guesses as to which ones will adapt and which ones won't maybe we have your guesses but that's neither here nor there I mean time will tell I would say there's a lot of people in leadership positions in Google and the singularity in advanced technology pretty well they have a fairly strong ability to adapt and not every big tech company shows that same ability to adapt but then the evolution of business is incredibly unpredictable like no one predicted IBM would be a services company but yet they manage to pivot so it's quite hard to tell who will pivot to embrace the decentralized there I mean you can see that in publishing industry also some publishing companies are going to flourish and some will disappear now how do we put our eggs in your basket because we're relying on your ethical and moral standards with the general intelligence that you're building as with anyone who would be building what we would be relying on we're relying on the community not just me personally in the unlikely event like I were invaded by a Martian mind virus that shit crazy and became malevolent I mean there's a load of other contributors to these projects so it's about seeding a community of people who are thinking in somewhat of a shared way in aiming to develop things in a benevolent manner and what are the guiding principles of your community that make it ethically and morally just grounded and that we can trust that sex drugs and rock and roll sex drugs and rock and roll yeah besides those besides that I think I mean at an abstract level the ethical principles I've written about are basically joy growth choice and continuity and I think all of these have an important value in a practical context I mean we're trying to promote happiness and doing good and we try to have a work environment in the community that's fun to be in I mean we're trying to grow and expand rapidly and create new patterns create new things new technologies new ways of being choice means we want everyone to have agency and that's an important part of the whole decentralized ethos there shouldn't be a few elites control everything and continuity means you want to respect the patterns of history as well as creating new patterns and this includes like persisting human beings into the future instead of replacing them with super AIs it also includes being respectful of historical cultures that exist now and certain people are very tied into and of course values like these are very nebulously defined though and sort of interpreting what they mean is part of what a community does and then approaching the end here what can we see come from the Hanson robotics ecosystem it's looking like we're talking about assisted meditation so the first thing is right now there's just a handful of human scale Hanson robots but we're working with a factory in Shenzhen to scale up manufacture so we should have within the next few years a massive number of robots coming out of the factory and I mean these will be purchased by customers for a variety of different purposes but the applications I'm most interested in are those that are you know explicitly promoting wellness health and growth among people so I mean meditation assistant is interesting I feel like I didn't give your last four points enough love a moment ago I just want to that's alright we're going to go soon I want to give them love though education is interesting thank you for composing those and for having that as an ethical and moral standard for building the community so I just wanted to say that we're also looking at making like a fully automated hospital room where you have sort of a Sophia type robot to provide conversation hear the patient's stories tell them stories answer their questions then I mean you have other robots to do physical things like up someone in a bed or change the bedpan or whatever then you have medical instruments in the room and all of these are integrated into a singularity that powered control system for the hospital room what's the practical one that maybe the consumer scale robots they're not going to be that cheap initially so probably the initial application of the human scale robots will be sold to stores hospitals companies and so forth it's going to be a few more years after that before the price comes down enough but then then when the price is low enough I mean you'll have home service robots everywhere just like in the Jetsons right I mean but much cuter than Rosie the robot so we're talking maybe like $10,000 up cost for now to companies and or even more I don't want to cite the price point because it's still to be determined it'll be leased each year actually probably interesting probably I mean I can't say for sure because that's Hanson Robach's business decision but I can see a future for a leasing model because everything's constantly being upgraded and improved and the other nice thing is that being able to upgrade and improve it the software can be done remotely but then you do have to ship in hard for hardware upgrades and what not yeah that's right hardware hardware is a pain but it's very useful to have okay and then I'm glad that we got as much as we did I want to are you what are your thoughts about the multiverse what are your thoughts about that it's there what do you want to know about it it's a big place so time happens all at once from some perspectives I'm a big fan of Revelli's relational interpretation of quantum mechanics which says you don't want to talk about a phenomenon in isolation you talk about a phenomenon in the context of a specific observer so an observer comma observed pair so I mean from our point of view situate as humans time is flowing in a certain direction right from a different point of view which is a more abstract view of a different sort of mind than we are then time happens all at once and not only that there's not just one time axis there's a lot of different time axes which are sort of floating out there in the space of patterns right I mean my general philosophy view of this is there's a much wider universe than this one I've used the word Yuri Cosmos to refer to that like wider cosmos right there's a wider cosmos our physical universe is viewed as like one conglomeration of patterns in that wider cosmos and if you want to look at you know weird poorly understood phenomena like reincarnation or seances those suggest that each of our individual minds has some sort of existence outside this physical world in some wider cosmos let's lead you to that quick do you think that the consciousness is localized in the central nervous system or that there is a soul or what are your thoughts about that the word soul is very overloaded with religious yeah I mean we don't have a good vocabulary for these things but no I I think consciousness is imminent in everything in the physical universe and also goes beyond this physical universe and that the individual consciousness associated with each of us can exist at times and places where our physical body is not there interesting which suggests a model in which you know our physical universe is embedded in some larger space and then maybe the mind patterns characterizing individual also have an existence that isn't respected to this 4d space time continuum so that and I've written I've written a bunch about this if someone Googles the coinage Yuri Cosm E U R Y Cosm which I made up it only exists in my writings on these crazy topics so I mean this is the sort of stuff I would love to be thinking about all day theories and how to experimentally poke at it right yeah because I think you could experimentally poke at it by poking it paranormal phenomena maybe in animals or something right so there's a lot of interesting research directions here and I sort of look at this sort of thing is almost where I was when I was a little kid it's just getting started there's limited amount of understanding no one gives a crap right so now I mean I sort of feel impelled to make AGI really happen on the other hand the part of my mind is bored with AGI because I don't think I know how to do it and I'm attracted to think about these other things that are like wide open and I barely know where to begin which is how I felt when I started with it right yeah it's so wide open and it's so fascinating it's going to unlock so much more beauty and potential it's so cool well an interesting question is if you have a superhuman AI will it figure out how to unlock all these spooky parts of the universe that we barely understand right now and I would imagine so I love it well with the general intelligence that you're building you'll have a lot to play with one would hope so so anyway we've reached the wider multi multi multi multiversal transcosmos so that that may indicate the conversation has expanded to a certain one one time and to collapse it down what about the formation of the mind of a child that is born into the world do you have a protocol we do a pretty good job we have an adequate amount of you know water and electricity and food and these basic necessities but the education of the mind at a young age to have some basics that you know to expose the children to that you think would be really helpful moving forward well I mean I've raised three kids I'm in the middle of the fourth one but I don't know them that sister come systematic about it I I generally speak to my kids as if they were adults and just explain the world to them in a simple but reasonable way and I tried to teach them all a lot of math science literature arts history and so forth and one of them became a mathematician and AI researcher the others didn't like math so much but they each learned a lot and went in their own direction I mean my second son is a Sufi mystic and an amazing classical pianist so they I mean my daughter did a degree in environmental science and is helping with the education in Ethiopia now so I mean I think kids intrinsically are curious and open minded so if you I mean if you let them explore different things and expose them to a lot of different information they're mostly going to grow in a beneficial way but this is like standard progressive education doctor and I would say I'm working with UNESCO and with Bethlehem Desi who's in our Ethiopia office on defining an advanced technology based curriculum which you want to roll out in schools around the world K through 12 so I help define the I help define sort of the high level the curriculum and then folks at UNESCO are working on the details and we're going to be testing that in schools in three or four countries over the next couple years but this is it's more about like let's get some cool technologies and let's put them in the hands of kids just in a way where they can explore and experiment with them but let's also get school systems in various nations to embrace this so that by doing this kids aren't doing something off to the side that doesn't help them pass the university entrance exam but that what they learn through this experimentation with the AI robotics biotech or something ties in with how they're assessed to let them move forward through the country's education system so I'm it gives them that experiential edge yeah so the challenge is we sort of know we know how to do that and I homeschooled all my kids to various parts of their childhood and I was also co-founded a charter school in New Jersey so I mean I see like progressive education methodologies are not that mysterious now and working tech into them in creative ways is not that mysterious the biggest challenge is structural and institutional and like if when one laptop per child went into Ethiopia where we have a big office so I spend a lot of time there I mean their laptops were perceived by the teachers there as a pain in the ass because kids just were playing with these cool educational games and you know making simulations composing music that was distracting attention from passing the exam that would get them into university which is quite challenging in Ethiopia so what you need to make the system embrace progressive education which is actually harder than defining how the progressive education should work because they're given the tool they're able to pursue what they love but then the system's requirements are you must fit into these boxes yeah yeah yeah and there like not a high percentage can go to college so I mean if you fail that university entrance exam it's bad it's not like the US where everyone can go to university so yeah and China is the same way like the university entrance exam is a huge deal really so you need if that exam is the focus and there's a limited amount of creativity that parents are going to let their kids pursue so this on unfortunately so like reforming the world's AI tech ecosystem I sort of see how to do like from the side but just build this decentralized network you know outsourced services to businesses from this network and let the whole thing spread on the other hand reforming the world's education system I don't see a way to do other than like work with governments to reform how they do assessment and evaluation because I mean otherwise you can provide all the cool like downloadable curriculum you want but if it's not what kids are forced to do when sitting in school eight hours a day and then it's going to have a real but limited impact by putting the assessments and examinations on the children we're automatically siloing time from them to those areas which then takes away from the other creative endeavors that they might be more passionate about so UNESCO is interesting in that they're embracing both advanced tech and progressive education so I'm trying to I'm working with them to to work with ministries of education in different countries then what are you not doing sleeping sleeping exactly that's what you're not doing you are an amazing human being this has been such a pleasure to talk and unpack this even in its first preliminary stages whatever we can do to help with our network of builders we'll do as well as hopefully when you're back in the bay we can do live events, the other promoting DAI and even more that you're up to so we can do that with Lisa we love Lisa as well so thank you again so much for coming to the show thanks for all the good questions it's too many questions to ask he's so awesome thanks everyone for tuning in give us a comment below with your thoughts about what we talked about it's so much to unpack also join the telegram join the public telegram join us there and also go build the future go build your destiny into the world go manifest that thanks everyone for tuning in much love we'll see you soon peace


The next item of business is a statement by Angela Constance on pathways to recovery, update on progress and milestones for expanding access to residential rehabilitation in Scotland. The minister will take questions at the end of her statement, and so there should be no interventions or interruptions. I call on minister Angela Constance up to 10 minutes, please. We carry a national shame of thousands of heart-breaking drug-related deaths, and it's my job as Minister for Drugs Policy to lead the national mission to turn the tide on this crisis. When speaking to people in recovery, I'm often reminded that stopping someone from dying is only the beginning of the recovery journey. Recovery isn't something that happens to people, it happens when the systems of services and resources facilitate individuals to build recovery capital, social connections and pursue their recovery goals safely. The system of services needs to be based on hope and trust to meet people where they are and not leave them there. It's with that word hope in mind that I come before Parliament today to provide an update on our progress on residential rehabilitation and set out our milestones for the road ahead. Our national mission to tackle the drug deaths emergency is focused on a public health response to save but also improve lives, whether that is through harm reduction services, medicated assisted treatment, abstinence programmes or support for mental health, housing and welfare. This is about supporting people to access the treatment and recovery that is right for them. Therefore, we are working to ensure that all the component parts of a recovery-orientated system of care operate effectively with good links and pathways between them to reduce harm and promote recovery. Residential rehabilitation must be part of this range of evidence-based prevention treatment and recovery services. That will ensure that there are options and choice for those who want to seek an abstinence-based recovery. There are three parts to our national approach towards achieving this. Improving pathways into and from residential rehabilitation in particular for those with multiple and complex needs. Investing in a significant increase in the capacity of residential rehabilitation and developing a standardised approach to commissioning residential services also. Today, we have published a suite of reports detailing the current state of pathways into through and from rehab. The research undertaken by the Government has highlighted areas that do not have clear pathways. That has enabled us to tailor and target our interventions to the areas where it is hardest to access rehab. Pathways into and between all types of services are important, but that is even more vital for residential rehab because it is all too often not part of the range of options available. We also know that the transition from rehab back into the community is a higher risk phase, so it is important to get it right with reintegration into other services such as housing and employability. Pathways to residential rehab and aftercare should be clear, consistent and easy to navigate no matter what area of Scotland you live in. We want to ensure that people feel supported and have more choice in their treatment journey and that a no-wrong-door approach means that they can ask for help through a variety of services, including housing, criminal justice and community outreach. The tragic statistics that are published today on homelessness deaths, more than half of which are linked to drugs, make this an ever-greater priority. We will be ensuring a rights-based approach by applying the panel principles of participation, accountability, non-discrimination, empowerment and legality in the development of all pathways in all ADP areas. By summer next year, we will ensure that each ADP has a published pathway document to share with clinicians, social workers and outreach workers, as well as individuals and their families. We have responded to calls for more transparency and accountability by working with Public Health Scotland to track the number of residential rehab placements that ADPs have funded. That will provide government with a clear line of sight on how the residential rehab money is being spent. So far in the first six months of this financial year, ADPs have funded 212 placements, an investment of around £1.4 million from the £5 million allocated to be spent on residential rehab and aftercare this year. That is almost the same as the number of placements funded annually in 2019-20. However, let me be crystal clear, it will be unacceptable for any area not to be investing in residential rehab. We are aiming to increase the number of publicly funded placements by more than 300 per cent over the five years of the programme so that by 2026, at least 1,000 people every year are publicly funded for their rehab placement. We will work with ADPs to support the delivery of this ambition and to facilitate regional approaches, especially in those areas where the rate of drug deaths are highest and access to residential rehab is most challenging. Regional hubs overseen by Healthcare Improvement Scotland will ensure that the local system of treatment and recovery services, including residential rehab, are operating to the highest of standards. In order to facilitate the increase in publicly funded placements, we are working to increase capacity. That builds on the recommendations from the residential rehabilitation working group that I am very grateful to to ensure equal access across Scotland. The total estimated number of rehab beds available in Scotland just now is 425. Our aim is that by 2026, there will be 50 per cent more rehab beds in Scotland, a total of 650. We have established a rapid capacity programme as part of the recovery fund, which will expand existing services and establish new services. Our service highlighted a gap in provision that meets the needs of women and those who require childcare facilities, so we have made that a focus for the programme. We have already committed to just over £8 million of funding over the next five years to support a new national family service to be delivered by Phoenix Futures. This service, which will be up and running by summer 2022, will support up to 20 families at any one time. I am pleased to announce today to Parliament that we are also providing funding to expand the capacity of the Lothian and Edinburgh abstinence programme LEAP by 40 per cent. The funding will enable the detox capacity in the Ritsyn clinic to increase by 50 per cent. This will enable more people to safely detox before going into the LEAP service. The project will be delivered in partnership with the Lothian ADPs and will act as a blueprint for a regional model of delivery to address inequities of access across Scotland. I can also announce to Parliament today that, in recognition of the fact that one size does not fit all and that there is a need for diversity of residential rehabilitation options, we are also funding Rivergarden to scale up their innovative residential therapeutic community and social enterprise. Based on the experience of international models in Italy, Sweden and the USA, Rivergarden offers a three-year residential programme for people in the early stages of recovery. The service currently supports seven residents and this funding will enable them to realise their vision of supporting 56 men and women in recovery. That brings us to a total of £18 million of investment so far from the recovery fund, which will increase capacity and ensure choice. In order to more fundamentally transform the way residential rehab beds and placements are funded, we are developing standardised approaches to commissioning rehab services. Subject to the outcome of the national care service consultation, Government may take a national approach to commissioning specialist addiction services. Whilst the national care service has the potential to reform how services such as rehab, detox and stabilisation are commissioned and procured, we do not need to wait until the more systematic changes are made. That is why we have asked Scotland Excel as the centre of procurement expertise in local authorities to undertake market analysis and further engagement with ADPs to consider what the different routes available to government are now. When the First Minister and I recently visited Bluevale Community Club, we emphasised that no ideas are off the table as problems and solutions belong to us all. We want to build a political consensus around what works, and, for example, we welcome the recognition across this Parliament that safer drug consumption facilities have a role to play in saving and improving lives. Today, I have outlined the work that we are undertaking over the next five years to ensure that everyone who wants residential rehabilitation and for whom it is considered clinically appropriate can access it. My priorities are on making people's rights real by funding and shaping new services, supporting the development of clear pathways and reforming the commissioning model. The national mission is not about residential rehabilitation over max standards, it is not about giving priority to abstinence over harm reduction. This is about supporting people, and it is about getting more people into the treatment and recovery that is right for them. By doing so, we can help people to flourish and feel hopeful about their futures, and we, as a country, can see through this crisis to a better time. The minister will now take questions on the issues raised in her statement, and I intend to allow around 20 minutes for questions after which time we will move on to the next item of business. It would be helpful if those members who wish to ask a question were to press the request to speak buttons now. I call on Sue Webber. I thank the minister for advance sighting of her statement and the many attachments that came with it this afternoon. In October, the Scottish Government held a debate on a person-centred approach to mental health and substance abuse. Today, we have heard again about the importance of getting more people into the treatment and recovery that is right for them. The problem with the idea and ideology of person-centred care is that, in reality, the care that people receive is system-centred or organisation-centred. Patients generally get what the system or organisation is willing and able to deliver, not what they want or need. What guarantees can the minister give us that person-centred care will be centred around the person and not around the ability of providers to deliver a service? I very much appreciate Sue Webber's contribution. I also understand that there was a wide variety of attachments and publications that have underpinned the statement today. There is a wealth of information that we have published with Ms Webber or, indeed, any other MSP. I am happy to engage further in the detail in and around that. Boring into the detail is absolutely crucial here if we are to redesign systems of care, whether that is community services or, indeed, residential rehabilitation services that meet the needs of individuals and not providers and not local authorities and not government. We have to have the person at the absolute centre of that. Although I appreciate that much of what I have published today might be less than politically sexy if I can put it that way, it is important to bore into the detail of where the money is being spent to understand where the gaps and provision are, to sort out pathways so that they are clear and consistent and easy to navigate across the country, as well as invest in services to use existing capacity but also to build that capacity. Much of our work around national commissioning and our regional approach will help us to change the systems, not to be meeting the self-perpetuating needs of the system but to meet the needs of our people who need treatment and its treatment that is right for them, not right for us. I welcome today's report on an advanced site of the statement. It shows that some progress has been made and that is to be welcomed. However, I want to introduce a note of caution and how we frame this discussion. I welcome that the minister mentions harm reduction. We must not stigmatise people who use opiate substitutes as a way to address their addiction. It is a legitimate treatment option, and if we are serious about bringing Scotland's fatalities to an end, it is part of the response. I have a few questions about the statement. Although the increase in placements are positive, the residential rehab monitoring funded places' recent report shows significant differences by ADP, so when will the postcode lottery come to an end? I also ask about fatalities of those under 25, for which we have seen an increase. There is also recognition as a lack of access to specialist treatment for young people, including rehab, so what facilities are planned for young people. The final question is to ask the minister if she is confident that the resources in place are sufficient and is she monitoring whether there are any increased changes in the cost to residential rehab? I will try to cover all of that as quickly as I can. I am grateful to Ms Baker for her recognition of the progress that we are making. I absolutely endorse what she is saying about not stigmatising opiate substitute therapy or harm reduction. That is one of the reasons why we are taking a whole systems approach and we are talking about that wider system of care where all the parts need to complement and fit together. She will also note that we are increasing placements significantly. I hope that that will be welcomed across the chamber in terms of phase 1 of the rapid residential rehab recovery programme. We are investing £18 million and that equates to at least 77 beds. It will increase capacity by around 18 per cent and is a significant step forward. However, she is right to say what is next. While we have had a particular focus on families and women and our work there is far from done, we need to think much more about where services need to be, particularly for young people, because what we have seen over the past few years is a growing amount of young people either being admitted to hospital or tragically losing their lives. The homelessness statistics today and those tragic deaths, which are also preventable, means that we need to, with even more haste, think about how we support those with multiple and complex needs. The £18 million investment is a great boost to services across the central belt of Scotland and our investment in the Lothians in particular will give us a blueprint for expansion elsewhere, but we need to have a really close and look at the acute needs that also exist in our rural communities. The expansion of residential rehabilitation is welcome. However, the minister has outlined the importance of a range of different types of treatments that are required and available. Can the minister give an indication of what role community services will play as access to rehab is expanding? I am particularly aware that that period after residential rehab is particularly crucial. Over the piece, it is important that we do not consider residential rehabilitation in isolation. We need to remember that community services are key to the success of residential rehabilitation. That is about the need to provide continuity of care. That is about the preparation that people need prior to entering rehab. That is also crucially about the aftercare that people receive. We need to be thinking about that aftercare and a much more long-term basis. That is not people coming out of residential rehab and receiving a little bit of support for a wee time. We need to be thinking about the longevity of that on-going support. The active outreach and referral to the lived experience recovery organisations is also important in that regard. In terms of improving aftercare, the £5 million improvement fund, of which £3 million was allocated to improve the quality of existing rehab services, includes improvements in preparation, outreach and aftercare. Before I call the next speaker, I remind all members who wish to ask a question to please press the request-to-speak button—not looking at anybody in particular who is not looking at me, so we will see what happens there. Craig Horry to be followed by Audrey Nicolle. The minister conceded that one size does not fit all. As the Government considers yet another structural overhaul of drug and alcohol support through the creation of a national care service, what assurance can she give that a further review will not simply result in more cuts and bad outcomes for those who require access to residential rehab and aftercare services? Improving access and the capacity to residential rehabilitation is a key part of our national mission to tackle the drug deaths crisis. It is not the only part, as we have heard from others, that there is an important in terms of harm reduction and community services. What I have done in this post with the support of the First Minister is to make long-term funding commitments, both to ADPs and to the voluntary sector, who are often at the front line with the four new funds for people to apply to, whether that is the recovery fund, the local improvement fund, the service improvement fund or, indeed, the family and children's fund. I absolutely concur with the point that this can never be about one size fits all, but we have a national emergency that requires national leadership. It does also require good partnership working on the ground and some bespoke arrangements. However, Mr Hoy could equally criticise us if we were devolving or outsourcing decisions by government where we need to set an example and lead and fund in show direction, but also raise the bar about what is expected in every part of Scotland. The proposal to increase capacity for residential rehabilitation and recovery is welcome and timely. However, what provision will be made to include access so that the highest risk individuals do not face barriers to access arising from preconditions for being alcohol or drug free prior to their admission? As is set out clearly in the good practice guidelines that we published today, there is much more that we can do to remove the barriers that exist in referral criteria, admission criteria and where that is most acutely felt is, of course, people with the most complex of needs, whether that is because they have a history of homelessness, mental health problems as well as issues with addictions. While it will always be the case that services need to make judgments about entry criteria based on safety and efficiency and cognisance to the needs of other residents, it is therefore also important that, as well as our expansion of residential rehabilitation, which is for those who seek an abstinence-based recovery, we are also looking at other models of care, whether that is other models of residential care or accommodation with support. It is also one of the reasons that we are actively committed, and you have heard the announcement today in terms of the extra funding for LEAP and NHS Lothian about why we are increasing funding to improve access to detox, but there is much more that we can do in terms of that different range of services that can accommodate people safely who are not pursuing an abstinence-based recovery. In the wake of the developing situation surrounding the Omicron variant, could the minister inform Parliament how many individuals in residential rehabilitation have received both doses of the Covid-19 vaccine? How many residents in rehabilitation centres have adequate testing and vaccination services available to them? Finally, what has been put in place to make sure that residents get the booster in good time? We published a status report maybe six to eight weeks ago. I will send that information to Ms Mocken, but as a result of that information that demonstrated that vaccination levels within people who were accessing residential rehabilitation were not as great as the general population or in accordance with various clinical priorities and age groups. As a result of that, we undertook a range of actions. New guidance has been issued to health boards. We have been proactive in arranging for guidance and testing kits to be sent to residential rehabilitation. We have also provided some training and support for people to access via webinars and such. However, it is an area that we are taking, and I can assure you, a very active interest, because this is about access to healthcare. All NHS boards as part of their bigger vaccination programme have, as part of those plans, how they will reach people that are harder for services to reach, and we are taking a very close interest in that. Indeed, this is about people's rights to access the same healthcare that you and I have the absolute right to get as well. As you know, Phoenix Futures plans to open a national drug rehabilitation centre on the set of the former Sea Gate Care Home in Solcoats in my constituency, backed by the Scottish Government. However, it will not consult the local community. Instead, it will contact neighbours and elected representatives to help them to understand what they do. I, for one, am still waiting. Does the minister agree that a new development of this nature and scale must be consulted on, not least to ensure that any local concerns are taken on board and addressed, scotch any misunderstandings and ensure that such a project becomes part of the Solcoats community and not just located in it? I appreciate those points, Mr Gibson. As I said earlier to Mr Hoy, we have a national crisis that requires a national mission, and that does indeed require national leadership and decisions to be taken at a national level. I think that I would always be the first to recognise that we can all work harder to improve our partnership working. In that vein, I recently met councillors from North Ayrshire and also Phoenix Futures who will deliver on this project to discuss the plans for consultation as well as community engagement. It is important to recognise that there are local opportunities and local benefits of having a national service in your facility in your area. That was a huge focus of our discussions with the local councillors. I am confident that Phoenix Futures has a well-established approach to carrying out things such as community impact assessments and consultations for projects such as this. They have been running a very similar family service in Sheffield now for 25 years, and I would expect this new national centre in Scotland to follow in this example. If I can assist in any further way to Mr Gibson to reassure his constituents, I most certainly will, but I was very proud that this new national service was the first project that we announced as part of our rapid residential rehabilitation increase in capacity programme because we all have obligations to keep the promise. There was a gap in services for families, and we know that fear of what will happen to one's children is very much a barrier to women in particular to come forward in seeking the assistance that they need. This is a real good opportunity for us to start a breaking cycle, but also to keep the promise. Before I call the next speaker, I remind the minister that I am very well aware of the importance of the subject and the comprehensive nature of the detail that the minister wishes to provide to the chamber in responding to questions. We have very limited time and still quite a few people who wish to ask a question. I thank the minister for advance sight of her statement and she knows that she carries the good wishes of this entire chamber towards the end that she has described. We still face a problem of global proportions. We are still the worst in the world, and as such our response to it needs to be equal to that. I am very grateful to see the Government commit to increasing our rehabilitation places to 1,000, but I am very concerned that it will take us till 2026—five years—to get to that number. People are dying today. What is keeping us? Why is this going to take so long to deliver? For the sake of brevity, perhaps I could emphasise to Mr Cole-Hamilton that we have taken significant steps forward without attracting always from the need to do more and to go further and faster. However, as the first stage of our residential rehab programme, we have committed £18 million. That will add an additional 77 beds, it will increase capacity by 18 per cent and will provide 450 more placements over time. That is an important first step. I do not demur from the fact that there are other steps that we need to take quickly, and part of that is about the whole systems approach. Within the next fortnight, I come back to Parliament to make a statement in and around progress around, for example, medication assisted treatment standards. Emma Harper, to be followed by Gillian Mackay. I would like to commend all the parties' work across chamber for taking a united approach to tackling drug-related deaths in Scotland. We have to use every opportunity at our disposal to identify those at risk and, meaningfully, signposting people to support services. Is the minister in a position to provide an update on engagement with her UK Government counterparts on proposals to introduce safe consumption facilities in Scotland? I continue to take two approaches. On the one hand, I continue to engage with the UK Government on the evidence, not on the politics. I recently attended the UK Drugs Summit and, at that time, published an evidence paper in support of safer drug consumption facilities. Recently, on the back of comments from Douglas Ross and the Conservatives' shift in position, I took the opportunity to write back to the minister, Kit Malthouse, to see if that could encourage a similar change in heart from the UK Government. I am also determined to do as much as we can within our own powers. The Lord Advocate's statement with regard to safer drug consumption facilities is helpful, as it is to be welcomed. We are working through the detail of a proposition to pursue within our own powers. Gillian Mackay, to be followed by Brian Bitto. Public Health Scotland published statistics today that state that 12 alcohol and drug partnerships, including North and South Lanarkshire in my region, did not provide data on the numbers of people entering residential rehab and that one of the reasons for that was patients not meeting the abstinence requirements. Can the minister advise what other treatment options are provided to individuals in those circumstances so that they are not being turned away with no follow-up support? Let me repeat again that it will not be acceptable for any part of the country not to be invested in residential rehab. I also recognise that residential rehab is not for everyone, and that is why we are taking a whole systems approach that we need treatment and recovery services, both different models of care within a residential nature, but also within community settings. As the minister suggested, Scotland has a shockingly high number of drug deaths, so it can come as no surprise that it also has a similarly high proportion of deaths within the homeless community, with more than 50 per cent of homeless deaths being drug related. I can ask the minister what the Scottish Government is doing to tackle drug deaths within the homeless community, to reach out to the community and ensure that they have access to rehabilitation services. Mr Whittle is absolutely correct when he says that this is about how services reach out to people who have more complex needs. Some of the work that is started in Dundee that is overseen by Health Improvement Scotland was focused on, for example, the integration of addiction and mental health services. We know the connection between problems with addiction, mental health and homelessness, so we really need that full spectrum of services, but it also needs to be far better connected. As a result of that work that started in Dundee, an additional four health boards have taken that approach. There is a 2.2 million project that has expanded that work that is essentially about the better integration of services, so that services can reach those most in need and to remove barriers where they exist. I remind the chamber that I am a member of the Moving One Inverclyde, the local addiction service. The minister will be aware of some of the issues that I have raised with in the past. On this, there will be many individuals who have an addiction to prescription drugs, such as benzos, as well as many others who have addiction to street drugs. Will any increase in the residential rehabilitation spaces ensure that there are sufficient spaces for those with an addiction to prescription drugs? The guidance on good practice pathways emphasises the need to facilitate access to residential rehab for all individuals, no matter what type of substance they are engaged in. Research shows that there are particular barriers around the use of benzodiazepines that have specific risks around detox. The germane issue in relation to drug deaths in Scotland is the polydrug use, but people's use of substance should not be a barrier to access and rehab. Thank you, minister. That concludes the statement. I will allow a very short pause to enable front benchers to move seats if they wish to do so.


Hello everybody. My name is Andrea and I am the owner of Dental L Tutoring. I've been tutoring dental hygiene students and dental assisting students since 2005. Time goes by so fast, so I can help you prep for the board exam and pass the board exam. I will leave the links for you guys down below if you want to learn more and study more. But in this video today, this is another study time video, so you will see a new one every Monday, so keep checking back. In our video today, I'm going to talk about tooth brushing methods. These have not changed. I've been in the dental profession for 17 years and they remain the same. We do teach certain tooth brushing methods to certain patients depending on what they need. If they have perio, if they have gingival recession, if they have, you know, if they're a child, if they're using an electric toothbrush. So I'm going to talk about that with you guys. I am going to share my screen and we're going to go through that right now. So let me make this a bit bigger. There we go. So these are all of the different methods. I found a really good chart online. I'm going to talk about the one by one for you. So the roll method, this is the one that I use for all children. Basically, they are going to close their teeth like this and then brush in circles. It's as simple as that and then make sure to also show them when they open, they have to brush the insides too. But this makes it very, very easy for children. Children can't be specific going through everything. Those are different methods for adults. But then we talk about the horizontal method, which we don't use anymore.  So you're not going in circles like the above method, the roll method, you're just scrubbing. We actually don't recommend that. I'm surprised it's in the chart here, but that's what we used to do. But there is such a thing as brushing too hard. So you have to be careful. But then the next method here, the bass method. This is for patients who have deep pockets. It's not for somebody with healthy tissues because basically what you want to do is you want to angle that toothbrush. So I'm using the top teeth at a 45 degree angle, light pressure, brush into the sulcus at a 45 degree angle. That's the bass method. There's no sweeping motion with a sweeping motion. That's the modified bass method. So the bass method, think about it this way is you're, is you're trying to get right into that pocket. You are like really focusing on that pocket. If you add modified bass method, that's a, you're in the pocket and then you sweep down for the top teeth. If you're working on the bottom teeth, you're brushing into that pocket and then brushing up, sweeping up afterwards. The stillman method. This is what I probably use the most often. This is for people who have, they're fairly healthy and, or they might have a little bit of gingival recession, but basically you want to place that toothbrush on the gum and a little bit on the tooth at the same time. And then like brush how you would in the previous method, but it's not right into the sulcus. You're on the gum and the tooth at the same time. And if you add a sweeping motion, that is the modified stillman. Those are the methods that I use the most, the stillman method and the modified stillman method. I'm going to first say the modified stillman method, but if a patient's like, okay, so I have to do this and then sweep, I can't remember that. Then I just simply tell them when you're brushing aim for the tooth and the gum a little bit at the same time and brush that way. That's very easy for most people. But what if somebody has braces, then you want to use the next method, the charters method. So the bristles are kind of held towards the occlusal. So not towards the gum or not the pocket, but the opposite way towards the occlusal at a back and forth. And you're also kind of like vibrating at the same time. Okay. This is for really getting those patients who have braces. If you're being careful around like certain areas, if they've had dental surgery, that kind of thing, but definitely have a look at this chart. It's a great chart, especially to help you prep for the board exam. But what's not on this chart is if they have an electric toothbrush, you want to show them how to use it. All they do for the electric toothbrush is they want to hold that toothbrush on the teeth, a little bit on the gum, but not too much. But don't press, don't do anything. Let the toothbrush do the work for you. That's extremely important. There is such a thing as brushing too hard and they can brush too hard with an electric toothbrush because it's doing the work for you spinning already. You don't want to add more spin into it. If you guys have any questions about that, let me know. I do talk about a full class with this also inside the board exam prep academy because you need to know all of the different methods for the board exam. So I go through this in a full class. Definitely check out the links down below. I have a board exam prep academy for dental hygiene students and a board exam prep academy for dental assisting students. You can and will pass the board exam with my help. So I do hope this helped. Sorry guys, as I'm coughing, I've been talking too much today. I do hope this helps. Let me know any questions and I'll see you guys next Monday for our next study tip video.