oh boy guys I've replaced my pro controllers you see this you doggo nobody cares about you anymore you have so many issues there's drifting there's a whole bunch of nonsense to be completely honest I've been looking for a replacement for switch joy cons for a long time third-party options a plenty but the problem with third-party options for joy cons is that you always seem to give up something significant when you buy them you know you get the the joy pad pros or whatever they don't work wirelessly you know those are like the Hori joy pad pros they don't work wirelessly you lose rumble and you lose some key feature sets of things like this in the for the sake of comfortability I guess plus it gets really bulky and I don't want bulky joy cons but I also don't want to give up features and one feature usually give up if you want everything especially in portable mode is rumble and I don't want to give that up you also give a wireless connectivity this these joycans are hard to replace and that's the fact that there's drift and everything else you know this doggo design is fine and everything but it's not quite perfect from Nintendo I'm not very ergonomic and again joycon drift is real and spending 80 bucks to replace a pair of joy cons or just you know 40 bucks or so to get one joy con to replace the left one which drifts most often is a bit of a hassle so I've been looking for replacements for a while you know you spend 80 bucks on these you know I have another set here it's just why why am I wasting money on Nintendo accessories that aren't working so in my quest to find a replacement I discovered this so this is the etch power joy pad for the Nintendo switch and it says switch light as well although I'm gonna tell you guys don't really buy these if you're looking to use them on the light then again you have a light you don't really replace the joy cons anyways you get drift you better be willing to take that bad boy apart and replace the stick yourself but these are what I discovered and there's some key things about these as you can see right here they come with the at the M logo design to replace the doggo for your your wireless connectivity controller things but what's interesting is that you get pretty much everything you could ever want in joy cons you do get rumble although it's not HD rumble it's traditional rumble I gotta be honest with you guys when is HD rumble outside of like mattered outside of one-two switch just being honest it's a really cool tech that isn't being used I think this is gonna end up being like the haptic feedback tech of the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller where some games are gonna use it at a start and it's gonna seem really cool but then as the gen goes on like it's just gonna be like normal and normal trigger rumble that we see even in the Xbox so it's got rumble which is a feature I actually enjoy since most games don't take advantage of HD rumble they just use it like traditional rumble so you get rumble you get wireless connectivity as you can see here player one player two you get full-sized control sticks which are actually better than the joy con sticks they are actually traditional control stick which means yeah you don't have that rumble issue right or I'm sorry you don't have the joy con drift issue right the drift issues avoided because these are traditional controller stick designs you get your ABXY buttons which yeah they're a bit squarish compared to the realm but honestly when you're hitting them you don't really notice the travels about the same you get your plus and your minus you get your capture button you get your home button and then you get some additional buttons as well you have your quick quick menu access button but you also have turbo buttons now I don't I'm not gonna be using the turbo so while there is turbo buttons included with this I've never been a turbo button user I didn't buy this controller because of turbo you want to experiment with turbo that's fine I'm experimenting with these as true joy con replacements you everything you could have the one feature you are giving up is a feature you probably don't even realize well two features really one you do not have the camera so there is an IR camera on the bottom of this again if you're not playing one to switch you don't really need it and based on the sales one to switch you guys aren't playing one to switch and to the other feature you give up is a feature that I never even bothered to use and that is NFC technology so on here you could tap your amiibo on and use them in smash rows and stuff like that you can't do that with this but even when I play smash I don't do that so it doesn't really matter to me I'm not giving up anything that I don't want and these are only 40 bucks half the cost of traditional joy cons for what I think is a more ergonomic design now when you unbox this bad boy and you open it up you will have this thing sitting on the inside like this you take that out and then when you lift up this plastic underneath there will be a power cord which is not in here but I don't know what I did with it it's a USB-C charging cable that you could plug it to the back of either one of these controllers and then a user manual now this user manual explain how turbo works and all that jazz the thing is you can connect these to the rails of your switch they will connect to that they will connect to the switch the same way normal joy con do as well they will also charge off the switch they have a 300 milliamp hour battery although it says 400 milliamp hour I didn't bother to open it up to see which is correct whether the ad on Amazon for 300 milliamp hours is correct which is exactly what the these joy cons use or if the 400 milliamp hour in the in the pamphlets correct doesn't really matter because they get plenty of battery life I get almost you know 8 to 12 hours worth of battery life which is about what I get on a standard joy con but let's go in and show you that the controller works that there isn't drift all that jazz so let's just get into this right now so I'm gonna start moving the joystick here see a move on screen we're gonna go down to controllers and then we're going to sorry so we want to look at right we don't look at controllers we're gonna go to system settings here controllers and sensors controller vibration on and then we're going to calibrate the control sticks all that has motion control as well I forgot to mention that so we press down on the left stick and you see there is no drift it is just sitting here without any drift as I move it around you see got full range of motion no issues no dead zones that's kind of a common issue with their body controllers dead zones nothing there all right so let's back out let's press down the right one and you'll see again there's no dead zone it snaps back like it should go around everything works as it should as a control stick should all right so we're gonna back out now we're gonna calibrate the motion controls so we're gonna calibrate the controllers we're gonna start with the left one so I'm gonna press the minus button we got hold it down here place the control on a flat stable surface with the stick facing upward so we're gonna set it down calibrations been complete all right so so it has motion controls I will show that off in a game here so let's go find something that takes advantage of motion controls like say Splatoon 2 all right so we'll load the Splatoon 2 all right so I don't have motion controls on right now I just wanted to show you guys that the control stick here and the running around where it's just fine as between so let's let's go to the menu here let's turn on motion controls now I don't actually use motion controls in Splatoon I'm not a big motion control fan but we're going to do that anyways most control is turned off so let's turn it on all right let's back out and you're gonna see that the motion controls work like they should there's no missing controls that the gyrosensors work just as well as your regular joy cons gonna run around you can shoot you shoot all that jazz now I am not a motion control user so I'm gonna go actually turn that off so I'm gonna I'm gonna go get into a match so one thing we talk about here as I'm gonna go get into a match is how the triggers and everything feel now they are a little bit loose feeling and so makes it feel cheap you can tell that it's made out of cheaper materials but since we don't have you know the sort of pressure sensitive triggers on this it's all digital just like on here it ends up not mattering that much and I'm gonna go into a mattress of a tune just to just to get kind of a play test here for you guys in in TV mode here that's really hard to show off handheld mode but we'll we'll try our best to to give you a look at handheld mode in a bit so as you can see here I'm just spraying some ink around having some fun it honestly feels great I like the new though the different ergonomic design of this controller everything's working as it should the buttons are having a nice contextual feel to them I'm not very good at spittoon but nice contextual feel I really like everything about this girl now one thing we do at the Tesla is a D-pad because oftentimes on these third-party controllers the D-pack it feel a little mushy or sometimes it be not responsive so we'll check out some Mario 35 here after this match is done just just to give her a look see and see what you know I can feel the rumble action happening every time I get into the ink and it feels nice it's a nice contextual feel with the the pressure on the ink so it's a Mario 35 action and we'll we'll test out the D-pad here now the D-pad does kind of have a concave in the middle feel to it but we'll see how responsive it is here so we're up and down up and down feels fine but we to really tell you got to get into some gameplay so let's see here let's select the the one one course and try out Mario 35 matches here and see how this feels it's got kind of a little bit of a sharp edge but they do have rounded corners so it doesn't feel too bad but let's let's see what it's like when we actually play and you'll see me using the D-pad and playing Mario 35 as we try to get a win and I will see if there's any sort of issues going up and down left and right or if it like pushes opposite directions when you're pushing down the sticks or on the D-pad area you guys know what I'm talking about all right so let's go you're trying to remember which ones jump and which ones so it feels fine I don't really feel any issues with that D-pad obviously not the most comprehensive of tests but I'm pretty satisfied there I'm like I'm liking how it feels so I guess the last thing to really talk about is how does this bad boy feel in handheld mode well let's find out all right so as you can see in handheld mode this is kind of the ergonomic design I was talking about on the back here you can see kind of both the concave you see where the USB-C controllers plug in and honestly it feels really great in handheld the only flaw in these controllers I see is that when the system isn't on and the controller is disconnected from the system you cannot turn it on it does not turn the system on see how it's like trying to connect but it doesn't and then when the system is on oftentimes I can't get the controller to do anything see how the lights not moving but if I slide it on the side like this suddenly I am connected so it has a hard time wirelessly connecting if it's not already attached to it first now when you take it off when you take them off it will connect like normal so it's kind of weird that it works that way but I got to be honest it's not really not that big of a deal to me I usually my joy cons on the side anyways until I want to take them off and just kind of turn the system on first so not a big deal to me just a little bit of handheld experience works great just being completely honest here so what's my grand takeaway well my grand takeaway is the old original joy cons I'm just gonna throw them in the trash like I'm literally done with them these are completely replaced and there's different color sets you can get of these I just got the neon blue and red version because that's just what Amazon had in stock at the time and I didn't want to have to wait but there are other color variations of these again the brand name here is the etch power joy pad for Nintendo switch slash light and yeah honestly outside of the minor quip you need to slide them under the side of the switch in order for them to be recognized by the by the actual switch before you take them off that's really the only flaw I see and for 40 bucks I'll take that over joy con drift any day I gotta be completely frank here yeah these are better than joy cons for 40 bucks I can't suggest them enough I know this looks a little weird but it feels great in the hand the controllers feel great in the hand whether it's in handheld or in TV mode or I guess if you wanted to try out tabletop mode you could do the same thing but it's gonna be the same experience as in TV mode man oh man these are some fantastic controllers for only 40 bucks I'm gonna put an Amazon affiliate link down in the description so you can pick them up for yourself if you're having issues with joy kind of you're looking for new joy cons or you want more ergonomic joy cons I know there's a lot of third-party options out there and I have tried a ton but these are the best and you give up the least you have all of the core functionality you really want minus an IR camera and regular rumble instead of HD rumble doesn't really make that big a difference Nintendo doesn't use HD rumble pretty much outside of one-two switch oh and NFC functionality which again when's the last time you tapped an Amiibo on your controller it's not like your old joy cons are gone you can still plug them back in if you really need that that functionality but damn damn the damn also with this you won't need something like a satisfied grip because it puts your hand in a more natural feeling position because of the way these are designed and honestly that's not that much worse than than the normal joy cons it's really minimalistic I like it all right folks so be sure to check this out be sure to enter our giveaways we are giving away a Nintendo switch a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X also two copies a pick me through your likes are in the description to find out how to enter that thank you guys so much for tuning in I am the thing about you guys from the center prime this is the etch power joy con replacements yeah baby yeah baby see these garbage see this that's what you want to get now only $40 thank you guys for tuning in and I gotta get back to play some switch so I'll catch you guys in the next video


Usually I'm behind a camera, but today I'm subbing in for EAT. So anyways, I got to check out the 2024 Chevrolet Equinox EV. Here's a quick look at my first impressions. With the starting price of $30,000 on the one LT trim, Chevrolet is aiming this line to be more in the affordable price range. The model that I got to check out is the LT version. This is a demo car, so I didn't get a chance to drive it. But when I first saw it, the two ton look does stand out. I do like the blue and white combo. There is a black roof available, but that's only on RS trim. Personally, I think the red and black option is pretty common up there versus the blue and white. For their design, it's pretty bold and edgy and sporty as well. For headlights, they are slim and sleek, and it does match the car very well. With these lights, they do have animations. Whether you're walking to the car or walking away, I like that visual cue to know that the car knows you're leaving. So it's nice to not having to press the lock key 10 times to make sure that the car is locked. And these animations would happen with the front and back lights. For the wheels, they are 19 inches, but depending on the trim, you can go up to 21 inches. I didn't get to see the trunk working since it wasn't fully operating, but it does have sensors in the back to know that you're there. So you don't have to wave your feet under the car to open the trunk door. It knows that you're there already. And moving to the inside, you do also get the two ton look on the seats, and they are a mixture of cloth and leather. When I sat on it, it did wrap around me pretty well, so it was pretty comfortable. With the infotainment system layout, it's pretty similar to the Blazer EV, where there's the panel in front of you, and then there's one besides it. In this specific model, this screen is 17 inches. And also, it's slightly angled to the driver, so it's very easy to look at. Another thing that was mentioned to me was ambient lighting. Behind these blue panels, light do come through, and it would look very nice during nighttime, where you can choose what specific light you want. So that is a very nice personal touch to have when you're riding this car at night. One interesting thing about the super cruise mode is they have sensors on the steering wheel to see that if you're actually paying attention to the road or looking at something else. The steering wheel is also heated, so that's super handy during winter time, along with the windshield and the seats in the back. Now moving on to the back seats, there are spaces for me since I'm about 5'8", and you do have options to control how strong you want the heated seats to be. And below that, you do get two USB-C ports to charge their devices. There are two more USB-C ports in the front along with wireless charging. The car does have a lot of safety features like reverse automatic braking, and as time goes, safety features do get updated and you do get that for free. There are a lot of other little things like a bigger heads-up display, so you can see a lot more information and more details in terms of direction when using GPS. And the rear view mirror is also a viewfinder for your back camera as well. One pedal driving is standard throughout the car, meaning that once you let go of the gas, the car will slowly break until it completely stops. And there's a setting to control how strong you want that to be. In terms of range, the highest you can get is around 300 miles. Of course, that depends on what driving system you have. And for charging, there is an animation for that, so that's a big plus. And with the standard DC fast charging, you can get about 70 miles in 10 minutes. Chevrolet does have a limited-time warranty that covers the battery for 8 years or 100k miles. So it's nice to have a piece of mind that the battery is covered for a very long time. With the lineup of the Blazor EV, the Silverado EV, and now the Econox EV, Chevrolet has a huge area covered in terms of price range for the consumers looking into the EV market. The Chevrolet 2024 Econox EV will be available in fall of 2023, starting off with the limited edition 2RS trim. So hopefully we get to test drive this in the future. If you want to see more of me, I'll put my socials on the screen. Thanks for watching and always enjoy entertainment.


Most Americans have come around to believing that COVID-19 originated in a lab and not at a wet market in Wuhan, as China's CDC claimed in March of 2020. The former director of the CDC has come around to believing that a lab origin is more likely as has the former head of the Lancet Medical Journal's COVID-19 commission. But I chaired the commission for the Lancet for two years on COVID. I'm pretty convinced it came out of the U.S. lab, biotechnology, not out of nature. Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory up until the summer of 2021, when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article and a viral rant by John Stewart, The disease is the same name as the lab, pushed it into the mainstream. Up until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins said it wasn't even worth considering the possibility that COVID could have originated in a lab. He tells National Geographic everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that this virus evolved in nature and then jumped species. Fauci added he does not believe another theory that the virus occurred naturally but was accidentally released into the public from a lab in China. More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci Collins and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab leak origin far more seriously than they were letting on. Top phyrologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and I mean freaking out basically. Health reporter Emily Kopp works at the non-profit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which revealed an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. They've also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by BuzzFeed's Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private. I think this is a really important question and a really central part of this entire story that maybe is not talked about enough. The fact that so many mainstream publications have completely overlooked really key pieces of evidence in this story and my theory and I think about this a lot is essentially that you know health editors, the people who are making decisions about what to cover and what not to cover at major news organizations at least when it comes to the health beat are friends with Anthony Fauci. They've known him for decades in some cases and it's probably very challenging to examine the possibility that research funded by Fauci's Institute might have had unintentional consequences and so essentially I think to put it very starkly we see a lot of health editors and health reporters prioritizing a tidy narrative about Anthony Fauci over you know providing the truth to their readers and I think readers deserve to understand the full scope of possibilities when it comes to the origins of the pandemic. COP has assembled a comprehensive timeline that lays out substantial evidence that Fauci, Collins and a number of influential scientists misled the public. Whether or not the lab leak theory is correct it's now clear that these public officials concealed their conflicts of interest with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and minimized their own roles in providing the government funding for the unsupervised gain of function research that may have led to the pandemic. Among other things COP's research has revealed that virologist Christian Anderson wrote privately to Fauci that he and three other scientists thought that the virus that causes COVID-19 looked unnatural and inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. Just four days later after participating in a series of teleconferences with Fauci and Collins Anderson called the lab leak theory crackpot. Other emails revealed that Fauci knew that his agency was funding gain of function research with SARS-like coronaviruses in Wuhan by late January of 2020, yet he publicly denied it for Congress 18 months later. Will you today finally take some responsibility for funding gain of function research in Wuhan? Senator, with all due respect I disagree with so many of the things that you've said. First of all, gain of function is a very nebulous term. COP works for the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, which is devoting significant resources to its biohazards project with the mission of investigating the origins of COVID-19, the risks of gain of function research, and mishaps at biolabs where pathogens of pandemic potential are stored and manipulated. At a certain point I realized that this is, I mean, I think one of the most important health stories of our lifetime, how this devastating earth shattering pandemic that has affected billions of us and unfortunately killed millions of people started. And I knew that U.S. Right to Know, this nonprofit was submitting a lot of freedom of information at requests and had found some pretty startling information. The first thing we should talk about is a paper called The Proximal Origins of COVID-19, which in the introduction to your timeline you call one of the most influential scientific articles in history. What makes you say that? This paper has been cited in thousands of news articles, hundreds of Wikipedia pages, and really shaped the discussion about the origins of COVID for a long time and continues to. The idea that a lab leak could have resulted in the pandemic, the idea that that is a total conspiracy theory really originates with that paper. What argument was that paper making and what effect did that argument have on kind of the course of coverage of the lab leak theory? The central premise is that SARS-CoV-2 could not have been engineered. They also said this novel virus doesn't look like anything that we've seen in the scientific literature. So it's unlikely that scientists would have used novel methods and completely unknown virus to create this new virus. There are a few problems with that though, which is that we now know that two of the virologists who helped write the paper were deeply familiar with work going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with its American partner EcoHealth Alliance, because they were directly collaborating with either the EcoHealth Alliance or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The other virologists who also helped write the paper were also aware of a very similar virus called RITG-13, were aware of gain of function work going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and had expressed among themselves serious concerns about aspects of the genome that looked unusual and looked prime to infect human cells. I think it would be useful to dig a little bit into some of the specific conversations that we now know were happening in those earliest days as the people at NIH, like Fauci and Collins, were trying to figure out where this might have come from. One of the key dates here is January 27th when Fauci learned that the NIH had funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That's fairly early. He knew there was a connection. Two days later, Christian Anderson found a paper describing gain of function research at that facility. By January 29th, they know that NIH has funded research at the Wuhan facility and that there has been gain of function research enhancing the transmissibility of viruses at that facility. A bunch of virologists and Fauci and Francis Collins start frantically emailing and scheduling phone calls. Just describe what many of the virologists in this inner circle were saying about the virus at that time amongst themselves. The striking thing is when you put these emails back to back, you see this panic that was going on in late January and early February as Christian Anderson and Eddie Holmes, two top virologists, giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically. We know from these emails that their first conclusion was essentially, I think Eddie Holmes said to Christian Anderson, something like, holy shit, this is bad. It's clear they were deeply concerned. The term that they used to Fauci at first in late January was that the virus seemed inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. In other words, it seemed engineered. Four days later, Christian Anderson is speaking to scientists working with the national academies who are putting together a letter for the White House around what sort of data is necessary in order to investigate the origins of the pandemic, and he uses the same phrase but inverted. He says, a phrase I like to use with these lab leak cranks is consistent with natural evolution. So essentially, you are doing a 180 change. There's this four day period where they go from saying inconsistent with expectations with evolutionary theory to consistent with natural evolution, and that's the thrust of this proximal origins paper. When you look at the paper, it seems to be saying that some of these unusual aspects of the virus, the receptor binding domain that makes it more infectious to humans, it wouldn't have been engineered that way. They wouldn't predict that that is what a person would go in to insert. It just doesn't make much sense. As you said, there was not a clear backbone virus that they would have built upon. Is it possible that just in those four days, taking a closer look, they saw something, they had their initial reaction where they're freaking out and then they look closer and they see some of these details and it changes their mind and that's the scientific process? Yeah. No, I think that's a great question. We know that Anthony Fauci was looped into these conversations very early and Francis Collins was looped into these conversations very early. And at the same time they were speaking with these virologists, they were concerned about whether there were connections between NIH and the WIV. And they learned, indeed there was a connection through this intermediary called TECO Health Alliance. So we can't overlook that the fact that these very powerful grant makers at NIH were participating in these calls and were concerned that they could be linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So that's one piece. Another piece is that at least one virologist, Eddie Holmes, as he's having these discussions, also did not disclose that not only had he worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but he had worked on RATG-13, this virus that is 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. And then I think a final piece is looking closely at what exactly they're arguing in proximal origin. So essentially they're saying that if you were to engineer a bio weapon, say from a coronavirus, you would not engineer it to be like SARS-CoV-2. It is not optimally designed. But that's a pretty high bar. There are experiments you can do to evaluate, say, the potential that a coronavirus could evolve into a human coronavirus that does not involve making it sort of optimal at infecting people in the way that you would design a bio weapon. And saying that this doesn't look like anything that we've seen conducted in experiments before, I don't think is a very credible argument if you're familiar with the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been sampling novel bat coronaviruses for years and messing with their spike proteins in the lab. There clearly was some awareness. What you're getting at here in terms of the high bar of genetic engineering in going in and inserting very precise modifications is one thing. Another method that we now is becoming more commonly known, this gain of function idea where you're just kind of passing the virus through mice that have human like cells in their lungs and getting it more and more infectious that way.  Does that indicate to you that this was a possibility that may have originally been in the proximal origins paper that they cut out later? Because it's just odd that it's in the email, but that conversation is never resumed until months later. This secret group passed back and forth multiple versions of this preprint that went on to be published in Nature Medicine, and NIH refuses to release them. We're currently challenging their redactions to our FOIA now, but it's curious why they wouldn't simply let the public into the early discussions about how they arrive to this conclusion. I was just mentioning there's this organization called EcoHealth Alliance, which has already been mentioned and is the kind of go between NIH or the intermediary, between them and the Wuhan lab. So NIH would give grants to EcoHealth and they would subcontract out to the lab, and there's one grant they gave called Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence. Why is that particular grant of note or even a problem for Fauci now that we have more details and can see the bigger picture? Yeah, so that grant has gotten a lot of attention because EcoHealth has repeatedly failed to produce legally obligated progress reports regarding the research that was performed under that grant, and we also know from the progress reports that exist that some of the experiments violated NIH's own regulations around gain of function research. And basically for some reason, NIH carved out this exception to its own gain of function regulations for EcoHealth Alliance. And one of the experiments conducted under this grant found that by splicing a spike protein from one coronavirus into another, that coronavirus grew to have 10,000 times the viral load that it originally did. The source of a lot of the pushback here, it's justifiably that we still don't have that smoking gun. There's no known virus in the Wuhan lab that could have been the backbone for SARS-CoV-2. They have found bats in Laos that are carrying the closest known relative to the virus, which has similar characteristics that allow it to bind to an enzyme that's in the human lungs, although there it is still missing what's called the Furin cleavage site, which is like kind of what's really special about SARS-CoV-2 apparently. But did the Laos discovery shift how you think about the evidence at all one way or another? The lead scientist who made that discovery is also continues to be open to either a lab origin or a wildlife trade origin. The discovery of similar viruses to SARS-CoV-2 and Laos does not nix the possibility of a lab origin simply because we know that EcoHealth Alliance was doing viral sampling in the same areas. We also know that we don't have access to every single virus that was in the Wuhan lab. The database is not public. Right, right. Yeah, that's a key source of intrigue is this Wuhan Institute of Virology coronavirus database that appeared to go dark in September 2019. There are also real questions about whether EcoHealth Alliance has published all of the data it has access to, which is I think really scandalous because EcoHealth Alliance is a U.S. nonprofit and accepts, you know, our public tax dollars. Emails between U.S. scientists and those working in the Wuhan lab confirm that many viral sequences remained unpublished as of 2021. In February of 2022, The New York Times published an article citing new research supporting the original theory that the virus originated at the Wuhan market. But after peer review, those findings are far less conclusive. First of all, one of the studies cited by the Times identified raccoon dogs as the likely animal host. But raccoon dogs were sold in relatively small quantities at the Wuhan market. There's no evidence that they are particularly susceptible to the early strain of the virus. And there are no natural infections of a raccoon dog documented by any strain of SARS-CoV-2 anywhere in the world, according to one critique by another team of scientists. In the published version of the pro-market spread article, the authors abandoned the claim of dispositive evidence for a Wuhan market origin, substituting a weaker claim that animals at the market were a clear conduit for the virus, though they concede that there's no direct evidence of a market animal infected with it. In contrast, there was strong evidence that the 2002 SARS outbreak was transmitted to humans by animals. More recently, a pre-print study published by three biologists claimed they found a genetic fingerprint indicating strong evidence of synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2.  A Senate committee report released by Republicans last week concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic was most likely the result of a research-related incident, citing gaps like the failure to identify the original host reservoir, intermediate host species, and the lack of evidence showing transmission from animals to humans. A pro-publica Vanity Fair investigation drawing on materials from that report uncovered internal communications that seem to indicate Chinese state officials went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to investigate an acute safety emergency in November 2019. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins are both stepping down. There's a possible, maybe even likely, change in the political landscape coming. If Republicans take one or both chambers of Congress and decide to hold hearings on this question, what are some of the most important known unknowns to borrow an unfortunate phrase that you'd like to get more information about? Most important and I think most immediate one is probably, again, looking at the credibility of the scientists who have been driving the narrative around the origins of COVID for years now and whether leaders of NIH had an influence there. I think that a lot of that has been fairly well established at this point, that there is some level of conflict of interest just from what we know already. Given that we can question the credibility of some of these people, including the very top with Anthony Fauci, what kind of information do you think would help get to the actual truth here? Yeah, as far as the sort of trickier thing of solving the origins of the pandemic, I think it gets more complicated, but that is not to say I think it's impossible. As I said, I think EcoHealth Alliance could have data that it has not published and if that data collection was funded with public taxpayer dollars, we have a right to see it. That I think is a key lead. A second key lead to follow I think is just looking at the genome itself. Does it bear markers of engineering and are the techniques that might have been used to engineer it? Can those be found in the scientific literature produced by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its partners? Were those virologists in communication with the Wuhan Institute of Virology about those methods? Some of these scientists with credibility issues, again, we're working directly with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I'm particularly interested in Eddie Holmes given that a bunch of spike proteins and SARS-related coronaviruses were uploaded to a public database and then deleted quickly after connecting him to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I'm really curious if he's told us everything he knows. There's been a lot of pushback from virologists against this theory because they say without evidence it's going to lead to a crackdown on valuable research that could actually prevent pandemics. You'd be creating regulations that are a solution looking for a problem is how Felicia Goodrum, who's the President of the American Society for Virology, put it. Another virologist named Peter Hotez has said that the GOP-led congressional hearings would be a disaster, an attack on the fabric of science in America. How concerned are you about those issues that this will ultimately have a chilling effect on science? I want to be very conscientious about that. I don't want to do any kind of reporting that could endanger people or halt the development of critical medical counter measures. I will say I'm irked by the fact that a very small number of very powerful scientists are sort of dressing up their lack of accountability. Anthony Fauci is a powerful individual. And accountability for a small number of scientists who have misled the public is not the same as an attack on the scientists who have done incredible work to mitigate this horrible pandemic. And so I think it's kind of offensive that a small number of powerful individuals are escaping accountability that way. U.S. right to know, I think, is an organization that has a different viewpoint on a lot of things than does an organization like Reason, which is a generally pro-technology libertarian leaning organization. We spent many years writing defenses of things like GMOs and genetic engineering, whereas U.S. right to know has spent a lot of resources criticizing many aspects of those things. But nonetheless, I think that on this issue of government-funded laboratory manipulation of viruses, much of which has been purposely obscured from public view, I think I share with you a broad agreement that it needs to be scrutinized and there needs to be accountability if there is unacceptable, risky research undertaken on the taxpayer dime. And the reality is that U.S. right to know has put a lot of resources and work into obtaining the public records, reading and analyzing and summarizing them. You've got the receipts. I should clarify, U.S. right to know is not opposed to GMOs, but we've traditionally done reporting that sheds light on whether GMOs result in the overuse of pesticides that can have negative externalities. And unfortunately, the agrochemical industry doesn't like that sort of reporting. Again, that reporting also relies on FOIA. And so you see a lot out there about us being anti-science or anti-GMO. But really what it is is, you know, pro-technology by examining those negative externalities. And our biohazards project is not opposed to synthetic biology or virology as a whole. It's simply asking, are we applying appropriate checks in order to make sure that that research, that can be really critical and lead to medical countermeasures, is being done safely in a way that doesn't jeopardize public health? And, you know, do the public really have a voice in those conversations about what sort of risks are unacceptable when you're talking about, you know, messing with viruses in the lab? Research that results in new types of coronaviruses continues in labs both in the US and abroad with a recent experiment out of Boston University resulting in a virus that combines the deadly ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2 with the transmissible and immune-invasive Omicron variant. The new chimeric virus killed 80% of mice infected in the lab. In September, the NIH awarded a new grant for studying bat-borne coronaviruses to EcoHealth Alliance, the group whose president, Peter Dajak, orchestrated an anti-lab leak letter without disclosing his conflicts and which still hasn't turned over all the records related to its work in the Wuhan lab. Even though we don't know the answers to these questions yet, you know, hopefully we will get them one day. But even what we do know is concerning in terms of what is being done with these viruses, it's ostensibly to try to predict and prevent pandemics. Obviously it didn't work in this case, even if that was the purpose. And again, you know, as a generally pro-technology libertarian, it makes me nervous to talk about banning certain lines of research or inquiry. But this does seem like something that is worth a look. Do you think that it is getting that sort of look? Does it look like there's going to be a serious look at gain-of-function research or a permanent moratorium on it? Or are we just going, does it look like the status quo is just going to maintain going forward? It's hard to say for me. And again, I don't think this is anti-technology. I think it's more incorporating the public's voice into conversations about what sort of risks are unacceptable and how we can achieve scientific progress while also not jeopardizing public safety. It seems to me like the status quo is more or less continuing unabated. We do see some words of caution from the NSAVB, which is this advisory committee that advises the U.S. government on these questions. And we've recently seen an initiative led by Alina Chan at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to sort of examine what risks are unacceptable in virology research. But again, I went to a biodefense conference yesterday and there was very little discussion about biosafety. In President Biden's most recent budget, he allocated a billion dollars to biosafety. But if you take a closer look at the budget, the biosafety funding is to build a new BSL4, maximum biosecurity lab. So I think a lot of the discussion about increased attention on gain of function research, jeopardizing experiments is another method to avoid accountability and oversight. I don't think that experiments are actually slowing and I think they might actually be accelerating.


Howdy Mosfans and welcome to a new edition of Whiteboard Fridays. Have you ever felt like TikTok is ridding your mind? It's just an algorithm. My name is Lidia Infante. I'm the senior SEO manager at Sanity and I'm going to talk to you about how TikTok offers you the videos that you like. The very first thing they're trying to do is to show you videos that interest you. They're trying to keep you in the app as long as possible. So they need to figure out what you like. How are they going to do it? The moment that you sign up, you provide some demographics data. Your age, your gender, where you're signing up from all gives TikTok enough information to start assuming what your interests are going to be and populate your free page. Out of that first free page, the topics that you engage with or don't engage with are going to give TikTok the information about what you might enjoy seeing on your free page. After that, they're going to try to find related topics to the ones that you have expressed an interest in. For example, I really like cross stitching. It's not difficult to assume that I also like interior design or flower arrangements, which I do. TikTok shows them to me and I stay on the app much longer than I should. Another point of information is your follow-up profiles and the topics that they talk about or that they are interested about. Your discover type behavior is a very strong signal for TikTok too. What that means is when you search for a hashtag, click on a hashtag, make a TikTok search, search for a user or a trend or a TikTok sound, that's all giving strong information to TikTok about what you like. Because making a search or diving deeper into the content of a sound is much more complicated behavior than simply just scrolling past on your free page. Now that they know what you like, they know that they can serve you videos about it. But first they need to understand what the videos that they have in the database of content are about. To do that, they're going to use the visuals. So literally TikTok can see with the visual AI the content of your video. What are the objects in there? Are there faces? What are the emotions of the faces? Is there a dog? Is there a chair? They're going to be able to see and process all of that. Another strong signal is going to be the text overlay that you put on your TikTok video if you have any notes or any content put on there or if you're manually inputting the captions. The audio on your video is very relevant for TikTok to understand what the video is about. And by audio, I don't mean TikTok sounds. We're going to come back to that. I mean the actual voice, the words that you're saying or the ambient noise that sets the location of your video. The captions and hashtags that you use in the video are very relevant and help TikTok understand what it's about as well. When you are done with creating your video and you start typing it out, when you create the cover for your video using the TikTok tools, that gives TikTok that level of information. And then we've got the TikTok sound. If you're using a TikTok sound that's related to a trend or to a topic, it also gives TikTok the information about what your content is, what the emotional tone of your content is, and so forth. All of these elements as a hardcore SEO are what we would treat us on page SEO but on the TikTok side of things. Now, they know what you like, they know what their database of videos are about, but they also know that they have a limited amount of time for your attention. So they're going to want to show you only the best of the best of their content. They're going to have to understand if the videos they got are any good. How are they going to do that? They're going to be using, amongst other metrics, engagement. So the engagement of users that have expressed similar interest to yours are going to help TikTok predict your potential engagement and how much you're going to like the video. They're also going to be favoring native content creation. So any video that's been created directly from TikTok using the TikTok tools is going to get a little bit of a boost. The language that the content is in is very relevant too. When signing up for TikTok and creating your profile, you state what are the languages that you speak and what is your preferred language. TikTok can also understand this based on your behavior. Then the device that you're using and the strength of your connection also helps TikTok serve you lighter videos and shorter videos when you're maybe on a train or don't have as good connection to actually have a good viewing session. There's some stuff that TikTok does not want to see on their For You page. Any content created by a user that has stated that their date of birth is under 16 is not going to be eligible for the For You page. So if you're trying to be cute and giving your brand account date of birth of when it was founded, don't, because nobody's going to see it. They're also quite strict with QR codes. They don't want to see any QR codes in there because of safety reasons. You don't know if that QR code is going to take your users to a spam website or a dangerous website showing porn or violent content. But also, they don't want to miss out on the affiliate marketing payout that they get when you shop directly on the TikTok shop. Any dangerous or violent behavior is also not accepted or eligible for the For You page. So unless it's tagged as don't buy specialist, don't try this at home, so forth, it's not going to show up. Engagement paid content is also not eligible for the For You page. So content that tries to trick users into engaging with it without them actually naturally wanting to engage with it is going to be demoted from the page. That type of content is like when on Instagram we used to see posts that said tap twice to see some magic and the only magic is that you had like the pose and increase the engagement of the brand that is the type of engagement paid that's not acceptable on TikTok. Another thing that they don't accept on their For You page is any content that shows tobacco products. TikTok wants to show you videos that interest you and keep you in their platform but they're also trying to not generate an echo chamber for you. Echo chambers are a very real risk of any recommendation algorithm that's based on interest and engagement and we have seen a rise in radicalization across different populations because of this. The way that TikTok is trying to address this problem is by offering random content of random interest, random creators that you've never seen before on your For You page. Initially they said they were doing this 20% of the time but there aren't any current numbers about this activity. This is not enough to remove echo chambers because of the psychological effects of familiarity and rear exposure effect. Once you see something that does not quite fit right with your For You page, you're very quick to scroll. It is a similar phenomenon to banner blindness when we are going around the website we kind of know what an ad looked like and we don't even look in that direction. It's a similar effect. So it is not enough but one must appreciate that they're trying. If you found this interesting you can catch up with me and my content on Twitter at Lidia Infante M on LinkedIn looking for Lidia Infante or on my website Lidia-infante.com Thank you for watching!


The global crisis is our immediate action, youth unemployment, 75 million young people to create a 15-year-old unemployment in 2012, and into 2010. Advanced members of the animal kingdom is taking care of our young. Animals will sacrifice themselves for their young. Parents will sacrifice themselves to provide health and education for their children. So why is it, while we are individually so committed to our young, and we are collectively failing them so badly? This is the topic of this session. Today's youth make up 17% of the world's population, but 40% of the unemployed. There are almost 75 million unemployed youth today, and five years after the beginning of the Great Recession, that number isn't getting better, it's getting worse. It's not just a cyclical issue, it's a structural issue. In terms of changing employment markets, in terms of growing labor pools in many parts of the world, and a mismatch between what they receive as education in schools, and what they need to perform in their jobs. So how can we address this issue? How can we actually go from bemoaning the problems to looking for concrete solutions? I'm joined today by an extraordinary panel to help, together with yourselves in the audience, and those involved in the conversation over Twitter, around the world, to see what we can be doing individually and collectively to deal with what is one of the great crises of our time. To start, I'm delighted to, Maria Fanjul, turn over to you. An entrepreneur who's worked and studied around the world, moved from Silicon Valley back to your home country of Spain, is the CEO of entradas.com, one of the leading e-commerce portals in Spain. But not only are you a great entrepreneur, you're also a member of that generation, which is in danger of becoming a lost generation. So Maria, welcome, and how do the youth of Spain today see the situation and look to their future? Thank you. So yeah, as you said, this is a big issue. We're talking about 75 million youth unemployed, 25% unemployment rate in Spain, sorry, in Europe, 57% in Spain. So this is a big issue that is actually discouraging many, many young people, and that actually involves like three big areas. So it's about mainly our cultural mindset, our risk aversion, why we're afraid of trying new things and proposing new ideas, also why this education is so that we receive, doesn't have much to do with what companies are demanding, what the skills are being demand, and also the lack of entrepreneurship that we have in Spain. So now we're trying to, Spain and Europe, I would say, we're trying to bring more entrepreneurs on the table in order to not only reduce youth unemployment, but also trying to encourage young people to be owners of their own lives. So what I would say is we as youth think that we are evolved in this problem so that we need to be part of the solution. We want to be part of the solution because in my case, for example, I'm a young entrepreneur CEO of a 70 people e-commerce company. I deal with these problems every day. So I think I must work with governments, institutions, universities and civil society so that we all together come up with solutions. And Maria, you're also a member of the Global Shapers, this dynamic group of individuals from around the world in the age of 20 to 30. I believe you had a gathering in Spain a few months ago where you yourselves, of your generation, were looking at what could be done. What were some of the ideas that came out? Yeah, so it was very interesting to see how a hundred Global Shapers from all over Europe, from 27 different hubs came to Spain and for two days we were not discussing about what's going on with youth unemployment. We were working on specific projects that we had an impact on, such as, for example, trying to make recruiting process much more dynamic so that it can be a learning process as well. So companies, instead of just doing an interview and in one hour trying to ask very theoretical questions, trying to do a much more practical challenge so that you can see how the person behaves and also that person can learn from that process. Also, another thing that we proposed it was called Codenation and it's about having kids learn software skills since they're very little. Why? Because technology is transforming industries. So it should be as important for kids as they learn maths or literature. And if you have these skills, maybe eventually you're able to start a company or to propose new ideas in your existing company because you already know how to do it or you're confident with that. Well, in this whole element of supporting the right mindset with an entrepreneurial mindset, ensuring they have the right relevant skills for the jobs of today and tomorrow and also helping them making that education to workforce transition in terms of the interview process and making sure that interview process is a learning process for them as well. Those are some of the ideas that came out. And Klaus Kleinfeld, you as the CEO of Alcoa and as of Siemens before, having worked and being involved around the world, you've seen lots of different situations around the world and it's worth noting that while we talk about a 20-something percent unemployment rate in Europe as a whole, it ranges from 57% in Spain to 6% in Switzerland for youth unemployment and under 10% in Germany. In fact, the lowest level in 20 years in Germany. So Klaus, how do you see the situation and how do you as a CEO try to get involved in addressing this? Well, it's fascinating when you look at the problem. You mentioned the range, but there's one other statistic that just came out with a recent McKinsey study. 50s and it's done basically in developed countries, so not in developing countries. 57% of the employers complain about not finding the right people for the job openings. And at the same time, if I look at the US, by 2018 about 25% of the manufacturing workers will retire. So there's obviously a misalignment, there's a mismatch which we have to build into this. So, and that I think is also where the opportunity lies. In our experience, it almost is like what good old Karl Popper says. I mean, many rows lead to a solution and every single one can help. You can attack it from various angles. And if I look at what Alcoa does and other companies do too, we attack it from the origination of the school from K to 12. We have a program, for instance, that reaches out to girls in eighth grade at Whitehall, Michigan. And the way this works is we roll two cohorts of girls through our facility, show them how manufacturing is today, expose them to this facility. Interestingly, about 90% of the women that go through this program go to college. More than 70% of those take a STEM education in college. I'm absolutely convinced they would not have, even in their wildest dreams, have gone for this. If they wouldn't have been exposed to how exciting the life in the modern manufacturing environment is, so you can start there. You can go then to the college level. I mean, today we have the strange idea in many places that if you haven't gone from K to 12 to college, you are not fit for society, which is not true. I mean, I think we've seen that community colleges, occupational training can play an important role in the education process. I mean, it can be the alternative to going to a normal college, much more oriented towards a certain degree that's kind of aligned with what the needs are. We've seen that working in regional clusters with community colleges, helping the communities build a curriculum that's in tune with the future needs of those regions is a very, very efficient program. It can be a community college program that's a full-fledged one, or it can be something that is offered in the evening hours or on the weekend so that people can do it while they are working. So there's a whole host of things. Another interesting statistic is that we saw a lot of young people don't know where to look for openings and are simply missing a good guidance, you know? And there are multiple ways how to do it. I mean, it can start in school with a guidance counselor. The guidance counselor also needs guidance. So we have to train the guidance counselors, you know, and help them to be better. Or there's an initiative also in the US to have an internet platform that's called Hope Street, you know, which a lot of folks sponsor so where people can go online and check their profile and match it with the openings and also match it with what additional educational courses are there and what sponsoring opportunities are there. One issue that comes with this is very often the accreditation because you want it as portable as possible.  One issue that remains is the perception. I mean, it's pretty shocking. I mean, we did a survey recently in the US and only 20% of parents would really, if their child came to them and were to say, look, I want to go work in a manufacturing environment, only 20% of the parents would advise that that's a good idea. So there's obviously a huge perception issue coming along with this. So, I mean, a number of the elements, making sure that the education is actually matched and business playing an important role in that. This idea of actually ensuring there's a more efficient market between the requirements and the people's looking for jobs. But also this issue of status, credentialization, recognition, ironically, the places where there are the most opportunities either in many of the engineering manufacturing, technical areas, or in the creating, the entrepreneurship, those two areas are in many societies, jobs that have less status than some of the traditional public sector or big private sector jobs. I think this goes away when people we get exposed to it, like the girls did.  They think it's a dirty job, they think it's a repetitive job, and they think it's a job that doesn't pay well. Once they get exposed to it, they see that it's not dirty at all, it's not repetitive at all, it has a lot of career opportunities, it's very technical, and you do something for society, you create something real, you know? And you get excited.  And that is super exciting, you know? And Kali Dalferi, as the CEO of Saudi Aramco, you are a key leader in the region that actually, although we talk a lot about the challenges of Europe, the region of Middle East and North Africa actually has the highest level globally of youth unemployment. Challenge economically, a challenge socially. Saudi Aramco has been leading in terms of thinking and acting on this. How do you see the particular challenges in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East and what can businesses actually do about this? Well, I can maybe focus on the oil and gas industry and countries that have resources in that area. And the dichotomy you see within the region, but also outside the region, is here is an industry that is growing, that is very profitable, that has opportunities to grow even further and more often than not, companies in our industry are constrained by growth because of lack of skilled human resources. While they are living in countries or working in countries where there are high unemployment, high youth unemployment in particular and high levels of spending on training and development of this youth. So the issue of mismatch that Klaus referred to Israel and it's in the hundreds of thousands of trained, educated on paper, young people that are out there seeking jobs while companies are bringing labor from other countries trying to do the projects on hand because of this mismatch. Now what we've done in Saudi Aramco and this is an evolution, something we've learned over many decades is try to turn this perceived problem of youth unemployment into a competitive advantage and an opportunity. And we've done it on two broad directions. One is within our own human capital, our own human resources. And the direction we have taken is I would refer to it as making our own human capital rather than hiring it from the outside. And by making, I mean we literally hire young kids as apprentices and we pay them very competitive stipends that exceed what they would get if they were to go and get employed even after some university degrees. We keep them for multiple years on training programs through our own in-house vocational training program. The capacity at any one time is 8,000 people over the years. We have hired 80,000 of these apprentices into our workforce. We also take people and send them to universities around the world, from China to the US and every country in between. Countries where we do business, we get university graduates and then we send them on to advanced degrees to become our researchers and scientists and leaders within the company. They come back, they are loyal, because we caught them at the age of 17. We not only developed their hard skills but their soft skills. They're indoctrinated into our corporate culture. Their retention levels are extremely, extremely high, their loyalty.  I am pleased elsewhere and I recommend it for many of the CEOs who are listening. The second direction which is more difficult is stepping outside our own boundaries and looking at the business space we work in. Not only the oil and gas and the chemicals and the energy but even our supply chain. And we look at ourselves in Saudi Aramco and say we spin off a lot of value in the Saudi economy that is not creating adequate jobs. So we're stepping in, we're leading and facilitating for industry clusters to work with us to create what I call multi-private public partnership where we bring a number of industry players with the National Vocational Training Agency, for example. They fund building vocational training centers. We put in our competency requirements, our curricula for the training. We fund bringing some of the high-skilled trainers to eliminate the mismatch in skills that we talked about earlier. And then they become available for the broader business community. It gives us security of our supply chain. It creates goodwill in society. So it helps us in the long term that would reduce our cost, that would reduce our risk as a result of skill shortages. And I think more importantly, it will address at the same time a societal need that will ensure our business is much more sustainable from a human resource and a societal relationship standpoint. These are powerful examples in the Western and Saudi Arabia of companies getting engaged, not just saying we're gonna take the human capital out there, but we're actually gonna be involved in partners in helping to develop and support the generation of human capital. And what I found Khalid very powerful there is not just saying within Saudi Aramco, significant though it is, but actually along the entire supply chain in the ecosystem. And there is this sense that although the macro conditions are difficult at the micro level, at the corporate and the industry at the sector level, things can happen to help address this issue. Now, Muhtar Kent as not only the CEO of Coca-Cola, but also as the chairman of our International Business Council are gathering of some of the most significant corporations from around the world. You've really helped lead the charge over the last year in terms of this community thinking about this issue. In fact, yesterday, almost the entire session was spent on what can business actually be doing concretely to contribute to this issue? Maybe you could share some of your thoughts on the challenge and also what can businesses here in the IBC but also in the audience be contributing on this issue. Thank you. You have to pull the microphone. Thank you. I think all the statistics, so one doesn't have to repeat them again, but there is a growing, I think environment out there that business is seeing that it has to play a very important, proactive role. It cannot solve the problem itself. It has to partner with government. It has to partner with civil society, create the golden triangle on the ground, conceptually and on the ground to play an important role in bringing down youth unemployment. And I think companies all have a role to play here, small, medium and large. We all have a role to play. That's why for the last year or so, we at the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum that you just mentioned, Robert, have been working on this matter, on this issue. We touched on it last year at the IBC meeting, International Business Council meeting here. We prepared for a very robust discussion in the summer of 2013 in Geneva for that and then together yesterday with 100 or so CEOs that are members of the International Business Community gathering together with mayors because the uniqueness of the meeting yesterday was we invited mayors from all around the world, city mayors, urban city mayors, CEOs of cities, cities like Buenos Aires, cities like Rome, cities like Istanbul, cities like Atlanta, cities like Madrid, Johannesburg, all around the world where roughly 25% of the population of the world and 50% plus of the GDP of the world reside today. And we invited also civil society organizations, OECD, others, universities to come into the room and really talk about ideas and we separated nine different opportunities from supporting entrepreneurialism to short-term work, to internships, education that was mentioned by Klaus and Halid. So we had a very robust discussion. The fact that the shapers, young global shapers were in the room, getting their opinion about the issue that faces them, that millennial generation, the fact that the mayors were in the room added significant value to the discussion, great ideas surfaced and I think now we have to go out and make it happen on the ground. The purpose is now to ensure that we can have best practices circulated, companies committed to this matter of doing something tangible, both inside the company and outside the company. And I'll give you a couple of examples and that's what we've committed yesterday. And as I said, working with sub-national government, I think is the way to go because they can act. They are action biased and they are time compressed, just like us in business. So it's no longer a talk marathon, but it's actually an action biased agenda. And that's where we ended up and this will be a multi-year task. So we'll come back next year at the same IBC meeting and put on the table, not start with another white page. We'll start with a page that says what worked, what didn't work, what did we learn, how do we make it better? And that's the purpose of all the preparation, all the time we spent on this matter. And again, I think companies cannot just say we commit to this idea, we'll hire another thousand interns. What is a good program has to be designed for a company to create value for itself and also employ more youth. I'll give you a couple of examples. The Coca-Cola system employs 770,000 people around the world in 207 countries. But outside of the Coca-Cola company, its supply chain employs 10 million people, direct supply chain of the Coca-Cola company, one to 12. So we have a program called Five by 20. Five, we've committed to empower economically 5 million women by 2020 outside of the Coca-Cola company. We are creating small distributors, distributorships, training women, mentoring women, getting microcredit from the IFC, which is a partner of ours in this endeavor. And we are creating small distributors of consumer goods products across the world. They in turn become hire more women and we've reached already, it's audited by an outside firm and we've already reached by the December 2013, 337,000. That is value for us and that's value for the communities because we know that if we do not help create sustainable communities where we operate and where we sell our products, we will not be able to continue to sell our products if those communities are not sustainable. Similarly, if we do not do something about this youth unemployment, it is for sure what's gonna happen is the social peace and the social mosaic in the world as we know it is gonna crack. Make no mistake, it's gonna crack. And that is probably the greatest social challenge of our time. Can we ensure that youth feel engaged in this so they remain employed? Because a great tragedy in many parts of the world is the unemployed of today will become the unemployable of tomorrow if they stay out of the workforce for two or three years and in many parts of the world, including Europe with an aging population, that group needs to be as engaged and productive as ever. And in a sense, Coca-Cola may be larger than a number of the companies here, but every company is actually able to make a difference on this. And in fact, we've adopted the starfish strategy and it's based on the story of the boy who was walking along the beach and he saw another boy on this beach that was covered with millions of starfish picking up a starfish and throwing it into water, picking up a starfish, throwing in the water. And the first boy just said, the second boy, what do you do? And he said, I'm saving these starfish because they're stranded. And the first boy said, what are you doing? There's millions, you won't make a difference. Boy picked up a starfish, threw it in the water and he said, it made a difference to that one. And that's the point. Each company can actually make a difference for a number of these individuals and collectively it can create a new sense of momentum. Because the challenge of 75 million seems so large that it becomes sort of collectively so significant that it almost allows people to abdicate their individual responsibility. But in fact, it'll be addressed through these kind of actions individually, collectively, scaled up to actually move things forward, to ensure that the education and workforces are linked up, to ensure that there's entry into the workforce, to encourage entrepreneurship. Guy Ryder, the international labor organization that you lead has been really at the forefront of the thinking on this, examining, raising the urgency of the issue in a report that you came out with last week that showed that not only is it not getting better, it's getting worse, that by 2018 there may be 80 million unemployed if we continue on the present trajectory. What's your sense of the situation and then what's also your reaction to what you're hearing today? And what's your suggestions for the audience? Well, thank you. Let me just start with the big picture, as it were, as you have done. You've given all the statistics of matter, but let me just add a couple of points. We should be particularly worried, I think, to disaggregate the big figures. Youth unemployment is becoming long-term unemployment. About one third of young people who are unemployed have been out of the labor market for six months or more. That should worry us a great deal. About one in six young people in the developed world, the OECD world, is neither in jobs nor in training, the famous NEETs. That should worry us as well. 62 million jobs shortfall since the crisis broke. 32 million is explained in open unemployment increase. The rest is in withdrawal from labor market. Some 30 million people who are discouraged or otherwise have gone. They should worry us as well. Some very sort of telegraphic points about the discussion I've just heard. We cannot dissociate the situation in respect of youth unemployment from the overall unemployment situation. If general unemployment continues to rise, we can be pretty sure we're not going to make a significant dent in youth unemployment. So the macro environment, getting companies investing again, that matters above all. But that's not a reason not to focus on the specifics of young people. So let me do that. First is the skills question. We talk in a great deal and quite rightly so about the mismatch, employers who can't find the right people. I think we need to unpack this mismatch idea because when you look a bit closer, this becomes a very complex set of issues. Our survey work shows that young people in work are almost as frequently over-qualified for the job that they do. Many are under-qualified for the job that they do. This is complicated. What are the skills that employers are missing? Are they the cutting-edge technology skills or are they basic literacy and numeracy skills? The answer is all of those things. So we've really got to look very, very carefully at that. Then let's look at what has worked on youth employment as has been mentioned earlier on. Countries in otherwise quite sort of comparable circumstances perform very differently in terms of youth employment. And we know that Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Nordics, the Dutch, they do terrifically well. They do comparatively terrifically well. And then you look at the way that the world of work and the educational work comes together in dual educational schemes. And it seems that the type of apprenticeship and such-like schemes that are operated in those countries, they really deliver the goods. They get young people into the world of work. I think everybody's interested in learning and replicating that type of experience. Now, I'm enormously encouraged when I hear colleagues from the private sector say, well, our businesses want to be part of the story. We want to get people back to work. Our company will do this. Our company will do that. But I depart slightly from your starfish-thrower analogy because that's great. If you get enough companies doing the right thing, you'll get enough starfish back in the sea. You'll get enough young people back in the jobs market. But the fact of the matter is the apprenticeship schemes, the dual education schemes at work are firmly rooted in public policy areas and very sometimes quite sophisticated labor market institutions. This is not simply the aggregation of individual company initiative. It is company initiative and goodwill. The fact that these are beneficial for companies, I don't think it's an act of philanthropy to do this stuff, but it's based in institutions. It's based in trust between the social partners. You negotiate the terms upon which apprenticeships are worked out. So this is part of the challenge of transplanting German experience to the United States, for example, which is an interesting story in itself. Lastly, and it was referred to earlier on, public employment services. Young people need to be able to go somewhere. We don't invest enough, not nearly enough, in the types of active labor market policies that will help young people to find the jobs that may be out there. So I think let's not take just a partial approach. Let's put all of these ideas, all of these commitments together to find the answers. It occurs to me that apprenticeships were probably the first ever public-private partnership in the world of work. They sort of disappeared. Why didn't my generation go into the manufacturing sector? I come from the UK, because these were yesterday's jobs. We were brought up in the idea that tomorrow wasn't about making things, it was about selling things or dealing with money. There's a bit of a reset of that, I think, coming up. And we need to catch that wave too. Well, and interesting, Klaus, I know you want to comment, but actually Klaus and I both, our cooperative program was actually McKinney. The work-based training we got after college was actually in the professional services organization. So this concept is associated historically with the manufacturing of saying you can only learn certain things by doing, is actually alive and well in the most successful organizations around the world. Klaus, you wanted to make a point. What I wanted to add is I totally agree with Guy's comments, particularly on the point that you need a larger, you need a larger kind of dialogue, and it's great that companies are moving, but I think you are absolutely spot on to say there are other institutions that you want to move at the same time. The apprenticeship model is a model that has worked extremely well in all of these countries you mentioned, but it's 500 years old in those countries. It comes from a guild system, and I can tell you from transforming or bringing it over to the US, you suddenly face a situation that you don't have this tradition, which actually leads to being very strongly publicly supported. You know, you have an accreditation that's accepted in society, which doesn't exist when you want to transport it. You have public institutions that substantially sponsor it, doesn't exist in the start, you have to add it, and you have industry groups that stand behind it, and it's not just one single employer. So the small companies can cling on to those type of programs and don't have to start it afresh. So to get a program like that transformed into another region, you actually do need these type of organizations, including the unions, by the way, you know? And I think that that's happening now, but it's actually much, much more complicated to get this done right than it sounds, you know? And I would also be careful to say, and we had this discussion yesterday at the IBC, I mean, the apprenticeship is great, you know? But in countries that don't have that tradition, let's not throw the baby out with a bathtub because there are a lot of very good occupational training programs that people can do while they are at work, you know? And that gives them, for instance, a degree in welding. You know, welding is very hard in demand, you know, all around the world, also in the U.S. There's a lot of open position and actually you don't need to be the brightest one in STEM, you can become a welder. There are welding courses, for instance, that you can take in the evening hours and on the weekend, take a year or two, you know, depending on how much time you wanna take to put into it, and it gives you a sure way into a good job. There are machine operator, modern machine operator things there, but the answer to that is the community colleges are not the ones that can put these courses together because they don't know what exactly is required by the employers. So again, also this requires to actively work together with the colleges in their respective community. We have seen about 80% of our facilities in the U.S. work with the community colleges. We have not seen one case where the community colleges was not happy for us to come to them and say, hey, let's refine the curriculum. This is what we need in future. Let's put something together. And very often other companies in the regions then came out and said, well, we'd also support this. I mean, the general approach you apply to manufacturing, you apply it to a lot of other areas as well, including the idea of providing access to coding and some of the other skills people need for tomorrow. A couple of quick comments from the panel, then I'd actually like to turn it over to some of the shapers who've been involved in this as well. Let me just, we haven't talked too much about technology here and the role of technology. Well, technology is, in one respect, a great challenge for youth unemployment because unemployment in general, I think it's also a fantastic opportunity that needs to be leveraged better yesterday, particularly in the developed economies. Yesterday, the mayor of Madrid said, Serrano said, while the mayor of Johannesburg was talking, said my challenges are completely different in Madrid than they are in the emerging countries and she's right. So how can we leverage technology better? The definition, we have to start by saying the definition of work is gonna change in the Western world. Much more work and value added is gonna be done from the home. Leveraging technology, whether they leverage technology, provide a service by working at home, whether they actually provide a design by working at home, a concept from working at home, but a lot more because you don't need to actually get up in today's world, particularly in the Western world, if for many jobs, you don't actually need to get up, go to another place and work there to create value. You can create value from where you are and so I think we need to get used to the concept, different concepts at work and once we are much more comfortable with that, that's when I think we can leverage technology better and leverage social media better, get better ideas to circulate, convene virtually, and so forth. That's very important. Khalid and Maria. I would just go back to the point I made earlier of looking at your competitive advantage and how this whole issue of youth availability to participate in creating a more competitive, more sustainable company for all of us and not only as the workforce of the company but to pick up on a point made by Muhtar is looking at your supply chain, looking at your customers, looking at your business partners and investing early in the development of that ecosystem that will ensure your long-term sustainability. One thing we have done at Saudi Aramco is an entrepreneurship institute complemented with a venture capital fund of $200 million that are targeting small startups and the $2 million and below either through loans or even co-equity investing with them and innovative ideas that will help the Saudi economy but in particular around businesses that we can support through our procurement, through our contracts, through the services that we require. And it's a win-win-win. It's win for the young people that are jumping in on these opportunities. It's win for us because many of them will be supporting us and obviously it's a win for the Saudi economy and the ecosystem around us. I would also emphasize that education is an issue that everybody can support without necessarily reforming it from the ground up. And I think the technology issue that brought by Muhtar again and some of the initiatives that Klaus mentioned are very real and doable in every place you go. So you don't necessarily have to get the Ministry of Education to undo the curriculum and retrain the hundreds of thousands of teachers. You can reach the young people, the kids and the high schoolers with STEM education using technology. You can engage them through their summer holidays. You can complement this with summer programs that get them attracted to the right disciplines and ultimately become potential employees that you can target later on. And the science, technology, engineering and math you were referring to, Maria? Yeah. I was following Muhtar's comment on technology as well. I wanted to share an example of what we did in my previous company since this issue, as you said early, not only involves all of us as youth, but also the competitiveness of the companies when we're not finding the good skills for the jobs that we were posting. So we realized that we were looking for software developers that we couldn't find in Spain. So what we did was we partnered with one Spanish university and with startups in Silicon Valley so that we sent last year graduates from software engineering to the Valley to do internships, like six months internships in startups in the Valley. It was all covered by ourselves. And then afterwards, they came back and we hired them. And it was such a success that the year after, it was backed by Spanish Foundation and now we're sending around 50 students per year. And they eventually come back or they stay there but that really helps the empowerment and the competitiveness of the companies. That's a great example. And let me turn it over for comments or questions from the floor. We have a number of the global shapers with us here, if any of them would like to intervene on this. Please. OK, this is Rina. This is Rina, Rina Onor from Istanbulhub. I'm one of the global shapers. And we participated in the International Business Council meeting yesterday. So something that resonated with me that we discussed yesterday was that there's definitely a skill mismatch between educational university training and what the businesses are actually looking for. An example is that I run a gaming company in Turkey and there's a devastating number of computer scientists, graduates that we hire, who by the time they start work can't actually code. So we have to train them six months on top of their four-year university training. So that is a problem we discussed. But my question was an issue that we didn't discuss as much was how to incentivize the business knowers, the corporate world, because they are the ones who are providing the jobs after all. So what can we do to invigorate them at the national or the subnational level so they have an incentive to hire the new graduates and train them possibly? Thank you. Let's take a couple more here and then, pardon me. Hello, I'm Ziyad Mabsud from Beirut Hub. My question is to Mr. Faleh. The Arab world is facing the huge problem in news unemployment. And the oil and gas sector is actually located in the GCC area, that industry that has been creating jobs. The challenge is how can we approach other industries in other countries, like in Lebanon, Syria, eventually when there is stability, and North Africa. Thank you. Let's take a third one, please. Hi, my name is Chris Geary. I'm a global shaper from Hong Kong Hub. And a perception I have, I'd like to address to the panel, is one of dimensions. I think the way that we view work is quite monodimensional. I think that detracts from our ability to engage with young people. And I don't want to seem impertinent in picking up on an example that we used before. But in defining intelligence in terms of a welder, I think you're taking a one-dimensional view of what intelligence is. And maybe when we look at our education systems, we look at we define topics and subjects. Whereas we can look at, and I'd said this in a couple of sessions this week, I'm a very strong believer in that we need to redefine the way we educate for the world of work based on competencies and values. And then we can redefine the subjects that we teach. And then we can create relevance for the workforce. And education systems can properly support the needs of business. I'd be very interested in the comments of the panel. And the woman at the back, please. Hi, I'm Arun Dutty, a global shaper from the Bangalore Hub in India. I really appreciated that the panel took a long view on employability, and some of the initiatives started way back in high school. My experience mentoring young children in India from adolescence to livelihood has shown that the critical skills and behaviors that will lead to good workforce actually start in adolescence as young people are forming their identity, looking at people around them. One experience that I've had, and I'd like to see if any of your experiences have echoed that, is that when we've connected companies and their professionals to work with young people, it's actually been a big win-win for the company in terms of driving employee engagement. It's actually provided employees a sense of achievement beyond just their careers, and help them build critical skills like empathy and problem solving that they need actually to be good leaders in business. So I was wondering if you all had had similar experiences in your initiatives. Thank you. Fantastic. So the whole issue of the broader sense of skillset and mindset, the issue of how does one apply more broadly across the geographies in the Middle East, some of these opportunities, and also how does one create the right incentives, although ultimately the incentives create and improve the competitiveness of the corporation and the sector. But why don't we talk about, Khaled, would you like to start? On the issue of the Middle East, I think obviously there are economic and there are political issues that complicate and exaggerate or increase the problem, but some of the underlying issues are about demographics, economics, you will find them elsewhere and they are not specific to a region or an industry. When we talked yesterday in the IBC, it was amazing that no matter what businesses you're in, the extent of the problem, from a corporate standpoint, long-term competitiveness and sustainability, we're very pressing for the CEO as much as the concern about the societal impact on unemployment. And we found that the fundamentals of the solutions that worked and many companies are the same. It's hiring young, training, getting involved in education, creating apprenticeship. So whether it works in oil and gas, it's likely going to work in tourism in Lebanon or Egypt, it's going to work in some of the service industries, it's going to work in other manufacturing, industries as we have heard from many CEOs. So I would say that ultimately many countries in the Middle East obviously need to resolve political instability issues that need to create an environment for investment and long-term hiring and unleashing the power of our young people in the region. And I'm sure there are many employers that will take some of the lessons learned that we will be sharing with them that the IBC will be advocating. In term of the question about practices we have done to address the mismatch, we in Saudi Aramco encourage our employees to go to universities and lecture. We actually compensate them extra if they go and lecture. And the idea is to bridge the gap between academia and industry, but at the same time attract more and more people to join Saudi Aramco when they hear from our leading scientists what are they doing on the job and what are some of the exciting opportunities that exist within Saudi Aramco. Very quickly Middle East, you don't necessarily have to always have a very stable environment. We every year now in the Palestinian territory convene an innovation summit for young would-be entrepreneurs. Hundreds of people bring in ideas. Together we have partners in this, local partners, we have partners like Cisco, they come in, they bring ideas and all those people either go and form their own companies with small seed money or they get employed. They get employed by us, they get employed by others. So just one idea, I'm saying there is a lot to be done today, but at the same time, we have to all start thinking about what is the 21st century education going to be, not the 20th century. Not everybody has to have a four year degree of bachelor's degree and not everybody has to have to be successful. Everybody does not have to have an MBA to go into the finance sector, to go to the services sector. All that has to change and we have to help that change in business. We have to partner closer with universities and a much closer partnership with cities to make that education 21st century so that we can actually feed in the right, provide that mismatch to go down. Well, on the last question, it was more a comment from the lady from India. I fullheartedly agree. The employer engagement aspect on being involved, I mean, working with the young kids, bringing graduates in, internships is very, very gratifying. It also plays, many of our facilities are not in urban centers, are in rural areas, it plays an enormously important role to be a good citizen in this community. So it's hugely, hugely encouraging. On this point that was asked as the first question, I mean, incentives for, to get more young graduates in, this is a broader topic. It's the whole question of how do you manage the inflow of talent? And there's a whole host of things how you do it. One thing that I believe is essential that you have a very good evaluation system and I personally believe in a normative function that you basically weed out about 10% of the ones that are not performing best. So that you basically, even in a non-growth environment, that you open positions. And I think it's the job of the CEO to really be radical on this, open the positions and make sure that there's an inflow of young talent. Because otherwise the organization gets way too comfortable, particularly when you are not in a high growth environment. The other point that is extremely important is to have systems that help prepare people not for the jobs of today, but for the jobs of tomorrow. And in many cases, therefore, the attitudes and mindset will be at least as important as the specific skill set. Because the jobs of 20 years from now will be radically different than the ones that exist today. And they may be ones that even we can imagine at this point. So it's not just to employ people today, but to actually equip them to have the resilience for the jobs of tomorrow. What I would like to do at this point is ask Moutar if you could perhaps comment upon the global shapers community. Because this is an extraordinary group that's been set up about three years ago with people in the ages of 20 to 30. They've been actively involved in this in so many issues because their unofficial amado is don't do things about us without us. And we all benefit by having them actively involved. Moutar, are you being one of the real supporters of the forum of this from the beginning? Perhaps I can turn the microphone. Yeah, just very, very quickly. I think it's one of the best things the World Economic Forum did, has done in the last three years. To include the young people in shape. It all started three years ago at the Dead Sea Summit when Arab Spring was just months old and there was a 23 or four-year-old girl that was on the main plenary stage that came up and talked a completely different language about the aspirations of Middle Eastern youth and why it was so important to change. And that changed the dialogue and that idea was born there in a way and Klaus Schwab through his leadership took it forward. We're very proud to be the first supporter and I wanna thank Reliance and Abraj, the other supporters of the World Economic Forum and invite other supporters to come and support the global shapers so that it can become even a bigger community. Now, 3,000, 3,000 all across the world. 305 hubs growing and changing the dialogue into a much better dialogue we all learn. Every time our organization collaborates in any hub across any country our people learn. We benefit a lot and I know that we have a great collaboration and the change of dialogue is greatly welcomed. Maria? Yeah, so I think it's very, very important and we are all impressed about the importance that the forum has given to us in this event. 50 of us are here in the global shapers community and as Mita was saying, we are already putting some projects into practice that can be leveraged on and can be shared and try to put into practice in other countries. So that's what I think we are, we're people of action and for example yesterday in the IBC meeting, we were like, yeah, well, these are all ideas but how do we implement them? So let's try to keep the ball rolling and put the ball rolling and leverage on that. Well, thank you very much and at this point I have two very pleasurable tasks. The first is to thank this panel for their great interventions and then secondly it would be to invite the global shapers to come and take the stage because you really represent the future. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.