Welcome to Embedded World 2023. Here at the Toradex booth, my name is Daniel Lang and I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for Toradex. Lots of stuff. Lots of stuff, yeah. So here, our droid. It's tracking your face, so it's watching me. Say hi and we did that with our Maven kit, so it uses our system on-module with the Verdi IMX8M+, which has a neural network processor, and we integrated that in a very nice kit, including a camera either from Econ System or Vision Component. We have a very modular backplane where you can have power over ethernet, RS485 and so on. And the whole thing will be, it's in a case, so you can actually deploy it in a real field. So you can put it on your factory floor, on a tractor and so on. And that's there in the head of our friend here. It's useful to have networking, you just kind of step up. So really nowadays everything is connected. You want to get data for the processing. All the AI is on the device, but then maybe you want to know which products are good, if there is a criminal around or something like that. So the metadata you get off, but the processing is on the device. And this actually board and even the droid is from our partner Ozone, which has a software feature which lets you optimize your neural networks, which you have maybe in TensorFlow or PyTorch. It lets you optimize for our hardware. So it runs very efficiently on this module. And depending on the application we can do up to 300 frames per second. So yeah, maybe we can have a look a little bit closer to the module itself. So that's just the card. So let's walk here on the way. We have some demos from our customer. So that's from emphasis and that's a pollen analyzer. So they use micro fluid technology to analyze pollen. And with that you can have more productive trees and fields. So it helps growing more food without using a lot of chemicals and so on. And they're still a startup and they're very innovative. And they use our hardware, but they also use our Torizen platform, which I can show you a little bit later. But Torizen basically allows you to have a very fast innovation loop. So you can develop something, you have tools for development, and then you can deploy it in a very secure field out to the fields to these devices. And they're connected and they're found every couple months. They found new ways how they can use their technology and they can update their devices, make them more capable over time. So very similar and a lot of Tesla is doing with their cars. They're doing that here on a scientific instrument. So you're all about enabling very innovative stuff. Yes, we are really, we enable this company, we have a lot of PhD in that technology to build a product because you still need embedded computing, you need Linux, you need to do security updates, you need a UI and all of that. And we really help with that. So emphasis can focus on their core competitors here. And then here also a device, we do a lot, you know, automation, it's a small robot, we do a lot of medical things. And here you can also actually see what's in there. So there's our module, an APALIS module, a display, and then of course it also controls the system. You know, you have a touchscreen, very nice here, it's running. So I don't know, I probably shouldn't interrupt it. Maybe I can try and see what happens. Pause, you know, continue. So you have a UI and there's also micro. Also very innovative, very special. And also even this one, you know, you need to do updates. They use more remote offline updates at the moment, but also here we have a very secure solution. So you're not corrupting the device, you don't break the device because that's a no-go in a lab. Then let's go to our hardware modules. Here you see an overview of our modules and let me try to pull in our hardware product manager. Sorry, I still... So that's Simon, our hardware product manager and he can tell you a little bit more about our modules. So this is our portfolio of system-on-modules. You see three product families here. You see our mid-range and high-performance APALIS system-on-modules. Then moving a little bit to the right side. You also see the colibris. These are our traditional system-on-modules from the entry level to a medium performance. And on the right side, there is the Verdin family, our latest addition with our brand new Verdin AM62 module at the bottom. So that's something we are introducing right here, launching it at Impedded World and it offers a very competitive entry point into the Verdin family of souls. Competitive entry point. Does that mean good price? What does it mean? It means basically the lowest total cost of ownership. So it means if you purchase our hardware, integrate into your product, deliver it and maintain it over the lifetime, you will be able to end up with the lowest total cost. So it's not specifically the lowest price of hardware. That's an important differentiation. There's also, when I look here, it's an A72, it's a big chip, it's powerful. You do everything from powerful to smaller? Yeah, so scalability is an important concept for us. We try to lay out the portfolio in a way that depending on your needs, you can go from the entry level up to the high performance and we provide a nice coverage for all of your needs there basically. If people want just one, they can go ahead. It's possible to all kinds of quantities. How does it work to start working with you? Yeah, so we are trying to facilitate it from the beginning. We provide extensive technical support with all the materials. We have products focusing on facilitating evaluation. So you can order evaluation products that make it easy for you to wire up your hardware, experiment with the hardware. If you feel you are more working on a software level, then pick a different product which is better suited for that. In terms of availability, all of our products are long-term available. 10 years, 15 years, we have that commitment publicly documented on our websites. This is one of the key values that developers are keeping coming back to the X-Force. So if people want this, what would be the package maybe they would get? So this is a song on its own. The package we would propose to take would be one, Development Intended Carrier Board, like our traditional Verdyn Development Board which is visible elsewhere. We would offer some accessories there and we would offer a starting package. Maybe we would select one configuration out of the many, depending on the concrete needs of the customers we would be discussing before ordering with our team. Cool. Thanks for that. Thank you. Yeah, so maybe I could also pick a little bit of my favorite here, so that's Mellow, so that's one of the carrier boards for the Verdyn module, you can plug it in. That board is good for prototypes, but it's also great for low volume manufacturing. So most of our customers, they design their own carrier board, but if you only have a few hundreds, you maybe just want to use it directly, something like that, and you can see a lot of common interfaces, extension connectors, it's very compact, so it's kind of, and it's brand new, so I like it a lot. And it's all, you can get all the resources, so you can also use that as a starting point and then modify it for your needs, if you want to have other connector or remove some of the connectors. So basically, if you want to go from there and just do something very specific, they can start there, but then they can ask you, how do I be more specific and optimize for that? Exactly. You can see here we have a lot of different boards and all of them are fully open, so you can just download the Altium design files and go from there. You can do that yourself, or you also have a partner network, which can help you. So if you said, oh, I need a smaller or a bigger board, or I need interfaces, I need two ethernet and so on. It's very, very easy to do that. So maybe have a look at some of our other demos here, just two. This is a pretty cool one. This is for visually impaired people, and that's actually a sweetie. It's an Intel RealSense and then our product is in here, and I can already feel it, it vibrates, so it actually detects the environment, and then it gives you here on this microphone, it's not a real microphone, it's going on your cheekbones, and it vibrates, and it gives the visually impaired a sense of the environment, so you don't run into stuff. What's the resolution? They can see walls, they can see obstacles. By sound. Exactly, it vibrates, and if you try it out it's very weird, so you need a little bit training, and I can see so from it's hard to use, but you can do that. And it's from our customer here. Is this like your mass production? Yes, you can go on their website and buy it. People use it, and it's changing lives. It really helps the visually impaired to navigate better. I can have a high resolution. It would be awesome if eventually blind people can see. I think here is more like not running into things, but a specialist on this one. Another nice demo here is from Practica. It's an oven, and it's super fast, so you can make cross sauce and pizza. I don't think anything is running, and I'm also probably not the right guy to demo it, but you can have recipes and do that. You use microwave and heat and everything, and it's also fully connected, and this is used in some really really big sandwich chains and coffee chains and some really big customers worldwide. It also uses our Verizon platform with our models. So here you can actually see their control unit where you can set that. It uses Verizon, so it's connected so they can do over-the-air updates, they can improve it, they can monitor it, what's going on, how many times it's used and they need maintenance, so they can do predictive maintenance on it and so on, and then here you see our module integrated, and that's a good example of a custom carrier board. Nice. It looks awesome, so there's special oven technology, and they want to do cutting edge UI for it and stuff. Yeah, not just the UI, the control of the whole oven, and you also have coffee machines and things like that doing that. Here you can see our display ecosystem. You want to talk short? It's on video, it's another hardware product manager. Hi. And maybe you can really talk a little bit about our display ecosystem. Maybe you can get a picture with me as well. So, we're working on making this place easier for our industrial partners. So, we're partnering with multiple display providers. Today we're showing off Reverdy displays, where we are able to guarantee availability of these displays for five plus years. Our ecosystem is made out of the standardized spin-out that you can see here with the display adapter, that you can add on the mezzanine, or that we integrated directly in our newest carrier, volume carrier board for Verden, the Mallow, so we're getting that ecosystem up and running and available for our customers during this year with an availability of more than five years so that they can work with DSI as a native interface and as the primary display interface of the Verden family. Because when you have displays, you have to run them, you have to run the touch maybe all the different things and that's a way to integrate it. Exactly, so what we do really we accelerate your time to market to partner up with this display so they work basically plug and play so they're easy to integrate and then of course you also work with crank, queue, slint, flutter and all these UI framers so you can do the UI very, very simple. Good? Yeah, so maybe have a look a little bit on our software. One of the main differentiators from Toradex to other summands is our software. Here you see we try to emulate a typical developer desk maybe a home office and here you can see how we integrate our software, how we make it fast. So we are integrated with Visual Studio Code so it's a very popular, very productive modern environment but I think through this finishing up can talk a little bit more about the highlights. So through what can we see here on your end? All right, great. Yeah, so what we're looking at here, this is the developer desk. This is kind of the central view of what a software developer using the Verizon system would look like so this is just my Ubuntu laptop with all the tools that are needed to develop applications to develop the custom operating system and just generally to work with the Verizon system as a software developer. So the first thing that we have, the first thing that most developers get is we're going to create a new project. So I'll just bring this window up. These are all the project template types that we support out of the box. So if you need to create a Python app or a QT app we have templates in place to allow you to quickly get up and running with any of these project types. So you don't have to be an expert on containers or on Linux or on Yachto to be able to start deploying your application quickly onto the device. So let's jump over here. I've got a basic Python Hello World app that I can bring up and so as a Python developer all I care about is my high quality Python source code. I don't need to know the complexity like containers or anything. I come in here and I start writing my code. I'm ready to debug. I hit the F5 button it's going to copy the device. It's going to copy the code over. It's going to hide all that complexity from me. It's going to package it as a container. It's going to deploy it to the board. Allow me to do source level debug just as if it were code running here natively on my desktop. Once I'm then happy with it I commit it to my local Git repo. I push it to the cloud in GitHub. We have reference implementations with our CICD system, or excuse me, with the GitHub CICD system, GitHub work flows so that when I push new changes it can automatically be configured to do a cloud based build to check out and deploy, say, to a QA group of devices. QA does their work and then they push the changes up one level further. The changes then get checked out and pushed up to the horizon platform for deployment to the entire production fleet. Do you think most developers will use the Visual Studio? Or they can use other? There are probably, I don't know if it's 50-50, there are some people that are used to Yachto, used to a traditional command line. Maybe they're coming in with some code and container setups already that might not use this directly. They might use it for inspiration, but anybody coming in that's, say, coming from Windows CE or some other environment that doesn't know this environment, those are the people we are really targeting with this Visual Studio code extension. And you support a whole bunch of platforms like people prefer that or this, they can work with what they like. Yeah, in fact those templates that we showed at the very beginning, the idea is that they're easy to generate, so if you have need for a specific application type that's not supported by our templates, it's easy to create a new template for your specific framework or whatever it might be. Thanks a lot. We talked a lot about the developer experience, so let's get a little bit of a bigger picture overview and for that, let's talk to our wall here. I take this here asking, so here you can basically see the overview of our horizon platform. So before, it's true we were actually at the developer location here and there you could see the Visual Studio integration and you can also see that we have our horizon core offering, so that's the basic Linux, it's the Octobase, Linux fully open source and you can use that, pull that in and then for example you need a Qt or a Codesys or a Crank or AI and that's all provided as a container, so it's very easy to integrate. And then Astru showed here on the Visual Studio place that's integrated, so you develop like you would develop on a desktop and why did we do that? It's really to make it easy for people coming from Windows, Windows CE, web applications and so on, so they can easily move to an embedded device and can be very productive. Then we have a very secure way to deliver your software to your end devices. We use something, a framework a whole thing we call the horizon but the framework below is Optane and Optane is very secure it's actually built for state level attack and it's commonly used in automotive industry and then also we have a way back to get information like device monitoring, remote access and so on, we see that here later. And then we have fleets, so most demos you see here, the brewery and the agriculture and the beer and the coffee machine they're all connected and maybe I can show you that here. I can give you a very short overview so that's our control panel, so for example before we were at the open, so you can here see what the open is doing, how many recipes they've processed like the current, you know, the CPU, I think you can also see the pre-heating thing, if the door is open and so on, so you can use that for predictive maintenance you can do remote off-sets, you can push OTAs here and so on. That's all about security? Yeah, so there's a lot of security and we have our security expert here and maybe let me trust try to steal it. So John lead our horizon platform, so the staff in the cloud team and he's also our security expert, so maybe you can talk a little bit about the security philosophy behind the horizon platform. Alright, so I would say if there's something that defines the philosophy we take it's that we try to do the hard thing first and then work to make it easier and especially when it comes to security around software updates, it is a topic that can sound simple when you first look at it but gets just devilishly complex and has a lot of implementation pitfalls. And if there's one thing that I would like people to know about software updates I think people usually start with an assumption that, hey, if I sign my updates, I'm fine. If I worry about some transport security and I sign some updates I'm going to be okay. And that is an attitude that tends to work well until it really doesn't. The core of any software update system is actually about securely communicating repository state from your remote repository that can attest the validity of software you have to install to the device in a secure way that considers the timeliness of updates. That considers the pertinence and compatibility if you have a multi ECU update scenario. And actually dealing with all of those things and working with all of those edge cases is genuinely a devilishly difficult prospect. So my background, I worked in the automotive industry for quite some time working with safety critical.  That used to be like that, right? I would say that that is something that very much woke up the automotive industry. I mean the famous G-PAC in I want to say 2014 really marked the turning point. And in fact, that was a big part of the impetus for the Uptane project which was when the automotive industry essentially got together to figure out what should we do to worry about update security in our vehicles. And they contacted folks at the Secure Systems Lab at NYU Tandon, the SSRI Institute in Michigan and developed an extension to the update framework which is a cloud-dative computing foundation and Linux foundation project that is the gold standard for software update repositories and how you would extend that for the automotive case where you need to have central direction and control of updates you need to update secondaries. And so the development of that standard started in 2017. I worked pretty closely on it. Toradex ended up approving me because they were interested in that system and our update system at Toradex is now based on the Uptane standard. So we deliver updates signed with two independent chains of metadata one that attests software validity and timeliness and consistency and all of these guarantees and another independent metadata chain that attests the actual installation instructions and you can probably tell I'm pretty passionate about software update security. So Torizon has the full security, the secure updates forever. When you have all these cool devices potentially they could be updated forever stay safe and it just works. Yeah. So this is the thing that I mentioned we try to do the hard thing first and then make it easy. So when you get to the really hard questions about repository state it turns out that practical research on flaws in software update systems often what it comes down to is flaws in key management and another common mistake that you see in update systems in the wild is thinking that okay I can I have a PKI management system I can manage signing software updates with my existing X509 asserts. I can do it with my centralized key management system. There are some special needs of software update systems that demand some difference in how you deal with that. So one of the things that's built in from the start is the ability to rotate keys and sign changes in the trust relationship of the repository which is a long way of saying when you start up and you sign up and you get a Torizen platform account you connect your devices to it you can see here we have some actual devices connected. Those devices the root of trust is actually managed by us it's online. You can click to update a package you can click upload a new software binary, use our tools, whatever however you don't want to have a single update system. What if you have a developer who left credentials to this system on a sticky note? What you can do for your devices in production is take all of your signing keys offline so that when you are ready to do production releases of software you can have a prod repository that has an extremely limited set of software that there's only these specific versions which get secure attestations from the device of exactly what software is running. Only these ones are authorized. It doesn't matter even our developers, even if you had complete access to our systems, as long as you have those key keys those important signing keys offline well you are fundamentally safe from the pitfall that people get into with signing offline and I think that a lot of people who start rolling their own update system with Rauk or SW Update end up with troubles with the signing keys you lose a key, it gets compromised somebody loses it what is your strategy for rotating it effectively on the device and our software update client handles that automatically transparent which is what lets you start with an online key and then roll it offline without pain that sounds awesome hopefully maybe you have 100% security support it's difficult you can see we are really thinking a lot about it we are spending a lot of time we choose the hard way a little bit to make it easy for our customer a lot of people would say it's maybe is it overkill for what you do but we are not doing consumer grade so we really do critical advice we do medical advice we do industrial so if something happens the damage is huge so that's the reason we go that way do you care about the platform we know all about that and all about the thing to make it easy for our customer so they do not need to have all that pain themselves we go for that and we have people here who love the pain to go through that and the horizon keeps improving this is the thing a lot of our customers choose to horizon so they can update their system but of course also on our side we need to keep an eye on everything and update it maybe one last we talk a lot about security which is extremely important but the other thing our customer really care about is reliability and for that really brave you are actually very confident about reliability and we just switch the demo here but you can actually come here so if you maybe on the next show we have here a demo we say like try to break it so you can actually try to break our over the air update system you can pull the power, you can have corrupted files you can play around and you can win a usb power bank if you do that so now we are actually switching our demo to our partner from Lightberry QNX so we are also working with QNX as an alternative software offering on our system so I don't know if you want a short talk a little bit about what you did with Toradex and how you support our models today we have planned a short demo for QNX running on the Toradex Apollo spot and we will just show how you can get QNX up and running on the Toradex spot and show a few more demos and opening options with our IDE have anybody been able to break it? so that's the order so that's still about Verizon so Verizon is breaking Bruno did anybody break it? No, not yet hopefully someone can break it so we find a problem we can fix but no one yet we have good hackers at the embedded world maybe walking around not here apparently yeah good yeah so I hope you could learn a little bit about our products and our presence at Verizon about our customer we hope it can work with you very soon and see you again here I think you probably have a very fun job working with all these amazing Toradex people have we talk about PhDs they have all these science all this knowledge and they want to turn it into a product and you are there to help them that's really one of the coolest part of the job we also look for new people so you can really work with very innovative companies for example we have 9T Labs they do continuous carbon fiber 3D printing we are in satellite hyper cars super cars PhD doing new micro thing we have people using ultrasound to split DNA you know a lot of wheelchairs we really helping people that's also very nice we do a lot of medical devices which really help people a lot of people getting older so we have a lot of connected devices helping them with less chemicals so it's really really cool to see what all these customers do and we have over 3000 customers worldwide so it's a very exciting field to work and the order quantity can be from very few to our products are used from a couple hundred to a couple ten thousand so our very high volume customer maybe have 70.000 devices a year or very low end customer maybe have 100 devices a year and we do everything between if you go very very high volume we can support you to do a design in so maybe you only have 10.000 pieces at the beginning and then you ramp up we can help you and of course also on the low end we have very good support we are very famous for our online resources so even your small company is very easy to get started so not only the universities in Switzerland but anywhere in the world and they are thinking how to get it done to just start contacting you so we love to work with university for I mean a lot of them you know creating startups have smart people or they go into companies also for recruiting so if you are in a university and you need any hardware contact us you have special you can get free hardware discounted hardware we have programs we collaborate on studies you know master's thesis and so on so we love to work with university and how is it going in New Zealand and your headquarters or the different offices it's more and more are you hiring? yes we hire you check our website we just went to a bigger office in Brazil in Campinas we have a very nice new office we are just going to move in Seattle to a bigger office the office in Switzerland is growing so it's going very well so very happy about that cool thanks a lot


Good evening and welcome to a Monday night edition of Tiskey Sour as today is a bank holiday. We're going to do a slightly shorter show than usual. We've got a few fewer segments lined up for you, but we are making the most of it because we are going to take on one of the biggest questions of our age. Where did COVID-19 which has killed upwards of three and a half million people, potentially nearly 10 million if you believe some estimates, where did it come from? Now until now, the dominant theory has always been that the novel coronavirus jumped from animals to humans, maybe via an intermediary animal. However, in recent weeks, the idea that the virus originally leaked from a lab has gained prominence. So why are the press and politicians changing their tune? Does this reflect new evidence about the virus's origins or a deeper political agenda? And what would be the implications if we were to confirm that COVID-19 did leak from a lab? I have an expert guest lined up for you to answer all of those questions before that. If you haven't already, do subscribe to the channel, hit that subscribe button. Now over a year ago, Donald Trump said this. Seeing anything at this point that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of this virus. Yes, I have. Yes, I have. And I think that the World Health Organization should be ashamed of themselves because they're like the public relations agency for China. Now at the time, that was widely dismissed as a crank conspiracy theory from Donald Trump, a conspiracist and many of his conspiracist supporters. However, the tide of opinion among liberal politicians and some in the scientific establishment now seems to be shifting. The new US President Joe Biden has launched a new investigation into COVID-19's origins. This was his spokesperson, Kareem John Pierre. President is asking the US intelligence community in cooperation with other elements of our government to redouble efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring the world closer to a definitive conclusion on the origin of the virus and deliver a report to him again in 90 days. So what changed and how did the lab leak theory go from a conspiracy to the subject of serious investigation? That was the question posed in a recent piece in The Guardian by science writer Stephen Buranyi. You can see the headline there and Stephen joins me now. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. And an extra special thanks for coming on on a bank holiday Monday. We do appreciate it. I want to start by asking you to give us an introduction. The title of your article was how this went from a conspiracy theory to something that's been seriously investigated. Can you talk about that transition? What did change? Yeah, I mean, there's been enormous acceleration on this in just like the past a couple months, sort of starting with media attention in sort of January, February, specifically some pieces in New York magazine, some former New York Times reporters sort of laying out what had previously been thought of as like quite a conspiratorial case, quite a circumstantial case for the COVID-19 pandemic actually arising in the lab. And then you had sort of a break moment a few weeks ago. 18 really prominent scientists wrote a letter, an open letter in Science Magazine basically saying not that the lab leak was for sure, not even that they thought that lab leak was the most likely explanation, but that they were looking for their backing rather like a full investigation. And then you've got Biden sort of following much more reasonably Trump's call to look into lab leak. And I think you can say it's sort of fully mainstreamed at this point. And then let's, I suppose, break down what one means by a lab leak theory. So obviously, on the very basic level, it's saying this didn't come organically from humans, sorry, from animals to humans, it leaked from a lab. But within that, you've got three types of theory, haven't you? You've got one which was that this was a strain that existed naturally in nature from a bat, but it had been collected by people in a lab and then it leaked from the lab. The other is you've had something called gain of function research whereby people in the lab have been intentionally improving a virus, making it more fit to spread among humans to then, I suppose, prepare for if it were to occur naturally in the environment, but it's actually leaked and what they were trying to warn us about that they've ended up creating. And then the final one is some sort of bio weapon. So you've got a lab that was that told us it was investigating viruses that occur naturally, but actually they were creating a virus which could later be used as a weapon. Those are the three. Now I'm guessing the two that are being taken seriously are the natural strain that was collected and the virus created in the lab through this gain of function research, which is to improve the fitness of a virus. Is that correct or are there people in the scientific community saying it might be a bio weapon? Yeah, that's a bit right. I mean, the bio weapon one, God, I mean, if you think if you're really sure about anything after the past year, like you're a jerk, but I'd be willing to say that the bio weapon is the sort of most at there. I mean, SARS is not, COVID is not like a very good bio weapon, if that makes sense. Like it's really bad, but surely I would think, you know, if our scientists are any good, it could be much worse. It also doesn't make a lot of sense as one. But yeah, I mean, the first two seem to be the most reasonable. I mean, like you said, we'll get onto this very specific, the very specific circumstances of the lab that people are very suspicious about. But you know, this lab is the world's premier collector of wild coronaviruses. So the question is, you know, did they get one that they then didn't report? And then it got out or did they actually improve it, which is something that frighteningly goes on. Well, now people are learning much more than they previously thought. I think it's time to name the lab. We're going to name that suspicious lab. It's the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Now, obviously the Wuhan Institute of Virology is very nearby Wuhan, which is where the first outbreak emerged. I want to go to a paragraph in Stephen's piece from The Guardian, which is suggesting why people are quite so interested in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So in the piece you write, what is also known for sure is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, nearby to the first recorded outbreaks, is the world's premiere collector of wild bat coronaviruses, has grown them in their in-house laboratories before and had the expertise to conduct gain of function experiments.  I've never really dismissed the lab leak theory just because it seems to me an incredible coincidence. If this were to have emerged in nature, for it to have emerged in nature, and it just so happened to do so in an enormous country, but next to the one specific lab that does the investigations into this type of coronavirus, and they don't do investigations in that lab because these types of coronaviruses are native to Wuhan, the back cave is actually where they collect these things from is really far away. So it seems to me this would be a big coincidence, were it not to be a lab leak. And I suppose my question to you Stephen is, if this were a naturally occurring virus, what would be the chances of it emerging precisely next to a lab such as this? Are there labs like this everywhere and it could have emerged next to some Beijing Institute of Aurology and we would be having the same conversations about that lab, or is it a real, real coincidence that it emerged next to this one? I mean, I think what you're sort of getting at is that the case for lab leak, for this coming from a lab, is that circumstantially you've got a lab that does this exact research, which is right there.  I mean, I think that if you're going to be fair to the natural emergence theory, you have to start from the idea that it's probably an incredibly rare evolutionary and logistical occurrence anyway. You know, there's tons of coronaviruses in the world, there's tons of viruses in the world, most of them don't go, you know, don't turn into a worldwide pandemic. So you're already looking at a really rare event. And you know, these sort of things happen all the time in nature, incredibly rare events that have massive consequences in the history of nature and history of evolution. And I guess the burden of proof on the natural emergence side is to show both that it's evolutionarily evolutionarily plausible, that the virus emerged in the form that it did, and then also that it's logistically plausible, that it made its way to Wuhan. And I mean, the way that would happen is the way that you've already seen sort of presented, which would be sort of through the movement of animals, not bats, but some sort of intermediary. And of course, the fact that they haven't found anything for that is one of the big, big knocks on the natural emergence theory. But again, you know, it took years to find the natural reservoir or the natural emergence point for both MERS and SARS. So anybody who's sort of on the side of natural emergence says, you know, let's just wait, we're looking, we're looking, we're looking, which of course doesn't satisfy anybody who said the labs right there. I suppose what I was getting at in maybe a roundabout way is how rare is the Wuhan Institute of Virology or how specific is it? There's circumstantial evidence that there is a lab that does research on this kind of viruses. But if these labs are everywhere, then, you know, it wouldn't be particularly strong evidence that it came from a lab because wherever it emerged, we could say, oh, but it's nearby this lab that also does this. But if this is kind of the only lab in the world, or one of only a very small amount of labs in the world that produce coronaviruses like this, that would seem like a much stronger case that it would be too much of a coincidence for it to have just naturally emerged next to the one leading, you know, institute. So, you know, is it correct to think of this as a very, very specific lab that is doing research on these kind of coronaviruses in a way that not many other labs are? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, if that's the simplicity of the question you're asking, yeah, 100%. I mean, there are several other institutes in China that conduct research on coronaviruses, but there's not very many of them, and none of them to the level of the one institute of virology. I mean, again, the world's premier collection of bat coronaviruses. So if there were to be a lab leak, it would be here. That's the one. Yeah. Yeah.  Yeah. Let's talk in general terms about gain of function research. I've sort of explained briefly what it is, but you're the science writer. So I want to throw this to you in terms of, you know, what is gain of function research? Why is it controversial and why is it, you know, in the spotlight when it comes to the lab leak hypothesis? Yeah. I mean, I'd practice by saying that I don't think the vast majority of gain of function research is a good idea. There's ways to alter viruses that are safe. But, you know, if you're if you're telling them how to infect human cells, that's probably bad. So gain of function research is basically, I mean, some people don't like the term, but as it's being presented is basically taking a virus and as you said earlier in the show, improving on it. And what this means in the context of what people are talking about in terms of the one institute of virology or other institutes that have studied coronaviruses are to look at a virus that, you know, infects animals, but is known to or suspected of being able to jump to humans at some point. And so basically what you can do is you can introduce functions that other viruses have that allow them to infect humans. And so this is like direct editing of the virus by a scientist. And then you can see how it how it works in human cells. So it's sort of get an idea of what kind of threat this might be. And then the other thing, which is really central to this sort of idea that there might have been a lab leak, is you can sort of mimic the conditions of placing the virus right up against a human population. So you just you basically like bang the virus against human cells over and over and over again, until it evolved the ability to enter them. And this is sort of like accelerated evolution. And the reason people do it, you know, whether or not it's it's a good thing to do. The reason people do it is because then the virus sort of naturally shows you the path that would take to infect humans. And if you keep doing it, and it keeps using the same the same mechanism, then you can sort of assume that's probably how it's going to to emerge as a pandemic. Now, if you've been listening to that, you probably realize that then that means the virus that they just used for those experiments can now infect at least human cells.  You've sped up evolution in the worst direction you could speed it up in, which is to say, how can we make this animal virus really infectious in humans? And the justification to do it is to say, now we can prepare for if it happens in nature, but it will the lab leak hypothesis in the in the gain of function version, which is that you know, they modified the virus as well as collecting it, then that would be that they then leaked it and they caused it. Let's look at some of the intelligence that's been coming out. And now lots of this is, I suppose unpublished intelligence, which I'm inherently suspicious of. But it's worth mentioning it anyway. So one of the reasons the lab leak hypothesis is back in the headlines is because of US intelligence, which has either recently come to light or recently come to prominence. However, one looks into it and especially a write up about them in the Wall Street Journal. So this was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. And it's suggesting that there were a group of researchers in the Wuhan Institute of Aurology who in November, so a couple of months before we know the outbreak started, came down with symptoms of something which would be consistent with COVID-19, but could also be consistent with with other types of flu. And again, this is circumstantial evidence. Well, I suppose another way to put this, if there were to be a lab leak, this is how you'd expect it to happen.  Then you get a cluster. Some of them have symptoms of COVID-19 and then it's out by then, isn't it? A family members got it or whatever. So if this were to be the case, it would seem again, it sort of builds that circumstantial case. What do you make of this? Do you trust the Americans here? I think you just have to, like you can, you just can take anonymous intelligence briefings off of a report that I think, if I recall properly, the WSJ hadn't even seen the report itself. Is it just just an anonymous intelligence source? But yeah, like you said, Iraq, the entire history of planted stories in the Cold War, as delicious as it is, I think the best you can do here is to use that as a jump off point to, you know, as an investigation that could actually be legitimated. But, you know, an anonymous intelligence report, I just can't, I can't do it, I can't do it. And I suppose that in a way is a bit of a segue into who do we trust? Who don't we trust?  So I don't understand how viruses evolve. But I do kind of understand interests. So, you know, whose, whose interest is it to make a big deal out of this? Maybe the American intelligence services, who's in favor of covering this up? Parts of the scientific community who are invested in gain of function research, probably the Chinese government. And you've got this, you know, this constellation of interests with certain people wanting us to know nothing about this and certain people wanting us to go wild with our imaginations. And, you know, Trump obviously wanted us to kind of think it was a bio weapon. So who, who's trying to cover this up? And who's trying to blow it out of proportion, I suppose, is my question to you. Yeah, it's really hard. I mean, It seems there isn't it. Yeah. Well, who's trying to suppress good investigations into this?  Yeah, yeah. I mean, anybody that there are still, I have been trying to as much as I can follow this through the scientific literature, just because again, if I'm following intelligence reports, I'm going to be up until 4am parsing these things that I'm never going to figure it out. And you'll never know. But if you sort of go through that, there are still people. You mean you can you can find them in the scientific literature, you can find that clearly the most plausible explanation is natural emergence. And they'll come and say that and you should not listen to me. I mean, there are the weight of experts, people that have parsed these things at this point is is really on the fence. It's on maybe it's on it's on we need to investigate. You know, by that same token, you know, maybe the US senators and sort of current and ex intelligence personnel who are deeply invested in some manner of cold or otherwise war with China, you know, you know, where where they're sort of going with it. And and a lot of this has muddied the waters since it first started. You know, the reason that it was discounted. So early, some combination of business, laziness, credulity, and also people genuinely not not wanting to to enter into a needless conflict with China. I mean, I think that the way you need to look at it is that it's not really necessary to be a partisan of either side as as boring as that is.   But what what you've seen over the past couple months in terms of like the idea of what I believe picking up steam is not so much the the actual proving of a lab leak theory. It's it's bringing up enough circumstantial evidence so that the balance of opinion is now open, you know, both sides are incredibly open. And it's just incredibly hard, you know, to tell either way. And the really sad thing is that you I'm just going to have to tell you to, you know, maybe wait or push for an investigation or whatever. But yeah, it's not that it's not that anybody's proved anything at this point. The moment right now is just in the opening up the discussion. Who would do the investigation? Because I mean, there has been an investigation by the World Health Organization, they came away with a report that said, you know, the natural origin story is very, very likely. And even though they're not rolling out the lab leak story, they're saying it's highly unlikely. Now, they got a lot of backlash for that because they, you know, they said they would they interviewed scientists, and they just believed whatever answer they gave them, they said, Oh, we're not going to look at the raw data. And I mean, China was obviously involved very heavily in the investigations kind of a diplomatic thing, which sort of undermines its ability to search for the truth. But who would be able to search for the truth? I mean, obviously, the Chinese government, and I mean, I think they're overly demonized in many ways, but they don't want people to find out that it was a lab. If it were a lab leak, they wouldn't want people to find that out. So how would a fair investigation possibly take place? So that is really like that's the billion dollar lovely question. I mean, you're you're entirely right. I mean, I wouldn't even phrase it the way you phrased it like that they wouldn't want people to know if there was a lab leak. I mean, I think the thing that makes this so difficult is that if China knew that there was no lab leak, if they knew like what people are asking for in an investigation is for the Wuhan Institute of Virology to be opened to investigators from some sort of international body for full interviews, full parsing of their lab journals, whatever records they have, and to take all of the strains that may not be catalogued of coronaviruses that they have and let people investigate and sequence them, get taken to the scientist. Even if China knew that those records were claimed, they're not going to let anybody in. It's not in their interest. The Chinese government, the Chinese state didn't avoid the sort of open society can opener of intervention in the 90s just to sort of let international investigators in now. It's just not how they operate. Sort of demanding an investigation. I think the only way that actually happens is if it manages the demands for it managed to move into a sphere that China would actually care about, which would be actually just like literally the balance of world powers and not just the United States, which is this very adversarial power that China has a big interest in stonewalling actually came along. Like if the entire WHO turned on them, if countries actually sort of cared about cultivating, turned on it, there's a possibility. But the other possibility is that they're able to stonewall it forever. Then the only thing you can sort of hope for is a whistleblower within, and then even then, it's not clear that you'd ever get sort of the smoking gun that everybody's looking for. Two more things I want to go through. One is historical precedent and one is what would be the implications either way. In terms of historical precedents, I did some very basic research before this show. SARS, that was natural origin. It went from bats to civic cats to humans. MERS, that was natural origins. Bats to camels to humans. But we also do know that lab leaks do happen. Since 2003, there have been six lab leaks of SARS. That was lab staff catching the virus. In one case, they passed it on to a family member.  It's much harder to pass on than COVID-19. If you accidentally gave COVID-19 to a family member, you can see how that would start an outbreak in a way that SARS is much more containable. This isn't a problem with anyone. Country lab leaks happen everywhere. It's why people have been wary of things like gain of function research everywhere. Close to home in 2007, a leaky pipe connecting Britain's Institute for Animal Health and an animal vaccine manufacturer led to an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. The reason they had a leaky pipe was because the Institute for Animal Health and the vaccine manufacturer were arguing over who was responsible for paying to renovate the pipe. There can be quite mundane things which lead to quite serious outcomes. What's history on the side of here? Would you say that MERS came from nature, SARS came from nature? Why are we suddenly assuming that this one didn't? You're looking at what might be an incredibly rare evolutionary event, which by nature doesn't happen very often. History on both sides is like most things on both sides kind of deadlocked right now. I mean, you mentioned the two previous coronavirus epidemics. Marburg virus came from bats. Nipah virus also came from bats. Those are two other human-infective viruses that came from bats. I don't know. You're asking me to adjudicate what seems more likely, given the background, where I think that what you need to focus on is what would prove it either way because both are pretty unprecedented events because it's an unprecedented pandemic. The question on the side of the natural emergence is that you need to find this plausible evolutionary route. Like you mentioned the viruses that had previously backed back to animals, mostly bats. What you would need here is you would need those intermediaries. In evolutionary speak, you need a missing link. You need to find animals that had the SARS coronavirus that had very similar structures to the one we see. And then it no longer looks like a crazy rare event. The sort of backing product is going on right now. I mean, they're looking, but it could take forever. We don't have a very good library of SARS coronavirus. The best one was in the Wuhan Institute of Biology. It's not even that big. The other side is quite provable as well. I mean, that's the smoking gun on the lab league side, which is that you get a whistleblower. You get access to the documents. I think that's what you need to focus on is like what's provable because history can be very misleading when you're looking at incredibly rare events. Yeah. Let's finally talk about the implications then. So what if, I mean, I'm also sort of, I think it seems quite likely that we'll never know from what you're saying in terms of what we might need to know the truth. But say we do, say we confirm one way or the other that it was a lab leak or it was natural origins. And actually, let's focus on just the lab leak because that obviously has much greater implications. If it were a lab leak, what would that mean for, I mean, geopolitics on one level, but then also the scientific community on the other? Because obviously, there are lots of sort of dystopian novels or disaster movies where scientists have created something they can't control to horrible effect. And it's very rarely been confirmed that that's happened in reality. But if it is confirmed that this pandemic, which is the most traumatic two years in world history and quite a long time was created by some well-meaning scientists in a lab in Wuhan, that could have devastating effects for public faith in science, couldn't it? And presumably, then the regulators are going to clamp down really, really hard on certain kinds of potentially dangerous scientific endeavor. Yeah, definitely.   I mean, it would be awful. It would set off a whole new range of conflicts and who knows where it would go. I can more easily speak to the scientific sides. I mean, I would start with saying that I think that, you know, you said a regulatory crackdown on the sort of thing, I think that should happen anyway. You know, now that people are focused on it, I think the whole idea of like gain of function, you know, should be should be looked at really closely, possibly the idea of like international regulatory frameworks, I mean, the US banned gain of function during the Obama administration in 2014, and then brought it back in a very limited form. And, you know, I think that's that's what needs to be going forward, you know, heavily regulated, really cracked down on, because even if it's never proved that this happened, even if it's proved that loudly didn't happen and it was natural emergent, we've definitely shown that, that, you know, there are this stuff goes on in poorly regulated environments. So there's that. I mean, I think you just see it an enormous backlash against science and the scientific community in general, starting with the fact that they sort of poo-pooed this from the beginning. And so, you know, if it turns out that the hashtag lab leak is real, I mean, I think you'll definitely see an intensification amongst people who already don't cross science. I think you see a huge backlash even amongst people who do, I think you'll see sort of scientific research, scientific credibility in general really take a hit. Although, I mean, I do think that though there's sort of, there's a bit of self-correcting going on right now, which is where you see a lot of scientists, a lot of very prestigious scientists, sort of positioning themselves in a sort of middle ground, whether they're very receptive to the idea that this might come from a lab, but I think that sort of take the lead and sort of show that if this is indeed the case, sort of science is capable of sort of punishing the wrongdoers and sort of performing itself. Let's go on to our next story, which is also COVID-related. And actually, in the here and now, probably more significant because it's about saving lives in the here and now. Before we do that, if you're enjoying the show, do like the video. It helps us on the algorithm. Now, the rise of the B16172 variant of coronavirus in Britain risk throwing, of course, our schedule for abandoning lockdown restrictions or the final social distancing restrictions, which are in place. However, in the success of our vaccination drive, even if the variant continues to spread, that shouldn't risk another wave of deaths, anything like what we saw in January and February. And the reason because most vulnerable people have been vaccinated, nearly all vulnerable people have been vaccinated. Yet while the vaccine is mostly able to keep up with the new variant in Britain, that's not the case in much of the rest of the world. And due to the heightened transmissibility of this new variant, one of the UK's leading epidemiologists has warned that the majority of COVID deaths on a global scale could take place after there are enough vaccines to protect all of those most at risk. So in short, the maldistribution of vaccines could lead to millions more deaths, more deaths than we had before a vaccine was available. Now, the epidemiologist who made this warning is Adam Kaczarski. He is an associate professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and also sits on the SPI-M modeling subgroup of SAGE, someone who really does know his stuff. However, this is probably an issue where you don't need to be an expert to see how dangerous the current situation is in the world right now. First of all, we know the Indian variant or the B16172 variant is much more transmissible than Kent. You remember the effect that the Kent variant had on us. That case is absolutely rocketed. This is worse than that. Two, most places in the world have really, really low rates of vaccination. Now, this map shows what proportion of each country has received at least one dose of the vaccine. Now, the darkest blue means that over 60% of the population received one dose at the moment. That only includes Israel, Malta, Bhutan, and some very small island nations. The royal blue color, you can see there's more countries which are colored in that. That means between 50% and 60% have had at least one vaccine. That includes the UK, the US, Canada, and Chile. Then the lightest blue, so I'm going through some of the intermediary ones, but you can see that the lightest blue is between 10 and 20. So that's not very many people at all, really. If you've got a highly, highly transmissible strain, then just having 10 to 20% of the population having one dose, you're still in a real danger zone. That includes India, Colombia, Mexico, and Russia. Then most depressingly, you can see the orange color, which is less than 5%, and the red color, which is less than 1% of people having had one vaccine. That includes nearly all of Africa and most of the Middle East and then also some parts of Southeast Asia. You can see if you've got this highly, highly transmissible variant and you've got the majority of the world essentially living in countries where you've got less than 10% of the population vaccinated, we could see something, I mean, essentially worse than what we've already had and what we've already had was horrific. That's where that warning is coming from. Now, the answer here, of course, is that we need to produce more vaccines. We need to be distributing those vaccines better so that people in Africa, for example, aren't waiting another two years to get vaccinated because it's going to be quite difficult to keep out the B16172 variant until then. On that issue, so this quote was from an article by Zaynep Tufeki in The New York Times, very, very clever analyst. Actually, I do recommend reading her stuff. See, COVID's deadliest phase may be here soon. So on how we should respond to this, she writes, waving vaccine patents is fine, but unless it's tied to a process that actually increases the supply of vaccines, it's a little bit more than expressing thoughts and prayers after a tragedy. Officials from all nations that produce vaccines need to gather for an emergency meeting immediately to decide how to commandeer whatever excess capacity they have to produce more for whatever means necessary. And that piece ends by saying, like all pandemics, this one will end either with millions, maybe billions, being infected or being vaccinated. This time, world leaders have a choice, but little time to make that choice before it is made for them. So a bit of a call to action there. We're even going to get herd immunity via having a vaccine, which is distributed fairly to almost everyone. Or we're going to get herd immunity by millions or billions more people catching this virus and millions more people in that case inevitably dying. Steven, you've written a lot on vaccine production over the last few months. You've spoken about it on this show before. What are your, I suppose, top takeaway points from how we do avoid this catastrophe waiting to happen? Right. So I mean, something that she wrote about in that piece, which is super, super good. And I also really recommend saying up as an analyst was that there needs to be a high level meeting amongst states, amongst, as they say, stakeholders about how to produce more vaccines. I mean, I think something that might absolutely shock people and absolutely shocked me when I learned about it is that to my knowledge still, actually, but at least as of a month ago, there have been no high level interstate meetings, whether through the WHO, whether through the G20, whatever international channels you want about how to make more vaccines. It's been done entirely at the national level. And so she's totally right.  Pandemic response in general at the international level has been a huge failure, but that can't continue as we move into this sort of, as you said, new and still incredibly dangerous phase. And how much of it is about patents and how much of it is about something else? So it's sort of tricky to say. I mean, there's, as you know, I've been on here, you've talked to me about it, advocating for dropping patent protections. There have been lots of people getting behind dropping patent protections. Even even old Joe Biden is at least partially supporting waving patents. But, well, some people will argue against this and say that it doesn't matter to share patents. You need to need to know how it's just a distraction. I think we've always seen patents as the first step. You need to make sure that some companies not going to sue you. And then the next step is to actually, in an environment where you're not worried about some pharmaceutical company coming after you, and ideally in an environment where states and international organizations actually get involved on the production side. You know, then you sort of create a global response and move forward.  But it's always been seen as just a first step in this process. And finally, I mean, this warning from Zaynep Tufeki and Adam Kacharski, it's nothing new, right? This is not a new discovery. And it does feel like at times, you know, people have been raising this warning for a very long time now. And it feels like kind of nothing's changed. I mean, from your perspective, what would be the worst case scenario here and what would be the best case scenario? Is there a sequence of events whereby the world suddenly wakes up, takes this seriously, and we get vaccines distributed everywhere? What would that look like? And what's the worst case scenario? What are those decision points going to be? Yeah.  The worst case scenario is, I mean, you've read the same analyses I have. The worst case scenario is that we basically rely on the vaccine producers we already have. It doesn't get expanded very much. The developing world gets it after we're done. And then the ideas are that anywhere from 2023 to 2024 is when we get reasonable amounts of vaccination. And that's only, in most analyses, about 60%, which we now know is not necessarily fully protective. And I don't like to speculate on how the virus is going to evolve. I do hate doom saying, but the longer you wait, the more infections there are, the more likely you start to see more significance. I hate saying immune escape because there's no snapping and it just suddenly escapes. But you'll see a decline in efficiency of the vaccines for sure. The best case scenario, it looks like we have an international response that joins up production across the world. You have, in my view, the best way to do it would be basically a public option for vaccine production. You have coordination of supply chains, of knowledge sharing between countries.  What you are actually seeing now is a little bit of movement. I mean, you're seeing some proposals in the United States that look quite good, a limited version of good, where people are basically like public citizens, got a very good analysis of this, but that the US itself could produce probably enough vaccine for the world for under, what is it, I think $30 or $50 billion. And so this is still national level, but at least people are looking at sort of a non-marketized production option. And what I'd really like to see is that jump beyond national borders and into an international response. Super, super interesting, obviously an incredibly important question.  Stephen, thank you so much for talking to us about both of those issues tonight. I'm sure both of them clearly we're going to be talking about for a long time from now. Both, I suppose, worrying in their different ways as well. Obviously, it's obvious how it's incredibly worrying, the maldistribution of vaccines and the future of this pandemic. Also, I think the lab leak, if it turns out to be true, we're going to have to really jump into action to stop this being a weapon in the new Cold War and point out how this is actually a problem for the scientific community and regulation internationally and not the problem with one nation. So lots to discuss. But in any case, thank you so much for joining us on this sunny bank holiday. No problem. Thank you for having me. And thank you for watching as ever. Tomorrow night from 7pm here on Navarra Media YouTube, Aaron Bostani will be speaking with Tom Fowler all about the spy cops inquiry. You'll be redirected to the page for that show when this stream ends. So stay tuned and then you can set a reminder for now. You've been watching Titski Sauer on Navarra Media. Good night.


to Virtual Abilities 2019 Mental Health Symposium. My name is Katzai Tenen. I'm 71, semi-retired, and 11 years old in SL as of yesterday. In SL, I can dance, create, work, and play in ways I can't do in real life. Am I addicted? I don't think so. But I'll listen to our next presenter, Dr. Tony Van Roo, Roy, and find out. Dr. Van Roy's talk is titled Gaming, Problem Gaming, and Gaming Addiction in the Netherlands, an introduction. Dr. Van Roy is project leader for gaming, gambling, and media literacy in the Trimbos Institute, the Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction in Utrecht. His research interests are in development of serious games, game-based learning, and mental illness assessment. In this presentation, Dr. Van Roy will introduce concepts that can help us understand gaming addiction more easily. He promotes the responsible and healthy use of video games. He will use the situation in the Netherlands as an example to explore concepts of healthy and unhealthy gaming. I remind you to turn off your mics and refrain from questions or comments until the end of the presentation. So as time is short, please join me in welcoming Dr. Van Roy to the podium. Thank you. All right. Let's see if I can figure this out. Yeah, there we go. So I'm assuming I can be understood with the voice, otherwise just insert some questions and I can see if I can fix it, but I'm sure it's fine. So my name is Tony and I've been working on gaming addiction, the subject of gaming addiction for I guess the majority of my career now, starting with survey research among Dutch high school students and ending up now in a position where we do prevention efforts in the Netherlands for gaming problems. I'll not exactly be following my teleprompter slides, but they should be addressing the core of my message. So that said, it's pretty obvious to people and to me as well that there are a lot of concerns about how much screen time is healthy. And this is actually, you see this quite easily if you go into Google and you actually go into the function that adds text to your questions. And there you can see that people are very much concerned about how much screen time is enough, how much gaming time is enough. And even if you look for the word addiction, then it supplements gaming, internet, mobile phone use quite often in addition to what you would expect, like for example alcohol or heroin. So there's definitely something going on in the public perception. There's also something going on in my personal experience with the subject because it's not exactly a secret that I've always been a gamer from a young age. But it was only in 2005 with the introduction of World of Warcraft that I actually started meeting people in games more extensively. And I often use this example of a guy I knew in Warcraft called Stealth. He was very successful in the game and he had a large amount of equipment. He was running his own guild. He was basically achieving a lot in the game. It was actually quite surprising to me that one day he suddenly decided to quit the game. He wrote a dramatic post on the forum, he announced he would quit the game. That would be the end of it because as a perfectionistic person, he focused too much on World of Warcraft and it basically to the detriment of his study performance. So he decided to quit. He tried to anyway because he was back a week later and the last time I checked a few years later he was still playing extensively. So there was one of the people I met in Warcraft that really made me think about what's going on with some people and excessive play. Which is what got me started in my PhD research. Alright so throughout this fairly brief presentation I will introduce two concepts that I like to use to understand gaming problems. They are basically the fish trap, a very Dutch device to collect fish. And it is a device where the further the fish swims into the trap, the harder it is to get out again because there's a very small entrance and you can only basically... So it's hard to swim back but it's easy to swim forward because the hole to the next area is relatively speaking a lot. Secondly I like to use the onion as an example because I think in understanding gaming addiction it's really helpful to go through a number of layers of understanding. And the first one for me is basically media. We're all exposed to media portrayals of games and very often they're heavily polarized. So it's either games are going to save the world by enabling people to become healthy or solving certain problems or vice versa. There's a large debate about aggression and very often about addiction. So it's good to understand that by definition the media is portraying fairly polarized images of gaming, specifically gaming addiction as well. And they tend to blame a single actor. So it's either the companies that are creating products that are abusive or it's the players who should basically have more self-control or it is the parents who are basically responsible for not paying enough attention to their child and using the game as a digital nanny for all sorts. So very often it's reduced to an oversimplified situation where in reality I think they're all interacting and they're all quite relevant. Now if we look cross-cultureally, there's a fairly big difference between countries. And the specific best example of that is the Asian countries. And in this case, we see an image from China where children are basically after gaming too much are reeducated in military style reeducation camps. Now I'm fairly sure that these days they're less prevalent than they used to be. But there's been some controversy about the treatment of people in these camps, including forced medication and forced electroshocks. So the concept of gaming addiction in the hands of certain governments can really have detrimental consequences for persons for sure. It's not something to be taken lightly, especially at a worldwide level. So the second layer of I guess disclosure is can you trust me up to a point I guess. So I work at the Trimbos Institute, which is a government-sponsored institute, which does basically health promotion. We tend to work on reducing tobacco use in society, reducing alcohol use. And my specific thing is not necessarily to reduce game use, but definitely to understand problematic gaming better and gambling as well. See that in the next slide is some brief screenshots of some of the type of projects we do. They're very often they're Dutch language, so they won't be too helpful, but I do have some English texts as well, if you're interested. Feel free to contact me. Basically, these efforts focus in two areas, both implementation and information for the general public, so prevention projects, and secondly, more fundamental research. And we have done both and I am currently doing both. So for example, I might be right now developing a new screening instrument for assessing gaming problems. Second disclosure, I'm also a gamer, not a secret at this point. Here I am in the middle, very proud of this. This we defeated Nevarian, a boss in Blackwing Blair in World of Warcraft. This is the group I was playing with. I think at this point it was 40 people. I often show this to the general audiences. To basically address the question that people are achieving real things in these games. Because if people are not informed about games, they tend to think that no accomplishments are going on, it's just a waste of time, it happens. Those thoughts are somewhat prevalent. I think that we defeated this dragon was a real performance. It was definitely difficult and there was a large release after we defeated it. Everybody was happy and as often happens, try to defeat the dragon.  So many things are going on. It's complicated. But as we're all in second life, I guess that's already clear to some of you. So moving on to the actual content and the Dutch situation. I like to employ for thinking about these subjects, basically the fish strap model and I'll show a picture of it. The first, I guess not even pictured here, is the first level of technology used, which is basically, it's beneficial.  And it's, I guess objectively demonstrable as well, that it's beneficial. You get richer, you get additional social contacts, you do something, it takes your mind of things, it's taxing. It's basically play as part of your healthy human functioning. However, these days, some people have some mild feelings of discontent about their, either their Facebook use or their gaming. You might ask them, are you addicted to mobile phones? Are you addicted to Facebook? Are you addicted to your games? And they might say yes. Actually, a fairly large percentage of people in research say yes. Might be up to 20 or 30% even, even if you ask them about social media use. And I would label that, obviously these people are not patients, but I would label that as, yeah, what I say here, mild feelings of discontent, self-reported. There's something going on. This is another example of this line of reasoning. This is Belgian research where we see fairly high percentages here in the, ooh, it's like 20% of people that self-report, that they have trouble getting away from Facebook. They might feel they should be doing less, but they're unable to do it. That's fairly high percentages of people that self-report this. So interesting, but from my perspective, the first step in understanding this, and it might also be an indication of something that's not even addiction, but just of other issues with the social media and how they treat people. Now, the second one, which is more directly related to excessive use and problems, it is what I would say is I define as problematic internet or gaming behavior. Or if you will, problematic social media or problematic mobile phone. It doesn't really matter too much, although we see it most often for gaming. And this includes basically all of the research that's out there. It involves survey research where people, researchers often go into schools, go into universities or go into society. And they ask people about their gaming behavior and they say, they might say, do you have problems controlling yourself? Have you tried to reduce your use and have been unsuccessful in it? Does video gaming create problems with your homework or with your health? And very often in survey research, a significant proportion of people say yes to this, even if you add up all the questions. And generally arrive at like, between 1 and 5% of people will be saying, will be indicating a number of problems in relationship to their gaming or internet. In the media portrayal of this, this very often this is referred to as addiction. So you might have a newspaper report in the Netherlands that says, 10% of Dutch adolescents are addicted to games. While I personally will see that in a bit, I personally prefer to reserve the term addiction or disorder for people that are seeing a therapist and are not in school anymore, filling out surveys. This is an example of an instrument that we might use.  And then very much like what the researchers do with gambling, there are some associated phenomena. For example, preoccupation with the behavior, people go gaming to modify their own moods, so they might try to escape a bad mood instead of solving the underlying problems. And if they quit, they might experience at least psychological withdrawal phenomena. Now, some actual empirical data from the Netherlands recently. I summarized the HBASC, which is a fairly big study on high school age students. And here it's unfortunately the text in the slide is somewhat touch, but in the bottom it shows the percentage of real players that are for scoring high on risky or problematic gaming comes out among the boys to 7% of the players. If we look at the red area, which is the group within the group, which is experiencing both a mental problem and a physical problem. So that might be obesity or being too light or not brushing their teeth enough or not skipping breakfast a bunch of times. So that would be the physical things. Mental would be slightly more rigorous indicators of, for example, depression or not feeling so well using the sdq scale. So we see that in this group, although in absolute terms, it's a small group. Within this group, they score five times more likely to have these issues. So this is definitely a problematic group. They are gaming too much and they score high on these issues. And then you get a chicken or eggs question, of course, because if you're not feeling so well and it's very tempting to sit at home and have to fill your time with something. So you might end up games or watching Netflix. But unfortunate thing with games is that I guess also the fortunate thing is that they relieve loneliness. They make you feel like you accomplish something, which is great.  So very interesting, but not necessarily patients related per se.  So this is where I reserve the last category in thinking and that would be the last part of the fish trap as well. People that are a disordered or have a gaming addiction. This is not a large group. They do exist and very often they have comorbid issues. It's actually fairly rare to find a gamer that is just gaming and has to see a clinician. Very often there's depression going on or people in the autism spectrum and are not coping one with life in other ways. So there's problems in the family. It's very rarely an isolated issue, although it does happen. If you look at the numbers in the Netherlands, unfortunately we only have official measurement up to 2015. Nationally speaking it's a small issue, like less of a percent within the addiction care treatment numbers for addiction. So alcohol at the national level for example is a much bigger problem. However, more recently the measurements on the national level have stopped but with the reports from the Dutch youth clinics we hear that gaming problems are now in the youth clinics the second biggest problem in some places after cannabis. So increasingly young people are coming into the clinics with their parents with severe problems in school in relation to the gaming behavior and in some cases in a significant number of cases I suspect even there's it's just panic among the parents about the gaming behavior because you know they'd rather that child was playing soccer than trying to become a professional in fortnight but in some cases there's actually something going on and there's a large the therapists feel they have a large need for a better grip on this problem. Now looking at the diagnostic criteria we have in 2013 the DSM5 manual introduced a tentative preliminary category for gaming disorder which is I guess grouped in some ways but I'm mainly negative about it because it's in practice people are only using the nine criteria copied based from the nine criteria that DSM mentioned and they also made up a cutoff score for the skill which is basically five out of nine or higher you score positive on gaming disorder but the unfortunate thing is is that there's only really two negative items in this list so and many of them sorry about the Dutch but many of them are actually did they deal with preoccupation for example that's the first you're thinking about games a lot from my perspective that's not an ideal question secondly there's a number of debatable criteria in there so for example withdrawal symptoms non-physical that makes a lot of sense with substances with gaming that's so I guess the third one is even more debatable like for example tolerance. Tolerance makes a lot of sense if you're drinking because your body builds up a resistance but in practice people have started drafting survey instruments that cover gaming and say you need to buy better computers all the time to feel equally equally good about your gaming and I don't think that paints a very realistic picture of how people participate in World of Warcraft they tend to buy a new computer when their old one burns out I think so there's some unfortunate choices in there but it was however I guess a starting point and I guess the main the main risk with the DSM-5 approach is that people they go blind to the things that are not in there so they might end up ignoring the nuances that really make gaming different from for example a substance use problem or even from a gambling problem and we now have a new effort from the World Health Organization which also announced that they're drafting a gaming disorder which was actually some substantial debate about it but they seem to be pushing forward with it. The fortunate thing is that it really places unlike the DSM-5 in its implementation anyways it really places functional impairment centrally so the behavior pattern of gaming has to be of sufficient severity to result in significant personal impairment in personal family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning that's great because that will really help us in dealing with people that might be prejudgmental about gaming or have a limited understanding you can say well it's not been a year and the functional impairment might not be big enough I guess it would have been nice if they made an exception for example for professional esports but it's a starting point but again like with the DSM-5 you have to ask if if we might be missing some central aspects of gaming by reducing the gaming disorder to just this very central and obviously important criteria. If we look at the history of for example gambling disorder we see actually a similar pattern where people historically gambling in the DSM-3 was phrased as a loss of control over gambling leading to significant problems pretty much exactly what we have now for gaming disorder but later on we added a criteria like chasing your losses which is very gambling specific you try to win back your money.  Like I said there was substantial debate about this disorder I participated in this debate as well but I'm personally at the point now where I say we have to deal with it. I guess it's helpful in the sense that we now can address we have a clear universal label worldwide to deal with the patients better but it's definitely good to be critical. Now some practical notes we see actually unfortunately mainly due to the debate I guess but it might also be a historical trend that always happens industry is not very responsive in public with this issue and what we see mainly is that some initial attempts from in this case telecom providers and Dutch game addiction game industry lobby organizations are shifting attention to the role of parents so this is I guess helpful because it takes away the misunderstandings about gaming somewhat and our first advice is also from our organization is also for parents to play along with their children so they know what's going on and they can better coach and help their children in the game but for now industry is limiting its role to that so this is unfortunate I think because they are in possession of basically all the data and all the opportunities for meaningful intervention for example if a person is showing an excessive behavioral pattern of play this would be an excellent opportunity to provide some targeted reach out or provide channels to healthcare or basically even ask if everything is all right with the person but these types of more proactive interventions are not happening in this industry yet and even in the public debate there's some flat out denial that even something is going on which is unfortunate because in some cases there definitely is a match between the product and a certain personality type and then it clicks and people go out of control the product does play a role in that I guess a simple way to understand that would be extreme achievement types in games World of Warcraft for example went through a phase where you could only become a general by basically doing 24-hour shifts behind your keyboard and that really promoted excessive behavior so once they removed that people started playing less in that type of battle mode I think so they do they do have an influence and they can have a positive impact I think it's unfortunate they unfortunate that the debate is polarized in this way what we are personally doing now is like I said we have a website gameinfo.nl in this case we provide geomaterials about acceptance of gaming but also tips from pro gamers parents themselves to deal with gaming in a family setting we have a telephone line like I said we're also working on a better and new self-test that at least covers the new World Health Organization criteria and the DSM-5 criteria and we tend to operate with a stepped care approach where initially you try to promote a nuanced understanding of gaming there's many benefits but and I on the risks but if people do require professional help we also provide the opportunity to reach out to professional health care in the Netherlands so that's something we do and finally right now we're focusing on a healthy school and behavior program within which we're developing an e-learning module to help teachers recognize gaming problems in the classroom here in we have for example cases of students that might be sleepy in the classroom or they might be overly involved in gaming and we have some cases where the teacher is over-reacting but we also have some cases where something is actually going on in an effort to educate teachers about this issue and finally what we find very interesting is some teleprompter clicks here now sorry about that finally we're also working on early intervention programs like the Motiveer program which is an established program already but not scientifically validated in which a trained prevention worker goes into the school and if a student is experiencing problems for example with cannabis or in this case gaming they have four structured meetings using motivational interviewing to help the student change their behavior if they're open to change in our often-cased it's this tends to help really well so that's that's it I hope that's clear I'll be around for the panel and for questions anyway so I hope you enjoyed this thank you so I guess I see the first question from Moog Wheeler I'll be reading this because it's quite the question do you want me to read it or do you want to read it Tony um I can read it so you questioned you said that the high-addiction levels involve involved gaming rather than mobile phone use which you say this is because of the intensively immersive and comprehensive experience of the gaming environment oh it's dropping out chat box is disappearing oh it's a one-on-one question I guess no I'm lost where's the question uh there it is yeah um sorry guys that is the more you involve the whole body mind senses visual sounds social interaction adrenaline emotions physical action etc the worst the addiction the more complete the human experience the more gripping the addiction well thank you for that question I do have an opinion about that I would say generally speaking that games on mobile phones are designed to be played for a limited amount of time people tend to people tend to wear out on them after approximately four to five months and this is why every four to five months we have a new variation of garden scape or candy crush or those types of games they're just very fundamentally different than games in which you have more community building oriented activities and for example if you take world of warcraft first of all it's a role playing game so you tend to build something secondly there's a reputation mechanism so people respect what you do in the game and we only see basically we only started seeing more gaming addiction problems from the emergence of world of warcraft so right now any players with problems in the Netherlands anyway are are purporting those in relation to competitive play they decide they want to become esports persons and they legitimize using games for hours on ant in that way and eventually they figure out they don't have a chance but then they've already lost significant time and opportunities so your I think your hypothesis might make sense but from my perspective it has a lot more to do with the feelings of I guess competence relatedness and autonomy that people get in the game so it really fulfills a number of the number of their needs and it can create these types of games can create a sort of yeah like I said fish trap or a situation where you start over evaluating the worth of that online presence so does that make sense thank you I think so Joey Obama has a question for you he says how we define what is a game is changing a lot these days many would not consider themselves a player of games a few years ago but they now play casual games and are more accepting of games as part of their life and he wonders how this will affect humanity as a whole over time wow very interesting question I'll keep it pragmatic and maybe Nick Bowman who is far more schooled in these wide-ranging communication topics in relation to games can address that later on when he's on I would say that from my perspective there's just a bigger market for games right now so more demographics are being drawn into groups into gaming and we see this basically with Nintendo we was one of the primary examples for that and a brilliant one by Nintendo it's basically they started addressing exercise related crowds they started addressing elderly people very young people so there's really just simply a bigger market for the fortunate thing is that it tends to create more acceptance for games which is a good thing the unfortunate thing is that right now you see that the the biggest game companies tend to be acting a little bit opportunistically so for example we had a big scandal with the loot boxes last year where big companies are basically just they from my perspective they tend to just make make the money they can make as easily as they can which right now it is a gambling type opening of boxes in games and then they just figure out when what point people start complaining about it and then it's removed I think that's that's an unfortunate development in gaming which I don't really like so yeah it's not as fundamental as changing humanity we might in the end I guess in that sense virtual reality is one of the more interesting ones but I'm not really in a position to judge that but it might be for now just a niche area with that's definitely more or for fundamental game shift I think then right now gaming might be but that's just speculation and nick I think we're going to have to get to your question in the panel perhaps we can do that let's do a real quick answer for Katzai from Tony what about the problem with product makers that their profit motive is tied in with increasing commitment to the game and even perhaps addiction she's asking is there a need for regulation so the answer would be absolutely yes and it might be self-regulation so to the extent that I communicate with the gaming industry I tend to emphasize that I think it's really crucial that they start drafting some industry-wide ethical guidelines on what they do because well first of all like I said there's basically very big opportunities for guiding people towards care and nothing is happening so I understand it is a PR disaster if you get unilaterally connected with addiction but on the other hand if you seek people in your products with games with problems then I think you have some sort of responsibility to act on it from a social responsibility type of corporate activity if they don't then unfortunately the only alternative cause of action would be for governments to intercede and governments to regulate the industry which is unfortunate because that's pleasant but right now I can see it going in that direction because like I said the media debate is increasingly unfortunately polarized it's already happening by the way regulation so the the the Dutch gambling authority has moved to ban certain types of loot boxes from Dutch games or games that operate on the Dutch market and the Belgian gambling authority has done the same because loot boxes basically are in Belgian gambling and they fall under criminal law so they really have issues if they keep doing that. I will point out that Lee's comment is an important one it will be translated and kept in the transcript but unfortunately we're going to have to say thank you to Tony for this session because we need a little bit of time to set up for the panel and Tony's going to be on that panel so you'll hear more from him in just a little bit. So please thank our speaker and let's Tony we're going to get you off the stage because we're going to put chairs out there.


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