Yeah, first thing and thanks again so much to to Zdenka for putting this whole event together It's been quite amazing for me and for our team to meet so many in this community that are working on kind of these big issue topics in science Maybe a little bit of background to me first like as also more and more people just start coming back from lunch So my background is originally not in science, but in economics I studied at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and their first kind of got in touch with with Bitcoin and and Dogecoin interesting enough in early early 2013 And then kind of went through different industries, but just after high school I got really fascinated with the idea of pharmaceutical economics and how the pharmaceutical system that we've built up today and that has kind of developed over the past almost 80 years Works from a macroeconomic perspective and then kind of one of the guiding questions that I Started coming up for me again over the past year is like how can we use these really new interesting? Crypto economic designs to change industries on a massive scale So after graduating I worked in South Africa for a while worked on identity systems They started a company called linen labs. We're just today developing this protocol And also worked at a company called consensus, which is one of the largest software development companies in blockchain So my background is like I come from a tech really from a tech product development and economics background And it's been a really fascinating journey for me to dive really deeply into the scientific community And and learn about all of the different aspects of molecular biology chemical engineering Yeah, cool. So just some background So what is the what is the big overarching topic that we want to look at today or maybe a quick intro at the agenda? We're gonna look at what are the general problems that we find with intellectual property and how those problems manifest specifically in the pharmaceutical industry Then we're gonna look at how can we actually tackle these problems with token engineering? So there's been quite a bit of talk from earlier Earlier speakers today around this this overarching topic of token engineering I'm gonna give you guys a brief intro to to molecule Just from a high-level perspective. What are our goals? Then we're gonna intro a curation markets using curation markets one of these crypto economic designs for IP We're gonna look at a specific concept called token bonding curves So really diving a bit deeply in one new design model and how we can use that How we combine that with crypto kitties actually And then we look at curation markets and pharma and some of the core architecture and the challenges that we're that we're dealing with in that concept cool So a large part of pharmaceutical or like of general innovation is based on patents So this was the first patent that was ever issued You can't see it on there, but take a guess how old it is does anyone know when the first patent was ever issued? Yeah, okay, so I'm ready cool. So it was in the United States in 1790 this is when we kind of started with a legal system around patents this particular patents was issued for a Production mechanism for pot ash, which was used in infertilizes and it was actually underwritten by George Washington the president at the time But there's been extremely little innovation in how we actually distribute and deal with patents Um, and today there's a lot of problems with how patents work So patents are justified in the way that they allow people to recuperate investments into technology and science, but what how they how that recuperation that works is It creates a monopoly and that monopoly leads to we've seen this like it with leads to patent trolls It leads to price gouging on consumers. So these extremely high prices for for drugs That we that we see in certain economies and it also leads to none a non collaborative scientific ecosystem So because patents are now being developed in secret because everyone is trying to create a monopoly That doesn't actually create an environment that incentivizes open-source information sharing So that's kind of one of the root big problems that we see with with IP and this the system has hardly evolved Over over the years. It's just gotten more and more legally complex But the underlying economics of it hasn't changed a patent is a monopoly enforced by the violence of the state so to speak What are the big problems in pharma at the same time? So current IP development and research and development in big pharma companies is closed source and Intransparent one of the biggest problems with interinspirancy is the negative data problem Which probably many of you know from other scientific areas. There's no incentive to publish negative data Because if I'm a pharma company and I commission a study to be For someone to create about my drug if it's if this drug is positive or not If the if the outcome is negative, I have no incentive to publish that because why should I tell people I'm developing a bad drug To that then it's non collaborative by nature so each company has to work by themselves and then to create these monopolies and The monopolies essentially almost distributed between 10 major pharma companies across the globe which have collectively have the financial power To take drugs to market Pharma today and this has been set up with the past 10 years is in an innovation crisis It's extremely resource intensive the average cost to bring any drug to market today is two and a half billion dollars So if you if you go to a hospital and you get a drug there Describe by your doctor the cost of bringing that to market was two and a half billion on average It's very risky only about 1% of compounds that ever enter clinical studies actually make it to market It's even extremely high attrition rate. It's very slow. It takes 10 to 15 years to develop a drug and And on top of that now the return for R&D. So we're investing these billions of dollars and the return is 3.2 percent That that's from a statistic that came out last year and The reason for that is in my opinion is because it's driven by these research monopolies and it's it's non open source on on top of that Because the whole way the system works its revenue driven innovation so the drugs that pharmaceutical companies want to bring to market Need to make revenue And there was a very interesting article by Goldman Sachs that came out earlier this year Titled is curing patients is a sustainable business model. It's not Obviously for if you're operating a giant company, you need to you need to have consumers for the drugs that you create and historically we've seen We've seen that Some of the drugs that pharma companies bring to market actually lead to public health crises One of the best recent examples is the opioid crisis prescription opioids in the US which per annum kill 72,000 people in the United States And this is by drugs that are being brought to market and and sold by pharma And it's not it's like it's not that those drugs are inherently bad But if we could bring better drugs to market that would create less consumers that would be a bad thing for revenue And one example there to bring is like let's say we had a painkiller that people only had to take once every two weeks And it was non-addictive and it was very cheap to produce Yay, but that would be a terrible drug to bring to market And so if we look at the innovation cycle that that pharma creates like essentially those 10 companies can control What what comes to market collectively? And and I think that's a problem like I think that's a huge problem If you think that the underlying goal here is to like to make give healthier lives to people and prolong people's lives So what is molecule protocol a brief intro molecule is an open-source ecosystem to incentivize Decentralized research and development in compounds and drugs. So primary driver. How can we incentivize the decentralized development of these things? Secondly, it's a market-making platform for price discovery and funding of chemical IP to crowdsource the most valuable Compounds for humankind. I just you think back a little bit if you have an open-source system People should would allocate rationally to the drugs that make the most sense Which currently isn't the case because it's closed So at its core the goals of the protocol are to distribute cost risk and the ownership of intellectual property Because all that that drug development is essentially is creating data About whether a specific compound is effective or not in the human body or it can do a specific thing It's just data creation about IP that belongs to someone and then the regulator approves the drug So what we want to move to is incentivize collaboration openness and and competition in this market and much more economic efficiency And ultimately what we're trying to build is an ecosystem that everyone can actually benefit from so from the patients that take these drugs To the researchers that produce them To investors that invest in pharma companies to the pharma companies themselves because as we've just seen Like the numbers are pretty horrific if you think about how much innovation they produce with these giant construct constructs So it sounds too good to be true. It's like we create we want to create a win-win ecosystem But we actually think we've found a way to potentially make that possible and so We started by asking like by you applying mechanism design Which is an engineering practice that's widely used in across a bunch of different field But is now really popping up in the field of crypto economics And what you kind of do is you start by asking what are the principal stakeholders in an ecosystem like this? And from our side, it's it's pretty simple. It's IP creators So IP creators would be biotech companies a researcher that discovers a new compound or even a large-scale pharma company It's someone who creates a new thing Then it's data producers So people who produce data about whether a drug is effective or not or whether a chemical compound can achieve what it What it says what it might potentially do then you have the regulators and verifies Which need to make sure that the data submitted about the IP is is good and whether it like serves the purpose and is not harmful to people Then you have the consumers which which take drugs at the end of the day Which need cures for for all kinds of various diseases and then you have the investors which make the whole funding Situation possible that we've talked about so much today So the key engineering question for us were what what do these stakeholders want? What behavior should they have and how can we change that behavior using incentive design? How do we get stakeholders to behave differently Demy said it quite nicely yesterday is like blockchain has a superpower to like incentivize behavior And we do that using a principle called crypto economics more broadly But you can only engineer you can only create economics through engineering in this in this principle So one of the subsets here is curation markets Which is a new crypto economic principle primitive that's kind of come up over the last two years It's still fairly new. There's a lot of experimentation happening the backgrounds of curation markets actually for trading It was pioneered by someone called Simon de la Ruvia to trade memes. So funny pictures on the internet And how do we how do we cure it the most the funniest pictures? And actually have people investing in those pictures, but the background is now Why don't we cure it the best the best valuable compounds? I mean have people invest in those compounds So this is one of the building blocks and something important to know. These are still experiments and not blueprints for for design So just briefly what is what is the concept of token engineering? So token engineering is a combination of systems and mechanism design plus software engineering patterns It's the rigorous design analysis and verification of systems like an industry And then assisted by tools that reconcile theory with practice It's also a responsibility So engineering as an engineer who has to build a bridge He an engineer that builds a bridge is ethically responsible for building a good bridge that doesn't collapse We unfortunately saw some of that recently. I think in Italy But so it's it's you need to be ethically conscious when building and engineering these systems and something important It's not token economics So token economics is like how might might these tokens behave and maybe make investors money token engineering is about How do we actually build the system that that can allow these new interactions? Cool, what a curation markets curation markets are so this is a quote from sam did it with it They would use information asymmetry in the market through the usage of novels skin in the game signals generated through the use of tokenized Crypto economic incentive games, okay long phrase, but it's basically just saying put your money where your mouth is And and have the market kind of curate information About what might be valuable and what's what's less valuable? We see something like this in the stock market today people putting in making investments But we there's much more in much more efficient ways to design these systems So basically you put your money where your mouth is you stake value or attention It could even be reputation into markets. They will believe will be more valuable And the market's currency now becomes a proxy for attention. That means the more stake is allocated in something the more We can see collectively that people are paying attention to it in the in the context of a compound this would literally imagine you had Tenth of thousands of investable compounds and now we can actually see as soon as market activity starts happening In any of them and early rewarders are adopted for for for early. Yeah for getting an early This is done using Most easily done using something called a token bonding contract It's a fairly simple concept once you rep you had about it It's a smart contract that can be deployed in various blockchains most commonly on a theorem It's a smart contract that accepts collateral so dollars or other digital assets in exchange for tokens of its denomination So dollar goes in token comes out token goes in dollar comes out and and that is essentially that relationship is governed by by a curve That's one example of what occurs could look like you have the price and the supply It's a simple supply curve So you have to imagine as more people start buying in early into the asset they are proportionately rewarded for adopting the asset early But what this now essentially is it's an economic. It's an automatic. It's an automated market mechanism Where we can trade attention in a specific asset In this example, this is a quadratic curve Essentially how you how you would code this contract is Totally up to the creator, but obviously you need to code it in a way that would make Would make economic sense Something that's really important. This is not an issuing or an ICO because No one gets the money in the contract the contract basically people allocate collateral in what they think makes sense And the contract holds that collateral and issues them tokens back and they can sell back and forth to the contract at any time Yeah, if you're interested in these concepts more broadly, I think they have a they could have a host of applications in this ecosystem Some of the best work as I said is from Simon to La Ruvia, but if you Google token bonding curve, there's a host of host of good articles on right now Okay, so then a second really interesting concept that has popped up in the in the crypto space Are these cute fairy creatures?  Okay, okay, so actually most of the audience great So crypto kitties are essentially just our digital cats They're created using a system called non-fungible tokens non-fungible token basically just means you can't divide it It's like a singular entity and now What it is on the other side you so you have this token and you attach it to a link to IPFS Which is then the picture of the cat and that's the whole magic But people got super excited about this it actually to the point where the whole ethereum blockchain slowed down Significantly and no one else could use it because everyone was trading these these cats It was a hype, but I think there's a much deeper thing here Which is namely like why don't we attach patents to these things? So IP is usually based on patents and it's proprietary data timestamp a timestamp claim We can do that pretty easily so we can do we take the information the data in a pattern and we attach it to an NFT But what we then and like so instead of having a crypto kitty You could have a fusion reactor design attached or or a molecule and what we then do we combine these two principles So this is where token engineering gets fun. We now say this this NFT is owned by this token bonding curve And what now means now we can actually trade shares using this market mechanism in a crypto kitty or in a patent for a molecule or a fusion reactor I'm sure there's many other use cases to think of and we can trade attention in Like in kind of this combination that we've made And I want to get to this first so in our context if you think about this now it's like you if with a digital cat You own the digital cat But now if you give the ownership of the cat or or the patent away to a smart contract you don't own it anymore and But now no one owns it and and so this was something for me to wrap my head around and Trent McConaughey Was based in Berlin in front of the ocean protocol It's done a lot of thinking about this It's like as it's starting to own themselves if no one owns the compound anymore because we put it in this market And now people trade shares in that compound if they kind of start owning themselves and It's a conceptual thing, but yeah, they essentially can own themselves and so what does this enable for for Scientists more broadly or like how can you use this as a funding mechanism because I know funding is a is a big topic in This community So now using these token bonding curves we can have a price discovery and market making mechanism We can have a liquidity mechanism. So whoever creates the curve can allocate himself Can allocate himself a small share of the initial market and now once there's attention in whatever research or whatever Combine for example, he's developing that provides a way to get liquidity because that person can now send back tokens to the contract to get Out liquidity So funding can be obtained back by selling tokens to the market and it's a model that actually still works with traditional equity financing So now instead of saying I own I own this whole patent in a monopoly You can say I own 30% of this market that is gaining more and more attention Yeah, so this enables a whole this could enable a whole bunch of things named But specifically offloading IP and getting attention for IP and getting liquidity for that IP And no one can own IP fully anymore or or capitalize on it What it also does and this is what I find really interesting it incentivizes open source data publishing Because if I know let's say I'm a researcher and I can purchase shares in a compound Or maybe even in a research that I'm interested in I can buy myself into this market And now if I create positive data about it or even negative data that will influence the market So now I have a way to get involved in the research about projects and and I'm incentivized to publish publish data about it Yeah, sorry we had that and so how How is this applicable with innovation in generally or with drug development like IP and ideas generally go through this long like Innovation cycle and the innovation cycle if you put that over drug development You have the discovery stage where you have potentially thousands of different compounds And then you have pre-clinical phase one phase two phase three and then the approval of a drug That exact process is is essentially just an innovation process of creating a funnel and narrowing down things that that have the biggest potential and How this is currently done is is centralized within companies Obviously, it's going to cost a lot of money to do that But if you curate that information from the crowd and if you open source that information we think that could lead to Yeah to to complete new ecosystem and industry Specifically in the in the in the chemical industry People have asked us like isn't this more broadly applicable. I think it is so I think it's a very interesting concept But and like yeah, please please go on and explore. We need more people experimenting with these ideas So but one big question is how do we actually map innovation? And there's something called it's we so we are looking at implementing this using sigmoid curves Which is an S-shaped curve and it's best suited for markets that stabilize after a certain growth point And so let's let's just assume and this is more like like of an experiment Let's assume we mapped we mapped open innovation and pharma using a sigmoid curve like this And what you would have is basically you would have people buying in selling in and out of the market all along the curve contributing capital and And enabling people to get funding We kind of just discussed this before like what does it mean for the IP creator? So an IP creator has Conset himself an initial creator stake in a market And at a later point once people start staking attention and value into it He can sell a part of a stake basically diluting himself further to get funding out of the market And So what is the how are we applying this? I just want to walk you through like a very simplified user flow Of like how would this actually all be possible in the real world because it can seem it can seem a little daunting So what you do is you have a chemical patent as a researcher and you move that patent into a structure called a patent investment trust So now you already say I don't own it anymore The trust owns it and then you attach that patent data. So the markers structure of a compound to a non-fungible token The trust then creates illegal contract that says our assets are now being managed by this specific token And then you set the owner address of that non-fungible token to the bonding curve And then you would set a creator stake So the trust would now receive a certain amount of tokens because it it created the IP and it now relinquishes the ownership of it and then from that point onwards essentially you've created an open source open market for anyone to start buying in and out of that that asset and Let's say everything goes well Upon once FDA approval comes through the drug actually goes to market all of the token holders who purchased shares and attention in this market Can now be paid out by the trust for example in royalties So if a company then comes along and says we would now want to produce this They need to license it from the trust and pay royalties to the trust the trust can recompensate those token holders I think we had a great legal talk earlier. So this is This is a security token. We're not talking here about like like like essentially we're owning We're issuing ownership in intellectual property But we're creating a huge distribution of that Yeah, these are some of the core components So we have an access layer of how people can actually get into the protocol Then compounds need to be approved So you can't just put anything on there like you need like it needs to be verified that you are the actual owner of this IP That it's been placed into the trust So it's not like people can put all their IP on this tomorrow Like there needs to be a process in order for the whole system to work because otherwise you're dabbling in these legal gray areas And then you have an NFT factory that creates these NFTs then You create a compound market and ideally in the end the the tokens that get issued by the compound contract and moved into production contract Where you can then talk about license rights or that ultimately then also depends on how the actual drug Will go to market I'm a big fan of doge. I think any any crypto or blockchain Presentation always needs to have a doge but there is a very high level of complexity that we're dealing here and a lot of Math involved in setting up these Kurds in a correct way something that is really cool though is there's Probably 80 years of data about producing compounds about the valuation around patents around what these markets could Could grow to like and what the ultimate prices of the broad drugs will be so it's not like we're dabbling in a completely unknown field with Yeah with economics that are not known, but yeah, we still need a lot of economic modeling One thing I think that we really want to figure out. So this is a pure IP funding model What we haven't taken in this yet is like, how can we get grand systems in there? for Yeah, for like for for rare diseases, for example Or for drugs that are like for diseases that are not where there's no big industry incentive to treat these The great thing about this though with an open market structure like this like anyone can now come in if you if you know someone who Has a rare disease or you've been afflicted by someone in your family like you can actually get involved in these markets You can invest you can say I'm allocating capital to something that I think should be researched So it's a democratization of scientific development for pharma There is governance mechanisms to figure out like once the compound comes to market how like how do you actually structure governance around this? Around around managing the IP that needs to be a board and the trust so on and so forth So a lot of legal complexity is still to figure out But as I said, I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel We can actually it was something that we realized as we started building this out There's a lot of existing market structures that we can mirror that exist today So there's a there's a concept for example called called royalty funds So these are funds that purely invest in patents to get royalty payments from them And so we're getting into this more and more and realizing. Hey, there's all these existing structures But using using a token engineered systems. We can make these structures much more efficient Cool, so maybe just a quick click. I don't know how I'm doing on time. Am I So good. Okay, cool Where we are where we today so this protocol is being developed by by our development company Which is Lindemax AG based in Switzerland Ultimately the whole ecosystem and the open-source IP will be managed by a Non-profit foundation in Switzerland, which will oversee the project's long-term research Funding and and development. We're currently about a 10-person team working working on this. We have a team of five developers We're onboarding. We're onboarding different advisors We have a lot of the blockchain architecture build out and once we did that We basically realized wait wait wait before we go deeper into this area into the token engineering and incentive design We need to build a user interface and like actually figure out how people went to act with us if our assumptions are correct What these markets are gonna look like? So that's one really big focus for us now And then building a lot of partnerships with different academic institutions with the industry with with think tanks Yeah, to really start getting a lot of feedback on on the big vision that we're that we're creating Yeah, what do we need to make this a reality you? So I've met a lot of amazing scientists here from all different fields Working with academic institutions having experience in pharma Yeah, so we want it We really want to build up these relationships at this point We see this as an as an as an ecosystem like we're not developing We're developing this right now as a company But everything will ultimately be managed by by a foundation and there we need a lot of buy-in and support Because this is a system that will only work as with many blockchain systems If if all participants are incentivized and and feel feel that this really benefits them And this is one big challenge I think that we've had with like or that we've already seen talking with pharma companies that they're very quickly interested Who else are we talking to? And they they kind of want to Yeah, like it sends negative signals to the market if you affiliate yourself too strongly with with single players Yeah, we're looking for advisors team members collaborators anyone who wants to brainstorm with us around this people specifically with background in patent law pharma biotech obviously And we really want to build a community around open source IP in science Because there's a large field here that we can we can figure out So join our discussion on telegram slack connect with our team Yeah, and I'd love to maybe if some of you didn't understand some of the concepts yet That I explained earlier. I kind of went through maybe too quickly like I think we maybe still have time for for questions Yeah You would need the pattern first, but now it's the pattern itself becomes open source in a way Because you now have more you can have any stakeholder buying into the pattern and the creator of the pattern doesn't own it anymore so the creator says Have let let let society decide let the market decide what this is worth And that then incentivizes open source data creation about that pattern. Do you want to follow up? Okay Yeah, but you can buy you can buy fractional ownership in it, which is totally impossible today. Thank you So how do the token holders? Decide on whether to and under which conditions to license the patent Good question. So One way that we thought about doing this is that there is a board in the trust So remember that remember this this trust might be super inactive if someone if it's a market that never gets traded a lot Of patents never find a use in the world But if if there is a lot of market activity in that in that trust initially you would probably define With certain token holderships you might have a board seat in the trust Which means because you're a big stakeholder in this specific patent You would then have a board in the trust and ultimately if a drug comes to market or if a chemical finds a Finds an industry use that trust board because they're now they now have ownership over a lot of assets And it's a big thing they would then decide on how to license it Yeah, I wanted to ask about the bonding curve when once it's set is there a possibility to change it Yeah, also what happens? Does it just at the end does it continue or can you like shut it? Yeah So there's from an open perspective. There's different models to implement it So some some people have been experimenting with infinite bonding curves So technically if the if the interest in something is infinite, then it just gives keeps on forever Our model is using like a finite token supply So at some point the curve finishes and then it's issued all of its token And if then the the demand for that thing is higher those tokens will be traded on secondary market Yeah, so then the token becomes freely tradable What what the what the bonding curve basically acts as is an is an early-stage price discovery mechanism You could also say we're only having this bonding curve until We get approval for preclinical studies or until we get approval for clinical studies And then we evaluate the whole market size Because the information that emerges with that might completely change the outcome And so then you actually work in in like different different funding stages Where after an initial stage you might then say cool now we're redefining we're redefining what this market looked like Very nice Concept and ideas, but I would like to know have you made any kind of a research about how the industry is open to those ideas because That industry is known to be very conservative and very closed as just probably said also Did you make any to talk to people about would there be any openness about even to get started or absolute So from from researchers that so we talked to researchers that create IP and one big problem that they have is and within five years A department where researchers working or even an individual might have created five to ten to fifteen patents But he only has he only has time and funding to look at one of them and maybe one of them actually turns into a company So you have all this IP sitting around so that's one big use case for them So research is from a funding perspective because now they can say cool I'll put it on there because I know I'm not going to develop this I mean I don't have the time But now I have liquidity to get to get funding out of those markets and I can I can give those IP I can leave that IP to be developed by the market in whoever finds value in it and your second question was from a from a farmer perspective farmer as a whole knows that it has a deep innovation problem and Those that those problems are like are structural. I think macroeconomic problems So the response that we've had is Is positive? I think it's for them. It takes a lot of What it takes a lot of talking to understand how how structurally? This may change their market and what we're trying to do But overall the response has been very positive specifically from research that is saying look if you can help us get funding through this mechanism and Allow us to offload our IP the same for biotech companies biotech companies That have done an IPO often only often have multiple patents, but they only have time to take one drug to market So what we see in this as well is really a system to incentivize the unleashing of Our pharmaceutical IP that that isn't being developed the same one I think the same way for large pharmaceutical companies who only have so much funding to take individual compounds through markets But are sitting on a big pile of IP that they essentially might not be monetizing So what they can use the protocol for is to because they know how much has been invested And they have a good sense of what they value this IP to be and if you create an if you allow them to create an open-source market for it That actually create liquidity Creates liquidity for them and ultimately it's good for them because they can put those assets on their balance sheet Which is good for their stock price to like to turn it Yeah I really love this portrait. It's cool. I would like to see it for more things than just molecules, right? Just molecule in pair sentences. Yeah. Well, so one thing so our focus is really on chemical chemical IP because it's deterministic In terms of what it what chemicals do what chemical structures do But I think this is applicable in a lot more fields I've realized from building startups and from working at startups that like Pick your market and do that well And we we think this is a market that we can serve an enormous amount of amount of problems And I think each of those each market is unique Is unique as well, but I could see these same principles And that's why I try to hold it keep it up a general these same principles being used in a wide variety of applications potentially I mean we brainstormed about it like if you completely make it independent from patterns and IP as It's a traditional way and then more go more to me my markets that they like we have like this idea And you can I invest in this idea and this crazy new concept that I'm like doing research on yeah Yeah, maybe this would be a way of like having the Mima markets effects for research idea to incentivize early ideas very early on Yeah, and investing in it I think ultimately if if systems like this take off it could replace because the pattern in this whole system is Just a legal structure to make it work in the existing system Like I mean ultimately this could lead completely a way to why do we need patterns in the first place because we can time stamp it And we can create a verifiable market that is that is yeah that anyone can invest in and contribute to to an idea Yeah, great. Thanks a lot again. Cool representation. Thanks everyone


Blood-borne pathogens.  The most common types of blood-borne pathogens are bacteria, parasites, viruses, HIV, AIDS, hepatitis. So the question is, how do we avoid these things? If you guys are around any sort of biohazard material, always wear gloves. Make sure you don't touch it.  So make sure you're always wearing safety gear if you guys are trying to clean this stuff up. You need to go to a biohazardous waste facility and they can get rid of the waste for you in a proper way. So make sure you glue the one in your area and find the nearest one and make sure that they are reputable as well. If you have a team of people and you're in the remediation industry or you're just in something that you're around a lot of viruses or just biohazardous waste, make sure you give them the right gear. PPE, respirators, gloves, anything to protect themselves. You really don't want to get anybody sick. If you guys have any questions about biohazardous waste or you guys have any biohazards that you need to get removed, make sure you contact S.W.O.L.T. and D.Con the numbers below.


This is primarily for Bill Bernstein, but anyone can reply. Market swings over the last year or three seem to be atypically wild, but that wild appearance could just be recency bias or lack of historical perspective. How would you compare recent volatility to the noise from the past? I think Allen just basically answered that question. You can answer it one, two ways. You can use Allen's approach, which is a good approach, but I would point out that implied volatility of the S&P 500 reached about 85% during the teeth of the crisis. We didn't have the VIX back in 1929 and during the 1930s, but you can estimate what it would have been about the same thing. If you just take the 30-day trailing volatility of the Dow Jones Industrial Average back then, it correlates pretty well with that. I think we saw an extraordinary event. The question is, will we see that going forward again? Will we ever see that anytime soon? I give it a pretty good chance. The Europeans are doing their best to precipitate a global financial crisis. Keep plenty of cash. You'll be able to pick up stocks cheap at some point. This question is from Gathar Lee, who is here. Is low-cost broad market index investing here to stay? Do any of the panel members see any possible threats to its continued availability? Will it evolve, and if so, how? Allen? I think it's here to stay. Greed versus common sense. I love the data that Jack showed yesterday that 100% of the cash flow for the last several years was into index funds.  I think it's here to stay. I think what Jack Bogle, whether he invented it or is just the person that took the idea to the public and made it popular and allowed me to do what I'm doing now, having a lot of fun, it's here to stay. I'm sorry, Gilla, I forgot that that was directed to you. Oh, I'm sorry. No, that was my point. No, I mean, I agree with that completely. You know, the level of retail finance, the level of the advisory service in the brokerage industry, the people in the brokerage industry are just scared spitless. They're jumping ship. And the model that is picking up all the business is Rick's model, which is low-cost. Low-cost. Yeah, low-cost. I mean, we're trying to, you know, it's just hilarious watching these brokers trying to rebrand themselves as Rick Ferry. So I see it snowballing. I certainly don't see it ever slowing down. Yeah, I've seen a lot of people coming into the advisor business who used to be brokers and used to sell products and used to sell insurance and whatever, and then now doing low-cost indexing. And they're trying to do it where they're the tactical asset allocator. So they're buying all these beta-type products, which are basically, you know, spiders and VTI. And they're trying to do tactical asset allocation to add value, which they can't do, but that's a different story. It justifies the fee, I guess. But there's this huge shift. I don't know if you've been reading the papers about all the amount of money that's leaving American funds. Now, American funds has been the leader in the brokerage industry for decades on gathering assets all the way through the 1990s. But they're actively managed funds, even though they're really closeted tax funds. And you're seeing very large withdrawals from American funds. You're saying, where is this money going? Well, it's going into indexed products, you know, particularly ETS, because the advisors who were directing money into American funds and are taking their clients' money out of American funds and putting them in index funds like SPY, VTI, and so forth, predominantly low-cost stuff, but some of it's going into the alternative junk that's being created. So there's this huge shift. It's going that way. And Jack's slides show it all. I mean, indexing is continuing to grow, and it's not going to reverse how these products are creating these new fangled index funds that Jack talked about as active manager who's close to indexing, indexing looks a lot more like active management. But Alan was right. They're not gathering much assets. I mean, indexing itself, Vanguard-type indexing that we're all believing and that we all do, grows organically. It grows by word of mouth. We tell other people about this. They look at it, and they say, yes, I became a believer. They put their money. So it's a very grassroots effort. All that other stuff, like what Rob are not, and I like Rob, and don't get me wrong, and I think he's got a unique product with his wrapping indexes. But all that alternative stuff has to be sold. It's sold to you. You don't organically buy it. And that's the difference between the organic growth of Vanguard and low-cost indexing that we all do. And all this other stuff that's being hauled into indexing that's being thrown upon is it has to be sold to you. And quite frankly, when you look at the numbers, and Morningstar has all the numbers, Scott Burns took my index strategy box methodology that I created a few years ago and dropped all these different index products in there and looked at what's collecting assets and what isn't. And what is collecting assets are Vanguard total stock market, or S&P 500, Vanguard total bond. Those types of funds are gathering the assets. All this other stuff out here is competing, but it's not really gathering assets. And Christine, you've been... Well, yeah, Rick, I very much share the concern about advisors serving as technical asset allocators. I think consumers sort of looked at their advisors and said, okay, there's only so much I want to pay. And advisors looked at that and said, well, okay, we'll squeeze out the active fund management fee so I can take more for myself, and I'll use these very low-cost products to technically asset allocate. Our data certainly point to the ability of anyone, whether retail investors, advisors, or institutions, ability to make tactical decisions like that correctly over the long term. We point to their chances of doing so as being very low. A colleague of mine has been collecting data on funds that he has categorized, hand categorized as being tactical historically, and I was telling Rick about this yesterday, and I think it dovetails maybe with your data, or maybe not. He found that the tactical asset allocators had beaten the risk-adjusted profile of Vanguard Balanced Index, just 6% of those tactical asset allocators had done so, which to us really cast into question the ability of anyone to make those tactical calls correctly on an on-doy basis. And fully 25% of the tactical asset allocators had actually gone away. The funds had merged or been liquidated, which generally speaking means that they probably weren't very good. Well, since I've got both Christine and Alan on the same panel, I'll ask the both of you about using on-flows. I know that you deal about it. I'm not unsympathetic to that point of view. And Morningstar, for years, used to have an on-flow inventory strategy, and you gave up on it, and I don't know why you did. I think my colleague Russ Kinnell is still doing some version of the Unloved Fund study that some of you may have been familiar with. It probably does, right? Wasn't it called something like that? It's called Unloved Funds. So we would look at the fund categories, the three fund categories, that had been the biggest asset losers over the previous year. And the idea was that you would buy all three categories. I think they back-tested it and found that you'd have to buy all three to have any record of success with it. But what we found was that those Unloved Fund categories strongly outperformed the market and certainly outperformed the loved categories, those that had gotten big in-flows in the previous year. So I do think that there's something to watching fund flows, although sometimes they kind of make me scratch my head. Recently, for example, there have been great in-flows in emerging markets. And I'm not sure what's going on there. So sometimes it doesn't sync up, but I think in general, it's not a bad contrarian indicator. I think it tells you about the future of voting markets returns. I think that the Unloved Fund is what we all do when we do annual rebalancing. When we do annual rebalancing, we are rebalancing out of the loved funds and we're rebalancing into the Unloved stuff. So we're all doing it if you just do an annual naive rebalancing. I can't predict what the market does in the next year, but I can tell you if it goes down, people will be taking funds, taking their money out of equity funds, if it goes up, they'll be putting it in. I shared with Bill and I presented to Vanguard a couple of days ago some ideas and back-testing how changing the allocation between total stock, total international, and total bond would have done on the buy-and-hold annual 1231 rebalancing or going in the opposite direction of fund flows. Between buy-and-hold and the fund flows, there was about a 1.4% annualized difference and it did not work every year. During the end of 2002 to 2007, five years when stocks went up, U.S. stocks doubled, international stocks tripled, funds flowed in and it continued to go up until obviously it didn't in 2008. So fear and greed, the instincts that helped us survive really comes into play and damages us in the stock market. I think that the things that Alan and Rick and Christina talked about are all just different ways of skinning the same cat, which is when I see an asset class in index that's falling 30%, 50%, 70%, I start looking my chops.  That's also a good sign and they won't tell me the same thing. Okay, the next question is from Bob, 90245. Recent threads on the forum question why stocks, valuations really matter. If we have properly assessed our need, ability, and willingness to take stock market risk based on our age and circumstances in setting our equity fixed split, shouldn't we stay the course, not change the equity fixed split and not worry about valuations? I think if you're young, that's true. I think if you're getting close to retirement, you really want to look at what your number is. In other words, how much are you going to be shooting for? You're shooting for $2 million, that's what you're shooting for. When you catch a bull market, like you did in the early 90s, mid-1990s, old-year-olds, you catch a bull market, your expected rate of return on equity is 8% and it was 16% a year, so you look at things as, well, if I need to get a 6% compound to return on my money, I'm here at $1 million, I'm going to be adding a little bit of money, seven years from now, six years from now, I should be at $2 million, or eight years you're finding yourself at $1.9 million. Well, that's because the valuations of stocks went up. I think at that point, it's a legitimate thing to do, is to say I'm almost there, I can coast in to $2 million. I've made a lot of unexpected gains in my portfolio. So I'm going to lower my asset allocation and you're really lowering your asset allocation because valuations of securities went from 14 PE up to 20 PE, that's really why you're doing it. You didn't expect this unexpected jump in equities to occur which funded your retirement. So a reduction in risk at that point because you're almost there, makes sense. But if you're young, I think you just ride out the wave. Basically what you're saying is that when you won the game, you've stopped playing, which is just a different way of saying that, and I agree, the young person should be fairly, continue fairly constant aggressive allocation because they're constantly adding money, and that's almost a, there are very few things in finance that are sure to buy her, but if you save continuously a large amount of money between the time you're 20 and the time you're 15, it's something that you're going to buy a lot of stock, break cheaply and you're going to make out like a bandit. And why would you want to screw up that by valuing, by building a ran with your direct reallocation? I think that's what the references to is that should people switch and change their asset allocation on an ongoing basis when equities hit the P-E ratio, or the P-E10, it's a certain number. Some people claim that like a magical bell will ring and now it's time to go from 75% equities to 25%. And then another bell will ring when P-E10 hits another number and now you jump back in. All of those experts that can do that have demonstrated that they haven't been terribly effective in that, and they spent a lot more time, I think, than most of us and most of the people on the forum worrying about that from a behavior perspective. I think you're just setting yourself up for trouble if you're trying to do that, and I think it's much better to look at if you're reaching your target financially and things like that and not worried about and sort of some of the underlying factors. I don't like to analyze a lot of these factors like these guys do. I just try and keep sort of investing a little bit simple and recognize that for me, a lot of it is very behavioral, and if I start worrying about a lot of that kind of stuff, I'm probably going to get down the wrong path and it's best just to keep looking at the total market funds and not worry about so much about all the individual components I'm going to need. Yeah, the funny part is is even the people that espouse that constant change all have different numbers. Some say 8 is the magic point, some say 14, some say 16. It would be nice if a bell rang and it really worked, but the bottom line is that even the people who espouse that can't agree on what the magic number is. Well, the number keeps changing. I want to tell a quick story of your mind. It used to be all the way from the 1800s all the way through till the early 1960s basically that when the dividend on stocks fell below the yield on the 10-year bond, then you sell stocks and you buy bonds. And when the dividend on stock and the S&P basically rose above the 10-year treasury, you sell treasuries and you buy stocks, that was the market timing system. That worked wonderfully from 1870 through 1960, roughly 65, but then what happened was because of changes in advances, if you will, in corporate structure and cost of capital and a lot of Ph.D. type were coming into this, they said, you know what, it's better if we use those dividends that we're paying out and keep them internally. It's the cheapest form of capital that we can have to expand the company, let's use them, rather than going on borrowing money or issuing more stocks. They changed capital structure and then the dividend yield started to fall because companies started changing their structure and a lot of companies cut out their dividend. So all of a sudden they said, okay, well instead of it being above 10-year treasury, buy stocks, we're going to put a range in of when dividend yields are up above, up below 5%, excuse me, when dividend yields were at 5%, because they had dropped now, when they went to 3%, you're going to sell stocks. That was now the new range, 5 to 3. And that lasted for a while until dividend yields went below 3%, that stayed there for years and then that didn't work anymore. So the next thing that I think we heard about was, well let's move ahead and review it, the Fed model. You remember the Fed model? All you that have been investing for more than 10 years, which basically says that the yield on the 10-year treasury inverted and that should be the PE of the market. So that when 5-year treasuries are yielding 5%, a 10-year treasury is yielding 5%, the PE of the market should be 20%. So if the PE of the market is above 20%, when treasuries at 5%, then you should sell stocks and when the PE goes below 20%, you should buy stocks. Okay, the PE, 10-year treasuries right now are at 2%. Okay, so you take 2 and you divide it into 100 and what should the PE of the stock market be? 50. We're currently at 12. Man, is this a flaming buy or what? I mean, so all these models keep changing. So the question is not so much, coming up with the models, which one's going to work in the future, we have no idea. So it doesn't, it can't do anything with this. I think the one wrinkle that I might add is that instead of changing your overall stock allocation, I don't think there's anything wrong within that stock allocation, making some minor adjustments. For example, in the 1990s, I think that anyone with pulse or early or the late 1980s, anyone with pulse would have realized that maybe they wanted to own more U.S. stocks than Japanese stocks because of the enormous gap in valuation. Similarly, in the late 1990s, large cap, U.S. stocks, large cap developed market stocks were pretty darn rich and that didn't mean that you should have sold off all of your stocks, but what I think a reasonable person has said when they've got, you know, REITs are yielding 9%. Maybe I should own a little bit more of those gold stocks and small stocks, value stocks have been horribly beaten down. Maybe I want to own a little bit more of those, but of course, you know, then again, it appears to the total stock market person, you know, you want to keep it simple, so maybe you don't want to do that, but if you're a slicer and a slicer, I think that that's presenting some opportunities and of course, you know, the late 1990s you could look at the islands and you're really in awe. So, you know, I think that there are, there's some filling around the edges that I think is as well to help you, you know, avoid the real trade mix. It strikes me that a discipline rebalancing program would get you in the same general ballpark as sort of the market timing type strategies would with a little more discipline perhaps. I can predict the past with uncanny accuracy, but I am smart enough to realize that I don't know when markets are over or undervalued and if I knew, I wouldn't tell you, I'm not that nice a guy. The next question is from Karen Bennett. Karen. She asks, what do you see as the ideal amount of inflation-protected securities one should have in their account, taking into account key variables such as age, size of the nest egg, current interest rates, etc., and why? What do you see as the best vehicle for this investment? Vanguard fund, actual bonds? I'm trying to see the range of responses from experts to help target the appropriate amount for our portfolio. I think we addressed the amount in another question, so can I address whether to have just bonds or the fund? Okay, I've got to disagree with Bill Bernstein. I mean, I don't want to have to invest in individual bonds. I don't want to have to reinvest the interest that comes in. Just give me the banger tips fund and I'm happy. And I've really ever disagreed with Bill, but I'd like to point out one thing that in your comments with Jack, you indicated that you talked about the risk of tips and how they behaved recently, but you said that you wanted to hold tips and not the bond fund. But what you neglected to mention is that if you needed the money in the time period where you're going to sell the bond fund, you're going to sell the tips too, so you're in the same boat. They were just as volatile of the individual tips if you needed the money at that time. Yeah, I guess the point is that you should have an emergency fund for that, no worries. The tips ladder, which I would recommend, are for your expected needs. You're unexpected needs you have to handle another way. Okay, this question is from actually from the forum. And the question is for all the panelists. By the way, this guy is from BT. This forum member, so. He asks, what is your opinion of single premium immediate annuities as a way to reduce uncertainty on a safe spending level during retirement? Can you offer any guidelines on what portion of one's invested assets should be converted to an annuity? At what age should they be bought? What factors should influence my decision? I think I need to go visit him personally before I can make a decision. Reconciliation. Just pay the travel expenses. I think that that, the single premium immediate annuity is the only annuity that I think that the bubble heads in agreement that is something that can really play an important part in investors' overall planning. In terms of how much, a lot of people, the amount is going to vary, but it would be enough that it would go along with social security in giving them a guarantee along with social security in any pension they have that would guarantee that their expenses are paid. In terms of how much to do it and when to do it, I think that's an individual decision, but the longer you wait, the higher the payout is going to be, so if you can afford to wait longer, I would never, this is my personal opinion, I would never put more than 50% of my assets in annuity. Remember, the annuity is unlike a variable annuity which is walled off, and if the insurance company goes under, you're going to be made whole with a single premium immediate annuity, it's mixed in with the assets of the company, it's subject to their creditors and if the business goes out, if it goes under, people call it insurance, but it really isn't insurance, state insurance, it's not really a guarantee, all they do is go to other insurance companies and assess them to try to make you whole, but in the meantime, you're not necessarily getting checks and there's a lot of disruption and insurance companies do run a business because you're betting on that insurance company being around for maybe 30 years or so, so if you're going to buy more than 100,000, normally in many states that's the maximum scaranteed, you would want to do it from multiple companies and you might want to do it at multiple times too. Yeah, I was going to say that Mel, I think a latter strategy with single premium immediate annuities is a great idea to help mitigate the risk of sinking a lot of money into a very low payout environment and also to help diversify across multiple insurers. One topic I think has been kind of under discussed in the realm of single premium immediate annuities is what they call the insurance industry adverse selection, so you have people with a lot of longevity on their side purchasing their things and I think what insurers are experiencing is they've got a lot of folks who are living longer than their actuarial tables might have suggested, so that's another thing to think about that could depress payouts for the foreseeable future from these types of products. I think it can make sense at age, I agree with Larry Swedrone at age 70, but the life credits, the insurance against living a very long life become larger than the costs you might pay through going through an extra intermediary. Do not forget, not only is there default risk from the insurance company, but there's interest rate risk. If we do hit, and this is not a prediction, but if we do hit hyperinflation then that payout becomes worth less and less each year, and yes you can buy inflation protected, but that drastically lowers the payment. And furthermore the inflation protection you get with most SPI inflation and adjusted SPAs is poor as a cap on them. The best work that's been done in the area has been done by I think by Moshe Malewski, who has looked at a very sophisticated they mean variance sort of statistical approach. And the results are very intuitive, he comes up with very intuitively appealing, which is you split your money among stocks and bonds and some SPIAs you should certainly buy at least two or three companies and maybe some tips and he puts very cool annuities in there as well. So don't bet the foreign on anything. And again it's sounding like a broke broken record but unless you think you're going to be pushing up the daisies anytime soon, the SPIA that everyone should buy is the delay in social security until soon. I have to preface this by saying this was written in May. This question was posted on the forum in May. Does the success of PIMCO's total return bond call into the question the desirability and effectiveness of indexing for bond funds? The question answers itself. Don't know if this question will be timely when the reunion occurs but here in September there's been much news about Greece a possible default there and whether the euro will survive. Has these additional risks to European stocks altered your thinking about diversifying equity asset classes globally? I think that would be a good question for the advisor. I think the answer is no. I think there's always different kinds of uncertainty if you look back over history it just varies from decade to decade year to year. This just happens to be the topic of the day but I think that historically diversification has been a good idea and continues to be an excellent idea. India, China, Brazil or growth countries Western Europe or value companies typically does better in the long run value or growth value. I have very specific and firm recommendations in the event of a Greek default expulsion from the eurozone collapse of the Greek economy in a return to the track mark which is you should visit Greece. I just came back from Greece as a matter of fact. I'll be back on my way back from Fiji It's a funny story. We were right down where the American Embassy was in Greece about three weeks ago and we were on this little tour where there were about eight of us and we went to this nice museum and went upstairs and they had a lunch area there so we had lunch and the guide that we were with was a national geographic tour which was wonderful by the way. The guide we were with said that's the Vice President of Greece. For me to head the Vice President of Greece and he was eating lunch at the table next to us and now I can say I had lunch with the Vice President of Greece and he didn't indicate that they were going to default although that is true. As Alan said the value stocks generally outperform the growth stock but they have more risk for example at least it's more perceived risk and 20% of our GDP comes from Europe so we have some risk and if they collapse in Europe because Greece collapses they might default, don't get me wrong but all of this talk that's going on with the IMF and with the G20 right now ECB and so forth is all about how to backstop that default much like the TARP program that we had is what is going on over there and they're going to backstop a country and they will put in measures to backstop the country and I think this is the reason why we're seeing a rally in European markets right now is why we're seeing a rally why was there already a decline in US stocks because of what was going on over there and why we're seeing a rally right now is because they're beginning to come up with resolutions to what they're going to do is it a kick or a can down the road scenario could be these austerity measures are tough one thing about being in Greece by the way we're right there at the parliament building for several days and about 315, okay police come out, put the barriers up protesters over there all lined up behind the other barriers take those barriers down the austerity is a little terrible okay 330, whistle blows they all break up go back to work we see on television that's the way it is over there and once in a while and in every particular day you'll get maybe three or four rowdies that start throwing rocks and if you actually look at those pictures on television or in the newspaper you'll see that the rowdies like this with their heads covered and the police there but look at the people in the background they're all sitting there all tourist with cameras they understand over there that they have to cut back they understand that they're going to get higher taxes they understand that they're going to be light off like 30% of the people over there work for the government they understand that it has to happen and there's no other choice, they get it they don't like it, but they get it and you know what, we're beginning to see that in this country I mean Occupy Wall Street, right? I mean we're beginning to see a little bit of the same type of protest in here it's actually a sign that there's progress being made quite frankly, I look at it in a different way so I'm optimistic that they'll get their situation resolved I'm optimistic that you know you're able to eventually rebound I'm optimistic that if you keep your same asset allocation and do a rebalancing of course I always look at Europe Pacific and I do equal, Europe, equal Pacific as opposed to swinging with the e-feedback and forth that you're going to do fine by the way, I did my international and Total International which last February completed a new index which not only includes emerging markets developed countries and Canada but small cap companies as well I don't overweight or underweight any country


All right, good afternoon everybody. Hands up if you were in the audience last year. Okay, I'm getting, for those of you on the line who can't see this is about half, okay. So those of you in the audience last year will remember that this is the session that I chaired last year and I thought it's interesting to start by looking at where are these projects now one year down the line. Okay, and so we go to project number one, which was all about using unidentified, no, unidentified unmanned aerial vehicles possibly unidentified as well, in Papua New Guinea to transport tuberculosis samples because the road journey and the sea journey is very complicated. And so the answer for where we are there is that they've done one pilot last year and they're still in second pilot mode. And so that's what they're going back this year to do another pilot with new tech. And so some progress has been made, but in terms of impact on the beneficiaries, on the MSF beneficiaries, no perceived impact on MSF beneficiaries yet. These things sometimes take time. The second project, so this was presented by Jean-Yves Nuttin, a Watson from OCB. He was talking about instead of drilling a new borehole when you find a broken borehole in the field, he was talking about refreshing existing boreholes, diagnosing the problem by putting a camera down the borehole and trying to make repairs. And this has had some more success and it's going actually to scale. And so this is beginning actually to have an impact on the beneficiaries or whatever she were. And then particularly he's just recently done a fluoride study that fluoride in the water, fluoride in the groundwater is an issue in Niger and they've been able to do some really interesting analysis and make a difference to people's lives in Niger. So that's project two, project number three. So this was, again, the problem which has been touched on earlier, this was transferring patient data from inside the red zone of an Ebola treatment center outside to the nursing station. And we attacked this using a PDA, so that's a little handheld computer which you can see in the photo. And we got as far as deploying it. We managed to go from conception to deployment in two months, which is great. But it failed, it failed forward. It failed because it made no significant, in fact no difference at all to the outcome of any of the patients. And I was personally responsible for this project and so I think it's important to be able to stand up and admit failure and admit that I learned from that failure. And the big thing that I learned was not to send a Rob Ma to the field at the same time. I should have found a Rob. Where are you, Rob? Really, there you are. And next time, you're going with that thing and so we can learn from it, that's the idea. And to really nail this, so that's, yeah. We fail forward and we learn and this is an important message to pass. Next project, fourth project is the Ebola tablet. So again, we've discussed this already, it's been mentioned and this was the same problem statement as the PDA. But this time they had a different approach and just for those of you who comment, does MSF ever work together? Yes, we work very closely together and we thought it was useful to work together and both of us approached the problem from slightly different angles and see what the outcomes would be. But once again, they also failed forward. They deployed seven months too late and by that time the Ebola epidemic was very much less intense than it was before and they learned. In fact, they failed forward twice as Rob has just presented. Because they took this tech and then tried to do something similar in Chad and this has been evaluated. And I think, and so I assume responsibility as project manager for the first problem and I invite Arjan to assume responsibility because he financed this second project. And so really nail this down.  Carry on, carry on. We're both well over 14. And you can see how I failed terribly because I've even failed to spell the word failed. So, which is really very embarrassing. And so I don't know if you can see this. And so, yeah, I think it's important because we have a culture sometimes within MSF of not necessarily tolerating the failure in the way that we should do. And I'm not saying go out and fail, but I'm saying go out, think hard about what you're doing, build your project correctly, try and fail forward if it doesn't work out the way you thought it did or you thought it would and learn from the experience. And thank you very much once again, Rob, for an excellent presentation on telling us how to do that. So you get a round of applause just because it's really illustrating my point. And yeah, I go back to Albert. I don't think anybody who's never made a mistake has never tried anything new. And so I do encourage people to try new things although it's never gonna get anywhere. Okay, I'm gonna give you some advice. I've spent the last two years looking for good advice for people who are trying to be innovative with the MSF movement. And the best advice I found was this chap called Magnus Lindqvist, who's a Swedish chap. He's a futurist and a trend spotter. And he says, ignore the trends. Look for the secrets. And this is the real key. Ignore what everybody's talking about, the big latest thing and look for the secrets. He says experiment. And you've seen all four of the previous presenters have experimented and those that are about to present have experimented as well. And don't be afraid to make enemies. I can assure you that one of the people or at least two or three that are gonna present this afternoon have already made enemies. And this is actually quite a good thing. If you're making enemies, possibly you're doing the right thing because you're challenging a status quo. You're challenging a norm. You're using a word which somebody I admire greatly, Megan McGuire, she is disrupting. You're being disruptive. So experiment and make enemies and finally be patient. And so yeah, absolutely. I hear the person who asked for e-care or the vaccine app to be deployed tomorrow in the field. But unfortunately, these things do take time. But there's a way we can get around that as well. And that's really the theme of this afternoon is to get over the sickness that we have within MSF of trying to do hundreds of projects and doing them badly over long periods of time to scope down our portfolio to do few projects and do them well and do them quickly. And so what we've got this afternoon is four projects that are in a more of an embryonic stage than things that you've seen presented certainly yesterday and things that you've seen presented this afternoon. They've tested things in the field. They've had some time to play months rather than years. And essentially what they're doing is that they're coming to present where they are now and where they want to go. And to make it more interesting, I've pushed them quite hard actually. They have to deliver seven slides in seven minutes and the slides are formatted. And they're not presenting to you, the audience, they're presenting to a panel. A panel, which for those of you who have seen Dragons Den, this is a similar kind of concept. And the panel is made, well, I'll introduce them in a minute, but you'll see. And so they're gonna present to the panel and then you will vote. The audience, you get a chance to choose your favorite, well, the project that you think will have the highest impact on our beneficiaries, on MSF beneficiaries. The panel will choose and the online audience will be able to choose via Twitter. And you can only choose one. You can only choose one because we can't resource everything and by overcommitting ourselves on projects, well, we've seen, we don't succeed. We fail numerous projects as opposed to succeeding few. And I think, so that's the innovation pitch. That's what we're coming to in a minute. But I'm gonna pause for one minute just to talk about this. There was an excellent question last year during the session that I presented on the ethical principles for innovative projects, projects that don't necessarily involve human participants or their data. Though some of these do, but there we go. And I think if you grow up with an MSF as a medic and if you've been trained as a medic, ethical principles are part of your DNA. This is what we grow up with. But if you're not a medic like myself, this is something you have to learn and you need guidance. And so we've designed a framework which is in the brochure and we hope that it'll be published soon in a peer review journal and certainly within MSF we've been starting to share it. And I won't go through the details, I'll just let you read it. But I think it's important to give people like myself, people like those that are gonna present a framework to walk yourself through to see whether you're actually to take an ethics into consideration or not. And so I thank the gentleman, whoever it was, I don't know who it was actually, who asked me that question last year. And this is our reply. And those who are presenting have applied this framework to their projects and so we'll see how that goes. And so here I've talked about this before. I think there's another thing to mention is that often when you have, everybody has good ideas in MSF all the time. Don't be fooled by this creation of innovation units within the MSF movement. That's not where the innovation happens. The innovation unit's role is more to help ideators bring their projects from outcome to fruition. And I think most of the best ideas come from the people on the ground in the field. But those ideators often, they'll just say, why don't we do it in blue? And they won't really think about, the difference between doing it in blue instead of doing it in green and the costs involved and the risks, et cetera. So I've encouraged them to actually present something called a business case. The first time I mentioned that word within MSF, I got nailed to the wall. But I think it's a useful term. It's what's, what argue, solid arguments for why we're doing this. And I encourage decision makers to make decisions based on something more than just le feeling, as they say in French, because they're solid decision makers. And finally, a competition played in good spirits, it's really, it's a healthy thing for the organization. And so that's the reason for today's innovation pitch.