So, what we're going to talk today about is how to structure activism, right? We all know this feeling that we're frustrated with the ways things are right now and we want to change it, but it's a grind against the machinery that are the e-corps of this world. And we want to defeat them and we want to win this fight, but in order to do that, we might need a little more structure than we have right now. It works for camps because those are short-time investments, but maybe for longer-term projects and longer-term interests, we need some other structures. So today, Dr. Rybak is going to tell us about these kinds of ideas that they are using. She's CEO at Radically Offensive Security. Radically Offensive, offensive. Radically Open Security. Radically Open Security, yeah. And so, take it away, a big round of applause for her, please. Hello. So, good evening. So, today's talk is, I think, a little bit different than some of the talks that I give. I oftentimes give technical talks, sometimes I give business model talks, but today what I actually really want to do is give a little bit of a personal talk. I'm busy with a social enterprise that also happens to be a security consultancy company, and I'm hoping today that by explaining what I'm doing that I can perhaps inspire some of you to want to attempt some similar things. So, let's start with a question. It's a bit cliched, but what would you do if you knew that you could not fail? So, a lot of us in the IT industry, we get sucked into these very comfortable living patterns and employment patterns, and many of us, of course, are quite lucky. We can get pretty good paychecks doing the stuff that we love, but at the end of the day is what we're actually spending our time on what we really want to be spending our time on. If you really choose anything, like what was your dream from when you were young? What is your dream now? If there's one thing that you could change about the world, what would it be, and what would you do if time wasn't an issue, if money wasn't an issue? What would you do? Well, for me, part of the reason right now why I think, for me, tourism is really important is because of the current political climate. Like many of the people here in the room, of course, some of the political events in the United States are somewhat alarming. Of course, the trend that's also spreading to the rest of the world, including Europe, it's undeniable, and at least for me personally, I feel a calling in the changing political climate to try and at least do something best of my abilities to try and make some positive change. But I think that for me personally, the call to really want to make things better started actually quite a while ago. So this is a picture of me back in high school. Basically at the time, sort of a teenager growing up in the south of the United States. Now we're basically talking about probably the mid to late 90s. And just as a little bit of contextual information, not that I think it makes a whole huge amount of difference, but I, for example, myself happen to be a lesbian. Now growing up in the late 90s, again, this is 25 years ago, in the south of the United States, it was not the most amicable political climate, shall I say, you know, and I got a bunch of pushback from a lot of places. You can react to that in several different ways, but for me, the way that I reacted to that was kind of wanting to push back. So I did, you know, after a while decide that part of the way to kind of harness that energy was to try and put it into activism. So for example, for a while, again, these are stories I don't usually tell, but for example, I was a member of a group called the Lesbian Avengers for a while. Anyway, big, big trouble, bunch of troublemakers, we ate fire and like caused all kinds of problems, but you know, basically it was me sort of at the time trying to take something, you know, that directly influenced me and really to try and mobilize it, you know, turn it into something impactful so I could ultimately make the world better. Also at the time when I was in the United States, you know, again, at that political climate, it was basically very, it was still pre-911 and the country was very much looking inwards and there were so many things about the American dream that I just didn't think were right.   You know, and it kind of starts to make you evaluate and sort of ask the questions of, you know, what are we spending our time on? You know, we come from these places of opportunity. We come from these places of economic opportunity, of education. You know, for me personally also, I mean, I'm white, which also confers any number of, you know, undeserved advantages. But then the question starts to become, how do you take these privileges, how do you take these advantages, and how can you actually turn it into something where you can attempt to have this positive impact instead of just getting caught in the rat race and just doing everything because you think you're supposed to be doing it? So, you know, for me, my first real foray into probably what I would call tech activism, because of course me also, another thing about me that's undeniable is I'm an incredibly huge geek, and I love it, and I'm proud of it. And, you know, for me also, technology was also one of those things, you know, I'm just like many people, of the people in the audience here. I have been using computers since I was seven.    But I don't have to explain it to the people here in this room. You guys know, you know, I'm preaching to the choir and this kind of stuff. But the first time I think I did something really what I would call tech activism was when I was working as a PhD student, and then later as an assistant professor at the Free University of Amsterdam. So, some of you, if you go back a little while, might know me from back in the days when I was working on RFID security research. Back in 2006, I have the notoriety that I was the first person to publish a proof of concept of malware for radio frequency identification tags, the so-called RFID virus. This basically went viral back in 2006. Again, this is 10 years ago. I'm starting to feel old. But, you know, but it really, you know, went viral in a period before viral was even a thing. It was all over the papers. It caused a whole lot of reactions. And ultimately, you know, to the point that like after the research was published, I got 200 emails in the first day.   No, but it's the kind of weird stuff that you get, you know, when occasionally when things get in the news. After that, I also did another project called the RFID Guardian which was basically building an embedded device which was sort of like a firewall man in the middle device for RFID tags. It actually was my intention at the time to attempt to commercialize the RFID Guardian. I had some subsidy, which I had at the time, but sort of due to circumstances, the subsidy dried up before I was expecting it to. And ultimately, well, the problem with hardware is if it's half finished, it's a doorstop.  Well, it happens. I mean, I basically consider it... I consider myself to be an entrepreneur, and I sort of look at the RFID Guardian and how I wanted to realize it sort of as my first failed startup.  And of course, I learned a whole lot from that process. One thing I learned was that hardware is hard. Yeah. But, you know, I also learned quite a bit sort of, you know, my initial leaning sort of into being interested in business.  I mean, at one point, people got mad at me. At one point, I was at a conference, and the chief privacy officer at the time of Phillips looked me straight in the eyes and said, your research is bad for my company. And this is the chief privacy officer, right? Anyway, but look, I'm not saying this to pick on Phillips, but, you know, the point is that, you know, sometimes your research is going to ruffle some feathers. Also at the time, also with the RFID virus stuff, F-Secure Antivirus had actually published a full-page ad saying how, among other things, they debunked the RFID virus. You know, so people were debunking my research. This is when you know you've made it, when people take out full-page advertisements attacking your research. But, you know, not that I was unique in that, because, of course, some of the other great RFID security researchers at the time, I mean, heaven knows the team at the Robboud University had got more than their own share of problems. So, you know, your research is good when you start getting problems.  It was about RFID, and it was about the ubiquitousness of computing, and it was about privacy, and it was about the security implications, and the fact that, you know, the companies wouldn't own up to the problems. And what I really learned from that period of time is that you can say to a company, you're insecure, and then their reaction is going to be, no, I'm not. You know, and the thing is, you can't really tell them, you know, that they have problems. You have to show them. And this is sort of what I learned being an academic. You know, you can try sometimes and have a dialogue. A dialogue can help, but I think at a certain point it actually only gets you so far. But then the question is, you know, if it only gets you so far, what else can you do? You know, what else is next? So, you know, so the problems then, you know, if you do want to change the world, answering the questions of what's next, you know, people might ask the questions of, okay, so what do we do if we want to build a change-making organization? You know, do we create a charity? Do we create an NGO? Do we create a foundation? You know, but the problems with a lot of these forms of, well, building social organizations is that they're dependent. So, for example, dependence upon subsidies. And as an academic researcher, that was one of the problems personally that I had. You know, again, due to the economic climate at the time, the subsidy dried up. And then once the subsidy was gone, it's game over.  And, well, I'm going to get a little bit more into things like social enterprises, but, you know, part of the reason why I think it's actually important is because sometimes if you want to build a change-making organization, if you can create something that can actually operate independently, that actually gives it a lot more freedom to move and it also gives it a lot greater chance to actually survive. So, and of course, coming back to the whole political climate now and Trump, I mean, a lot of the problems, of course, is that if you are running some kind of an ideal organization, you know, this is not the most stable climate right now for getting those subsidies. They're starting to reroute them, you know, to other places. So, I think, you know, unlike any other period in time, I think that creating self-sustainable, you know, positive change-making organizations is going to be more important now than it ever has been before. You know, because the generosity, you know, from some governments that we've had, you know, might be a thing of the past, and I wouldn't necessarily rely on it. So, you know, another thing is that and coming back to the issue of trying to tell companies to change their behavior. So, I'm a member of this thing called the Spindle Inspiration Council. There's this organization called PARTOS in Amsterdam, which is this sort of group of NGOs that work together. And one time I was speaking with a lot of these people from the NGO, and they were talking about, for example, companies like Shell.  What can we do? You know, can we talk to them?  And this is the problem. I mean, you can lobby, you can protest. Again, you can publish research, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to listen. And one of the things I think that I've discovered about social entrepreneurship is that the one way that I think you can get the companies to listen is to hit them where it hurts. And you know where it hurts? In their wallet. That's the way it is. The only way I think that these big companies will listen is if you hurt them financially. And how do you hurt them financially? Build something better. So, business. Activists consider it to be a dirty word. You know, business. Big business. Business is always the problem. But the question is, can business if we repurpose it in just the right way, can that business actually be part of the solution? Now, one of the things about business that I think makes it a really ideal form of well, vehicle for activism is that it is set up in such a ridiculously independent way. I mean, the whole concept of corporate personhood. You know. I mean, obviously corporations are not people. But, you know, they've done enough lobbying to sort of set up in the legislation as if they are. You know, companies, they have rights. I mean, oftentimes companies have more rights than individuals do. But the point is, as activists we can exploit that. You know, precisely because of this corporate personhood it means you have a lot of freedom to be able to act. And it means you have a lot of freedom to be able to set things up in the way that you want to set things up. One of the problems, again with charities and foundations and NGOs is that they only perform a certain small amount of commercial activity before you start getting restrictions from the government. I mean, if, for example, you're a foundation that's registered as charitable with the government there's usually only a certain amount of financial transactions that you can do before you start coming into a gray zone where you might lose your charitable designation from the government.   One, you have to stay within the law and two, you have to be able to cover your own expenses. That's it.  You know? And again, it's a big business that's set it up this way. But we can repurpose it. We can reclaim it. And we can use this one entrepreneur that I mean, look, good or bad, agree or disagree, but I think he sort of exemplifies what you can do with social entrepreneurship is Elon Musk. I mean, talk about disappearing subsidies. Of course, you know, the three things that he's working on, you know, the space race, solar energy and electric cars. I mean, those are three things that absolutely can no longer count on being funded by anything government related, you know? And research grants and things like that. I mean, all of that is probably pretty much guaranteed to dry up.  You know, what he's also doing now with SolarCity, for solar panels, he is harnessing the vehicle of a company to essentially try and change not just technology but the political climate that is influenced by that entire ecosystem. If he can actually accomplish what he's attempting to do between SolarCity and Tesla, you know, it could eliminate our dependence on oil, for example.   But for me personally, I see him as a really inspirational example, you know, and he's also faced a lot of hurdles, had some problems, managed to get over them, and, you know, has managed to build impressive, but what's most impressive is that self-sustaining organizations self-sustaining, you know, and that, for me, I think somewhat exemplifies what we can do but I think it can get even more idealistic than that, but I do take him as a good case study and a good example of what you can accomplish with social enterprises. Another example that I really, really love, this is a more local one for folks here in the Netherlands, is an organization called Burtzorech. So Burtzorech is a home health care organization in the Netherlands and the problem with health care is that health care oftentimes has been structured in a bit of a pyramid fashion.   So, this guy, his name is Yolst the Block, he basically figured out that, you know, what we could do is we could actually take that whole health care structure and we could try decentralizing it. So, instead of having this really huge top-down structure, instead we can create these little localized circles and then we can ensure that they are completely decentralized, they can operate completely, uniquely, you know, independently of one another. You know, they're all sort of Burtzurek, so they all operate with a similar set of principles and operating procedures, and if they need help, they can sort of phone into the headquarters to get advice and tips and to help resolve disputes and things like that, but except for that, they actually all work completely independently. And what wound up happening was because they were smaller and decentralized, it eliminated the overhead.   The only people, perhaps maybe who didn't like it, you know, were some of the bureaucrats, you know, who were losing some of their margin and some of their overhead off of this, but the truth of the matter was Beurtzorch became so financially efficient because they had stripped off all of that overhead that they were starting to actually become more profitable than the, you know, the previous market leaders that they were actually trying to replace. So at a certain point what wound up happening was the other health care providers went to Yolst the Bloc and said the way that you are structuring Beurtzorch, we want to do that, too. And what he did, and this to me is really the sign of a great leader, he helped them. He went to his competitors and he helped them to restructure themselves so they also could be more decentralized and so that they also could change the way in which they were operating. Yes, to become more cost efficient, but of course it also made them more social and in such a way it wasn't about market share for him. You know, it was about having a positive impact on the world of home health care. You know, and regardless of whether Beurtzorch had the percentage of market share or his competitors did, that was actually irrelevant because he changed his competitors and thus he raised the bar, you know, with home health care in the entire Netherlands. You know, this to me is really inspirational. So, for me personally, you know, I've also attempted to build a similar kind of social enterprise. So for those of you who are not already familiar with radically open security, but that basically is my own social enterprise and it I set it up actually as a not-for-profit computer security consultancy company. I started about three and a quarter years ago and when I first started it everybody was like, you're doing what? You're foolish. But, you know, and people looked at it and they were like, well not-for-profit, that's kind of weird. I don't know, you know, is this going to work? But, you know, three and a quarter years later and well look, I'm up here telling this story to you, you know, on the big stage in this nice hacker camp, so we've done a few things right, but I mean what I think actually we have managed to do is change a lot of the things about the dialogue, about computer security and the industry and openness and transparency, you know, and sharing and I think slowly but surely we also are starting to influence also our competitors and causing them to start re-analyzing their own behavior. So, really quickly, I guess before I go on to the next slide, but just the core principles of radically open security are basically just ethics. Again, open source, everything we develop we release into the open source and openness and transparency. So, openness and transparency, what that means in practice, we invite our customers to join us in chat rooms and they see and hear absolutely everything that we're doing while we work. We also release all these tools to everyone. So, we work using this principle called chat ops. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about that right now, in fact I have a whole separate talk on that that I give, but I'm not going to be giving that today. But the idea is that we work in these chat rooms with a globally distributed team and we have a chat robot that actually facilitates our operations and the chat robot is actually quite interesting because it assists us with everything from penetration testing to documentation and reporting to project management to billing and scheduling and all these different kinds of things. So, it's super important to us and we've open sourced everything. Again, with the hopes that at some point our competitors can take these tools and run with them. Why not? But a lot of people if I tell them about what we're doing, they're a bit hesitant to want to take similar steps to do similar things themselves. Another thing I really like about Radically Open Security is I really consider us to be a bit of a lifestyle business. I work, we are essentially a collective of freelancers and small businesses. I am the only internal employee in Radically Open Security still after three and a quarter years but we have about 35 freelancers that are walking together. And again, the organization is the people. So, they're contractually bound. Occasionally customers look at us a little bit funny and say, yeah, but you have contracts, you have NDAs, yes, of course we do. But ultimately what it means is that people are location independent. So we have people working all over the place because it's essentially business to business contracts with our freelancers. I don't have to deal with immigration or work permits because it makes hiring really easy. And yeah, ultimately it's just a construction that's really scalable and that's really worked really well for us. That's why I haven't been inclined to change it. But a lot about how we operate is actually really quite weird. But at a certain point I just figured out that weird is actually a benefit. Weird is actually an advantage. The other thing also is when people know that you're weird, they actually will accept that weirdness from you and they will actually come to relish it. So we get away with a lot of weirdness and we think that some other companies can't because we have the reputation of being weird. So people kind of accept it. But it works well for us. So, again, I started it three and a quarter years ago and I was optimistic when I started it. But I don't think I really understood how far perhaps that this all would go. I mean we have won a ton of awards for how we've set up our organization. Both for our operations but also for our business model. The Dutch Chamber of Commerce called Radically Open Security the 50th most innovative SME in the Netherlands. I'm really proud of that. We've also won a whole bunch of other awards. Things like I was inspiring 50 twice. Our hackers have won some awards at Black Hat and some other places. We've done this awesome net aid kit project. I don't know if you guys know the free press unlimited. But net aid kit is a not-for-profit project that we've done to help build them up completely open source Wi-Fi tour and open VPN router. So that's also a great project of ours that I'm super proud of. And also yeah, Sprout Magazine put us in their Challenger 50. Which was just an entrepreneurship magazine. So like 50 most challenging startups in the Netherlands. And also just sort of to peek it off like two months ago about CIO magazine in the Netherlands actually called me the most innovative IT leader in 2017. So look, I'm not saying this to toot my own horn. I'm saying this because if you take a chance and try and build something different you never know where it's going to go.  But they didn't understand how this could work. And now three and a quarter years later people are seeing it work. And I think in another five years from now I think as far as we've come I think we're going to have a whole lot more impact and I think we're going to make a whole lot more waves right now than we already have. But you know, people are hesitant to want to think differently. And people are hesitant to want to create something that's unique that really fits them and fits their passion and that fits their drives. And there's a number of really common excuses that I hear for the reasons why they need to stick with traditional business models or why they need to stick with their usual jobs or why they need to keep doing things the way that everybody else has been doing it. But we need to pay our bills. Right. Well, we pay our bills too. I mean look, with radically open security we charge market conform rates to our customers and we pay market conform rates roughly to our personnel. So everybody is able to pay their bills. And what's different about us though is that, again, it's the manner in which we operate. So it's, again, the openness and transparency, the open source also, you know, set up as a being a not-for-profit company. We actually, I forgot to mention this earlier, but we give 90% of our profits to the NLNet foundation. 90%. We literally have a contract which is set up with them. We've already made our first donation to them. You know. When we're more profitable, we'll wind up giving them more. But of course right now, we're still a scale-up. So we're still reinvesting a lot to sort of build that sustainable vehicle. But it's starting to roll. You know, three and a quarter years later. And I'm also super proud of this, that we actually already have been able to start giving NLNet some money. And they're actually right now in the process of creating basically the radically open security fund within NLNet. So they can actually start funding community projects with that. Within the next few months, NLNet will start making some noise and announcements about this. So this is sort of your first little preview of that.  I mean, this was like the vision that I had of trying to take security consultancy, try and reclaim it from these huge commercial black box corporate security companies. And look, I mean, we obviously haven't completely taken over everything. They're still there.  And at this point I've heard for sure that they are starting to actually have internal strategy meetings, trying to figure out how they can combat the up and coming threat that radically open security is. Think about that. It's a David and a Goliath story. You know, why would something like, for example, a big four consultancy firm be afraid of us? Well, think about it. I think, actually, they do have really good reasons to be afraid. Another thing also is that the common well, I'm actually going to skip since I'm on the topic to not scalable. You know, a lot of people just sort of think, yeah, but the open source business model, that means you have to give away your products and sell services. But selling services isn't scalable. Well, I'm going to tell you that it is. But not in the way that people usually think about. So with radically open security, the way that I see it, yes, we're a services company, but we're also a platform. There's a really good well, you guys are familiar now with, for example, Uber and Airbnb. I'm not saying they're great companies. You know, we all have differences with how Uber and Airbnb sometimes operate. But the one thing about Uber and Airbnb is they are a platform that essentially matches producers with consumers. And they have an IT automation layer in between that facilitates those operations. And because it's ICT facilitated, ultimately, it's almost you know, completely scalable, right? Because as long as they have, in the case of let's say Uber, the producers are the drivers.  The consumers are the people who want to ride. And they have money and they want to go somewhere. All Uber does is it matches the two of them together, right? So think about it now with radically open security. We have producers and we have consumers. So we have producers. Those are the pentesters.  They want a good job, a nice comfortable job. And they want money. We also have consumers. The consumers are the companies, our customers. It could be huge corporations, it could be governments, it could be little tiny NGOs, whatever. So, but ultimately what radically open security is doing because we're a platform, because we only work with producers and SMEs is we are matching the producers with the consumers and we are building a platform to provide a stable process and user experience for both sides. The penetration testers have a certain way in which they work. So we provide them with automated templates. So for example we have this suite that we built called a pen text. It is essentially the core of our documentation workflow and reporting process. We not only open sourced it, but we made it an OWASP project. So OWASP pen text. But that facilitates sort of on the pentesting side consistency and process and making sure that the customers get a reliable experience that's consistent every time. With the pentesters it's sort of like a competitive marketplace of pentesting jobs. They log in and then there's basically announcements and then we basically say we've got a job and it's going from this date to this date we need these technologies, these tools and frameworks who wants it. And then basically based upon skills, availability and the price as number three, we then make a match between the job and then groups of pentesters. Now what we're doing is a bit more complicated than Uber and AirBnB because with Uber and AirBnB the matching is one to one, whereas with Radically Open Security the matching is many to many. Because you will have several pentesters working together on a job and you will also have multiple customers in the chat room that are interacting with us. So I mean it's a more complicated process to facilitate, but fundamentally it's the same thing. We are building a platform company and we are automating almost everything. Radically Open Security is a security consultancy company, but I also see us actually as turning into a DevOps company. That's actually what we've become lately. Because our increased use of things like containerization, continuous integration you know just I have been hiring less and less administrative stuff and more and more coders and sysadmins and DevOps people because we are building this platform we are building this automated open source layer and by the way I'm open sourcing it, right? But that's the point. We've got this platform which essentially means that yes we are a services company, but what happens when we finally get this platform right? How could we scale? Look, I mean I'm not doing this because I want Radically Open Security to grow big. That's not the point, that's missing the point. I'm doing it because I want to change how the industry works and I'm perfectly happy to give away this platform so everyone else can use it. But ultimately what I believe is that how we are working with openness and transparency and with the chat rooms so the customers can actually interact with us as equal partners rather than you know as being traditional you know vendors and customers you know I just think it's a better way of working you know and if I can give away these tools and enable everyone to do it this way then why wouldn't I want to do that? The other question is hard to get funding. So yes being a non-for-profit not-for-profit company makes it harder to get investment. You look at the very beginning an angel investor had offered me a half a million euros in funding and I turned it down because I did not want to give up one iota of control of what I was building because the second you accept venture capital you've already lost you've already lost and if you're trying to build any kind of organization with any amount of integrity having to constantly explain yourself to some investor of some kind it's going to shackle you but I think actually especially for the kind of thing that we're building you don't actually need funding to get it started. We bootstrapped Radically Open Security using my savings account okay and it's not that I'm that rich or anything I'm really not but the way that we did it is we again started as a services company and you need investment to create products but you don't really need much investment to do services and what we did is we actually used services to bootstrap our products and to bootstrap our R&D you know because once you actually have turnover then you can actually start to reinvest some of that into sort of building that vehicle that you're building and you know it's not going to grow as fast as if you have some kind of an investor but it is going to maintain your integrity and it allows for slow organic growth. The other nice thing actually about not having venture funding is because when you don't have very much of a buffer, when you don't have very much of a margin it means when you make incorrect decisions you feel the pain quickly. I've had moments in radically open securities history where I have made incorrect decisions you know in running the company incorrect decisions and trying to decide what to sink money into and what I shouldn't I've had months, I had one month where I literally had to take a 30,000 euro loan from a friend of mine under my own personal title to be able to make a role that month because I made the wrong guess. Fortunately it worked out we basically wind up getting the money back I paid my friend back it's all good. These are stressful moments when you're the director of such a company but at the same time though the other thing also is that if you don't have investment and if you're a charitable organization you will have a lot of friends so we don't have investors but we have had a number of partners that were willing to give us interest-free loans and guess what that's even better throughout the history of radically open security we've had about 25,000 euros in interest-free loans from friends of ours why am I telling you this well openness and transparency right why not but the point is we've paid all of that back now you know and it did enable me to be able to bootstrap the company without giving up any of that control and too many people go to investors because it's easy too many people go to investors because it's sort of that sexy Silicon Valley ethos of do it fast make it big, have your exit but you don't have to do it that way and that's one of the great things I think about being in Amsterdam and not being in the Bay Area I've spoken with people in Silicon Valley before about what I'm building and one particular CISO of a company in Silicon Valley she could not wrap her head around why I would go to so much trouble to build an organization that I'm not going to get rich from you know whereas in the Netherlands I think radically open security is the kind of company that perhaps could have only started in the Netherlands you know because this is a country that is social this is a country that gets it to the highest levels of the government we get support and I've appreciated that and that has helped us countless times the other thing also is things like for example customers won't accept it you know but really huge bureaucratic organizations yeah but you're weird and non-commercial why would they want to work with you I'll tell you why they want to work with us it's because the way that radically open security works and the way that we succeed is we find one geek you know like a tech geek like the kind of person who is at a conference like this we find one geek that gets it and then that geek fights to get us into their company you know and that geek navigates the bureaucracy within their own organization for us because they know why we're doing this and they want us there you know and this is the kind of stuff that like money can't buy this is the kind of stuff that the only way you can buy it is by believing in something and fighting for something and letting other people know what you're doing so that they want to help you and support you and in such a way you know radically open security in the first you know again three and a quarter years we already have had between 50 and 60 customers you know across sectors from government to law enforcement to banks insurance companies, media companies telcos, hosting providers IT companies, software SMEs, little law firms you know NGOs universities everything in between you know and how did we get into so many places it's because of those geeks that get it it also doesn't hurt that sometimes those geeks happen to be the see-so but this is something that you know our competitors can't do and this is why they're starting to get afraid again for good reasons won't competitors steal our IP now that's one that I hear a whole lot you know sometimes I talk to other people about startups and I'll say to them you know what you're building is awesome if you just open sourced it you guys would kill the market and then they say yeah yeah but if we open source it then our competitors are going to take it and run with it I think that whole line of thinking is really a fallacy because if your competitors, first of all your competitors are not going to adopt it pride you know many of them have not developed here look I mean I'm giving away my tools already as open source as radically open security have all of my competitors adopted it yet no are they going to? I don't know we'll have to see but the moment they do it's going to be admitting that the way that we're doing it is better so I mean I think they're probably not going to adopt it until the point where they realize that they have to you know but you know that's cool another thing also like from my days with the RFID Guardian I also made open source hardware and software stuff and I know again first hand from experience just because you put stuff out there as open source doesn't necessarily mean that other people are going to use it because then it would mean that they have to learn it, they have to troubleshoot it, they have to be able to debug it, maintain it upstream things to be able to keep going well being able to benefit from additional developments you know that kind of stuff so it's actually complicated for other people to steal your stuff but what other people don't realize though is that if you do give that stuff away what you're going to get back is goodwill, what you're going to get back is reciprocity when you give you get you know I mean you don't want to do it with those intentions you know I mean you don't want to just give so you can get but if you give it makes people want to give back and that's the thing you know and as soon as the other thing also is that when you give it lowers the barrier to entry for people to actually use your stuff you know and ultimately you know one of the rules of business is once you have users you can sort of monetize the whole thing but until you have users you know there's nothing to monetize and the point is that if you keep the stuff proprietary and then sell it or have licensing fees you are creating a barrier to entry for people adopting your stuff isn't that silly you know but people don't think about it that way you know but business is changing the world of business is changing how it's being done is changing and the people who don't change you know are dinosaurs and you know those dinosaurs are going to also change in similar ways you know but again this is the kind of stuff now that is going from the IT field to you know to MBA programs you know but so these are again some of the common objections but I have to say that you know radically open security has managed to do what we have been doing not just despite these things but because of them you know and that's why I'm out here talking about the story if you do things differently and you do things that are unique sometimes it will evolve in ways you didn't expect and it will also pay you back in ways that you don't expect so the sky is the limit I don't think what we're doing as radically open security is necessarily unique you know there are other social enterprises that are out there I mean I do think we're somewhat unique in the computer security space but I don't think there are a lot of other organizations out there doing good like the Mozilla Foundation and you know others but I mean take the whole concept of a not-for-profit business so you know basically taking a commercial front end for a not-for-profit back end how many other industries could we take that concept and use it with you know I mean Beardsourch has already sort of doing that for education could we also use it for transport, for agriculture you know perhaps for banking you know also with banking we've seen other examples like Grimmie and Bank and you know the world is changing you know and if you can take the area that you're good at I mean for me it happens to be computer security you know that again I'm an artist and computer security is my clay you know other people are going to have different clay and you know I'm an artist of computer security and other people can perhaps be artists of banking maybe they can be artists of agriculture, artists of healthcare why not you know and you don't just have to do art to be an artist you know so that leads me then back to begin I think to end where we started so let me ask again what would you do if you knew that you could not fail thank you if you have any questions please line up at the microphones in the middle and then you can ask them there do we have a question here aren't you scared in your task of not becoming a corporate bastard that you become a corporate bastard yes all the time I mean I think that from time to time it's really important to re-evaluate where we're at and to re-evaluate where we're going and you know sometimes I also make incorrect decisions about things you know I think it's good to have the people in your company thinking along with you and also to make sure that they're sort of imbued with the same values you're right the open and like for example when we have customers I have sometimes staff members that will actually question whether or not we want to be working with a particular customer police defense you know those are the kinds of things that tend to raise discussions internally and sometimes I'll make decisions about things and sometimes my staff members will call me on it and whenever they call me on it I thank them so yes you're completely right at some point yeah at periodic intervals we do need to re-evaluate what we're doing to make sure that the direction that we're in remains consistent but I also think that because I'm so open and public about what I'm doing I'm pretty sure that if I were to change it I would get a hell of a lot of criticism for it so I think that's also a whole lot of you know a little bit of insurance also to make sure that we also stay on the right path and on the good and narrow you know I'm trying to almost be a caricature of myself and I'm trying to make the company a caricature of itself in sort of how you know pure I'm trying to make it take that path and I think if we were to stray from it I think I would hear that from several places at least that's what I'm hoping sure hi there when you talk about creating a company it's always a the question is how you people will sorry how do the legal kind of what is it called the LLC or what did you found so we are something so we're a Dutch company but we have this designation with the Dutch tax authorities that's something called a fiscal fundraising institution fiscal funds there for the instilling so that basically is a construction we stole from the Dutch churches so churches sometimes want to do a commercial spin-off okay and then the the church does this commercial activity and they want to get the money tax-free back to the church again so there's a Dutch language institute called Regina Chaley that those of you in the Netherlands might know them otherwise as being called the nonnen van Vucht the nuns from a little village called Vucht and what it is is the language institute is an independently operating language institute I mean it's a commercial enterprise but 90% of the profits from that go back to the nuns so we essentially stole that construction from the churches and we just made our commercial spin-off a security consultancy company and we made our church the NLNet foundation so it's a bit of business model hacking but that's how we set it up yes hi my name is Kees thanks for the talk I like this a lot I have a very similar business called The Hive it's about 40 people and differences I actually have employees so but probably doesn't matter much because I find that the hardest thing is getting loyalty and the only way you can do that is by providing training and learning options so I was wondering how you do that yeah I mean training is a bit difficult because we work with this whole peak over our shoulder concept which basically means again customers are in the chat rooms with my pentesters the problem is if I use junior people it becomes evident to the customer incredibly quickly that they're junior so I have to admit I have a bias towards hiring senior staff because they're less likely to screw up in a way that my customers are going to see it I mean I will sometimes hire mid-level staff and then kind of attempt to train them up but people fresh out of school as things are right now they tend to not be a very good fit for my company I feel bad about that I wish I had a better training budget maybe when we're larger we'll have more of a margin for that kind of stuff but as of right now I sort of avoid the problem by not hiring juniors maybe that's not a good solution before you're a senior people they will only stick with you if you keep them continuous chances to learn and also improve I mean this is the way especially millennials are and nothing I can do about it so they have to deal with it yeah well I think that they do learn a whole lot I mean I'm providing them a stimulating environment with a lot of freedom where they have a lot of smart colleagues so I mean if they have questions about I'm hacking some system and I'm stuck can you guys help I mean we've got a lot of smart people together and I think that we tend to keep the smart people because smart people like being with other smart people so once they're there they don't want to leave the community you know so at least the good fits don't want to leave so that is one way of retaining people yeah the other thing also is just that I think we have the reputation that we've built up that we are very competent in pen testing and a lot of customers tend to come to us with sort of their specials so if they have something that's particularly hard or you know this weird embedded system they want tested or a cryptographic audit or sort of a mix of different things in a single pen test they will tend to choose for us and that's actually really nice because when they give us the harder jobs it actually also tends to keep our staff really sharp so you know I guess just by having the seniors we've been able to provide better quality and because we have the better quality it means the customers give us the more challenging assignments and that turns into a virtuous cycle cool yeah one hack I also use is having them give a training to their peers they love to do it and it's good for everyone yeah thank you for the questions another one yeah I come from Germany and when you look there there was kind of trendy to do social entrepreneurship so and when you look at the companies in the end you would still seeing investments venture capital so how do you experience the kind of social washing that's kind going on when you in the sphere so how do I experience the one I call my term would be social washing like greenwashing social washing of these companies but in the end when you look at them they have venture capital and in the end they will do stuff that is not from my point of view and I mean to me I mean if anybody's accepted any kind of venture capital I don't think they can really call themselves social I mean maybe again this is kind of dogma this is like my religion this is my belief I mean maybe there's good investors out there but I've never seen them you know and look it's easy to call yourself a social enterprise but I mean you need to walk the talk you know and ultimately the community will see what you're doing and judge so I'm sure the speakers around afterwards some minutes our time is over now so I really enjoyed this talk and I hope you did too let's give our speaker another round of applause


Hello everyone and welcome to Unit 2. So far we've covered some of the most basic and important principles of genetics and this has laid the foundation for what is to come. We've discussed Mendel's work, the Punnett Square, a brief bit on the concepts of probability and human pedigrees. We're going to expand upon this and begin to get more in-depth on the whole concept of chromosomes. We'll discuss locus and alleles and the difference between them. We'll talk about chromosomal theory, mitosis, meiosis, and then a comparison of mitosis and meiosis. We'll also have a few mini lectures which will focus on chromosomal theory, which will also give us additional information on mitosis, meiosis, in fact two on meiosis, and finally we'll have an additional lecture which covers the comparison of mitosis and meiosis. We hope you enjoy this unit. There's a lot of interesting information to come. Hello everyone. Today's lecture will focus more on chromosomal theory. If you'll recall, we mentioned earlier that it was Gregor Mendel who laid the foundation for the entire field of genetics. But remember, he never actually knew the concept of a chromosome. Chromosomes were not discovered as the main unit of heredity until later, when Walter Fleming would first describe chromosomes. It would then be Theodore Boveri, who would link chromosomes to the concept of heredity, and then Walter Sutton, who would find evidence to link chromosomes to Mendel's principles. And finally, it would be Thomas Hunt Morgan, who would actually put this concept to use when he tracked the white amutation in fruit flies. The concept of a chromosome wasn't instantly discovered by one scientist. In fact, it was discovered by many scientists who built upon each other's work. Morgan, however, was credited with actually giving evidence to linking chromosomes to heredity. Thomas Hunt Morgan worked on Drosophila melanogaster, otherwise known as the common fruit fly. Fruit flies are great lab specimens for several reasons. First of all, they reproduce quickly. Secondly, they're easy to care for. And third, they have many, many offspring. If you've ever left a banana out for too long, you've been evidence to this, I'm sure. Fruit flies look like this, a particular drawing here. Morgan's group used fruit flies and first described the chromosomes that were found in fruit flies. They found four pairs of chromosomes. They also discovered a mutation in fruit flies that causes white eyes. It was this mutation that would lead them to link chromosomes with heredity. Through thousands of breeding experiments, Morgan found that this mutation was recessive. He also found that it was on the sex chromosome, otherwise known as the X chromosome. Now, just like humans, male fruit flies have one copy of the X chromosome. And then they also have a copy of a Y chromosome. Females, however, just like humans, have two copies of the X chromosome. In order for a male to have a white eye mutation, he only needs one copy of the mutated gene. However, in order for females to actually show white eyes, they have to have two copies. Because remember, we said that this is a recessive mutation. In Morgan's experiments, he would take a white-eyed male fruit fly, as you can see here, and cross it with a red-eyed female. Now, the red eye is the normal trait that fruit flies usually have. And again, if you ever have your piece of fruit, take a good close look at those fruit flies and their eye colors, because usually you'll find that they're red. Now, when he did this, he found that the offspring were all red eyes. And this actually makes sense. Because the female, if in fact she's homozygous for the red eye, as you can see here, she will give one copy of her X to any males, and then another copy of her X to any females. The males, however, will give their X to any females, okay?  So in this case, we have all males with red eyes, and we have all females with red eyes. But the females actually are carriers for this white eye mutation. Let's do a second round of crosses. Morgan's group then took those heterozygous females and crossed them with red-eyed males.  But in any female offspring, he will give the X. So this normal X chromosome is going to go to all the female offspring, and then his Y is going to go to all of the males. The female, however, will give one copy of her X to any females, and she'll also give one copy of her X to any males. And in this case, all of the females, again, are going to have red eyes. They'll either be homozygous for the red eye mutation, or they'll be a carrier and be heterozygous. The males, however, will be half with the red eyes, normal red eye gene, but they'll also have half of them should be white eyes, because they're going to receive half the number of chromosomes from the female in her case, which carry the mutation. So not only did Morgan give the needed experimental evidence for chromosomal theory, but he was one of the first to actually find a sex-linked trait. Sex-linked traits are those that are located on these sex chromosomes, which can either be the X or the Y. Morgan did thousands and thousands of breeding experiments, and this let him follow the inheritance of these mutations through many generations. And this gave the scientific proof that chromosomes carry the genetic material that in fact control what an organism looks like.


Welcome back to the third session of today at the Stanford Health final conference here in Brussels. My name is Derres Orrer-Frank, and I'll be moderating this session. We have five speakers who are key figures in the Stanford Health project. And we'll follow the same format as before. So we have about 10 minutes presentation for each speaker, and then five minutes of Q&A afterwards. And everyone who just joined and joined us online can visit slido.com and then type S4H, all capital, to submit their questions to the speakers. And the first speaker in this session is Professor Klaus Grunert. He's Professor of Marketing at Ohus University and founder of the MAP Center at Ohus University. And he specializes in consumer behavior research and has led the consumer studies in the Stanford Health project.  OK, thank you, Darius. So I'll try to keep you awake now after the lunch break here. I will not talk about the nutrition science and the other natural science basics that you've heard about in the morning here. The project stands for health, as you have heard from the coordinator is innovation action. That means it's supposed also to lead in the end to something which can be introduced on the market. That is actually what I'm dealing about with here, because anything that you're developing in this project here will have an impact on public health only if it's actually adopted by consumers and it's being used by consumers. So a personalized nutrition is also a question of consumer acceptance and willingness to pay. And I'm breaking this down into six questions here that you can see here. Who is interested in personalized nutrition? Do people understand what that is? If they do and they're interested, how do they want to have it delivered? Then we can ask what are the barriers, both for the adoption and for the continued use, because that makes a difference, as I will show you. And then most specifically, what are the key features for an app like the one that is like the IDIAT app which has been developed here in this project here. And in the sense for health project, we've been doing consumer research to shed light and give answers to these questions. We've done a number of survey studies mostly in Germany and Spain as the main countries where this project has been working, and also some things in the UK. Also been doing some focus groups, qualitative research in the number of smaller studies, all of which, of course, has been reported. First of all, what I will show you here, this is something we did at the beginning, and this is not data generated by sense for health, this is data we found from a big European survey which measured people's life satisfaction and people's subjective perception of their health. We found that four groups differed not surprisingly, some are happy and healthy, some are unhappy and unhealthy, and some are either happy and unhealthy all the other way around. And which of these have most need for personalized nutrition? Of course, we would think that those that have most need for personalized nutrition are those on the right-hand side here, right, which have not so good health. On the other hand, we can see those on the right-hand side, they also have lower scores with regard to trying new things. So adopting something like personalized nutrition and especially app-based personalized nutrition may not be the most obvious solution for these people here. So this points already at an issue that I come back to which we encounter with this type of solution we are working with here, that the people who objectively may be most in need of this kind of thing may also be the people that are most difficult to reach with the kind of instruments we are working with here. We have done a study where we looked at use of nutrition apps, not the one we developed here, but any nutrition apps because lots of these are out on the market. We looked at people who have never used a nutrition app, those who have used one but stopped using it and those are still using it. And then we're looking at differences between these three groups and they mirror what I've just shown you in the previous slides, namely that those who have never used a nutrition app, they have less interest in healthy eating, they have less confidence in that they can do something which would improve the healthiness of their eating and they have also less interest in technology. And the health is also not as good. So those that do use nutrition apps, they have already a better health, are already eating more healthily and have also high interest in healthy eating and in technology. So if you look at people giving reasons for why they are using or not using or have stopped using nutrition apps, we can see them here. The top reasons for using it, not surprising to improve your health, improve what one eats. The top reason for not using them mostly related to what I just said. Now people think you don't need them or people think it's simply too difficult to use. So it's a lack of motivation, a lack of self-efficacy. Now also those that stopped using it, that these are a bit different. I mean lost interest can be also a motivational aspect but the other factors that we see here is that the thing is takes too much time to enter the data it's too confusing to use. So this is a different question. This is a question not about motivation to eat healthily, but a question about how difficult or easy it was to use this particular instrument and helping you to do so. And again, that is an issue that I will come back to. If you look at those that do use a nutrition app, they seem to be some pretty proficient users because most of them use it at least once a day. Many of them use it every time they use it for more than 10 minutes. So if you actually are a continued user of nutrition app people seem to be serious users of these apps here. So the answer to the first question is who is interested in personalized nutrition? It's people who are interested in healthy eating, have confidence in their ability to eat healthily and to already have a healthier diet. And I'm saying this not sort of to demotivate the importance of what we are doing here. It's only to say that if you bring a wonderful new app on the market here, it by itself is not enough for the huge impact on public health. We need to do something else. We need also to motivate people to be interested using this kind of app and that cannot be done by the app alone and in a way, of course, that should not be a surprise. The second question then was, do people understand the concept of personalized nutrition? And as I said, we did some focus groups that dealt with this issue, two major results. One is that the concept itself is not known. People have not heard about personalized nutrition. If you ask them, you have heard about it, the answer is mostly no. The good news is the concept is intuitive. If you then ask people, what do you think it means? People come up mostly with a right, pretty right sort of explanation. You see some of the examples here. Probably nutrition, no tailored to one specific needs, depending on someone's health condition based on what you can and cannot tolerate. That's pretty close to what we are working with. So people can make sense of it, even though the concept of such is not known to people. So do people understand the concept of personalized nutrition? There is an intuitive understanding of the concept if you prompt people, although the level of knowledge that people have at the moment is low. Then how do people want personalized nutrition delivered? And we have both some qualitative research from focus groups and some quantitative results that are relevant for this question here. These are here our results from the focus groups where we found that people differ in their approach to which kind of information they're willing to share. In the focus groups, most people had no issues with sharing a blood sample, but they had issues with sharing genetic information, and some also had issues with sharing detailed lifestyle information, including your medical history and the number of other things. Nobody knew about microbiome based personalized nutrition, but people found it very interesting and there was generally a reaction that people would be interested in hearing more about it. Generally, based on the focus groups, we found there were four key dimensions. Now that had an impact on the interest and personalized nutrition. One was not surprisingly how useful and beneficial we thought it was. And then there were three more. One is related to the kind of information you need to provide as I already have mentioned. And then there were some issues on how reliable people thought the underlying science was. Obviously, if you think the underlying science is reliable, you're more interested than if you aren't doubt about that. And then there are also some ethical concerns that mainly have something to do with sharing data and the privacy of the data and things like that. This is from the quantitative study and I think Darius will maybe say a few more words about that later on. But basically what we've been doing here, we've been showing people different hypothetical personalized nutrition services. They differed in how much effort people had to spend using them. Whether the advice was provided by a human agent like a doctor or an algorithm or a combination of both. Versus the degree of personalization was high or low and then which kind of information as input is needed last time, microbiotic or phenotypic. And people chose between these ones here and we found that there are three different groups of people who differ in their preferences. The first one, as you can see here on the left, the major factor for them is who's providing the advice. They want the advice from a human agent and not from an algorithm. The one in the middle, they are mainly concerned about which kind of information they want to share or need to share. Another lifestyle is acceptable but the two other ones are not. But the most interesting ones for us in our context here is the one on the right. It's also the biggest one. It's 55% of the population and the two samples here because here the one that is the most highly preferred is a combination of a human agent and the algorithm which in a way is close to the sense for health solution. It gives a high degree of personalization. The effort in using it is low and it involves sharing microbiotic information. So it's actually very close to the type of profile that we are working with in the sense for health project. So the good news here is there is a large segment of the population that seems to be interested in this particular solution here. So how do they want? How do people want personalized discretion delivered? Different people have different preferences but for about 50% a macroeum-based easy to use AI plus personal service solution is very good. And I think that's of course good news for the purposes of this project here. What are the barriers for adoption of personalized nutrition and pay attention to the word here because I have two slides on barriers. One is about an adoption and one is about continued use once you have adopted. And there are different answers to these. So this one here, what are the barriers for adoption? Start getting started with a personalized nutrition nutrition. As I already said, the two main factors here, a lack of motivation for healthy eating and a lack of confidence that you actually can eat more healthily even with the help of personalized nutrition. Now, based on that then, also a lack of insight into the benefits of personal nutrition skepticism is regarded as the underlying science and issues related to privacy and data security but the two most important ones are the two first ones here. Because if you look at the barriers for continued use, people who have started using a nutrition app, what are the factors that have an influence that they continue using it or drop out? That's what we can say here. And the major factor that's maybe not so surprising is whether the app delivers the benefits that have been promised, whether they experience those benefits leading to satisfaction with the app, which in turn is very much related to whether the app is easy to use. That's not surprising. I mean, that's what we would expect, of course. The interesting part here is what is not in the diagram.  So the motivation is decisive for getting started but the ease of use is decisive for keep on going. And I think that's an important implication from these results here. So what are the barriers for the adoption, lack of motivation and confidence, mainly lack of insights concerns about privacy? What are the barriers for continued use that is difficult to use and therefore no benefits are forthcoming? Last question then, what are the key features for a personalized nutrition app? We did some research on that as input to the development of the eye diet. We looked at a number of different things and those three that came out as most important, you can see here on the left, the most important of them all is the first one, namely the possibility to add your own personal preferences, to individualize the advice that you get, have some flexibility that you can make sure that the recommendations you get are adapted to your personal preferences. That was clearly the most important one. Then we had two more, one is giving evaluated feedback and giving not only qualitative feedback, how often have you actually done what the app suggests that you're doing, but also saying good, this is, you're doing a good job in terms of your dietary choices here. And the third one then is gamification that we add some fun elements in terms of for example, rewards and levels of progress that help people and are valued by some people in the use of such a device here. So the key features for a personalized nutrition app according to our research here, taking into account individual preferences, feedback and gamification. Where does that leave us? What are the major implications for commercialization of a personalized nutrition app? First of all, an app-based personal nutrition is attractive for people who already have an interest in healthy eating. That is the main target group. Any commercialization attempt, of course, should aim at that target group and not at the ones who lack the motivation and the lack of self-efficacy because they need to be dealt with in other ways at least in the start. Secondly, an app-based personalized nutrition should include a component of human interaction like having access to nutritionists. And that can be just an option. Now if you want to, you can have contact with a human being here and it could be for an extra fee or something like that, but I think that just the option of having that possibility according to our results could have a major impact on people think this is a good solution. Third, a biome-based personalized nutrition solution is new to most people and needs explanation and giving that explanation. It is very important to be clear about what the underlying science is and to which extent you can trust in the underlying science. Of course, one should not accentuate and make promises that you cannot keep, but this thing about being clear about the underlying science, I think is very important. Then, as I said, the adoption is largely a question of motivation, but then having people keep on using it is mainly a question of how good the app is, whether the app is easy to use and delivers those benefits that have been promised. And in doing that, we have a number of recommendations for how that app should look like and of these the one about the individualization that the app can take into account personal food preferences is the most important one. And these were my conclusions. Thank you. Thank you, Klaus, for these deep insights. I don't have any more questions. It felt like you covered everything already, but does the audience have any questions to the consumer insight expert? We'll have a slight delay for the questions from Slido, so who wants to go first? Yes. Where? Yes. Klaus, thank you so much for your clear presentation. As usual, you focus on the main factors. And one of them is that using a personalized nutrition app is that you want to use it. You are open to it. Do you think that different passions with different pathologies could be open to use this kind of applications if they think that they could improve their health status related with that pathology? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if people have a health condition, obviously, they are also more motivated to healthy eating. I mean, if we would have a diagnosis, there is specific health condition, people also usually have a higher motivation for healthy eating, and I think we know that. I don't think people necessarily think about using nutrition app in that context. Now, but that could change. I mean, it becomes more common doing this. And if we have also in the public arena discussion about the underlying science and not least about the positive effects of doing that, I think that could change. Because then these are people that have some motivation, but may not be familiar with using this type of tool here. So in that case, maybe we should combine the practitioners, the clinicians, to convince the patients before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, nice. Question in the back. Thank you very much for this insightful presentation. I was wondering about something. I think the motivation issue, we see that a lot of times in nutrition, and that, for example, food supplement users are mostly those who are actually already quite healthy. Could it also work the other way around that having more of these nutrition apps and more of these personalized nutrition apps might also help to increase the motivation of people to become more healthy? Is there any other way that we can broaden this target audience? Yeah, yeah. One of the issues with the motivation is that many people perceive some kind of trade-off between viewing food as a bundle of nutrients on the one hand side and viewing food as a source of pleasure and a good life on the other side. And that is a major barrier. It's one of the reasons why some people are not interested. I think the way something like the eye diet works, and we'll see more of that here a little later on, is that it provides, in a way, a more holistic approach to giving nutritional recommendation because it's not advised with regard to specific nutrients and eats more of this and less of that, and then you need to compose your meals based on different nutrients and so on. I mean, the app does that for you. The app gives advice in terms of meals. And I think it's actually closer to this other view of having food as a source of pleasure and a good life. And therefore, once it becomes more well-known, becomes more popular, more widespread, could actually have that effect, yes. Another question in the back. It was spoken today also that a lot of new directions into nutrition are considering the food environment and all the lab innovation labs and so on. We do have one project which is addressing also some aspects like that. And one of the things which we do not really understand, and probably here you could give us some hints with regard to personalized nutrition. What about the ones which are not having such so large financial boundaries? Are they still willing to move towards a personalized diet, a personalized meal? Because I mean, we were just passing in Germany a time where one cucumber was two euros. Was it something which is considered by the consumer or was something which is considered is not related to the stance for health strictly, but is mostly related to the changing the food environment in the future? Yeah, that's a difficult question. I mean, the stance for health, of course, if it's a commercialized will come on the market, people will need to pay for it. Also, there is an expense. It may not be a huge expense, but there will be an expense, which is why the motivation is really crucial, because if it's an additional expense, if you're not motivated, you will not do it. I mean, generally, there is a lot of research about how healthy eating is related to income and things like that. And for some people, obviously, the income is a major restrictive factor. But I also think that, in some ways, it's probably more related to social class than to income. Because if you're depending on the kind of life you have, a low income life, it's not only the financial constraint. It's also where the pleasure in your life is. For some of these people, certain types of eating are a major source of pleasure in their life. And then somebody comes and says, you should do something else. It's very sort of very much uphill doing that. What I'm trying to say is it's not only the question of the financial constraint itself, because the food budget in Europe is not so enormous as a percentage of your overall disposable income. I don't know whether that answers your question. Well, we have two questions from the online audience. One not anonymous from Arno Greiling. Do you think that another barrier to use might be challenges of cooking and eating in a family context? How to solve this? Yeah, I mean, if people have difficulties cooking, obviously that is a challenge. Also here, because it assumes, I mean, the app is a home cooking app. It's not only it has a restaurant component there as well. But it's mainly a sort of home cooking app. I think what we have seen in the wake of the corona pandemic is that people have been doing more home cooking.  But I mean, we've done research showing that people not only did prepare more meals at home, but they also enjoyed having more meals at home and enjoyed being in the kitchen. There was a boost in enjoyment of cooking in the kitchen. And we have some new research which is from last year, which shows that's still there. Even though the pandemic is largely gone, that is still there. It's nothing to do with the fact that we're talking about here. But I think there actually is a development after many, for many years, we've been saying this goes in the wrong direction. You may now have a development which goes in the opposite direction. First one question from the audience next. I was just wondering if there was any specific insight about what people wanted to know about the microbiome. Could you detect anything that, you know, any specific questions or? Yeah, I would need to go back to those results. I don't have any sort of specific quote here ready at the moment. But the reactions, as I remember them, were very basic. People had no idea. I mean, everybody has an idea of bacteria in your gut, right? But that's also where it ends now, so that you can use it in order to optimize your food intake, as I said. It was completely new to people. And as I said, people were very interested in, because it was also introduced as a new approach, right? Which it is, as you know here. And that sort of prompted the question, are you sure? I mean, can we trust on that if you tell us this is good for you, because of your microbiome that you actually are right in this? I can understand that. I mean, the first time in meetings that I saw the effects of the microbiome on mice behavior, it was hard to believe. It was like, you're cheating somehow. Why would that be? It's hard to believe that you can have so much of an effect. Yes, we have many more questions, but we're out of time. So thank you. Professor Klaus Grunert, everyone. Thank you.


So let's consider, suppose you will have amount c at time t, then the present value will be c times the reciprocal of the accumulation function. Remember that if the accumulation function is a of t, the present value of a dollar at time t is this reciprocal. So the value at time tau will be this present value times the accumulation function at tau. And we can simplify this expression. So, for example, suppose you inherit a fund that will pay out $500 in 8 years based on simple, not compound, annual interest of 4%, but you want to sell it. What's a fair price for the investment? For simple interest of 4% annually, the accumulation function is, so the present value of $500 will be, so a fair price to sell your inheritance today would be $378.79. Now here's a very important variation on this problem, same situation, but this time you plan to sell it in 3 years. What would be a fair price for the investment in 3 years? Well, we might reason as follows. The fund pays out $500 in 8 years, so 3 years from now will be 5 years from a payout of $500, so the value of the inheritance then will be the present value of $500 paid out in 5 years. And we could do this, but we would be wrong. And it's not obvious why we're wrong, so let's think about that. Remember we calculated the present value of the fund was $378.79. So suppose you deposited that $378.79 into an account earning simple interest of 4% annually. After 3 years, the account would have a balance of... So if someone offered 4.1667 for the account, you wouldn't want to sell it for that amount. Instead, the correct computation of the value in 3 years will be the present value of the account, that's 500 times the reciprocal of the accumulation function, times the accumulation function evaluated after 3 years. So a fair price in 3 years would be $424.24. Now, we could have any function at all for our accumulation function, so let's consider another example. Suppose we've received 507 years from now from an account with our accumulation function, which is a product of simple and compound interest functions. How much should you sell the account for in 2 years? And to really get at the difference, let's calculate the incorrect answer and the correct answer, and then explain why the correct answer is the correct one. So first, we'll do the problems the wrong way. In 2 years, the payoff of $500 will be 5 years away, and so the present value of $500 2 years from now will be... Again, this is the incorrect answer, $411.70 is not correct. So let's compute the actual value. So remember the value at time tau of an investment worth C at time t is C times this ratio at tau at, where at is the accumulation function. And so we compute the actual value for $1314. Now, if you're cynical, you'll say that the larger value must be correct because that's the way that banks can get more money from people. But in this particular case, there's a reason why this is also mathematically correct. So to explain why this is correct, let's take that expression apart. And this first factor, C times the reciprocal of A of 7, represents the present value of our payoff C. And again, if we deposit that amount into an account with the accumulation function A of t, then in 2 years the value will be... which is the expression we used. Of course, that's just a bunch of mathematical symbols thrown onto a page. And again, if you're cynical, you might suspect that there's some sort of subterfuge going on. So remember, never hesitate to use a concrete example. So the present value of the $500 to be received in 7 years is... and if you deposit this amount, or the rounded amount 38182, into an account with the same accumulation function, then in 2 years that amount will be... and again, if it's worth this much, you wouldn't want to sell it for a lesser price.


Now I'm afraid that before you watch this video, you will have to pass a quick mandatory power level screening. So please just sit still, this will only take a moment as we measure you. Oh, and look at that, congratulations. You have been deemed powerful enough to unlock the coveted subscribe button for the Ground Line Review, the pushing of which will grant you regular One Piece content uploaded straight into your YouTube feed. Hello and welcome to the Ground Line Review, your source for everything One Piece, and today we have a discussion regarding the, I guess it's either explosive or a tired topic, depending on your personal viewpoint, which is power levels, yay. Specifically, the common misconception that a large segment of the Western One Piece fan base have regarding power levels. And this topic is more or less a direct response to the release of chapter 980, and I'm obviously not going to spoil things here for non-manga readers, but basically it featured a brief skirmish between some major characters. And let's just say that the outcome did not go as many would have suspected, thus causing internet controversy and in some rare cases even outrage, as the rest of us watch from the sidelines with popcorn in hand, soon to be converted to popcorn in mouth. But this sort of situation occurs because when becoming part of a community and discussing things like strength and power over a certain period, and in the case of One Piece, that period is potentially decades, a sort of communal canon develops, whereby the large majority agree on certain aspects, and when odor dispels such a commonly accepted thought, then that sparks controversy or not controversy. Honestly, it's more like a non-traversey because it is not odor's fault that you have built up false expectations for yourself. And this is something that I do personally grapple with quite a bit when reviewing the manga weekly, not in terms of power levels though, but more general storytelling. So when I review chapters, I come up with all sorts of ideas for where the story is going. And then on the odd occasion, I will be legitimately disappointed when things don't play out how I personally expected them to. It's a completely unwarranted and unfair response. And I really think that the only way you can truly inoculate yourself from such a thing is to not be an active part of a fan base or dwell too much on the series. That's not necessarily the lifestyle that most of us want to live though. So let's tackle the number one issue by far in this realm being power levels. And we're going to begin with the very first misconception about power levels in One Piece. And that is quite simply that power levels exist in this series at all. To put it bluntly, they don't. One Piece is not like many other classic shonen series where a character's power can be accurately quantified in some way. So the obvious example would of course be Dragon Ball or at least prior to Super, you could draw distinct tiers because combat in that series is super simple. There is very little room for nuance and creativity with combative styles. And in 99% of situations, the stronger individual will win because the stronger one is more often than not the fastest one as well as the one with more energy reserves and intelligence is a questionable factor of relevance in Dragon Ball. One Piece is an entirely opposite entity. This is a series where it is possible for raw power to lose to a cleverly implemented strategy or simply a bad matchup of abilities. Very roughly, One Piece operates on a scissors paper rock type of system. And yes, that's what we call it in Australia. None of this rock paper scissors blasphemy, but this dynamic makes power leveling very difficult as just because character A can be character B, that does not necessarily mean that they can be character C because character C was beaten by character B. You really do need to consider the large majority of One Piece matchups on a case by case basis, which I have a whole series exploring called One Piece Battles, which takes an in-depth look at combatants through at least seven different categorical distinctions as well as adding miscellaneous data on top to predict an outcome. And even then this is often not a solid outcome and in many cases I am left legitimately questioning the fight, but that is the beauty of One Piece. It is an incredibly vast world with nuanced individuals who you cannot broadly categorize, not for the most part. And this will bring us to the second common misconception of power levels in One Piece, which is that even if they did exist, which they don't, but if they did, the fan base is using them incorrectly. And here I am referring to the emergence of broadly accepted leveling metrics. And probably the best example of this would be people who use the term Yonko level. Now taking this term at face value, it would imply that everyone granted the title of Yonko are all pretty much on the same level of power. And the existence of this feature is one of the big, big reasons why a lot of fans simply can't get their pawpaw heads around, Luffy being labeled as the fifth emperor.  Likely shanks as well and possibly even black beard, although I would heavily argue that last one. And that's kind of the problem. So I say possibly black beard because despite his global shenanigans, there really isn't a lot to say that he is too much out of the realm of possibility for Luffy to deal with. Physically, we've been shown evidence that he simply is not all that strong and he mostly progresses in this world via the same mechanism as Luffy, which would be the art of fate. And so there is a huge, huge flaw in the armor of classifying someone as Yonko level because the six candidates who would officially make up that category in the minds of fans already have a great disparity of personal power between them. Black beard does not possess the strength of say Big Mark or Kaido, but he has made it to the position of an emperor through the device of sheer notoriety and amassing a legion of support behind him, just like Luffy. And that's why this Yonko level garbage doesn't work because it isn't simply strength or power that allows someone the title of an emperor. So for example, if we take a character like say, Dracul Mihawk and decide to label him as Yonko level as many do, then what does that even mean? And to answer that, it means nothing because what it implies is that yes, he is powerful but how powerful are we talking Blackbeard Yonko level or Kaido Yonko level? Could it even be Whitebeard Yonko level? Maybe even Shang's Yonko level which is the epitome of pointless discussion as we know almost nothing about Shang's actual strength. And this is a common problem that will arise when trying to use titles in power leveling. Inevitably, you will always need to fall back to an individual character for comparison rather than a broad group, which is fine. And in fact, that is probably the most effective way to judge the power of any given individual. But for another title example, let's use Mihawk's title as a warlord of the sea. You could never say that any character is of warlord level because it is meaningless due to the incredible disparity of power between all of them. For two examples, let's take Crocodile and Doflamingo. Both possessed the warlord title but one was defeated by a pre-gear pre-times get pre-hockey Luffy, whilst the other was able to tank gear fourth and it took a King Kong punch as well as the rebellion of an entire nation to overcome. The two are not comparable at all in terms of power but they each managed to acquire the warlord title due to their own personal circumstances. And as such, that title cannot be used for anywhere near an accurate measure of strength. Now I will say there is one potential exception to this. The one title that you could maybe possibly get away with using is Admiral level because for the most part, each of the admirals have been shown to be on quite a similar all-around area of power to their counterparts. And yes, we do know things like for a fact, Sakazuki is stronger than Kuzan specifically but it took them a 10 day battle that permanently altered the climate of an entire island to reach that conclusion. So the two were pretty evenly matched as would seem our all admirals. So that is my one little concession on using titles for the purpose of power leveling.  And speaking of giant messes for one more title related example, I now present the worst possible power leveling definition in this fan base, which is Yonko Commander level. Now this obviously refers to top officers in each Emperor's crew, such as the Calamities or the Sweet Commanders, Ben Beckman's, whatever. It doesn't really matter because it's absurd. Just as with the Warlords of the Sea and even the Emperors of the Sea, there is a ridiculous disparity of power within every character who holds one of these positions within the series.  Like Carter Curry and Cracker cannot be placed on the same quote unquote level and then have that broad level used as a relevant metric. But it does get used. And as a result, you see a lot of really poorly thought out arguments claiming things like Omg, Luffy can't be Yonko level because Carter Curry is only Yonko Commander level and Luffy couldn't even beat him. And if you want to weigh in on another controversial discussion over whether or not Luffy actually beat Carter Curry, I have an entire video on that here but that is not our focus today. No, our focus abroad statements like that that is something of a cancer upon one piece discussion online because of the sweeping generalizations made and the lack of any internal consistency. So for example, and this is my final point on titles I promise, they don't even form a cohesive system if you do choose to use them. I mean, how does someone who is considered Yonko level stack up against another character who is considered Admiral level? And the simple answer is you would need to look at both characters individually because look, there are all of these wonderful fake tears going around but there is no way to effectively rank those broad tears. I mean, I guess if I had to give it my best go, I'd say that Yonko level goes on top because of characters like Whitebeard and Kaido followed by Admiral level next but that doesn't really work either because there are characters in the Yonko level tier that seem to be blatantly outclassed by those on the Admiral level. And in fact, there are even beings within the Yonko commander level who can stack up evenly against Admiral level combatants. So there's no actual distinction at play between these tears which renders the whole tier system entirely pointless. I mean, if someone on Yonko commander level can be considered equal to someone on Admiral level and then someone on Admiral level can be considered equal to or greater than someone on Yonko level then what was the point of even creating these tears in the first place? Or are we supposed to dive even deeper and say that this Yonko is actually Admiral level whilst this Admiral may very well be Yonko level and this Yonko commander is actually more accurately Admiral level whilst this Yonko commander probably shouldn't even be in the Yonko commander level despite being a Yonko commander. In the end, they don't actually tell you anything and they only serve to muddle up discussion. So in conclusion, stop using titles to power scale. Next up is a misconception that I think thankfully a large majority of the fan base have gotten over but I do still see it enough to mention it here which is that bounties do not equal power. Unfortunately, there is still a healthy trend of power scaling according to the bounty metric and it's all but entirely irrelevant in the modern era of One Piece. Now granted, this was not always the case like when the series first started during the East blue era, bounties were probably quite an accurate representation of direct strength. You could take characters like Arlong and Kuro, compare their numbers and very accurately judge who would be more likely to win in a fight. And you could do that quite consistently with most of the very, very early characters. However, this is no longer the case because when we have characters with a 500 million very bounty, taking out characters with bounties of over a billion berries, we do hit the realization that, uh-oh, these numbers are a bit pointless. What bounties are an indicator of is the perceived threat of an individual by the world government with the limited knowledge that they have available to them. That is very important. It is the knowledge of the world government to play, not the knowledge of the readers and watches of the series. So yeah, it's fun to see bounties change and often some of the biggest moments of the series spawned from that, but using them in direct correlation to power is one of the most unreliable metrics that this series has access to. Now, one of the more accurate systems one could use in the series, I suppose, would be Haki because it is a universal system. Unlike Devil Fruits, Haki does not necessarily produce a unique outcome. And in many cases, you can make solid assessments based on who obviously has greater levels of armament or observation Haki. Not so much Conqueror's Haki though, not yet anyway, but using Haki is not an effective method alone by which to judge others. To illustrate, NL is one of the finest observation Haki uses that we have ever seen in one piece. I really want to emphasize that. His Devil Fruit gives him God-like omnipotence. No, he doesn't have the cardicuri depth of future sight, but NL's particular brand of observation is still incredible, but even that did not stop him losing to a pre-timeskip, pre-gear, pre-Haki Luffy. It's a cool thing that he had in his arsenal, but it goes to show that you cannot depend on Haki or even Devil Fruits for that matter to power scale people. Once again, it all needs to be done on a case-by-case basis. And even then, there are so many variables to consider. So a good example of a shocking moment in the series would be when Caesar clown defeated Luffy, Smoker Toshigi, and several other straw hats. In an instant, mind you, because the group were not anticipating his power to remove all oxygen from the immediate vicinity. And look, Caesar is not a powerful character by traditional metric means. His Haki is nonexistent as far as we know. You can't place him on any vague title tier. His bounty is fairly low. He isn't physically strong in any way, but because of a funky quirk with his Devil Fruit, he can still demolish characters who would be widely considered to be capable of wiping the floor with him. And that sort of interaction can happen anytime, anywhere to almost anyone, which is exactly the case in chapter 980. A certain character with an unknown power took advantage of that situation and emerged as the undisputed victor in a brief, and I want to emphasize that word, brief skirmish. It was not an extended battle. It was not an accurate judgment to power. And the segment of fans who were losing their minds in the depths of disappointment need to calm down and reread one piece because that is the entire history of the series. Characters caught off guard or caught within a bad ability matchup can unexpectedly lose battles. Welcome to the glory of this world. And just imagine how disappointing it would be if things were the other way around. And we always knew who was going to win before a fight even began. In which case, one piece may not even be worth reading. So please, for your own good, stop power leveling. And if you do insist on the practice, then don't overreact to the briefest of conflicts as if it was a key scientific discovery that changes everything we know about human existence. What do you guys think? Please do leave your thoughts in the comments below or even join my Discord server. And if you're keen to see more videos like this, then please do go and check out some of my other content or even subscribe to the channel for more glorious one piece business, uploaded straight until YouTube feeds. But for now, this has been the ground line review and I'll see you next time.