Welcome to Rehash! All the internet, we're all news, and this is old news. We bring you the best and worst of what's happening today. What's going on, ladies and gentlemen? Welcome to Rehash, the best show on freedom, so don't forget to like their video and subscribe if you're new to freedom and see you guys later. Thank you so much to the average PR who provided our intro. If you'd like to do the same and be awesome, link in the description to where you can provide an intro and receive a meaningful spotlight at the end of any of our episodes. Just a quick note, we are sitting at a few hundred of these, so we are working through them. I know there are a lot of people who are waiting for theirs. It'll come. And hopefully you've followed the previous instructions and provided something meaningful and interesting and not like CGI and whatnot. So yeah, then we have a couple of newsy type, whatever type things that we want to discuss with you, the Freedom Family. All right, I'm gonna go first. Yeah, actually I will go first. Thank you. Today I wanted to talk about the Humble Jumbo Bundle, which is a great source of low cost games if you're doing it for a YouTube channel or just in general. And then I wanted to talk to the Freedom Family about how commerce are now being wirelessly hacked. Work. And then I wanted to talk to the Freedom Family about Anzhuatnega talking about climate change. So we should probably get into these news stories. So get down. So it shouldn't be news to any YouTuber who's been doing this for a while. The Indie Humble Bundle or in this case, the Humble Jumbo Bundle. That's a mouthful. It is. Is a great source of low cost games and it's for good cause. It's actually for charity. You can decide how much goes to the game developers, how much goes to charity. When you purchase these titles, you're able to say how much goes not only just to the developers and charity, you can actually pick which developers get how much and whatnot. And it's something that I've been supporting for a very long time. In fact, it was this main source, well not the main source. It was a good source of games that I played on my gaming channel when I got sick of Minecraft because let's face it, it didn't happen. That's right. I wanted to bring this to the attention of the Freedom Family because like I said, it is for a good cause. It is a great source of cheap games. Right now, for a donation of as little as a dollar, you can get three games.  You pay a little bit more than that. You get more. So check it out in the description down below and go do some good deeds. And what happens if you lose? You don't need like a hundred thousand dollars. I wonder what would happen. I think that the charity people would come and kiss you or something for it. Yeah. Actually, that's not unheard of. Notch a few years ago, donated quite a bit of money to the YouTube channel. Really? I wanna read about that after this. Yeah. All right, so let's talk about your thing. All right, so recently, cars are getting more realistic, more futuristic, they're already realistic. I was gonna say, what kind of virtual car are you driving? The ones that you guys can't see. Anyway, they're getting more futuristic. You mean that they're connected wirelessly all of the time when they're on, so they're always subject to hacks? What? Yeah. No, no, wait a minute. I don't wanna deal with hacked cars. That is not something I'm ready to deal with. It's like watchdogs in real life. So. Can you hack cars into watchdogs? Yeah. What? Yeah, so now over half a million vehicles are at risk of being hacked wirelessly through a simple mobile app. They can, they have the ability to disable the brakes. They have the ability to actually monitor.  They can actually control the steering. That is insane. All the same. Now with a click of a button. I don't really wanna live in a world where that's a thing. Like I'm, I have come to grips with the fact that I have to have like antivirus and stuff on my PC and on my phone, but on my car. Exactly, yeah. Ah, so for the most part, they've not reached to Chrysler and all of the manufacturers of these vehicles that are potentially at risk and they're working with these companies, but are they actually working back? Are they just one-sided? Really don't know a lot. Now this worries me because Chrysler has their offering, which I forget what the name of it is. Steve, do you know what's on top of this? Nah, I don't. Anyway, they have their offering and then Ford has their offering called Sync and then we have OnStar from GM. This is a really, like, if we get into a world where it's, you know, a real potential risk where this kind of thing just happens, that's very scary. It makes me wanna just drive a Hooptie. Or just a bicycle, just pedal everywhere. But I'd have to have a playing card in this, folks. Make a noise. Yeah. All right. And then I wanted to talk to the Freedom Family about the Gavinet die. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently made a public statement about climate change. Now this is actually big news because he's a staunch Republican. And he's not really, his party doesn't usually speak out about climate change. Mainly, depending on who you ask, mainly because it's inconvenient for businesses. Doing things to help keep climate change from progressing and things like that, it's expensive for businesses.  That's what some people would say. Anyways, so he went on record as saying, I believe the science is in. The debate is over and the time for action is now. I have starred in a lot of science fiction movies and let me tell you something, climate change is not science fiction. The battle is real and it is impacting us right now. Or at least I assume that's what he sounded like. That's how I read it in my head, me too. All right, now, so this is, like I said, this is big news, especially with him being the ex-governor of California. California has CARB or the California Air Resource Board, one of the most stringent in the country as far as, you know, emissions and climate change and stuff. So this is big. Let us know in the comments section down below. Who is your favorite celebrity with a cause? Tell us who the celebrity is and what the cause is. And if you say Willie Nelson, you don't really have to tell us what the cause is. And now comes one of my favorite segments, the segment where we talk about your comments. And if you don't mind, I'm gonna go first. All right, go ahead. All right, first comment comes from Steven Van, who says 99% of people won't read this.  You're right. Oh, moving on. Comment number two comes from the Manky Tube.  The Manky Tube. Okay, all the best to you. He says, I'd spend it on PC hardware. No, for those of you that do not know, yesterday, Anthony asked the Freedom Family if you had one million US dollars, what would you spend it on?  A million dollar PC. A million dollar, what would a million dollar PC look like? What would that be like? You get like, I think it's like a thousand gig of RAM. You get like a hundred gig of video memory. It's just insane how much you could get. Diamond keys and keyboard. Yeah, server cases for it. Liquid cooling for like every single part.  Interesting. Okay. Comment number three comes from 2Kreturner, who says, why can someone be versatile? Like, do videos more than one game, it would be boring playing just one game. I assume you mean on a YouTube gaming channel? Right. So, when it comes to diversity, the jury is really still out and here's why. It really depends on your personality, it depends on your fan base, and a few other issues. Like, we talk about this a lot when we're giving advice to channels, which we're gonna do here in a minute. No. So. I'm not. No spoilers. So, when we give advice to channels, a lot of times we may not make it clear why we're giving the advice that we are. And the thing is, like I said, it depends on your personality. If you have, let's say built 5,000 subscribers on one particular game, moving past that one game can be difficult. Right.  YouTube is much like the business world in that respect. You want to find a niche market that you can, for lack of a better word, exploit. And then you want to go past that niche market and expand from there. That's what's called a channel strategy. Now, there's a lot that goes into a channel strategy, but keep in mind that anything that you do, you need to think about market penetration in it. So, let's say it's indie games in general. You can build a sizable channel just off of indie games. Look at Total Biscayne. Yeah, there's plenty of indie game channels. Yeah, now he's done more than just indie games. But still, that's primarily where a lot of his traffic comes.  When you are doing this, when you're being versatile, as you say, just keep in mind that looking for a way to make that versatility work for you is what's best. Now, with all that stuff out of the way, let's go ahead and talk about the partner. To the chopper! So, in today's episode of ReHash, we're gonna be spotlighting an awesome partner by the name of the Average PR. Now, I know, before we actually started recording, we had a few pros and cons about the channel already listed up. Now, the guy has a lot of potential, but there's a few downfalls. You're gonna go into the first downfall, or? Nah, I'm gonna let you go. Okay, so the only concern that I've had as far as the channel is he uploads relevant content that's surrounding Call of Duty and Call of Duty Black Ops 3. He does consistent news type videos, similar to ReHash, but the only downfall is he does not work on his titles, descriptions, and the thumbnails. I'm not a huge fan of. I don't know if you feel differently. I feel that the, for instance, he's got a shout out Sunday series. I believe that that could be retooled to maybe include an action moment, a funny joke that happened in that series with maybe shout out Sunday over to the side. So, for instance, let's say he's answering a viewer question about, let's say, a topic that we continue to talk about on ReHash, the legalization of marijuana or something, you know, he could, you know, say, okay, legal weed, yes or no, and then shout out Sunday, or let's say that, you know, one of the things that he covers is a guy who does like epic guitar riffs or something or gun sinks, you know, include that with shout out Sunday over to the side, because you really want to, you know, drive clicks because if you're giving shout outs to someone and you don't have an additional hook, other people may not see it. Like we do here on ReHash, one of the main reasons that we do this show, we cover the news to bring in people from outside the network to people who do want to view content and they see your channel and you want to do the same. That's our book. And that's a great example, and of course that applies to other videos as well, but I don't want to go too in length here. But aside from that, the only other concern I have is as a colony content creator, I've grown my channel to almost 11,000 subscribers. Sadly, I don't have enough time as I used to to create daily content, but you got to think that normally what we're doing has been done tens of thousands of times either in the past or currently. So something I would suggest doing is working on the descriptions and the titles so you rank well for search optimization. YouTube's algorithm is very weird and you can get ranked by simply budding call of duty in the description. Or simply using the shout out as an example, placing something in your description, saying today we are shouting out and then give a list of people with links, also any other topics or discussions. It doesn't necessarily have to be at length. Just we talked about the new call of duty game, we talked about this new DLC package, we talked about this, that and the other thing. That is really what you need to start including because though it may not necessarily help you out with the initial boom from your subscribers, it will help that video have an extra long tail at the end so that your videos continue promoting you down the line. Also one kind of note I have is, well two notes I have, your banner and your profile image do not look like they belong to the same channel. So you're gonna wanna take a look at this, you're gonna want to make sure that that is taken care of because if I see you comment down below, I want to go, oh yeah, I remember seeing that guys banner. It's all about building a consistent recognition. Yeah, brand recognition. Also you do have links to your social medias in your descriptions, but it would be nice to see that on your about page because that also shows up at the bottom of your banner. So yeah, anything else? That's pretty much it. Awesome. Now I would say that this is a definite subscribe if you're into call of duty, if you're into gun game type things. So freedom family, go spam him with hashtag rehash. You don't have to subscribe, but if you do, let him know why. Till next time, don't forget to like, subscribe and do all those things that make us love our jobs. Also be awesome to yourself and amazing to each other. And I'll be back. See you guys later, tomorrow. Bye. The time for action is now. I have starred in... Oh come on, dude, you're so close. Come on, man. Okay.


There. If you're standing in the back, there are plenty of seats. Please feel free to filter in. This afternoon, I'm going to be talking about deep learning. If you already know about deep learning, you're going to be bored. So take the opportunity to ask the hard questions about the stuff that I didn't cover. If you don't know anything about it, this talk is for you. You can be forgiven if, when reading on the internet, you can substitute magic for deep learning and it fits perfectly in all of the articles. It's hard to know what it can't do. We don't get to talk about that very much. So the goal of this talk is just to talk about it on a really simple nuts and bolts level. There we go. The summary, in case you want to take a nap, deep learning is not magic, but it's really good at finding patterns. So if this is our brain, this is deep learning. An owl can fly. A fighter jet can fly. But there are a whole lot of things that an owl can do. And arguably it's a much more complex thing. Although what the fighter jet does, it does really, really well. So deep learning is the fighter jet, highly specialized, highly engineered. We're today going to talk about the basics, the Wright Brothers airplane. If you understand the principles that it works on, then you can see easy to branch out into the finer engineering details. But there's a whole lot of things that go on in a fighter jet that we're not going to talk about in detail. But this is nice. We can talk about this at a comfortable level. This is a neuron. Like all neurons, it's got a big body in the middle, long tail and some arms that branch off. Here's an artist's conception of a neural network or a bunch of neurons. Again, big body, long tails, arms. This is an actual picture of neurons into some brain tissue. Here the bodies look like dots or globs. You can see long tails, some of which branch, and the arms are pretty much invisible.  Here the neurons are small dots and you can barely see any of the tails at all. This is just to give you a sense of how tightly these things are packed together and how many of them there are. Big numbers with lots of zeros. And the crazy part is that a lot of them are connected to many more of their neighbors. This is one of our very first pictures of a neuron. Santiago Ramón de Cajal found a stain that he could introduce into his cell, turned the whole thing dark. Under his 19th century microscope was able to see this and then draw it with a pen and paper. This is old school. What you see here though, bodies, long tails, lots of arms. We're going to turn it upside down because that's how they're typically represented in neural networks. And these pieces actually have names. The bodies are called the soma. The long tails are called axons. And the arms are called dendrites. We're going to draw a cartoon version of them. This is what they look like in PowerPoint. Now the way that neurons work is a dendrite, you can think of it as feelers or whiskers and they look for electrical activity. They pick it up and send it to the body. The soma takes this and adds it together and accumulates it. And then depending on how fast it's accumulating it, it will activate the axon and send that signal along down the tail. The more dendrite activity there is, the more axonal activity there is. And if you get all of the dendrites really firing then that axon is just as active as it can possibly be. In a very simplistic way, a neuron adds things up. Now a synapse is where the axon from one neuron touches the dendrite of another. That's an artist's conception of it. You can see in Ramonica Hall's drawings these little nubs or buttons. They're actually called boutons on the dendrites. And these are sites where the axon of another neuron touches them. So you can imagine there's a little connection there. We'll represent that connection by a circle. And the diameter of that circle is the strength of that connection. Big circle, strong connection. It then connects strongly or weakly or somewhere in between. We can put a number on this connection between zero and one. So a medium connection, we'll call it a .6. When the axon of the input neuron, the upstream neuron, is active, then it activates the dendrite of the output neuron. It passes that on with a modest strength. If that connection is strong, then it passes the signal on very strongly. If that connection is a one, then when the axon is active, the next dendrite is very active. Likewise, if that connection is very weak, say a .2, then when the axon is active, the dendrite of the output neuron is only weakly activated. No connection at all is a zero. Now this starts to get interesting because many different input neurons can connect to the dendrites of a single output neuron. And each connection has its own strength. We can redraw this by taking out all of the parallel dendrites and just drawing each axon and the single dendrite that it connects to and the connection strength represented like this with the dots. We can substitute in numbers for that, the weights. Although most often, oh we can also substitute in line thicknesses to show how strongly these things are connected, most of the time neural networks are drawn like this. And this is what we have. We went from the super complex slice of brain tissue with many subtleties in its operation and interconnection to a nice circle stick diagram where each one of those sticks represents a weight. In its current form, it can still do some pretty cool things. The input neurons can connect to many output neurons. So actually what you get here is many inputs, many outputs, and the connection between each is distinct and has its own weight. This is, it's good for making pretty pictures, it's also great for representing combinations of things. And the way this is done, let's say you have five inputs labeled A, B, C, D, E. In this case, this output neuron has a strong connection to A, C, and E, very weak connections to B and D. That means when the A, C, and E input neurons are active all together, that really strongly activates the output neuron. B and D don't matter because they only connect weekly. So a way to think about this output neuron is in terms of the inputs that strongly activate it. So we call this the A, C, E neuron. And here we have an atomic example of what happens here. This output neuron represents a combination of the input neurons. This is neural networks in a nutshell. You can do this with any kind of input. So you have a really low-tech four-pixel camera. Each of those four inputs is one of the pixels, upper left, lower left, upper right, or lower right. In this particular neural network with strong connections to the upper left and upper right pixel, we have a neuron, an output neuron, that represents this bar in the top half of the image. So we can combine letters, we can combine pixels to make small images. If you're doing text processing, the input neurons can represent individual words. So in this case, we're pulling words out of text. This output neuron is strongly connected to the input neurons for I and ball. So we can call it the eyeball neuron. Similarly, we can have a sunglasses neuron. And input neurons can connect to many outputs. We can have an eyeglasses neuron just as easily. So going a little deeper into this, this is a somewhat trivial example to show how these things work in practice. So there's a guy at the Schwarma place and makes Schwarma like nobody else. So you want to make sure and go when he's working there. And taking a step back, we actually have some domain knowledge here. We know he's got two schedules. Working in the morning, off in the evening, and off in the morning, working in the evening. Now if we were to instrument this with sensors, we would have the working in the morning, off in the morning, working in the evening, off in the evening. And it might be useful to represent his working patterns in terms of a couple of output neurons that combine those. So this is the network that we would expect to end up with. Working in the morning, off in the evening is one pattern. Off in the morning, working in the evening is the other pattern. And you can see based on their connection strengths how they combine those inputs. Here would be the weights associated with those. Now the question is how do we learn this? If we have to go in and fill it all in by hand, we haven't learned anything. It's just a fancier way of programming and a lot of hard work, especially if you're dealing with many millions of input neurons. So we want to learn this automatically. So to start with, might be a little counterintuitive, we create our neural network. We have our input neurons. All we choose is the number of output neurons. In this case we'll choose two because we happen to know we're learning two patterns. And then we randomly assign weights. Randomly generate numbers for each of these. It's a neural network that's completely, you roll the dice, you throw the sticks, and whatever falls out, that's what you start with. And then we start to gather data. We go, stand on the other side of the street, and we observe that the Schwarmagai on this particular day worked in the morning and then went home, did not work in the evening. That means this input is active. We'll say it's at a level of one. Off in the morning is at a level zero because we didn't observe it. Working in the morning is at zero. And off in the evening is at a one because we observed that too. So the next step is for each of the output neurons, we calculate the activity. So in this case, an appropriately simple way to do this is just take the average of the inputs. So here this weight is 0.3 and this weight is 0.1, so the average of those is 0.2. These neurons don't contribute anything because those inputs aren't active. Similarly, we can take the weight between this input and that output, 0.8 and 0.4, the average of those is 0.6. The output neuron on the right has a higher activity. That's the one we care about. We ignore all the others. There's a million others. We ignore the rest and focus on this one for this time step. First thing we figure out is how wrong is it? Well, if it was perfect, our neural network is perfect, that would have an activity of one. It would be perfectly aligned with our inputs. But it only has an activity of 0.6, so the error is 0.4. The bigger that error is, that's a signal for how much we need to adjust our weights. When that error gets very small, it means that the weights really represent what's going on. We don't need to make any more changes. Now the trick here, gradient descent. If there is an element of magic in deep learning, it's gradient descent. What you do is you go through and adjust each of these weights all through. You adjust it a little bit up and a little bit down and see which way decreases the error. The idea, the concept in gradient descent is weight is a quantity that you can shift a little bit side to side. As you do, this error will change. You can think of it as taking this ball, if you shift it a little bit to the left, it has to climb the hill. If you shift it a little to the right, it has to fall down the hill. And you like the direction, you choose the direction in which it gets lower. You want to bring that error down as low as it can get. And you take small incremental steps to keep everything numerically stable. So we go through and we do these for all of the weights that attach input neurons to our output. And we find that, yes, we want to increase this one. Because these aren't active, we actually have a bias toward low weights. So it doesn't hurt to decrease these. So we'll go ahead and decrease that weight and decrease that weight and increase that one. When we do that, sure enough, our new activity is 7. And so our error went from a 0.4 to a 0.3. It's a little bit better at representing what we saw. So that was one data point. We go back and we do the same thing the next day. It just so happens that this day, he's off in the morning, working in the evening. We adjust the weights and we do that day after day after day. And eventually the weights will stop changing or they'll slow down changing quite a bit. They'll get stable and we get the system of weights that we originally saw because we had knowledge of the problem. So this is the Wright Brothers airplane version of how training by back propagation using gradient descent works. Back propagation is a very specific way to do this that is computationally cheap and slick and fast. And you get your jet engine instead of the flapping of wings. So this is an underlying mechanism by which it works. So what we just looked at was a single layer. We have inputs, we have outputs, every output is a combination of things that were on the previous layer. Now there's no reason then that we can't turn around and take that output layer and make it inputs for the next layer. And do that again and again. If a network has more than three layers or so, we call it deep. Some have more than 12. In some recent research in Microsoft, there are deep neural networks with more than a thousand layers. There's no theoretical reason to limit the number of layers that you have. It just depends on the specifics of your problem. Now, what do deep get you? Why is deep special? If your input neurons are say letters in the alphabet, your first layer outputs, sorry, this is a deep neural network with all of the connections omitted for clarity. So these are your inputs. This is your first layer of outputs. They're combinations of those letters. Each level you go up, you get combinations of what happened the level before. So by the time you get to your second level of outputs, you're getting perhaps words in the English language, if that's what you're training on. The layer above that, you get combinations of words, short phrases, and so forth. And you can do this as deep as you like. So there's a variety of things you can learn with deep neural networks. A very popular one is images. If you take as your inputs pixels and show, instead of looking at Schwarma guy schedule, you're looking at individual pictures as your training data set. What you start to learn after a while is these little representations of short lines and dots and patches. These are the primitives of an image. If you train on image of faces, then your first layer outputs, sorry, your second layer outputs start to look like eyes and noses and mouths and chins. And your third layer output starts to look clearly recognizable as faces. Similarly, if you train on automobiles, your second layer outputs start to look like wheels and doors and windows.  So that's pretty cool. We didn't have to go in and twiddle any of those weights. This just learned that from seeing a bunch of pictures. You can do it on color images too. Here's an output of some of the output neurons of an eighth layer neural network. And as you get deeper, you can see things that are clearly recognizable and quite complex. You get spiders and rocking chairs and sailing at ships and teddy bears. You can also plug information in about music artists. So here's some research where output neurons were learned based on information about artists and then their representation was plotted based on how similar they were in that. And so we see things like Kelly Clarkson and Beyoncé are similar over here. Which is also not too far from Taylor Swift and Avril Lavigne. Whereas if we go up here, we get Weezer, flat keys, modest mouse, presidents of the United States of America, all in the same neighborhood. This is a network that didn't know anything, still doesn't know anything about music. But because of the data that it gets on the input neurons, it's able to group these things appropriately. It finds patterns and then finds things that most closely fits those patterns. Turns out you can take Atari 2600 games, take the pixel representations, feed those in as input neurons, learn some fun features and then pair it with something else called reinforcement learning that learns appropriate actions. And when you do this for a certain class of games, it can learn to play them far better than any human player. And it turns out that you can take a robot and let it watch YouTube videos about how to cook. And it uses a pair of deep neural networks. One to interpret the video, one to learn to understand its own movements and then uses those pairs that with some other execution software to cook based on the video representations that it sees. So while it's not magic, it's pretty cool. You can do some stuff. So as you're going through reading literature, reading popular articles about this, you can kind of play Bingo. There are some buzzwords and popular algorithms. You can think of a lot of these as the, you know, model numbers for the various fighter jets that are out there. But when you see any of these terms, if you like, you can mentally do the substitution of deep learning and apply what you know about the Wright Brothers airplane and most of it will still be accurate. For the bottom line, it's good at learning patterns. It doesn't do anything, but it's pretty good at learning patterns. So if you're interested in these slides, please add me as a connection on LinkedIn. I'll be posting them soon. Links to both the video recording and the slides themselves. And of course, if you have any questions, feel free to crawl on. Thanks for your attention. So until they wave signs of me from the back, we have a couple, oh, we're waving signs at the back. So we are done. There is a Microsoft booth right outside the door. By the way, I work for Microsoft. I'll be there for the next hour if you would like to follow up or have any questions. Thank you.


Next question is from Lamar second. I think training biceps is the most boring thing to do in the gym Hey, man, brother It's Justin for sure. Do you have any advice on how to keep bicep training fun and interesting? I cannot relate to this Yeah, I know I Cannot relate to this at all. I have no tips because I'm still like with this guy. Never skip the bicep one So okay, so here's something for you. Okay, you don't like bicep training. It's boring I get what you're talking about bicep training. It's a lot of isolation single joint movements You sound like somebody who enjoys doing the challenging functional movements or the big compound lifts Here's the truth. Okay, if you're doing heavy pulls heavy cleans heavy rows heavy Yeah, you don't need to do too much, you know bicep work really don't I mean just sprinkle it in there Yeah, heavy high poles like in okay in the program we have on sale this month is map strong It's half off in that program. There's a snatch grip high pole That'll hammer your biceps that's gonna give you great results for your bicep in fact as a kid I noticed my biceps got better results from doing movements like that than from doing the the you know curls and all the Isolation exercises, so that's one thing you could do is you don't necessarily need to do Specific bicep work it just throwing more heavy pulling work. Here's the other thing you can do. Okay have some fun Doing heavy strength training with biceps now I don't recommend this to everybody, but you can do this if you're bored a hammer curl is a great exercise You could do with one arm where you're kind of practicing no joke Singles and doubles, you know arm wrestlers do this This is a favorite exercise among arm wrestlers will they grab a heavy dumbbell and they'll do one heavy curl and let It go down real slow and they'll practice doing singles like they're practicing a deadlift or a squat That stuff is a lot of fun.  Well, that's a different conversation But if you're doing bicep curls just because you think that you need to do bicep curls Or maybe you're following even one of our programs and it has bicep curls in it But you're doing everything else. You don't have to that's what that's another thing, too It's like when we talk it like The programs since day one right when we created them were with the intent to mold them to you Right like it's the idea was to give people a very solid blueprint that if you followed it to a tee You're fine. You're set. But if you have things that are that you care about or you don't care about to customize So, you know, if you were following a program like maps aesthetic or maps anabolic and and where there's bicep curls in there And you're already doing a lot of pull-ups deadlifting and you'd rather do maybe abs inserted in there instead or do another set of Getting better at perfecting your squad or doing some more prime mobility work because you know you need that You know or you know doing adding, you know carries in there because that's not an anabolic I mean shit do it. Yeah, I'm saying do it. Don't don't stress having to do bicep curls.  Yeah, well, okay So here's your evidence if you you know, you think oh man, you know, it's boring But I have to do it and but I do do lots of heavy pull-ups and poles and stuff like that Like what's gonna happen? The athletes with the best biceps you'll ever find anywhere besides bodybuilders Besides bodybuilders and people the flights gymnast and they don't ever do a bicep. No, look at a male gymnast arms and by now I know there's a there's a bit of a bias because they're probably genetically gifted on doesn't matter though You could tell their biceps are way more developed than than any other athletes because of all the pull-ups and ring work that they do They don't do curls. I mean, I know gymnast that some of them do some curls here and there But that's not a staple. They're stables are in such a state of tension trying to keep stability that The contraction there in all those muscles that it requires is insane most insane biceps ever seen my life was a trainer that worked for Me who had done year was it was a gymnast for years and years and years He had the most insane looking arms and I remember asking I'm like, you know How often do you do curls like what's the deal and he goes I rarely ever do I actually don't do him that often But he did pull-ups all the time. Yeah


Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our panel discussion on managing wetlands for climate change, adaptation and groundwater sustainability. I'm Yulia Vistana, Senior Water Program Officer at the International Atomic Energy Agency. And today we will discuss what is the connection between wetlands and sustainable development goals? How are wetlands buffering extreme events? What are their impact? What are their role in climate change? But before to start the discussion and to introduce our panelists, please let me to open a floor for our Deputy Director General, Head of the Department of Technical Cooperation at International Atomic Energy Agency, Mr. Yulia. Thank you. It's my great pleasure to participate in this society event. Ladies and gentlemen, IAEA leveraged the power of science and technology to address the effect of climate change. Our researchers are working on cutting-edge nuclear science and technology to help countries adopt climate change in multiple areas, including food production system, water resources, marine ecosystem, urban and industry infrastructure, and the effective early warning system. Throughout our technical cooperation program, the IAEA also helped build the capacities of the national level to monitor and adapt climate change using nuclear applications. Wetlands are crucial components of ecosystem, serving as a nature buffer against the extreme weather event and providing essential ecosystem service. They absorb carbon and help to prevent flooding. Climate change, however, is causing wetlines to disappear, which threaten the vital functions Today we will discuss the indispensable role of the isotope hydrology in unraveling the complex relationship between the white line, groundwater, and the climate change. The IAEA used isotope hydrology, a powerful nuclear technique, to track water's movement and origin. By tracing source and pathway, we gain invaluable information and the insect into the dynamic of this ecosystem. Accurate and precise data on water resources obtained through the isotope hydrology can contribute significantly to the sustainable management and provision of wetlines. For example, the Ramsa, the Ramsa site, Aestaro del Barra white line area in Argentina is one of the largest freshwater systems on the South American continent. Extending close to almost 40,000 square kilometers, the IAEA has been working to preserve the site, reach biodiversity, and support the local Guarani communities through a hydraulic characterization of source, age, and the interaction of the various surveys and the groundwater components using nuclear technique. The IAEA has mapped the water resources to help improve water balance estimated and support the development management policies toward preserving this white line. So this is one of the good examples we can share. And finally, I would like to say thank you for your commitment to preserve white line and I look forward to the enriched discussion and the collaboration that will undoubtedly emerge from today's session. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for opening remarks. And now please let me to present our distinguished panelists today. Today with us, we have His Excellency, Mr. Joan Francisco Facetti, representative of the permanent mission of UN Organization of Paraguay. And can I tell with your former minister of the environment of Paraguay? Thank you. Also, next panelist, Moxin Hafiz, he's director of Water Food and Ecosystem in International Water Management Institute. Also welcome Flora Lafayette Michaud. She's a doctor and she's senior advisor for Europe at the Convention for Wetlands in Ramsar. Also with us we have Mr. Kenzo Hiroki. He's professor at National Graduate Institute of Policy Studies, coordinator and the high level expert and group and leaders on panel on water and disasters. So opening our discussion, we will have also, I would like to mention what we will have also special guests. He will come a little bit later for closing remarks. Mr. Johannes Kuhlman, UN water vice chair. So let's start our discussion about wetlands. And I would like to ask the first, Mr. Moxin, been working in the international water management. How do you see the wetlands within the complex management challenge in the regions and globally? Thank you very much, Julia, for inviting me. It's an honor to be here as a panel when we are looking around the disasters, around 90% of national disasters are relevant to the climate extreme. That's about the floods, drought and heat wave that's very common. And when we are talking about the in Asia aspect, there are in Asia, particularly the climate extreme and many reports are highlighting that the frequency of the disasters are increasing over a period of time. On the climate change is adding those more uncertain about the disaster and then it's a bit more uncertainty about how to deal with those disasters. So wetlands are typically providing that one of the services in several ways. First is national protection is the first strategic defense against that kind of climate extreme, whether we are talking about the flood or we are talking about the drought and it's also supplementing that when the groundwater is charged into the certain areas. So again that the ecosystem services in that context, I will give one example of the Colombo wetland, where we are actively working it. It's a Colombo in the city which is built around the wetlands in Sri Lanka. And there is around 220 square kilometer area, around 20 square kilometer is a wetlands. And those wetlands are basically also helping us in terms of that one, the flood protection as well as saving the GDP around 1% and also contributing to the flora and fauna and then the healthy ecosystem there. But over a period of time, of course that the things are happening, that the land fields are happening and then the wetland area is reducing and everything is there. So when we're talking about the immediate experience on the global on the wetlands and then how the wetlands are acting, it's a context specific where we are talking about the wetland. If we are talking about the wetland, then that's a, it's not in the middle part of that one of the catchment, it will store the water, it will reduce the flood and frequency and it will also be water would be more available. The typical example is in case of Colombo wetland, it's storing around the 40% of the flood water. But if the wetlands are located at the head water, that's where the problems are more, it will be storing the water, but then it will increasing the flood frequency downstream and that one. So it's important on that one when we are talking about the wetland, it depends on the hydrological catchment of that area. If that's the kind of, what's the soil moisture condition there, how much water could be stored and if the soil is already saturated, then the flood water will exceed and all sort of things are happening. In the, particularly when we are talking about the wetlands, it's also, and the other part is on the flood, on the drought mitigation. Again, in the dry season, in the flood season, in the wet season, you will store the water and then in the dry season, you could use those activities and everything and wetland could also serve it as a kind of other benefits like the ecotourism as well as on the different transport modality is a part of the larger wetland and as well as on that the people, the agriculture systems, the people that are using that water for growing vegetables and the foods and everything is there. So if it, in summary, with me talking about the role of wetland, it depends on where that's located and it's a location specific, but then it depends on a lot more on the type of that one and somewhere it will attenuate the floods, but it will improve that one. Another headwater wetlands, it will be generating more floods and that that will be increasing downstream the flood. Again, the nature-based solutions and another angle which we can look around that one, the wetland, the nature-based solution along with the infrastructure, the hardware infrastructure, how that could be blended together to improve that one, the wetland, the ecosystem systems is there and as well as on a more balancing of that one. So again, the wetlands are really providing that one, the buffer to deal with the climate change and that's one of the natural defense there, so therefore we need, but overall, globally, the wetlands are decreasing and there is a scientific evidence that we're saying that we need to work together on to deal with climate change and especially on adaptation and mitigation, but then could play a critical role. Thank you very much. It's excellent overview of the wetlands and how they have positively impact on the hydrological cycle. Also, you mentioned what we need to collect more data about the wetlands and the hydrology. When I was a child, in all of my fairy tales, we had something strange in wetlands. Something bad was happening there. Something was stolen. And then we started to drag out all wetlands in the region. No one cared so much, unfortunately, about that because from the childhood, I was trained what wetlands is related to something negative, but only now we can see how they play important role here and how important to preserve and collect. So this is really very strong message of the impact of wetland to help us to mitigate and to adapt to climate change and also to deal with this disaster as you mentioned about the floods and droughts. And now I would like to ask His Excellency, Mr. Fasetti. Mr. Fasetti, what is about Paraguay? Please tell us about more, how the data collection help you in Paraguay to manage the wetlands and to improve the resilience of your ecosystems. Thank you very much for this invitation. And also I commend the agency for organizing this side event. Yes, I would like to mention before that in my country, we, for many years, we worked in wetlands, in natural wetlands, not in built or constructed wetlands. And the last, I would say, 20 years, a strong emphasis was done in promoting the, for instance, irrigation for rice production, which is absolutely important and not only for production, for food in this case, but also for nature, natural conservancy. We have, Paraguay is a country that has one of the largest and availability of water per capita, fresh water per capita in the world, but also is a connection, is in the migration path of very important bird life. So we have to consider two realities. One is the natural wetlands we have. We are sharing the Pantanal with Argentina, with Bolivia and Brazil, and part of the Pantanal extend along Aluvial River, which is the Paraguay River, and connects to the Paraná River. And so I'm talking about an extension of 3,400 kilometers long, and it's a system of wetlands. So we have very important wetlands there. Why is important for us conserving the Pantanal, conserving the wetlands? Paraguay is a landlocked country. We have no shores on the sea, but we have larger rivers, and we need to conserve this river. We need to avoid, for instance, to reduce the cost of dredging the river every year. And one of the important services provided by these wetlands are avoiding sedimentation. And this is one, but also other services are extremely important and are related to climate change. So climate change can affect not only, I mean, through altering the hydrological cycle, but also the rays of temperature can alter the biogeochemistry of wetlands. And also, as it was mentioned by DDG Liu and also by the director of the institute, it can alter the services. So instead of providing services, we'll create this service. So on the contrary, so if one of the services is zinc of carbon, and if this biogeochemistry is altered, instead of sinking or capturing carbon, it will release. So this is a big impact for climate change. So to study the biogeochemistry, and of course we need to study physical chemical parameters, but also we need some specialized techniques as they're using hydrology isotopic studies, and using carbon-14, using nitrogen also, and different isotope natural as well as radioactive isotopes. Because to study the comprehensively, the hydrology, the biogeochemistry cycle, we need all these tools. In order to also to based on building this baseline, data baseline, we can create regulations, we can create laws, and regulations and laws are part of policies or strategies. But not only at the national level, I mentioned that within these 3,400 kilometers, we have three countries, four countries. We have Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina. So we need to harmonize our methodologies to analyze what is happening in these wetlands in order to have the same language, in order to be able to compare the results obtained by laboratories. So this is why it's so important, having capacities at the national level but also having a platform, I would say, at the regional level in order to discuss all these results in order to create also regional policies. We cannot implement an environmental policy, national environmental policy without taking into consideration what our neighbors are doing in the vicinity. So this is why we need to work not only looking at the national level but also at the regional level. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for highlighting us importance of wetlands in biogeochemical cycle, in hydrological cycle, but also in transboundary comparison. So actually wetlands can connect us also. And here I would like a little bit to tell more about isotope hydrology role for water balance because now we are developing the technique to understand how wetlands and supply background water using the radon isotopes. So in this case we can precise water balance. You also mentioned water balance is highly important. It's also important for transboundary comparison. We should understand how different country parts, how different participants in transboundary comparison shares the storage on wetlands. So here it's our role and we're using isotopes in our isotope hydrology section to understand and to precise, but also to quantify the amount of water that was stored under the wetlands and the amount of water was depend on ground water supply of the wetlands because this is complex ecosystem. And to continue discussion about complexity of the wetlands ecosystem and role of ground water, I would like to ask Dr. Flore. She is representative of Ramsar and she is one who can give us more information about knowledge gaps in terms of wetlands and ground water interaction and how there's tools of the convention to advance water management of wetlands. Thank you, Julian. So very pleased to be here in this discussion that highlights the complexity of wetlands, groundwater interactions and climate change, especially as negotiators are now in the final stage of discussions on global stocktake and global goal for adaptation. And I think it's very important to have this discussion here. So thanks for the invitation. Let me first maybe introduce a convention on wetlands to the audience here and maybe also to the online audience. So the convention is the oldest multilateral environmental agreement. It was signed in 1971 in the Ramsar city of Iran and it now counts 172 parties to the convention. And its aim is to see the conservation and the wise use of all wetlands through local, national and international actions. And it's a convention that hosts an international network of wetlands of international importance or Ramsar sites. And we heard Pantanal and we heard other examples earlier by the speakers. And this network counts more than 2,500 wetlands and that represents 150 million hectares. So it's quite a large network. And so to answer to your question on the question of integrity of wetlands and groundwater, I would like to really recall that the integrity of wetlands is strongly dependent on sustainable water management. And this is true whether climate change or not. This has always been true. And in that regard, if we dive into this groundwater wetlands interactions, of course this is extremely complex because parties have to face not only water management at the hydrological catchment level but also at the aquifer level. And aquifer level is in the invisible part so it's even more difficult to mobilize people around it. And I think these difficulties also are connected to knowledge gaps and here I'm coming to your question. In fact, in 2010, the convention issued a report, a guidelines to manage groundwater and it looked quite straightforward. It was a statewide process to identify the water transfer mechanisms, what to choose as a period to report and how to also use modeling, etc. But in fact, in the reality, this knowledge requires time, funds and capacity to be produced. And this is a key challenge for parties to find these time, funds and capacities to develop this knowledge. And especially we must also consider that that knowledge, even if it's present, it's not then only solved because then there is the management part and the governance part that comes into the picture. And as well, His Excellency mentioned the difficulty to have governance at a transboundary scale and this happens a lot. We have several transboundary ramp sites and there are of course several transboundary groundwater aquifers. This becomes even more difficult for parties to cope with that knowledge projection and then that use of the knowledge, that wise use of this knowledge. So what I can tell also is that of course in the climate change that was mentioned by my colleague, the uncertainty makes it even more difficult. The uncertainty and the unpredictability and the difficulty to compare current situations with past ones because data trends are no more reliable. So where can we help in the convention? So I would say in three ways. First, in through guidance, technical guidance but also community of practices. And there is a recent resolution that was adopted at the last COP, COP 14 in Geneva that set up the mechanism to have a community of practice on climate resilience through ecosystem-based approaches and nature-based solutions. So this is one aspect. A second is encouraging and fostering the international cooperation, as Excellency mentioned, through two ways. One is the transboundary ramp sites where parties formally agree to collectively manage a site. I mean to agree on the management of the site. And second is the ramp site regional initiatives. There are about 15 of them as of now and they cover or a region or a thematic. For example, on the Mediterranean, on the Nordic Sea or even in other places of the world. And third, I think the convention can encourage a political process to really recognize the value of wetlands. And this is something that is, thanks to the convention, is increasing. And I think there was a mention of national strategies for wetlands, national wetland inventories. These are moves that are going on. And I want to mention maybe for conclusion, the Freshwater Challenge, a ministerial roundtable this afternoon at 4 p.m. that will be a commitment from several parties to restore rivers and wetlands up to 350 million hectares of wetlands and 300,000 kilometers of rivers that will be connected to the NDCs. And this is a very interesting move, I think. And I invite all to join that even this afternoon. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Chloré. Chloré, you told us very important things. You told us how we need to fill the gap from science to management to policy. So here we see where good decision can be done only based on the reliable data on the scientific innovative approach so we can actually improve the management here. And also thank you for highlighting conventions. For me, personally, this convention, RAMSAR was always some kind of magic convention because it's really dealing with the ecosystem in a very interdisciplinary and integrative way. Thank you so much for that. And I would like to ask now, Professor Hiroki, you're a specialist on disasters but also on climate change. What kind of freeze climate change pose on wetlands? Maybe from Japan or regional scale. Thank you. Thank you very much. Actually, climate change is happening now. In Japan, in elsewhere, here. So what to do? That is the main question we have to ask by ourselves. Then, like in the case of Japan, 40 years back, we had a certain level of heavy rains. After 10 years, the frequency of the heavy rains increased by 10%. After 10 years, 40%. Meaning that we are having more and more heavy rains. This is not only the case of Japan. It's happening in the United States. It's happening in Germany and Europe. So how to solve it? Then the main problem was that we could not estimate how much of the increase of the flood event considering the speed of the climate change. Now, compared with the 20 years back, we are now fairly accurate, calculate the amount of heavy rains, how much of the peak rainfall is increased because of the climate change impact. In the case of Japan, for the class A rivers, 109 class A rivers, the Japanese government concluded that 10% of the increase of the rainfall, which comes to the 20% increase of the flood peak. And this 20% implies a huge investment we have to do. Probably a trillion of US dollars or more. If we are to prevent it by embankment and the new reservoirs and dams. So the conclusion of the Japanese government is that we have to rely more on the watersheds rather than structures. So then comes the importance of the wetlands. The small or large, the wetlands can serve as the new buffer zone to prevent flooding. We have a good example, since even before the 78 years back, the capital of Tokyo is saved from the wetlands in the upper stream. That stores a huge amount of water when the flood comes. So we know that wetlands helps us to prevent floods. But then comes the question, whether we just keep the wetlands as it is or what to do. If we just conserve or keep it as it is, we cannot prevent future floods. So what we have to do is to combine, integrate gray and green infrastructure. That is what we need. My group, Harawakita and leaders on water and disasters are now creating the new principles on integrating green and gray infrastructure. By doing that, we have to more fairly accurately estimate the impact and also benefit and the value of the wetlands. That comes to the more of the investment to conserve wetlands. Then comes the question of how those wetlands are valued. It's not only for the prevention of the flooding, but it's also for the creation of the new water sources. Then comes the new technology making use of the isotope. By integrating green and gray infrastructure, we are having more water sources coming into the ground water. Then new water cycle is created, a hydrological cycle. Then the behavior of the water will be changed. Then we have to know what's happening. That comes to the isotope technology. Then we can make use of the water resources more efficiently and also at the same time prevent flooding. That is what the Japanese government is intending for. Thank you. Thank you very much. We can see here the role of technology, how it's important. Before I didn't know what constructed wetlands can be used also for flood prevention. Normally, they're constructed to prevent the clean waste waters from different types, mostly it's waste waters from houses. We are constructing this constructed wetlands as nature-based solutions. For me, it's the first message that I got, that it can be constructed now to prevent and to deal with the disaster risk. Also, we are creating additional hydrological cycle, what is also important for us to understand how it's functioning inside of the whole ecosystem now. Thank you very much for highlighting all this important technology roles here and also a green and gray infrastructure role. Here, we are coming to the end of our session. I would like to ask each of the panelists to tell one message important. What is the next for our wetlands? What's the next for our wetlands in the global scale, in the region and local scale? Someone would like to start? For my point of view, conserving wetlands is conserving what we have now, but also trying to expand to create more constructed wetlands as for food production. We need to secure food for the humanity. In the case of Paraguay, we are a country of 6.5 million people, but we produce food for 80 million people. And we use a lot of water. 97% of our exports are absolutely related directly to water. So for us, wetlands are extremely important. So it's conserving and also expanding the surface. And as it was mentioned, of course, the relationship, study the relationship between wetlands and aquifers. We have a very, I mentioned the Pantanal, the Pantanal as a wetland, but also we have the aquifer Pantanal, which is below the wetland Pantanal. This is just one example. We have many other wetlands that are connected are connected to our aquifer system. So conserving and expanding. Thank you. Protecting the wetland is very important, but not only in terms of quantity, but also the quality. That's one that is healthy, and then that could serve the various needs. And one of the important things is we are looking at system level approach, the hydrological cycle. And hydrological cycle is important to do the provided field in the data gaps, and for saying about the surface water, about the groundwater, and how that's connecting at the system level, whether we are talking about global, or whether we are talking about transpornery wetlands or the regional wetlands or the local wetlands. And that's where the remote sensing, the artificial intelligence, the data mining techniques, plus as well as the hydrological model coupled could provide a breakthrough, and then we could have a much more monitored way of that one, how to make sure that when the wetlands are healthy and it's protecting us against the disasters, and then serving as the ecosystem for the communities and also serving the food production, which is very vital, as honorable ministers have mentioned. Thank you. Thank you. I would say that a multi-level action is required. So at the national level, for instance, there should be policies, national strategies that support the production of knowledge, because this requires funds and it has to have a sustained effort. But at the same time, there should be platforms and support at really local level. Westside management are embedded to support this platform of local governance to have every stakeholder involved. Thank you. Thank you. We have to create a policy in which the wetlands are positioned as a tool to preserve and to help us develop sustainably our society. Then to do that, we have to convince our government and even private sector that this policy is very valid. But the government likes to calculate in monetary terms how much is it and how much do we get benefit. So we have to have a more making use of the technology like isotope, the review in monetary terms, the multiple functions of the wetlands, in terms of the flood prevention, the recharge to the groundwater in terms of the vegetation varieties and those have to be turned into understandable manner. Then if we could convince those politicians and decision makers then we have to put each of the wetlands small or large into our new policies. It's not just a conservation. We have to proactively make use of the wetlands. Then, you know, the government agrees to do more investment to conserve wetlands and then to even enhance the usage of the wetlands so that the entire society and the people benefit from it. That is what we need now. Thank you very much. So today we did a very intensive discussion and actually this short period of more than a little bit half an hour we discussed a lot of complex things related to the wetlands and climate change. Particularly we discuss how science is important. We also should be open for different innovation and to look to different perspectives here. We also should consider technology because we have natural wetlands but also we have constructed wetlands. And those constructed wetlands can be used not only for treatment facilities but they open us to some opportunity to adapt to climate change disasters related to climate change for example droughts or floods but they are creating inside of hydrological additional hydrological cycle what we need to better understand particularly because they also can change the ground water flow, the ground water storage here. Our sophisticated knowledge and collection of the data important for decision makers because we can manage only something what we know if you don't know something precisely we cannot manage it in a good way and this management and decision makers give us to the policy level so I would like to thank all distinguished panelists because we are running and maybe we have one question do we have time for one question maybe someone would like to comment from the auditory or give a question or make yeah we are in developing I am part of this group of research despite I am ambassador I am still doing research with the university. We have a consortium of universities from Bolivia, Argentina, my country Paraguay or my university but also the National History Museum of Paris and we are doing we are studying a huge, a very important wetland in between Argentina and Paraguay which is irrigated by a very important river Pilcomayo river and this is a river from the Andes and is affected a lot by sedimentation the first study done on sedimentation using techniques isotopic techniques was in 1982 and the first mission of the agency came to my country in 1982 to start doing this research we found through this studies the reasons why this river was disappearing so this very important wetland was going to be also was going to disappear so we start doing all this infrastructure works in order to assure the irrigation of this wetland and now what we are doing is because there is a complaint we were talking the last few days we were talking about the society the community participated in the conservation of water resources we are studying the effect of the disappearance of one commercial species because they are not able to migrate to Bolivia through this river and our theory in my group that is that fishes are using our this wetland and through this wetland they can arrive to Bolivia but this is something that we are studying now using strontium-86 the rate strontium-86, 87 and we will probably have the result in two more years but this is very complex situation because this is affecting economy this is affecting also other SDGs so it's very complex and it's very useful to use isotopic techniques so it's very radioactive but also stable isotopes thank you very much so I feel our gap about the community also involved we always should think about the community around because I remember we had in my region we had problem with community when we would like to construct wetlands they will come and tell what they are doing here we don't need any more wetlands so that is why also community can be negative and positive in this way and also probably we need to work more with different social group to change the attitude to wetlands if they have been educated through negative view on wetlands with schools with parents with indigenous community with locals and after we will have stronger impact on the in our management systems because we have also strong community understanding what is going with wetlands how they can be involved in the protection of the wetlands thank you for sharing all your excellent case study it was absolutely interesting discussion I hope our results have learned a lot thank you for who have been with us here and who have been online thank you very much