Thank you all so much for being here. I've been thinking a lot about this question, and I'm very excited to share my thoughts with you all. So just a quick run-through of the learning objectives that were published. So we're going to review the concept of evolutionary mismatch and what it means for the human diet. And we're going to look at the perspective from three different fields. We're going to look at it from the anthropological perspective, evolutionary biology perspective, and also the nutrition and dietetics perspective. And then we're going to look at the clinical literature about mismatch from diet, from three different dietary perspectives, from the food group perspective, the macronutrient perspective, and the diet quality perspective. And then we're going to determine if the evolutionary theory fully supports the use of the paleo diet today and discuss how an updated stance on diet can hopefully help the ancestral health movement move forward. So many of you in the room are familiar with evolutionary mismatch. This is just when you have an organism that has evolved and is better adapted to one environment, and the environment changes, promoting a state of disease. Evolutionary discordance hypothesis takes the evolutionary mismatch perspective and applies it directly to humans, thinking about how changes in from a hunter-gatherer and sexual times to modern times today promotes diseases of civilization. And when I tell people that I study evolution and diet, one of the first things that comes out of their mouth is, oh, you're talking about the paleo diet. And the paleo diet is really interesting. It's highly debated because it's one of the many fad diets out there, but it's also debated because it's based on the central keystone of biology, evolution. And since it's based on the central keystone of biology, we're going to look at it from the three different disciplines that I mentioned earlier and look through and see what the literature has to say about the paleo diet or evolutionary mismatch and what it means for the human diet today. So first will be the anthropological perspective. Chang and Noel in 2016, great title, How to Make Stone Soup, is the paleo diet and missed opportunity for anthropologists. So in here, they basically are excited about the paleo movement and think that, you know, they say, shouldn't we be happy that consumers are searching for evolutionary guidance about how to best live their lives? And in the paper, they recognize that prior efforts of anthropologists to engage the paleo community have primarily failed. And they basically say moving forward that anthropologists should take advantage of the paleo movement to educate people about their discipline and about human evolution. So this is a recent 2016 paper, so it's a pretty promising start. Another paper here, before and prepared to, they talk about in the paper how the natural human diet is a product of human evolution, and there really is no one set human diet. So the idea of having something like an optimal diet or a diet made up of certain food groups or not certain food groups is really incorrect and they emphasize in the paper that diversity and flexibility of a diet is really crucial to the human diet. Turner and Thompson, they start the paper off by talking about the evolutionary discordance hypothesis that I mentioned already and they recognize that it's sustainable and they support the use of it. They say, but it's focused on a single model of the ancestral diet and the assumption that cultural evolution outpaces genetic evolution and that this is a cause of diseases of the modern world has really resulted in an incomplete view of the flexibility and variability that is the human diet today and in the past. And they say that returning to a more true human nature is inconsistent with how human metabolism and eating has evolved throughout time. Critidine and Schnorr, they also go ahead and say that, you know, the true human diet is tremendously variable based on things like ecology, seasonality, seasonality, and the available resources. But they also talk about in the paper that there's recently been a strong public interest in evolutionary health that's effectively forcing this interdisciplinary response by health researchers and policymakers. They say things that like evolutionary medicine, the paleo diet, and just people seeking alternative medicine has led to this realization that human health is immutably dictated by human evolution. So again, promising. To summarize, there is no one human diet and you know, variation and flexibility is key. But overall the anthropological perspective doesn't support the use of really any one diet or the paleo diet. Moving on, evolutionary biology. Eaton, Cordain and Lindberg outlined some common counter-arguments to the evolutionary health promotion and thinking about evolutionary mismatch in diet. They specifically talk about the potential for genetic changes since agriculture, the heterogeneity of the ancestral environment, and then just human adaptability. And while they discuss these in detail in the paper, you know, there's still some reserve bio-evolutionary biologists and Marlene Zook in a paleo-fantasy book has pretty much talked about all those counter-arguments and says that it's still open for debate. Basically, argues against every justification for the use of the paleo diet today. A great book review titled Throwing Out the Mismatch Baby with the Paleo Bathwater. This was written in response to paleo-fantasy. And they basically, these two authors say that Zook is basically failing to acknowledge the success of the mismatch perspective. So she thinks that she's attacking it a little too much. And they still argue that it is still useful to use while I may not fully support the use of a paleo diet. And one last paper. Ville argues that the paleo trend has led to a widespread misconception regarding the true nature of human evolution. And this narrow conceptual model romanticizes the hunter-gatherer lifestyle while simultaneously relegating it to the distant past. And they say that this romantic and simplified evolutionary model has major limitations of understanding global variation in human health and nutrition. So to summarize, you know, evolution doesn't stop the idea that we are best adapted to one point in time versus now doesn't really make make sense and when you think about evolutionary biology and they give examples. So overall the evolutionary perspective doesn't fully support the use of the paleo diet today. Nutrition and dietetics perspective. So this is a systematic review that incorporated many randomized controlled trials. And we see that, you know, the adoption of a paleolithic diet is associated with some physiological benefits, specifically weight loss, BMI, waist circumference. But they continue to go on and say that we need larger, better trials to really get at this question of is the paleo diet effective. This is a 2019 systematic review. Another 2019 systematic review, so very recent. Studied a lot more. The paleolithic diet associated with a decrease in weight, BMI, waist circumference, body fat, lower blood pressure, improved lipid profiles, and a decreased circulating CRP, so inflammation. But again, go ahead and say that we need larger, well-designed clinical trials to really get at this question. Another 2019 systematic review of paleolithic diet randomized controlled trials. This one found no effect in improving glycemic markers compared to the controls. So in 2016 here, Pitt wrote a response to some of the randomized controlled trials that were coming out at the time. Cutting through the paleo hype, the evidence for the paleolithic diet. And he concludes that the paleolithic diet is overhyped and understudied. Overhyped because it's one of the many fat diets that are just buzzing in the media. And underresearch because the level of evidence that we have to fully support its use is minimal. And then of course it continues on to say that further research is warranted. A review of various weight loss techniques created a list of pros and cons for the paleo diet based on the evidence that's available. So there is a number of physiological benefits associated with adopting it. Rapid weight loss, improved lipid profiles, improved glucose, but overall it's expensive. And there's concern about whether or not the benefits that are seen in the diet is not just from the caloric restriction that's produced, but from the actual food groups that make it up. There's also a number of studies that have reported side effects with its adoption of headache, diarrhea or weakness or fatigue. And then also there's concern about calcium intake on the diet that's been reported. So to summarize it's effective at promoting health and improving physiology, but it's overhyped and understudied. It's concerned for micronutrient intake, cost, and of course side effects. And there's just a general lack of evidence to support the paleo diet over another diet and more research is needed. And yes, while the Paleolithic diet and evolutionary mismatches based around the central keystone of biology, evolution, we don't see support across disciplines that use evolution in their discipline or not so much dietetics, but the other ones. So there really isn't a consensus across the disciplines for the use of the paleo diet today. And I think the reason that there's not a clear answer in the literature is really just a matter of perspective. And where is the mismatch in our diet? So when we're talking about how our diet has changed over time and looking at evolution and mismatch, what has actually changed in our diet? And I really think it's a matter of perspective with how we're defining or thinking about diet. Excuse me for a second. I'm sure many of you have seen this here. Depending on how you're looking at something you can come up with a completely different answer. This is the same thing that's happening in nutrition. You can have somebody who looks at a diet or a plate of food or an individual piece of food and say, oh, this is a food. This is a fruit. You can have somebody come along and say, oh no, this is carbohydrates. And then you can have somebody else just come along and say, it's a nutrient dense whole food. So you have these three different perspectives all looking at the same thing. So what I'm going to do today is take these three different dietary perspectives, look at how they align with the evolutionary mismatch perspective. So we're going to look at the literature and basically look at these different perspectives and how well they can improve health and improve physiology via diet. And then come look at the dietary prescriptions that come out of them. So the first one, the food group perspective. This is one many of you are familiar with. You have ancestral food groups and non-ancestral food groups that came after the adoption of agriculture. Food groups on the left here and their ancestral would be considered on the paleo diet. And everything that's not on the paleo diet would be the non-ancestral food groups. And we know that today this represents roughly 70% of the calories that we take today. So this brings us back here for the paleo diet. So let's take a look at the clinical evidence. This is a large cohort study at about 20,000 people in it. And I basically scored them on their diet and looked at how paleo-like is this diet or how Mediterranean life is this diet. So again, the paleo diet being a diet that's only made up of ancestral food groups and the Mediterranean diet which includes non-ancestral food groups and ancestral food groups. So it scored them on their diets and looked at mortality. And we see the conclusion of the paper is that the more paleolithic your diet is and the more Mediterranean life your diet is, they're both equally associated with lower risk for various types of mortality. Another study looking at biomarkers of inflammation and oxidative stress. Again, just scoring on their diet and looking at inflammation and oxidative balance. And we see the same conclusion for both diets being equally associated with lower levels of systemic inflammation and oxidative stress. Another study here, this time looking at colorectal cancer. Same type of study design. And we see the same relationship.  Another study here, this is a large cohort of 35,000 people. An evolutionary recorded diet, paleo diet and Mediterranean diet. And we see the same exact relationship.  Another study here, comparing the Mediterranean diet to the paleo diet and its effects to lower hemoglobin A1c, which is a long term marker for blood glucose concentration, used to diagnose diabetes. And we see that both based on the evidence Mediterranean diet and paleolithic diet were both associated with a significant reduction in hemoglobin A1c. No difference across the literature. So if it was truly better to have a diet just solely made up of ancestral food groups, we would see in comparisons that it would just be ringing true to be better than any other diet if it had, if it was only made up of ancestral food groups. So we're not seeing this in these comparisons here. So it may not be fully necessary to restrict a diet to just ancestral food groups to have a healthy diet. So we're going to move on to the macronutrient perspective. And this is the percent of calories based off the average ancestral intake compared to the 2011, 2014 and HENZ data. And we see that overall there is today more carbohydrates being eaten, roughly an equal amount of fat being eaten and a lower quantity of protein being eaten. But before we even continue to look at the prescription that comes out of this, there is really just tremendous variation in what our hunter-gatherers, what hunter-gatherers that we study today consume. And again we use them as a model to try to understand what our ancestors ate. Tremendous variation in specifically carbohydrate quantity that's being eaten. So even just looking at this perspective and just using the averages to move forward and make a recommendation doesn't really, it's not exactly true because the averages is just an average. But from that perspective you come up with this idea that a low-carb diet is what we're going to need to address the evolutionary mismatch in our diet. There's been a ton of research on this. I'm not sure many of you are familiar with it. The never-ending macronutrient debates that's circling around low-carb versus low-fat. I've seen, there really isn't a clear answer. I've seen all sorts of randomized controlled trials and even at the RCT level and the systematic review level, I've seen some mixed information as to whether or not it's better to restrict low-carb or low-fat. But there's two studies here that I want to present to you that have done low-carb versus low-fat. So this is a 2009 paper. It's a weight loss goal and varying diets in macronutrient content, but the diets were matched for a few things. So they had 8% or less saturated fat, recommendation for 20 grams of dietary fiber, recommendation for cholesterol as well, and also with a caloric deficit. But across all the diets, regardless of the macronutrient content, all of the carbohydrates were going to come from low-glycemic index carbohydrates. These are going to be your minimally-processed carbohydrate-rich foods. And again, specifically looking at weight loss, all the diets were equally successful at promoting a clinically meaningful weight loss. And satiety, hunger, and satisfaction with one's diet and attendance to the group sessions were similar for all the diets. So it looks like there's something else going on above the macronutrient level. And the next study here really does a better job of driving home that there's something else important to consider other than macronutrient. So this is the diet fits study.  But again, the diets were matched for a few different things. Both groups were educated to maximize vegetable intake, minimize intake of added sugars, refined flours, and trans fats. But most importantly, they were educated to consume whole foods that were minimally-processed and nutrient-dense. And no significant difference was found in the change in weight between the healthy low-fat and the healthy low-carbohydrate diet. On top of that, there was an equal decrease in the prevalence, or I should say non-statistical, difference between the two groups and a decrease in the prevalence of metabolic syndrome. They basically equally improved a number of physiological markers that were studied throughout the study. So again, it just kind of, there seems to be something else above the macronutrient level that really needs to be considered. So next we're going to move on to quality and look at diet quality. So diet quality is a very interesting thing. People will use it in the literature to mean whatever they want it to mean at the time that they want to use it. But when you just search diet quality, you see that there's a clear positive relationship between whatever diet quality is and health. It's going to be beneficial. And there's a number of different ways to use diet quality in the literature, but most of the time it's used in terms of just an adherence to a certain dietary recommendation or to eating certain food groups or not. So based off of one of these scores, if you don't eat a certain food group or you don't have access to a certain food group, you would have a low diet quality score. So we really need to come up with a diet quality measurement that isn't dependent on a food group or a dietary prescription that also doesn't bother to think about macronutrient intake. So thinking about just the differences in how our food has changed, I'm going to go ahead and use this definition of diet quality and talk about just the degree of processing, the nutrient density of the food and also the variety of the food. And this is the definition that I'm going to use moving forward when I say diet quality. So looking at how, by that definition, how diet quality has changed over time, we can see that our diet was minimally processed in the past, nutrient dense and had a ton of variety, and today that is not seen. So the mismatched perspective here would be the answer, the high quality diet. So I'm going to present to you a nutrient density score. It's called the NDS 23. 23 because it includes 23 micronutrients into the score. It looks a little something like this, but basically it's a mean of the micronutrients, how it meets the recommended dietary allowance for the micronutrients, all controlled for the amount of calories in the food. And we see here, so on the left-hand side is just the various food groups and some of the sub-food groups so you get an idea of what they look like. But in Figure B here, we're mainly looking at the dotted bars. And we see that fruits and vegetables are the most nutrient dense food group there is, then drops down to meat, and then the next highest is dairy, and then mixed foods, and then we see sweet starches and added fats. Importantly, the starch group, fruits and vegetables four times more nutrient dense compared to the starch. And then the starch group is reds, potatoes, grains, and legumes. So we see that ancestral food groups on the left-hand side, fruits and vegetables and meat, are way more nutrient dense in comparison to the other ones when we lump them all together and look at nutrient density based on their food group assignments. This analysis was with over 600 different foods. Now we're going to look at a way to think about food processing. Has anybody heard of the NOVA classification system? It's pretty hot in the nutrition field right now. So this breaks up foods into four different groups. You have your unprocessed or minimally processed foods. These are all your whole foods then, your fruits, your vegetables, legumes, they include milk here, eggs, meat, etc. They also include some grains in this categorization. Then we have processed culinary ingredients. So these are basically energy dense foods that we're going to use in the cooking process. Sugar, honey, oils, butter, they include salt in here as well. Then we have processed foods, condensed milk, cream milk, cheeses, beer, wine, etc. Then you have your ultra processed foods, the very delicious things. This is your pizza, your donuts, you name it, it's on there. So looking at both the nutrient density score that I presented and the NOVA classification system, we can see that, so this was a large database of foods, over 600 foods also. They scored them for their nutrient density score. They're calling it the NRF here. They scored them and they ranked them all and they cut them in the tertials. And we see that the largest, the most nutrient dense foods are in the green and they are mainly found in the unprocessed food group. And then when we move down to the processed food groups, there's less and then ultra processed, there's less. And in terms of culinary ingredients, again most of these are just energy dense, very nutrient poor, they don't have any of the first or second tertials. And when we look at the means, we see that overall unprocessed foods, 108, then we drop down for processed foods, lower for ultra processed foods and then culinary ingredients are negative. So if you wanted to have a nutrient dense, minimally processed diet, you would want to eat typically as much of this category as you can, but you could also, it allows for some wiggle room because you can have nutrient dense foods here, nutrient dense foods here, and I don't know what's in this category. I'd be very interested in seeing that. So this type of thinking about nutrition and diet from a larger perspective, looking at dietary patterns and whole dietary classifications is relatively new for nutrition science.  So this is a relatively new way of thinking about food. But there's really an abundance of literature that basically shows you that the more processed your diet is, you have more associated with a larger intake of problematic nutrients, mainly salt, sugar, and fat, and also a greater risk of disease. Again, this new perspective, thinking about processed foods only, has really only recently did we have the first randomized controlled trial that looked at the effect of processing on improving physiology. So this was two groups, people with obesity. There was two diets, one diet made up of ultra-processed foods, the other diet made up of unprocessed foods, and the diets were presented in random order to the participants over a two-week period. But the diets were matched for the calories provided, even though it was ad lividum, they could eat as much as they want. They were matched for sugar, fat, fiber, and even macronutrient content. And over the two-week period, what we saw is that those eating the ultra-processed food diet on average significantly ate 500 calories more per day, just starting even on the first day of the diet. And what that translated to was basically a significant weight gain of two pounds over the course of two weeks, or a weight gain if you ate the ultra-processed food diet, and a weight loss if you ate the unprocessed food diet, in as little as two weeks. So I'm hoping that they do a lot more studies like this to really get at this. This was an in-hospital metabolic ward. They weighed and measured everything that went in and out of the body to see the effect of the diet. And the researcher, Kevin Hall, he didn't think he was going to see an effect at all, but he proved himself wrong. So Katzenmeller wrote a review paper, Can We Say What Diet is Best for Health? And in this, they run through a number of different dietary recommendations that are used. We see low carb, low fat, low glycemic Mediterranean, even the paleo diet. And they look across all the diets to see what's compatible with all of them. And they say that in one shape or another, the diets limit refined starches, added sugar, processed foods, limit intake of certain fats, and they all emphasize whole plant foods, whether without meat, depending on your recommendation. And they conclude that all of these diets are potentially consistent with the famous Michael Pollan quote, eat food not too much, mostly plants. But what I see here, thinking about evolutionary mismatch, is that all of these diets in one way or another is addressing the change in diet quality that we have through evolutionary mismatch. So pretty much any diet you follow is better than the westernized diet, regardless of what it's made up of. And this is why in the literature we see that dietary adherence is really the best predictor of success with any diet. You look at any clinical study, those who follow it more have the most physiological benefits produced from eating their diet. And any diet is going to work to increase diet quality per the definition we're using, yet they all vary in the macronutrient intake and the food groups that they do include or restrict in the diet. And what's going on here is that, you know, yes, our diets are made up of foods from various food groups, and they contain their nutrients, but it's really the quality of the diet that determines how a diet interacts with our physiology to produce either a state of health or disease. So here we are. And overall, across all of these, a high-quality diet really has the most evidence behind it through the evolutionary mismatch perspective. And one thing that I really like about thinking about diet quality like this is that this diet quality prescription of just consuming a minimally processed nutrient-dense and varied diet really allows for the variation in flexibility that's an essential aspect of the human diet. So in terms of adherence, having a dietary recommendation that allows people to have some wiggle room in terms of what they eat and how their diet can change throughout their, as their taste change or food accessibility, this prescription also would hopefully satisfy everybody within anthropology and evolutionary biology as really because it'll allow for the variation that they talk about throughout human evolution. And, you know, we're here at the Ancestral Health Symposium, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about diet, and we all know that evolutionary medicine is valuable. Thinking about our health and disease from an evolutionary perspective produces all sorts of new things and new hypotheses that we can test. And hopefully if we alter our diet recommendations via evolution mismatch away from the paleo diet to one that just focuses on diet quality, hopefully this would decrease some of the pushback that I have definitely experienced and probably some of you have with the Ancestral Health Movement when people just think about the paleo diet. And again, you know, the paleo diet has a lot in common with other diets. We're just in one way or another working to make people healthier and making diet quality. And the other thing that we have going, Connor and Ian say in 2010, most people respond to the notion of a diet and lifestyle that's natural. And the Hunter-Gatherer model is the first and only scientific model that we have for this idea. And yes, we can use it as a model, but we need to look at the diet from the diet quality perspective instead of the food group perspective. So to conclude, paleo diet has enough full support across academic disciplines. If it was truly the answer to the dietary mismatch, we would see support for it in every comparison. And really it's this change in diet quality that's responsible for the diseases of civilization that we see today. And just thank you all for coming here. The Center for Evolution and Medicine paid for my travel fees. We have some time for questions. Thank you. Okay, so thank you very much. I have to ask, is this your thesis project? It's the background for one of my chapters. Erin? Very nice talk, Anthony. The only thing I'm a little confused on is I thought the paleolithic diet was based on the principles of level of processing in the sense that paleolithic technologies can do a certain amount of processing and then agricultural, you know, iron age and later ages produced more technologies that can do higher levels of processing. So I thought the paleo diet was really couched in terms of the level of processing. I have never heard that. When people tell me the paleo diet, they just say I've heard and read that food groups of our ancestors versus not food groups of our ancestors. Oh, really? That's funny. That's the most common thing that I've heard. Anybody want to help me out here? I saw like one person over there. Dovetailing behind Erin. I was like totally confused. Who gave you the... I mean, who's the definition? Sorry, that sounded aggressive. I didn't mean it that way. But was it Lauren Cordain's definition of the paleo diet? Where is your definition of the paleo diet? Because what you said about nutrient density and high quality has always been my definition of the paleo diet from hanging out with these guys. I think more when I think about it, when you look at clinical trials that use it, they only use it in terms of the food groups. Okay, so is there a predisposition against the scientific work that we're doing with the ancestral method and the paleo diet that they don't look at what we're talking about and only just like what somebody wrote in a grocery store or something? I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that paleo diet isn't a healthy diet. I'm just saying the mechanism at which it is a healthy diet is that it's working to increase diet quality. Yeah. And there are multiple ways to do that. And I actually have experience with your department. I went to one of the meetings at ASU at the Center for Evolution and Medicine. And I ran into a gal who just ripped me a new one because I told her that I was in the ancestral and paleo movement. And I think she might have been vegetarian slanted. So I wrote one of your directors and just said that was just totally unfair. I just came there and just happened to mention. I had always thought we look at evolutionary mismatch and a number of people right here in this room have done some beautiful work in regards to evolutionary mismatch. But thank you for clarifying, but you don't have any definition that's more than... I mean, did you analyze who is promoting the concept paleo diet? I mean, I've read all sorts of stuff on the paleo diet. And when most people talk about it, they just think about it only from the foods that you do or do not eat. That you wouldn't eat? That you do or do not eat, yeah. Yeah, that you would and then also wouldn't eat. So, well, it's just confounding because the concept of being close to nature is anti-processed. And whole foods and everything you said about the good diet was my definition of the paleo diet. So I'm out of here. Thank you. It was actually, it was a great talk. Thank you so much. I'm also more than happy to talk to you. Yes. I'm a certified primal health coach and I think a lot of the points that you brought up about the word paleo, what the mainstream interprets paleo to be and how they can possibly study paleo are really important for all of us to accept because if you can't fit it in a column of what you do eat and what you don't eat, then they're not going to be testing it and researching it and the mainstream isn't going to be able to get ahold of it. And so now we have to think if that message doesn't translate with the paleo diet and it's too late now, everybody just thinks it's the caveman diet and it's the meat eating diet, then we need to imagine, can we support a trend like the primal diet? Will that be accepting? Because I don't know if you know any of the nuances, but the primal diet is very similar. It's just a little more open to legumes and dairy and things that have been forbidden like peanut butter. And so I'm just bringing this to the conversation because maybe we lost our chance with the paleo diet. You know, maybe it's too late and like Mark Sisson reformulated his dietary pyramid because he had meat on the bottom because that would be the bulk of the calories. But he changed it so that plants are on the bottom now because the way that we understand it when we look at a food pyramid is that the bottom is what we should eat most of. And so plant-based paleo is something also trending which is something we can all consider and primal. So it sounds to me like that's a lot of what you are promoting. Yeah, thank you so much. You raise a great point. And no, we think about ancestral health and where are we drawing the line when we say ancestral? Is that just several hundred years ago? I mean the Mediterranean diet could be considered an ancestral diet. So yeah, you raise a great point. Yeah, and too bad we can't call it the ancestral diet because most of the population won't be able to pronounce ancestral so there goes that idea. Thank you so much. Terrific presentation. Thank you so much. I wish I had a good question for you, but I have a couple of comments. One, I think it is a very interesting conversation about what is paleo. We just released a how-to guide and we created a distinction between authentic paleo and popular paleo. A lot of people are introduced to paleo through products in the grocery store, of which there are many now. A lot of those are basically the standard Americanification of approved products, right? They're basically refined and processed. And so should you reject all of those? Well to the degree that you can perhaps stay within a range that helps you comply with the paleo ideology but still lets you create a birthday cake for your five-year-old's birthday versus serving grilled sardines. Maybe that helps you stick with it more easily. One comment. The second one was on the Kevin Hall study. Stephen Keeney and I created a weight loss program a couple of years ago and it created a saying that highly processed foods make you eat more calories before you're full and more calories after. So they're acting upon different mechanisms, both of which lead to the consumption of more calories before you're like, I'm done and that was a great illustration of that. Awesome talk. Thank you. Thank you so much. I've got mainly a comment and an illustration about food study. And I'd like to start off by plugging a conference called Acres USA which is all about nutrient-dense growing of food that's a worldwide leading organization, Acres USA, on how to grow nutrient-dense food. All these studies are considering carrots are carrots are carrots. And like meat is meat is meat. K-fo meat versus grass-fed meat, organic versus conventional but grown in soil that has nutrients in it. To me, the fact that none of this is taken in consideration in these studies invalidates practically the whole result because carrots are not all carrots. Industrial carrots versus grown in nutrient-dense almost virgin soil is a world of difference in nutrient density and also how it affects the body, the enzymes and all. There's a world of difference between those things. So this metadata study and trying to draw conclusions without any understanding of what the actual food was consumed where it came from, what is nutrient density. There's a term in food density, this called BRICS, which is actually from the wine industry. Those little prismatic devices, if you take a garlic press and squeeze a carrot onto the BRICS meter and you measure across a range of carrots, the density of nutrient density that varies from almost nothing in industrial carrots to a nice juicy sweet carrot can be measured. So my advocation is that you go to Acres USA as long as all of us here as well and we learn how to grow nutrient-dense food. That'll be even more nutrient-dense than what we have in the database. Excuse me, it's four o'clock so anybody who wants to talk to Anthony can do that. We have a 10-minute break and we'll start again at 4.10. Thank you all so much.


ntly had a conversation with at our open source foundation summit in Geneva and we both agreed that we're getting older hopefully wiser Dave Nally also works at Amazon Web Services he's the head of open source strategy and marketing there and today he's going to talk to us about topics that are a challenge in open source around policy and security and so forth please welcome Dave Nally so the first thing I want to tell you today is that open source has won over the course of several decades open source has transformed from something that was primarily people sharing patches via email to solve problems that they all commonly had to become the default development methodology people use for software development today perhaps unintentionally it's also become a market definer and you know it's notable that once an open source project reaches a certain critical mass that proprietary software regardless of how well funded can not compete with it there's example after example of this we could talk about the Linux kernel and those proprietary unices are all but a fading memory we could talk about Kubernetes which has become the default way in a very short period of time that people manage schedule and allocate resources at scale I always knew that we were winning though you know benefit of hindsight here I knew that open source was ubiquitous I knew it was everywhere and then something happened to make me really understand what ubiquity meant in open source it was log for shell and I went from understanding that open source was winning in software to open sources winning in refrigerators and phlebotomy machines open source truly is everywhere of course not everything is a big named project like Kubernetes or Linux or PyTorch a lot of what we're actually doing is building small components and libraries that are able to be reused Synopsis who makes a software composition analysis tool called Black Duck said that in their 2023 report that of all of the code bases that they saw 96% contained open source I don't know what the 96% number represents to you to me my first reaction is that Black Duck may have 3% or so of margin for error here because it feels like open source is far more pervasive than just 96% but buried more deeply in that report was an even more interesting number and that number was the percentage of code bases as measured by lines of code that represented open source in the code base and the average code base that they saw contained 75% open source so 75% of the average code base that you come across is open source I'm not really here though to talk about the fact that we won or even how we won I'm here to talk about a couple of the problems that winning has presented us with and these are just two because I have a relatively limited amount of time to talk with you today but the first is something that really isn't new but does have a lot of increased activity over the past 12 to 18 months and it's something that for many of us perhaps it's the first time in our lives that people want to be just like us or at least like our software and so they have taken advantage of calling their software or their other technology elements open source and we heard Brian talk about this a little bit earlier this is a big problem because it's going to cause problems for our users over the long term they're not going to understand the freedoms that we expect them to have when we call something open source we even have folks wanting to take the halo effect that open source software has earned and apply it to brand new technologies like open source AI I'm still not sure what open source AI might look like is that open source data open source transformers are the models themselves open source I don't know I'm glad there are people who are working on that actively but I think it is important for us to hold fast on that definition for no other reason than to benefit the users who make who make use of the software and other technology that we produce they should have the same freedoms that we are used to when we are talking about open source software but the second problem that we have is that the entire world has realized that open source is everywhere we have governments now who want to regulate us some of those are well-intentioned some of them much less so and so we're now entering into a phase where open source is doing amazing innovative work critical work it is the foundation that we build upon 75 percent of the average code base is open source and we are now having folks who also realize that and instead of hearing wow it's amazing how innovative you are they're saying yes we realize how important you are and we realize we must regulate you these are new challenges they're not technology challenges and I didn't come here to whine about problems that we're facing due to our success I came to member summit to talk about some of the problems that I see because this is where leaders come leaders in companies leaders in open source organizations I often joke with Jim that member summit is the Davos of open source and so I'm coming here and my plea to you today is as you're going back to your organizations and companies think about what's going to happen in 2024 how are you going to help open source deal with the sustainability problems that John was talking about earlier how are you going to help us deal with the fact that folks want to overload the definition of what open source is how are you going to help us deal with the fact that governments are seeking to regulate us in ways that would change the very existence of open source I don't have solutions for these today but I know that this particular audience has the capability to work on it thank you so much what is it with great power comes great responsibility is the other cliche and I think your talk is as well stated Dave our last speaker we're going to circle back to the topic of AI for and specifically talking about responsible AI the speaker has had a decade of service in the Austrian public sector Katerina relocated to Silicon Valley and has since focused her career on tech policy privacy security and regulation she's the founder of the AI education network please welcome to the stage Katerina Kerner hello everybody thank you so much for having me yeah it I'm gonna address a complex topic as we have heard there are a couple of answers to the questions that have not been answered yet and this is working so it is indeed challenging to talk about responsible AI in the context of open source as our starting point is this very complex and conceptually difficult relationship between open source and AI the open source definition as you all know best has been super robust for decades and today with this rapid growth of AI machine learning the definition faces new challenges AI machine learning involves various components and we have to explore how the open source definition as we know it can adapt or include those new elements and then also of course as you have addressed in your talk earlier the public release of AI ML components such as LLMs with Meta's leading example of releasing Lama has contributed to this conflation of the term open source sharing the trained model but not sharing training data or the code used for the for training so but what is responsible AI I think it's not I mean the term responsible AI ethically I trustworthy AI is kind of omnipresent at least in my bubble but it can sometimes seem as a still a fluffy term but actually it's not it has a pretty clear profile by now responsible AI is a set of good governance guidelines that are composed of a set of common principles these usually include privacy data governance accountability auditability robustness security transparency explainability fairness human oversight and promotion of human values or the alignment issue and there are many sources for those responsible principles but nevertheless the overlap in in those principles so we have for example the UNESCO has defined them the Council of Europe the OECD the European Commission we have countless self-regulatory guidelines within companies Microsoft Facebook Google Salesforce they all have really great and also very useful guidelines to download and with playbooks how to operationalize them we have the partnership on AI so we have the IEEE list we have like so many organizations which focus on those principles right now in this context we also I also want to mention the upcoming EU AI Act it's currently in the last phase of negotiation and it could be passed early next year and it will take 18 to 24 months to get into force and I mentioned the EU AI Act because it also evolves or incorporates those responsible AI principles so there is a kind of overlap and going in the same direction and the EU AI Act will as had the GDPR have extra territorial effect so it will be super relevant also for the US it will of course it aims at protecting fundamental rights it will classify AI systems in different risk categories with different requirements and what we see here I just wonder you know my notes on how to scroll down I cannot really scroll down so so and the EU AI Act in the current version of the European Parliament because there are currently three draft versions that are negotiated between the European institutions thank you so much someone scroll down for me so it the European Parliament luckily enough introduced the exception for open source licenses so the regulation shall not apply to AI components provided under free and open source licenses except when it's part of a high-risk AI system or a foundation model we also see that in this recitals so recitals are more like interpretation tools for the regulation itself we see though that they mentioned that developers shall nevertheless even though AI components might be free and open source whatever that exactly means is also not super clear yet so we have the same problem here maybe incorporate it into law if we don't pay attention that developers also should take care of documentation practices such as model cards to really pass this information transparency on along the EU AI value chain and also as soon as you charge a price which you see in the middle except for those exceptions in the middle you also are not in the open in this exception anymore and there is a recording of a presentation I gave on the EU AI act and open source on the OC website so if you want to learn more about this you could look up that presentation that I gave last month of course talking about the intersection of responsible AI and open source it is super important to note there exist so many open source resources to do responsible AI better so we have responsible AI toolkits and frameworks such as IBM explainability model card toolkit Microsoft responsible tool box etc so I really want to stress that this is again an example how the open source community contributed significantly to also the responsible AI ecosystem and operationalization but we also have some great project not only addressing open source for responsible AI but responsible AI in open source so I collected some examples Mozilla has a working group on trustworthy AI the Linux foundation addresses open source governance for ethical AI responsible AI licenses are a big topic in development and of course I'm hugging face has this great expert team working on responsible AI and has a very very very good newsletter that addresses these topics which I can really recommend signing up of course there's still some challenges so some examples of those is governance in accountability so I mean responsible AI is basically all about governance and while the Linux foundation does place a strong emphasis on governance guidelines we do know or you know for sure way better than I do that there are open source initiatives that grapple with governance that manifests in various ways some projects have no former governance or there are others have some form of governance or a talk governance anyways if those governance issues are not addressed they can have far-reaching consequences including that we have a lack of adherence to responsible AI principles within those very open source communities and downstream and that could become a problem I think if this is not addressed because it could become a bad example and for regulators to maybe look at this closer then we have the topic of bias mitigation also I can really recommend this specific blog post on the hacking phase website bias is extremely complex multifaceted issue with no single one fits all solution it's not only technological it's also related to the broader social cultural historical context like who is in the team who is in it what's in the dataset it reflects in all of those things and yeah so this this blog post I can really recommend because it lists very very very concrete tools and approaches and techniques to address bias throughout the AI life cycle among them this very classic by now and very successful initiative a couple of years ago of model cards and I will get to that a little bit later and I have 11 minutes still okay and the third topic I wanted to you know highlight and of course cannot like tackle in depth because this is huge is also huge and responsible I is the topic of security we have a lot of development also in this space for example with the cyber security and infrastructure security agency recently released a guidance on how to improve open source software safety or we have tools like Google's Dev API which provides free access to the data that powers the website and can point out dependencies and just this is a complex topic it's like I can only scratch the surface and I just want to give some pointers that if you are interested in one or the other aspect that you can it's maybe easier to you know have an overview and dive deeper in whatever interests you most so as we anticipate the EU AI Act I think it's essential to recognize this responsible AI and upcoming regulations will likely impact all stakeholders in the ecosystem so it will really be a riffle effect or it will have like an effect as if you throw a stone into the water so we will do not know yet what exactly it will mean for all of us or for the open source ecosystem or what open source AI will mean and what components are exactly so it's all very it's a lot of questions not so many answers but I think nevertheless this regulation will come responsible AI is totally on the table so it is really necessary or best to strengthen best practices open source AI documentation and also focus on transparency because that can help downstream for example by using model cards to communicate AI model details and ethical considerations and I also put together this slide which with some ideas you it would be great to discuss those because I would really like to flesh this out a little bit better even but what I already can list here is and recommendations that already came from the other sources I mentioned is to establish and promote AI ethics advisory group or a working group within your project and also put together ethically deployment guidelines and usually I talk a lot about AI governance in companies organizational governance or ask you know I made a study on AI governance in organizations and I mean they're all very much at the beginning with AI governance in general and a recommendation how to start this is usually just start small and just start somehow so just get together some people are interested in it discuss which principles are relevant or important for you and for your project and take a concrete example and discussing how those principles would apply to this very to this project so this is really the recommendation of all like you know the people I talked to in bigger organizations such as IBM which is great AI governance and I think that's we shouldn't make it too complicated as from the start just really get together people that's also the second aspect here because bias is not only in data sets or computational bias but also it's about diverse contributions so a diverse team is always best to have there are also a fairness toolkits that are available for use then transparency measures for example using monitoring tools or model cards is a big big topic in responsible AI then there is I came across the tip to come up with package managers for accountability so so pre-deployment that they can really be the the person who is knows exactly what is going on and make sure that all those aspects were addressed before before getting into deployment and then I came across the idea of creators for open source so either monetized open source they will then deploy those tools I think that's a very good way to go and last and not least the various programs to promote responsible AI principles in open source for example the secure open source rewards program the open SSF and I think every project where you can come up with contributions and engagement of the community is great for this really important topic and last and not least in this context I also want I want to conclude with if we need new licenses and how that will look but we will also have a panel on this tomorrow so I'm looking forward to discussing that tomorrow there's the open and responsible I license initiative that a license is open access usage and sharing of AI artifacts by promoting responsible use I don't know if this is going to be picked up but I mean how much this will grow or not they make the comparison that open source software licenses applied to code and credit comments to general content and those open rail licenses should apply to responsible open source AI as well to empower the community with with tools to really be transparent about their initiatives for open and responsible machine learning I hope we can discuss this further if you have anything where you want to correct me or help me learn more that would be great because I'm also I really love to educate others while I'm learning myself so anything that you will tell me I can then tell others and that's that would be wonderful so thank you very much for your attention thank you now we've definitely seen some calls out there for stopping open source in foundation models a lot of those arguments tend to be very generic and vague some day these models will create a super bio weapon or they'll be used for some nefarious purpose I'm not buying it I think that in order to have transparency trust attribution you have to have open source foundation models so that we can figure out how these things work and build systems like we just heard about


Never allow a response in a room to govern or tell you the quality of what you're carrying. Never allow whether it is applause or people looking bored. Never allow that to tell you how good or bad a job you did. If you did the best you could, their response is pretty irrelevant in terms of you knowing I did a great job. No one may be able to tell you that. So bringing your A game gives you control of your part of this, whether people seem to be into it or not.


Good morning everyone, my name is Deputy Commissioner Brett Pointing, I'm very pleased to be joined here today with Detective Superintendent Mike Nyland, who's running Task Force Maxima and of course Superintendent Jim Pio, who's in charge of Task Force Take Back. Well ladies and gentlemen, yesterday all police jurisdictions in Australia combined in a national day of action against criminal motorcycle gangs in Australia. All states and territories participated, and it was a blitz across Australia to send a very clear message to criminal motorcycle gangs that Queensland's not going alone here, that all jurisdictions are combining through this national day of action to rest assure the public that we're taking this matter seriously and doing proactive enforcement, but also to enhance public safety through Australia. It's my intention to read out the national results and of course talk to the Queensland results, and then there'll be an opportunity at the questions of course. On a national level, some 57 members of criminal motorcycle gangs and their associates were arrested. Over 122 vehicles surged, 79 search warrants were executed throughout Australia. Over 362 licensed premises that are known to be frequented by criminal motorcycle gang members and associates that were checked for compliance. Over 125 bail compliance checks were conducted. These are members of criminal motorcycle gangs who have bail conditions or rather corrective restraints, who are visited by police throughout Australia. The types of offences related to assault, robbery, property offences, drug offences, firearms offences, traffic offences and other miscellaneous offences. In terms of Queensland, Queensland results, 11 persons were arrested, 11 search warrants were executed. Over 238 licensed premises were checked. There were 60 bail compliance checks conducted in Queensland, and of course that means that the residents of these criminal gang members were visited to ensure compliance with the orders. In addition, a number of actions were also taken in Queensland correctional centres with respect to criminal motorcycle gang members or their visitors. As a result of that, a number of breaches were identified, and Queensland correctional services officers are taking action with respect to a number of weapons located. There was also charges relating to willful damage to property within corrective services, and there was a number of positive year-on tests which will result in action down the track. As I mentioned, this was very much a whole of Australia operation, 24 hours of action, but all jurisdictions were very keen to send a message to tribal motorcycle gang members that this very much is a national approach. Now I'll open up to questions. Can you give an idea of the specifics in Queensland? Do you wrote down some of the charges nationally? What sort of charges did you visit in Queensland? Those charges in Queensland very much related to... Could I talk just in relation to the two lots of the charges. One related to the president of the Gold Coast Banditos. His search warrant was executed in Brisbane at his home address. He was charged in relation to possession of steroids. In Mount Isa, the home of the president of the rebels, search warrant was executed up there. Whilst he wasn't charged, three persons at that address face eight charges in relation to drug possession. Drug possession? That's correct. I think it's a very important point also that the charges in Queensland related to offences all through out points from Brockhampton, Emerald, Burnett, Hebb's, Gold Coast, all throughout the length of breadth of Queensland. We've been plating the results over the last hour and we've been in a position later on to give everyone more specific details of locations and details of the rest of the charges. Was it very difficult to get the other jurisdictions on board or were they happy to come with it? This operation was put together very, very quickly and all jurisdictions were very, very keen to participate. High degree of enthusiasm I think everyone acknowledges the problem with criminal motorcycle gangs is not Queensland specific, it's not Australia specific, it's an international phenomenon and all jurisdictions were very keen to participate. Did you say Queensland would be? Look, the Queensland certainly initiated it. It came back to the request of Queensland. We believe to be effective in our job, it really has to be a national approach and all jurisdictions were very keen to participate. Well, we've been assured by government that a very serious about the mission, which is to eliminate criminal motorcycle gangs from Queensland, so we believe it is. We've certainly had strong support to date and we're assured that we'll have that support in the future. Yes, we've already been advocating additional $20 million for both of the task force and certainly another $5 million was allocated to crime stoppers to encourage people who provide information that will lead to a arrest of criminal motorcycle gang members and to shut down the gangs. Across the country, how many additional police were put on yesterday? It's very, very difficult to collate just at the moment and we encourage people probably from the media to talk to their own jurisdictions and those states. Really this was, from the Queensland perspective, very much there was a whole service approach. There was enormous amount of activity and of course there was a number of different protest rise that had been going on over the last couple of days. So really it was a whole of the Queensland approach that was pretty much, whilst there's always cool business, the focus over the last 24 hours has almost all pleased in the Queensland focused on this. Can I ask you, what different clubs were targeted throughout Queensland? Well the entire 14 clubs in Queensland were targeted. CMG across Queensland were targeted. So every club with no links to criminal activity? Yeah. Every CMG in Queensland was targeted. And just on the seriousness of the challenge, story position, why maybe that's followed very well personally by serious. And so was this more about sending a message from a mature audience? It was most definitely sending the message. Another one was up in Toowoomba, a Patch Bandito member. He was found with 20 grams of amphet and he's been charged with supply and possession. He was also located with nearly $3,000 in cash. It's sending a message and we're going to take what action we can, whenever we can. We've seen in southern states just over the weekend the intervention of the Australian Defence Force working with the police. Is that something we're likely to see in Queensland? That's a good observation. I spoke to Deputy Commissioner Fontana from Victoria this morning. The military asset, which is in essence a crime, was simply used because Victoria Police had taken possession of a prime mover. They did not have the equipment to be able to seize it, so they used the equipment of the military. And we see that very common in Queensland in a range of contexts, whether it's the disaster management context. We'd be in the same position if we were taking possession of a prime mover or another piece of equipment. If we never had the hardware to move it, well then we'd probably seek to find those resources, likely, if we couldn't then we'd seek the assistance of the military. I'm sure that's more about logistics rather than the police. Absolutely, very much a logistical issue, not a tactical one. Was this past 24 hours a first in terms of the scale of this operation in targeting bikers? Yes, certainly, to my knowledge, in my experience in the QPS, we've never had a national day of action on cruel motorcycle ban. So I'd expect this to be the first of many. All jurisdictions were extremely enthusiastic about participating in it. We know that often enforcement action does displace motorcycle gang members. We know that the highly mobile, highly agile, you know, the network of infrastructure in Australia, whether it's airport or other forms of travel, makes it very easy for gang members to travel throughout the length and breadth of Australia quickly. So we know we need to attack this on a national level and that's what we saw yesterday. Could you please connect with them again to make this a regular occurrence? Well, we'll debrief this event and over time and have a look at the success of it. We'll analyse it and we'll get back together with our colleagues from other jurisdictions and make those decisions. But certainly, I think from our point of view, it has been a success and I think it sends a clear message to gang members that just because there's a strong enforcement action in Queensland doesn't mean you can find safe haven in other states and territories and I think that's a very, very important message that Australian police jurisdictions are committed to working together on this. Jim, you're on the streets. Do you feel like there's a shift in power at the moment from where we were two weeks ago? Almost definitely. As you can see now, there's not so many criminal motorcycles out there on the street and whilst they've certainly gone to ground from what my colleagues have said, here you can see that there's been a number of other strategies that have taken place to address the criminal active people behind the scenes. Just on that, do you have any intelligence or do you have any concerns that you might have gone to the ground now in terms of some sort of greater effort by the Cubs later on to make it fine and make it pretty much fine? Yeah, look, that's something that I've considered but again, with the strategies that we've got in place, should they combine and you do see it from time to time, you'll see members patch over. You know, it might be only a couple of them and even if the Cubs do combine, I'm quite confident that our sustainable strategies will hold us in good stead for the future. Well, it's not simply a matter of the task force coming doing their job and leaving. This is a situation where the task force coming implement new strategies, sustainable strategies and remain until they're quite satisfied that these strategies will be able to ensure the safety of the community. So I can see these things being ongoing for quite some time, in particular the aspects in relation to the criminal investigation and the side of things. Well, we were saying, we were speaking about it before, we were saying that some of these bikies are getting fed up with all the attention and are just simply handing in their colours, is that right? Yeah, look, I think to date we've had about eight bikies hand in their colours and walk away and some of them are indicating that this really isn't what they joined the Bike Club for. So, yeah, that's a clear comment. Can we get a little bit more detail on the president of the Gold Coast, Van Dinos, who's been charged with possessing steroids? Is that going to be enough to keep him off the streets even if we do have compulsory bail introduced? He's been arrested and charged currently in custody and he'll face the Brisbane Magistrates Court on Monday. The issue of bail has been a topical one and I'm talking about this new legislation coming in. But would you say that the checks on the weekend to the 60 checks have proven that they are moving up to their bail expectations? Look, I haven't been able to collate the amount of breaches with respect to bail but we have seen historically enormous problems with recidivist offenders getting bail in terms of cracking down on CMGs and other other types of crime. Naturally, we're very supportive of the change in the legislative regime that will keep people in custody of committed serious offences. So my apologies for not being able to give you the results of the bail checks but police often on a daily basis arrest people today who have been released from bail yesterday. That's been an ongoing frustration for police. When you do get these people, you get them in front of a court and then they're given bail straight away. Will we pass on Tuesday? Do the police welcome them? I do. I mean, the police are highly committed to the objective of eliminating criminal motorcycle gangs from Queensland and all other crime. So any legislative support that we can get particularly to stop recidivist offenders, in other words stopping people from offending who continually offend and continually victimise people in terms of the corrective services operation. Can you give us an idea of what police were looking for? I understand they were sort of given specific tattoos to keep their eye out for. Was it about gaining information as well as every direction of criminal motorcycle gangs also obviously has a degree of intelligence analysis with it. But very much we were looking for breaches of the law and we noticed a couple of breaches there with the damage. Also a couple of positive tests to ultimately be analysed. Very much trying to monitor the activities of gang members in prison because one thing we do know that often gang members still try to conduct their illegal criminal enterprises from jail. So once again sending a clear message that even if you're in jail you're going to continue to be monitored and criminal activities are best to go. The weapons that were found, what type of weapons are we talking about? Like knives in particular. Small blades that are made from different materials in any other way than the knife. How are they getting drugs in jail? Any ideas? I think one thing we know about people who are in jail are highly creative and they find multiple ways of getting drugs into jail sometimes that's through their visitors and that's why yesterday based on intelligence certain visitors were also intercepted by us. We're very encouraged by the legislative reform package that we understand is going into cabinet during the week. It's not appropriate for us to discuss it in detail because it's yet to go through the parliamentary process but we're also tapped into the debate that's going on. We've also been consulted and we're very encouraged by the discussion around tougher laws. Do you see that as somebody similar in these cases? Well, one thing we do know about criminal gangs is whenever there's an intervention they also strategize and they work with professional people to strategize how they can overcome the changes. I think a good way of putting it is criminal enterprises look at the risks associated with their behaviour and they look at the rewards and they almost apply their own risk matrix. So our job and our intention is to disrupt these criminal gangs as much as we can. So tougher laws a lot more jurisdictions around Australia carrying out more enforcement action. We know they'll change their tactics and so we do expect them to challenge the legislation and the highest courts of the land naturally. We'll be able to see what happens there but of course I think what you're seeing in Australian policing jurisdictions is law enforcement changing tactics as well in response to criminal motorcycle gang activities. You three gentlemen have been in the QPS for a very very long time. Have you ever seen anything like we've seen in the last two years in terms of focusing on outlaw motorcycle gangs? No I certainly haven't in my 36 years haven't seen this amount of activity but of course we've also seen criminal motorcycle gangs change and morph into what they are today. We've seen younger members members who are not a heterogeneous group we're seeing members from all over the world a younger group that's more aggressive more competitive and the time is right now to really continue this enhanced effort it's a safety and security of Queensland that we're talking about here. This concern of effort we're putting in is critically important to making sure that criminal motorcycle gangs don't get a stronger foothold in Queensland and Australia.


Hey guys, so today I'm going to talk about micro nations another fascination of mine So micro nations are essentially small unrecognized nations the difference between a micro nation and say a country Like the Vatican, which is essentially a micro nation is that a micro nation does not have support from other recognized nations recognized on the international stage the easiest way to think about it is say the United Nations is a List of recognized nations so countries that recognize the presence of each other and their borders And their passports and the fact that you are a citizen of one or another nation Well a micro nation is like a little Small one that was created maybe for idealistic reasons or due to just someone having a beef with their local government or some guy in his Backyard because he felt a little bit crazy that day So they are not recognized by the big boys They want to play in the big boys, but they can't play for big boys because the big boys won't let them in however, they can play among each other and Every now and then in history one of these little guys somehow worms his way into becoming one of the big boys So I have a real fascination with micro nations because well, they're small bizarre and off the side and I'm fascinated in things Which are not generally considered normal by the majority of people around the world I'm not sure that's a good thing or a bad thing doesn't matter anyway eight years ago a Micronation came into existence called Liberland now Liberland was basically founded in Well, it was founded between Croatia and Serbia and if you go to the Wikipedia article it's got a here Liberland also known as the Free Republic of Liberland is an unrecognized Micronation and Southeast Europe claiming an uninhabited parcel of disputed land on the Western Bank of the Danube and It was founded by this guy right here and when this country came into existence this Micronation there was like a real Interest among specific segments of the Esperanto community who wanted to be able to push Esperanto into the Constitution of this new Micronation and that's where I kind of got interested and I was like what's going over here And I actually connected with the leader of this new Micronation on LinkedIn and via email and chatted with him quite a bit So I can claim to be friends with you know a world leader Okay, anyway, so I connected with him spoke a little bit in the end What happened was that Esperanto didn't get into the Constitution English got in and also check Which is his native language, which I guess makes sense But Liberland was an interesting case because it was started by a politician someone who actually understood politics And he managed to make a fair few contacts around the world and even kind of get like Support in written ways from other politicians and other countries primarily ones that belong to libertarian groups so in Poland and America and stuff like that and Liberland really grew online So it's primarily an online nation although they have managed to actually have physical material Infrastructure and support and buy and establish things But I primarily forgot about Liberland for a long time But every now and then every six months I would get a comment on my YouTube channel such as this one here Which came in eight days ago Liberland did not disappear alive and well long live Liberland I was left on one of my videos and I was like, okay well, I guess it's time to dive into the the history of Micronations or at least the ones that fascinated me So the first Micronation on that list because we're not just going to talk about Micronations No, we're not just gonna talk about Liberland is the principality of Hutt River And this was this one holds a special place in my heart for one It's in Australia in Western Australia. Well, I should say it was long live the Hutt River province What happened was it was founded by this guy here Leonard Kaseley and at the time in the 1970s He was basically the head of Like a farming family But he was like the patriarch of the local farming community and they grew wheat Okay, and they grew a lot of wheat but due to something happening on the international markets I believe it was due to like a saturation or something the Australian government Decided that we're gonna put quotas on the amount of wheat farmers can sell and it was it came out of like left field and It would have basically bankrupted these farmers if they followed these new Legislated quotas about what they could sell because they had so much debt that they said in an article I remember reading that if they followed the quotas, they wouldn't even cover the cost of Removing the wheat that they would have to remove as a requirement of that quota So basically it would not have only bankrupted them it would have further indebted them So they went to the courts Nothing was really resolved and the leader of this community the patriarch I suppose Leonard he had a lot of interest in and knowledge of British common law and British common law actually plays a foundational part in Australian law and He found very old laws regarding secession and basically declared that this community would succeed from the rest of Australia And he made a very public and he wrote to the Prime Minister's office and the Prime Minister's office kind of like We don't know if it was jokingly or by mistake But they responded using his official titles which gave him some form of legitimacy And then there was all this stuff backwards and forwards with the local government and what ended up happening in the end Is I believe that quota stuff it was kind of ignored for them But at the same time the local government always just took him as like an interesting oddity that helped drive tourism in the area because Tourists came to visit the location. They sold Passports and you know coins and they set up like a little museum on the properties there It was all very fascinating But for me the most interesting thing was that they set up a constitution which contained as official languages English French and Esperanto due to the support that they got internationally and I remember one stage They reached out to me because they wanted to translate their website into Esperanto by the way if you haven't seen their website It is this bad boy right here This is clearly a modern website of a large international government But unfortunately what happened was I believe a year or two ago Probably two years ago at this stage the leader that Leonardo guy He passed away, but before he passed away. He passed on the I guess what would be like the law not not lordship like the He basically declared that his son would be the new sovereign and as soon as he passed away His son sold off all the lands and that was the end of the the whole Principality I guess as you can see what's on their website on the 31st of January 2020 actually was three years ago We made the very difficult decision to close the borders of the Principality of Heart River So it Unfortunately, I never got to visit the place before it closed down I actually intended to go one day because of my fascination for micro nations And I just wanted to see like what it looked like over there like I saw plenty of pictures of the place In fact, they might still have pictures on their website Calendar of events. I'm pretty sure that's gonna be empty planning a visit Yeah, this was always fascinating. They actually had a Royal like cannon club, but it was located. I believe in America. So they had a military arm which was in America Don't know how that works, but as you get it and here you go They've got the French language version of their website the English one and Esperanto was meant to be over here on the right But our boy evil dear failed to translate it Okay So now I want to jump back across to Liberland because recently on LinkedIn where I'm connected with the founder I saw that there was some type of national calamity. So let's go check out the Liberland official website So as you can see here, that's the article. I believe it is Yeah, this is it. So this is the news article that's come out on their website. So they're like brutal Croatia invades Liberland This sounds pretty serious. Okay, let's check it out So on the morning of Thursday the 21st of September a private company under the orders of Zupan the Prefecture inspector acting on behalf of the Croatian forest made an unannounced extra teresh extra territorial Incursion almost an extra terrestrial Imagine that there's like aliens coming in to invade Liberland You know, this is where they've in all the Hollywood movies where the aliens always come to America first. No, they came to Liberland anyway, so there was a Extra-territorial incursion into Liberland and demolished to remove Liberland property Which does sound pretty serious. Liberlanders living on the land were threatened with arrest if they interfered Notice here. We've got this Liberland person. They're wearing like their I guess it's kind of a the cloak in the Liberland flag This so reminds me of like every now and then when you go to an Esperanto event You have the guy the guy's usually me by the way But he's wearing like a green cloak and he's got like an Esperanto flag and he's like And it's like the verte de papa, which is like the green pope in Esperanto And he's like the one that everyone avoids because he's just so over the top about Esperanto Even the Esperanus don't want to deal with him. I'm wondering if she's like the Liberland version of that And do they have like a word for that? Like someone who's like overly the top four supporter of Liberland Anyway, creation police escorted the demolition crews who committed this act of indiscriminate destruction The assault was committed without warning and without the forest company and police issuing any reasons or justification Person's presence were not given any time to gather their own belongings much lesser equipment Thankfully, no one was injured, but our property was damaged and confiscated So apparently this is what was destroyed two well constructed garden houses and one marina house One well constructed fully functional field kitchen and multiple refrigeration units and stores Like I've noticed that the views this word well constructed twice now Generally when I have a field kitchen, which I don't have I would just say one field kitchen was destroyed Or one garden house was destroyed There's only two reasons why you're like emphasizing well constructed one Because you want everyone to know that you weren't violating any local laws and this thing was good It was sweet or two. It totally was not sweet and it was like a real hazard Anyway generators and electric equipment quad bike bicycles transportation food and other supplies personal belongings So it appears what actually happened Oh, there's a good little map is that the police from Croatia came with the this private company it looks like some type of uh Private Croatian forests again No came with Croatian forests and they basically just packed up everything So it reminds me of like here in Tasmania where you've got like the green piece protesters on the um forestry land And the forestry come in with the police and just like kick them all out type of thing Now you guys are probably thinking that I'm Like I'm basically dissing the hell out of libel and right now I actually love micro nations and I want micro nations to exist in the world because they just add some spice You know, we've got all these giant countries and stuff and I'm if libel and becomes like an actual thing I will totally go there and spend my tourism money there and check it out and stuff like that But at the same time I can't help but read this and just see through what's actually happening Is basically the local government doesn't acknowledge its existence, which of course it doesn't and they just see them as a bunch of like People have come in and set up camp in a place where they shouldn't be and now they're throwing them out type of thing Which also from their perspective makes complete another sense. They've got some pretty cool renderings here of like the presidential palace So I'm guessing this is where uh old mate, uh, what's his name again? Zit? No, not zit. That's terrible No, I'm looking at the wrong wrong one Old mate vitt vitt. This is where vitt's going to be living. By the way, that was not intentional I'm not trying to insult a guy. Okay concerning the li- the boat liberty So here's another big international event that happened. So they've got this boat liberty Which is why I say that libel land is probably one of the best formed micro nations out there These guys have got a boat Like the hut river province had some houses some museums and stuff on and museum was basically like a shed done up as a museum type of thing, uh, but that was actually private property originally So it wasn't like anything that was really built on top like they built a couple little buildings and stuff But these guys have got boats. They've got like on the ground activists. Basically, uh, which was that girl that we saw with the flag She's basically an activist for the community and like they're doing this like they're they're actually Committing to this. It's not just an internet thing, which is what I I love about libel land Like it's not just some online community where everyone wants to be a president type of thing Like these guys are actually seriously trying to build something but at the same time Everyone's just not taking them seriously except for uh, people within libertarian circles But again, I would be happy if these guys are fully successful. I'd totally go to libel land Maybe not on that boat though Because apparently I've read this article by the way this boat got uh, well what it says so On the 6th of order the border crossing point was officially declared making the commencement of the permanent settlement So they set up their own permanent settlement basically following this approximately five individuals took up semi permanent residents at jefferson square in libel land So apparently they've got a square, which they're calling jefferson square. I don't know if like there's actually any like, uh Stonework in place there, but who knows while the border crossing point continued to be inhabited facilitated by Facilitated me in my English by the amenities provided by the boat named libel land. So this is this is obviously their supply ship Okay, now apparently, um, where was it says okay, so Due to escalating activities and growing lists of priorities the boat libertarian became libert Liberty became stranded for the first time immediately efforts were made to organize a rescue operation So vitt can contacted the port authority for assistance. So which port authority obviously not the libel land port authority I'm guessing is probably like the Croatian port authority And contrary to expectations the port authority dispatched police and inspectors. Well, there you go It's it's definitely not theirs because they're not going to send police after their own Uh asserted the boat wasn't a deteriorated condition Yeah, it doesn't look too bad like honestly that does not look too bad compared to like anything you'll see in tasmania Issued misdemeanor charges against the captain martin alleging Uh, nedgulance charges were subsequently contested. So it looks like somehow they got their boat stranded and they called in Like asking for support probably from the Croatian or the Serbian Port authority who basically just issued them with tickets because they're not recognizing them Attempts at rescue were further complied by police interference resulting in the failure of the rescue operation I like how they write this article like there's two ways you could read this version a Some guys driving his boat called liberty. He gets it stuck He calls the police for help and he gets a ticket because his boat's in a bad condition and he doesn't know what he's doing That's version a version two. This is a Presidential ship carrying the president of libel land. It got stranded They called for international support and help and what actually happened was that they were assaulted by a invading military force who attempted to bring them under submission of that country And unfortunately they tried to send in their own rescue operation, but it was a complete failure so now i'm getting like a mental image of Like navy seals coming in like dropping from cables from helicopters coming in to help these guys And then like there's a shootout on board and then you've got a somali pirate type of thing taking over and I don't know this actually this has to be a movie. They got to turn this into a movie.  So on the 7th of september vitt who's by the way the president of this micro nation Martin who's obviously the captain of the ship and jan urban I don't know who he is were arrested and subsequently deported for a period of five years So they've been deported from their own territory. That's crazy on grounds of national security. Ah, so what i'm guessing is Uh, and it says effectively incapacitating our primary navigational personnel So it looks like the president is also one of the primary navigational personnel of the ship. So Maybe he's like assistant skipper or something like that um And then it says mr. Vladimir was subjected to a series of contradictory legal actions by Croatian authorities Initially, he was penalized for failing to register At an accommodation facility. So Again, you could read this in two different ways. Basically guy has boat. He didn't register his boat Acting like within that facility being as a form of accommodation. Now. He's getting tickets version two They're being harassed by larger international actors Subsequently, he incurred an additional fine for not being physically present at the registered accommodation What You get a fine for not being at the registered accommodation. Like how does that work? Maybe Okay, so they got a fine for not being registered as accommodation facility Then got a fine is for not being at the registered That makes no sense to me. Okay. I'm with Liberland here This seems like some real deep political stuff Okay, upon his departure from Croatia a requisite step for the compliance of the aforementioned orders. So they were departed Mr. Havonek was issued a 30-day entry ban. So he's not allowed back for 30 days Man, this is really a government in exile now the rationale provided for this prohibit prohibition I'm not even gonna try that one was the potential for committing misdemeanors and lack of justified reasons for entry As far as we can tell this is a case of guilty and tool proven innocent Which has no place in a rule of law based country Well, that's the problem So what I think Liberland needs is a military to defend its borders See, this is one thing people like mock about like countries having militaries They're like, oh militaries, you know, they didn't do anything on border security They didn't do anything if they had a military they could have fought off this international Like attack then again, I don't think it would go down too well Some micro nation pulling out guns taking on the the Croatian government that that That would turn into like a cult status documentary in no time But just saying maybe you guys need military although I did see that they had guards Like they actually hired guards. Oh, where was that? Was that I didn't see that on this website I think that was on LinkedIn. Give me a sec. Okay. I'm just looking at the the profile link to the president here Um, okay, let's have a see where yeah, here it is. Look at this. Okay So they've got we are making all forestry and policemen personally liable for the damage in Liberland We're gathering their identities and they will be sued for the damage in merits also through Croatia server Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungarian, German, American, Hong Kong courts So they're going to sue them like in the international courts, man This is something that's going to hit the hate for sure They will have the chance to come and defend themselves in front of a jury in Liberland Mario So they're actually saying that the uh, you gotta admit a man. They've they've got some Cone ads on them. I didn't want to say the actual word But what what they're saying is that they've got some strength behind them They're saying you got to come to our Liberland and we will see you in our courts Even before this major court case our ministry of interior already Processed two merit transactions for members of the Croatian police chief of the police with a count flower And was awarded for letting our deputy minister of interior Daniel Bateman go to Liberland without subsequently banning him from That's the Schengen is like the european area of travel So apparently they What is this he will receive 1000 merit points for his friendly gesture. Whoa Merit points other chief is awarded 3000 merit points for banning No minus 3000 merit points for banning Daniel from Schengen for three months in the following day Okay, what is this merit point system? I'm getting like some more wheeling vibes right now So do people in like Liberland have like Social credits Okay, guys, we gotta search this out Okay, so here we are. We're on frequently asked questions. Let's go merit points. Okay I don't want just an e-residency. I want full citizenship We will open new citizenship application forms soon the forms will be identical blah blah You can buy 5000 Liberland merits required for citizenship if you don't have them yet So you buy citizenship? I guess it is a libertarian country kind of makes sense. You know everything's For purchase. Why do I have to pay if I already have merits? Everything has a cost. You are simply helping to cover the cost of production of your car Okay, if you have to collect 5000 Liberland merits by working for Liberland or donating So Interesting you work for them you get merit points. You can buy merit points internationally. I'm guessing using more like well-known currencies Or you can actually lose those so what happens you buy merit points and let's say you like annoyed the president and then he like Just deducts you merit points and what like those purchase merit points throughout the window I don't know about this like this is some Okay, well you can buy with paypal These guys are pretty you know, I get these guys credit because it is actually hard to get membership for Which is the universal aspirano association using like such a simple payment method system just clicking like this Um through the website like these guys are like straight up. You don't need to sign in on nothing You can just like form pay and they've got their crypto all there. So I thought they would have their own crypto coin by now, but I guess not so citizenship Let's go back to this. So to complete that patient. You need to register or log in. Okay, so well I guess you've got to register here to get citizenship or Up for fast tracks citizenship. Let's find out what's required Uh, we have secured the free and legal access to our country Also now and so here they're saying we actually have free and legal access to our country Which looks like they don't because they were just ejected from their their country So this is a country literally at war right now You can find all the necessary information about traveling and selling in the travel advice guide. Let's go check this out Okay map with entry points. Okay, so they actually show you the entry points So they got the Croatian border entry point just here. Let's zoom in a bit Yeah, so we got the Croatian entry point just here Okay, so I actually thought libeland was like I thought it was that sliver sitting in the water But it's actually quite a big piece of land right here. Okay, cool. And jefferson square is right there I really want to see what jefferson square looks like libeland settlement updates and president vitz birthday Okay, what do we got? There's that boat again. So i'm guessing that's their main flagship This is actually quite a beautiful render. This is what they imagine libeland would look like But it's attached to a fox news article about the president being arrested So they do have a cryptocurrency. Uh, so this person is actually asking about libeland merit This is from two years ago and they're saying we're working on bringing it to an exchange So it's actually going to be a cryptocurrency But how how will that work with them deducting merit points unless that's what I don't know how that would work This must be separate to what i'm thinking. So i've just found a video. This is of the forestry. They're actually here pulling apart this um Shelter that was set up in libeland as you can see here. They've got like little libeland seats everywhere and stuff So they've actually got a bit of infrastructure that they've managed to build And the forestry are coming in and just basically tearing it up on them Oh man, this is brutal. Look at this. They're they're straight up chainsawing right down. They're just destroying it on them Yeah, they must have been issued with some type of order that they need to get out of there. So it looks like all this um Stuff that was set up for libeland has been completely just pulled apart on them. They're destroying it Damn, that's brutal. Okay, but they don't look too worried. They're kind of just cruising around I guess there's not much you can do when you've got the police saying you've got to get out type of thing But anyway, that's my update at the moment for uh, oh, there we are. There's the there's the verde de papa or flava papa I guess I guess this is like the titanic going down He's he's singing the last song as a libeland crashes into the ocean type of thing Um, again, I hope they are successful in the end because I'll totally go check them out I just wish they put esprayla in their constitution if they did they would have had full support of evil deer over here No, uh, but that's pretty much it. I hope you guys like this video and we will check back in on libeland I guess in a year or so. See you guys next time