 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things in matter-to-tech and Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Elise Anderson. In our show this time, we'll review last week's top five Think Tech talk shows and staff pick. We'll check out the best of the best and have a look at the issues and guests involved. Think Tech produces some 30 talk shows every week in our downtown studio. Here's a list of our great Think Tech hosts and shows. Every week, Think Tech chooses its top five Think Tech talk shows from the week before based on the number of views each of them has had on the internet. For this past week, the winning shows were as follows. Number one from the series Humane Human Architecture, it's called Elevate Elevated Structures, hosted by Martin de Spang with guest Nathan Toothman. It's on our Humane Human Architecture playlist. What are you simulating there in the shot? We're just showing like a carving out a small area of the trunk of the tree as a shower area, the bathroom area. It's just one case kind of mixed in with the spiral staircase. And so that would be probably a lower cost option to use that space down there for that and then putting it up higher. So it kind of depends on who would be using it, where the bathroom would go. But this is just kind of illustrating it's a tight space, but it's kind of like an RV sort of shower situation. So it kind of depends on who the customer is, where they would want that sort of feature. But just trying to pack in as much as possible into a structure, but still making it livable, making it aesthetic. And the shower would be behind the sort of implied here as spiral staircase. And let's walk that up and go to the next picture. And there we are, we're back in business, we're back in Elevate. And in a very, very different way, whereas Elevate was rather conventionally constructed and spatially conventional. But here we go. This is a totally new beast of Elevate, a skeletal Elevate that next picture shows all you guys basically being up there. And this is just a fantastic evolution of a creature, again, that is homegrown in Hawaii and has ventured out and is really thriving in the Silicon Valley as one can see here. And the next picture is doing that days and nights. So not only is Elevate spectacular below as a sort of incubator for socializing, but it can be inhabited and you're having a movie night up there. I mean, how fantastic is that? Go to the next picture. This is you already referred to that. That this is, again, work in progress. And you already talked about the kids of parts and components that we were talking about. But let's jump to the next picture, which is the fascinating thing that then, basically, the next day, you started out to transform back to the Mandala. And talking to you is you're pointing out this is doable for a couple, which you're demonstrating here, right? Yeah, I mean, every part is designed to weigh less than 60 pounds, so that one person can carry it. It's easier for two. And it doesn't take any sort of special skill to, at the end, assemble it. Number two from the series, Life in the Law, hosted by Jay Fiedel. It's called 50 Years Before the Bar with guest Vernon Char. It's on our Life in the Law playlist. My son had written down Vernon Char's reflections at the Char Family Reunion 2017. I think of it more as introspection, though. And I look at it also as an ability for passage of time, stages. Sort of my version of Gil Sheehy's book, Passages. But when we spoke before, you talked about how it was a tonic experience to write the book. And as it would be for really anybody, you wanted to put the time in to do this. If you write about yourself, you make an autobiographical statement, you think about yourself. And it gives you a new view, an introspective view of your own life. Well, it also gives you an opportunity to brag a little bit, too. But try to do it in as modest a way as possible. Yes, it was modest. So all of that. One important factor that it all began with, because it was a family gathering, was the family history. And what is amazing to me is that here I live now, 82. But even after visiting the family village, which was very modest, thinking that my father came over in 1898, he was born in 1893, the same year as Mao Zedong. And he almost didn't make it because, as I recall, his ship landed just before annexation. So through that whole period of the overthrow of the monarchy, frisional government, and then the annexation, if he didn't come when he did, they might well have been problems because the exclusion act would have come into effect. Who knows whether I wouldn't have been on the Long March in China or my father. Or here, having the luxury of whey. Well, but through him and through your family, with Big Family, you have been part of and studied the whole Chinese experience in Hawaii, including some really remarkable things that happened with respect to the relationship of the Chinese community here and the Chinese community in China. Right, right. That's been fun to do to examine some of my father's writing you know, starting out at a law firm as a law clerk or messenger really for $75 an hour back in the early 1900s. An hour would be good today. Right, a month. A month, yes. Okay, we'll straight now. Right. Number three from the series Hibachi Talk, hosted by Gordon Bruce. It's called Jell-O-Shot Pro from Idea to Mobile App with guest Mark Sullivan. It's on our Hibachi Talk playlist. So now you've got this mobile app. Okay, so when you don't have the mobile app, you got to develop it. So what do you do? How do you develop a mobile app? Well, I mean, you know, first off, I decided to get like all the content I wanted to put on there ready. So we went through all the recipes and, you know, clean up the wording and all that and wrote the little bits about, you know, how to and the tips and tricks and all that stuff. And then I set about shooting photos for each one. Because I thought each recipe should have a photo to show, you know, what you're going to turn out with. And that took, you know, some time making shots of all different colors and putting them in the shot glasses and plastic cups and things like that. And then I... Where was quality control? You forgot to call me again. I know. I don't think we had met. I know we had not. I was a while ago. And I shot the photos in my kitchen with my sons who were eight and ten at the time helping me stage the photos with flowers and little hoola dolls and all that. They must have had... They must have had... There's a dad... There's a dad child by him. They had a ball and they're quite proud of their work and so am I. They did a really awesome job. That's pretty cool. And so we got all the content together and then I thought, well, how am I going to build it? Yeah. How are you going to build it? Can I do it myself or... You're not a programmer or somebody. I have, you know, kind of rudimentary skills and HTML and stuff, but just not really enough to do that. So I looked around it. There are lots of places online where you can get some DIY software. There are lots of people online that you can hire to do it. And I looked into the DIY stuff and it was just way past my knowledge experience and my pay grade, really, to get to that. Well, you get a lot of tips. That's what I do, but still. But still, that's not in the grade. So there are a couple of services that I tried, but I just could not get the app I was trying to build to do what I wanted it to do. So you were using an outside third-party developer. Did you go offshore like to India or did you try any of those kinds of things? There's a ton of those too, but I wanted to keep it local because I wanted to deal with somebody who I could talk to in person to discuss design ideas and all that stuff. So you found someone locally here that could do this? I did. Oh, good. We need to have that person on the show or person, so whoever they are. So tell me... Waiheena Net Designs. Waiheena Net Designs. Yeah. She did an awesome job. And we just, she sent me an estimate and we've agreed on that and went and sat down and talked about design ideas to kind of feel we wanted. I said, I wanted to have kind of a tropical sort of a retro-tiki kind of feel. And I wanted to do that on this to be that way. And send her all the photos and put her to work. Wow. So how long did it take? I'm not going to ask you how much it costs, but because she may, if she gets any business from this... I hope she doesn't. She can ship me some jewellery for us. So how long did it take to develop this app? To get it from that point to when you got all the pictures. You got the content. Upload it took six weeks, a couple of months. Number four from the series called Law Across the Sea, hosted by Larry Foster. It's called GATT, WTO, NAFTA, TPP, TPP11, and Chorus. Do they matter for Hawaii with guest Steve Craven? It's on our Law Across the Sea playlist. Let's see, I just read something recently, an interview with some almond farmers in California saying that due to NAFTA, their exports of almonds have gone from close to zero to 15% of their production. So that's, NAFTA has been quite lucrative for them. So the net benefit for agribusiness has been a great increase in their ability to export their food products to Canada and Mexico. And the benefits have been even bigger in other agricultural products, like corn and derivatives from corn. It's been quite positive for beef and pork. And the current Secretary of Agriculture has been one of those in the administration that is trying to convince the Trump administration to keep NAFTA. He thinks it would be a disaster for the agricultural community if we withdrew from NAFTA. Same thing is going on in the automotive industry that you mentioned. One of the Trump proposals specifically addresses an arcane area we call rules of origin. And currently under NAFTA, I think I've got the percentage just correct, to qualify as a NAFTA automotive product, a company has to have at least 60% North American content. That means that if you put together a car somewhere in North America, if it has 60% U.S., Mexican, or Canadian content, or all three of those combined, then it qualifies for duty-free treatment. But isn't one of the motivations of the Trump administration is to, how would I put this, sort of stop the outsourcing of American jobs, high-paying jobs, and bring them back to the United States so that the automotive companies have outsourced to Mexico the production of cars and in car parts and bring the parts and cars back in the United States and sell them. Are we better off having the jobs here rather than outside the United States? Well, in saying that Trump is assuming that trade is a zero-sum game, and it isn't. We're building the pie continuously with trade agreements like NAFTA, and yes, you've got a lot more happening in the automotive industry in Canada and Mexico than you would have before. Number five, from the series Working Together, hosted by Cheryl Crozier Garcia. It's called Social Groups and Impacts on Society, with guest Chris Shelton. It's on our Working Together playlist. Were you raised as a Scientologist? I was, yeah, I grew up with its principles, and so I never really had any idea to the contrary in terms of the philosophy or the beliefs of Scientology. In the same way that anybody who's raised in a Christian household would be raised with, you know, Jesus is your savior. I wasn't raised with that belief. I was raised with the idea that Elron Hubbard was our savior. And so, you know, what Elron Hubbard had to say and what he thought was given greater importance in my life because my parents believed. When I was 15 years old is when I personally went into a Church of Scientology myself and started doing the classes. And two years later, right out of high school, I started working for the organization, and I did that for 25 years. So it was a long journey for me before I finally woke up and got out. I'm a little bit of a slow learner that way. Did you feel brainwashed? Or did you, was there ever a time when you said? That's a term for it, yeah. The indoctrination is not a one-shot deal. It's a very gradual process. There's, you know, one of the problems people have is they see the extreme end of it, and they go, well, how could anybody ever put up with that? But that's not how it goes. The day you walk into a church, they're not talking about extremist ideas and black and white ideas, and we're all and you're nothing. That's not how they get new members in, right? It's a very gradual process where the first thing is you have a problem. You've come to us to help solve that problem. We're going to help you solve it. And the person goes, wow, this is wonderful. These people really care about me. I've never been anywhere where people listen to what I have to say, et cetera, et cetera. And they come on board for a $50 course, which is nothing, 50 bucks. Yeah, great. And they get a little bit of help. And then they do the next course. And this next course isn't 50 bucks. It's 100 bucks. And then there's the next one and the next one. And by, before you know it, you know, you're involved and you're, and you're kind of fully into this world. And within a year or two or three, you've then started buying into things that on day one, you never would have accepted. We also have a staff pick. This time, it's from the series Think Tech Global hosted by Mark Schlauve. It was called Out of Africa with guest Tim Apichella. It's on our Think Tech Global playlist. In this short 20 years where I would go to a country and you would see people wearing traditional wear, you know, that they've worn for centuries. Now it's being replaced with Levi jeans or designer jeans and cruise shirts. And that's true in Africa? Yes, it's happening exponentially. Because I think when, you know, I've never been to Africa, but in my mind, you say Africa. I'm thinking the traditional dress and... Yeah, we all carry a stereotype of what Africa is. I mentioned Africa to some people and they think there's, you know, there's lions and rhinoceros right around every corner. In fact, it's not. It's, you know, there's a little strip mall around the corner. So first off, Africa is a huge, huge continent. It's, you know, take Canada, the United States, and Mexico, and, you know, it's a diverse, diverse continent. And so we all carry stereotypes of what Africa is. And your stereotype would be shattered each and every time you go there. Yeah, I mean, when I, and I think of Africa as being very poor, a poor country, oppressed in many ways, and currently undergoing political problems. What is it like? I mean, is that, I mean... You know, again, that's kind of on the surface. Yeah, there's, there's indescribable poverty, but I will say that people are very, very rich in spirit. In fact, they have things hands down that we can't even begin to touch. Tell me. You go to any of, you know, an Islamic-based country in Africa, and by God, there's a brotherhood. Whether you're a stranger or a distant relative or a distant cousin, there is a greeting and an acceptance and the just this affection. Okay, so generally speaking, that's what you found when you were in Africa? Yeah, that's what I've witnessed. And I said, you know, there's, people talk about Southern hospitality in the United States. Well, if you ever go to an Islamic country, my God, they'll, they'll do hospitality above and beyond your expectations. I mean, you could be a complete stranger. And this has happened several times when I've traveled. I'm lost. You know, that's, that's, that's one of the things happen when you're lost. And they'll say, you know, can I help you? And they'll take you by the hand and they'll go, they could be completely busy. They could have something they're working on or they have to go or they're late and they will go out of their way to hand, hold your hand and take you to where you're trying to get to. You can always find the links to these shows and our daily email advisories. If you don't get our daily email advisories, you can sign up to get them on our homepage on thinktecawaii.com. These are only samplings from the top five and staff pick from across our 30 weekly talk shows. There are, of course, many more. To see these shows in their entirety, go to thinktecawaii.com or youtube.com slash thinktecawaii. Great diversity, great community, great content at Think Tech. Every day better. And now let's check out our Think Tech schedule of events going forward. Think Tech broadcasts its talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. And some people listen to them all night long and on the weekends. If you missed the show or if you want to replay or share any of our shows, they're all archived on demand on thinktecawaii.com and YouTube. For our audio stream, go to thinktecawaii.com slash audio. And we post all our shows as podcasts on iTunes. Visit thinktecawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links or better yet sign up on our email list and get our daily email advisories. Think Tech has a high-tech green screen studio at Pioneer Plaza. If you want to see it or be part of our live audience or if you want to participate in our programs, contact shows at thinktecawaii.com. If you want to pose a question or make a comment during a show, call 808-374-2014 and help us raise public awareness on Think Tech. Thanks for your contributions to our November fundraising campaign. We've extended the campaign one week until Friday, December 8th. So if you'd like to make a contribution in the next few days, it's not too late, please help us particularly at this time of year. Go ahead, give us a thumbs up on YouTube or send us a tweet at thinktechhi.com. We'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives in these islands and in this country. We want to stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's think together. And now, here's this week's Think Tech commentary. We've come to accept Oahu's terrible traffic congestion and that's worse than the fact that the city is doing nothing about it. It's become the new normal and we've learned to go zen about it. We've given up like sheep. Rail won't help at all, but even if it sometimes helps some people get to Kapolei, it won't help the rest of us over the Pali or points east. The congestion there will continue. Incredible that some officials say will be just fine. We won't be just fine. Note we haven't done anything, period. We haven't fixed the roads. We haven't expanded or built new or alternative roads. So for many routes, there's only one way there when there should be a relief route too. There are no traffic circles, no street widening, no underpasses, overpasses or other new infrastructure to ameliorate are serious, if not terminal congestion problem. The smallest fender bender sometimes results in hours of delay. Permits are given to 5.0 that allow them to block our streets all day long, even during rush hour. This reflects an abiding disrespect for motorists. We haven't timed the lights or put in sensors that could tell us when there's no cross traffic. These could save us precious time at every single traffic light. There are no staggered work hours, even though there were years ago, and even when there's a desperate need for them now. There are no congestion or time of use tolls on the freeway when modern technology could do this so easily. There are no car pools to speak of because there are no serious incentives. There are no efforts to reduce the number of cars on the roads. We keep selling cars like hotcakes, even though there are already more than a million cars in these islands. Are we so unengaged that we can't find a solution? We need new ideas but we don't seem to have any. Where are the innovators when we really need them? Nobody in office seems to be addressing this, and for that matter, nobody seems to be watching the store. We sit like vegetables, completely unproductive, while our days and nights and our automobile payments and tanks of fossil fuel are being frittered away in congestion. Reducing congestion has got to be a top priority for our economy and our quality of life. And yet we seem to be getting more complacent even as things get worse. Can we afford this? It's a huge extravagance to sit in your car doing nothing half the day. No one can tell me we can't do anything. Of course we can do something. If other cities in this country and in fact overseas are addressing this problem, why can't we? Our intelligence is being insulted by those responsible. We should be mad as hell and we shouldn't take it anymore. Will somebody please run for office and do something about this? Remember, it's an election year. How about making them tell us they'll do something? And after that, let's hold their feet to the fire until they actually do it. Don't be a vegetable. Say something. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of Think Tech. But first, we want to thank our underwriters. Energy Policy Forum The Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology Hawaiian Electric Companies The Hightech Development Corporation Gailen Ho of BAE Systems Integrated Security Technologies Kamehameha Schools Carol Mon-Lee and the Friends of Think Tech MW Group Limited The Scheidler Family Foundation The Sydney Stern Memorial Trust Volo Foundation Eureko J. Tsukimura Okay, Elise, that wraps up this week's edition of Think Tech. Remember, you can watch Think Tech on Spectrum OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it, just like Elise does. For additional times, check out oc16.tv. For lots more Think Tech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on Think Tech, visit ThinkTechHawaii.com. Be a guest or a host, a producer, or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks so much for being part of our Think Tech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification, and global awareness in Hawaii and of course the ongoing search for innovation wherever we can find it. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Elise Anderson. Aloha everyone.