 Okay. Okay. And Ron will look at me. Aloha. Welcome to the art of thinking smart. My name is Roger Epstein. I am the third substitute interviewer today, replacing Michael North, who was replacing David Chang. And it's my great pleasure to be here today with Ron Porter and talking about his story and his unique journey of not only thinking smart, but learning a whole new way to think, going from Hawaiian surfer and skin diver to international economists and international relations and how he put people together with the economy. Ron, Ron is now with Oha as an economist and part of their strategic investment group. So nice to have you with us today, Ron. Yeah. Ron, I think the audience would love to hear how you started and where your journey took you and how that helped you really expand your thinking, and not only just thinking smart, but learning how to think smart and how that worked for you. Well, I believe that career paths are just extensions of who you really are. So if you can look back at what you thought was important growing up, I think that's a good indicator of where you're headed in the future. And as far as my thinking goes, or what I thought when I was young, things like value creation, how it's exchanged, the inequalities of that and injustices of that were very important to me growing up. And I remember having debates or talks with my father. We talk about this kind of thing. So as a young boy, you were really thinking about the world, how people relate, and why there's so much inequality, and the people aspect was important to you. Right. And as you go forward in your career, I think those stick with you. So when I got to university, I went to the University of Hawai'i Mono, studied peace studies at Anula Sparts Masanaga Peace Institute under Brian Hallett. And he was very instrumental in guiding me towards understanding things that I have been thinking about for a long time. And while in that program, we did a lot of conflict resolution kind of stuff, but we also did international relations kind of stuff. Because that's what you see in the news, you know, nations reacting and interacting with other nations. And so you got started at that level with the micro, if you will, people, and then in the bigger world and the bigger, how this relates to the bigger context. Right, right. And you know, you look at the news and you watch the news and you think, well, that's important, right? So I personally latched on to if I want to see what is causing injustice in the world, I'm going to attach myself to that because that seems like it's important. So I went that route, followed that for a while through my my bachelor's, and quickly went into my master's degree that was in Japan. You graduated in 2004. Right, with a bachelor's degree, and then you decided what do I do next? Right, you further your, you know, you try to find answers to the questions you still have, right? So you take the next step and you go to your master's. Were you thinking about career at that time? I had an idealistic kind of view at the time. I wanted to work in an international organization. I thought working for the United Nations was something that I would like to do. I was a firm, you know, advocate of international organizations where there's a lot of people that are not, but I was at the time. And yeah, and Japan was, is heavily involved in the creation of international organizations, whether it's the United Nations or OECD. So they had some good graduate programs. So Japan being a place where they don't even have a military, and having struggled so much and suffered so much during World War II, they've been focused amongst. Right, self-defense force, but no military. Right, but they're leaders in this, and so you thought, okay, maybe Japan would be a good place. So I looked at specific programs in Japan and was able to go there for my master's. And while I was during my master's time, I explored international relations, the theories of international relations. You were getting a master's in international, and you had a scholarship there in Japan. Right, right, right. So that was another good reason to go there. Yeah, that helped. So going through that next stage of inquiry led me to focusing in a little bit more on the economic side of international processes and relations between people and relations between bigger units like companies or multinational companies or nations. And how that has an impact at the bottom. Right, and how that affects the individual people. Can you think back to how your thinking was starting to change? As a kid, you're idealistic, you want to save the world, you want to do, you go to school, you get a degree in peace studies, and now you're beginning to hone in a little more. And well, this economic aspect is pretty important all the way around. Right, my path towards economics, well I am an economist today, and my path towards economics was not a straight line, by any means. I avoided economics like the plague, I would say, and tried to focus in on other things that I hoped were more important than economics. And it had to do with the whole idea of the very, very narrow scope of our economic system today. But growing up, I didn't know that it was such a narrow scope, that it doesn't have to be this way. So therefore, I avoided it as much as possible. But as I was going into my into my studies a little more, I started seeing that economics is not only what people tell us it is. It's not only the exchange of money. It's really the production modes of people. The production of goods and services. Goods and services, which goes back to pretty much an expression of the individual. So when you look at it that way, it's a very nice thing. Economics is a very nice thing. It's the expression of individual consciousness. What is valuable to the individual expressed externally? And how do we trade that? How do we exchange that? And their creativeness. And let other people enjoy the value that somebody else is creating. That's economics. To be of service. Right, and we're not taught that in school. We're taught that economics is the distribution of limited resources. And that is a turn off. When you hear that, that's competitive and there's a lot of friction in that interpretation. So as I started to go forward, I started exploring economics in a more broad way, with a more diverse understanding of what it is, the fundamentals of what it is and what it can do. And by the time I got to my PhD studies, I was still hesitant. So even if you see my doctoral dissertation, it's pretty much all about economics, but the word economics is not in the title. And that was a conscious decision on my part. So even at the end of my doctoral studies, I was still hesitant to buy into the notion that this is actually really, really important. And it wasn't until after that, and when I was a faculty member in Asia, following my doctoral studies, let's go back on your history a little bit. So you're in Japan. Yeah, you speak Japanese. I speak conversation. But you didn't when you went there? No, not before. And so you spent a couple of years in Japan getting a master's degree in international relations, then you finished that and then you said straight into a PhD, straight into a PhD. And what's the university you're at? It's you make on Asia Pacific. It's you make on Asia Pacific University. So you're able to get a master's and stay there and get a PhD. And then what was the title of your PhD? Cyclical continuity in Mongolian political history. So here's a kid from Hawaii, who is really into local culture, but has a big heart of, how can I help the world? Go to college and find yourself in Japan. Now all of a sudden you're doing a PhD on Mongolia. Right. And why Mongolia? I had connections to Mongolia. Some family connections that allowed me to have a home base when I was doing field research. So I thought, you know, not many people are doing research on that region. And it's a very important historical region. So the continental northeast Asian region where China, Mongolia and Russia and the political economy of that region and how it affects not only China and Russia, but also Mongolia in the middle as a sandwich between these two big powers. So you get an unusual look from Mongolia, a huge country which at one time controlled all of China. Right. And now is kind of a backwards area, looking for their own economy and how it fits in the politics. And between two monsters, of course, which China believes it owns Mongolia. Right. And if you look at Mongolia-China relations today, it's a pretty clear cut case for how China is dealing with Xinjiang, Tibet and parts of Vietnam economically. Why they think that they have a certain sphere of influence over these areas. And that there's a historical story there. And it may not be the historical story that they themselves are articulating, but there are truths on both sides. And then looking at the economic relations between China and Mongolia really puts in a framework into how Beijing today is dealing with these inter-Asian areas. So we're going to take a break in a second, but I just want to recap to where we are that all this training now is getting you to understand an unusual situation, but it highlights the personal relations that the economics has to do with not only the country, but on all the people. And then we'll talk about how you bring that back to Hawaii right after the break. Thanks, Ron. Aloha. My name is Justine Espiritu. This is my co-host, Matthew Johnson. No, you're doing great. You're doing great. Every Thursday at 4 p.m. on Zintec. So let's go from there. So you're a, let's talk a little bit more. We like to bring in folks from the whole realm of the local food supply and agriculture, anyone working on these issues, any organization or individual that has plans or projects. What kind of people have we had? Okay, thanks. We've had farmers, we've had chefs, we've had people from government, larger institutions, everyone who's working to help make Hawaii's local food system that much better. So you can see us every Thursday and join the conversation on Twitter and we hope to see you there. Aloha. Thank you. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Roger Epstein. This is the Art of Thinking Smart. Our guest today is Ron Porter, who's now an economist and a strategic planning officer with OHA. And Ron, you were just talking about your PhD in Mongolia, how it was helping you to understand the bigger picture. Here's a country that's dealing with two big behemoths and also how they're looking at their people and you're learning a lot about how they interact. So in Mongolia, my focus was how do Mongolians navigate this? And politically, how do they navigate this? And that has a lot to do with leadership. So how are leaders born in Mongolia using resources of the region? Because Mongolia has a specific subsistence economy that doesn't produce much more than its own for its own needs. And that's the traditional animal husbandry, semi-nomadic animal husbandry economy. So given the specific dynamics of the economic system in Mongolia, it was paramount for these leaders or these aspiring leaders in Mongolia who wanted to change society to somehow facilitate resources from outside in. So that turned out to be one of the catalyzing principles for acquiring leadership, a leadership role, and sustaining that leadership role in society. And when you get down to that level, you realize, okay, it doesn't matter how you produce something, but you need to produce something. And this is the base of economics. People need to produce something that can be exchanged for value. So it was at that time where I started seeing that economics does really, really, really matter at the grassroots level. And we get caught up in the grand scheme of things, stock markets, and all the fluff that goes along with a modern economy. And we tend to forget what it really is. We tend to forget what really is commerce. And how it impacts the individual in every place, not just Mongolia, but every place. Every place has it. And going to a place like Mongolia, I got to see firsthand an economic system that is at the base level right now. There is not a lot of fluff. So we can see the pillars of what they are. And then the leaders are saying, we've got to bring in new resources if we want to go from a subsistence economy to something more. Or even influence. You don't have to tell somebody in a semi-nomadic society to go take care of your animals. They're going to do it by themselves because that's going to sustain them. There's no political leverage there. Yeah, you don't need it. You just do whatever you have to. If you facilitate resources from outside that they don't have access to, that would enhance their lives, then now you have leverage to be a leader. And then you sustain that distribution throughout society. And try to make the society raise the whole level. All boats rise with the rising tide. Right. And it hasn't always been done that way. It's been done in very corrupted ways as well. But that's the base of economics. Okay, so you finish your PhD and now where are you? Now you're a grow-up. You've got to actually do some more. You've got to go work, right? So I had a faculty student in Mongolia at the university that hosted me. So I ended up starting a master's program, a dual language master's program in public administration. Helped them to start that. It was funded by a Japanese foundation. Really bringing these nations together in China and Japan. Yeah. And so I taught there for a few years and there was a sense of clarity when I taught for the next few years that anything that came up I was able to then incorporate whatever social variable that we wanted to put into the framework we could. But that soon started becoming a little stale as well. And I think most academics go through these phases where they are all excited about this new framework that they came up with and then it starts to not tell the story so much after a while and they have to retool. Right. And my retooling process was throwing everything out of the window and saying, okay, let's start from scratch and let's just go as deep as we can to find what are the pillars holding up society? What are the pillars holding up individuals? And then what are those pillars that then are added on to build up institutions within society? So I ventured further and further and further into that and like anybody who does that, I hit a wall. I hit the wall of okay, we as human beings, we know from experience, we have a conscious awareness and what is behind that veil, we don't know. What are we doing here? What are we doing? You and I are having a conversation right now. We're pretending we know what the hell we're doing but we have no idea where we came from, what we're doing here or where we're going. Exactly. So we hit that wall and then we say, there's no going past that wall and for thousands of years people have been debating what's behind that wall or that veil and that's not really interesting for me to debate what's behind that veil. What was interesting to me then is saying, okay, we hit that wall, now I'm going to turn around and I'm going to work now forward, forward. Whatever the purpose is, whatever the meaning is, let's go do it. Right. So the only thing that experience tells us is that you say, what are we doing here? And pretty much the answer is we are expressing ourselves. Expressing ourselves and that gets into creating value and that gets into economy and commerce and the output and the ability to create goods and services that help other people and make money for you as well. Exactly. So when you break down what it is that economics is, it gets down to individual expression. Yeah. And that is a nice story. Yeah. And that's a story that I would don't mind calling myself an economist now. Right. Having that story about economics is. It's interesting. I was a corporate tax lawyer for 45 years and people were like, oh, you represent all these big companies. I'm a cog in the machine of creating things and we all are in different ways. Right. And you could change the system, but you also have to understand it and you can choose to work outside it or work with it. So you then decided it's time to come home. Yeah. And you've been home about a year now? About a year and a half. About a year and a half. Yeah. And now it's exciting because now knowing that economics is actually the expression of individuals and understanding that the expression of individuals is pretty much infinite. Yeah. It's really fun to come to work and explore how do we build an infrastructure that can take into account all of these people's inherent value, all of these people's expressions and be able to compensate them for that and then be able to facilitate the exchange. And Hawaii has some similarity in the sense that we don't have a big enough group to really create big manufacturing, but what do we do with it? Like the Mongolians, we're past subsistence obviously, but how do we expand so we take care of everybody and eliminate some of the economic injustices? Right. And that has to do with the structure of our economy today, right? So we're very vertically structured and then we tend to focus on it. What do you mean by vertically structured? Well, when you create an institution, it is either, it's an institution with its own supply chain, right, and its own outputs, and then our economic system tends to only focus on that top layer of these organizations where economic value is created. So our entire economic system is based off of keying in on only that top end of these vertical structures. The final output. Exactly. When we view value as expressions of people, we see that all along this value chain, up and down and across vertically and horizontally, value is being produced and created all the time. We're just not recognizing it, right? And one of the reasons why our economic system is so exclusive that not everybody has access to playing that game is because it's a very narrow circle. It's a very narrow train track that focuses on only recognizing the top end value of these vertical institutions. Can you give me an example of where you would put in a horizontal model in the tourist business? Well, a good horizontal model today, which we just had a meeting at OHA, is Hawaiian investment ready here. It's Hawaiian investment ready. It's called, it's an accelerator program for businesses and nonprofits to get them to be self-sustaining and to be able to stand on their own. And it's funded by the Felicitas Foundation and it's directed by Uncle Neil Hanna's and from KS. And what they do is they're creating a horizontal platform for vertical businesses to first learn how they can maximize their value, but then create an ecosystem where they are side-by-side with each other, where they can create vertical value, but they can also create horizontal value within this ecosystem that they're creating. And right now, they're working on that infrastructure. So by having a number of businesses that connect with each other in some way, you expand the whole base of everything that allows more growth. Right. And that's an organizational level. We can even see people compensating horizontal activity now in developing countries. One good example is now banks or lending institutions are actually using mobile phone data to track people's movements. And they're saying, okay, although this person doesn't have a credit history or their credit history is poor due to volatile economics in that area, we can see that this person talks to these same 10 people or has this network that they are a part of. And therefore, since they have that form of stability, we can give them a loan. And they can use that as a base perhaps to start their own business. And that's a tangible way of compensating horizontal activity, human being horizontal activity. So right now, we're just starting to explore this space, this horizontal space. And once we can come up with an infrastructure that can take into account these horizontal spaces, then we can have a more inclusive economic system. So that's kind of where I'm coming from when talking about economic development, the grassroots level. It's still a little esoteric in my mind. Right. But there are tangible examples now, so we're starting to see. And whether the people that are making these steps are viewing it this way or not, they're just seeing it as a need or as a new space to operate, whatever it is, it's fine. We just need greater density in where we can recognize and exchange value as a society. Where the different vertical industries somehow connect horizontally. And people. And the people, how they connect up and how that's going to broaden the base for everybody to participate more in the wealth. Right, right. Fantastic. So what is OHI doing exactly in your capacity? They're looking for projects to. Yeah, we seek out partners, partnerships. We have a certain amount of resources at OHI that we can use to further these things. Of course, as an organization, a vertically aligned organization, we also need partners to get stuff done. And we're looking for partners in a variety of different arenas, whether it's land management, stewardship, or economic development for Native Hawaiians, economic self-sufficiency, these kinds of things. So there's a few things in works right now. We're open to people approaching us and saying if they have any ideas, you know, it's wonderful. Well, we hope whoever is listening today will come to you with some ideas. And Ron, our time is up. And I just want to thank you so much for coming up with not only smart thinking, some really thoughtful, and to see your progression. You know, this is the classic James Joseph Campbell Hero's journey that you've gone from your home place and out into the world and learned a heck of a lot from some really unusual sources and then brought it back for the benefit of the community. That reminds me of a quote, the TSLA quote. It goes something like, and at the end of all our exploring is to return to the same place and know the place for the first time. And know the place for the first time because you're looking at it with a whole new perspective. Yeah, that kind of embodies my experience. It's wonderful to have you back and to have you with us and I wish you a lot of luck and thanks for being on today. And that's all the time we have. Thank you so much for viewing with us. Aloha.