 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC 16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Cynthia Sinclair. And I'm Anna Jimenez-McMillan. In our show this time we'll visit the state capitol and meet with Lieutenant Governor Josh Green. We'll take a tour of his office and compare notes with him on current issues and political initiatives. Who is Josh Green? He's a doctor and a politician and the Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii. He's a member of the Democratic Party and was a state senator from the third district on the Big Island from 2009 to 2018 and a state representative for the sixth district on the Big Island from 2005 to 2009. We know him at Think Tech. He was a talk show host hosting a series called Healthcare in Hawaii when he was a state senator before he became Lieutenant Governor. Here are some excerpts from the show he hosted. Just recently we ran into him at the opening of the new Planned Parenthood Center on Baratana Street. Well, we're advocating for women's health today. They have built a beautiful clinic downstairs that respects our women's needs for whatever health services they may require, may want, may desire. That's what we are about in Hawaii. We're about taking care of people and to have ever left any women's health availability on the table or in another state or another part of our state is unacceptable. When we saw him that day, he was happy to make a date with us so we went to visit him at his office in the state capitol. First, we walked the halls of the capitol building itself. We walked around the rotunda on the ground floor. The fifth floor is dedicated to the Governor and the Lieutenant Governor. Henry went up to the fifth floor to meet Lieutenant Governor Josh Green at his office and to get a tour and see what his office looks like and get an idea of what it's like to be Lieutenant Governor. And we also wanted to compare notes with him on the issues he's concerned about and the initiatives he's working on, particularly homelessness in our state. He was happy to talk to us about those things. Thanks for taking time. So this has been an exciting early adventure. Right now we're here in the ceremonial room of Lieutenant Governor's office, which is everyone's office. We hope people come. Just this morning we had 50 engineers around this table and we got a national report about our state of our infrastructure. We talked a great deal about what we really need to do on things like wastewater. We're worried about storm water. We're worried about all of our infrastructure issues so we had a great way to bring people together. Meanwhile, they're seeing history because if you start over here, we've got the 14 previous Lieutenant Governors here on our wall. Pretty interesting people, James K. Aloha, then William Richardson, who became Chief Justice. Right? We had Andrew Ng. All these people are pretty famous. I mean, Andrew Ng I think was the CEO of Aloha, Thomas Gill, we all know, Labor Leader George Ariyoshi, former Governor Nelson Doi, needs no introduction, and Gene King, you know, a women's leader from the start. I mean, really special people. Here we have now other Lieutenant Governors that went on to more higher political office I guess. John Mohe, who I had lunch with yesterday, who looks about the same, same, you know, vibrancy. He's a great guy. Senator Cayetano, again, spark plug of a human being, loves to mix it up. Our current U.S. Senator, Maisie Hirona, who was Lieutenant Governor. So I feel, you know, it's humbling and quite extraordinary. Duke Iona, really interesting good human being I think, great mustache. Brian Schatz, who is a dear friend and is now our Senator, our Senior Senator, and Shansetsu, who I called a friend, who was also our Senate President when I was there. And we're going to save some space for Doug Chin, who was a terrific Attorney General, and then served a short stint as Lieutenant Governor to support Governor E. Gay. So it is quite something. Here's the seal, which we often come and have ceremonial moments here with dignitaries, ambassadors, leaders of the community. That bunch of four-year-olds in here the other day, they were awesome doing some early education. Like I said, we had the engineers. Every day we do something best we can. And I, of course, focus on health, human services as a physician. But to have these people, which is just amazing, kind of looking at us over our shoulder, if you will, and then the actual work that we do, we're trying to treat this office like a super-vibrant, day-in, day-out place of action. So it's neat so far. So that's this room. Let me take you on a tour out. Walking into my office, which I feel pretty blessed to have. The paintings are amazing. They come from the State Art Museum. So as you see the art all across the office, we're working on a Lieutenant Governor's Initiative on Homelessness, Addiction, and Mental Health Care. This is how we break it down. We break it down based on projects that should be done, private sector, public sector, mobile health. Making sure we have a volunteer corps with our religious community. Working on Waimanalo Solution, Hawaii Health Systems Corporation. I just got back from the state hospital and Hina Maoka today. Interviewing them, trying to find more resources. There's good news all around. Working with private folks that really offer a lot in the health sector. So there's that. That's our homeless piece combined with an innovations think tank, which we're beginning, which will be a grant writing entity, to write grants for people who want to do humanitarian projects. I'd like to seek universal health care for the people in Hawaii. And that's what we're calling Hawaii care 100%. So that will be unveiled at some point. Health care provider shortage, which we've spoken about on Think Tech many times, the governor would like me to work on that as well. And we're talking about global warming. Like with the engineering corps today that we had. Charing the food bank fundraiser. Working with Mao Farms, hopefully to help them with their farming. Disaster preparedness, some hair-raising stories. Adult dental, anything you can imagine that might help people we would like to be somehow supportive of. And when people have new ideas, we jump into them. We have maps here just because we're looking at, this is Wainae, right? This is where the Boat Harbor is. This is where the Pua Onua Hawaiian Eye is. And we're trying to make sure we have additional support for them. This is the model of a Waimanalo respite space. Or we're really referring to these kind of areas as places of refuge, along with the Hawaiian tradition of places of refuge. Where people can get some social respite and medical respite. It's very important. So this is how we kind of go about the day and create ideas. And then the team mixes it up and we try to find partners. We have overlapping three circles over there. Could you give us a concept on that? There's a large number of people that are in poverty, which is very, very troubling. And it hurts to watch people live in poverty when there's so much wealth in our country and our state. But those who live in poverty, because it's expensive to live in Hawaii, often overlap with those who are suffering with mental illness. And when that happens, people begin to fall into a homeless state. When you add addiction, the crisis of addiction, which plagues about 10% of our population, you hit an unpleasant sweet spot, which is about 18% of all those who are homeless and up falling in this category. Chronically homeless with addiction and mental illness. Those individuals have a very, very hard time pulling out of their tailspin. Of the 1,500 or so chronically homeless individuals, the median spend is $82,000 per person per year, which is $123 million of state taxpayer money that goes into Medicaid. By putting a roof over anyone's head, we say 43%, or $53 million if we could get people coverage. If we could get them a house or a roof over their head so they don't become, as you saw the numbers recently, there are individuals who are homeless, who are sheltered, and those who are unsheltered. These are unsheltered homeless that are struggling with these challenges. And as soon as you come into a place where you can get some help, taxpayer dollars drop the spend and suffering drops even more precipitously. So that's why I'm so focused on that. It's focused mostly to make sure people aren't hurting, but also these are real serious initiatives that will save us money that we can invest in early education or that we can invest in free tuition at the community colleges or we can build actual permanent housing for housing first. So that's how we're approaching it. There's lift zones on this list. We're gonna be launching those out of the city program with the help of the state. The home project. A lift zone is a mobile navigation center where the police will run it. They basically come in with very fully equipped inflatable tents. And these tents can serve a shelter for up to 90 days. We provide social services and health services and people just plain get some relief. A lot of social workers and then move hopefully to permanent supportive housing. And that way we don't have tent cities, parks overcome and overrun by people who are struggling. So we all know that there shouldn't be tent cities and there shouldn't be people that are unsheltered who are homeless, should be any homeless, frankly. But that's the goal. And the state's planning on putting $6 million towards that from the Ohana zone monies was meeting this morning before the day really even got going with Scott Moore Shaggy who's just terrific, worked very hard with him, Eddie Mercero, who's the head of behavioral health for the Department of Health. And that's the kind of stuff we're working on. This is actually the official conference room. So two evenings ago, we held a gathering, reception for the Aeronautical Association of Hawaii, which I'm chairing now. And it's kind of a neat thing. It's one of those things that they asked Lieutenant Governor to do. And it's to look at aerospace and issues regarding anything up in the air, whether it's rockets to drones to what we do with planes. And they're important to me, not just because of it being interesting, but because they do search and rescue. And so to have the Coast Guard and those folks to come talk to us about what they can do and how they can help people, very valuable. So we had about 30 or 40 of them, which was great. But we use this room for all kinds of things. Sometimes it's like the Attorney General, sometimes it's the ambassador or the consulate from Japan. Sometimes it's collecting food. We're hosting the Food Bank fundraiser this year for the state of Hawaii. So all of the union, I'm sorry, the departments and all the union workers and whatnot, they donate food, we encourage them. So we even store some food here when our people bring it. And we encourage volunteers and we encourage people who are coming to see us anyway, tell them, why don't you bring some food supplies to and we're gonna distribute it. So we're into the Food Bank. They have about a 14-day backup supply for us in case of a disaster and it's important. So we're looking at disaster preparedness from a lot of different angles, from the health perspective, human services perspective, response perspective, food perspective, all these things. Today with the engineers, what the impact of clean water would be or wastewater if we had a surge. So I'm trying to have a holistic approach to it. And so far so good. In my 14 years as a legislator, I flew what we believe to, I can't even keep track of 800 round trips back and forth to Big Island. So it was a lot. Yeah, a lot less now. More like one of the week instead, yeah. It's been, what, two months and change since you, can you talk about your first impressions? The first two months and change, we've had a chance to do so many different things. We have had the opportunity to actually serve as acting governor for a week when the Gov was traveling, which was very flattering. We had a landslide and we had to sign off on emergency declarations right then, also for Maui. So that was something. And meanwhile, every day we do something. We go off into the field and we've been doing community medicine. We've been helping people get access to long-acting antipsychotic drugs. We've been building new programs and promoting the model that we have for a homeless health system is essentially what we're building, which will save money for taxpayers and greatly decrease suffering. We go and do cleanups. We meet with ambassadors. We develop big humanitarian projects. So it's a perfect job for me because I like to have a role where I can be flexible in whatever our interests are and try to help people. Because as a doctor, that's really all I did or do. And now I can do it from a different perspective. And we saw you two weeks ago at the Planned Parenthood opening. That was very nice. They were great. My grandmother, I think I might have mentioned then, was president of Planned Parenthood in Pennsylvania, Western Pennsylvania many years ago when I was a little guy. And so I first of all, I respect them immensely for providing women's healthcare to anyone who needs it. And it's kind of an homage to my grandmother and my mom to a degree. So I love that. And I love the fact that people were out there to support. And I even respect the fact that there are people that express their opposition to it. Hey, that's democracy in America. That's good. As long as we can be peaceful with one another. So all of that was good. That was a great day. Our security team is here, always ready to help out. Sure. Here's the front room where when we are kind of seeing people come in from the community, they're greeted very pleasantly by our team up front. And this is where we take people in. We do work with name changes. We have to be responsible and respectful of their needs for Apla Steals, which are formal documents that are from Hawaii to be used elsewhere. But we've tried to be very welcoming so that whenever somebody comes in, if they have a need, and it's it's hectic over on the governor's side, we try to be available for whatever additional problems they have. Are you enjoying it? Are you having fun? Are you finding your personal niche and doing this job? I am. I'm happier now than I was before in the legislative process. After a few years, I think I started for 14 years, which is hard to believe actually. And this just suits my style and my tempo better. You know, I think that I like to dive into problems and see what comes, see what allies emerge, see what is possible, see which other partnerships that maybe aren't even governmental can offer. And that is way more available to a person in the executive branch. Josh Green is very personable and we're glad we went to see him. We wish him well in this administration and look forward to talking with him again. After all, he's got four years to go as Lieutenant Governor of our state. Want to know more about the state capital and the Hawaii legislature? Check out capital.Hawaii.gov. Want to know more about Josh Green and the office of the Lieutenant Governor? Check out joshgreen.org or look him up in Wikipedia. Learn about the state government and don't forget to participate in it too. After all, it's our government. We are the government and the government is us. Yes, it is our government. We are the government and the government is us. 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 10 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 a show or if you want to replay or share any of our shows, they're all archived on demand on thinktecawaii.com and YouTube. And on our iPhone and Android apps, both available for download on your smartphone. For our audio, 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 participate in our shows, 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. Go ahead, give us a thumbs up on YouTube or send us a tweet at thinktechhi. 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. Aloha, I'm Jay Fidel, the CEO of Think Tech Hawaii. You know, events move faster these days. We all know that. The media is under pressure and some people are at war with it. We all know that too. We need to support the media. How about supporting Think Tech? We provide a platform for volunteer citizen journalism, lots of it, so important in these difficult times. Help us keep doing what we do. Help us stay on the air. Go to thinktechhawaii.com, give what you can. If you like what you see, then please give generously. We're a Hawaii digital media nonprofit and your donations are tax deductible. We need you, you need us. And we should all go out of our way to support and improve our community. Let's think together every day. Click on the button that says donate and help us raise public awareness in Hawaii. Thanks so much. I'm Jay Fidel. I care about Hawaii and I care about Think Tech. Aloha. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of Think Tech. But first, we wanna thank our underwriters. Okay, Anna, 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 Anna 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 and good government, wherever we can find it. And in any event, you can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important Think Tech episode. I'm Anna Jimenez McMillan. And I'm Cynthia Sinclair. Aloha, everyone.