 Welcome to ThinkTech on Spectrum OC-16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things in matter-to-tech and to Hawaii. I'm Jay Fiedel. And I'm Elise Anderson. In our show this time, ThinkTech's Ian Davidson showcases more of the stories our volunteer hosts are covering on the street. We'll hear what people are saying about the efforts to remove the Pacific Paradise shipwrecked in Waikiki. Senator Daniel Kaka shares stories that helped shape his career and will take a peek at what may be the only coffee tree growing right in the middle of downtown Honolulu. So here we go, back on the street with Ian Davidson. Thanks guys and thank you for tuning in. I'm Ian Davidson. One of the great things about working here at ThinkTech is working with our volunteer hosts. They come in, they tell us that they want to produce a story and we go out and help them do that. This week we've got a few of those stories to share with you. We're really excited about them. Thanks for tuning in. Enjoy. I'm Matt Blutter and our company is Madre Chocolate and we're the first bean to bar chocolate company on Oahu. So that means we take these cacao beans and turn them into chocolate bars that are now winning multiple international awards. So tell us now, I just discovered, as you were saying, that this is the, that comes from the tree? Yeah, this is the cacao fruit. They grow on the tree. We actually have a few in our backyard here in Chinatown. So we're growing Chinatown cacao. And we get most of our cacao from North Shore of Oahu, Windward Side, and Big Island. And we or the farmer will take these fruit, crack them open, take out all the delicious lychee tasting pulp that surrounds the seeds, and ferment those for about a week, which is the most important part of the process that no one ever hears about. And then, and then we'll dry them, age them, roast them, crack, winnow, conch, temper and wrap them. So it's only 12 steps in two months from this fruit to a finished chocolate bar. How long have you been doing this? I've been making chocolate for about 10 years and Madre Chocolate is almost seven years old now. This seems like, well, everybody eats chocolate and uses chocolate for any number of things. How did you come with this special Madre Chocolate that's winning awards and so much better than everybody else's? How did that happen? A big part of it is understanding and respecting the history of chocolate from where it was invented in Latin America and working really closely with the farmers in Hawaii and around the world for that fact. So since the farmer is usually doing the ferment and that contributes about three quarters of the flavor to the final chocolate bar, we need to work with the farmers to make sure it goes the best way possible. And in Hawaii, cacao has only been grown for about 20 years in any large scale. So no one can learn from their ancestors how to do the ferment. So we've gone to Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and studied how it's traditionally fermented and brought that knowledge back here. You said the history, how long have mankind been making chocolate? The earliest record we have now is about 4,000 years ago in Honduras by the, even before the Maya or the Olmec, probably their predecessors. So it's pretty old and so since the people in Central America have been working with chocolate for 4,000 years, we think they probably know what flavors to combine with it that work well. So we do a lot of those traditional flavors like chili chocolate and we use another fruit called a jaguar cacao that's traditionally mixed with chocolate in Central America. On first Fridays and other special events, we do drinking chocolate and I'm about to go to the Northwest Chocolate Festival in Seattle and give a talk on traditional drinking chocolate because that's how chocolate was originally conceived as a drink, not as a bar. Well they don't grow any cacao in Europe so when you say European chocolate that means it's just made there, the beans always come from the tropics. So up until recently it's been difficult to make chocolate where the cacao grows. So Hawaii is one of the first places that's happening where we have the cacao farmers and the chocolate makers right next to each other. So that can never happen in Europe so you don't get this closed feedback loop that we have here for really improving the cacao very quickly. My name is Dante Tanner and you're watching Think Tech on Spectrum OC16. Hi, Carol Cox here down at Waikiki Kaimana Beach going to talk to people about the recent sinking of the Pacific Paradise, a long line fishing boat that ran aground here some weeks ago and is presenting a very serious health problem, environmental problem, busting up the reef, introducing oil. We don't know when the boat is going to be removed so we're going to ask some questions and get some comments from the public so come on and join us. So I'm down here for 50 years and for two days I smelled oil in the water but that's gone away and it might have been because the waves were going over the boat and sloshing what oil was inside. My opinion, like everyone has one, about how they should handle it, I swim here every day is the first day I was here, which was the first day I was on the reef, the boat was just teetering there, it wasn't stuck badly but the waves came in and drove it further up under the coral reef, this is what I figured out. I would have been there the first day with three or four tugboats. Tugboats, not light boats, something with torque. I would have had three or four tugboats and pulled it off right there and they had their chance because I don't think there was a hole in it, I'm just guessing, that's my opinion. So do you think, in your honest opinion, do you think this matter was handled properly or efficiently? We'll say that, we won't be critical, efficiently or they could have done better? All I could say is they should have had three or four tugs the first day there and they didn't. And so do you think that this poses a risk to the coral reef there and anything else that's in here as it sits now? I don't, maybe we're sitting but I don't see how it's going to destroy anything else, it's just the coral upon, it's the coral upon which the ship sits, the boat's only 70 feet long. And by the way, what was the purpose of this boat and its voyage, have you heard anything about it? I've heard conflicting stories, one that they were bringing fishermen here from Samoa and they in turn came from the Philippines and Indonesia and Vietnam and I also heard that they were transporting illegal so there's been two stories in the newspaper, nobody knows what's happening on that score. Ah well, it should have never happened, you know, there's a lot of mysteries people don't know, still don't know to this day, you know, why it crashed, you know, what happened, the motor died, you know, did they scuttle it? But yeah, it's a shame, it's right on a nice reef where there's a surf break and you know. So you have any concerns that by laying there now it might break up in the future and then present a problem for the coral, the surfing, do you think it'll impact the break? I think so. Is it having an influence on it now you think? I know Kent might know the lifeguard here but it's a solid metal hole so I don't think it's going to break up anytime soon but the coral being much softer is going to take the brunt of the toll, you know, every time there's a storm or a cone of winds it's going to move around and crush the coral heads even worse so it's great if they get it out of there. What are some of the rumors you hear about of it being here? Just rumors, I've heard a number of them, what have you heard? Um, I don't, well I don't know if you call them rumors but just what I've been reading in the paper, you know, 20 guys on board, sleeps 10 and came back from, you know, the south but with no fish and all that so I don't know just a lot of sort of unanswered questions. Maybe even toss some of our legislators or even toss the suspicion that it was human trafficking and slave labor. Have you seen anything indicate that? I don't know, that's, you know, the immigration ISE would know more about that but I don't know. I do, I understand it's probably more difficult than we might imagine to remove it from the reef, it's quite an operation I guess but yeah I was just out there, I could taste diesel fuel in the water, who knows, you know, the damage that's happening to the environment in the reef. So they say an estimated 1500 gallons still remains on the boat, that was as of last week. So you today tasted oil, diesel as it's surfing. I most certainly did, actually first time I was curious and sort of pouted up close to check it out and there's a strong taste of smell and taste of diesel in the water. Well I think it needs to be handled as a tourist, like now knowing that it's kind of concerning to go in the water but and like the fact that it's affecting the marine life as well I think that the ship needs to be dealt with and shouldn't just stay out there. And this is beautiful, why keep it clean? Oh it's stunning, it's absolutely beautiful, even with the bad impression. I know, yeah, I knowing what's on the boat, yeah, that's concerning to me, yeah, for sure. It is a really negative environment in a pack, if they got the oil out they could leave the boat but other than that if there's the oil on the boat I suggest that you get it out here as soon as they can. We have a lot of those up in Alaska, you know, people are out, you know, crab fishing and things like that and they lose their boats in some of the craziest ways you can imagine but, you know, it's, you know, most of them are unsalvageable because they're in fairly deep water and they get swamped and then sink. But you already agree with that this is no place for a sunken boat right up. No, because it's just going to make a mess, it's just going to make a bigger mess when it breaks up. Like 40 yards away you can really start smelling it but smelling like it's more of just like where everything's been burned, just the smell of burnt plastic. Burned plastics and diesel oil. Did you feel it on your skin or anything when you come out? No. So one gentleman said he was out there surfing and he'd actually case it and swallow some of it and then someone else say about a half mile down. Try not drinking the water, so. Yeah, but you know it's how hard, if you're a surfer, you know, you're going for it. I mean, I imagine they've done all that they could do. We've kind of watched it, after I flew the drone over you could see the whole front end submerged in the water. So it's kind of, we actually saw the fire actually about a week or two after the fact. I personally don't think that they have made the best effort that they could because we've had multiple days where they could have made an attempt to remove it. We called the fire department one night because there was a fire on board and we could literally see the flames from our room and they let it burn all night instead of, I don't know, trying to put it out. The manager said that the fire department said it's a Coast Guard issue so they don't even report or aren't following up after that point. And then like the next day they came out with a helicopter to put the fire out when I feel like they could have done that the night before and then attempted to remove the boat the next day. I don't know, it just, it's not, it doesn't seem like it's been the best effort to pull the boat out to me and to protect the environment because I know they've taken off fuel and stuff like that which is, I mean, thank God for that but with the fire and everything it just doesn't seem like they've done enough. They've done enough. Yeah. We're standing back of the Outrigger canoe club and you're looking out over my shoulder there, you'll see the Pacific Paradise, a vessel that ran aground more than two weeks ago and we're down here just to try and gather some information what people saw and what they know and what do they think. I'm asking the questions, did the state health department, the state land and natural resources of the United States Coast Guard do enough, quick enough to have prevented this? I'm Anne Kobayashi and you're watching Think Tech Hawaii on Spectrum OC 16. I feel really blessed because I had a father who was Chinese and Hawaiian. His father came from China, from Fukien and this was in 1800s. Now he's one of the early Chinese and he came to Hawaii and of course got married to a Hawaiian girl and that's where it came from. My mother was a pure Hawaiian and she came from the area in Pearl City and those two parents were very devout, relatively soft-spoken, treated us with love. As a matter of fact my mother's tombstone has aloha kea kua and in Hawaiian means God is love and so in a way that was the basis of our family. When I came along I was the eighth child of the family and I would say that my brothers and siblings did real well for themselves including the person of Reverend Akaka. Reverend Abraham Akaka. Yeah, Abraham Akaka who was minister of Kauau Church. Brother Abe, again, taking the family spirit really made differences with people and I always considered him the quiet rebel because he was one that didn't scream or yell or he spoke softly but his ideas were rebel ideas that brought changes to Hawaii. The late 1950s and 60s I was at Ever Beach Elementary School and it had opened a new school because the population was growing out there and so I had a part in a growing community. As a matter of fact the school that's there that's called Pua Kea is the school that I opened. I was vice principal at Ever Beach Elementary and after spending their three years under three different principals I was asked to be a principal and that there would be a need of a new school out there and so I accepted it and so what I did was I selected a name and I talked to my dad about this and I always thought of education as a means of enlightenment, seeing a new light and so I selected a name Poha Kea and in Hawaiian Poha means to break forth and care is light so when you put it together it's enlightenment and believe that the process of education enlightens people's lives and so basically that was how I felt about education. Governor Burns called me and said I want you to work for me and I hesitated and I even told him no that I was doing something in communities that I think will be helpful and he said that's why I'm asking you he said I want to offer you opportunities to help more people than you're helping now. I couldn't refuse that so I left education and I worked for Governor Burns and he was the one that the one day called me in and he said you must run for office you know now when we go back to that and when I first got there as a freshman somehow mom mom came back to me and and all and I said and so I vowed that I would be and and work up there and be an example of Aloha and so I would tell you I I I worked at that all the years I was there and so Aloha meant so much to me in my work but you know I I must tell you that that I've discovered Aloha has really powerful it makes differences it makes things happen it brings people together to help you it brings a kind of relationship that's trustful and so so many things come out of that and and so the the power of Aloha and there's lots more on the street too on think tech check it out at think tech Hawaii.com and now let's take a look at our think tech schedule of events going forward think tech broadcasts talk shows live on the internet from 11am to 5pm 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 archives on demand on think tech Hawaii.com and YouTube for our audio stream go to think tech Hawaii.com slash audio and we post all our shows as podcasts on iTunes visit think tech Hawaii.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 advisory for the daily docket of our movies and shows think tech has a high tech green screen studio at Pioneer Plaza if you want to see it and be part of our live audience or if you want to participate in our programs contact shows at think tech Hawaii.com if you want to pose a question or make a comment call 808-374-2014 and help us raise public awareness on think tech. 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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 for being part of our Think Tech family and 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 Fiedel and I'm Elise Anderson. Aloha everyone.