 Welcome to ThinkTech on Spectromosi 16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Elisa Anderson. And I'm Cynthia Sinclair. In our show this time, we'll review the most recent top five ThinkTech talk shows and staff picks. We'll check out the elements of the best of the best and get a handle on the public issues and the guests involved. ThinkTech produces more than 35 talk shows every week in our downtown, high-tech green screen studio. Our ThinkTech talk show offerings are very diverse and their coverage is also very diverse, covering things you might never have otherwise known. Every week, ThinkTech chooses its top five ThinkTech 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 Pinoy Power Hawaii, hosted by Emmy Ortega Anderson. It was called Pinoy Power Extravaganza, Pinoy Power, with guest Efren Extravaganza. Emmy had a conversation with entertainer Efren Extravaganza. Efren performed songs and comedy skits and shared how he was lucky to have come to Hawaii to live the American dream. Now, he'll go back to the Philippines and live like a king. I like singing, dancing, everything. So when I was young, my parents brought me by me a harmonica, a gauge of seven. And then I always liked to play harmonica when I was young. So now you're a ruggie? Yeah, that's right. I was in school in Bakara National Comprehensive High School. I was in school in Nagilian Academy in Second Year High School. I was a pastor here in the Philippines. That's why I like to play the ball. The music. He told me to sing with me. I was a !!! in 감사합니다 for the video. the video the video is Hada anda ti pasarabu, hada araken sigario Haru tida ikali, inarami danakilawin Maka pala ki di fu, kadagito inga hawaya nofau Maka talunak mit, ditwi hawai paraizo Ita nagapi tui, nagali nara paku Ia rarami dek, trapahu nara pahu Uppaga oras lam tituru ko Uppaga oras lam tituru ko Uppaga oras lam tituru ko Number two, from the series Likable Science, posted by Ethan Allen. It was called a study of current scientific research, development, deployment and prospects, only on likable science. But guest Leland Worden, tropical landscapes have been extensively degraded due to human activities. Fortunately, many of these landscapes are very resilient and have great potential to recover after major disturbances. Restricted ecology is a really enormous field, but the concept is that you're coming in and basically restoring an ecosystem that has been damaged, degraded or destroyed. So the idea is to try to bring back function that can be species or also just ecosystem services of that ecosystem. And specifically I work on tropical forests restoration in both wet and dry forests. One of the really cool things about restoration is that there's so many steps involved that you really have to take a holistic approach where you understand how a seed germinates and whether or not that species is suitable for the soil type and there's a lot of things, but it's true. It's very complex and really fun to work in because you get to do a lot of different things. Basically the green segment is the protected area and I worked in kind of the northwestern corner of that, this little anvil in the corner called Horizontes, which is the experimental forest. What's really incredible about this system is that about 80% of the forest has naturally regenerated after just removing some pressures such as unnatural grazers, cows, and that actually restricting non- just naturally occurring fires. Where I work, a lot of that basically the pressures were agriculture and the reason that we're able to restore our scale there is because a lot of the production of agriculture products, which was mostly beef, has actually moved over to China. So that is a success story in the fact that we're able to now restore that land, but there are a lot of places, even think about prairies in the Midwestern United States that have this tiny little area now because of agricultural pressures, but we don't really have the ability just because of human land use to restore those systems. Even in natural forests, you can think about actually harvesting of forest products such as collective harvesting of wood, and there's a lot of ways that we can actually sustainably use ecosystems rather than just completely replacing them with agricultural or other uses. Even though that is absolutely necessary to sustain our really incredibly skyrocketing global population, but there are some ways such as agroforestry, where we can actually think about transitioning systems that are purely agricultural over to hybrids where we do have forest products and ag as well. Number three, from the series Lillian's Vegan World, hosted by Lillian Cumick. It was called Vim Vigor and Vegan, surviving and thriving on a plant-based diet with guest David Nichols. Contrary to what people think, those on a plant-based diet are just as energetic as omnivores, if not more. Lillian talks with David about how he became vegan and found the healthy diet he was in search of. Many famous vegan athletes thrive on a plant-based diet. I've been wanting to have you on as a guest because your story is very interesting. I actually interviewed your partner a few weeks ago on my show, the lovely Dukor Murusan. She was amazing and I was very interested to hear that you are also vegan and on a plant-based diet. I would say about 98% vegan. I can't say 100% but I try to watch what I eat. Tell us a little bit about your journey. Again, when I met Ryukul, that's how I met her. I was more vegetarian and I switched. I was really overweight at one time. Genetics paid part of that with obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes because my mom has high blood pressure and diabetes. I was very unhealthy, blood pressure out of the roof, the sugar level going really high, borderline diabetes. The doctor was like, okay, we're going to give you all these meds. I was like, I don't like taking a pill. So I asked him, is there any alternative? He goes, yeah, watch your diet and get some exercise. One of the biggest main questions we get where you get your protein from. Yeah, that's a really interesting fact because the beliefs that I was instilled with is that you're going to die if you don't eat animal flesh, which is animals survive on. I know there's animals that survive like cows and horses. They're healthy and they don't eat herbivores. Their protein comes from what they eat. Why eat their protein when we can eat the same thing? Directly from the source. And they're healthy. I started the vegetarian diet. My blood pressure started going down. I started exercising. Exercise is a huge factor in it. Definitely. It's mainly what you eat. I did come up with quite a few famous vegan athletes that might surprise a few of the viewers. One of them is Venus Williams. She adopted a raw vegan diet after she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called Sjogren's syndrome. Wow. She adopted the raw vegan diet which is a very, very strict diet obviously meaning no cooked food. Okay, raw vegan. And so she started her raw vegan diet in 2011 to relieve some of her symptoms. Number four from the series Trump Week hosted by Tim Apachele and co-hosted by me, Cynthia Sinclair. It was called Real Constitutional Crisis on Trump Week. We discussed Trump's orders to Don McGahn and William Barr ordering them not to comply with subpoenas issued by Congress and Trump's efforts to block congressional attempts to obtain his federal tax returns. The subpoena for Donald Trump Jr. to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee has also been in the news. The administration's moves on China and Iran are likewise troubling. We discussed how Trump is dismantling our democracy and how, if at all, we can preserve it. Before we go down the points, know that Nancy Pelosi said, she said, I believe we're in a constitutional crisis. Now, Jerry Nadler, who's the chair of the judicial committee, he was the first one to say it. Okay, so what leads us to this point? What leads us to this statement? It's a very dramatic statement. We've heard it before. We heard it in 2000 when we had the hanging chads in Florida and it wasn't clear how this election was going to be resolved. I distinctly remember the comments that we're in a constitutional crisis. They certainly said it when Richard Nixon didn't want to turn over the tapes and yet he was being asked to do so. So we've heard it through history. We heard it during the Clinton impeachment. But what makes this one a little more serious and different? There's foreign actors involved. At what point does executive privilege begin and stop? So we know that if you talk to the media, we know you've been called in to testify and you testify about certain things, you have basically waived executive privilege. Now the legal team for Donald Trump says no, that's not the case. Well they say no, that's not the case for everything, which is how we got through this crisis. That's how we got here. You can come up with the absurd my new reason why something I won't answer a subpoena or we won't supply someone to testify in front of the committees and as bizarre as they are, they still have to be challenged. They're just stalling for time is my thought. Because the more they can stall, the closer we get to 2020 and the more likely people are not going to be swayed against him unless they see the evidence that's there. Not only did we have the 800 signatures from DOJ, we also have a Republican who is a very, very important part of the Senate and he's a Republican and he said no, we are going to hold Donald Trump Jr. accountable to the statements he made before this committee versus what we've found to be in the Mueller report. Exactly. And he is taking flack for it. I can imagine just how many calls and how many people are bumping into him in the halls of the Senate and really laying it to him. But this is where again, the crack in the vase is this further evidence that we've gone far enough and I don't know the answer is to that. I don't need it but I can just hope, right? That's all I can do is hope. Number five, from the series Hawaii State of Clean Energy hosted by Jay Fidel and co-hosted by Maria Tomei. This is the 2018 legislative session with guest Kurt Sue. Jay and Maria talked with Kurt about energy policy and the energy bills and resolutions of the 2019 session. Yes, we need to focus on and follow energy in every session. We're trying to partner with a lot of emergency management agencies and elected officials when they host their preparedness fairs. We want to be a part of that conversation and I'm sure you've seen the handbook that we've collaborated putting together to get people ready for hurricane season and all the other associated events, right? So that's an important part of the conversation as well. There's not only clean energy and sustainability but also resilience and preparedness. I do think that interest is growing. People want to be part of the conversation whether it's rooftop solar electric vehicles, lots of questions and opportunities and when we're rolling out new programs within the company, that's a perfect opportunity to meet up with that interest and to talk story and to get to share information. A lot of us get those inserts in our bill, and then that contains a lot of useful information as well. I know I'm guilty myself sometimes of getting the mail and not reading everything as carefully as I should but there's a lot of good information in there and traditionalists who look forward to our recipes, that's also a piece that's built in in there as well. Of course. What else? So what are some of the things recently that people have been asking about? Well, rooftop solar continues to be, we're getting a lot of calls about particularly a lot of projects. When people see things in their community, they want to know what's going on and more recently we're the renewable request for proposals, so we have developers now going into communities and so people have questions about what's happening and why and so those are the types of questions that we receive and even at the neighborhood board level, whenever they see trucks in the neighborhood, sometimes they'll call, what's going on, what's why electric doing in my neighborhood? The guys who run the trucks are perfectly happy to answer your questions too, aren't they? You asked a question. They do great work and so that's the part where we really want to share that information and it goes back to what we were talking about earlier with regards to resilience and sustainability, all of these initiatives are really going towards those purposes where we're trying to harden the grid, make the grid more reliable and that which leads to better service for all of us who use energy and we're also working towards the 100% renewable goal in trying to integrate more renewable energy. And our staff pick, from the series Taking Your Health Back, hosted by Wendy Lowe, it was called From Fast Food to Smart Food, You Are What You Eat with guest Christy Nicks. Christy shared her health journey, Taking Your Health Back is made simple one step at a time. Why is this topic so important to you? Well, because I've been on the spectrum from fast food to smart food and as I started to learn how important it was to eat more fruits and vegetables, I learned a statistic. There's like some statistics that just always stick with you and this one just kind of it hit me. Dr. David Katz said this may be the first generation of children to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. One other statistic you've probably heard it from Dr. Sears I know you study a lot of what he teaches. He says that 75% of all chronic disease is preventable. 75% so if we have that ability to change, like I look at it as if I had a lottery ticket and I was like here's the lottery ticket you have a 75% chance of winning, you would buy the lottery ticket we need to take that same approach with our health we have such a great ability to be able to shift our habits that this can make a really big impact and I couldn't have done it without being around a circle of people who cared more about my health than I did at one time and now I just want to be able to pay it forward. I can't even tell you the amount of friends I've gained because of one simple change that I've made along the way and you know they always say you're the average of the five people that you hang out with now and I just I feel like I've really leveled up so it's been really impactful to be around a lot of great people that have impacted my life. Pat and I were awful we would wake up and have like snicker bars for breakfast and we just didn't think about how bad things could be and my friends titled me as McChristie because I would go through the drive through McDonald's I mean I ate what I could afford which was total junk that's all I ate was junk. I had McDonald's twice a day every single day and everything else if I did make something it was like I ate like a frat boy it was macaroni and cheese, cheeseburgers, grilled cheese like just anything that was beige with no color I was a frat girl. Well here in Hawaii we call that the local diet okay and you know like I can totally relate to you because and that's why this is so encouraging for everyone watching this because frat boy here frat girl here our local chick I mean the worst diet we lived on fast food so much as mindset you know there's this there's this pattern that we tend to get into and for whatever reason I didn't get into a pattern at a young age about having a belief about a certain thing maybe about food or about my body and then you have these thoughts that create that and then it just keeps going into like this cycle of you know your actions then support the beliefs and thankfully whatever it was maybe it was my mother I don't know but I just never had that bad relationship with food. What I would really like you to take away from today's discussion is the idea that food really is medicine you've heard that before that food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food so simple changes will have massive effects on your overall well-being. You can always find the links to these shows in our daily email advisories if you don't already get our daily email advisories you can sign up to get them on thinktecawaii.com These are only sampling from the top five and the staff pick from across our 35 weekly talk shows. There are of course many more. To see these top five shows and staff pick shows in their entirety go to thinktecawaii.com or youtube.com slash thinktecawaii. Great diversity great community great content at ThinkTech. If you have questions or comments about these or any of our shows please let us know and yes it's okay to share them with your friends and colleague. Thanks so much for watching our shows and for supporting our efforts at ThinkTech. And now let's check out our ThinkTech schedule of events going forward. ThinkTech 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 weekend. If you missed a show or if you want to replay or share any of our shows they're all archived on demand go to thinktecawaii.com and youtube for our audio stream go to thinktecawaii.com slash audio and we post all our shows as podcasts and 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 advisory. ThinkTech 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 shows go to thinktechshowsatthinktecawaii.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 ThinkTech. 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 together. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of ThinkTech. But first we want to thank our underwriters. Okay Cynthia, that wraps up this week's edition of ThinkTech. Remember you can watch ThinkTech on Spectrum OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it just like Cynthia does. For additional times check out oc16.tv for lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech visit thinktechawaii.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 ThinkTech 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 ThinkTech episode. I'm Elise Anderson and I'm Cynthia St. Claire. Aloha everyone.