 This is State Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. And how are you doing? Welcome to E-Bakti Talk. Gordo the Texar here. Welcome for another thrilling and exciting ride in the E-Bakti Talk land. I got Rick Sifan, my sister with me. Hey Gordo. It's been a while. Yeah, yeah. It's been a while. It's good to be back. And that was fun. And we have Ray. Ray. Oh, God. I'm going to do it again. Le Roux. Le Roux. I got it right. Yeah. I'm going to do. And Ray has a really interesting background. Let him talk to you about it. But he's running for governor. I am. In the state of Hawaii. And as I've said to you before, I don't endorse any candidates, and I've had many candidates on the show for many parties. And I don't have an opinion. I just want to hear their opinions and their thoughts and so on. And I welcome any other candidate that wants to come on the show. Please come see us. We're more than happy to do that. Obviously we focus a little bit on tech, so you need to be up on that and so on. So let me ask you this first question, Ray. So where'd you grow up? So I grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts. So in a little town called Salem, you might remember it if you're a historian. Yes. Oh, we're 10 and a half years. Exactly. And I enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1980 as an infantry kid reservist, went through college after I graduated from college commissioned into the Marine Corps and left New England at that time and spent 30 years in the Marine Corps from there on. 13 of it spent here on active duty and because of that, my children went through this public school system and they consider it home today. So what schools did they go to? Kailua Intermediate and Kalaheo High School. And then I came here, my last job, Chief of Staff at Marine Force is Pacific and then retired out of that job and have never left Hawaii. Never left Hawaii. I don't know. When it grabs you, it just grabs you. It's as expensive as it is. So my next question is, I've got to ask it of anybody because, you know, well, we just met. So everything is, we just met. So we haven't had a chance to sit down, talk or break bread together. No, I watched your show a few times. Yeah. We quickly had a chance. So what even possesses you to want to run for governor? Well, I'd be lying if I said you were the first person to ask me that question. In fact, all the folks that I needed to collect guidance from or my mentors had the same question, though none of them have tried to talk me out of it. But you really have to do. And it took me a couple of weeks once asked if I would run to really do that soul searching. And when I looked at the political landscape today, and I look at the state of the state, if you will, in many different factors, my sense was that any vote would be a vote for the status quo. And a status quo vote right now and what I would consider a state of dire need just does not move us in any measurable way into any sort of prosperous or growth economy type of an environment. And then I looked at, you know, just the monopoly that is the Democratic Party here. And I think for the Hawaii voter, they just should have a choice. They should have a freshness of voice. It's part of the system and let them make their own minds up. Even our congressional delegation is all one party. It's all one party. It's all one party. And we're going to talk about tech in a little bit. Sure. I wish we had an hour show now for this, but I agree with you on this. We've had this single-party system here for decades. And yet we still... Since back to what? 18 arms are not 18, but 19 to it at least. Statehood. Yeah. Statehood. And we had a Republican governor, Linda Lingle, a number of years ago, but she was surrounded by a fully Democrat Senate in the House. And I'm not picking one party versus the other, but it's just the nature of the beast is what will happen. But let's come back and take a look here at things. So you were involved with the Department of Education. I was. So you've been in the system. I have been in the system. I was the assistant superintendent office of school facility support services, which is all the facilities development, repair and maintenance, new build projects, school security and safety, food services, which is school lunch, school transportation. Didn't you have something to do with it? Because you came in, there was an audit that was done that you came in afterwards. So I got parachuted right into post-audit. Oh, the training was helpful. With the, you know, the legislature had just slashed the transportation budget because it was just skyrocketing out of control. The audit put that forward and they had just canceled bus services for almost 2,000 students. I remember the fiasco that was going to happen. That's when I got a hold of the issue and said, okay, where do we, where do we start? And we brought that now into a model that actually does provide what I would consider contemporary bus transportation for almost the, you know, the ninth or tenth largest school district in the nation. And it does it with all the market drivers that do escalate insurance, gas, et cetera. But it's got contemporary modality to it when I say, and what I mean by that is routing software, looking at it, just taking a forensic look at all of the things that guide routes so that you have an efficient system. So you make better decisions to look at it, right out of the gate and probably overall in the model, upwards around 10 to 20 as you go on. As you go on, as you go on, wow. So you've had experience. So my point is I want to be able to realize it's not like you're just coming in from the outside. You've been in it. You've seen it. We all feel our pain together. But it sounds like you've brought a technology to the job that perhaps wasn't there before to be able to make better decisions and make those better decisions faster than was And I think you're going to apply that to almost any situation. For instance, there are in 2018, but the advance of technology, for instance, and you look at best practices, and there are best practices. And you should have no shame in stealing those best practices at all. It's a story of my life. I mean, too, metrics. Exactly. Well, all I do is I take what everybody else does, and you've been part of the DOE, and so what are your perspectives on the education system in Hawaii? So I'm an optimist by trade. So when I look at this DOE, and it's about 257 schools, 30-some-odd charter schools, it's got a $1.9 billion operating budget. It's got about a half a billion biennium capital budget. And when you look at the fringe, which by the way in 2018 in this session just went up to 56.5%. So you add all that up. Ostensibly you'd think you'd have a pretty good system and a delivery of education. 57%. Yeah, and we're not. In fact, there are great and high-performing schools, and parents aren't sending us their worst kids, and we're not hiring the worst teachers. But our kids aren't failing, but the system is failing our kids. So while we put all of these one-trick pony or two-trick pony reform initiatives and with some pretty catchy phrases and whatnot, they've done nothing with regards to having a kid matriculate through that system and come out on the other side. So what we have to do, and the rest of the world understands this, look at Finland, is you have to look at student-centered learning. While we were doing all of that, by the way, America changed. The way that a kid learns, the way that a kid is going to collaborate with the kid next to him. You and I grew up with a learning wall and a horseman kind of a model with 30 seats facing the wall. That doesn't work anymore. So where I think we've failed is that, first of all, in a system like ours, the first thing that I would say has to happen, where's all the money going? There has to be a fiscal transparency. Don't have a huge amount of administrators within the DOE. I mean, I'm hearing numbers that we spend more on administrators than teachers. I don't know if that's true or not, because everybody spends it one way or another. It can get into the hyperbole kind of conversation, but there are a lot of administrators. Are they all needed? That would have to be looked at. But as you know, we are, and I'll say it, we are extremely and umbilically connected to how the labor unions look at those job positions. And how does that work? You talked about how the system is failing the student. Right. But what ran through my mind, as you were saying that, is it strikes me that the system is also failing the teacher. Because they're leaving the state. And if you talk to teachers, and I do, even with their entry salary is not bad. I mean, there are teachers leaving Hawaii going to other districts on the main line of making less, but the cost of living meets that. Yes, right. But they would even absorb some of that crappy pay, if you will, for the cost of living if they had freedom in the classroom. In other words, the one size fits all, which is one size fits nothing. Right. Testing to the test, or teaching to the test kind of mentality, or not having the freedom and trust from the leadership starting at the principal complex area superintendent all the way into the central office. If a teacher understands every child in that seat that they have been chartered to deliver education to then let them do it. There's oversight, there's boundaries, there's checks and balances. But if we want empowered schools, in other words, empowering teachers to deliver that type of education that kid in the seat needs, let them do it. If we just template them and tell them what to do, kids learn differently from each other. Yeah, so I say, to have empowered school, you have that trust. If you don't have that, you're not going to have the innovation that has to come on board, especially in the tech world. And we need principles that get support from the parents. And I'll go back there, so go, underlying is still parents. Mom and dad, you better both be involved. If you're involved in your child, you'll definitely be involved, so that's a must. So we'll come back as schools in the system. So I'm going to throw one little campaign thing at you, but. You all right? No worries. You don't have to be there. I know. So, E.Gay, in one of his speeches, said that he was going to create 80,000 new tech and innovation jobs, paying $80,000 in work in 2030. Now, I did the inflation man, and that still gives me McDonald's pay. So I mean, and I'm not going to be around 2030 to challenge him that he may or may not have made it. So what is it we need to do to encourage the creation of tech within the schools and then having the kids stay here? Yeah, so, well, first of all, don't sell yourself short. That's only 12 years from now. So, but that's also a bold statement to make. $80,000, as you know, $93,000 is a new medium income for a family here in Hawaii. So you're starting up below. So that means that you're still, well, in 10, 20 years? Yeah, you're still below today's poverty level. But what I would ask the governor, and I will, is how do you propose to do that? And when you start looking at Hawaii as a state, we are 50th in the nation with regards to being kind to new business, either small business or corporate business. So how are you going to incentivize the Elon Musk's of the world to come to Hawaii and build their innovation or think centers? You're not. There's got to be an incentive. There's got to be what is good for, because in a private public partnership like that, both of those partners have to have a benefit, right? And I don't think it's impossible, but you've got to loosen a lot of the friction and inhibitors that right now, businesses won't come here. I know Act 2.2.1 was there, and it was a good law with some bad pieces in it. Sure. But instead of just fixing the bad pieces in the law, they just expanded the law. Yeah. Which then just through the whole thing. And, you know, Elon Musk will set up his business somewhere else. I used to set him just because it came to my mind. Case also, I mean, AOL. But if you look at the... Built it someplace else, you know, if you look at the rate of technology right now. So for people my age, that curve was manageable, right? I went from rotary dial to push button to cell phone. And we've all kept up, right? I mean, sometimes you got to catch up a little bit more. I'm not sure, but... Yeah. I find myself sure. That's OK. But the kids today, K-12 kids and kids in undergrad programs, that's a steep curve. And if you just look at the advances, for instance, in nanotechnology and biotechnology and how those are going to intersect and how they're going to rule the day. And I would say in five years from now. I mean, if you look at the artificial intelligence, the sensors that they're using, that technology and that whole foods that they just opened up in Seattle where you just walk in and you put your stuff in your basket and you walk out. Walk out and you walk out. And it's all done. The mobility revolution that is happening. It's changing our whole mindset. OK, so hang on a sec. So 14 minutes is done. Yeah, OK. We're done already. So we're going to take a short break, pay some bills. Got Ray LaRue here running for governor, state of Hawaii. Good background. I do want to talk to you about Air Force One, though. We're going to mention that in the second half. So we'll be back in a minute. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Excitement builds. Game plans are made with responsibility in mind. Celebrations are underway. Ready for kickoff. MLS clubs and our supporters rise to the challenge. We make responsible decisions while we cheer on our heroes and toast their success. Elevate your match day experience. If you drink, never drive. So I'm Yukari Kunisue. I'm your host of New Japanese Language Show on Think Tech Hawaii. Called Konnichiwa, Hawaii. Broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 PM. Please join us, where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 PM. Aloha. Hey, aloooha. How you doing? Gorda the Texar. Iwashi talk. Bricks the turn of politics. Cool. Welcome to the web. Ray LaRue, who's running for governor of the state of Hawaii, has some interesting fresh perspectives on some things that are going on. And before we took the break, we were talking about business in Hawaii and tech business in Hawaii. And if you have a question, you can call us at 808-374-2014. I just gave that number out. My brother's going to call probably. No, 808-374-2014 from the shed. Anyway, so we're talking about business in Hawaii. So I reached out to this company in the Midwest because I want to do something here. And this is their response. And I'm going to leave a word out. It says, thank you for reaching out to the name of the company. Unfortunately, Hawaii is not such a such friendly state related to business. Please keep in touch for further update. So I got immediately rejected from a Midwest organization where I have an idea on how they're doing it in other states. I have an idea to bring business into here. And they already know if they don't want to come here. In fact, you can almost fill in the blank business or not even have the blank and just say business-friendly because it is not. And even some of what I would consider low-tech small business, not even getting into the technology sphere, a lot of the folks that I've talked to on the Big Island in Maui who are small business owners, I sat down and said, what are the inhibitors? And there are many. And there's no, if you would, freshman, sophomore, junior, kind of senior advancement to a small. In other words, let a small business get on their feet and be prosperous before you start hitting them over the head with the permitting the taxes and everything else. There should be a graduated entry into that sustainment of how you're going to pay the taxes. So I think Hawaii has a huge opportunity for tech promotion, not only in the US but in Asia because of our relationships there. We are the gateway to the Pacific right now. If you look at the advances of technology in other markets such as China, Singapore, Japan, certainly, and now Korea, you can just see that flying out of any one of their airports and coming into our airport. And we as people that call Hawaii their home, we love our little airport. You come home, you smell it. But then you get on the wiki-wiki. If you're coming in internationally, you're like, I just came from Incheon. There was no wiki-wiki. In fact, there was a magnet train. So I mean, yeah. It was a magnet and got me from here to the other. Oh, now here we go down the rail. So tech careers in Hawaii, it'll be a challenge. It's only a challenge if you're not willing to do the investment. In other words, you've got to sit down. You've got to find it. You've got to recruit this business and make it such that Hawaii is the place where you want to build your think tank, your innovation center. If you go back to my earlier comment of where there's nanotechnology and biotechnology is, for instance, if you look at some of the advancement of microprocessors right now, I mean, they're building processors or at least about to build processors that are 1-tenth the size of a human hair that have the consistency of jello. And this is not too far out there. But if you read some of the folks and if you follow DARPA at all and some of the things that they do, I mean, what if you inject this microprocessor into your body and the whole, oh, by the way, this microprocessor has the computing power, more computing power than anything that we know right now. And its sole purpose was just to hunt down irregular cells in your body and then zap them. What have you just done? We've just turned our lives into living 200 years old. Well, we'll have to deal with that later. We're going to be the associates. But my point is that technology and the advancement and how it's going to touch every phase of our life. And right now, if you can write an algorithm for a task, that job is gone. But what are the other jobs that are going to be born out of that? And that's where we can capitalize. And these kids coming through a K through 12 system, they know that. They know this. But if we are continuously in our public education system, and maybe even our private, because I don't know, we're preparing for our past. And that can't be sustained either. So say that thing. I think you just said something there. You said the way we're educating I would interpret it. The way we're educating our children today is for the past. I believe so. And not for the future. Correct. In fact, our past. What we think their future is. You know what? Having grandkids and seeing where they are within the system. And it's not the teacher's fault. I agree. But I think some of it is, or another is, we know that some of the private schools have 3D printers. We don't know that there's any 3D printers in any of the public schools. So I would guess it may. I mean, I reinterpret it as how I could. And there may be a question. The things of where, yes, we are. We are perhaps with our public school system educating in the past. And I'm just throwing this out. There are a way to. Like I said, high-performing schools in our system were principal leaders have said, you know what? I know what I need to do. Why not? Why not? Radford. Radford. Oh, yeah. People think of all these schools as really problem schools, but they've got some incredibly technical students. Early 2000s, Radford was one of our poorest performing high schools, and now it's one of our highest. Yes. Because of technology. And well, not only that, it's just, again, we're not sending our worst kids to school and we're not hiring the worst teachers. So what is the problem? I'll tell you, the problem is we've systemically looked at the wrong things. And one size fits all does not fit anything. And then when you start looking at the budget and how we're allocating and otherwise encumbering that budget is upside down as well. So if school empowerment means trust at that school leader position, then that should have some authority in the fiscal authority as well. In other words, the central office controls all of that budget process. They'll tell you that most of that is from 97 cents of every education dollar is going to the classroom. Not so. No, I don't believe that. And we've got four, essentially four districts, right? We have one district. One district. And 15, what you can call, what we call complex areas. OK, complex areas. Complex areas. They used to be districts, but they're now complex areas. So I guess the hierarchy or the chain of command from the central office would be superintendent, a layer of assistance, assistance superintendents, 15 complex area superintendents spread out through the state. And under those hang all the schools. All the schools. So to me, that's kind of an issue, the fact that you've got, why can't they be independent? It's my kind of thought. So I believe in that. And you could, like every other state, has multiple school districts. We are the oldest public school system in the nation, by the way. I don't know if you know that. I did not. And we are about the 10th largest, depending on the census, but anywhere from now. 10th largest, just waiting for where we're standing. The only island nation, the only state that is a state-run district. In other words, you will have your state Department of Education. Every state has one to include ours. Underneath that, like for Ohio, has something like 1,000 school districts, so 1,000 superintendents. More like counties. Yeah, some are very big, some are very rural. But we have a large system. But to split that up, to get back to your point, I believe they tried to do this during the Lingle administration. There are some things within an island state that need to be centralized so that the principal doesn't have that on their plate. And those are the operational logistic type things. Principles shouldn't have to worry about paying their utility bill. They should pay attention to how they're using electricity, but they shouldn't have to worry about trash coming out of their school. Those things should just be centralized. Let principals teach, educate, manage your teachers, and deliver education. Let the central office take care of how to do that in their plants. If you tried to replicate those central services on each of those districts, if you split it up, let's just say five districts, the way that the state typically does it, we don't have the resources to do that. Because of the way we do it. I'm going to hear a resource. Does that mean more people? Five school boards, five central offices, five. You replicate everything five times. OK, but where? I saw it. This is a whole other story. So what about the relationship between the University of Hawaii, the community colleges, and the NOE? So Waipahu is doing some great things with regards to getting kids that qualify college credits through the community colleges. In the system, the program existed before. But what Guy's done is he's got the college to come to them versus trying to find the resources and funds to get the kids to go to the colleges. In other words, transportation is always a big factor. So I think that's just a model program that they're doing in Waipahu. With regards to how UH intersects with everything else, especially in the tech world, I don't think it's enough. And where we really should be intersecting is with their College of Education. We as a state, with a teacher shortage, should be, OK, what are the incentives that we're going to provide to students in the College of Education to commit to the Department of Education for, say, five years? There's ways to do this that have not been tabled, discussed, or anything else. Instead, we recruit on the mainland. We hope we get the recruitment coming out of the College of the Jed. But there should be incubator programs. There should be a lot of things immersed in our DOE with the College of Education. And by that, we're going back to the cookie-cutter situation we had before. We were just trying to make everybody fit into this box. And if we get our scores are high, then we're OK. Here's another. You look at some of the disciplines where we are in dire need on in the state. Just take physician's assistance. Take teachers. If we've got a very large military spouse population that roll in and out of here every three or four years, a lot of those spouses are teachers, coming from other accreditations in other states. If you're coming from Massachusetts and you've got a Boston teacher credential, which is one of the toughest in the nation to get, and you come to Kanioa Bay, Hawaii, or Schofield Barracks, and you can't get a teaching permit in Hawaii. In other words, there's something wrong. Oh, yeah, there's definitely something wrong. It's like transferring credits to the University of Hawaii. It should be very, very one-step simple. It should be simple, simple. OK, we're going to digress for just one minute. So you have an interesting thing in your career. So you've been a Marine for 30 years. And I got to ask you this. So you flew Air Force One for multiple presidents. Marine One. Marine One, OK. Marine One for multiple presidents. That means landing on the backyard of the White House. Yes. Yes. The law. So how was that? So it never got old. In fact, I've done plenty of interviews on this subject. And people always ask, where is your favorite place to land? What's the most fun you've, well, it's always fun aside from the responsibility of it all. But whenever, and I said this on another program not too long ago, when you come up the Potomac. Oh, I've seen them coming up. And it doesn't matter if it's night, day, winter, or summer. And you get to make that right turn at the Washington Monument and set up on the backyard of the White House. It just never, ever got old. I'm getting chicken skins just here. And you talk about it. Oh, that's pretty awesome. So is there a website where we can find out? There is. It's TrustBackInGovernment.org. So it's TrustBackInGovernment.org. I thought it was a little long, but I thought it was succinct. It's there. That definitely will hold true. And we give every one of our guests an autographed solo cup. So when you're up there accepting your, when you're the governor, and you're accepting it, I would expect this cup to be sitting there. You just hear your marketing people going, no way. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Ray. I will bring it back on November 7. All right, awesome. That's great. So good luck out there. Thank you, sir. Thank you for doing this. Yeah, it's a steep climb, but it's one I believe in. All right, I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to seeing this. Yeah, I'm looking forward to be there, you know, and bringing the libation to pour into your cup. Very good, perfectly all set. I didn't know you were Republican with the Berkeley. Anyway, this is Gordon of the Tech Star. We've got Rick's the Fun Leister. Ray LaRue. Ray LaRue. I'm going to get it right. Ray LaRue, who's running for governor of the state of Hawaii. LaRue. LaRue, LaRue. Yeah, Ray LaRue, running for governor of the state of Hawaii. And we'll have him back on the show, please. In a not too distant future. And like we say at the end of every show, one, two, three. How are you doing?