 Hey, we're back. We're live. This is Think Tech. I'm Jay Fiedel. We're doing Seymour's World. And we have with us the original progenitor at Seymour's World, Seymour. Seymour Kazimurski. Welcome to the show, Seymour. Hi, Jay. It's been, oh my God, well over a year since we last spoke, but we had such a wonderful time for four or five years. It was terrific. Love it. You're looking well despite all the things that have happened. And I wanted to talk to you about those things. Let me just say there are three things we should discuss. One, of course, is the protests over the weekend and what that means. Two is the COVID. What's happening these days and how the administration is dealing with it and how the world is dealing with it. And the third one, of course, is Trump, who sucks up all the oxygen and gives us an eccentric headache almost every day. Well, every day, I don't know why I would say almost every day. It's every day, every single day, maybe every hour. Okay, so I guess let's start with Trump. He's been in office almost four years and he's been revealed or he's revealed himself. And some people say that he's wrecking our country and the world. And I wanted to get your take on that, at least that one issue. The government under Trump, the country under Trump. What do you think, Seymour? Actually, Jay, I'm an independent. And as an independent, I don't vote Republican. I don't vote Democrat. I vote what I think is right for this country. And it's in between. Trump is not right for this country. Unfortunately, we are at the behest of the newspapers, at the behest of social media, at the behest of all everything we see on TV. What do we believe? Do we lean right? Do we lean left? What should we be doing? Trump, unfortunately, is not the best arbiter of ideas. He is extremely right wing. We all know that he's doing a lot of bad things. He's doing, in my opinion, for business, a lot of good things. But he is right now not a unifier of this country. And he is actually making it worse than I've ever seen. But we have to admit that he is the president of the United States. And if we would at least work with him a little bit better than we are today, instead of vilifying him as much as we do, maybe we could get somewhere. I think it's our fault, Jay. I don't think it's just Trump. I think it's the fault of the media. I think it's the fault of a lot of the politicians that are out there that are just looking for time on CNN or on Fox. And they're not really taking care of you, me, our children, and our grandchildren. So when you say, what do I think of Trump? I think of Trump as the guy who is supposed to be helping us, but he's not. You think he'll be turned over in the next election or will he continue? If he wins the next election, we're in trouble. If Biden wins the next election, we're in trouble. So as you can see, this is not a win-win situation one way or the other. I believe that we should have smaller government, Jay. I've believed in that for a long time. I don't think we should have Medicare because, you know, I come from Canada, I think you knew that. And it's not a great system up there. My son lives in Nova Scotia, and he's having a terrible time with his daughter who's autistic getting care. There's a two-year waiting list for autism centers up there. I don't care if it's free. It's not a great system. So my feeling is we need to really look at getting a medical system that's sort of a hybrid between what Canada is doing and what we're presently doing here. It's not good. Other than that, I think our military is too strong, much too strong. We don't need to kill the world over. I'm using a number, I'm not sure if it's accurate, 26 times, but that's what our military is. We spend as much as 26 times the rest of the countries put together right now to defend our country, much too much. We need to put that into social programs, which of course leads us into one of the other topics today. Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. Okay, one other thing, and this leads us to the COVID topic. How do you think Trump's efforts at dealing with COVID have worked out? Terrible. Absolutely terrible. One of his biggest errors, I think, in what he has tried to tell us as the public that he has done a good job. He's done a terrible job with COVID. I don't think we really have been, we haven't been working on it the way we should. Now, my personal feeling, I feel the epidemiologists and all those scientists that have been saying this could happen or this may happen, they can't give us this will happen because they don't know. So I think fear has been one of our biggest problems with COVID. And I think we could have done a lot more votes on a state level, on a federal level, to make this thing more like South Korea, more like some of the other countries that I see that have done a great job. I don't know if you remember, Jay, but I did a show on SARS out of Hong Kong when I was there. And there were only three people in the hotel when I was there because they locked it down. They absolutely locked down Hong Kong. And of course, they overcame it. But I'm not a believer that everything is going to die, and we're all going to, you know, this is going to be the end of the world. I really believe we have overreacted to COVID. You're a big traveler. I recall that you traveled Hyderion to Asia to Europe. Every time I checked, you were in some, you know, distant place. How about now? Well, I still do a tremendous amount of business in Asia, as you well know. I just had 84 containers shipped out of China on May 25th that nobody thought was going to be possible because they locked down the country, as you know. But I had 84 containers shipped May 25th. And that was only because of the efficiency of the Chinese working system, you know, the way they were able to make products and go double shifts, etc. I think from the response that I've seen around the world in Europe and in Asia and in South America, I think we did an okay job, but nowhere near what we could have done. If Trump had been a little bit more forceful and a little bit more honest and tried to be, let's say, a spokesperson for the epidemiologist rather than try to talk about himself closing China as being the biggest deal in the whole world, I think we could have saved a lot more lives. I really do. Well, at the moment, you mentioned that the military may be bigger than it should be. He's resuming nuclear testing and he's having a kind of a war of words with Xi Jinping. And, you know, lest we forget, the tariffs are still in place and he has the right to increase them and I don't know what he's going to do, but that could happen any day. And he's, you know, trying to assign blame to them for COVID. How do you think our relationship with China is doing? I'm really happy to hear that you were able to ship your containers, but how do you think our relationship with China is doing and how will it do under this administration? Our relationship with China, Jay, in my opinion, don't forget I do a lot of business in China, is okay. It's fine. There's a lot of negotiations going back and forth. You have to remember, China owns a tremendous amount of U.S. currency, more than you'll ever believe, billions and billions of maybe even trillions of dollars. So we have to be very careful. And Trump calls himself the world's best negotiator, you know, and he's trying to make things sound like he's in charge between China and the U.S. This is all negotiations. That's what it's all about. I think we'll be okay with China. I don't think it'll be as bad as he wants it to seem because he wants to be the guy up above China. I think we're equal to China. I think we'll be fine in our business dealings with China. Tariff's notwithstanding both ways. I'm not sure where that's going to go, but I'm not really worried. I'm a very, very positive prognosticator on China trade right now. Okay, we're going a step further. China is, of course, very important for business. And we have a remarkable decline in business as a result of COVID. And Trump is talking about, I'm not sure exactly what he's doing, talking about reopening the economy. This is no small task. And I don't think the U.S. has ever been faced with a situation where the economy has dropped off so quickly and is at such a low point where we are saddled with the idea of bringing it back up hopefully quickly. You're a businessman. You've seen business cycles up and down. How heavy an issue is this? How likely is it that we'll be able to recover in the short term the way Trump would like? No. The answer is 100%. No, we can't. It's not going to be, you've heard of the V. Obviously, I think it's going to be a U, but a very long U. I mean, you take our state, Jay. You take Hawaii. I mean, do you think tourism is just going to bounce back this fall and time for him to win the next election? Impossible. It's not going to happen. Now, notwithstanding our state is probably the most fortunate state when it comes to COVID itself, but it's also the most unfortunate state when it comes to returns of business. Our governor is not absolutely pro business. And I think he doesn't understand how important it is to make the determination very, very soon that we bring in international tourism. And it's really quite simple. Josh Green put it very, very simply. We have to have a COVID test before you fly into Hawaii. It has to be within 72 hours. Take your temperature when you get here. Welcome to the islands, but our governor isn't even close to that right now. We don't even have inter-island travel today. So I think it's going to be tough if you take other states who are being much more progressive and opening up. They may, again, talk about the epidemiologists, just bringing fear into the project. And they're saying it may cause a spike. It may cause more deaths. As far as I'm concerned, I look at hospitalizations and deaths, not the cases. I want to see what the real story is. Jay, how many people died of heart attacks last year in the US? You probably don't know the right number, but I'll give it to you. 800,000 people died of heart attacks last year. Now, 100,000 people have died of COVID. Maybe it'll be a lot more. I'm not sure. But to close the country down for 100,000 people who have died, most of them who have been seniors and most of them have had a lot of underlying conditions. I don't know, Jay. I'm leaning towards the side that said, we need to open up quickly because we need to bring this economy back because there's no way we can keep paying. What is it? 40 million people on unemployment today, in particular? How do you feel about the CARES Act and then the bailout money, now $3 trillion, that the federal government has allocated in order to deal with the COVID reduction in the economy? I think it was the right thing to do. I do. I think the economy needed to have a time span of maybe four weeks to six weeks to figure out where we're going next. And that's what it did. I mean, I know many, many people who are making as much money, if not more money than they were making when they were working because they not only got their unemployment checks, they got stimulus checks every week. So there were, or there are cases where we're not helping the situation because people are not going to be that anxious to go to work. I think they had a terrible situation with larger companies that were getting millions and millions of dollars when they really did need it and they could have survived with it. Any of my clients know, I always say one thing, you must put 25% of your income in reserves for things like pandemics, things that happen that you don't realize. And most companies do keep 25% in reserve. So they didn't need it. All of these big companies didn't need the money that they took away from the small restaurants and art galleries and the people that really needed it. On the state, you mentioned the state and tourism and how we deal with bringing it back. But there are a lot of people that says this is a great opportunity for the state to refashion, reimagine, restructure its economy. And maybe tourism would be different coming back. I don't know whether this is achievable, but whether tourism would be different. And whether other collateral industries could be established, for example, the one we have talked about since statehood, technology, agriculture, manufacturing. What about that, Seymour? You think we should just go back to the way it was where tourism is the modern economy? Or should we make some serious effort to get into other areas? There are certain areas we can, Jay, and we have to. Ten to 11 million tourists for this infrastructure economy that we have is no good for Hawaii. We've got to get a much better picture of what is the right amount of tourists that satisfy the local people. Because otherwise, we're not going to be hospitable. We're going to become angry, as you saw last year. You see what's happening in Venice. You see what's happening in Mallorca. I mean, different places in the world are saying, that's enough. We don't want more tourists. And how does that make a tourist feel? So, yes, number one, we have to find the right level, whether it's 7 million or 5 million. That's up to people who really know what they're doing. But to be able to go into business, Jay, it's not easy. Forget high tech. We cannot compete in high tech. Forget about major manufacturing. We can't compete in major manufacturing. Where we can get good and strong at is agriculture, space, meaning, do something with TMT, for instance, do something where we can have our astronomy school could be the best in the world. Can we do something with medical? Could we take some of the resorts that we have and turn them into mega medical resorts where people come in to get healthy for 5, 10 years? You probably know about 10, 15 years ago, I was very involved in Makaha. Micah, Kana, and I were trying to do a medical, it's an outpost of Mayo Clinic, basically, where people would come here to get healthy. That's the kind of tourists we want. We could really do a medical tourism business here. The other business that I think we could do is travel management. We are one of the best in the world when it comes to it. We have 50,000 hotel rooms. So we know what we're doing, but we should expand the school of travel management. Those are the things that we can do, not the high tech businesses. I don't think that can work here because we can't compete. But yes, Hawaii can definitely find its space when it comes to alternatives to tourism. So what's the path in the current set of circumstances for us to do this? I think people would like to see, right or wrong, a return to normalcy in the Trump term as soon as possible. They'd like to see all the tourists coming back. It's hard to get them motivated about things that are more difficult, about entrepreneurial activities require a lot of effort and risk. How do we get them to go to other issues and go down other avenues and build a diversified portfolio in the middle of a crisis? It's simple as DSPS. That is a term that I use in my foster program for my youth foster program. It's discipline, structure, passion, and support. That's all we need. If we take those four posts to build this new house that we want to build in Hawaii, we can do it. We have to have the leaders who want to do it. And that comes from the business community, not from the politicians. It's key that the politicians take a second seat behind the business people. If the agricultural people want to really build an agricultural model where we can sustain all of our needs here in Hawaii, plus perhaps send stuff out to other places, don't forget. We lost sugar, we lost pineapple, macadamia nuts, as you know, we're not doing great. Flowers are not doing great because other places can make it cheaper. That's where government comes in. Business starts and then we ask for the support from government. Government helps and then we're able to do it. Travel management, obviously UH is involved. Astronomy, obviously we have all ready to go, but we need to make it bigger and better. Maybe the whole native Hawaiian community issue has to be resolved. But I believe our astronomy could be the world leader, not just one of many, but the world leader. So there is discipline, structure, passion, and support. And it has to start that way. And if we can do it, we can make Hawaii a much better place to live in, not just to visit, but for you, for me, for our families, a better place to live in. You mentioned the business community and I really, I really liked that idea. Because businessmen, successful businessmen who run successful companies, you know, they have a few assets in their kit bag and they can apply those things to community project, community directions. Oh, you're right. So the question is, how do you motivate them? Because, you know, they're busy trying to save their business right now. How do you say, wait, stop. It's more than just saving your business. It's saving Hawaii. We need you to go out and encourage other activities in order to achieve the diversified business portfolio. How do you get them to do that? It's not easy, Jay, but how have the developers, I'm turning this into a question, how have the developers convinced all of the people here, the politicians and everybody to continue building, building, building, building and more and more and more and more. They did it because they knew how to do it. We need to get the people, if we decide that we want to focus on four new industries for Hawaii, it will come from within, it'll come from the agriculture industry. They're the people to start it. It'll come from if we're, you know, going to talk about the School of Travel Management. I guarantee you that if we ask the School of Travel Management at UH right now and say, how much money do you need to make this into a really much better facility? And they tell us that then we can do it. Then people will come from all over the world. Let's say we want to do a medical facility program here. So if we do medical tourism, we're going to have to have two or three hospitals. We can't use our existing hospitals. But look at locations like Makaha, Turtle Bay, right? Those are right for building facilities where people can just get healthy and people will pay a lot of money from Asia, from Europe to come here. If you go to Europe, Jay, I don't know, I go to Europe a couple of times a year and we go to something called the Guzunta House. Now, you know what that means because you're Jewish and that's a German expression that's the same in Jewish or German. A Guzunta House is a healthy house. Probably every single one I've ever been to is full with people who want to get healthy again. And that is something we can promote as tourism in Hawaii. You come to Hawaii's healthy house. And I don't know what the word is in Hawaiian, but I'm sure somebody is going to call me and tell me you should call it so and so. Oh, by the way, if there's anybody out there wants to ask Seymour a question, send it on email to questions at Think Tech Hawaii. Then I was talking to a guy named Marty Sanders, by the way, just before this show. He sends you his regards. Thank you. I'm sure he's going to want to talk to you about your comments. Anyway, so what about the politicians? I mean, some people say if the legislature would just stay home, it would be better. Some people say that the politicians should just leave business to do what it needs to do. On the other hand, somebody has got to design a statewide plan to wrap around all these things you're talking about, at least to write it down, to advocate for it. Who's going to do that and when? It has to be, it has to be soon because we need to have the plan in place as we redevelop our economy. It has to be cooperative, Jay. You have to have the combination of the business people working with the politicians. I mean, we do this all the time. I mean, lobbying is a big business here in Hawaii. It's a big business in Washington. We have to understand that this is the way we want Hawaii to be. If we have a governor and a mayor or mayors that decide that they want to truly change Hawaii, they will reach out just like EGAY, Governor EGAY reached out to Allen, right? When you reach out to people in the community, they will help you, but you have to have the message. How are we going to build a tourism medical facility here in Hawaii where people will come to? It's a five to 10-year project, but I guarantee you it'll work. The same as the astronomy will work because we know it does already. The same as agriculture will work because we have land, land galore. I mean, we just started growing hemp. Do you know what hemp is doing in CBT? I'm working on a 25,000 acre hemp farm in China outside of Tibet. 25,000 acres of hemp to be grown for the marketplace. You don't think we can grow that here? Of course we can grow hemp in Hawaii. Just have the will to do it. Your reference to Allen, of course, is Allen Oshima who is the reopening person that Governor EGAY recruited. Really, that answers a lot of this because Allen undoubtedly is working on a plan. He understands the issues that we've been raising here. Our hats off on that one. Hopefully, we'll see some real action coming soon. I wanted to talk about the something also that you raised and it's the fact that benefits are running out. In fact, it was a piece today about how it wouldn't be long before all the benefits to Hawaii's newly unemployed will run out and they won't have unemployment insurance. They won't have any further federal benefits. That's going to be problems. That's going to create pressure. That's going to be where the social safety net gives it up. What are we going to do about that? There's a lot of people going to be unhappy because that's going to happen before we can effectively reopen the economy. What do we do? Jay, that is the $64,000 question. Everything else we've talked about is incidental to how are we going to help the people who are unemployed here in Hawaii because the hotels are not opening that quickly. They're not going to be at full staff for several months, maybe a year or two. I don't know. I wish I could answer that, Jay. I don't think the state has enough money. I don't think the feds are going to give us enough money to continue unemployment insurance for a longer period of time. I think it's a real dilemma. I don't have an answer for it, but I do have for the first time a negative issue that you and I have talked because everything I've talked about has been positive. At this time, I think that's a negative. I'm afraid I don't know what's going to happen. Well, just to one more area that we need to cover, I do want to get your comments on it is, of course, the protests over the weekend, over the George Floyd murder, and the fact that people are out in the streets, a lot of them without masks, a social distancing, risking a resurgence in COVID, and there was a sort of resonant protest from city to city, including Canada, by the way, and Europe all over. And gee whiz, I mean, this is a real problem to settle down, to settle down on the problems we have with Trump and government, to settle down with the problems we have on COVID and the economy. Where are we going on that? How long is that going to last? What are your thoughts about it qualitatively? And how can we resolve that problem so we are not distracted by it to solve the other problems? Jay, the protests, I'm not calling them riots because it's a different issue. Riots are what are happening in Hong Kong. Protests are what happen in here. The protests in America are valid protests. We know that. We also have to remember that, in my opinion, 99% of police forces are good guys. I deal with police all the time, and they are good guys. You have one incident like this, or one in 2017, you remember the one then and so on and so forth where, yes, rotten apple spoils the whole barrel. And in this case, this is horrible, terrible. The guy was fired, now he's charged. We're waiting for charges for the other three guys. I believe in protest. I believe that's how we get people, you know, not riled and upset and angry. We get them to understand that society has to make a fundamental change. And the change that we need to make when it comes to the protests that we have right now are more training for police officers when it comes to Black people, African American people, when it comes to, look, we're not experts, Jay, but I can tell you, if I was in the heat of the moment, I don't know what I would do in the heat of the moment, right? When some guy is twice as big as me, you know, what am I going to do? I don't know. So we have to train the police officers a little better. But who are we? We can't train the police officers. It's got to come from within. It's got to come from hiring smarter people, not allowing people who have had, and I understand this guy has had several incidents where he's had reports on internal affairs about him. I don't know what they are. But obviously, this guy was a bad apple. But to do what we're doing now in the air of protests, protesting is excellent. It's a way for everybody to see that there's a problem. But the rooting and the stealing, I don't like the word looting. It's not as bad as stealing. These people are stealing. They're going into businesses. They're taking stuff out. I mean, to do that in the name of this poor man that was killed, terrible thing. Just terrible. It's going to blow over like everything else does. And hopefully one more thing will change in the police department to make sure, I hope, that things like this don't happen again. But thank heaven they don't happen frequently, Jay. They make it sound like they do. But 99.9% as far as I'm concerned, those guys are good cops. I see them a lot. And they come to lecture with me when I talk to my foster kids. They come to make them smile. I have two or three policemen who are musicians that come to our make them smile program. If you don't think they have enough to do, these are good guys. So we should not be vilifying police departments. We should be vilifying the system that allows us to retain people like this guy. I see more. It's so good to talk with you, to reconnect with you. It's so good to hear your thoughts about this and have you weigh in. This is exactly what I had hoped for a discussion. Seymour Kazimurski, the original host of Seymour's World. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jay. Be well. Take care of yourself.