 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Okay, it's still Monday. Still Think Tech. All day long. Now, this is Think Tech Tech Talks. We've been talking about technology, but also the energy, and we're talking about impact investment in things like that. I'm calling this show, A New Age of Awareness in Impact Investment, Through the Vision, if you will, of Gordon Fuller. Hi, Gordon. Aloha. Good morning. Good morning. Nice to have you here again at this table. Honored. And you brought somebody with you. His name is Dylan Lanius. Can you introduce him for me? Well, my lovely friend Dylan has a very special mission. He's been working as an impact investor with a group of millennials who have chosen to impact the way financial markets operate and have been doing so with great skill and cutting. And so, we're honored to have him here. He's been enjoying Hawaii. Thank you, Gordon. Thank you, Dylan, for coming down. Pleasure, Jay. You're operating out in New York City. Gordon lives here. He has an advantage on you. I'm afraid. Dylan lives in New York City. What's it like in New York City doing impact investing there? Well, the New York City pulse, as you know, is much quicker than it is in Hawaii. So, it's a lot of fun because there's a constantly changing landscape of players, of people that are passionate about the space. Once the other day, the Wall Street Journal introduced a story on a very prominent, big investor called Janna Partners, who I studied under. My university was with a partner at Janna Partners, co-founder of the firm. And they've moved into impact investing. And they're a traditional asset manager, traditional investors. And so, the landscape of impact investing is evolving quite quickly, and New York City is really the epicenter of that space. Interesting. So, things are changing then. Wall Street is not so much Wall Street as it used to be Wall Street, right? Well, Wall Street is always looking for opportunities, always looking for where's the money, and how can they get a piece of it, right? That's essentially the Wall Street way. Without trying to affect public policy. They're just looking to make a buck. And that's what impact investing relates to, is how do investors do well by doing good. And so, you are, what, the managing partner of something called, Haraday, Haraday? Hiradea. Hiradea, capital management. What is that? So, we're a long, short public equity investment manager, and we look at public listed companies, how they are approaching environmental, social, governance problems, and then how business innovation and organizational change and regulatory policy shifts is affecting the pricing and valuation of those companies. And so, we look for opportunities in the marketplace to buy and sell securities. So, you're not necessarily advising people. You're doing it. You are doing investment. We're doing it on behalf of our investors, and we're working with companies to improve their performance around environmental, social, governance issues. So, we engage with company management, with boards of directors. We look to engage in the broader ecosystem as well, the stakeholders around a business, from customers to regulators to the general public, and help understand how forces the change, the evolution in culture and society around what are the environmental problems, the social problems, the governance problems that are most pressing, and how those are being affected, and how these different participants in the marketplace and in the world are changing their behaviors, and then look to engage in ways where we can improve the environmental, social, governance outcome of improved state and improved condition. You know, I mean, policy is determined by capital investment these days, more than before. And I remember, I was a Harvard Business School professor out here a few years ago, and she said, you've got to follow the money. If there's a trail of money from, say, country to country, if a country is spending money in the global realm, that's a certain amount of power. But if you measure it by that, look at the multinationals. They spend lots more money than countries do in the global realm. So they, theoretically, well, in fact, they have more power because they're spending money between countries in the global realm. Well, anyway, I mean, I think things are changing. Gordon, you've been following this for a long time. What's your sense of it these days? Well, it's interesting. I've been looking ahead. That's my special area of focus. I'm a designer, and I look at the... A designer? A designer. A designer. What is a designer? Well, you know, I started in life as an artist. I was a painter and illustrator, and was kind of a child prodigy, honestly, and then had the opportunity to study at university. And I was a kid in art and went to art and design school in Europe and had a great future ahead of me as a designer. And then I found myself challenged by blindness. It was a progressive loss of vision. Sorry to hear that. My vision. Well, you know, actually, it's been something of a gift. You know, I'm still alive. I was always interested in highly dangerous sports, from rodeo to motocross, by racing and surfing. Tell us how it's a gift. Well, you know, it's been in sight that I have gotten from the experience of vision loss. The world as a designer, to me, is greatly malaligned with the human need and the environmental problems that we have. So good design would recognize that. I submit that we as humans have evolved in the natural world to develop this tremendous gift of vision that gives us such incredible abilities to be such extremophiles, to adapt ourselves, to be flexible and adaptable. But in our modern world, everything around us is synthetic and made by the hand of mankind. And in this world, this utterly synthetic world, we've lost our way. We fail to perceive reality. And in truth, our own little monkey brains, which are wonderful brains for avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, really good. A million monkey brains I'll add to this conversation. They're easily manipulated by clever men like myself, where we learn how to twist a phrase and push the monkey's buttons and pull his tail and get him to do the things we want him to, to buy a new car, buy a purse. But we've discovered a lot since we started on this journey as human beings. And it's true that the same pleasure you get from buying a purse at the mall or a new car, you can get by reading a book to a child. So taking individual responsibility is the part of the in-breast. So you call your organization, I guess it's your company, Fuller Vision, based on the same enough. The other thing I get out of that, which I really hadn't gotten before, is when you're into design, it's more than visual design. It's design of everything, am I right? Truly so. And in the world that I come from, the world of Buckminster Fuller, of science fiction, of people that push the envelope of mankind's endeavors, I sort of am looking for how we solve the unmet problems of our society, both environmental and human. And I think we're in such an age of miracles that it behooves us to recognize that things are changing very rapidly. You know, my good, lovely colleague to my right here, Dylan, his group, Nexus, that he works with, is a group of young people that have looked ahead and say, we want to make an impact. We want to use our resources and our influence to make this a better world. So you're behind that. You want to see that. You want to see the millennials step up to impact investing. They are stepping up, but you know what? We'll join them too. Most of my older colleagues don't even know how to use a smartphone, you know? But those things are kind of crude devices. They require you to pay a lot of attention to little things on the screen. Take it from a blind man, that's a hard thing to do. And I noticed this. And I see how people have not really adopted that technology as rapidly. But now with the AIs and new vision systems, an area I've been interested in as a person who's blind, how can I use artificial intelligence, deep learning and pattern recognition to create systems that can visualize the world around me and give me the information about the people, places and objects I encounter. And you found that you can. And that technology is now off the hook. It's everywhere. It's changing the world very rapidly. People aren't really a cognizant of it, just yet. But very soon you'll have your own personal AI that'll help you. So whatever you do in life, if you're about to make a transaction or purchase, you can get the information. No, don't buy that. That's a corporate pig. Or that has toxins. You're kind of a laboratory for the rest of us. In other words, you have this advantage and I do consider it an advantage of being internal, intrinsic, self-contained. And your thought process is different and therefore more expansive in its own way. So it's not inaccurate to call it a fuller vision. Nope, not a bit. And your worldview, which you've expressed to me before, I think has actually expanded since we last met. So the question I put to you, Dylan, is how much of the worldview that Gordon has expressed you agree with? Where are you? Well, I'm right here next to you, Jay. I got this, Gordon. I got that. Take a note of that. Get that man's name. The future is wide open with possibilities that we're bringing into the present. And so the choice of path for any one of us in pursuing a technology innovation to its culmination or to exploring the world through technology innovation and how we can come together and really develop this partnership with each other in the human realm of ideas and making those ideas real, that this is part of the play that has been going on for the complete history of the human race. We think about the first technology, maybe that was a cooking pot, right? Being able to eat different kinds of food. Mastering fire, well, when it first happened, people got burned in that process. And some people, I'm sure, in that era said, hey, we shouldn't play with fire. And so we have that same thing occurring today with issues like synthetic biology, with cybernetics, with the integration of computer systems and human systems. And so if you're into impact investing, not all of technology is gonna be on your menu, on your plate. There's only certain kinds of technology. So what's the definition for you? I think people have different definitions. So I can speak to my definition. For me, what's impactful is something that, in my own life, is lighting me up, right? Is impacting me. And an investment that is a learning experience, an investment that is looking to realize some type of gain beyond just a financial return. Personal gain. Personal satisfaction, alignment with my values, desire to see something in the world beyond just a material, a financial gain. Nothing wasn't aligned with your values, if it wasn't. So I think that's the... If it did not give you that special gratification, would you not touch it? Would you ignore that possible investment? So I think that exactly is the definition of an impact investment. It's almost like, buy it what it's not. So an impact investment is something that has a impact that isn't just for financial gain. So for my own self, for my own portfolio, there is different ways that the mind can play and run into poops and say, hey, if I'm holding a stock as a stockholder, this company is providing a product or a service that is solving somebody's need, somebody's desire. There is some solution being offered there. What about current developments and sea changes that may have taken place after you originally decided this was consistent with your values? You wake up in the morning, you open the paper, and you find this company is doing something that offends you, that is not consistent with your values. They're involved in something bad. What do you do? Go and sell, right away, sell? What do you do? I think people have to look at their personal liabilities and their personal assets and make that determination for themselves. I liked what Gordon was saying earlier about how it's really on the individual's sense of personal responsibility. So taking responsibility for one's own investments is what leads to that impact investing and saying that I want to have an investment portfolio that aligns with me, that is doing well by doing good. And so this expectation is what my generation is calling for is that level of self-determination as every new generation comes in and taking their money, their financial assets, and saying that we can do more with our financial assets. Are you saying this is a sea change around the country where millennials like you are growing in number and are growing in the focus for impact investment? Are you saying that your generation is different from us, you know, Gordon? Your generation is actually getting into impact investment big time more than it was five years ago? Yes, definitely. How do you know that? I think that the anecdotal evidence in my own personal experience speaks to that. But importantly for anybody who follows objective reality or tries to have some measure of objective reality, there are a lot of studies that show that millennials' orientation towards their investment portfolios are around impact investing. And these are studies done by Deloitte, by Goldman Sachs, by major institutions who are trying to part people from their money or trying to serve people who have money or trying to provide a service to people in order to provide for themselves. So they're looking at this arena as it's changing, as the generations are changing, and saying how can they position their businesses to provide a meaningful product and service to you? This suggests to me that there's a polarization here, because after all, the oil companies have to get investment too, and they're not so much into clean energy. Some of them talk about that, but I don't know if they're really heavily involved in clean energy. How do you feel about that? There's a polarization between the guys who want to make a buck at any cost and the guys who have impact investment and have philosophical standards, global vision, if you will. I'm talking to you, Gordon. How do you feel about that? Yeah, I'm sure that's one of the things that's about to change very substantially. Again, it goes back to that awareness thing. If I'm aware that a company is a corporate pig, that it behaves badly to its employees, that it makes products that are toxic, that it has unfair labor. Any of those things would negate my trading with them, and so that means either from an investor standpoint, but even as a purchaser. And that's what I'm saying is the granularity of the knowledge and awareness of the world around us is about to reach the individual level. And when I'm concerned about various things from global warming or global climate change to oil companies that are corrupting the government to telecom companies that are evil, I'm going to divest of those products in my life as much as I am not going to divest. I mean, it's just noble and it's been going on and it sounds like you guys are practicing it faithfully, but we live in the age of Trump. We live in the age where the government is pulling the wings out of the Environmental Protection Act, that it's building pipelines for fossil fuel, that it's doing, we don't have time on this show to tell you all the things the government is doing that are inimical to what you're saying. And I wonder how things have changed this year under this administration for you in making this kind of analysis. One word for it, for my side of the desk, stupid. That's it, right there, from an investment standpoint, stupid, from an environmental human perspective, stupid, from a spiritual perspective, stupid. Stupid all around, stupid little orange troll. Well, can you combat that stupidity with careful investing, careful impact investing? Are you saying that if I follow these rules that you guys are following, to be faithful to my own tastes and inclinations, my most high-minded tasting, that I can combat what the Trump administration is doing with the country? I think it brings it all back to Hawaii. Here in Hawaii, people here, we appreciate our quality of life. We look at Puerto Rico and see what's happened there. And we understand that we have challenges ahead of us. And we're all starting to look ahead and think of how we can shoulder our own responsibility, how we can reduce our requirement for imported oil, how we can find our own local foods, improve our health care. We're doing that. Those are the opportunities for investors. That's where we're going to see a lot of change from a local level, when we become aware locally of what our impact is by our buying decisions, by our engagement. Well, now we've seen it from, I don't know, maybe the 50,000-foot level from you guys. Right after this break, we're going to come back and ask you about specific deals, OK? We're going to get down in the weeds, ready? In that case, we'll take a break. We'll be right back. Living in this crazy world, so caught up in the confusion. Nothing is making sense. Fusion, how to make a party. OK, we're back. I told you I'd come back. I told you what we were going to do. We're now going to ask you specifics on what you're doing with your big bucks, OK? So, Dylan, I'm looking at you. What do you got going? What can I learn from you about your investments these days? What are you investing in? So, right now, I'm investing in situations where, as an investor, I can actively influence the outcome of the company's development because the company needs or has a need for strategic advice that can help it resolve an ongoing organizational challenge or business challenge for it. So, one example of this is a traditional real estate development company very much of the Trump-esque thinking of that era of generational change happening now. It's a real estate development company in California. And it's tied up in litigation because of how it's treating the California condor's habitat. And this is bringing the wrath of people in the environmental movement who have tied it up in courts for its development schedule. So, I've been working with this. They must be losing money because of that. They're losing money. They're also losing valuation. Their ability to raise money and to develop this piece of property is limited because of that. And so, I've been working with this company on a green real estate development plan that aligns with LEED certification, with independent studies that can support the green outcomes, the ecological outcomes for this region, as well as helping them become advocates and supporters for the California condor. Helping the company. Helping the company. So, how do you do that? You walk into a proxy meeting and have a fight with them. You appear at their board of directors and make some statements that try to change their minds or you write them letters. How do you do that? So, it's all about building relationship and rapport. And so, it comes down to listening mostly and to seeking understanding and open curiosity as to why they are taking their positions. To do research. A lot of research, a lot of relationship building. And to give them the product of the research. And over time, understanding where they're coming from and then presenting pathways where they can have resolution of this outstanding business organizational problem. And then, see that the financial gain that they're seeking for can also be met by creating an environmental gain. Do they listen? They listen within various degrees. And ultimately, the resolution of any of these issues, there's always a compromise involved. Why did they listen? Why did they listen to you? I mean, because. Their interests are aligned with resolving this outstanding business problem, organizational problem. You give them persuasive positions on it. Give them evidence that there is a marketplace for this green real estate that their litigants will come into a settlement if they take certain steps forward in their real estate development plan and if they support the California condor directly with philanthropic dollars. Now you own a piece of the company. You bought it, did you buy it before they got into the fight about the condors? Bought it afterwards. Afterward, you saw they were at this advantage. So you went in there to buy stock and then correct it. And so the cost of the stock, I guess it's stock, right, it's a corporation, the cost of the stock was lower than it would be had they resolved, when they resolved the condor litigation. Exactly right. So this makes money for you in the sense that you're gonna clean them up. That's right. It's trading a discount to a fair market value. I use a fundamental value discipline, a traditional, a warm, buffet approach. Do you have a big position, a plurality position, or a majority position? No. I mean, what percentage of the stock of this company do you own? Well, I own less than 1% of the company. It's really the power of ideas. At the end of the day. So you don't own stock in the company? Well, I don't own a material position in the company. Nothing that, for me, material, but for the company's capital table, immaterial position. But that ownership gets you in the door. It gets me in the door, and ultimately it's the power of ideas that my interests are aligned with their interests and that we're talking about the long-term well-being of their business. Last question on this though. You feel passionate about it, and you're incurring expense and time and opportunity cost by making the analysis and trying to convince them to clean up. Suppose, gentlemen, suppose they don't. Suppose they blow you off. What happens then? Well, speaking of hypotheticals is always troublesome because we can concoct the logical scenarios and hypothetical scenarios till the cows come home till the end of the day. In this situation, the position that I took was based around my assessment of being able to resolve the situation in a favorable degree. Now, if something changes and there is a clear obstinate management move that looks like there will no longer be this pathway forward, I'll probably end up exiting the position. I don't think I'll exit it at a loss. I'm sounding like you're taking a loss. I don't think I'm setting a loss. But you hope to make a gain. You hope to have an exit opportunity and things will be better at this company and make some money. This company is a small capitalization company. It's under about $500 million in equity value today. And this company should be worth, if you've played it on a fair value, a basis of discounted cash flows of its current real estate holdings, it would be worth about $750 million. And then if it has its development schedule in place and is actually realizing the overall value of its assets with a green real estate development plan, this company could be worth $2 to $4 billion. So it's a big opportunity over a multi-year period and expected to be a long term point. Have you done this kind of thing before and achieved a part of that gain and a part of that appreciation because of your own advice to a company like this? Yes. Okay, now, why are you so comfortable? So relaxed. Well, you're very kind to give me those compliments. I think, for me, it's actually living in a state of uncertainty and paranoia about what is, what could be that usual business stuff. Okay, Gordon, what about you now? We have a couple of minutes left and I'd like a similar kind of analysis from you on some investment you've made with due regard for impact investing. Well, I'm very interested at the local level on how we can solve some of the really perplexing problems. Hawaii imports $450 million worth of oil every year to generate power using diesel electric generators through a big grid. I'm interested in microgrids. You hear that, Hiko? And we believe in people like John Petrie and natural power concepts. And we're helping them to look ahead and see how they can apply their technologies from windmills, water turbines, ocean boy systems, desolination systems. We see a big future for companies like this and we're helping them to shape themselves for that market opportunity. Working with another company, which is called Solar Skyways, which would put solar panels leasing the space from the government over the roads and streets. These roadway spaces would then be given solar panels on poles, either from the center islands or the sides. And then underneath those solar panels would be little tracks on which computerized cars could be driven automatically. Computerized cars traveling from fixed bus routes, perhaps. But once you're in motion in that car, it never slows down until you get to your destination. You can also use it for overhead handling of freight. When we look at Puerto Rico and we see how devastated they were, how their power grid isn't back up yet and interesting enough under the current administration there in Puerto Rico and Washington, they're required to put the same poles back in place, the very same power infrastructure. Not a new one, not a Tesla-style battery-operated solar plant, but an old-style coal-fired power plant. So that's kind of ridiculous. And here in Hawaii, we look at that and we say, well, if we had along our riparian areas, along the river areas, the Ahupuahas, along the shorelines, instead of the roads we have, we could have solar pod cars that would zip along on these tracks and be able to move goods and equipment. And in the event we have an impending storm, we could disassemble it, stow it away, ride out the storm, afterwards put it all back in place, have a power grid, have communications, have emergency services. So that's a really important one. Food security, breadfruit could change things here on the island, a lot of things we do. We could reduce our importing of food items. We're looking at that, new entrepreneurial opportunities for local products and goods in the world market. We're looking ahead to new watercraft. I have an electric watercraft I'm introducing here in Hawaii this month, a little recreational thing for pools and rivers and outdoor calm waterways where people could ride about on this five-foot disk and enjoy themselves in an electric watercraft. And we have quite a few things we've been doing. Looking at local industries and spinning things up and finding new ways to improve the quality of life. One of the things I've been working on for years with the vision systems is how we can do wayfinding and navigation on an improved basis. As you know, GPS is kind of not working very well. And now using the camera and your smartphone, I can tell you exactly where you're standing and give you information about whatever you're looking at. Truth is we could empty out the museums by pasting all over geospatially the information, the historical material, the songs, the art, wherever you happen to be. So when you're standing at a point in Waikiki, you could see how it used to look in the turn of the century, two centuries ago. You could understand more about the environment and every tourist that comes here could hear it in their own language and then go home and become new Polynesian citizens. Steven Spielberg did something like that 20 years ago called Talking Streets. Wherever you were, you could dial a number and it would know where you were and it would give you a little radio play about where you were. And he did that in Lower East Side, I think he did it in Chicago and it created a tourist attraction for people. They would learn so much more about the neighborhood they were visiting. But these are research R&D kind of situations you're describing. And, you know, there's a long way to go for some of these ideas to actually get commercialized and you know... These are all things that are ready to get... Incorporated into the community. Where are you? Are you the key to having that happen? We are. We tend to spin things up, that's what I say. Technology is my palette of colors. As an artist, I look for places where people haven't considered how technology's impact will be felt. And there's where I see opportunity. Lots of opportunity, as you can imagine. 20 years ago I built a virtual reality city in Palo Alto, California, complete with video conferencing for people in the city, seeing each other's little avatars, games, museums, all that. So a lot of design, isn't it, Gordon? I've been ahead of the curve often. But the changes are coming faster and faster these days. Things go so fast. Are you making money? Oh yeah. Really? Money is good. And it's a reward that comes with being thoughtful, careful, considerate, and trying to do good and do well. Well, this goes to the core of our society. It's especially important now, and in the Trump administration, where we seem to be going the wrong way on so many things. So, how, take Hawaii for a minute. Are you invested in Hawaii? Not currently, no. Maybe now that you're here, you should talk to Gordon. You guys should get together. Well, his family's been here a long time. Okay, okay. Isn't that right? So, what is your advice to people on investing and otherwise supporting projects that are worthy of impact investment? Because, I mean, I'll have to say, I mean, my view is that, yes, there are people, Hither and Yon, who do and practice impact investment and who follow the principles that you've articulated, not that many. And perhaps we need more because then we could have the effect that you want to have on a macro scale. So, what's your advice? Look at the camera. It's in that direction. It's to your left, Gordon. Oh, yeah. Okay, no, it's right there. Well, okay. What's your advice to people about what they should be doing that people who are not invested, that people who understand the problem but are not invested? Become engaged and become engaged in your community. Become engaged in the world of ideas. Be creative. Think about who you are and what you are. You've been called into existence. You're a fountain of matter from the Milky Way galaxy. Here we are. And what do we do with that opportunity? You know, what is reality? What counts? It's the clouds in the sky, the water in the sea, the land in which we live, the Ina. Those are the things that are the most important things in life. Everything else in our mind is monkey business. So, when you attend a monkey business, make it count, make it reasonable. Make it something that a future progeny or future generations will look back on and you can be proud of the role you played in it. And that's my way of keeping myself going in this world is to know that despite all the Trumps and everyone like them who exist in this world, they're a minority. They're fewer all the time. And the great weight of humanity is moving towards a better world. The best for humanity is yet ahead. We're just entering a great age. And be patient and do your part. Be responsible individually. Don't buy products from corporate pigs. Don't use toxic products. Do everything you can to reduce your dependence on plastic and oil. And we'll make it a better world together. Wow. Wow, Dylan, your views. Can you top that? My view ultimately in this arena is that the spirit of competition is there to elevate us, to make us aspire to higher things for ourselves. And so ultimately human cooperation is cooperation of all life is what's occurring. And so the message that Gordon shared is a poignant one and one that I hope the viewers and the audience can take into their own lives and apply. I would only echo a few things in my own language and say that ultimately I encourage people to live with integrity and understand what it is that they want and what they're willing to do to achieve that and how much they believe in themselves is ultimately how much they believe in others and believe in the world and our capacity to realize the world that we want as a species and as the universe. What is the universe that we want to live in? So it's all available to us and investment dollars and investment of our time and energy in the world. Ultimately that is up to you and I encourage you to take risks and to be bold and to dream big and live a life that you want. Okay, I'm taking out my checkbook. Thank you, great discussion. Go ahead and great discussion. My brother. My brother. All right, you guys. Thanks for having us today. Thank you so much for being here. We'll see you again soon, right? Yes.