 One, bingo, I'm back. He said, she said, our Monday show with Marianne Sasaki and me, where we kick it back and forth. And since I just spent three weeks in change in Europe and in New York, there's plenty to kick around. The first thing I'd like to throw at you, Marianne, is the conditions of the airports. You know? Our third world airports? Yeah. Well, if you go to Asia, you see the most beautiful airports. Now there's been some commentary about, can they really afford that? Well, they find a way. It's there. It's beautiful. If you go to, you know, Europe, the airports are likewise beautiful. And what I found, for example, in Lisbon, it's so interesting, is that on the way out of the country, or in the country for that matter, but mostly out of the country, there's restaurants. Really first class. There's shopping, like you'd find in Palm Court in Alamoana. Really? International stores all around, you could buy things at any price. And how'd you find JFK? Did you go to JFK or LaGuardia? No, Newark. Newark is nice. I like Newark. You know, you could go to Newark just to go to Newark, just to go to the airport. Right. They're good, great restaurants. It's all very high tech. Food is pretty good. The prices are a little high because it's the airport and all that. But it suggests that Honolulu is not only behind in the physical structure, because we were saying at the early part of Linda Lingle's administration in 2002 that there was a billion dollar project to fix it up. They haven't spent anything close, they haven't spent anything on it. The airport here is, it really is, I can't get out of there in less than a half an hour. There's so much money in the left on the table. So much money. You could sell things to tourists coming in and out. You could food, waiting for the plane, all the stores in Alamoana, you know, that kind of thing. We have an incredible number of tourists and well-heeled tourists coming in here and we don't have any real opportunities for them. It's a completely unavailable, I think, the airport. If the airport would have these stores, somebody could make a lot of money. Somebody could make a lot of money. Listen, I advocate that because, you know, I think it's, well, I think JFK is a terrible airport, too. So, I mean, I'm very picky about it. I don't shop there. They have nice stores there. They have nice stores there. But here, it's just a completely counterintuitive, I mean, there's no clear way the things work. It's not well laid out. It's like a jumble. It's like a jumble of landing places and I don't understand. Why is it like that, Jay? Government. Because it's old? Government is stuck. You know, it's the same thing as the roads and all kinds of infrastructure. It's a can't, nobody's in charge, everybody sort of blends into the background. I mean, you find people who are just doing bureaucratic knee-jerk all day for careers that last too long. You know, I think we could use a new airport even more than we can use a train and you know how much I think we can use the train. But a new airport, because we were just talking about this, somebody I was talking with about petroleum. And the highest use of petroleum in Hawaii is not on car gas, but jet fuel, because there's so many flights coming in and out. I mean, our airport is, it's the only way you can leave, you know? It's not like we can get on the highway and go to another state or whatever. So the airport is integral to the functioning island. You know what I mean? I mean, everything comes into there. Yeah. We should have multimodal transportation there, we should have, that wiki bus thing is ridiculous. Yeah, what is that? I can never understand where that goes. Where does it go? And then year after year until we all get old, I mean, after a while we're just going to pop, waiting for something to happen on the wiki bus. But nothing happens. And the physical structure is still the same and the way it's set up for security and for shops and shopping and eating, still the same. So I mean, I hope there's somebody out there. Director Ford, are you listening? We need a real boost on the airport. It would be great to have a new airport. We are not keeping up. We're supposed to be a hospitality industry of, you know, of excellence. There's no excellence at the airport at all. And it's sort of like a moribund welcome of like, you know, hello, welcome to Hawaii. Right. It's exactly true. Nobody's cheerful. Nobody's, you know, out there, you know. Compare that to when I first arrived here, that's got to be 50 plus years ago. You got out of the plane, you had to walk down a little gangway, right? I love that. With no security. Like the Beatles. And there were dancing girls with hula skirts serving you as much pineapple juice as you could possibly imagine. And they were happy and smiling and loving and kissing, putting lays on every passenger. I mean, now that's an arrival. I think that... It's not like that today. No, no. But I think a little of that would be nice. A little theater at the airport, I think people would like. It's true. There is no theater there. No. And, you know, traveling to a place like this, you're traveling to a far, you know, a paradise, a tropical paradise. There should be some theater, right? There should be a little bit of romance and mystery. What's wrong with putting a Kodak hula show kind of thing in? When people arrive, they hear some live music. How hard is that? I know. How much could that cost? Give me a break. I'm going to go to another thing. Okay, go ahead. What? Bathrooms. In the world or where? Well, we're called comparative bathroom analysis. You know, I wanted to do a book on bathrooms all over the world. I think it's a book there. I think it's a book. I suggest to you that there are not enough bathrooms in Hawaii and the bathrooms that are public bathrooms and the bathrooms that are available. In fact, also private bathrooms, that's another discussion. But the public bathrooms, really, there aren't enough and the ones you find are awful. You don't blame it on the homeless, blame it on people who abuse the bathrooms. But that's not an excuse. Everybody has to go. Let me assure you of this. It's part of the human condition. And if you take the bathrooms away from them, or you don't maintain the bathrooms, you're doing everyone a huge disservice. I do not understand what it is in the Hawaii culture that dumps, excuse the term, dumps on bathrooms. Have you had a recent traumatic event with a bathroom, or that agendas this? Not a recent, good events. Oh, in Europe. It's amazing, isn't it? In Europe, that's not a matter in New York. And when I grew up in New York, and you too, the bathrooms, public bathrooms weren't all that good. No. They're better now. Yeah. And they're everywhere. You can find them in every kind of establishment. They're always there. And they're clean. And they have paper. They have paper. Paper. That's the acid test paper. They know that. They have no paper. Oh, bad thing. Oh, doors on the stalls. They don't even have doors on the stalls here on the bathrooms. Terrible. Even the women's bathrooms. There's no excuse for that. Everybody rips the place off, takes all the doors off, you know, destroys it, steals the paper, so you put more paper in. So you put better doors on. You need somebody to do that. So you put security. But you need somebody to do that. You need money to do that. You need money to do that. I need political will. What do you think of the New York? Well, since when? So fancy, though. I mean, it's so, you know, it's a nice bathroom. New York is hopping. New York is hopping. I wanted to talk to you about that. I mean, we're both from New York originally. And it's hopping. You know, Broadway is just, the whole world is there. You know, the old adage, you know, if you stand on 42nd Street, you'll meet everybody you ever knew. Right. Well, it seems to be true. I know. It's really unbelievable. And, you know, the hotels are good. They're hopping with people. The police are good. They caught that guy who did the bomb on 25th Street. The one thing that I have to say is a problem. And it's a problem for Hawai'i and the traffic. Traffic is really hard. And you know, there are a lot of cabs, but the cabs are all locked up. And we have the subway. And New York has the subway. Can you imagine if there's no subway? Oh, gosh. But, you know, some people don't like the subway. I like the subway. Oh, the subway is very efficient. And if you didn't, you're right. Two-and-a-half bucks or whatever is $2.75. But that is no argument for rail here. That's no argument for rail. Well, I disagree with you. You think it is an argument for rail? Yes. Okay. I think it's just the argument for rail. You have a deep pocketbook, I think. And the problem, though, is when you have all these taxi cabs lined up and you have—everybody wants to travel by taxi cab because, you know, it's the safest, cleanest way to get around. The price of a given ride goes up. It's expensive. And I was—sometimes it was, you know, breathtaking how expensive a taxi cab is. Uber. You have to Uber. So I get in to Honolulu yesterday. And I get a taxi cab because my wife insisted on taking a taxi cab. And we had parked downtown. So this was a ride of about three miles, okay, to get from the airport to downtown. It was actually a bad decision because the first thing is we had to wait nearly half an hour for a taxi cab. What's the problem? A lot of taxi cabs can't go out there. They're politically barred from going out there. It's not a security issue. It's just politics. They can't go out there. Then you finally get a taxi cab after a lot of really crazy things, you get a taxi cab, and now you drive three miles to downtown, 30 bucks. That rate per mile is way higher than any place on my trip, including Manhattan. Yeah, I think so. I think so because I'm always shocked whenever I take a little quick trip. Like, sometimes I go from my house to Alamano, which is probably half a mile. And it's just—it's like 12 bucks or something. It's just crazy. The same guys who were charging the 30 bucks are fighting against Uber and Lyft in the city council and winning with the politicians— I know they can't go to the airport. No sense of how important it is that we have that one multimodal mode available to people. This could be a great town for taxis. It used to be a better town for taxis. Is that true, really? I think so. You don't have to have a car. You just spend the money. Well, you know what they did in New York? They banned cars so many places. I mean, we could ban cars from, like, you know, maybe near Waikiki or—I mean, they banned cars in places people never thought they would, like Broadway and 47th Street. There's a whole big stretch of Broadway that there are chairs and tables now. And I mean— Yeah, that's true. 6th Avenue between—oh, gee—between, like, 34th Street and maybe 59th Street a couple days ago. It was Sunday, Monday, Saturday. It was Saturday. No traffic. They cut it all off. They had food stands and trinket stands and people came in by the thousands just to hang around. And that would work here, too, because there's a lot of bicyclists here. A lot of bicycles in New York, believe it or not. Yeah, now there are. There are definitely a lot of bicycles. But I mean, closing the roads here would work. It would work, I think, you know. But people aren't—they're just not thinking in that—that's kind of an avant-garde public space kind of Jane Addams way of thinking, right? We don't have that consciousness. We don't. We don't have— The public would be up in pitchforks about public bathrooms, about the airport and about public spaces in general. New York has been very good about developing quality of life public spaces for people to share and have lunch at. They have greenery. They have waterfalls. They have things that people—you know, that people in a city don't get to see very often. They've—they've done—they've really done—I'd say over the past 20 years really, really changed things. So it's a fabulous city. You walk down the street and see all these people, you never hear the same language twice. They're all smart. I'm telling you, they're all smart. They're all hustling. It's true. And they're friendly. And you can talk to them. But they have so many languages, so many places, they come from everywhere. I know. And they all— Live together. Live together in not only harmony, but in excited harmony. No, it's true. It's true. Like, you know, you go to the deli and there's like maybe an Indian guy at the deli and he's got an opinion about the election and the guy behind you is from China also has a question about—he also has an opinion about the election. You're standing, you're getting your morning coffee, all of a sudden you're engaged in a political debate, you're talking about the mayor or the bombings or whatever. Everybody talks about it. They're all informed. Everybody's informed. They're all informed. It's not just TV, because TV there is about the same as what we have here. Somehow they're otherwise informed. I think people still read the paper. I think they do. A lot of papers there. And we'll take a short break and when we come back, we're going to hear about Mary Ann's latest thinking and my latest thinking about the Trump-Clinton campaign. Oh, my favorite subject. We've got a minute or two, even though we don't want to. We're going to force ourselves to come right back. Oh, we want to. One of us wants to. Hi, I'm Chris Letham with Think Tech Hawaii and I'd like to ask you to come watch my show, The Economy in You, each Wednesday at 3 p.m. Thank you for watching Think Tech. I'm Grace Cheng, the new host for Global Connections. You can find me here live every Thursday at 1 p.m., where we'll be talking to people around the islands or visiting the islands who are connected in various aspects of global affairs. So please tune in and Aloha and thanks for watching. Thank you for watching Think Tech Hawaii, Asia in Review. My name is Johnson Choi. My next show next month is on October 13th, 11 a.m. See you then. Bye-bye. Aloha. My name is Richard Emory, host of Condo Insider. More than a third of Hawaii's population live in some form of association. And our show is all about educating board members and owners about the responsibilities and obligations and providing solutions for a great association. I went around in Portugal and I asked people whether the day after the debate last Monday, what do you think, you know, and people understand that whether they speak English or not, I would say Trump on the one hand or Clinton on the other. Oh, they know. And I was sort of the gestures and I'd say 90% of them, you know, liked Clinton. That's because they didn't like Trump. And the ones who articulated, you know, why they didn't like Trump is they thought he was crazy. They thought he was mentally crazy. And that scared them because they looked to the U.S. for leadership. I mean, it's the most influential. We are the most influential country. And they care who is our leader. You miss the debate, right? Did you see the debate? I would say I saw it in detail the middle of the night. I would say to them who you're going to vote for, Trump or Clinton. These people are American citizens. They can't vote. But they have a vested interest. They have a vested interest and they would answer the question in a serious way. I'm going to vote for Trump or Clinton. I said, what? You can't vote. Well, it's a state of mind. Voting is a state of mind. I think if you allowed them to vote, the percentage would be higher than in Hawaii. The ones who did like Trump, there were a few, was usually on the lines. He's very macho. He's strong. He's macho. But there was no, as there is in those... I think she's more macho than he is. But that's just my opinion. I mean, I wish they would have the bloody election already. I know. Do we need to know more? Two more debate. Two more debate. It's a passion play that goes on and on and on. And just as you think that all the television is full of this stuff here and on the East Coast, all across the country, it is full of this stuff. It's full of this stuff in Portugal, too. Yeah. I know. We had... Yeah. I've spoken to many Europeans who are fascinated by this. They just don't understand how the election got to this point. But I want to tell you that this is October 1st. I said this. Andrew and I did a talk... We did a... He said, she said on Friday. And I said this on Friday, and I say this now. October 1st marked the beginning of the plummet, the dissent of Donald Trump. I think that she's going to win a spectacularly large number now. I really do. Because between his taxes and the things he said about women and his attitude... At the debate, his demeanor was, like, fascinating. Didn't you think his demeanor was fascinating? But we are in real time, Marianne. And that will go away? Anything could happen any day. That's the crazy thing. It's like you don't know whether some strange new factor, some strange new thing, if she got sick, for example, that would change it. If he got sick, that would change it. Some remarkable event that requires new opinions from them, and they take an opinion... Right. That's true. A terrorist event or something like that could happen. And that will change it, too. And of course, and I mean to talk about this in other programs, it's a revelation that Vladimir Putin is going to manipulate or try to manipulate the election on the Internet. And this is really scary. And frankly, the one revelation I'll give you about that is that even if he doesn't, even if he does nothing about it, people will wonder if he is doing something. You think so, really? Sure. He's planted that seed. He's already planted the seeds of, you know, lack of confidence. And it's got to be a big factor in what happens. Well, he monkeyed around in the DNC, right? Didn't he hack like the DNC, the Russians hacked the DNC? And Trump invited him to hack Hillary. How nice. But I mean, you know, that's going to be, all I'm saying is that you're going to hate me when I say this, you know, it's not over until the fat lady sings. I could never hate you, but yes, I told you, we can't talk about fat ladies. Fat ladies, all ladies, no lady wants to be, you shouldn't even notice about their way. The poor little plump, she was sort of plump, Miss Universe. Well, I want to close with some stuff that you know or don't know about Portugal. Tell me Portugal facts. We had a great flight. You can fly from Honolulu to Newark, stay overnight to rest. And then you can fly from Newark directly to Lisbon, Lisboa, if you want. I love Lisboa, I love that. And we just, it was relatively painless to get there. And once there, we stumbled into this great hotel, which was really, 1892, it was built and it was kept in meticulous condition. And every night there was a concert in the salon, the great hall there as you walked in. And the public was invited and they came and they listened. Some of them were coming like for years to hear the music that emanated from this hotel. Isn't that nice? Yes, really nice. What's it called in the hotel? Do you remember what you did? Yeah, Avenida, which is the word for avenue. Right. Liberdad. Okay. Avenida, Liberdad. I have to look it up. On various revolutions and tumultuous events in Portugal over the past hundred years, including some recent things, and Liberdad is, I guess that's instead of the way it was before. The way it was before was this avenue, a beautiful avenue with tree-lined streets and everything, was more like for the royalty. The royalty were there for hundreds of years. The other revelation about Portugal, which you didn't know and I didn't know either, is that it was the lead discovering power for a hundred years, from, say, 1450 to 1550. Yeah, it was really, really influential, right? It was really influential. It was sending its ships out everywhere. It was doing high-tech ropes and high-tech masts and high-tech sails and all. What was some of the big discovers? Was Vasco de Gamo from Portugal? He's the great hero. Yeah. He's the great hero. Everybody loves Vasco de Gamo. Remember, Columbus did not come from Portugal. He came from Spain. No. Yeah, he came from Genoa. He came from Italy. Of course, I thought you'd say something. But he came under the flag of Spain, yes, under Queen Isabella. But Portugal was ahead of Spain. Portugal was discovering all these places. I know they were very powerful. I didn't know they were the top... South America, Brazil, of course, South America in various places in the Caribbean and South America. I think they went to Nova Scotia. They discovered Nova Scotia way back when. They had ships going everywhere, all through Africa, India. They discovered India. I mean, we didn't know. I didn't know this. They were, of course, Macau and other places in that area. And they were the first ones to actually visit Japan. Really? And I'm going to tell you something. I didn't know this. Are you ready? Are you sitting down? I'm never ready. The word for thank you in Portuguese, which is an odd variation on Spanish, it's not the same. In fact, the Spaniards can't understand the Portuguese, but the Portuguese can understand the Spaniards. The word for thanks in Portuguese is obligato. Oh, like arigato. Sounds like arigato. The reason is, are you sitting down? The Japanese got it from the Portuguese. Really? Is that really true? Really? It's absolutely true. Arigato is the Japanese pronunciation of obligato. They came in the, I think it was 15s, 30s sometime. They found Japan. They were the first howlies there. That's amazing. Yeah. I would have never thought that. That's amazing. Yeah. That's amazing. And what there was an exchange of culture, too, because tempura, tempura, which is the big Japanese food, that was originally, let me think, whether tempura came from Japan and went to Portugal or whether it was in Portugal or went to Japan, but there was an exchange of tempura, too. So a lot of the cultural points, interesting points were exchanged between Portugal and Japan. That's fascinating. It is fascinating. They have a map that takes a city block for this map where they have it all laid out on what year they discovered this and what year discovered that. They were world travelers. They were the most active, aggressive world travelers, world discoverers of any country in Europe. Now I want to read a book about that period in Portugal's history because it's probably really, really interesting. It's probably fascinating. It is fascinating. Portugal is fascinating. People are very layback, very friendly. Food is very good. They're into fish. I told you the break. When you tell them you're from Hawaii, do they know where that is or do they? Yeah, they give you the same reaction that all of Europe does. Oh, Hawaii. Oh, we love to go to Hawaii. I said, well, you have a lot of the elements of Hawaii. Yeah, right, exactly. Don't get too excited. Yeah, exactly. We have to work for a living. So I would go again. I mean, I don't say that about a lot of countries. Really? I would go again. And Portugal is finding, it's very attractive now to people in Europe. It's safer than other places in Europe. There's not any terrorism there. It's very welcoming. There are people, it's like New York, and every language is spoken. And people are very friendly and engaging and easy to get along with. Don't you think it's fascinating that it could have once been a world power? It was. It was a world power with Spain and the Netherlands. Well, Spain took away some of their holdings. The Dutch took away some of their holdings, and ultimately the British took away a lot of their holdings. Right. The history of imperialism, I guess, had countries like, you know, even England. Great, the sun never sets on the British Empire. Now it's like a really tiny little place. We should be aware of that. America should be aware. We should learn from what happened. They went down the slippery slope sometime after, I guess, 1550, and when their holdings were taken from them, because they didn't prevail in sea battles and the like. And they had a bad earthquake, by the way. Oh, really? Okay. 1755, that really wrecked them, and they took a long time to fix things up. Those days it was harder to fix things up. But I think the lesson that I would leave people with now as we approach the end of the show is if you have trade, if you have connections with other countries, if you engage with them, you buy and sell, manufacture, you know, if you have commercial engagement with them, and people engagement, your economy is better. You have to engage. If you don't engage, you know, you slide down that slope. I think in so many ways, yeah. Not just economically, I think, you know, culturally. I just think it's very healthy for people to explore and have others come to their country. And that's one thing that makes New York so exciting, right? I agree. They're out there. So things like Brexit, you know, very disturbing. So disturbing. Yeah. And I just heard on the radio that there was a similar referendum in Hungary. Hungary's population of 10 million. And for comparison, Portugal has a population of 12 million. Three million of whom live in Lisbon. Oh, really? So you know the relative population. Anyway, Hungary had a referendum on whether they should permit any further immigrants to come in. And the percentage of people that voted in favor of continued immigration was 90 percent. However, the terms of the referendum were that you had to have a turnout of over 50 percent, a quorum. Oh, okay. Okay. They didn't reach the quorum. Oh, what? So the vote doesn't count. Okay. So now, you know, there's a real issue about whether they will take... Are they going to do it again? Vote again? I hope so. I hope so. But I mean, you can see there's a sweeping nationalism now in the EU. And... Yeah, you can see it. Yeah. And these referendum... Referendai? Right. These referendum is starting with Brexit, but also look at Scotland last year. You know, it's really interesting how many politicians will cop out and put it out in a referendum instead of making the decision themselves, which they could do. And then it's interesting to see how people more and more seem to want to fold in on their own. Yeah, xenophobia. There's xenophobic. But you're right. It's... That will cause a culture to languish. It will cause an economy to languish. And they think it's going to be good in England for the economy, but I don't think it will be. I think the permeability of the borders and the working, being able to work across Europe is a huge thing. So what happened in Portugal to close up on that? What happened in Portugal was that if you could get out there and discover and trade with all these faraway places, your economy was going to be significantly better. Now just trying to put that forward, take it a sort of jump it forward and see how that works now, I think the reality is if you have an ability to compete within the new global context, and that means not xenophobia, it means trading with everyone. It means opening your borders, not closing them. If you can compete with that, much more sophisticated competition. But if you can compete with that and reach out, you will do better. You will be a better economic power. I think that's right. I think that's right. But we'll see how the trend, where the trend goes, it doesn't seem to be trending in that direction. No, no, no. Okay, well... But I think you're right. We're going to do this again. So glad you're back. Oh, I miss you so much. Oh, I miss you so much. That's Mary and Sasaki. He said, she said, we enjoy doing this. My God. Yes, we will do this.