 Hey Aloha and how you doing? I am obviously not the Texar, Gordo's on break, so I'll be hosting today Andrew Lang, the security guy. Thanks for joining us today on Hibachi Talk, I've got a great guest for you, Sam Snead is here with us. Aloha Sam, thanks for coming out today. She's from the law firm of ESNA and we're going to talk a little bit about an event that they put on this week that was amazing. We're going to kind of give you a recap so you know if you didn't get to the event. I'm sorry for you, but we'll try to take care of you here as best we can and give you a little teaser and try to influence them to put on some more of those. Let's see what else. Gordo's headed down to UH to watch the Bulls play or the Warriors play next weekend and we may have a report next Friday from there, so check that out. Sam, so let's see, let's get to it. What we like to do typically is start off giving us a little background, you know where'd you grow up? Let's start there, where'd you grow up? Alright guys, born and raised here, so I'm on Oahu, so my family's originally from Wailua side so I grew up in Mililani, went to public schools, go Trojans, and then I went away to school for college and business school in Denver and then I came back home for law school. Wow, it was just in Denver, and where'd you go school up there? University of Denver. Okay, nice. Beautiful up there. It's great, great state. Did you state, did you do your law degree there as well? You've got quite a bit of education, so. I actually came home to do the law degree, so I knew I wanted to come back home to live and work and contribute to the community plug-in, so I came home and went to Richardson. And so your background, you work, forgive me about your background, because it hit some constructs, you had a lot of different things in there. Yes, so I got my, my background's actually in electrical engineering, so I focused a lot on renewable energy when I was studying my senior design projects, my group, we actually did sort of like a virtual model of our school, and so we plugged in the data on the energy usage of the school, and we did, we did a payback calculator based on what the likely profile of wind and solar generation would be in that area. Wow. It was really cool simulation. And then while I was in school, I also interned briefly with Department of Energy, so they sent me out to Folsom, California. I got to work in the SCADA department. Okay. Have you seen control systems? Yeah, really, really great experience. They did stick me underground behind blast doors, so that was also interesting. Interesting to see, you know, how our critical infrastructure is kind of set up and what it looks like to live there. Wow. And so from the EE, how did you move over into law? Was it just... So it was kind of, it's kind of an interesting progression. What I tell everyone is I went into engineering thinking that I was going to build robots and wind turbines and renewable energy systems. Okay. And I realized pretty quickly that, you know, you only get to build stuff that you can afford to build. You have to go out like general dynamics, do it, or... Yeah, somebody needs to pay for your cool toys, so I went to business school. Also really interesting, completely different point of view, very macro view, you know, a lot of synthesis of completely different areas, not so technical, going through business school, I realized then that, you know, you can do whatever you want under the sun, but you also don't want to go to jail. So I went to law school. Wow. Okay. Interesting. So really what I try to do or what I enjoy doing is learning about new technology and figuring out how to make sure that it makes it to market, makes it to the people who need it and can use it. Okay. And then help them, and so there's, I guess around that, it says new products or intellectual property, there's like patent laws or whatever that maybe pertain to, do you help people bring stuff to market here from Hawaii as well, or...? So we have to, we are working with a couple of clients who do, actually my particular area of interest is how it works in with the government contracting. Okay. So I'm really interested in dual use patents and that sort of intellectual property where it's basically, the government has an interest in funding and supporting a certain type of research or idea. And so they give people the tools and the economic support to do it, and then they let you take some portion of the usage to commercialize and do what you will, and the government will you keep its designated purpose. Wow. Yeah. I know DARPA puts out a list of technologies that they would like to develop every year. They do. It's like I've seen it. So is there grant money associated with that then or do they just provide an expertise or is it mixed up? A little bit of both. So it depends on the program that you go through. For example, the SBIR grant program is really great. Lots of times the procuring agencies will be DOD entities, they'll fund really high tech research, really, really interesting work that comes out of there. And at the end of it, the DOD or the procuring agency, again, they take what the government interest is and they'll say you can choose to own it if you want and we'll keep a license to use what we want to use and then you can have the rest of it. To go to market. Right. Or if you don't want to own it, we'll take the ownership rights if you really don't want it and we'll patent it to make sure that the information gets out there in the world. Wow, interesting. So is that you have to engage them from a, I guess there's a legal engagement when you take that on obligation, I guess, and you take that. So interesting. Like if they're starting to give you money or want you to develop something, I guess you have to develop it, right? Definitely. So federal government money is great money, but it does come with strings, so sometimes it does help to have somebody who can explain to you where the strings are and what they mean. Interesting. Interesting. Is it going on at UH? Is it going on a lot of universities here? Or is it going on public sector or all the above? Surprisingly, all of the above, and I think that's one of the things that people don't really know a lot about Hawaii. We have some really fascinating research that goes on here at the universities and on the private side, and it's really, I think we need to do a better job of marketing it and letting the world know just, you know, how innovative we are here in Hawaii. Yeah. So a lot of that came out on the show that was called actually envision, strategize, and actualize, you know, how technology can transform Hawaii, which was, it drew me when we first, you know, first talked about it. I was like, well, this is going to be a good one. And then we had this really cross-pollination of speakers, and we'll get to some of that, but when you take that sort of vision and, you know, widen the lens of it, because you go to a lot of shows that are sort of focused. And I think that the ESNA show that you guys put on was amazing because it brought that cross-pollination of ideas that you don't normally hear about, and we'll definitely get to some of that in the show a little bit. So tell us a little bit about, so you've been in, you moved out of basically through EE, through business, into law, and then did you begin practicing, did you start where you are today, or did you start with another firm, or how, I don't know how that, does that, how do you transition into like working, the working attorney world, I guess. Right. So after the school. Right. So while I was in school, I had actually planned on starting in the government or working in public policy. And I realized, you know, after talking with a few advisors that it might be better to start off more on the, more on the real lawyer track, so to call it, because, you know, you do need a lot of mentorship when you work in the law. It's almost like, it's almost like being a doctor or being an apprentice, where there is an apprenticeship period, because the law in the past couple of decades has just become so complex, where it's not, it's no longer really feasible except in a very few select areas to just start practicing right out of school. Wow. Okay. So if you, maybe you worked on that as your thesis item or something in school, so you learned it well. So I had actually, while I was in school, I studied quite a bit of intellectual property, government contracts, and then privacy and security law. Awesome. Okay. And so it's interesting that there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of convergence now coming in the law, where it's gotten complex enough, and the world has gotten complex enough, honestly, that we need rules that will cross those boundaries. Yeah. Privacy, security runs right into cyber, yeah. Absolutely. Which is a big thing, which we talk about all the time. That's awesome. Well, let me do a, we have a couple of little things we do. One of them is, you got, you know, got, you know, got one tech job. That's what it's called. So let's, let's see what we got today. So this is how not to carpet your stairs. All right. No. How do you, how do you get up and down? I mean, is that, it's just mind boggling to see that. Just the photo. I think somebody, I forget where that came in from, but there's better choices out there for your stairwell. Do you run across anything like that? I haven't. Well, with the lawyer hat on, I can just think of all sorts of torches. If you want to, you know, make yourself a pest about it. Wow. So we got a tweet up here. They wanted to know what does ESNA stand for? So it's a great question. ESNA, we've been around for maybe about a year and a half. It stands for envisioned, strategized, and actualized. Okay. So that, so that was the name of the show. It's the name of the show. So I thought ESNA were the names of the, the attorneys. Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. I thought you were the S. No, not so much. Okay. I didn't pick that up. So amazing. So, envisioned, strategized, actualized. We had a, we had an opportunity, it was on Wednesday. And I just want to, we had, I want to give you an idea of some of the folks over there. Donnie Dawson was there from the Hawaii Film Office. Kelly McCandless there was there running one of the panels. She's a big privacy person from Hawaiian Electric. Allen Ashima was there. Ian Kitejima was there from Oceania who does a lot of R&D, nanotechnology. And we also had educators like Steve, Steve Arbaugh was there. Yeah. From PCAT was there. So we had, it was an amazing conversation and we will get to, well, let's talk about, let's talk about what you first and, you know, how did it get started as an idea. So when you, you know, first of all, we need to, we need to educate. We need to put on a show. You had that come about. Right. So in my firm, in the past, we've put on our group, we've put on similar, we call them thought leaders conferences. Okay. And the notion is to raise the average level of discussion of people who do have decision-making responsibilities. And so when we were thinking about this year's program, we realized that, you know, technology has evolved and become so pervasive really that you could be in any industry and you're going to have to have some sort of tech or IT skills. And so we started thinking about, okay, what are the resources out there? And we realized that they're, like you said earlier, they're phenomenal conferences that go really deep into particular subject areas, particularly on the tech side. And they have ones that are business-themed. They have ones that are policy-themed or education-themed. And again, people go into the conferences. They get great depth of knowledge. And then they all go home and nobody ever comes back and talks to one another about it. And a big problem that we saw, because it comes up a lot in our work and with the volunteer work that we do sometimes, is that these problems, they transcend industry. They transcend businesses. And they're really problems that everyone faces. It doesn't matter what you do, what you make, how you provide service. So they're very universal. And, you know, we live in such a small connected community that I don't know how you couldn't have a universal or really a solution that's developed that involves everyone. Yeah. And that came up. We actually worked through from some deep, we had cyber. And we had, well, we'll talk about the show after the break. The other thing I thought was very interesting was the sort of the format, right? So a multi, a multiple panel format, which was really good because there was a mix and also led by, you know, the moderators for each panel also was a contributor to the discussion, which was kind of, and there was a lot of Q and A, you know, with the audience as well, which I've done a lot of those in Hawaii. You don't always get good feedback from the audience or nobody wants to ask questions. So that worked out really well. I mean, it was, how did you settle on the venue? Because that was a great venue. I had looked at that for a show for Hicca. We didn't end up there, but I enjoyed the venue. What did you think? I really loved the venue. I think I had been at HPU after they had renovated and walked by it and I saw the floor to ceiling whiteboards and I went, this is amazing. I want to be in this room. And, you know, they did a fantastic job of overhauling their IT. Everything's connected. You know, it's a perfect space for doing, I think what our conference is trying to do is spur all sorts of, you know, what you would think would be disparate thoughts and try to bring them together and, you know, put it out on the whiteboard, spit it all out and see how it matches up. If you don't, you know, HPU is one of our, we love HPU. So, this is what the show was. They do have stuff for rent down there. So, you know, if you've got a show or you've got something you want to do, go check out their space. It might work out. We're going to take a quick break. We're going to pay some bills, as Gordo likes to say and we'll be right back. Aloha and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii. I am Ina Chang. I am the guest host for Small Business Hawaii with Reg Baker. Tune in every Thursday at 2 p.m. and watch us. Aloha. I'm Jay Feidell and I'm the host of Research in Minoa, Mondays from 12 to 1 on thinktecawaii.com. Take a look at us and learn about geophysics, learn about planetology, learn about the ocean and earth sciences at UH Minoa. You'll really enjoy it. So, come around. We'll see you then. Aloha. My name is Danelia, D-A-N-E-L-I-A. And I'm the other half of the duo, John Newman. We are the co-host of Keys to Success, which is live on Think Tech live streaming network series weekly on Thursdays at 11 a.m. Aloha. Aloha. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host of likeable science here on thinktecawaii.com. I hope you'll join me every Friday at 2 p.m. to discover what's likeable about science. Hey, Aloha and welcome back to Bachi Talk. Here with Sam Snee. We're chit-chatting about a show. We want to keep you baited just a little bit. So, let me do a security minute for you. A report just came out from Kensington, which I got a hold of talking about laptop theft and that it's really much higher than people would expect. And that's also, you know, where this big loss of data tends to occur. So, 34% of organizations, what they found, don't have a physical security policy in place for their laptops. 54% of the respondents don't currently use physical locks for their IT equipment. They don't use locks on non-computing equipment like projectors, hard drives, or monitors. So, when we're talking about data loss, which we have here, we talk about cybersecurity and other ways we lose things. Laptop theft from, you know, internal sources is still one of the really large ways this is happening. I wouldn't have thought that myself. So, I was kind of surprised. So, lock down your devices, make sure you've got a good asset inventory, all that kind of stuff that we've talked about, because it seems like laptops are still being stolen out there, so don't think yours are safe and that owns them. So, that's it for the security minutes. So, let's get back to ESNA, because we had a ball. So, we had speakers ranging, and so we had envisioned, strategized, actualized how technology could transform Hawaii. So, Wednesday, sorry if you missed it, we'll give you a snippet of it here. But, Donnie Dawson was there, one of the very first panelists, and she really, I was amazed that, you know, she's talking about drones and how drones are, people are using drones now, they're filming in Hawaii, they're not paying for the licensing that she's, her office is supposed to protect, right? Yeah, I mean, what did that stir for you? Like, you know, wow, is our legislation not keeping up with technology at all? Well, I thought it was such a perfect case study, really, of how, you know, again, why we wanted to, why we wanted to have this conference, and I'm glad you brought up the issue of laptop theft, is that technology has become mobile, so that's a good and a bad thing. Sure. And it's become basically democratized, it's become so ubiquitous, everybody has a cell phone in their back pocket, it has, you know, some sort of mobile computing device that can store sensitive data, and the advantage of it being mobile is obvious, but I don't think people always think about the disadvantages, and so talking about the drones, you know, they're to the point where I can go over to Walmart and buy one for maybe like 50 bucks. And so it's a perfect example, I think, of how technology is so easily available, and people don't always consider, you know, what might be, not to be a downer, but what might be the risk factors associated with having these devices everywhere on all the time? Yeah, especially with the drones, like you just didn't consider that, you know, wow, filming in Hawaii costs money, you have to pay Hawaii to film our beaches or our parks or our forests or whatever, but drone operators can just go up, and I got high-resolution cameras and GoPro Black, and they're like amateur movie makers, and so they're sort of thwarting the whole process, and so she was struggling with that, right? And she had gone for advice from California, and it's like good luck. So it was amazing to hear that. What we see on the law side is, I think one of our other panelists, Ian Kichijima of Ocean It, put it fantastically, is that the need is never, the human need is never going to change. What changes is how we address it, and so the how portion on the tech side is pretty obvious. You can, again, go to Walmart, go to any store, you can buy some sort of tech solution, and so what we've been really struggling to keep up with is on the policy side, as far as what do we think are appropriate boundaries for how we do things. Yeah, you don't want to restrict people, but you can't just let them have all, there is intellectual property rights, and there are things that are owned, and so you can't just take them for your own use, or at least you can't take them and make business out of them without remunerating the proper persons, or licensing the technology or the information. Ian was great, so Ian Kichijima was another panelist, and his panel ended up amazing. Those guys actually got into education, and then they got into leadership, and I think it was suggested that all the old guys like me with the bald heads and the gray hair got to get out of the way and let the kids, like, we should go work for them, because they have a different perspective on how they can help the world, and we need to quit telling them how, and we had a couple of students in the audience, and their comments were sort of, I think, like, don't put us in a pipeline. Don't keep us in a channel. Let us decide how to do what it is we need to do, and as refreshing to hear, I don't know if we're all ready to get out of the way yet. I mean, I want to get my paycheck, but maybe I don't need it. I don't know. I think there's room for it all, you know. I mean, and that's kind of going to be the struggle in the next couple of decades, is where we have the workhorse that is aging and transitioning to the baby boomer generation, from the baby boomer generation to the baby boomer generation, and oftentimes very different work styles, very different needs and technological awareness or ability. But, again, going back to Ian's comment, the human need is never going to change. It's always how you do things that does. And so, I think... Do you think it's a trust element? I mean, you know, like a generational trust element kind of thing, because, you know, how, like the blue collar, the boomers have all these, and I think I'm not 63, so I'm right at the end of them, I think I'm in the boomers, but, you know, we have an expectation of the how. And it's not shared, I don't think, and it's not necessarily the best how, you know, for sure. Right, and I think it's the expectation that there is a single how is what has changed with the millennial generation. Again, with the proliferation of technology and what, you know, you can kind of think of it as the democratization of information where, if you look hard enough, you can probably find what you want to know somewhere if you try hard enough. And so, as a result of that, you know, people can self-teach, they can self-learn, and they can become self-starters, and I think a lot of people in the millennial generation expect to be able to do that, but it's sort of coming to the decision or coming up with a strategy is how do we make, marry that flexibility with some of the security and the time-tested structures that already exist? The ones that we believe or we know, like, you're getting paid X so I expect you to work for your pay, but I think there are organizations, I don't know if it's Google or Amazon, I think they give their staff like an hour or so many hours a week to go do something creative, like create something new, and it's unstructured, but they're, you know, so I don't know if they're accountable with a report of what they're doing, or I'm not sure if the company owns it or they own it, I'm not sure how that works, but it seems like the right idea, at least from what one of the students expressed anyway about the way we, I guess the, I guess she was really talking about her career path, sort of not being, don't put me in a pipeline, I think was the thought, because it may not be a pipeline at all. Right, I think it's sort of learning to be comfortable with that spirit of innovation and bringing it into our everyday lives that I think a lot of younger people want to be able to see in their workplace because, you know, it's interesting as time goes on, more and more studies are coming out that find a lot of parallels between the millennial generation and actually the greatest generation where a lot of findings are that they share a lot of traits in that they want to be mission-oriented, they want something that they can believe in and work towards and, you know, really, really fall behind, and... So strong ethics then, so they, you know, it's not faking it, you know, it's legit, you know, and help the community or help the world or truly make a difference, like really make a difference, I'd say we make a difference and not, you know. And I think a lot of the basic tools are available now. It's just, again, we want to make sure we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater that we do have tried and true methods and structures and institutions that are valuable and that they are very inextricably linked with our community that, you know, we can't throw them out overnight. Yeah, I kind of wonder if there's a little bit of protectionism in there, you know, is there a little bit of fear of change, which I'm sure is normal, you know, and how much change can we have because, oh, you know, you want to enable failure, right? Because if you're not failing, you're not trying, all those types of things, but too much failure can cost you the business, right? So there's that aspect of it. And I don't, I've never heard, I don't have heard of millennials asking for that kind of lateral room in their job performance, but I think somehow we've got to tie their performance to the greater good. You know, what's this company doing? What are they doing to enable this company to contribute or something like that? I hear that, you know, discussed quite a bit, and it came out, you know, on the show. Absolutely, and I think the way I've heard it expressed before that, you know, change is inevitable. It's sort of like when you, it's sort of like the tides. The tide will always come in, the tide will always move, the waves will always come in, and so it's a matter of do you dive deep and avoid getting swept out? Do you learn how to catch the wave, or do you just kind of stand where you are and hope it doesn't knock you over, right? Yeah, I think that's the tourist approach. So we also had, you know, Alan Oshima was there from HECO, the head of HECO, and wow, like he's enabling, he's talked about like the sharing of information that we're not even talking about the good things that are happening. He was talking about some education programs that they contributed to, and it was difficult to get the contribution into the hands of the school, because it was like, I don't know, it was a grant or the way it was funded, that that was hard, you know, so there's, but there's all these, there's some amazing things going on in R&D here and in education here that you don't even hear about. So we heard about it at the show, I was like, wow, I've never heard of this. Right, and there's, you know, there's so much room for collaboration, and I think, culturally, we're raised to believe that you work with your neighbor, you work with people who are here. It's just, I don't know what happens in the translation between being raised with that mentality and then entering the workforce where we have this, I want to call it a bad habit, almost, of you hunker down at your job and you don't look outside, which is unfortunate. And a buried behind the keyway. Right, and you know, you don't talk to people who are in different industries or sometimes even in different departments in the same organization, and that's kind of what we wanted this conference to be the first step to work against, because again, like you said, we have fantastic resources, we have fantastic minds here, and we're small enough that it's not that hard to work together, we just need to, I think, start talking. Yeah, and when we found out there was an educator there from Hung-Won-Jee School. Yeah, the Hung-Won-Jee Mission School. And he kind of turned us all in our ears, like, hey, here's the stuff we're doing. He had built an IT organization for his students. They could use any device, any software. I mean, I was like, I want to go to school there. Right. I'd love to go to school there, you know? And he was, are they K-12? I'm not sure, I don't know the school, but... I think the one, the program he was talking about was K-8, but we'd have to double... K-8, I want to say. Amazing to give those kids that gift of anything's possible. Here's the toolbox. Build whatever you want. Absolutely. You know, I didn't get that. I got ABCs and multiplication tables. Sit down and face the teacher, right? Right, sure, yeah, yeah. And I think a number of our speakers actually touched on that where, you know, you want to bring innovation into the classroom as early as possible because we want our children to really internalize that to understand that that's a part of life and that there are different ways of thinking. And we want to encourage that because it does for valuable products out of it. Yeah, we need the leadership in our community definitely needs to step up and enable this. And we talked a little bit about that. Steve Auerbach was there from PCAT. He had some great hypotheses about how things occur and why they occur. And, you know, he's charged, I think, with delivering some educational components out there in a more of a bootcamp style, I think. Or is actually, are they integrated with the UH a little bit or something like community colleges, I think, at PCAT? Right. They're the Pacific Center for Advanced Technology Training. And they're a consortium of the community colleges under the UH system. So they do plug in with the UH strategic planning. And they've been doing a lot of great work as far as having, like you said, bootcamp style trainings. And it's an interesting new approach to education where you do have sort of the seminar setup. And so it's more flexible, I think, for people who might already be in the workforce with students who want to be exposed early on to that sort of education. And it's not something that you see integrated just yet into a lot of curriculum. But it's, you know, very focused set of hard skills that you can leave with. Pick up, sure. So we need to get, like, Steve and now. We need to get them in here on the show. And we've ran through our time today, amazingly. It's awful quick. I'm sorry for that. Thank you for coming out. Yeah, thanks for having me. I owe you a cup. We never let our guests go away empty-handed. I've got to get a solo cup. I've got to get an autograph by Gordo and myself. And I will deliver it to you. And come back any time, next time even before the show so we can, you know, see the audience a little bit and get them pumped up. So thanks for watching us today. Appreciate it. And we'll talk again soon. Aloha.