Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante at wikibond.org. I'm here with Jeff Frick. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. We come to events, we extract the signal from the noise, we share with you, our audience, the best guests that we can find. Mike Scarpelli is here, he's the CFO of ServiceNow. We're at Knowledge, great conference, and we're extracting that signal from all the noise in the industry. Mike, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much for having me today. Yeah, you got to be thrilled with the progress. You're coming off obviously a very strong quarter. You had your financial analysts here at the event, which is great for them. They get to see the customers. You guys are very transparent about giving access to customers and try to sort of coordinate them off behind the velvet rope. I mean, it's wide open here. You've got 4,000 people, most are customers. You've got prospects here. So congratulations on the progress thus far, because you're a public company, so you're never done. You're always on the cusp. So tell me, what's the reaction been from the financial community that's had an opportunity to attend this event? What are they telling you? The biggest feedback from investors was, is they're surprised at the number of customers, and large logo customers, that we're able to have up on stage and talk glowing about the company. And it's beyond the whole ITSM help desk, because historically that's been the biggest pushback we've gotten from investors. There's a lot of kind of some of the, more the shorts that kind of pushed the limited market size, and the feedback was, is now they get it, how big the market size can be and the potential. And many, they feel it's endless the market size. Yeah, well let's talk about the TAM a little bit. Your main served market, you're saying, is the global 2000, you're about 14% penetration into the global 2000, even though you've got 1,600 plus customers. So you've got a ways to go there. There's definitely some nice runway, but the TAM is much more than that. Certainly you can serve a small and mid-sized customers. Plus, you're approaching this new opportunity with platform as a service, if I can even use that term. So talk about your TAM a little bit. How should observers be thinking about the opportunity for service now? Well, the way we look at it is we feel the traditional ITSM market is at least a $4 billion plus market. If you just do the math based upon our run rate, our penetration, and then looking at and our penetration boost in terms of the number of customers, and this is just focused on large enterprise. We think there's about 12,000 large enterprises in the world that are ideal customers today where we're going after. We really don't go after the SMB market directly. We let some of our MSP customers, like Dimension Data and some of the others that serve the SMB market. And then within our customer base, even within IT, we still see many G, for example. We're not in all the divisions of G, so we know there's more room to grow. And we think we're somewhere about a third penetrated. And if you just look at that, that would tell you we're somewhere around a $4 billion market there. And the platform, we just announced the app creator to this date that we really never enabled our customers to really deploy custom apps. They did it on their own. Now with the app creator, it's much easier for customers to now play with it. And so we think the market is at least double the ITSM market, and I think that's being very conservative. Talk to some analysts and they think it's a $20 billion plus market. Yeah, I mean, my sense is that's very conservative because the big problem with the ITSM market is it's sort of been forced on people. You don't buy the legacy ITSM products because you want to, you buy them because you sort of have to and you sort of forced into it and they just don't help me grow my business. It's just a painful environment. So $20 billion to him, I don't know. I mean, that sounds like it's a great possibility for you but as you start to go into the business lines and new applications, who knows, it could be even much larger than that. So talk about what it's like to be a public company. I don't know if you saw Mark Andreessen on CNBC the other day, did you hear about this? No, I never saw that, no, what did he say? So he basically came on and said, oh, it's horrible to be a public company and it's very challenging and the number of public companies is down and of course it was self-serving but a lot of what he said is true.  I personally thought the Facebook IPO was going to be a great thing for technology companies but when they overpriced it, it became not a great thing. It wasn't Netscape, it wasn't Google, it was face plant. So what's your take?  What's it like being a public company? What's the experience been like other than ringing the bell at the NYSE? That must have been exciting. You know, things really haven't changed that much. This is the fourth company, I've been the CFO of public company. What I will say today is probably the biggest challenge for being a CFO today and any company is really the whole auditing profession with the PCOB has really changed that the level of detail that auditors go into today has made it a lot more challenging for your quarterly close and your annual close. And that's probably the most painful thing of being a public company from my perspective. I think it's great being a public company because we can give full transparency to our customers. When you're a private company, you can give transparency but they don't necessarily believe what you're saying. As a public company, I can't hide behind the numbers. Well, the other thing too is as a private company they almost want to talk to the CFO and you don't have time to talk to them. That's right. So that's really sort of why I asked the question because, you know, Andreessen's angle I can understand but from your standpoint, you're competing with much larger players. And if I'm a sales guy, I'm going to say, well they're a small company, they're underfunded or it could be out of business in a while. So going public had to be a big brand boost for you. Number one and number two, it probably changes the way in which you look at cash flow a little bit. So the number one thing about being a public company versus a private company is once you set expectations for the market, you have to make sure you meet those expectations. So if you give long-term, if you're really giving long-term guidance in a technology company, it's very hard because you want to be dynamic, change on the fly. And if you are a public company and if you don't want to meet expectations, you may make the wrong business decision. And you saw Dell, one of the reasons why he wanted, they want to go public is so they can make the right to business decisions. That's more for large companies have that struggle. As a small company, when you're in growth, if you set the right expectations to investors, it's not difficult being a public company. Cash flow, we've told all of our investors, our goal is we have 330, 340 million in cash. Investors invested in us to grow that. I'm not looking to just grow it and earn a half a point of interest. You're going to grow that more if we invest it back in the business. And hence we hired at a record pace last quarter. We're expanding in more data centers and you're going to see in 2013 we've told the analysts that we're going to invest all of our free cash flow, operating cash flow back into the business. Yeah, I mean that's obviously a question that everybody's asking you guys aren't profitable because you pour the money back into the business and that's by design. If I understand what you're saying, it's a better ROI than sticking it on the earning statement. Correct and in terms of the profitability, SaaS companies, their profitability is mass given that we sign a contract and generally we sign a three year contract and we get annual billings in advance and you see the deferred revenue growing and you see that you want to see operating cash flow not necessarily free cash flow but you want to see your deferred revenue grow and you want to see the backlog grow and you've seen that every quarter our deferred revenue. A couple hundred million almost. Yeah, we have about a hundred and don't quote me on this thing. It's in the filing, 172 million or so. Yes, exactly. Yeah, so that's a good observer should look at that deferred revenue line item and are there any others that observers should be paying attention to? Yeah, in our mind, the three things that we really manage our business by and it's as we talked at our investor today is we want to walk before we run and we think we have a clear line of sight to get to a billion dollars sometime in 2016 and we're going to get there in three ways. It's really new customer acquisition, gaining new customers and the reason why that's so important is we've shown historically and we've been disclosing this in all of our filings. Once we get a customer, we retain a customer, we have north of a 95% renewal rate, dollar renewal rate for our customers and we've also been able to show once we get a customer, we further penetrate those customers. 30% of all of our business and on average in any quarter is new business to existing customers. Those are upsells that's further penetrating the ITSM opportunity and it's also getting users on the platform as well. And your average sales prices are up? Yeah, well the average revenue per customer continues to increase. What we're doing is we're much better disciplined around our pricing with customers such that we're not discounting, really haven't changed, our list prices haven't changed. Yeah, so that's more increased number of seats. Correct. Not charging more per se. Correct, correct. And when you talk about- Actually a lot of times you'll see when we, when customers buy more seats they start to get volume discounts. There's tiered volume discounts when they get to us. You don't reset all of your original seats. There are a few original contracts that we had that we inherited, but most it's just incremental discounts on the incremental seats. And you have this massive, impressive renewal rate of 95 plus percent and it was 96% last quarter. Now when we talk about that, we're talking about units, right? That's not a value-based renewal. No, it's a dollar. We do lose. So we have 1,640 customers. We exited last quarter. We added 128 net new customers. We lose any quarter, somewhere between six to 12 customers. It's been as high as in those customers. We lose, we lose for three reasons. We let customers go bankrupt. It's a fact of life. Customers get acquired. And if they get acquired by one of our customers it's one of our existing. It's still a customer, but it's a lost customer because it's now going into one. And then customers, we have a lot of small customers. We signed up historically that we're, as we're increasing our price of those customers, some customers never fully deployed it and saw the value because they had too small of an IT shop and they decided to go with something more of a ticketing system. Okay, so mathematically your renewal rate could be over 100%. Correct. Okay. I might be going to ask you. Well, we don't know. It can't mathematically be over 100%. Well, if you raise prices. No, we don't include, so that's actually a good point you raised. Some companies mix upsells and price increases in their renewal rates. Ours is a dollar for dollar renewal. If they originally renewed at $100, or if they originally bought at $100 and they renew at 102, the 100 goes into the renewal calculation. The two goes into an upsell because we pay our reps on those upsells. Oh, I see, okay. So it's actually more conservative calculation the way most people do it. Good, thank you for that clarification.  So you have some street cred on this question, but should the CIO report to the CFO, the CEO, the CO, do you have an opinion? I do have an opinion on this. I'm happy to give up IT to report to someone else. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I've had, for some reason, if you look at history, IT historically in most companies has reported into the CFO. And why was that? Because people looked at the cost and they thought it was something you needed to really manage costs and so it went into the IT. In my mind, it doesn't really matter who you report into. The important thing is that whoever you have leading your IT organization, whether you want to call them a CIO or VP of IT or a director of IT in a smaller shop, is that they have open access to, not the CEO, quite frankly, a lot of times the CEO is not going to be the one driving your IT decisions and your information system divisions. Who it is is going to be the other members of the executive team, whether it's the VP of engineering or the VP of support or the VP of sales with your CRM. It's so important that your IT leader is able to communicate and get feedback from all of the executives in the company. Let's talk about comparable.  Can you talk about that a little bit? I mean, are those fair comparisons? You know, the real comparison between the three is we're sass, other than that, there's so many differences between the companies. You look at a Workday, Workday really is focused on right now the HR. Yes, they are working on financials, but I think it's going to be a couple of years before they have a, and I'm not saying this, anything bad, Workday? I just think it's going to be a few years before you're really ready for large enterprise. Yes, you can sell to smaller businesses today. And that's a segment of the market we really don't play in at all. And if you look at- And they don't sell to IT. And they don't sell to IT. No, who they go into, and I know, we were actually, in my prior company, we were customer number five at Workday. I think it's a great product. And then at ServiceNow, we are now a customer again. And I think it's a great product. It's really your record keeping place for all of your HR records, but we front-end it many times with our own product. It doesn't onboard and off-board employees. It doesn't interact with your systems internally, that when you have a, whether you want to do a password change, or you want to sign someone an active director, you want to shut them down when they leave the company, we can do it seamlessly through our own product. Workday doesn't do that. In terms of Salesforce, once again, I think Salesforce is a great company. And I got to give them credit for they're the ones that really paved the road for the adoption of SaaS. We go about it a very different way. They start at their business really more as an SMB and then grew up into a now they're doing. They've been doing it for quite some time, but now they sell into the large enterprise. But if you look at their average revenue per customer, it's much lower than ours. And that's because they were selling, they have a lot more SMB customers than we do. But once again, a very, very different delivery model. It's not as mission-critical. I know my last company, we used Salesforce, couldn't go without using it. However, it was down pretty much every Saturday where you couldn't use it or on a weekend or on an end of quarter when you were trying to close the deals and end up where your pipeline is and what deals close, you're hitting refresh, refresh, refresh. That doesn't work with our customers. They want instantaneous feedback. And hence why we have a different architecture for our cloud. We have what we view as a, we call it enterprise cloud, as Arna and others have talked about this week. So we were talking about the Tamil earlier. Frank talks about these sort of vectors that you're on. You talked about it as well. Transformation, consumerization and automation as the three sort of real opportunities that you're approaching. I wonder, is there a fourth in your view as I hear things like app creator is this notion of a business line penetration? Is that potentially a new vector? Is that part of one of these three? One could argue that it's a new vector but I think it kind of falls into all three of those a little bit. It's a slice through them. Yeah, no, I just think it's, even internally we use our own product internally, probably not the best of our ability but we're really focused on it. As we talked about, we're kind of like the cobbler's son. We're now really focused so on and we have a number of interesting initiatives but what really blows me away about this product is my finance guys, my business analysts, my FPNA guys, they've been playing around with this and they've been creating an app where we can track our whole closed process where we can put a lot of the whole documentation for our SOX controls. Things that I would have never thought of doing in our product but what was amazing about it is it's done by finance people. It's not done by programmers. IT hasn't been involved in this at all. They did all the apps, your guys. Yes, they're just playing with it. And they're not Python programmers. They are not Python programmers, no. That to me is what is amazing about this. That's what I'm saying. I personally think your TAM's way bigger than four billion. I mean, you're going to say that, who knows, right? You don't know but it just seems to me that IT is such a large opportunity for you and that piece alone, it's unique in the marketplace. There's really not another organization out there and the closest I think is Microsoft Excel. And we all know, we love it and hate it. The other thing is we hear about developers, the rise of developers, the enablement of developers. There are things about the developers but no one except for Fred talks about citizen developers. I've never heard that phrase in all the conferences we've been to. It's about the developer, but you know, he kind of took it down a notch in terms of technical expertise as a citizen developer. And that was, that's a unique twist on it. Well, this is what it opens it up to the lines of business. Any business analyst can create apps on our platform and that's what makes it so much more approachable. And it's, I've just never seen another company like that. The other thing I wonder too is this, we talked to Fred about this a little bit and this is way off in the horizon, this notion of the internet of things, G.E. calls it the industrial internet, potentially service now having a role there. We talked about the big data meme and so forth but there's going to be a lot of data, a lot of complexity. Complexity seems to be your friend and so who knows, that could be just yet another wave of potential growth for a company like yours. You just, you don't know sometimes, right?  My last question is, you know, the classic what keeps you up at night, what worries you? I mean, you're working with Frank Slutman so he's throwing gasoline on the fire. We know Frank from other days and he knows how to scale companies so I'm going to speak to you guys pretty hard but so what keeps you up at night? What worries you, what are you looking out for? You know, these days the two things that worry me the most as a CFO is IT and I'll explain why in a little bit and facilities and the reason being is we are growing so fast and the problem unlike my last company was that most of our growth was in one location so it's a lot easier to project your growth and the requirements for IT requirements for facility. In this company we are so geographically dispersed with all of our offices in the US and what we're doing around the world. It's as you're adding last quarter we added 192 net new employees. We're going to add around 200 this quarter as we talk. Where are all those people going? And trying to get the, I think some of the managers whether they're in R&D or whether they're in sales or they're in our support organization they're great at telling me the number of people they need but they're not necessarily great at telling us exactly where they will be located and it puts all kinds of challenges on the. Well, that's just reminding me you guys are what, 70% of your business is North America? 70% of our business is North America from a revenue perspective. Just a number of those customers are global customers so the way we do it is based upon where the PO is actually generated so that doesn't mean that 70% of our users are in North America but we're growing rapidly internationally and we have such a focus half of our ads from a sales and marketing perspective are going into international markets. Isn't that how, for instance, IBM would do it? Maybe you don't know, I don't know necessarily either but and IBM's, I think the majority of its business is not IBM but not a $100 billion company but the majority of that large company's business is overseas, I would imagine they do it the same way. I'm not sure. But they do but when you look at other SaaS companies out there whether you're looking at Salesforce and stuff, most of Salesforce is still and yes they've done well in Japan but their users tend to be more where the company is. It's easy for them to just add on seats from that corporate PO, okay that's the kind of difference. All right Mike, well listen, it was really a pleasure having you on and thanks for helping educate us about your business. We're really excited that you guys had us here, it's been a fantastic two days, we're going another half day tomorrow but so thanks very much, it's a pleasure meeting you and thank you for having me today. Thank you. All right everybody, keep it right there. We're going to do a quick cut, we're going to check out what's happening at Google I.O. in San Francisco and we're going to be back to wrap. This is theCUBE, we're right back after this.


Exercise number six in our eight exercise progression to activating your glutes during the deadlift. We did a lot of stuff on the ground on those first five exercises. Number six now, we're increasing the complexity, the motor pattern complexity of the movement. So now there's more gravity to oppose. I have fewer points of contact on the ground and we're gonna start doing movements that look a lot more like deadlifting. Number six is the single leg RDL. I should have practiced a couple of these because I know I'm gonna fall on camera, but it's okay. We're learning here. Okay, so single leg RDL. RDL means Romanian deadlift. That's just the top half of a deadlift. Okay, so as I come down here, I get a little bit of a stretch and I'm pushing through my foot. That makes sure I'm still activating this stuff here. Now, why is this important? How does this relate to what we've done already? If I reach this foot back and arch my low back, I turn my back on, I feel it in my back, but I don't feel it in my legs so much. I might feel it in the front of my leg, but I don't feel it in the back of my leg. So instead of arching my back like this, I need to round my back a little bit more. Seems counterintuitive. Not what people say often, but often people don't understand biomechanics either. So that was a little aggressive. I apologize. You saw part of my unfilteredness. So round the low back so that the hamstring, so that the glute is in a good position to work. And now I'm gonna take that and I'm going to make sure I'm maintaining it throughout this movement. So there's two main components to this. One, I gotta get the spine position. And we're talking about that with the round back thing throughout the movement. And two, I need to initiate with my hips, okay? I don't want to, if you've watched my video on Bring the Hips, it's probably the most important video I've ever made. Maybe I should link to it if I remember, I will. I need to initiate with the hips. I need to bring the hips forward and then the body stands up. I don't want to initiate with my shoulders up because that's a good way to cue my back to turn on. So what this looks like, I'm not here, I'm gonna set up with an exhale and just round my low back. Yes, round my low back. That's actually what I want. That lets me, I feel my glute already. I feel my heel in the ground a lot more. Good, I know what I got. Okay, so I'm gonna hang on to that as I bend over, making sure not to lose it. If I do lose it, I'm gonna just check at the bottom, okay? I can put my foot on the couch while I sit here and take inventory. Did I lose it? Oh yeah, I did lose it, so let's find it again. Okay, and we're gonna try that again. I'm just gonna say I gotta get to that position. And we're there. Now, to come back up, I initiate with the hips. I bring the hips forward like this. Bam, keeping the heel, not shifting my weight forward onto my toes like this. I know it seems kind of subtle. I might just keep my foot kind of normal here. It seems kind of subtle, but I feel a lot of calf when I shift my weight forward and I start to feel a little bit of front of hip.  And I feel my glute, there it is. Good, so I wanna hang on to this while I do all my reps. Got a nice low back position and then I bring the hips forward. What does it look like if I don't bring the hips forward? Maybe my whole lowering is really good and then I do this to stand up, okay? You see that makes me lose my balance even. Let's do that again. Shoulders first, like this. Ooh, shoulders first. What that's doing is it's initiating with my low back. What that does is it actually decreases some of the feedback that I get in my foot. My foot's my main point of instability for me, so I lose my balance really quickly when I do that. Instead, we gotta maintain that little rounded low back. I know I'm being very repetitive on this. This is a complicated one and if you can get this, it sets you up for success in a lot of other things. So we're activating the glutes. Now, why did we do the single leg before we did a normal deadlift? The single leg gives me some more freedom, okay? It's easier to overemphasize maybe the rounding of the back on one side than it is to overcome the tension on both sides while I'm doing this. So we learned the single leg variation first and then we're gonna get into deadlifting or normal deadlifting. There are two things at play here. One, there's that, that just general glute activity as you're looking at me from the side. Can I get it here? And there I feel a great squeeze. And then, drum roll please. We turn around and we look at this from behind. So I could film myself from behind and if I'm doing this, I'm not getting all the glute that I could be getting. I can use the single leg variation to kind of cheat because in a deadlift I'm not gonna do this but in the single leg variation, I'm gonna hike the opposite hip up, keep my foot flat on the ground and now there it is. I can feel a little bit more of this outside glute, this deeper glute, okay? And that's gonna just help me find the glute at the top of this lift. So same idea, I keep my low back rounded. I make sure I have it at the bottom, check, bring the hips forward to stand up and then at the very end, I don't wanna finish like this. I wanna finish with this hip a little bit more height. Where people go wrong here, oftentimes you start to list the upper body this way when you hike this hip up. I need the upper body to stay loosey-goosey so that left shoulder comes down when I get to the top, okay? That's just something that I usually visually cue or I might just say, bring your left shoulder down too. If you don't get it, sometimes you're just tight because you're trying to learn a new movement and it's okay, just do a couple reps and it looks better. If not, film yourself, try to find another way to do it. If it's still not working, go back to the single leg variation. Maybe try that hip hike in the single leg, not variation, single leg glute bridge that we did previously. That can help you start to learn that motion. I know this is a lot. It's because it's a complicated exercise and there's plenty of places for it to go wrong but that's why it's in here because I need to challenge you now. I need to get you on your feet. I need to teach you how to extend your hip without using your back so that your glutes turn on.


What's going on, everyone? Sam here with late sports cards. We are ripping 22, 23, top 28 for club competitions, Merlin, Chrome, soccer, hobby. Six box break, number 12, random team style. Here's a look again at your random results. As always, you can find those on the website, under the results tab, as well as the link in chat. Good luck here, everybody. What up, Shane? I know, dude, I felt so bad for Shane. He got zero cards, and I was like shocked. And it was, you know, the craziest, it was the AL Central, too, which is like a bunch of teams that have a billion gods. You know what I mean? Like the White Sox always hit, like the Tigers always hit, like they're all teams that have been around forever. Royals, wins. That's my type of look right there. What's up? Definitely my type of look right there. Oh, yeah. I feel like... Yeah, chat home, grin, freaking case hit, no. Sure, sure, buddy. Do you see a... Antonio Nusa, club bruce. I jumped in the finale today, dude. Which one? I was like the six box, chrome... Arno Calamuendo. What'd you get? I had the Royals. Oh, yeah? Nothing? No. Here's a lot. Marcel DeSalle. I actually did well in the break I did with Forrest. Really? I was in Nicola Zaluzki, A.S. Aroma. I think you were top loading that night. It was like last Friday night. Oh, we had the... I had the Red Sox, yeah. Of course. There's Gavi. I was like, damn, that worked. Not bad. Vintage Merlin, Marquisado for Barcelona. Yeah, no, I agree, Trab. These Merlin look insane, dude. Lucas Ucic for Salzburg. That's a Lucas Ucic, atomic to 250. Could always just take a couple of random hit spots, Shane. See if we can make it to and around now. There's Charles de Cattelari, AC Milan. Oh, man, I know we gotta get Shane something, dude. Come on. That is a Luca Romero under 21 for Lazio. Minidiamonds, Erling Holland to 150. There you go, Man City. Nice one there. Manchester City. Going to Sean M, correct Sean. Holland. White Speckle. Refractor Darwin Nunez. Merlin Masters, Jamal Muziala. Osemen L Azuzai, Union Saint-Julie, three of five. Red Wave, congrats on that one. Noah F, it's a big one, buddy. Let's go. I know, that's a tough one. That's nasty right there, bro. Congrats on that. That's a match ball right there, too. We'll do that one last. Come on. Ah, you can add the red. Tistel, Calamuendo. Renee, I've got a lot of spots coming in here. Scott with the divisional. Adam with a mixer spot. We got Lorcana. Chad S with the Blue Jays and Finest. We've got Shane with the last divisional spot. Stephen H with the Eagles in 51. And Justin with a mixer spot as well. Thank you all. So yeah, Divisions is now sold out of Archives. Robert Lavandowski. Cool one-on-one, Randy Johnson. I'll be forgiven. All right, see if we can do that. That'd be awesome. Got match ball is Kyogo Furuhashi. Nice one there. Congrats, Celtic. Oh, that's a nasty ball patch as well. Congrats on that, Celtic. Very nice. That's sick. I'm going to take that. Oh, absolutely. Those are fire. So we are down to 13 to go now on Finest. Just two left on Jumbo. We've got the Guardians and Giants. Guardians, Giants. And Giants on top scrum. Jumbo, that breaks next. Got those two teams sold out. Both on sale. Yeah, that is one of the nicest relics I've seen out of the match balls, which is awesome.  So Fernandez, Paul Vonner. It's a refractor of Jared Bowen. Check one thing really quick here. Yeah, I kind of feel that, to be honest. I feel that, Jeremy. That's A, Mikhail Moudric. Merlin Masters rookie. Yeah, now I'm just nagging. That is a sorcerer's Joao Felix. Nice one there for Chelsea on the auto. Nice insert. I love the insert autos issue too. Insert autos look fantastic. It's a Julian Alvarez refractor rookie man city. A Fabio Moretti for Juventus. A Ronaldo, R9, Agus Alchemy. It's a blue of Pedro Gonzalez for Sporting to 75. Alejandro Carnacho. Nice one, man United at 350. Rookie, Green Shimmer. That's nasty. A Esauk, Bergman, Johansson, Copenhagen. Refractor Gabriel Martinelli, Arsenal. Frank Ricard, the Merlin Masters. Kai Osaka, Anthony, Merlin Masters. I picked up two packs and I thought I was like, oh another match ball. It is not, it is not. I know about move, about move. Say a refractor of Carney Chukomeka. We got a gold of Sergio Ramos, PSG 35 of 50. Nice one there, Gareth PSG, Jeff M on the gold. Gavi Giorana, Marisha Dortmund. US men national team legend. Antoine Griezmann, 199. Nice one there for Atletico. More spots coming in here. Arcadius P with a Merlin spot. Got Ronald A with a divisional IMAX spot. Raymond R with a archived spot. Glenn with the Guardians in top scromb jumbo. Thank you, Glenn. So we're down to just the giants in TC jumbo, everybody. Just the giants in our next break. Then we got to fill up the rest of our breaks that are still available today. Some NT, we've got some baseball, some archives as well. Love me, some archives, man. God, it's so nasty. It's a refractor of Josco Gavardio for Leipzig. Valentin Carboni for Milano. Enzo Fernandez, Merlin Masters rookie. Got a mojo of Antonio Silva to 99. Nice one there, Benfica on the auto. Antonio Silva, that is a Alonso Granacho rookie refractor. Under 21, Gavi Mena. Antonio Nusa, that is to 299. Rose gold shimmer for Club Bruges. Fractor, Karim Adiyemi, Dortmund. Pink mojo, Dijon Kulesevski for Tottenham to 275. Pink mojo. Say Gabriel Martinelli, Merlin Masters. Andre Schlitter, rookie under 21. Benfica, Zidane for Aegis Alchemy. Vintage Merlin is Mohamed Kudus for IX. Luca Modric, Shri Amadrid refractor. Mubama for West Ham. Green shimmer is Arno Calamuendo for Rene, 350. Oblacal Palmer under 21, Man City. And last pack here is Yoria Reger, that is for IX to 150. Many times, White's back low rookie. Very nice, very nice. More spots coming in. Scot C with the Red Sox in Finest. We've got Glenn with the Giants are sold out on TC Jumbo, thank you, Glenn. Lou F with the Finns in 52. Chiakai with a Merlin spot and a personal. So very nice, thank you all, appreciate that. I like your dad. Oh yeah, he does do it. Desiree Due. That's a Paulo de Bala to 150 for Roma. Refractor None Maduike for Chelsea. Polinava Rezruki, Christopher and Kunku for Leipzig to 199. Been boxing. Send help out sparring and I'm dead. God, I feel that album. Lee and Al Messi, itches out for me. I gotta get back into that, man. I love boxing. Sparring was always a little scary though. He's always gonna hit in the face. Chavi Simons, Eindhoven, PSV. I don't know if I told you or Donnie this, but me and my buddy, we used to box like, Matisse tell like every day in college, not spar, but like we just like do like, we have like a workout and the like. That's Magnus at Luyeche for Monaco and we would, the last part of the workout is you had to take an upper cut to the jaw every single time, yeah. That's Elise Ben Seguir as Monaco to 250. Cause it's kind of like the way we were thinking about it. Like, well, you know, obviously this is good exercise, but like Merlin master most solid.  So it's like, all right. Might as well learn to take a punch. Robert Lavandosky. Learn to take an upper cut. It is a lot of fun. It is a lot of fun, Alvin. That is a INS Hagi for Rangers refractor auto. Alvin, a good way to start the workout too is do like 30 seconds to a minute of jump rope and it really like gets you going. That's like my, one of my favorite part, apology, Bala is I put like a song on and I do a jump rope through the entire song and then start with the workout. Matteo, cancel, you just got your blood flowing like blood pumping really well. All monsters can jump rope so. I know. We used to like, I used to be able to jump a serious rope. Serious rope. Serious rope. At least Ben's the gear. Oh, there you go. Yeah, there you go. That's smart. Honestly, that is really smart. That's literally probably better. Dijon Khmeri for Salzburg refractor. Just as good, if not better for sure. Vintage Merlin, it's Bruno Fernandez, Man United. Nice one there. All right guys, let's get Finest working on here. He just saw your order coming. Jacob P with a spot in that mixer. Again, we've got Finest. So, TC Jumbo sold out Finest. We've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 teams to go. 11 to go on Finest everybody. Let's get that sold on out. That is a full case, pick your team style. All cards do ship on that. So, you get every single card we pull will end up with you.  I got a good laugh out of it.  Yeah. That's Ronaldo R9, Aegis Alchemy. What do you put on Instagram? Yeah. Oh, that's a young Alvin. That is our buddy Alvin right there. Alvin, chipmunks, slots in chat. That's a young Alvin. I was dying when I saw that. That was so funny. That's gonna be Jack Raelish 2150 for Man City. There's Mosalla Liverpool Refractor.  Gabriel Martinelli. I'm sure still knocking him back to it, 19. That is a Noah Lang for Club Bruges Refractor Auto. Nice one there. Glad to congrats Club Bruges. Yeah, Mohamed Ali Cho, Real Sociedad. A Refractor of Francie Pereo for Maccabi Haifa. Maccabi Haifa. That is a Chavi Simons Eindhoven. PSV. Blue Shema is Simon Adingra for Union Saint-Jolie to 75. Hey, Benjamin Sesco, Salzburg. Refractor Nicolo Fagioli, Juventus. I'm surprised we haven't seen K-Riz, I have to say. That's Nicolo Berea. So, you know how he lives with Sab and one other kid. So the other, his other roommate's name is Kyle. Oh, really? Mateus Sule, and he joins like a lot of Razzes on Facebook, so I coined the nickname K-Riz and K-Razz. There's Luca Modric, so you have K-Riz, Kyle and then K-Razz, which is the other Kyle. There's Hugo Ekotike, Vintage Merlin, Rookie. Sure he'll be in there at some point. Santa Jose, right, it'll be Sam and Springs in the morning, that's what it'll be. Benjamin Sesco, Refractor, Marcus Edwards, and Atomic, Marcusado to 250. Nice one there, Barca, Lona on the roof. All right, man, more spots coming in. Thank you all, Jonathan S with the bills in 52. Got Seth with a Merlin spot. Charlie with the Rockies in Top Chrome Jumbo. Troy with a archive spot, thank you Troy. And Sean L with some Larkana over on late in gaming. Thank you all, I'm sure the gaming shop is very appreciative of all of you picking up spots, or not spots, but like Larkana personals and Larkana sealed stuff. It's gonna be fun, man. I'm excited to see this though. I am too, dude, I think it's gonna be solid. Unless you have a game watch too. Yeah, that'll be interesting. Lucas Suchich, Salzburg. I'm sure they'll have tournaments over there too, which is kinda cool. Yeah, I think there's already a thing on the way. Oh, tonight maybe, yeah. That's a Savio, Eindhoven, Antonio Silva, then Fica. Yeah, then... Is there one? Yeah, it's a Larkana starter deck tournament. Alex Lowry, that's kinda cool, because I think it's like $40 answer when you get a starter deck, which is really smart. Yeah, first one you get five packs. Leroy Sane for Bayern Munich to 99 on the green choice. The green mojo, very nice. Vintage Merlin, Dominic Sobelzai for Leipzig. Green Shima, Romelo Lukaku for Milano to 350. Green Shima. Refractor, Yori Vaz, Ajax. That is a Mohamed Darmy for Copenhagen Refractor. Jadon Sancho for Man United Refractor, nice one there, Man United. Merlin Masters, Harry Kane. Rose gold shimmer, Leroy Sane to 299. Congrats to Bayern Munich. Love the rose gold, it's so good. And this... That is a Refractor Otto Marco Verotti for PSG. Nice one there, congrats. PSG going to Jeff, then. There you go, Jeff. Grats, buddy. Very nice, very nice. Rivaldo. Age of Salisman. Ekotike Refractor, Sergio Ramos, PSG. Wayne Rooney, Merlin Masters. We got an orange. Orange mojo, Nicholas Raskin, 23 to 25. Rookie for Rangers, nice one there, Rangers. That'll be going to... We've got Rangers. Jeff M, there you go, Jeff. And last pack to break, good luck, everybody. That is a Refractor of Dejan Kulessevsky for Tottenham Hospitals. All right, we had orange, Nicholas Raskin, 225. Otto's Marco Verotti for PSG. Noah Lane Club Rouge, INS Haji for Rangers. Joao Felix, nice one there, Chelsea on the Sorcerer's order. Antonio Silva to 99. We had a red, Osama El Azauzai for Union Saint-Jolie and Matchball Kiyogo Furuhashi for Celtic. Matchball signature. That'll do it for the break, guys. Thanks again for the film. Up next, we've got TC Jumbo.


I'm Wendy Lo and I'm your friend as we journey to take your health back and what a journey it will be as long as you take the right steps to do so. We are coming to you live from downtown Honolulu from the studios of ThinkTech Hawaii. Today our topic of discussion will be on growing healthy. Remember now, growing healthy, okay? So remember that word growing, you can do it. What I would like you to take away from today's discussion is that taking your health back is easy.  But when you're tired and you want better, then take that first step and we're here to help you along. Today, I'm your host and your guest sharing all my knowledge of growing healthy by growing with the Tower Gardens. But before I get started, I just want to tell you a little bit about me. So I am not the right person actually to talk to you about growing and making things grow from the earth because I can't even grow flowers. You give me an orchid plant, I'll put it in the pot, it grows. A couple of weeks later, the flowers fall off, it's done, I'm done, I'm over it. So this is really unusual and very out of the box for me to be in this field as it is my first career and I'll get to that in a minute. It's a little bit about Wendy. I am a mother of two beautiful young ladies and that's all I wanted to be is a housewife with two young ladies and a husband and just cook and clean and take care of the family. And that's what I did until I got thrown into the business world. Then I started making chocolates. I made chocolates for about 20 years. And if you can see a slide there of me and my daughters, first of all, those two young ladies were born into the chocolate factory. So I had Cassandra, the one in the forefront. And then I had the second one as I opened my first factory. So it was like I had twins. Jumped in there, survived for 20 years, loved every moment of making chocolate. And I was a happy camper. I thought I would die a chocolate tutu. And what happened was when I turned 50, I sold it, I retired. And another career opportunity came to me. But before we get to that, let me show you a picture of what I used to look like for the last 20 years. And that is me with the hair net and the garb. And some people won't recognize me, but that's what I look like in the factory for the past 20. And now we started another factory called Chocolate Unmission. And they're continuing to perform and produce the best chocolates in all of Hawaii. But that's what I used to look like. So about seven years ago, I was introduced to a concept of growing. And it's called the Tower Garden. And so on this slide here, this is what I started growing on my balcony.  But what happened was this opportunity came to me via a company, the Tower Garden Company, and we were test marketing to see what it would be like if people like me were being given a tower and see how easy it is to grow or not to grow. So I flew mine into Hawaii. I started with the little seedlings and I'm going to show you in a little bit how simple all this is. Start with a little seedling. After two weeks of germination, we put it into the Tower Garden. And then it grows on its own for about three weeks in the tower. It's ready to consume. So the next slide shows you I left my salad or my lettuce in a bit longer than three weeks. And so that's the same tower a few weeks later. And see how mature all that lettuce came. And so as we grow, you're supposed to cut and eat. And that is right there. It represents non-GMO seeds. I don't use any pesticides.  And so I basically don't have to do a whole lot. And that's why my job is so simple because I travel a lot. I want to say raising produce and veggies on the Tower Garden is a little easier than even raising children. I don't want to compare them, but it does. It is. And what I get from it is I get very great results of great food that I get to consume daily. So I've been living off of my tower for the last seven years. Every morning I'll cut kale, blend smoothies, and I drink it every day. When I go on the road, I make fresh kale smoothies or whomever I can pass it out to. But the whole idea, again, non-GMO seeds, no chemicals, cut, five minutes old, blend it up, and it's right into my body. So I'm very, very excited about that. So our company said, wow, and your tower's growing really well. But you know what? We can't get towers to Hawaii because it's going to be about $100, $125 to ship that 48-pound box to Hawaii. And I don't think the people of Hawaii will be willing to pay that amount of shipping costs. So I said, let me try. So what we did was we gathered up some orders, and everybody was excited that saw my tower. They all wanted a tower or another tower here. So we sold the first 30 or 40, and then another shipment. And then it got to the point where everybody pretty much was jumping on board. So I asked the company, can we now get towers in Hawaii? And they said, not yet, Wendy. I don't know. We still got a test to market. So what I did was I said, what if I purchased a 45-foot container, a Mattson container? And this is exactly what I did. That Mattson container would hold about 150 tower gardens with the tonic, with the extensions, with the dollies, with everything the tower garden needed to satisfy 150 towers. And so the company allowed me to do that. We brought the tower garden in via Mattson container. Went from Memphis to Long Beach, from Long Beach to Oahu. And then when it landed, it looked like this. It was one container full of tower gardens and their items that you needed to run it. So I called my crew, my juice-less crew. I said, hey, I need help. We got 150 tower gardens that need to be unloaded. So we opened up the container. And I can honestly say that we brought in almost 1,000 tower gardens. And every one of those first tower gardens went through my hands. They're 48 pounds. They're about 18 inches high. And they're three feet in diameter. So it's a three-by-three box, three-foot-by-three-foot box. And they passed through my hands. Everything that came off of that 45-foot container, we brought them in. I believe we brought in about eight container loads. And then the company said, wow, Hawaii wants tower gardens. And I said to the company, Hawaii doesn't just want tower gardens. Hawaii needs tower gardens. Because of the fact that we have so many different companies producing food here, using a lot of different systems, chemicals and all. And so the fact that we have a lot of urban dwellers living in condominiums like myself or just living with small spaces because real estate is a high commodity here. And so the tower gardens just makes sense. It just uses about a three-foot diameter of space that will grow right now up to 52 produce, herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers, that can supply a family of two to four enough produce throughout the course of each month. And that's why I think this is so important. Because when you start teaching the children how to use the tower gardens and give them the responsibilities that they're gonna grow the vegetables for dinner, you know, the whole idea is when they grow it, they're gonna consume it. And that's the really neat part about the tower that generations, whether they're Kiki, whether they're the Kapuna, they both can use this opportunity to grow, grow the best source of food for their families and say they go out to eat dinner tonight. The lettuce, the kale, the tomatoes, stay on the vine and they're continuing to grow and they're buying fresh tomorrow. There's still live living food versus food that was cut a week ago and you know, who knows how long it's been sitting on the shelf. So once we bought in the tower gardens, we were very blessed. Schools adopted the tower gardens. So we have a shot here of a tower garden flourishing and this is done by high schoolers. This one sits at Eulani School. They have a sustainability department and Debbie out there, she grows on every growing medium. They're using aeroponics, which we are called. They're using hydroponics, aquaponics, sorry, and traditional farming. Every system works. It's just the one that fits your needs and your purposes. So we're here to just promote people just falling in love with growing and putting the best quality into their bodies. And that's what we're really wanting to make the people of Hawaii aware of. So growing healthy. You choose which media you want and you decide what works best for your space, your time, and then you go at it. I know a lot of kupunas when they were younger, they used to grow, but now they're at senior homes or assisted living homes. They don't have the opportunity to grow. So why not give them this opportunity? Have a tower garden there. They can tend to the garden when they feel like it. They don't have to bend down to the ground because they just don't because it's a vertical growing system. And I just think it's just the best thing. So a lot of different programs throughout Hawaii have adopted these programs. We have them in public schools, private schools. We have them at Easter Seals. I know that the Culinary Institute of the Pacific is just starting to adopt this concept. They right now have one with indoor grow lights, which I'm gonna share with you later in the show, but they're growing these vegetables and herbs within their culinary institute in their kitchen. And so that's so exciting because the chefs can turn to the tower, cut and season or cut and put into the bowls after washing and then prepare the dressing and out it goes. The freshness is robust.  Who knew lettuce had smells? I had no idea. The cilantro, the lettuce, all of the different herbs, you can smell it even when the wind is blowing up high on my balcony. So I know that we're onto something and by studies from the University of Mississippi, we have studies that we can provide that shows that the vegetation that are grown on the towers registers sometimes up to a half more to two times more the nutrient content than some produce that are produced in Mother Earth. So some of you are asking, what is the tower garden and how does it work? So I've bought with me a little video to show you how the tower garden is and how it works. And then after that, I'll explain a little bit more in detail after you watch this little video. Tower Garden's state-of-the-art aeroponic vertical garden system uses both water and air to produce more colorful, better tasting and incredibly nutritious fruits, vegetables and herbs. Tower Garden has a 20 gallon reservoir at its base that stores the Tower Tonic nutrient solution. Developed by experts in plant and human nutrition, Tower Tonic mineral blend enables superior plant growth and better nutrition from your Tower Garden produce. The process begins once the seedlings have been placed in your Tower Garden. Here they will be nourished with Tower Tonic nutrient solution. Inside the reservoir is a small low wattage submersible pump. The pump pushes the nutrient solution up through the tower to the top. From there, the nutrient solution drips through the central tower using a special device that evenly cascades the solution over the exposed plant roots. On the journey down the tower, the nutrient solution feeds the roots and becomes highly oxygenated as it cascades gently down the reservoir. This process is continuous, providing fresh oxygen, water and nutrients to the roots of the plants. This patented aeroponic process enables food crops to grow faster than they would in soil so they can be harvested more often. And it makes Tower Garden the healthier, easier, smarter way to grow your produce. Wow, so is that simple or what? And that's why I love my Tower Garden so much because it's very simple. And I want to share with you as well, the Tower Garden itself is all food grade. It's not made of PVC plastics. It's all food grade. So there's no toxins that will leach into the water, into the roots, into the plants, into our bodies. Number one, they are UV protected twice. My towers have been sitting on my balcony for the last seven years. There's no cracking or chipping and it looks, I mean, yeah, it'll yellow a little bit because of the sun but it won't crack or chip like most PVC planters and plant pots. So that's another great thing because I want to know that this is going to last me a while. It is an investment. So it's lasted me seven and I expected to last the rest of my life that I will be passing it down to my children that they will continue growing. And it takes about 95% less water which is an excellent bonus. And it uses about 95% land space. So in a three-diameter feet, I can grow up to 52 plants in my home and commercially I can grow 52 plus plants on a commercial-sized tower. So there's a lot of advantages because real estate is costly, water as well, but the most important is the space. So I know this makes a lot of sense and I'm hoping that you'll see the positiveness of what we can offer with this tower garden. Right now I'm going to take it to a break and when we come back, I'll have more pictures of Tower Gardens and I'll introduce to you Tim Blang, the designer of the Tower Garden, Aloha. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. My show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m., Aloha. Aloha, I'm Yukari Kunisue, the host of Konnichiwa, Hawaii, Japanese talk show on Think Tech, Hawaii. Konnichiwa, Hawaii is all Japanese broadcast show and it's streamed live on Think Tech at 2 p.m., every other Monday. Thank you so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. I'm Yukari Kunisue, mahalo. Aloha, I'm Wendy Loh and I'm your host and your guest as we take your health back. So today I'm so excited to share with you all my knowledge about the Tower Garden, the importance of having a Tower Garden here in Hawaii and why it makes so much sense. As we take our health back, part of it is being excited about it and for me, I never grew any vegetables. I never farmed. We did experiments in high school and grade school. We put the little lima bean seed in there. We saw it sprout and then it came up this high and then we took it home and poops, it died. And that was the end of the experiment. But now I get to take it a few steps further where I actually sprout and grow my own food in this Tower Garden and I'm so, so excited that we get to launch it and share it and just share all the knowledge about the simplicity of this Tower Garden. Earlier I mentioned that the Tower Garden does take 95% less water. It does use 95% less land. It's made of food grade plastic versus PVC plastic so it doesn't leach toxins into the plants, in the water and the plants into our bodies and it's also ultraviolet protected twice. So that will prevent it from chipping and cracking in the dead of the heat. In fact, we have a friend, he has a Tower Garden farm, about 300 Tower Gardens commercial ones in the heart of Mesa, Arizona. The last time I was there was 120 degrees so it sits there in the heat and no problems. We have Tower Garden farms in Dubai and right in the middle of a desert where they formulate the largest greenhouses so they've concocted this large community. It's a walking community, no cars, golf carts only, walking and bicycles and they want to make it a sustainable community right smack in the desert and they've chosen the Tower Gardens to be the vehicle to produce their greens and so we're so excited about that as well. But here locally in Hawaii, we've got over a thousand Tower Gardens already in use. This year, Keokua spoke to my heart and he said, 2019 is a year of the great harvest. Continue being obedient. People will understand your message and they will see the value to what you're doing and so right now we're popping Tower Garden farms up with the Kupuna Centers, with the Vet Centers, Culinary Institutes of the Pacific is going to be engaging into this Tower Garden use because of the produce that we can get from it. They're so excited. So the next slide I want to share with you is just simply how simple this is. Those are babies, they're kikis. They're about just going into two weeks old of sprouting and this is Wendy. I brought a bunch of seedlings to show you but since we're shooting on a green screen, I brought those seedlings and you wouldn't be able to see them. So the blessing is that I have that little slide there that you can see that's about a two week growth of seedling and from this point, you'll take it out of this little black container and that little square, you simply put it into the Tower Garden. When you put it into the Tower Garden, you put it there and it'll stay there for the next about three weeks. At that point, you can start cutting, harvesting and consuming. So two weeks to germinate, about three weeks in the Tower, you'll be able to eat arugula, mescaline, lettuce, manoa, butter crunch and simply you want to just take around the edges and the heart continues to grow. Or if it's mescaline, arugula, just cut the whole head off and leave the root system behind, eat the leaves like we usually do and after about two weeks, that top that you took away will now become another head of arugula or another head of mescaline. And I would say after about the third cutting, I would then advise you to pull the root system out and then you can replan and have more cakeys ready to go, put it in and start the cycle again. So I want to just share with you, I've been growing on my balcony for the last seven years. I consume at least $100 and $120 worth of produce per month from my Tower and to manage a Tower to maintain it, it cost me about $15 a month. So basically I'm investing $15, $2.50 for electricity, $8 for the tonic and a few dollars for water, $15 investment into my Tower per month and I'm consuming $120 plus worth of produce and herbs.  I'm Chinese, I get it. You don't have to be Chinese, it's very clear. You're gonna understand what I'm trying to say, but the best thing when you purchase and when you work with the Tower Garden, peace of mind, peace of mind that you're getting chemical free non-GMO produce cut on demand into my body five minutes old. The freshest you'll get unless living on a farm when you go out to your backyard and you cut. For me, living in urban environment, it's the best thing for me. I don't care if the farmer just cut it to get to the market, it's still a few hours old. Mine is five minutes old, cut into my body and that's what I like the best. Our company is really forward-minded. We believe in giving back and so what started this whole concept of giving back is, this next slide is about the Boys and Girls Clubs. So the Boys and Girls Clubs in inner city Memphis, they were one of the first right there by our headquarters that we gave a Tower Garden farm to and they just went crazier on it. I think they had just about 50 students in the programs. So these students started to learn how to grow and as you know, the Boys and Girls Clubs are after-school programs and then the dynamic ones meet on weekends and in lunch breaks but this one met after school. They started finding ceilings, growing it and then the next step was they also had a culinary program. So these students would grow the herbs, the basil, the tomatoes, the cilantro, all of the above. They would grow it and now they were picking the basil, chopping it up, blending it up with pine nuts and olive oil, blending it up and making pesto. They would cut the tomatoes, chop it up, they would buy onions, cut up the onions with the cilantro and they were making salsa. All right, so then they got another forward-minded idea. They said, why don't we start selling all this? So they went to the open market and they started standing behind their table with their banner in the front and they would make these items, they would make herb breads and things and then all the pastors by would take samples and like, sir, young man, this pesto, this salsa is incredible. What chef made this? And the young man would say, sir, I made it. No, no, no, son, who is the chef behind this great recipe and this great product? Sir, I made it. I even grew the tomatoes and that's how they would respond. Now these kids grew their integrity, their self-dignity, everything, their pride, it grew within themselves and they started learning marketing skills, PR skills, everything behind what they were producing on the tower, taking it from seed to growth, to production in the kitchen, to marketing and getting good results and then income generating to help other programs. I know that this Boys and Girls Club boasts 100% job placement after they finish high school and that's powerful, job placement or college placement and that's powerful because those were not the results in the past. Because of the success of this Boys and Girls Club, our president, Jay Martin, decided that he made a commitment to all the Boys and Girls Clubs in the nation.  So your members, your students can learn on this one tower and I know for a fact that we have them in Nanakuli, we have them in Kailua and we have them in Eva and we are soon to deliver one into Waianae and actually there's one more Boys and Girls Club in Nanakuli, so we're gonna be delivering that to them as well as long as we have the heart behind working with the students, helping them to produce, that's exactly what we want. So again, there are over 4,000 Boys and Girls Clubs throughout the nation and our heart is to make sure that each one of those Boys and Girls Clubs gets a tower garden and some heart behind it to help them succeed with it. Now the next story I wanna share with you is about this young man, he's Chef Muni and he's a dear friend, he is right in the heart of New York in Manhattan. On a rooftop, six stories up, he has a restaurant on the basement called Bell Book and Candle, but he believes in the towers so much, on the sixth floor, he has 30 towers and that's some of the one tower that I'm showing you there, but he produces his tomatoes, his strawberries, all of his different greens that he uses downstairs in the basement.  The neat part is when Hurricane Sandy came through, all you gotta do is take the water out of the 20 gallons, take it downstairs, put it under cover. Hurricane blows over, damages all the, whatever it does damage to, the crops in the fields, et cetera, when the storm blows over, walks it back upstairs, puts the water back in, still producing. That's the neat thing about the tower garden as well, so we're very excited. For the last, I wanna say seven going on eight years, we've had tower gardens in the O'Hare Airport and here you see about 30 towers lined up, producing produce for the restaurants within O'Hare Airport terminal one and two, it's right there in the Rotunda area and they've been producing for the last almost eight years and they actually are overproducing, so what they're doing is they're harvesting, putting them in containers and selling them at a Kia. So the next time you go through the airport and your friends say, hey, Wendy, before you get out of the airport, run to that kiosk and grab me some lettuce, it's the best because it's just harvested, no chemicals and pest free. So it's also creating better quality of air within that airport terminal, so that's so exciting as well. And now I wanna introduce to you the gentleman behind it all, he's a very dear friend, he's fallen in love with Hawaii, he just wants this for Hawaii more than life itself, his name is Tim Blank. Tim Blank was just with us about two months ago and talking his heart out about the Tower Gardens and the value of it for Hawaii, because we all know when we have a disaster, when something happens to our island, within three days our shelves are empty. If it's a hurricane or if it's bad weather, our fields will be damaged, we've got to wait a while before more fresh produce comes in, so this is just another little part of a solution to some of the problem that we have here, that we face here as an island state. So growing healthy means growing your own food, being prepared, being more food sovereign, that we can take care of ourselves in disasters or even in good times. And that's what we're wanting to encourage, people not just think after the fact, let's be in preparedness mode. With this weather today and the last few months, it's very cold for Hawaii, it's a lot of wind for Hawaii, and it's out of control sometimes. But I've got my tower, as you can see in this next slide, I have one tower right there in my living room. That's my living room and that's growing indoors with my LED grow lights. So I want to encourage others that, yeah, I can put 20 Tower Gardens on my balcony, but why not have it in my living room? It takes three diameter feet, it's right there. Again, I'm cutting kale, I made some smoothies before I got, as I got up this morning, I had meetings last night, I supplied them with smoothies so that they would stay up and alert. And I'm just so excited, can you tell? So the missing component to this all is a company that we formulated is called Tower It Up. So if you are so busy that you can manage and do what you need to maintain your tower, we've created a company called Tower It Up and Tower It Up will be just that. Your go-to person, they'll answer questions, they'll supply your cakey, your seedlings, and they'll help you to manage and maintain it. So if you are needing any questions answered, just give us a call, call us at Think Tech, go online and see where we're to be found and we'll be right there to answer any of your questions. So for Hawaii, let's grow healthy together. I mean growing healthy together. When you're ready, we're ready. Just take that first step. Aloha for now.


We will now speak about max min strategies. These make a particular sense in the context of zero sum games, but actually are applicable quite to all games. What is a max min strategy? It's simply put a player's strategy that maximizes their payoff, assuming the other player is out to get them. We will concentrate primarily on the true player case here again, because when we get to zero sum games, those really make only sense in the case of two players. But keep in mind that one could define this more generally when we speak about max min strategy. So the max min strategy is a strategy that maximizes my worst case outcome, and my maximum value or safety level is that payoff that's guaranteed by the max min strategy. And here it is defined formally. The maximum strategy for player i is the strategy s1 that maximizes the minimum that the other player, remember the minus i is the player other than i, would hold a player i down to. And the maximum value is defined similarly to be the value of that maximum strategy. Now, why would we want to think about the maximum strategy? One can think of it either as simply a sort of a certain cautionary, maybe the other people will make some mistakes and they won't act in their best interest. Maybe I'm not sure exactly what their payoffs are. There are a lot of interpretations, or you can simply be paranoid about them and think that they're out to get you.  That's the max min strategy. And just to confuse things, we'll also speak about the minimax strategy. The minimax strategy is strategy against, if you wish, the other player in the two-player game, is the strategy that minimizes their payoff on the assumption that they're trying to maximize it. And so here is the formal definition. The minimax strategy for player i is playing against the other guy, which we know by minus i, is the strategy that minimizes the maximum payoff as attempted by the other guy of the payoff to the other guy. And the minimax value is simply the value of that minimax strategy, the value to player one. Now, why would player one want to harm the other guy? Well, you could just be out to get him. That's a possibility. Or they could be playing a zero-sum game. And in a zero-sum game, hurting the other guy is tantamount to improving your own payoff. And so in the setting of zero-sum games, max min and minimax strategies make a lot of sense. And in fact, in a very famous theorem, due to John von Neumann, it proved that in a zero-sum game, by definition, we consider only two player such games, any Nashicler BM, the player receives a payoff that is equal to both his max min value and his min max value. And that means that we'll call it the value of the game, the value for player one is called the value of the game. And that means that the set of maximum strategies are really the same as set of the min-max strategies. That is, trying to improve your worst case situation is the same as trying to minimize the other guy's best case situation. And any maximum strategy profile or min-max strategy profile, because they're the same, constitute a Nashicler BM. And furthermore, those are all the Nashicler BM that exist. And so the payoff in all Nashicler BM is the same, mainly the value of the game. One way to get a concrete feel for it is graphically, and here's the game of matching pennies. This is a game where each of us chooses heads and tails some probability. And if it comes up either, if the result of our random optimization, I end up choosing head and you end up playing tail, you win, and vice versa, if I chose tail and you head. But if we both chose a head or both chose tail, I win. And so here are the payoffs. You see here the strategy spaces. This is player two is kind of increasing the probability of playing heads, and this is player one. And on this dimension, you have the value of the game of the payoff to player one. And the only Nashicler BM is for both to randomize 50-50. It's just right here. It's kind of uniquely looked by slicing the three-dimensional structure in this way. And you sort of see that it's got to be an equilibrium in the sense that player one could be moving along this curve. But if, as he does it, his payoffs would only drop. And so he's trying to maximize the value. He wouldn't do it. And conversely, player two can only traverse along this. But if he does that, the payoffs would only increase. And he's trying to minimize the value. So you get a stable point, which for obvious reasons is called a saddle point. So although there are general-purpose procedures for finding a Nashicler BM in particular in two-by-two games, we can use the max-min definition to find it directly in zero-sum games. And let's see how it happens in the game we'll call the penalty kick game. So in this game, we have a penalty kicker and a goalie. It's a zero-sum game. And the goal of the kicker is to score a goal. And the goal of the goalie is to prevent it. And let's assume that they each have two strategies. Kick to the left and kick to the right for the kicker. And jump to the left and jump to the right for the goalie. The payoffs will be the, each of those will determine a probability of the kicker scoring a goal. And we'll have that probability being the payoff, the value of the game, that is the payoff to player one. And therefore, minus the payoff to player two, namely the goalie. And so here they are. So for example, if the kicker kicks left and the goalie guesses correctly and jumped left also, then the goalie has not too bad a chance of stopping the shot, namely probability 0.4. If he jumps to the wrong side, his probability of stopping it is much lower, it's 0.2. Similarly, if the kicker decides to kick to the right, if the goalie guesses wrong, his probability is low, even lower than if he gets wrong in the other case. And if he guesses right, his probability is higher, although not quite as high as that had he guessed right in the left case. So he's better at stopping shots when the kicker kicks to the left. So how does the kicker maximize this minimum? That's what we're after. So here is the expression, right? We want the maximum value of the following. So they each have some mixed strategy of playing left and right with some probability. So S1L is a probability that the kicker kicks to the left, and S2L is a probability that the goalie jumps to the left. And as we saw, in that case, the value is 0.6. And similarly, the value of 0.8 is if we end up in this situation, 0.9 and 0.7 in these situations. So this is the expression that we somehow need to compute. So what is the minimum that the kicker should keep in mind?  When I play it, player two is going to play S2 so as to minimize my payoff. So let me write down this entire expression. And this is simply copying it over, replacing S expressions such as S1R by 1 minus S1L. That's all it's doing. And the same for S2R. And so we have this is our expression. And player one is saying to himself, what would player two do if I were to play my strategy S1? And this is simply rearranging the terms, nothing else going on here, as a function of S2L. Because player one says, I'm going to pick S1. What would S2 be best response, namely its minimum? And so this is arranging it as a function of S2 strategy. And now all that remained is to look for the minimum of the strategy. And the minimum is taken by taking the first derivative with respect to S2, holding S1 as a constant. And so we have this expression. And then we solve for S1. And we get that S1 of L is a half. And therefore S1 of R is a half as well. And so by this maximum calculation, we see that player, the kicker, figures out that in equilibrium, they better randomize half, half between left and right. What does the goalie kind of figure out? Well, he's trying to minimize the kicker's maximum. That's the one way to look at it. He's doing the min-max strategy. And so here is the min-max strategy for player 2, just writing it down. And as before, we'll simply rewrite S1 of R as 1 minus S1 of L and so on for S2 of R. And we'll rearrange the term. This time is a function of S1 of L because player 2 is saying player 1. Player 2 says player 1 is whatever I choose, namely S2, player 1 will want to best respond, namely to maximize. So let me write it down as a function of S1's choice and now figure out what the maximum would be. Well, here's the maximum. And when you solve for L2 now, you get that the randomization in equilibrium for S2 for player 2 is a quarter and three quarters. So this illustrates how we can use the maximum theorem to actually compute the natural equilibrium in zero sum gains, at least in 2 by 2 games. In general, we can use the min-max theorem to compute the equilibrium of zero sum gain. And we do it by simply laying out a linear program that captures the game. And here it is. So U1 star is going to be the value of the game. That is, the payoff to player 1 in equilibrium. And so we're going to specify from player's 2 point of view. We could have done it the other way around also. So what player 2 is saying is simply says, for each of the actions of player 1, each action that player 1 might consider, I want to find a mixed strategy S2. So here's my mixed strategy S2. It will look at all my pure strategies K and make sure that the probability that is probability distribution over those, say sum to 1 and they're non-negative. So what I'd like to do is that the best response to my strategy by player 1 for any of these actions will never exceed this value of the game because I'm trying to minimize it. So I'm going to find the lowest U that has a property that player 1 doesn't have a profitable deviation by any of his pure strategies. So when I look at the payoff for player 2, when I play A2K and he plays A1J, that J that I'm considering right now, and I multiply the probability of in my mixed strategy playing A2K, I don't want that other player 1 to have a profitable deviation. So it's got to be that his expected payoff will be no greater than the value of U1 star. So clearly, this is a correct formulation of the game and it is a linear program. As we know, linear programs are efficiently solvable, in theory, by an interior method that is provably polynomial in practice by procedures that are worst case exponential but in practice work well.


Lecturers abandoning universities leave VCs lecturers others worried. Federal government unveils plans to unbundle TCN into two entities. They'll also be off the press where we'll be looking at headlines that made it to the front pages of some of our national dailies. A very good morning to you and thanks for joining us on the breakfast this morning. My name is Nyam Gul Agadji. Today is the 13th of December 2023. Yesterday was 12th-12th. Today is 13th-12th. We're hoping that it's going to be a wonderful day for you and all of us here on Plus TV Africa. It's a wonderful day. It's about 12 days to Christmas. If you've been singing a song on the 12th day of Christmas and all that, you start singing it today. Let's see what happens from now till then. We hope that this season brings you good luck. This season brings you fulfillment. This season brings you love especially because that's the reason for the season and we're wishing you all that and more. We're taking the top trending immediately. And the top trending are always issues that caught our attention in the course of the last 24 hours. So the first one here is Tinnable Rights Senate 6 confirmation of 19 NPC commissioners. The Senate on Tuesday announced President Bola Tinnable's request seeking the confirmation of the nomination of 19 commissioners of the National Population Commission NPC. Their appointees are Immanuel E. K. from Abia State, Clifford Zira, Adamawa, Chidi Ezo K. Anambra, Issa Buratai, Bornu, Alex O'Kam, Cross River State, Blessing Brumei Atta Guba, Delta. Jermaya Mwakegu Eboni, Tony Ayejeni Edo. Ejike Eze, Enugu, Abubaka Damburam Gombe, Uba Nabue Imu, Dogon Garba, Kaduna, Aminu, Sayawa, Kano, Yuri Afolabi, Kogi. Ola Kunle Zobokola Ogun, Temitayo Oluwatui Ondo, Mary Afan, Platu O'Giri Henry Rivers, and Sani Saleh Taraba. The president also asked the red chamber to confirm the nomination of Bashir Indabawa, Northwest, Enore Se, Amada Su, South-South, and Babaji De Fashino, Southwest as NPC commissioners. The Senate, led by Senator Gotswila Pabio, referred the nomination to the National Identity Management Commission, NIMC, to report back in two weeks. Meanwhile, the Senate approved the nomination of Ambassador Desmond Akao, as commissioner representing River State in the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission, RMAFC. The appointment followed the recent passing of the immediate past RMAFC federal commissioner from River State, Asondu Temple. We wish them luck and we hope that the National Population Commission will leave up to its billing and ensure that we get a headcount at least every 10 years, as the case may be, so that we can have good data to plan with. Because we know that without good data, knowing the population of wherever in Nigeria, we may not be able to plan to meet the needs of these people. For instance, if Lagos has 25 million or 20 million, we know what should come to Lagos and what should go to another state that has less than that. So planning is important and data is critical. We wish them well and hope that they will bring the difference, the much needed difference in the NPC. Oshun government begins probe after 18 pupils hospitalized from eating free meal. The Oshun state government has begun an investigation into the reported case of about 18 pupils of James Primary School B. Oshobo, who reportedly landed in the hospital after eating a midday meal set to them under the free school feeding program of the state government. The government also directed the stoppage of further food cooking at the affected school pending the outcome of the investigation. A statement by the state commissioner for information and public enlightenment, obtained in Oshobo on Tuesday, said the governor had demolished a delicate, directed immediate action when the matter was reported to him. According to the statement, the victims have been treated and discharged from the hospital. The statement read, and I quote, Oshun state government has ordered full investigation into the reported cases of food poisoning at St. James Primary School B, a walkway Oshobo. The state governor, Senator Ademola Adelike, subsequent to being informed of the situation by the special advisor on O-Meal, Mrs. Grace Ayodeli, directed the stoppage of further food cooking at the affected school pending the outcome of the investigations. Meanwhile, the affected cooks in the said schools alongside the planning officer for the O-Meal program were summoned to a meeting on Tuesday morning. Additionally, the governor has directed enforcement of food standards and control as well as the auditing of the O-Meal structure to foster further or future occurrences. The government is also setting the medical bills, or settling rather, the medical bills of the affected students, according to the chairman of the local government education authority, Mr. Nathaniel Ojetola. The incident which happened on Monday caused panic, especially among parents of the affected pupils, who shared videos of them on hospital beds, on social media. Now narrating how they became ill, one of the victims said they were served rice with egg after which they started running stool. Also in the video, mothers of the victims said they observed foul smell of the egg their children were served when they returned home from school on Monday. We thank God that it didn't end in a very fatal way. Nothing, no death was recorded. We've heard cases of this nature happening in other places and some people died more than the 19 that we even heard in Oshun state. We do hope that whatever was the problem will be arrested and further occurrences will not happen in that state or anywhere else. The problem may not really be the people who cooked. It may also be the people who cooked, who neglected the expiry dates on some things or some, you know, there could be a fault from somewhere and the sooner it is found out, the better for everybody. So if it is a fault of the cooks, well, let the needful be done. If it is a fault of the people who sold in the market or somewhere along the line, then we do hope that they will find out and it never happens again. The kids must be protected at all times. Now Edo state police has arrested 81 suspects for cultism and others. That was done on Tuesday. They arrested the 81 suspects allegedly involved in various crimes across the state. While parading the suspects, the State Commissioner of Police Mohammed Dankwara said the suspects were arrested in the ongoing clampdown on criminals which began on December 11. He said the suspects were arrested for cultism, car snatching on lawful possession of firearms and kidnapping among others. He said most of the suspects were arrested for cultism, adding that they had intelligence that highly placed individuals were behind the cult group. He wondered anyone either in government or outside supporting cult groups tactically or financially to desist from it because anybody, no matter how highly placed, would be prosecuted. He called on cult groups to desist from their criminal act as the clampdown would continue, noting that there is no benefit to being a cult member. He added that they have intelligence that highly placed people in the state were supporting and were behind these cult groups and once they verified this, they would go after them because they can't make the state ungovernable. He promised to arrest any known cult groups no matter where they may be. Well, for a lot of us this is not really news because for a very long time a lot of people who are in power have been fingered to be members of these cult groups. In fact, that is how some of them win elections. Well, that's conspiracy theory because we may not have names to name. We also know anyway that in some of the states, governors even who fly according to cult jargon, fly the colors of some cult members and openly declare that they belong. So, I don't know, what if in a case where you find culties and their financier is a governor or a commissioner or a minister somewhere or somebody in the presidency and all that, what would you do? People who are part of the people that nominated you for the position that you are having right now or who can at a snap of the finger in a Nigerian way just have you sucked. I do hope that people, officers and men of the Nigeria police and all other agencies will stand up for what is right in spite of anything that might be against them and do the needful. This verification they are talking about, we don't know what kind of verification they will need to get before the needful is done. If these people are arrested, I'm sure some of them will sing and when they sing we will know what the tune will be saying. We do hope that they will not sweep this under the carpet. If they have intelligence that a lot of people highly placed are also financing this, I'm sure there are a few names that have been dropped already. We also had a case where one of the people in the presidency is saying highly placed individuals are sponsoring so many things that are making Nigeria a very fearful place to live in and again I say it is not news to a lot of people. What we want now is if you have this intelligence go after these people let us see that even the highly placed are coming on the hand of the law and they are being prosecuted. If that is done, every other person will stay in line. We wish you luck, whoever is going to be in charge. Whatever cultism is doing to Nigeria, it is more negative than positive. I don't know which positive part it has. Right now I don't know because I'm not a beneficiary but I do know when cultism entered Nigeria it was to fight in discrimination, it was to fight colonial rule more or less. It was to fight against the oppression of the black students or the Nigerian, indigenous students. At least that was the excuse we were given by people of no less standing than Wule Shoyinka who is said to be the father of cultism in Nigeria. So it was like a pressure group, it was like a group that was fighting for the rights of the people who were downtrodden and oppressed. But is that the reason cultism thrives these days? I doubt that and a lot of people will doubt that. But again, if these people are known, let them be fished out and let them face the music and keep our country safe. Now that will be that. We'll just take a break now, possibly look at what the weather is. In so many other places the hamatan is very, very high. In Lagos we're just seeing the signs now. But even with the signs we're still finding it difficult to say for a fact that the rainy season has gone because every now and then there is rain. In fact, last night there was rain in some parts of Lagos and this morning is also threatening. But let's see generally what the weather is and see if we can plan our day around that.


President Mohammed Buhari has flagged off the construction of a center of excellence for environmental restoration in Oguni land that's in river state. The president laid the foundation for Oguni Power Project and 100 bed specialist hospital in river state. Buhari joined the groundbreaking ceremony virtually and said the projects are in fulfillment of his administration pledge to provide soccer for four years of environmental degradation in Oguni land. Addressing the event virtually, Buhari commended Oguni people for supporting the cleanup of all imparted communities which he flagged off in 2016. He noted the three project affirms the commitment of the federal government in addressing environmental issues in Oguni land in line up with the United Nations environmental report on Oguni land. Get notified about fresh news updates