Hi, it's Jeff Frick from Silicon Angles, The Cube. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise, and we're starting a lot more mobile events now, going out to the companies where they are when they're making important announcements, when they have great news to share, as opposed to just being at the large events. I'm here at Accelerator today with Nolan Wright, the co-founder and CTO, and we're here today because they have a big announcement. They've got a live stream. Maybe you guys are on it right now, and they're announcing their Enterprise Platform launch. I've got the notes here, Nolan. It's a mobile-first enterprise SaaS platform built from the ground up for mobile. First off, welcome to The Cube. We've been at a lot of shows lately, and there's clearly three big transformative events that are happening that we've been covering. One of them obviously is Cloud, one of them is Social, and one of them is Mobile. But the other piece that kind of rolls all those up that we're seeing more and more is people's expectation around enterprise applications being driven by their experience with their regular applications that they work with. Somebody said at one of our last shows, kind of what I do on the weekend, I now want that to be what I do during the week. So talk a little bit about what's going on here at Accelerator and how that kind of fits into that. Sure. The first point you just made is I think a really critical point and we're seeing this too with our customers is that user experience really matters not just for consumer applications but for employee applications. And the other thing that's also driving that is trends like BYOD and BYOA. In the old days, IT could really dictate, mandate hardware and software, but with mobile and BYOD and BYOA, they can't really do that so much. So we're seeing enterprises really focus on great user experience for employee-faced apps as well as consumer-facing apps. So it's a big change, we view it as a good change and something we've been prepared for. Now back to the platform announcement. So yeah, we're announcing what we believe is really the first mobile first, not used first twice, but mobile first platform out there and we've always believed that mobile is driving fundamental shifts to every phase of the software development lifecycle and so this platform has been designed really from the ground up to help people create great apps, great user experience for both consumer-facing, business-facing or employee-facing. Do that quickly, do things like testing, have great visibility in your applications because obviously you need to know what's going on in your application to drive improvements into it and you need to do all this very quickly because one of the things we're seeing with mobile is that it's kind of an opposing force. One is users want apps delivered faster so release cycles have gone from months to weeks with frequent updates but at the same time the demand for innovation and quality has gone up and so our platform is really designed to really help you deliver great experience So, talk a little bit about the history of Accelerator. You guys have been around for a long time and I think it's probably an accurate assessment that most of the early mobile apps were games and kind of fun things and talk about how the company has changed as mobile has grasped really the enterprise side and then the second piece if you can when you're working with your customers how do you help them not just recreate what they've got on their desktop applications in mobile but really think through how a mobile application is completely different and rethinking the way they're trying to accomplish tasks with a mobile app. Good question. So, in terms of how we've evolved we've always seen this as an enterprise opportunity we've always talked about how it's similar to what BEA did for the web technology stack when the web came along the technology stacks were completely changed and BEA emerges a multi-billion dollar company to really redefine that. So we've always seen this as that type of opportunity it's just been a question of evolution and with a lot of big technology shifts they start in the consumer world and then they move on to the enterprise world and so knowing that certainly we focused early with consumer but the technology stack we were building was always meant to be focused very horizontally and to solve both consumer facing problems as well as enterprise applications and so that's always been the goal from the outset you have to evolve it over time. In terms of how we help customers deliver some of these really good mobile first experiences a lot of that's really deep in the technology itself so really it's about making it easy to build great user experiences a lot of reusability letting people build reusable components that they can take from app to app from app to app and so that's one part the other part too is we spend a lot of time with our customers evangelizing that the opportunity with mobile to imagine things from the ground up it's not about taking a web application simply moving it to mobile it's how do I really rethink business processes and some of the examples we use are more in the consumer world like with Uber Uber is a great app where I can now get a taxi through my iPhone and all the payments handle automatically and so we try to help our customers really think about their own business processes that way because that's the real opportunity and that's really what we try to promote and our technology is built entirely that's great okay so one last question I was listening to Jeff on the Ustream announcement and he talked a little bit about open source and what open source means to you as a company we were at OpenStack Summit a couple three weeks ago and it was really interesting hearing companies like Rackspace and even HP talk about how just an open source not only just reducing costs with their core components inside their own but really how it changes the culture of the company using outside contributors enabling you to bring people that are excited about a space into your company to work for you because they get to do some stuff talk about the open source culture here at Accelerator and how that's infected the company as you've grown it it's also a really good question so we really open source has been a part of the company since we started and it just gets back to a fundamental set of beliefs that Jeff and I have which is we don't want to be closed off to only the innovation we can do within the four walls of this company so we want to open things that we've always wanted to make things open and open source but also extensible so make it easy for people to not only work on our technology and identify issues and fix them but also extend the product and so every part of our stack from everything we've ever built is always open and extensible and it's just we just feel like that's where the world has been heading for a while and I think also the other thing is if you can build a really strong community of developers of ISVs and partners who are all leveraging the openness and the extensibility it's very difficult to compete with that it's a very defensible business strategy but at the end of the day I think for customers the benefit is you really get all this great access to technology you wouldn't get from just a vendor who's closed or proprietary and also to some degree you don't have to worry about locking so much because it is open source the codes out there and so you're able to make changes and do things like that so to us it's always been a fundamental part of our strategy from a business standpoint to where the world is definitely going and we've seen the fruits of that so much of the success we've had has been because of our ISV partners our developers and our integration partners so the strategy is really paying off that's great, well thank you so it's exciting times here at Accelerator check it out Nolan thanks for coming on theCUBE we're glad we could come out and cover the event we've got a couple more guest lines up so we'll be right back


I've been waiting for this package for so long so you might be asking Ashley what is this box that you still have in your room? This whole box is full of my Sailor Moon collection goods and I just don't know what to do with them right now because I love Sailor Moon but I don't know about putting the figures like all over my house so it's just in this box for now but I have nowhere to put the box so it's just been sitting here in my room for the past like 10 weeks really don't know what to do but anyways let's open this up I got a bunch of stuff from Urban Outfitters it's mostly LPs though and some clothing okay first I have the Her album this is Deluxe album so it comes with two LPs yeah I ordered the 1975 album myself too just because I feel like it was just the classic that I need to have but now I have two so I guess one I can just use for like decor or something put it up on the wall right and I have the Daniel Caesar album I really wanted this I have a SZA album too the control album this also has two LPs so excited never knew that LPs could make me this happy and then cigarettes after sex it was really sad when I missed a chance to see them in Korea but that's the LP I also got this from Urban Outfitters it's like a small jewelry holder that comes with the mirror I wanted to put it on the wall in my closet room just hang my necklaces there I was worried that it might look a little cheap but it's very sturdy I also got this hand ashtray but not to use it for ashtray I wanted to put my rings in here my mom also sent me my brother's airpod cases that he doesn't use my mom also got me these like cute little animals these like wooden animal figures to decorate my house with I think my mom still thinks I'm like a little baby but these are pretty cute I also got more coffee three pants can't wait to try them on hopefully they fit Levi's shorts let's try them they fit perfectly really like these as well they're really short though so I'm gonna wear like shorts underneath it kind of make my hips look really big because of the pockets on the side of oh my god these are so comfortable they're kind of like leggings but not really they're super stretchy yeah it's like the first time ever actually like all this stuff that I ordered online can't wait for summer and which new LP should I listen to I have five new LPs to choose from more of like that girl kind of mood so I'm gonna listen to scissors no these pants are so comfortable I can wear them as pajamas dude I should have gotten these in other colors too these pants were like one of the highest rated and most reviewed pants so just have to listen to it or something I'm gonna show you guys all of them because most of them have like special limited vinyl the cigarettes after sex one is white this comes with like an extra plastic case comes in a case like this so well made as a thank you letter on the inside it has the track list in the back all right let's listen to scissor I have just finished getting ready for today I'm going to have lunch with one of my dongsangs that I do radio with on sound k her name is Iris and she just had a birthday yesterday so we're gonna go out for lunch and some dessert so we're going to go to Iksundong cuz she says she's not very familiar with that neighborhood so just gonna take her around and eat something delicious also this is how my hair looks after two washes kind of looks reddish as well especially out the roots cuz I only bleached it once so there's still a little bit of yellowness left it really depends on the lighting like what color it looks like like here in bright light it looks kind of looks lavender a lot of you guys asked me how I maintain my hair color I use purple shampoo this one I use is from L'Oreal it's a neutralizing shampoo I just use this every time I wash my hair and it slows down the process of the color fading today's OOTD wearing this knit that's cut out in the back I got this a few years ago don't remember where it's from and wearing jeans skirt and boots since it'll be raining later so we're gonna have Japanese food for lunch we're here at Hoho Shikdong yes have you been here no okay it's really good we're gonna get the sake and I'm her guide for today look how cute this place is my god need to come back here next time I was right here is a fan of mint chocolate this place is all mint chocolate desserts you came into this sticker picture place iris is picking out her hat the birthday hat you're beanie yeah it's cute what should I wear okay I'm gonna read this what color should we do you can choose mint mint okay what should we do yeah let's do that friend yeah this cafe what is that it's Giro Giro gets kind yeah round a bit more before I go to a radio look at all these Hanok buildings wow check this arcade place out 1001 to get my nails done again it's been over two weeks and scraped some of my gel nails off of course I would so I came to get them fixed I mean why are you so high we're why are you so good at French I did my nails done and on my way to Pilates I got this like a lavender color to match my hair back home from Pilates and grabbing coffee with Pyori and Joan now I have to go to radio besides that nothing else special just gonna come back home finish editing the vlog uploaded tonight hopefully just have to add subtitles and do the description box really like my lavender color I changed my shape into kind of like an oval circular shape kind of matches my hair anyway some flower updates I got this from a fan it was rose day today before so she got me a bunch of roses I put some here on my work table this is another one really beautiful colored pink roses over here I have some of the and get good but they were dyed red so look at the water kind of looks like a potion or something looks very mysterious last one is filled with some of the leaves that were with the flower they're doing well so far thank you of a video call me 10 40 a.m. I'm kind of starving right now and I know you guys haven't seen me cooking in a while because last two weeks have just kind of been busy I've always been out like during the afternoon and unless I eat at home for breakfast or lunch I don't have the opportunity to eat at home most of the times I just get breakfast so today since I've woken up early and I have no plans on going back to sleep I'm going to make myself some pancakes so I think the time has come that I need to say goodbye to Cordelia listen to the leaves they're so dry I'm so sorry you don't deserve this you deserve to live a good happy long life and I'm so sorry I'm inadequate as a plant mom I'll stop being dramatic I'm gonna take this out and then I'm just gonna get a fake one to put in this coconut shell because I do like the way this looks goodbye Cordelia I'm sorry the noise you're hearing right now is my washing machine doing my laundry right now so today for lunch I'm gonna make this this is whole wheat pancake mix I bought this at Olive Young I just went into Olive Young to kill some time and I saw this and I was like oh let me try making pancakes so what you have to do is open this zip back up put in hot water or put in milk or soy milk any of your choice I'm gonna be putting an almond milk and then just shake it shake it shake it shake it shake it and fry it let's do this first I'm gonna have to heat up the almond milk a little so it's easier to mix it all together and that tells you how much water to put put in too much cook one at a time so we'll electric kettle as a housewarming gift it was one of her gifts she also got me a topper and a pillow set but yeah I've been using this so adorable wooden handle cream colored which matches my kitchen so thank you Rosie oh thank you forever so hungry right I have gotten some of the things ready to put on my pancake since I don't have whipping cream I'm gonna use this really thick Greek yogurt and some cinnamon powder and my maple syrup that Sojung got me from Canada this Greek yogurt is so thick it's like cream cheese I'm only gonna put it on one pancake because I don't know how it's gonna taste okay I don't have much battery left so I gotta do this quick four turns off okay when I first ate it it was really good because of the syrup but the mix itself isn't that good it tastes very dry camera shut off so I'm using my phone maybe it's dry cuz I used almond milk maybe this is just what whole wheat pancakes tastes like and I just don't know cuz I never tried it my conclusion is if you're gonna eat pancake folks just stick to the regular ones don't try to be healthy and choose the whole wheat eat the regular pancake I eat this anymore


From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation, I'm Lisa Martin. And today joining me is CUBE alumni, the co-CEO of MemSQL, Raj Verma. Raj, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa, it's great to be back and it's so good to see you. Likewise, so since we last saw each other, a lot of changes going on everywhere. You're now the co-CEO of MemSQL. The CEO's role is changing dramatically in this year and the last few months. Talk to us about some of those changes. Yeah, where do I even start? I was just listening to something, watching something and it said, in leadership, one thing that they never tell you is, you don't find the event, the event finds you. And it was four and a half, almost five months ago, we were at our SKO in Half Moon Bay. And if someone had said to me then that we'll be quarantined for five months following that and more likely seven months, I probably wouldn't have believed them. And if I did, I would have burst out crying. So it's been sort of a lot of change for us. The one thing is for sure is the CEO have probably made more compelling decisions in the last four months than I probably made in the year prior to that. So there is a lot of decisions, important decisions that are being made now. I think the thing that's impressed me the most about just the human race per se in the last four and a half, five months is the resilience, how the adaptability of just the community and the race at large. There is a lot of goodness that we've seen happen. I think there is a greater appreciation for the life that we sort of had. And I think when everything does, one day come back to normal, we would be a lot more appreciative and nicer just as individuals. Now, as CEO, I think the first order of duty for me was to embrace our employees and my colleagues. It's a trying set of circumstances for them, worrying about their health, the health of their raised parents, of their families, their well-being and whether they have a job or not and how the economic environment would pan out. So I think it was just my number one priority at the start and continues to be till today with the, with our colleagues and the employees at Men's Seafoam. And the first few decisions that we made were 100% employee centric. None of the big ones was taking the pledge of no retrenchments or no workforce reduction for 90 days to begin with. And we've continued that. We haven't really reduced any employee headcount at all. The second was to go in turn embrace our customers and deliver to the promise that we had in normal times and help them get back to as much of a normalcy as they could. And the third was to do whatever we could to use our technology and efforts, our resources to help society at large, whether it was to track and tracing projects that we did for a large telco or, you know, telco in the Middle East or telco in Asia. And we put our resources there. Or it was just using a platform to heighten the public awareness around Juneteenth and other sort of social issues.  And those were really the three things that stand out apart from just normal decisions, normal decisions that you make to make sure that you're well-capitalized, that you have enough cash to run your business, that all the fundamentals of the business are sound. So yeah. So lots of decisions on a massively accelerated scale, more than in the last 10 years, but big strategic decisions made in a quick time period for employees, for customers, for how do we use our platform? What is the key that you need in order to make those decisions as strategically as you can, like that? Yeah. You've got to lens it through what is the why of the organization. Our advice is very simple. We want to be the platform of decision-making or what we call the platform of now, where we can marry historical information with real-time operational data being streamed in to your organization and be able to deliver up reports and insights that you need for quick decision-making in other organizations. So delivering up the now. Internally, when sort of presented with options to make decisions, the lens that I've used is, what's in the best interest of our employees, what's in the best interest of our customers and what is in the best interest of our investors and stakeholders. And if you apply that lens, the decisions aren't actually that difficult. You will never have 100% of the data that you need to make a decision.  The other aspect is that having data though, having said that having data now to make decisions is more important than ever before because you do not have the, you know, sort of physical cues to depend on or clues to depend on. I'm still finding it hard to read the digital clues on Zoom or Google Hangouts or Teams or what have you. So you just have to have a very steeped in data decision-making, marrying it with what is it that you stand for as an organization. And the third vector that we've put to this is very simple. We as an organization stand for authenticity. We like to simplify rather than complicate. And we need to do, you know, demonstrate courage, overcome fear. And those are the other vectors that we use to make prior, you know, majority of our strategic decisions. So if data for years, you know, you've heard this all over the tech circuit, Raj, data is the new gold. Data is the new oil. Now you're saying it's even more important than ever in this unprecedented time. How does MemSQL help customers get access to as much data as they can to make really fast strategic decisions to not just, you know, survive in this mode, but thrive? Yeah, I think two questions, you know, the, what is the, you know, data and the value of data? And you're absolutely right. The value of data now is more than ever before. And also the amount of data that is now being produced is more than ever before. So it's actually a pretty, pretty non-trivial issue to solve. And I think the first thought is that you can't solve the problems of tomorrow with the technology of yesterday. You cannot solve the problems of tomorrow using a technology that was built for a different era, which was built 45 years ago, 25 years ago. And, you know, some of the tenants of the technology are still steeped in, let's just call it heritage. So first and foremost, the realization that the problems of tomorrow need the tools of now and the talent of now and the management of now and the leadership of now to have to solve it is paramount. What we do as a technology company and a lot of companies in our genre called hard tech is exactly that, it's hard tech. It takes a lot of talent, it takes a lot of time, resources, money, clarity of thought to build something which will solve the problems of today and of tomorrow. And today the challenges that we actually have is the real-time nature of decision-making, of interactions, of experience, of security, of compliance are more exaggerated than ever before. And how do you marry real-time information with historical information in the cheapest, easiest to deploy flexible architecture is of paramount importance. And that's exactly what we do, Lisa. We give you a database that is arguably the fastest in the world from a query speed standpoint. It scales more than any other database in our genre. It has data governance by virtue of us being SQL. It's hybrid, multi-cloud, so it doesn't lock you in. And it's among the easiest to use. So, I don't know what the future would bring, Lisa, but one thing I can assure you is these, there are five things which wouldn't change which is you would, developers would prefer fast over slow, cheap over fast, flexible over rigid, ease of use over complexity of use, and a secure, safe platform versus the alternative. And that, if you have those five tenants, I think it'd be pretty well-versed with solving the problems of today and tomorrow. So you mentioned real-time and minute ago, and that's, I think right now during the COVID-19 crisis, there's nothing that highlights the urgency of which we need information real-time. It's not going to help us if it's 24 or 48 hours old. How does MemSQL deliver real-time insights to customers, whether it's a telecommunications company looking to do contact tracing or a bank? Yeah, so let me start with a couple of examples. A very large telephone provider, telecommunication provider in the States uses us for, or uses us for network telemetry. So, you know, how many calls did Lisa make? How many texts did she send? What time, without, of course, the privacy attached to it, when did she experience a call drop? What's the coverage at her home? Is the sort of mobile tower close to her place going to go down and what would be the inconvenience? All of that. So copious amounts of data are required to really deliver a customer experience and it's a hard enough problem because the amount of data, as you can imagine, is extremely, extremely, extremely large. But when COVID-19 struck, the data became that much more important because now it was a tool that you could use as a company to be able to describe or follow cohorts of subscribers in hot beds like New York at that time and see which states they were actually, let's call it fleeing to or moving to. And to be able to do that in near real time was not good enough because you had to actually do it in real time. To be able to track where the PPEs were in near real time was not good enough. It had to be real time. And, you know, to track where the ventilators were in near real time wasn't good enough. You just needed to do that. And, you know, I think that probably is one of the biggest and examples of real time that we have in the recent past and something that we are most proud of. How do we do that? We built this hard tech based on first principles. So we didn't try and put a lipstick on a pig. We didn't try and re-architect a 45-year-old technology or a 15-year-old technology. We just said that if we actually had a plane sheet of paper, what would be, what would we do? And we said the need of the future is going to be fast over slow, as I said, you know, cheap or expensive, flexible over rigid, safe over the other alternative and ease of use. And that's what we've built. And the world will see the amount of difference that we make to organizations and more importantly to society, which is very near and dear to my heart. And yeah, that's what I'm extremely proud and optimistic about. Talk to me about some of the customer conversations that you're having now. I've known you for many years.  As you were saying a few minutes ago, it's hard to read body language on Zoom and video conferences. How are those customer conversations going and how have they changed? A lot has changed. I think there are a couple of aspects that you touch upon. One is just getting used to your digital work day. You know, initially we thought it was two weeks and it's great. You don't have the commute and all the rest of it. And then you started to realize and the other thing was everyone was available. There's no one was traveling. There were no birthday parties. There's no picking up a kid from baseball or school or swimming or what have. So everyone was available. And we were like, wow, this is great. No commute, everyone's available. Let's start meeting and interacting. And then you realize after a while that this digital work day is extremely, extremely exhausting. And if you want deliberate about it, it can fill your entire day and you don't get much done. So one of the things that I've started to do is I don't get on a digital call unless of course it's a customer or something extremely, extremely important. Till 11 a.m. that's my thinking time. It's just eight to 11 is in thoughts and people I want to call rather than my calendar describing what my priorities should be. And it's the same thing for our customers as well in a slightly different way. They are trying to decide and come to terms with not only what today means to them but what the realities of today means for tomorrow. I'll give you an example of a very, very large bank in the United States, which Consumer Bank, which is essentially believed in the fact that customer relations were the most and customer relationship managers were the most important role for them. They are thinking about moving to bots. So the fact that you would be interacting with bots when you reach your bank is going to be a reality. There is no if and then buts about it. Very, very large company providing financial services is now trying to say, how do you make the digital platforms more responsive? How do you make analytics faster, more responsive and collaborative? Those are really the focus of C-suite attention rather than which building do we call after our company and add towers to it? Or what coffee machine should we buy for the organization? Or should we have a whiskey bar or a wine bar in our office? Now, just the mundaneness of those decisions are coming up. And now the focus is, how do we not only survive to your point, Lisa, but thrive in the digital collaboration economy when it's going to be about responsiveness, it's going to be about speed and it's going to be about security and compliance. At the end of the day, kind of wrapping things up here, COVID or not, the customer experience is critical. It's the lifeblood of what your organization delivers, the success of your customers and their ability to make major business impacts is what speaks to MemSQL's capabilities. So a customer experience I know is always near and dear to your heart. And it sounds like it's something that you are, have modified for the situation, but really MemSQL focused on, not just the customer experience, but your employee experience as well. Well, that's exactly it. And I think if you do right by the employees, they'll do right by the customers. And I would any day put the employee first lens to any decision that we make. And that's paid off for us in spades. We've got a family environment. I genuinely, genuinely care about every single employee of MemSQL and their families. And we've communicated often. We have listened, we have learned. These are unprecedented times. There isn't a manual to go through COVID-19 work environment. And I think the realization that we just don't know what tomorrow would bring is actually very liberating because it just frees you from rinsing and repeating and further feeding your prejudice and biases to getting up every day and say, let me learn as much as I can about the current environment, current realities, lens it through our priorities and make the best decision that we can. And if we are wrong, accept it and correct it. Nothing too intellectual, but it's in the simplicity that sometimes we find a lot of solace. Yeah, simplicity in these times would be great. I think you're, I like how you talked about the opportunities. There's a lot of positive COVID catalysts that are coming from this. And we want to thank you for sharing some time with us today talking about the changing role of the C-suite and the opportunities that it brings. Raj, it's been great to have you on theCUBE. As always, Lisa, it's a pleasure. Thank you. For the co-CEO of MemSQL, Raj Verma, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Conversation.


My name is Timothy McDermott and I am from the Kingdom of Swazland. I have created a company called Syswap which aims to provide a comprehensive learning tool and language and cultural guide for aid workers and tourists in my kingdom. And what it does is it offers four main features, a translator, language learning guide so you can converse with the locals and everything, and then the cultural learning tool and then the topic specific word search.


My name is Ala. I'm a researcher and electrical power engineer. I'm working in a project related to the battery management systems, battery savings, telematics, and everything related to immobility. And this is all in research cooperation with MCOBA organization that's based in London. This project is mainly carried out on Kenya. It's dedicated for offering the end users a free access to immobility and motor bikes that are based on batteries and electrical motors. In this project, I'm aiming to target three SDGs. SDG 7 for the affordable clean energy, SDG 9 for industry and innovation, and SDG 11 for sustainable cities and communities. I hope that I will be a part of the digital transformation that's been taking place all over the wallet and to have a significant contribution to the battery management systems inside the immobility vehicles.


Hello and welcome back to Mayazol Ecoestate, a bastion of luxury living right here in the south of Johannesburg, close to all major highways, incredible shopping centres and sought after schools, but if that isn't enough to make you start considering the move, then the mouth-watering Italian and Portuguese restaurants will certainly will. I'm standing in front of a 16.9mm home that boasts 6 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms and so much more. I'd like you to come with me as we explore this amazing home and show you why it should be your next one. My name is Chad Rivera, this is the Private Property Home Shopper Show. Welcome home. Coming through your glass front door, you find yourself in the main reception area and what a reception area is. From walking in, you're surrounded by fountains and pillars, really giving you just the taste of how incredible this home is. But talking about the reception area you get to see firstly, your top level where all your bedrooms are located and then on my right hand side, floor to ceiling is flanked by glass, outlining the fountain, your driveway and allowing you to show off your incredible car collection. As you can see how the current owner of this house is already done. What I'd like to do however is start behind me. That is where you'll find your former lounge, your guest bathroom as well as access to your garage. Come with me. Coming down a short passageway, you immediately arrive at your guest bathroom, incredibly well equipped. But what I like most about it is it is very, very close to your front door. So all of your guests, if you like entertaining, have immediate access to your guest bathroom without anybody needing to go through some of your more private areas. This guest bathroom comes equipped with your toilet, a single vanity and a lot of nice comfortable space. And I really do like the wallpaper. Cool wallpaper continues right here. This is your formal lounge area.  It lets you look out onto that driveway and that incredible collection of cars. In the corner, a set of windows and a door that leads out onto the back garden is also responsible for the massive amounts of light this room receives. And on my right hand side is a wooden door that leads off to a four car garage. As you walk off to the other living areas in the home, you get to pass this right here. A set of windows that look out onto a beautiful natural fountain. And just past that fountain, you find the remaining living areas. First up is this right here, your dining room area, which is incredibly well equipped. With a 12-seater dining room table that is massive, sitting in here very, very comfortably underneath this crystal chandelier. Now on the right hand side of that dining room table, you've got these sliding stackable doors that open out onto your patio, which overlooks a stunningly blue pool and incredible views of the Mayazol eco-estate. This plot has got a prime location in the estate and the estate agent will definitely vouch for just how lucky you'd be to be able to call this home your own. Seamlessly from the dining room area, you have your kitchen, again immaculate and incredibly contemporary. This massive centre island is flanked by storage. On my right hand side is your pantry through this stained glass door right over here. You've got your kitchenette on my right hand side that also includes your laundry area, your large sink, plenty of dry good storage and also place all of your under counter appliances. They don't mar up the look of your kitchen and that's why it keeps these lines so clean. You've got a Bosch full plate stove, extract an oven and then just next to that, you've got a Bosch coffee machine and microwave with storage running all the way across. And then we cannot forget the chef's sink or prep sink with all the faucet attachments. This one does come with one thing extra though and that is immediate hot or cold water and the water is filtered. So for our tea lovers or our coffee connoisseurs, you know with one click of the switch, you've got your hot beverage ready to go. What I love about this kitchen though is this right over here. You've got a built-in breakfast nook that is right next to the kitchen and the dining room as well as the patios. It looks so cosy and I think there's many families who'd love to kick back there and enjoy a breakfast every Sunday or weekend that they've got that extra time to whip up something special. Over here, there's your normal lounge area, space for a TV, beautiful views, but we've also got those plantation shutters here giving you a bit of privacy if need be, but it does make this room again feel so much more cosy and relaxing. Down lighting runs the length of the room and then as we can see, it is also air conditioned. Another set of sliding stackable doors leads you out onto your patio, which is without a doubt the icing on the cake for this home. Spacious, welcoming and yet with an incredible view right here in Mayazal Eco State, it is the cherry on top of this cake. But I also really like the small garden area. The rest of it is flanked with either wood patio decking or these tiles, but you've got this garden area with another fountain, some white rock. It does bring a little touch of greenery to an area that is otherwise one that you kick back, relax, enjoy a nice bri from the built-in bri, you've got some storage as well as some counter space. But most of all, you've got this right here, a sparkling blue pool with a view to enjoy. Well, as soon as summer decides to come back to South Africa, but right now it's time to head on to the other wing of the house and see what that has in store for us. And here we are coming full circle back to where we started. The spiral staircase behind me, you can see there are two sitting areas, one just behind the spiral staircase and one right here for you to sit down, relax and enjoy the sunlight that cascades from this room filled with windows. But right now we are talking about this wing of the house. Just off to my right-hand side, you have the first bedroom, it's a guest bedroom that is located downstairs. It is the only bedroom that is located downstairs. We're going to check that out first and then it's off to the office. The first bedroom located downstairs is set up as a games room mixed with an office. It has immediate access out to the balcony, beautiful lighting and views that anyone will really enjoy. It comes with an en suite bathroom, with a walk-in shower, freestanding bath tub, toilet and single vanity. The last room of the house is arranged in an office right now. It's got three windows, either overlooking an incredible blue pool and patio. The one right in front of me is picturesque, giving you that view of the entire Mazel eco-estate and then the right-hand side one lets in so much natural light and lets you overlook the driveway which is also flanked by incredible plant life. But you can do with this room how you feel would work best with all those natural lights and windows. Now, however, we have wrapped up the bottom floor of this house and it's time for us to go up that set of stairs and take a look at what the bedrooms have in store for us. Come with me. And now that we're upstairs you get to once again look down upon that reception area which I think always does make you feel like this house is something special which it most certainly is. And this is the first bedroom we are looking at so far and as you can see as soon as you walk in you've got an area here that's been chiseled out with a wall full of windows and a beautiful spot to put a desk in case you do need to do some work and you inhabit this room. It is very, very spacious. This could easily be a master suite, high ceilings, bulkhead with LED recessed all around, TV spot and then flanked on both sides with covered space. Like I did mention, nice and spacious. I love the fact that they've managed to fit in an L shaped couch here, king size bed and then more windows on the left hand side in that corner and on the right hand side that brings in that natural light makes it feel quite spacious and very, very airy. Another very cool feature about this room specifically is between those two windows you've got an area of wall that you can etch out and cover in a wallpaper that really does bring your own flair or style to the room. My favourite feature, however, is it's got an ensuite bathroom that is a sight to behold. As I mentioned earlier, this room could easily be a master suite and the bathroom brings that to the forefront, double vanity each with their own mirror, plantation blinds just behind a free standing jacuzzi tub. What a beautiful spot to take a relaxing bath.  With the first bedroom under our belt, let's take a look at what the rest of the upstairs area has to offer. Behind this door is a linen closet, behind this one is your master suite so we're definitely saving it for last. Behind this one is another linen closet so you can have no issues with storage. Then you've got this bridge area here with again a wall of windows and a stunning chandelier that leads all the way down to the bottom floor and then we've got two bedrooms right here. Let's start with this one. This bedroom is again incredibly well equipped. We've swapped the tiles off for stunning laminate wood flooring. It comes with this very own ensuite bathroom with a walking shower, single vanity as well as a floating toilet with hidden cistern and then the bedroom itself comes fully equipped. Beautiful closet space, a built in desk area but the cherry on top for this bedroom has to be the wraparound balcony. Open one door up and you have immaculate views all the way down Alberton Valley including Mayor's doll and I have to admit sitting back and enjoying a sundowner on this balcony must really really be a treat. The bedroom right next door has a hallway full of closet space.  Free standing bathtub, single vanity with mirror as well as under counter storage and another one of those very nice sleek toilets. Carry on a little bit further though you find a spacious room that easily fits your bed as well as a work desk and again has access to that balcony so you get to enjoy those unparalleled views. And here we are finally past these two doors leads into your very own master suite and this one comes with a few surprises. First and foremost being this waiting area. You've got a whole frame of glass windows taking up a wall looking down onto your back garden space with these two massive armchairs so you can sit comfortably if you are entertaining people just before somebody does get ready and in this counter space here with all of the under counter storage but there's so much more to this master bedroom. And here we are within the main area of this master suite and you'll quickly see that the design elements of this room has to be two things one tall ceilings with a bulkhead as well as the LED lighting. Quite a bit of space here but space isn't the thing you're looking at when you walk into this room because the walls of this room disappear. Talking about bringing indoor art or living to life this bedroom does it the best. It leads immediately out onto your balcony. I've spoken so much about the view I'm not going to mention anymore but being able to lie in the bed and wake up to this view is incredible. You can see the mountains and hills in the distance and I love it. Another thing I do love other than the extra space for you to design it as you want is it comes with his and hers cupboard space for walking closets as well as bathrooms. His is on the left, hers is around this corner. Let's start with his and then see what else is there. Now as he's befitting a his bathroom you've got a ample amount of storage space for our garments, for our clothes but not an excessive amount. We are simple men living simple lives and then we've got two sets of plantation shutters that close up and give this room a lot of privacy but you have your very own balcony which is super cool. Single vanity, under counter storage, toilet tucked away in the corner but the most important accessory for every man is a comfortable large and spacious shower which is exactly what this one is with a rainfall shower head situated in the ceiling so you know when you are having shower time it's going to be a pretty comfortable experience. The hers side is a lot more glamorous and we headed there next. And here we are, double the space of this walk-in closet and extra space enough for this beautiful Caesar stoned countertop that makes up this dresser but leaving the walk-in closet behind we come to the bathroom itself. And in the bathroom the luxury continues. Behind me walk-in shower, double vanity with double mirrors and under counter storage toilet tucked away neatly and privately in the corner and then behind me as you can see those plantation shutters this time we changed the wood ones for these beautiful clean white ones a chandelier hanging right in front of this free standing bathtub really ticking the list off when you come to comfortable bathrooms for you to share with your partner. And now with the master suite all wrapped up it's time for us to head over to the cottage that comes included with this incredible home. The cottage is located to the left of the four car garage and as you open its glass front door you head up a set of stairs that let you in to its main living area. Now this main living area is very well equipped with a kitchen, stand out living area and it's very own master suite. The bedroom is large, has access to a balcony that balcony wraps all the way around to the living area and the bedroom comes with its very own en suite bathroom, a free standing bathtub single vanity built in cupboards and walk-in shower is all included so this cottage is perfect not only for your children who have grown up and want to leave the nest but not leave so far as to move out or even if you have some family or friends over your own self-contained space. And here we are back downstairs and it's now time to talk about how you can become the next owner of this incredible home. First however let's recap what we've seen so far. We've seen six bedrooms, five bathrooms, entertainment spaces that are both very well thought out contemporary and exceptionally functional. This is also a home that resides within an eco-estate allowing you to relax away from the hustle and bustle of the city life but not so far away that it's going to be a chore to get back into Santon or any of the other big metropolitan areas. And if you'd like to purchase this home what I'd like you to do is contact Louis from Law Real Estate and schedule a viewing as soon as possible. Also remember you can find your new home on privateproperty.co.za And lastly before I head off please like, share and subscribe to us across all the social media channels including YouTube, Instagram as well as Facebook. So you never miss out on when we tour some of the most sought after exclusive or unique homes around South Africa. From myself, Chad Rivera, the team at the Private Property Home Shopper Show. We'll see you next time. Goodbye.


Hi, I'm Marsha Martin, and this is Inside the Ballot Box. Here Inside the Ballot Box today with me is Rob Edward, and Rob is the President of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund, the issue committee established to run the campaign for Proposition 114. Proposition 114, in case you're not already seriously focused on it, is the campaign to reintroduce the gray wolf in the northern ranges of the Colorado Rockies, mostly on the western slope. And Rob is a resident of Lewisville. He's been working toward the eventual return of gray wolves to Colorado for over 20 years. Rob, thank you so much for being here, and really this is going to just be your interview. So the first thing I have to ask you is why, I mean, you've dedicated 20 years to this. What do you think is the importance to humanity and the planet earth to have gray wolves in more of their original range? Gray wolves were the engine of evolution throughout all of the ecological systems that they were part of throughout the northern hemisphere. And that's for a very simple reason. It's because of the way they hunt. They look for infirmities in their prey. They hunt as a group, usually. To do that, they need to test their prey for weakness, whatever that might be. To do that, they need to get their prey moving. And their prey happens to be large grazers in the western United States. Some Canada, that generally means elk, sometimes deer, but elk are a little bit bigger. A member of the deer family and more part of the wolf diet, wherever they occur. And so by moving their big prey around those big grazers, they keep the big grazers from grazing everything down to the ground. And especially in the wetland, riparian, riverside areas, that's important. Because those plants need a chance to rebound from some grazing. Grazing is important to the process as well, but too much grazing is like too much fire. It creates a sterile environment. So the problem came when Europeans in their conquest of North America decided that wolves and most other large carnivores were a competitor and needed to be eliminated. And they went about it with a vengeance. We actually created a special branch of the U.S. government back in the early 1900s called the U.S. Biological Survey, Congress appropriated at the time $250,000. Now think about that, that's in 1914 dollars. If that was now, that would have been many millions of dollars. That's how serious they were. They were going to wage and did wage war on wolves. Yet it still took from the late 1800s to 1945 for Colorado's last wolf to be killed. And that was down in the South San Juan Mountains. So it took a very long and arduous campaign by professional wolf hunters, wolfers they were called, to eliminate wolves. And it's because we wiped them out that we now have things like if you go to Rocky Mountain National Park and you notice all the fencing that they've put up for several million dollars in the last 10 years. We're fencing elk out of the riparian areas in order to help some of those areas rebound from the over browsing that Elker are doing there. Aspen had almost been eliminated from the park because the elk were so hard on it. And a lot of the willow communities as well. So now we're fencing them out artificially, which is obviously not a long term solution to the problem. The problem was created because we reintroduced up to Rocky Mountain National Park in the early part of the 1900s as we were wiping wolves out and then they had no natural coursing predator. When I say coursing, that's that action I was talking about earlier. Wolves are coursing predators, they move their prey around, they chase the course. And it's that action that is so ecologically important and beneficial. In the absence of wolves, we've got an ecological degradation cascading through the system over the course of decades. At the same time, we know that starting in the 1960s and 70s, ecological awareness was building and people were understanding that some of the things that our forebears did weren't necessarily the wisest things in the world. And that we maybe should take a chance to take a pause and where we could make things right again. So there's been a call for restoring wolves to the places that they were wiped out of throughout the United States for many decades now. And Colorado is one of those places. But Colorado now stands as probably the last best place for wolves. Western Colorado is the majority public land. It's over 68% public land and 17 million acres, way bigger than Yellowstone. Yes, it's crisscrossed with some roads, but it's still public land and it's full of the largest population in North America, one of the largest deer populations. And there's no reason why we shouldn't have wolves back there. So people started calling for a study of Colorado's status vis-a-vis wolves back in the mid 1990s, and that's when I came to Colorado. And we actually got a study appropriated through the Congress, then Congressman David Skaggs got an appropriation that paid for a biological and a public opinion study. And the biological study said that Western Colorado's seven national forests, just a national forest, not the other public lands, could support well over a thousand wolves. That came out around 1994. Right around that same time, late 1994, the public opinion survey came out and it showed that statewide support for wolf restoration stood at 75%, approximately 75%. And that if you looked at it, if you broke it down geographically, the Western slope, the respondents on the Western slope supported wolf recovery by 71%, and the front range by 73%. Now remember, this is back in 1994. And private polling since then, several times along the way, and all we've seen is gradual creep in favor of wolf restoration. We haven't lost any support, we've gained it and solidified it. And in 2019, as we were starting to go to the ballot, and we'll talk about the reasons where we decided to go to the ballot in a minute. They did another public opinion survey and they should they, sorry, I should say Colorado State University did another public opinion survey and they showed amazingly that statewide support for wolf restoration through reintroduction stood at 84%. Which is just incredible on what what you would think in reading the media over the years you would think that it was much more 5050 or something along those lines but it's wildly popular with the public. Sure. Yeah, that's the big picture ecological picture and the public support picture about why we're going to the ballot but the real guts of what's led us here stands in the in the public policy arena. The public policy arena completely ignored the biological reality which is that Colorado can support and needs wolves that the public supports the idea of putting wolves back in Western Colorado. And in the public policy arena, both the state legislature, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission, formerly the division of wildlife on their, their wildlife commission have steadfastly refused to entertain any real scientifically based study of the potential of wolves back on the ground. Time and again they've refused. So, after doing 20 years worth of due diligence, which I think is plenty. Yeah, enough. We decided that the, it's the public's time to have their say on this. We're not asking the public to, to legislate the, the details of this. All I'm saying is, should the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Department begin and complete a plan for wolf reintroduction by the end of 2023 that starts pause on the ground by end of 2023. So that we can move towards self sustaining population of wolves in the next 10 to 15 years. That sounds like a reasonable ask. But we certainly have opposition we can talk about that in a minute as well. But yeah, this is the public's opportunity to have their say on this. I think that sounds reasonable. It sounds very much like my experience with the oil and gas extraction industry. And therefore regulating it and the power is not. So, I think there's a pretty close analogy there. Well, we're on the upside. There are a couple of really good stories that you probably know. Talk about the wolf reintroduction impact in Yellowstone because I thought the benefits with that of that were just lovely and I'd like everyone to hear a good storyteller salad. Tell it. Absolutely. Well, you know, as I was telling the intro here, I was telling the backside of that is what did we lose when we lost wolves we lost that that force on the landscape. It sounds like wildfire. Wildfire is very important to the health of our forest systems. We need fire. What we don't need is the kinds of things that have been happening lately because we suppressed fire for so long that once fire actually happens it happens explosively. But in this instance with wolves we've wiped them out and that has degraded their native habitat. So when we decided we were going to put wolves back in Yellowstone, and that went through a federal process because of course Yellowstone is a national park and tied to that was a reintroduction simultaneously in Central Idaho where I'm from originally. Yellowstone was perfectly set up to immediately start studying the effect of putting wolves back on the ground. So in 1990 late 1994 early 1995, we got the first batch of wolves, about 15 or so into the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. And then the next year we put another 15 or so down. And after they had had some time to acclimate in their pens. We brought entire family groups to the extent that we could. Right before it was time to have pups, the fence came down to each of these various locations where they were being housed, and the wolves wandered out into the Yellowstone ecosystem. They dug dens, they had pups, and within two years, scientists were seeing small glimmers of changes on the landscape that they thought might be possible but hadn't had any evidence until then. And within another year or two, they had entire willow communities suddenly rebounding along stream banks that had for decades been denuded in Yellowstone by the elk. And with the rebound and willow and aspen beaver started coming back. And as beaver started to come back into the Lamar Valley and build beaver dams, the water got deeper and colder, and suddenly there were more native fishes that were spending time in the Lamar Valley and river otters and songbirds were back in more abundance because there was more willow habitat for them and aspen. And the list goes on, but the fact is that by helping to give the the plant communities a break from constant browsing by elk. And suddenly those plant communities were able to to bounce back and that has tremendous ecological benefit. What period of time did have these changes been observed over? Well, they really there were papers coming out within the first five years of reintroduction and then there's been several since. Impressive.  Is that truly only owed to wolves? You know, so there's there's been some of those kinds of debates, but by and large scientists agree that it's had a significant ecological benefit to the Yellowstone ecosystem. And I don't know real study of what happened in central Idaho is very different sort of reintroduction scenario where instead of bringing the wolves in and putting them in acclimation pens for a couple of months feeding them roadkill and then letting them go. And so they just opened the cage doors and the wolves ran out, but they still stayed close enough in central Idaho that they were able to start breeding and and ultimately reach the self sustaining level and started to populate Washington and Oregon and ultimately northern California. The interesting thing about what I'm just describing there is that during the period from 1994 to 2014, let's say, we had individual wolves occasionally wandered down from the southern portion of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem into northern Colorado. 2001, nearly everyone was killed or disappeared went back to, you know, back to Yellowstone or we don't know where they went, but none have ended up resulting in a rekindled population here. Yet, Washington and Oregon and northern California have wolves now that are breeding and, you know, trying to get to the level of being self sustaining. The reason for that is that southern Wyoming is big open country.  There are there are some migration corridors that they could take that are very narrow, but the trip is pretty dangerous one way or the other. And given that southern Wyoming now in a scenario where wolves are not protected under the Federal Endangered Species Act in Wyoming anymore, they're basically treated as vermin. They can be killed 24 seven. And so it's a very risky proposition for wolves to wander southward and they don't generally do it as multiple wolves. So the fact that there was suddenly a report of multiple wolves in Northwest Colorado, the week that we put proposition 114 on the ballot was to say the least stunning. Good PR for them, huh? Good PR for them, but it creates a PR quagmire for us in terms of messaging this. The reality is though that our scientific community has been very clear. Those wolves do not mean that Colorado is is now going to have wolves. It's such a small group of wolves.  And you don't want to start a population in a new area based on four or five siblings. Unless, you know, you want to start a bluegrass band. No, no. I'm a bluegrass man. I get to say that. So, yeah, okay, me too. But I wouldn't have said it anyway. So in terms of good, I guess, pack management, you want to obviously introduce a more genetically diverse group of wolves than might just wander down. There's the another reason that I could think of for this is sort of climate change insurance, right? You want the range of the animals to be as wide as possible in case one locale or another becomes bad habitat sometime in the future. Is that one of the things you're thinking about? Yeah, absolutely. Those are very important. The potential for the ecological effects of wolves being back in their native range. That has implications for climate change resiliency. Right, because if you have a place that is robust and the water is running deep, even in drought years, it's being retained by the beaver dams and the plant material is so robust that it's got a lot of roots in the soil. And so the soil is retaining water. The ability to be more resilient to creeping climate change is important. Sure. You know, that can't be understated. Right. And of course, the reestablishment of the Aspen forests is really important if fires are more common. Absolutely. Okay. So I noticed that the Sierra Club, and possibly in conjunction with your organization, I'm not really sure, is doing a lot of messaging about livestock management in the presence of wolves. Is this a response to the opposition issue committees which are largely farmers and ranchers associations? Certainly, their messaging around some of that is directly tied to that. But regardless, we know that it's important to help people who grow livestock here in Colorado understand, number one, that the world's changing. If we are going to reintroduce wolves, that is going to change the way they have to do business to some degree. And that there are good models already in place and being constantly updated that show how we can raise livestock in the presence of wolves on the landscape in a way that promotes the sustainability of the wolf population while minimizing depredation on livestock. We are very clear with our constituents and the voting public that there will be ultimately, once there's enough wolves on the ground, there will be some depredation on livestock. There absolutely will be. We know that for 20 years of wolves being in the Northern Rockies, for example, which is very similar habitat and a very, the same food base, which is elk. We know that, you know, when you've got wolves in a county and livestock are in that same county that on average 99.95% of the livestock in that county are never killed by wolves. Right? So that means a fraction, a multiple decimal point fraction of a percent are killed by wolves every year, which is insignificant in the larger scheme. But if it's, you know, one calf or 12 lambs or, you know, some sheep that get killed by wolves on a single light or something, that individual rancher, that hurts monetarily. So we built into Proposition 114 a economic compensation component that says any confirmed depredation by wolves on livestock will be compensated for at fair market value. Okay. Yeah, I saw that in the bill. I thought that was very smart. And was going to ask about it if you hadn't come to it on your own. Are there, are there ranching techniques that can be used and taught as outreach? Can you tell me about how that works a little? I'm not an expert in that end of animal husbandry. We've got some ranchers who are working with us who are very excited about helping Colorado come on board with this. To their credit, Colorado State University has created a new extension, a piece of the extension service that's focused on carnivore coexistence. And they're going to play a long term vital role in ensuring that livestock production and wolf conservation go hand in hand. But there are ways that, for example, one of the primary ways that we know you can reduce conflict with wolves on livestock is to have herders. So it's asking for the model of livestock production in the open range public lands west to change some. Because the model here to four has been I've got a hundred head of cattle or sheep. I have a public lands allotment and I put them out on that allotment in early June and I come back in late September and put them back into the truck and hopefully I've got as many as I left there in June. And that, you know, you're going to see more losses on those kinds of allotments than you will where they've got a herder in place. The other thing is to help ranchers understand that they can teach their livestock how to defend themselves quite literally from predators, not just wolves but coyotes. And that means teaching the herders and the ranch owners how to get their cows when they're faced with a threat to bunch up and not run in five different directions because when they separate is when the wolves can get to an individual. Sure. You know, let's face it cows and sheep are not the fleet of foot that or deer or antelope are so when they split up they are totally vulnerable when they bunch up into a tight herd and face outward kind of like musk oxen do in the part of the northern hemisphere. So when musk oxen are faced with with wolves and bison do the same thing to a some degree.  Yeah, I see that. And that's a skill that is deep in the DNA of the cattle they just haven't had to use it for a while right. So, in terms of benefits to the agricultural community, I would think that the eventual wildfire control that you get from not having the elk eat all the baby aspen would be a big deal and would improve the ecosystem has any thought been given to that. There are so many different facets of scientific study going on with regard to wolves and ecological benefits. I'm sure somebody's probably thinking about that, but I don't know specifics. Okay. Fair enough. In terms of the opposition. Do you know enough about the case, because I don't know whether I'm going to be able to interview anybody on the opposition side or not honestly, but you know, they're there's the obvious cases, you know, I send my, send my herd to the high pasture and it comes back less that there's going to be predation. And that's the end of the story. Do they have a deeper case than that or is is that just the nature of the opposition. You know, I've having done this so long and had many conversations, most of them very similar with with ranchers. It's, it's complicated because some of them say, and especially on the sheep ranching and the things say, well, you know, just the presence of wolves in an area can cause my sheep to not give birth to full weight lambs or abort. Whether that's completely true or not. That's what they're saying. And some of the cattle ranchers have said the same kind of thing. Some of the cattle ranchers have said, well, you know, if they come in and get a prize bowl of mine. If your prize bowl wasn't able to defend itself against wolves, I'm wondering whether it's worth the genetic import, but that's my own take on it. Oh, you only have that many prize bulls. Can't you keep him down in the low pasture? I mean, certainly that's, I'm being flip and you probably should. The final line is I think that there's a way for us to be innovative in Colorado. If the people of Colorado stand up on November 3rd or when they get their mail in ballots and say, we want wolves and we have a strong majority of them say that, then that's a strong signal to the agricultural industry in Colorado that you need to come on board and you need to make Colorado proud of you. Sure. You can do that by, you know, swallowing your pride if you were against this and saying, all right, well, I guess I'm going to have to figure out how to make a go of this. Really, most ranchers are never going to see wolves. Sure. Or they'll see them off in the distance, but they're going to be affected by them in their lifetime. Even if we have over a thousand wolves here, it's just not going to be the end of the world for them. But to learn how to protect your stock is an important academic and cultural change for them. But it's also the opportunity for us to look at ways we might be able to incentivize that haven't been done before. For example, if you've got a large cattle operation that has both public and private allotment rotation where you're putting them on public land for part of the time and bringing them back down into the valley in the winter. So if you end up with wolves, setting up shop with a den or something nearby, or on your on your private property, why couldn't we pay that ranch to grow wolves? I think the public would be on board with figuring out how to do that to say, no, we expect there's going to be some depredation. We'll pay you for whatever depredation there is. But beyond that, we're actually going to proactively give you some incentive to try to prevent depredation and to not ask for lethal control if there is depredation. And relocate the wolves into unoccupied areas when they start building up. So relocate the livestock into unoccupied areas where there are wolves. Yeah, so livestock is it's an interesting question because some apex predators, I'm thinking mostly in the sea, you know, why we can swim with sharks right have a preferred have preferred species for prey. Is it going to be true with wolves? I mean, if there are elk around, are they going to leave the cattle alone? Or are they indiscriminate in that way? Actually, they're not indiscriminate. I just saw a new study come out. I can't cite it verbatim, but I know it was in a peer reviewed journal that looks at that very question. And the overall thrust was or in the abstract was that indeed, if native prey or present wolves tend to select for native prey. So the mule deer, the elk, not so much the sheep. Right. Well, in my mouth. Who likes the taste of landland anyway. Yeah. Um, yeah, I mean, it's not black and white, but it science is telling us that they do tend to prefer their native prey. They'll even go for a bison over a cow. Interesting. Which is long memories. Not easy. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't want to take on a bison. Actually, I wouldn't want to take on an elk either, but right. Um, all right. So, you know, the other aspect of our organized opposition right now is is is a segment of the hunting community. You would think from the public statements or anything you would read in the media that all hunters are against wolves. But in fact, if you look at public opinion survey after public opinion survey, including the one that was done in 2019 by CSU hunters are majority support for world frustration. I don't certainly think so because it's a lot more sporting to hunt fit plentiful but not overpopulated animals, then then to shoot elks in a in a valley and then have to have them tested for chronic wasting disease. Exactly. But there are certain segments that have banded together under the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation in particular. Amazingly, they were in favor of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone until wolves were on the ground and then suddenly that all changed. They were fighting alongside the organized ranching opposition and their basic refrain is that wolves are going to wipe out the native prey, which is on its face, ridiculous, because let's just take, take it one step at a time here from a pure logic because wolves were prone to wipe out their native prey. Wouldn't they have done that? Everywhere else. Pleistocene, right? Okay, but setting that aside, what does science tell us about that? Well, science tells us that in the northern Rocky Mountains where we've had wolves now back for 25 plus years, that elk population in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana is higher than it was in 1995 when wolves were reintroduced. Because the habitat has improved. Well, we don't know. It's complicated, but it's, there are more elk. There's not a ton more, but there are more. They haven't been wiped out. There's a bunch more wolves than there were, which was zero. The northern range herd definitely was significantly reduced, the northern range being that part of the northern part of the Lamar Valley going up into Montana. But it was already significantly over management objective for elk population anyway. So the wolves actually did a good job bringing the elk population in the northern range back down into decent shape in terms of what the habitat could support. And hunter success has not dropped with regard to those places where wolves are present. That was a question I had too, because I did notice that a couple of the signed up opposition issue committees were outfitters. I guess outfitters are people that an inexperienced hunter would go to to get told what to do to go get his elk. Not inexperienced necessarily, but somebody with a big wallet. So, but anyway, the objective is a guarantee of success in hunting. Those hunts usually cost tens of thousands of dollars when they're usually conducted on private land. Not usually, but part of the time they're conducted on private land, usually by ranchers who are, you know, supplementing their income by having an outfitting business. So they've kind of got a dual reason to be concerned about what wolf restoration means and I understand that. But again, it's not the end of the world. It does change. It can change where you can expect elk to be. And it's not, what we're asking is what we're asking for is for elk and deer to be moving around the landscape, which means that it's not so easy to guess from year to year whether your favorite hunting unit and a particular valley in that hunting unit is going to have elk in it. So yeah, okay, I get it. It changes the dynamic. It actually makes you have to like be more strategic about where you hunt and when you hunt. But it's not the end of the world and it doesn't mean there is any less animal biomass out there for you to hunt if you're a hunter. Isn't that what makes it a sport? One would think. Okay, well we are trying to keep these under half an hour, but and I've got a little spiel I have to say at the end, but I want to give you one more shot to just sum up and and give us your best message. You bet. Well, we're asking the voters of Colorado to think long and hard about what we leave our grandchildren. And we have an opportunity now to restore a keystone species to Western Colorado to the vast public lands of Western Colorado. Gray wolves, which have tremendous ecological importance to Colorado's future. And you have that opportunity on your ballot. This fall, Proposition 114 will allow us to tell the state game management agency to develop a plan with public input to put wolves on the ground by the end of 2023 and and enough thereafter to ultimately get to a self-sustaining population. And anytime livestock are depredated on by wolves, thereafter the public will compensate them for it. It's not going to break the bank. Neither is the reintroduction program. So we believe for all those reasons, a yes vote on Proposition 114 is is the way we're going to restore the balance of nature to Western Colorado for future generations. Thanks. Balance of nature in the Colorado way of life right. In other words, thank you very much for giving me your time. I know that in the thick of the election season and this is something you've been dedicated to for a long time. It's a big deal for you to take time out and come do that in this and for me in a small media audience. So I really do want to thank you. And I want to tell everybody out there. Proposition 114 is going to be fairly far down a very big ballot. And I want you to look for it by voting the whole ballot from top to bottom. And that's the way democracy works. And I think everybody needs to do that vote the whole whole ballot, all the way down to the propositions. And here inside the ballot box, we are trying to make sure that you know what to do when you get there. All right. Thanks very much, Rob. Thank you. Great public service. You're welcome. Goodbye, everybody.