You just watched some of the destruction caused by catastrophic flooding taking place all across Pakistan and currently 33% of the country is experiencing flooding and tens of millions of citizens have been displaced as a result of flooding. We're looking at a humanitarian disaster on a massive scale and to really put things into perspective I want to look at some satellite images taken on August 28th that really capture the sheer enormity of the flooding. This is courtesy of Axios. So as you can see here these are village fields in Rajanpur and these were taken by Maxar and you can see the village before flooding and then after flooding the entire village is nearly submerged with water coming up to the buildings. And now here's another look at fields in Rajanpur just completely devastating on an unfathomable scale. Now this was the Indus River before and after flooding as you can see massive difference. Now finally these are fields and homes along the Indus River in Rajan and it's been a catastrophe needless to say and I just want to emphasize this is an ongoing disaster and this is a climate change induced disaster. Now for more details we go to common dreams where Julia Conley explains with hundreds of thousands of people displaced more than four million crops destroyed and nearly a million homes demolished or severely damaged Pakistani officials and rights campaigners on Monday called for a major international aid push following flooding throughout the country fueled by the fossil fuel driven climate emergency and an unprecedented season of monsoon rains. More than 30 million people are in urgent need of help. The international rescue committee said after conducting a rapid needs assessment three days after the Pakistani government declared the flooding which has killed more than 1000 people a national emergency. Both the IRC and government officials have explicitly linked the flooding to the climate crisis with IRC country director Shabnam Balik noting despite producing less than 1% of the world's carbon footprint the country is suffering the consequences of the world's inaction and stays in the top 10% countries facing the consequences. Amid a monsoon season which has so far seen 784% and 500% more rains than average in Sindh and Balochistan provinces respectively the IRC is anticipating a sharp rise in food and security as 71% of Pakistani surveyed by the group are already without access to sufficient clean drinking water. So to say that the situation is bad is an understatement. Now here's some facts these are just preliminary statistics all subject to change these are estimates so take all of them with the grain of salt by the time that you see this video these will likely have been revised but here's what we know so far as the article pointed out more than 1000 people have been killed. I believe the current estimate is around 1400 but again that's just an approximation take that with the grain of salt over 30 million people have been displaced the highest estimate that I've seen is 50 million when you consider that the total population of Pakistan is 226 million as of 2020 we're looking at almost a quarter of their entire population being displaced imagine how many people this affected it's just it's hard to grasp how bad this is as I stated earlier 33% of the entire country has been flooded 63% of pregnant and lactating women are considered extremely vulnerable 40% of people don't have access to critical health care which is something that is a necessity at this time considering the fact that IRC reports that they're seeing increase in skin infections malaria and cases of people having diarrhea so it's it's bad now I want to go to a statement from Pakistanis climate minister because what they say is really important Pakistani climate minister Sherry Raymond did not mince words Monday as she pointed out the link between the climate crisis and the suffering of the tens of millions of people directly affected by the flooding quote this is very far from a normal monsoon season it is a climate dystopia at our doorstep remnant told agents France press we are at the moment at the ground zero of the front line of extreme weather events in an unrelenting cascade of heat waves forest fires flash floods multiple glacial lake outbursts flood events and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking nonstop havoc throughout the country and she's absolutely correct now the problem is that things like this extreme weather events are going to get a lot worse especially considering a study that was released on Monday which essentially states that the rise of ocean sea levels is accelerating the Washington Post explains human driven climate change has set in motion massive ice losses in Greenland that couldn't be halted even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases today according to a study published Monday the findings in the journal Nature climate change project that it is now inevitable that 3.3% of the Greenland ice sheet will melt equal to 110 trillion tons of ice the researchers said that will trigger nearly a foot of global sea level rise so what we're seeing in Pakistan this is just the beginning it's going to get worse so when their climate minister says that this is a climate induced dystopia they're absolutely correct about that and as the common dreams article stated they are responsible for 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions but countries that have benefited from industrialization and emitting the most CO2 like the United States I think we bear a lot of responsibility for this so we absolutely should be sending them aid and doing what we can to assist them because again this is a humanitarian crisis on a huge huge scale and it's just I don't know what to say about this it's it's not like this is a one-off event where you can say wow this is unfortunate but thankfully this isn't very frequent unfortunately this is going to be a common phenomenon in our climate dystopian future now if you want to take action and help I'm going to link you to the International Rescue Committee where you can donate and thank you to Emo Dragon on Twitter for recommending this organization they're going to need all the help that they can get so if you can chip in a buck or two then that will be much appreciated I'm sure so that's where we're at where now in this day and age you can no longer deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change it's right here and it's affecting people in a substantial way so anyone currently who still is denying the reality of climate change like Tucker Carlson who just did that the other day on his program who said global cooling is the real issue these people now are enemies of humanity they don't care about the suffering and as the Washington Post article citing that nature climate change study pointed out even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today we're still going to see the sea level rise so what we've done is irreparable harm to our planet the best that we can do now at this state is try to mitigate some of the damage but we're still not taking this seriously thankfully the Democratic Party just passed the Inflation Reduction Act which does provide funding to invest in clean green technology the problem is that we're still not taking this seriously when we see goals about reducing you know greenhouse gas emissions to 2005 levels 40% of 2005 levels whatever that may be we need to stop emitting greenhouse gas now like yesterday but we were not doing that and that's just at this point in time it's not going to happen so if we're not going to take action then we have to assist the countries and the islands that are going to experience this because it's going to be devastating it is literally going to kill countless people so if we're not going to do anything we at least need to take responsibility and assist them and provide them with immediate aid because this cannot stand we cannot just allow them to suffer and do nothing when they didn't contribute as much as we did to this current crisis I mean they barely contributed comparatively speaking so we've got to do what we can to help them and the US government needs to take action right now


Good morning everybody! JR Fisher here and it is Monday the 21st. I want to welcome everybody. Want to remind you to use that chat box there, put in your questions, your comments, your suggestions, all that good stuff. Today's going to be a really cool session because by the end of today, this probably 30 minute session, you'll be able to get more done. So it's going to be worth your while to stick to the end. I've got some tips for you, a few things I've learned along the way and I think it's going to help you out a lot. Don't forget, if you haven't done so already, make sure you hit that subscribe button down there. Turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn all bell notifications so you're notified each and every single time I go live. Make good use of that chat box guys.  I've got another little iPad right here. See that? I can see myself. So I'm monitoring which you have to say over here off to the side. Let me get this thing plugged in here so that we have a power without power. It won't work well. There we got some power now. But make sure you use that.  Wait a second here, I've lost my connection. I want to make sure I get my connection back guys. Give me one second here. I am trying to connect again. I think plugging it in did something here. Hang on one second. Okay, let's see here. Okay, are we hooked back in? Give me one second. There we go. There we go. I think we're good now. I think we are good. Sorry about that. Sorry about that guys. We lost a little connection for just a second. Put in that chat box that you can hear me and that you can see me. I just want to make sure I lost my connection. I plugged in my power cord here and all of a sudden the camera went away. We don't want the camera going away. That's not productive. We're supposed to be talking about being productive today. So put something in that chat box. Let me know you can hear me. And I want to get on with this list, but I want you to think about this.  You put in hours of work, but you got nothing to show for it.  You were very reactive to everything that happened around you and you really didn't get much done. I felt that way before. I used to feel that way. I don't feel that way anymore, but I've picked up a few things that have really helped me along the way. And Paul says, okay, what we got on here? I'm going to start putting these comments up on the screen. Paul says loud and clear. You had stated before you start the week on Sunday planning the week. Does Jessica do the same or do same? Yes. As a matter of fact, she was doing that yesterday. We went out and saw a movie yesterday, The Batman. I'm not into these, you know, superhero kind of movies. But before we went, we both had to do some work. I mean, I got to the gym and I got back and I planned stuff and I had to set up this live that you guys are watching right now. And I had to, you know, set up emails and I had to do a thumbnail and she was doing the same thing. She was setting up her week. And yeah, we both do plan that stuff. It's got to be done. If we don't get it done, then it doesn't get done. So we got to set it all up. But I'm going to go through a list of things, but I just want to share with you. I remember a time when I couldn't get much done. I mean, I was always like frazzled and I was, I was putting in a lot of hours, but at the end of the day, nothing really happened. And the, the, I guess the thing I want you to really understand today is it's not that you have to work a whole lot more. That's not it at all. As a matter of fact, you may end up working less, but you do have to get it organized. You've got to get this whole thing set up so that it pretty much guides you through your day. You don't want to be reactive stuff. Reactive is not good. Now, sometimes you have to be reactive. I got some emails yesterday. They were actually support tickets and they're from people who didn't get their orders. And the reason they didn't get their orders is they bought from these ads on Facebook of people who are scamming them using our company name and taking their money and never sending them anything. And I feel bad, but I have to tell those people, you get scammed. You didn't even buy from us because they would put in, you know, hey, yeah, I bought from you guys. I'm like, really, what was the email you got? And they said, well, it came from QRBZDB. And I'm like, that's not us, you know, that's not surrounding food. And I feel bad, but that's a reactive thing. That's a reactive thing that I have to do. But if you can set up your environment, and it's not just making up a list of things to do, and I'm going to go through all this in a second, but it's actually setting up your entire environment so that it makes you more productive. That's what we're trying to do here is be more productive. Paul says, okay, okay, got that in there. So that's what we want to do. Now, the first time thief, and we didn't have this time thief years ago, this is a new time thief. This is a time thief that is really insidious. This is a time thief that will steal more of your time than anything else. This is a time thief that I've gotten caught into. I don't anymore. But it is a terrible time thief. And it's social media, social media. And I don't even know why they call social media anymore, because for the most part, the stuff you post, let's say on Facebook, nobody ever sees it anyhow. Okay, so it's not very social anymore. But it's, it's getting in there, and it's getting hooked into all these posts and all these people's lives and all this stuff going on. And it just robs you of your time. R-T-O-P-I-K, all this new technology can be confusing and frustrating, especially for those of us who didn't grow up with all this stuff. Also, soon as you get comfortable with something like Facebook, it changes. This is true.  We all grew up with it. We all grew up with it. If you were alive when it was happening, then you grew up with it. Did you grow up with it as a child? No. But does it make it any different? No. So one thing you don't want to do is tell yourself that you're at a disadvantage.  And you're not really at a disadvantage. If Facebook came out when you're 45, then you were alive. And I think a lot of people say, well, you've got to learn everything when you're a kid. It's not true. When I started my business as a matter of fact, I was 50 years old. And I couldn't really send emails. I couldn't really do anything online. I didn't know how to do anything. I couldn't type. And I still can't type, so I can say that's a disadvantage. But it's not. I don't think it is. So be very careful when you tell yourself you didn't grow up with something. Because if you were around when it occurred, then you were there. You were there. You were just there at an older age, but you were there. Let's see here. Paul says, it had to be so important, especially when you were starting out hard time to make most of time. Yeah. And I got to tell you, Paul, I was terrible at this in the beginning. I was really terrible at this. And like I said, I'm getting ready to go through my list. But the first thing is that social media guys. And here's what you can do on social media. Excuse me. I am not saying don't use social media. I'm not saying that at all. What I am saying is don't use it all day long. Okay. Don't spend your day watching reels. Okay.  And I've been caught up in doing that too. But I allow myself to do that when I want to do it. When I have the time for it, when it's not work time. So what you want to do is decide when are you going to go onto Facebook or Instagram or whatever it is. You can't just randomly do it during the day. If you randomly do it during the day, you're going to get caught up in it. It is designed to pull you in. It is designed to keep you on the platform. There are experts. There are people who study your eye movements and where you're looking on a page to figure out how to keep you online. So keep in mind, if you don't set some boundaries, if you don't say, Hey, I'm going to do social media from 930 in the morning to 10am. And then maybe I'll check it again from 530 to 6pm. If you don't do that, you are going to get caught up into social media. It will control you. It's designed to control you. Don't think that you could just resist it because you won't be able to unless you set some parameters. Okay. Unless you set some parameters. Now, mine is a little tricky because I'm actually posting for my business on social media. So I have to decide when am I going to do that and what exactly am I going to post and where am I going to post. Once I've decided that, then that's all I do. I don't do any more than that. Okay. I just don't want to do any more than that. So I have to set up some rules and we're going to talk about some of those rules in just a second.  You've got to understand that. Now, the next thing I want to tell you is number two, is there's no such thing as multitasking. Don't tell yourself that you're going to work on three tasks at the same time. It doesn't exist. There's no such thing as multitasking. Nobody can think two thoughts at the same time, let alone do two pieces of work at the same time. That has been a idea that's been sold to us over the year. Are you a multitasker? No, you're not. All you're doing is shifting your brain from one thing to the next and back to the first thing and then back again. And when you do that, you lose focus. So if you keep shifting between all these different tasks, all you're doing is losing focus and it's been proven it takes several minutes to get back into what you're doing. So you're wasting time. You're not multitasking. You're never going to multitask. It's not going to happen. All right. Number three thing I want to talk about, your desk. What does your desk look like? What does your desk look like? Now, right now I've got a few items on my desk I shouldn't have on here. I've got a microphone and a camera from the other day. I've got a bottle of water. And outside of that, I've just got an empty desk. Empty desk is nice.  You say, well, JR, I use a stapler. Okay, but you use it every single day. And if you do, you've got too much paperwork.  And you say, well, I've got my tape. Get rid of your paperclip holder. Get rid of your stapler. Get rid of your tape. Get rid of all these things. Get rid of your in and out box. I mean, I got rid of that. I want to say in 2014, I had an inbox and an out box. It was actually combined into one. And it was nice and it was leather. And it was cool. And then I had this leather pad. Okay. And it was nice. It was cool. And then I had this leather holder of my pens and pencils and all that, but I didn't use those every day. So I got rid of it. The pad of my desk, I didn't write on it. I didn't need a pad. I got rid of it. In and out box, right?  That's what those in and out boxes normally are. It's stuff you don't want to deal with. Get rid of it. At this point in my life, I have zero paper on my desk. None. I don't have paper. I get rid of paper. I don't like paper. Paper is not my friend. Paper bogs me down. Paper makes me feel like I'm choking. I don't like paper. So I got rid of it. Let me get a sip here real quick. All right. And guys, don't forget to say hello. Don't forget to participate. Some of you guys are really good about that. And some of you just kind of hang out. Some of you guys are just not there. So it's really important that you participate that you write something in there. Paul says, like you, I have to block out time to focus on one thing. The time last trying to multitask is huge. Yes. Time lost. I think she said, oh, it is lost. Okay. I couldn't see it from here. It is huge. There's no such thing as multitasking. Doesn't exist. If you want to argue with me, do it in the chat box. Tell me why you think you can multitask. Matter of fact, if you think you're a multitasker, put it in the chat box. Let's see if you really are. I don't think you are. And if you aren't watching this live, put it in the comment section below. Tell me how you multitask. Tell me how you think two thoughts at the same time. I bet you you really don't do it. I bet you don't. So anyhow, I had to clear my desk. And what you can do is you can say, I'm going to allow four things on my desk. Like right now I've got my computer. I have to have this computer. It's a must. Okay. But as I look at the other things, do I need it? I've got my cup of tea right here. Do I need that? Yes, I do. I want to have tea when I'm doing this. I have a mouse right here. Okay. Because I'm controlling the screen. That's okay to have that. Okay. And I have my iPad right here. Outside of that, I don't have anything. And the reason I don't have anything on my desk is because it will distract me. I don't want anything to distract me. And I have my bell. My bell, you can't count. I mean, the bell, I mean, the bell's got to be there. Right. See here. Let's see. Paul's got a comment in here. Just FYI, your video looks not sharp. Audio quality is excellent. Yeah, it has something to do with StreamYard. Paul, I don't know why it doesn't, but it gets blurry for some reason. And we're going to talk to StreamYard and see if we can fix that. It has nothing to do with the camera or anything. It's actually the software. And I apologize for that. The software is not good. We're working on some external cameras of which I'm really working on because I want these external cameras and microphones too. I'm working on an external microphone. And I know that sounds simple. You say, well, just plug one in. It's not that simple with a MacBook Pro. It doesn't work that easy with a MacBook Pro. Matter of fact, I've got all kinds of cables I've ordered among my third or fourth cable. The other cable didn't work. I don't know. It's a whole thing. So we're working on it. And I apologize for that. So anyhow, keep your desk clear, okay? Keep your desk clear. And you don't really technically need a desk. You know, that's only if you want to have a desk. You don't technically need it. Now, the next thing I'm going to tell you, and it has a lot to do with getting rid of paper, is keep a digital to-do list. Consider skipping all paper versions and just have a digital list, okay? A digital list will allow you to search what is really a powerful advantage of a paperwork. You can't search your paperwork. You have to go through every single piece of paperwork. When I do a digital list, I can actually search keywords. I can make keywords for whatever that item is. I'll be able to search it later on. So you could search for, I don't know, YouTube in your digital list. And anything that you tagged with YouTube, you could pull it up. And it's going to save you a lot of time. Think about that.  That is so much lost time, guys. This will gain you so much time if you just switch over to a digital list. I have a digital list for books I'm working on. I have a digital list for recipes. I have a digital list for YouTube videos. I have a digital list for the grocery store. And in the grocery store, like I'll give you an example, my wife and I share a shopping list. And on that shopping list, we add stuff to it. And the cool thing about it, and I have it in a program called Google Keep. As a matter of fact, let me put that in there, in that chat box there, because this will help you guys out tremendously. Search Google Keep. That is an excellent, excellent way of saying organized, guys. Google Keep, the way it does it, is like, I can add stuff to my list and it has a little tick box next to each item. And when I click the tick box, it throws it down to the bottom as an item that's been done. Now, here's why this is really important, especially let's say a grocery list. Let's say I had milk, eggs, and bread on there, okay? And I bought all those items and I ticked them all off. It throws it to the bottom so that later on, if I need milk, eggs, and bread, I can untick it at the bottom and it will throw it back up to the top and it's back on my list. I didn't have to type in the word milk or eggs or bread. That saved me time. Now, you may say, well, that's a small amount of time, okay? Or that's a very small amount of time. That's only going to take you like 30 seconds to do that. You're right, but it's another 30 seconds. It's another 30 seconds. I used to teach my kids this, too, when they would say, you know, this is only $3 or this is only $5. I said, no, it's another $5. It's another $3. You have to look at it that way.  When you have to keep adding things to your list that eats away at your time, use software that's going to make it easy for you. Use Google Keep. It's free. I'm not selling it. I'm not an affiliate for it. There's no money made off it. It's just something that Google gives you for free. And it's a very cool thing. Plus, as I find the digital shopping list and pick up saves time and money, no more impulse buying. Yeah, that's very true, too. If you're the type of person that you go to the grocery store and you go for four items and you come out with 40 items, it saves you time and money, okay? Time and money, because you're buying things that you don't necessarily want or need. I did that the other day with a couple of sauces. There was one sauce that was like $4.99 and they had it marked down to 45 cents. Wow, 45 cents. I checked the date. The date was fine. I saw another sauce they had marked down. It was like $3.99. They had it marked down to 35 cents. I'm like, well, I can't go wrong. It's 35 cents and 45 cents. I came home. I showed my wife. I was bragging about all the money I'd saved on it. I put it on my food and it was awful. They were both awful. I had to throw them both away. So that's maybe a weird example of meat-like food that I hadn't tasted yet, but those sauces were terrible. I mean, they were inedible. So I understand why they marked them down so far because nobody's going to buy them twice. It's not going to happen. Nobody's going to buy them twice. So that's my next thing on the list is use that digital list. That digital list will help you tremendously. Now, the next one, I think we're up to number five now, is you want to set aside 15 minutes every day, but at the end of the day. Set aside 15 minutes every day, but at the end of the day. Now, those last 15 minutes aren't for deep breaths before you leave. They're not for you to meditate. They're not for any of that. These 15 minutes before you leave your work and your work could be the couch or it could be your office or it could be your driving somewhere, but that is where you want to set up everything for that next day. You want to put things away. You want to get rid of whatever paperwork that you didn't finish today and don't keep putting it away. Deal with it. Deal with it. That's the problem. I used to have a paperwork and that's why I got rid of paperwork is because I wouldn't deal with it.  As a matter of fact, I've got some paperwork in the pantry I'm going to get rid of today. It just reminded me of it. I don't have any on my desk. There's none on the counter or anything like that, but you've got to either, you know, with paperwork, I found the best thing to do is either take care of it right then and there, throw it away, handle it, or take a picture of it, a digital picture and file it that way. Okay. Unless you need that piece of paper, unless it's a document that you're going to need, and if so, go ahead and file it, wherever you're going to file it. We don't have file cabinets anymore. We got rid of them because we got rid of all of our files. We put everything online. If it's a burst certificate or something like that, sure, you've got to keep that. I get that, but there aren't too many documents like that anymore, guys. There's very few documents that you have to have anymore. Don't kid yourself into saying, I have to have this document. Now, somebody may have like say coupon, something like that. Maybe it's a dollar off some happy meal or something like that. Have a spot for those. And I think the best spot for those is in your car because you're never going to use it at your house. Now, I've seen that happen so many times where people say, well, I've got these coupons at the house. I didn't bring it with me. All the coupons you have that you think you're ever going to use, put it in your car. Put it in your car. That way you have it. And then look at them regularly and check the expiration date because they're usually only good for a month or two and throw them away. And it's the best thing you can do. So, you know, as far as coupons, paperwork, all that kind of stuff, everything has a place. Okay. And that last 15 minutes of the day, you want to take care of that. You're going to come to work the next morning, a whole lot more comfortable, a whole lot more organized. If you take care of all this stuff at the end of the day, that 15 minutes, that small 15 minutes can save you hours the very next day. I promise you it can. Let me look at some of the comments I got here. That is Paul's. Okay, let me get this other one up here. All these apps like Google Keep are great. How do you first find them all? You know, I search. I really do. I search. My wife and I share things a lot. So, when I see something online that I think is cool, I'll send her the article. I'll send her the app or whatever. Maybe I see a certain kind of, I don't know, food or I'll see a site that, you know, like she's into pets and training and nutrition for animals. And I saw one the other day and it's a recall site. And you can put in any dog food you want. And it lets you know if there's recalls on it. And I sent it to her. And she looked at it and she already knew about it, which was kind of funny. She knows about a lot of these things. But it was only for dry dog food. And we don't feed dry dog food. So that site was useless. So we got rid of it. Google Keep is something she started doing. And she said, hey, I'm going to share Google Keep with you.  And now I use Google Keep for a lot of things. She also shared with me, and this is a big time saver, guys, a app for all your passwords. As a matter of fact, let me pull this up. We use insecure. And let me pull it up real quick. Okay, next, next, they're trying to get me to do something here. They're updating. But I want to show you, this is all my passwords. Look at this. Look at all these passwords on here. Okay, I've got hundreds of them. And that way, I never have to reset my password constantly. How many of you guys always forget your passwords and just reset it again. How many times have you done that? How much time has that wasted for you? Get one of these apps like this Google Keep, I think I pay $10 for. It saved me thousands and thousands of dollars in time looking for stuff. Okay, get an app like that that's going to help you get organized. It matters so much if you have something like that, and it can save you so much time. All right, next thing I want to talk to you about, and this is number seven, I think it's number seven, is schedule organizing or filing time. Okay, now you can do this two ways. You can either, and I guess you're technically scheduling organizing time if you go through stuff and you handle it as soon as you go through it. But if you're not that type of person, if you get all your mail in and you don't open it and you just set it aside, set an amount of time every single day to go through it, every single day. And you single day, I don't have time to go through it every single day. Well, if you have time every three days, then you have time every single day. Right, because all you're doing is letting it pile up. Don't tell yourself you don't have time to do stuff. Don't wait, do it right then. And I like to do like, if we go get the mail and bring it home, we go through it right then. And I said, go get it and bring it home because where we live in our neighborhood, we have a place where all of our mail goes and we have to go pick it up. They don't want mail trucks driving off to the neighborhood. It degrades the neighborhood, I guess, I don't know. Let me get a sip here. But you don't want to wait. Okay, you don't want to wait because it's going to pile up. And there's no really putting stuff off. It still has to get done. There's no putting stuff off. It still has to get done. You know, it's like people who let dishes pile up in the sink or up on the counters and all that. At some point, you got to clean it up, right? I think everybody does at some point. You got to clean it up. So really putting it off just makes the job bigger and more taxing on your brain later on. If you've got a dirty dish, put it in the dishwasher or wash it, do whatever you got to do with it, but do it right then every night. You know, at the end of our dinner or whatever, we go in there and we clean the kitchen. It's clean. Every morning we wake up to a clean kitchen. This is the way it is. I didn't use to be like that. Okay, I'm telling you I didn't use to be like that. So schedule that time. And my schedule is whenever I go get the mail, I go through it. Whenever I get a piece of paper, I go through it. And that's the same thing as scheduling. But if you want to schedule, you know, at the end of every day or the beginning of each day to go through all this, I like the end of the day so I can start the next day a whole lot cleaner. I think we're up to number eight now. Put repeating tasks on some type of autopilot, okay? Every job that says you've got to do every single year or every single week or every single day, put it on autopilot. Every job has little tasks that need to be handled weekly, monthly, whatever. Don't reinvent the wheel every single time you start these recurring tasks. Automation tools can be your best friend. Pre-written thank yous, thank yous to people. I have a pre-written spam respond. And what that is is a lot of people will buy our product. They think they are from some kind of spam or scammer site. And I have an email that explains what these scammers are. And then when I go into that email that I get from them, I can click on it and it drops that email in there. It says, hey, sorry, you may have got ripped off, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I send that right out to them. If your job is on, say, social media and you're posting things, use stuff like Hoop Suite. Hoop Suite is excellent. We can take a post from, let's say, YouTube and I can send it out to Twitter. I can send it out to Instagram. I can send it out to Facebook. I can send it out to YouTube all at the same time. I don't send it to different places. This is all automated in the software. So as soon as I have that video, it automatically sends it all out. These automations, guys, are so important. Now, if you've got some kind of automation you're using, I'd love to hear about it. I'd love to hear about it in the chat box there. Put it in there. Let's see here. Put another one of these comments up here. Working at the firehouse, you learn to be organized to be efficient on a fire scene. Yeah, it's kind of important, right? I was on the ambulance for years in the city of Virginia Beach and we had a list. We had acronyms like OPQRSC and that was how to, what questions to ask people when they were ill, what was wrong with them, okay? And you had to have those. We had those protocols. We had certain things we had to do in certain order. First thing we had to do is see if somebody was breathing. The first thing you got to do, if somebody's unconscious, you got to see if they're breathing because if they're not breathing, the brain's going to die. So that's the first thing we had to do is assess that. Then we assess pulse and all these other things. But odds are, if they aren't breathing, nothing else is going to help, right? So we would always make sure they were breathing. Being organized carries over into multiple areas of life. Oh boy, isn't that true? Isn't that true?  What are the odds that you were to go to their house and their house was neat and clean? Probably not. So if you want to start getting better in all areas, start in one area. Is your car clean?  And you say, well, JR, I've always got trash because I'm eating out. I'm doing this.   This is a simple thing. Put it in that trash bag and don't leave it in there. Okay. Take it out. Years ago, I had AAA. I love AAA, not for the maps, not for any discounts, but because they gave me these little plastic trash bags, I could keep them. They were awesome. But every day, I don't leave any trash in the car. It always comes out every single day because you're always in a spot where you can pull up next to a trash can and get rid of it. But by keeping my car clean, I'm going to keep my house clean. I'm going to keep my bedroom clean. I'm going to keep my closet clean. I'm going to keep everything clean, my teeth clean. I'm going to floss. I'm going to brush my teeth. I'm going to do all that stuff I'm supposed to do. It does carry over. Paul's very right about this. Discipline and organization go hand in hand with developing systems to be efficient. Nothing worse than having kids put kitchen stuff in wrong place. Yes, I had kids and I raised them by myself. Yeah, I had certain rules. It was really funny because in our house, our kitchen butted up to the living room. They used to always bring toys in the kitchen, and they would leave them all over in our floor at the time. This is years ago. It was vinyl flooring, and I would step on them, and I would hurt my feet. In the living room, there was carpet, so it was like carpet up to the kitchen and then this vinyl flooring. We had a huge kitchen. One day I said, that's it. That's it. No more toys in the kitchen. You cannot have to weigh in the kitchen under no circumstances, no toys in the kitchen. Now, what was funny is where the carpet met the linoleum floor or the vinyl floor, there was a row of toys because they knew they could have them in the living room, they couldn't have them in the kitchen, which I compromised with that. So they had a row of toys right at the edge of the carpet, they're almost coming into the kitchen, which I thought was really pretty funny. It was Paul says, IBM used to take a new hire to lunch and suggested they drive. It allowed them to see if the car looked bad as well as how they treated the hell. Oh, wow, that's pretty interesting. Yeah, you can tell a lot from somebody's car. You can tell a lot from somebody's car. What does the inside of somebody's car look like? And that will tell you a lot about their life. That'll tell you a lot about their life because if that's a mess, if the car is dirty, if the inside of the car has got trash in it, all those things. Yeah, not good, right? And how they treat help. And you know, I have a hard time with help. And what I mean by that is that person waiting on you is no different than you. And for somebody to treat somebody different because the job's different, and I know I'm a little off track here, but I do want to hit up on this since he brought it up. Nobody's better than anybody else. I don't care what your job is. I don't care what your talents are. I don't care what. Nobody's better than anybody else. You just have a different job. You have a different way of making money, but you're not better than.  Everybody's a human being. Some people have more education than others, but they're not better than. It's not better than. And we got to get rid of that idea. And as soon as we get rid of that idea of better than and in all fairness, I grew up pretty poor and I was a dishwasher and I cleaned toilets and, you know, I waited tables and I bartended and did all these things. So I was in those positions. But I think if everybody realized that they're not better than, I see a lot of people who forget who they were. They come up poor and they get some money and all of a sudden they get cocky and they start treating other people poorly that are below what they perceive to be them. And how is that? Because you have more money in the back. It doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't make any sense at all to me. So I always try to be as kind as I can to somebody.  Oh my God. But anyhow, we were at a restaurant and they totally screwed up our food order and we probably waited 45 minutes to an hour to get our food. And it was at a sushi place. So they didn't have to cook anything. Okay. If these were just rolls and sushi and stuff, all they did is cut some fish and put it on some rice. And the waiter was very kind and he came over two or three times and he says, Hey, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And a lot of people would say, well, I'm not going to leave a very big tip because it took forever to get my food. Understand that the people in the kitchen are still going to get paid the same amount. They're the ones who made the food. The sushi guy is still going to get his salary, whatever it is. The waiter unfortunately works for tips and that waiter had no control over how long it took them to make the food. So you got to start rationalizing. If food is bad at a restaurant, don't take it out on the waiter. The waiter didn't make the food. He didn't cook the food. She didn't cook the food.  So we're going to end on that today. Treat everybody kindly. How hard is it to do? It takes no effort to be kind to somebody. It takes effort to be mean. Okay. You've got to really try to be mean. Why would you want to do that? You don't want to do that? No, it's going to come back to you, by the way. It's going to come back to you. However you treat other people, it will come back to you.  And don't tell me you never did a bad thing to other people because everybody has. Everybody has.   I liked a teacher who had a question on a test which was a life lesson. What was the janitor's name? Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. But sometimes you're not introduced to the teacher in all fairness. But yeah, everybody's the same, guys. Everybody's the same. It's just a different job. Don't look at people differently because they're doing a different job than you. I know because I've done those lower end jobs. Some of you who haven't done those lower end jobs, you can't relate. But trust me, it's tough. It's tough. I mean, I feel very fortunate now I get to talk and type and make a living. I used to have to scrub floors and wash people's dirty dishes. That's what I had to do. But I got to tell you at the time I actually liked the job. It was kind of fun. It was in a cool restaurant. They had the pretty cocktail waitresses, so it was kind of fun. But the point is everybody's the same. I hope this list has helped you out, some guys. I hope it's given you an idea how you can save some time, become more productive. That's what we're trying to do here today, is be more productive. And you guys have really been helpful today. I really appreciate you being here. I appreciate you asking questions and participating. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do so. Hit that subscribe button down there and bell notifications. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or if I upload a video. Give me a thumbs up if you would. I would really appreciate that. Let's see here. I got another comment popping in here. Let's see here. Hey JR, what was wrong with the Batman? I haven't seen it yet. Haha. Well, I'll tell you. First off, this is first off. And I don't think any movie should do this. It was a three hour movie. Three, just grasp on to this. Three hour movie. Three hours. Secondly, I don't like superhero movies. That's not my thing. My wife liked it and I don't like going with her.  I should support her. But I can't do three hour movies, guys. I can't do it. It's just too long. I think I fell asleep about five times, but she would always give me one of these. She says, you're snoring. You're snoring. I think anyone who worked in food says it's hardest work they ever did. Yeah, I mean, it was difficult. I'm not going to say it wasn't difficult. But I enjoyed it. I mean, to this day, I like to cook because I worked in food industry. And it's really kind of cool. I mean, I liked waiting tables. It made me feel like I was important. Really?   But to me it was. And to that waiter that's waiting on you, hey, it may be a big thing to them. Okay? But whatever they're doing, if they do it, well, I had a waiter the other day.  He was just one of the best waiters I think I've ever had. I told the manager that this guy's amazing. And he's like, Yeah, we hear that all the time. They almost blew it off because they were like, Yeah, we know how good he is. But I mean, everybody can do a job half ass, or they can do it really good. So when you see somebody really doing a great job, take care of them, way over tip them, compliment them, tell them they did a good job. You don't know how far that could go with somebody who's had a family problems or health problems or had a bad day or whatever. And if you pull them aside and say, Hey, you, I think you're one of the best waiters I've ever had. I told him that. And he was like, Wow, thank you so much. He was so happy that I noticed what great service he was giving. He was doing way more than any waiter in that entire restaurant. In that restaurant I go to a lot. And I know what the waiters are supposed to do. He was helping the bus people. He was doing just extra things that nobody else was doing. And it was just so impressive. Good morning, folks. The Queens within is with us. We're nearing the end. Unfortunately, I apologize for that, but we're down to the end here. I think, Oh, yeah, my gosh, I'm at 37 minutes. Been talking too long. Let's see here. What else somebody's got to say? I want to get all these in here. I fell asleep in cinemas too. Oh, you do too. Okay. So it's not the back when I went pre COVID. Haha. Oh, so you don't go at all anymore. Uh-oh. Did you stop going to theaters? We have one here in Georgetown, the matinee is $5. $5 is a deal. And some of you may say, Well, JR, you can afford to spend $20. That's not the point. I want to deal. I want a really good deal. The Queens within says, I have executive functioning issues, and I'm glad you made this video. Oh, well, good, good, good. I'm glad. We'll go back and go to the beginning too, because there's a lot of time saving tips in there. There's software that I talked about, all free. It doesn't cost you anything. It will really help you get organized. And I appreciate you being here very, very much. I really do. What's Paul going to say? I loved a waiter in Chicago at the Black Hawk restaurant. Took our order of six people and didn't write it down was practice for theater where he was an actor. Wow. That's pretty cool stuff. I actually worked at a restaurant called Ships Cabin in Norfolk, Virginia, when I was in college, and we weren't allowed to write down anything either. We weren't allowed to. We weren't allowed to auction off food. I mean, I learned so much from the owner of this restaurant. And auctioning off food is like, okay, who had the spaghetti and meatballs? And this was really a high-end restaurant. So we we did seafood and steaks and all that stuff. But he says, don't ever go out to a table and not know where that plate's supposed to go. Don't ever do that. And he taught us where to take a plate from and where to set your plate down. And you always cleared the table before you gave the check, because if you don't, there's plates in the way and you can't even sign the check. I mean, it was silly, right? But those are the things that are really, really important. He taught me so many things. Paul says, have a blessed week ahead gang. See you Wednesday. Yes, I will be back here Wednesday. Thanks for reminding me. I'll be here Wednesday. And will I be here Wednesday? I have an appointment on Wednesday. Hang on one second. Hang on one second. Let me see if I'm going to be here Wednesday. I think I think I'm good, but I have to look and see calendar calendar Wednesday. Oh, yes, that's in the afternoon. I will be here in the morning, guys. And Friday, I will also be here. So Wednesday and Friday at 10 a.m. Make sure you show up. Make sure you're here. If you have a subject you want me to talk about, I'll be happy to do it. Anything about starting running and growing online businesses or getting your head right, getting your head right matters a lot.  And I'm working on the beard. Give me your opinion of that. Should I continue growing this beard? Or should I get rid of it? It's pretty white at this point. This thing is pretty white. Should I keep it? You know, a waiter's good when they memorize all orders. Yes. But you know what? Anybody can do that. You can do that. There's ways to improve your memory. There's books out there on memorization. I can literally, a matter of fact, I used to do this at one of my trainings. I would have a grocery list of 10 items and I would call it out to the audience and I say, who's going to remember that an hour from now? And everybody inevitably would say, no, I can't remember that. And then I would show them how they could memorize 10 items on a grocery list. As a matter of fact, that's what I may do Wednesday. I may teach you guys a grocery list and show you how you can memorize 10 items on a grocery list and you can do it within 15 minutes. You can learn the process within 15 minutes. If that interests you, put that in the chat section. If you want to improve your memory, and I had a friend who was a memory specialist for many, many years ago and he taught me this trick on how to memorize stuff and it works pretty amazing. He could memorize 100 people's names in one room, which was amazing to me, blew my mind. But he could do that. I think I may do that Wednesday on how to memorize stuff. If you guys are interested, put it in there. Give me a thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe. Let's see. He says, that would be sweet. Okay, we'll be here Wednesday. I'll do it. Paul, let me know if you like that. Queen's with it. Let me know if you like that. All you guys, let me know if you like that idea. It'll be here and you will improve your memory within one training session. He says, wow. I can't quite click on it. Yes. Do a segment on memorizing. Okay, cool. Wow. I wonder how. Oh, you're going to learn this and go, oh my god, this is so easy. It's so simple to do this. So I'm going to do that. I'll see you guys on Wednesday at 10 a.m. Let's see here. Yes, do a segment on memorize. Okay, everybody's down with it. Everybody's down with it. Sounds like a plan. All right, guys, you have a great day and I will talk to you later.


I'd say that one of the biggest secrets where I try to keep is this sense of autonomy or a sense of pride or a sense of achievement. You know, all those things are things that as you really give yourself over to the miracle, you feel like it's like being washed away. Like the idea of being that you're important in some kind of special way or the feeling that you're loved by a special person or that somebody is giving special attention to you. Those are some of the very subtle kind of secrets. It's like we're playing a game of hide and seek. We've come to this planet to forget our divine self and we're playing hide and seek now and we're trying to hide our divine self and play all these different games. And it's a pretty upsetting game, pretty depressing and it doesn't really go anywhere so we try to get scraps of special love and attention and recognition to kind of prop ourselves up a bit. And one of the things that I learned over the years was that instead of trying to become perfect, it was more of just not hiding and protecting anything that I was ashamed of or guilty about so that I could fully expose all these obstacles in the mind and instead of trying to become perfect, it's more of having a recognition that I was created perfect, that I don't have to improve anything. And that's another secret that we have to learn to let go of, this self-improvement game. You know, we work so hard at becoming better people. We work at getting more intelligence and more skills, more abilities and we want to be better liked, more popular. You know, those are like core things. There's a whole self-help book industry that is really about improving the self that you are to become a better you. And that's another secret that we've played on ourselves, that we actually have to keep spinning our wheels to try to become better. And it's very relaxing when you start to realize that you don't have to become any better than you already are because you were created perfect. And it's not through self-improvement, it's more like self-acceptance, accepting the self, the innocent, beautiful self that we were created by God instead of trying to improve. So that was a big secret for me because I spent 10 years in university trying to become better at something. It was exhausting.  So it's another letting go. I think ultimately too there's this fear of God, but it's not a fear of the real God. It's a fear of this make-believe God. The ego made up its own version of God.  He knows when you're awake. He knows when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness. How do you do that? You know, if you feel like God is watching over you or even like that song from a distance, is that supposed to make you feel any better? God is watching us from a distance. I hope he doesn't have binoculars. You know, you start to realize that that's another secret that we've believed in this ego and it's made up this false God. And it's the God that's in a lot of the religions where people are afraid. And working with the Course what I could see there was a secret there was that really there was a fear of God's love. But it was the ego's fear of losing itself. The ego's fear of being exposed to seen as a puff of nothingness. That's the fear of intimacy. We talk about fear of intimacy like in relationships. Really it's not a, it's not really a sexual fear of intimacy. It's a fear of dropping the mask, our persona, our mask of individuality and getting swept away by this glorious love that is so powerful that none of us can even imagine how glorious and powerful it is. But that's why we yearn to share that love experience in relationships because something inside us knows that there's something more loving than anything that we've experienced on earth.  We still listen to the love songs. We still watch the romantic comedies. And with the Course we're just learning that it's actually, we're never going to experience that love in a specific or an interpersonal context. But the Holy Spirit is going to use what the ego made to take us back to that natural state of love that we were created in. So for me those are the big secrets. It doesn't start that way. It always starts where you feel like you've done something.   Even people that have gone through like sexual abuse oftentimes will repress and push that out of awareness because it's too horrific to keep into awareness. And the reason we do that is because we believe those memories and those thoughts are real. Underneath all of those memories and thoughts is the belief that we've separated from God. And it's really an impossible belief but as long as we believe that it's true, we have judged it as horrific and we push it out of awareness and we could say that all unconscious guilt comes from that belief in separation from God. And we're not consciously aware of it. No one who walks this world is really aware of that belief or of the fear that that belief generates. But as we practice with relationships and as we practice as we move through time and space, it becomes more and more apparent that all of our guilt and all of our faulty decisions are coming from this little puff of nothingness. And we just kept it hidden in secret. So in the end it's the ego that's the guilty secret. And once we expose it, we can realize that we really had no need to hide it and protect it from the Holy Spirit. But all we had to do was expose it freely and openly and we're free of it. And it works. It really works.


Aloha, and welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy, and I'm your host, Michioen. Our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, which is a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. So welcome to, I'm pleased to welcome back our guests, Adam Struvic, who's a graduate assistant with the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, and we're going to be talking to you today about community resilience hubs, everything you wanted to know about them, but we're afraid to ask. Adam, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me back on, Mitch. I'm excited to talk story again. So let's get going on what is resilience, and we're going through what constitutes a resilient hub. So what is resilience? So resilience, I think, has come into play a lot more recently in terms of discussion among politicians and stakeholders and communities. It's really means the way that we bounce back from some sort of emergency or disaster, but it also can mean just kind of how tough you are, how you deal with adversity. So there's differing contexts for resilience. It could be psychological, emotional, talking about an ecosystem, how it bounces back from some sort of shock, or even in our case, an energy system or food system could be resilience. I think maybe about 10 years ago, there was a lot of talk about sustainability, but it's important to make a distinction between sustainability and resilience, because something could theoretically be very sustainable, but not necessarily resilient. I think the wildfire on Maui's really brought us in the focus in the last month or so about what resilience is all about. So it's very, very... Yeah, a timely discussion. A timely discussion. Yeah. So why is resilience so important? Why is everybody so interested in it now? I think a big reason why resilience is so important right now is because of climate change. There's been a lot of scientific study that shows that humans are changing the climate, and there's a number of effects such as stronger storms, sea level rise, coastal flooding, and then erratic rainfall patterns, which could lead to drought or long periods of intensified heat. So communities are looking at this from a local approach and saying that we want to have the ability to encounter these obstacles and overcome them, or at least have them not be too big of a setback, because we're aware that climate change effects will be impacting our community. So that's why resilience has come to the forefront of a lot of discussions today, and especially... Oh, yeah, we're so geographically isolated that resilience is a huge, huge thing. Yeah, one of the things we have because we're on an island, so sea level rise is an important issue because as the oceans heat up, they expand, and you can already see it when you drive up to the North Shore on high tides, you know, the water is getting pretty close to the road. And I think in one of our other slides, we talk about that, what one community is like, basically blocked off.  If it's underwater, you're stuck and can't go anywhere. So let's talk a little bit. Oh, sorry, go ahead. I was going to say that a lot of the development here in Hawaii is based on sort of a one-way and one-way out road because a lot of our roads are coastal roads. So it's a road that wraps around the whole entire island. So just by the nature of that, there's only one way and in one way out of a community. And that plus the geographical isolation of our whole state makes resilience really important. Just to speak to the geographical isolation, the closest U.S. port, which is Los Angeles, is about 2,500 miles away. So if there is any sort of major catastrophe, we are kind of on our own in terms of age reaching us in a timely manner. I think the emergency agencies are pretty well aware of that, but it's really hard to prepare for something like that when aid is so far away. You know, I'd also like to make the comment when researching this show is look at food sustainability, for example. You know, according to the article I read, we only have five to seven days worth of food available in Hawaii. And most of that is at the store or in a store's warehouse. We don't have a lot of huge amount of food storage. And typically the cycle takes about 14 days from the time you're on the mainland to the time it gets to Hawaii. And I guess on the shelf, you know, it's got to go by ocean, which is like a four or five day trip. Now you're talking 14 days. So food, we don't produce that much food anymore here in Hawaii to support itself. That's a big issue for Hawaii. It's, you know, the level of resilience we have on our food chain. Not good. So what kind of factors affect resilience, so, Adam? So there's a lot of things that come into play when you're talking about resilience. Part of it is the built environment. So how our community is structured, how our city is structured. And that affects the way that we're protected from natural disasters, but it also affects the way that we recover. Additionally, the natural environment has an effect if we're altering ecosystems too much. We're probably lowering our community's resilience. And like you mentioned, talking about food systems, a lot of times food production is part of or can be part of the natural environment. So the more that we're degrading those sorts of areas, the less food we may be able to glean from our natural environment. Additionally, the ecosystem services that the natural environment provides for us. For example, coral reefs block a lot of wave energy coming in from storm surge. So if coral reef goes away, then we're going to be much more exposed to those sorts of disasters. And then one final factor is the connection between actors in the community. So this would be the final bullet point there, the strength and collaboration between stakeholders. So in order to have a resilient community, you really need good cooperation between all levels of government from local up to federal. And then a lot of times resilience is helped by local groups like churches, community groups, schools, NGOs, things like that. Delight. So let's talk about a resilience hub now. This is kind of a new concept. It's not that new because I understand there's been efforts as far back as 2011. But we haven't heard, we've heard about hygiene hubs, but we haven't heard about resilience hubs. So let's talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so a resilience hub is really a place that's in the community that people can gather in case of an emergency. And it provides different services that increase the community's resilience. A resilience hub can take a lot of different forms and we'll look at a couple of them in a few minutes here. But really resilience hubs kind of have already existed in communities, whether it be like a school or some place where you would gather if something goes wrong. But formally calling them resilience hubs kind of lends to more complex energy systems or stockpiling reserves. So really just taking areas in your community and making them into one of these resilience hubs would give you everything you need to make it through a disaster. So now with our transition to clean energy, a lot of times resilience hubs will be on a microgrid so that they can be isolated from the main power system and then keep the community running if the power gets knocked out. Well, like we had on Maui, so there's absolutely no communications at all. And you know, that was one of the major issues in trying to get the word out to people what was going on. So if we go to the next slide, here's kind of a graphical display of what a resilience hub might look like. I think this is like almost a two-story building. So do you want to describe it, what the components are? Sure. So this is a graphic I found from the local government in the District of Columbia. So it just shows some of the elements that you would find in a typical resilience hub. I think most notably are the resilient power systems and communications. So that's ensuring that your community has power and the ability to communicate with others even if lots of people have lost power and those communications. So I'm planning to come out and recharge their cell phones that can get on the internet and find out what's happening in the world and also communicate with their families and friends. I think an important thing to mention is that resilience hubs can function as community centers in times where there's not an emergency. So this is what's referred to as blue sky versus gray sky operation. So blue sky meaning everything's okay. This is just functioning as a normal community center where we can run programs, have community meetings, things like that. But then gray sky when there's some sorts of emergencies that's when the resilient design power system and communications all become very important. Okay. So let's go to the next slide and talk about what they actually do. So resilience hubs really act as a community center and provide security for people, whether that be energy or food security. So a lot of times you need energy to preserve food so that you kind of go hand in hand. They also reduce the burden on local emergency personnel because they make it easier for them to coordinate a response to an emergency and also communicate with whether it be the state or federal government or emergency management agencies. In both blue sky and gray sky times they can provide access to technology. They could have a technology center where people can come in and use a computer or printer or something like that. And finally they back up communications networks. But a big part of both resilience and probably sustainability are reducing carbon emissions. So a lot of the resilience hubs that we're seeing proposed today are using clean energy systems are advertised as carbon neutral. So one final kind of service that they provide is reducing the overall carbon emissions of the community. Very good. So I really like this next slide where we're talking about a mobile model. I want to make a comment about it after you say what it is here. Yeah well I had lived in Florida for a few years so I am familiar with how warm it gets there. So this was a mobile resilience hub that was designed for the Orlando city government and it actually acts its primary function is as a cooling station for people that may be vulnerable to heat. You know we talk a lot about the urban heat island effects where cities get a lot hotter than surrounding areas. So in places like Phoenix, you know California, Florida, probably Texas I imagine that we'll be seeing more and more of these mobile kind of models and when I found this graphic it reminded me a lot of a hydrogen bus. So I'm hoping you can speak a little bit on that. Yeah I was going to speak about that. Thanks for the intro on that. So we've developed fuel cell electric buses on the big island and one of the things we did on one of them is we put in a power export system which is a 10 kilowatt system that runs off the bus's power system and I can produce 110 to 20 volt DC power for about 30 hours so it could totally power up something like you're talking here or you can connect it into a building to provide these extra power supplies at a mobile basis when you have a civil defense emergency. And so the other beauty of it is that you can refill it or charge it back up again charge it back up again in about 15 minutes because that's how long you just have to refill the bus with hydrogen you're off the races again so you get another 30 hours of power on it. So basically what it makes is your whole bus system can become a mobile power system in times of emergency with civil defense really like this and then when you're trying to justify you know costs of a bus compared to a diesel maybe now but maybe not so much later when they get to be at parity it really makes a good business case the value you know value added business case what's what's the value of being able to save somebody's life by running a dialysis machine or keep them cool like you say like you see here so that's that's that's a great concept and something we can develop as we continue to go forward. Yeah and I think that's a big part of this whole resilience hub idea is being able to stack different functions so in your case it's the community bus system but it's also functioning in times of emergency as a backup or redundancy to all these different things. So that's something that a lot of resilience hubs do is take an existing building in the community whether it be a school or hospital and then you're able to retrofit that into a resilience hub so they don't necessarily need to be built from scratch or they can stack upon functions like the community bus system like you mentioned so yeah I think that's great. Okay so let's talk a little bit more about why we want them here in Hawaii I think we covered it but let's we actually have a slide on that so go for it. Well Hawaii has a commitment to renewable clean energy so resilience hubs and micro grids kind of have to go hand in hand when we're discussing that. Micro grids again is a way to isolate yourself from the main power grid which a resilience hub would do and this is just due to the nature of reducing the use of fossil fuels but in Hawaii specifically we also have very isolated communities like we've discussed a little bit we are vulnerable here to several different kinds of natural disasters whether it be hurricane tsunami volcano or wildfire and we also have a need for food and energy self sufficiently self-sufficiency. Historically speaking we've been very Hawaii has been very self-sufficient in its food production but now we're heavily heavily reliant on imports for both food and energy so having resilience hubs that contribute to food and energy security would maybe put a small dent in that while also making communities able to respond to disasters more. As we saw on the highway that's really really important just brought it totally into focus we can't ignore this anymore I can't kick the can down the road we've got to be proactive and get out ahead of this thing you know it's kind of a false economy not to invest now because look at the cost of not investing on in Maui I mean billions of dollars as opposed to like for a few million dollars we could have been much better prepared so let's talk about what kind of agencies are out there to support this now. Yeah so I thought something that was interesting when I was doing research is I got a moped going by a lot of community resilience hubs are bottom up meaning that they're started by members in their community or like a NGO that is operating in the community but then they're supported by the higher levels of government whether that be the city and county or even state federal government. The city and county of Honolulu came out with an Oahu resilience strategy plan and a part of that plan was to incorporate resilience hubs in the most isolated communities. Additionally the Hawaii Department of Health which is a state level government has put out some publications on resilience hubs and how they interact with community health and then UH in the form of SOAS is getting involved but the main like NGO or business I guess that's driving the push for resilience hubs I found was called Vibrant Hawaii so they've put out a lot of interesting publications on resilience hubs that the listeners can check out and finally Hawaii County I think has also shown a lot of a lot of interest in resilience hubs. Okay so a prime example is what's happening on Oahu on the North Shore so let's go through that. This was an example of one that's actually being set up now as I'm speaking although it's been started quite a long time ago so tell us about this Adam. Yes so this is in the Ha'uola community which is on the windward side of Oahu. Their process started in 2011 they realized that they were a very isolated community so they wanted to pursue making a resilience hub or planning out a resilience hub. I think part of their process was analyzing what kind of disasters they were exposed to and they found that even with just the category one hurricane it's possible for both ways in and out of the community to be blocked so that kind of necessitates the need for them to be more resilient towards any kind of emergency so the resilience. I like to make one comment that was not you know a category one hurricane it's not just covering the road with water I mean the road could actually get washed away that's why it would be you know much longer than to oh well the storm's gone we're okay now well maybe your roads are totally gone and how long does it take to put in a new road well quite a long time actually even if you're going you know 24-7 trying to put in a new road you still have to spend the time to do it well that's why these people can be stuck there for you know several could it even week before they can get out of their neighborhood. Yeah definitely one interesting thing I think about this resilience hub was that they have a they designed a helicopter pad so they'll they'll be able to evacuate people or fly in and out supplies because like you said if there's no road then I guess the only way to get supplies would be a boat or a helicopter so they thought of a lot of things I also looked more closely at the design and read some other articles and it's pretty interesting that the shape of their resilience hub actually follows an overturned canoe design when when native Hawaiians faced big storms I guess they would paddle their canoes out and then flip them over and it it has the whiff funnel right over the top so that's the design of this resilience hub so I thought it was an interesting way that they're integrating you know traditional knowledge or traditional ecological knowledge with modern design and resilience so like we were talking about too I mean when we're not not in an emergency situation it can also act as a community center you know reading the article where we where we both saw that Sykes to you about researching this out it's like you can have all sorts of other services here at this hub like they were talking about you know dental services you know medical services so all sorts of various services of the community could want and the other interesting thing is that they had a pretty large budget for this it's about a 30 million dollar deal but we compare it to billions if you wipe out a community and and people are hiding at risk and that's it's certainly worse than money although money is always hard to get and my understanding is they've already submitted an environmental assessment and they are looking there there are federal agencies that might be able to support this uh with grants and so they've submitted an EA environmental assessment and we'll see how they go but like you said it started my understanding of the third in 2011 so it's it's not a short not a short time deal to get these things in place but now that we have a have a prime example of what happens if you're not ready then maybe there'll be more incentive uh to get these kinds of uh facilities and capabilities set up yeah and I think like you mentioned um this this might have taken a long time because it's a new project um but maybe some sorts of resilience hubs that are retrofitting already existing buildings or perhaps the mobile resilience hubs that we that we looked at could be you know undertaken in much less time because you're right we do need to get these things going as soon as possible yeah it's too late once it happens fingers stuck but let's have some final thoughts well what do you think about all this with what how can we thumb up for the audience here right so there's I guess there's no really specific picture that should come into your head when you think of a resilience hub because each resilience hub should be unique to the community that it serves um for people what the community looks like uh what kind of disasters they're exposed to um and that's why the priorities for each resilience hub will differ so I guess before a resilience hub gets developed they should probably have a really good analysis of what disasters they might be facing um and then like we talked about resilience hubs can act as community centers even in normal times so that's this idea of blue sky versus gray sky functionality so when the sky's blue and everything's normal it can act as a you know robust community center maybe have community gardens and stuff like that um but when there's emergency it has the backup power the medical supplies the communications um and then you can harvest that garden for your food uh many resilience hubs are from the bottom up so they're founded by community members um but then supported by local governments so I think that's where having really strong community organizations comes into play because it's those organizations that need to do the planning and the analysis to justify uh getting grants or having the government come in and fund and then uh there's plenty of resources that people are interested in learning more about resilience hubs um they're kind of a big topic in urban and regional planning which is what I study so that's how they came onto my radar but I think for your average person they probably you know haven't heard too much about resilience hubs unless they just read this news story that came out so I think it's a good trend and I hope it I hope it continues well it's also very important to have a community involved because if the community is involved and they can stimulate the political class to do something and if the political class doesn't understand that there's a need from the community to who I act on it you know where the community really gets behind it that it sounds like the North Shore crowd uh really got behind it at the I've been pretty aggressive in getting this thing going even though it's taken like for 12 years now they've been at it but they're you know they're they're persistent and persistence wins in the end at the end of the day they're going to win especially now in the current climate we have is much more emphasis on this so I really I really appreciate the work you've done in your Adam and pulling all this information together I wasn't really familiar with myself with resilience hubs and when you recommended that as a topic for today I went ah Bravo that's a great idea so nice job so thank you for that and so we've got to go now we're down to our last half minute it went pretty fast so we've been talking story today with Adam Strubeck from a graduate assistant with the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and we've been talking about resilience hubs bouncing back from a disaster what they are and why your local community should consider having one and this program will be available for you on ThinkTech Hawaii and of course the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum website so thank you again Adam for educating us on this important subject thanks Bech great to have great to have this convo and thanks to all our viewers for tuning in I hope you found this information interesting and informative and please share it with your friends or your community and start one of these hubs and I bet you and we'll see you back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii State Clean Energy Aloha


Alright, so this is Dr. James Canton, who will ride with me in Mill Valley, California. I'm Gerd Leonhard, futurist, and we collaborate on speaker missions and our futurists work. And today we're going to briefly talk about what we think are the key trends in the next five years, in general, not just technology, but across the board. So why don't you tell us, in two minutes, tell us quickly what those trends are and we can think on it a little bit. There's a big trend that changes, disrupts, and livens this technology. And there are five key technologies that will transform the future. Now these are only good for the next 100 years. After that, don't email us. But it's nanotechnology, biotechnology, IT, neural technology, and of course quantum technology. And everything related to consumers or making products or some kind of services, actually even the life of organizations is going to be based on the innovations that will come very quickly. And the convergence of nano, bio, neuro, quantum, and IT are going to transform our world. Everything from mobility to new nanoscale products, molecular manufacturing. So we're in a time of dynamic, dynamic, disruptive, and I call kinetic change, kinetic change. Okay, I would add to that, you know, for my point of view, of course technology is the key driver there. But technology is also changing culture. So all of a sudden we are, I call this, you know, I think it's actually an Ericsson header now, is the Network Society. We're actually, we're a global village now, as Martin McLuhan said. We actually are a global village. You know, look at Facebook, one billion people in a village, more or less. And it's bigger than most countries are now. So the Network Society, all the data that we generate, you know, what's called big data, and this is, of course, a technology driven thing as well. That data, for example, allows us to say whether whoever like President Obama, you know, tell us what kind of food they like, we can find out on Facebook now. Right, so big data, technology, mobility. Also, I think the, we're getting to solve some of those issues like poverty and starvation. There's less wars, even though there's more terrorism. Right, but so the couple of key trends, democracy, people are getting older. Absolutely. This is a major trend for society, for how we take care of older people, what we do with them, education changing because of digital.  But also people are going to be living longer. I think the largest marketplace of the 21st and 22nd century is going to be the health enhancement marketplace. Now, people are going to be living longer, but we need to defeat Alzheimer's. We need to restore the aging brain, people's mobility, their cognitive functions, just defeating cardiovascular disease and cancer, which are the killers of our society. I mean, as the world ages, particularly Europe, the United States, and Japan, and then within 15 years, of course, China will have an aging phenomena. We need to do better at improving and enhancing the health of the population because even though there's going to be 9 billion more people, maybe in 50 years or more, the question is what will be the quality of life and maybe on the planet sustainability that will be just as important too. I'm sure you have something to say about that. That's a big topic. I mean, on this issue of, you know, age and, you know, Kurzweil says we're reaching the level of singularity to where machines can basically enhance what humans do and vice versa, probably. I think in the next 15 years or so, the major issue is about, you know, what does a human remain in terms of what they are, what's going to be augmented reality, you know, transhumanism.  But the poor guy can't afford it. But there is one, you know, so there's going to be a market. This is a very strange society. Also, I assume I can have a brain implant with Wikipedia, you know? So I'm a better speaker because I have all Wikipedia information. But is it still me? Is that true, by the way? Well, no, that's it. Do you have a brain implant? Yes, yes, I have several of those. That's why I'm so vastly successful. Just kidding. I think I look great for 85, what do you think? But I watched the, you know, what's the total recall of the remake. I watched the movie and I realized, you know, all those things in the movie actually are somewhat true, you know. We can, so the transhumanism and this convergence of human machine brings up a huge amount of opportunities for medicine, but also a huge amount of issues. You know, women and many guys have plastic surgery now because they want to have a better nose. That's kind of normal.  You know? Well, I think what's going to happen is we're going to have a, whether we like it or not. Again, one of the things we as futurists do is don't necessarily judge the future, but we report on what we think the future trends are going to be. We will have two classes of the world within 20 years and to a certain extent we have them today. If you're in the developed world, the affluent world, you have access to statins and blood pressure and better nutrition and, of course, more security. Already, just from having better public health, we've increased longevity from the average age people a century live to was 40 years old. We've increased it now to in the 70s. It is possible that there will be a new enhancement that will enable you to live middle age, maybe in your 80s, or even 100 plus. My theory is that I think in order to keep this inequality from blowing up the planet, which in a way this is the source of terrorism, of course, ultimately, we have to give some of that to whoever wants it, regardless of the ability to pay, because otherwise it creates an inequality which creates much larger issues. So the way of solving crime on terrorism is usually more creating an equal opportunity to where people have better things to do than to kill themselves with suicide bombs. So this is a typical scenario I think that we're seeing in the next 20 years. Solving those problems will take quite a bit of vision. It will, but keep in mind, at the same time we have massive innovations exploding, greater enhanced health, greater longevity. At the same time, what are we going to have? In terms of population, density. I mean, we've got a billion people on the planet today that can't find a clean glass of water. We have another 2 billion people and a 7 billion that are in poverty. So we're going to have 8 billion people by 2035 to enhance all those people, so they're at the same, so they live just as long as everybody else. That's going to create an overpopulated world where we can't feed, clothe, and provide health care for even three quarters of the planet. Not three quarters, but let's say one quarter of the planet today. I think we have major global risks that are going to face us. And these are very serious issues. These are issues that will require more than a few futures to be able to help our clients for their own. We can't solve all those this afternoon. We'll have to use the next week for that as well. But I think that the issue of water, for example, getting clean water, that is technology-wise a low-hanging fruit to solve. The other issue of having, for example, food, vegetarianism is going to be a standard, or we're going to eat fake meat. In my view, that's a trend that we are not going to eat meat like we do today. Whether we like it or not, that's a huge challenge. But why? Because I think that basically with a much larger number of consumers claiming their right for meat and the production of meat being very involved and very extensive, you can do it in Argentina when you have wide open spaces. In Germany, then it's quite clear that the meat eating or fish eating, because of the overfishing, we're going to have to find other solutions. But the other point I want to discuss briefly was the sustainability and the, I call this the green business future. I think a main trend that we see in our work is that every single company is interested now in being more, you know, doing the right thing and making money. If, you know, Richard Branson talks about this a lot, how that can be combined, which is maybe not always true, but that is now a sustainability default. So I think in five years there won't be a company around that is not going to be really responsible that they'll be gone.