Welcome to What's Sex Got to Do With It? We're here with Heather Remoff, my favorite 84-year-old great-grandmother in all of the United States. Wow. And so, we're still at 84, right? Oh, yes. Don't, don't, don't, don't. But of course that means I'm in my 85th year, you do know that. Yeah, I understand. I understand. I've just been staying at 84 for a little while. No, it's going to stay that way. Yeah. A little bit. All right. That's fine. So, the name of this chapter is First Words, the Evolution of Language. I think I have a good sense of where this title came from. Oh, give me your sense of it, Len. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm asking you questions here. That's sort of an expression I hear. I think it probably has biblical origins. In the beginning there was the word I'm not a church person. Yeah. But I, and other books on the evolution of language, we use that expression first words. I think there was actually a book that was a collection of essays on the evolution of language that might have been called first words. But I so much believe that Homo sapiens starts with language. Gotcha. And so understanding the origin of language is such a, so is that what you were thinking of, Tommy? Well, I guess having read all of it made, it just made sense that what you were thinking is that humans, the language was what really separated us, you know?  But I will start with some reading, the confession in one of the early paragraphs. And you start with, okay, I confess that recall of my interviews with women has influenced my speculative account of the origin of our species. I find it impossible to put out of my mind that one woman told me regarding her decision to have sex for the first time with the man she later married, he gave me a bite of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and the next thing I knew, we were in bed. Was that literal? Was it literally a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Yes, literally a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But the fact that he, I think he may have made the peanut butter and jelly, it was his peanut butter jelly sandwich and he gave her a bite of it, he literally fed her. And so that, you know, and the reason that I recall that is that I was imagining my hypothetical garden of Eden where suddenly we have this, I think it was in that chapter where suddenly there's this, what I call prototype one, this little baby that's been born with 23 chromosome pairs. And I began to imagine what would happen to that prototype one as the child grew and demonstrated various skills that would emerge as the child reached maturity. And I think that's why, because I was imagining, oh, he's smashing a nut with a rock that other primates can't do and then he's feeding one of the females that's watching and then I think I recall at that point I went to, oops, maybe I'm taking this story too far, I can't help but remember. But I envisioned the courtship feeding as being an early, an early innovation. Yeah, I was just wondering if maybe, you know, that was. But that's a true, no, that was a genuine quote from one of the women I interviewed. Yeah, I love it, I love it, that's great. And it makes me, you know, I sometimes go through these phases where I eat a certain food a lot for a while until I'm just tired of it. Now I feel like PBJ's kind of back in my near future. So, but then my whole deal is that I have to be careful about giving someone some of my PBJ because I don't know if I'm sending them. Yeah, you have to watch. So, I think we touched on this, me, in some of the earlier segments. But I am still kind of fascinated by this whole notion of the one of kind, you know, variant, the naked ape as you call the individual. How is it able to reproduce? Because me, earlier on you said, well, there might be the situation we have multiple or more individuals undergoing these fusions, you know, chromosome 2, so it's not happening just in one place, it's happening, anything that's causing that. But it just seems that, it seems like the frequency still has to be fairly low. Oh, I think it probably was low. Lynn, there's so much we don't know, in part because we're locked into, you and I were talking earlier about the early Darwinian notion of natural selection, which I do believe needs to be updated. But for example, what used to be called dark RNA, I think it's now called non-coding RNA. A lot of that may be viral in origin. So, you know, we don't know, when we were infected with viruses, just look at how COVID-19 has impacted so many different body parts. I mean, people get all kinds of reactions from having been infected with that particular virus. I think it's even possible that there could have been a viral infection that swept through that might have made the telomeres weak and made those kinds of fusions more likely. We don't know, but I don't think it would be a one-off. You know, I think there would be, and just like the Neanderthal and the Denisovans, they also have 23 chromosome pairs. So, that was going on. I guess what I'm driving at, though, is that would that disruption be so large, that that kind of individual could only mate and have viable offspring with another individual that had similar mutations? I suspect that that is the case then.  But we don't know that it was only two. I mean, as I said, there could have been solar flares. There could have been a whole lot of things that might have challenged the stability of our genomes. And as I mentioned, I think in an earlier chapter, I don't think all chromosomes are created. Some are more vulnerable to those kinds of copying errors and nondisjunction and so forth. I think it's possible, but again, that's speculative. I'd like to get other people thinking about this. I need more ideas. I agree, and you do say that as speculative. And sometimes to me, I'm just kind of interested in the details, and I did not look at the footnotes closely and then go to the sources. Because that's not the point, really, of this book. And as we were slowly getting towards the latter chapters where the whole reason for this book is going to become really apparent. And so as I said earlier, it's a nice little mystery in Hunt. And so I take it for that. But also along the way, though, we get to explore some topics. And so one is, or you mentioned, the difference between language and communication. Can you tell me? Yes. And I think all species, plant and animal, have communication. And the person who alerted me to the difference between language and communication is the late linguist, Derek Bickerton. And he, for him, to be true language, it has to show displacement. And he uses the word displacement differently than another linguist, Noam Chomsky, but for Derek Bickerton, displacement characterizes language. And that is the ability to describe something that you can't see or point to, something in the past or something in the future, something that's not immediately there. Where he felt that communication is just about things that are immediately there. And it was so interesting to me. He started by saying, we need to look at what humans do differently from other primates to get an idea of where that symbolic ability came from, the ability to imagine a past and to picture a future, to talk about things that happened over a hill that we can't see. And so he started, let's look at the difference between humans and non-human primates. But then he very quickly veered away from that and started looking at what I call haplodiploid species like honey bees communicating and so forth. But really, the difference that makes a difference is the difference between humans and non-human primates. And in fact, language is symbolic communication.  So that is the source of our exceptionalism. Language is the source of our exceptionalism. That's what makes us different and that's what enables us to communicate with other members of our species who've been dead for generations. I can talk to Darwin. It's what enables me to communicate with someone on the other side of the world. Language just makes us, that is the source of our exceptionalism, but I say that it's a double-edged sword. I was trying to understand the difference between language and communication. That's the difference, the displacement. He was, I forget, one of the examples he gave was buzzards circling over a kill, but to me, you can point at that in gesture, but that's not the same as the true displacement where you can talk about, oh, when I was out this morning, I saw there was a dead woolly mammoth on the other side of that hill, and let's go try to harvest some meat from that, talking about something that you can't see. You say that when he talked about he uses ants and bees communicating about something else, it's out of sight as an instance of them using displacement. I think his whole point is that maybe displacement isn't the difference between language and communication, and you say that, well, essentially because they're haplodiploid, they are essentially being... It's almost like one individual. But I was thinking, well, yes, we're deployed, but we're so closely related. I mean, the genetics between one individual and another, just aren't that great. It's not that great at all. Yeah, and then we have the pheromones, and so I was thinking, well, maybe he's onto something, maybe it is something other than the displacement that really is the difference between language and communication. Language is symbolic communication, and it's that ability to symbolize, to communicate with symbols that really does set us apart from all other species. To me, it explains everything. I mean, it really does explain how we're so different, and it's much of what makes us wonderful, Len, and it's also... It's got a downside, but it's not so great. We'll definitely get into that. One of the things you talk about is what you write about is the olfactory receptors that are found on the skin. Isn't that amazing? It is, and so it makes me wonder now, do you know if other primates have that also, the ones that precede us in the evolutionary tree before that? I don't know that. Because that would be interesting, maybe that is something that... I've only heard of it in relation to humans, and that's a fairly new, I think, discovery in relation to humans, that we have olfactory receptors in our skin. And that, to me, is fascinating because to me, that's pheromonal communication is those olfactory. And I think, I know in the book, I make a point about we lie with language. Language enables us to lie. That's one of the downsides to ourselves and to others. But pheromones tell the truth. And I think that's one reason why touch is such an important component of human courtship. Do you know if there are taste receptors also on the skin? I'm not aware of that. I was just wondering. Smell and taste are so closely related. Of course, you can taste differently, but that's your tongue that's doing the reception. That I don't know about. And I think the fact, as I'd explained in an earlier chapter, whenever there's a major genetic change, like a chromosomal shift, a whole lot of things change that aren't necessarily adaptive, but they're not necessarily maladaptive either. They just come along for the ride. We've been described as the hairless ape or the naked ape. I think there was a book, was it Desmond Morris? The Naked Ape. But the fact that we don't have much hair on our skin, and then suddenly there are olfactory receptors in the skin touches a very important part of human courtship. A very important part. And I think we're reading people's signals that they may be getting a better sense through the messages they're sending via pheromone than we might be through what they're saying. I hear it. It is fascinating. I'm just so curious about all of those things. In the preface of this book, I asked my imagined reader to read it with an open mind, to forget everything they think they know. You've been really good at doing that, by the way. Read it with an open mind and be thinking about your own theories. Don't accept my ideas as the last word. Because that's what humans are good at. I want ideas from other people. That's how we build reliable theories by incorporating a lot of different ideas. I really love it when something I write makes someone go, I wonder if that could possibly be true. How would that work? Those are the questions that I find to be so much fun. I'm having one of those moments now. I'm darting about really rapidly. We're limiting these chapters to 30 minutes, 28 minutes. This one just had so much to me. I'm not really going on. We just have to touch on things. There's one point where you talk about comfort revolution. It proceeds much more rapidly than the brain allows. I'm wondering, is it really cultural evolution or is it just cultural fashion? Yeah, I think it's probably cultural fashion. Maybe I was referencing something that Terence Deacon had written in his wonderful book. I think it was the symbolic species that co-evolution of language and the brain. Yeah. In his book when I read it, he was talking about cultural evolution of language. Like how new languages develop. How quickly that happens compared to how slowly the brain evolves. But there I part company with one of the people I most admire is Derek Becker. I think the change in our brain, because I'm such a fan of this theory of it happening at the moment of the chromosomal fusion, I think the change in our brain, the ability of our brain to process symbolic communication, probably that ability was pretty abrupt and pretty fast. So I think that was evolution happening fast. But then of course we had to build on it. So I part company with one of my heroes a little bit. But he knows much more about biology than I do. That's his field. So then you don't feel as if we are outpacing our brain. Culturally. Well just as a species. Like our language and what we have created as a result of our language has outpaced our brain's ability to deal with the... of. And where I look where I would go to an example of that would be the digital revolution has happened so fast. And it's amplified what I consider our species specific traits. Things that are basic to us. But digital media amplifies it in a way that it exaggerates it. And I think in that sense we've gotten into a little bit of trouble where our cultural evolution the skill with technology that we have has gone so fast that our brain hasn't caught up necessarily and in some ways it can be harmful to us. But caught up to what? Like I think it disturbs our sense of peace. Like we hear so much about young people on their screens all the time. And the rise in the level of their stress and anxiety as a result of the amount of screen time they spend and I think that has been documented that the two are correlated. So the things that have made us comfortable as humans our technology that's our cultural evolution has speeded that up in such a way as to cause some disruption in our... Yeah, yeah. That's the cultural evolution has speeded up in a way that our biological or biologically social selves are not totally adapted to. Certainly for myself that's very true. I'm a publisher's nightmare and that I do know social media. So what I find when people are doing screen time they're normally communicating to other people. It's not generally that people are doing screen time and only focus on themselves. That's the wrong way of saying it that they are in isolation. In fact a lot of the gamers are playing these interactive games with other people. So I see it now as can our species handle being as connected as we are and increasing all these other connections and as you know as you get more and more connections then the range of responses that you get increases but also the probability that you're going to get a negative response goes up and generally it's like people can handle the positive responses but the negative ones are what do them harm and I think just as a species we're wired up to react more strongly to the negative input than the positive input but the more connected you are the more likely you are to get that negative input and so I think maybe where the argument for support is that maybe we just can't handle as much connectedness as our technology has given us and maybe it'll take a while to evolve to that maybe we can't maybe it's just too much maybe we have to figure out a way to decrease the amount of connectedness those are such good questions to discuss I think those are things we have to talk about for the next book well you're ambitious for me yeah so I'm going to cut you off just a little bit because I just have one more question maybe I can ask it some other time but right now it's staring me in front of me is there any other reason for a concealed ovulation? other than a mutation no not the cause but you say that concealed ovulation allows for deception or because this is because you're talking about truth and lies in the section so what do you think was the evolutionary advantage that concealed ovulation gives women more choice gives the female much more choice you think it could have been any other reason for it well again I think that I believe that that was a pretty abrupt I don't think that was selected for I think that happened and then we used it in a way that benefited us but I don't think concealed ovulation was selected for but if it could be selected for it gives women much much much more control of their reproductive options I hear you I'm just scrolling down because I can't remember if this question looks like it's not in oh actually I think it might be so do you think monogamy and marriage preceded language wow I never actually thought of that well certainly species that don't have language are monogamous so I don't think the two you know I don't think language and monogamy necessarily go together but primates are they generally or are they generally monogamous no I'm actually thinking more of species of birds that are monogamous well I think language helps in pair bonding I certainly do and given that I think the capacity for language and the capacity for concealed ovulation came as the result of one mutation and the ability of symbolically create contracts date of missiles so you could consider marriages like a contract and a way of saying I own how you possess me so I'm just really I think that's an interesting one to talk about so yeah I do like what you say about mathematics is unblemished I think there's something very pure about math and when people ask about reality I think it ultimately comes down to one plus one equals two and from that everything flows kind of refreshing to see that because you were talking about that in the context of lies and how math is kind of like impervious to that I mean they say you can lie with statistics but that's not math itself that's us doing something with the results of math I I think that's the mathematical thing is fascinating the purity of that yes and so we have about a minute and a half left here and I'm not going to go anything else because we'll go over time and I will just say to folks who are listening to this and watching it you want to read everything up to chapter eight of course before we read chapter eight but when you get to chapter eight it's just so full of interesting information it's not the climax but it certainly takes off do you know how that chapter came to be there was a friend in California who's interested in linguistics and she was coming to visit me she said oh Heather let's have a salon we'll invite a bunch of your friends over and we'll discuss the evolution of language between lasagna and the cheesecake and so then I started reading up on the evolution of language prior to Sarah's visit and that was the origin of this chapter related to food always of course there would be an opportunity to come back and visit this chapter because this segment could have been three times as long but anyways thank you very much and we'll be coming back for chapter nine which is called can we rewrite the script so thank you folks thanks yeah I did


Hello everyone. Bonjour. So I'm going to present the Lightning Talk alias telephone equals TOEFL drops down. So now what? This is me. I'm an architect from SIL. How do we meet open TOEFL? So at SIL, we build an open source software which is called VORUS. It helps to build application abstraction that works for multi-cloud. And we also use IAC technologies like telephone to for resource provisioning. So that allowing operation team to make a progressive transition to developer self-service. We have verified and integrated with open TOEFLs from the first stable release. And as the title of this talk suggests, the move into open TOEFL is pretty straightforward when you are familiar with telephone. So it is simple from the day one. Now what's the next move? A few months passed since the first release. So let me do a quick wrap up. I think open TOEFL is performing well thanks to the maintenance team. So the transparency is commendable. We have weekly updates. We have TSC summaries. So users can easily follow or know the progress and direction of the project. And we have hundreds of commits per month, which I would say is comparable to telephone. The documentation is also thorough. Including compatibility promises, migration guides and many other useful resources. If I were to ask why users should switch to open TOEFL, license must be one of the top factors. But can we expect more? Here we refers to both users and the community. So open TOEFL is actually a newly-bound project. But on the other hand, it also has a long, it inherits a long history from its predecessor, which is telephone. So I think from my opinion, I think we can learn from the past before planning for the future. So how do we do that? Let's look at some numbers. Maybe some phone numbers. All are from public sources. For example, we can collect all those telephone, GitHub issues, comments, events to help us provide some of the ideas. And we mainly focus on the enhancement and proposal issues and ignore those bugs because they are less relevant. So the analysis is also open source. So if you are interested in reviewing or reproducing, you can follow this linked report to take a look. Now let's start with some easy ones. So what's the oldest yet open issue in enhancement issue in telephone? Actually, that is open at 2016, which is about supporting the Docker provision. It actually might not be critical in our work throws by some issues there, my last for a long period before it has been resolved. So what is the highest number of the plus one reaction among those issues? The number is 1038. It's about using variables in telephone backhand configuration block. So I think in a nutshell, we want the configuration language more flexible. And we can see that this is an important topic in the following statistics. Now if we draw a line chart about the enhancement issues of telephone that is opened or closed per month, we can see this trend. So we can see that TEPRA is actually a successful project. As time goes, the community opening issues continues to grow. So we can see on the top right side, actually, this is the time when it changed the license. We can see the license change causes a little bit job of the number. But actually, it doesn't affect much of the overall trend. But if we aggregate those numbers by year, we can also see another trend. So this is the enhancement issues open and closed by year. We can see that the opened enhancement issues is decreasing. I think that might be what we call technology iteration curve as the technology as telephone itself goes mature. So if we try to tag all those enhancement issues by their domain or topic, we can also try to find in which area users may concern the most. So the first one is configuration language and syntax. So that we can, I think most users want to have more powerful expressive and flexible configuration languages. And the second one is the user interface and experience, which I think should be critical for any software adoption. And the third one is the state management, which I think is an important thing in the telephone system. The following is the provider framework and integration with external tools like CICD and then the model system and etc. So this is what users, telephone users or in the future maybe open tofu users would expect in the domains. Now, if we try to do some sentiment analysis on those open issues, we can see that there are some although not a large portion of them are marked as negative. So I think as the open tofu committee, we can check those negative issues to see if there is anything that yet to be resolved and if we can find some solution there. So these are my humble ideas to open discussions. And let me put one sentence to end. Open tofu is young, so let's help it grow. Okay, thank you. If you have any feedback, just second it and put your feedback. Okay, thanks.


I would like to go ahead and welcome session A, the World Health Organization Guidance on Maternal and Newborn Health during the coronavirus pandemic. This session is going to be presented by Mrs. Elizabeth Eero, the Chief Nurse of the World Health Organization, and Fran McConville, the lead midwife of the World Health Organization. I would like to go ahead and welcome Elizabeth. Elizabeth has a very extensive biography in maternal care. Before joining the World Health Organization, she had more than 30 years of experience in public health in the Cook Islands and regionally. She was Secretary of Health for the Cook Islands. She implemented health reforms to strengthen the country's health systems, and this involved developing many roadmaps and strategic plans for that. She also served as the country's Chief Nursing Officer and Acting Director of Hospital Health Services. For the first 25 years of her career, she was a staff nurse, midwife, and charge midwives at hospitals in the Cook Islands and New Zealand. It truly gives me great pleasure to welcome Mrs. Elizabeth Eero to the conversation, and I'm just going to give you over a microphone. Jane, thank you very much. I think I just want to say the World Health Organization is definitely very honored to be joining the Virtual International Day of the Midwife and to share a recorded message from the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Gebreasis, on this very special occasion. So we'll start off with a message from the DG. Thank you. Thank you, Jane, for sharing that and for that video recording with everyone. As I said earlier, it's a real honor for WHO to be participating in this event. And I wanted to say a few more words, and to start off, I wanted to pay respect and tribute to the midwives who have died in the line of duty during this COVID-19 pandemic, and I extend my condolences to their families in France. May the 5th is a special time for midwives, and this year even more so because it's happening in this international year of the midst of the midwife.  Midwives, alongside your nursing colleagues, are responding to the COVID-19 outbreak, placing yourselves at personal risk of contracting the disease, working longer hours at risk of physiological distress, fatigue, burnout, stigma, and physical, in some instances, psychological violence. And additionally, we're finding midwives are being placed away from expected mothers and newborns in some countries. You are being referred to as the heroes of our time. You continue to bring humanity through ensuring the continuity of respectful care, the companion at the birth, the skin-to-skin contact, and the respite and support that you so ably provide. I know that as you have accompanied women throughout history, you will continue to be by their sides throughout this pandemic and beyond. The midwifery profession demands exceptional knowledge, skills, patience, and compassion. I congratulate those students who have chosen this profession as their career choice. I know that because of your courage and conviction, you continue to care for women and their babies, even when you are working in the toughest of environments and conditions, applying principles of infection prevention and control measures to ensure safety for both mother and baby. Your actions are courageous and selfless, and I thank you. The midwifery profession also demands up-to-date data and evidence. And I thank our midwifery researchers and educators for the work they do to inform and advance the practice and the profession. I want to take this time also to congratulate Caroline Homer, who has recently been appointed as the chair of the WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group of experts for maternal newborn child and adolescent health and nutrition. May the fifth is your day, the International Day of the Midwife. Celebrate, knowing that WHO is not only profoundly grateful to you all for the care you provide, the sacrifices that you make, and the extraordinary impact that you have on the lives of women, newborns, and their families everywhere, but that we are committed alongside our partners to continuing to support the strengthening of midwifery globally. Thank you, midwives, celebrate your day, take care, and stay safe. It gives me now great pleasure and honor to introduce Fran McConville, the midwifery technical lead in the World Health Organization at Headquarters in Geneva to continue the WHO presentation along the guidance on maternal newborn health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you, Fran. Hello, everybody. And thanks, Elizabeth, for setting the scene there. And a huge thanks to Jane and her team for setting this up and asking WHO to speak. And also happy International Day of the Midwife for me. It's fantastic actually being here in the UK and starting a little bit earlier. I love it. And I hope you all well. I think it's fantastic. So many people have been able to join and I hope you keep well in these difficult times. So we all know about COVID-19 and I just thought it would be helpful to put out a summary of some of the information that is coming out of WHO that would be especially helpful for midwives. And it is difficult as midwives and nurses sometimes to get hold of this information. I've covered quite a lot of ground here. So I'll keep moving through it but please do ask questions at the end and hope that we can answer most of them. Things are moving fast as you all know but we'll do our best. So first of all, I thought I'd just give the update on the evidence and what it's got to do with maternal and newborn health. I just wanted to talk about what that means for us as midwives during this pandemic and the continuity of essential services and then think a little bit about so what happens next beyond this pandemic and the impact that it's going to have and the needs of women, newborns and of midwives and then just run through a little bit about the thinking on future research and the documentation and policy dialogue that's already emerging. And then I've left a slide on some WHO resources. So first of all, we know this. I'm never going to stop saying it. We know that midwifery care could avert more than 80% of all maternal deaths, still births and neonatal deaths where midwives are educated to international standards and midwifery includes a provision of family planning. Now we know that came from Caroline Homer's article in paper two. As WHO, I've been absolutely delighted and stunned with the impact that quote has had on governments all around the world and how it's changed their approach to investing in midwifery because I think for many years they thought it's okay but they really couldn't put their finger on the evidence. So that will always remain until the next Lancet series a really critical quote. So the other thing that I was so impressed with that came out of the Lancet that's having a very big impact is for many people including where I work and where we all work and all the rest of it. They have this picture of the midwife with a mother giving birth and it's all fantastic and it's about childbirth. I think often they forget that midwifery education and care can improve over 50 other health related outcomes. Again from the Lancet series, Mary and I put this together for the framework for action on midwifery education launched almost a year ago at the World Health Assembly. So we know it reduces mortality, it reduces serious morbidity, it reduces preterm birth and low birth weight, it increases satisfaction with childbirth and mother-baby interaction, reduces anxiety and labor, depression, newborn crying. It reduces unnecessary interventions such as augmentation of labor, instrumental births, caesarean sections, episiotomies and unnecessary blood transfusions but increases spontaneous vaginal birth. And of course breastfeeding, the first and most important public health intervention which sets us up for life is increased through midwifery as well as birth spacing, improving and immunization hugely important and reduces smoking and late pregnancy. And then of course improved referrals for complications and less time actually spent on the labor ward. So a huge wide vision of midwifery that we can now really openly talk about and use in everything we say. And I wanted to say that before I move on to COVID because this is what matters in COVID that we continue to have this language, this evidence and this conversation throughout the COVID pandemic. Oopsie, sorry, I've gone too fast there. So when I think about what does this pandemic mean for midwifery? In essence, it really does not change quality midwifery care. And if we look at it, there is no current evidence that of course things change but at the moment that pregnant women who are infected with COVID-19 present with different signs and all symptoms or are at higher risk of severe illness. And that in itself is really important in the way that some facilities have reacted to pregnant women. So far and fingers crossed, there was no clear evidence of mother to child transmission. Now that means through amniotic fluid called blood, vaginal discharge, neonatal throat swabs or breast milk, very important. There is uncertain evidence of increased severe maternal or newborn outcomes because the evidence is really limited to infection in the third trimester because the evidence collected has really been so recent. So we're watching that one, but we know that at the moment there was really no certain evidence. We do however, as WHO recommends that pregnant women with symptoms should be prioritized for testing. So what we need to do is remember absolutely good quality midwifery, but we do need to adapt to maternal, to adapt our maternal newborn services. And I can't say this enough. We can do what we want as we normally do but we must strengthen infection prevention and control to prevent or limit the transmission in the facilities as well as in outreach and in community services. We must establish triage, early recognition and source control at entry into the hospital or the ward. Now that could be antenatal, during childbirth, postnatal care and adjust our personal protective equipment, our PPE and infection prevention and control strategies accordingly. Now that's a huge, huge task. We have to avoid moving and transporting patients. Now this is for women who are COVID positive as well so they're sick, out of their remote area unless medically necessary. And if transport is required, use pre-determined routes and have the patient wear a medical mask. And of course this is important for companion at birth. It's important to have that companion at birth but to limit the number of health workers, family members and visitors who are in contact with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 pregnant and childbearing women. And when I think of some of the countries where WHO works and often you'll have very large numbers of family coming in to the hospital and that's really got to be taken care of very seriously to make sure that the woman and the companion are there but not the rest of it. So moving on, it's very important that these services are sustained. And so we've got to sustain the routine services and care and the management complications but we must not ignore women's choices. Their rights to sexual and reproductive healthcare and these must be respected regardless. So for example, access to contraception and safe abortion to the full extent of the law really must continue. There's no reason why that should stop. We have to establish that triage and source control again of COVID infected women and adjust our PPE. And we must ensure an appropriate physical environment with adequate water, sanitation, energy, medicine, supplies and equipment. Now that's easy to say in many countries but as you know about 40% of health facilities globally are without water or sanitation. So it's really tough in those environments to keep this adequate appropriate environment clean and safe for the midwife as well as for others. So I think we really have to think about how we support midwives in those environments where it's really, really difficult. So health facilities really must prioritise infection prevention and control strategies. So special considerations where a woman is infected and it depends on the severity of the disease but there's very few reasons why she wouldn't have a companion of choice if she doesn't have the appropriate infection prevention measures and if that companion is educated about it, told what it means and has everything that they need. They must continue to have pain relief. They should be able to move around and be upright and in places where there are functioning midwifery programmes, midwife-led, so that continuity of care should continue. There's no need for this to be taken over by an obstetric only team or by a medical team.  So please do share and use those infographics that are there on the right. For special considerations when a woman is COVID-19 and she has complications, WHO still recommends that medical interventions including caesarean, induction of labour and apesiotomy are only carried out when medically justified and we've all heard that actually this is not happening everywhere and that in some places it's been a sudden spike in caesarean section, inductions and apesiotomy. So we really have to watch that one. WHO also recommends that anti-natal corticosteroid therapy for women at risk of pretemper from 24 to 34 weeks where there is no clinical evidence of maternal infection and adequate childbirth and newborn care is available. So we still recommend that. But where there is mild COVID-19, the balance of benefits and harms for the woman should be discussed with a specialist. The standard midwifery referral for a woman who's really not well. Now this slide, it seems almost crazy that we have to put it up. But we do know at the beginning of this outbreak that there was quite a lot of advice out there saying, stop, stop, women shouldn't breastfeed, which is not correct. So WHO recommends that all women should be supported to breastfeed. As mentioned earlier on, there is no evidence of transmission through breast milk. So babies and mums should stay together. There should be skin-to-skin contact, kangaroo mother care where needed, and rooming in day and night. Again, with those infection prevention and control measures. And for mothers who can't breastfeed during the first hour of birth, possibly because they're very sick from COVID, they should still be supported to breastfeed as soon as they are able. And whatever their status, mothers should continue to have that wonderful breastfeeding counseling, basic psychosocial support, and practical feeding support. And this should be provided by trained healthcare professionals, community-based professionals, lay and peer breastfeeding counselors. And on the right, you'll see there should be no promotion of breast milk substitutes, feeding bottles and teas, pacifies all dummies in any part of facilities, providing maternity and newborn services, or by any other staff. And this is so important at the moment. Now you can see I'm reading this stuff off. And what I had forgotten to say early on is these slides are forming what will soon be launched as a training app that will be launched globally for anyone caring for mothers, babies and their families globally. So what I'm saying, it will come out as a slide set, but also as a training app to be shared and used wisely. So just in terms of breastfeeding, it's very important again to protect the mothers. So a bit more emphasis now on washing hands before and after breastfeeding, practicing good respiratory hygiene, which does mean wearing a medical mask when possible, coughing or sneezing into the bent elbow or tissue, and bent elbow for women who don't have a box of tissues to hand, as many, many do not, and disposing of those tissues immediately. And routine cleaning and disinfecting services that have been touched. So a little bit more attention to all of that during breastfeeding these days. So those are the slides that have come out of the app, which we hope will be released any moment. And I just wanted to take you into a slightly different discussion now, which is really about what impact is COVID having on maternal newborn child and adolescent health, including sexual reproductive health. And I think, I hope you'll find this interesting because we're just trying to find out what is the long-term impact of reductions in services and lack of access of where we are. And as you know, we have made the most tremendous gains in reducing maternal mortality and newborn mortality over the last two to three decades. And there is such a risk now that we will lose those gains because of this pandemic. And there is much on our shoulders as midwives to make sure that that doesn't happen. So if we start with the top row, which is about family planning, and I might try and use this pencil here and see if I can make it happen. If we look at this, if this lockdown continues for three months, up to two million additional women may be unable to access and use modern contraceptives. Now, if that goes on for six months, it would be seven million unintended pregnancies. That is absolutely huge. Now, that is a timeframe estimate of six months of lockdown. It's based on Ebola outbreak disruptions applied to estimates of current, current modern contraceptive users in 114 low and middle income countries. And you can see it comes from Abermeer Health, John Hopkins, and Victoria University in Australia, and UNFPA. So it's just fabulous to see people starting to pull this data together, but it's really quite worrying. Now, if you move to maternal and newborn health and you look at excess maternal under five mortality from weak systems and lower utilization of 72 essential reproductive maternal newborn and child health services in two scenarios with two types of disruption scenarios, this is what you get. Reductions in coverage of around 15% for six months would result in an additional 253,500 additional child deaths and 12,190 additional maternal deaths. And then if this goes on with reductions in coverage in around 45% for six months, we're looking at 1.157 additional child deaths and 57, sorry, 56,000 additional maternal deaths. And that is absolutely terrifying. So we're going to continue to work on this data, but I just wanted to highlight to you, what is at risk here if we cannot continue to give good quality midwifery care to all women and newborns everywhere throughout this pandemic. So that's why the director general who you just heard in that video, and by the way, he loves midwives. He thinks you're absolutely brilliant. He knows that. He did a special call to attention to essential health services. And he raised the issue that there's rapidly increasing demand on health facilities and health workers for COVID care, threatening some health systems, so over stretch that they would be unable to operate effectively. And previous outbreaks, styles, MERS, Ebola and others have demonstrated that when health systems are overwhelmed, death due to vaccine preventable and treatable conditions increased dramatically. And I don't know about many of you, but I remember being in Bangladesh in the early 80s when one of the biggest causes of death for mothers and babies was tetanus. And the idea of going back to a time where women didn't have their routine tetanus vaccinations, before pregnancy would be absolutely awful, we've forgotten what it looks like, we've forgotten how to treat it, we've forgotten what happens to babies. And so we've got to keep those vaccinations continuing as well as all the other childhood vaccines. So essential health services really must continue. Babies are still being born, vaccines must be delivered, and people still need life saving treatment for many issues. And what I didn't show you is the similar data on vaccine preventable diseases, malaria, HIV. We're going to lose a lot of gains made if we can't continue these essential health services that midwives are so essential to. So this is just to show you that there is this document on operational guidance for maintaining essential health services during the outbreak, again, to prioritize essential, and that includes pregnancy, childbirth, and the post-natal period, and we must never forget that. We have to optimize our service delivery, settings and platforms. So we have to look at targeted outrage, use of telephones, tele-consultation, many things that I know that you'll be doing and talking about over the next few hours. We've got to look at effective patient flow, screening, isolation, keeping it moving, rapidly redistribute health workforce capacity by reassignment and task sharing, but not taking midwives away from caring during midwifery work and putting them somewhere else and leaving women and babies without midwifery care. That's really important. But keeping the trust of the population as we move forward by keeping this infection prevention control going. I won't go through all of this, but just to say that mental health and psychosocial care for midwives, increasingly important as this pandemic progresses. And if we look at the SARS epidemic in 2003, there's a 30% increase in suicide of people around 65, around 50% of recovered patients remain anxious and 29% of health group workers experience probable emotional distress. That's a lot given that over half of health workers are women, most of them nurses and midwives. And a lot of the consequences of quarantine-associated social and physical distancing measures are themselves the key risk factor for mental health. Substance abuse, gambling, cyber bullying, feeling a burden, bereavement, loss and relationship breakdown, all things that affect midwives and we've really got to continue to support midwives and women, babies and their families, right the way through this epidemic. So, you know, we have, I know we've always done that, but we've really got to focus on that as well now. So I won't spend too long on this. I just wanted to just remind everybody that once the baby's born and we go back and care for a woman with that wonderful moment of postnatal care and the family is there, we have to, as midwives, just be aware also that these children are not the face of this pandemic, of course, that's the elderly, but they do risk being among its biggest victims, falling into poverty, exacerbating the learning crisis school threats to child survival and health and risk to safety. So as midwives, I think we have a very special place with the continuity of child-centered services as referral, being aware of protections that might be needed for vulnerable children, providing that early practical support in a postnatal period and ensuring child services wherever we can get started again as the lockdown measures unwind.  And so I think again as midwives, in the care that we give in the community, just to remember that those grandparents need support as well and to keep on top of that while we're giving our postnatal care and hand over to other health workers. So I know there's many of you here from the research community, absolutely amazing research community of midwives. And I just thought I would highlight these few points as to where we are now in WHO on research priorities around the COVID pandemic. So of course the natural history of the virus is transmission and diagnosis. We're still finding out more. We're trying to find out much more about the origin of the virus. There are a lot of epidemiological studies going on. We need to understand better clinical characterization and management, including in pregnant women and children. We're not really sure what's going on in children. We've got to get better infection prevention and control. We talk a lot about PPE and water and sanitation. It's not easy. How do we best protect our healthcare workers? A lot of research and development going on for candidates therapeutics. You'll hear all that in the news as much as I will. A lot of the news is coming from WHO. Research and development, oh sorry, that's for, oh sorry, for candidate vaccines. And very excitingly coming out of our department now is the Maternal and Newborn Child Health Department is collaborative global research network on maternal newborn child and adolescent health under development. And I'm really enjoying this because I think if ever there was a time we all had to work together, now is it? And we can see researchers coming together as they never have been recognising that we must work together to end this pandemic through research. So just a very brief summary. These are the current situation and key insights. We know there are direct and indirect effects, lives, livelihoods, ways of life. We really do need to work, including for midwifery national strategies, international cooperation. I know when with the massive refugee movement in Europe over the last few years it's been international cooperation across Europe that has kept women being cared for as they move across Europe. We do need to transition now to a steady state of low level or no transmission and midwives are going to have to keep moving on that and adjusting, but we must accelerate research innovation and knowledge sharing amongst midwives so that we're at the front foot of this and we're not constantly trying to catch up with what's going on with others. So for midwives as well as everyone else, it's about the speed of how we act. It's about the scale at which we act as midwives and it's about equity. And I think that's where we are so important, making sure that no one is left behind and all women have access to this care and know that they can breastfeed, know that they can have a companion, know that they'll be cared for if they're sick and all the rest of it. So these are a few resources. This is the page from the department that I work on. There's a whole load of stuff on there about COVID maternal newborn health and the training app will be on there as many other places. So please do visit it. I wanted to let you know that we do have clinical guidelines on the management of COVID. Now, this is a lot about respiratory distress and how much oxygen women need. So perhaps not so relevant to all of us, but I just thought I'd let you know that as I'm sure many of you know, WHO guidelines are a very long process. Many of you are involved in them and thanks for that. At the moment, we just don't have that two to three years to get the research together and set up the steering groups and all the rest of it. So we're having to move very fast and issue interim guidelines. And we have a clinical network that's continuously sharing the data and field experiences and new topics for guidance that are identified or current guidance is updated. And it's very important that your comments that you make here and the questions that you're asking, if we don't have time, well, I can't answer them, which is very likely, that we collect those and I will send them back to the team and they will continue to develop guidance for the things that you're asking about. It's been really helpful for us to have those questions and it's happening every day and we really value them. So here's a page just with a lot of updated links and I'm sure that this will be available. So please do use them. They're coming out all the time. I know there's going to be a new breastfeeding one very soon. There's going to be a new guidance on essential health services. There's one coming out very soon on communities, how to ensure that communities continue to be involved. But this is where we are now. And I just thought you'd like to know that there is a global survey of health workers and I would just love it that all of you on this wonderful International Day of the Midwife send this round, share it and participate. It's WHO and the International Labour Organization together. We are really worried about what's going on with frontline health workers, midwives especially. And we want to know how you are, how safe you are, what level of protection you have at the workplace. And whatever we get back and it will prickle in and we'll keep watching, these results will inform what we do about targeting the most important risks for health and safety of you guys. And what preventive measures are needed. And it's going to contribute to raising awareness amongst responders about the risk for health and safety and their prevention. And it is already available in all these languages. So please do participate and share as widely as possible. Your voices are so important in this. I'm very concerned that we get lots of doctors and others but that we really don't have midwives. So to have midwives with a strong voice here would be so influential, would be fabulous. And then it's 200 years next week since the wonderful Florence Nightingale, who I think is incredible, was incredible. I'm a complete Florence fan. And I've been very concerned about the progress we made as some of you know, over the past 200 years in terms of the recognition and appreciation and pay for example, and the gender power dynamics around nurses, midwives 200 years after the profession was professionalized particularly in the UK. I know it had happened in other countries as well. And I just love this quote of hers, which is obviously about 170 years ago, which is, no man, not even a doctor ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this, devoted and obedient. This would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman. Now to those of you, some of you might want to think back to Victoria in UK, horses were the most important thing of everything, especially for the military. So we weren't quite up there. We weren't up there with the horses. But I'd be quite concerned, but I have to say in the last few weeks watching this COVID pandemic and listening to what Elizabeth just said now, all of a sudden this language is changing and we are being described as the heroes of our time and the most trusted of professionals. And I just think that's such a tribute to you as midwives and all of you working out there. It's quite clear that the profile that you're having, the vision you're having is probably unmatched into what France Nightingale did. I think it's quite fabulous. So we've got to keep that up and we've got to make sure it translates into investment and better pay and better working conditions and recognition and all sorts of other things. And now I'm just going to indulge because this is a poet, a spoken poet called Holly McNish and please visit her. She's quite fantastic. And she wrote this poem which always, always makes me feel great and makes me laugh and I find quite emotional as well, but it's an apology from her and an ode to midwives. And so this is my thank you to you, all of you through Holly McNish's poem. And she says, sometimes I lie and I say I'm a midwife, when strangers on trains ask what I do, I want them to think I am good. I want them to look at my hand and imagine those hands have held more than a pen. I want them to think I have run between bedsides, mermaid to ships, carrying sailors to safety on shores, delivering life or toast or condolences, comforting those in the midst of an earthquake, sewing stitches in skin like life-saving tapestries, sitting for seconds, catching breath between screens. So I just love that so thank you and it's my thank you to you all. And with that, I just want to put this up on the screen. This is from midwives in the Western Pacific, Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand. And this is a huge tapestry that they wove at a WHO collaborating center in Australia over two years ago. And you can see whether we call it the egg, the placenta, whatever's in the middle and then the hands of midwives all the way around and then the rivers of love and joy and they've done all their fantastic drawings all over that. So because we're starting really in that region I just thought we'd make sure that they had a beautiful picture there and that was painted through this beautiful ethnic group of people. So thank you to midwives all around the world on this really special day of International Day of the Midwife in 2020 and where in earth would we be without you? You are more valued than you will ever understand. Thank you very much. Thank you Fran so much and welcome everyone again to our celebration and our presentations for International Day of the Midwife. I'd love to hear first, is there any questions in Spanish that we might hear for Fran? I have a question in Spanish that I would like to hear in the chat. I don't have any Spanish questions yet, Jane. Thank you. And is there any other questions for Fran or we just have so much gratitude to everyone from the World Health Organization? So fantastic presentation from the Director General, Dr. Tedros to Mrs. Elizabeth Aro and to yourself, Fran, we really, really appreciate you so much. Oh, and is it, Becky says, do you recommend washing with water and soap before skin to skin after birth? Yeah, hello, can you hear me? Sorry, I managed to disconnect myself. Yeah, you sound great Fran. Yes, yes. So for water is good, before skin to skin. Yeah, so it's just very, very... Oh, I'm, Becky, can you just clarify that? Certainly washing hands, but actually not the woman's body because that skin to skin is so important. What you don't want is to have, you know, COVID from your face or from sneezing on your hands when you're holding the baby. But what you do want the baby is to go straight skin to skin. Does that make sense? That makes perfect sense. And I really appreciated you clarifying. I know initially I live in the United States and we were told, oh, you must separate the newborn from the mother. And I found that very distressing. So I really appreciate that. We are going to share all the links that Fran kindly shared with us today. And please, when we will share the survey monkey widely, please complete the survey because we need your voices around the world. It's so very important to midwifery. And I'm not sure if there's any other questions in Spanish for us. I don't think so. That's fantastic. So I'll let the, oh, and Baker is asking, can the virus also be on the body? Do you mean the body of the baby or of us or as midwives? Can you clarify? Hi, maybe I'll just try and respond to that. You know, we know it's not passed through childbirth, you know, vaginal fluids, whatever.  But, you know, there shouldn't be, it's just the respiratory thing. If the baby's coming straight onto the mother's skin and the mother hasn't sneezed on her tummy or wiped her hands after sneezing on her tummy, it should be fine. I see a question about the virus be transmitted in breast milk and at the moment, no, we have no evidence that it is transmitted in breast milk. I also see a comment about BAME women and we're just trying to find out about that. What's very interesting is, I've been asking in my department how we're collecting that data about BAME and midwives. And the interesting thing is very few countries are collecting that data. And where they are, it's not at scale. So we really don't know what's going on with ethnic minorities and midwives working with ethnic minorities, but at least the discussion has started. So I was very good to see it coming up in the question there. And in the interest of time, Janine, to answer your question, we do have Rebecca Decker is doing a session on evidence-based birth and COVID-19. And I do believe there's other speakers going to be addressing the emotional wellbeing on that. So I think that was so incredible Fran. I'm going to go ahead and...


No, nothing has happened. I still have a few more years left. That's a good run, it's good. So we work together to provide bystanders for any matter, any number at the base. So we did on the education side and more, and more. Thank you guys. I appreciate very much. This is not all for the rest of you. This is the first week. Thank you very much. Because you're from Montana, you're not keeping a mouse record of Montana. I think it's going to be very popular. Yes, Madam Secretary, I have the privilege and honor to present you with a couple of gifts. We have a coin for you. This is an actual, this is part of the core sample. This is an actual piece of the airfield. And I'd like to present it to you. Thank you. From Joint Base, Lackland, and Staff Sergeant Jeffrey Pauling. Great to know you. He's our structural gravity for the department. The first assigned United States Space Force asset. Yeah. So it's a great privilege for me to get a chance to come and see what's going on. Visit a number of large bases. This is an opportunity to see gratitude to the workers who are making this great facility operational. I'm here to express my gratitude to the men and women who make Agadez a successful facility. You know, there's nothing that fills my heart with joy more than seeing the extraordinary work and the spirit of the people who are here making this an operation of which America can be proud.


Welcome to Inside Hawaii Real Estate. I'm Will Tanaka. And I am Milani Lam. We are so honored to be your hosts for this show, Inside Hawaii Real Estate, where we are committed to taking a deeper dive together with you into our local Hawaii Real Estate industry across all Hawaiian Islands. There are so many topics to cover and we'd love to hear from you. So feel free to make suggestions directly to us. We have a couple of goals during this time together with you every two weeks. We wanna inform, share information and perspectives providing you with local and sometimes national real estate related information. Everything real estate. We're gonna also bring on guest speakers that are experts in different areas to provide you with real estate insider information. That's right. Leone is a real estate broker and vice president of Benahom's and Garden's Real Estate and has been working in the Oahu Real Estate industry for over 20 years. That's right, 20 years. She's very active within our local real estate industry is currently serving in our leadership as a director with the Honolulu Border Realtors and as the treasurer for Hawaii's Real Estate Business Institute. Wow, that's a lot. And then you've got our co-host, Will Tanaka. He's a full-time real estate professional serving his clients. And did you know that he's also a licensed attorney who attended William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii. Will practice law as a real estate litigation attorney as a very prominent law firm right here in Honolulu. For many years, he was the president of a local escrow and title company also here in Hawaii. And he was general counsel with the nation's largest title company. Basically, Will has been involved in all corners and aspects of Hawaii's real estate industry over the last 15 years. And he really knows how to resolve complex issues. Well, our combined experience has led to this show. So let's get inside Hawaii real estate. What time is it? It's show time, baby. So today we have a very special guest the state escrow manager of first Hawaii title, Shannon Cortez. And she's also a very good friend.  Well, escrow and title, I feel like not many consumers may know much about escrow and title. Yet they represent such a vital and essential part of any real estate transaction. To me, they're reminiscent of unsung heroes, totally behind the scenes. Will, why would you say this is a fun topic? Well, it's fun because today is the day we get to bring them to the forefront. And when we're talking about escrow, it's about interacting with people. It's about problem solving, putting the little pieces of puzzles together by dealing with all parts of the transaction. It's about helping buyers become first time home buyers. It's about helping sellers navigate their emotional process when they have to sell their generational home. So it's exciting, it's fun, it's all of everything. That's right. Shannon Cortez will be joining us in just a few minutes. But, you know, before she dies, Will, did you know? Wait, did you know what? Did you know about the sea level rise disclosure law? Oh, that's right, Leone. That's a great topic and very timely too. It's actually the state of Hawaii law that's currently in effect across all islands where it requires sellers to disclose any risk of sea level rise exposure to the property. This law took effect this year, May 1st, 2022. It applies only to residential homes, condos, town homes. It does not apply to commercial properties. Those are good points. So if a property is located near the ocean, streams, canals or areas likely to flood in a heavy rainfall, it falls within the 3.2 feet sea level rise projections. That's right. 3.2 feet, then the seller has to disclose that the property being sold is in a sea level rise exposure area. You know, I think this matters because 20,000 people are projected to be displaced and 28 miles of coastline will be impossible with a 3.2 foot sea level rise. Wow. Making it back a step, five years ago in 2017, the state actually published a report saying that our sea level is rising at an increasing rate due to global warming. And it's expected to rise up to 3.2 feet by the year 2100, which is about 78 years from now. So it could be an ocean from property in Lanakai, a condo near the Alawai Canal, homes near Waianae Elementary School. But basically, if you're selling any home and it's an area where the sea level rise could potentially rise up to 3.2 feet, then you must disclose that. And that's pretty easy to figure out if your home is located in a sea live rise exposure area. There's a state website, interior address, if your property is in a blue affected area, you have to disclose that in a sea level rise exposure area. So simple as that. And you know what, Will? Now we know about sea level disclosure. You know what? I actually like this digital section. So let's make it part of the show. Sounds good, okay. Well, I think let's welcome on Shannon Cortez. Shannon, I am a huge fan of yours. Aloha, Shannon, and welcome. Hey Will, hey Leonie. Hey, Shannon. All right, so Shannon is an industry veteran. Over 20 plus years, I don't know how that's possible. You must start it when you were in elementary, 60, okay, I was gonna say elementary school. So she's the vice president of Hawaii as for operations of First Hawaii Title, born and raised on Maui, and she oversees Oahu, Maui, Big Island, six offices and over 30 people. Wow, that's incredible. Fun stuff, very fun stuff. Okay, so we're gonna start with a very hard question. Okay, tell us one thing not too many people know about you. Let's start with that. Yeah, tough question. I wanna say not too many of even my close friends know that my family were livestock junkies. I was born and raised in Waikapu on the island of Maui and basically my grandfather and his brothers started one of the few Piggeries on the island, which are still in existence. So lots of hard work, tiring days, even more tiring nights, but it was fun. Growing up with my cousins and all of our family on 15 acres, I wouldn't take that back, anything back at all. You said Piggery, right? I did say Piggery, which expanded over the years. So we went from Piggery and like I said, livestock junkies. So expanded to goats, horses, cows, anything. That's out there, you name it, they had it. And you said that your family still owns it today? They do, yes. So it got passed down, of course, generation to my uncles, still run the Piggery up there. So our kids, our family, they still get to enjoy, if you wanna say enjoy the lifestyle of being raised on a farm. That is so cool. Well, so from farm to real estate. Yes, huge, right? Turn of the tides, different side of the spectrum. Everything in between, yes, total offset. So how did you get into that? You know, so I never shared this before, but my aunt, she has been in the industry, she's still in the industry. I always found it when we would have family gatherings. I would be so intrigued of her day to day. She was an escrow officer, project officer, and it was always something that I just found very interesting, and I love accounting. So the money aspect, bringing that into play with, you know, hearing some of her stories, I was like, you know what, that's what I wanna do. So after college, it got my degree in accounting, tried the banking scene for a tad bit, and within two years, I made my way into the escrow and title industry. Look at this. Sorry, kind of starting us off, I mean, do you have to use escrow and title in all real estate transactions in Hawaii? Yes, you do, because Hawaii is considered an escrow state, so yes. And so is it different in other states? And we mentioned Hawaii is an escrow and title state. Is it different in other states? Yeah, good question, Leone. It does differ, and it does vary. There are some states that would be considered an attorney state. So in Hawaii, we would say escrow, where they would say settlement. Oh, got it, got it. So in a Hawaiian situation where someone doesn't wanna use escrow, a family member wants to transfer title to another family member, what happens in that situation where they don't wanna use escrow? Yeah, that's another good question. I would always recommend that they consult with an attorney, because there may be some implication on the back end where they're conveying from, you know, one family member to the next and it might have an impact on the title insurance that was issued during their initial transaction. That's a great point. You know, because it's Halloween month, do you have any horror stories to share for us in escrow? Oh, for sure.  But one that really sticks in my mind is actually just a couple of years back was, you know, we had a seller who was in a distressed situation, had to relocate back to the mainland. We had a buyer moving in, coming in from the mainland and it was law of attraction when there's a transaction that's going a certain way, if you know where I'm going with that, it will always veer that course. And this one transaction, it was the basically complicated transaction, we got everything in line, lender was ready in a position to fund, we packaged up our recording package ready to send it to our title team.  And they went into detail, yes, they went into detail as to, you know, the why, came down to it that the buyer placed a resignation with their current employer. Oh no. Current employer, exactly. Current employer, buyer didn't anticipate, right, being let go, turning in my resignation. Employer then turned around and basically terminated the buyer's employment that day. Lender called in to confirm and re-verify employment and they couldn't do it because of the termination. Oh my gosh. Yeah, obviously they couldn't go through with funding the loan, it was a complete mess of the entire situation. Buyers actually already moved into the property. So that in itself led to, you know, some pre, some legal matters that they had to address. And bottom line, basically, don't terminate your employment if you're in escrow. If you're purchasing a property, you know, get the advice from your agent, get the advice from your lenders, you know, don't make crazy moves without consulting the experts in the field because it definitely can lead to some crazy and unexpected situations. Hey, Shana, you mentioned that the buyers who resigned, they actually moved in during escrow. Can you get into that a little bit more? How's that possible? Yeah, no, it's definitely possible, you know, that that's some pre-work that goes into the negotiation stage or the contract stage. So there was a pre-occupancy agreement that was done, early occupancy agreement that was done, sorry about that, where there were terms and negotiations made between the parties. So seller and buyer basically came to an agreement to allow the buyer access to the property without closing escrow. So yes, it definitely can be done. Wow, this is a huge lesson for any potential buyers. Do not change jobs, don't buy new cars, don't change your financial situation, right, Shana? 100%. Yes, always consult with the experts.  Well, good thing that there was escrow entitled to protect all the parties through transaction. Yes. Totally, totally. You know, Shana, what happens if you're in escrow and in a transaction in real estate and someone passes away? What if the seller passes away? Then what happens? Well, that's a very good question and it happens more often than we think it does occur. But it's not the end of the road for you. You know, there's different recording systems in the state of Hawaii. So we have land court and we have regular system. If in regular system, if the deed was executed prior to the death, it may be so considered a valid conveyance or a valid deed. If it is in the land court system, definitely that would be something that you would have to consult with your escrow and title folks on because a petition may be required, but there's always an option out there. That is good to hear that there's always an option. You know, Hawaii is so unique, right? Because Hawaii is one of probably the two states where there's two recording systems. You mentioned the land court system. I think the other one's a regular system. So wow, this is something really unique about Hawaii. Yes, very unique to Hawaii. And there's other, you know, there's transactions that may lie in both. So that would be considered a double system recording. So we are very unique in a lot of different manners when it comes to escrow and title in the state of Hawaii. You know, we've been talking about escrow for a while.  Can you let's kind of dig deeper into what escrow is all about? Yeah, so I mean, escrow is basically a neutral third party. We facilitate the closing of real estate transactions by handling all incoming funds, you know, initial deposit, additional deposit, closing funds. We deal with the lender. So we hold the, we accept the lender's funds and we basically draft and facilitate the execution of the required closing documentations for both all parties, buyer and seller. And of course, at the end, when we receive recording clearance, the best part of escrow is releasing those funds, those proceeds over to the seller. So at any given time, we will be handling a lot of different aspects of the transaction. Very cool. You guys do so much, right? Because I think escrow is the only party, the neutral third party that handles millions and millions of dollars every single day. You're entrusted with very confidential information like our buyers and sellers, social security numbers. They don't even give it to the real estate professionals, right? So I think, you know, a lot of respect goes to you and your staff and the escrow industry for holding down the transaction and making sure that the seller gets the proceeds, the buyers get the keys to a new house. Yeah. And you know, it's such a rewarding time, right? Like you said, Will, at the beginning of the interview is you are dealing with, there's so many life changes that may be occurring that we don't know, you know, for the seller, for the buyers. So it's always, it's the best part of my job. And I'm sure I can speaking for the rest of our escrow staff is, you know, we hold the key for the next chapter in someone's life or the beginning chapter of another party's life. So it's very, I love it. You know, it's very rewarding, but there's definitely a lot that goes into play that we see on a daily, daily basis. And you know, Shannon, you kind of mentioned in the beginning, you know, we're talking about your background and that you had kind of had a background in accounting and then you got involved in real estate and escrow and everything like that.  But what would you say, if someone wanted to become an escrow officer and what kind of traits would be essential for them to get started in something like that? Yeah, you know, I think ultimately it's the love of people, customer service, right, communication is a big part of the real estate industry in general. So having those people skills, being able to communicate effectively, that's out the gate, number one.  So being able to multitask is another trait that we look for. And just being an overall great team player because you are working with the principals, you are working with lenders, you know, real estate agents, attorneys, we can be dealing with 10 to 15 people at any given time. So being able to work as a team to get to the ultimate goal and it's closing your transaction. So that would be three key things that I would look for in an individual who's interested in becoming or stepping into the escrow or title industry. That makes sense. Multitask, whoa, that's a hard one. I'm not sure if I could ever become an escrow officer. It's one thing at a time. You know, we've talked about escrow and we hear about this title insurance. I know that it's one of the most unique types of insurance because we all understand car insurance, for example, VP, annual premiums to protect us in the event of a car accident, right? So car insurance, it protects us for future events. But can you go into a little bit more about what is title insurance? Yeah, title insurance is a very important piece of the puzzle when it comes to escrow and title.  So very important. I can share that there have been times where we hear there's someone that comes to the property and knocks on that door and says, hey, Mr. Wiltonaka, that's my property that you're in, right? You immediately start to panic. Like, oh my gosh, what am I gonna do? I just invested in this huge part of my life, right? Purchasing your home the first time, whether it's your first time, second time, third time, it's still a huge investment. And just having that title insurance will make you feel secured. You know that you can go back to the company that issued you that policy and you're protected. We would basically come into the picture and we would defend your right to that property. So very important. In Hawaii, who pays for that? Like would it be buyer or seller? Good question. And the norm, it would be a 60% split to the seller, 40% over to the buyer. That's interesting, yeah? That the seller pays 60%, the buyer pays 40%. And I don't think that's another unique aspect about Hawaii, right? And I think part of it is, you know, the seller is giving a warranty deed to the buyer. So they're guaranteeing certain aspects of title. And you would definitely want the buyer to get title insurance because as a seller, you don't want to be liable for it. So it's in the best interest of the seller to pay at least a portion of it in Hawaii pays 60%. And then let's have, you know, the title insurance and oversee everything that happened in the past that you were saying, Shannon. Yep, exactly. Well, see, isn't escrow and title pretty fun, Leonie? Actually, it's a lot of fun. I can see Shannon has so much passion for it, you know? And I'm just so grateful for the time that she's spending with us kind of sharing the knowledge, right? Because this is such an important aspect of real estate, especially Hawaii real estate. Yeah, and then you know, when it comes to choosing an escrow company in a transaction, who makes the call? Who chooses the escrow officer to use in any given transaction? Well, according to the contract, the buyer basically sets forth the title of an escrow company. Okay, so it could be negotiable? Definitely, and it all depends, you know, we see, it depends on where the market is, you know, the current conditions of the market, who dictates the market, right? So we're basically seeing currently right now that it could be construed as a seller's market. So a lot of the time the seller is kind of dictating who the escrow and title company are and a lot of the back end story would be because of title work. Sometimes the pre-title work is completed prior to the contract actually making its way into escrow. That's a very good point to have really good relationships with the escrow and title company because, you know, sometimes there's death in the family, marriages, divorce, a change in trusteeships and there's some pre-title work before the agent listed on the market. Yeah, very, very good point. Well, and that's important, right? Because for a lot of agents, you wanna make sure that first off, you know, who you're going out to your listing appointment that you're actually having the correct party executing that listing agreement and having the title report in advance can bring you up a couple of levels and get you prepared for what may be in store and what you may be having to deal with down the line once you enter into escrow. So for a consumer, instead of the real estate professionals, realtors choosing the escrow and title company, how about can a buyer or seller choose as well? As far, yes, yeah, no, definitely that could be established, yes. Okay, wow. So, you know, in terms of what makes a great escrow officer, so we talked about the traits that, you know, what you need to become a solid escrow officer, what makes you go above and beyond? Who are the A-level escrow officers? What makes them so great? Well, it's communication, you know, I am such a strong believer in communication. Having that constant teamwork communication, being ahead of the game, right? We're always anticipating, we see something happening and this may be happening if we could foresee, you know, A or B, so always having, being solution-based, going above and beyond, having constant communication and always providing a solution and having the knowledge that this may occur and we want to prepare you for this so that you folks as agents are aware of the options that you can provide over to your clients. And the relationship, right? It's like, you know, with you and Leonie, well, I know that I could come to you and be like, okay, these are the things that I can foresee happening and you would take that to heart and already start working on what you can gather, what information you can gather for me so I can present it to my title officers. Oh, right on. So true, so true. Well, should I segue over to ask Shannon a special question? Let's do it. Shannon, what is your favorite or unique household product? What is your must-have go-to? Clorox wipes. And why is that? Every room, every room there's a bottle in there by my front door and my kitchen. It's just because, you know, I'm with COVID and everything we're extra cautious. So especially having, you know, grandkids and I have a 11 year old, I'm constantly walking behind her and making sure everything is just thick and span because we don't want dirty hands in the house. Wait, I don't think you're too young to have grandkids. Yeah, I just heard the word grandkids, but that's not possible. I have four, three granddaughters and one grandson. Yeah. Wow. Wow. I know. It's fun.  Every little bit of it. And he said you have an 11 year old also. I do. She's my youngest, yes. So 26, 20 to 20 and the 11 year old. Oh my goodness. That is a busy life. It is. It's fun. It's really fun. I enjoy them a lot. Well, I thought our life was busy. You have double the trouble. So Shannon, thank you so much for joining us today as we explore inside Hawaii real estate, you know, and for being together with Will and myself. And we just, we appreciate your time and value so much. Thank you for being our guest on the show today. And thank you to my co-host, Will.  Thank you so much, Leone. Thank you, Shannon, for being our very first guest. And this is really excited to be, to host Inside Hawaii Real Estate. And you know, we had a company meeting today and we'll leave with this because with the COVID getting over it, there's a lot of things going on, people making changes. And, you know, my life model is risk and no regrets. So I thought this was timely that someone brought this up. So regrets won't change your past. Anxiety won't change your future. Action is the only way for you to change everything. So thank you so much and we'll see you in a couple of weeks. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.