So, yeah, as the introduction said, this is my first opportunity to share my Python story with you, so I'm very happy to be here. So I lead a small team of data scientists in Credit Swiss, we have four, soon to be five people, we're located in Zurich, and although we're in Switzerland, we have the mandate to deliver advanced analytics solutions globally to all of private banking and wealth management. And so when I say advanced analytics in banking, I'm talking about use cases such as customer analytics and product recommendation. What you see here in the blue is what we work on typically, what you see there in the gray, so investment in trading, customer support, chatbots, fraud detection and so on, they're typically done by other departments in the bank. We're more focused on the clients and products. So those two combined use cases, customer analytics and product recommendation, we call client book planning. And when I talk about clients, it could mean either private clients or the people like you and me or our corporate clients, so small to medium enterprises or large institutions. And there you can see sort of the range of products that we would recommend to clients. So I joined Credit Suisse in 2015, and I joined during a long protracted period of cost cutting. There's also a lot of increased regulation on banks after the financial crisis, and it was important for the business to rationalize in this new era. What this meant was that relationship managers, so the client advisors who look after clients, they had more work to do because the coverage ratios had decreased, but at the same time margins were also decreasing, so the business was under pressure to generate more sales. And that meant that relationship managers who were struggling under the additional workload were being bombarded with sales leads and so on from multiple sources trying to drive revenues in this low margin era. So that's the situation, and where were all these sales leads coming from? Well, back then we had what were called expert selections. So these are people who are responsible for products who say for this new investment product we're only going to focus on clients who have a million or more, so unfortunately the poor guy with only 999,999 francs, poor in a relative sense, will not be offered this product. And that seems somewhat arbitrary, right? So it's better to sort of learn from the data what's actually driving people to buy certain products. And there were some initiatives in different teams to try and use the data to better make these selections, but they were very fragmented, so we had pure SQL, we even had SPSS, Modeler if anyone remembers that, and Perl, yeah. So a lot of these campaigns and sales initiatives were not well targeted and the methods to deliver them were not well standardized, but that wasn't the only problem. The biggest problem was how all of this information was delivered to the front. Yes, Excel spreadsheets everywhere. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this problem, and the problem with building a data-driven client relationship management in banking with Excel is that, you know, Excel is a very poor delivery channel. It's kind of a one-way street. You send them out, they often disappear. People can modify them. You have no control over what actually gets to the client in the end. And you don't have any tracking or feedback for the process, so you have no idea what's actually happening out there, so you can't even measure the quality. So in 2015 when I joined, I thought, I think we can do better than this. So I started out by architecting a process to do this data-driven relationship management called client planning. This is the high-level architecture. I think I should also add that we're not in IT, so we've no IT budget. We have the tools that are available to us and what we can onboard ourselves. And that's where Python comes in because, you know, Python's open source and it's great. So the architecture that I designed consists of, you know, the data. It's a data-driven process. On the left, some nice data extracts that you need for training models. You produce some models and then you use those models to try and predict which customers might have a need for a certain product. And once you have this information, you can select leads which are delivered downstream to sales channels. And if you want to be totally data-driven, you have to then measure what's happening in those channels and feed that back into the process. So I'm going to break down this overall process into its different components. Now I'll start with the data universe. You've probably heard that about 80% of a data scientist's time is spent processing and understanding data. So a lot of this talk is going to focus on that end of the whole pipeline. So when I came in to credit Swiss, the team was just me. So I had to set about starting to understand this huge field of data. There were hundreds of databases with hundreds of tables fed from any different applications and systems all around the bank. And there was very little to no documentation available, no user manual that would help me, you know, quickly get up to speed about all this data. There was some knowledge in the department and so on. But, you know, really to be efficient at this, I would need to use some kind of specialized tool. And that tool would be Django. Well, Django's a web framework. What was that going to help you understand your data universe? Well, it provides a nice front end. And if you scrape your metadata from your data warehouse, you can construct a nice data model that you can query and interact with. So this is a small application that I built called the Data Warehouse Browser. And I'll take you through a small example. So say if I wanted to, you know, I want to build a model to understand why clients buy an investment mandate, which is a product that people delegate to the bank to control their investments. And I need to find some information on that topic. So I do a search. I find it's in this ACT database. I click that. I get a list of all the tables. This is all coming from the metadata scraped from the data warehouse. I can even search amongst all those tables. I start typing man. And I see the first table tells me something about mandates. I click that. Looks like the table I need. So then I can, you know, click each of these columns and get a description. I'll click just the status indicator because I can't show you any sensitive data. And there you see a description of what this data is about. It's also a very common column. So if I click the synonyms, which is Django, you can query then all of the tables that have this column. And it returns a list which shows you that this is a very common column. It's appearing in a lot of databases. So you can use this information then to see what other tables have these columns and that gives you a clue how they are related and how you can join them. And also helps you then to build your queries on these data sets. So now that I understand my data universe, I have some tools to help me get started. I want to build some useful feature extracts. So that's like a feature engineering process. So how does Python help me there? So yeah, there I can use SQL Alchemy, which maybe most of you know is an open source SQL toolkit object relational mapper that enables you to work with SQL data through a Python interface. So if you're a Python developer and you're given a job of working with a lot of SQL data, you probably don't really want to start writing huge SQL queries. It's a bit tedious, which I'll show you in a minute. And instead, you can then just connect to your data warehouse like so. In a few lines, it's very simple. You create your engine pointing it at the database. You say which schema you're interested in, create a metadata object. And there it's just a matter of creating a table instance. And with that table instance here, it's called depo mandates. You can query for the records you need. And then just plug that into a pandas data frame constructor. Now you have your data. So like I said, it's very tedious to write SQL queries. Here's an example of a SQL query that you would have to write to get data from our MIS database, the management information system. It's heavily coded. You have to remember all these individual codes, which only the most experienced people around can remember. Instead, if you want to get data for a project, say around FX turnover or equities turnover and so on and so forth, you would either have to make a whole range of these queries or you can use SQL alchemy to abstract away all this complexity and parameterize some queries and programmatically build the logic to make up the query. So on the right, you have this nicer situation where for your whole project, you set up some parameters, which are common. So in this case, there's a particular area of the business I'm interested in over a certain time period. And I want to aggregate a lot of these features with a rolling sum. And then it's just a matter of substituting in your data type that you're looking for. In this case, it's turnover FX, which is encoded in a nice variable in our library, which everyone can remember instead of all these archaic codes. Yeah. So that's the structured data. We can build now some nice features from our data warehouse. We have other types of data that's very interesting for modeling customer analytics and product recommendation. One is the spending and income profiles of our clients. This is often called personal financial management. And the credit Swiss, when I joined, still doesn't have one of these products available to its clients. So at the time, I decided to sort of build my own light version internally. And to do that, I used Luigi, which helped me to process all of these. It's up to a million transactions per day to extract it from the data warehouse, do the classification in a distributed way, and aggregate that data again at the end for creation of features, which you could then go into the model. Yeah, some other data. Once we had all of the structured data and transactions wrapped up is the text data. So we've moved more into processing of unstructured data, such as log files and text data. And here is an example of how we extract some useful features from text. In this case, it's a corpus of client notes. Client notes are recordings of interactions between the client and the bank. It could be initiated by the client or by the bank. And within that data set, there's a lot of information describing what the products the clients are interested in, whether they have complaints, this level of satisfaction, et cetera, et cetera. But this data set is labeled with seven possible topics. And the world is a bit more complex. There's more than seven types of interactions between clients and the bank. And of course, if they're hand labeled, they often can be maybe unreliable. And one of those labels is called general, which is not very helpful. So you can use techniques such as topic modeling, which is built into scikit-learn to extract topics from within this corpus. Here's a short example of how you might do with a set of German language client notes. So one interesting thing that we do is to substitute a lot of these non-informative words such as a client's name or an account number with some sentinel values that have some meaning. So in some cases, that can be helpful for prediction. And then one other challenge in doing this is the N in the number of components when you eventually factor out this topic vector from this count matrix. N is the number of topics that you want in the end. But of course, you don't know a priori what that should be. So what you can do is make use of what is labeled with all its limitations to give you an estimate of how pure these resulting clusters are. So here's an example of a test on a subset of 100,000 notes. And we can see that within this data set, we have about 9,000 contacts that are related to online banking support in its various forms. So it's good to be able to recognize these contacts and label them as such because perhaps they're not so informative for an investment product, but they may be informative for churn or digital affinity or use of new digital tools, et cetera. So yes, now we have, we understand our data universe. We have some nice features. We have some targets which tell us what we want to learn, which could be which products people are buying, whether a client is going to leave the bank and so on. And we can start training models because we have the data to do so. And we can do this in one of two ways. There's what we call dynamic on the one hand and static on the other hand. Dynamic is a setup where you want to understand what the client was like when they acquired this product. So going back into the history and looking at their profile before they made the purchasing decision and static is an alternative approach where you're just interested in how the client looks today. And in those situations, you're thinking about products that don't materially affect the client profiles and usually involve decisions that the clients can make day to day rather than taking a while to think about. So with those two approaches, we use these libraries. It's probably not a surprise that this is the main stack we use. I don't need to go into too much detail here because you're probably all using them. I just want to make a special mention to this book, Python for Data Analysis. It's the book I learned Python with seven years ago or so. And it's my favorite book. And I'd recommend anyone who wants to get into data analysis or data science with Python that there could be far worse places to start. So a lot of the models we train are trained on very imbalanced data because we have some products that have different categories. So a premium package for more wealthier clients and more entry-level products such as a banking package. You get a basic bundle which is a card and an account or you could have insurance benefits, a platinum card and so on that's premium. So if you're trying to understand what makes people buy these products, you have very imbalanced data sets to work with. So there you have to use methods of balancing where appropriate. And I would recommend looking at the imbalanced learn library, which is a great complement to scikit-learn. And there it has its own pipeline function. Pipelines are great. In scikit-learn they have the same API as transformers and classifiers. The fit, transform, predict. Not sure why they chose fit instead of train, but fit, transform, predict. And so you can package all the steps in your machine learning pipeline into one object and then treat that like a classifier. So that allows you to do things like grid searches for hyperparameters as though you would with a single classifier. In this case we have a function from imbalanced learn which looks exactly the same as make pipeline from scikit-learn, except this lets you put in these sampling methods, like this random under sampler in the middle. Which is a very simple way of balancing your data set before you do some learning. There are more advanced methods of sampling such as smote and so on, unless this library gives you a lot of possibilities to do balancing. Yeah, so one of the favorite aspects of using pipelines is its modular design. And we put pipelines in our pipelines and we like to reuse existing pipelines because we have a lot of the same data in different machine learning problems that we're working on. So we use column transformers to split out the numeric and categorical data. And we have a lot of categories that we want to treat in a certain way. For example, if we have the domicile of the client, there are certain products that can only be offered to clients in a given domicile, say only clients from Switzerland or not clients from the US. So depending on the product, you can keep the data as it is, but use a custom transformer to convert that into a kind of reduced prototype set of categories. And just plug that into your new pipeline as it's needed. So we also use one other module quite heavily, but it's our own in-house library. And that has been very helpful for us to standardize the machine learning process. Like I said, machine learning in our department was very fragmented before with different technologies. Here we build reusable components and help abstract away a lot of complexity, such as creating training data sets from our data universe. Doing it in the right way consistently and avoiding having to write the SQL alchemy, the SQL code yourself. So its main function is bridging the gap between the nice Python universe of modules and their upstream data sources, as well as our downstream sales channels. So it helps us do our work more efficiently. So we have now got to the point where we have some models. We've trained them properly, hopefully. And we want to now start making recommendations to our client advisors so that they can offer these products which the client may need. And in order to do that, you take the features which you've used to train the model, of course. You need the current values of those for all your clients. You want to exclude using the targets. Those clients who already have these products. And then you also want to incorporate any exclusions that, for example, clients that cannot be offered this product because they refuse it in the past, or they're too young or too old, or they're in the wrong domicile, et cetera. So you put that all together, and you make the predictions. And with most of these models, you get, if it's a classification model, it will give you a class plus a score from zero to one. You can interpret as how likely this client is to buy this product, say. And you can use that to then rank clients and maybe focus on those that are most likely to buy this product, instead of simply trying to contact all and wasting a lot of time. So providing the score and the class to the client advisor is probably not enough because the client advisor needs some information to try and sell this product. So they need to understand why I should contact my client. Why should I offer them this investment advisory product? So here's an example from the front tool, which is one delivery channel. This is what the client advisor works with on a daily basis. So there you see rows of leads that we provide for different products in their client book. And they can click the lead, and you see a breakdown of the different rationales why this client needs this product. And in this case, it's an investment advisory product. You can see that they don't have an investment consultant. But they do have a lot of equity, a lot of assets. They do trade a lot, and they do have a lot of contacts related to investment. So that's a good lead for this product. So how do we do that? The models are just providing scores and classes. So how do we provide this tailored list of rationales? Where we use explainability methods. One explainability method I want to tell you about is tree interpreter. And this helps us see the forest from the trees. It's a very simple package to use if you have a random forest classifier, for example. So here's some snippet. You train the classifier. And instead of using the predict method of that classifier, you use the TI predict method, the tree interpreter predict. And that returns to you not only the prediction, but also a breakdown of this prediction in terms of bias and contribution. The contribution is the contribution of each feature in your model to that score. So it can be positive or negative. And it does that by aggregating over all of the trees in your random forest. Here's an example of kind of the contributions for a churn model. You can see they're negative. So these are all features that reduce the churn risk for this client. So they have some volume. They have some mortgages with us. They tend to be clients who stay. They have inflows from other banks. So they're obviously happy with our service. So they bring assets from other banks. And their account volume is growing. Their private account volume is growing. That way we can take this data of contributions and combine it in a sensible way that allows us to provide a list of rationales and reasons to our relationship managers and advisors of why this client needs the product. So the last step in the process is monitoring the sales channels. And this is where you get the feedback and enable improvement of your process. So the leads go to the sales channels and then we have a monitoring process. So we're monitoring the activity on these leads. We're seeing which ones are closed, which ones are won and lost, accepted, rejected. And then we're doing metrics such as impact on revenues, precision recall, etc. And then we feed that information back into the model training process on a regular basis to update the models. Plus, we also get information about which clients have rejected these products. So we don't have to include them in future campaigns and can exclude them from any future deliveries. So I just want to make a quick note. This is not a Python part, but like I said, it's important to be able to track what happens to your leads that you can't do that with Excel. But you can do that by building a front tool which has an interface and a process whereby the leads go into the client channel. There's an ability for the advisor to see and assess them, to make a contact, to meet the client and potentially close the deal. And that's all recorded in the system and it comes back to us in an evaluate step. And then we can use that information to improve the process. So what I showed you there was at the top left, which is the client book planning, which is the client advisor workbench part. We have other channels. In blue, we're also having a data-driven process in mailings, as well as in the contact center. And we're also looking to build out these processes in other channels. So that brings me to the end of the talk. I want to say thank you first to the audience, but also thank you to the Python community, especially the developers of the PyData stack, all of these great libraries that we use on a daily basis. And it can be a thankless task sometimes, I can imagine. But it's great that people like me can use these tools and solve real world problems in a very easy way. So thank you and thank you, the community. If anyone has questions, there's microphones in the aisles. We have two or three minutes. Hi, so thank you for the presentation. And I wanted to ask because if I understood correctly, there's a little of feedback loop that the leads that are generated, then there are sales, so they are going back into the training as correct data. But what about users that were not included in this first batch? Will there be leads for them generated from some random, just randomly? Because there is a risk that we won't spot the new group of customers. Because we will be constantly focusing on this loop. Have you anticipated that in any way? So if I understand your question, it's about missing out on potentials by only delivering certain leads. We tend to just deliver the leads that have the highest ranking according to the model and those that don't have a sufficient level of potential are not sent to the client advisor. But we do use some of these clients as a control group when evaluating models or evaluating new channels because sometimes a new channel might not be effective because the channels are not properly constructed. So you have to mix in the potentials with the no potentials to be able to do a proper statistical analysis. But otherwise, we just focus on those that the model has high potential for. Because we see in the evaluation of the models that there's good accuracy. Okay, thank you. Is there someone else? Questions? One question for me is about the Excel usage. Why are you totally banning this one? Did you try somehow to parse the files and so on so that your users can actually keep the tool they are used to use? And you can also extract data and, I mean, analyze it. Why did you just, why this red flag for Excel files basically? Yeah, so we still use Excel file sometimes for kind of evaluations of new models or just for a quick turnaround for new stakeholders and so on. But the problem with Excel is you have no control over it once it goes out. So there's nothing stopping the person you deliver to from screwing up the data or getting the indexing wrong. And then it comes back to you and you kind of have no information you can use. Excel is, I don't want to hate on Excel. It's a great tool. It's one of the 50 things that made the modern economy, as they say. But as a channel for a data-driven process, it has a lot of limitations. Yeah, the user can do whatever they want with the data. That's the problem. You can't lock it down. And do your users are willing to just exit Excel for the sake of data analysis in the future or are they, I mean, do they understand the advantage of leaving Excel for a tool that will have more limitation basically? But that will ease your analysis, which is basically not their job. Yeah, people do love their Excel, right? And they like to keep their own numbers. So you have to make sure that the tool that you want them to use instead is probably easier to use and gives them some benefits. And that's why we were closely involved with designing this client advisor work bench so that it gives them the information they need without them having to keep their own Excel sheets. But no, I think we need to have a rigorous process that gives high-quality data that feeds back into the process, so not Excel. Hi, thank you. I was wondering how you serve your models or the results. In the process, it seemed like you put out a data set like the predictions and then you feed that into the front end. Is that the way or is there like some APIs involved or some completely different stuff? So I didn't catch the first part. How do we what? You serve our results of your models. So you serve your models. Serve, yes. Like make them available to the front end basically? Yeah, so we have an interface between our application and this application where the leads are displayed. And it's not a very sophisticated process. It's a flat file which a lot of things work still by flat files. So it goes from one data base to another. And then it gets updated in the tool and then it comes back to us via a data feed in the warehouse, sure. Paul Hughes, everyone.


EFCC ready to address corruption at all levels amid battle to sustain anti-corruption war. And governors have been asked to loosen their groups on local government. This is Plus Politics and I am Mary Anacorn. The President Bola Med Tinnibu's government has promised to renew hope of many Nigerians saying that he would fight corruption. But since the arrest of the embattled Chairman of the Economic Crime, Financial Crimes Commission EFCC Abdul Rashid Bauer, there seems to be an unusual quiet in the anti-graft agency, especially with the unactualised threats to arrest some of the immediate past governors and prevent the corrupts among them from travelling. The initial zeal shown by the federal government to stamp out corruption appears to be losing steam which makes us question the battle to sustain the anti-corruption war. Joining us to discuss this is Mr. Daya Khayadeh, he's a social political technocrat. Mr Khayadeh, thank you so much for joining us. Good evening. Good evening. Good evening. Great. Let's start by looking at the fact that it's been a hundred plus days for Mr. President in office and many would say a hundred days is not enough to assess a government. Some others would say, well, with the putting together Mr. President's cabinet and the steps and the strides so far, it would show whether the President is really serious about fighting corruption and bringing that renewed hope. But let me start from the issue of renewed hope. One of the things that the President had said he was going to do was to continue from where his predecessor stopped. In the fight against corruption under the Bahá'í administration, many would not score the former President even up to 50%. And here we are. Mr. President has inherited that same anti-corruption war. Do you see a body language of Mr. President in that direction of wanting to seriously fight corruption? Yes. Mary Anne, let me quickly say this because in assessing anybody whether one day or two days or three days or hundred days, even eight years, you got to look at two things. Number one, why do you campaign? What are your promises to the people? Number two, you are there based on constitutionality, you are there based on the constitutionality of the federal republic of Nigeria, 1999 as a mandate. What does that constitutional stipulate as regards your relationship with the people? And all has to bow down to two things again. One, ensuring good livelihood of the people. And then two, ensuring safety and security of lives and properties of the people. Now, if we prepare a checklist, these are these stipulations. I want viewers to judge themselves what percentage are they going to give to Mr. President. Now, coming to issues of corruption, I've always been saying it, and I continue to say it. Can corruption ever fight corruption? Where you have ten lions and then you have ten goods. Which one do you think the lion will fight to eat? There is no way corruption can ever fight corruption. Let me give you an example of what is on ground now. Look at the issue of meteorology. The S.Y. chairman of E.F.C.C. had promised him that immediately that slogan of what do I call it now? You cannot investigate a chief executive of a state or the president immunity. That immunity clause has been provided by the Constitution. He said immediately he dropped that. He was going to prosecute him on the issue of the 17 billionaire of which he allocated or he gave out contracts to some proxies and he paid them without even executing anything.  Not just a junior minister, but a hierarchy minister. So what do you expect?  Who were governors before that Bauer had promised that, listen, I am not going to allow any of you to travel out of this country without you dropping all the money that you have stolen. Where are these governors now? They are now in the Senate. Let me give you another example of the current Senate president. He was supposed to go to jail when he deflected to E.F.C. at that time. And you remember what Osho Moles said while he was the chairman of E.F.C. then. That any sinner who can drop his or her party and come to E.F.C. will definitely become an angel. Where is that governor? He's now the Senate president. So tell me, how do you expect the E.F.C.C. as is to perform? Because they're now more powerful than E.F.C. We are not building institutions, but we are building personalities. When you say the E.F.C.C. is no longer powerful, what exactly do you mean? We've seen them arrested. Right now in their custody, there is the former CBN governor. In their custody is also their former boss. So again, when you say they're not powerful, how exactly do you mean? The issue is, when you are talking about those two people, you have to also look deeply that they stepped on some powerful tools. That is why they are there. Why is former CBN deputy governor, that lady, not an E.F.C.C. next? Why is some of these governors not an E.F.C. next? Well, I then let off the hook. Just the way, I mean, unlike the way the former governor of CBN and the former chairman of E.F.C.C. are to be in custody for how many months now? Do you have the constitutional right to detain, to detain, not a criminal now, but a suspect, be shown as a particular hours? So why are we doing this on the two of them? Remember, even autumn, autumn that was asked to come to a place of peace was not released. So what has happened to these two people? Are you not saying because they have stepped on some tools, you now want to deal with them? The problem in this nation is rather than us building strong institutions, we have been building strong individuals. And that is an old display now. Alright, I'll come back to you because I want to paint another scenario for you. Joining us again is the chief political advisor to the governor of E.M.O. State, Aina O'Negbu. Mr. O'Negbu, thank you so much for joining us. Good evening. I think that you need to unmute yourself. But let me come back to you, Mr. Coyote. I want to paint a scenario. When you say that detention, and I'm not in any way holding brief for the federal government or the EFCC, nor the DSS, we've seen these kinds of scenarios play out. Let's take for example, the leader of the Shiite group, they're still in custody, do you know that? Yeah. Elzazaki. We still have Namdi Kanu, even after a court order, has been, has asked for him to be released. So what is new about this? Again, I remind you, Mr. President had said that he would continue from where his predecessors stopped. So maybe this is what he meant in part. Hasn't been on corruption, rather, but tagged, and I'm saying tagged as public disturbances from the two of them. So their scenario, their scenario cannot be a consulance with that of Ida Bawa, or that of city media. There is no correlation between those two scenarios because Elzazaki is talking about freedom and Namdi Kanu is also talking about freedom unlike that of Sibyan Goblu and Bawa that are both talking about corruption. And the issue is this, I'm just saying it, and I will just say it, I was affected. I was affected, really, by activities of the SYCN government and I will never be in support of what he did while he was the Sibyan governor. However, however, here is a country that has rules, regulations, and guidelines guiding interrogation of anybody that had gone ultra-virus with the rules of the land. So why are we not following the rules? Just hold that thought. Let me just quickly bring back Mr. Nekbu in. Mr. Nekbu, can you hear me now? Yes, I'm here with you. Perfect. Thank you for joining us. We just needed to be sure that your audio is working. Let me bring you in now. Looking at the anti-corruption fight by President Nekbu, of course, many would say he just got into office, but there seemed to have been that very energetic drive for Mr. President when he just got into office with the arrest of the Sibyan governor and several other issues. We do know that he had a private investigator looking into the books in the CBN, et cetera, et cetera. But then it looks like that track is gradually, you know, going cold, and many people are saying it's too early in the day for the track to go cold. But share your thoughts with me on what you think about Mr. President's fight against corruption. Do you see the body language of a man who would be able to do more, much more than his predecessor? But I would want to encourage the usual cliche in Nigeria of sounding to sanctimonials. The important thing is somebody talked about having strong institutions rather than having strong men in power or positions. How do you have strong institutions if we cannot sanitize these institutions at the court, no matter how high the place? When we are talking about corruption, let us use the well-known most important agency in the fight against corruption, that is the EFCC. Nuhu Ribadu, who headed EFCC, had ended up being a case of the hunter becoming the hunted. And when you're investigating people who have occupied such positions, you will require, I hope you're hearing me. I can hear you, go ahead please. Yes, when you're investigating such positions or such persons, you will, an easy job, to do forensic investigation. For example, let us use the subsidy matter. When we are investigating the matter connected with this subsidy regime that operated and puts Nigeria back, it involves some institutional breaches. And such investigation will not last in a day or a week. And I know that every person who has had to be detained for such matters, there is usual additional pending investigation. But then there are laws that need to be followed. Yes, the EFCC also does not operate in isolation. There are laws that the EFCC needs to follow. And all of us, including the courts, if the court or the law says you can't detain or hold a person beyond 48 hours. Why does the EFCC and other security agencies continue to hold people for longer? Especially if you're saying you're fighting corruption and you want to do it by the books. This is what people are querying. I'm just trying to let you in into the situation where I seen a bank fraud, for example. It is a different kind of fish from investigating a case of housebreaking. It will involve some forensics. You will have to study some books. You will have to study... But people... You should have shown that allowed by warrant by a court of computer injuries. As it does go by, review that detention order to see if they are being complied with or breached. And that is why when eventually such a person is charged to court, the courts would also consider whether to grant bail on... Mr. Necbo, we're going to have to fix your connection. They may get the...  Let me come back to you, Mr. Kaede. He's making a case that... He's trying to say that we cannot build strong institutions without sanitizing the system. And I'm trying to quote him almost directly when he was talking about making a remark as to what you have said about building strong institutions as opposed to strongmen. This is something that we hear all the time. I see that's on the ground. How do we even go about building these strong institutions if we have more strongmen than the institutions? And is there a willingness? Let's look at the legislature, which is a group of people who are supposed to legislate on issues such as this. Many would say that our legislators also benefit from some of these loop holes in our fight against corruption and legal system and the rule of law. Former President Mahmoud Buhari at a legal conference here in Lagos, if I'm not mistaken or in Abuja, had said at some points that national security trumps the rule of law and we're seeing it play out every single day. Many people also tie what's been happening across the African continent to this, the fact that the rule of law is never followed. How can we deal with issues such as corruption or trying to make sure that people do the right thing if the people who are trying to make these people do the right thing and not doing the right thing? Am I making sense? You have made a lot of sense. You see, building a strong institution cannot be switched away from fighting corruption. And I'll give you an example. Look at our NNPC today. Our NNPC today vis-à-vis our refineries that are now working. I bet you are 80% of people in NNPC and that of refineries are being flushed out today and then made to pay for what they have made us to go through unnecessarily in this country. And then bring in fresh blood that are very, very passionate about our nation. You will see that all those refineries will work. Where are we getting these passionate people from? Permit me to ask. Are we getting them from the moon? Are we getting them from Mars? Because the truth is we also have a system. No, no, I'm sorry. Please hold on. Where are we getting them from? Are they from the moon? Because we also, let's not forget, there is a system that is already on the ground. Whether we bring these people from the United States, from the moon, from Mars, there's still a systemic problem in our country. So how do we fix that? And I was coming to where you just touched now. You see, in this country today we have a lot of passionate people there. I wouldn't want to use myself as an example so that I won't be a slave. I am marketing myself. All right? But I have seen passionate Nigerians that have the opportunity to live this country and Japan. But because they strongly believe in our nation, they strongly believe that Washington, Charles de Gaulle, and others, Mandela, were in their country to contribute to the development of those nations. And they are here in this country. They are here in this country. All right? We can figure them out.  All right?  Because again, when you put people there, there are some strong people that are telling them, for instance, look at the case of Metawali. Let me come back to Metawali. Whereby he allocated, it was her right to have allocated contracts. Giving those people money. And he didn't do the work. And they were telling the SEC that he asked them to go and change those monies to dollars. And then give some monies to the local government executive and the particular commission. I like the deal. I'm sure you're talking about Governor Ghanduji. It could be that Ghanduji. See, that's what Ghanduji was saying face to face when I was collecting those dollars. I'm talking about this, the issue of this same Metawali that has not been made Minister of Defense or something like that. State for Defense, yes.  I'm talking of that Metawali. That's what Ghanduji is still there. What has happened? So what I'm saying is there are credible people in this nation that are still ready to ensure that Nigeria gets to its elders, that Nigeria gets to its zeniths, that Nigeria reach its acme. But unfortunately, they are not having one Godfather or the other that will push them. When you push those people there and then you cannot use them to build strong institutions. And I go back to my question. There are very many people who can single-handedly be called or rather you can single out of the crowd and say this is a man of honour, this is a woman of honour. But then I'm saying we have a systemic problem and when I talk about the system I'm talking about the whole makeup. So if you bring one person that is good and you put in a mix of people that are all bad who are used to a systemic rot, what good have you done, really? And we are saying the same thing but in different ways. When you're talking of the system, the system is made up of one at the top, the institution. And below it, the people. Are you with me? We are saying the same thing but we are just using is a matter of semantics now. We have a system that is rotting and there is need for us to overhaul. I will give you an instance. I will give you another instance. When Badabia Mila was trying to become the speaker of the house. This case came from America now. The case between him and his client. I will privy to all this. I was among those that orchestrated that gave me the volume that I spoke of. Such a person. What do you expect? The issue still came up on the social media today. And what do you expect? When you have as the head of a society let me give you this analogy again. I'm sure you know the fish and as a grown up lady you must have been going to fight the fish. How do you know the kind of fish you're supposed to buy? That the head is already smelling. Will you buy such a fish? Will you buy such a fish for goodness sake? Because when the head is rotting definitely the house system will be rotting. And that's how we are talking here now. Alright Mr Khayyadi because of time I'm going to bring you to my last question so we can wrap up. Because I've been trying to get you to tell us how we can change the system but you keep saying one person. I don't know how one person I mean I'm sure we can point to so many good one persons that have been sucked in by the system. Again we as Nigerians have continued to complain about the fact that the fight against corruption has been lopsided it's much more of a witch hunt as opposed to fighting corruption and there are others who would also say that when you fight corruption, corruption fights back. Will Nigerians in their lifetime anytime soon under this democratic dispensation be able to see a true fight against corruption and how soon will that be? Again we're still talking about Mr President Mr President is just at the beginning of his tenor and he still has some more years to go and there's a lot like I said at the beginning his plate is very full, too many things it's dragged on the one side to insecurity especially in the southeast the uprisings he has to deal with an economy that's already facing a downturn he also has to deal with the issue of fuel subsidy removal the trust deficit that Nigerians have when it comes to this issue of fuel subsidy the fact that there's been oil theft and nobody has been able to account for it shall we be able to see or boast of a true fight against corruption under this administration or in the next decade? Democracy democracy is based on the sanctity of the constitution and when you are talking about sanctity of the constitution that's what we call the rule of law and when you are talking about the rule of law it also has to do with justice dispensation the moment our democracy is allowed to throw up the kind of leadership that we require definitely it will lead to the sanctity of our constitution okay and when we have the sanctity of our constitution definitely the rule of law we play out and when we allow the rule of law to play out strong institutions will emerge we have to go we have to go we don't have time we have to go I have to ask Mr. Negbu one quick question so that we can wrap up here unfortunately his connection has been bad Mr. Negbu will we be able to see a fight a holistic fight against corruption under the Chinubu administration or any time soon is when you are fighting corruption corruption fights back cherries of the post subsidy or trouble to keep quiet they will try to influence the civil society try to influence the masses what is important is that those places have so much in their hands that they can fight the system what we must agree is that the manner of aggregations mentors that the process of investigation would take some time requires that there be a detention order allowed or granted by a court of court talking about fundamental rights there are exceptions to that rule or that cases that involve Chinubu felony or cases that threaten the territorial integrity of the nation your fundamental right is put in the to jeopardize the security of our nation for your fundamental right limitations to that right of personal liberty now in this case investigation and charging a person to court and when they are charged to court it not it also to educate the society that there is the rule of certain that there is a day for reckoning and the law of the requirement for would be practitioners of such I'm so sorry I'm so sorry Mr. Nick unfortunately your connection is really bad and we are losing half of what you are saying but I want to thank you Mr. Inaya he is a chief political advisor to the governor of emo state also I want to say thank you to Daya Kayade who is a political technocrat thank you so much gentlemen for being here in the studio and having this conversation with us Mr. Nick hopefully next time you join us we will be able to have a clear audio from you but I look forward to this outing alright thank you very much we will take a break when we come back we want to talk about local governments and the grasp of governors on their monies especially their duties stay with us


The worst crime that we have done against humanity is that we planted this idea of heaven in people's head.   It's alright to die, but you don't have to get old. Ah, but are you scared of dying? Are you scared of dying? Not at all. Why? Not at all. I've lived a full life. I live every day like this the last day, so I'm not sure. Are you a good sleeper? Oh yes, for 25 years I manage with just about two and a half to three hours of sleep. Really? A night? Yes. These days on an average I'm getting lazy, sleeping four and a half hours.  If I had two and a half hours sleep, I'd be sitting here like this now. No body does not need sleep, it needs restfulness. If you know how to keep yourself restful, the sleep quota will just go down. That's a good point actually. When we perform action, we want it to be successful, there's no question. But today you watch all the successful people, they are spreading a message, success is misery, success is suffering. Once you spread this message, next generation will not seek success. This may not be articulated in their mind, but they will not seek success because they're looking at the successful you and they don't want to be like you. They think they're better off smoking pot. And they are. That's true. So for you to be successful, the most important thing is your pleasantness in the body, pleasantness in the mind, pleasantness in the emotion and pleasantness in your life energies.  There's no such thing as too much. Human being is geared to do a lot. The problem is, most human beings, their own mind is against them. When your intelligence turns against you, then you're finished. So you may call it stress, you may call it anxiety, you may call it misery, madness, whatever you like.  I love that. Is there any other reason? Consciousness is not some strange thing happening somewhere.  If you're unconscious, you don't even know whether you're alive or dead, isn't it? You don't even know whether you exist or not. So you are conscious. The question is only how conscious? So right now, let us see consciousness as light. Let's say there's just one light here in this hall. We dim it. Now it shows only these two people. Other people are not missing in my vision. What do I think? I think only these two people exist in this hall. You've brightened it up. I suddenly see four people. Oh, suddenly four people are in this hall. Now somebody turned it on. Oh, ten people are there. They put it on full brightness. Now I see everything and everybody in all detail. This is all consciousnesses. Everybody is conscious. The question is only how? How conscious? Everybody is awake. But question is only how awake are you right now? So that is why the word in India, we always use the word awakening. Antoine, am I awake? I am awake. But you can get more awake than what you are right now. You can get further, more and more awake. To a point, if you become fully awake, the entire creation is in your perception. The worst crime that we have done against humanity is that we planted this idea of heaven in people's head. We told them there is a better place to live than this.  Somewhere else everything is going to be fantastic. This one idea has made us so gross and insensitive to everything around us. This idea, if you're not eating well here, no problem. There it will be fantastic. You didn't get your drink today. It doesn't matter their rivers flow with wine.  Their virgins are waiting in dozens for you, whatever, nonsense. I'm saying just this idea that this is the damn place where you have to do your best to live at the highest level possible. There is no higher place to live. This has to sink into all of us. If we want to live in a great way, this is the place, isn't it? I'm asking you, do you have any proof that you're not already in heaven and messing it up? Humility in victory and gracefulness in defeat is the mark of great men. It takes great men to make a great nation. At this time, when the election results are out and people have expressed their will, all of us, whether the contestants who have won and those who have lost, must remember you are only weighing to see who can serve India better. This is about serving the nation and the people of this nation.


me reading the Midnight Library by Matt Hague. Have you heard about it? It's making a lot of headway on the national frontier for books. It's about a story, it's about Nora, a young woman who in the afterlife gets to go back into her life by picking an alternate voice as to a decision she made earlier in life. Now for me this opened up a ton of possibilities. So I enjoyed the read. For instance, think about this.  How would that feel, right? Or let's say you rescued Tippi the cat from the Humane Society but you really wanted to breed AKC registered dogs and make a lot of money. Well now you have that chance you can go do it and see how that works out for you. Here's a really good one. Let's say you marry the love of your life that got away. How would your marriage be? Would you be happier? Would you be happier having married that person? Possibilities are endless. My name is Elaine Gallant and I am the Think Tech Hawaii's host for Books, Books, Books where during this live streaming series we're going to talk about reading books, writing books and everything in between and beyond. Which brings me to our special guest tonight. He is the epitome of that statement as chair of the Hawaii Music and Book Festival. Let's welcome Doug Chen. Aloha Doug, how are you? Hey Elaine. Hi. Great to be on the show. Congratulations. Thank you. Well, you know the Hawaii Book and Music Festival has been going on for how many years now? Oh my gosh, it's been decades. You've already caught me in a question that I don't actually know. But I'll tell you this, it's been around for as long as I've lived in Honolulu and that's been like three decades actually. And so during this time I have so many memories, especially at the live festival when it was going on, of being able to go down to the festival to walk around the different tents and to see authors and people discussing very important subjects, either about the books that they wrote or about issues that really were important to the community. And then to be able to go grab a bite to eat at a food truck and then to be able to browse among the used books that were sent, remember books, hardcover books, there are all these bunch, there's all these used books that were just ready for anybody to be able to take for free or for ten cents or a quarter. And it was really a lovely time. I thought I read it was actually formed like in 2005 and the first festival was 2006, something like that. So it has been a long time and it's a two-day event, right? It's a Saturday and a Sunday. Yeah, that's right. And so under normal non-pandemic circumstances, and we're going to get to what this year was like, but under typical circumstances, it's a live event that takes place on public grounds for the long time. Since it first started, it was taking place at the Honolulu Halle Civic Center, which is in downtown Honolulu. And more recently, the board has made the decision to move it to the University of Hawaii, so we could be closer to students, the professors, and to better work out the partnership that we have with the University of Hawaii and their publishing house. Well, that's fantastic. Dude, let's talk about this year's event because, hey, it's going on right now, right now. Yes, I've exhausted. There have been so many amazing panelists and local authors, as well as national authors that because of the fact that we were doing it all on Zoom, we had the opportunity to be able to partner with other organizations, to be able to bring them in and let them be part of the Hawaii Book and Music Festival. I saw Bob Wood on there. Sorry. I saw Bob Wood on there. Woodward. Oh, yeah, yeah. So that's amazing. And so I think for the people who were able to take part of it, so long as you knew how to be able to link up and be able to register for the programs, there were some amazing, not just authors that were talking about their books, but some great musicians, concerts. There was a Makana concert that was done at Kauai Hau Church that happened at the very beginning of the month that actually, like they honestly brought me to tears. It was so beautiful and so just so delightful in the presentation that actually what's great for viewers to know is that there's going to be a repeat of the performance tomorrow. Let me tell you when it is 2 p.m. So yeah, so you can actually be able to log into the Hawaii Book and Music Festival and to be able to schedule yourself to be able to watch the repeat 2 o'clock tomorrow afternoon. And that's going to be one of the last presentations that the festival makes as we zoom to the state and to the entire world. That's fantastic. Now it does go on until, I thought I read it goes on to the fourth, so it goes on until the third. Sure, there's going to be, there's three more presentations that are tomorrow including Makana. Then there's going to be one more at 10 o'clock a.m. on the fourth. End out with Storyteller Joe Miller talking about Tales for a Planetary Autumn. So that's about as pretty yet going. Yeah, that's on Thursday. November 4th. So who are the three for tomorrow? Because if somebody has not participated because now those of us who live on the Outer Islands don't always get to go to this festival because it costs us a lot of money to go. But now that it's by the internet and by Zoom, who can we anticipate seeing tomorrow? And you know, here's the lineup for tomorrow. At 10 o'clock a.m. we have an Italian storyteller, Giovanna Conforto. And I can tell you, I'm definitely looking at my notes here, so that's what I'm looking down at. But I just want to make sure I get the author's name correct. And what is it about this person? So he's an Italian storyteller and he is going to basically, I think what's nice about our Storyteller series is these are people who are able to do actually something very similar to what you presented us with in your nice introduction.  And it's just a nice way to be able to relax during the morning and hear from Storyteller. And who else is tomorrow? We have two more, well, I can ask the third one. Right, McCona, McCona's at two o'clock. And then tomorrow evening, if you like to cook and you're into cookbooks and recipes, Chef Sheldon Simeon who has done his, who has written a book called Cook Real Hawaii, Real Hawaii. All right.  He would just love him. Awesome. Yes. So, and you've already touched on something that I think was was kind of a nice side benefit of what happened due to the circumstances that we had where we put everything on Zoom. And as we had so much more participation from people on the neighborhoods who were able to watch, I got to tell you, I really missed the live festival that that's kind of like excited about joining the board. But I understand how difficult it is for people from the neighborhood to fly over to go to what will be UH next year and to set that all up. But one thing I remember actually about the cooking demonstrations is what they were live. They're so awesome because you have to go up and sample afterwards. It smells so good and I could be able to check it out. Well, tomorrow you won't be in person, but he will be demonstrating and you can you can watch it from the comfort of your own kitchen and perhaps learn. That's wonderful. So let's talk about some of the people. Because this is on books, books, books, and even though music is a fabulous creative outlet and also involves writing and words and symbolism and all of that, we're going to focus a little bit more on the books. Tell us what you tell us about some of the new authors that you presented. I recognize some names. I got really excited seeing Hawaii. What's his middle name? Now see now I'm drawing a blank. He wrote Sharks in the, oh God, it was a wonderful book. I read it. It's quite strong. Washburn, I think it is. Oh, okay. I don't have the name. Yeah, we had some great VIP authors and partly it was because of the fact that we were able to do this on Zoom. Not only did we have a huge amount of, there were a lot of local books that were published by local authors in the last year. Think of that. I mean, that's great. The books are making a comeback. But in addition to that, we had some VIP speakers. So that included Kate Raworth, Mazie Chornot, Senator Horono. Actually wrote a great book. Lisa C., as you already said, Bob Woodward and Costa, they were able to present their book. Michael E. Mann, that was a heavily attended panel. Almost 500 people watched it from all around the state and elsewhere. Charles Johnson and Joy Harjo were all involved in the festival talking about their books. What's the correct? She's a poet. Yes. Yes, that's correct. That's correct. And I think what was nice about not only this group of VIP authors, but like I said, there were a bunch of local authors who were also able to talk about their books. And I got to say, I mean, I think I lean more towards like law and politics, but let me just give you an example of one. So one was the person, the federal public defender who sort of broke open the case involving former Honolulu police chief, Louis K. Aloha, his wife, Catherine K. Aloha. He wrote a book called The Mailbox Conspiracy. And so his book came out in the fall and he was able to be interviewed and to have a panel discussion really about that book. I read it from cover to cover. I mean, I think it's going to be something that our local law school makes part of their curriculum for everybody who enters into the law school.  That's just very disturbing because it happened right here. But then. So really, I mean, we all, I mean, this is, this is still fresh news to all of us, right? Right. Right. Processing it. Right. But Alexander Silver was living in first hand because he was representing the brother-in-law who was falsely accused of stealing a mailbox from, you know, from the grandmother that kind of started this whole ball rolling as more threads got pulled in terms of, hey, what's really going on here? And it eventually resulted in, you know, all right, that we're very serious. Say the title again. It's called The Mailbox because it's called The Mailbox. Dyspheresy. Dyspheresy. I went to a large book well. So that might be one of our picks. Oh, sure. Also a really good friend of mine, the attorney general who preceded me, his name is David Louie. He also wrote a book kind of talking about his time when he was the attorney general. And I think for all of us who are not authors, we really appreciate people who actually, you know, like it takes such discipline and courage, I think, you know, to just kind of put yourself out there and write something. And so my hat's off to David Louie for writing a book and being able to talk about it, you know, who his panelist interviewer was. He was former governor of Herkronby. So how cool was that? That is fabulous. That's wonderful. That is amazing. Oh, gosh, I got a couple of really good questions for you too. I don't know if we want to go ahead and talk about more about the location for next years or how you want to go into that now? Yeah, yeah. I'd like to talk about that because you want to go live next year. You want to take it back to a two day weekend event. So how's that going to shape up? So I think the typical festival has always been live. It's been on the weekend. I think something that'll be different is instead of it being at the Honolulu Hall of Civic Grounds downtown, it'll actually be at UH. And part of that came from a partnership that was developed between the festival and the university, which has a very robust authors program and publishing house. Yes. And just being able to get us closer in closer proximity to students who could then be part of the conversation, part of the discussions right there, right outside their dorms or right up where their classes are being held. So we're trying to do that. But I think what's also important for people to know, especially people watching this show who are probably seeing it on the internet, is that we're taking the lessons that we learned from last year and this year. And the intention is to try to do as many programs as possible as we can and have them also be streamed onto the internet so that people who can't travel or who live on neighbor islands or elsewhere have the opportunity to be able to participate. That's wonderful. Actually, doesn't it make you a little jealous? But don't you want to be a student again and walk outside the form and be a part of this festival? Oh yeah. It'll be amazing. Right. And I think all of us, again, those of us who are readers, I think what we always appreciate and perhaps don't get enough is that there's so many times when you enjoy a good book and you're like, oh, that was really amazing. And then I know how special it is, just from this last month, just to be able to hear from the person who wrote the book and to hear what their heart was behind it or what they were thinking about. It really just makes the book come alive. And so I think that's actually something that's really special about the festival is this opportunity to be able to connect the person who wrote the book with the people who are reading it and to ask questions and for them to get some explanations and things like that. I think it's really very special. Yeah, books really open up a lot of possibilities. It's amazing.  Talk a little bit about that. And also, have there been or is there now and will there be some Hawaiian printed type? I know they do the newspaper. Are there any books that are going to be promoted? Like the woman who did the dictionary on the 600 words or phrases that Hawaiian Jews for rain. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah, that's fantastic. And so a question. I mean, I think because we're based here in Hawaii, we have a strong component, not only in our plans for next year, but already this year and last year. If you look through the scroll through the schedule for the 2021 Book and Music Festival, you can see just a lot of great presentations by local native Hawaiian indigenous authors talking about what they wrote, what they believe in, what's important to them, and just sharing their mana'u. And I think that's very, very special. I got to say that the partners and sponsors that we have in the festival are not just limited to UH Press and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I also want to give a shout out. I should just take this opportunity now to like, not a super long list, but I want to make sure I talk about them also because we really super appreciate the support. I mean, it's hard to raise money during the pandemic when everybody's at home and these people stepped up and made the festival possible so that it could keep going. All the challenges that we have. So they are Kamehameha Publishing, Best Press, the Lilio Kalani Trust. We have some other great sponsors like Oceanit, Hawaii HEI, so the Electric Company, a Hawaiian Electric, Hawaii Public Radio, Civil Beat, I Heart Media, BDK, Hawaii Green Growth, and Holly Kalani. And I'm going to, at the risk of annoying all the other sponsors, I am going to give a special shout out to Civil Beat. They are an online, basically an online newspaper platform that, you know, all of us who are ever in government were really familiar with Civil Beat, but they have their own connection to and their own mission statement in terms of wanting to connect to the community and get a conversation happening with their readers about what's important to them. So by partnering with Civil Beat, especially during this time, we were able to really, like triple our audience over last year and really get a lot more involvement from people who were able to hear about these presentations and then participate in the different discussions. Right. Let me ask you this. The festival is only two more days in one session, but one day in one session. If we missed anything, how can we go back and view it? Yes. Okay. You can see it on our YouTube channel.  So basically, it's streamed and it's archived on our HVMF, our Hawaii Book and Music Festival Facebook site. And then the other way that you can see it is UH Minoa has a Better Tomorrow Speaker Series YouTube channel. What a mouthful. And yet that's what they call it. It's called the UH Minoa. I actually think UH Minoa BTS speaker series. The UH Minoa Better Tomorrow Speaker Series. They have a YouTube channel video website. And from there, you're actually, if you go there and look up the Hawaii Book and Music Festival, you can actually watch all of the previous presentations. So if you missed one, then you're able to, if you missed any of the presentations that we talked about that are happening tomorrow, you can still go back to the UH Better Tomorrow Speaker Series YouTube channel and you can watch it there. What a privilege to be able to access this because where will we be without books? Where would we be without music in our lives, right?  So tell me, how is it that you became the chair of this wonderful festival? And you've been at it a couple of years. Yeah. Yeah. So I think when the opportunity came up, I'll tell you what I always thought about was I remembered how special it was for my family, when my kids were growing up. Do you remember, okay, do you remember Barnes and Nobles and Borders when they were around? Yes. Like a typical, like it was almost like a traditional Sunday afternoon in our family is because it was hot and we didn't have air conditioning at our house. A typical Sunday afternoon was we would go to the borders, excuse me, the Barnes and Nobles, either at Kalamol or at Alamonamol, and we'd find a couch and we just camp there and we would read. So it was really fun. But that's kind of our time as a family. And then later on, what I loved about the Book of Music Festival was that it almost became like an intellectual fair. So in other words, the carnival is awesome. It's great to be able to go on rides. Those are always a pleasure. But being able to just, like I said, go to a place where you have this tent and somebody is talking about health and wellness. And then in other words, the next tent and somebody is talking about climate change and sustainability. And then the next tent, somebody is talking cooking and then there's a Kiki Hula performance happening down the ways. I love that. And so when the opportunity came to be part of the board and I was back out of the public sector and just back trying to think about ways to be able to give it to the community, this is like the first thing that came to my mind. And so it's been a real pleasure. I love the people that I get to serve with on the board. And I think we've got some exciting plans for what we're going to be doing on the board. Maybe are there authors on the board? Yes. So there's people who are who are part of the different publishing, local publishing houses, as well as some people who do write or do visual media or musicians. And I think all of them are able to contribute a lot. We even have the Hawaii State Librarian on the board. I think she's able to. Presentation, didn't they? Sorry. Yes, they did. Yeah. And that's really great. Yes. I mean, the state of libraries, we're only being at libraries in our lives.  Well, you know what? You know what? My mom was a librarian. So yeah. So that's another fun story is that when I was growing up, my mom would bring me to work with her. And that was my summer daycare, was that she would just in the library system. And I was just watching around.  The Midnight Library. It's not for my age group, but it's an interesting book. The librarian is her mentor in it. So I'll just give you that. Oh, cool. Cute. But anyway, the book fair, let's talk a little about the musicians now because they are equally important. And like I said, they are words, they're using words, they're singing, they're performing. Tell us about some of the entertainers. Yeah. Well, like I said, we already had, we had Makana put on a special presentation from Kauai Hawa Church. And that in many ways, that was, it was a venue that we wouldn't have had if we were going live. And I think it was, I think if you watch it tomorrow at two o'clock, you'll see exactly what I mean. It was, it was very powerful to have him be performing his songs in such a special place. It was just, it was very powerful. But I think what's also great is that, I mean, we've all been cooped up in our houses and it's so nice to be able to hear live music. I mean, that's just, I would say that's probably something that I think we've all ended up missing is just the ability to hear musicians just playing outside and to be able to appreciate that and to appreciate their art and just the special passion and heart that they bring to everything that they do. Yeah, that's fantastic. What else can I, is there anything you'd like to say? Do you have any closing statements? What would you like to say? Well, closing, I have many things I want to say. No. Yeah, you know, what I would say is this is that, you know, I think we're excited about what the next year is going to be like, you know, I think, I think especially coming out of the time that we've all been in, I think there's, if anything, there's, there's come a greater appreciation, at least on my part, of just, you know, needing, needing time to not just be stressing about the immediate things in front of me, but to really be able to appreciate the creativity and people who have a special voice and being able to learn from those voices. And so it's expressed through books or music. I think it's really a great way to be able to be part of the festival. So I just want to encourage people, if in case you missed it, to, you know, go on to our YouTube channel at the UH Minoa Better Tomorrow Speaker Series channel. And to be able to check out some of those things, just turn it on, have it in the background. That's what I often did. And it just, it gets you thinking.  And a lot of times being able to appreciate hearing the voices of people who just live down the street from you or live, you know, on the next island. And I think that's very special and wonderful. That is special and wonderful. And we forgot to pitch. How much does it cost to attend? Oh my gosh. So the most special and wonderful thing about all this is that it's been free.  So we really appreciate that. But I think that's probably been the greatest thing to set for as long as the festival has been around. The admission is free. And I think that's something worth noting. Thank you for reminding me to say that. Well, it's like free. Amazing. I would, you know, yeah, that's fantastic. The food's not free. The food's not free, but the food's really good. And you say there's rides too? There's, oh yeah, when I was talking about rides, I just meant the difference between the festival which is a little more books-oriented versus like a typical carnival, which has a lot of rides. But I think that like normally there are a few cakey rides for like very small children just to help the whole family get excited about it. Well, I do hope that we have let people know more about the Hawaii book and then music festival and your numbers are going to increase tomorrow. That would be great. Yes. And speaking of the fact that you rely on donations, think Tech Hawaii does too. So I really want to thank all the people who donate money to think Tech Hawaii to keep it going. I also want to thank Jay Fidel, the executive producer. Without him, I don't know what would happen. And the broadcast engineer and also the staff and all the technicians. And if I can put out a little shout out, I'm going to give one to Hayley and Eric. Thank you, Eric. He's behind the scenes. Folks behind the scenes. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Doug.  They show us the world and they take us out of our world and give us a chance to see and believe and partake as does music. So thank you very much, Doug. The pleasure was mine. I hope the pleasure was also our viewers. Thank you so much. It's really awesome.


Thank you. Thank you so much. Improvisation is great for young people. Yes, and improvisation is wonderful for older people. Let's bridge the gap! That is what our conversation is about today. We are so thrilled about the Applied Improvisation Network because through this organization we collaborate with one another and that's how we found each other. I've been passionate about using the arts as a bridge between generations for years. I directed my first intergenerational art space project when I was in my 20s, an intergenerational community mural project in LA, which you can still see. And then this project was born two years ago in Irvine at the AIN conference who was there. Yay! I was sitting at dinner and I was showing a picture of the improv class that I teach at a wonderful music and dance camp every summer, and it's for teens and adults. And that particular year my class age range was from 10 to 75. I showed it to a fellow AIN person and they looked at me and said, wow, maybe intergenerational improv is your calling. And I went, why didn't I think of that? And so as soon as I got home I called Joel. I gave him a little time to rest because he was in charge of that conference. And then I called him and said, I have to talk to you. I have a wild and crazy idea. And he said, yes, and let's do it. Y'all had some great ideas in terms of how to bridge cultural gaps. And one of those bridges that we need to cover is the gap between older generation folks and younger generation folks. And if we're lucky, we're all going to eventually be the older generational folks, right? That's kind of where we're all going. So we want to be mindful of that and how do we treat one another within that framework. So we came up with this approach, one which was to recruit the younger generation through my student body. So I offered a class. I teach two improvisational classes a year. One is on kind of the core concepts and then one is on a special topic. And so we taught one on applied improvisation. And I told them that we'd have an opportunity to work with people from different generations. The second element is that we recruited older generations as there was a number of folks in the community. So we reached out to a wide variety of different folks to invite them to come and participate in our eight-week exploration. And then we kind of nested those in each other with a specific emphasis in thinking about how do we work with people from a different cultural framework than us, but also kind of just thinking about the core concepts of improvisation, which I developed from my partner, L. Veenstra's dissertation on improvisation, thinking about acceptance, presence, and trust. And on the very first day, the first thing we did after welcoming them and giving them each a journal that they wrote in throughout the process to record their thoughts. For the students, it was maybe new to actually write with a pen. And we divided them then into two groups and two rooms. And Joel went with the students because he's young and handsome. And I went with the older adults because I am one and proud of it. And we talked about surfacing biases and assumptions about that other group. So with them out of the room, they could be more open and honest.  And in doing so, we wanted to really accept the reality in which we were existing. So we want to be both mindful of our physical capacities in terms of what we can and can't do, both for the older generation and the younger generation. And trying to really set a tone of equality and the way that we are unique and how we can all be treated within the same framework within that. And also, with that intention, we tried to intentionally put people together of the different cultural frameworks within exercises and explorations and making them work together intentionally. One example that we saw of this being very successful is in past the clap. And sometimes we had silos where the older generation would be on one side of the room and the younger generation would be on the other. And we intentionally tried that exercise where we passed the clap around the circle. And we found that there's a lot of tension and nervousness around the older generation when this clap got around to them. And we said, what's going on here? And they're like, oh, we think we're going to mess this up. We're not going to do this right. We feel like it's awkward. And the young people just get it so quickly. And so we shifted the framework. And rather than being these silos, we interlaced them so that every spot we had an older person and a younger person. And when we did that, the exercise worked perfectly. And we think when we intentionally put ourselves in situations where we are combined with one another, we have this opportunity to make the systems work better. And the exercises that we did with them, we intentionally had them work with somebody of the other age group, sometimes switching roles and scenes. And it created a great amount of trust between them and developed a deeper relationship. And so we're going to show you a quick video of some of the feedback and experiences that they shared together. My name is Jesse Tromburg. And I am part of this amazing improv group, an intergenerational improv group. Improv by itself is great. And you don't have to have a background like that. You just have to be quick on your feet and support the group that you're working with. It's a great experience. It's used as a tool, a teaching tool from any different disciplines. It engages you to listen more, to respond better. And it's fun. Just fun. It's going to be taking an improv class. I didn't know there would be an older generation in the class. I mean, to be honest, it was kind of funny because I came from a community college and so there would be older people in our classes but it was like, if I was taking a swim class they'd be like doing aerobics, you know? And so I thought it was kind of funny. I was like, oh no, what's going to happen? This is like a silly class and we're not much going to have a lot of work. I don't know. Yeah, I just thought that it was going to be a lot less serious and I didn't think that I would like do anything important with my improvising. I think I trust myself a lot more with improv and I keep hearing people talking class about working with the different generation but it didn't feel any different than doing improv with my own generation. It was just another group of people. And so I think it's funny that it was a whole topic for a class that doesn't happen more often than intergenerational improv because, I mean, I don't know why I wouldn't. It doesn't make any sense because we were just doing improv together like any other group of people. As many times as I've seen that, I still get checked up. It's pretty remarkable. And you see Irvine, University of California Irvine, being a research institution. We really wanted to make sure that we had data and we feel like that's so important to our field. And so as part of this, we did a pre and post-rease survey that outlined essentially what kind of aspects, seeing at the beginning, what did you feel about other people about yourselves in terms of these kind of key frameworks and had them take this survey and then reflected that on a post-survey. And we saw statistically significant results in over half of the feedback in terms of what was going on, so that this impact really seemed to have some very distinctive quantitative analysis differently. And the questions were not only about how it impacted them in terms of confidence, all those things we know improv does, but how they felt about the other group. Then a year later, we brought them back together for a reunion and did a follow-up survey because we all wonder, does this have a lasting effect? And we found that on a couple of the items, on two of the questions, they went even higher than they had at the end of the class. And on the other eight, it went down a little bit because they hadn't seen each other for a year. We didn't have funding to do the class the next year, but it was still way ahead of where it was before they took the class. So we take from that this works and it would work even better if you can continue it and make it ongoing. We got some great feedback, and for sake of time, we'll let you read this and pause the video when you see the video. But we had great feedback both qualitatively as well in terms of the feedback, in terms of people really having good impact. And probably the additional impact which we think is most exciting is that this group of people became friends. And they really started missing each other and communicating each other beyond the classroom, which we think has a lot of potential in other platforms of different cultural shifts. So we urge you to go out there and do work with mixed generations. Enough of the age silos. Yes. And do it. Thank you. Thank you.


The film opens with a flashback in the quantum realm. Janet Van Dyne comes across two creatures that attack her. She kills one but is pounced on by the other.  Janet turns and sees another man, appears to have crash landed in the realm with her. In the present day, Scott Lang has been enjoying his newfound celebrity status after helping the Avengers save the world from Thanos, although at least one person mistakes him for Spider-Man. Meanwhile, Hope Van Dyne has taken over her father Hank's company and has been using Pym particles for expanding her research and using it for global benefits. Scott has also written a best-selling book about his experiences. However, his absence from being stuck in the quantum realm has also kept him from his daughter Cassie. Scott gets a call from jail and meets Hope there. Cassie was arrested for being at a protest. She has also been tinkering in science ever since the blip, even beginning to work with Hope and Hank, whom Cassie refers to as Grandpa Hank. Scott and Cassie join the Pym's at home for dinner, where Hank accidentally lets it slip that Cassie has been arrested more than once. She draws attention to the work they have been doing, including Hank having an aunt farm with his smart aunts, while Cassie has worked on a device that sends signals to the quantum realm, and signals can be received in the outside world too. This causes Janet to panic, and she shuts the device off. Before she can explain herself, the device reactivates and starts pulling everything and everyone inside. Scott jumps in after Cassie and uses his ant man suit to protect her as they fall into the quantum realm. Hope uses her wasp suit to save her parents. The Pym's gather as Janet tries to keep them from being spotted. They are found by inhabitants that Janet confronts. After a quick duel with one of the inhabitants, Janet and the creature laugh it off like old friends. She is then able to get her family a ride atop a large flying creature. The Langs are found by other quantum realm inhabitants, varying from humanoid to many alien-like beings. Scott and Cassie must drink a red fluid called ooze that comes from one of the creatures, Veb, which allows them to understand the natives. They are met by another native, Quas, who can read minds, as well as Gentura, a rebel warrior who suspects that the arrival of the Langs and Pym's will draw attention from someone they call the Conqueror. When Scott mentions Janet's name, Gentura becomes more suspicious. Janet leads Hank and hope to a bar full of other quantum natives. They meet with a man called Lord Criller, whom Janet befriended, and is implied to have had a relationship with, during her time trapped down there. While Janet tries to get Criller to help, he tells her that he is working for Kang, the Conqueror referred to from earlier. Conqueror also alludes to Kang's greatest weapon, a mechanized organism designed only for killing Modoc. Kang's henchmen show up to take in the Pym's, but they fight their way out, and Hank uses one of his growing discs to turn a squid creature gigantic to grab Criller and throw him around. The family then steals his ship and escapes. The rebels soon come under attack by Kang's forces, before Modoc makes his appearance and begins to vaporize some of the freedom fighters. In the chaos, Cassie reveals she has been wearing her own super suit to help her shrink and grow.  He was also the one who sent the signal to Cassie that she responded to. Modoc then brings the two to Kang. On their way out, Janet comes clean to Hank and hope about her time down there. When she had met Kang, he gave her the impression that he was another lost traveler, and that she could help him power his ship to get them out of the quantum realm, promising her he will return her to hope. After Janet found his ship's core, she learned that his ship was powered by his thoughts. When she touched the core, she caught a glimpse into Kang's mind, and she witnessed all the atrocities he committed, from wiping out entire planets and destroying timelines. Kang attempted to appeal to Janet by saying he can make it so that she never missed Hope's childhood, though she knew it would mean other worlds would suffer because of him. Saying that he was a monster, Janet used her waspsuit to steal the core and blow it up to a massive size to prevent herself or Kang from escaping. Scott and Cassie meet Kang, who boasts about having killed other Avengers across other timelines. He demands Scott's help in getting his core back, threatening to kill Cassie and force Scott to relive the moment for eternity if he doesn't help. Scott reluctantly agrees but makes it clear he will come for Kang if he hurts Cassie. Scott is dropped down into the core's location to retrieve it, but he gets caught in what Modoc calls a probability storm, causing hundreds of multiple Scots to pop up. The Pims fly by the location when Hope gets a read on Scott. As she flies down to help, she gets surrounded by her own probabilities. Scott's probabilities manage to help him since their entire shared goal is saving Cassie. Hope helps Scott, and they shrink the core down together. Hope and Janet try to help Scott now that he has the core, but Kang shows up to take it from him, going back on their deal to let Cassie go. He also takes Janet with him and as Modoc destroy the ship with Hank in it, though he survives. When Janet calls Kang a monster, he explains that he is the exiled one among his many variants, and he believes they are responsible for other horrors across the multiverse. He thinks that escaping the quantum realm will allow him to take control over an event that is coming for humanity. The ants from Hank's ant farm arrive, after apparently having gone through time displacement that has helped them grow more advanced over less time than what the humans have gone through. They help Hank get Scott and hope to head toward Kang's stronghold. Meanwhile, Cassie uses her suit to shrink into a prison and free Gentara and other rebels to charge toward Kang's tower. Just as Kang tries to make a big villain speech, Cassie hijacks it and tells everyone to head to the tower to fight Kang. The other rebels are freed and fight off Kang's goons. Modoc goes for Cassie, but she turns giant and punches him down. Before leaving, she convinces him that he doesn't have to keep being evil. Modoc grows gigantic as he angrily runs toward Kang for reneging on their deal. He reunites with Cassie and is proud to see she is giant too. Hank leads the ants, plus a giant mecha ant toward the tower. Kang leads his own attack against the rebels, but Modoc goes in for his own attack now that he has switched sides.  The heroes make their way into the tower, where Janet has repaired Kang's core and has opened a portal to return home. Scott pushes Cassie through just before Kang attacks him. They get into a brutal fight, with Kang nearly beating Scott to a pulp. Kang attempts to jump through the portal, but Hope jumps back to help Scott fight. They overpower Kang and destroy the core by using multiple growing slash shrinking discs on him. Hope pushes Kang toward the core, which pulls him into a portal to oblivion. Cassie manages to reopen the portal to help Scott and Hope get home, while the Quantum natives cheer for their victory. Scott returns to his life and family, although he worries about what Kang said regarding something terrible coming. He brushes it off as nothing enjoins the family to celebrate a fake birthday for Cassie since he missed some during the blip. Mid-credits scene, a council of Kang variants discuss the death of the exiled one and prepare to send each of themselves out into the multiverse as they prepare for a major war. Post-credits scene, another variant of Kang, is seen teaching a class in the early 19th century. Nothing among the class is none other than Loki and Agent Mobius. Loki tells Mobius that this man is going to be a very dangerous threat.