Good afternoon. My name is Ray Tsuchiyama for another episode of Business in Hawaii. We are going to be discussing, for a very business investor point of view, all about a small piece of the island of Oahu that has become a global center for hotels, for retail, for restaurants. It's called Waikiki. In Olalo, Hawaii, or the Hawaiian language, it means loading of water. Waikiki. And it used to be very swampy in the past. And the Alawaii Canal has become a major drainage canal for the area. And now, through the years, from the 60s, the 70s, and now in 2019, with nearly two million Japanese tourists last year, rising numbers of Chinese, Korean, North American, of course, and Canada, and even Europe. So it has become a global destination. To speak more from the investor and how to achieve success in the business world of Waikiki, we have Mr. Andrew, or Andy Starrin, is the Senior Vice President and Retail Market Expert at Cushman and Wakefield, Cheney Brooks. Welcome to the show. Hey, thank you, and thank you to Think Tech for having me. Great being here.  And you went away from college. Tell me about your background a little. So I was born and raised in Hawaii, grew up in Kaimuki area, was fortunate to go to Punahou School, and then graduated from there, went to the University of Colorado in Boulder, and then moved back after a little bit of travel post-school, and spent 16 years at C.B. Richard Ellis doing predominantly retail, focusing on Waikiki, and then now I'm at Cushman and Wakefield, Cheney Brooks, and doing the same thing, focusing on Waikiki, specifically within the retail markets, and then the other resort markets around the state.  Tell me, what's unique about Waikiki to you? So, you know, I think if you look at retail across the country, what's amazing is that on Oahu we have two areas that are kind of globally known and globally strong performers and it's strong performers in the United States, and one is Kalakau Avenue, and you have retailers that do phenomenal there, and you have Alamoana Center. And so the fact that this little island on Oahu in the middle of the Pacific has these two kind of retail mechas is just incredible. Well, why don't we turn to the first slide and see what's going on. Now, and this is all about retail and rent. Describe the scene to me. So this is, you know, for people in Hawaii, this will look a little strange. The biggest reason it looks strange is because these are how people across the United States look at numbers. It's per square foot per year. So these, you know, you have to divide them all by 12 to get to the per square foot per month, which we talk about in retail in Hawaii. What you see is, now the other thing we have to clarify is this is taking New York City as a whole, Los Angeles as a whole, because New York probably has six or seven of the top 10 streets in the whole country. But Fifth Avenue, they have, you know, rents up to $4,000 per square foot per year, you know. So it's just an extremely high volume, expensive street. But what's surprising is the fifth strongest street in the country is Calacao Avenue. And so you have New York, you have Rodeo Drive, you have the Union Square area of San Francisco, you have the Miracle Mile of Chicago, but then you also have Waikiki, and Waikiki has rents of $38 to $40 per square foot per month, you know, for the very best portion of that street. All right. So this kind of frames our discussion. Waikiki is really up there. Competing against other major retail centers in North America. I think Waikiki is probably the most underrated street in the country. It's opened 365 days of the year. It has a global tourist base from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. And so it's just such a tremendous area for these brands to, you know, have sales and connect with their customers. And then we actually have amazing local retailers.  And so it's really an amazing retail market. And the global brands are here, the Prada's, the Louis Vuitton's and Tiffany's are here. And one of the ways they really kind of leverage their brand is to showcase their brand to visitors from all of the world, from Asia, from North America and Europe. And so Waikiki doubles as a kind of place to promote their brand to global visitors. Absolutely. And so, you know, you have the almost 2 million Japanese visitors. You have somewhere between 140, 170,000 Chinese visitors, 500,000 Canadian visitors coming every year, 400,000 Australian and New Zealand visitors. And so one, it's an incredibly diverse market. And two, it's an extremely productive market. Like those luxury brands, these stores can be one of their top five stores in the world. And it's here on Kawakawa Avenue. Well, why don't we go to the next slide? And this is all about flights to Wahoo. And we're just talking about the global visitor destination, which is Wahoo and Waikiki now. So I think what's great about this slide is it just really is a visual on how diverse Waikiki is. And I think that's just hugely to the benefit of Waikiki and to the benefit of Hawaii as a state. I mean, this is where a huge amount of the general excise tax revenue is generated. And it's just so important because on some level, the money from Waikiki from those hotel jobs, construction jobs, you know, it's kind of supporting the rest of the entire state. And so it's just an extremely important part of Hawaii and Hawaii being a great place to live and work. And, you know, what you see here is just that it's global in nature.   And then when you had, you know, an event like the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which I personally was like, this is horrible. There's going to be no sales. And really the U.S. domestic market kept, you know, Hawaii and Waikiki afloat and things were still relatively strong. So we can hedge our bets. Yeah, exactly. And it's not just one group that Hawaii depends upon. It's really an international grouping. Next slide, please. Oh, go ahead. Oh, no. This is about malls. And I see number 10 is Alamoana, which is one of the largest malls in the country and in the world. And again, I'm surprised because I wouldn't have put Alamoana shopping center in the top 10. Yeah. So Alamoana, in terms of sales productivity, is the 10th strongest mall in the country. But some of these other malls I see are huge. They're like unbelievably large places. And like the Central City one is in LA, extraordinary large. So what do you attribute to Alamoana having that type of visitor spending? You know, I think Alamoana benefits from one, the million residents on Oahu. And I think it is, you know, if you're going to have a big shopping experience, you're going to go to Alamoana because it has everything, but then it also is close to Waikiki.  They'll spend a day and go to Alamoana and shop. And so, you know, I think it also benefits from those visitors shopping at the mall. Well, this is also a slide that shows that, again, in spite of Hawaii in an isolated location, it does attract high-spending visitors, especially from Asia. And we'll go further in our discussion about if you were a business investor, how would you find Alamoana or Waikiki as a place to do business? And it must be not that simple. I mean, you have a lot of competition out there. It's like, where do you begin to really see what to prioritize? What advice would you say, first off, to anybody who's even thinking, contemplating of opening a shop along Kalawa Avenue? There's a couple of different components of that. If we're talking about people coming in to have a retail business in Waikiki or Alamoana, I think most important is it's getting the right advice, getting your support from your legal support, your real estate support, your tax support. All of these different pieces to do it right is really important. And people that can get that right support, make good decisions. They have the right business from their restaurant experience or retail experience from where they're coming from. If that all gets coupled together, I think you see groups that are very successful. But if I see very local advice, I mean, people who are expert in the market have seen how others have failed or succeeded. Yeah, Hawaii's unique. It has its own nuances. It has its own things that can make you do really well or not be successful.  We'll get back to a drill down, especially on the real estate side, after we take this very important break. Hey, loha. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii, airing every Wednesday here on ThinkTech Hawaii, live from the studios. I'll bring you guests. I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your coworkers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that, you know, may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me because security matters. Aloha. Aloha. This is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About, where every other week, Mondays at three, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation and world, and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there. And we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at three o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. We are back with our guest, Andy Starn. And we're having a very drill-down discussion on how to succeed in retail in Waikiki. And we've seen through Andy's slides how Waikiki, Halaaka Avenue, Aalamoa Shopping Center are ranked in the top 10 of the most successful destinations in the U.S. So we're going to go back to some decisions that investors make. And they're going to rely on local experts. You're absolutely right. And you're one of the local experts that can provide such guidance. And how would you go about choosing the right retail location? Yeah, so, you know, the thing about Waikiki is that it's not apparent in terms of what's available. It's such an opaque market that if you go online or go on Loopnet or CoStar, one of these listing agencies, you're only going to see what's empty and being marketed for available. The reality is you have to work with someone that's tracking the future lease terminations and knowing what's coming up, you know, six to 18 months before. Because that's really when decisions are being made for these really prime locations. So it's about getting in front of, you know, what may be available in two to three years. And, you know, some of these brands are making decisions that far in advance. And when you're talking about tens of millions of dollars in potential sales per year, it is that important to be thinking that far ahead. For some investors who also will open businesses, there's the significant area of leasehold that is kind of not that well known on the mainland. And when you buy properties, usually on the mainland, it's fee simple. Here, if you want to buy a building and the land and go forth and do business there, how is that different in Hawaii? So, I mean, most investors coming in, if they can buy fee simple, they can buy that fee simple interest, that's what they want. Now, in Waikiki, you know, a big portion of the land is not fee simple. And what ends up being important is that underlying lease. How long of no one rent do you have? How often does it reset? You know, it's really an interesting story. This goes all the way back to the late 1800s. And the Hawaiian monarchy was looking forward and kind of said, are people may have issues going into the coming centuries? And they set up a trust for health care, a trust for education, a trust for orphans, and they left those land holdings to those groups. And so, a lot of the land in Waikiki is actually owned by Queen Lilio Kalani, Queen Emma, Kamehameha schools. And so, the money from those lands are now going to support health care, support education. And so, that legacy is still, you know, a lot of the lease hold interest. Now, the least fee, the groundless sea, who ends up having a hotel on top of it, or having a retail center, you know, if you have a long no one amount of no one rent, and you have, you know, I mean, ideally it's 40 years or longer of a lease term, it becomes almost, so it's very close to owning a fee simple property, because that residual value is so far out. And so, I mean, it still is an extremely strong investment. The other thing I would say is, you know, if you're buying existing real estate that's already there, then you know what you have, and that's an easier thing to accomplish as a buyer. To do development in Hawaii is extremely challenging. And as we know, Waikiki is a very special design district with onerous rules and regulations, even for local people to construct or something on an open lot has many, many restrictions. And I think it's, you know, this is really an area where you have to be working with good advisors. I mean, you probably even want to be working with one of the local Hawaii developers that do that every day to get it right, because there's so much to accomplish in your goals.  And so, once you own real estate in Hawaii, in a certain way, you're insulated and protected from, because it is that difficult.  It takes so much more than that. You have a very huge advantage if you own the land. That's where it all begins. And, you know, even leases, if they can get structured in the right way, you know, it's very valuable because it's so difficult for it to be reproduced, especially on an island.  I mean, that's one of the original thoughts behind leasehold, but you're correct. Just because it's leasehold doesn't mean it's an obstacle. That there are ways to look at it as a way to, you know, establish a business. Absolutely. Well, we want to talk about hotels now. And that's the other category of major investor interest is on the hotel scene in Waikiki, that rarely there's transactions. Of course, the last booming transactions came in the 80s when many Japanese firms bought hotels along Kalakaua and all over Waikiki. And but the fact remains that during the last 20 years, there haven't been many new hotels built. And during the 70s, the built more was destroyed. The high regency was built. Kaiser Permanente was raised for the Waikiki Hawaii Prince Hotel. But the story of the last 15 years was in timeshare. And the Princess Kailani that's going to be built on that side along Kalakaua is very rare to see a new hotel. But how is the hotel, I guess, market evolving today? Is it a place where investors get a huge return or is it very, very a challenge for outside investors to have a good ROI on owning hotel properties? So, you know, Hawaii is probably the number one hotel market in the country in terms of average daily rate. So typically, you know, New York would have been the number one market and Hawaii is actually stronger than New York currently. On top of that, you have a market that has, you know, instead of hotel rooms growing and there being more hotels, they're actually being reduced. It's getting changed to timeshare. It's getting changed to condo hotels. So those two market influencers actually make owning hotels extremely valuable in Hawaii. And I mean, it's a great category. I think it's something that you see investors like, you know, Blackstone and Mide and, you know, these different investors coming in and buying here because those, you know, those pieces of the market make it a really compelling argument. Now, return on investment is all based on your purchase price. So it really depends on what you're paying for the property.  Yeah, I think you're correct. For many institutional investors or many large investors, it's iconic. They have an iconic building on Kalakau Avenue. It's a great branding kind of, you know, promotion for their own firm or for their own organization. But you're right. On the other hand, there are these issues of hotel management firms to work with them, that Hilton's and Marriott's and Starwoods and so forth. And also to deal with some of the renovations that have to come up in the future. A lot of the hotel infrastructure has not really been changed in 20, 30 years. Some of them go back to statehood, to most of the gold cost condominiums, that is. But the hotel market, I think, will have a very exciting year. This year, I think, will be the return of a lot of transactions along Kalakau and a major interest, major focus on that area. And then I know we're running out of time, but to also focus on an area that you think that Waikiki is a gem for dining or culinary experiences and how did that evolve? But what you have is, it's really become a foodie street. You have things like Paya Fish Market, Uncle's Pizza in the Laila Hotel that are waiting to open. Across the street, you have Marukami Udon, which is one of the highest, I see lines out the street. Four places in Waikiki that has a line almost every day. Around the corner, yeah. So I think what's been happening on Kuhia with Michael Mena, the street, and then the third floor restaurants, like Stripped Steak, Kona Grill, up on the third floor of international marketplace. I mean, I think there's been a lot of awesome dining that's come to Waikiki. And then you have just huge volumes out of restaurants like Wolfgang Steakhouse, Dukes, Cheesecake Factory. I mean, there's probably over 12 restaurants in Waikiki that are doing over $10 million a year in Sam's. You were involved in the international marketplace from way back, am I correct? My first really coming to understand Waikiki from a commercial real estate perspective goes all the way back to the old international marketplace. I was leasing the back half Waikiki Town Center for Queen. I'm getting to work with really awesome people there. And it was really an education into the market. And it's that little piece of Waikiki I got to discover and learn about is why I made the decision to kind of give up all my business outside of Waikiki and really focus in doing commercial real estate there. And that has been a transformation. I would not have expected that type of fine dining and shopping that overlaid that really, really scattered marketplace like before. Yeah, it was a massive investment that they put in there. And it's getting more and more foot traffic. It's getting better and better. And I'm really hopeful that it's going to really hit its full stride and be a super successful project. Now, do we have one more slide left, a fifth slide? Oh, there it is. We come back to the end and we have two more. This defines kind of like the retail area and the hotel area right there. And you can see that it is not a big area. No, and this is kind of what we typically track in terms of Kalakawa Avenue. And it's not, it's even beyond the very best portion, the very best portion of Kalakawa starts it, Prada Kom Heart Max Mara, right where you intersect with Louis Street. There's Louis Vuitton. There's a brand new Tiffany that I think might be the most beautiful store in North America. There's very little rise in that area. They're not big places. Yeah, that's right. And it's right where you can walk in pedestrian access, right? And then it runs down, you know, to the high end. And that's that portion that's getting this $38 per square foot per month in these big reds. That's only a half a mile when you think about it. It's just, you know, it's really three long blocks. Wow. Last one, please. Last slide. Oh, we're getting really down to this. Yeah, so this is just, you can kind of see an upward trend in rents between 2015 and 2018. And then last year, we saw a tick up in retail vacancy. There was a couple things outside of that prime zone of Kalakawa that took a while to get leased out. And actually, most of that is now leased up. So I think in 19, the vacancy is going to drop down to below 2%.  One between one and two. So this is 2019 and 2020. What do you see? I mean, I think that the rents are going to continue to go up. I think that you see a new three-story Tiffany that's absolutely beautiful. The new three-story Hermes flagship is about to open. It looks, it looks beautiful. I can't wait to use it. So these are real class architectural designed destination retail outlets. And I think when the other luxury retailers, just other retailers in general, kind of hear the sales that I'm sure are going to be generated out of those locations, you know, they're going to want to come and be part of Waikiki 2 and the amazing retail opportunity there is there. Well, we have to end at this point with your very optimistic business growth projections. We wish to thank Andy Starn for his great insights. But as you can see, he was in the trenches at international marketplace and Waikiki has evolved as a global destination. And for investors and business people looking at Waikiki as an opportunity, there are lots. I think 2019, 2020 will be unbelievable years also in hotel transactions and renovations. As new people come in, new owners, they're going to look at and transform hotel properties again to world class standards. And it will be a unbelievable growth in the economy for Hawaii as the Waikiki is indeed the engine of economic growth in the state. This is your host, Ray Tsuchiyama, another great episode of Business in Hawaii.


So we're here in downtown Los Angeles. I'm gonna bring my cardio outside this morning. Performing this fasted, so no food, just some water and a thermogenic. Start off with some stretches up here, mobilize the joints, get some blood pumped into the body. Now I can move on, start with some interval training and then basically just some low intensity cardio running around downtown and throw a mix of some chin up, some crunches in there as well. All right, let's get to it. We don't need to do the things we don't want to do. The cardio for me used to be about fat burning. Used to be in the gym, on the bike. It's all about my heart rate, no more than 20, 30 minutes. For me now cardio is about getting out, getting out of my head, out of my body.  So today, I'm in downtown Los Angeles. I like to get out of the gym. Some days I'll be in the gym on the bike or the road, but today, great weather, I start early. And so to come to downtown Los Angeles, there's so many different nooks and alleys and pathways that I can run down and run up and stairs and obstacles to jump up or lift my body weight up. And that's a real dynamic way of exercising, both the mind and the body. So I start with the thermogenic. I do my cardio without eating. I get it done first thing in the morning, purely because for the past 10, 11 years, that's the way I've done it.  So it's a mixture of fast interval training with the sprints, which basically consists of 20 seconds of all our effort sprinting, and then a recovery phase walking back. And I repeat that six or eight times. And then just finding a place to run upstairs, down some of the streets. There's no real objective. 20 minutes. If I find a ledge, something I can jump onto, or a ledge I can lift my body weight up, it's just all about having some fun with my cardio. Once I've hit my run, I get some BCAAs and branch chain, amino acids. It's important to look out for a high-lucine content. And that's it, nothing else. Just clean, simple BCAAs mixed with some water.  You don't have to get too crazy about mixing everything into it. This isn't a weight workout. I just want to get some protein into my body, start that protein turnover. Then once I'm back home, I've showered, I've dressed, then I can eat breakfast, carry on with my day, and then usually I'll head back down to the gym in the afternoon and start my weight training program. So that's what cardio is for me. It's to get out of the gym, to get out of my home and just run. Just get my heart rate up and I'm not worried about what my heart rate is doing or how long I'm out running. It's gonna keep running until I feel good. Once I'm at that point, I know I've done something, I can get back, move on with my day, and then my training doesn't start to define me. I don't live my life around my training. Training is just part of my life. So whether it's cardio and weight training or weight training with a little bit of cardio after, it's really no more than one hour, one and a half hours total out of my entire day. All right, speaking of which, let's go on with that day.


What's going on everyone? Sam here with LaytonSportsGuard, driven 22 top scrims Sapphire Edition Baseball, five box break number seven, random team style. There's a look again at your random results, as always. You can find those on the website, on the results tab, as well as the link in chat. Kathy, we've got the New Haven Ravens today. The New Haven Ravens, they're like a debunked, or defunct I should say, minor league baseball team from like the 80s and 90s, I think. I think my buddy's dad, my buddy from home, his dad played on the New Haven Ravens. Made it all the way to AAA for the Rockies. All right, top scrims Sapphire, five box break. Here we go. Again, we'll have dice rolls for this most likely. I'll explain that when we get there. Gold, John Gray for the Rockies, the 50. Nice one there, Colorado. Kopeck and Gaussman. People need to learn or take a class and like how to take an eBay picture. Fenway Park Fireworks is a Yankees card, very nice. Thanks, Kathy. Appreciate that. Yeah, I like this app. Got it on minorleaguebaseball.com. Minnesota Meetup. That, I think, is the random. Yeah, so this will be a dice roll. One, two, three left with the Angels, with Otani, four, five, six right with Kento Maeda and the twins. So if there's another one of these, it'll go to the team who doesn't receive it, but we're going to knock this one out now. It's going to be a two. We're going to go to the left for the Angels. That'll go with the Angels. Again, if we get another one of those, it will go to the twins. Unlikely, but possible. Yeah, Rip Celtics is right. Carpenter, Wilmer Flores. Jaylen Brown, Future Hawk, that's all I know. We won't boo all-in players. I already have one franchise that does that. What's up, Jeremy? It's going to be Kansas City Royals, purple to 10. Nice one there, KC. That's cool. It's what Carlos Santan and Salvi, I think, I believe, on that one. Jeremy, one of our resident F1 fans. Nice. Hunter Renfrow. Gold for the Red Sox, for the City Connector. That's pretty sweet. Nice photo on that one. National's team card. Tray to the Celtics. I know we might try them. Maybe. If we can get Jaylen Brown out of it, I'm kind of okay with Tray. Last pack, guys. Good luck. He's your guy, though. He is, but I don't know. We'll see. James McCann on the Orange to 25. Nice one there for the Mets. Nice. Four number parallels in that box. Very solid. And Nick Solak. Eric P taking a spot in 10 Box Tuesday Football. Again, guys, just eight to go on baseball. Let me drop you a link to that really quick break in in about an hour or so. Got eight to go on that one. Bowman's Treasures Mixer. Two to go. I hope Jaylen Brown goes to the Hawks. That'd be freaking awesome. He needs to get out of Boston. Ain't gonna win there, unfortunately. How good the east is getting. Wander Franco. Cal Raleigh Rookie as well. Now Nick Nurse coaching the Sixers. They might actually be a threat. No more dock rivers, so. Look out. Congratulations. What am I doing, Vaughn? Gold. JP Crawford. Nice one there for the Mariners. Former Top Prospect to 50. New Bard. Austin Raleigh. Former Top Prospect to the Phillies. JP Crawford. Paul Goldschmidt. Duval base. Colorado Neal. Tim Anderson. Gold case, evidently. Yes. A lot of golds in this. Jay Bad. Kimbrell, Manmider, and India. Now that's fair. Yeah, I would say, like, I wouldn't want him to be my number one, but. The one guy can't do it all. Right. It's out. Box, please. Why do you think LeBron got out? Should be soon, would be my guess, John. We'll probably see Ellie in the Bigs by the end of the year. Archie Bradley, Xander. Just depends on the Reds decide to. Phillies. Ryan Rookie, Curvan Castro. There's a Ryan Belied Rookie as well. So follow their carer. Orange is Pittsburgh Pirates at 25. There you go. Pittsburgh, team card. Cabrion Hayes, Bryan Reynolds. Luke Voight, and Ozzy Alves. Good on the Pirates for finally extending a player. There's Julio Urias, Adam Wainwright, Walker Bueller. Gonna do a dice roll for all three of these. It's gonna be one, two, left, three, four, middle, five, six, right. That will indicate which one of these, like which team on each of these cards it'll go to. Unless it is numbered, if it's numbered, it'll do a separate random. It's gonna be a four. We're gonna go to the middle. So I'll go with Adam Wainwright in the cardinals. That will go at the middle. I know it gets called up in time for update. That'd be sweet. That'd be so sweet. Kenley, that's wisdom. Gold's coming up here is Matt Barnes. Mattie Backpacks for the Red Sox still before he got DFA. Mattie Backpacks. Was he carried the team on his back? I don't know why that was a nickname, but it was like I've heard multiple people, even like the announcer called Mattie Backpacks. Do you know why Matt Barnes, why he was Mattie Backpacks? I really don't know, to be honest. Sounds like he's carrying a team on his back. He was the closer at one point. That might be it. Donnie, where are your shiny cards? Kellen now on Twitch. Christian Pache, Jackson Reitz. Oh, was that a, were there two Dodgers on that? A what? Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, all right, hold on. Let me see that again. Let me see that again. All right, so here's what's going to happen. That's my mistake on that one. That is owned by the Dodgers. Good catch on that one there, Ryan. So this is actually a Dodgers card. Since they do own majority on that, I didn't even realize that, to be honest. So we have, again, Dodgers own two thirds of this card, so this will go to the Dodgers. My mistake on that one. I do apologize on that to the owner of the Cardinals. But for the rest of the cards that aren't owned by majority, it will go to the middle. So if one team does have two players or more on the card, it will go to that team. So again, that is my mistake. But for other cards that have no majority, that will go to the middle. We see another one of those, I will explain that. There's Carlos Correa, nice one there. Orange, Color Master 25 for the Astros. Good catch on that one. Thank you, Ryan. Yeah, that is owned by majority. I did not catch that. Slugger Reunion. All right, so we've got another one of these. It's going to be a dice roll. Again, one, two, three, left. Vlad Jr. with the Blue Jays. Four, five, six, right. Wander with the Rays. If we do have another one of these cards, it will also go to the other team. So that is going to be a two. Going to go to the left with the Blue Jays and Vlad Jr. Blue Jays and Vlad Jr. On the Slugger Reunion card. Cubs, Mancini. Okay, so like this one right here because it has Robbie Ray, Garrett Cole, and Dylan Cease. This will go to the middle with the Yankees. That'll go to the number four. Since no majority on this one, different with the other one, of course. Merrill Kelly, Gold to 50 for the Diamondbacks. And Luen Diaz. Rue Gnetto Dord, Nick Gordon, Anthony Rendon. Red Sox. CJ Abrams, rookie, nice one there. And A, who's the last one there? Lubab. Lubab was the last one. Lubabarino. Lubabarino is right. Austin M taking a spot in Select H2. I'll drop you guys a link to that one as well. That is the only basketball break currently with spots. There's 15 to go there. Thank you there to appreciate that one, guys. You've got to still have to sell out 10 Box Tuesday baseball. Then after that, there's only two left. The end of the night, we have Star Wars, Rain and Box style, Top's Chrome, this most recent year, as well as 10 Box Tuesday football. And then we're into Personals for the night. Mount Castle. That will go middle. That is Tatis, Adam Duvall, and Peolonzo. So that will go middle with the Braids and Adam Duvall. Again, no majority on that one. Euler, Garver, Deedee, and Nick Castellanos. Walk Off Water. City of Walk Off Love. See if you can get a red out of this. Gold. Tyler Kilbert, rookie. Nice one there for the Diamondbacks. No, Darth. We did a dice roll earlier. So it'll be like if you have the triple, if you have the triple with three players, it'll be one, two left, three, four, middle, five, six, right? I think we rolled a four. Three or a four on that one, so they all go to the middle unless it's numbered. Or a team has majority, which was the case with the Dodgers. Dodgers won earlier that I did not catch. So thank you again, Ryan, I'm catching that one. Igashioka. Starling Marte. Orange coming up again is Connor Wong, rookie for the Red Sox at 25. Grats on that. Boston going to be 5 of 25. Connor Wong and Christian Vazquez. And last pack of the break, guys. Good luck, y'all. Colton Wong, Orioles, Heaney, and Brandon Lau. All right, do a quick recap of our color cards. We've got Gold to 50. Tyler Kilbert, Meryl Kelly, Matt Barnes, JP Crawford, Hunter Renfrow, John Gray, Orange is at 25. Connor Wong, Carlos Correa, Hitsburg Pirates, James McCann, and a Purple, Royals, 3 of 10. That'll do it for the break, guys. Thanks again for the fill. Up next is clearly random division style.


Everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE. We're in the CUBE studios. Our next guest is Adam Weinstein, who's the CEO of a company called Cursor. So introducing Cursor, it's a hot startup growing in the data analytics space, doing something unique, very innovative around changing the game on data, data catalogs, but more importantly, how data is being used and consumed and also kind of revitalized. So Adam, welcome to the CUBE conversation. Thanks for joining us. No, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.  You're in a really good wave right now, obviously cloud data, the changing nature of data, taking me to explain what Cursor does, what's the company, what's the focus, how big, you raise money, you get the update. Yeah, yeah, so I'll give you a quick background on me that sort of leads into that, right? So spent most of my career as an analyst, you might say, right? So working with data, living in data, good, the bad, the ugly, right? And spent the last couple of years prior to this at LinkedIn, working in analytics team there. And one of the challenges we had as an organization was finding what was where and who worked on what. So when you had literally 1,000 people across the company that was 10% of the business, touching data on a daily basis, one thing we struggled with was knowing who was working on what, what was where, what was accurate, what was maybe outdated. Data was getting created at insane velocities. Talking earlier, literally we were creating a trillion events a day inside the business. And so as an analytics practitioner, if you will, it became increasingly difficult to get to a quick answer. There was no search to go and say, okay, I want to look for this question as I've been asked before, and if so, where is the data? So there was this new space called data cataloging at the time that seemed interesting, but the cataloging was really only looking at how do we create like a yellow pages of data? Not necessarily how do you put it in the workflow of a person that's then taking that and acting on it and then feeding that insight that they may have created back into that sort of cataloging field, right? So saw an opportunity to create something new that really supported an analyst and really was mindful of how their day-to-day job existed and that was cursor, right? What's the role of the analyst now? Because one of the things that's challenging for the industry was this idea of, let me just go back five years. Data science is the next big thing. There are more open jobs in data science than there are people. But then this also trend came on around humanizing data science and not requiring you to know hardcore C++ or Python or having all this wrangling environments doing all this provisioning of stuff to get started. It was an idea of, okay, can we level up that and also can it make it easier, almost like using Excel? That's been kind of the trend. What's your thought on the current state of the data analyst role? No, so I think that there is a lot of analytics work that maybe five years ago was being done and there was no automation around it and in the next five years it'll get, I wouldn't say automated away, but it'll be heavily automated away. Call it 80% of the workload. But that 20% of data that's really difficult to understand and may not be able to get an answer out of it automatically, that's not, you know, that needs people. And someone that understands the business that's technical enough to go dive into the data. And even though that may not be the 100% that existed before, the amount of effort that's needed to decipher it I think is maybe even greater than it used to be just because the rate of data getting created is so much greater too. Hence the demand for more solutions. Tell us about Cursor.  Who's on the team? What's the product? Is it SaaS? Is it software? Give a quick overview. No, great. So we're a small, we're a seven person team right now. We started the company a little over a year and a half ago. You know, the idea was to get a solution on market that was lightweight enough that someone could come and download it and try it very quickly without having to go through a long enterprise sale cycle. They could get something on that computer, literally stand it up in five minutes, start pointing at a data and having it, you know, identify and help with their day to day job. The team is all engineering minus me, right? So, you know, there's, we have folks from Salesforce where, you know, I came from a company called Exact Target that Salesforce bought, Pandora, Thumbtack, basically we've tried to bring people together that have all, you know, seen company scale and data scale and, you know, bring those insights alongside them. So first generation data scale, the classic, you know, web scale, build it out on open source, grow it, have things break, rebuild it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, we certainly levered some open source, but I think for us right now, it's really just how do we get something that's unique to market as quickly as possible, right? So if there's things that we can use that are out there, that are available, that are, you know, especially if they're standardized, right, we'll make use of them. But other times we'll, you know, we've built quite a bit of stuff on our own. And our solution lives, it can live in the cloud, it can also live on-premise and actually see a lot of customers deploy it in a hybrid manner. So they may have this sort of collaboration layer live in the cloud, but it's pointing at data that's both cloud-based and on-prem. And even though that data make it migrated to the cloud over the next several years, it, you know, a lot of large enterprises are still. So are you guys going to market by selling a product, a freemium? What's the, and is it software they download on-premise? Is it SaaS in the cloud? Talk about the go-to-market and how people engage with the product. No, it's heavily SaaS in the cloud, right? So I think sort of companies that are in a heavily regulated industry that really haven't yet figured out that cloud model, you know, our products SaaS delivered, there is a client that lives on the user's local machine and the reason that exists is just for security purposes because data is still often behind the firewall. So like, you can ask your security guy, hey, poke a hole in the firewall for this company I've never heard of or you can have a tool that lives on their machine that sort of brokers that in a thoughtful way. So you guys are flexible. We're flexible, right? You don't necessarily need that, right? If you deploy it in your own infrastructure, obviously there's no need to then have that client. It can handle things. So why cursor? What are the market drivers for you guys? What's driving your business? Yeah, I think we saw this need and I felt this need very acutely at LinkedIn, which is, you know, analysts are getting, you know, hundreds or thousands of questions as a team on a daily or weekly basis if they're in a large organization. How do you address some meaningful portion of those with automation? So if a question's been asked before and you've got, you know, great solutions like a Tableau or a Looker or a ThoughtSpot or a Power BI, like you've got tons of reporting solutions around the business, but there's no place to go and say, hey, where's the answer to this question? Which one of those is it in? Is it a Salesforce report? Is it a Tableau dashboard? And so you'd ask your friendly analysts who'd be happy to help, but like that's taking them away from doing things that are new. And so I kind of became that switchboard unfortunately and so I saw an opportunity to create a solution that would sort of automate me. And that's really why- Basically index all the questions, kind of see what the frequency was, the behavior of the analytics, kind of packaging it up in the catalog. Yeah, and taking it even a step further, right? Like what are the topics? How do you map topics and understand, okay, there's a fire on aisle seven and that fire happens to be churn and it's Q3 and why is there a fire on churn and how do we dig into the data behind churn and get some automated insights around it. And then, you know, but yes, certainly the step one is being able to direct people to the right place. Once you get beyond that, though, to understanding where our company data is and what the sort of size and shape and characteristics of it are, you can actually take it a step further and really sort of recommend things, which is what we want to do. So the alternative to not having like a data catalog and cursor is to go ask your resident analyst or hope that someone posted something on Slack and then you have to search through Slack. I mean, all kinds of, I mean, really not a viable- No, it's a hodgepodge of solutions, right? So one of the things we saw and it's interesting having been at LinkedIn is that, you know, more and more teams around the organization are hiring analyst talent.  A lot of overlapping skills and what the real need is, like, someone to be on that team that knows their data inside and out, but yet can help answer, like you said, sort of the ad hoc question that comes up, you know, every day. And so for that, like, you know, they can use cursor to answer 80% of those or as many as possible, right? We think we've got a pretty good opportunity. It's interesting, I do see the same kind of knee-jerk reaction. Hire the data of analyst or whatever. When LinkedIn and other clients that have a similar profile where they have a lot of data, I certainly see that. When they get hired, what's the marching orders? Go jump into the data and figure it out. Is there, I mean, because this is kind of an evolving new position that's growing very, very fast. What are they directed to do? I mean, what's the job responsibility? It's a great question. So I think one of the challenges is how do you onboard people when there is no place to start, right? Like it's, okay, here are the hundred places where we store data, go figure it out, go learn on your own. We had built a little bit of a training and onboarding, I have to call those, really it started as a PowerPoint deck and then it expanded into some code and some additional training. But, you know, there is no solution for that, right? I think internally we had this notion that somewhere between three and six months the person was ramped enough to begin to be productive. It was like how do you measure our life on a person when you hire them, right?  Like I think we're pretty good at organizing things relatively speaking. I can't imagine what that's like.  Is that good enough? Like guessing or sink or swim kind of mentality. And then, you know, then get someone else in there. Yeah, and the nuance of the data has gotten just because everyone's mindset is record everything, right? Like it becomes harder and harder to actually get a quick answer. So I'm going to give you an example.  How do you account for, you know, fraud? How do you account for things that, you know, if you look at the data and say, I just want to add up all my orders and get some total amount of receipts. Like you would think, oh, that's my sales for the day. But then you forget, like there are all these things that if you don't know the data really well, that you miss out on. And so multiply that by, you know, large corporates. What's a phrasing needle in a stack of needles that I'm trying to find like everything in there. I mean, data structures, data cleanliness, these are huge issues. Huge. And, you know, we will address every single one of them, right? I think what cursor wants to sit is in between a lot of best-of-breed solutions, right? So we're not building a new Hadoop. We think Hadoop does a great job of storing data, whether you want to call it a lake or, you know, something beyond a lake, right? Like, you know, there are plenty of data stores in an organization that do a great job of storing data. You know, on the opposite of the spectrum, like in terms of visualizing data or actually generating, you know, insights, there are great BI solutions in the market. But in between those two sort of, you know, ends of the spectrum, there's a lot of work that gets done and that's what we want to live. Adam, talk about the innovation and the tech behind cursor. And then just innovation in general, the way you see it and the team sees it because you're on the front range of a new trend, bleeding edge, cutting edge, whatever you want to call it. Certainly you're pushing the envelope. Yeah. What's the core tech for cursor? Where's the innovation lie? How does it all tie together? Sure, so we have a couple different deployment models but our most common one is we have a cloud layer that enables collaboration. So anytime a company is using our product, you know, metadata, we don't ever look at company data. That's one promise we've made because we want to work in regulated industries. We want to be in places where, you know, there are high security environments but we never push actual data to the cloud but metadata about a company's data. So, you know, what's the name of a column? You know, what's the name of a database? Who's used it? How often have they used it? What dashboard names are using? All those kinds of things get pushed to our cloud. You know, we use a language called Kotlin which is a Java derivative to write most of our backend code. Mostly because a lot of legacy data stores are designed to interoperate with Java. And then, you know, we have a client component that lives on a user's machine and that's what facilitates a lot of the day-to-day work and we do that just for security purposes because, you know, because most data is behind a firewall whether it's cloud-based or not is, you know, it gets independent of that. It's oftentimes not publicly accessible. We can't expect our cloud will be able to get directly to it, right? Whether we're at AWS, GCP or Azure we can work with any of them. You know, we expect that the company's security policies require some sort of, you know, local connectivity.   So that's awesome. Talk about the marketplace and customer interactions you've had, I'll show you guys are a year and a half into this or so. What's the feedback? What are you seeing? What are you learning? What are the key signals from the marketplace that you're seeing that's supporting your company? The direction you're going? Share some anecdotes and data around what you're seeing and hearing. So when we launched the first version of the product it was last May. And what we were trying to do was get something out there in the wild that anybody could try and get value out of without having to go through, because it's sort of a long enterprise sales cycle. So download it, you can use it, you can share it with the guy next to you. Think of like an Evernote or a Google Drive style approach to actually being able to do something. And so that had some great success, right? When we went out with an announcement, we announced we had fun with the company. We got about 1500 users in the first four months just that we're trying it. It was across about four to 500 companies of four-ish, five-ish users of a company.  Some of it was, hey, we don't like this. And other was, hey, double down here. And the key thing that we learned was there are sort of three audiences that we're serving, right? One is that traditional analyst, which hopefully that was the case because that's where I came from and that was the goal. There's also two other audiences I didn't expect as much of, one being software engineers.  And they don't want that to be their day job, but they do want to like do it once and then share it with the rest of the organization. And they don't have a place to do that today. So there's a great audience of software engineers. And then the last one is actually business leaders that are the ones asking the questions and they want to find a place that they can go to that will answer the majority of them. And so the feedback we've gotten is that there's probably three skins of the product that we're going to have to build. One's for that analyst. The second's a little bit more technical for an engineer. And the third is actually very business friendly, which is just, you know, you don't care about SQL code. You don't want Python code. You don't want any code at all. You just want to know the reports here or if it's not Ask Danny. That's interesting. So the feedback for the marketplace is kind of lays out the workflow stakeholders. Yeah. You know, the analyst has got to do their job and doesn't want to be coded. So they bring the coder in. Coders wants to get pulled into the project. So they're doing their thing. And they certainly want to get back to their coding but get pulled in for business reasons. Then the business wants to search and discover. Kind of all kind of coming together. That seems to be the stakeholders. It's the stakeholders exactly right. I mean, I think it's, it almost lines up probably engineer, analyst, business leader, right? Like in the engineer oftentimes is the one that has to go build a pipeline if that's what's needed, right? And the analyst is the one that consumes from it. And the business leader is the one that looks the report every morning and says, oh, that's bad. And really what you're getting down to is classic software development. Kind of thinking of DevOps and cloud computing, which is you want to automate repetitive tests and you don't want one-offs, right? So engineers want to do one-offs, a constant one-off pipelining. Yep, yep, no, you hit the nail on the head. Like I think the whole notion of like self-service BI or self-service data, like it's aspirational, I think it will be forever, right? Even as you get into AI and yes, automated AI and a certain percentage of problems will always be able to be automated but a certain percentage won't be, right? We'll just get... Well, your point about the reporting is it's only good as the data being reported. So you might feel good that you're looking at a dashboard that's underlying data. It's not good.  That's a very true thing. Fortunately, we saw that, you know, not just like every company feels that, right? All right, talk about the environment and customer base, okay? As you worked at LinkedIn, which I think is a very acute example because LinkedIn is one of those magical companies where they really hit the data equation really well. Obviously it's like a resume for recruiters and it turned into a social network and then they got a treasure trove of data, all kinds of gesture data. They got great metadata on profiles. Now they got a feed. So again, it's like Facebook, they got all this data. So the unknowns probably came piling in. So it's a great proxy for as enterprises and businesses start thinking about how to think about the tsunami of new kinds of data, not just growth in data, but like, hey, there's all kinds of new data, mobile, touch point, gesture data, all those kinds of stuff's coming together. How should they think about setting up a plan? So if I'm a customer and say, hey, you know what, I got all this data, I got CUBE interview data, I got consumption data, all these new things, and what do I do? How do I create a holistic architecture to take advantage of the different data silos or data sets, but yet not screw up the operations of those data? What's the- Because it can't stop, right? What's your advice on that? Because that seems to be a core problem. It is, and one of the things I think I've come to believe is that companies will get together and they'll spend months or even years coming up with like an architecture of the future, right? And I don't believe that you can come up and sit in a room no matter how many days it takes and come up with something that's going to be all things to all people. Like you're going to basically need solutions that are nimble enough to be installed and get value very, very quickly, even if it's just a small amount of value, and then grow with you over time. So Cursor, that's sort of the way we're set up, right? You can come have a small team, so take a marketing operations team. They work with advertising data they're dealing with. How do you get a lead and convert them into a sale? They can use a product like Cursor, or I think any other good product in the marketplace should be designed this way, where you nibble on it, you get some value, and then you deploy it to other teams once you've learned how to best do that. I think that like big bang approach of like, hey, this is our solution that's going to work for everyone is really tough. So pick an area we can get time to value quicker. And is it like a data lake up in a wall where you just kind of throw some data into one corpus? So we connect to the database. Data doesn't actually live ever within Cursor, right? We may, if you're actually operating on it, say you're an analyst and you're writing some Python and you're writing some SQL, like yes, for the sake of seeing it in the UI, it will temporarily be cash that encrypted there, but we never actually store any company data. We just point to it, and what we've built are these really intelligent connectors that can go mind what's there. So if we're looking at a Tableau instance, we can say, okay, here are all the dashboards there, here are all the code behind those dashboards, here are the table and the data stores those dashboards are hitting. Here's how often they're consumed. Oh, every Monday morning at 9 a.m., 250 people in New York hit this dashboard, and how do we learn from that? And then ultimately make recommendations on it. Like what happens when data underlying a dashboard changes every Monday morning and all of a sudden it doesn't? Should there be a red flag somewhere that we should tell somebody that, hey, there's probably an issue with this. So we're trying to really learn from things that are already there today, as opposed to having you create new things. What's next? What's going on now? How are you going forward? What's the key objective for you guys? Yeah, so I think there's two things, right? As an early stage business, like you can get sort of pulled into this, hey, we want to be a generic solution for everything. What we found is that there's probably a couple industries that are really, they feel this problem very acutely, and some of its financial services actually retail, surprisingly, just given the dispersion of data inside retail. So we've had pretty good success in both of those areas, and I think our next step will be to actually probably formalize some playbooks, if you will, and continue down that path. And then integrations are the next thing, right?  So we want to continue to partner with companies that have best-of-breed solutions, work with them to create deep integrations. We're not trying to displace them, we're just trying to compliment them and help drive the traffic to them that's looking for what's in there. So that integration work is really never-ending. Why should a company give up the old way to bring in the new way? What's your think that is by some end? I don't think they're necessarily having to give up the old way. I think it's, there are some things that you're going to naturally be transitioning off of, right? There's always going to be a BI solution that transitions from legacy to new, whatever legacy may be defined as. And as you're doing that, that there's this missing ingredient, I feel like, of how do I track what's where when? You could say that that was sort of solved by data catalogs, but I think the old data catalog is kind of dead, and I think what's really happening is that you need something that works with where you are every day, whether you're an analyst, a business leader, or an engineer, right? It can follow you along, not disrupt you from your day-to-day workflow, and also be intelligent about what's where, and that's sort of what we're trying to build. Well, great to chat. Thanks for coming and spending the time, talking about Cursor, congratulations on the venture. Thanks. Looking forward to seeing that B round coming soon. Yeah, thanks for having me very much. It's coming soon, B round? A round, A round, C round, and yeah, it will definitely be on the near-term horizon. Adam Weinstein, CEO, Cursor, serial entrepreneur here inside theCUBE. Innovating around the data, this is the new model, this is what's going on, this is the new wave that they're riding. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.


What's going on everyone? Sam here with late in sports cards. We're in six boxes for Jeffrey H. We've got three 23 Bowman Chrome Baseball HDA Choice and three 23 Bowman Chrome Baseball Hobby. It's good luck here. Jeffrey, we'll start with your 23 Bowman Chrome Hobby. Good luck, buddy. I'll see something big. See a super in this. Zach Dean, Jackson Holliday. That is a Yossi Galam, 275 on the Orange Yellow Vapor. Hendry Chevilli, Chilly Chevilli. Face Auto, Andy Perez for the Rockies. There you go, Jeffrey. Nice one there, buddy. Ratoran and Base Hobby Reba. Jackson Holliday at Camderley. Brandon Maia first. That is a Jacob Melton, 2199 for the Astros, base and base. Second mini box, box of box one. Super first pack. We did that on Fanax Live yesterday. Jackson Holliday. I was like, come on, let's see a super first pack in the first box. All right, that works. Peter Lanzo iconic and Jackson Merrill. Miguel Tamarez, first refractor to 499. Lou Raywave Auto, Jr. Franco to 150. Nice. Congrats, Jeffrey, for the D-Backs. Lot of work. Francisco, Braylor Guerrero. Shimmer, Gavin Cross, Elian Soto as Waldo Asadio. He's probably going to win Cy Young, dude. Shimmer, Roman Anthony. That's pretty impressive because that means he's going to win a Cy Young in both leagues because he won it with the Rays a few years back and he's probably going to win it with the Padres. Base Auto, Brennan Malone. Brennan Malone. Atomic is the Yoga Cartaya. Prospect process to 150. Hold the Super on that insert, which is pretty sick. Zacara was awesome. Base. Jackson Malone and Base. Second mini box. Good luck, Jeffrey, again. That's Kyle Schwabber to 499. White Speckalotto, Hendry Chevilli to 299. Congrats, Jeffrey. Nice one there, buddy. Lantigua, Hendry Chevilli. Holiday came to the lead. Invicta, Diego Cartaya. Brennan Maia first. Teal, Alex Ramirez to 125 for the Mets. Drew Jones, Justin Crawford. Geez, dude, look at that headline. Oh, my God. Never came back.  Like, swollen. Geez. What up, Eddie? Restructure and read on. Brooks Lee to 75. Oh, yeah. It's 112 right now, actually, Eddie. It's a yellow auto. Brennan Malone to 75. Nice one, Jeffrey. Yeah, true. Shimmer, Gavin Cross. Oh, yeah. I didn't even keep... I didn't even know how many hours I work a week anymore, dude. That is a Elijah Green to 125 for the Nationals. One second, Jeffrey. Hold on. Base auto, Yosie Galan for the Rangers. Thank you, guys. Blaise Jordan. Nishida and base. This is Kaba. That is a true blue. James Wood to 150. Frost, Burgoyah. All right, Jeffrey. Three choice boxes for you now. That is a Jordy Vargas first base auto for the Rockies. That's Rockies. That's a first base auto. Kennedy Corona for the Astros. Nice one, Jeffrey. And Refractor is Junior Marin to 499 for the Royals. Junior Marin. Base auto is Yaniel Laboy. Yaboy Laboy. That is a base auto. Luis Torres for the Angels. There is some Schmeck on that. I'll give you an empty box and wrapper, Jeffrey. Four choice. And then a Dario Barrera to 499. Refractor, first auto for the White Sox. Let's see. Something big in here. Let's see it, man. Let us see it. That is in Axial Plaus, first base auto for the Pirates. Chase Astep, first base auto for the Mets. And Refractor, first auto to 499 for the Tigers. Danny Serretti. That'll do it for your break there. Jeffrey, thank you. As always, all your support, man. We do appreciate it. Get them right out to you, buddy.


Okay. I've got this handout and a jumble of handwritten notes, etc., and I'm going to try to somehow organize it. First I thought I'd just say a few things about religion versus conscience. And I suppose I can see conscience being used in two senses. One is to refer to a strongly held belief that is not attached to any well-recognized religion or the individual does not see as being religious in nature. So it's a bit, I would call it a residual category in a sense. But then there's another sense of conscience which I think is where it's used to up the ante in a sense to make a stronger claim when we say that this belief is really a matter of my conscience. And you see that in the dissent of the Liddell case in the European Court of Human Rights where her claim is presented as based on her Christian beliefs. And then it's in a sense elevated to a matter of conscience. So actually I'll refer to them in both senses. I suppose I'll mostly talk about religion and conscience as interchangeable. But later on I'll just ask whether there is a special category of conscience claims to be treated differently. Just while I'm on this question of religion and conscience, I never could understand where the phrase religion and belief came from which appeared in the Directive 2078 of the European Union in the year 2000. And then I noticed that it's actually been in the European Convention of Rights since 1950, Article 91. But if you look at Article 91, it says here, it starts out evidently right to freedom of thought, consciousness and religion. This includes freedom to change his religion or belief. So reading it together with the first sentence, I think religion and belief means religion or other conscientious belief. And I think the case under the Equality Act has gone away too far because we're trying to maintain a distinction between religious and conscientious beliefs and political beliefs, which would generally enjoy less protection or much less likely to be accommodated. And the example I give to my students is if you say you have a political belief that no one should work on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, whichever day you choose, that is unlikely to be accommodated. The response will probably be, well that's an interesting idea, good luck campaigning for it. Go talk to the government and Parliament and see if you can get the law changed. But if you present it as a religious or conscientious belief, it will be taken more seriously. So when the Granger case talks about Marxism as being an other belief, protected by the Equality Act, I think that's going too far. When I arrived, Juliet then was just talking about conscientious beliefs being characterized as irrational and suggesting that that was inappropriate. But with great respect, I think actually, I'm not sure exactly how we phrase it, but this line between religious and conscientious beliefs and political beliefs does involve distinction between, I'd say, reason and evidence and not being required to provide reasons and evidence. So on the religious and conscientious side of the line, we don't expect people to explain their beliefs or prove them, etc., on the political side of the line we do. So in that particular sense, I would say we are talking about a distinction between the irrational or the hell on the basis of faith versus the rational and evidence-based. Okay, so turning to point one of my outline, I'd say, well, two different ways you can approach these issues under the European Convention of Human Rights. One is as a freedom of religion and conscientious question under Article 9, which I would call a liberty approach. Or you can approach it as a discrimination question under Article 14. I prefer the discrimination approach because it allows you to compare the effect on your group, people who share your belief with the effect on other groups of the apparently neutral rule. I think that often makes your argument more powerful. Now, I adopt this approach, not coincidentally, because I teach anti-discrimination laws very specifically. Possibly also because I suppose my first contact with multiculturalism was in the 1980s, when the question arose in Canada whether a Sikh man could be a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Now, to be a Mountie, as they're known, means wearing a ceremonial uniform, a red jacket and a broad brimmed hat. And so the initial reaction by many people in Canada was absolutely no way. This is a sacred Canadian symbol. We cannot modify it in any way. And eventually that debate was resolved and now you do see Sikh members of the Mounties, just as you see Sikh guards outside Papua and Palos, et cetera. And of course we had the assimilation in the manhood case in 1983. Now just, oh yeah, so when I was including these materials in my presentation, my initial thought was, maybe this is wrong for this conference, this has nothing to do with conscience. But I go back to my grouping of religion and conscience together. If you asked a religious individual why they had to wear their religious clothing to work or a university, et cetera, they might well say it is a matter of conscience. I cannot go to work, I cannot study, I will be excluded because it is so important to me. So I don't think we have to confine a discussion to refusal to perform an abortion, et cetera, I think it could be broader. Yeah, so that's my approach, indirect discrimination, case-by-case analysis. I've got the Maba case here as an example of a Christian woman who did not want to work on Sunday where the question of justification came up. Who was it too difficult to rearrange work schedules, et cetera? Now the area where I think this analysis should lead to a finding of indirect, prohibited indirect discrimination is generally religious clothing and symbols. Because I would say generally they have no effect on anyone else and we're not talking about taking time off work, et cetera, there are no practical problems. So this right to wear religious clothing and symbols is well entrenched in the UK law since the Mandela case, although that was in the context of the Relent Race Relations Act. So I think the tendency in the UK has been to see a combination of minority religious practices as part of respecting ethnic minorities. Which I think affected the reaction to the Awida case. Awida I think was seen as an eccentric white Christian and her claim was not taken seriously by the UK courts. So we have this well established protection in the UK and if you go to the European courts you see none. So the Flaminos case, which Ian just mentioned, should have been applied to Muslim women wearing headscarves, to Sikh men wearing turbans, et cetera. Jewish lawyers asking for rescheduling of a hearing, et cetera. And the Strasbourg Court has consistently rejected all these cases. And so actually when we look at the outcome in Awida we have to bear this in mind. One explanation would be, say, Yossi's analysis that they're saying this is the refusals of the individuals here are based on illegitimate values. But the Strasbourg Court's approach tends to be not to accommodate any religious belief generally. So it's not necessarily making the distinction I would like them to make. So this, just before I turn to the Court of Justice of the European Union, a couple of points. Yossi when you talk about religious clothing or symbols that he put under the category of misguided or irrational. I personally wouldn't do that because I find that potentially culturally insensitive. I welcome you to come to King's and run a bond like Holly Professor Saf Inderjas who wears a turban. I'm not sure how he would react. But on Monday the, what are we today, 13th, 5th of June I did an interview for France Five Television. They were very keen to know whether the terrorist attack at London Bridge would cause Britain to reconsider its approach to multiculturalism. And I said, no, absolutely not. This has been with us since at least 1983. And I said, no, it's France. You're the one to have it wrong. Your rigid approach is what should change. And I hope that will be the case in future. But unfortunately the French approach has now influenced the Court of Justice of the European Union, which has come up with two judgments in March in the context of a private company where the private company can't claim to be the state and have a duty to be neutral and secular, but even there that approach is potentially being upheld. Right. So, turning to Iwita in other case, just one thing I wanted to say in relation to Peter's presentation this morning about Iwita's view that she should wear a cross being ill founded. That's an area where I don't think the Court should not get involved. I think all it's enough that she says she's Christian, she thinks it's necessary. There's certainly a plausible link between a cross and Christianity. I don't think we should second guess that. My analysis of Iwita was that it was direct discrimination simply because the employer allowed a headscarf's turbines and skull caps, et cetera, but not crosses. I don't know why that case ever went to court. I think they should have just recognized the mistake right at the start. As for Liddell and McFarlane and conscious exemptions in the context of non-religious employment, I've argued against that in the modern law of view. And I think that is the broad trend that these exemptions are not being adopted, but there are actually three statutory exemptions I'm aware of. One is South Africa, another is Prince Edward Island, my colleague Bruce MacDougall and Vancouver drew my attention to this. And most recently Gibraltar adopted same-sex marriage and there's a conscious exemption for registrars. So personally I think these are bad policy and adopted for as a matter of political compromise but not as a matter of human rights principle. If you want to talk to someone who defends this, Alvi Sacks, former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He was speaking at King's Laster and I had a discussion with him about it and his view just seems to be, oh well, it's just not worth the fight. Why would you want a registrar who was against your relationship, et cetera, just have someone else? But I didn't have a chance to ask him so if the registrar says no I don't do Jewish ceremonies for Jewish couples, et cetera, is that okay? I don't know who might take a different view. Turning over to page 2, and here I can just try to say something quickly about conscience plays generally. I've written about the ashes baking case and I think it's actually, well on the conscience side of things, religion and conscience is indistinguishable from bull versus hall. And I don't think it will be treated any differently in the Supreme Court. The distinguishing feature is the message on the cake. And I've argued that for various reasons. It's not, it wouldn't be seen as the message of the bakery. The Northern Outer Court of Appeal noted that they would put a witch on a cake for Halloween but would not be seen as supporting witches. So yeah, I don't think the only distinguishing feature in that case is to me is the forced expression argument which I don't think is going to succeed in the European Court if you're right. Now conscience generally, I touched on this in my modern law review article and had to make some cuts and so I cut it out so maybe this is something I could develop for a piece for the book from this conference. But I'm trying to see what thread runs through these conscience flames. And I did see a list of statutory exemptions. I think it was in a third party intervention in the Ouide and others case. But the common thread seemed to me to be beginning and end of life.  And we don't have assisted suicide yet but you can imagine conscience exemptions there. So really quite serious, dramatic, extreme situations which I would argue are quite remote from the Liddell situation. So the way I put it before is that civil partnerships registration is generally quite a happy occasion and no one dies. And so I would be interested to see to explore this further. One conscience exemption that seemed to stick out was jury service. I couldn't quite see the connection there unless I suppose jury service is a form of conscription. I did it in 2012 and the state is telling you for two weeks you have to work for the state. But maybe that's origin or maybe because juries used to impose the death penalty, I don't know what. But there were two examples mentioned this morning about inoculation and trade union membership which are not life and death events. But inoculation I would see that more as respect for family life or parental decisions and quite easily overridden. If you look at the case on Jehovah's Witness parents and blood transfusions etc. If the state were to decide that not having the inoculation was threatening the general population that would not be respected. And trade union membership I think that's better explained as freedom of association including the negative rights not to associate which the European Court of Human Rights eventually accepted. Now if we accept these as particularly strong conscience claims the question of degree of complicity arise which I believe the Dugan case addressed. And I must say here I would be quite strict on this you really have to be in the room a party to the procedure not just signing forms, supervising people etc. And I think that's where the hobby lobby case in the US really goes too far when it's a question of setting up a scheme that will cave with something which is so remote from the owners of the business. Okay and I suppose just to end with a trailer for a case to discuss at a future conference that's the Trinity Western Part 2 litigation in the Supreme Court of Canada on whether or not you can have a Christian law school that requires all students and staff to commit to not engaging in sexual activity outside of a different sex marriage. Now this is shifting from the individual to the collective almost everything I've been talking about has been an individual in a non-religious context making a conscious claim. This is a collective situation you have a religious community setting up the university etc. And I think what's happening in Canada then is that Trinity Western for many people has crossed the line because people just cannot see what legal education has to do with religion. And so although Trinity Western won its first case I think that was because of the effect on the students who were asked to do a fifth year of studying. I think it's quite possible in this case they will say no you cannot set up a law school which will effectively will certainly strongly discourage lesbian engaged staff and students from participating. Okay I'll end it there. Thank you.