Hi everyone Joe for jazby's case race comm with a 2023 top series one baseball hangar box random team break number nine number nine number nine number nine number nine Number nine. Did I get everyone's names correctly here? Yeah, I think so Is this number nine? Yeah all right, and All the teams available right there as well Now let's roll it and randomize names and teams five and a one six times each. We'll do the break first Then five and a one six times for the teams You know no one Would anybody it be into true crime and group breaks? You might have to try that I'll come up with some some fun true crime stories. I'm gonna combine that with group breaks Here's the first half of the list right here Second half the list right there be a game-changer. I think In group raking world a whole new audience will be will be into both true crime and group breaks And that that's gonna mean in the next video. Yeah Rex might know all about these true crimes I mean if tops released serial killer cards They'd make that they'd make a killing the consolation prize For someone who doesn't get spots in that will be the triple-player cards That's Graham Ashcroft blue Is that number? No, it's not but it'll shift Is that uh, that's Byron Buxton doing the world-famous Joe Jaspie train whistle? You see that so he's doing all right, so nothing too crazy there, but let's he's gonna win those Those hit parades spot so let's gather everybody's names one through 30 who was the worst serial killer Worst you're not just talking about body count, right? Let's roll it randomize it six and three nine times top eight after nine will be in hit parade One two three. All right, so after nine times top eight All right. Yeah, Jack the Ripper is probably a good one. Those are pretty horrific No, sure. I'll have to get some thoughts on that tune in next time for Joe's thoughts on serial killers Um Top eight you're in that hit parade break Franklin you're in Frank. So is John you too Nathan Patrick Frank Stephen K Scott and Joe So congrats to the top eight After nine, we'll see you in that dual case break. I'm Joe for jaspies case breaks.com and I'll see you next time


Lecture 16, Assalamu Alaikum. Welcome to the virtual university's course on business and technical communication. In the previous lecture, we looked at different forms of internal communications within an organization. In today's lecture and the next, we will look at different forms of letters which are used to communicate outside of an organization. Whereas, the memorandum is that we looked at in the previous lecture is the primary vehicle for communication within the organization to communicate with the people who are working within your organization. Letters are often used to communicate to individuals outside the organization especially in formal and semi-formal contexts. Letters are an essential part of all business and technical communication because they are more formal and more reliable than electronic mail or email and they are more precise and permanent than telephone or face-to-face oral conversations. So, where we use email a lot, where we use oral conversation a lot to communicate with people outside the organization, oral communication either face-to-face or on the telephone, letters are usually more reliable, they are more formal in business situations. So, it is necessary that if we want to communicate with people outside the organization, not in our company, but in some other company or individuals, then when we communicate with them through a letter, then communication is more effective. There are different forms of commonly used letters that we will be looking at in this lecture and the next and we will basically be looking at letters used in technical contexts, not informal letters or personal letters that we use in our digital private lives. The different forms of technical and business communication letters which include job application letters, acceptance letters which would be letters that you are writing to accept a job, transmittal letters, letters that go when you are transmitting some documents, letters that go as cover letters for those documents, enquiry letters, information letters and letters of recommendation. In today's lecture, we will look at the first three type of letters which are job application letters, acceptance letters and transmittal letters. A letter has a specific format and if your organization has a specific style of format that they dictate or that is set for them, then you will follow that format. However, if your organization does not dictate a specific format, then you will follow the guidelines that I will be providing you in this course. Business letters are normally either fully blocked, formatted which means that every line is starting at the left hand margin of the page and usually they have a business letter head at the top of the page. On the other hand, the other type of letter formatting would be the modified block format where the heading and the closing are aligned more towards the center of the page rather than towards the left of the page. It is more commonly used nowadays to use the fully blocked format rather than the modified or semi block format. Business letters typically have the following elements of heading, date, recipient's address which means the address of the person who will be receiving the letter, the salutation, the main body where you will have the main text, the closing and any end notations that you will have. So, yeh sare jo elements hain yeh ek letter ke andar hote hain. Now, let us have a look at an example which includes some of these elements. If you see in this formal letter which is used to correspond from between one company and another, there is they have the header which is more like a memo which says what who it is from, who it is to and the date and what the subject is. And then it starts with an introductory paragraph which gives a summary of the key points because it is a long letter highlighting a procedure and some tests. Therefore, there is a heading that has been given and then under that heading the paragraph has a topic sentence and then details of the of that paragraph. Then there is another heading and then the that is followed by another paragraph with a key topic sentence and details of that topic sentence and so on and so forth. The after that once we have got topic sentences like this under headings, there is a conclusion which again is given as a heading and a sentence or two which are the concluding sentences. The last sentence in the letter is the closing sentence which says please call me if you want additional information on these tests. It is a closing, it is a goodwill sentence which indicates that the writer would welcome further communication and will be happy to respond. And after this would come the closing which would probably be yours sincerely or yours truly. Now if you are using letter head stationary then you will only include the date two lines below the where the letter head ends and in the date you will spell out the name of the month. So, if you have got a letter head, if your company has letter heads, pages which have the company's name printed on them then you do not need to write your own address on the letter. You will just write the name because your address comes in the letter head. And when you write the date, you will not write the spelling of the month in the numerical form. If you are not using letter head stationary, if you are writing your letter on a plain paper then you will begin with your full address which will include the street number, the zip code, the city, etcetera along with obviously your company's address, whatever building it is in, whatever block number, etcetera. And this will be placed one to one and a half inches from the top of the page. So, you will leave one or one and a half inches at the top of the page and then on the left write your own address. Within your address you will spell out any abbreviations such as the name of the street or avenue etcetera or if they are any, if it says if you would normally be writing S T for street in the letter you will be writing the whole spelling of the street of that word. Include the date aligned at left with the address. So, if your address is at the left, your date should also be at the left hand margin of the page. And again you will spell out the name of the month. After writing your own address, you will write the recipient's address. If you are using the letter head then instead of your address, you will use the letter head stationary and then you will write the recipient's address. And this will be two or four lines below the date. So, wherever you have written your date, if you have written your address on a plain paper or on a letter head then you have written your date. After that, you will leave two or four lines and write the address of the reader. And you will include the recipient's title such as Mr, Ms or Doctor and the full name. You will not only write the first name, you will not only write the last name, you will write the full name. If it is a woman who does not have a professional title, if it is a female who is maybe not a doctor, does not have a title like doctor, then you will write Ms or Ms or Mrs. If you know that she prefers Ms or Mrs then you will write Ms or Mrs otherwise if you do not know whether the lady is married or unmarried and what she writes as her title then you will write Ms Ms. If the recipient does not have a title and you are not sure of his or her gender, you have the name but there is no title, there is no doctor for example and you are not sure whether you should be writing Ms, Mrs or Mr because you are not sure of the gender then you will omit the title, you will just write the name. If the recipient has a job title, a designation then you will write that. For example, if the recipient is the manager or director of a company or whatever title they have then you will write that. If you know it, if you do not then you will omit that. If the recipient belongs to a company or organization then you will write the name of that organization and then you will write the full address following the same format as the address in the heading or the same format as your own address. Please note again that the recipient's address is always aligned on the left margin. So, the recipient's address will always come on the left. The sender's address in some cases if it is a semi block letter or a modified block letter can come on the right hand corner of the letter but the recipient's address will always be on the left. In a fully block letter the sender's address will be on the left and the recipient's address will be on the left as well. Now, after you've written the receiver's address, you will write a salutation after the recipient's address. It starts with the word dare and continues with the title of the recipient and then the last name and then there is a colon following the title, the last name. So, if you know the last name then you will only write the title Doctor, Mr, Miss, Mrs, Miss, whatever the title is as appropriate. You will use that title and then you will write their surname. You will never write the first name with the title and then you will put the colon. If you are not sure of the recipient's gender you don't know whether she is a man or a woman and the recipient does not have a professional title then as I said earlier for the address. Similarly, in the salutation you will omit the title, you will not use the title and instead you will use their full name, first name and last name. For example, you will write dear Tabasum Khursheed. If you're not sure if the Basum Khursheed is a man or a woman then you will not write dear Mr. Khursheed because it could be a woman, a lady. So, you will write dear Tabasum Khursheed. Please note that you should avoid using salutations such as dear sir or madam or respected sir, etc. These salutations are not to be used. Instead, you will use the name or the department name. Now, coming to the main body of the letter. We have talked about the address, the date, the salutation. Now, the main body, the text that we have to write, that body should start two lines after the salutation. With the salutation, dear Mr. X, you will leave two lines and then start the main body. The body paragraphs should be single spaced and there should be a double space between paragraphs. So, in one paragraph, the lines of the paragraph, there will be one space but there will be double space between two different paragraphs. Indenting the first line of the paragraph is acceptable but this is more informal than the unindented style. So, if you are writing the first line of the paragraph a little bit inside, it is okay but it feels informal. Therefore, it is better in formal letters that you do not put the first line and do not put a little space inside and all the lines start in the same line. This is a more acceptable way in fully blocked letters. In the body, this was the organization of your body and the format of the body. Now, as far as the content of the letter is concerned, you need to be concise, direct and considerate. These are three things that you have to take care of to the point, do not talk too long, do not talk too much here and there, be direct, reach to what you mean because in a business situation, those who are reading your letter do not have time, they do not want to listen to you. So, what you have to talk about, what you mean is that you should reach there quickly. And considerate that the needs that you are reading, we have already talked about the audience needs. So, do not keep that in mind, you are considerate for the needs of your audience. You should state the letter's purpose in the opening paragraph, include supporting information in the middle paragraph or two paragraphs, and conclude your letter with a very brief paragraph that establishes goodwill and expresses what needs to be done. So, in the first paragraph, you will tell your purpose, why you are writing this letter, you will write all the supporting information in the middle paragraph. And in the last paragraph, you will do something pleasant like, your goodwill is established with the reader and you will recap what you want to do with action. So that the last line, the last impact on the reader is what they want to do and what action they want to do. If a letter requires more than one page, make sure that there are at least two lines of the body text on the final page. Never use one page just for the closing. So, if you feel that your letter is long and you need to go on to the next page, make sure that you have at least some material from the body text to go on to the next page. On the next page, there should be no closing, there should be at least one or two lines of the body text. The second page and all subsequent pages, if they are more than two pages, must include a heading which will have the recipient's name, the date and the page number. Now, coming to the closing phrase of a letter, you will write a complimentary closing phrase, two lines below the final body of the paragraph. Yours truly, sincerely or sincerely yours are the common endings for professional letters.  Please note that you will not write things like yours obediently. In professional letters, you will not be writing yours obediently. You can write if you are on slightly informal terms with the person that you are communicating, you may at times write best regards, but it is more common to use sincerely or yours sincerely. You will also in your closing, capitalize the first word, the first letter of the first word of your closing phrase. For example, if you are writing sincerely yours, then sincerely's S is the capital and yours Y is not the capital. And you will end the complimentary close with a comma. Four lines below your complimentary close, you will write your full name. If you are writing it in an official capacity, that is not included in your letterhead, that you are writing on, then you will write your title below your name. For example, you are manager or deputy director or whatever. And your signature will go above your typed name. Now at the bottom of the last page of a business letter, you may use end notations. These will show who typed the letter and whether any materials are enclosed with the letter. And also who is receiving a copy of the letter. In the end notations, when we talk about the typist's initials, you will have the initials of the typist. Just the first letters of that type, the initials of your typist will be the first type of type. And the initials of the typist, the first type of type will be the first type of type. You will have the initials of the typist, just the first letters of the typist's name in lower case, not in capital letters. And these will follow the initials of the author. For example, if you are dictating the letters but the type is your secretary, then your initials will be in capital letters and then the initials will be in colon or slash. Also, if there are enclosures then you will have an enclosure notation. Which will be you can write enclosure or ENCL or ENC to alert the recipient that there is additional material in the letter or in your correspondence. This is to make sure that whatever you attach with your letter does not get lost. You can either identify the enclosure by giving the name or you can indicate how many pieces there are. This can be done by, for example, you can say enclosure colon article by Ali Bashir for example or you can write ENCL dot and in brackets write the number or ENC dot in brackets write the number of things that you are attaching. Also, in addition to the enclosure notation, always refer to your enclosures explicitly within the text of the letter. If at the end of the letter you are writing the enclosure reference of what enclosures you have given. But in the text where you have your main body, you also have to give some reference to what is your enclosure and its relevance with your letter. The third thing that we can use in the end notations is the copy notation which we write CC. This lets the recipient know of who else is receiving a copy. You will put each recipient in your CC list on a separate line. Like we will see in this example that CC is written as a colon and after that all the extra people who are writing this letter are in different lines. Those who are initially writing this letter, who are the direct recipient and the primary recipient of the letter, their names will not be there but those who are getting copies will be their names. Now coming to job application letters. Letters that you will write when you are applying for a job. That is the first type of letter that we will be looking at. You will write job application letters that identify a specific area of employment that summarise your qualifications for the job, refer to an enclosed resume and request the next step of the application process. Usually this next step is an interview. So in your job application letters all these elements should be mentioned. The area that you are interested in, you should specify that. You will write the summary of your qualifications. You will refer to the resume that you have attached and the next step is the interview of the job process. Generally you will say that you wish to be called for an interview. Application letters are usually just one page and they consist of three sections. The front matter, the body and the end matter. Obviously in this the recipient's address and date will be the same as in every letter but after that the front matter, body and end matter will be in a job application letter. The front matter would include a statement of that you are applying for a specific job, title or field. You will also mention the person who referred you to this job or told you about the job. If you learn of the job from an advertisement you will mention that. So in the front matter whatever you are applying for, you will be given an address of that job and you will be given an address of that job. If a person has told you, you will be given a reference of that job. If you have read a newspaper or you have seen a poster, you will be given an address of that job. You will in the body of the job application letter, you will state specifically why you are qualified for the job. You will describe your education and work experience and any other activities that display relevant talents. Maybe such as foreign language proficiencies, leadership, supervised experience, whatever is relevant is your experience. If you have donated blood during college then you don't need to write that for example.  In your end matter, you will refer to your enclosed resume in which your entire educational history, work related and your interests and hobbies are attached. And you will express your desire for an interview stating when and where you will be available for one. So you will say that you would look forward to an interview and you would also say when it would be convenient. For example, you would like to be called for an interview or that you are looking forward to an interview. Preferably after the 5th of September or whatever you are available for. And if there is a city where you are in Karachi and you live in Lahore then you can specify that you would prefer if the interview could be held in Lahore. If you can travel to Karachi then obviously you will go there. In addition, you will invite further inquiries and state how you can be contacted. You will definitely write that if your prospective employer needs more information from you then you should contact him. So you will write a sentence like if you require any further information, please feel free to contact me. And if you have specific, you will give the number where you can be contacted. If you have different numbers to be contacted between day and night then you will state those and the timings. Let us have a look. In this example, in the front matter the writer has said that he or she will be graduating from MIT in June and what degree they will be getting and what they are interested in. In that particular company what type of opportunity they are interested in and why they are writing the letter. In the next section, they have given a brief summary of what they have done. What type of work they have done, what their experience has been etc. What all they were involved in basically to highlight how they are suitable for this job. So they have told their experience in a very brief way in this paragraph that their previous experience is how they are suitable for this job. In the last section, in the end matter of their body they have given a pleasant closing in which they have written I would welcome the opportunity to meet with you and discuss my qualifications for working with Atria. I believe my training has given me the skills to make a valuable contribution. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Now they have written I look forward to hearing from you soon. But they have not specified when they are available for an interview or not. Which leads the reader to believe that whenever they contact them in the next few days they will be available. And then the closing sincerely, etc. Now once you have applied for a job, you will hopefully get an offer. Once you have gone through the interview process and on. And the next written communication that you need to do with that company is an acceptance letter. So an acceptance letter is obvious. If you want to take a job, then you will write a letter to accept that job. Letters accepting a job not only convey the information that you are accepting a job, that particular job. But they also establish a contractual relationship between you and the organization or the person who is offering you the job. So that is one kind of a written contract between you and your new organization. Formal contract will happen later. But they gave you an offer letter writing, in writing and you answered it in writing. So you are bound to take that job and that is bound to give you this job. The rest of the details will be in your contract. Because this is a contractual obligation, it is better that you state your key terms of employment yourself in your acceptance letter so that there is no chance of confusion. So you should restate even if the employer has written the key terms in the letter. You should restate them in your acceptance letter as well just to make sure that they are acceptable. You need to send the acceptance letter as soon as you are absolutely sure that you want to accept the job offer. If you are not sure of accepting that particular offer then please do not send an acceptance letter. Then you need to maybe negotiate or let them know that you will not be accepting. But if you are sure then send it the acceptance letter as soon as possible. If you need more than two weeks to decide whether or not you want to accept the job. If you need more than two weeks to decide whether or not you want to accept the job. Then you should call the company or write a letter to the person who has offered you the job. And ask them for an extension in time that I have not decided yet. Please give me some time and then I will decide and tell you. So it is only polite to let them know that you need more time because otherwise they will give that job to somebody else if they do not hear from you. Now the format of a job acceptance letter will be such that you will begin the first paragraph by enthusiastically accepting the job. If you want, obviously if you are accepting then you need to show your pleasure at being offered that job. So you will show them in a pleasant way that you are happy that you have been offered this job. And you are accepting it. Be sure that you will state the exact title of the job and the salary that has been given to you when you are accepting. The second paragraph that will usually discuss details about the position especially the date that you will begin work. So first of all you will tell that you are happy that you have been offered this job. You will write the title of the job and what salary you have been offered. You will also show that you are accepting the job on that salary. In the second paragraph you will state the details. Especially the main points of the job description and when you will start working. The last paragraph is usually a short statement of goodwill. And it usually indicates that you are looking forward to starting your new job. So a goodwill indicates that you are happy that you want to start your job soon. It starts with a salutation and then in the body the writer says I am pleased to accept your offer of a position as an analyst programmer. This is the job title in the local electronic operating systems division at a salary of so many hundred dollars or rupees per year. So in the first paragraph you have told the job title and also the salary you have mentioned and accepted. In the second paragraph this is written. I have already given my current employer notice of my intention to leave and will be ready to report for work on the date you mentioned in your letter June 1st. So then here they are saying that they have given their notice and they will start work with the new organization on the 1st of June. So the main key term that of employment is when they will start so they have restated that. And in the last the end matter the goodwill closing they just say I look forward to a long and rewarding career with low key which is the name of the company. So that is a very pleasant way of closing that job acceptance letter. The third type of letter that we will look at today is the transmittal letter. It is also called a cover letter and it accompanies a larger item, usually a document. When you send a document or a report or a proposal to another company or another individual, then you will always send a cover letter. The way you applied the job application letter with the resume, that was also a kind of cover letter but it is not a transmittal letter, it is a resume cover letter. Similarly when you send a document to another company, then you will also apply a cover letter with it so that the document will not be misplaced. If you send it to someone or a postman, then the person who opens it will not be confused about why this document has come and for whom it has come. When there is a letter with it, then its purpose will be clarified. And apart from that, from your transmittal letter the person who reads it will get a summary of what this document is and what we will get in it. It provides the recipient with a specific context in which to place the larger document. So, they get a context and then they know why this document has been received by them or why this document has been sent to them. And simultaneously it gives them a permanent record of having sent the material. You get a record, they get a record, they know that they received the document on a particular date and you know that you sent out a letter along with that document on a particular date. Transmittal letters are usually brief. You will not be giving too much information in the transmittal letter because all the information is probably present in the document that it is accompanying. So, you will give a lot of detail in the transmittal letter. In the first paragraph you will tell what you are sending along with that letter and why you are sending it. What is being sent and what is the purpose for sending it? And that is generally the key information that needs to go out in a transmittal letter. A longer transmittal letter, slightly longer one, if the document that is being sent is large may summarize key elements of the proposal in one or two sentences. Whatever has been sent, the document or the proposal, that will be summarized in one or two sentences and maybe any other useful information that needs to be given to the recipient maybe when it was published or when it was approved. You will end your transmittal letter with a one sentence paragraph that establishes goodwill by thanking or complimenting the recipient. Like other letters, you will have like the job acceptance letter. In this letter as well, you will have a one sentence closing paragraph which will establish some kind of goodwill. We are going to have a look at an example which is a formal transmittal letter accompanying a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation has sent a grant proposal. Along with that, the transmittal letter is attached. We will see that. The structure of the letter, the use of language such as words such as hair width and the use of the passive voice reflect common conventions for submitting formal scientific proposals. Because this is a scientific proposal which is being submitted that is why its cover letter, the transmittal letter, its language will follow the scientific proposal's key conventions. That is why in this letter, you will see that the words such as hair width, passive voice, etc. have been used. It starts with the salutation as we said, dare, the title and the surname. And the writer says, I submit hair width a proposal in support of a research program and titled Problems of Excessing Aegon in Cilexate to be performed under my direction in etc., etc., library. I am requesting funding in the amount of so many thousand dollars in total estimated costs for the period from this date to this date. So they are basically in the sample letter saying what is being submitted, where it has been written or where that research has taken place and what needs to be done, what action needs to be taken. Basically, it shows why that document has been sent. Because it is obvious that the reader also wants that if you have sent us this document, then what we have to do with it? Why are you sending us? So they have clearly told us that they are going to fund something. And then they go on to say on page 2, questions relating to any technical aspects of the proposal should be directed to me. Questions of administrative nature should be directed to so and so person at this extension. So they have told us the details of the contact and the queries they will deal with themselves. And then the goodwill closing, your consideration of my proposal is greatly appreciated. They have already complimented that if you consider this, then we are appreciating it a lot. Although they don't know if they are considering it favorably or not, but as a goodwill gesture, they have assumed that it will be considered favorably. Now in this lecture, we looked at job application letters. We looked at how they will be structured, what are the different elements that go into them. We looked at the main body of the letters, of the job application letters and how to refer to resumes that have been attached to job application letters. The next thing that we looked at was acceptance letters, accepting a job. And we talked about how they will be structured, what you need to include, what are the key points that go into your acceptance letter. We also looked at transmittal letters, in which we saw that transmittal letters go along with what kind of things, which things are used as a cover letter. What are the main points that should be included, which we talked about, that the document that goes along with it should be given, what kind of language should be used, whatever document is attached, what is being transmitted, related to that area, related to that document's convention, you will also use the language in your transmittal letter. Now in the next lecture, we will look at enquiry letters, which means letters which you will be sending out to people outside your organization, but there will be letters where you will be requesting information of some type, some kind. You will write a letter to some other organization in which you will need enquiry of some type. You might need some material, or you might need some information. If you write a letter to ask for information, or you will write a letter with enquiry, what will be its format and how will you write it? We will look at technical information letters in the next lecture. If you want to give technical information, how will you give it? And letters of recommendation. Letters of recommendation normally go out with job applications of people. So, if you need to write a letter of recommendation for somebody who is applying for a job, then we will see how that will be formatted. Another reason why letters of recommendation may be written would be when people are applying for studies. They might come to you because you have been their former employer and you will need to write a letter of recommendation for that. So, whatever the purpose we will look at, how you will form those letters. Note that whatever letter you write, all the elements will be there. That is, heading. You will have the recipient's address. You will have the sender's address. If you are writing a letter of recommendation, the sender's address will be in the letter head. If you are not writing a letter of recommendation, then the sender's address will be above the recipient's address. Then the date will come. Then the recipient's address. After that, the salutation. In which you will write the name of the person who is going to study after a long time. You will write the surname with the title. If you do not know the title, then you will write the full name. Then you will have the main body of the letter, which will include an introductory paragraph. In most cases, a middle paragraph and a closing paragraph, generally of one line. Then you will have the closing salutation or the closure, which will, for business letters, which will always be yours sincerely, or sincerely yours, or just sincerely, or yours truly. Please note that you will never write yours obediently. Also, in the same way, you will never write dear sir or madam in your salutation. After your closure, you will leave four lines for your signature. You will write your name. And if your title is not mentioned in the letterhead, if your company's letterhead is such that your designation is not written in it, then you will write your designation under your name. Beneath that, then you will have the end notations, which can include who the letter has been copied to, whatever enclosures there are. If there are any enclosures, then you will indicate those and the initials of the person who is dictating the letter and the initials of the typist. So, with that, we come to the end of this first session on letters. And I look forward to seeing you next time for lecture 17. Allah Hafiz.


So, since we're running late, I'm going to open this up right away to discussion from the group. But I think one of the recurring threads here that's a rich one for the broader conversation really is the whole question of what kind of public space we want, the contested nature of what is public space in an era where there's this constant repartitioning and blurring of the boundaries is obviously an interesting question and that includes everything from various kinds of semiotic conversational rhetorical cues that indicate markers of inside and outside to literal physical space. So I'm going to open up the conversation here. I can do the honors to pass the microphone if you want to. Thank you. I'm Zaynep and I wanted to just follow up on what Ethan was saying, especially regarding sort of this Facebook real name in light of what's been recently happening with the fur over Amina Araf, Syrian blogger, if you guys don't know who was a fairly well followed blogger, turns out she's at least partially fictionalized whatever it is and might be a complete hawk. Or it might be completely true, we don't know at the moment, but there's a lot of fur. And it was before this I started thinking about this, so I didn't just change my mind. But I've recently kind of been thinking how, following from your cute cat theory, that what's going on is a bit of a tragedy of the individual where what's good for the commons is actually not good for the activists in that the realish name norm on Facebook, which is ish because in my surveys 10, 20% don't really do that. But as you point out, the people who get called on it are the people vulnerable. But still that norm seems to really have helped activists, both in Egypt and Tunisia, by embedding political conversations in everyday conversations like what you're seeing. So even though they put themselves in danger by being out there, they also were somewhat protected, one by being in large numbers, also by for creating an authentic place. And I think under, you know, autocracies, you don't really have the sweet spot where you can have political efficacy, safety, trust and anonymity and like some perfect intersection. It's just how you're going to balance this. And ironically I used to criticize Facebook a lot for the real name policy. And recently I've been thinking there's really value in that kind of space, even though Facebook is not doing it with, you know, maybe the best intentions. So I just wanted to ask you about what you think. So I think one simple reaction to this would be to suggest that what's really going on is sort of a raising of the stakes on multiple different levels. And this didn't really happen first in the activist space. I think it first happens around bullying. I think it first happens around, essentially, teen behavior in one fashion or another where we're sort of willing to look at highly flexible identities. And then suddenly there's this realization that some very uncomfortable things happen in these spaces and we immediately sort of swing and say, well, maybe these should be pure real name identity spaces. Maybe if we just have names associated with those problems go away. And of course we also know that that's not the case. As Dana's revealed, there's all sorts of ways to have those fights occur stagnographically. I think what we're finding on a lot of the tools that we produced is that we produced tools sort of assuming that they are light and funny and for cute cats or for congratulating each other on birthdays and that in a bunch of different ways those stakes are starting to get raised. And as those stakes get raised, we need to reconsider a lot of design decisions that went into them. One of the design decisions we need to consider more than anything else is who is involved with setting those rules of the road and setting those terms of service. So far it's been entirely a corporate process with sort of nominal participation from member bases. That may not be acceptable in the long run. Dana's made the argument in the past that as some of these services essentially start functioning as utilities, we might choose to regulate them as such and try to figure out how to have a public interest involved with figuring out what's involved with those rules of the road. For those who actually don't know Alessandro Questi's work, please go read it. One of the things that he does, which is really interesting, he's working on a current experiment that I want him to finish writing up and I've had the great fortune of hearing him presented a few times where he can take a picture of you and through a combination of photomatching technologies and other things can predict your social security number with a high degree of accuracy. All of our conversation about real name being the most important personally identifiable information, I think it's going to be technologically undermined very, very quickly. So one of the questions then is how do we actually deal with systems of power? Because what you're really dealing with in the cases that you're talking about is what happens when somebody goes from being part of a broader society to an individual that becomes identified by a system of power. And I think that's where we have to really look at all sorts of marginalized populations and their relationships to power in all different forms. Because the thing is that the technology is getting to a point where it's going to be able to be leveraged by systems of power to really identify people when there is a need to do so. And it's no amount of individual hiding will allow you to sort of hide within a collective in the way that we have understood historically. So the question then is how do we actually rethink our relationship to power and rethink what it means to deal with individuals and collectives in relation to power? So some of these clients are sort of going to something I wanted to bring up as well, which is to do with sort of a privatization of public space and a sort of reinterpretation of what those public spaces are, especially in transnational contexts. It seems to me not irrelevant that these are American corporations that are providing the space for a sort of notionally public discourse in non-American spaces. And the question again of what that means within a corporate context, because turning it around, it's interesting to note that all it took for the US to shut down Wikipedia as concentration on two spots, Visa and Mastercard. That the infrastructure that supports these things is a corporate infrastructure, but it's located in very particular kinds of places. So I wonder if you could speak a little to this, the notion of privatization and corporation. And not just in Ethan's stuff, but actually I think the questions of publicness and the privatization of public space has been a big issue in architecture and urban planning as well, for instance, and across the talks. It's probably worth remembering that the reason that WikiLeaks shut down happens is because WikiLeaks is forced by a DDoS attack to move off its own controlled infrastructure in Europe onto Amazon's cloud. And then Amazon responds extremely badly to public pressure. So, you know, while I'm thrilled that people are looking for interesting technological solutions to this, even Mogun's Freedom Box, all of these things, at a certain point, these forces are incredibly difficult to deal with. And you find yourself flocking to hide behind the big rock. And the big rocks are a small number of companies that I think therefore have a special responsibility to think about how they protect public space. Just on the international piece of it, just on a tiny subsection of it, language becomes incredibly important within this. We have taken to changing activist best practice. An activist best practice nowadays is, sure, use Facebook, use YouTube, use everyone, make sure there is an English language description of your content. Even if you are putting up a protest in Kyrgyzstan, in Kyrgyz, you need an English language description because the people who are evaluating your content don't speak Kyrgyz. And when five complaints in English come in to say, these people are advocating the slaughter of innocents, that site's going down. So, you now have the responsibility, whether you speak the language or not, to try to speak the language of the people who are controlling the platform that you're on. I'm Jeff. Ethan provocative as always. I'm struggling though with what you think you're, where you had for solutions. Regulation doesn't satisfy me because I'm that way. And because, you know, we see regulation in China and Iran and all those places. Once you open up to one body to regulate, you open up to all bodies to regulate. But the notion of what is the definition of a public space for public speech? I hear you say at the end of yours, maybe the current best option we have is to lobby the private organizations to behave well, which is where we're going now. I'm just, well, I guess what I'm asking is what is the other alternative to that in your view? So, and this is hard because I'm trying to give a quick presentation in the context of other things as well. But Rebecca McKinnon's got a new book coming out, Consent of the Network, which basically ends up arguing that the problem is using these spaces while adhering to these usage agreements that we have no ability to shape. And that ultimately what you need to have is a revolutionary moment where the people who are using these spaces take some responsibility and power over shaping the rules of the road, ideally in cooperation with the benevolent monarch that is the company putting it forward. And it's to the company's advantage as well as to our advantage and there's the possibility that we see differentiation in the space over time to companies that are open to that process rather than to companies that are out open to the process. The problem, Jeff, is that I've been working for 10 years on the other alternative. I've been looking for the technological fix to this. I've been playing around with circumvention systems, all sorts of different distributed content. Ultimately, technically, we do not have a good answer to a question of how you deal with something like Facebook in a decentralized fashion. I can host video in a bunch of different places and spread it over tournodes and so on and so forth. But I cannot have a social networking conversation without some degree of centrality. And so at that point where we have centrality, we need to figure out whoever that entity that is centralizing becomes part of a discussion about the idea that this is both a public space as well as a private space. I think another thing to tie both Paul and Jeff's comments sort of together, one of the other things to keep in mind is that corporations have incentives, right? And individuals have incentives and sometimes they align and sometimes they contradict. And one of the most challenging things in thinking through this is that I often run into folks who just assume that corporatized interests are so far removed from what their interests might possibly be that there's always a hatred. I actually think there's a lot of power when you can actually think about alignment, right? And alignment is one of the tricky things. Sometimes alignment happens through finding common interests where you're sort of odd bedfellows. Sometimes alignment happens through forms of regulation at a social norms level or at a legal level or at a technical level. And so one of the things is as we think about all of these individual roles as actors in this, a lot of it is to think through those incentive structures and find points of alignment where good work can happen and good change can happen. And I do actually believe that's possible. It's not just by rallying and trying to convince the corporations to behave like you want them to, but to find points where you can actually agree on things and it's in your shared interest to produce XYZ. And I think that that's, so rather than thinking ourselves as in opposition, I think a lot of it is about finding those points of alignment and those ways of really coming together. My name is Diyu. I have a related question to Dana. In terms of the problems with the social norms of people not respecting on social networks, have you seen designs like in terms of technology which actually solve that problem? Is it even a hope for it that you could actually design something where by definition it is much more conducive to people following social norms as opposed to kids having to invent? Sure. So, you know, the design issue is a really interesting one from my perspective because the design issue, it builds the conversation really about the technology and what's in that space rather than thinking about the technology as situated behind a whole variety of things. So, for example, one of the things I struggle with all the time is that people are like, oh, we have to build better technologies to make certain in Facebook that they won't share in these ways. All it takes is for a parent to lurk over the shoulder to violate any technical conditions that you could possibly have developed. Likewise, because of, you know, one of the things I love about teenagers is that their cultural logic around these things is not necessarily the same as parents and adults in general. So, the vast majority of young people share their password, just like many of you probably shared your locker combination as a sign of trust, a sign of relationship with people. So, these technical solutions aren't quite there. That said, there's really important design implications that play out. There's a real big policy conversation right now about private privacy by default, which I actually think is deeply problematic. The reason that I think it's deeply problematic is that, actually, what people are really good at is adjusting to a set of technologies when they understand it and they can work around it. So, when I look at young people who are using Twitter, they know it's public by default and they act accordingly. The bigger challenge from a design perspective is what happens when you make changes. And changes are where there's a huge cost because changes are where we undermine social norms. So, in December of 2009, when Facebook decided to automatically change certain privacy settings that resulted in a lot of people suddenly being public without knowing it, that's where we see a design violation. So, part of it is actually as you're one of the challenges for designer is as the system is evolving, figuring out how to tango with users so that you can actually evolve the system because the system has to evolve. No system comes out and is forever that way. But you do it in alignment and that is a very hard design problem. And it's really not about the initial design but the iterative design where we really need design efforts. Hi, Tim Sparapani from Facebook. Thank you all for your very interesting comments. Yes, I've outed myself, hello, I'm here. If anybody's responsible for the architecture that Ethan was talking about, it's me and my team. And I think you make some very interesting points about how to hide advocates within a mass of people. Every design that you could pick for any networked system has consequences. And I think that's the point that you're essentially making and we have made certain choices. The one that has always bedeviled me and I come from a background of being at the ACLU having spent a number of years there and having really worried about the people with the guns and the ability to lock you up rather than large corporations which can annoy you and charge you money but can't really put you in prison. And so that's again a bias that I have in terms of the design that we look at. So here's the nub of my problem. The same system that finds and identifies fake accounts for advocates around the world also identifies by intention fake accounts from law enforcement and national security and secret police people around the country and around the world. If you think that the conversations are difficult with respect to what happens when an advocate is outed they are equally difficult when a law enforcement or national security agency intends to haul you in and say why is it that you've just shut down our honey pot intended to find and disrupt the following crimes terrorist activity whatever protests that they would suggest. So I guess my question is this is how do we avoid as designers as people who want to build a structure and this is to everyone on the panel building systems that when by design would create a pseudo sense of privacy for people because literally on the back end if you look at a fake account no matter whether it's an advocate's fake account or a law enforcement's fake account it looks the same essentially it has all the same anomalous behavior it doesn't look like the other you know more than a half billion people on Facebook so I just I hope you can throw some some meat on the bones there of that rambling discussion. Thank you. So I think there's a couple of interesting pieces of this that come into play. I think the first thing that comes into play is that we tend to make design decisions about a platform and then we tend to watch behavior occur atop the platform that surprised us. This has certainly been my experience in building social media platforms people do things with it that I never thought about. I got sensitized to this issue in 1996 when the Malaysian opposition put more than 50,000 pages on the website that I was hosting because it was the best way that they could promote the reformasi movement and I found myself in this interesting position of having all this content which was clearly very sensitive I got a lot of complaints about was in a language that I couldn't read but on the other hand appeared to have a certain amount of political significance and so we then had to sit down and start bringing in experts in Malaysian politics to figure out what the right thing was to do at that point. So I think once we start realizing that there's problems that we didn't know that we were going to deal with we're dealing with law enforcement doing stakeouts on our services we're dealing with activists trying to figure out how to organize on our services behaving in ways that are technically against the rules of the road but may in some cases be admirable may in some cases be very dangerous how do we figure out how we adopt around it and the answer is it's got to be some sort of ongoing process as it obviously is. Now Dana has signaled that there's another complication in that process which is that having a change in an arbitrary and opaque fashion tends to break goodwill and it tends to break the ways that people have figured out how to use those tools in creative ways. What I'm suggesting knowing full well that it's provocative and probably unacceptable on the surface but it's an interesting way to go from there is to say there needs to be some way that we open that process. There needs to be some way that you're talking not just with law enforcement who I'm sure you are talking to about figuring out how to make that work but to the activist community about what are the ways in which we evolve that terms of service over time that doesn't just recognize sort of a legitimate law enforcement need to use that space but also recognizes this responsibility that you guys have found yourselves in by virtue of tremendous success in becoming a network public sphere whether or not it was your intention. And there's a long conversation thank you David there's a long conversation about how we could best do it we can argue about you know GNI and all sorts of different mechanisms but I think this conversation is going to be a growing one over the next couple of months and years in figuring out how we open that process so it's not just purely a lawyer's process but it starts becoming a community process as well.  But I actually think Tim's question is extremely important I think Ethan's point is really critical and something that involves everybody in this room which is that these puzzles are not actually easy and it's not really clean to sort of figure this thing out and some ways what we're really struggling with is what the sort of moral fiber of the society that we want to live in is really about and how we actually deal with it and I'm dealing with it in a slightly different variant than Tim is which is that I'm thinking about it in terms of human trafficking right which is a lot of the same puzzles that we use to sort of out you know activists also can be used to sort of out people who are actually trafficking minors for sex work in really horrific horrific ways and so how do we actually balance between these things that we see as really do good and things that we don't in many ways that's actually the big puzzle to me about the neoliberal society that we're creating which is that we have these ideas were market driven rhetoric and that the idea of the individual can trump all of this but I think we actually have some of the hardest puzzles for thinking about the moral society we want to create ahead of us and I think one of the things is as we dichotomize against these institutions I think it's really important that we figure out how to come together and work on solving these problems because there are really problems for all of us I think on those with those words we're going to conclude I want to thank the three speakers Beatrice Dana and Ethan and we're going to transition to the final connections talk of this morning


The narcissist will never do this, there are many things that narcissists will never do, but this is definitely one of the main things you should never expect from them and that is for them to be loyal, for them to give or show firm and constant support and allegiance to you to the positive and productive aspects of society, to a religious, educational or social purpose or to an established law, practice or custom. They are never going to do that, they are never going to be loyal, honest or trustworthy, they're never going to be able to love you or anyone else, they're never going to experience true joy or happiness and the reason why is because they have a void, they're very insecure so they often feel empty and nothing you or anyone else does will ever fill them, they're never going to be satisfied and as soon as you figure them out you will quickly discard them because you know that you're not going to be able to make them happy, they're never going to be happy with anyone but you would rather that they would be someone else's problem because all they're going to do is bring you down in an attempt to fill that void, when it's a void that can never be filled, they're always going to want more and they're never going to be happy because they're never going to be faithful, they're never going to be true to their word, promises or vows, they're never going to be deserving of your trust because they're never going to keep their promises which is why they will only end up cheating on you, they will always be looking for something better or something more, the bigger better deal, the next shiny new toy because they have this inflated ego, an exaggerated sense for unabilities and importance which distorts their ability to recognize truth in themselves and other people and causes them to have a strong sense of entitlement for things that they haven't even worked for, for things that they don't deserve and yet they will hide it because they already know that what they're doing is wrong but even though you may not think that they're cheating, a lot of times they are, you're just unaware of it, you haven't caught on, you haven't recognized the signs because they are expert meditators, they can make you believe that they're committed to you and you will be none the wiser until one day you catch them out, you find out that they are being cheating on you but when you first got involved with them you felt like they were dedicated to you and you were dedicated to them and it would have appeared that way to anyone outside of the relationship as though you were connected and everything was great but that was just a love bombing, it was manipulation and they used it to fill the relationship with enthusiasm and excitement to make you believe that it's who they really are and everything is amazing so then you wanted to stay with them and be with them but then it trapped you and kept you stuck as you started to notice things that they were hiding and they started to withdraw, they became distant and reserved, they began to hide their phone, they would disappear for hours at a time and when you tried to confront them on it they didn't want to talk about it or they would get angry as though you have no right to question them because they're just trying to distract you, maybe they already met up with someone else and now they're gaslighting you or they're love bombing you again, they're acting nice all of a sudden but there's something going on and they don't want you to become suspicious because the truth is that they will never be loyal, they will never be faithful, even if you give them everything that they need, even if you give them money and a place to live, even if you give them sex, even if you treat them well, they're still going to want more and you're not going to be able to give that to them, they're not even going to want it from you after they've spent a certain amount of time around you, they're going to want it from someone else because it really isn't about what you're giving or not giving to them, they will still hurt you regardless of how well you're treating them, regardless of you being a good person because they don't really care about your good qualities, they just feel you as an appliance, an object that exists to meet their needs, they don't care about who you are as a person that doesn't concern them which is why you may not remember a time where you actually sat down and had an actual conversation with them, it was always something superficial, there was never a time where they tried to get to know who you actually are because they never cared about that, all they cared about is getting their needs met at your expense whether it's emotional or financial which means that they're never going to be able to love you, they're never going to experience true joy or happiness because they're always looking for something to fill that void, they're not a complete person on their own which is why they can never be alone and they will never be honest with themselves or be honest with you, they will never be grateful and it's because of their ego, they're addicted, it's just whatever makes them feel good, whatever makes them feel important, so they're enslaved to their impulses, they can't control it, so they're just going to keep doing the same things again and again and it's never going to change until they accept who they are but in the beginning it will look like they actually cared about you, when they're just addicted to the chase, they always want what they don't have and once they've got it, they don't want it anymore because they've locked you down, they know you're not going anywhere so then they start seeking new supply, they start looking for something else to fulfill them, they're bored of you now, they've learned you, they know what makes you tick, they know what you're about so for them it's just lost that sense of mystery and excitement that it once had in the beginning, it's more fun for them to chase someone else, to try to attract and win another person because the more time you spend around them, the more your value goes down, they don't value themselves so why would they value you, they see it as though if you're willingly desiring to spend time around them then you can't be that special which is why it seems like they're always chasing people who are out of their reach or people who they believe they can't have because that's what feels special to them but as soon as they know that they can have you, they won't want you anymore, they will instantly lose interest in you, they may keep you around if you're fulfilling that emotional and financial needs but they're never going to see you in the way that they did before, they're never going to look at you like you're the prize because they know they've already got you, you're not going anywhere so they begin to take for granted, they have their eye on someone else or they may just be fantasizing about them but either way they're still cheating, they're still not being loyal because they believe that there's something better or greater than you and while they may not have physically cheated on you, a lot of times it may just be because they can't, they may have tried to cheat on you already but then they got turned down and by staying with them, you are disrespecting yourself because they're never going to respect you after that, whether you know it or not, they're always going to feel like they have that upper hand over you, they're going to feel like they're more powerful, they're never going to treat you as equal because they have this void and they have these desires and they know you're never going to be enough of them, they're never going to feel satisfied with you and they know there's nothing you can do to change that so they look at it like they're always the winner in the end because in their minds you fail to satisfy them which always leaves them in a position of power because you're associated with them, you're connected to them so they're always going to take you for granted, they're always going to look at it like if you were anything special you wouldn't want anything to do with them because they already know that they mean you know well, they've been through this many times before, they know what they're like, they know they get cold feet they lose confidence in the relationship, they lose desire and attraction towards the other person so they know it's only a matter of time until they idealise someone else which puts them in a position of power over you from the very beginning because you're unaware you don't know that you genuinely believe that you could be enough for them when deep down they already know the truth and a lot of times that's what gives them the sound realistic and superficial self-esteem it's just the fact that they know that no matter who you think you are or how much of an asset you think you're going to be to them in the long run you're going to fall short you're not going to live up to their expectations and they're going to feel pressured to give you credit to patronise you and to feed your ego to make you feel like you can be good enough for them when deep down they already know the truth as soon as they've got you they're going to want something else but they don't see it as a character flaw in their minds that makes them powerful because they can just toss you aside whenever they want to even if they're emotionally or financially tied to you they don't care and many of you are deluding yourselves into thinking that you hold some level of significance to them yes they may play along with it and they may even trick themselves into thinking that they want you because they like how that makes them feel in that moment but time reveals all and just as they lost desire and attraction towards other people before you everything is going to happen again and it will begin to affect your self-esteem you will start to feel like something is wrong with you when this person just can't be satisfied they're always going to want more and it's because they know that you don't really want them you don't really accept them and what they're looking for is someone who does accept them because they don't accept themselves and it's almost like they need permission from someone to be able to accept themselves someone who won't judge them someone who will let them be who they actually are but even then they're just going to walk all over you they're going to take you for granted and they're going to have other sources on the side you will never be the only one you're never going to feel special they're always going to overlook you unless they think they can get something out of you and in the end all you're really going to have is these moments and it was just a figment of your imagination a shared fantasy it was never real because everything they gave to you was not real all they care about is the moment and to get that they have to sell you a dream that they can never live up to and as long as you think it's real it will feel real for you but it won't ever be something that's actually grounded in reality thank you for watching if you found this video helpful please give it a thumbs up share your thoughts in the comment section hit the subscribe button to receive the notifications if you would like to support the channel you could donate a paper that me slash NARC survivor you could book a one on one with me on my website it's NARC survivor the code UK thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon


Welcome again to Think Tech, another edition of Tourism 101. We have a very special guest today that we're going to talk story with, and that's Chris Tatum. He's the president and CEO of the Hawaii Tourism Association. Chris, thank you for agreeing to be here today and being on our show. Thank you very much. Well, it's a pleasure to be here and look forward to talking about tourism. Yeah, well, let's start right from the very beginning. Let's talk about where you grew up and the question we always ask folks, where you went to school? Well, actually, my family moved here in 1965, and we never left. So I grew up in Foster Village and went to school at Radford High School. I actually went to Intermediate School at Aliamanu, and so this is home for me. And we lived here all the way through high school. I ended up going to Michigan State and then get a hotel degree and worked for Marriott for 37 years. But fortunately, Marriott brought me back here about 15 years ago, and so I was able to raise my family here too. Now, all those that remember government back in the days of Governor Arayoshi, very familiar with the name, a woman named Betty Tatum. Yeah, thank you so much for bringing that up. So my mother was a, she worked for the National Federation of Independent Business. She was a lobbyist for them for 25 years, and so she spent a lot of time in the capital, and it's really helped me in my new job. My former job with Marriott, I talked to the legislators periodically, but in this new job, I spent a lot of time at the capital championing with you on the things that are important to the industry. And my mom led the way, and she had a great reputation, and so it gave me an opportunity to get into a lot of offices that people want to talk about with mom. So thank you for bringing that up. What's your fondest memory of Radford High School? The school that also produced Bette Midler, amongst other things. Ken Neal Matalo. There's a lot of great memories. Radford was great for me. We lived right down the street from it. And I played baseball in high school. That's right.  We did all right, and it was funny you mentioned that because I was talking to, you know that Scott Chan from the stadium, we were talking about, 40 years ago was the last pre-season game in 1976. That was also the year that Scott threw his touchdown pass, and it was also the year I had my 19 in in game, all in a low stadium. A special year. Yeah, so it's a small town with a lot of great memories. Well, let's talk about your current role at Hawaii Tourism Authority. Now, what made you leave a very successful career with Marriott?  You were doing very well. You're one of the pillars of our tourism industry. I would always look to you for counsel, for advice, because you were chair of the Hawaii Lodging and Tourism Association, the chair of the Hawaii Visitors Convention Bureau, Oahu Chapter Chair, Oahu Visitors Bureau Chair. I mean, you had a lot of experience there. You were doing well. Why would you want to go into the crazy world of government? That's a good question. You know, after 37 years, I really enjoyed the industry. Marriott was a great company to work with. They took care of me and my family over that time, which gave me the basis of how I do business on taking care of people, and they'll take care of the business. Over, you know, after 37 years, you know, my wife and I, who we're talking about, our kids had grown up, moved out, and we wanted the next level of our life. So we decided I was going to retire and look at different opportunities. And then the HTA CEO job came up, and I thought this is an opportunity to hopefully not only use the experience that I have from Marriott, but also hopefully have an impact on the state. I think there's a lot of great things we can do. Tourism is a big part of the state's economy, but that's just a tax revenue. Managing tourism is what attracted me. How can we do a better job not only continuing to promote Hawaii and bring visitors in that bring in important revenue to the state, but also how do we engage the community, perpetuate the Hawaiian culture? There's a lot of great things we can do, working with the different entities throughout Hawaii, including HLTA, DLNR, HVCB. If we work together, I think we can continue to make tourism very, very successful for Hawaii, but also realize that we need to make sure we take into account the community and their quality of life. Now, when most people think of HTA, they think about the marketing mission, if you will. When you've introduced a new concept that I think is starting to resonate with folks, you talk about your primary focus, or one of your primary objectives is to manage tourism. I think that's a very important concept because there's a lot of people talking about are we reaching the point where we have too many tourists coming here? What are we doing to ensure that local people, local residents who always feel part of this industry, not just being directly employed, but everything else that goes with it? Can you elaborate on those thoughts of yours? Sure. Coming from the industry that I was in, to me it's not really that complicated because when you ran hotels, you could market and drive business, but if you didn't maintain the facility and train and support the team and improve the experience of the visitor, it would be a very short-term success. So, bringing that to the Hawaii Tourism Authority, we can market and I have enough experience, I believe, to do the right thing on marketing Hawaii, how much resources we put towards that. But if we don't reinvest into our product, and especially nowadays because with social media, everyone ends up in all the parks and the trails, the places you and I used to go to when we were kids that no one knew about before, now they're finding out about it. So, we have to reinvest in that, not only physically, but we have to have the experience and we have to educate the visitors on why those areas are important to us as residents. And we want to share that with them, but we also want them to respect where they're visiting. And I've found that if you educate the visitor about the importance of the place they're going, they do respect it and they want to do the right thing. So, hopefully as we move forward, that's really that managing piece and balance will be the important part of sustaining long-term tourism success in Hawaii. Let's talk a little bit about the importance of the Hawaiian culture because you mentioned that and I know you've been big on that. You were a strong supporter of that as an executive at Marriott and you seem to have taken that philosophy over at the Hawaii Tourism Authority. Are there any specific things that you guys are going to do that's going to make sure that those who regard the Hawaiian culture is very important? Of course we should all do in the hospitality industry and everything else. Specific initiatives that you're taking in that regard?  And then everyone reported to them. That's the first thing I changed. Now the gentleman Kalani who supports our Hawaiian, perpetuating the Hawaiian culture reports directly to me. He's now on that level. You've elevated that position. I elevated his role. So I can be more engaged and also we need to communicate that that role and responsibility is vital to the future of tourism. And I say that because not only does it give us a competitive advantage by having the Hawaiian culture as part of our thought process and how we market, but it's our obligation to do the right thing, not only for the land but for the culture and perpetuate the language and the music. Everything that makes Hawaii Hawaii that we grew up with, we need to make sure we're supporting that as a tourism industry because in the long run, that's what's going to make us successful. I know you must have everyone tugging at your sleeve here and wondering what's the process by which if you have an event and activity that you'd like to see funded through the HTA, what's the criteria that you've set up for those type of activities, whether they come from the mainland, something internationally or more importantly, someone here locally that has a really good marketing idea or I should say an event that he or she feels would warrant HTA dollars. So I mentioned Kalani and she now reports to me. The other person that now reports directly to me, her name is Caroline Anderson, her responsibility is engaging in the community and we also have a component of our responsibility is community enrichment and to answer your question, relative to anything, any activities, festivals, promotions from a perpetuating the Hawaiian culture to community engagement that will not only be positive for the visitor, but for our community. We actually have an RFP process. We do work for the state and we do have a process. You can't just put out that. No, I like that person or I like that event. I'm going to fund it. Yeah. In fact, we don't really write grants. We do contracts. And so what happens every year and we're coming on that time of year because we work off a fiscal year from July to June, we'll be starting to put our RFPs to the public and the RFPs will be broken down with the scope, both from a community enrichment sample and perpetuating the Hawaiian culture. We'll have a scope on what the requirements are and people can put in their request on requesting to be contracted for their events. And then we have a committee. Obviously on the Hawaiian culture, we have Thalani and a team of we see them as advisors to give us feedback on who we should focus on and what makes sense. And then on the community side, the same thing. And it's really important for us is that we engage HLTA, HVCB and the island chapters on making those decisions because one of the things we're going to do differently this year is the money that we put aside for those two opportunities will be split four ways. It's not even though obviously O'ahu has a lot more activity, a lot more revenue coming in. We believe it's really important from the tourism industry that the neighbor islands are as engaged as anyone. So we're just going to split it by four, put it out there to each of the islands and then the chapters and the people in those communities will be making decisions working with the counties on the programs they want us to support. You recently had a big announcement that made everybody chicken skin and feel that, man, this is the best news I've heard in a long time. And that is the announcement that the Los Angeles Rams are going to be playing a game here in August. Talk about that and all that all came about. It's very exciting. Again, you and I grown up here at the Pro Bowl here for so many years. And then actually the Rams approached us last year and they had an interest in talking about an opportunity to get more exposure and actually go after our fan base which is very, you know, I think it's very creative and very smart on their standpoint. So we talked about a number of things and they talked to us about a pre-season game. And so we went back and forth with them for a number of months and signed the deal last fall. And then yesterday we announced the actual date of August 17th and they're playing the Dallas Cowboys. So it was a great opportunity with the Rams and they're perfect for us because of that market. Our big market is on the West Coast. But then for them to bring in the Dallas Cowboys is just phenomenal. Not only is that market great out of Texas and that part of the country, but the Dallas Cowboy brand and the Rams brand, we couldn't ask for two better teams to come in from the NFL. Because you're so big on community engagement, I know that you've emphasized to the Rams that you'd like to see them doing their stay here, but also try to see what they can do to reach out to those aspiring high school players that may want to be the next Marcus Mariota, the next Tua Tonga Vai Law. Can you talk about that? Sure. Actually the Rams are the ones who first brought it up. They really feel it's important for their brand and to do the right thing in any market that they go into, to engage the community, especially the kids. How do we take the opportunity to have our pro players engage with the kids of Hawaii? They are excited about it and then I got smart and I actually asked the guy who runs HLTA that has a lot of contacts to help me in engaging with the high schools and the community. I was blown away during our press conference yesterday. We had, I think, 12 high school football coaches at the conference, along with June Jones and a lot of ex-football players, which actually I had nothing to do with. Mufi did that all and it really made a difference and show that the NFL and the Rams, the commitment from the community and from the high schools, I think it gives us an opportunity to show them that this is a great place and have an NFL game. We actually had two former Rams where they're Leo Gowas and Greg Salas. You're listening here to a talk story session that we're having with Chris Statham, the head of the White Tourism Association. We're going to take a pause for the cause and we'll be right back and more here on Tourism 101. Hey, Stan Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii and they won't let me do political commentary so I'm stuck doing energy stuff but I really like energy stuff so I'm going to keep on doing it. Join me every Friday on Stan Energyman at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place, just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. I'll see you at noon with Stan Energyman, aloha. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines, and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership, and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports, and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m., aloha. Welcome again, everybody. We have here today, we're talking started with Chris Tatum and his new responsibility as the head of the Hawaii Tourism Authority. Chris, you mentioned earlier that one of the things that you learned from your mom was how to weave her way around, how she wove her way around the Capitol, had a lot of credibility. I was with Governor Ariosi's administration at that time, and of course we all knew, that Tatum is speaking for small businesses, you need to listen. What are the challenges and issues that you are facing at the state legislature and how you're dealing with it? Sure, obviously I'll never be as good as my mom, but I did learn a lot of things from her, and her comment is always just be truthful, be candid with people, and relationships are important. So, you know, in this job, what a lot of people don't realize is, so the HTA is funded by a portion of the TAT, which comes from the hotels and transit accommodation tax. So we generate about, TAT generates about $630 million, and we get $79 million of it. But when I say we get it, the legislature gets that, and they allocate it to us, so it's the state's money. So knowing that, that's why I need to make sure that we're sharing with legislators why it's so important that they continue to fund our ability to manage tourism. So as we do that, a number of the items that are on the board, but the biggest one, to be honest with you, is transient accommodation, illegal transient accommodations. Obviously legal transient accommodations, we will continue to be part of the way that we can promote those. But if the illegal ones that are not sanctioned by the state or the city and counties, those are a challenge for us. We've gone from 8 million visitors to 10 million visitors over the last few years with no additional legal accommodations. So you can imagine when you're trying to manage tourism, and those numbers are going up and you can't control the inventory, it becomes a challenge. And we've asked the legislature and the counties, and to be honest with you, the neighbor islands have addressed it in a number of ways, and the city and county is working through it. They've got a couple of bills they're working with us on. Hopefully that would be able to have enforcement that is reasonable. At the end of the day, we're not against additional inventory. We just think I think that that decision should be made by the residents and the leaders in the legislature and the city and county, not by the platforms. If they decide to make them legal, then we will support them. Until this happens, we need to manage that because at the end of the day, if it's unlimited, there's a real demand for Hawaii. They'll keep coming and the numbers will keep going up. There are those that say, we can't do without having more accommodations since the hotels are kind of restricted in many ways of expanding or renovating or even building new accommodations. So there has to be a certain amount of rentals out there. How do you respond to that? I think there's two pieces. One is we talk about the bed and breakfast of the people that want to rent a room in their home in order to make some additional income. I don't think that's the big issue. We found that more than 80% of the illegal vacation rentals are wholly owned homes. A lot of them are owned by people who don't actually live in Hawaii. So there's an opportunity to make a lot of money. I think the important thing to answer your question is that Hawaii has to decide what we want to be. We have resort areas that we have resorts. We have the facilities and infrastructure to take care of those guests. And we have our neighborhoods that we all live in throughout the day and experience and go home at night and enjoy our neighborhoods. And the legislature and the counties and the residents have to decide, do you want Kailua to be the resort area or do you want it to be a residential area? Whatever they decide to me is what we need to support. Right now, their zone does not having the ability to do short-term rentals. And there's a reason for that historically. So however if they change their mind and decide that Lani Kai should be a resort, then that's the decision that those residents in the community need to make. But until then, those residents that live over there should be able to go home at night enjoy the neighborhood engage with their community and not have to worry about illegal transient accommodations. So what do you see as the perfect balance to strike in a legislative measure that needs to come out, especially at the county level where the enforcement and the registration and the identification of who's actually operating a TVR residential home. What's the ideal legislative piece? I think what we have to do is get control of the current situation first. Before we go back and evaluate if we're able to add additional rental inventory. And again, that's the decision made by our leaders. But we already have laws and zoning in place. And to have that enforcement put in place and follow through with that and have control of that first the leaders can decide through the community how much more they want to put in different parts of the island. So that would be the first step I think is to have the enforcement and to make sure that who is legal and illegal is clear and that we're able to enforce it in a practical way. You talked about HTA collecting or receiving $630 million of the transient accommodation tax and that the portion that goes to marketing is about $79 million. So actually of the $79 million about $45 of it goes to marketing. And then we also put about $8 million towards sports marketing which is things like the Rams. We worked with the Clippers. We're going to do Beach Volleyball. We had soccer with Pacific Cup this year. Tennis golf that help us with our branding. So we support that. And then we do about $20 million of it goes towards perpetuating the Hawaiian culture and investing in our natural resources and enriching the community. The rest, the other piece is we have a responsibility as statute to do the research and the data that comes out every month on what our occupancies are, what the rates are. That's part of our statute. So that is part of and we have a research team that does that for us. So what about the other part of the balance of that $630 million? Where is it going to? It goes to the general fund and that's, you know obviously over the years that's grown and that's what the legislators use to support other priorities for them throughout the state. And obviously they get pulled a lot of different ways on what they use that money for but it just goes into the general fund and they allocate that. Well, as you've noticed when you're in the private sector and now that you've taken this job through the years there's always been a natural tendency at the state and county level. Whenever they're short of money to fund a particular project you'll look to the tourism industry. So what's the best way to kind of say to those folks that may think that tourism should be the funding source for every project whether it has a nexus of tourism or not. What's the best answer to say be cautious about once again just taking it all from tourism because there's other challenges ahead of us in their life. Obviously they have to balance. I would tell them from the tourism standpoint we'll always share with them what other markets are doing to make sure that we're competing and if the taxes are impacting the overall cost of the vacations to be impacted. The individual traveler probably does not look at that that close when they're booking but what's important for us is to realize that we want to make sure that we also are a attractive destination for convention business. Convention business is the ideal business for us to have a base of that business because not only does it help us fill our convention center which the state owns and we'd like to get as much revenue as we can out of that but it gives us a good base of business. Visitors usually spend more outside the hotels and they're much more engaged within the resort communities and they're not as much going everywhere else because they're a little more contained on what their goal is when they come. So they're an important piece of our puzzle but as you add additional expenses to the overall package that they're offered between us and say Mexico and South America and other destinations that potentially could get her from a competitive standpoint. Chris what's the tourism outlook going forward? We've had seven straight years of increases in tourism arrivals. Some folks think that maybe we're going to start to flatten out. Some say no, no, no, they're going to continue to come in. There's announcement at Southwest Airlines now it's going to bring people to Hawaii. What's your take on that? I clearly don't have a crystal ball I couldn't do when I was in Marriott and I can't do it but my initial when I look at the pace as I see the information that I'm getting the first quarter of this year is probably down a little bit but I will tell you the first quarter last year was way up so it's relative to you know if you take back a couple years it's still not terrible it's still in good shape. Going past April then you've got the A380s coming in from ANA which will bring Japanese customers which are very important that market is very important to us so we want to continue to grow that market I think we're going to I think we're not going to have double digit growth that we've had in the past it's just not realistic but as we look at how we again going back to managing tourism that's really the measurement I see the measurement access moving forward is resident sentiment visitor satisfaction we know we can drive business but those other pieces are very important as we move forward well our guest today has been Chris Tatum as you can see he comes with a plethora of ideas and initiatives that he wants to embark upon we need to bring you back on this show Chris because we didn't even touch upon a wonderful new initiative that he's doing to create more opportunities for our young people to be engaged in the hospitality industry and that scholarship opportunities with people in high school and the community colleges to be able to pursue their dream as a result of a partnership that we're developing between HTA and HLTA Chris thank you very much for being on the show you're doing a wonderful job you are a breath of fresh air and certainly someone who's been a veteran of the industry I can tell you right now I'm excited by the prospects of Chris Tatum being there and all the wonderful things he's doing for Hawaii Thank you Mofi, appreciate it