Okay. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Matt Cannon and welcome to the Tomcat Center spring innovation showcase. I'm really happy to see a great turnout today and really excited to introduce you to our presenters very shortly. Let me just give a quick primer to this event for those of you who may be joining a showcase for the first time. So this is our actually our fifth innovation showcase. And in these events, we feature three teams who are early stage startup companies. And they have, they have two things in common. The first is that their business and their product has the potential to have a major impact on energy or sustainability. And the second is that they have been part of the Tomcat Center innovation transfer program here at Stanford University. If you're not familiar with that program, I would really encourage you to check out our website. Basically we support innovators in the Stanford community students staff faculty who nucleate around innovation or an invention with the potential to impact energy and sustainability and seek to commercialize that through creating a new venture. The numbers really speak for themselves. It's been a very successful program. It's been going on for about nine years. We've supported over 90 teams. The vast majority of which are startup companies in various stages, developing amazing products that impact a very broad spectrum of really important problems. So, so please check that out. You can find a link. I will put a link up in the chat if you want to learn more. So today we're going to hear a brief presentation about 10 minute presentation from each team. And then there'll be time for for Q&A about five minutes for Q&A. We really have two goals. So one is really to hear from our teams and to be inspired by what they're doing. And the other is to make connections. So I would encourage you to put questions in the chat as you listen to the presentations. I will do my best to accommodate questions, but very often what happens is that the presenters can follow up with you and hopefully that leads to a further conversation. So we really want to make connections as much as possible. So our teams today are tackling three very different areas with three very different technologies. So we have the cold chain, wireless charging and nature based carbon removal. We'll start with the cold chain and the team is called ARTIC. It's Hannah Sieber and Mark Langer. ARTIC designs and manufacturers reusable battery powered cold chain shipping and storage containers that offer a more sustainable alternative to refrigerants and can reduce spoilage across many different value chains and several different industries. Just a sort of a fun fact to prime the presentation here. A recent study of grocery stores found that 86% of their scope one and scope to greenhouse gas emissions come from refrigerants and energy use associated with that. So Hannah and Mark, thanks so much for joining us and I'll turn it over to you. Thank you so much for being here. And so just a quick introduction to us. I'm Hannah, I'm wrapping up my MBA and my master's in environmental resources at Stanford. And prior to this, a brand different company in the energy storage space. Mark here is an electrical computer engineer, Carnegie Mellon. And together we have about two decades experience and transportation and logistics, which is what ultimately gave us the initial insights into this market. Let's talk about how the cold chain works today. The cold chain or any product is temperature sensitive, and needs to say a temperature all the way from a factory through planes trains cold warehouses, all the way to an end user. In fact, most products need to stay within one degree Celsius stability through this entire chain. One of the reasons is things spoil. Things might spoil because of mechanical failures, because of labor shortages, because of increasing natural disasters, or just because of human error. But what that means is that product spoil all across the value chain to put this in perspective in the medical field, two to 10% of medical goods spoil or $35 billion of losses. To make sure that numbers even higher 17% of post harvest produce spoils are almost 60 billion globally. One in two medical products is expected to ship via the cold chain next year. And if we've moved that spoilage from 17% down to 1% we would actually feed another billion people on the agricultural side. In addition to the economic impacts, the climate impacts are massive. According to the most recent IPCC report refrigeration will be the largest cause of greenhouse gases within the next decade. And when you take refrigeration and food waste we're talking about 160 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. As we start to think about how we address this industry, there's there's sort of three main points here. First off, this is a hugely growing industry been relatively stagnant for about the last two decades and then obviously with a lot of growth in, you know, direct to consumer grocery shipments and in medical and biopharma investments. You were 23 year over year growth in the industry, and ultimately what we're really coming up against is the fact that this is a very capex intensive industry which is point number two. Demand is up pacing supply we talked with a number of customers where, you know, even if you're, you know, large company that's doing grocery shipments, you literally can't find a warehouse that has any more availability to, you know, store your products, you know, hold on to them and sort of a depot configuration before you ship directly to the store that really depends highly on you investing a lot more capex expenditure on creating that infrastructure. So currently that means you have to buy refrigerated truck trailers, you have to buy, you know, heavy duty freezers usually walk in freezers for the your warehouses or even pull the entire warehouse in certain instances. There's a lot of capex costs in order to make that work.  Emissions are becoming really important, you know, reporting is an is important not just in in order to meet, you know, internal mandates in terms of emission standards but also externally in terms of signaling to consumers that companies are doing the right thing for the environment. And we've seen this sort of across the board, even in very high polluting industries such as airliner airlines, where the companies are fighting to sort of get resources to reduce their climate impact because it actually does have consumer impacts about which product they end up choosing. So really what we're starting with is our first container. This is a smaller size where we're working with this is really meant for medical and biopharma shipment so these are particularly cold down to negative 25 degrees C. And we can maintain that for multiple days in transit. We're really viewing this as more of a leasing model on the business side. So, essentially giving them the same cost on a monthly lease, as they would spend on a single shipment. We have more volume, and obviously we can be used multiple times during that month. So as soon as you use us on one shipment, you're already, you know, 3x savings but you know if you use us three times during the month then that becomes nine. And the one really cool thing is as I was sort of mentioning along the cold chain. There's a lot of instances where something might arrive at a warehouse that may not actually be space, even if, you know, you've already accepted the shipment. And the boxes themselves can actually use this dynamic storage on site. So, yes, there's a battery pack for cooling them down while they're in the supply chain itself and they're moving through it. But if it arrives, for example at a hospital or at a warehouse that actually is currently full up, you can just plug this into a law port and we can cool indefinitely. And then the last thing is we're building in a full IOT platform on top of this so you can use a phone or web app to then control and manage multiple units, track them see what's going on do things like regulatory reporting through that platform, which currently has been like a whole, you know, one off shipment that they have to do every couple of months to prove to regulatory, you know, advisors that were they're actually meeting standards but they can do that with live data with our units. Across the board, as I was sort of mentioning everybody is sort of fed up with the way that the cold chain currently works. So everybody from like custom sale manufacturers that are shipping, you know, maybe 10 or 12 vials at a time, but they're super high value. You know, this is something sort of the end result and project they've worked on for a couple of months to, you know, organs one thing we found out that was really crazy is that 10% of all kidneys that are arriving to a major hospital in New York, are actually arriving either damaged or in some, you know, basically have spoiled during even the couple of hours that they were in transit so sort of across the board. There's a lot of pain points in terms of spoilage in terms of being able to get more warehousing space all that kind of stuff that we can sort of solve with a single product that really allows people to sort of shift as if it wasn't a cold good, as if it was a book or anything else. And so just a little bit about our track and where we are so far. Mark and I started working on this late last year, and did dozens of customer interviews. We applied for Tom cat grant, which we received and built our at home prototype getting down to negative 12 degrees Celsius. Since then we've closed seed funding. We're using that to hire a few engineers, get our manufacturing setup, as well as getting set up as a B Corp right now we're set up as a benefit Corp. And we are plunge. We are planning to launch pilots in q4 of this year with a full launch in q1 of next year. So that leads us to where we're at things that we would love help from or if anyone on this call has ideas, we are looking for pilot customers who are actively recruiting pharmacies, labs, biopharma companies or food delivery companies that might be interested in working with us any company that's shipping temperature sensitive products. We're actively hiring we're right now we're hiring for a great thermal and mechanical engineer to join us at our office here in San Mateo, and we will be looking for an operations manager later this summer. And finally, industry experts, if you know senior people in biopharma clinical trials and hospital systems that you think we should know, we would love to hear about that. Thank you all. Great, thank you, Hannah and Mark. Firstly, let me just say really impressive trajectory is really short, short timeline you guys have made amazing progress. Can you tell us just a little bit more about how the technology works.  Can you tell us a little bit more about how yours works for the market that you highlighted. Yeah. So, so there's sort of two, two modes there's, there's either something that you might be used to from from a consumer point of view, if you use like hello fresh.  That's 20 pounds of dry ice that they're putting in one of those boxes, just to carry like 13 or so vials. So that's status quo number one. So number two is sort of the heavy capex investment in the refrigerator trucks and refrigerator warehouses. So we're sort of tackling those in different different products the first one like I said is really meant for those lower temperature bio biopharma and medical shipments, then as we scale up, you know, we're not especially is removing towards agriculture we don't need to go as low as 25 so you know those were really focused more on refrigerated and and frozen and you know bigger sizes from there. And then, you know, in terms of the technology itself so we're removing refrigerants because we're using thermoelectric cooler so it's just, you know, just similar magnetic materials that sort of create a hot and cold side on the unit and are really, really good at cooling very quickly so there's not a lot of prequel time that sort of stuff. They're not the most efficient, you know, they're not as reason why you don't see them in a track system is that they're not as efficient as a compressor. But we can sort of, we can deal with that issue a little bit more since we were highly controlling the environment that it's in. So we're vacuum insulating the environment. And so, you know, we can optimize our own environment to deal with the fact that we're not using pressure systems but we're also then, you know, if it gets dropped in transit and something really does break. We're not going to be releasing refrigerants and on on anybody you have a hazardous material on board so it is not a benefit there. Okay, thank you. And how, so how big is the system that you that you showed for your first product. Yeah, so that that system is pretty small. So the goal that is really to fit about 36 standard vials inside one of those boxes, then the next size is, if you think about it in terms of like a large tote bag that sort of the internal space of the next one. So the full size one is more meant for larger agricultural shipments that would head on like a pallet size. Okay. And what sort of scum from one of our audience members so what kind of range are you looking at for these different sizes in terms of time and distance. And with anything that you're dealing with with thermal you're you're dealing with differences in longevity, based off of temperature that you're trying to maintain right. So, you know, the difference between ambient and the internal temperature makes a huge difference in terms of longevity. And the negative 25 I think I'm trying to remember I think it's like five or six days at that temperature, you do frozen. We're more at like 15 refrigerators like 20 and then chilled is like 30 or so days, and then you know as you scale up a little bit. Obviously that's it gets a little bit worse because you're pulling a larger space, but we're also not going as low on the temperature so we can still do about about like five days at frozen, even at that scale and and obviously better once again it refrigerated and then chill. And that's up a single charge of that's on a single charge. Well, and that's, you know we're keeping under the Department of Transportation has a hundred watt hour maximum for being able to fly one of these units. So we're keeping under that in terms of the battery pack, but in terms of ground shipping shipments where we know that we're going to go longer distances or, you know, have a longer time scale on the ground. And we know that we're going to ship only through ground, we can actually expand that about three fold. Okay. So I'm thinking about markets and I mean, obviously many different targets here for you guys. And I understand why you're starting in the sort of bio in the pharmaceuticals first but if you think about food, and you mentioned making these larger containers. What are sort of the first customers is it grocery stores is it sort of the cold chain for the for those distributors or and then you mentioned you know that a lot of shopping, particularly in the past couple years has gone to, you know, at home delivery of groceries I can't tell you how many cold packs I've thrown out over the past two years or so. What's your business model, how do you envision going after those. Right. And so on the you know food and agriculture side we're starting with grocery stores generally than those that have integrated supply chains that are not working with 3PLs but are running their logistics in house, a particular interest to us or grocery stores that also have pharmacy so that are fairly large rx business. Within that up the chain we're actually looking at distributors so distribution anyone that's doing politicized distribution of produce food delivery is a really interesting spot but also complicated. So we get to the returns element right so getting a picking a unit backup from an end customer. We've spoken with a ton of food delivery companies, many of whom are wrestling with this on their own because they recognize customers dislike the wastefulness and it's actually a selling proposition for customers. And so with food delivery, you know we will get there, but it's something that is top of mind that it changes the business model a little from a B2B to a B2B to C model. And then to answer your question on the model right it's a leasing model right now. And so you would pay a monthly fee, and that's for access to both the hardware and the software side and we didn't talk as much about the software is given the length of this presentation. But the opportunity to do your missions tracking your reporting to API into any database or federal regulation regulatory database, as well as to help you meet business KPIs and to be able to basically optimize network flows and understand where and when you're shipping. That is all of key importance and that will be part of the leasing model as well. Fantastic. And then when you when you think about sort of scaling and having a lot of these containers, you know, in a truck or in a plane or whatever. Are there challenges with sort of the heat, the thermal management as you as you pack these together and can you take advantage of the software side to manage that. Yeah, so, you know, we're being really smart on the control side, if I can say so myself. What we're trying to do is work with the best installation possible because the best installation possible also gives us the least amount of heat output right so like we're talking about an enclosed space. If you've got, if you've got a really highly insulated area you have to put less power into it to keep it at that stable temperature right so in terms of our heat. We can do that with with natural convection we don't need like fans or anything on top. It's sort of that level of heat that we're sort of putting out into the environment. We've got a whole like venting system that essentially gives us some air buffer room that would give us a number of hours before the ambient temperature even in that space gets above anything that we would be concerned about in terms of, you know, hurting the efficiency of the cooling system, anything around that but you know the long run, you know, most of these, these units are not going to be in situations where they're going to experience, you know, an ambient temperature beyond like 30 or 40 degrees C. And we can do, in most situations, well beyond 60 C and still be able to cool effectively. So, you know, we've got a lot of pepper on that side and have been, you know, thoughtful about the way that we create space around the heat, heat exhaust in order to manage the fact that we might be stuck in a truck for 12 hours 24 hours, so on. Fantastic. Well, I want to thank you both again for sharing Arctic with us. And I really wish you the best and that's really exciting trajectory so so thanks for being here. Thank you. Thank you. And this is actually a rare occasion in the innovation showcase where I think, at least it seems to me at a high level there's a, there's a potential opportunity for for two teams to maybe connect so it's we're going from from Arctic to to this from the cold chain to wireless charging with the resident link. And this is we're joined by Grayson Zuloff is the founder of resident link. So resident link is developing wireless charging systems that eliminate the most expensive component and conventional wireless chargers and actually improve the efficiency as well. Many different applications one could envision ranging from medical to transportation just in the medical space I was astonished to see this. Yeah, so for medical devices, 5% of for implanted medical devices that that resident link is targeting 5% of the patients with those devices die each year from infections from the wires or the battery replacements. I'm Grayson. It's great to have you here. And we're excited to hear about resident link. Perfect. Thanks so much professor. Yeah, I'm Grayson Zuloff. I'm one of the co founders and the CEO here at resident link and just want to thank Danica Brian the whole Tom cat community for having us here as, as you'll kind of see in our story. It's impossible for me to extricate the story of resident link the story of kind of spinning it out of Stanford and my research from Tom guy who actually funded me from day one of my PhD we were supposed to build great DC DC converters. So I had a bunch of problems with these new wide band caps and conductors and Tom cat supported us all the way through spinning this out into a company. Five years later I think we've been working together for for about six years now. So our resident link we're building, as Matt said breakthrough wireless charging permission critical power. The short story and I won't spend too much time here on the technology is that we have a breakthrough innovation that fundamentally changes the achievable performance with wireless charger so you can think of a wireless charger. You've taken a conventional charger and you pulled apart that transformer, put a big air gap in the middle. And now you need to figure out how to recreate the performance of a transformer that's actually coupled together tightly. So those are what what people some call antennas the coils, basically the things that convert the electrical energy into that magnetic field to go across the air gap through a fundamentally new way of building these coils that actually my co founders invented at Dartmouth college called the MSRS. And these get five to 10 X lower losses than conventional technologies. So we can do five to 10 X faster charging we can do bigger air gaps, smaller sizes better misalignment higher efficiency and lower cost all of the above so it's a great technology rare to get kind of this order of magnitude improvement in the hardware. We demonstrated this at Stanford with Tom Katz support, and then we sat down and we're like, Oh man does anyone actually care about high performance wireless power. So I still remember the day we demonstrated this in one's lab my PI's lab, we went to Cooper and we're like okay let's list all the places where we could use wireless power to PhD students, you're like okay consumer electronics that's kind of a weird one let's color it in red. Okay induction cooking that's basically wireless power maybe we'll use that. And then my background's in commercial electric vehicles that's actually how I got excited about it originally. You can see we're like okay maybe a room but room but could use wireless power. And then we have big question marks medical underwater clean room, lighting, all of the above, trying to really figure out where people actually care about high performance power. I think we're lucky now for years since we founded the company to have determined that wireless power is important for places where you need mission critical power delivery. So we're working across a number of different markets where people have known that wireless power make a huge difference, but haven't been able to deliver the performance that they need to have it make sense for these. In the medical device market you know people have been working literally since 1965 to get wireless power to certain products here, and just haven't been able to deliver the efficiency to eliminate the wires and save thousands of lives every year. In consumer electronics it was Apple's first ever publicly announced product that was subsequently canceled because wireless power so hard, people want to go to portless phones, but it's really difficult to get the charging speed and this limited form factor. So then we go to EV is kind of why why I'm here for for the climate impact how can we accelerate electrification through wireless charging, but it's just too expensive to deploy beyond ultra luxury today. I mean these are huge opportunities right medicals about a billion dollar charging market, all the way up to to 10s of billions of dollars in the electric vehicle market defined properly. So today, after many years that we're making progress and we're winning every single one of these markets, making wireless charging the default for the next generation of medical devices consumer electronics and electric vehicles. So in medical devices we actually just last week cross double digit customers, and this is just one case study from one of our biggest customers here. So again 40 years of development $25 million spent with competitors at the end of the day just holding the bag with a product that was 10 times too hot to ever get FDA approval. We've delivered the alpha units we've been working with them for three years now, eight times lower implant losses completely eliminated power conversion stages integrated data into the wireless thing. And this huge company's principal engineer saying it wasn't our first attempt which is kind of the understatement of the century it'd been 40 years of attempts. I think 70 key members I think 70 came to our last milestone presentation five other competitors nailed every milestone they're going to market, and we're growing in this medical field to truly make implantables and there's more and more things inside our body that are electrically powered to make rechargeables the default solution there there's really no excuse. These makers neuro stimulators heart pumps insulin pumps should not be wirelessly recharge for a non invasive way to deliver power. In smartphones and consumer electronics, you know there's been a lot of press about how an efficient wireless charging is there, we get two to three times lower losses. And then we drop in replacement same electrical characteristics same mechanical characteristics operating at the standard, and you can see here on the right. It's a thermal image for a conventional phone and for conventional coil in a phone, and a resident link coil in a you can see if ambience 25 degrees it's about twice as high at the same power level so we've got wrapping up studies with some of the leading smartphone OEMs in the world, and moving that toward commercialization. I'm hoping you'll see a resident link charger in your phone in less than two years, paving up the way toward portless phones where we can have fully sealed phones with wireless charging that's as fast and as efficient as our wired chargers to that. And the big ones EVs are goals to get small batteries on EVs with 24 seven uptime for these fleets by integrating charging into the short stops that already exist during operation. Starting in the warehouse space there lift trucks primarily for cliffs and other other styles of that vehicle, and then growing into this autonomous vehicle and electric vehicle world with a high power charger that's coming out later this year so we're working with people like Shell like NREL through the game changer program the Air Force and a number of leaders in both the tier one tier two world, and then in the electric vehicle and autonomous vehicle world to get this deployed and again you can see how much smaller our systems are much lower costs, and I believe this one also has 30% faster charging so that that order of magnitude hardware game is is deployed differently in different applications, but it's it's uniquely powerful in each of them. We built an amazing team we just crossed 30 people, all fundamental scientists on the founding team and we've kept growing that people have left Tesla to join GE. Apple plug power people graduating from with their PhD is from Stanford ETH Michigan professors at Harvard Medical School we're really trying to build a team that's committed to delivering on the promises of wireless charging and truly delivering on the promises within the bounds of physics here, unlike some of the promises that we've seen in the last decade. So really building the future mission critical power we have a double digit enterprise customers that we're lucky to have trusting us to power their next generation of devices and vehicles were backed by some incredible investors we closed our seed round. The end of 2021 led by the engine with participation from some great investors scout, Emerson Volta third sphere and urban awesome fresh tracks capital, and we're really we've were the trusted recharging player in the medical market today. And we're really excited to bring that and see what we can do to have a big impact on climate in the mobility market. So I'll stop there and yeah we're building breakthrough wireless charging permission critical power and always open for for people that are excited about wireless charging and are hiring really across the team today so Tom cat thanks so much for the support and thanks for having us today. Grayson thank you that was awesome. Really amazing to see all the progress there. So I guess I want to start so that you told us how you know the industry's been trying for 40 years to make this happen. Your device looks so simple what can you give us a sense of what the breakthrough was always a design concept is it materials innovation or what was the nature of the breakthrough to make this possible. Absolutely. So most people build these coils with something called let's fire, which is this multi stranded conductor that's braided together and they basically wrap that in a loop and then attach it to a separate capacitor. And what you want to do with let's fire is the performance goes up as you make each of those strands smaller and smaller, but the cost goes up exponentially so basically you're stuck around 100 microns depending on how much you're going to pay. Even with these foil layers we can build them in single digit micron thicknesses so you basically have that similar mitigation of proximity skin effects but with 100 x smaller conductors, you can call it. Or it's some materials because we're combining the inductor and after and doing single block or really the fundamental driver is getting much thinner strand diameter, you could call it for let's wire. Okay. And, and so the, the, what are the major sort of challenges. You showed all of these, all these potential markets as the challenge really in sort of manufacturing and scaling manufacturing or is it. Do you basically already have the design concept you need for the EV and it's just a matter of, you know, getting the other side to get the compatible hardware so you can start rolling this out. I think we spend most of our time trying to answer that question that I started with where do people really care about high performance wireless power like where can we make the biggest difference and then figuring out which of these metrics we should be optimizing is it's speed of charging. Is it efficiency you know what, what should we be building towards so it's takes we're relatively fast to kind of changing the platform application and size and power levels. And then it's, you know, basically putting the time in with OEM since we're asking for OEM level integration so people want to see the proof points, they want to kick the tires they want to fire up with that. Okay. And it's, I guess presumably it's it's easiest to get traction sort of with the medical devices because the, the products are smaller and and I guess the price points much higher for those for those applications as well. Yeah, I think in medical devices, you know, the it's in some ways the hardest place to get traction right like we're literally powering hearts people don't turn that over to a startup lightly. I think the reason we're trusted there's because people know wireless power is literally life or death it's a huge quality of life thing for their patients, and then they don't have internal resources. And they don't believe they have the ability to attract people to build great wireless charging system so someone like Abbot and Medtronic are amazing at everything in medical devices but they don't have a dedicated wireless charging team like you might see in the consumer electronics or in some of the other markets that we worked in. So we're someone that helps them get to market faster with less risk, more likely to be successful and in the end deliver something to their patients that improves our quality of life. And, and how so how well aligned do the components have to be for for charging in these in these systems. Yeah, it really depends on the market like in EVs we have, you know, up to a 10 inch gap and six inch misalignment in something like medical devices you're looking at centimeters, like up to six centimeter implant depth, a few centimeter misalignment and there you're really trying to make it easy for the patient to align it but that's a lot different use case than it might be for you parking your car say so we really optimize it based on on the application. And the charging frequency in a medical device with what does that look like. Yeah, in medical devices it's all over the map. And so something that we spent a lot of time is optimizing the frequency, you want to go higher to get better wireless charging performance but you have to balance that with that you get more tissue losses a higher frequency so they're, you know, optimize is in the megahertz range, but then some customers are above that summer below that and we work with our customers to optimize that for their application. And how often would the patient need to need to recharge really depends on the application so some of our customers say we don't want any batteries inside the body we need continuous power. There's you know like a pacemaker you're only needing to recharge in on the time scale of years. And then we have ones on months and weeks and days, kind of everywhere in between. Okay. And just from a sort of business level question so I know you have locations in multiple cities and you're chasing. You have multiple very very different markets you showed, you know, incredible team you put together. How do you keep everybody. How do you manage that right and and how do you sort of run in parallel for all those different applications and different parts of the world. I'd be lying if I said it was easy I think we're one of those companies that is trying to see what this future of remote and hybrid work might look like and while building a hardware product so we have lab headquarters in Burlington, Vermont. We've got people all over the world with hubs in San Francisco and Zurich and then a number of fully remote teammates. And so we're doing the best we can trying to build a great team, great culture and doing it while letting people live where they want. And the idea is that so you would, you will manufacture all of your of your own hardware ultimately or would you eventually go to some contractors to. We have partners on the coil side and then we work with contract manufacturers on the electronic side. Okay. Well Grayson this is just really been a tremendous success story to watch certainly from the from the Tomcats perspective, and it's really inspirational to hear about everything that you're going after today so so thanks, thanks so much for sharing that with us. Thank you guys for the support it's been foundational. Okay, so our final team is called working trees and so now we're transitioning to a very different technology going after carbon credits and carbon removal. And he's really trying to deploy trees as a carbon removal entity where the interests of farmers and climates where the interests of farmers and the climate overlap. And we are so just a couple of interesting facts to sort of set the stage for them. First of all, but the median farming operation in the US is losing money. So, so farming is a, as a very challenging business. There's a the voluntary carbon credit market has has blossomed in the past two years it's tripled in the past two years to sub to surpass surpass $1 billion. So this is really where working trees sees a tremendous opportunity to to find something that wins that's a win for for farmers and for, and for the climate as well so so john foyer and Akash, Hamid, our co founders of working trees and thanks for for being here. Thank you. Thank you for having us and thanks to Tom cat for all the wonderful support since the very early days so we're happy to be here and grateful to be here. My name is john and I'm a dual degree graduate student studying land use and agriculture plus getting an MBA, and my co founder Akash is here. He's a PhD in geophysics and remote sensing. And we got together about a year ago with a shared interest in trying to uncover okay trees get so much press and tree planting in particular, you see in newspapers, almost every week but when you look at the facts, it hardly happens at all certainly not at scale. And as we've gone through our exploration with the support of Tom cat. We've founded working trees with the mission of, as Matt said, growing trees where the interests of farmers and the climate overlap. We think there are ways to address the bears that preventing it from happening at scale and now that we're a couple hundred interviews in many hundreds of interviews with with farmers. We're at the point where we've launched the first agroforestry carbon project in the US and we're happy to tell you more about that journey so far and where we're headed. So to start off, I do think it makes sense to just quickly walk through what is a carbon market to make sure on the same page. I'm sure all of us have heard of a company that has made a net zero commitment. This means there's a date by which they plan to get to effectively zero emissions. Companies will first do that by becoming more efficient reducing their own emissions, but for nearly all companies there's some amount left over at that point they can pay other entities to pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere for them. So that transaction is all carbon market is, and we've spoken to a couple dozen buyers and there are two big takeaways on on the needs they have in this market. This is quantity. As has been alluded to, it's exploding and actually demand is exploding and there's no way for these companies to actually source the volume that they need to hit their commitments. And the second is quality the biggest fear they have is that they'll end up on the front page of Bloomberg with a greenwashing claim that the money they put into a project didn't actually drive real climate action. At the same time, you have to make it work for the farmers that manage the majority of the habitable land on earth, and in our many hundreds of conversations with farmers to two big takeaways on on the needs worth noting. The first is financial, as mentioned, typical farms, even in the US really struggled to break even. And second, because farmers are on the land, they're most exposed to environmental extremes things like extreme heat changes and precipitation pattern patterns. The good news is, amazingly, incorporating trees into agricultural systems actually addresses the needs of both buyers and farmers. On the higher side on quant on the quantity need agroforestry is actually the largest agricultural climate solution we have. And there is a, an actual practice a particular practice of agroforestry called silvo pasture, which just means planting trees on pasture that leading carbon think tank project drawdown has sized on par with rooftop solar. A small niche application this is massive because there are billions of acres where this can be done because pastures though, and livestock grazing is the largest land use in the world. Second on quality buyers can rest easy because if they can use satellite energy to look back a couple of decades and verify that a particular piece of land has been cropland or pasture land for decades. They can know that the money they put in in terms of carbon finance is what actually drove action. On the farmer side, financially, if you can enable farmers to tap into carbon revenue that can make them whole. And environmentally trees have a wonderful set of benefits that can be provided to farmers, big ones for livestock growers like shade and feed, but they also include things like greater water retention infiltration as well as improved soil health so sounds too good to be true. So now we have to dive into why this isn't happening today. And honestly, the big reason actually has to do with cash flow. So in order to establish trees, say trees on pasture, it costs hundreds up to $1000 per acre to get trees in the ground and yet the benefits we just talked through whether it's shade feed or even theoretically carbon are years in the future. Now this is interesting, because maybe you can use some financial engineering with carbon in order to overcome this, this cash flow imbalance but that does not work with how markets work today. It costs a ton of money to go out and quantify how much carbon is stored in these systems. How it works today is boots on the ground, usually two separate crews are going out with clipboards and a tape measure. And so I'll hand it over to Akash to explain how we how we fix these problems. Thank you, John. So given that farmers are walking their lands anyway, you know, almost at a daily cadence, we saw a significant an unrealized opportunity to equip them with the tools that they need to acquire the measurements needed to estimate carbon sequestration in a cheaper and more efficient and equally as accurate way as the status quo. So farmers acquiring these measurements themselves eliminates the cost of the manual monitoring and verification that john just mentioned. The cost savings can go back into the pockets of farmers and also benefit working trees. Moreover, the data itself is a competitive advantage. More data can improve our ability to remotely sense carbon stocks in these types of ecosystems and move us toward a fully remote verification solution, which creates kind of a self reinforcing flywheel. Now, by providing financing before looking purchasing agreements, we can incentivize the farmers to take agroforestry take on agroforestry projects at zero down and realize their benefits, both in terms of revenue production and the ecosystem service co benefits that we just mentioned. So we've started to develop our technology with the support of Tomcat and other grant funders. And so here you're looking at some screenshots from our application which is nearing a first release. And so what it does is provide a way to cheaply and accurately measure the parameters that you need to estimate woody biomass carbon. So these parameters are tree height tree diameter and the species type, and we can use these along with satellite data to cheaply and accurately extrapolate carbon estimates over large areas. And so by using the app instead of the manual measurements. We dramatically reduce the time and cost without sacrificing accuracy. And we also have this very highly auditable and transparent data set, which makes our buyers feel good about the credits that they're real. So this is super exciting. But is it scalable. Let us look at the total market sizes for the carbon credits in the US and as well as agroforestry projects. So, as Matt mentioned the market size for carbon credits has tripled in the last three years alone and we're likely to see continued price appreciation. And but even with current market prices, there's still a sizable opportunity in the US here, upwards of two and a half billions of dollars in the US agroforestry market alone. And as john mentioned, we're targeting a specific agroforestry practice called silver pasture, just the practice of cultivating trees on pasture, and we're looking at the US southeast as our first target market, do a strong local connections and the added bonus of a favorable market for fast tree growth. So at a high level this looks promising, but everything really starts on the ground with the farmers themselves. So it's really my pleasure to introduce you to our partner producer lick skillet farm. There are family owned operation more than 100 years old located in Jefferson County in eastern Tennessee, they run cattle grow chickens and grow other ag products, and they're incredibly passionate about being stewards of the environment and doing their work in the fight against climate change. And they're also excited to be the project ambassadors for us as our first pilot producers, and kind of realize the benefits both in terms of economics, core production, as well as the ecosystem services that trees on pasture provide, and their collaboration and support will allow us to tap into the network effect that's so strong among farming communities. So to provide you some additional details about the business model handed back to john. So, the first step is how do we, how do we find the millions of lick skillet farms that are out there, and we kind of think about this in two steps, awareness and the decision process on the awareness side across alluded to some of it which is farmer to farmer is huge we were already seeing that with our pipeline build up for the next season, next planting season early 2023. But we also are going through trusted networks including cattleman's associations in the USDA, as well as extension programs. Farmers are aware of the benefits. The next step is to decide what and how to plant. And at this point, we're really happy to say we're developing strong partnerships with technical service providers, you can think of these folks as consultants to to farmers and ranchers. And we find up massive partner in Virginia Tech extension as well as a handful of other for profit TSP's and I definitely want to highlight this because we think this is how we get to scale, not necessarily us going door to door farm to farm but working with folks who already have strong relationships and connections. And quickly in terms of how how you convey the value problem in terms of economics there's probably too much on this slide for for how much time we have but the key point here is, we can make this $0 down for the farmer. This is for a representative farm 400, excuse me 300 acres. There's a bit of cost as we mentioned to begin with. This is more than offset with incentives that are in place from the USDA, as well as the carbon for contracts that we mentioned.  And we think this is what will unlock adoption at scale, much in the same way guaranteed offtake and power purchase agreements worked for rooftop solar. Now our business model is to take a 25% revenue share on all carbon payments and so. Yeah, it also works out and creates value for us. So the competitive landscape there's a lot, there's a lot here but we are the first carbon agroforestry project in the US and so we're the only ones that run project development and monitoring and verification particularly for agroforestry projects. Just to point out our differentiation versus some of the measurement monitoring and verification players that you may have heard of like Pichama and Silvera. We're getting by collecting the ground truth data that we think is crucial for running high quality, high accuracy carbon projects, because without that you're guessing on things like species and wood density and the different morphologies of different trees so I think, even in that space it's a differentiated approach. And with that I'll hand it back over to the crash to bring us home. So we're really excited about this we are united by a shared passion for both evoking positive change both in terms of climate change and in terms of rural economic development. John and I both have previous startup experience and super complimentary skill sets, him being an MBA students and me being a technical minded person. We have an incredible team of advisors at Stanford, NASA, the University of Maryland, and one of the world's leading solar pasture scientists at Virginia Tech, and we're super excited about our growing number of partner farmers in the US southeast. So, where we are right now. We're the first agroforestry carbon project in the US we planted more than 500 trees in the last few months in Tennessee and Arkansas we have a guaranteed fire, who's agreed to off take the credits that we're going to generate. We will fully functional phone app capable of measuring out everything that we need to measure. And with the support of Tomcat, we will be certifying our project with a carbon registry to take the next step this summer. So, briefly, just to summarize, agriculture is the largest land use on earth and nature based solutions like silver pasture have a huge and unrealized mitigation potential that we are working to scale up. So we're really looking for help connecting to corporate buyers looking to purchase high quality carbon offsets, and we're also looking for potential funding opportunities. So thank you so much for your attention and we're happy to take any questions. Thank you so much, John and Akash awesome teamwork on the presentation as well so maybe I'll start with the with the big picture so and I think you touched on this but the total opportunity in terms of tons of carbon removed and so what is that if we just could find ourselves to the US and then and then how basically how many trees do you have to plant and what's your, what's your timeline, you know, how quickly do you want to be able to get there. Yeah, so in terms of the potential just in the US for for civil pasture alone, you're looking at close to 200 million tons. It's sizable and that's limited to pasture that is in locations that were historically forested. There's almost almost 100 million acres that meet that criteria, then when you go global, the potential impact of civil pasture alone is a multi gigaton per year approach. I do want to emphasize our approach, we're prioritizing civil pasture for all the reasons Akash mentioned, but it will work for other agroforestry practices including things like alley cropping which you basically put rows of trees within annual crops or repairing buffers things like that. Yeah, and in terms of the scale of the trees I guess it's kind of implied in the 100 million acres here in the US and depending on the installation of civil pasture you may do 50 to upwards of 100 trees per acre. Okay, okay that's what I was getting at, yeah so when you sign a farmer on, they say they have a couple hundred acres, you're looking to get that person to commit to thousands of trees I guess ultimately on their lands. Yeah, and just to give you the image, it isn't a full forest for a lot of reasons you need to keep the grass so maybe 25 to 50% canopy coverage is where you want to end. Okay, and then the monitoring, so can you give us a little bit more insight into the farmer has to go out twice a year or something like that and they have to go tree to tree or what's involved with that. So our app actually designs a little sampling routine for the farmers to collect the measurements. And yeah, actually the status quo is they currently acquire measurements you know go out with clipboards and tape measures every five years. So we're actually asking the farmers to go once a year, and it takes about a couple of hours three to four hours to acquire the amount of measurements that we need to be to drive reliable estimates. So we think we have kind of a higher frequency and higher quality and more auditable measurement system. That's not too burdensome on the farmer and their time as well. And the app knows I guess just from the GPS, the species of the tree that's being so the farmer doesn't have to enter any data about the tree when they're going around under. Yeah, so they they collect the measurements that the species of the tree is in our systems we have the benefit of knowing it beforehand since we're planting the trees. That said we're also working on an automated tree identification system, just to verify that you know the species that we think are there are in fact correct. So working on that. So the farmers take the measurements that they need they also capture images of those measurements and images of the tree trunk and the foliage. And then we have a back end machine learning system that verifies that the tree is in fact the species that we think it is. Okay, and then from a verification point of view so so you mentioned the satellite. So you're focusing with satellite data as well. And I guess what I'm getting is, you know, how do you know, you know the trees that are planted how do you know that there's not other land use changes on the farm that would sort of undo the, the carbon that's being captured by the trees that are that are planted with working trees. So this is, this is core to why we focus in on the potential for agroforestry because you aren't actually asking for changes in land use. So there's, there's no reason why you would do anything like change, change your stocking rate stocking density. And in terms of, I guess, ongoing monitoring with individual farmers, there is kind of a survey process we have to go through to comply with the voluntary carbon market standards methodologies that we're using. So there's really information like that through that process. Okay. And can you comment on sort of traction with the companies that you showed some really big companies that that are, you know, looking for, looking for carbon credits that you're looking for the quantity and the quality. Are you getting traction with those or how do you, how do you present this. I mean we have, like, like Akash said, we have a get we had a guaranteed buyer for our pilot who's looking to ramp up for the next year so that that's wonderful in terms of some of the very large buyers. We aren't yet at the scale where we could meet some of their RFP requirements but that will be changing with the 2023 planting season so stay tuned. Okay. And then last question, and this kind of relates to other. You know, another Tomcat program this year around solutions and focus on tropical deforestation so you know we've we've heard from a number of outside experts. And then Tomcat events. Of course, as you know, cattle and agriculture are driving tropical deforestation and in many cases it's, it's small farmers who are who are clearing forest land, you know, for new pasture land or new agriculture, is that on the on the horizon is that is that an ultimate target to try to use something like this to disincentivize, you know, basically create a, a alternative to, to what's clearing, you know, to the drivers that are clearing tropical forest today. We think there, there's a number of ways we can expand our application to support in that way so one, one is, we are starting with agroforestry as the tool gets more and more sophisticated can be used for all sorts of forest inventory. And I think very directly to the question you had about, say, grazing lands and pasture in South America. If we are able to increase profitability through other channels then it certainly decreases pressure and expansion and crucially. You can do this while still maintaining, maintaining pasture land so you aren't necessarily planting trees and then just pushing cattle further into the forest. Fantastic. Well, I want to, I want to thank john and Akash and all three of our teams again for just a really phenomenal afternoon. I also want to point out we have a Tomcat Center LinkedIn group that we encourage everyone to join that's a that's a good way to connect with these teams. Feel free to, to reach out to us, if you would like to and Danica put the LinkedIn connection on the chat as well. Feel free to reach out to the Tomcat teams. If we can help connect you further with Arctic or resident link or working trees and also feel free to, to reach out to our presenters directly so so thanks so much. For being here today and we hope to see you at another Tomcat event very soon.


And then one, two, three, have a go. What's happening? Are they throwing outwards? Do they throw outwards? Yes or no? They stick together. Because what happened is, you've blown a stream of air in between the two sheets. The air has a high velocity. Outside, on the other side of the paper, the air is stationary. So, low velocity is high pressure. High velocity in the middle is low pressure. The two sheets slam shut. So now that we've got that principle in our mind, we can go on to the physics of the fart. So, this is the end of your gastrointestinal tract.  If you're not familiar with an anal sphincter, if you don't know what it looks like, it looks like that. If you've never changed the nappy, for example, you wouldn't know that. Your bum looks a bit like that. It's a ring of muscle.   Anyway, what's the time?  Whatever gets the bacterial fauna in your gut is by ingesting and producing phlegtus. What's phlegtus? It's the medical term for a fart. So, we've got all this gas here, and we're going to attempt the most difficult maneuver of all, the SBD, the Silent But Deadly Fart. We've got a build-up of gas, but hold on. We've compressed the gas. It's at a high pressure. It's very uncomfortable. We're going to try and relieve the discomfort silently.  What happens is, you relax your sphincter, the gas starts to move, increase in velocity. Bernoulli says, oh, decrease in pressure.  Stopping the airflow or the fart flow. So now it's stationary. Bernoulli says, oh, high pressure. And the process repeats itself about 100 times per second, giving you the characteristic, when you hear the fart, it's not as if you've got fantastic muscular control and you're opening and shutting your anus 100 times a second.  Now, as a physicist, I've often had people say to me, Dr. McGregan, you're talking through your arse. If you think about it, in your larynx, you've got two vocal folds and the breath from your lungs goes between those and it creates a vibration there. So the next time someone says, oh, you're talking through your arse, you can say, no, but I'm talking through a modified version of my arse because the physics is exactly the same. Right, we'll move on to heat. If you get too hot, what do you do? Well, ladies, you don't sweat. Folks, you don't sweat. Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies, you just glow. Right? If you were to perspire, you'd produce a layer of sweat on your skin in the liquid phase. To go from the liquid phase to the vapor, gaseous phase, you need to supply heat, a special type of heat called latent heat of vaporization, and sweat steals that heat from the body. So perspiration cools you down by stealing latent heat of vaporization. It doesn't seem socially acceptable, but there are far worse alternatives. What's that? A kangaroo. But it's either a humongous rat or it's a kangaroo. Now, I wanted to admire this for the beauty. It took me ages to get the kangaroo to pose like that. Now, where do they come from? Australia. Is it a hot or a cold country? Very hot. Poor old Joey is covered in fur. Fur is designed to keep you warm. So he's a fur-covered animal in a hot country. Furry animals can't sweat. It doesn't work. You need a flow of air over the skin.  And all the cooling is taking place from their tongue. Joey has a different strategy. Have you ever wondered about the arms, the little stubby arms of a kangaroo? What are they for? They don't use them for feeding because they're too short. And they don't use them to put their mobile phone in their pouch. They have no apparent use. But you'll notice there's no fur on their arms. And their arms are highly vascularized. You have a huge volume of blood going through those stubby little arms. These are cooling machines. What they do is it's a very elegant cooling process. They cover their forearms in saliva. They lick their forearms and they use their saliva in the same way that we use perspiration. It's a very effective way of cooling down. Cools the blood, keeps them cool. Now, it's very elegant. Ladies, if you saw a bloke licking his arms in a disco, you're probably not going to want to ask you to dance. There are worse alternatives. What's that? It's a bird store. I was looking for more than just a bird. What type of bird is it? A what? It's not a crane. It's a stork. It's a stork from Africa called a marabou stork. And you usually get these in the savanna. They're quite dry environments. So they don't go wading around in the water to keep cool. They're covered in feathers, highly insulating. Again, heat is a problem. How do they cool down? They don't perspire. They don't use saliva. Can you think of another bodily fluid they could use? Come on. Urine. Well, it's not quite urine. If you look at the anatomy of a bird, they don't have separate outlets for the urine and their feces. They mix urine and feces in their cloaca. That's the last bit of the gastrointestinal tract, just the other side of your anal sphincter. But it means birds have very liquidy poo. And they squirt that all over their legs. And that cools them down. Isn't that fantastic? So never lick a stork's leg. You don't know where it's been. Finally, we're going to do one bit of optics. Hands up in the room. Who has glasses or contact lenses? I'm not going to ask anybody up. Okay. Anybody ever thought or would like to have laser corrective surgery? Do you know what's involved? Well, this equation up here is the equation that tells you how strong an optical instrument is. It's magnifying power.


Mae'r Ymddi yn y fawr yn y gweithfaeth yw'r ystod yn y cyd-dylaeth gyda'r ymarfer a'r Ymddi, yng Nghymru yng Nghymru yn y ddysgu ymddianol, a'r ymddi'r ymddi'r ymddi, ymddi'r ymddi'r ymddi, ac mae'n gweithio'r Ymddi sy'n amlwyno'r ymddi yn y ddysgu yw'r ymddi. Rwy'n i'n dechreu'r ymddi'r ymddi, ond Andrew Lambert yn y ddweud, a'n cyho-egwyddau. I've very much enjoyed Brian Holden Reid as a lecturer. I think it's an excellent balance he provides between information transfer which is always done in quite a engaging and active way. And also the more student led side to class which again really brings out some aspects of an issue which you may not have thought of yourself. And especially as it's a small group there's only seven of us it really does allow for you to be quite active and really feel part of the module. I certainly think from an educational point of view it's a fantastic environment and the calibre of your fellow students makes for a dynamic environment. Every student that comes onto the programme will be taught not just by staff within more studies but from the Department of History, from Defence Studies, from the Institute of Contemporary History and also from the Little Heart Centre for Military Archives. Now this is a real feature of King's College London which isn't matched anywhere else. We've got our own archive for military history and this is an internationally recognised archive which grows by something like 30 named collections a year. And it's indicative of the wealth of resources that are available to students here and it's indicative also of our dedication to the subject. I looked at the modules for the course and the wide range of choice that was available. It was just really interesting. The first thing students will notice when they arrive here with an interest in warfare or military history however defined is that they're not just tolerated, they're really valued. I've had a career break of 12 years since the birth of my third child. It's done wonders for my confidence on that level because when you've been out of work for a while these things that you think will never change, you suddenly lose confidence in your ability compared to everybody else. Because you have no comparison, you're not doing that kind of thing anymore, you feel out of touch. So I think it's been a real confidence boost in terms of where I sit compared to other people and my own abilities in terms of either expressing myself or researching material. So it's been really useful for that if I want to return to the workplace. The range of courses that war studies offers is unmatched anywhere. So the opportunity to tailor a programme to an individual's interests is unmatched. My dissertation is on the Rhodesian bush war and I'm effectively doing a cost benefit analysis of whether Rhodesian cross border actions gained a battlefield advantage proportional to the international disdain and resultant sanctions that they also garnered. I think I'd either like to continue studying. I've really enjoyed the history aspects and I could see myself continuing in military history. There are lots of history departments that offer the odd course or two in military history related subjects or even a named programme. But there's no where which is steeped in military history like King's College London and there's no where and there's no programme like the history of warfare which has the range of expertise and just the sheer number of experts in subjects that range from ancient history right the way to contemporary warfare.


And aloha, my name is Mark Shklav, I am the host of think tech Hawaii's law across the C program. You know, being a lawyer is not only about the practice of law. Lawyers have clients and some lawyers even have friends. Those clients and friends have interesting business and personal activities that are not subject to the attorney client privilege and we can talk about them, we can share Today, we're going across the sea with my friend, Hawaii businessman, Robbie Gessel. Robbie likes to mix his business trips to various countries with walking. We call our program today old man walking because we want everybody to know that there are healthy physical activities that become even better with the wisdom of age, with travel, with business and on the ground experience. So Robbie Gessel, welcome. Good to see you. How are you doing? Doing great. Very excited. Before we get talking about walking, tell me a little bit about yourself. Where do you live? What type of business activities you do? Please. Well, I live in Manawili and I'm helping out and working with a company called Pacific Craftworks. They're a manufacturer of cabinets and furniture and doors. And their plant is in Vietnam, just outside of Vietnam in Binh Dung province. Okay, so Pacific Craftworks, you just explain a little bit more what they do. What type of furniture or what type of things do they build? Well, it's basically a custom manufacturer. We'll build kitchen cabinets. We work with the homeowners or the contractors or the developers. And we come up with the designs for what their specific needs are with kitchens or bathrooms. We also do walk-in closets. Everything is pretty much a custom job. Unless we're doing like a high-rise and we get involved in the ground floor and we're doing all of the, we're doing all of the cabinetry work in this high-rise, then it's, you know, one or maybe three or four different plans that a homeowner would be able to choose from. Okay. And we build it. All right. And you said the factories in Vietnam? Vietnam, it's about 45 miles outside of Ho Chi Minh. So I generally get to Ho Chi Minh and then every day take the drive, which is actually a 90-minute drive outside of Ho Chi Minh, even though it's only 45 miles. And the products that are made there then get shipped to Hawaii and to be installed around the world? Wherever, you know, the clients are, but I basically, I deal with Hawaii. And you travel to Vietnam and all over Asia, really, as I understand it, on business? Yeah. I'm in Vietnam three to four times a year. I go to the factory and do what I have to do at the factory. And then I'm off to doing what I love to do. Okay. That's going to bring us to the title of our program, Old Man Walking. Now, let me ask you first question. Are you an old man? Well, I'll call myself middle-aged. Okay. You know, I'm... Yeah. Well, how old are you? Yeah. Well, I'm in my 73rd year. Wow. So I'm going to be 73. So still young. Yeah. So I'm still, I figure I feel still very young. Okay.  Well, even when I'm in Vietnam, and I do my work at the factory, and then I come home, I may walk around the city, and I may go for hours just to see difference. Well, you know, the exercise comes in as a plus, but it's more for the pleasure of seeing what's around me, and you don't get to see that in a car or in a mo-scooter as easily as you do when you walk and go through the alleyways and whatnot. So you try to do that every day? Pardon? You try to do that every day? Every day. I try to do it. And when you're in Vietnam, or when you're in any foreign country, is that's part of your routine? Well, part of my routine is I do my work, and then I always spend a little more time in the area or fly to an area that I want to see and explore, so, and I've done that almost every time I've been out to Vietnam, I do, I'll call it a side trip. So that allows you to kind of mix business with the walking and do both things while you're traveling? Yes, yes. And you say you live in Manawili? I live in Manawili. And we have a short video of you walking in Manawili, so let's take a look at that. Okay, walking in Manawili with Mark Sparv. You're close to the block across the sea, Mark Sparv, how are you doing? Okay, just to give you a little idea, the beauty of Manawili, I can even walk backwards, it's very talented. I do a lot of walking all over the world, but it's just so wonderful to wake up in the morning and to see the koalas and be able to walk, yeah, ain't that the truth, but this is a love of mine, a passion that I really enjoy seeing the beauty, meeting the people along the way, and the dogs and cats, but it's a wonderful experience.  Well, in my Asian travels, actually, I've been to Northern Vietnam in the mountains area, Sapa, and there's five Humong tribes up there. And I did a two-night homestay on this three-day walking trip, and I got to visit with the families and eat the food and also meet people along the pathway, whether they're another fellow walker or the locals, I really enjoyed that, and then Dalat in Vietnam, actually many places in Vietnam, I've done it in Laos, I've been to Laos, and also China and Taiwan, so I've done walking in all places. And so this business kind of gives you the freedom to do that because you're traveling, and you also say walking is a love and passion of yours, so it's not just business that brings you, but you have this feel for it, right? It's a love and a passion. What does that mean? Explain what a love and passion about walking means. Well, it means it gives me the opportunity not only to enjoy the beauty of where I'm walking, but also to meet the locals where I'm walking. And believe me, I have no qualms about stopping and talking, and you're not shy. I am not a shy person, so whether they speak English or not, somehow we're able to communicate, and it's just very, very pleasant for me and something I really enjoy doing. And you say in the video also that you like to see the beauty and meet the people, and you talk a lot about meeting the people, but let's take a look at about three slides before our break and describe what they are. Let's take a look at the first slide. Where are you, and who are those people? Okay, this is in the mountains in Sapa, and this is one of a couple of Humong tribe natives. Sapa is where? Sapa is in northern Vietnam, and we're talking and they're trying to sell me some goods or something, but very friendly. You were just walking, and this is what came up? Just walking, and they came up to me, and I came up to them, and we started trying to communicate, so maybe they don't speak English, obviously, but yet we're able to smile, and goodwill. Let's take a look at the next slide. What's this all about? Well, this is, I'm in the home of this woman, and there's a couple, it's a home stay, and she's actually getting the coals ready to cook my dinner. Actually, the meal was quite good. My guides told them what I would eat and what I wouldn't eat, so not to insult anybody. I have a diet that I'm pretty careful about, and oh, and by the way, that's another thing. When I do these hikes, especially in foreign areas where I don't know the routes, I try to hire a guide, and the guide will be with me, and I let them know what I'm willing to do and how dangerous it would be, and I like to go at my pace, so they all work within my pace. Old man walking pace is what we call that. Old man walking, but I do have a pretty fast pace. Yeah, I know you do. I've walked with you. Okay, so, and you have a home stay, and that's, you pay for that? There's a, it's with the family? Actually, yeah, I arranged with the tour guide, and I found the tour guide online. It was very simple. I found the tour guide online. We communicated. She actually spoke. Her English was quite good, and so I made the arrangements. She made the arrangements for the home stays, and she knew the meals that I wanted, and then, you know, we got to spend time and actually sit down with the homeowners, and she would interpret for me. And everybody was friendly? Oh, extremely friendly. And what are we talking about charges, just generally, for this type of the thing? Well, that was the two nights, three day, including meals, was about $75 to $100. And that includes the guide. Wow.  That's good manners. And then let's take a look at the next slide, and that's, I think, same area? The same area, different tribes people, and I'm handing out kosher candies. I brought a bag of candies to the kids, and they all came around, and it was, they had a great time, and I was enjoying myself, and you can see I have my backpack on. So, yeah, it was, again, you meet the people, you have a conversation if you can, just the interaction is a very positive thing, and you have the scenery. And the candies is something that you would typically do.  Adults, too. I have a picture of me handing out to the adults, too, and they loved it.  And you're traveling all alone, all by yourself, basically, with your guide, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I get the guide, and we travel around, and again, I've, she's aware, this particular guide was aware, she told me one day it was really wet, and she said, this might be dangerous for you, and she arranged for a different route, and that was great, we had a great time. Okay, we're going to take a one-minute break right now, and then we're going to come back and take a look at some more of your travels, some more of your travel slides, okay? So, hang on, don't walk away. Aloha, I'm Keisha King, host of At the Crossroads where we have conversations that are real and relevant. We have spoken with community leaders from right here locally in Hawaii, and all around the world. Won't you join us on ThinkTechHawaii.com or on YouTube on the ThinkTechHawaii channel. Our conversations are real, relevant, and lots of fun. I'll see you at the Crossroads. Aloha. Aloha, y'all. My name is Mitch Ewen. I'm from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, and I'm the host of Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy. We're on every Wednesday at four o'clock, and we hope that we have interesting guests who talk to us about various energy things that are happening in Hawaii, all the way from PV to windmills to hydrogen, most of my heart, electric buses and electric vehicles. So please, dial in every Wednesday at four o'clock on Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy. Aloha. Aloha, welcome back. I am an old lawyer, Mark Schloff, host of Law Across the Sea, walking with an old friend of mine, Robbie Gessel. Robbie has been telling us about how he mixes his business trips to Asia with walking, one of his passions, meeting people, giving out candy, and talking and watching and seeing the beauty of various places.  No. All right. I'm still here. Okay, now, let's take another look. I mean, it's very interesting. I mean, you have a guide and you're putting all your trust in the guide, and it seems like you're really enjoying yourself meeting these people. You know? I do. It is wonderful. And I've been very fortunate with the guides that I've had. And I guess if somebody wanted to replicate a trip, you could perhaps give some advice if they wanted to contact you. Is that a possibility? Absolutely. And I keep a record of the name of the people and how I contacted them, and they're welcome to get in touch with them as well if they're still in business. All right. So let's now go back to the slides. I want to take a look at some more of the places you've been. Let's take a look at the next slide. Where's this? Okay, this is in Laos. And I climbed a small hill called Nafusi. Yeah, not everybody believes is at a small hill, but yeah. It really was. But it was a wonderful climb and beautiful views. And again, a lot of people trying to climb it. And it's not how fast you do it. Again, it's not a speed race. It's you're enjoying everything and the steps along the way. You're enjoying life as you do it, right? I do. And at the top of Mount Fusi, as I understand, there's a temple up at the top. Is that correct? There is a temple up at the top, and I went to it. I went inside. And on the way down, too, there's temples and religious. And that's what town is that in? In Vietnam? This is in Laos. Laon Prabang. And that's kind of an ancient town in a way, isn't it? But it has French influence and that type of stuff also, right? I stayed in Villa, which was quite beautiful. Where was this? A villa? Yeah, I stayed in a French villa. It's a hotel. It was a hotel, but it was a French villa. And it was run by French-speaking people. Okay, let's take a look at the next slide. Okay. Okay, so outside of Laon Prabang, there is an elephant camp. And unlike other places in the world, possibly Thailand or India, African elephants, you can't do this. But the Laotian elephants are, I'll call them friendly. And I went to the camp. They're very well looked after. So people that are worried about animals and what not and animal rights and what not. These animals are very well cared for. And this particular elephant took me down the river about a half a mile. And just, again, it was a wonderful experience. I'm talking to my guide that was on top with me and enjoying it. And it takes you outside of your normal activities for sure. Yeah, it does. It does. Okay, let's take a look at the next slide. Okay, where are we? Now we're in the Yellow Mountains in China. And again, it was a side trip. I flew to Huanxiang in China.  But it, because it was in an alleyway to really crawl around, call from Vietnam. But anyway, yeah, so to get to this Yellow Mountain, the driver took me to a bus stop. And the bus took me up about 20 minutes up the mountain. And then I had to take another gondola ride up to the top of the mountain. And if I have time, I have a funny story to tell about it. Because I wasn't aware that there are no roads on the top of this. And it's all pathways. So they're well marked pathways, concrete even. But I didn't realize, I'm carrying my bag, which is a 20 pound carry-on bag. And you're going up and down these hills.  And I didn't realize that. I thought, oh, there's transportation up there. There isn't. It's walking. Okay. Okay. And you find again, you found this online. Is that how you found the hotel? I found the driver online, talked to him, called him up, arranged for pickup, made payment. And it worked out great. Now in China, the driver didn't speak English. So we ended up communicating through one of the chat programs. Because you're allowed to speak English and what we chat. So when you type something in in English, he gets it. And he pushes a button and it comes out in Chinese. This is how we communicate it. It's amazing how technology combines to make it so that you can enjoy nature. It's interesting. That's an interesting twist. Let's take a look at the next slide. Okay. Now we're in Taiwan. And I'm at the top of a mountain that I climbed. It's Toroko Gorge is on the bottom of this mountain. And again, I hired a guide. Same thing online. Found him. And he, this was a quite a tough climb for an old man. But still very doable. And he followed my pace, explained things along the way because there are, you know, the nature and the trees or the plants. He's speaking English with you? Actually, he was from, I think, from Netherlands. I see. And he just happened to be an English speaking person living in Taiwan, in this area of Taiwan and married to a local girl. And so he, like I say, took me up the hill. He had a fantastic lunch up at the top of this mountain. It's about a three and a half, four hour hike. And like I say, it wasn't an easy hike, but it certainly was exhilarating. And coming down, it was about a three hour, two and a half hour hike down. And then he took me around to different areas after that. Okay. Let's take a look at this last slide, which is kind of interesting. That's you. The pathway is, and that's looking down at Toroko Gorge. Now that's a steep drop. You know, it's very steep all the way down. And the pathway, you can barely see a rope on the side of the mountain. It's about 24 inches wide the pathway. And you can hold on to the rope if you have, if you're afraid of heights. I was pretty comfortable up there. And looking down, it was amazing, amazing views, amazing views. So it sounds like you've really enjoyed all the, all these adventures and walking that you've had. And you were able to tie them. I mean, the nice thing is you can, you've been able to tie it to your work in a way. And, and, and so kind of makes your work a little bit more fun, right? I mean, it kind of a little more enjoyable and like, and it makes your life a little more, a little more fun too, right? That's what I'm hearing from you. It is. Yeah. Yeah, it was, it was a great time. All, every one of my trips have been wonderful. Like I say, there's other trips that I've done. You've highlighted a few of them. And, and I certainly enjoy my travels in Asia.  Where, where are your thoughts and why? I always wanted to climb Mount Fuji. Okay. And I'm doing a little bit of research on it. It's about an eight hour climb and you can break it up as an old man I would. You just have to make the reservations. You, you know, you're not climbing from the base of the mountain. You're, you're going up to the point where cars can go up to, which is station five. And then, and then start your climb. And it's about a four or five hour, I think initial hike. And then you get to another state, a station up there. I think it's station eight where you, if you rent in advance, you can get a cot to lie down on and then take, take in the sun's sunrise. If you get up at three and do the last few hours hiking, and then you're at the top of the mountain for the sunrise, which I hear is spectacular. And you just got to be lucky with the weather. So that, that's your, your next goal is to climb Mount Fuji. That's my goal this year. And if somebody wants to join you, how do they go about joining you? Can they or find some more advice from you? How, how would they contact you? Well, you can use my email address. It's King Kailua at gmail.com, K-I-N-G-K-A-I-L-U-A at gmail.com. And you're willing to share your knowledge. I'm willing to share my contacts, my knowledge. You're welcome to, to all of that. I haven't set the dates yet. I'm working around some of the calendar, but I'm looking at fall, September, October, timeframe. Okay, now here's my last question for you. And anyway, briefly, if you can, tell me, what, what, what have you learned from walking? And what have you learned about life? What have you learned about people that you met? Well, well, you know, it's, it's just a peaceful thing. What have I learned? I've learned a lot of different cultures, a lot about different cultures, different ways of life. Not everybody thinks the way you do. And I guess it's, it's being tolerant of others and being patient with others. Because not, like I say, not everybody thinks and does things the way you do. And if you can, if you can be somewhat patient and tolerant and, and enjoy, just enjoy the environment that you're in. I think it's a bit of a peace of mind and will hopefully give you longevity. Good job. So, so, so, you know, I hear you saying that walking kind of brings you together with other people. And maybe if we were all out there walking, it would, it would be helpful, huh? If we were all walking, meeting each other on the trail, that might, might be a good result from that, maybe. I think it would be even in Manawili, you know, walking around and talking to the people. It's, it's a great thing. Well, Robbie Gessel, thank you very much. Enjoyed hearing about your walking travels and how you mix it all up and what you get out of it. So Aloha, thank you very much. I'll see you on the walk.


When we die, our parents, they mourn for us the most, and then families and then friends. They're really mourn. But one thing that people always forget is the place that weeps for you is your prayer spot, when the person is no longer praying in there. And this is really visible in a lot of the Masajid that they are missing the people who used to pray in here, and then they're just abandoned in these empty spots. One of the things we take, things for granted, and we didn't know the value of prayer. We didn't know the value of Masjid. One of the Urdu poets said, Shauq-e-Kalam legay al-Musaqatur. The desire to speak to God took Musa to Mount Sinai. Mekidna ba nasib ho Masjidna jalsakat. How unlucky am I that I don't even go to the Masjid to talk to my Lord. This is the house of Allah, and may Allah give us the understanding of what a Masjid is and the value of these places that Allah blesses, especially those of us who live in the West.


Oh, what's up everybody? Once again, it's Brand Man, Sean. And I'm back with another episode of Acts Brand Man where every Wednesday I answer your questions from the comments section below. So keep them questions coming. It's the mat work. Now today I wanna do a special episode where I do a rapid fire answering to a few questions that I haven't gotten a chance to answer because I felt like I couldn't do a long enough video but I do have an answer to it. So let's go ahead and get into this thing. All right, but number one, La Lasso says, is the 360 deal the same as a licensing deal? The answer is in short, no. 360 deal is literally 360, right? Not only am I getting your music right in that recording but you pop up and you appear at some concert right in the award show, bow, tax. I get some of that money. You can sell some merch, bow, tax. I get some of that money. You, I don't know, get on somebody's TV show, bow, tax. I get some of that money. You could drop a book. You drop a DVD. You drop a VHS tape, bow, bow, bow. I get some of that money. That is a 360 deal. I'm getting a cut from everywhere because I invested in you. That's how I'm looking at it, right?  That's a 360 deal. As a matter of fact, one of the things that you can or will have to offer up a cut of if you had a 360 deal would be licensing. So you see that? Licensing is this one area where 360s cover a lot of areas. Licensing is, well, it's specific, right? So you have sync licensing. So that's your licensing, something out. Oftentimes on TV, movies, things like that, right? But there's so many licensing, licenses with your brand. You can license your brand out to create clothes with it just like any kind of other entity like Fubu, right? Or Supreme, right? Any of these just typical clothing brands that might either collaborate with somebody else, right? Or they might allow somebody else to put their name on other objects, right? That's what a licensing deal looks like. It's specific to certain areas where you can just say, hey, just my music, just my name, just my clothing, right? 360 licensing, not the same thing, all right? Next, this guy essentially, when it comes down to it, man, that's a long question. Sina Matarzada says, yo, do I absolutely need a logo for branding? When you go through all of this, he's basically saying, yo, some people that are big brands, most of them pretty much have their face, their profile. I don't see logos. Well, that's because the answer is no, you do not need a logo for branding, right? I know a lot of people talk a lot about logos and things like that when they bring up the branding conversation, but most people you have to understand do not understand branding for real in depth. You need these three things, you need these four things, and most of it is visual and aesthetic based. Anybody who's simply talking about aesthetic or visuals based on branding, I guarantee you they do not understand branding. Logos are just a form of expressing and distributing your brand, but it's absolutely, positively not necessary. So that's it, all right? Now, this other guy, the Sun Collective 147 says, I'm a producer looking for a female singer to front the material, all right? So is it a good idea to get a manager to scout out one for me? I'm not really hooked into that scene. You're not hooked into what scene, brother? Female singer scene? All right, look, you can get a manager for that. If you just do not want to do the work, any work in that category, you want some female to magically appear at the door of your studio waiting to sing, like we can get it to that. All right, but I say, before we even think about a manager, why don't you just find female singers on Instagram, find female singers on TikTok and DM them? You don't have to be into a scene, all right? Just find them. They're out there trying to find a producer to connect with. Just find them, bro. Like put in that work. And as a matter of fact, you're the best person because you know the type of artist you want to work with. So maybe you will find some girls that are doing covers of some similar artists that you kind of like want to get into that, you want to get into that sphere in terms of the type of music you want to produce. Find that voice that goes with your production, all right? And if you aren't picky, that just makes it even easier, all right? But you can find girls doing covers on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, girls doing their own original music on all those platforms. Do that, try DMing them first. But again, a manager can help that process even more or you can go completely lazy and let a manager do all the work for you. But there is no scene, you know what I'm saying? Like there's no scene or there's a collection of females just waiting to be picked and produced with, all right? Cool. Now, another person says, how can I work with one of you? Anthony, he's referring to me or Corey. Well, obviously we have Contra brand agency. I'm only doing this because other people ask these questions as well of that same question a lot. Contra brand.agency is that's just that simple. You'll find out everything you need to know when it comes to working with us from a services in, but I guarantee most people who are watching this video are not prepared to work with Contra brand agency. So a little bit higher in or working with artists that have some serious budgets and labels, right? Now, if you don't have that, that's cool. Check us out at brandmannetwork.com. I am answering questions every day, question after question after question. I'm talking to people, we have our entire team that are in there answering questions. We got calls where you can get one-on-one access with us. Well, most of the time it's gonna be group access with us, those live calls, but it's just as helpful because oftentimes there's not even enough people on there so you'll still get one-on-one access. So check out brandmannetwork.com before you try to get into working with us and doing services for as an agency. Because I guarantee even though you might not be prepared to work with us as an agency, the information you get from us in brandmannetwork.com will help you better pick an agency, find the right type of agency. As a matter of fact, people are already in there saying, yo, does this look like a good company? And then we'll analyze it and say, and I wouldn't work with them if I was you. Yeah, I would work with them if I was you, all right? They look legit, all right? So get in that space. We'll help you one way or another. Trust me, it's not, as a matter of fact, it's so little money in my opinion, just do it. It's not even a risky decision. It's less than $20 right now, all right? Now, am I gonna do one more question? Nah, that's the rapid fire. That's the first rapid fire and I might even answer them even faster if I do an episode like this in the future, but y'all let me know if y'all like it in this format. If so, y'all gotta keep them questions coming so I'll have enough questions to do it in that way other than that. Appreciate y'all watching the episode again. Thank you for 100,000 subscribers yet again. I'm gonna be saying that all month as we continue to celebrate this, 100,000 subscribers. Appreciate y'all, appreciate y'all, appreciate y'all. Have a great one. Bow.