This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. Hey, welcome to Stand the Energy Man. I'm Stand Osserman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, fresh on the chair here from the Military Affairs Council over at the state capitol. And I got to spend half a day yesterday at the state capitol getting ready for budget hearings. So I'm about capitoled out now, so it's a real refreshing thing to come do my show today. And I've got a really great guest. It's not his first time on this show, it's not his first time in Think Tech. He's a natural over here, Mr. Dave Raul from the Hawaii Auto Dealers Association. And we're going to talk electric vehicles and thank goodness the term electric vehicles, we're trying to get it naturalized now or embedded or just implanted into people's brains includes hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. I have to say that because I'm Stand the Energy Man, the hydrogen guy here in Hawaii. If I don't say hydrogen, at least once during a show, I'm going to get severely reprimanded by my office. So anyway, Dave Raul, thanks for being here again. Thank you, Stan. And could you, kind of for the audience, because not everybody watches every show all the time. We missed you last time, a little bit about your background and how you got into doing what you're doing right now. Well, thank you. I came here in 1975. I was a naval aviator. In fact, right before that, I'd been stationed at Lauri Air Force Base where I'd asked to fly this thing right here on your shirt. The F-86, I go that far back, but I've flown the A7 and the A4 and I was a naval test pilot in China Lake, California. So I rode a lot of tech manuals and kind of helped in a lot of adoption of new technology. I've taken my Volkswagen all the way apart to a parade rest and put it all back together. So I'm not from a car guy too, but I've owned an ad agency in Honolulu since 1984 and done 24 different kinds of retail clients. But among them, I was asked by the auto dealers in 1999 to help them with their trade association. So I've worked with the Y Auto Dealers Association as their executive director since then. Great. Yeah, I think that's, people ask me all the time, okay, you're a fine arts major. How do you end up doing energy stuff? But that's why we're kind of like soul brothers because you're an aviator and now you do art too.  The journalism background helps, yeah. So now you're into public relations and doing media stuff, which is great. But people oftentimes can't connect like a military career with a civilian career, especially when it's so diverse. But like for you, a test pilot, people that are like from my background, we appreciate when you say you're a test pilot, that means, oh, they tried out new airplanes. Maybe that's really cool. No, it means really large colonies because you got to really, you really got to have a lot of guts to jump in an airplane that's never been proven before or to test new equipment. Or my father was a test pilot in the Navy also and flew the Fulton recovery system, snagged the balloon and everything. And so I have a real appreciation for what test pilot means and I appreciate your art. Well, you have to be able to take that technology and communicate it. There you go. And that's why I have about 50 books on physics because I think they're the jet jockeys of communication. There you go. Okay. Well, we're here to talk about electric vehicles. And particularly the title of the show is talking about electric fields in Hawaii and the future and where they're at now. And you kind of have your finger on the pulse of electric vehicles from the manufacturer, distributor, sales side versus the Blue Planet folks here who have it from the, we want to be clean yesterday, get all those cars here now and make it happen. But that's a tall order. And so we kind of want to get your perspective on that transition and how we know that electric vehicles are going to be the future in Hawaii to a great extent. But it's going to happen on a timeline and it's going to happen with the grid or in conjunction with changes in the grid. And it's going to come with some big adjustments. So why don't you give us your perspective on some of those aspects? Well, we appreciate the Blue Planet people and a lot of those folks, the Sierra Club and others who have brought forward ideas about the electric vehicle adoption. And I think that's kept the momentum going. That's why Hawaii ended up number two behind only California electric vehicle adoption. It all started in 2011. We had to make a special call to Nissan to see if we could be a rollout market here. They were only going to do six of them. We said, please make Hawaii your seventh rollout market. Otherwise, we wouldn't have even had those 300 cars that were sold that first year that they really came out in 2011. Now, out of the million cars that are on the roadway, about 1 half and 1 percent, actually about 6,000 cars are in the electric vehicle category. And I know that the goal is to have 100 percent of all the vehicles on the roadways be renewable energy, predominantly electric vehicles and hydrogen and electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles. But my goodness, that's a tall order based on how many are coming into the pipeline, how many internal combustion vehicles you would have to just prohibit from operating on the roadways. And so we've kind of brought that truth to the table and said, it looks like some cars can last 20 years. In fact, many do. The average car is average age out there is 11 years. And so we would have to start selling 60% of all our cars by 2025. All of the 50,000 cars we sell a year would have to be electric to reach the goals of the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. Yeah, which is 10 times more than we have on the road to every year. It's a power of magnitude greater than what likely we'll be selling. And so that's something that we've tried to discuss with people. And they've asked, well, how can that be changed? And we have some thoughts on that. It has to do with shows like this and a lot of education, a lot of telling people the benefits of the electric vehicle. Particularly for Hawaii in producing its own energy. And so we produced a graph called the Cars and Energy Graph that kind of shows what Hawaii could do if it could make its own energy and use it in vehicles. And that's a point that's been brought up by a couple of our guests before. Is that just because you have an electric car and you're plugging it into your wall, if you don't have PV on your roof, feeding your car, you're still polluting the air because you're buying electricity made with fossil fuels. So just because you have a clean and green car doesn't mean you're not polluting. And so to really, truly, honestly, from cradle to grave be clean, we have to look at the full picture, like you say. Well, in a good book, it says in the book of Matthew, it says, under much is given, much is required. So if I could have you take a look at that Cars and Energy Graph, you'll see how much is given to the people of Hawaii. Because we lived out here in the middle of the Pacific, we have this wonderful trade wind that allows us to blow windmill blades around and make those turbines also create the generation that creates electricity. And so what I used is public art, art that's found down in the capital, that's the Tadashi Sato Mosaic. And interestingly enough, being a journalist and being an observer of things and a poet, I just happened to notice, I wonder how many blue and green tiles are in that Mosaic. Well, it was roughly the number of all the cars on Oahu. So it became the perfect graphic to explain to legislators and anybody who'd ever been to the capital. Take a look at this. This is our island here. And take a look at how many cars are on it. And if you want to have them all be electric, here's what we're gonna have to do with public policy and with adoption too, because we want it to be free market. So we fortunately, much has been given and so much is expected of course. So we have the best wave energy in the world. We have the best geothermal energy access in the world. The ocean thermal energy conversion is another thing being developed here. Of course, our solar, which you referred to as phenomenal and we've just learned that now they're gonna be coming out with solar panels that can be printed like newsprint on a piece of paper and then rolled out and imagine when that all comes about. And finally we have H-Power, where we even use some of our rubbish to create electricity. All that electricity can also make hydrogen with some of the waste energy that's being prepared. I mean, by all that wind, wave, sun and geothermal. And then it can go into the grid and into the cars that are out there that can use that energy. Well, that's why I did the kind of the yin and yang thing saying there will still be some internal combustion vehicles on the roadway, but you could make a lot of them be in a renewable energy. And the goal of the Clean Energy Initiative was to take that oil barrel up in the upper right-hand corner of this graphic and lower than the 500 million gallons of oil that we use each year down to 150 million gallons by 2030. That was the White Clean Energy Initiative. Now they've extended that initiative out and are looking at lowering it down to zero by 2045. Now that's a tall order. And so how do you do that with massive profundo amounts of education? You really have to have people embrace the greater concept of what would happen if we could use our own fuel that was created here and keep that billion dollars rotating in the Hawaii economy. Well, let's look at infrastructure for just a bit because I agree that education's got to be a big part of it, but something that struck me as kind of ironic was when President Trump said, hey, we're not gonna be part of that Paris climate accord. We're just not gonna do that. And people were all upset and everything, but the point is, well, what are you doing right now today that actually will impact the climate? I mean, we're waiting for big government or the state or somebody to do all this stuff, but it really gets down to the individual. And are you willing to pay more in a gas tax? Or are you willing to pay more to put more PV on your roof to store it in batteries or hydrogen and charge your car at home versus plug it in at work? Because right now the workplace, is your boss gonna put in a charger for you? Is Safeway and Long's drugs and everybody else gonna put free charging? 10 or 20 spots there? Is Hawaiian Electric gonna pay for new substations and new transformers to get your utility to the point where it can put fast chargers in? You know, everybody's looking to somebody else, a big business or government to fix it. You know, what are some of the options you think we have? I mean, you're right, we have all these renewables. Do we really need to start looking at the holistic picture? How does the grid interface with the traffic, with the cars, with the hydrogen, with batteries? I mean, what do you think about those kind of? The answer is found dead center of that holistic picture you talked about. And first of all, I have to admire the pioneers, those 6,000 people who bought those vehicles. And there's 29 people who bought those vehicles before those 6,000 people bought them. And I don't think we give enough credit to those 29 people. Actually, half of those folks, 14 I guess, because we had 14 dealers early on who were, they have to buy the electric vehicle first and then the customer buys it from them. So the dealer's the first one to buy the car believing that it can be sold, then the dealer has to train their electric vehicle technicians. The dealer has to pay the specialty tools cost, which was extensive. For 20-something vehicles. Correct. And the dealer then had to put in the charging station and the dealer had to put in all this expense to be able to transition to the electric vehicle without a profit structure coming back. It just didn't pencil for years and years, perhaps even 10 years that it doesn't pencil back. And I've seen dealers still willing to invest and help move the whole process forward, knowing that that first dollar of profit isn't going to come for maybe a decade down the way. That to me, I have such admiration for those, almost like founding fathers who are willing to take that big risk. Those first adopters are risk takers. And then those who bought the vehicles, after them, they're willing to see how it worked and do the charging that it takes because there's these issues of sustainability, but not actually issues that are roadblocks to purchasing vehicles and keeping them sustained going forward. And that has to do with charging time, with range and with cost. So yeah, so those are key issues. I got an article last week from a network from the California Fuel Cell Partnership that talked about how plug-in electric vehicle drivers are too smart to buy electric vehicles, which I thought was kind of ironic. But their point was that as with the early adopters who are real risk takers, the consumer now is not so willing to take the risk and they want to lease the vehicles. So with any new technology, whether it's hydrogen fuel cell or electric plug-in or who knows, maybe some thermal or pressurized gas, pressurized CO2 or something in vehicles, the early adopters are going to look to lease the vehicles. They're not going to look to buy something expected the last 11 years. And when the technology is changing every two years, it's rapidly changing. Well, that's called the leap-rogging effect because the new technology leap frogs over what someone has right now. And so you're right. You just see things about the time you have something, sort of like the cell phone. You get it and need to upgrade it and upgrade it and upgrade it. In fact, that's the best analogy I know of. That cell phone came out, as I recall, a Motorola Brick, the 8400, that you could charge. It took 10 hours to charge. And you got a half hour of talking time. And it was $3,500 to buy it in the 84. They had just a few cell towers around. That's very similar to the electric car. It was very expensive in the beginning. And the battery was very costly. And it took a long time to charge it. And it didn't give you very much range. And so if you want to look at the adoption of electric vehicles, it's going to be very similar to the adoption of the iPhone and all the cell phone technology we have. Yeah, it's just going to take time for everybody to really get comfortable with the technology. And for the technology to become, I mean, as consumers, we're very impatient. And we have a very low threshold for failure. So if you got into a car and two years down the road, this goes wrong and that goes wrong, boom. You're not buying that car again. The car has to last four or five years without any major issues, like you don't have a big transmission problem or something. Or your loyalty to that company is probably really crippled. And I mean, you're the auto dealer guy. You would know that.  Like, this has got to work flawlessly and the quality's got to be there or the customer base won't be there. Sure, and when we talked about how many will be around to 28 years to ubiquity is what we said in 2017. That's what it took for the cell phone to be ubiquitous with everybody having them everywhere. You'll see 230,000 electric vehicles on the roadways in 2045 out of the million that are out there. So we thought that would be about 23%. But 250,000 or so will be driverless cars at that point. And that really dramatically changes the whole picture out there on the roadways. Especially now that we learned today, the GM is just trying to put out 2,500 driverless cars that have no steering wheels and no pedals. And so they're gonna use them as taxis. And they're trying to get clearance for the 16 requirements of having, there's a requirement to have an airbag in the steering wheel. They don't have a steering wheel. So now they're having to get that requirement released. And so that's happening much faster than anybody thought. 2019 is when they plan to do all that. Wow. Well, with that, we're gonna give you 60 seconds to watch some ThinkTech promotions before we come back and talk to Dave Ralf about the real shaker, which is autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence and what it means to electric cars. So we'll be back in 60 seconds. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate and power and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4 p.m. And we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. Aloha, I'm Keeley Ikeena, and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. on ThinkTech Hawaii's Hawaii together. In Hawaii together, we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on ThinkTech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii together. I'm Keeley Ikeena. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stand Energy Man on my lunch hour as usual. Not taking any state time away from this. This is on my lunch hour. So I'll go grab something quick at 7-Eleven after this to feed myself. But I got Dave Ralf here and we'll go from the Spam Musubi to artificial intelligence and what it means in vehicles, electric vehicles, which is quite a leap, but that's where we left off about a minute and a half ago. So let's talk a little bit about how you see the future. Well, they said the autonomous vehicle really was the avenue toward artificial intelligence. And so that's sort of the doorway where you get to the big control of artificial intelligence. And the country that controls that in this space race toward dominance and AI will control productivity and will control so many things economically that that's why it's important to kind of control how the driverless car is being put on the roadway so that we can beat the everybody else who's in the race toward artificial intelligence. So is it too soon to introduce this graphic here? No, no, I think it will be first done here on ThinkTech. We've also put it in our magazine that we're just about to release. It's not officially released, but we could now show on ThinkTech a thing we call the Rosetta Stone. And those who kind of remember their history from 1799 and Napoleon's people in Egypt ran across in the town of Rosetta this stone that had graphics on it, but it had Greek and it had Doptic and it had... It was kind of the key to unlocking language translation. And so this unlocks the future in the view of we had to testify on House Bill 1580 this year about electric vehicle adoption through the year 2045. So I took what I thought would be market uptake. First of all, you have to know on this graph that the blue lines represent internal combustion engine vehicles. And it kind of goes up and comes down in a roller coaster fashion, but that's been the historic adoption rate of these vehicles up to 60,000 down to 40,000 up to 60,000 down to 40. And that will continue on just as it has for the last 40 to 50 years. Then we put on here years ago when the first electric vehicles would come in and that was 2011 and you could see that start to grow. And we hit the numbers almost exactly. The chart even many, many years ago now has been fulfilled and now we're here at 2018 and we're doing about that many cars and just exactly we predicted. And so we studied the autonomous vehicle adoption rate too and I started putting that in there, the red line and it hockey sticks out there in the 2040 to 2045 timeframe. But those autonomous vehicles are largely electric vehicles because the computer technology takes so much electric energy. So it's natural that those two would be married together and that includes hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles. So when I created this chart, this is what I thought would be the natural market uptake but it had to have this holistic view of the whole thing from the four corners. You had to have 5G technology out there that fifth generation long-term evolution technology. You had to have plenty of engineers and a lot of educational community involved in this whole process. Tourism had to continue to hold as the base along with our military spending. And then on the right hand side of this graphic, you had to have those alternative ways of income coming in, including agriculture and all the others besides tourism. Filmmaking, science and observation. Medical industry. You have a rocket ship there taken off that. Yeah, thought the space industry would play a large part too. Are you seeing that as a player? I hope so. In fact, we hope all those things can continue to hold up the base, our economy. The thing was so difficult to envision. It was just exhausting. And it's so hard to imagine how it'll change the industry so much for the auto industry. And for people who've had car dealerships in their families for many years, for decades, generations, I decided it's gonna be this hard to do. I might as well make it joyful. And so that's why I put the word joy at the bottom of the chart. And I did a proof of the joy with using Oilers Identity as the formula. And so the dealers kid me a lot about the fact that I said this is so hard, we'll just try to make it joyful. And then at the top, I put the adoption bridge that would require all sorts of inclusion in things like bicycling and like other travel because that will affect also everything going forward. And the fact you have to have TOD, lots of buildings built along the rail that's going in. Everything is on this chart and you could sit down as a thinking document and start explaining everything over the next 28 years. So if you wanted to have 100% adoption of electric vehicles, you would have to see where you would put up vectors on these lines. And I believe that the autonomous vehicle will drag the electric vehicle and the hydrogen vehicles along with it. And so the governor has come out with an executive order, 0717, saying that Hawaii would be... We're open for business. Open for business with regard to the autonomous vehicle. And he told the world that and the Silicon Valley people came in and the Department of Transportation people came in and they sat across from each other on the table and they said, what do we do to tell the world we're ready? And they said, come out with something and they came up with this idea of the executive order. So that was published now that said we are this perfect Petri dish, just like I pointed out with the cars and energy graphic, the perfect place to test all these technology and me being in the test business and coming from that background and also in the business of telling people what the value of it all is. I just thought it was a natural and so did the dealers and that's why they're 100% behind all this and ardently supporting the adoption of electric hydrogen and autonomous. I think people underestimate the message that our governor has sent out in number one and the legislature doing 100% renewable by 2045 on the grid. Our mayors jumped in and said, we want clean transportation. They put a stake in the ground and then the governor coming out with, we're open for business for autonomous vehicles. That's big, big, big, big things. And for those of you on insider trading, this is not, this is the people in Hawaii know this but for those of you on the mainland who are looking for an in here in the stock market or something, the guy who came up with putting autonomous vehicles at the airport now works in the governor's office. So I'm just telling you, if you're gonna buy stock anywhere, it's gonna be in Hawaii, so we can do this. But the governor is an engineer which brought up the, when I brought that up to the hydrogen association, they said, oh, you can't spell geek without a double E and that was based on me telling them that our governor was an engineer and they're really excited because our governor understands this technology. Our legislature's picking up on what the governor already knows and we're getting, we're sending that message. You know, I mean, when it comes to economic development and putting Hawaii on the map as innovator, a place to do technology, a place to really start this stuff. Hey, we have millions and millions of tourists coming in here. I think the last number I saw was eight million a year come into the state of Hawaii. And if you want to showcase a new technology, showcase it at the airport, like Ford Fujigami proposed with his buses. And that's how he's working at the governor's office now. He's got the vision. And there's some people here in the state with some vision that are doing this thing. So your chart shows it and I think people are gonna start going, oh my gosh, the governor and they were all for both right. Well, I don't know about it. I think the people were right in embracing the technology. Hawaii's people said they wanted to embrace it. Just as we were early adopters of the internet, I think we were one of the first really on that. We kind of came out early on that. Even way back in King Kalakaua's time, we embraced electricity early on. So the people of Hawaii have been early adopters of technology and look at our solar adoptions. I think number one, rooftop solar per capita. So yeah, I think it's a wonderful place to have the Petri dish of Goldilocks environment. They call it perfect conditions. We've said another metaphor. We said Hawaii is to the electric car when Napa is to the great perfect conditions. And so with all that said, you still have to have people buying it. They still have to find an economic incentive in buying it that makes some sense. And so battery prices have to come down and charging stations have to increase. Yeah, what makes me feel good about the electric vehicle piece is I know that batteries are kind of in a lull right now. They've kind of gotten as good as they're gonna get for the short term. And when you talk to the technology guys and the lab guys, they go, we're pushing the next leaps gonna be nanocarbon and nanotubes and things like that to store energy. And the nice thing about that is if it works in a battery, it'll work in a fuel cell for storage. So hydrogen and batteries are gonna start going right along together as technology improves your batteries, technology will improve for fuel cells and they'll ride that same curve like you say up to getting us towards our clean energy goals. And I hope Hawaii takes advantage of your rainbow of clean energy options there because I do think there's an individual responsibility. You can't sit there and point the finger at government or big business to make all the changes. Well, put the PD on your roof and put the batteries in your carport and put a hydrogen tank out back and make your own dang hydrogen and be clean. Will HECO be part of it? Well, if they start seeing the trend that everybody's gonna come off the grid, they're gonna come up with a solution where they're part of the solution. They're not just poo-poo and everything. They're going, well, we would need to be the people helping you come off the grid and make that part of our business model, but... Well, the dealers are certainly ardently pursuing it. It's not easy, but they've, you know, we found some joy in doing it. Okay. Well, I tell you what, we got about a minute left, Dave, and I'm gonna leave the last minute up to you to do whatever you feel in your heart to do. Well, I went to this exhibit of Hawaii a thousand years from now and the artist painted Hawaii in 3017. And I said, well, I see what you're talking about with sea level rise and some other things. But I think as a poet, I'll take a shot at it. So here's what I submitted to the National Poetry Contest. First came the driverless car, then the age of AI. And as work went away, with minimum annual living cost stipend, people didn't even have to try to make plowdown cillians shine. Work went away. The next century saw the eventual death of the multiplication tables. And in the aftermath, all electrical things shed their cables. We turned on lights with our thoughts. We drove to places in our minds because there was no real places left of any kind. All the days had just been too nice and the earth party ran out of eyes. An inductive reasoning became a thing of the past. There was no truth left for the press. What a mess. I know it ended with this kind of dark, what a mess. But as somebody asked me during Christmas time how to fix that end of the poem. And I said, well, for Christmas I'll add. And the answer to this is found in Genesis and again in John and the old and new become one. I made a nice ending to it during Christmas. But I submitted that to National Poetry Contest to tell folks that the car is the direction you have to figure out artificial intelligence. And that's gonna be so important going forward. And it's just happening so much faster than any of us thought. Well, Dave from Fighter, Pilot to Poets quite a leap in public relations in the middle. But thanks for me and my guests today. And I know you're gonna be back again because you're always good to have on the show. So for this week and the Stand the Energy Man for the third show, second show in January of 2018, signing off. Thanks to Cindy and Robert here in the control room for helping putting this on and making this come live to you and be looking for us along with the other ThinkTech shows on YouTube. Until next week, Aloha, Stand the Energy Man, signing off.


Key ghosting occurs when certain combinations of key presses cause additional unintended presses to be registered. You can see how it happens by looking at a keyboard or keypad's internal matrix. A microcontroller powers a matrix column and determines which key is pressed by reading a matrix rows, low, or high voltage state. Ghosting occurs when the controller checks a row and current flows back up through a neighboring closed key switch and out through another closed switch on a different row, resulting in that incorrect ghostly input. But fear not, adding diodes to the matrix can stop current from flowing the wrong way through each switch, and subsequently busting all those ghosts.


Mae'n ddiddordeb yn gwneud o'n ddeddwadd ar ddoedd y ffordd i'w ddim yn gwneud o hyd yn i gweithio'r ddiddorol. Ond bydd y dynamxion oedd y ddiddorol yn ymweld thatidol ar wahaniaethu dyma o'r ddiddorol. A byddwn i gwybod ei ffaintol o'r disgustiant. Ydw i'n gyffried cyfgrif Mmmn Warth i ddefnyddio'r cyfle fyddiaeth fyddiaethol erbyn mwyaf wgwr. Dwy maen i'n entrydol yn eu cynnwys, byddwn i'n ddiddordeb yn dda, ac mae'n ddysgu'n ddweud o'r ddechrau yn y brif. Dw i'n fawr i'n meddwl o'r un ddweud o'r sifatru yma. Mae'r ddechrau'r ddim yn ddweud. A oeddwn i'n ddweud ar y dyfodol yma. Felly, mae'n gweithio hynny. Brillian, bod ydw i'n odd i'r byw sy'n cyfeithio'r hwn. Mae'n ddweud ar y cwrs yn South Africa, dyfodol yn ei ddweud ar y mewn Gweithio. Rydyn ni'n meddwl am ysgrifiannol, We met a delegation of Somalian parliamentarians, which was a fantastic opportunity to talk to the people who are trying to create a parliament in an African country which has a lot of issues. The CPA came in to talk about what they do and I found that personally interesting because again we were able to question them as to their role and then we had the librarians to talk about how they support members of parliament in their research. In the first week of our course we had this great outing. We basically went on a boat trip. The view was incredible and there was live music. There was this guy playing a saxophone. It was really lovely and then you got to meet your classmates and socialise with them. I definitely loved the boat trip. It's a very, very lively, stimulating place. I've never come across anybody who's been to SAS who wasn't impressed with its enthusiasm and interest in other parts of the world than the West. It's very intensive and I like that because we are learning a lot of things in our lecture and then we have time to do some readings and learn even more about it. I want to come do my studies here so I tried some summer courses to just have the feeling how SAS is and I think a summer course is the perfect solution for that. Jump in to this new environment. It's really exciting and you never know what's going to happen but there's always friends that will help you if you're struggling so just come.


Ladies and gentlemen, my presentation at the Looting of Germany is a translation of the title of my latest book, which in German is called Beuteland. Beuteland literally means a prey country. And of course, Germany has an above average prey value because of its location of its geopolitical location in the middle of Europe and because of its resources and because of its financial strength and strong economy. The reason why I researched the subject is twofold. Firstly, it is always a pleasure to question politically correct narratives. And in this case, it is the history of post-war Germany up to this date, as it is called by the German government, the German ruling class, and its Western allies. And it goes like this. Germany was liberated in 1945. Then the victors introduced democracy in 1945. The Americans generously assisted Germany after the war and helped to rebuild the economy. Germany never paid reparations according to President Truman. And the American ambassador to Bonn or the narrative that there is no alternative to European integration and even to the European Union and to the Euro and the narrative that the Euro is an enormous advantage for Germany. And even that the Euro is a question of war and peace and so forth. Now secondly, I came across some astonishing statistics from the German Bundesbank and the European Central Bank, even the Italian Central Bank. And all these statistics show that the Germans, the citizens, are not particularly rich. In fact, the median assets of German households are lower than their respective Italian ones. So how can this be? I mean, one reason could be that taxes and social security contributions are very high in Germany. Nearly 50% of GNP compared to less than 15%, just before the First World War, which by the way proves that the monarchy was a much more liberal system than we have today. And liberal as far as property and freedom are concerned. Another reason might be that Italians pay less tax. They avoid paying tax whenever possible. And so their shadow economy is very large. You only become rich by paying less taxes, of course. Now the truth is that the German state has a triple rating. It is solvent. It is financially sound, but only at the expense of German citizens and taxpayers. This is a very important point. Now another explanation for this not very exciting German wealth is what you could call the looting of Germany. And this is my story. It was President François Mitterrand, and the editor of Le Figaro, French newspaper, who compared the Treaty of Maastricht, which, as you know, introduced the euro in 1999, to the Treaty of Versailles, which concluded the First World War. It was the British historian Nile Ferguson who once said in an interview with Der Spiegel, German weekly magazine, that German payments for European integration correspond to payments resulting from the Treaty of Versailles, by correspondingly meant nearly as large. And I, if you don't mind, I quote the Greek philosopher Panayiotis Condulis, who once remarked, quote, you don't genuinely believe that anybody would be interested in German guilt if Germany had no money. Now to begin with, nobody talked of liberation in 1945. Nobody, except, of course, for the victims of the concentration camps. For instance, I checked all memoirs by politicians. For instance, Konrad Adenau, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic, speaks in his memoirs of occupation, not of liberation. No. Or somebody like Erhard Epler, very well-known social democrat, remarked in a television interview, I didn't feel liberated. And he was, of course, a strong opponent, always, of Nazis and so on. And then there was the famous directive, JCS 1067. JCS for Joint Chiefs of Staff. This was signed by President Roosevelt in March 1945 and laid down the guiding principles of the future policy of occupation in Germany. Now what is more interesting, paragraph four of this directive formulated the thesis of collective guilt of the German people and stated, quote, Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation, but as a conquered enemy nation, as a defeated enemy nation. Now, ironically, Austria was treated quite differently. In 1943, the Western Allies declared Austria to have been Hitler's first victim. And the victim had to be liberated, of course.  If you are guilty and nasty and very bad, you are not liberated, but defeated. And in the Treaty of 1955, the four powers renounced their right to German property in Austria and handed it over to the Austrians. Now coming to paragraph five of the directive, paragraph five forbade General Eisenhower to take any measures to rebuild the German economy. And equally important, the JCS 1067 defined the war booty, namely all assets of scientific and industrial research, trade secrets, patents and so on. Now what resulted from JCS 1067 was the biggest ever robbery of intellectual property in the history of mankind. John Gimbel, an American historian has written a superb book on the subject titled Science, Technology and Reparations, Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany. I'll give you a few examples. In the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin, Reichspatentamt, 70 Americans and Germans who had to assist them copied more than one million pages on 70 miles of microfilm. In Germany practically everything of value, I mean as far as possible within three years, was systematically investigated and removed from universities, research, institutes and industrial companies and taken to America in order to be made available to American companies. The Americans were very impressed, they were even impressed with a German butter machine or a machine to wrap chocolates because they didn't have it in the same quality. To quote John Green, he was involved on the highest level as the director of the American Office of Technical Services. He wrote in May 47 that today's imports of German technology would be America's exports of tomorrow. And another official of the Ministry of Trade spoke of, quote, the biggest transfer of knowledge on a huge scale which has ever been executed from one country to another. Another official said German technology would save the American economy billions of dollars in the course of the next decades and advance American research by several years. And this was of course especially true for the chemical industry and even more so for airplanes and rockets as you know. Now responsible for this so called document program, it was called, was the field information agency technical acronym Fiat. Founded by Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarter in 45 and it concluded its work in 47. And then there was another project you've probably heard about, project paper clip, sometimes called project overcast, which organized the transfer of German and Austrian scientists to the United States, up to 1,000 persons. This was secret in the beginning in the United States also in England and when it came out the public was very angry because they said Nazis coming here to America or to England. And the funny thing is the German scientists in England had to pay their taxes twice in England and in Germany. But somebody like Van Haar van Braun was a former member of the National Socialist Workers Party, and of the SS, but they didn't care, he was vital for their rocket program. Of course it is impossible to quantify this kind of intellectual transfers, to quantify it financially. John Gimbal tried to do that and he arrived at a figure of 10 billion dollars, which in today's money would be, this is by the way very difficult to ascertain, it would be between 10 and 20 times as much in today's money. But anyway, when you just compare the value of one German company like Siemens, which on the stock exchange right now is worth 95 billion euros, and if you take away from them practically everything, their whole knowledge, their patterns and everything and hand it over to their competitor, how much would Siemens lose in value? I think one third would be not too high, would be a conservative estimate. Now if you add to this document program, to the intellectual reparations, the long list of other reparations, excluding the dismantling of whole industrial plants, which only ended in 1951 in West Germany, dismantling of industrial plants, forced exports of coal and other goods. For instance, coal was prime energy of course in these times, not oil. Germany had to sell their coal, which they needed desperately really to foreign countries for 10 dollars per ton, whereas the world market price was around 25. And many other things, or if you count the costs of occupation, for instance in 1948, occupation in West Germany, in the three West German zones absorbed one third of tax revenue in West Germany. In today's values that would be more than 200 billion euros, comparing it to today's tax revenues, more than 200 billion euros. So you get an idea of the enormous price the Germans paid for losing the war. And I didn't mention the Russians and the French, whose occupation was much harsher than the Americans and the British occupation. Ah, and I nearly forgot the expropriation of private property, of German foreign private property, which according to one calculation in 1952 amounted to 18 billion Deutsche Mark and according to other estimates between 20 and 30 billion in Deutsche Mark of the 50s, in today's purchasing power that would be at least 10 times as much. Now, don't understand me, don't misunderstand me. I do not argue against reparations per se. They are unavoidable if a country loses a war. And when the war ends, only then it is stated who was guilty or not, who has to pay or not. But anyway, normally reparations are agreed upon in a peace treaty, like with Japan, like with the other European allies of Germany in 47, with very modest reparations. For instance, Japan in their peace treaty was only obliged to pay one billion dollars in reparations. So it was handled completely differently from the German case. So in Germany's case, it was irregulately arbitrary plunder without bookkeeping. And this reason why even the German government does not know to this date how much has been taken away, because there was no accounting. It was just, it was arbitrary. And of course, taking away private property is not allowed under international law. That is just, that is theft, theft. And later on in a treaty with the Western allies, the Bonn government had to promise in 1954 that it would never ask for restitution of private property and that German courts would not be allowed to hear such cases. Okay, now, as it turned out, the Germans were lucky. The wartime alliance collapsed. The alliance between the West and the Soviet Union, the Cold War broke out. And the U.S. Army started pleading Germany's case, not the State Department, the Army. And America adopted a policy designed to prevent Germany from staying a vacuum in the middle of Europe and being a soft spot for communist infiltration. So in 1947, JCS 1067, the one which I quoted extensively, was replaced by a new directive. And this one was much more lenient, much more lenient. But even after 49, after the constitution of the new German state, there were many restrictions on German industry which only ended in 1955. And I could give you a lecture now about the Marshall Plan, which is always, that is also a myth. The Marshall Plan didn't rebuild the German economy. There was credit of $1.4 billion. The French and the British got much, much more and with less effect. So, and Ludwig Erhardt, who is sadly forgotten in Germany today, Ludwig Erhardt, even in the 60s, he warned against the Euro and the European Union how it evolved later. But he saw it coming here. Ludwig Erhardt once said, the German Wirtschaftswunder, economic miracle, was achieved by us solely, not by a credit of $1.4 billion, so it had to be repaid nearly entirely. All right. Now, 55 brought the end of formal occupation in Germany. Germany didn't become a sovereign state. This was only the case in 1990 with the 2 plus 4 treaty. And so Germany became an American satellite, which it still is today to a certain extent. Now, the problem for Angela Merkel is that she's still not sure where the real power lies in Washington with Donald Trump or with the East Coast establishment. So, I think she still bet on the deep state, but we will see how it turns out.  Most of them voluntarily in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. I also mentioned the 90s, because Germany paid an enormous sum for the Iraq war for a war which they didn't want. They didn't want to take part. They thought it would be the wrong war, which was the case, as we know. But anyway, they were forced to pay very high sum for the Iraq war. Well, instead I'm going to leave to European integration and to the European Monetary Union, which started in 1999. And I'm referring to the German role as European paymaster, which is, by the way, often misunderstood as a form of German hegemony. But this is not true. I think it was Alain Mink, the Frenchman who once said Germany has no power. And I sometimes wonder what the whole EU would look like if everybody had to pay their own bills. Then it would be a completely different animal. Well, as you know, every European state pays into the common, into the Brussels budget. And now, when a government gets back more than it pays in, it is a net recipient of subsidies. And when it gets back less, it is a net contributor. And there are two methods of calculating net contributions. But I won't bother you with this. In any case, a certain part of national expenditure always flows from Brussels, which doesn't make sense because bureaucracy costs are deducted, then a lot of money is misused or prone to corruption. And because a local bureaucrat would know better how to spend money than a bureaucrat in Brussels. For instance, in 2014, Germany paid 28.8 billion euros into the European budget and got back 11.5. The net figure is 17.5 billion, double the amount of 2009. Of course, Germany could have avoided all the hassle and the complicated money flows back and forth by just paying 17.5 billion into the budget. Then in Brussels, they would have less work to do. And what is more important, all these signs with the inscription co-financed by the European Union, which you can see all over Germany, would be unnecessary. When you confront a German politician with Germany being paymaster, they always say, well, we get a lot of money out of Brussels, but they don't do the whole calculation. And a lot of people believe them. It's wonderful. You get money from Brussels. You give them five, you get back three, for instance. Well, to cut a long story short, Germany has been the European paymaster from the beginning. And that is why Nile Ferguson went so far as to speak of a mutually agreed system of war reparations. And the figures I'm going to tell you now have been investigated by Professor Willecker and myself for all relevant time periods. And we had to do it because these figures are normally not available. Anyway, from 1976 to 1990, Germany financed 60% of the European Transfer Union. You could as well call it ETU instead of EU. And the others, just 40%. And what is interesting, in the years immediately after reunification, after 1999, Germany paid net 73.7% of the whole Brussels budget. And the only explanation is they wanted to reconcile their partners with the new reality of a unified Germany. This is what Ferguson meant when he talked of more of mutually agreed reparations, otherwise it wouldn't be. Well, later on, Germany's net contribution receded to 40% then 30%. And in the next years it will go up again because of Brexit. I mean, last year, for 2016, we have not yet the relevant figures. But for 2015, we have them. And in 2015, Britain was the second largest contributor after Germany. You see how much money they want to extract from the British now. They try to blackmail them, 50 billion or 70 billion, whatever. So it's all about money. They talk about values all the time, but they mean money. Or put it differently, when somebody keeps talking about values, most of the time he wants to destroy other values and to discredit them. I mean, just to mention something else. Of course, Europe could exist without the EU and without this kind of integration. And without the euro, of course. You don't need a transfer union. But this is Emmanuel Macron's idea. And he kept quiet during the elections in, during the election campaign in Germany. But I'm absolutely sure after the German elections on September 24, I think, he will present his demands to Angela Merkel. Then he will present his, he wants a common eurozone budget. He wants an arrangement for European national debts and bank debts. In the eurozone, we have 1,000 billion euros of non-performing loans, as they are called. Very high level in Italy, for instance, in Greece also, of course, but it's 1,000. So the whole thing is still very shaky. And let me phrase it like this. Emmanuel Macron wants to sap Germany's financial strength. This is exactly what will happen. How much the German government will concede? I don't know. We just have to see what happens. Now, in addition, there are the enormous debt claims of the German Bundesbank under the target to transfer system. And this, it is complicated, but I have to mention it. And I'm going to simplify it a little bit. But these target to transfer this transfer system was no problem until 2010, when the euro crisis broke out. The figures were more or less flat. Then the, and I'm talking about the Bundesbank debt claims against the euro system, the debt claims. After the crisis, it went up strongly. Then when the crisis seemed to vanish, it went down again. And now, this year, it hit an all-time high of more than 800 billion euros. 800 billion euros. These debt claims, which are of course liabilities of the data countries, they are no interest whatsoever. They are not tradable. They cannot be exchanged into real assets. They even lack a payback term. So what are they worth? In case the euro breaks up, they will be lost to an unknown extent. And the Bundesbank will have a problem. And by the way, the Netherlands, with their own target to claims, are in a similar position. Now, by coming back to Germany, target two has the very consequence that at least part of German exports are financed by Germany themselves. And secondly, that the current account surpluses create no real value, like in the 50s and 60s. In the 50s and 60s, we had the European payment union, and the surpluses and deficits of the others had to be settled in gold and dollar. And from this time, stem the German gold reserves. But this is a completely different accounting system. Normally, you should be able to buy for 800 billion euros if that was possible, gold. It's not possible, of course, this amount of gold available. You could even say that the euro prevents Germany from becoming rich. For instance, a German sovereign wealth fund of which I'm an advocate is not feasible within the European framework. And I'm completely convinced that in the end, the euro will have damaged all participants, including France, all beat for different reasons. And it was never introduced for economic reasons. It was a political deal between Kohl and Mitterrand who traded the French consent to German reunification with the abolishment of the Deutsche Mark. That is the true story behind the euro. Now, to conclude, you must believe me that I didn't want to indulge in German self-pity. I just wanted to describe international relations as they are. And I also know that many things detrimental are self-inflicted, but this is a different story. And behind the curtain of ideology, political formulas and propaganda usually lurks the question of money. The question of money who pays, who profits, who is able to loot. My nations have no interest. And I really think that all these power plays and all these silly wars which still go on are vain and infertile. And the sheer existence of superpowers and constructs like the U or the Euro are necessarily harmful to people and their freedom. Well, in Germany, we have a proverb which goes like this.  Thank you.


To monetize or not to monetize that is the question Okay, maybe that isn't quite how Shakespeare said it but guys in today's video on best practices for avoiding spam We're gonna talk about whether or not it's good to monetize your videos or not monetize them Now I get it if you guys are watching this video chances are in 99 out of 100 of you If not all of you do monetize your videos your freedom partners you want to you know follow the best practices great Don't feel bad about that in fact feel good about that because the short answer is yes You should monetize your videos and almost all circumstances now with that out of the way I know me personally and probably you guys too. We get a lot of comments on videos that say hey I just do this because I love to make videos. I don't want to make any money at it So I'm an amateur and you know, I don't monetize my videos and great And you know what there's nothing wrong with that again There's nothing wrong with that if you're not doing this I'll address this first if you're not making videos because you love to do it You're probably in the wrong business or you're doing the wrong thing with your time You got to do this because you love doing it first and foremost if you make money at it great If you can support a family great if you come a superstar awesome, but most importantly enjoy what you do That's probably why you're doing this and I support you completely in that that being said like I said those types of comments Do get me thinking personally like what if I didn't monetize my videos? Would I actually get more views? short answer No, you will get fewer of yours and fewer views and here's why let's do a quick thought experiment Two videos are made one by you one by me your video is a follow-up for a video And it just came out and it's got great content. My video is a follow-up for video. I just posted it It's got great content. They're almost exactly the same to YouTube and Google The only difference is your video is monetized my video is not when somebody searches for what our types of videos Which one is Google gonna show the monetized video or the non-monetized video easy answer They're always gonna show the monetized video. Why because Google and YouTube aren't charities They do this to make money. They do charitable things no doubt, but at the end of the day They want to make money. They got to do that So they are gonna show your video over mine, even though I don't want to make money or etc Your video still gonna get shown So if you're not monetizing your videos and I understand why you're not doing it and it is noble My recommendation to you is to go ahead and monetize your videos and then send that money Whatever you make to a charity that you support or a cause that you support Just because you will get more views if you're monetized just from a simple business perspective That's pretty much a fact. So go ahead monetize give your money or whatever you make send it to charity Etc. Etc. And then if you do monetize your videos, don't feel bad about it. Feel good about it It's good for you because the more people that see your videos the more Influence you have the more clouds you have the more people that get your message see what you do and at the end of the day That matters too. All right guys that out of the way Let's talk about this second spam indicator or best practice as we like to call it around here that you should be aware of Alright guys this second best practice is not putting dollar signs in your title descriptions or your video descriptions are on your about us page We're on the topic of money and monetizing so this makes sense guys If you've got a dollar sign in your in your name or in your title description unless you're Kesha Don't do it. Here's why YouTube flags that type of stuff traditionally dollar signs and stuff like that are Not linked directly, but they're very very correlated with spammy sites with spam sites that like to do affiliate scams Or they like to send people to their website and then try and sell them products that are scammy I'm not saying all that everybody that does that Everybody that has a dollar sign does that they don't but it is linked with that or it's correlated with that And they do put them under the microscope So I'm gonna assume that you're not that kind of video maker So if you have the choice of putting it in there or not putting it in there simply don't do it also Channels that have zero monetized videos that I mean zero Those are also we looked at and kind of frowned upon too because that's also a scammy slash You know spammy tactic why channels that don't care about making money on YouTube Well, they'll just batch upload a bunch of copycat videos not turn the monetization button on assuming that they're not gonna get caught And then they're gonna try and drive traffic through annotations and links in their descriptions And and links on their about page to a website or some sort of web Property that they can go ahead and then make money off that often in illegitimate way. So guys, that's my advice to you today Monetize your videos if you don't feel good about making money off of it give it to charity But click that yes switch guys. This is your boy, big C. I'll be back more with some more videos. Check it out


What's good YouTube this your boy Chihuahua back at you guys again with another video If you're new to the channel go ahead and hit that like button come in subscribe Make sure you hit post notification so you will be notified every time your boy drops on heat So without further ado let's jump right into this video You know what I've been getting a lot of people wanting to buy art from me and wanted to get custom work made for They self whether it's cover art or a little cartoon heads and all you got to do if you want to get yourself Some artwork for me Go ahead and hit DM me on Instagram at two world one two three four You know I'm saying leave me a DM and if it's taking me a while to get back to your message Just understand. I got a lot of people Sending me messages on a daily basis whether it's people wanting advice And it's just a lot of fan love then it's a lot of people placing orders So it might take a while for me to get back to you But just know I'm gonna get to you eventually and to be honest with you guys. I really Don't plan on Doing custom work for long. You know I'm saying I want to spend Most of my time focusing on my YouTube channel. So it's I'm giving myself. I'm gonna give myself a deadline with this doing cartoon and taking orders so My prices will be going up one more time and Then after that, I'm officially out the game as far as trying to Do the little custom work for people it's gonna be strictly focusing on my YouTube focusing on my brand as an artist You know I'm saying so And the only time I will do like some custom artwork for people The price just got to be crazy You know I'm saying they got to be some that I can't turn down But I'm really getting to a point in my life where I want to focus on Myself as a brand I want to focus on my YouTube channel and just put out more content for you guys But a lot of times you don't see me on YouTube. It's because I be taking orders on Instagram You know I'm saying but it's getting to a point where I Want to say everything I have into my channel. So You know I'm saying if you want to be able to say you got some artwork from your boy custom artwork Go ahead and hurry up and get at me on Instagram Before it's too late and your boy ain't doing it no more because the only art I plan on selling in the future is things that I like to draw I want to be able to be free as an artist be able to create anything and people just want to buy My work, you know, I'm saying other than having to draw certain things that people want I just want to be able to be had that creative freedom and then just Have my work up and people just want to buy work. That's already made you give I'm saying so My prices will be going up from this very soon and that'll be the last time And then I will and announce When your boy is no longer doing The love, you know, I'm saying the cartoon is the full body the way stuff to cover art I will be announcing when your boy ain't doing it no more. So hurry up and get at me Thank you guys for the love and support And I'm out