Special segment today with James Taylor, who is a famous author, blogger, prolific blogger. He tweets a lot. He also is deep involved in the SAP Core apps. James, welcome to, and a friend at El Lone School at Palo Alto. Welcome to the queue. Well, nice to meet you. Okay, welcome. Welcome to our world. Yeah. So, Dave and I... I'm intimidated by these two Macs. Yeah. What's your Twitter handle? Real James. Real James. One, two, three. What is it? J-A-M? E-T. One, two, three. E-T, one, two, three. All right. We're going to have to tweak this out. There you go. The other James Taylor. So, Real James. We'd love to have experts in the queue, but you're one of us.  I mean, an analyst. Yeah. You're basically an analyst. Right. Right. But it's authoritative content. But you're in an area that's really kind of core to the SAP and all its ecosystem. That's the core application suite within SAP. SAP has been modernizing their business over the past four or five years built from the ground up. They've got some nice little facades around things called analytics in memory and haunt. It's actually the big gun for them. They've got their own traditional ERP system. So, where are we with this? Okay. What's window dressing? And what's the real deal? So, break it down for us. So, there's a couple of things. I think one of the things that SAP has clearly been focused on the last few years on the core applications is moving from an environment where really what they did was capture your documents as data and then move them through your process. So, copy from a PO to an invoice and just manage all this data. Just interfaces on the data structure. And trying to say, how do we make these more of a partner in running your business? So, if we've got a claim system, well, how do we make the claim system not just move the claim around, but actually decide if the claim is valid or not? Decide how much we're going to pay on it. How do we tell it how to do that? So, they've been really integrating their business rules technology into their apps.  And now we're at the point where the next big thing is going to be to say, now we've got this real high performance analytics. How do we take what we learn and use it to improve the behavior of the operational systems? We're not quite there yet. That's where the next step needs to come. You start to see it now with Connor and the predictive analytics, but we're not quite closing the loop yet. So, we talked with, we were supposed to have Passo on yesterday, but it turns out he was never actually scheduled.  He didn't have it. But, you know, he's got the four-step plan, right? The step four is ERP, HANA on ERP. And that's kind of massive what step five was. It was a world domination. Essentially, you wanted to have an Apple store or like a store for enterprise. Okay, cool. The step four is ERP with HANA. Where are they with that? You know, they close it all. I mean, what's the update of that step? You know, that I don't know. They're clearly, HANA's been something they've been talking about for a couple of years now. They've clearly got, you know, they went through a phase where it was really about reporting and the sort of soft analytics. And now they've got this new HANA with predictive analytics. They've built a new front-end for it. So, they're really pushing the analytics up that curve. And certainly, if you talk to the groups in the research side, they're thinking in terms of what else could I do with HANA? You know, if I've got the rules for my claims and I want to change them, wouldn't it be nice if I could run the five million claims I processed last year through the new rules and see what's different? Well, that needs HANA, otherwise it takes forever, right? So, that potential is really there with HANA. But I don't think we're still just scratching the surface. What do you see for benchmark with HANA? We're here for people that's two weeks to 30 minutes. Yeah, I mean, there's the same kind of stuff I hear. I mean, what for me is more interesting is not so much the... does it make things I have to do faster? But does it do things that I've never thought about doing fast enough to be worth trying? Yeah, so if I've got... If I get 600,000, I'm working with a client. I've got 600,000 claims a month, I mean, whatever. Huge numbers of claims. Well, if I want to know anything about them, I can't really do anything with that. It's just too much data, right? Once I can start to do things quickly enough to ask a question, get an answer, and go, well, that's interesting. What about this? What if I rerun them and I don't approve that kind of client? Oh, okay, well, it saved me $5 million. Well, maybe I should think about that. Okay, well, yeah, which clients did I piss off by doing that? Well, okay. Maybe it's not such a good idea. Exactly. And so that ability to be really analyzing how you run your business. It's similar, yeah. So, John, you mentioned that HANA journey. It was side by side of bringing it to the business warehouse. Right. HANA specific apps, and then ERP on HANA. But the core applications, right. So, of those steps were furthest away, obviously, from HANA on the core. He even said today, we really can't improve your transaction processing much more than 2 to 3x, which is still good, but it's really hard to do and that's probably a stretch. I mean, they said, I guess the number is 160 million euro, which is, what's that, 250 million? 200 million, some year. Sounds big, I mean, it sounds sizable, meaningful, but you know, you talk to customers and they're like, we're not quite there yet. We did have opera on there, beginning to use it. You know, so they're an early use case. Yeah, I know opera.  Yeah. But they have the kind of problems that HANA is really good at because I think the value in HANA is not going to be from running the current core ERP systems on HANA. Yeah, you can make it a bit faster, but frankly, the ERP systems run a transaction perfectly fast anyway, but if my transaction still has to stop so that someone can look at it, does it matter if it gets to that person in half a second or in three seconds? Well, no, because he's not going to look at it till tomorrow. Dead meat, right? Yeah. But once I can start to use HANA. Use HANA for days to minutes, weeks to days. Yeah. But when I can use HANA to say, well, gosh, if I did this automatically, what would the impact be? Oh, that looks okay. Great. And then I go make that change using some of the other technology SAP Scots. And now I'm starting to feed back into my transactional systems what I learned in HANA.  You can go back and forth between the two. And then I think he gets in real time. I guess my sense is in terms of the journey we're sort of at the beginning of side by side. Yeah. They're starting to get some of the specific apps. You know, specific areas, they've got good strong use cases. They are starting to sort of package some of that up, make it easier to do. And that's obviously important because some of this stuff is intimidating for people. They don't feel like they're smart enough to use some of these new features. So if you can make them more consumable, that makes people try it and get their feet wet. So that's good. I've been saying all week, it seems like the SAP customer base, they're starved for new technologies and innovative stuff, right? Yeah. What's your sense of that? You buy that? Yeah, I don't know. SAP's community has two very different groups to it, right? It has the people who use the core apps day-to-day to run their business. They put orders in. They put sales orders in. They get their commission checks from it, that kind of stuff, right? And those guys, I'm not sure they feel starved for new technology so much as they want to have the system do more of the work, right? Share the load more effectively. I think the IT guys, they're looking for better ways to run this infrastructure. They're virtualizing everything there. Higher performance. They're trying to run it more like an IT service. So I think, yeah, they perhaps feel a little bit that new technologies recently.  And the apps, but I would say the core application teams are starting to sort of think about that. I mean, you know, I work with the folks on the business side, and they have some great business rules technology that really lets you build some very flexible pieces into the application. And it's surprising how many of the applications now ship where essentially the right holes to plug those in so that when you want to define how I handle a tax form, how I handle a claim, you can change it whatever you need to. And so they're starting to build the apps in a way that reflects that desire for more flexibility. And I think that, you know, that's a good trend for SAP customers, for the people who use the apps, you know, for sure. Even though it's not perhaps a new technology, it's a new way of thinking from SAP's point of view. So James, if we were to ask you, so John and I, sometimes we're called the ESPN of tech. So we love to break down the pregame, right? So we were talking about, okay, what does SAP have to accomplish at Sapphire to make it a home run? If we had asked you that question on Monday morning, what would you have said, and have you seen it? You know, I think they have to make, you know, given the focus on HANA this year, they have to make HANA obviously compelling to people outside the IT organization. They have to be able to go to people who run the business, the CFO, people running the business and say, because of HANA, you can run your business fundamentally better, more profitably, more effectively than you could do before. And I think the answer is sort of mixed. They've made some good pitches around some solid use cases. I think they've got, they've made some good progress on it, but I don't think they've got a home run as far as the majority of their sort of core application uses are concerned. But I think they would come away from this going, they could see how they could do that. Now, so it's interesting to look at the three days. So the day one, you had McDermott doing the keynote, it was kind of superficial. I mean, I think it was. I mean, he's good, he's smooth, but... It was like a politician. Yeah, right, right. Mitt Romney. Yeah. Okay. And then, in the audience, I guess not surprising, it's filled with Republicans and independents. But anyway, second day, Schnabe somehow connected to the audience a little bit better. Product guy, but didn't go deep into the products, but I think gave some credible examples. Today, Hasso went over 99% of the audience's head. And then Vishal, obviously, very credible. A lot of people criticized Hasso's presentation. It's just too complex. But from a business person's standpoint, I actually thought it brought a lot of credibility, because I see, okay, I got a dose of the politician, you know, the credible, you know, product guy, and now I didn't really understand it, but I know they're spending a bunch of money off and they got their best people working on it. That makes me feel better as a CEO. So I wonder if you could sort of break down your reaction to those morning keynotes and the messaging that came forth, and how does that translate to what customers really care about? I think you're absolutely right on the last one. I think the important one, Hasso, to some extent, is trying to demonstrate that he can go a level deeper than you want him to to prove that it exists. Because he can. He can, and it exists, and we have really smart people thinking about this stuff. Okay, and then sort of, you can dial it back a notch and say, okay, I feel comfortable now trusting these assertions that I got earlier in the week, because clearly someone has drilled one level down and got a bit more specific. I still think that the challenge, and it's not just true with HANA, it's true of all these sort of in-memory, high-performance computing kinds of technologies, is as technologists we get very excited about them, how fast they run, and how many of this we can do, and how much that we can do, and we can't always turn that into, and so what? And therefore you can, and I think that to me is, so what's not for the business objects users, not for the knowledge workers, but for the people whose job it is, they run a call center where 500 people log in to the CRM system every day, or the people who run supply chains on the CRM. I'm not convinced we've connected with those. Okay, so not a home run, but certainly putting some in on the base. Okay, that's a great answer. Go people on the base. Okay, so now they've got to drive the runs home, so we'll be watching for tech ads in next year. Now, my other question is a competitive one. We love to look at the competitive stuff, so Hasso said today, well, the people in Redwood City should just back off a little bit, or take the time to really understand the architecture, and it was very typical SAP above-board classy, and we know, of course, that Ellis is not going to do that. He's going to take up the list. There's a lot of things about SAP getting into the database business. They must be on drugs. He said, that's like me going one on one with Kobe. Right? And we love that stuff. Sure. It's good for ratings. It's good for ratings. So what's your take on the competitive posture, SAP versus Oracle? They've made runs before, taken some lumps, but they're trying to change the game. Can they do it? Yeah, that's an interesting question. If you compare SAP and some SAP IBM, these are companies that are willing to put a stake in the ground out ahead of them and say, here's where we're going. This is the vision we have, and then take a couple of years to deliver it, right? Yeah. And normally, when you're competing with Oracle, Oracle doesn't do that. They're probably happy to be a fast follower. Lots of good stuff, but never quite got the same sense of vision. And the only exception is really on the database. Yeah. And the database Oracle is willing to be a bit more visionary. Yeah. So I think it's much harder to compete with Oracle around databases than it is to compete with Oracle in general. Yeah. Because they've got, they're more willing to also put it out there. But I don't think anyone who thinks that any of these technologies is so, is completely impossible to displace or what have you, I think it's delusional. I think, of course you can, of course you can lose out to one of these guys. So we're getting down to cut that to our time here in the segment. So I want to ask a couple of final questions. One is honestly going forward next year, what are you going to be working on personally in your relative to your focus? And talk about the change. So that's one question. The second question is, what's happening in the services business that's changing? Obviously, you know, when you have these inflection points, it's a tsunami of new solutions. And people will make more money. There's money making opportunity for all involved. So break those down. One, what you're going to work on, what your focus is, and then the impact of the, I guess, channel, I thought better work, consultants, integrators. You have these new opportunities. All the money's changing hands now. Sure. So we'll talk about that. So the first thing I think is, what's interesting to me is, is the way SAP has been restructuring its core applications to make them easier to embed more flexible decision making. To make them more of a partner in how you run your business. Instead of saying, here's a transaction, it's going to sit in the SAP system so someone comes along and presses a button to say, okay, what can I do with that transaction? Can I do something with it now as the system? And they've made that possible in a lot more of their apps. And so I'm going to be working with clients who are like, excited about that opportunity and say, okay, instead of touching 100% of these transactions, maybe I can only touch, I only have to touch 5%, 2% or 1% of these transactions. The right percent. And the rest gets handled by the system. And that's becoming possible with the ERP systems and the CRM and the tax and planes processing. I think that's a really exciting change in the way SAP builds its applications. And I'm looking forward to that. I'm also hoping to work with some of the predictive analytics stuff that's coming out of the business objects group who are beginning to take their analytics infrastructure and move into this data mining predictive analytics area. And that's an exciting change to it. I'm looking forward to that. From a consulting point of view, I think the challenge here is that the initial money with any new technology goes to the people who just understand the technology because it's too complicated. No one understands it. But the real money comes when people can say, I can use this technology to give you a better ROI and change your business in some way. Solutions. Yeah, change some ratio in your business. Okay, if I can do that, then instead of having more of these kind of people as your business grows, you can keep that flat and grow your business anyway. And I think we're going to see that with the high performance, the in-memory, the analytics. We're seeing it already with rules and predictive analytics. I think that's really big data has to go through that transition. That's what we're going to do. Okay, James, great angles on that perspective. You have an exciting agenda ahead of you. We'll hopefully get you in Palo Alto, Cuba. We're in the same town, same school. Daughter's graduating fifth grade. Got my son in fourth grade. So, you know, it is 12th grade years at a Loni school in Palo Alto. I feel like I lived there. They probably feel that way too. I love the angle on the services and the consultants. I think that's totally right on the money. Thanks for your perspective. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thanks very much, Chris.


Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Pele Glendale, Dr. X17, and entropy UK. Coming up on DTNS, well, we have an Elon Musk Twitter deal, plus Amazon's trying social sales again, and what does the wearable market look like it's going? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 25th, 2022. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Richard Raffalino. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. As we mentioned, just about an hour ago, it became official that Elon Musk is going to take over Twitter, and we're still trying to make some sense of that, but we have a lot of other news to talk about today. So let's start with a few tech things you should know. The analysts at NPD Group found that the Xbox Series X and S was the best-selling hardware platform in March 2022, and in Q1 overall, and that's in terms of overall dollars spent, not unit sales. The unit sales title went to the Nintendo Switch, and it led for both of those time periods. The last time the Xbox led a month in total dollars spent was in March 2014. Overall Q1 video game hardware dollar sales did decrease 15% of the year to a mere $1.2 billion. Meta will open its first Meta Store in Burlingame, California, that's just south of San Francisco on May 9th in the same building that houses the Reality Lab's hardware division. The store will demonstrate and sell portal smart displays, Quest VR headsets, and its Ray-Ban smart glasses. The company says it doesn't have plans for future stores, at least at this point. Several iOS developers report receiving an email from Apple with an app improvement notice. Warning that apps that haven't been updated in a significant amount of time will be removed if not updated within 30 days. This doesn't appear to be a new policy from Apple, rather an enforcement change. Apple did change its policy back in 2016 to say it would start removing abandoned apps. After removal, any already downloaded app will remain on user devices and developers will still be able to monetize as well. SpaceX reached its first deal to offer in-flight internet service with its satellite network, signing a deal with Hawaiian Airlines. The airline plans to offer it to passengers for free, and the service will be its first in-flight Wi-Fi offering. That will make some folks happy. Installation of Starlink terminals is expected to begin next year, although the airline has yet to test and certify the technology for flights. The autonomous driving startup Pony AI received a taxi license to operate 100 self-driving cars as traditional taxis in the Nansha district of Guangzhou. While Pony AI received approval to charge fees to operate robotaxis in Beijing last year, this is the first taxi license granted in China for autonomous vehicles. So operating robotaxis does not mean you necessarily have a taxi license. The company said it plans to launch service in two other large Chinese cities next year. All right, Rich. Let's talk a little bit more about how platforms are going to have to behave in the EU going forward. Yeah, lots of interesting legislation coming out of there. Of course, we've talked about earlier about the Digital Markets Act. That's a proposal in the EU, or DMA as sometimes known as. That's the one that among other things would require some interoperability between messaging platforms. That's like the top line kind of item that that would regulate a companion measure called the Digital Services Act or DSA has now been unveiled. And just like with the DMA, the DSA has no final tax and will have to make its way through the European Commission, European Parliament and individual countries before becoming law. So you may say seems a little early. Why are we talking about it now? Well, yes, some parts may change. But these proposals do their best to get kind of all the member states or at least representatives from them on board before the release. So this gives a pretty clear indication of where the legislation is going. So here's what it sounds like will be in the DSA as it applies to large platforms defined as at least over 45 million users in the EU. So there will be the DSA will prevent any targeting of users based on religion, gender or sexual preference. It'll also include rules against dark patterns, the way content is either colored, capitalized or otherwise designed to encourage a particular response. There's other measures like terms and conditions must be understandable to minors and no targeting of advertising to specifically minors as well. The way algorithms work must also be made transparent to users and users must be offered a feed, not based on profiling. So something like a chronological feed would be a requirement under the DSA. There's other measures like hosting services and online platforms will have to explain why they removed illegal content and give users the ability to appeal such takedown. So have a clear mechanism mechanism for content removal appeals in place. And illegal content will be defined by each country. So this won't, you know, there'll be some individual sovereignty on that front. Basic information must be kept about traders to help combat sales of illegal goods and services. So kind of tamping down on counterfeit stuff. Measures to force a disclosure of steps taken to combat misinformation and propaganda must be present for all platforms. And this will apply to search engines as well as regular social platforms as well. So that that one was one that really stood out to me to power all of this compliance, because this is quite a bit of of compliance on this end, fees of around 20 to 30 million euros will be collected from large tech companies with at least 45 million users in the I mean, collective is very generous term for a tax and finds up to six percent of global turnover in the event of non-compliance. And you may say, is this coming tomorrow or when's that when's this coming now? Well, like I said, there's still a big pipeline to pass all of this. But companies have 15 months after the act is voted into law or January 1st, 2024, whichever is later to be in compliance. So Sarah, a lot in there, a lot on pack. What stood out to you of any any top line ones that stood out to you?  This is not law yet, and it's going to be some time even if it passes all the things that it needs to pass. Most of this feels pretty standard, right? Like, let's not target advertising to minors. Let's make sure that if if, you know, an algorithm works a certain way that users understand how the algorithm is working, what did strike me as a little unclear is the whole dark pattern thing. Now, when, you know, I understand that if if if the dark pattern is defined as something being colored a certain way or looking a certain way, maybe a word is capitalized in a way that's supposed to invoke a certain response. And that might be something that doesn't seem very fair on a platform. Is that something that I as a user would would would would that that would be something that I would not be able to do? Or is that just the platform itself? Let's say let's say we're talking about Facebook. Let's say I'm looking at my newsfeed and somebody shares something and it's some sort of an image that is invoking a response in me. That's not what we're talking about, right? That that would just be Facebook shouldn't be pushing me one way or another. I believe so. But again, there where you get into the language of design, like things are designed to have an impact on you one way or the other. And so again, we have the broad strokes. We don't know the exact language that this will take. So my like my question is how they will enforce this. Like if Amazon rolls out a change in one of their shopping page UIs, will that need to get approval beforehand? Well, they have to show a slide to say here was the design process of the intent behind this. This is why we rounded this corner. This is why we're highlighting this button right here that it's not, you know, so yeah, like I don't yet. So to your question, will individual user be able to complain? Most of the ways that we know about these dark patterns is through leaks. You know, design guides or something like that.  So that. Well, I mean, the idea of advertising is like, I mean, advertising is all dark patterns. That's I mean, whether you like it or not. I mean, it's a series of dark patterns. We want you to buy this thing. So we're going to make you feel guilty or excited or, you know, all of the, you know, there are all these tactics that that that also that lives online alive and well and certainly on platforms. But yeah, it's it's maybe needs to be a little bit more defined. Yeah. And and and again, this does apply to large platforms. So it does limit the scope of this. And for reference, I looked up what the Max find for GDPR, which is one of the, you know, kind of signature tech regulations that we've seen, or at least privacy regulations that we've seen in past years from the EU. That's four percent of annual turnover. That was a huge deal when that first came out several years ago now. So six percent of annual turnover is there are some financial teeth to this regulation for sure. Well, moving on at the Economic Times of India's sources say that Amazon India acquired the women focused social commerce startup called Glow Road in an attempt to further expand into the rapidly growing social commerce space. Now, Amazon has tried on its own to get into the social commerce market. You might recall way back in 2017, Amazon launched Amazon Spark. That was an app that let prime members post pictures of products with users shown feeds of products that they were interested in, you know, to get to get excitement up to get people buying stuff. But Amazon shut down Spark in 2019. It did integrate some of the idea into its interesting finds section. But as a standalone product, didn't really work. Glow Road has a different approach. It pitches itself as an earn from home business that uses other popular platforms such as WhatsApp to promote products from resellers. Glow Road's website claims a reseller selling, let's say 100 products a month can earn around 20,000 rupees. It's about 260 US dollars. Again, within a month, I mean, it's not a ton of money, but depending on who you are might make a big difference. Maybe many e-commerce players in India are trying to expand outside of the country's top 10 to 12 cities as well. So Glow Road currently claims to have over 6 million resellers across 2000 different cities. Yeah. And usually when we're talking about social social commerce, these kind of sites, at least in the US. And this is why I found this story so interesting is because it kind of gives you an international perspective. I'm thinking of things like Depop or Poshmark, where they're borrowing the language of social media and present and using that to craft a marketplace. So you have a lot of the same mechanisms of I can like this. I can comment on it. Oh, and I can also buy this shirt or pair of pants or what have you. Yeah. What's what's interesting about this is it's kind of almost the opposite of a of social commerce, what we understand, or at least usually what I assume to be social commerce, is piggybacking off of other services like, hey, WhatsApp groups are super popular. Boom. You know, you can get on here. We'll give you some some promo codes or what have you and you can kind of get link backs kind of almost like super localized affiliate link or influencer operations, whatever, you know, what have you. I think it's a really fascinating way, you know, Sarah, does any of this though sound a little multi-level marketing to you, though? That's like the first thing that kind of popped up in my head. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I would say that, but I would say of what I understand of Glowrode's business bottle, a few people are going to be really successful at this, just like, you know, you can get certain people are just great sales people and that, you know, it's might, you know, give you some money in your pocket, might have some fun doing it, might get to know some products that you wouldn't have known otherwise, you know, and and be able to sort of spread the word. Most people are not going to be good at this. That's just the way that just the way that life works. So in that sense, sure, I think that this is this is a interesting opportunity and is going to help some people out. I think I, you know, if I have to guess, I would say that the scale is going to be a big issue here because they're they're just only going to be certain people that anyone listens to and buys products based on their their recommendations. Yeah. And on the multi-level marketing front, from what I understand, Glowrode does not require you to like hold inventory or anything like that for these things that you're selling. So it's you're not taking on a liability and and kind of forcing it to pass on. It's just like when you get that like, hey, sell so much and you get this reward sometime with your group of friends, it can sometimes feel that way. But I could definitely see this, I think of like parent groups and stuff like that where you have like a big group chat with a whole bunch of other people.  Like you got, oh, you got a deal on those. Hey, I could see like that kind of like influencer based, like super micro influencer based, I could see being really popular. Well, like you mentioned, you know, with affiliate links, it's as long as that is something I'm aware of done by me at all. I don't really know if it bothers me that I realized there's an affiliate link that wasn't super disclosed to me just because I understand the practice. But, but yeah, we were talking about drobos before the show started. It's like if I was trying to sell some drobos, well, I don't have to like clear my closet out to have a bunch of them in my house.  You know, it would be there would be a lot more pressure on me to like get rid of this merch and, you know, save myself some space and make some money. So so yeah, I think this is I think this is interesting. And if anybody out there is like, I know something like Glow Road, or I've even I've even used this in the past, do do let us know. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Just don't sneeze on those drobos. All right. Well, the big news of the day, Twitter's board accepted an offer to buy the company by Elon Musk in a deal worth forty four billion dollars toward stockholders. We received fifty four dollars, twenty cents per share, the exact same as the initial offer from Musk. And once the deal closes, Twitter will be a private company. Musk said he wants to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating spam bots and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential. I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it. Twitter's next earnings call is on April 28th, although it will not hold an earnings call. It's already said just based on the acquisition. The company's annual shareholder meeting is set for May 25th, so we'll make it some comments there as well. And the deal is expected to close overall some time this year, pending regulatory approvals and that and shareholder approvals as well. So, you know, Sarah, where we are in an Elon Musk, you know, it seems like every time we're on the show together, Elon has to break new news. I appreciate that he likes giving us the attention. It's nice that he pays so much attention to you and me that he does want to, you know, give us a lot of news content. I appreciate that, Mr. Musk. Otherwise, yeah, so this this has been a, I think I called it a roller coaster a couple of weeks ago. It really has been a roller coaster I haven't been able to get off of. And yeah, so today we got a deal. The company will will go private. I think that that is probably, you know, right now I know, particularly on Twitter, because that's where I am every morning looking for news and everybody was losing their minds about this. This is extremely new news. We will discuss this more tomorrow because there's going to be more information and more hot takes that we can kind of parse. But for now, I think what is most interesting to me, and I've said this before, is I don't feel personally like my Twitter experience is about to go into the toilet in any way based on this. But if I were running a an account that maybe represented a marginalized group and I was worried about, OK, well, how will free speech be defined in the future? And I'm not saying it will be defined any differently than how Twitter has been defining it thus far for the last 14 years. But but, you know, if that was something for 15 years, if that was something that was concerning to me and already was, yeah, I might be I might be a little bit worried, especially again, because the company is private. There are certain things that they don't necessarily need to listen to people about the way that you do when you are a public company.  Twitter didn't go away. In fact, I just paid for my annual subscription to Tweetbot. So I'm still here. But yeah, there are a lot of questions yet to be answered. Yeah, a lot of reactions out there if you love Elon Musk, if you don't like him. But like at this point, what we do know is that he plans on making the algorithms open source to increase trust. He wants to target defeating spam bots, and he's looking forward to authenticating all humans. And it seems like he's not going to be taking any measures to decrease what he sees as free speech on the platform. Any of you look square? Like that's what we know. He's been very vocal about that. I for all that you could say about Elon Musk. Usually, he's extremely vocal about what his plans are. And then you have a reaction to them and then he does them. And then we have a reaction about when he does them. So at this point, that's what we know. He's been very vocal about it. And we'll be continuing to cover any changes to Twitter that certainly have a lot more ability to experiment with new features, not having to worry about reporting growth numbers every three quarters or three months, excuse me. So it's an interesting one. Indeed, you probably have thoughts on this. You have thoughts about anything that we talk about on the show. And you say, you know, I'd like the team to know how I feel. Please do send us an email. We love your emails. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send them. Thank you in advance. So we've heard leaks for some time now that Google has begun working on a first party smartwatch, but the company hasn't announced anything officially and sourcing on rumors can be kind of sketchy. Not the kind of things that we cover on DTNS unless we feel it's really warranted and has some weight. But Google evidently has a name that it wants to protect for a device of this kind, as it filed a trademark on the phrase Pixel Watch with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which specifically lists it covering smartwatches and accessories. So probably signs point to they're doing this. This also comes as Android Central sources sent them pictures of a supposed Pixel Watch prototype that was left at a restaurant. How convenient and showed up on Android Central. Interesting how there's things work showing a circular face, a rotating crown and two buttons. Now, we don't know the source, so it could be legitimate. It could be final hardware. It could be neither. But Google has been trying to crack the wearable OS market with some success here and there for some time that we do know. So, Rich, do you think a new hardware play as wearable makes sense for the Pixel line? I look at what Google hardware has generally been and usually it's a showcase for a platform in a in a market that Google is usually already doing pretty well in. So like Pixel phones like Android has a huge market share, right? It's it's number one globally, right? So you can you can have a Google showcase and it's and it's going to show off. Hey, this is what plain vanilla Android looks like. And we have a cool, clean design or what have you. And it's not going to traditionally, those have not significantly sold in huge numbers. I know Google has been ramping that up and trying to refine those efforts over time. But that's just the history of those. Same thing with Chromebooks, a lot of Google Chromebook devices. Again, Chromebooks are a huge market, you know, that we've seen kind of grow up over the course of the pandemic. And yes, Google makes well regarded Chromebooks, not necessarily the top sellers, usually fairly premium. The where this gets weird with wearables is that Google does not dominate this market in any kind of way, right? The most popular smartwatch category when you're looking at the statistics from where is it here? When you're looking at analyst numbers that from counterpoint research that the top OS usually is other. It's like 42 percent other, which is like proprietary or real time OS or stuff like that, where you're really not installing apps. Apple is number two at 30 percent, at least at the end of 2021. And Android is at 10 percent. You may say, OK, you know, second or third compared to the depending if you include the other category, that's pretty good. Except most of that came from Samsung devices after the unified play where they integrated ties into wear OS.  But at the same time is a Google watch. What is that going to offer? It's going to run the same unified platform. It's not going to have Samsung's one UI integration on top of that. It's not going to integrate as well with Samsung devices. And one would presume it would interoperate pretty well with pixel devices. But that's an extremely small set of numbers versus Samsung devices, which, you know, is the number one Android OEM by a mile. So I don't know what the goal is for this. If it's to be a showpiece and say, here's the cool things we can do with wear OS, no one else is doing this right. It's great. If not, it could actually edge out smaller wear OS players like fossil, for example, you know, has been making, has been plugging along on that wear OS train for years now. Despite it seemingly being abandoned at times or not getting updates maybe as quickly as they would like. But all of a sudden you have Google and yeah, fossil has more of a traditional watch kind of background to it. But I wouldn't be thrilled if I was fossil. Let me put it that way. I was and this is probably just because until very recently when I started wearing an Apple watch, which I'm reviewing for my next Live With It segment with Jen Cutter, I was a Fitbit user. And I actually I'm still using Fitbit data for my Apple watch. It's a very long story for another time. But I was surprised that the Fitbit OS was only 4% of the market. I would have thought it was a lot higher. And that's probably just because I used it so much that I just was like, oh, it's great. You know, it's this is great. The Pixel watch competing with Google's Fitbit line is strange to me. And maybe I'm just maybe it's because some people go, I don't really want a fitness tracker. I don't want to wear that. But I would like to wear, you know, a high end watch. And the Pixel line is high end by all accounts. So this would be the same. So maybe maybe it does make sense for Google to have that kind of distinction. At the same time, I'm like, this is what Google does. There's too much. You have all these products that are like kind of similar, but not exactly the same. And they've got different names and they have different product roadmaps. And it confuses all of us and we talk about it all the time. So yeah, I'm I don't I don't know what's going on here. But let's just say that prototype was real. I would I would think that Google would want to integrate everything that they have in a smart watch slash wearable slash fitness tracker category and make it this watch. Yeah.  We don't know the specs for this have really haven't been leaked a ton. I'm assuming it's going to run some kind of Qualcomm chips at, you know, stuff like that. But the the the issue is it's like if you buy an Apple watch and you use an iPhone and you buy a new Apple watch and you put it on if especially for a watch, it feels probably the same. It's going to sync all your settings. Everything's going to look exactly the same.  If you're using the other category, right? One of these proprietary, you know, smartwatch and stuff like that, you're buying it probably because it's fairly affordable, right? So that's that's your your top thing. And oh, yeah, it tracks my steps and I can get notifications from my phone. That's really awesome. Where Google is going to have this problem and where OS has had this problem also is like everyone wants to create their own experience. And that works great if you're like whole hog. I'm imagining it's going to work fairly well if you're whole hog into a pixel ecosystem and I got the pixel phone, I got my pixel watch, I got my pixel book, I'm good to go. I'm all Google all the time. But if you're coming from a Samsung smartwatch and you port everything over, you're going to be missing that Android or that Samsung One UI secret sauce that they put on there. You're going to be missing all the Samsung apps, even though it's running the same OS, you know, kind of in the background. And to me for like to me a watch, I this is tough not to crack, but I don't think people want like radically changing experiences. Like they want the watch, they look at it, they know what to expect and they can put it down and get on with their day. It's a little it's a different interaction than a phone, I think. Very much so, especially because, you know, it's a small screen. So you have to get creative about what kind of data you're you're you're checking on the device. It's also a watch. The way that the way that a phone is a phone, but it's also so many other things. But but yeah, there's there's only so much you can veer into like our uncharted waters before people go. This is weird. I just going to go with what I had before. Well, a couple of years ago, it was my birthday and a friend of mine had a person on a reality show send me a video message telling me happy birthday. I'm not going to tell you the reality show because it's just too embarrassing. But that that service that my friend used to get the celebrity to send me a birthday message was called cameo. Might have heard about it where celebrities, you know, often reality TV, but it could be, you know, sports figure or whatever, send you video messages. Well, move over cameo because a startup called Imagine A.R. has launched something called Fame Days. It's both a website and a mobile app. So fans can enjoy life size hologram video images from athletes and also celebrities. Now, the roster, you know, it's limited for now. Current A.R. celeb greetings include boxer Tyson Fury, baseball athlete Pete Alonzo, football player Vaughn Miller, wrestler Rick Ric Flair, rather reality television star Blake Hortsman and others. So again, it's not that many folks, but this is new stuff. Imagine A.R. launched back in 2018 and now delivers an A.R. self publishing CMS. That's content management system, if you're not familiar with the term in the cloud that lets businesses create an A.R. experiences for customers in 60 seconds or less with built in chroma key capability, meaning that the company uses a visual effects and post production technique in tandem, layering two video streams together based on color hues to make that A.R. effect. So imagine A.R. includes things like A.R. scavenger hunts, holograms, as I mentioned, and some other unique ways of using this technology. So my interesting idea, if they can get that chroma key stuff to work that, I mean, that obviously is the whole kitten caboodle. But you can Snapchat filters have convinced me to the point they could probably do that fairly well.  Of course, you know, Mick Foley, I'd love to take your call and talk with you about my birthday. That seems absolutely wonderful. Now, would I love an A.R. message from the Nature Boy? Of course, that would delight my heart. I would say woo, he would say woo. It would be a really fun time. But I don't I like I this to me is it should be like a Snapchat or like an A.R. filter, like Snapchat filter. I don't need it to be personalized. I just need to be like, oh, there's, you know, there's Von Miller and his pat me on the back and he's saying happy birthday and he puts his arm around me and I can share that. That's that's the experience I want. It lacks the I guess the personality because like cameo also offers like chat things where you can like chat with a celebrity for like five minutes or something like that, too, because like you wanted to feel personal, not necessarily like you're trying to fool people into thinking they're there or like they're you're interacting with them in real space. No, it's weird. Yeah, I this some. It's I not that I'm saying like, please get this for me for my birthday to anybody, but I'm like, I don't want to poo poo it because I'm like, it actually could be really cool.  This this actually could be really cool.  But maybe I'm not thinking outside the box enough. Maybe it's just not the right reality show star listed on there for you to was it love is blind? You don't have to say yes. It wasn't love is blind. You know, it's like two years to confirm or deny. You don't have to confirm or deny. It was fine. I'm not sure. OK, OK. It was for sure. Now, let's just move on and I'll look my wounds in peace. Well, we do we do have a lifetime supporter for DTNS. We'd like to thank Alex Erickson for being that top lifetime supporter. We have quite a few of you and we'd like to shout one of you out when we can. Thank you. Thank you so much for all the years of support, Alex. And of course, you can get a longer version of this show called Good Day Internet, available at patreon.com slash DTNS. It gets started in earnest right after the show. Indeed, it does reminder for folks that like to join us live or can in the future. We are live Monday through Friday at four PM Eastern, twenty hundred UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. We're back tomorrow with this big and science host, Dr. Kiki Sanford. Talk to them. This show is part of the broadband network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.


What do you think about mandates the way masks? I have been resisting resistant to it because that's my default position whenever I see what might be Expansion of state power now I'm questioning that I'm against Mandates the way masks government mandates the government should not mandate wearing masks unless you know in a government facility But you the government cannot should not mandate wearing masks, but of all the things to resist This is what drives me nuts The government mandates you pay 50% of your income we play along They come in mandates that you pay property tax otherwise They'll confiscate your home and we play along the government mandates that you can't get a drug because it hasn't been Proved to the nth degree to be to be able to cure your disease that you're dying of anyway And we just play along the government mandates a million different things that you do every day and you just succumb you just you just You know lay down and let them tromp all over you, but God forbid they mandate you wear a mask That's where you're gonna draw the line. I mean at least in the tea party era They try to draw the line on social life medicine. All right. That's a real issue But here the line is being drawn in a way as to hurt yourself Because it's rational to wear a mask it makes sense to wear a mask It's like a seat belt. Now. Do I like the fact that the government mandates seat belts? No All right, I'm gonna I'm gonna ask that you guys stop sending super chat questions Unless you're willing to have me answer them in different day another day because I can't do anymore today So do I like the fact that the government mandates me not wearing a seat belt me wearing a seat belt? No, I don't like the fact that the government mandates it But am I not gonna wear a seat belt just to go now to the government? No, because it makes sense to where she built And the mask is exactly the same thing it makes sense to wear masks not because Trump told you God do one reason I wouldn't wear mask is because Trump now embraces masks, but because it just makes sense If you're sick and you and the stuff coming out of your mouth That might make somebody else sick then why would you want to make somebody else sick if you wear a mask?  Everybody wears masks and you think that's an accident you think it's an accident that everybody's wearing a mask and Now they've dealt with it in other ways much better than the US and much better than the West But look at South Korea Taiwan Hong Kong Singapore Japan The oldest population in the world highly concentrated in a city Lots of public transportation very few deaths from coronavirus one to some extent. I think it's because not all some extent because they wear masks so Stop being such a tribalist and stop thinking for yourself And yes, the government mandated and they shouldn't Alright, but that's not where you draw the line. This is where you're gonna fall in your sword Literally, you're gonna commit suicide because the government mandated that you do something you should do anyway What we need today what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think Meaning any man or woman who knows that men's life must be guided by reason By the intellect not by feelings wishes women's or mystic revelations Any man or woman who values his life and who does not get want to give in to today's of the stare cynicism and impotence and does not Intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist All right before we go on reminder, please like the show. We've got a hundred and sixty three live listeners right now 30 likes That should be at least a hundred. I figure at least a hundred of you actually like the show Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but but at least the people who like it You know, I want to see I want to see a thumbs up. There you go start liking it I want to see that go to a hundred All it takes is a click of a click of a thing whether you're looking at this And and you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego It's an issue of the algorithm the more you like something the more the algorithm likes it So, you know, and if you don't like the show give it a thumbs down Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes But if you like it, don't just sit there help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share and and You can support the show at your own book show Dot-com slash support on patreon or subscribe star or locals And and show your support for all for for the work for the value. Hopefully you're receiving from this and And of course, don't forget if you're not a subscriber Even if you even if you just come here to troll or even if you're here like Matthew to defend marks Then you should subscribe because that way you'll know when to show up You'll know what shows are on when they're on you'll get notified, right? So Yes, like share subscribe support like share subscribe support. There you go easy Do one know all of those please


Welcome back to Politics in Hawaii with Dennis Esapi on Think Tech Hawaii. Today we'll be speaking with James Konani Tokioka, a state representative from Hawaii. He has made a positive impact in the community and the hospitality industry and they're in the political world. He has been on the Kauai County Council for 10 years and in 2006 he got elected to the state legislature where he is now. Welcome Jimmy. Thank you for joining us today. Can you tell us a little bit? Aloha. Can you tell us why you first ran for office, especially as a former Republican and some of your proudest accomplishments while in political office? Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that question Jimmy, but I first want to start by thanking you for having me on the show Dennis. I've always admired you and respected you because talk about doing so much for the community. Our work is minuscule compared to the things that you are responsible for in building and constructing and without people like you and the engineering company, a lot of responsible stuff on this island would not happen. So I'm sure everybody who watches this show knows about you in some form, but I just wanted to go on the record and tell you thank you because every time I I need a spell checker. For every time I need to have a question about engineering or many, many things. Dennis, you're the first person in my mind that I call and for people who are wondering why Dennis is laughing, I send out brochures every year from my office at the state capitol and one year Dennis found the typo and he sent it to me and he said, Jimmy, by the way, there's a typo in your brochure. Me, I'm a terrible spell doctor. I thank God for a spell check and I thank God for other smart people who know how to spell. When I read it, I know it's spelled wrong, but sometimes you all miss stuff, but Dennis peruses. He always calls me and says, it's okay to pronounce it like that or write it like that, but it shouldn't be like this. So for somebody who you say didn't graduate, how did you graduate Dennis from my school? In English, second language. Yeah, that's what they sent me to. So I think it's interesting for people, it's good for people to know how meticulously this guy reads. And so that also goes down into your work as an engineer and thank you Dennis for all that help. So yes, what you said about my elections and the career that I took on, the 10 years in the county council started in 96 and then it went from 10 years from there to the state house now it's 15 years. The question that you asked about Republican, I wouldn't say, I wasn't, I ran as a Republican in 1996 for the county council. I was a nobody in office and I'm a very competitive person. And when people tell me that, you know, you cannot win, I take that as a challenge. And that's what happened because Mary Ann Krusaka who was the mayor at the time, she was the one who asked me to run for office. And, you know, I was, I had a restaurant at the time and, you know, I didn't know much about running for office. I didn't know much about campaigns, but what I knew at the time from running hotels and restaurants is that you need a good team around me. You need smart people. You need people who can help you meet people on this island. So I put a team together. Dan Mackey was my campaign manager when I started and until this day, he still is my campaign manager and a very, very good friend. A very, very good businessman. So I learned a lot from him. So that's what got me into office. And I say that because getting elected right after Ipimiki, I thought I had a good skill set to help reopen the island because my background was hotels and restaurants. So I spent a lot of time on the mainland at 11 years before I came back to open Marisha here. Ipimiki put a damper on that. I had to delay it for almost two years. But the reason I ran for office was I thought I could make a difference after Ipimiki marketing the island. You know, making sure that we put things in place so that the visitors can come back and have the same experience if not a better one after Ipimiki. So that was the impetus for me to run for office. And, you know, running as a Republican, as you know and everybody, a lot of people know on this island, it was me and Brian Baptiste that started at the time. And we were both approached by Mary and Fisaka and bless his heart, Mary Baptiste. I learned a lot from him about campaigning because that guy was nonstop, you know? We did a lot of things together when we were on the county council. And I, you know, as I was going through the show and I was on Felicia Cowden's show three weeks ago and Mel and Charlie's show a while ago, I was just looking at some of the things we did when we were on the county council. And there was a lot of things that we got done but we had a good team. You know, Ron Kochi was the county council chair. Darryl Connoisseur was the planning chair. I was there. Brian Baptiste was there. Randall Judge Valenciano was there. In the beginning, Billy Swain was there. So we had a really good team. And I learned a lot. But one of the things that, you know, I feel, you know, we accomplished was housing. And, you know, part of it was after Niki, there was federal money for housing. So, you know, the Ligui theater was, I was at the tail end of that, you know, making the appropriations for that. But, you know, whether it's Ele Nani from A and B and, you know, the Kukui Ula project, I think the Kukui Ula project to me is one of the projects that we got a lot of, not a lot, but we had some, a lot of people that weren't supportive of the project. But when I explained to them the conditions that came with the project, some of them understood, you know, like the roundabout in Pueblo, right, Dennis? Probably the best roundabout on this island. And that was put in by A and B and that was put in as a condition to the project, the wastewater treatment plan. You know, nobody likes to talk about wastewater treatment as you know better than anybody else, Dennis.  The county. And if the county's paying for it, then guess who's paying for it? Your property taxes. And that's, you know, that's why all of these entire conditions that we put in, a lot of it was housing. Puea, I think it's 134 units. On our village, one and two was 50 each. So that's a hundred units there. When they get up to 300 units, then they have to build additional housing at Kukuiula or, you know, write a check to the county. So those were, you know, a lot of good conditions, LA LA Nani, 152 units. And just off the top of my head, trying to remember some of the projects. That's just started from one development. And then the park, the park that we approved as well is gonna be maintained in perpetuity by the developer. Where does that happen? So, you know, I'm proud of a lot of the things. And like I said, it was a whole team effort. It was not 1%, but a lot of people working together. Lima Ola was a condition of, a part of the condition of Kukuiula. You know, it's just the sidewalks. If you walk around that area, the sidewalks are, you know, put in, and those things are all not cheap. And some of the conditions in me and DMB had to put in way before the project got developed. So I'm proud of those things that we accomplished. I'm, one of the things at the county council level is the, with your show Dennis, the net expo.  So we put a team together and bought a lot of people here from the Silicon Valley to teach our Kukuiula and our children, you know, what was happening on the internet. And you can think about 1998. A lot of people didn't know what the internet was and it was slow and it was dial up and it just has progressed so far. But I still have contacts with the people that came for that expo. And I'm very, very proud of that. I think another one of the biggest accomplishments that I'm proudest of in my political career is the smoking ban and restaurants and bars. So that council chair, Kochi at the time, myself, Brian, that piece, we worked on that and it was tough because there were a lot of people, there were a lot of people that were against the smoking ban. I can remember, and I can share his name because, you know, he talked to me after it. Rob said, Rob, it's a good times girl. He was upset.  And I said, Rob, I have a restaurant too. And I think about the employees that are in that restaurant. And I don't want them to suffer secondhand smoke and Janice Vaughn and her team worked very, very hard on that. And so today, shortly after that, maybe like a month or two after we passed that bill, Rob came into my office at the county council office and he said, Jimmy, I gotta apologize. You were right. I said, Rob, I wasn't trying to be right. I just trying to do what I think is right for the community. And he was so happy.  So that's probably one of the things at the county council level that I'm proudest of. The bike path. You know, I just think of all of these things that happened from the time that I was there. We initiated, you know, mayor, mayors, Yukimura and Cusato and Baptiste who were all part of the introduction of it. But when we were there at the county council, that's when it started happening. And, you know, it's a beautiful thing in my opinion. It runs all the way from Manapola. And I cannot wait till it connects to Kauai Lagoon and Pocuala and that area. It's something that it's gonna be, and it is used now by a lot of local people. You see a lot of local people riding their bikes, walking their kids, all of the different comfort stations that are along the way for people who eat their picnic lunches, bentos, and, you know, very, very happy that they can sit in the shade and watch all of that. So, you know, that's the time that I had at the county council. But when I, the question that you asked when I joined, I didn't know anything about the Republican Party. When I went to some of the meetings, I was like, oh, I don't represent a lot of what they stood for. But I did have people that I respected, but I knew that my heart and the things that I stood for as far as, you know, helping people who need help, helping people that cannot help them, that have disabilities, you know, for people who don't know my son's deaf. And he was born shortly after I got elected. And then we found out that he was deaf.  And then I could see how, you know, people who were blind and deaf and people who had, you know, any type of disabilities were not always at the front burner of issues when it came to legislation and politics. And I thought that I could make a difference. So here on Kauai, when I was at the County Council, there was an ADA lawsuit regarding the captioning of the County Council meeting. And so Ron Cochia, I give Ron Cochia credit for this because he knew Pono was deaf, but he said, we have two choices. It is something that should be for everybody captioning. Oh, then if it's not for everybody, then it shouldn't be for anybody. And that was a profound thing that he said at the time because I was like, so you're saying that you're going to take off the meetings from TV if it's not fair because the captionings are not on. And he said, yeah. So captioning is not cheap. I think the first contract that the County put out, I think it was in the neighborhood of 300,000 at the time. They didn't have as many word to voice technology, or voice to text technology, sorry. So, you know, Ron was instrumental. Speaking of Ron, he's just texted me. I don't think he's watching the show, but he just texted me, sorry. And, you know, Cochia was the first one. So when I went to the state capitol, I told speakers, I said, you know, it's not fair for deaf people, or even people who are hard of hearing to not have a meeting captioned. So we got that the year after I got there, we got funding to caption the meetings at the state capitol. So, you know, certainly certainly proud about that, but over the years it's just continuing to make sure that the voices of the people on the neighbor islands are heard. And I think we have a good team on Kauai. I know we have a good team on Kauai, and we're very fortunate around Cochia as the Senate president. So it's very helpful to our community that, you know, when Ron is given an issue that it's certainly gonna have a lot of credibility and weight behind it. So I think, you know, I feel very confident that we make a great team, and I'm proud of the ability to work with a team that is tenured and knows the different nuances of the government. Because, yeah, you can go sideways in a minute. Yeah, thanks. I'm sure you're a family neighbor. Dr. Bald, the district health officer was happy with your smoking ban. Yes, he was. Yeah, you know, as we're talking about the legislature, this past session, he passed some bills, the governor E.G. vetoed some of the bills, and the legislature overrode them. Can you tell us about some of them? Sure, I think technically a lot, he vetoed 28 bills, and of the 28 bills, more than half of them were technicalities because of the Americans Recovery Act funding from the federal government. One of the biggest ones in House Bill 200, which House Bill 200 is the budget bill. So everything in that bill is everything in the government, in the state of Hawaii. But the governor found out after the session closed that some of that money could not be used for paying off bond debt. And so if we didn't correct that, we couldn't pay off our debt. So, you know, the bill had to be vetoed and fixed. So it was a little bit of a complicated section, a special session, because we had to veto and fix. It's never happened before. And it's never happened before that a governor has vetoed 28 bills. One of the biggest controversial ones was House Bill 862, and that was the funding for HDA. So a lot of the organizations involved in the visitor industry, a lot of the nonprofit organizations that had funding through grants from HDA for colloquial plantation days. And they got on the emails and texted us and called us and emailed us to let us know that it was important to them that the funding be kept. Excuse me, but their legislators at the capitol that had some concerns with how HDA was funding projects, the procurement of the funding of the project. I was not one of them. I felt like HDA was doing a lot of good things in the pillars that they were addressing. I think that John DeFries, when he started, he came up with a plan and he was trying to execute that plan. It's hard to execute a plan when you're going through, you know, the biggest downturn in tourism in the state's history. But that was one of the biggest bills that was up in the veto override. And the rest were pretty much technical stuff. So, you know, we went in last week, Tuesday and we finished on Thursday and we think that all the bills are fixed now. And, you know, I'm hoping they are because every year on each side of the legislature, House and Senate, about 2,000 bills get introduced on each side. And at the end of the day, only about 300 or 400 bills passed. So it's just, you know, some of the good and the bad and making sure that it's all properly, the oversight is proper on each of the bills. So that's probably the biggest thing with the special session in my opinion. Yeah, thanks. Speaking about the HDA. Now, a lot of people are saying we've got too many tourists with too many effects of tourism. So what can the legislature do? Okay, so during COVID, you know, let's just go back to June of last, during that time, everybody was like, oh, we got to do something to open up the economy to get people to wear their masks to do this so that we can get visitors because we can't, there's no jobs. There's no people. A lot of the restaurants were closing on Hawaii. Everything was closing for a while. So I would say that, you know, tourism is not like a water faucet. You know, you cannot turn it on and turn it off, but what was amazing is when the mayor and the governor took away some of the conditions as far as quarantining and all of that, the numbers came in unbelievably strong. I just think that that's a few things, Dennis, is bent up, frustration for people not traveling is people not being able to go to other countries, Japan, South Korea, Australia. Some people don't feel safe going to Mexico right now. So they look at the numbers in Hawaii and they're coming here. As far as what can be done about the number of people, you know, it's hard to address that because you have airlines, right? That are gonna be selling cheap tickets and that's what they're doing right now. So the governor or the government cannot tell the airlines what to charge or how many flights to bring in. I mean, they can, as far as the fees, the airport fees, they can address it that way. But like I said, it's not like a faucet, you can turn it on and turn it off. But, you know, I'm like any other local person, I want the tourists to come, but I want them to come responsibly. But then you see tourists today on the news playing with the monk seals, which there's signs all over the place. They're gonna get, I'm hoping that they're gonna get prosecuted to the full effect of the law.  But then there's a lot of other tourists that come and, you know, are very, very responsible. They could do cleanups and stuff like that. Part of the big problem right now, and everybody knows this on Hawaii, is that tourists, we don't have the inventory for rental cars. You know, we have the hotels are back, the hotels are back, but not all the hotels have all their employees back. And, you know, Paul Toner, who is a close friend of mine, we talk a lot about, you know, inventory and what's happening coming up in the months to come. But the hotel rooms are there and they're going up to the rates that they used to charge before COVID, but they don't have the employees. And then the rental cars, I talked to the rental car agencies at the peak of, before COVID, then as we had over 20,000 rental cars on the side, 20,000. After COVID, 10,000 of those cars were left Hawaii. Before they left, there were ornaments on golf courses at Kmart parking lot, at, you know, Kukui, I mean, Grove Farm in their, some of their fields and the grass was growing all over these rental cars, but they're all gone now. And a lot of the company said they can't get cars. And I think you've seen it on television and the shows that you watch about the microchips.  So the cars, they cannot produce the cars. The Japanese car makers stuffed up on chips, but the Americans not so much. There is that problem. There is, in the beginning of COVID, there was some uncertainty with some of the companies. Hertz went bankrupt, but then Hertz also purchased locally a lot of cars that they couldn't, because they were in bankruptcy, they couldn't purchase from the manufacturers themselves. So is that good for the economy?  So you're trying to find a car right now, good luck on Kauai. You're certainly not gonna be able to get the car that you want. So how do you fix that?  And a lot of people are saying, well, we should be marketing to the high end tourists. I don't know about that. What about the smaller hotels? But the smaller hotels bring in the discount tourists and some of the tourists come and they can't. And so you wanna stop all of that. You wanna stop some of that. Tell me how you stop it. That's all of it. That's what I would say about that. And I know, you know, people say, oh, we gotta move away from tourism. You cannot be an economy just based on one thing like tourism, okay, well, then what's the next thing? Because farming, I don't know if farming is gonna be the answer because why? As you know, Dennis, coming from families that work in the farms, your brother, it's hard work. It's very hard work. You get one storm and your crop is gone. So what's gonna be the next industry? Technology, man, I don't know. Anyway. Yeah, yeah. That's why we have you in the legislature. Figure it all out. Yep, you made good points about tourism and housing. The next big topic we have is housing. Yes. We think about, you know, what the state of the county doing. I got my dogs, but... I think the housing department on Hawaii has done a great job. You know, I'm blanking on the name now, but it's the shelter for women in need by the theater. You know, Kanani and Adam, you know, Kanani did that building in the front between the theater and that water department. I didn't think that we could put that, I think it's 62 units over there. I don't think, I didn't think we could do that there. And it's gonna be opening pretty soon. And the women in need shelter, that was in the whole, entire time that I've been in office, that was the fastest project that the government ever did. And it's awesome.  Okay, let's analyze that. Who's selling them the houses on Kauai? It's Kauai people.  There's some people that have land from parents and they sell the land. And guess what? They're not gonna sell it for, you know, the Kama'aina friends and family, right? They're gonna go to the highest rate. And sometimes it's not gonna be somebody, a local person that's born and raised on Kauai that can afford it. But to the guy selling it, he's trying to make as much as he can because he wants to buy land someplace else on the mainland, maybe, maybe another lot here or something else. But that's the biggest problem. And then unless you can tell me other, I mean, there's other things that are issues, but that's one of the things. And I would say like some of the vacation rental housing. So those, the people that have bought those houses in, you know, the VDA or other places, they want to make money. So they vacation rental it. And that's another problem that we have with housing.  You know that? Yeah. Yeah. That's upon, you know, the housing department doing a great job and expediting. Yes, they are on the very low end. You know, they do fast track. They, you know, they exempt from a lot of the conditions. But along that lines, the housing for the regular working class, they, you know, and they get so many conditions they get satisfied and there's no fast track.  And it gets some other conditions, I think, you know, that you got to be looked at to expedite that. I agree, Dennis, but every time stuff comes up, there's a lot of political will to stop it. But, you know, affordable housing. Let's talk about affordable housing. But before you get to that affordable house, you got to put in the drainage. You got to put in underground utilities. Now you got to put in a solar water heater. And, you know, all of these things are good things, but it's going to make the price higher. So, you know, as legislators, as we're going through the process of putting in these conditions to make the community better, it's also jacking up the price. You know, and we tried to do 201H to expedite stuff, but, you know, there always seems to be chokeholds at different points. And, you know, I'm sure there are better ways for us to do it, but it's difficult. Yeah, Jimmy, it's great to talk to you that our time is about to run out. We got so much more to talk about maybe later, but any losing words? No, you know, Dennis, just thank you for reaching out to me to do this show. I mean, I appreciate it. I always enjoy talking to you and for listeners who don't know you very well, Dennis, you know, is not doing a lot of the talking on this show, but Dennis is a very smart, funny guy. And I always, when we're talking, I'm always laughing at some of the things and your profound knowledge that you have. So thank you for everything, Dennis. Yeah, thanks. Thank you to Jimmy Tokioka for joining us today. Mahalo also to the viewing audience. If you enjoyed this show and others, please support Think That Hawaii. I'm Dennis Isaki with Politics in Hawaii. Until next time, Mahalo and Aloha.


erny the demand of money, the price level and the real income and interest rate. As students we are talking about asset market and we are talking about money market in that we are talking about success of money and demand for money. So what is the demand for money?  तो अगर वादने उसक लिकुडिती ती अहुट मैचुरेटी थी, तो मनी गिसुरत में ताएगी मैचुरेटी प्र आपलाए नी होती कि वो तो बावनस बगारागा किसुरत में ती, कि बावनस कितने अर से बादाग को कैश में लिका, तो तो RAD काएश में हैं तो इसलिये बाखी तींचीजनों पर वो दिपन्ग करता है के रिटान्ज रिसकोर लिकुटिटी पर दिपन्ग करता है. Okay. So, इन हवाले से, लिकुटिटी के हवाले से money is the most liquid asset. Okay. और रिटान्ज के हवाले से money per always आपको बहुत लोग रिटान्ज में लेंगे. Okay. और people's money holding decision depend on how much they value liquidity अगे अस्था low return on money. के वो अपनी wealth को, जब money की फाम में रखते है, तो क्या होता क्या? उनको उसका advantage क्या है, और उसकी cost क्या?  आज हम बात करेंगे, एक ये money demand है, इस पर different macroeconomic variables किस तरा से इस पर असरन्दार डोतें? So, some key macroeconomic variables जो money demand को effect करेंगे, उआज हम दिसकरस करेंगे, परस्वन is the price level, एक अनुमि में अवराल क्या prices कि सुरते हाल है, real income और इसी तरा से, तीसरा factor है, variable है, interest rates. Ok. Price level. Price level का money demand के साथ direct और proportional relationship है. The higher the price level, the more money will be needed for transaction purposes. Ok. So, when prices increase, then if you are in 1980, if you are first in 1980, today's ratio is 10 times higher in 1980, then for the same transactions, the amount of cash you need in 1980 is more than 10 times. So, this means that when prices will double, then you will have to double the money demand for the same transaction. So, there is a direct and proportional relationship. So, nominal money demand is thus the proportional to the price level. Price level, the ratio which is increasing, nominal money demand will also increase by the same proportion. Second, macroeconomic variable, real income. Real income का क्या रोल है? Money, we had to demand for this, so that our transactions do not cause any harm to us and we can do it easily. So, how many transactions will a person do, how much will he spend, how many things will he buy, whether he is an individual or a business form, then his transactions will obviously depend on the individual's income and similarly, the size of the business form will depend on the turnover. So, the more the individual's income or the size of a business, the more transactions he will have to do and the more cash he will need for it. So, this also has a direct relationship, that by increasing the real income of the income, the money demand will increase. So, real income is the prime determinant of the number of transactions you conduct. Now, I have explained this to you. So, money demand rises as real income. Like I said, the direct relationship moves in the same direction. When your income increases, the money demand will also increase. But money demand is not proportional to real income. When we saw money demand as price level, we saw it on money demand. So, we said that it is direct but it is also proportional. If the price level doubles, then your money demand will also double. But if the income doubles, then the money demand rises but it does not double. Less than doubles increases. Higher income individuals use money more efficiently, number one. The reason is that rich people use money efficiently as compared to poor. And since the country's financial sophistication grows as its income rises. And the second reason is that as the economy grows, its income increases. So, the financial instrument of the country also increases. Sophistication increases. Instead of cash, plastic money, credit cards, or use or transaction, or transactions like online, there are more options available. For this, demand for money is less. So, the proportion of income that is increasing, demand for money does not increase from that proportion. So, the result is that many demand rises. When the income rises, many demand rises. But less than one. One to one, there is no correspondence in this. And third factor is macroeconomic variable. That is the interest rate. And increase in the interest rate or return on non-monetary assets decreases the demand for money. We had said that the total wealth of one person is divided into two. Money and non-monetary assets. So, there are bonds, shares and other things in non-monetary assets. So, when the interest rate, when the rate of return on non-monetary assets increases, then what will happen in the third factor? That the money that you have kept with you, you can say that the opportunity will increase. If you invest in it, then you can get returns from that investment. But when you keep it in the form of cash, then you are forego those returns. Okay, they are getting deprived of returns. So, it is obvious that when the amount of interest rate, i.e. you can take bonds, we will take a simple example. Okay, the bonds were offering 10% interest rate. And if you have kept your money in the form of cash, then return is zero or if you have kept it in your current account, then the interest rate is 5%. So, to enjoy that liquidity, now what you are doing is you are forego the interest rate of 5%. Now, if the interest rate of bonds increases from 10% to 12% or 14% or 15% or 20%, then now this sacrifice will increase. Now, you are getting 5% on your current account. And if you keep the money from there and keep it in someone else, then you are getting 20%. So, now it will be difficult for you to forego this. So, whenever the interest rate of non-monetary assets increases, then people will keep their wealth less in the form of money. So, it is a negative relationship. Okay, but there is also another interest rate. This is what I talked about the interest rate that you are getting on non-monetary assets.  Like I said, you get 5% on that. So, if that increases, then what will be the impact of this? That you will increase in the demand of money. That is, the impact of increasing the interest rate on non-monetary assets will be that the demand of money will decrease. And the impact of increasing the interest rate on monetary assets is that the demand of money will increase. So, this occurs as people trade off liquidity for return. I am talking again and again that the demand of money is basically a trade-off. There is liquidity on one side and returns on the other side. If you have to forego return to enjoy more liquidity, then this is a trade-off. Okay, so now there are many non-monetary assets with many different interest rates because they often move together. We assume that for non-monetary assets there is just one nominal interest rate. That we have said for simplification that there are only two types of assets. One is called money and the other is called non-monetary asset. Now, there are many varieties of non-monetary assets. And obviously, there will be a different type of interest rate on each of them. And similarly, there are different types of money such as cash or your current account. So, there will be different interest rates on these too. But for the sake of simplicity again, we assume that all the non-monetary assets have the same interest rate. In the same sense, we are saying that all of them are different but they all move in the same way. If there is an increase, then in almost all of them there is an increase or an decrease. So, without this, we can say that the interest rate of non-monetary assets is common interest rate. And we denote it from i. And we denote the interest rate on the money as common interest rate. Okay, thank you.