Okay, we're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is ThinkTech and it's Thursday morning, business in Hawaii. And we have today Ray Tsuchiyama, an old friend and host and guest on ThinkTech for many years who has thought about and written about what it's like under coronavirus, especially for the CEOs. How do they change the way they run their companies? How do they respond to the crisis? So all you CEOs gather around because this is the kind of conversation we're going to have. Ray, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Jay, and happy Prince Kuhio Day. Thank you very much for that. So you have a bunch of slides and I want to allow you the opportunity to go through them and present your thoughts, at least initially, and then we'll get into a discussion about it after that. Thank you very much. And we'll start with the first one that shows a friend of mine at the Honolulu Japanese Chamber of Commerce. But what is really, really significant about this photograph is the words since 1900. And that was the year of the great Bipartic plague in Honolulu that led, unfortunately, to the great Chinatown fire, which destroyed more than 30 acres in central Honolulu, and really resulted in Japanese and other ethnic business people at that time banding together and working to grow the economy of Hawaii after the Bipartic plague. So again, it's an indication or a sign that a plague or epidemic did have outcomes to business and economy in Hawaii right there. Just for context, Ray, the Bipartic plague was a bacterial plague. It was spread by fleas on rats, as I recall. And it was of great concern in the late 19th century, early 20th century in Hawaii. And it was one of a number of diseases that had decimated the population and economy of the state over the 100 years prior. And it was not like coronavirus. It didn't have the same contagion level, but it did kill a lot of people. And certainly the business community was very concerned about it. And it led to, as you and I discussed before the show, it led to a kind of rethinking of how we deal with business enterprises and how we deal with crises along those lines. Please continue. That's absolutely correct, Jay. But there were similarities with the Bipartic plague outbreak in Honolulu of 1900 and today in 2020, that is to say, the basilis seemed to come from originated from central China, number one. And it came to Hawaii and also infected people randomly assumed. And the Board of Health at that time was giving a really broad powers, almost dictatorial powers to quarantine Chinatown. And they were the ones in charge. And the pandemic ended in five months. Unfortunately, it did result in the fire. But you're absolutely right. In the 19th century, there were smallpox, diphtheria, typhus, cholera, many, many epidemics. And of course, the longest running one that has its own quarantine is Hansen's disease in Kalau Papa. And so far, drugs did treat patients that it's okay for them to be in society and back to society. But that's a quarantine that has been around since the mid 19th century, in fact. Putting it in context, Ray, if you looked at the year 1800 or so, we didn't hear in Hawaii, we didn't have a lot of these. We didn't have most of these diseases. We didn't have any of these diseases. And Captain Cook and following, they brought them here for us and the Native Hawaiian people suffered throughout the whole century. And we're decimated in population because of all these various diseases. So by the year 1880 or so, correct me if I'm wrong on the year, the monarchy developed a Department of Health. And they were really tired of all these pieces and outbreaks. And so they gave a lot of people, a lot of resources to that department. And that still exists today. The Department of Health in the state of Hawaii is one of the biggest departments we have. It has thousands of employees. It is proactive. It is on the streets and in the homes. It occupies the same influence and the same proactivity and concept that the Department of Health did at the outset. So we have to be cognizant of that. And the question ultimately, which I hope we can discuss today, has the Department of Health met that standard vis-à-vis planning preparing for the coronavirus. Anyway, go on please. Well, let's go on to the first slide in business. We look at the CEO and COVID-19, the first priority for any CEO in the world, in Hawaii, is of course the employees of the company. But I also add that the CEO is responsible, has to lead the company to survive. Plus, I think many people, including myself, see the COVID-19 crisis as a time to innovate and have new growth in business and new products. So that's, I think, my key number one. And for the CEO to really point to health sites or headquarters approved materials, there's a danger for fake news among employees, among families and so forth. They really have to be a leader in looking at the right sources of information, like the CDC, the Hawaii Department of Health, WHO. The other area, the number three that people have been doing is to divide into micro teams like A, B, C, D. And each one is like a micro company. Because if one person gets infected or sick in the sales department, the sales department entirely has to quarantine. So you want to have micro groups, teams involving different parts of the company so that you can have survival of the company. Are you saying that even if you didn't have these teams before, the CEO should establish these teams upon the crisis? That's really what I'm saying. And also that if the CEO has a COO, never travel together, never meet together in this time, so that if the CEO gets sick, the COO can come in as the number one from number two, just like a vice president moving into the presidential role at the United States federal level. So you're absolutely right. A lot of things that we see with COVID-19 should have been already in planning or in contingency mode before such as crisis. You're absolutely right. I want to go back to your point too for a minute because we've seen that on the national level. The dissemination of accurate information is critical to responding to any crisis and especially a health crisis. And we've seen that in the national response here. We've had a lot of inaccuracy and fake news coming from the White House and inconsistencies. And this is a big problem because a crisis, by definition, a crisis of the community of the citizenry, of the population is a crisis of people. And so in order to calm them down, in order to get them on board, in order to have them take your advice, you have to be consistent. So I think one of the biggest tools both on the national level, state level, and of course on the business level is good information, well communicated. It's a major tool in dealing with any crisis, especially this one, don't you think? Absolutely. And I think the CEO also is a position where does that right or correct information lie? And that's where I would say the Chamber of Commerce is stepping up, Honolulu Japanese Chamber, many business associations, trade associations are stepping up to that role also. But you're right that Dr. Fauci is a very much a trusted figure in the society today. Candy coding is not acceptable because if you candy code it then later on you're going to be found to be inaccurate and then you lose the confidence of the community. That's right. Second slide. The second slide kind of goes to what does the CEO do to really get the right advice? And I would say leverage your trusted advisors, your board directors, consultants, even retirees who come back to fill in roles. Maybe you find at a time of crisis your sales ahead is not really achieving or doing at the level that you want. You bring in an interim sales director from one of the retirees, for example. You have to talk to your competitors, what are they doing in all this, and in the Chamber and other associations. But before you send everybody home, which is what companies are doing right now, you must know what your employees are doing in terms of operations at the company first. But what is the outcome? Can they achieve the same outcome? And how do they do it at home? And you bring in IT, of course. And now everybody's buying millions of laptops. And I say, I was talking to an IT professional, and he says, oh yeah, laptops are a new toilet paper. Because people, I'm serious, they're buying millions of time. You can't get them. And we're at the end line of the supply chain from the US, mainland. Servers, yeah, let's buy three servers to create more bandwidth or file. Again, it'll take time. And when you send people home, then you're exposing your files or servers to all kinds of malware, ransomware, phishing, all kinds of this. So you have to be very careful and say, who should get access to? What do you have to look at the exact work that people do? Do they have to get into your server for a file, or they can do other types of work at home? So that's the key. Don't look at IT first. You have to look at your business first. Yeah, you know, one thing is that people think that in a crisis, the scammers and the hackers and the fellows that do mischief on computer security are going to join in the community effort to survive. But that's not true. Actually, they come out of the woodwork. And you have additional security problems of mischievous people taking advantage. It is kind of a shodden froid of the misfortune of others. So you can't expect they're going to be good now. They might be worse. So you have to double down on security. You're absolutely right. And you have to have very good training. But again, you have to look at how your business works and have your employees very, very aware of what you just said. Next slide, please. Now, going back to my theme here, throwing IT at people does not increase productivity. And there was a very famous MIT research project in the 90s that had the mystery of IT and productivity. It didn't rise. And then they discovered that you have to change management. You have to change teamwork. You have to change for, especially for millennials in your workforce, OKRs, objectives and key results that you trust the employee that they will meet the objectives in their own time, in their own schedule. And there are software available for CEOs to look on, monitor every employee at home and how they're accessing service. Don't do that. You lose your employees because you want to create a very good environment for your employees to be successful. Now, you know, I spoke to an IT professional this morning. And, of course, they do a lot of video conferencing these days in order to address these very same things that you have on this slide. And what he said was he was more busy now in trying to put things together along these lines than he ever was before. It's not like he's at home relaxing. He's under tremendous pressure every day to have conferences and get people on board and change the system to be resilient for the crisis. Very interesting. It's not easy. Again, like you said, Jay, in the beginning of the program, if companies had done this already, had a very solid OKRs in place that they could manage and trust employees when they go home to do the work and have outcomes that really contribute to the company, you wouldn't have all this crisis. The pandemic crisis just sets a light on how companies should do better planning. Next slide, please. This is the, before the final slide, which is a pandemic, but I would also like to say that companies should really go forth and think and innovate. You are not going to do the same things going forward that every B2C customer marketing survey is worthless today. So you have to rethink how you're going to sell to you, the customer, how you're going to sell to your market. The market is completely changed. And also that IT will be very significant going forward. It will be even more doubly significant because you have people working at home going forward. But coming, yeah, go ahead. But in so many companies, and maybe Hawaii has a fair share of companies like this, the tension is, you know, why change? We've always done it this way. So we should continue to do it this way and resist change of any kind. The thing about the virus and the crisis is, it is change. You can't resist it. And you must come up with new ideas to deal with it. So in that sense, it's going to, you know, elicit or require new thinking, which ultimately it's sort of like the Airbnb and Groupon phenomenon that we find new systems because we have to. Necessity is the mother of invention. And of course, if IT is going to be so significant in the economy going forward, then we also as a society, as a state, have to look on that, look upon computer science in K-12 at universities in business as the number one priority going forward for the state. And that's something that I hope the governor, the mayor, the UH president, and the superintendent of schools are looking at to see, to really foster an integrated computer science initiative throughout the society. Yeah, one good example would be education, especially higher education, where, you know, the University of Hawaii has not adopted online courses to do any significant degree, even though we've had MOOCs, you know, on a national level for years. And now we have to do that. The university has to do that. And they're establishing systems and people, students are in fact attending classes and MOOCs type classes to finish the semester. So that's a positive thing, and it will outlive the virus, it will outlive the pandemic. And at the end of the day, we will have more people who know more about how to do online classes and we will do more of them. So that's a positive change, although in a sea of trouble, it's a positive change. You're correct. So even before the crisis, a state like Arkansas under its governor really put computer science as a major initiative in K to 12, even before the pandemic. So this is an accelerate change for Hawaii being isolated. We have to develop a strong workforce in computer science that has a base in K to 12, and then have new industries, new products based on software development that we can sell globally. And people will enjoy and have better products than money, you know, through PayPal and other e-commerce to Hawaii. That's what we need, a new economy. Yeah, please go on. Last slide. So last slide is quite an appendix. Just that CEO should be aware that when they send their employees home that they should have a training session or program that these phishing or malware or security issues will be exponentially attacking that employee at home through their Wi-Fi that anybody can hack. So you have to be very careful of how you do IT or emails or accessing the company server. Because once a hacker gets into your server, the ransomware could be 50, 100, 200,000, maybe millions of dollars just to restore your files back to a company. Yeah, remind you of that shipping company in Europe, Scandinavian shipping company that was hacked and they had a terrible time. They were down and rolled their shipping stock for a while. And they were only moderately prepared for it. This is maybe three years ago. But let me say that, you know, what this all evokes for me is that there's no room for a lie in the CEO job or in the CEO job in a company today, anywhere in this country and probably the world. And this is going to separate the men from the boys, the women from the girls. And a CEO who doesn't follow this kind of thinking, a CEO who doesn't respond to the virus and make the changes necessary to deal with it, who doesn't come out the other side with better systems is the CEO who may very well lose his job in the process of the crisis. This is not a drill. The CEO must respond and he must take your advice rate. You must feel like a very important person. Well, I'm trying to help the community because we have a landscape of small to medium businesses, many family businesses that the CEO's father or grandparents established since before statehood or just before afterwards, they're in their own building that they own. They're thinking of selling their own building or other income producing properties. It is a very crisis time for a lot of small businesses. And they have a product that sold well in the pre COVID-19 economy to local people or exclusively to tourists. There are no tourists here and local people are like me, it's a question of the homes. We're not going to malls or going to these small shops. So you're right. I think that I hope these little advice or guidelines will help CEOs really develop the right mindset. First, the right planning and they can retain their great core employees because that's the heart of our community. Yeah, and self-reliance is really an essential part of that, a concept of self-reliance around the state. You and I were talking about it before the show and we are not self-reliant. Although there have been governors in the past, I'm thinking of John Burns who spoke to that and George Ariyoshi and maybe others too, but we have not achieved self-reliance, not in agriculture, not in diversification. And I recall one appearance at the Hawaii Venture Capital Association where a young programmer stood up and he complained. He said, you know, these big institutions in tourism go to the mainland for their software development, but we have developers here. We have programmers here and we know as much about tourism, for example, as anyone in the world. We have the expertise in an operational sense. We should become more self-reliant and use our own people and develop systems. And it's not just software, it's everything. We have to learn to have the self-reliance of an island state, an island economy. And this epidemic is, I think it's going to show us we don't have that self-reliance and we better change our view of the matter. What do you think? Well, as early as five years after statehood, Governor Burns said he desired, quote, a Hawaii economy based on research, unquote. And that's barely in the 60s. He envisioned, and many others envision also the University of Hawaii as an engine of economic growth. Again, another thing that we should go back to, it becomes even more significant. That is a current one, research university on the island in Hawaii. We have to leverage that. Bishop Street and New Age has to partner for the future. So I have a tough question for you, Ray. So we're talking about CEOs, talking about doing the right thing. We're talking about self-reliance, seeing the state as a place where we can and should develop self-reliance. But you know, since statehood, since you and I have seen the state develop, a lot of capital concentrations in this state have been acquired by mainland firms, mainland investors, mainland controlling interests. So the CEO doesn't necessarily work for, he's not necessarily oriented to you know, the local market, the local concern, the local need for self-reliance. He's taking instructions from somebody in LA who owns his company. What do you say to him about all this? Well, again, the number one priority is the local employees. He or she has to look after the employees. That's really the responsibility. I feel a leadership here, right now, right now. But going forward, you're correct that it's aligning what you have in resources. And we've always been capital poor, your absolute right. Capital has to come here from Japan or mainland or whatever. And that's something that we really have to work on, be self-reliant and work with less leverage of resources, the limited resources we have here in much more ways that we really need to think of. Being like Singapore, they're a bit of nowhere, but really leverage language and entrepreneurship and trading to attract companies to come there and then develop their own capital and then send people out to sell things and market commerce globally. So there are other models we can look at. But right now, you're right, we're beholden to the swing, upswings and downswings of Wall Street to the stock market and investors in companies in Hawaii or throughout the world. Well, one last question, Ray, and that is, I'd like to know your feeling about this, either optimism or pessimism about how well we're going to do, how well our companies are going to do, not only during the crisis, but after hopefully soon after the crisis has been ameliorated or has been minimized somehow. Are you pessimistic? Are you optimistic? What's your thought going forward? How do you feel about it? I feel that CEOs are working very hard right now, ultra hard. That's number one. But I think the future will depend how bright it is, how rosy it is or how complicated it is on how CEOs look at this phase, which is just about survival for the next six months, and beyond that, how to innovate and seek new ways of growth. We're talking about growth. How do you grow? How do you restore 40,000 to 60,000 lost jobs right now in the hotel industry? How do you recover that into new growth areas throughout the state? That is an unbelievable task. And I think we need a lot more alliances, a lot more partnerships in society to move this forward. In innovative ways, three, five years from now, we may have a completely different economy, but again, it depends on how people can innovate. Ray Tsuchiyama, host and often a guest on Think Tech Hawaii, business counselor, tech counselor, par excellence. It's so great to be able to talk to you, Ray. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And thank you again. And let's move forward in the spirit of Prince Kuhio, King Kalakawa and other leaders of Hawaii. Stay safe, Ray. Aloha.


This is covering the spread part of the Fandall podcast network We are finally to the point in NFL training camps.  We've got injuries. We've got camp battles that are being settled and all those things do impact betting markets So what we're gonna do for today is catch up on all the NFL news We have not yet discussed here on the show that has transpired across the past couple of weeks break down What it means for me with my wind total models and some other fun markets over at Fandall sportsbook Then I'll wrap up by talking about NASCAR at Watkins Glen later on. This is covering the spread That's right here on the Fandall podcast network. My name is Jim Sonis I am a managing editor of digital media for Fandall research here to talk about the NFL for today break down training camp news And as I mentioned, we'll go through some NASCAR at Watkins Glen later on Let's start things off with the NFL here in just one second But first a reminder to make sure you're subscribed to the covering the spread podcast feed wherever you get your podcast We had Austin cast on yesterday's show to break down this week in EPL That is for match week number two Austin went two for two on his bets last week two more bets in the show For this week find that on the covering the spread podcast feed wherever you get your podcast You were awesome as to say And also tomorrow lots more baseball here on the show as well get covering the spread wherever you get your podcast If you like what you hear leave us a five star rating on Apple podcast or Spotify The baseball season is heating up So get it on the action with Fandall America's number one sportsbook because right now new customers get $150 and bonus bets guaranteed when you place your first five dollar bet Fandall is safe secure and super easy to use plus when you win you'll get paid instantly So don't miss your chance to swing big with $150 and bonus bets win or lose when you make your first five dollar bet Fandall official partner majorly baseball majorly baseball trademarks used with permission must be 21 plus and president select states First online real money wager only ten dollar deposit required Refund issued as non with trouble bonus bets that expire in seven days restricts his apply see full terms at fandall.com Slash sportsbook fandall is offering online sports waging in kansas under an agreement with kansas star casino llc gambling problem Call 1 800 gambler or visit fandall.com slash rg in arizona 1 800 next step protects next step to 5 3 3 4 2 in connecticut 1 8 and 8 7 8 9 7 7 7 7 or visit cc pg.org slash chat in indiana 1 800 9 and with it in wyoming in kansas 1 800 5 2 2 4 700 and kansas ks gambling health dot com louisianna's 1 8 7 7 7 7 7 0 stop in massachusetts gambling helpline ma.org or call you 100 3 2 7 50 50 for 24 7 support in mariland md gambling health at org in new york 1 8 7 7 8 hope and wire techs open wide and in west virginia go to 1 800 gambler dot net Let's dig in now for yennefell and i want to touch on some teams that have had big changes recently across yennefell as we've had Some signings some injuries that could alter things from a betting perspective Obviously running backs are not going to move the needle a ton But i did at least want to touch on the signings of dalvin cook and azika elliott start things off here With the jets signing dalvin cook and cook Did not have a good year last year He had worse efficiency metrics in alexander madison as far as rushing yards over expectation and stuff like that he had explosion at time still but In that's not madison's forte But overall it was not a good year for dalvin cook, which is why he was released But the key here is that none of the jets backs other than brice hall had good years either hall averaged 1.4 rushing yards over expectation per carry according to next-gen stats And that's a very big number. He was tremendous last year michael carter was a negative point six zahneman night was negative point 0 2 israel abanaconda looked pretty good in the first preseason game i thought but he's also a fifth round rookie so Hall is coming off this torn acl He can't carry the entire load So the question is whether cook is an upgrade over the other guys over carter overnight abanaconda And how much does that matter? I do think that dalvin is an upgrade over those guys So I did put in a bump for the jets projected rushing efficiency But I also did lower their expected pass to run ratio because they gave dalvin cook a lot of money Aaron rogers past couple years has been in pretty rush heavy offenses. Maybe that does translate to this year as well so When you give dalvin cook 8.6 or whatever million dollars that's us to me. You're probably going to be decently rush heavy. You've got two good backs to do it The offensive line is struggling with past protection protection right now. So I think that the tea leaves kind of do say they're going to be a bit more Run-centric than I thought they may be initially So that lowers scoring expectation for them in the season as far as like projecting out totals and stuff like that I had the jets at 9.8 wins before and they are still there right now But I will be lowering point total expectations for them in their games because they're worried they may go a bit more rush heavy than I would like so Downgrading the jets from a scoring expectation, but the overall win expectation Did remain large the same at 9.8 wins As for the Patriots with Zeke Elliott, it's a pretty similar thing where like dalvin cook He's not great. He's coming off a pretty good or a pretty rough year But he's probably better than the alternative that they would have had Running it when remandry stevensson came out the field because someone's got to do short yard and stuff stevensson can't carry all the load So I did give the Patriots projected rushing efficiency a slight boost and I also did boost their third down success rate a bit because Zeke is good in short yard situations. So That could allow them to convert in those short yard situations a bit more often It doesn't matter a ton for their win total Uh, I've got them below their win total even at 7.5 wins They are minus 142 to go under we had talked about the Patriots win total under back when it was I believe still plus money But I think that's appropriate where they're at right now. So the value is in the past. It is no longer there In the ASE East as a division Patriots are pretty big underdogs right now They are 8 to 1 to win the ASE east. So obviously, you know pretty big underdogs I think that's appropriate once again. I cannot get to them at 8 to 1 As far as the rest of the division, uh, buffalo plus 120 the jets are plus 250 the dolphins are plus 290 The dolphins did lose jam and ramsey So I have downgraded their defense as a result of that and after you add in the ramsey injury I have buffalo at 10.2 wins the jets at 9.8 and the dolphins at 9.4. So a very concentrated division I think the biggest takeaway there is that I can't bet buffalo at plus 120 to win this division They've got a tougher schedule than the jets and dolphins, which is why their win total is lower than you might think at 10.2 wins I think you could consider both the jets and the dolphins if we had this like a true dead heat Every team would be two to one if we just come to the Patriots aren't there Obviously, that's not accurate because the Patriots could win this division. There is separation between these teams So, uh, that's not a proper way to do things But the jets are plus 250 the dolphins are plus 290 At least interesting at lean dolphins right now among this group if I were to bet one of those teams But I think it's a stay away from me with their thing stand right now The other what I would deem to be important nfl news was the rustle gauge injury rustle gauge going down For the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. So missed the entire year Due to an injury for this year and when you look at this buck's offense Their win total is six and a half wins with the over a plus 116 after I add in the rustle gauge injury I've got them at exactly 6.5 wins And that's actually the second lowest number in the entire sport ahead of just arizona for me at least The one point against being low on Tampa bay would be the infrastructure around the quarterbacks specifically they got mike evans and chris godwin Offensive line is not that bad And if you've got a non elite quarterback having guys like that around you can elevate everything in a pretty good way So if the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were to exceed expectations It'd be because of that infrastructure But that infrastructure does take a hit with that rustle gauge because they're going to rely on probably a rookie Um to try to fill that gap Now from a division perspective that doesn't impact things much because I still think the saints are The best bet there a plus 130 the bucks though are in play for some grim bets some other markets that might not be quite as enticing so looking at teams the team to have the worst record in the nfl The Tampa Bay Buccaneers right now are plus 950 that is the second shortest number behind just the cardinals And I get why I do think the bucks are viable in that market But if you're looking for values stemming from the rustle gauge injury, which decreases the expectation For the entire offense. I think you're going to find a different market That is for the team to score the fewest points this year What you can find right now at vandal sportsbook in the season specials market And right now the Texas are their favorite there are plus 450 I think that's honestly a bit wild given that their offensive line is pretty good Their pass catchers have some upside cardinals are five to one to find Tampa Bay You have to scroll all the way down to 16 to 1 for them to be the lowest scoring team in the nfl this year This is a team with a defensive minded head coach who said last year when he had tom freaking brady as his quarterback So they want to be run central. They ran the ball despite the fact. They were awful at it This year they don't know tom brady. They're probably going to be run heavy once again they got an offensive line to do that and Their offensive expectations just went down because they did lose a decently key member of this offense so Tampa Bay at 16 to 1 to score the fewest points in football this year I think is really really fun. Obviously god and the evans do impact this market, but Maybe they decide to go Kyle Trask tear things down and try to rebuild a quarterback room That is absolutely the worst in football as of right now I would not be shocked if that's the route. They do mind of taking I do not think in any world the buccaneers should have longer odds in this market than the broncos the rams Honestly even like the bears and commanders. I don't think it should be longer than any of those teams So to me if you want an actionable potential bet based on The nfl news we have seen across this week I think the biggest one is betting the buccaneers 16 to 1 to have the lowest scoring offense in the nfl for 2023 Finally the finishing is up here with Anthony Richardson. The Colts officially did name him the starter for this week And I'd baked in that as the expectation from the start to have like a possibility was Garderman shoe about 10 percent But if we put Richardson in there as full starter Their projected rushing efficiency is very very high because it's a rushing quarterback who boosts that himself But also he opens more lanes for other guys within the offense and that does matter quite a bit Now obviously jonathan taylor If he can't go or if he decides not to go that would impact things here in a negative sense as well Taylor left the facility last night. It sounds like that was more for a personal matter and not due to his contract. Maybe I'm naive um, but It sounds like We're potentially trending towards a resolution there at some point Obviously rushing efficiency does not matter as much as passing efficiency But it is still in the model for sure, especially if you're going to be a run heavy team You want them to be better running the football? I do saw the Colts Uh, pretty even with their win total at 6.6 wins. I don't think they'll be a great offense I think it'll be fun to watch because Richardson is is exciting It's not sure how good it'll be right now, but they might not score a ton now They play indoors, which is why I'm not super intrigued in Checking out them in the lowest scoring offense market as we discussed the Tampa Bay Richardson knows plus 150 to an offensive rookie of the year For a quarterback who is now confirmed as a starter. It's not a bad number Bryce young 4 to 1 bijan Robinson 3 to 1 Richardson will get attention because he's going to have some highlights He'll put up really good rushing numbers and he plays indoors as mentioned If I were looking at this market the rookie of the year market I would lean towards CJ Stroud at 9 to 1 is being the better bet because He has a better offensive line than Richardson has right now His pass catchers are at least interesting is what I would say He's also playing indoors against a Not elite defensive division So Richardson is a consideration at 750, but I do think that Stroud is a better option at 9 to 1 With where things currently stand We'll talk some NFL again next week JJ Zachary is going to be on the podcast next week talk some Season long player props and break down his thoughts on those markets He's been fantastic at pinpointing good value there in the past looking forward to talking to JJ Once again next week for this week though Let's transition now and talk some NASCAR for this week because NASCAR The cup series and Xfinity series are both in Watkins Glen and the Finger Lakes in central New York It's the second to last race before the playoffs and chase Elliott is Desperately in need of a win almost got it last week Michael McDowell held him off and you got the narrative here with Elliott But also it's his best track and a track where my model adores chase Elliott I have chase Elliott at 18.7 to win That is a very big number for a cup series race given how competitive those races are right now But he's plus 350 at faddle faddle knows chase Elliott's good faddle knows chase Elliott needs to win So we're not going to catch them sleeping here. It's implied odds are 22.2 percent. So I cannot bet chase at plus 350 I did bet him personally early this week at five to one elsewhere but plus 350 too short for me and there's not much outright value elsewhere on the board because Both chase Elliott and Kyle Larson are very high in my model But not not high enough to be values and cells at plus 350 and five to one respectively So Outrights to me right now are a stay away. There is some value in the top 10 market though So let's talk about that first There are two bets that like in the top 10 market with where things currently stand at faddle sportsbook And those are in ross chastain a plus 195 and austin dillon at six two-inch are both available right now over at faddle sportsbook chastain Was plus 230 yesterday I'm still showing value with him now after shortening to plus 195 the new implied odds there are 33.9 percent My model is chastain at 39.7 percent to win And I understand why the market is low on chastain because his form recently has been awful both on road courses and non-road course last week At indy He was not super competitive even though he had two teammates finish inside the top 10 Obviously his teammate won at chicago as well So trackhouse has been good chastain is not With that said his form turned down at darlington That was kind of after that race is where things really started to get pretty bad He did still finish top 10 in sonoma So that was encouraging and again, even though he's been outrun by his teammates This is encouraging to me at least a trackhouse has had good speed in each of the past few road courses So we don't need chastain to win. We don't need to have a ton of upside to catch this ticket He could do that because he is generally a good driver in good equipment but I think that Having the flexibility of having him finish, you know in the back half of the top 10 to me is reassuring There are also fewer ringers this week. I think that taking out shane van gisburgen That does actually impact top 10 markets because it's one less Very viable driver to contend for that. So that benefits chastain as well So I think with where things stand right now Unless you think chastain is totally broken as a driver to me plus 195 Very good market to get him in Other one has mentioned is austin dillon. He is currently six to one to finish top 10 at fandall sportsbook and he's not a great driver on road courses, but he's been a lot better recently and He can get good finishes because he does tend to finish now This year's a bit different his best finish this year is 16th on a road course But two of those were because of rex. He wrecked a kota and wrecked at chicago He wrecked in chicago while running third, but that was due to strategy. So Overall this year. It's not been the best for dillon on road courses The speed has still been somewhat good especially last week. He had a 15th place average running position in that race He's had a mark of 17th or better in two straight races at walkins glenn and if you look at dillon overall during the next gen era He has a 20 top 10 rate on road courses In this span the implied odds here are 14.3 percent. I've got dillon 18 percent for a top 10 so Dillon at plus 600 and chastain a plus 195 are the top two bets I like right now for the cup series at walkins glenn On the extended series side of things we have both kyle bush and ty gibbs in the field and also hoax bowman bowman's driving a Hendrick Exfinity car which I assume is basically a junior motorsports car Which means very good equipment We've seen the Hendrick cars on road courses run very very well in the past So you really got three guys three super star bangers in this field between bush gibbs and bowman My model does like bowman a lot It's not quite as high on him as the market The downside of that is that if we're going to bet anyone else to win this race We need to make sure they've got the upside to beat some really really good drivers and That's scary for sure The one guy I do like most to do this is austin hill He is currently 22 to 1 to win at vandal sports book And I do show value at that number and I find hill very intriguing as a somewhat long shot here Hill has been lurking the entire year on road course. It's actually the entire two years Ever since he joined the Exfinity series. He's been very good at road courses He had an issue at kota But since then his finishes in road courses have been fifth eighth fifth third and fourth That fourth place run last week came behind ty gibbs a j alman dinger and sam mayer mayer won a road america Dinger and gibbs tremendous road course racers So basically we need some chaos, but if we do get any kind of chaos, especially with uh gibbs bush and bowman We would see I think hill in the mix for a win He did this last year too finished top five basically whenever he didn't wreck on a road course He hasn't shown that in the upside markets yet But the markets reflect that at 22 to 1 to win this race As a plot odds winner 4.3 percent I think that's underestimating him a bit and it's fully accounting for the fact that there are other Really good drivers in this field. I got hill a decent amount above that It could be because I'm underestimating bush and gibbs And I think that's a very fair critique and a very fair potential downside here But hill is a good road racer. He's in good equipment. Which does matter at walkins gland If you can get it to finish top five, I have his odds there 41 He's a pretty good value in that market at other books, but I don't mind the upside play Giving that a look at fandal with him being 22 to 1 to win Obviously again, it does require A really good race from hill to beat those kind of guys But I think that he's capable of it and I would not be shocked if he wins a road course race Whether it be here or the starlet road course to close out the year Especially the starlet road course where there won't be any cup drivers I think hill there could be very very fun. So hill to me 22 to 1 my fair bad for xfinity for this week That's all we got here for today on covering the spread back once again tomorrow with with some more baseball to close out the week No pitching ninjas. He's traveling this week But we'll be back with some more baseball regardless for tomorrow to get that as it is posted Make sure you're subscribed to covering the spread wherever you get your podcast if you like what you hear Leave us a five star rating on apple podcast or Spotify If you've got any questions for me, I am on twitter at gymsonus j i m s a n n e s You can also follow fandal research at fandal research Want to thank you all for tuning in for today. Good luck to you with your bets across thursday We'll talk to you once again tomorrow to close out this week This has been covering the spread right here on the fan dual podcast network


Ah, this is Rob Hack back with another episode of exporting from Hawaii. Today, I'm very pleased to have a guy who has been in the business of shipping from Hawaii for 50-something years, probably know more of an expert exists in Hawaii than Brian Suzuki, president of Hawaii Air Cargo. Thank you for being here with us today. Aloha. Aloha. Aloha. So companies that I consult to in Hawaii constantly hear me talk about shipping and I think that our local companies don't pay enough attention to shipping. Packaging is a big part of that, we'll talk about that too. Your company, Hawaii Air Cargo, is a freight forwarder. What is a freight forwarder? Can you explain that to the audience? A freight forwarder acts and I'm specifically an air freight forwarder and we ship by air, we do everything that the airlines are required to do except that we don't have our own aircraft. We use all the scheduled carriers and we have contracts with each and every one of them to get preferred rates and to get space. Believe it or not, space is very tight to get into the islands, I mean, this way. Going out, not that bad, we have so many tourists buying on wide-body jets that space is going out. We don't have too much manufacturing products. We can get favorable rates and I'll explain to that about that later. Okay. How old is Hawaii Air Cargo? Hawaii Air Cargo actually goes before I took over the company and I did take over the company in 1982. And so 37 years. But we're about the only locally owned company. We compete against a lot of mainland and international companies and we also compete in many respects with the FedEx, UPS and all the airlines. The only thing is that we consolidate and a brunt of the bulk of my business is actually shipping in from the mainland and you'd be surprised what air freighted in from the mainland to Hawaii. Air freight consists of only 2% of what's in and out of the state. But that 2% could be just inventory products. Nothing rushed as we might think, oh, air freight is expensive. We can't afford to ship air. But a lot of times it's cheaper than going by boat. And so it's actually something to look at. Same token when you ship to Asia. Because we have so many wide body flights, and they're empty with cargo. So what happens is that we can negotiate prices on behalf of our customers. And with that, we have, for instance, a rate from Tokyo to Honolulu coming this way is the same $2 a pound, or whatever it will be. Going from here to there could be 50, 60 cents a pound. A lot less and people don't realize because they said, oh, in Japan you want to sell your product. Hawaii flying it is too expensive. Because they know how much it costs to ship by air, within Japan, but also from states neighboring Taiwan or Korea. And the air freight is expensive because they actually go for a certain type of product. Here our air freight, since we have the space available, airlines want the business, whatever it might be. But they want to give us a pretty good price. So they do a lot of things that are helpful for our exporting. Although most of the exporters, the old-timers know, the new people getting into it, they just don't realize it. When they do get some kind of a prospective buyer without knowing the freight cost, wow, you know, air freight is going to be a lot more than we can do. Ocean freight doesn't allow less than container loads going back to Asia. So you have to fill a container, a 20-foot container, a 40-foot container, whatever. And that could be expensive for the buyer if you've got to load up so much stuff, you know. But there are no consolidations out of Hawaii. There are consolidations out of LA, the West Coast. Can you just one second explain what is a consolidation? Consolidation is, for instance, you buy a container, a 40-foot container, and then in there you put 10 different companies' products, you put it in there, you consolidate it into the container, you get a container rate, you may pay for a loading charge to have a company stage the container and load up. But it's a lot cheaper than shipping, you know, 1,000 pounds, you know, one time as opposed to shipping 20,000 pounds one time.  And they have a lot of consolidators, but unfortunately not from here to Asia. So the next best bet is we have very favorable air freight rate going back to Asia. What are the most common rates from Hawaii to Asia? I, of course, I hope to read Haneda. Yeah. Well, we have all different rate structures. For instance, Narita Airport is less expensive than Haneda Airport just because of the handling charges within the airport and maybe your ticket prices might be more expensive. And it's the convenience of being close to downtown Tokyo as opposed to Narita. But Narita Airport has all the customs, cargo, cargo, customs, and everything else. There's a big operation there with freight orders in Japan that have offers there. So it's very convenient. But at the same token, we can ship something for very inexpensively to Tokyo. And then next thing you know, their customs and clear out to have the delivery made might be more than double the price. And that's where negotiations has to be not only with the air freight, but also on the landings. So a freight forwarder such as Hawaii Air Cargo, are you working with customs clearance in the foreign countries? We do. But because we're an American company, we have to have an age agent, someone that doesn't kind of work. And then for the volume that we may have, it's very small compared to some companies in California, wherever. We try to ask the input of record, whoever's going to be the input, to do the shopping and maybe they order stuff from elsewhere and they already use a broker. And then with that, they can get a better rate. About domestic transportation in Japan, do you handle that as well? From Merida to... We could, through our agent. Through our agent. But again, it's a one-shot deal. So therefore, you have to look at, when I say one-shot, it may be this one time. And who knows when the next ship is going to be that you're going to deliver 500 pounds of candy or something. It's good to have a distributor that might be well aware of all the different companies that do that kind of work. A lot of Japanese stores, you can't deliver the whole order there. They're so... If you've been to Japan, you see the stores are small. They have very little storage room. So the distributor has to do the storing. And then as the order is placed, you might place an order for one week supply only. And so you have to have a regular delivery set up.  Only because of all the intermediary costs. So that's going to serve. And then going back to shipping, handling of cargo is very important. Unfortunately today, there are a lot of contractors that do ramp service, cargo service. There are various other things that I would like to say the old days, if you went to a carrier, people that receive your freight, they know they're well aware. You should be in chocolate candies or you should be cut flowers or plants. You can't leave it out in the sun. You can't leave it in the sun. Yeah. So therefore they take pride in that some of the newer companies, we have to watch because I pay claims on that. Most freight forwarders in the islands, they don't play games because the airlines won't pay the claim. For melted chocolate and cat flowers. Yeah, they say that, oh, you have to hack it in a refrigerated container. And that costs money to rent a refrigerated container. So we're saying that why should we have to do that? If you can take that product, which is in a container already, usually we put a blanket of those foil blankets to repel the heat. And then we may even do in the summer. We put dry ice back that the coolness stays within the container. And that's a lot cheaper that way. But the main thing is don't take it out two hours before the flight departs. Because there's no way the plane's not even in and hasn't even landed. And here you are taking it out and it sits out in the hot cement apron. So those things are something that the freight forwarder has to be aware of. How about on the flip side? Just those used chocolate as the example of the flowers. Once they land in Japan, how do you know that they're not exposed to the hot tarmac? It's a good question. I give an example in Seoul, Korea. Well, Seoul, Korea was posted down. When they opened the inch on the airport, the new ones, it's far away. So luckily Korean Airlines, they're good friends of mine too. I said, I want to do a familiarization trip. All the chocolate candy, my customers, I want to take them to Korea. And you give us free tickets. Oh, no problem. We got free tickets to go over there. The shippers from here, they would pay for the hotel and stuff like that. But we went to the airport and we had cargo manager around. And I had about six companies, maybe 10 altogether from the six companies. And first things first, the time the plane arrives, what time does it get into the cargo area? And fortunately, we were there in about maybe April and the weather was nice. But it gets in the 100 degrees in the summer and hot and it freezes in the winter. The plane lands, they take out the cargo, get a tin of chocolate candy, leave it outside, right close to the plane, and they wait for everything to come off. And they take a train from the plane, meaning a tow-out tug, take all those containers back to the cargo. It takes a 15-minute drive, let alone the wait time out on the ramp. So it's either going to freeze or it's going to melt. And so that was an issue, first of all. And we got it solved. Ask the guy, how come it takes so long? Can we get it done faster? If you tell us by email or whatever, we send a message, actually, the home office here, the Korean Airlines office here, send a message, so JL, whoever's taking it, send a message to that airport that says we have chocolate candy and you take it into the warehouse right away. And they will have a specific tug driver, just to pull that container. And that will take just 15 minutes. So that's a lot less of our time. And during the summer, they'll put up a big blanket that would keep the heat off the top. But then the next question is, what about once you get to the warehouse? I'll note that there are five climatic zones in the warehouse in China. Five, ambient, whatever's outside, whatever is freezing or hot. The other side is they have minus 10 degrees Celsius, zero degrees. So it's at what temperature you have to list it on the airway bill and on the message. We want it air conditioned, it's about 19 degrees. Oh, we got that. So all those things got to be done to get that product in. Now we had a situation in Japan where a shipment went to Osaka.  And you say, oh, if you're going to Hawaii, you can order from the catalog. And then the catalog people would ship it, you know, whatever date you want. It's a give you a fulfillment type. You don't even have to buy it here. You can just go over there and order it. So we're shipping, and I said, I got back a word from one of those. And he said that we got a claim. I got 10 boxes of chocolate melted. And we shipped in that low 90. The company 10, definitely a little questioning, but we replaced it. I shipped the 10 boxes in the back over there, they're very happy. But a month after that happened, I was going to Osaka anyway. So I went to visit the importer. And the importer takes pride. He's got a seven-story building, all air-conditioning, air-conditioning. And then, I want to see the chocolate candy that came out. So he showed me the storage area. And there was a, from where the containers were, the containers of chocolate or the stock. It was an aisle of about maybe 10 feet wide. There was a big window, picture window. Sunlight. The sunlight was coming through and hitting. That's right, only 10 boxes was on the side, was hitting that constantly every day. And they'll pull it from the stock. So only the ones that were on that side got melted. And you get the chocolate butter bloom. But that was untailable because it looks like mold. And so I told the guy, can you move this chocolate in and stop everything after that? And the guy says, oh, I'm sorry. It was our fault. They're so gracious. He says, we'll pay for the replacement. I said, no, it's been replaced. I'm glad I came. Don't just keep it away. It has to be placed down. So things like that, good examples of what you have to do. Try to get out of your freight forwarder, too. A lot of times, we depend on our agent to do that away. But it sounds like you're doing a lot of consulting work.  Well, I speak a little Japanese. And a lot of times, we have customers come in. We had a guy wanted to buy flowers, cut flowers. Well, let's hold that thought until after the break. Right now, we're going to take a break. Our exporting from Hawaii will be back in one minute. Thank you. Thanks to our ThinkTech underwriters and grand tours. The Atherton Family Foundation. Carol Mon Lee and the Friends of ThinkTech. The Center for Microbial Oceanography, Research and Education. Collateral Analytics. The Cook Foundation. Duane Kurisu, the Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners. Hawaii Energy. The Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. Hawaiian Electric Company. Integrated Security Technologies. Galen Ho of BAE Systems. Kamehameha Schools. MW Group Limited. The Schindler Family Foundation. The Sydney Stern Memorial Trust. Polo Foundation. Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. Aloha, this is Rob Hack, back with Exporting from Hawaii. We have Brian Suzuki, President of Hawaii Air Cargo with us. Again, thank you for being here. Before the break, we were talking a bit about Japan, but I want to jump ahead, and we'll certainly talk more about Japan. I'd like to open slide four, if we can, please, real quick. Let's talk about methods of shipping with air freight. We talked a bit about this passenger aircraft. I think that's obvious what that is, all cargo aircraft. I think that's also obvious. Then a freight forwarder. You could, as a freight forwarder, put cargo on either of these. Is that correct? And even on the integrator. So what is an integrator? An integrator is one that does not only air freight, the airships, the product, but it also picks up and delivers. So integrators are your UPS and FedEx. And they're an international, big company. We use them, believe it or not, to ship container loads. They give us a container aid. Like, for instance, I want somebody going from LA to Hilo. They have a flight to go to Kona. While you're talking about this, can we bring up slide five, please, as air containers? I think probably some people in the audience might not understand that there are different types of air containers and that it depends on the plane, actually, and the cargo door and the capacity. Maybe you want to explain a bit about that. Right, on this slide, in the middle, upper one, the M1, we ship about two of those a day in from LA. That's our biggest hub coming in. And the other ones we can go, what we call LD containers, lower deck. It goes in the bottom of a passenger flight. The M1s go on a cargo-only aircraft and that would be like the FedEx plane, the UPS plane, or Pacific Air Cargo. And also, Aloha Air Cargo have daily flights coming in from the West Coast. So, using these containers, we pay a flat rate whether we have like an LD3 container, lower deck, we can put up to 3,500 pounds. That includes the tear, the weight of the container. We can put 3,000 pounds in it or we can put 1,000 pounds. But we pay a flat rate. We have less weight, it's hard for us to get a good price per pound. If we had 3,000 pounds every day, wow, our price per pound is less. And we sell it per pound to our customers. So, we have to have a mix of customers. So, we have density rates, things that are very dense, heavy. We give them a preferred rate because they're heavy. Like honey, or something like that. Honey is something else here. Unfortunately, container rates are not available to Asia. So, we've shipped container rates to the East Coast and from there connect to another carrier that won't sell container rates, but they'll sell per pound rate and we can have it adjusted. But those are stuff that we have to look at the best price. Also, for our customers, they have the savings and our industry is not regulated. It's been deregulated since 1975. So, it's a buyer, the airside, yeah. It's a buyer-beware market. And so, when I say I'm not trying to scare you, but you could pay one customer saying, I'm paying 50 cents a pound, you can get a better that. I'm thinking no way you're getting that kind of price. So, what happens, you have a slide there, that slide, if you can bring that up. We charge- Slide seven, please. Yeah, slide seven. We charge by actual weight or what we call dimensional weight. And you see the dimensional weight, there's a formula, length times width times height in inches and then you divide by, domestic standard is 194, international standard is 166. Now, each carrier can have a different standard for what the divisor is. For instance, we use 194 for domestic, FedEx and UPS use 166. 166 goes more so your dimensional weight will increase. So, I have a quick question on this that all of this is in inches and pounds, but internationally you're not using that. So, when a customer calls you from Hawaii, they're probably speaking in pounds. Right, well we had to clarify that, because some people, when they give it out to their customers, they have to make sure that they change to, because we're the only country that uses a lot of pounds. Most other places, kilos, kilograms, that kind of stuff. So, it is important, that is very important. But, with that customer that was getting 50 cents a pound, actually a company they're using, uses a device instead of 194 was 94. He was, they were paying double the weight, large. And actually for their four shipments that I audited in one month, I would have saved them $5,000 because they were charged for the space it takes up. And I said, oh, my price is better, you pay for less bulkiness. And so, even going to Asia, some boxes, we talk about packaging, and if it's a good time to get into it, but packaging of your product is very important so that you know that if your product is bulky, you'll end up paying for the space it takes up. Companies that I consult to here, I tell them they should be thinking about packaging very early on in the process and working with their freight forwarder, shipping company to decide what kind of packaging is best to ship. Can we bring up slide nine, please? I think that this is a good one we can talk about for a second, hidden charges because you were just talking about this. So what are some of the things that companies need to look out for? Well, number one, documentation. Some companies charge just to cut an air bill. We don't charge for that, but you could, some people. Sorry, let's be basic. What is an air bill? Air bill, a bill leading. Air bill is what that particular shipping lies on. It's a house air bill, it's a Florida's house bill. You have an airline air bill and on and on. So who would do this paperwork? Would you do it as a freight forwarder, or is it the shipper filling all this out? The shipper can do it. We will give them an air bill number and they can go in and make it, this is the air bill number and use that for their tracking and tracing. And all the FedExVPS, they have, they're all billilating, but it's all electronic. And then for that, all you care about is the tracking number when it gets received, when it gets sent out, so you can make sure it gets to where it's supposed to be on time. So when you look at all those things, shippers export deck, the shippers supposed to be doing that, but then they can do it, they don't want to deal with it, so they'll ask us to do it, and which we do. But you have to have a value of $2,500 or more in that particular shipment for US customs. Everything that goes out of the US, they want to know what's going on. So they make it so that it's $2,500 or more. On the other hand, we have a lot of, and it has to be one SKU item, one particular type of item. You can have a mix of stuff that each one amounts to $1,000 but not $2,500, and you don't have to make an SCD.  Some people charge just to take you from their facility to the airport. And another thing too, as a freight forwarder, we have to abide by all of the rules that the airlines do. So we are under the gun with TSA. All of our employees have to have background checks done and they have to know all the rules. They can make stops between our facility and say United's cargo office. We can't stop and pick up a drink or something somewhere. Has to be watched, monitored or locked. And then we do have TSA, believe it or not, would send someone in. And because we know most of the inspectors here, they end up sending and bringing somebody from the West Coast, coming for a few weeks and then they go and try to walk into our facility. Or they wanna order something. They'll call from the hotel, can you pick a pickup? I belong to IBM. We can't just take their word for it. So you're just testing here? They're testing us because we have to call the home office. Where do you work out of? We can't use you, even though it's a big name. And obviously there would probably be a known shipper. We have to watch them. But so we do all that kind of stuff for which you even get a cheaper rate than going to the airlines. So it's something that we have to be looking out for. And again, one of the things with Japan or anything else, once your product hits, they want all you have. And a lot of the producers here are not big time they can benefit from big stuff. I give an example, one customer of mine, they've been my customer from day one. And I'll say it's Hawaiian host.  The biggest sell of macadamia and chocolate is host. But it doesn't say Hawaiian host, Singapore host. It's all the same, we ship the stuff. Singapore host, Korea host, all that. Very smart and that's where packaging comes up. They look at the thing and they go, wow, that is terrific. And some of the, anyway, like in Seoul, the ancient airport, they have to pay for cashier there. They have a duty-free store, but each chocolate that's sold at that place shares in the cost of that sales person. So before we finish, can we bring up slide 10? This is how people can contact Brian and Hawaii Air Cargo. You say, you've been there for 37 years. That's great. There's nobody in Hawaii, in my opinion, that would know more about shipping by air internationally or even to the mainland than Brian Suzuki. So please contact him or his company if you have any shipment requirements. Is there anything you'd like to add before we wrap up? No, I think what you're doing, Rob, is great. I think more people should be watching your program. Thank you all the time. Because you share a lot of information that we try to share, but then we're limited. It's about, you know, time of year. But I can go on and on and on. And I've thought, I didn't make any money, but it was at the community colleges. I lectured at the University of Hawaii and all the university on the neighbor islands, too. But people just, the students, as far as that goes, are only looking at their own personal stuff. So what catches their attention is we have a lot of international students that when you graduate, they're gonna send your computer home, your books and stuff. Never thought about that. Then they have to get a shop around. Same thing with products from Hawaii. They have to shop around, look at what's going on. And I'm not saying that everybody in our staff can say everything that I know, but at least if they can, they'll ask me to talk to that person and try to see if we can get that customer to want to export. Because that's what we need more export. I agree completely. That's why we have this show exporting from Hawaii. So thank you again so much to Think Tech and to Brian Suzuki for being here today. We'll see you again in two weeks, at the same time. Thank you. Mahalo. Thank you very much. Thank you.


I'm Justine, I'm from Cameroon. I completed the 120 hours ITTT TOEFL course. It's a 20-unit course with some of the units that triggers my attention while studying. The units are quite broad and explicit. Unit one, the talks of teachers and the learners which is exactly what we are talking about. Then you have other units that talks of the tenses, parts of speech, productive and receptive skills, the use of didactic material, very interesting. Teaching learners of different languages, English language, pictures are very important because they are very explicit and helps the students understand very fast. I am so happy I was able to be part of this course because I had the urge to upgrade my teaching. Here in Cameroon, I build up reading skills in young learners. It will be my wish to go in for more courses that will build me up to be able to keep up this good work. I feel satisfied when the students are now able to express themselves in English, spell the words correctly, speak the language, read appropriately. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to share my views. Thanks so much for watching. We are ITTT, the leading provider for TEFL and TSOL training courses. If you like this video, please subscribe by clicking the button down here and click on any of the videos here on the left for more interesting teaching tips for getting certified to teach English abroad and online.


Okay, so Dr. Raj, first we'd like to know, Qatar has ranked 25th in the recent Global Information Technology Report, and that was in network readiness. So Qatar aspires to reach the 20th position by 2015. What steps does Qatar need to take in order to rank higher and reach that position? So whether it's 25th or 20th, the exact number doesn't matter. What the goal is, Qatar should be viewed as one of the leading countries in the use of information technology and communication technology. And the way to do that is to attend to the fundamentals, ubiquitous access to broadband connectivity everywhere, high speed broadband, ubiquitous access to platforms that can be used by anybody, you know, in Arabic and so on, like iPad, like devices. Capacity building, training all the people, the entire, all the, all the citizens. For example, in ICT, I would set up daily classes. One day, computer literacy class, anybody can come and take it for free. And they bring their own computer and then sit there and you learn how to use it. And then they go. And finally, content, books and music and newspapers. Once you have all of that content, everybody will use it. And so I think by taking all these steps, suddenly you make yourself an ICT-rich environment and therefore automatically the world will see you as one of the leaders in the field. So you've mentioned broadband. When we look at the broadband ecosystem, there's always both the demand and the supply side. So how can we make sure that they're both equally strong in Qatar? What are the steps that Qatar needs to do? So the, there's a fundamental flaw in the current business model where the phone companies are expected to charge and recover the entire cost of the broadband. And so much so, you know, even though the actual cost of providing it is negligible, it is the overheads associated with the company, which they have to recover part of it from, from the broadband. And I've often said, if only we could have provided the bandwidth and the fiber and the infrastructure for free at the state's expense, then the phone companies don't have to charge much. And then if you said, we'll give the same capability to multiple people, then you would introduce competition. And so I think what has to happen is the cost of getting high-speed broadband, if I wanted 10 or 100 megabits per second minimum immediately, I don't shouldn't have to pay more than 10, 20 dollars. Right now it's hundreds of dollars, if I can get it at all. And the other thing I notice is right now, peering charges in Qatar are very high. So if I make a Skype call to USA into your phone, in a Skype call, it's only two cents a minute. On this side I'm using a computer, on that side. And computer, computer is free everywhere, but computer to phone. But if I am in USA and call Qatar, the instead of two cents a minute, it's 33 cents a minute. And that just built in into the existing system, appearing charges that the country and the phone company charges. And there's no reason to do so. It's purely artificially built up there just to make money. And the amount of money you make is not worth it.  So countries like USA, all of Europe, Australia, you know, Korea, Japan, all charge two cents a minute. See, you know, the backward countries like Africa and India, India is better now. It used to be 33 cents, it's down to nine cents, but I've been saying to them it should be two cents. China is like four cents, it should be two cents. So there are things that can be done that are currently outside of the conventional wisdom. And I don't know what it'll take, but I'll keep on proselytizing my soapbox and so we'll see. Maybe one of these days it'll sink in. So you mentioned that broadband, it's great, but there also needs to be content. So do you think Qatar needs only to improve on its Arabic e-content or also other languages maybe or what should it do in that regard? And multimedia content, movies, you know, will be on all languages and then the issue will be can you get automatic translation? That's a research problem ICT can help with. Music, you know, so you want to listen to the music, everybody enjoys listening to music from whatever language, but if you can understand the lyrics and see the lyrics that'll be even better. That can be provided now, it was not possible in the old days. You hear some of the words in the lyrics, but not all the words. And newspapers, you can read any newspaper that you want completely online, e-papers. And that's also not fully developed. And photos, images, you know, and access to the web and books, all media, content in all languages should be available. And then we also need supporting technologies for summarization and translation. Okay, so tell us about the digital library project that you're working on. Right. We'd like to know more about it. So basically, we spent the last ten years scanning books mostly, and now that Google is scanning a lot more books, we've said we're not going to do that anymore, that Google do it. But we're actually doing other things, like the thousand newspapers for the next thousand years to be archived and available is one of the projects we're trying to get launched. We are also doing monuments, digital library of monuments. UNESCO has 870 or so heritage sites. These are very unique sites, and most people never get a chance to go see all of that. They can't go to Taj Mahal, they can't go to Great Wall of China, they can't go to pyramids. If they can view those things virtually online, they can at least maybe get 50, 70, 80 percent of the enjoyment. So we are doing digital libraries of monuments and digital libraries of newspapers, and songs are already available, you can buy them and get them. But there are lots of other songs that there's no market for that are not digitized. So we're trying to get some of those recorded. Okay, so when we look at the ICT workforce in Qatar, we have around 20,000 ICT professionals currently and Qatar wishes to raise that number to the double, to have 40,000 employees or ICT professionals by 2015. Do you think, how can Qatar reach that aside from importing labor? So basically you have 20 years to do that, and if you want to double it, and so that means annually you need to add a thousand more people. That can't be from internal growth. Right now, the computer science education in Qatar University and CMU, Qatar and all the others taken together, maybe is producing 100 or 200 ICT professionals. So there will be a shortage of 800. So you can either get them from outside, you probably have to get some of them from outside. The reason being there's not enough children born here. And if you take thousand people all for ICT, there will be nobody working in the gas fields and petroleum and all of those other things which are also needed to generate the revenues. Okay. So you've mentioned some research areas, one of the research areas that Qatar needs to work on which is transcribing or captioning. But what other research areas generally does Qatar need to exert more effort in or start to research more about? It goes back to the four or five topics we talked about. We need to kind of have serious research into content of different kinds, multimedia content. We need to have serious research into accessibility and affordability. And we need to have serious research into platforms that can handle, if we take iPad, I'm sure there's Arabic for iPad, but how easy or how maybe voice recognition would help make that iPad, Arabic data entry much more easier. So there are probably half a dozen such things and basically infrastructure, computer platforms, connectivity, we already talked about connectivity. And you also need people, research into educating people. Rather than saying we want to have 20,000, 40,000 professional, maybe the right vision or right statement is everybody, the entire population including expatriate population must be computer literate. They must know how to use email. They must know how to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, a few other things, create documents and communicate. And that's probably equally an important role so that everybody is doing whatever they need to do with using computers. Professionals do programming or software or whatever other things you need that require more specialized talent. So my last question would be in the Jitter report, Qatar was in 42nd position when it came to the business usage of ICT. This area was one of the deficiencies or one of the weakness areas. So how can Qatar ensure that its businesses, whether it's small businesses or medium size or large companies do really use or maximize the potential of ICT and raise its rankings in that regard? So there are two parts to it. One is no matter what business you're in, use of ICT will make it better or faster or cheaper, whatever. So you need to encourage all businesses, banks and gas companies and small businesses, anybody. The reverse is to kind of create computer businesses that can support all these people. And that requires companies like IBM or Microsoft or Amazon, all of them to find that this is a good place to have business. And I think it's possible. We need to set that up. Thank you so much for your time and for these valuable insights. And we look forward to seeing you again on Qatar State. Thank you.


The Edo Civil Society Organization, Edo School has been lauded by stakeholders across the country for its contribution to the development of the society by raising the bar of activism in the country. The Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, Dr. Ernest Umakile, and others gave the commendation in Benin City, the Edo State Capitol, at an event organized by the Edo Civil Society Organization, Edo School, to mark the 2023 World Human Rights Day themed freedom, equity, and justice for all. This collaboration fight is to really bring down the threats of drug use and illegalities and criminalities in the state. And I want to wish them to keep doing this as often as possible. As generally all of us know, we keep fighting these drug menace, these drug threats, and we are not relenting because the Sherman has given us the backup to really fight this drug. And we are all out to keep fighting this drug. I feel they dedicated to the cause and the idea of the Edo Civil Society Organization. So I feel fulfilled and I'm elated by this award. It's a recognition that I value so much. It's a day that the whole world understand and recognize that all human persons are born free and deserves no oppression, no extortion, no injustice. And this is the 75th year that this celebration has been honed. We are particularly glad that this celebration has been honed and it has been sustained. It is to let the whole world know that all human beings have a right. Respect my right and I respect your right. Respect your neighbors right, respect your friends right, respect the right of every human being that is around you. That is the significant. And we are preaching to the government's agencies and officials, individuals, private, respect the right of everybody. As government officials respect the right of citizens. And citizens respect the right of government officials. If we do all of that, this society will be a better place for everyone to live in. We celebrate the crowning of the year and we are happy with our life, we are happy with all the successes we have made throughout the year. We are happy that we can join the rest of the world to celebrate and we are glad that it came to pass and we use this one to prepare for 2024. I think basically that's why we are here. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.