This is State Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. I'm Marsha Joyner and we are navigating the journey and today's journey is unlike anything any of us has ever seen. We are today visiting with the mayor of the beautiful city, the county, the Garden Island which, as God created, was one of the most beautiful places on the planet. And last week they had 36 continuous hours of rain, can you imagine? So the mayor has taken time out of his very busy schedule, boots, mud and all to be with us on the telephone. So thank you Mr. Mayor, Mayor Bernard Cavallo. Thank you for taking the time to be with us. Aloha. Aloha Marsha and thank you for the opportunity to share what's happening here on Kauai with all of you and of course the listening audience, so mahalo. Okay, where do we begin? If I may, you know, we obviously navigating to a journey, right, that's the big part We're navigating here. You know, unfortunately we've experienced a terrible disaster situation. We've gone through our share of it from Hurricane Eva in 1982 and then of course Iniki in 1992 and then now with this particular different kind of disaster but it's been devastating to our island, to our people but we have an awesome team in place. We're here at the Emergency Operating Center since Saturday when this whole thing began and so we've been placing all of our people of course in the right roles and try to give you folks an update. We have an incident command station here in our EOC and an incident action plan so I wanted to share a little bit about what are the top priorities right here for us as of today and some of the updates on where we're at as we continue to navigate in addressing some of the disaster areas on our island and unfortunately one part of our island is totally isolated as we speak so that's a big concern for me and for all of us but our priorities right now in these what six areas damage assessment of our public and private property. We're trying to do everything we can with deployed our teams here from our EOC to do boots on the ground and do a thorough assessment of the damages that are happening right now as we speak so we can continue to get all our information together and of course help us to seek assistance here on Kauai. The second area is to provide adequate relief of outgoing personnel and adequate supplies to current shifts so we have a turnover of personnel in this EOC as well as out in the field so we got to make sure everybody is fresh and ready to move and do the work that needs to be done boots on the ground as I stated earlier we're doing a complete restoration of power and water to affected areas some of our areas of Hanalei and Hyena we're kind of intermittent totally out of water and electricity but as of today it's back we're still waiting to get in the testing on our drinking water so we're telling our people out on the Hyena and that they need to not drink the water but they can use the water for other purposes around the home or whatever they need to do but I'm be assured that every effort has been made and it's still being made to provide water and supplies and food and all of that to that part of our island we're also completing the restoration I'm sorry continued debris clearance that's a big big part now the debris and trash that is being accumulated since it's happened and so we're working on a plan and where to place the debris and this big part for us as well and of course there's isolated areas like I mentioned that the community is seeking assistance we have an evacuation plan in place to assure that our people are able to get out of that area safely and then finally of course to maintain the ability to protect our people and thank goodness thank God that there was no actual entries to date but devastating results on homes property land of course and parks facilities etc so that kind of gives your brief outline on our priorities as of today but here at the emergency management system agency we're fully activated of course a flash flood watch is in fact right now starting today tomorrow Thursday until Friday again again oh yeah that is as of 6 30 this morning so we're kind of have that on the side knowing what we have to get done today the U.S. Army and National Guard and the County of Kauai we have airlifted 340 people from the Hainah and the Wainiha Wainiha area since Monday so as we speak Marcia from Wainiha to Hainah is totally isolated the people who live there cannot utilize any vehicle access so the bridge is gone yeah yeah no the devastating landslides oh there's eight plus landslides that are kind of all along the roadway the hillside just coming down onto the roadway so our public works in our state crews have been out and about trying to clear the roadway however the more you clear the more it comes down you know so the integrity of the land area is very unstable right now so there safety issues also involved so this particular area is still assessing the situation unfortunately you know we're talking about three to four weeks before we can actually open up one lane so people can come out of that area of our island so in the meantime we're doing everything we can to the National Guard to the Coast Guard to hearts and souls of the community who step up to look at how they can add their parts whether they be bringing additional food water supplies medical supplies we've identified two locations on this particular area Camp Kauai which is a very popular site there on the north shore and of course one of the hotels how about a colony is another one that is also serving as a distribution site we've deployed several helicopters that go in daily as are there are evacuation efforts to get people out like I said we've evacuated over 300 people from that area already so the landing zone has been identified in that area we're asking people call in to get do their best to get to that landing area and of course the helicopter will take them out to a high higher ground well now where where do you take these people once you get them out where do they go up to we have a principal airport in Hanalei kind of located way up a higher ground of course and once we can get them to that little airport area there the people family we provide transportation whether it be via county bus transportation we get them either to the airport we do have visitors of course in this part of our island and if you're a resident a lot of them are hooking up or teaming up with their family member or friends for now but since Saturday some have chosen to remain in this area and others of course have made the decision to evacuate so we're trying to encourage everybody to if they can to evacuate the area and get to a safer place for now until we can do a better assessment of the entire area so we've been working closely on that there are multi-agency relief efforts from my visitors and our National Guard like I said the American Red Cross we have a solid team here at the EOC trying their very best to address the entire situation now our last conversation with you you told us about the fact that you had all of this in place ready just in case because you had learned so much from the last two hurricanes you know right but unlike the hurricane we we have it's almost a little different well majorly different kind of disaster so yes we have a checklist in place if you will we know what we need to do we've gone to something like this we assembled the team we've done numerous mock type of trainings prior to this with our team a team which is a kawaii emergency management team that has been doing so you know now it's a real situation and I'm so happy with the support from the federal state and county levels of people wanting to help support we've got people in here from Maui from Oahu different members helping alleviate or or transition some of our team members to stay here 24 hours sometime overnight you know for the next day as we transition in the mornings at 6 o'clock and so we're asking for support from our neighboring islands as well from our political leaders to help support what we can in relief efforts or funding so there's a lot of stuff happening but the main part right now is to address an isolated area boots on the ground do assessment of all the damages in other areas and then come up with a checklist so we can submit that for relief efforts and support well now I heard on one of the many newscasts that in fact I think is constant coverage of kawaii the one young man said there were rivers in place that had not that the whole landscape was different can you tell us about that what what is different did mother nature just go back to what it was originally before people started developing tell us what you know that is true I have a chance to get up in the helicopter just the other day back right after I wanted to have an area of view of what is really happening which is why I mentioned the landslides along this critical area of the hyena waniha area and at the same time the the large amount of flooding in all areas of the island and like you said rivers not streams rivers that were created that wasn't there before that went right to different properties it went right to some of our park facilities it went right to some of our eroding many of our restroom facilities in the parks and pavilions you know because that's the weather water came rushing down and so we're trying to address all of that as we speak how homes are you know torn off their foundations but again it's all the homes and structure and land area but thank God till today no life or injuries were reported well we're going to take a break for one minute and we'll be right back to complete our visit with the mayor of kawaii who has taken his time to be with us we'll be right back this is think tech Hawaii raising public awareness you can be the greatest you can be the best you can be the king come play and now your chest you can be the world you can be the war you could talk to God don't welcome to Hawaii this is Prince Dyches your host of the Prince of Investing coming to you guys each and every Tuesday at 11 a.m. right here on think tech Hawaii don't forget to come by and check out some of the great information on stocks, investings, your money, all the other great stuff and I'll be your host see you Tuesday. Aloha I'm Marcia and we are back we are visiting with the mayor of the beautiful island of kawaii and mother nature was not kind I don't know what we did now you're Hawaiian and you're tied to the Ina what did we do what did we do to upset mother nature well I'm gonna say that you know unfortunately um with the with the disaster that took place I mean I think you know we got to continue to work together culturally to honor our land honor our water respect the Ina respect the culture and all of that is so much um sometimes we forget yeah especially as leaders we all need to continue to look at that because you know I believe some of that ties into what happened I would say that but at the same time is how we continue to be a resilient island and resilient community to bounce back and and really wake up and say maybe we got to look at different things and work differently and be more pono and look at our hearts and souls and stay connected spiritually I believe so that we can continue to take care of each other more importantly the land and so now with this thing this is what what has happened recently we're all pulling together like I said we have a great team in place here we have an abundant of support from just community who allows businesses individuals wanting to give water and food and supplies that alone is a big task at hand to coordinate and operate that and place it somewhere that is accessible to people so we're working through that I'm happy with the volunteers from our Red Cross from our food bank and all the different people and donations are being like I said coming in all areas and I wanted to explain or announce some of the areas where donations can be accepted or are being accepted the food bank of Hawaii is a kawaii branch here on kawaii is accepting whatever food items so we're asking them to please come by a kawaii independent food bank is also available Kilauea neighborhood center which is in a higher area on the north shore is receiving all the different supplies and and gifts from the people all in this one area Kilauea neighborhood center over on the south side Kilauea neighborhood center in addition Marcia not only the north shore but other parts of our island were affected like in the Kapa area Keapana totally flooded homes but they're not isolated but they're affected by this storm same like in Kilauea we also accept non-perishable bottled water cleaning supplies hygiene items that being requested first so all of that is being assembled at these locations so we can get it to the people in need but very thankful for all the people who put their hearts and souls into giving and providing support so I wanted to mention that as well tell me now you know our modern-day world operates on fuel so what about getting fuel to those places you know it takes those big trucks to to move all that gasoline and things how do you get fuel out there okay late afternoon we made a call to the robinson family uh knee-how I want to make sure knee-how was doing well it's okay and they're doing okay but through that conversation led to an opportunity to actually deploy a barge that is used to take equipment and supplies from kawaii to knee-how back and forth so we're able to deploy the barge this morning at five o'clock and on that barge we were able to transport a tractor dump trucks a payloader and some of the equipment that is needed to help clear the area in the hyena we're also able to put on extra supplies onto the barge and we have to work with our military our base people captain Vinnie Johnson and the team at PMRF and five o'clock this morning we were able to deploy that barge and it was going to go over and land over in hyena to get supplies out there and on the barge include drums of gas fuel as well and so we were able to transport fuel also on this barge and we're going to continue to do that via the barge and we have water wagon stew to help support as well so we're working closely with with all the team members well now of course I didn't think about knee-how but how did they do in the storm you know we we kind of forget them no no our fortune is no I said we do yeah no major damage but very um willing to help and so very happy with that and happy that knee-how is okay but they're willing to help and this is part of their their manao and their love oh wonderful that's wonderful yeah wait uh now that's part of your county is it knee-how yeah the county of kawaii and knee-how and knee-how oh wonderful great so now what you're getting ready for a flood tomorrow what do we how do you get ready what are you prepared for when everything is jambles yeah so now the prepared part like I said we'll assemble our first responder teams and assessment teams or how boots on the boots on the on the ground type of thinking that's a big big part the assessment teams have been deployed we're already managing I believe we have the food and supplies we have two locations that are people isolated from us can go to we have an evacuation and planning place helicopters coming in we have a bar it's going over to provide that part of our island other parts of the island the assessments will take place so we can get relief to the people who've experienced tragedy to their property and homes and at the same time working closely with all the partners right here federal state county I've been in communication with a representative from congressional team or senate team or local senate just to stand by because I wanted this umbrella of faith around us when we need help we can reach out and ask and they've been very willing to do what they can as we continue to good good data good information that could help us bring in resources to to get through this terrible time that we're experiencing here on kawaii and so now you have a problem of whatever it is from the mayor from the governor and then what does that mean so the governor's proclamation offers us support that we can actually go out and get resources instead of going through the normal process which takes longer because of the emergency part of it and then I did one as mayor for island two that our public work team our parks team our management team can go out and bring in resources contractors whatever we need to do to get the job done and then resources will come and then you can get reimbursed accordingly that opens that door and we're working closely with our congressional team now to get a presidential proclamation which will help us to get more funding and resources that way as we continue to assess the entire island so all of this the emergency support comes via these proclamations from our governmental leaders so the mayor did it I did it our governor and now we're looking for the presidential declaration to help us hopefully get the big picture is that with FEMA is that what the federal and and the military yes the FEMA federal emergency management association they're also deploying certain FEMA people coming in from DC into our EOC here to help us as side by side to help us and shepherd us to the right process in doing assessments and then once we get that documentation now they take that back and we can get support that way do now there is does that mean for you for you as a as a government entity but what about individuals whose homes are gone everything is like there's nothing to come back to what what happens that are doing assessments of all properties so once we get whatever the address is we'll do the assessment documented that that particular home will receive whatever support to help them rebuild because we saw we saw some places that look like mother nature just redesign the island and there's nothing to come back to yeah and those are the places that are like I said our assessment teams will be doing a thorough overview and then accordingly providing support back to the people that lost their property due to the store and that's the important part so that's the assessment team I was talking about well uh Mr. Mayor as always it's a pleasure to talk to you and for you to take your time out to to be with us uh hopefully I know we're going to ask you to come back but hopefully it won't be like this hopefully more good news the next time to make sure much of that if anybody has any questions or want to provide any additional support whoever's listening out there or you have any um want to give us a give us a telephone number or an email right here the operating center right here and the way 241-1800 241-1800 and from that point we have our team here receiving the calls and helping people to get the information they need or whatever help that is provided we can we can take a document so thank you for that well thank you for taking again taking time out to be with us and uh who we hope


Boom. What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are still on site in New York City, New York, on Manhattan, and we are going to be talking about the architecture of Dataflow. So we're going to be talking about all things media. We're going to be talking about all things future of humanity. I'm super excited and grateful to be with Jon Battelle. Hello. Hello. Thank you for coming on to the show. So good to be here. Greatly appreciate it. Of course. And it's an honor to be here because you have been a huge figure in this industry over the last two decades. And it's... Oh, we're counting it's three, man. It's now it's on the third. Yeah, since 1992. Well, really, I started in 86. So, longer. So older than I am in the industry, which means there's been a massive accumulation of a wealth of knowledge in Jon. So this is exactly why we sit down with people like Jon. So background on Jon, founder of seven companies all in the media space, journalism, event production, advertising, author of the search, how Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture. Also an investor in 35 seed or series A in media, tech, consumer mobile companies. And he's also the CEO and co-founder of Newco. So let's start with a big history synthesis of things. You and I were talking earlier and you made this really interesting point. We were talking about how, okay, here's the human race we've evolved on on earth and we're now kind of at this tipping point with exponential technology, 7.7 billion of us now. Crazy. So you were saying we're in the kitchen with the Oracle. Yeah, this is like my sort of... I run down the transcript in the dialogue that happened during that scene in the matrix where Neo is in the kitchen with the Oracle and she's offering him cookies and he's kind of like, I can't believe I'm talking to this. He's been looking for this person. And she's just like, I've seen a thousand of you. I might see a thousand more. How do I know you're the one? There's no reason for me to think you're the one. You're going to blow it. Humanity is going to die out. The world's going to end. And then another one is going to be back here. Her sense of time is the sense of time that physics has, which is essentially timeless. Whereas our sense of time is like, well, we have an urgency to fix things in the next 30 years or we're just the Neo who didn't make it and there'll be another one in half a billion years or so. And I think we're really at that moment where we just came into the kitchen and the cookies are being served. We're just realizing that we have a very big task ahead of us and we may not actually complete that task. And when there's too many people distracted and not so many focused on the ethical dilemmas that are the most pressing of our time, this is one of the oops ways to. Right. I mean, I think we've gotten to the point with the technologies that we've invented and the knowledge we've acquired where if you're spending time watching things like your show and, you know, reading certain books and paying attention to certain thinkers, you can't but sort of come to the conclusion that there is a, you know, alignment of the tectonic plates happening. And it's time for us to change a lot of things about our assumptions that we maybe grew up with.  There's a number of things that we sort of need to adjust in really the span of maybe half a generation. And that's the kind of rapid change that has never really willingly happened in human history. It's accidentally happened World War Two. You know, in other words, we've had wars that have changed human history significantly. But interestingly, we've never had multiple existential threats at once. And we've got them now. We've got nuclear, we've got AI, you know, we've got synthetic biology, you know, we've got a lot of things going on at the same time. Brain computer. You know, yeah. And all these things coming together, portend a much higher possibility that we may screw it up. So that's a good way to start. And this is all the areas and this is why you're focused on specifically these areas in the next decade. And so we're going to get to John's focus in this that he's focusing on. We'll get there in a little bit. I want to make sure to explain this this trajectory three decades of this trajectory for you from wired to standard to Web 2.0 to federated sovereign and new co give us a synthesis of how that what you what you what you did. Yeah. Well, when I was an undergraduate, I studying cultural anthropology, just, you know, self referential, you know, set of studies, it's a study of mankind. So studying us and how we work together culturally. And during that period, I was taught kind of fundamental lesson is to understand ourself through the things we make. And those are essentially technologies, right? Now, if you're an archaeologist, which is cultural anthropology of the past, you look at artifacts, and you say, Oh, you know, with stone tool, what can I, what can I understand about an entire culture from this like small set of artifacts I've dug out of, you know, the Gobi desert or whatever, right?  And as I was studying that, the Macintosh computer came out. And I, you know, newly trained to see all that we make as artifacts. I'm like, Well, here is the most important artifact in the history of humankind. This right here, this computer, I was convinced of it. And fascinated by it for a number of reasons. As were a number of early converts, you know, there was like a complete cult around the Macintosh. And so when I graduated, I decided that instead of trying to get a doctorate in cultural anthropology, which I was considering that kind of had an academic bent, I decided to become a journalist, because a journalist, you kind of write history in real time. And that seemed kind of more interesting. I joined a startup magazine, my first startup, it's not like on my resume, because I just joined as an intern. But it covered Apple. And so I got a chance for three years, I kind of rose to senior writer, senior editor and so on, to cover Apple and the Macintosh and networking and graphical user interfaces and databases and basically all the stuff that became the web before well before the web in the 80s. Okay, you know, but those of us deep in the weeds there, we knew it was coming, right? And that laid the ground for about three or four years later. I realized I was so on fire about this, but I didn't have the tools to really write the stories that I wanted to write. I was convinced that the whole world was going to change radically, and that no one really understood that. And it was really important. I was not alone. But there weren't that many of us that were convinced technology was going to change everything in 1989. And so I thought I need to go back to school. So I went back to Berkeley, got a graduate degree in journalism. And while I was there, you have to do a master's thesis.  And I wanted to start a magazine that I called the Rolling Stone of Technology. And I got shot down by my Dean. So I didn't start that. But I did I wrote a long paper, which you can find somewhere. But instead, when I graduated, I was offered a job by the LA Times.  Like that was, you know, big paper, great job. I hated it. And I quit and I got a phone call almost the same weekend from this crazy man named Lewis Rosetto, who was starting the Rolling Stone of technology. He called it wired. I didn't have a name for it much better name because I didn't have a name. And he asked me at the ripe age of like 25 to be the managing editor, which was just, you know, being prepared meeting, you know, it's just luck and preparation, right? And I was ready to do that. And so wired, you know, our purview at wired was to see absolutely every single possible impact that technology might have on everything. It did not matter. It could be education, it could be medicine, it could be, you know, entertainment, it could be business, did not matter. We wrote stories asking a simple question, which was what's going to change? How's it going to be? Right? And we were so convinced that it was going to be different. And we were so convinced it was going to be better, that, you know, the wired optimism was kind of is a well known, you know, fact of, you know, and matter of fact, the wild eyed kind of optimists of the California, you know, everything's gonna be great, you know, I think that that set a tone or reflected a tone of an industry, the technology industry, that started to believe it's on bullshit, like, we're gonna change the world, we're gonna make the world a better place, you know, we have these amazing new tools and we're gonna use them for good. We all believe that very, very strongly. About five years after starting Wired and doing a whole bunch of crazy stuff as part of that, I got another idea, which I pitched to Lewis and my partners there, and they're like, it's a good idea, John, but we don't really want to do it. It's kind of not a wired thing. And it was an economist for the internet. And so I left to do that. And I started the industry standard. And this was essentially I want to say you had this really cool, a polymathic look at because again, you were seeing technology, but in education, health care biology, you started seeing network. And but to me, I've spent my whole career following one story, the impact of technology on society, right, digital technology specifically. And I saw an inflection happening in about 9596 that where that was going to break out the most sort of, you know, in the most dramatic fashion was going to be in business, right? And so I thought that story was really like the story of technology and society wired was sort of writing the digital revolution. Like where the digital revolution where the rubber was going to hit the road in the late 90s was the internet. So I left in 97 and started the industry standard to cover that story. And as a weekly magazine and daily website and research and you know, all the stuff you do conferences, all of that. That was a wild ride because that was the go go dot com boom, right? That was 97 to 2001, where you know, for the first four years, this thing grew faster than any media company in the history of media had the most ad pages of any magazine in history. And it was it was profitable in year four made tens of millions of dollars in profit.   And so we went from a 200 million dollar revenue run rate to a 40 million dollar revenue run rate in about a quarter. And that was a huge lesson to go through that as an entrepreneur, you know, as a sort of semi public figure, you know, as a face of this thing and all that. We had 500 people, we had we had magazines in 15 countries, you know, it was a big kind of thing. But it was a long time ago. So 2001, I find myself with, you know, a failed company, you know, a sort of reputation, I hope a good reputation in the industry as a starter of things.  You know, thank God, it's just, you know, it's just, it's a good place to sort of send email and communicate with people and it's good distribution for our old line businesses, you know, but it's not going to be what all those people like Patel were saying out there in California, especially New York, where I now reside, where we are right now. The New York press was almost throwing parties that like the internet thing was over because they were terrified that it was going to upend their, you know, their incumbent position. But I just couldn't really believe that it was true. My faith in the story was like very shaken, but it wasn't broken. And so in 0102, I started looking for proof that their, that the story still had legs, right, was my story. And I had spent, you know, my early career really in it. And I found it. I found it in two companies. One was Google, which I knew from the industry standard days. We had put it on the cover once before anyone really knew what Google was and like 99, 98, 99. And then another one was called Overture, which is a Google-like company down in Southern California. And these companies, when you visited them at that time, 0102, they were going off. They were hiring people, free lunches, everyone was happy, doing great work. It was the opposite of the absolute like pile of ashes that the entire technology world was in at the time.  So I went deep into that. And I learned a lot. And what I learned was, of course, you know, became the subject of the book, the search. But essentially what I learned was, we were about to remake our relationship to knowledge. Yeah. You know, humankind had had over the process of the early internet and into the first boom. And now, even as the second boom was building, had rewired our ability to access knowledge. And that was super powerful and important in laying the groundwork for where we are right now. And so I wrote a book about it. I started a company that drew from its insights called Federated Media. And I started a with a partner, Tim O'Reilly, who's an amazing dude, started a conference to think about it out loud and talk to the leading lights of who are involved in this process. And we called that Web 2. And the idea of Web 2 was there's a new set of companies that are arising from the ashes of Web 1 that are leveraging the sort of the fact that bandwidth is getting better, processing is getting better, new sets of technologies like Ajax were emerging that are allowing for interactivity with information in real time using the web. And it seemed like we were just at the cusp of making an incredible open connected internet space. And it was super exciting. All these new sites and services were launching. All these things were starting to share data and make mashups. And it was just like, wow, we're on our way again.  And so, you know, I started a company that got, you know, very big and very successful called Federated that I want to say the perseverance that you had to get through the ashes. I don't know if I call it perseverance as much as I would call it like I just need to feed my kids. Like I just end my head, you know, like, like, and you also knew where to look. You went to the ones that were still thriving in the ashes to dig and find that it was this big, the fact that we've collectively learned as society to get to now. And then you went and figured out that it the internet is now we're actually able to parse the collective. Yeah, we had, we had a significant problem, which, you know, my current work, which we'll get to is focused on, which is, you know, all of a sudden we had access to all the world's data, but we couldn't make sense from it. And what Google became was it was a massive new sense making organ. Right. We have eyes. We have ears. We have skin. We have these sense organs that we've evolved over hundreds of millions of years. But we are, we had begun to make digital sense making organs and and anyone could get one. Right. You could add a Google to your sense making organ lineup. Right. If you just get a computer and go on the web and you could start to make sense of things. Right. You could start to refine data into information and make sense of that information and make it useful to you or to society.  Right. And now one of the ways I made sense of it was I made a company that now narrowed from everything wired business industry standard to media, federated media. And my idea that when I started the company for 2004 was the relationship of the three parties that really make up the media ecosystem audience publishers and advertisers that that relationship was completely being renegotiated. And I called it conversational media that everyone was talking to everyone else, whereas the mass media one to many approach to sort of, you know, monologue media versus conversational media. And I started a company in that space and I recruited all the best blogs, which were the conversational media of the time. Right. Because people left comments and there was a whole linking, you know, structure that had been worked out people, you know, citation and and, you know, one guy would write a post and someone would respond with another post and they'd link back to each other and Google loved blogs because it helped them understand interest and all of that. So I started a company with the best of those and helped them make money and deal with their ad operations and all that stuff. And that grew very, very large. You know, we got into the top 20 in ComScore.  And what happened, you know, I'll shorten this because it's a long story. We don't have any bourbon here, but, you know, what happened really is that, you know, we grew and grew and grew and everything was awesome. We rethought kind of the role of advertising. We came up with new approaches to advertising. We called native advertising sort of in blog stream, you know, sponsor content, stuff like that. Seems like duh now. But back then it was very novel and even though it really wasn't because the idea of, you know, sponsor content goes all the way back to P&G doing soap operas and goes all the way back to inserts in magazines and newspapers or, you know, it's not a new idea. We adapted it for the media. But what we couldn't do and didn't do is we didn't think to become a centralized control point for everything. My great blind spot and I hope strength as well is that I believe in decentralization. Yes. And we watched Facebook from 07 really when it started to matter through 012. We were growing like gangbusters. But it was about 1112 when they turned the newsfeed on and then they put that ad unit in the middle of the newsfeed and advertiser and automated the ability to buy it out there against the audience. That undermined the independent web. It undermined what we stood for, right? We had tens of thousands of sites that we were repping at that point. We had a huge audience but they had an even larger audience and the ability to, you know, with the data they had to allow an advertiser to pick and choose any audience member they want and have them in a captive moment, right? And there was very hard to compete with that. So, fortunately, I saw that coming and Federated had purchased a company that was in the automated programmatic advertising space. And in 2013, we spun that company out and created a new company and moved all of our cap table and key people into that company, sold Federated. And that was called Sovereign. And the idea was you should be the sovereign owner of your own data, right?  And Sovereign goes on to this day and it's still a struggle because Facebook, Google and Amazon are very dominant in this market of data and advertising. But that was company five. By this point, I was starting to think maybe I should not be starting companies anymore. Maybe I should sort of start investing, which I had started doing and maybe I should be on some boards and I joined the board of a big data company called Axiom Now LiveRamp and writing more and sort of thinking out loud more and doing that kind of stuff. And I sort of started down that path, but I had this side project called NUCO that I was doing. It was an idea that because of the Web 2 boom, almost every college graduate from sort of 2010 on had the option, should they choose to, to become a CEO of a company when they graduated. All they had to do was like, you know, borrow five thousand bucks from their parents, get an AWS account, you know, get a WordPress site, put something up, start coding or hire someone to start coding for them. And there was a chance they could be the next Mark Zuckerberg, right? And everybody was doing it. It was what I was noticing is there's too many of them. Not all of them are really driven by any kind of purpose that has to do with making the world a little bit of a better place. And there was a lot of just like, you know, let me see if I can figure out a way to, you know, rent seek on parking spaces in San Francisco.  So I thought like maybe what we should do is identify the companies that are truly leveraging these technological tools to create significant change in the world. We'll dub them new COS, new kinds of companies, and we will identify them, celebrate them, you know, write about them, do videos about them, you know, and that was the idea of make a media platform for new kinds of companies. And along those lines, we did an event and we've done it in 30 cities where we identify those companies and they all open their doors on a given day. And it's a big celebration of these kinds of companies in a particular city. They did much better in small cities like Cincinnati or larger cities, but that are not as connected to New York or San Francisco like Mexico City than they did in New York or San Francisco, which is really interesting. But beside that, it was a great product and a terrible business. So it sort of, you know, we tried, we tried, we tried, and we ultimately pivoted into a high end thought leadership conference and a small media platform. And so that kind of piece where, you know, the mission of the company was really to step up above technology and look at what is the one agent of change that might be the vehicle that we as a society can use to cross the chasm we're about to face, right? And to me, that agent of change is the corporation, right? And if we're going to do that, we need a different kind of corporation than the one we currently have, because since the Milton Friedman School kind of took over all of thinking in capital markets, really Reagan Thatcher in the 80s, profit seeking has been the number one goal of corporations. And it's, I'm going to extract capital, and I'm going to put it in the pockets of my shareholders. That is the number one job of corporations. And so the new co ethos was, no, that should be table stakes, making money. You got to do that to be a business. But maybe you need to make other kinds of value besides money. And maybe you have more stakeholders than just shareholders. So that idea was at the core of new co and my view was, I should spend all of my energy. So I became full time CEO of that company. It was a side thing for a while. But I, you know, trying to identify and, you know, sort of shout from the rooftops. This kind of company, we should be emulating that kind of company, maybe not. Right. So I was not a fan of Uber before it came over, but I was a fan of Lyft.  Right. There are companies that are really trying to change things. And and so what I realized about three or four years in is it's a really big job. Number one, number two, I would have to raise 10 or 20 or $30 million to do it right. And number three, I wasn't that interested in doing that. And that's sort of the thing you can do when you're a seasoned entrepreneur is make a decision to not raise money as opposed to do a decision to just keep running through walls, which is what most entrepreneurs do, you know, we're sort of programmed to just not see obstacles and then run into them until we get through them around them over them under them or redefine them as not an obstacle, but a feature, you know. So I just said, you know what? No, I don't want to run through that obstacle. So I pulled back from that last year. And I was thinking really deeply about what do I want to do. And I realized what I needed to do in order to answer that question was get out of the space I had been in for so long, which was the Valley, you know, all the companies that I mentioned and the book and every other project I had worked on and all the investments for the most part were in Northern California. And it was time for me to change the conversation that I was in. So my wife and I decided to move here. And that decision was made early last year. And we moved here in the fall of last year. Yep. And there's a huge to two huge things that you talk about. You talk about the company, the formation of companies that choose to rent seek versus formation of companies that are solving world's challenge, pressing problems. Huge difference between those two things. And it's really important for as we come up with our moonshot ideas across the world is to really keep that in mind all the time. And the other thing crucially you mentioned was the the paradigm of capitalism. And what the what a court what an entity of a corporation doing of just taking funds and moving it to the shareholders versus now it's about solving those pressing challenges. And we see that a little bit with the benefit corporations. We see that a little bit with some of the millennial and Gen Z drive towards looking at mission statements of companies and putting our money into those companies. And so now you've made this move. And actually I will agree with you actually quite I'm 26. I've only been in the valley less than seven years still. But I have seen a lot of thought monoculture in Silicon Valley. And I'm I'm I'm also very excited to be in New York talking to different different thought culture. Well, I mean, it's the thing I say about the valley and it's, you know, part of partially ingest but but in all humor is truth is that the that the valley is a company town. And I don't mean like it's a technology industry town, but that is also true. It is literally a town that wants to talk about companies. That's all it wants to talk about. So if you know, one of the things that was really starting to bug me and I was even starting to take notes every time I was in a meeting in my notebook, I would say now we're talking about companies again. So you'd start talking about an idea. But it would always end up being how do we turn that idea into a company? Are there other companies that are already doing that idea? How can I invest in that idea? You know, so it's always company, company, company, how do I make a company? It's like, you know what?  The point is to figure out a problem. The company is the vehicle. And if we over obsess on the vehicle, we forget about what we're driving to. Yeah, right. And so like, I thought I need to get out of that dialogue. I love San Francisco. I love where I lived for many, many years, Marin. I even love the Valley, although I have some issues with sort of the culture of the Valley. But I needed to jolt myself out of it. Because I knew I had more work to do. I just couldn't enunciate it. And I knew coming here and forcing myself into a new conversation would would sort of bring it out of me. And I think it has. Yeah. And I'm glad you also took a big leap into a cold water pool and into into this shock for you because now, yeah, you're immersed, your nervous systems immersed in this in the environment of thinking differently. I also just want to reiterate for viewers that are that are my my age 26 and younger, it's difficult for us to to get behind your eyes and the eyes of so many others that were actually there over these last three decades of technology going from that first Macintosh all the way through the dot. I mean, I was your age when, you know, when I when we were doing the first edition of wired. So yeah, that's that was 25 years ago. So that's that's something. Yeah. Yeah. And I have a son who's 22. And, you know, what did he do when he graduated college? Started a company. Like, you know, that's what and I think he's got a great idea and I wish him well. But, you know, I also have quoted to him exactly how many of these companies actually succeed. But, you know, he's very passionate about it. So this is a this is a in this pivotal moment, the slowing down to think about what we're doing with exponential technologies and what we're doing with geopolitics and how we can find a sense of unity together is the most salient right now. So OK, so tell us about what's going on. OK, we have now we like to say it this way. The the the the second the second greatest invention of mankind is the data we leave behind. And the first greatest invention of mankind is how do we measure that data and make it applicable to our lives. Right. And it has yet to be invented. And so now you're obsessed with the architecture of data flows and rightfully so. And we're trying to get out of silos and into decentralization and into actually making sense of this data. So teach us about this. I think it's time. I think we finally have the right set of circumstances for to start to justify and defend some new answers to some old questions. Right. First of all, the second book that I was working on that I abandoned in 2014 2013 2014 was essentially about trying to understand the distinction between data and information and the impact of data on society. And I could not quite get my brain around it. And I'm a proxy for my kind of what I consider like my readers. You know, if I can't do it, then at the time isn't right. You know, and there's a lot of brilliant books that were written before that period and written since that are about this. But we haven't quite been able to find the metaphors to help us get to another place. But I think we're there now. And I think one of the things that's happened in the last five years is number one. Most of the sort of sentient population has realized the importance of data.  They're like, it doesn't really matter because I'm getting stuff cheaper. I'm my searches are getting answered quickly or, you know, I stay in touch with my high school friends on Facebook. What's the deal? What's the problem? Right. People were talking about it, but it wasn't an issue yet. It is now.  You wondering, you know, what are they listening to? Right. People are there's an ambient awareness of information and data that just didn't exist five years ago. That's number one. Number two, we started to solve a lot of hard problems around distributed architecture at scale. And we've gotten a little overexcited as it relates to blockchain and ICOs and all that stuff. But the truth is that this set of technologies is not nascent anymore. It's developed and it's starting to come up its own scaling curve, which is exciting. So that's a fundamental thing. And the third thing is we have existential crisis driving this massive existential crisis that people are waking up to. We can't do nothing about global warming.  We can't do nothing about the impact of synthetic biology. We can't. If we do nothing, then the Oracle in the kitchen will just dismiss us and know that someone else will be back in a few hundred million years. We're done, right?  I didn't even mention nuclear, but they're still nuclear, right?  So we have to find a way to have a civil dialogue about these issues. And the way we find it is through media. What you're doing right now, this is how we have the dialogue.  I'm sorry, social media is not the last form of media. And if it is, we are true and well, well and truly fucked. Okay. So we need to keep going, man.  Now we're done. No, we're not. We have to keep going. We have to come up with better media to solve the problem that is in front of us. I've been obsessed with the role of data and information in society for quite some time. In 2007, I wrote a piece called The Data Bill of Rights. And it listed sort of these, I think, 10 things that I think we should have the right to around personal information. And this was not sparked by Facebook. In 2007, Facebook had just sort of flipped from being a dot edu service to being a generally accepted service. It was really because of Google that I was thinking about this stuff. And so I've been thinking about this for like 11 years really deeply, or I guess I wrote the book in 05 so earlier, but data flows according to rules. Information flows according to rules. In the internet 1.0 kind of, you know, and the web 2.0 world that we had been part of prior to now, there was an assumption about how that information would flow. And it was essentially a difference between a mainframe computing architecture and a PC internet architecture. So what are the main differences? Well, a mainframe architecture has two components.  It's really expensive and it's where all the value is.  And what they do is you put data into it and it goes up and gets processed by the big computer in the sky. And then the computer will send back a program that gets run on the dumb terminal to tell the person putting data in what to do. It's a siloed back and forth and the nodes never talk to each other. They'd all talk to the master controller, right? And that was the 1960s and 1970s in computing.  Then came along the PC revolution and the internet revolution. And all of a sudden the intelligence and control and value exchange at the center at the top got pushed to the node and all of us were in charge, right? And we were the intelligence and we started sharing data laterally, right? And so this distributed network approach to information architecture. When I got involved in the internet in 93, 94, you know, well the internet, I mean I was on the well in the 80s and you know, copy-serve and all that but the real internet as we understand it today, we just assumed that that architecture would continue forever. And what happened was it got consolidated and this has been sort of Tim Wu has done a good job of this in his books, Master Switch and The Curse of Bigness and the Attention Merchants. This consolidation occurred which is the result of rent seeking, capitalistic, you know, true norths that say extract capital and put it in the pockets of shareholders. So what happened is the same cycle happened to the internet that happened to every other medium and where do we end up? Five biggest firms in the United States are all technology companies and they're all rent seeking data driven companies, right? And so those corporations now own and control a vast universe of information, right? And that architecture, you know, that I described all the power and control up here and just sending an application that we're just sort of data inputting on this side and we're getting that application sounds a lot like Facebook, right? I can't take my Facebook data and give it to you or give it to Amazon or give it to a startup or give it to a researcher or give it to whoever might make value from it. I can't because Facebook has this big document called the Terms of Service that won't allow me to do that, right?  So what we've done is we've created a silent and what they don't know what the big giants don't know is that they could even be making more money by taking a percentage of that data that we would own as a packet of like you said, a machine readable and then distribute that. And the research like you pointed out to it's so interesting to think about all the missing research that is not being done on this data. So I've been thinking about this, I've been writing about this for the last couple of years, mostly in obscurity to be honest.  But I've been sort of thinking out loud, thinking out loud, trying to figure out how to put it all together and how to make some progress in this space, right? These guys are seem so dug in that it's such a kind of oligarchy now. Like our entire ecosystem of startup entrepreneurs like, you know, dream of selling to one of them really. It's you know, it's like the odd company that is that makes it to an IPO these days. And it's usually in the enterprise space, you know, it's not in the sort of consumer societal space. It's in the cloud security or, you know, some other, you know, it docusign, right? It's not, it's not, you know, but in any case, what I realized was is there was this shadow constitution that in the United States, particularly we without voting on it without declaring it without studying it without thinking about it, we are governed by a constitution as it relates to how data flows around our society and who gets to make value from it. And we've never really ratified this constitution. We've never thought about it very deeply. But it exists. It's very powerful. And it's the product of this very strong intertwined rope of technology and capitalism, right? And that's what I was studying at NUCO. And so it kind of all comes together. And I was like, wow, what is this constitution, right? Well, I have a theory, which is that it's the terms of service of the largest technology companies. And those terms of service, which run 20, if not hundreds of pages, you know, are written by lawyers to protect the business model of current companies. And almost every entrepreneurial startup, except for the ones that are trying to fight the system, of which there are many and they're great. But they're very difficult to do. But almost all the startup community just copies those because those are the successful companies. So I'm going to write the same terms of service that Amazon has because look at Amazon, they're crushing, right? So I'm starting a startup. I'm going to have the same terms of service about how I handle data. Data is the most powerful potent resource. So I'm going to hoard it. So we have this data hoarding architecture in our economy, right? I thought to myself, what would be a different architecture? If we could just go to the white board and build a new architecture of how data flows around society, what would it be? Right? And I imagined and, you know, not which is a great question to ask across every sort of industry is if you every industry, if you could rebuild an industry, how would you design it from scratch to make it much better? And of course there's huge problems getting from utopian, you know, you know, perfect design land to where we are now. And we can talk about that. But I looked at healthcare. I looked at financial services. I looked at agribusiness, you know, ag and what was striking in all of those from just sort of a cursory, some research that I did, you know, over the last couple of years is they all have the same architecture. They all hoard data. They all don't share it laterally and they all are extracting capital from it for the benefit of their shareholders, not for the benefit of society. And so now a lot of people have noticed this problem.  But one of the things that I think I'm semi-good at is creating media and, you know, thinking out loud about, well, we have a problem which we do about it or we have an opportunity. What should we do about it? That was wired. That was the standard. That was federated. That was, you know, even NUCO. I think what we have is the opportunity to rethink some basic regulatory gates in our society. Some very simple things we could do to change things. They would be radical. There's no way that the tech oligarchy is going to like this at all. But it's a very simple idea. And I wrote a piece about that just a couple of months ago. They may actually end up liking it. They may end up liking it because I think there's a strong argument to be made, but I've got to make it. That's why I'm at Columbia doing this research, that this is actually a 10x or 100x of their business. But they've got to make the transition to get there. Right? So the simple idea, and again, I'm creeping heavily from the shoulders of many giants, many of whom are anonymous, but in the open source world and the distributed architecture and blockchain world and beyond, that if we just let the data flow in an environment that is regulated, not by either a oligarchic company or by the government per se, but by us, with an environment of trust, safety, security, privacy built in, the things that could happen would be extraordinary. And so I've been writing a series of pieces with examples of those, right? You had this great image of a bunch of valves that you control and give to researchers more data, get paid for that data. Right. And so people often obsess and right now they are because people are so, as we were discussing earlier, people are so sort of woke to the power of data, right? Your privacy is imperiled. You're not getting paid. If you're not getting paid, or if you're not paying, you're the product, right? Everyone's sort of woke to the power of data. So there's a lot of obsession on well, my data should be worth something, I should get paid. I think that's the wrong thing to pay attention to. It's not payment, it's value. Yeah. And how much value could we unleash for society if what could be known is knowable? So just an example and imagine we're here on a block in New York City and one of the things I noticed when I moved here is there aren't very a lot of interesting restaurants in this specific neighborhood. And there's a reason for that, but that I understand. But there's a million reasons I don't. Yeah. And there's a million reasons why the bankers who might back a small entrepreneur starting a restaurant here don't understand. And customers don't understand. There's just a there is knowledge lying on the ground. But it's not being picked up because we have hemmed that knowledge into silos that cannot be shared laterally. So 50 years ago you might have had to go and walk on every door in the neighborhood and ask the questions to people. But now that data is here. Imagine I just moved to this neighborhood, which I did and I'm I have a hankering to start a restaurant. Now, you know, currently starting a restaurant is as crazy if not crazier than starting an entrepreneurial business in tech. It's like that the failure rate is like 90% after year four. So it's crazy, right? So if you're going to take your hard earned savings and pour it into a restaurant and hope it works, wouldn't it be good if you knew as much as you could about what's going on that might affect that restaurant, you're going to start down the block? What's knowable now that wasn't knowable five years ago? Well, imagine if you could ask a question of the world and the world answered it, right? So I'm going to start a restaurant. I think I might want it to be an Italian Vietnamese mashup restaurant, right? That's my idea. Okay, I've got a hypothesis. We're talking about enlightenment. So I can use a little bit of metaphor. We've had a renaissance and data in the last five, 10 years, a deluge of data, renaissance. Everyone is awoken to the amazing power of data. Well, if history rhymes, let's go back to the last renaissance, right? The last renaissance predated a very important moment in human history called the enlightenment, right? That was after the renaissance when all of a sudden we opened up and realized the potential in the renaissance. And then we thought about it and we came up with something called formulating a hypothesis, gathering the data, testing the hypothesis against the data, sharing and being transparent about both the hypothesis and the data so that others can test it. Yes. Rinse and repeat. That's the scientific method, right? And that has driven us to the point of progress we are now. That has given us the microprocessor, the internet, everything. Okay, the scientific method is at the core of all of that. And that is shorthanded by the enlightenment, right? So we've had a data renaissance. We haven't had a data enlightenment, right? And so here's the imagined scenario. Imagine that if I want to start this restaurant, I could say, okay, I'm going to go to this great company that started a few years ago called the Research Board. There is something called that, but let's just call it that anyway, the Research Board. And I'm going to put up a request for proposal or a request for token, okay? I want 1,000 people who qualify in my neighborhood, right? I'll just ring fence it, geofence it, right? Within a mile of where I live, I want you to give me your Uber data, your Lyft data, your Rezzi data, your OpenTable data, your Yelp data, your Search data, all the data that might in any way help me understand whether or not having a restaurant here is a good idea. Everyone who's driven by in an Uber, go into a restaurant. Anyone who's ever signed up to go to a restaurant around here and then canceled and why? What did they eat? How much did they pay? What kind of food was it? Right? You know, did they do it once a week, once a month, once every quarter? You know, how much money did they spend? All of a sudden, I've got all of this data from all of these, it's just out there lying like fruit on the ground. We just can't see it. Now I can. I can ask questions of it and I can make from that unrefined data information that will drive the creation of a physical thing in the world called a restaurant. And I can take that data and if I'm smart enough about it and there'll be a whole ecosystem of people helping me be smart about it, I can go to a bank and go, check this data. Here's my token for why this restaurant makes sense.  I'm going to give you a loan to get your restaurant equipment, right? Right now it's just like, well, do you have good credit and, you know, can I take your house over if the restaurant fails? I'll just, you know, that's basically where we are right now in our economy. But imagine if all of this data laying on the ground could be applied to that one problem and 10 million others just like it.  It's crazy that this data exists and no one can use it. It's crazy that our economy is not flourishing because it has the information to flourish, but we have not figured out to release it. And that's what I'm all about right now. So the project I'm doing at Columbia is trying to prove that we have a broken architecture and there's a better way. And so I'm literally creating a visualization based on the terms of services of the four largest firms in the United States, all tech firms, right? And saying, here's what they're, here's what they're allowing and here's what they're not allowing. Now, let's compare them and contrast them and see what you could do. Could you do what I just described? The answer to that question is no, you know.  But the truth is they all have similar data policies.  What's going on right now? We need to see that we have an architecture of data control in this, in this country that is busted. Once we see that, we can then say, we should change it. How? And my idea is just one. There's probably a lot better ideas than mine, but you got to have at least an idea to, you know, to sort of tell the story, right? We got to admit that we have a problem. It's number one of A8, right? You know, acknowledge what you're doing. Acknowledge you have a problem. And then crowdsourcing solutions and ideas to the. So that's the work at Columbia. And what's interesting is, again, history rhyming or echoing when the dot com crash happened. I not only, you know, sort of, you know, for a couple of years, it was rough. I was, I went to Berkeley and I started teaching at Berkeley and I started studying and I ended up ultimately writing a book. I started studying search because I just thought that was the most important and interesting thing happening in a world that seemed completely fucked up and broken at the time. Right now, our world doesn't seem so great. I'm sorry, even though employment is, you know, at record lows, it's not good employment. And even though, you know, me and my friends are doing pretty well because we're highly educated and we've been successful in our careers, most people aren't doing very well. We've got a broken society and it feels that way to me, especially when you go to New York and, you know, you can't like live in Moran and in Silicon Valley and kind of be, you know, insulated from it.  You know, it's very real what's happening. And so what can we do to fix our political system? What can we do to fix our technological system? The two are absolutely, irrefutably interconnected now.  What can we identify that is something that can change the conversation? Right? And that's what I'm focused on. So the work at Columbia is all about that and it's not driven by any commercial. Like, it's just I want to know this. I want to see this. I want to see what the world thinks of it, you know. Share it. And I think it's going to lead to something else. You illustrated this really interesting these fruit that has these fruit that have fallen from the trees, these data fruit. It's an invisible fruit. These invisible fruit that have fallen from the trees and the creative potential that exists across all of the different fields if we can just forage those fruit and then put them in different assemblies that can then provide us with so much more value. What we need for that to happen besides sort of political will, which is very important, because I realize I haven't kind of talked about the one kind of the one line that we need to change in our architectural code, our regulatory code. I'll get to that in a minute. But what we need technologically to do that is we need the ability to create a trustless environment. In other words, not no trust, but you don't have to worry about trusting it, right? We need the ability to that, you know, billions of consumers of citizens and consumers can trust an environment that they can manage their own security, that they know that this is that as they share this information, it's secure that they can revoke it, you can turn it off, turn it on, turn it off and that there are economics associated with it. All those things need to be true. We need to invent technologies to make all that possible. Guess what we have? We literally have already solved all of those problems for other things, right? So we don't have a technological reason that the system can't happen. We have a cultural reason. We have a societal reason. We have an economic reason. But the one line of code that needs to be changed is simply this. And this is sort of under let the data flow, right? Every data service. At scale, because I don't think you should tax like the startup necessarily, but I think every startup, if this were true, would already build this into what because they want to get to scale, right? Every data service at scale must allow their customers to create tokens that encapsulate all data created, co-created with the service into a machine-readable, portable vehicle that they can share with whoever they want. So my entire Amazon purchase history, my entire run and ride history on Strava, my entire ride history on Uber, anything that I do with that service, turn it into a token, machine-readable and portable. And so there'll be a standardized system I'm not worried about. We invented a really good one called the internet, you know, where I can just give that token to a startup that wants to try to do something cool with my Amazon data or give it to a university that's trying to study something that has to do with my Amazon data or give it to a nonprofit that is trying to crack a really hard problem because my data is somehow relevant to them. And I have the ability to turn it off remotely and I have the ability to get value from it. And I know that it's secure and I know that the party that's taking my data doesn't actually have it. They have access to it. Very important distinction, right? We've solved this problem. It's called the ad tech ecosystem. It's built. It's built. My little company, one of my companies called Sovereign, does nine billion requests a day, a day. So we've solved this big processing based on parameters and rules thing, right? Securely. It's not even blockchain. Could be, probably should be. But it's not. So also the ad tech-based business is a little bit gray in many of its areas as we well know. But we can do this. So. The proposed method, the token act. I call it the token act. It's very interesting. The problem is that the tokens are so corrupted because of the ICO stuff. There has been a big issue with that. I've got to come up with a better name. But you've formulated in a way that it gets people to understand that their data is worth value for society in so many different ways. Right. And it's also worth value for the company to open up their data silos. And then this single machine readable format across different.  I also wanted to indicate this as well that this is so everyone likes to live healthy. Everyone finds living healthy to be something that's extremely important to them. And we're starting to understand that we spend such little amount of money on preventable health care and medicine that we now understand that if we can turn on the data flows of our biometrics out for research. Perfect place where this kind of a regulatory framework which is what this is. People go oh regulations it's terrible.  There's a regulatory framework called no regulation. That is a regulatory framework. So get over it. No matter what we're in a regulatory framework a regulatory framework is simply the structures we create to ensure that we don't dissolve into entropy. OK. That's what a regulatory framework is. It's like how we can our bodies are regulatory frameworks. Right. And so why aren't we taking the data off our bodies in real time and making ourselves healthy? Because we have a sclerotic bad architecture of information control in the health business. Who built the data information and architectures in the health business? Insurers. Why? Because they're the ones that pay.  You know and by the way we have 1950s capitalism controlling outcomes in our technology industries as well. And so we have to change that core architecture. That's what the argument is of my work at Columbia. We're really looking forward to that in the research with Columbia. We're really looking forward to doing a follow up on this. John, couple quick questions that we like to go through on the way out of the show. Sure. First question is let's start with what is a core driving principle of yours? Core driving principle of mine. Work on stuff you can't help but work on. Like if nothing's getting you excited do nothing. Like I've never worked on anything.  Sorry, I'm a Southern California guy.  Those are kind of two core principles.  And if you let the which you're kind of trying you're doing this right now but I want to see all the way back. Let's bring the whiteboard all the way back. So if you could rebuild civilization from scratch how would you design it? I've never thought of that question. I mean, I studied civilizations, right? It was like my undergraduate major. I could design it. How would I design it? I think I think the greatest impediment to civilization is otherness, is a sense of otherness and one of the greatest strengths of humanity is a sense of otherness, right? So this idea of the individual is that we have of each of us as being other. Like I am separate and apart from you. It's sort of one of the remarkable things that makes us interesting and when we combine that socially one of the things that fucks everything up, right? So I think if I could go back and redesign civilization as you say, I might if I were such a God give the gift of everyone who initially is part of the first civilization, I guess, a overwhelming knowledge that the other is okay, you know?  That the other is just you with a little bit of a different spin that's worth checking out.  And so somehow that philosophical concept which took millennia to really start becoming something that could be discussed publicly without getting either shot or laughed at, I would give the gift of that early. Yeah, well said. And do you, this wouldn't be simulation if we didn't ask you, do you think we're in a simulation? Yeah, I've really struggled with this one. I think that the technical answer is yes, but I think it doesn't matter. Why? Why is it yes? Because one could argue that, you know, given what we don't know, if there is a chance we don't know, then it's technically possible. Now there's, we don't know what the ultimate rules of the universe are. We don't. We know that. All scientists acknowledge that.  Sorry, we don't know, you know. But we're understanding the code, which is math. Yeah, we're pushing our way toward that understanding, but right now, we don't know. And since there's a chance we don't know, there is a chance it's a simulation, right? And if there's a chance it's a simulation, you know, I'm gonna say it probably because I like the idea that it probably is.  That's right. That was a simulation, the whole thing, right? And that's what the Chesky brothers were actually asking. You know, is this all just a simulation? Or is it a system that just keeps repeating, right? Well, if it's a system just keeps repeating, it could just be a button on someone's coat. You know, and so even if it's not a simulation, it's just a button on someone's coat. Might as well call it one. That's what, you know.  Like, you know, there are these ineffable questions, right? I prefer to answer them in a way that makes it sort of fun to stroke a chin. Yup, yup. And last question is, what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? Well, the first idea that came up was my wife giving birth. I know that's totally fucking, like, cliche. But like, you just asked, and I just like saw my wife holding our first kit. So, but the most beautiful thing in the world past the cliche is when you're in the flow.  So there's this cycle that's happening about you and the flow and the flow's not you, but you're in it and when you're in that, that happens to me when I ski, when I ride bikes, when I practice yoga, when I write a piece and when I get into conversation like this, like that flow is the most beautiful thing in the world. Then we should all pursue it. It seems like the deepest cognitive instinct is that. It seems like that is what brings us meaning if we can hone it on that. Yeah, get in there, man. Get in there and stay in there as long as you can. That's why people are lifelong surfers. You know? John, this has been such an enlightening conversation. We are very much looking forward to the new architectures of data flows. John, thanks again for coming out to the show. Great, I appreciate it. Thanks everyone for tuning in. You usually appreciate it as well. Give us your thoughts in the comments below. We'd love to hear from you. Let us know. Join the community chat. Let's get talking about these concepts and coming up with our ideas about how to solve some of the most pressing challenges going on in the world. Inspire these conversations around you. Check out John's links below in the bio. Check them out. Also, join us in supporting simulations so we can continue coming on site to great places and talking to incredible leaders like John. And go and build the future. Everyone manifest your destiny into the world. Build, create, execute. We love you very much and we'll see you soon. Peace. That's it. All right, man. That's it. That's how we do. Thank you, brother.


OTAN Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. IT, Folsom Cordova Adult School, located in Rancho Cordova Sacramento County where our motto is STRIVE, PERSIST, 16, Cindy Noble and I am the administrative assistant to our wonderful principal, Rhonda Balmain. I am the administrative assistant at our school since 2017. Also on our team we are lucky to have our superhero ESL teacher, Avi Jones, aka Hybridman. Avi is the master of juggling many roles. He is not only Folsom Cordova's lead ESL teacher, but he is an outstanding instructor for our ESL beginning high in-person students and our beginning high intermediate low online classes. He is the curriculum developer, the main instructor for our paraeducator training program. When not teaching at UC Davis Sacramento State University, Avi uses his expertise to develop curriculum ESL civics assignments for our data collecting systems. Avi is the Jedi of Canvas system where he creates engaging curriculum. Our digital leadership academy coach and reputed cousin to Wonder Woman.  Our reputed cousin to Wonder Woman is Cindy Wislowski who is spreading her knowledge and superpowers not only with our school, but she is also mentoring Grossmont Adult School. Cindy was an ESL instructor for 40 years with the San Diego Community College District before she retired five years ago. She served as ESL department chair 15 years and as ESL technology coordinator for 12 years. Cindy has worked on different projects with OTAN since 2012. Join us for a brief overview of our marble less agency and our progression through D-LAC exploring our achievements and goals. Fulsome Cordova has been providing excellent education and services since 1949. We are part of Fulsome Cordova Unified School District and we are fully WASC accredited. In fact, we just had our WASC in March. Our school's mission is to prepare and empower adult learners by providing quality academic programs transition services and career pathways necessary for higher learning employment and civic responsibility. Fulsome Cordova Adult School is small but mighty. We have seven staff members in our office including the principal, register, data analyst, budget tech, clerk typist two, refugee support services, and houseowner campus. We have an independent study high school and an adolescent parent program, a K through 12 distant learning school, and we are partnered with the Fulsome Cordova Job Center. Offsite we offer parent co-op pre-school programs at three different elementary schools. Our school currently has 10 ESL teachers for ASE and as of April we have had 705 ESL students, 218 unduplicated ASE students. We offer in-person online courses for both ESL and ASE for the students that qualify. Fulsome Cordova has a fantastic CTE and workforce prep offerings which include Lobotomy, Microsoft Office, QuickBooks, free online paraeducator training, free computer classes, free citizen class. Also new this year we have a six week electrical training program which is with Northern California Construction Training sponsored by SMUD. During our pandemic our staff, teachers, and students very quickly learned how to use technology to communicate and continue with classes. We were obligated to learn how to hold zoom screens and remote testing. So many of us were hesitant, reluctant, and unable to learn the new ways of connecting. We learned quickly how important technology is and what a wonderful tool. So what is our vision? Our vision is to improve equity and accommodate students who do not have access to computer or internet at home. We want to improve our teachers and students knowledge of Canvas and other web based learning tools. We want to improve the technology skills of teachers and students. We want to offer high flex classes to accommodate students who have barriers to attending school. So being accepted at the digital leadership academy was very exciting and we knew we were on the right path to meeting our goals and guidance with our guidance of OCEAN, our superheroes. We have talked about offering the high flex classes at our school in the past but needed guidance and planning. So now we know we're finally on our way. Our team quickly dove into the CELAC schedule encountered our year. At first we're meeting. We were introduced to our mentor, wonderful Cynthia, Wonder Woman, and our partnered with Grossmont. We dove right into exploring our strengths and our basements on Gallup's Clifton strengths presented by our hero and defender Dr. Porter. We learned what each member contributes to the team and how different we all are. We continued by examining our communication skills and how to handle conflicts. The knowledge of these skills will be helpful when working with the staff who are reluctant and resistant to going paperless. This is where Hybridman, A-A-B, steps in to save the day. He will help us with campus training as well as our high flex classes. Thank you, Cindy. Folks, Cindy talked me up a lot so I need to say that I cannot overstate her value to our team. Like she said, we're a really small school. This is like one-third of the whole school. And with the numbers that you've seen in terms of the students going through our programs and everything, she does a heck of a lot of work. And I want to say really thanks a lot to her. She's also responsible for most of the presentation that you're seeing today. What are Hybridman's powers? Actually none, except to empower other people to do these things. So that's why Cindy wanted to pass out all of these masks to you all so that we would all share in the spirit of empowerment. We were introduced to our ideal DLAC activities and course assignments by Destiny. Love seeing her face up there at all of our meetings. She shared her knowledge of Canvas and sent us additional resources needed to implement our site plan. We learned what an amazing tool the Canvas learning management system is and how important it is to get our staff accepting trained and ready to use the system. That is an ongoing process. Our ideal one-on-one deal assignments got us thinking about who would benefit. This is the big question we often get from management. Who would benefit from high flex classes? How to recruit students into the high flex classes? And how to qualify those students? We decided that high flex classes could help with our students' persistence. As many have said today, this is a big deal for all of our data people, including administrators as well as our enrollment rates. We really conceived of it as a way to break down barriers to education, barriers to participation. I might talk about a couple of those in a minute. Students who have barriers like childcare, work schedules, or illness can still join classes online from their homes as you all know but with high flex, we can offer as the name implies the maximum flexibility. So the goal that we're following is that students are going to be able to come to class in person or join online up to their decision on that day. So thinking about all the variables that are in adult people's lives, something might happen and where they would need to do one thing or the other. Also not all students as you know have the same learning techniques, so giving them the choice to be in person or online or a combination of them is another offering that our school wants to provide. We think this will go a long way toward improving equity and we want to think about equity as being where appropriate resources are given to those who need them, as opposed to equality, which is something we've driven for all of us, we've driven for a long time, which is just providing everyone the same resources and hoping they all get themselves sorted out. We want to move to a more equity based model. Recruiting and qualifying students to join our new high-flex classes will mostly be done in our orientation. Cindy does a whole lot of orientations and I did the orientations for the Paragita Training Program. New students attending orientations will begin by taking a survey on a computer that includes questions like these. Do you own a computer, laptop, iPad, or Chromebook at home? As you know, many times the answer is no, no to all the above. Do you have reliable Wi-Fi at home? Who does? What level would you rate your computer skills? No skills, beginner, average, good, these kinds of things. And of course, when I write the surveys, this one is always the number one question. Would you prefer an in-person online or a choice of online or in-person? These survey questions can be translated into multiple languages. You know how we do with Google Translate and we also have multi-lingual staff. Count myself among them who can translate things in a more personal way. The students always watch a slide show of some kind to learn more about the school, our class offerings, our rules. Don't drive faster than five miles per hour in the parking lot, things like that. Our superhuman team will cause this test. The new students and really their effort is incredible, the number of folks that they test and how often they test them. We'll meet one-on-one with an advisor. Students would meet one-on-one with an advisor to go over class offerings. Cost of scores need to be high enough for a student to qualify for a high-flex class. Right now, our ASA students need to score a 239 or higher to attend an online class. As far as the ESL high-flex class goes, it's only going to be offered in our first iteration. It's only going to be offered in the advanced ESL level. Recently, we got the great news that we were approved for a Measure H grant funded by our city of Rancho Cordova. With these funds, we'll be purchasing a whole bunch of Chromebooks, like about 50, we're hoping for, which we'll be able to loan out to our students. We haven't had loaners for a long time, and so this is going to be really nice. In addition, we have some poly cameras, as Cindy's shown on the screen right here, that were sort of donated to us from our IT department. There you see some wing nut in a mask teaching a class using it, so you can't see the poly camera, but it's right there. We hope to buy three or four owl meeting cameras for the new high-flex classrooms. We're really looking forward to having a 360-degree camera. You can see if I were to be teaching in this classroom, I'd probably like to put it right there or something like that. Everybody can see what's going on online and off. So far in our school site plan, we've implemented how to qualify a student for these classes, how to outfit students with technology where we can, and we've tested the cameras for the classroom. So what are we going to do next? Our next steps will be preparing and training the teachers with best practices on how to teach a high-flex class. We'll be relying on OTAN for help with that. Training of our two pilot teachers will include a series of sessions with OTAN folks in August, and we've been working with the OTAN team to plan and schedule both advanced trainings on Canvas and on high-flex in terms of best practices. We've found, I'm sure lots of folks have noticed that when we bring someone in from the outside, it's helpful for the teachers to get a different perspective. So it's not just, oh, Avi's talking about Canvas again. We plan to regularly gather data from students and teachers on their experience with a high-flex course in the upcoming semester, and we really hope to pilot these classes in the fall. So if at all possible that's what we're going to do. And then we'll be able to, because we survey students a lot and we gather just data, testing data, standardized data, and we'll be able to examine that process from qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Really looking forward to the next chapter of our D-LAC training, working with the amazing OTAN staff, thanks guys, and learning from the other superheroes from other agencies. Thank you very much.


FNN. The Tiger. Financial News Network. Headline. News update. Welcome folks. We have the Dow Industrial finished up 168 and as that goes up 133, S&Ps are up 22. Gold. Gold contract traded up $21.60 at $19.80 an ounce. We had Silver up 85 cents, $24.38 an ounce. Light Sweet Crew down at $1.47, $71.04 a barrel. Notes and bonds. Up 17 ticks, $113.24 the 30 up a full point plus four ticks at $127.20 and $1.00. $1.00 down 760 ticks trading $103.339, the Euro at $107, the Yen at $138 and the British pound at $125 to $1.00 US. We get over to the spy folks and you get a meltup happening here. The spy closed out here today at $429 and that's that $431, that's your next swing and that's where we're going to go. The contraction of volume coming into a Friday in the summer, that thing can get up there in a heartbeat. We go to the NDX. The swing point in the NDX is pretty far away, it's $371.00 but looks like it wants to get there. So we'll see how it shakes out man. Right now you're at $353.00. We go to the gold contract and you still didn't get enough juice in the gold contract. So this is going to get, you know, we've been trading sideways actually for now two full weeks. You have that being said though, you're going to confirm the ABC structure down and we'll see whether the dollar can basically save gold as the dollar is saving the market. We go over to the dollar, what you're going to see in the dollar here, you know, this dollar took it on the chin in a big way out here today down almost 800 ticks. You had wide price spread. This is the second time with wide price spread. We had wide price spread last Thursday. You have wide price spread today. That's saying that hey, guess what, you know, this thing can, we're almost at the point 382 on the way back. If we, if we break the 382, the 382 right now is at 103, 200. We're at 103, 325. You break that, then that puts game at 50% and puts 618. You know, we'll see where the shakes out. We got to the notes and bonds. They still want higher price, lower yield. They both saved themselves out here today. The note and bond market, they got to a lower low. They had lighter volume. They rejected lower price. They want higher price. Have a great night, folks. Have a safe night. Stay tuned for tomorrow, Tommy tomorrow morning, nine o'clock. Great show, folks. Look at them, folks.