Welcome to the DevSync. It's December 2nd, and we're going to kick it off with Derek. He's got a short timeline here.  So yes, my continual CAD progress on the Mark II. I've made my way to the display housing, and I've been working on that mostly today, and I've got it in pretty good order. Because of the switch and stack up, as I've mentioned many times, the way it gets mounted also had to change, but I've got that all sorted out. And tomorrow I will be working on buttons, and hopefully also spending a little time trying to get the tolerance on that a little better. They were pretty good the last time I left off on them, but they still had some room for improvement. I'll be addressing that. Nothing really on the software side. I mean, you know, yesterday I mentioned the GUI stuff was kind of ready whenever you guys are to implement on the Wi-Fi setup. I added screens and Figma. So if anyone wants to discuss that when necessary, just ping me. Yep, that's it for me. All right. Thanks, Derek. Ken, do you have a cat who's walking on your keyboard or something? No. That sure is a weird thing. No. Okay. Well, why don't you go ahead then? Okay. So let's see. So I continue working on trapping the TTSKS that Michael has experienced. And I can now produce that consistently so I can fix that or try to fix it. And it also looks like part of the problem when you get into that chaos mode is that the playback control skill has bad audio service status. So it doesn't bother sending it a stop, which is part of the problem. It doesn't know it's playing. But the important point was that I was able to reproduce the chaos. And it only occurs with long-running TTS that happen to, and when it breaks, it has to be an intermittent breaks.  And then see what the result was on the system. And it holds up really well because all of the Q&A skills now have clipped very radically at nothing more than a sentence or two. In fact, some of them are actually clipped in the middle. So you don't see it there. You have to get a long-running answer. And the only way to do that was to ask about the story of the Odyssey. And so that takes a while. And then when the Mimic 2 will after, because I have it like every fifth or seventh, like throwing an exception when it throws an exception, the Mimic 1 will start playing. And if it catches it between sessions, they'll both go off and you can't stop either. And it's very annoying. So now that I can reproduce that, I should be able to make more progress on getting that fixed. I filed a bug for DuckDuckGo. It throws an exception on what is Helium. I noticed that most of the Q&As are timing out now. Obviously, there's the build issues with booting and losing pairing and all that. And then I also noticed that this build was running slow. I was able to actually get the Wi-Fi logs and see how the bring up sequence goes, which is cool. That's like I said, there's only three statuses from what I was doing. I'm assuming Mike will speak more to that in a minute. But I backed that off because it was like running every 15 seconds and it was slowing everything down. So I backed that off significantly for like five minutes and things are running better. But the important breakthrough was I was able to reproduce Michael's chaos because it was difficult actually to reproduce. And so I'll be fixing that relatively shortly. Okay, great. Well, it sounds like Michael might be doing some work that's related to that.  Sure. So let's see. This morning I got in some tests for the network manager. So this is the software that based on Ken's stuff pings the D-Bus right now to the AW Connect on the Mark II board and asks it, you know, connectivity status for the network and the internet. And then just a little bit ago, I got in the Mark II enclosure, there's now a thread that's polling this basically every so many seconds checking connectivity and it outputs events on the bus. So it outputs both status changes. So I'm connected, I'm disconnected for network internet and every polling interval, it also outputs a status message with the same information. I did discover though, just before we got on, my internet went out while I was watching the log actually of the connectivity status on the Mark II and it continued to report fully connected. So to me, this suggests that when it connects, the network manager checks internet status, but from there on after, I don't think it continues to check. I think it believes whatever it was at the beginning, it must still be connected to the internet. So I think I'm going to have to, in the enclosure thread, make sure that it's also doing the DNS check and the URL check out to, you know, Google or something to verify that it can still actually reach a website even though that it believes it's still connected to the internet. Yeah, we need to, we are making a clear distinction between Wi-Fi network connectivity and internet connectivity, right? Yeah, what's odd is that the D-Bus network manager, the status, if you read the documentation, when it says it's fully connected, it says it can reach the internet and that's the status it's reporting. And it may have been true when it was first connected, but later on it's no longer true even if you keep asking it. Am I understanding you correctly that you're not seeing the network go down when the network goes down? I'm not seeing the network go down because the network net didn't go down, the internet went down, so my cable modem was unplugged. And it's still, at the time it first connected to Wi-Fi, it could reach the internet. And so it believes apparently as long as this connected to the same Wi-Fi, it will be able to reach the internet forever. So we need to do that. I'm trying to understand what you're saying. So what you're saying is that your router still had an internal connection? Yes. So you were connected to the edge, but not connected to the internet? Yeah, I was connected to my Wi-Fi router, but not to the internet. Got it, got it, got it. So we have all the tools necessary here and now we'll have the distinction. So we'll have network and once I add this extra thing, it'll be internet now or not, basically. Okay. Yeah, we can definitely do a workaround on our side, but we should also report that as a bug. I'll have to dig through the docs and see if there's, I don't see anything that says like internet as of right now or as of it as it started. So yeah, maybe that is just a bug or maybe there's some other property I need to dig into. That's a bug you reported to in Boontu, right? I'm not sure, who runs Network Manager? I think it's a known project that runs that. Yeah, maybe. There are other ways you can check the actual connections and see whether or not there are, maybe we should, that you were checking at the device level, right? Or even at the Network Manager level. I wonder if you drilled down into like a device or like a connection if you get the same result. Yeah, I'll have to check that too. So I'll check on that tomorrow. Let's see. The other thing I got today is my, I got my model finished, my TTS model finished to a certain level and was able to run it on the mark too. And it runs great. So I'm getting a real time factor of about 0.4 so it runs 2x faster than real time. And I mean, it's not, you know, the highest quality ever when I hear it with my headphones, but on the speakers it sounds just fine. So there should be a viable option for us to have offline neural TTS on the mark too that runs in reasonable time. As long as you, if you have, you know, gigantic sentences, it might take a second or two. But if you have short stuff or you can break it up at clause boundaries, even it'll, it should perform just fine. So I'm going to start training. I have one that's got multiple voices and no single voice sounds the best. So I'm going to train a single voice one off the, uh, who's, who saw dataset and see how that sounds. Okay. Yeah, that sounds really cool. Do we have a name for this? I don't know.  I'll leave that to you guys. Yeah. And mimic is our. Yes, moniker.  Like it's, yeah, if it's still, I mean, it's still using the Tucketron stuff. No, no, this is using a, it's an advancement above that. It's a, it's a model called vits. So it's, yeah, it's, it's basically, they did a combination of something called glow TTS and a vocoder. They jam them together in a single network. And so it actually doesn't end to end phonemes straight out to the audio. So you don't have to run a separate vocoder stage, which is great. That sounds like a mimic three. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds great to me. Okay. I'll call it mimic three and we should be able. So I can also train for different languages. Any of the languages supported by my group and LP library. So once I get something for English, I'll concentrate on others. And then you win the award for most significant contribution in your first week of work at any workplace ever. Like a little trophy. We have these cool coins. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I got one of those. And I got the cool, the cool book with the trolls. So, all right. That's awesome. A new, you know, getting a new TTS model in there. That's really cool. Thanks. We need, but there's a lot more than just the TTS model, right? There's the whole, all the infrastructure around it. And such as we've got, I don't know if this applies only to mimic one or it's one and two, but we've got these hints in there where just we're going straight from, you know, English as it is written, not as it is spoken, right? So we've got this database where people could write in actual transliterations, like the proper pronunciation for various words and things like that, right? Make sure it integrates with that and all that kind of thing. Yeah, I'll have to figure that out. So this is based on what I've done with larynx where it's, the model is not actually trained on English as it's written. There's a normalization step and then a phonemization step. And those are done using a library I wrote called Groot. They could also be done from using eSpeak, depending on licensing with that. So it produces, what's that? I am Groot. That's the way, yeah. I called it Groot, but I spoke with two U's just to make fun of English pronunciation. So it uses a database with the phonetic pronunciations. If it can't find it in there, it guesses it with a conditional random field model. So if you add, if you can update this database with pronunciations, what I'm saying, as long as they're in the right phonemes, I'm using the international phonetic alphabet for this. Yeah, so yeah, I would take a look at what we have. And I wasn't aware that you guys had talked about that and decided to do this project, but it sounds really cool. But yeah, let's, let's make it into, you know, at least if not, if you're not going to work on these particular aspects right now, at least record them as, you know, to-dos to turn it into a fully, you know, realized product. Yeah, okay. While you're at it, taking up where Michael just said, because I wasn't aware of this, if we do have hints for MIMIC too, I noticed that when you ask who Abraham Lincoln is, and it says Washington D.C., and they're both capitalized, it says Washington D.C. So that should be D space S-E-E. Yeah, there's actually a- Yeah, there's actually a- Sorry, we talked over each other. What did you say? Oh, just saying we have a website where you can go out and specify those things. Yeah, we were literally- Yeah, we were saying the same thing. Just warning that that website is not in an automated fashion to, like, take those and then implement them. So currently nothing, like, no one's taking those and adding them to the service. We're collecting them though. Yes, yes. I think they're also largely, I would imagine, that they're largely based on what people type in and see how MIMIC2 pronounces things. And so they're going to be, you know, what is the spelling that gives me the best pronunciation in MIMIC2 rather than, like, say, the international phonetic alphabet or something like that. So, yeah. But they'll at least give us a list of things. So they assume instead of assume and we're all confused. Wait, what do I say? There is an extra layer too that Groot does that may need to be, the website may need to be modified. So, you know, in English you can get better hints at a pronunciation depending on the part of speech, usually a noun versus a verb. And so it distinguishes that too. I don't know if we could, I don't know if we could add that to the website or if they're willing to go to that level to, or if they even, I mean, I didn't really think about this before delving into this kind of stuff, you know, just kind of automatic.  Yeah, those all sound like great issues to just start documenting as, you know, to-dos for a future sprint project. I would suggest that people generally are pretty terrible at thinking about that sort of stuff, unless they're like really deep on, you know, linguistics and things. But I wonder if asking for a sample phrase along with the word that they think is not pronounced correctly would be helpful because then we can see the context in which they are thinking about it. Yeah, that would be great. Forget the sample sentence. Yeah. But yeah, all great ideas. Okay, cool. Great, you've just made more work for us. I just made more work, yeah. Glad to help. I thought we were going to run out. All right, great. So, I guess, why don't you go? Wolfram Alpha is in release to stable. So, it's even on the stable images, which is cool. But the other QAs, QA GUIs are not in stable yet, I don't think, because they're relying on, they're waiting on these test changes that are in core. So, yes, going to do one thing that we talked about yesterday, Michael, is that we want to get the next XDU changes in, but for the last couple of weeks, I've been hitting a bunch of just bugs and things with the last round of XDU changes, and as much as we review code and everything, there's just always things that pop up when you actually start to use things in real life. So, the plan now is to do a point release of core and then merge in the next XDU changes so that there's a decent amount of time to sort of test those in the wild before they get marked as stable and all of that. Yeah, so I'm going to do a point release of core as the short version. What else happened? Oh, I also fixed the Pandora thing, so Pandora is now fully up to date in the marketplace. I haven't tested it because I'm Australian and Pandora left us long ago, but if other people have accounts, that would be good to tech. And, yes, focusing on trying to focus on community PRs a fair bit at the moment. Yeah. All right, well, I'm testing out your Pandora still now that's been pushed. Cool. I'll let you know. All right, and Chris, other Chris. Yeah, so I've been testing my changes to the boot sequence today. I got the skills service to start in 15 seconds. If you take out the Wi-Fi connect skill, which currently runs for a minute, but currently it's for a minute. So that's good. So as soon as we get that kind of straightened out, we'll get the skills loading in very, very short order. And everything else that was in the skills that what didn't belong there is now running the enclosure and it seems to be doing fine. I haven't tested the actual pairing and Wi-Fi stuff yet because I think I was waiting on some of Mike's stuff and a little worried about some of the bugs that have been reported about identity files disappearing and stuff.  I won't be testing my code or testing something else. Is that related to the SDG stuff or something else you think? It feels, yeah, it is. So I don't know.  I propose the change to dev because it's like it's something that's in mainstream as well. Um, and, you know, okay, pointed out that, um, it was kind of done intentionally that way so that if the, if the migration was, you know, um, not completed successfully, then it would, then it would try again in the future. Um, uh, yeah. So it, and I can, I can understand that logic, but we're seeing a genuine literal problem right now on the mark two, um, versus a theoretical problem, um, elsewhere. So I think my, I think it would make sense for us to just do this fix on the mark two feature branch, um, because the whole problem is a short-term problem because we can pull the whole migration code out, you know, after the next major release anyway. Um, so yeah. Something else I noticed in my testing today was that every time you do go get configs, if you're config valid on the right place, you get one of those deprecations. I'm getting like a hundred of them every time I boot my device. So I don't know if there's a way to, you know, make those a little quieter, but, um, they're everywhere in the log files right now. Uh, It's here, configs on the right place. Yeah, right. There shouldn't be that many of them, but so. Just on closure, start up alone. I have six. Okay. We should look at that. Anyway, um, I mean, it's a minor, it's kind of minor compared to everything else, but it's just something I noticed while I was. Yeah. Yeah. And the quieter we can make the logs, the more the actual problems jump out at you. Yes. So, um, So I think what I need to do now is integrate with the stuff that Michael pushed up today. Hey, I'm working on the same branch right now. So kind of working on the same thing. Um, so, um, I do want to talk to him too about what he's done because I think I want to see some changes, but, um, But yeah, so I mean, we're, I'm getting, I think we're getting pretty close on the, uh, On the happy path at least of the startup sequence. Then when I need to start getting into, you know, what happens, you know, how do we, um, use this stuff to trigger the wifi skill and how to use it to trigger the bearing skill. Cause right now I'm just saying, okay, I'm paired. I'm, I'm, I'm paired and connected. And, you know, what happens on a normal boot and that's what I'm doing right now. So there'll be extra testing for that. And then there'll be extra changes for that as well. But we are making progress. Michael and I make good progress. We should be able to formulate the startup sequence in terms of these, these network connected and internet connected events now too. Right. You have a no internet. In the spec. But I wonder like for the, for the non happy path, we probably were needed to handle cases where it's connected and connected and all that, right? Uh, not, well, for boot up sequence, I think we don't be as, are you talking about just the boot up sequence or about like in general, if we lose connectivity? I don't think the boot up sequence too, or if, you know, instead of having timeouts, I guess is what I'm getting at is we, we should wait for particular connected events, right? To, to move steps forward in, in stuff, right? Yeah. Yeah.  So if I understand what you're saying there, Michael, that move away from more of a polling mechanism and into an, an event driven system. Yeah. It should be, there should be no timeouts and unless you're, I mean, if it's interacting, direct with the user, that's a different story. But if it's booting up, it should be an event driven, I would think. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to, you know, if you tie it out of trying to get to a network connection, then what? Yeah. There's no human there. Well, we know, we know that and what then in the middle of the night it says, why if I disconnected? Right. Well, yeah. Same thing with Barry. There's a lot of, we probably shouldn't tie not have anything during the initial boot. Or at least until you get past pairing. Yeah. Can I, can I just double check? Chris, did you say it takes 15 seconds to boot the skills service? Until you get to the Wi-Fi connect? Yes. That is incredible. Nicely done. Cause just memory, if my memory serves me correctly, it used to be right. Yeah. That's what I thought. Yeah. A major improvement for sure. Yeah. That's great. And so, um, and the Wi-Fi, you're saying, and then you get to the Wi-Fi and then it takes another minute or whatever it right. And that's, that's because the init method of the Wi-Fi skill actually goes through all 60 seconds of, of what it does right now. Right. So as soon as we yank that out and make it event based, then it will be 15 seconds. Awesome. That's really great. Yep. Cool. So we get to an initialized state that fast because that's, that's still the slowest at 15 seconds with all the, all the things. So we'll get to initialized state pretty quickly. That's great. Yeah. Cause that's, that gets us really close, if not to the point where, you know, the device boots up and it's, it's ready. Like Microsoft, like we were talking about, like, the Microsoft system can be ready before the internet is connected and before Wi-Fi is connected, right? Like we've got an operational system. Now it goes out and tries to find all the things that it needs. Right. But the system, I'm really happy with what work we're doing. I think it's going to be some pretty cool stuff when we're done. Yeah. Great. And hopefully a lot more stable. Yeah. God, I hope so. Oh, and I have, I found a bug today. So I think you will all find interesting things. Yeah. Because I think it might be causing some of our problems. So, um, there's logic in the, uh, message bus client that. Something about on error. It retries getting, um, the message bus connection because, you know, obviously you couldn't get one switch for future trying. Um, but I think that might be happening on, um, On an error when you try to admit a message. Because I, so I'm, I'm emitting messages. When each of the services are done initializing. And when I, when I admitted. At a, the first one, which is the speech is done. Um, that never got admitted because I think it triggered this loop. That wasn't connected to the. Message bus. So I haven't completely nailed it down yet. But I found it very interesting that. And my, my whole startup sequence just stopped because I'm, I wait for all three services to be ready. And I never, I never got the speech one because, you know, like got swallowed somehow. Um, which I thought was very interesting. So I'm going to, I'm going to look into that deeper and provide more information when I have it, but. You sure it didn't get admitted before you, uh, on the, onto the message bus. For your client was connected. No, because my connection. Not like, it's not like they're stored and saved. Yeah, they are. And yeah. So what, what I'm doing here is, you know, if I don't get it initially. Then I go back and look and do, and check the process status and see if it's there. So. Um, anyway, I'm going to take a further look at it. But I think, you know, if that really is a problem, I think that could be. The culprit for some other things that we've been. Seeing some weirdness. As you every start thing. Cool. Well, keeps up to date on that too. Um, All right. So how are we doing with respect to, um, all of the administrative stuff?  No, I thought I wanted to wait. Didn't want to just like quietly do that by myself. I think we need a celebration. Have a little, yeah. Look at that. You didn't want to, didn't want to unceremoniously close the sprint. Yeah, exactly. All right. I'm going to push the button right now. All right. We need a little trumpet. You. Awesome. All right. So now our official sprint is. 22 and a half. Excellent. We've moved a half sprint forward. Uh, yeah. Oh, so for, uh, Have you gone over with Michael? Uh, how are our sprints are not really sprints. Um, yes. Okay. Yes. Yeah. He has a ticket in this print actually too for his network connectivity work. So it's, I mean, maybe it's helpful for the community too. Like the, we use the term sprint because it's the, the concept in JIRA that we use to manage our work is in sprints, but we're not actually using them in the. Like in the pure. Agile sense of the term sprint. So no to the moment at least. We're changing that from what I understand. We'll actually start doing that soon. Yeah. It seems like it'll be. Yeah. It'll be useful to adopt that going forward. Yeah. We basically a sprint thus far has just meant. All of the tasks related to achieving a particular milestone. However long that happens to be. Years. But yeah, we are going to be refactoring those into ethics, which will be the new home for groups of related tasks. And then the sprints will just be, you know, fixed time periods. I think we've been getting better at getting some tighter scope around our current sprints as well. Um, because yeah, previously sprints for months and months and months of work. Um, because people would dump things in the sprints just because it was the active sprint. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who did that? So it became a slog instead of a sprint. Yeah. Something like that. Uh, I think my, my tickets are up to date. I am working on what I'm working on. Okay. Although the, uh, skill update has got a bunch of stuff in there that may not be done in phase one. Um, The skill. I'm sorry. I didn't quite follow you. The skill. My C9 40. Oh, I can share my screen share. That would be too easy. Or maybe it's not that easy. Hold on. So this ticket here. Um, there's a lot of things we wanted to do the skills. Startup sequence. There's also stuff we wanted to do. After the startup sequence is over. Like how do we identify, how do we update? Um, The skill. I'm sorry. I didn't quite follow you. The skill. My C9 40. I didn't know. Oh, I can share my screen share. That would be too easy. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. How do we identify? How do we update skills? Um, Going forward. And I didn't know if you wanted me to go as far as, you know, there's some of these things in here. Like, um, You know, only updating one skill at a time. Um, non-scrystal skill updates may be formed at certain times at that kind of stuff. I didn't know if that was. Phase one type work or if that was suffocating. Put it in an epic and do it another. Yeah. And definitely we should. Recall these out the ones that aren't already done and put those into an epic. And, um, and I think, um, Because it's probably going to require some MSM changes too. I would think. Well, yeah. And I think there's, you know, we've talked about having another pass at the whole, at the skills. Stuff anyway, like more holistic things. So maybe we can wait for that. I don't know. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I think that maybe to a is, um, We're doing now it's pretty straightforward. Yeah. We'll, uh, I think yield a better user experience. And in fact, me, you know, we might want to just totally hack that and say, make it 30 minutes. Because, you know, if we're doing demos. You know, Probably, uh, don't want to have any skill updates happening in the middle of a demo. Yeah. It's going to happen once an hour.   That sounds great. Yeah. And then the other ones can go into, you know, Yeah. Uh, uh, an epic around fixing up the M. Oh, yeah. MSM and, uh, you know, aggregate the other MSM issues we've got in there. Cool. Cool. That makes me very happy. Yeah. That'll be great. The other thing I'm going to run into too is I don't know. We talked to, like right now is a microp ready event. We're talking about either adding or replacing it with a microp started event. And I don't know how, like, how that might impact other parts of the system. I don't know if anything actually looks for a microp credit event right now. There may not be anything that actually looks for it. Um, Last time I checked, there wasn't anything, but if I do change the name of it, that's a, that's a change in. Hmm. There's probably, yeah, there's probably downstream projects at the very least that are using that. But I would wonder, because microp started is like the system, the system is, is initialized. Right. But I wonder if, like, microp ready in my mind, I can still get ready as the, as a, you can talk to it now. Right now started. We're going to be. Hey, all initial nation stuff's done. So I could still use ready as okay. This is when you can interact with the system. Yeah. Yeah. I can still admit it just maybe later than we normally would. Or a different time and different and do it in different code that we normally would. Well, but like, for example, if, um, if some, if, if someone's got a, a version of core that, that doesn't connect to the back end, for example, so there's no pairing, you know, then started and ready are going to be much closer together when you don't need to worry about that sort of stuff. But yeah. I'm trying to do with some of this new code is, um, is implement the activity. Um, framework too. If we're running, if we're running something new, I want to get that tested out. Yeah. Examples of it in code. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I think that's good because it's, um, right. It's just really a naming convention at this point and. Yeah. And it'll give us, you know, it'll give us, um, some real world examples of seeing it in practice and, you know, maybe see how, see how useful it is. And, uh, maybe start to use it and debugging and whatnot. So, uh, yeah, it's good. Thanks. Okay. Sorry. That was a lot of yapping.  Um, and, uh, you know, I hope you're able to keep the communications, uh, fluid and flowing and, and, you know, not get stuck in a, uh, corner by yourself too often. No, I think, I think we're all pretty good about talking throughout the day. I think a lot of this is keeping you up to date because you haven't been here in a couple of days. So.  But yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks. I appreciate it. It looks like a really good progress this week. Um, so good job. All right. Well, Sounds like it. Yeah. Well, there I will see you guys, uh, next Monday and, uh, Have a good weekend. If I don't see you before then. Michael, do you have? Yeah, sure. Do you want to hang on after? No, Michael, Michael Lewis. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, sure. I got, I got. I thought, I thought Michael Hansen, Mike. I'm, I'm, I'm Mike. I gotta remember. Michael Lewis sparked that rule by say. Did I? Did? I'm here to learn the rule. Also your, your, your, uh, Name tag says Michael Hansen. So. Yeah. Yeah. Touché. All right. How do you also? Yeah. Who wants to take the lead? Oh, Um, I can go first. It's been an eventful day. We got the announcement of the, Oh, Derek. Yeah. This is the well run, the well oiled ship here. Yeah. I forgot. Well, well first, First, we have to say the date and all that. I've never done that. So I guess I could try. Yeah. Uh, yeah. If, if, if, if, If Giz is going to cut out the beginning, then. Then yeah, I'll just, I can do the intro. Okay.  This is the blooper reel. That would be my recommend. Cut it out and put it at the end. Okay. All right. Take, I'll take it away, Michael. All right.


Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Good afternoon. This is Ray Tuchiyama for another exciting segment on business in Hawaii. Actually, we're talking about business in Hawaii, business companies led by visionary CEOs who wish to export products, especially to Japan and other Asia Pacific markets. And this is a huge new area for businesses in Hawaii and throughout the world, exporting. And today we have a guest who is really involved in assisting business in Hawaii to export to Japan and other Asian Pacific countries. His name is Lyle Fujikawa from the Department of Business and Economic Development and Tourism. And we're looking at Japan as a great market for goods from all over the world. But we think, and Lyle thinks, and the Department and Hawaii State thinks that there's a receptive market for quality products from Hawaii. And Japan is quite unique to Hawaii. There's nearly two million tourists a year from Japan. They spend time on the beaches, at restaurants, shopping. And there's back in Japan about 600,000 to 700,000 people involved in hula and Hawaiian music practicing the ukulele and really interacting with the Hawaiian language and anything that really sparks their interest in things about Hawaiian history and culture. Welcome to the show, Lyle. Thank you, Ray. We appreciate it. We appreciate the invitation to speak, and it's always a pleasure to see you. Well, let's define what the state of Hawaii does to really help Hawaii business export to Japan. Where can we start? Well, we have an annual program. We're actually leading up to, we're waiting for the decision. It's actually a grant from the SBA. It's called High Step Hawaii State Trade Expansion Program. And it's something that we've been doing for about, oh, I want to say seven, eight years. And we really have systematized things. We work with great partners like the SBA, SBDC. That's a small business administration. Small business administration, who gives us the grant, but we have partners who do consulting the Hawaii Pacific Export Council, HPEC. SBDC also helps us with counseling. What we do is we prepare Hawaii companies who are selling well, and they think they can get to the next level and actually export product to Japan or to other markets. So what you're saying is that they've already developed a product for the Hawaii market first, right? Right. And they've already enjoyed some success. Let's see. They're looking for the future. So let's say they're in Waikiki, or they have some product in Don Quixote, perhaps. You have all these Japanese tourists buying it, and they see, oh, we have something. And so what is the next step? They understand that they need to sort of localize their product to make it acceptable or even readable of the brand name and what it's about. In the Japanese language. Into Japanese language. And they say, oh, what should we do? So we do get a lot of inquiries like what do I need to do to get my product into Japan? And that also includes the packaging, right? Packaging. And how to present them. And quality. Quality. Yes. The whole bit. So there's a big gap in terms of what the Hawaii companies understand. They may have gotten success to a certain level, but then they need to really jump to another level. So through our program we work with a lot of other partners to give them that kind of advice. It's concrete, systematized, and to get them literally into the market where they can meet with potential distributors and customers as well. So you prepared a way for companies that have had some success, early success, and you're correct. The Don Keori's or the shops or Waikiki stores where they may have their product on the shelves. They've already tested it out with Japanese because they're Japanese tourists. Right, exactly. Hawaii.  And suddenly the people behind that product, the CEO, the owner, and the marketing folks said, wow, there must be a market in Japan. Yes. The business owner or people may have traveled to Japan and seen this opportunity, well, you know, a product that is similar, or maybe they see there's a gap and say, oh, our product should be here in the gap. And we could fill this. This is an opportunity. So we have all kinds of companies that we help large and small startups to establish companies. And we've been finding great success through our business to business introductions. We have this one particular show, Tokyo International Gift Show. We're going to lead up to that. We'll lead up to that. And that's a B2B activity. But more recently, we've been doing actually B2C, sort of a pop-up show in Osaka. And that's been hugely successful. Now, B2B means that you're marketing or selling or kind of showing your products to other businesses, right? Correct. Become your partners, your distributors, or channels within Japan. Exactly. That's one thing. And B2C means people off the street who may look at the products as, wow, it's great. But somehow, if you modify it, it will be even better for the Japanese consumer. Exactly. Right. Correct. As you said, the B2B is really about the distribution, right? As we, you and I know very well, since we're working in Japan, distribution is key. You need to have an importer. Someone who's going to take that product to another wholesaler who will go to a specialty retailer, very complex. And we discussed this even before the show. Right. It's even complex for Japanese companies who speak Japanese, write Japanese, but are befuddled by the complexity of distribution. And sometimes they say that this is a barrier to business in Japan, even within Japan itself. It really is. We have partners on the ground, our friends at the U.S. Commercial Service, at the embassy, export.gov. And what they do, they do have specialists understanding each market, category, geographic. They provide information and relationships, and they will make introductions. And so using their support, we will put on a show like the Tokyo National Gift Show and match up businesses with potential importers, potential distributors and all that. Well, why don't we go and show what a show looks like? Sure. Can we have the first slide up? All right. What is the showing there? These are the... Where is the show? This is in Umeda, Osaka. This is actually the Hankyu, Hawaii Fair. And I just went there in July, the beginning, first week in July. This is a B2C show. Right. Hawaii companies are able to bring their product and sell directly to Japanese consumers. And what is this product we're seeing? This is Chocoléa. Oh, yeah. Erin is an up-and-coming star. She's got a great product. Her mission is to bring about world peace, one piece of chocolate at a time. Well, and again, we were talking about before the show, her Chocoléa chocolates really reflect an obsession of quality. Yes. It's an authentic Hawaii story. Yes. It's from a white-washed cottage in Manoa. Yes. And when you take a bite of that chocolate, you're experiencing the breezes from Manoa Valley and you're part of Hawaii. Exactly. It's definitely aspirational. I always show this pyramid at the very top. It's emotional benefit. And it's something that all consumers will aspire to, but especially Japanese. They want to be in Hawaii. They want to be like you and I locals. And they want to understand what it's like to. And now, when I see that, what was that company trying to do? Showcase a product to Japanese consumers or distributors? Yes. Or trying to attract more people to buy things in Hawaii? So specifically, she's selling to consumers in Osaka to show that her product has a viability. Right? She would sell continued. I'm not sure if a lot of people know this, but in Valentine's Day of February is huge for chocolate in Japan. Right. And so what she was trying to do was to show the viability of her product and that would be popular. And so for Hunkyu to actually bring her product in for Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day is millions of dollars in revenue. I think it's billions. It could be. It really could be. Because as you and I remember. It's the White Day afterwards. That's right. But the Gini chocolate is another whole sub-genre. It's not just people you like. It's like people you're obligated to. Right. You're controlled and so forth. So there's this economic activity that if she can just get a piece of that. Wow. She got it just in the consign reason. That's like $500 million. That's huge. But fantastic. So she was showcasing this product to gain visibility. To gain visibility brand. To gain feedback as well. It says well what flavors were working. How did you think of my packaging? Wow. And talking to the consumers as much as possible. Okay. Next slide. This is also part of the Hawaii Fair. So all the photos are from the most recent. Right. Very, very new. Very successful fair. It happens every year in early July for seven days. We have 250,000 consumers of all demographics and what have you come through. But the sponsor, Hankyu Umeda Department Store, is the Arbiter style in Osaka. It's upscale. Very luxury. It's upscale. It's like you're in North Shum named Marcus.  Right. They're looking for authentic products. Right. Right. Quality. Right. And the kind of thing that is really, again, the emotional ties, you know, to whatever Hawaii experience that they have. And I see it's dresses here. I know I can. There's apparel. There's gift, you know, items. Right. Cosmetics, skincare. It's like a, I mean, it's a Hawaii Fair. So it has everything. It's like a mini ball. It's a mini ball for seven days. Okay. Next slide, please. That they do. Nina Tai, she's been very successful. She has two stores in Waikiki. Apparel that is for young women. Very successful in her business as well, because what she's done is understand what the Japanese consumer wants, making sure that she continues that, but she pushes the edge and, you know, in terms of design and all that. And what is her market niche? I would say it's young Japanese women. 20s, 30s. Are they like, you know, fashionable? Definitely fashionable, but they have disposable income. Okay. So they will spend money. Her price point isn't super high, but definitely the quality is there. But she had brought up the idea. So she's been in Hankyu for at least three years. Right. From the very beginning, she says, we need to do a fashion show. Wow. And so she brought up that idea, and it took two years to do it. You do it. Yeah. Everything good takes time, right? In Japan. So she brought up the idea, successful, you know, filling up the time, getting people to buy stuff.  But she's a great partner because what she does is shares her information. Each time she always learns something new. And so she's the kind of entrepreneur that we want to, you know, help. I mean, she's not waiting for, tell me what to do. She's doing it. And then she says, I'm trying to do this. Help me with this. And so we keep, you know, adding together. And so it becomes very synergistic. Terrific. And we're going to come back to more exciting stuff for the Hawaii Intrometer in a few moments. Well, I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that just kind of scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on thinktecawaii.com, 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up. And please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keepin' you safe. Aloha. Are you tired of sleepwalking through life? Are you dreaming of a healthier, wealthier, happier you? You're not alone. And that's why thousands of people tune in each week to watch RB Kelly on Out of the Comfort Zone Tuesdays at 1 p.m. Make a change. Get the help you need.  Hey, Armi, we're going to go live. Hello. It's 1 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon. And I'm your host, RB Kelly. Welcome to Out of the Comfort Zone. Welcome back to a scintillating discussion at the Hankyu Department Store in Umeda, Osaka, where the top Hawaii companies and entrepreneurs want to really find success in the Japan market through the assistance of the Hawaii State Agency in economic business development. So we have Laya Fujikawa. And could we have the next slide up, please? And here we go. It's a lot of pink there. It's a Hawaiian hotel. It was their anniversary. And so they had a booth of their anniversary items, merchandise, and they allowed Hankyu to borrow the design elements. So that's the center of this huge amphitheater floor that they put all the stores around. SmackDev in the middle is Banan. And this doesn't show, this doesn't do justice, but you see those stanchions there. They didn't have them in true Japanese style. They waited for the line to really develop. And then they said, OK, we've got to put control on here. And the line didn't go, hundreds of people. And what were they lining up for? Banan. Banan is a frozen dessert. Again, entrepreneurs, a bunch of kids who decided they're going to make a business. I know the one in the university. Right. And I heard that, well, this is the first time that they actually sold in Japan. So that had a huge cache and huge effect on the sales. What was the reaction? It was tremendous. Everybody was lining up and they were paying, I think it was like $10 at least. So they were making money. I heard they had a licensing deal that started. So very happy to be helping companies get to the next level. Our job is to, we really take a lot of startups and guide them with other people's help. They're partners to get to be a viable business, continue to help them with branding. And then we're in the more mature part with the exports. But you're correct with the branding and so forth. But there's a lot of preparation that goes into it. You just can't hop on a plane tomorrow and go to Osaka and expect to know how to, say, exchange cars, Japanese meshi, business cars, or have the right packaging, or have Japanese and English on your brochures, or to have pricing or your channels of distribution all figured out before you go. These are very complex areas that really deserve a show by themselves, all these topics and websites also. But what would you recommend people to do before investing in a booth? Would you recommend people just going to one of these shows? Most definitely. Actually, Erin, earlier at Chocolier, she had realized that she wasn't at the stage to actually have a booth when she did the Tokyo International Gift Show. So that was a couple of years ago. And she said, I'm just going to go, I'm going to see how things are, I'm going to check out the market. And so that's the very first thing you can do. It's very inexpensive now to travel to Japan. And you can just go for a few days, check out the market. But in terms of strategy, definitely want to talk to us at DBED because we have our high step program which has training seminars, consulting, we're helping you by subsidizing and putting together this Hawaii Pavilion. So they should really contact us right away, get into our email newsletters. We have a lot of things that are online and you can start learning from there. We have other people who have been successful, but they've had to really figure things out. There is like food items. They have to be very careful because as you know, Japan restricts beef imports from the U.S. to Japan. Even still, beef jerky is kind of off the table. But there may be other food products that can be sold in Japan, but they have to really talk to the right people including the Department of Health state people here to get really insights and guidelines on what is the best types of food products to sell in Japan. As you know, pharmaceuticals and food are two areas where Japan is very strict on ingredients and so forth. I'm glad you touched on that because we do have in terms of the Hawaii brand, we have a lot of opportunity for great food products that can be exported, but you just have to do it in the right way. Meaning that you need to have the right agent to help you localize your ingredients in this and make sure that you're not on some list that's going to get rejected. You're passing customs. Exactly, getting through customs. Making sure that your products are packaged in the right size. The quantity is not a huge thing. It's not like everybody goes to Costco every day. They buy things every day to put in a small refrigerator. Which retailer are you going to be a gift item with surprising? There's all these basic things that you could start with your basic business plan and as an extension of that say you're going to create your export plan and refine it towards that. But again, because Japan is such a different market it's almost like a whole new business plan because are you going to create it manufacturing in Hawaii and then ship it or at some point will I manufacture it? I thought these are great questions because some entrepreneurs will say well I sold in Arizona and sell the same shape or packaging or same ingredients in Japan. That's the case of death right there. So that would be very careful and get the best advice. But again, market entry, oh can we go to another slide before we go into anything else? Here's another one. This is a tremendous opportunity. This is actually Michelle Zane. Zane is her brother. Michelle has a company called Hanaho which is in Hilo creating Laohala products and I didn't realize this but she says her a pouch or a wallet can last for 50 years 5-0. It can define a Laohala part. Laohala, the tree the mangrove tree they have specific types of tree species that they harvest the leaves and store it for some time. It becomes really a treasure because things are handmade they're very high quality so it's perfect for the Japanese. Authentic based on culture it's definitely related to Hula it's all related to all those things very aspiration and emotional you would invest in something like this because it's going to last for a long time. They would pay a lot of money if it becomes almost like an heirloom or something you could really show your friends that this links you again to Hawaii a big part of this is also too that they had this demonstration so we had more space this year because Dibe is investing in this partnership with Hankyu we have more space for more companies and we had a table as you saw people doing demonstrations and so when they are doing something hands-on there's going to be an even closer affinity towards a brand that was a great experience and we hope to keep replicating I think the hands-on experience for local people to go and they'll go back and tell their friends next slide please just to show Hankyu is actually part of a huge group of department stores they acquired Hanshin department stores they own a railway company this is in the station it's a digital sign Umeda station so it's leading towards the tracks department stores behind and it shows this is Hawaii this is what you aspire to be like or in or around and come to the Hawaii fair and you can be a part of it so they have huge presence on the web they have a video and all the trains will have these signs in there and so they bring the people and I think Hankyu would not do it for just about anybody I think there's a very good emotional, cultural, historical ties with Hawaii Japan has the cultural ties the values, the history backing up a little bit though Hankyu definitely is an expert at what they do to partner with them we as the state are basically validating yes, we're bringing authentic products the cultural part is sort of certifying if you will we fit very well as a partner because we definitely want to promote Maine and Hawaii Maine and Hawaii products as best as we can and so that's what we're doing to push towards them and by partnering with this partner people in Japan then have the approval quality that they know it's been vetted and they know it's an authentic product and it's coming from a state of Hawaii where they really like and love and also in the end though you're creating a pathway for local Hawaii entrepreneurs creating jobs locally so that it will be again, export driven small business and I think it's easier to start a business now in Hawaii than when I left for Japan 20 years ago but to continue that to keep it sustained is hard so what we're trying to do is to find these other opportunities for companies to sell and why we do the big B2C is that validation like you said, building the brand and giving them a lot of feedback which they normally would not be able to do well again, Japan is a huge market it's the third largest economy in the world over 11.5 trillion dollars and like we said it has a population that loves Hawaii 600 to 700,000 people who practice the hula and do music but we're unfortunately at the end of our show and we could go on forever different topics on quality and business development and distribution which we think are very important to people who are coming to Japan and finding success and I want to point out that my column on export in Japan will be featured in the September issue of Hawaii business, it's a plug shamelessly by myself and working with Hawaii companies and other companies for market entry I want to thank all our viewers and especially Laia Fujikawa for another great segment for Hawaii business in Hawaii, thank you very much


So as you know, we a while ago reviewed a game called 1846 race for the Midwest, right? So though it's an 18xx game, it's a real train game. When people say train game, that's the game they're talking about. Right? They're games that, you know, often include things such as real historical representations of actual trains. Yup. You got like operating rounds and stock rounds. The basic core idea of all these 18xx games, right? I think we reviewed 1846, which if you are going to play, get into these games, that is the first one to play. Yeah. Do not start with this one. I don't even know if I want to recommend playing this one. No. We reviewed it in late 2017. Now I've played a lot more of these games since 2017. And basically the core of these games is this really, they seem complicated and they are complicated for the average person. But that's because of reasons. But the core thing of all these games is that you invest in companies in one round. Then the companies actually do business for two rounds, two identical rounds. And then you invest or divest in companies again and you repeat this cycle of invest, work, work, invest, work, work. And whoever has the most shares in a company during the work set turns is the person who actually controls that company during the work turn. It's like, you know, the company isn't you, it's separate from you. You have your money and you run companies that you have a majority share in. Right. So to win, you want your money to be the most at the end of the game when the bank runs out of money. But you know, so you sometimes you control a company. Sometimes you might not control any companies. You might buy a company that used to be someone else's. You might sell a company now.  Right. It's like, you know, the company's go in order. So it's like one company might go, then it's someone else's company, then it's your company. That's how it works is investing and then the companies do business and then you invest again. And you're controlling basically your investment decisions. Which companies do I want to have shares in along with trying to make certain companies do well and make some do worse. The ones that you have more shares in, you want to do better. So they spent out more money and the ones you don't have shares in, you want them to do worse. So that other people will not make as much money. So when the game ends, you win. That's all there really is to it. Yep. And if you want to know more about these details, like what these games are like on like this higher level, I will link to go listen to our old review of 1846 because that's where we talk about a lot of this in detail. We're going to review this train game in comparison to other train games. And in the context of, I was about to say normal, regular board games. If you don't understand the other train games, you're not going to understand this review really well. Because I would say it's hard to talk about it and except using words that only people who understand these games will understand. And the other thing I would say is that this game 2038 tycoons of the asteroid belt, if you have never played one of these train games before and you like the kinds of board games you see in a game like PAX, I doubt you will enjoy playing this game. Right. This game is not easy to play. Right. There is no reason for me to try to explain this game in simpler, you know, in terms to someone who doesn't know anything about these games because this shouldn't be your first one. And if you, right, the only reason to listen to this review is if you already know about train games, 18 XX games, and you want to know about this one. But the reason of that, because I like what 1899, 1889, 1889 is the Japanese one. That's my favorite one so far. 1846 is my like second or third. I like 1846. But the thing, the thing I'll say about these games that's relevant here is that they all have this fundamental problem of, I don't want to say naive game design. That problem. But they are designed for goals other than elegance and consistency of their mechanics. Correct. They're designed for the historical experience. People that people play them tend to like very fiddly rules that have like, there'll be more exceptions to a rule than the rule. Mm hmm. Like you, you cannot internalize all the rules to one of these games unless you play them a lot. If you play them a lot, they actually break down pretty poorly. Mm hmm. So the problem with these games for someone who likes to play normal board games is that you can't just learn the mechanics and then start to play.  And unless you have a facilitator, basically these games only need a game master or an expert to help you play them. Or a computer. Yeah, we'll get to that. Then they're very difficult to play.  Right. Like I said, that core concept of investing in companies, controlling some of them, right? And trying to make the most money is a great game. And I still think. You could even replace, you could, and the best part is that simple framework can be expanded, contracted and rearranged to make lots and lots of different games. You could make the investment part simpler or more complex or even crazy complex. You can make the operating part a completely different game. There's a game called a show big city shoulders or something like that. I forget the exact name of the game. If you go to board game, you can type in shoulders.  You're going to find it. I think it might be city of the big shoulders. Anyway, it's an 18xx game with an investment round and operating. The big shoulders. I got it right. But basically instead of trains, it's like a Euro game in the operating part.  It's the same. Right. Or then there's games like Chicago Express. Take the core concepts of a train game and just like distill, distill, distill. Right. Anyway, or Paris connection. So 20 38. What it does is it gets rid of the historical part by putting you way into a theoretical space future. We know we're probably not going to have space trains in 20 38 at the rate things are going.  Meaning if you want, if you know something about the 1840s in the Midwest, that historical knowledge will actually help you a little bit better. I'm not not a lot, but like a little bit. Like you can intuitively play the game by doing the things that make sense as an intelligent human being looking at a complex situation. And in fact, if you do things that happened in history, right? Or they tend to play out the way they played out in history. Right. They tend to play out. So it's like, oh yeah, that rail line was built there from the Civil War. But then this event caused it to be irrelevant. Right. And then they had to dynamite it. And that happened around this year and the game starts in this year. So if I do that at this timing, it'll. And it kind of works out. So the games are almost more experiences. Like if I play an 18 xx game and I lose terribly like go bankrupt or something.  I've never won and I've never been upset playing an 18 xx. Yup.  Right.  The operating round of this game where you run the trains like my train goes here here and here to make this much money is really fun and makes sense. And I liked it.  So normally the way it works in most most of the 18 xx games is when you actually run your there's a point at which after everyone's done building tracks and shit we figure out how much each money each train spits out. And what you do is you look at the board and you say all right my train has to start at one of my spots. Right. And it gets blocked by other people's spots and it can go on pretty much any track. Right. My trains just can't my my trains can't overlap each other but I have to care about what anyone else's trains do. I just can't go through any spots they're blocking with their stations. Right. So it's pretty easy to look at a board and it might not be easy to a hundred percent perfectly get the best pot most money out of the trains. But you're close enough. But you can get very close and once you get very close it's like well what changed since last turn well one piece of track was upgraded while I guess my route is upgraded by ten dollars then. Right. I'll just run the same route again with that one upgrade. And you don't have to balance to where it takes it might take you a little while to figure out but that is downtime for the other players to figure out some shit that they're going to be doing. Right. It's not too bad. It's it could be improved a computer should just tell you the optimal routes and sped out the money with no thunking whatsoever. But it's not so bad that you're it's a problem that you're like frustrated with. Yeah. 2038 the way it works is each train each company operates in order. Ain't no tracks in space. Right. Going around with their spaceship mining asteroids and collecting ore. And but the problem delivering all that stuff. Right. When potentially refueling. Right. When a ship picks up or right. It picks up a little piece of cardboard off the board or flips it over and now no spaceship for the rest of the turn can get that or it's that turn might involve like five different companies each running multiple spaceships. Right. So you the first person sends their spaceships out and now you see which ores have been flipped over and then the next person goes and sees which ores have been flipped over. And basically each person has to wait for each spaceship every turn completely rethink and re figure out the exact optimal way to get the most best ores. Right. With each spaceship. No. And then you can't even begin to think about your spaceship until everyone before you has picked up resources with their spaceships. This it made the game interminable now on one hand and the early turns is not a big deal because it's like OK well this one picks up the only two ores it can reach and no one else can reach them. Fine. And there are also ways to state claims on certain resources and no one can take them and hopefully you would claim the best ones and that way you can quickly just be like well this ship takes all the claims spots no thinking necessary because no one else can take those are claimed but you still get when you get better ships and more of them and unclaimed spots or you ran out of claims you don't have enough claims those later turns in the game starting about halfway through become a big mess plus it gets part of that might have been that the way we were playing it because we weren't fully versed in like there's no history to look at. Yep. So we ended up making companies in a way that was a little bit weird. Yeah. The way the board broke down. Totally legal though. Yeah but totally legal but it basically means that there is a trap where if the game evolves a certain way the game will take four times longer than it normally would but even if the game performed optimally this operating around situation would still be a serious problem. Right.  For the computer. But you could solve like a third of this problem just by having better physical components and ways to track this stuff better. The game doesn't give you anything to do this. Another thing to have another thing that contributes is also the lack of stability in the game and a lot of other train games there'll be a series of rounds where things pretty much stayed mostly the same like the turn order of the company stays the same mostly. Yeah. The ownership of the company stays the same mostly everyone just sort of operates and upgrades for a few turns just moving things along here. It's like all right well this turn is value went way up and it's going earlier so that changes everything. Yeah. Right. Oh and now these all these companies merged into the Asteroid League.  Right. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. I want to talk about that because that part's really cool. Right. That part is really cool. Yeah. There's basically you know in these train games. I'm just saying it contributes to the instability and that you have to rethink the gathering of resource part every single time you're starting from scratch again. Optimizing which or for each spaceship and it is just this busy work it's not even like decision making. I guess there's a little bit you could theoretically take a sub optimal route with a ship to pick up resources to deny another ship resources but not in a super significant way once the board is full of Asteroids everywhere to complicate this there are ways to refuel ships so then that they can move even further if they move a certain way making it actually a pretty difficult problem to solve and optimize for like I even give an unlimited time on a complex board. It would take me a while to fully optimize. Yeah I think it would actually be hard to write a computer program to optimize and the search graph would be enormous and you'll have multiple kinds of ships and when you're buying ships you got to decide don't want the one that moves further and picks up less of the ones that are like there's way too many variables for the operating round which should be the least interesting part of a train. It's not the part where you're making decisions and I think that's a fundamental problem with all the train games is that the part of the investing part of the game the stock round is what actually most determines the victory condition which player wins which player loses which shares you have right the second part of the game the operating rounds are are only sort of secondary to who wins and loses right they're important because they control how much money each company is spitting out but if everyone's good any good gamer can operate a company not optimally but optimally enough that it's you know right and the actual decisions made during the operating round aren't as crucial to the actual victory condition of the game but they take a disproportionate amount of the time and effort and the stock rounds are usually oversimplified and don't take long at all so you're just buying and selling shares going in a circle it's real simple the really cool part about this game which is why I really wanted to like it and this is why I want I want to make a computer version of this game and then fix a bunch of stuff but 2048 2058 and some of the other train games 2057 or 58 different time you understand different spaceships the independent companies tend to be pretty simple and disappear pretty quick in this game they're all very different and you run them like real companies and there's this whole complicated mechanic where based on things I don't want to explain too much depth because you can learn this game if you want to play it they can either join the asteroid league or not join the asteroid league at some point in the future and the asteroid league then becomes this company and there's a whole like system around this that is really cool and I really wanted to interact with that by playing the game until I ran into the operating ground deadlock that made me never want to play this game again yeah I actually had the asteroid league I was the asteroid league guy I know which made it pretty cool because I started the game with one space company understood that I could withhold or pay out with like I had the option with these into these privates I would have done something way different right and you can also take a private and like turn it into a company early like there's there's a company which is like a company that's worth like nothing at the start of the game and basically instead of joining asteroid league you'd start this little like I little startup who like ships like one good basically and sucks ass it starts with no share value but I bought those shares for nothing right but those shares were worth nothing because the company was like a guy with a like a space truck is like galaxy trucker but I didn't and then theoretically if you start one early enough and work on being like a big-ass awesome company that's what I didn't understand I kept paying out because I don't I had ice finder which was a really like it was making a shit ton of money for a private because the way I'd set it up so I was making all this money and I was paying out dividends to myself and it was awesome I didn't realize I could withhold even in these privates I with I'd known that I would have withheld and I would have gotten a couple fewer shares of like the other companies having a discussion about how it should be oh yeah but train games are about your evil capitalist exploiting a corrupt system I understand yeah no I would do the completely unethical thing yeah I would withheld I would have turned ice finder into into a growth company and I would have made bank I played this game way different I had the asteroid league and it was way fun when the asteroid league formed that was way fun but the problem was is now I had to control this giant ass asteroid league and that kind of sucked so Chris in the chat says the asteroid league minors thing comes from a different 18xx game that's more normal okay okay I want to play that one whichever one that is our friend Chris you see him in the forum and he if you see a guy hanging out with us like playing train games at PAX's it's that guy Chris brings us the train game that's right I don't own any of these fucking things I would well I would consider owning 1846 I would make one before I bought one I would own it to start ideating on how I would make one because this game taught me something I can just read a rose pdf if I need to I would play 1846 1889 a lot of the other train games again I would never play 2038 again no not not in its default tabletop form but a video game that was designed to feel a lot like this tabletop game but take advantage of the fact that it's a computer and have a little more complexity like these games would be more fun if you could have a little bit more complex stock market like if I could sell options from a train company to other players or have a player sell futures that would be fucking impossible to do elegantly on in the tabletop and if you made it too complicated it would just turn into sieve or I mean there is a New York one I think that has a selling short and the stock market is a little bit more complicated but yeah like I said before the victory condition of all these games is mostly in the stock ground the operating round is like a separate mini game of optimization I would really like to play one where the stock round was more advanced and had more decisions it was more complex and the operating round was simplified and made more elegant and streamlined and abstract and this while the theme and some of the detailed rules and cool thematic things like the asteroid league and the mining at least the theme of the mining make it awesome the reality is this is the exact opposite of not in a train game it is the a much simpler stock market or at least a normal level of complexity stock market for these games and a ridiculously tedious operating rounds that are have fun aspects but just too many busy work aspects that take too goddamn long but here's the line to make it worth my while and so with 1846 and 1889 it's like I'll still play those games that are worth my while enough yes the TDM is not insane 2038 is impossibly tedious in the operating round alright so if you want to play it get into these games you can go listen to our old episode of 1846 or go play 1846 or 1889 yeah you can play that one too sure but do not play this one 1889 is actually better in a lot of ways some ways do not play this one 2038 as your first one you can find some TDM and you just want to see what the deal is there's a lot to there's some good stuff to see here in this one so I'd recommend like you play it learn it maybe not play a whole game of it because it would take too long or maybe you just have a ton of time and our game went on so long we got kicked out of packs and couldn't finish it I would not recommend this one though for serious buying playing and replaying but I realized something fundamental the primary problem with these games is that because they are tabletop and because they have very fiddly rules everywhere else they end up needing to rely heavily on start player order and the mechanics to determine that are just terrible and it matters too much to be a terrible mechanic that is the thing I think you could solve with all of these tabletop games you can make them more elegant without ruining what makes them unique and different from the euros we tend to like more simultaneous market and not an ordered market because I learned after playing it took me like a year it's got mule, mule, mule it took me a year or two to learn how important the priority deal is because that means you go first in the stock round how that gives you having it at the right time is how you win the game and I've played several games of this and I basically got burned by it over and over that I learned it but got burned by it even though I saw it and was trying to grab it I basically had the start for most of the game because it was a three player game and neither of you were willing to rust stuff there was a game of 1889 I played I think a magfest where I finally understood it and was trying to grab a hold of it it's like I understand it now but I can't get it I understand this raging bull now I will attempt to ride it I understand what I have to do in a video game even though I know when I have to push the button at that time but I keep pushing it and it's not the right time and I keep dying anyway when we played this it was the first time where I finally managed to grab a hold of that priority deal mechanic at the right time move my trains from one company to the other force the shitty company onto rim get everything in order I didn't do it perfectly I could have done it even better but that's just because I didn't understand exactly when the trains would rust but the problem is the squishy of rusting is also so important and also relies so heavily on the turn order right but I could have screwed rim more but the point is I was the first regardless of which one you played this still would have been the one where I figured it out because it's the same mechanic in all of them basically so coincidence there so yeah space trains is the only one I've played so far that I would never play again which is a shame because stylistically a plus a plus it feels very do all the characters and art and you know everything about space wise is really great so that's a shame


Okay. Good morning, Peter. CBLT Update, you are in numerous different directions, but it's my understanding that the number one priority of CBLT is actually being a dealmaker. Is that correct? That is correct. And in this dealmaker, I see that you are involved in a minimum of one dozen projects, at least eight physical projects for exploration, and then five other types of deals. Is that correct or are there more coming? Well, there's always more coming. That's the great hope of the industry. Here's the thing we take a lot of pride in, and it's an answer to your question. The company has been around 14 years. It has roughly 75 million shares out. It has never done a consolidation. We've been able to finance the hard dollar operations of the company through successful M&A, through optioning, through joint venturing. So we paid the bills for the company through M&A, not having to dilute the company. We raised money by flow through to work on the properties in Canada, and we're proud of the fact we've never had to do a rollback. So for people who want to get regular updates, because I know you have a lot of huge network of individuals that know you in the industry, and actually know you as a compliance expert as well, can you tell me how you keep members updated regularly? Phone call, email, Twitter is our general platform. I don't know how much use LinkedIn is. I know some people use it extremely well. We just have never had that traction with our shareholder base, and of course the website, which some local genius recently redesigned for us, and it looks wonderful. So the website address has changed. It's cblt.tv. No longer cbltink.com. So in addition to that, so your company, if I recall properly, is very focused on taking all of your years of experience in really debating acquisitions of deals and getting them to the next level. Did I read and understand that correctly? Right. You and I had this conversation earlier about, I don't think we're a project generator. I don't like that term. To me, it's always had something unseemly about it. Our team likes to find assets that we think are undervalued for one reason or another, whether it's political, geologic, there's something there, it's all a note of favor. Buy that asset, either sit on it till it's back in favor, or do work on it to clean it up and put it back into favor. Then sell it out to another group with a capacity to move it from where our skill set is to get it to here. Another group has the skill set to get it much, much further, and we're happy to sell an optional joint venture to a group who can move it further than we can. So having just hosted you on an investor talk, one of the actual investors that was in the audience was asking me about your involvement in Falcon Gold. Can we start there and give us an update, please? Sure. Falcon Gold is a deposit that was owned by Falcon Bridge, hence Falcon Gold, and then by Kinross. It's a former producer. Because it's on patented lands, the production records are spotty. Even the district geologist's information is spotty, although, you know, the district geologist's office in Ontario is one of the best ways your tax dollars get spent. They were able to find a mine plant from 1936 for us, which I find that fascinating. There is a historical resource estimate on this property, pre-43-101, so all the usual caveats and warnings apply. In the wall of the shaft and from the dumps, samples were taken, and they ranged from between the mid-30s of gold per gram up to 58 grams of gold per ton. Consider you have mines in Canada running around one gram of gold per ton. It's shocking to find values that high. In 1992, a Falcon Bridge geologist said there were three properties side by side. No one should do any work at the north end of these projects until one person owns all three of them because the garson fault runs through all three and unites them. And about three months ago, we were able to buy the last project, unite title, which greatly increases the value of the three projects, and now we'll be doing some work in there. When I was reviewing your information, Peter, I counted eight projects that you currently hold positions, and I counted other deals, like over a dozen deals that you're involved with. Of the eight projects, can you tell me, can you list a couple of these that are your favorite and tell us why they are such extraordinary investment deals from you? It's like asking to name which is your favorite child. You'll love them all. We've acquired these for specific reasons. Back in 2013, we acquired one in North BC for a specific reason. The owner next door came to us and said, we want that project, but not now. He said, okay, so that neighbor has been paying all of our annual dues, and we gave them a roefer. Our cost on that was around $10,000 all then, and we just sold it for $180,000 cash. Small win, but I'd rather have small wins than small losses. And that put a further $180,000 cash in the bank. That's hard dollars. The CFO and I could run a public company on $180,000 for a year quite easily. We do most of the legal in-house. We do the filings in-house. Our outside costs are minimal apart from the ones like transfer agent and stock exchange. So the company's in good standing now to be run on the hard dollars for some time. The projects that we have that we like, we like each of them for a different reason. We like the cobalt property in Quebec because we've optioned it off to a group that has great financial strength. And we're fairly sure that they're going to be able to develop that and acquire further assets and help that company grow. As it grows, we still own a quarter million shares in that. Plus, our shareholders were granted a dividend in those shares. So every single one of our shareholders owns Powerstone shares as well, and they will see a direct exposure to that project. So I like that a lot. I like the Big Duck Lake project in Hemlow West. According to the geologists, very, very favorable. I'm not a geologist. I just listen to the smarter people and take their information. There's a high-grade zinc at the north end, high-grade copper at the bottom, and a gold deposit, historical Pre-43-101, of 59,000 ounces of around 11 grams of gold per ton. It's a pretty significant small deposit. Our plan there would be to prove up that deposit. There's about 10,000 meters of drilling that have never been incorporated to update that estimate and put it good with 43-101, and to investigate the high-grade belt across the north end. I like that project. It has some real upside potential to it. We're in the Bird River pegmatite field in Manitoba. There's the Tanko mine, which is Canada's only currently producing lithium mine that no one's ever heard of because indirectly it's owned by the Chinese government and all the lithium just disappears. We're next door to that, about three kilometers away. We've done some rounds of exploration. We're happy with the results and we'll keep going. It's an exciting project. You know it's exciting when I get notes from the field geologist who lives in Winnipeg saying, when are we back in the field? Here's my plan. This is what I want to do. Can't wait for winter to be over. If the field geo is excited to get back in, I'm going to be excited to get back in. I could go on and on about every one of the projects and the reason why we love them, but every project has a specific reason why our management team likes them. It's not just because they're ours. We bought them for a specific reason and we will see those reasons through the fruition. Well, Peter, thank you so much for the update and for everybody interested in trying to keep up with what is a lot of activity for CBLT. Please go to CBLT.TV. Peter, thank you. Thank you for your time and help.