Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to exotic wine travel. I'm your host Matthew Horky We're doing something a little bit different right now with the With the way the world is these days So we're gonna have a little chat about the future of wine communication And I thought it'd be great to have somebody I call a friend somebody I've known now the whole time I've been in the wine industry for the last five years Paul Caputo he used to be an importer you know in the wine bar and now he has his own Content website wine database called Vinerandom. So thanks. Thanks for being on Yeah, cheers Matt. Thank you for for inviting me. It's um It's obviously a brave new world where we're about to step into as soon Yeah, it's already funny I think we're just gonna kind of dive right into it if guys if you have questions put it in the description box the comment section will answer them We already seen that wine Media communication is changing. Look at all the online wine tastings and stuff like that. What the We're what is the actual future? We're both doing content media. What actually is the future? What's gonna work moving forward? Great great question. I mean I would have never dreamed of doing This kind of video even you know two months ago and I'm already I'm finding that my my calendar is Is clogging up with opportunities to talk to people all over the world. It's great obviously but you know already are we Are we at risk of becoming bored of watching people's head and shoulders? You know intruding into our facebook Actually, if you know, I don't think I think just maybe In wine nobody's got we haven't all get it right because if you look still the most some of the most successful channels on YouTube They all started and maybe still are are just face to the camera channels Not every single one but some a lot of the a lot of the really really big you to two channels are still just face to camera. So Right, okay, I mean for me as a writer first and foremost I would say now these days It's you know, it's a strange medium for me and I'm having to ask myself. What am I trying to do? I what am I really trying to achieve with it all? because it's Yeah, it's Well, you just did one you just did one so tell me what what were the challenges? What did how did you feel actually doing you just did a call with the swap the consortia suave right? Yeah, I mean it was you know loads of lessons from that really about what life might be like for us First of all, I'm used to I'm used to sitting down and writing and giving my opinion. So In hosting one. I found myself, you know, I was a moderator.  I should have said that I could that was my moment That was like the I knew the answer to that I just asked out to keep the show running So there's a you know, it's different from an authority perspective. I Think for new like we're talking about the new tastings and stuff I thought from what I saw you doing it I could knowing you I could tell you were kind of uncomfortable during it And I've seen it with a lot of people that are doing the online tastings and it's a lot people realize It's a lot you got to moderate comments. You got to ask questions. You got to keep people engaged You have the whole tech stuff.  So it's No, it's true I mean I I I'm on a lot to support people and there's some good points being across now I haven't found many people that have ever really really gotten it to a hundred percent, right? unfortunately The the the audience is interesting as well For these kind of things because you could you can never really tell who's super interested in in The content you're putting out versus who's interested in just seeing what you're like, you know my my various Social media channels are full of people that I don't really know that well. Many have never met me Could could be a little bit of curiosity just to see who I am and what I'm like You know, you always have a different impression of someone from there from their digital work than when you actually meet them. So I think one You're right and what I think what most people most people kind of throw something up there, but Haven't really built the audience yet. I think the best for me firstly the best that I saw who's doing virtual tastings 20 years ago was Gary Vaynerchuk at one library TV because of course his parents owned his owned a Wine a wine store So he's sending out packs of secret wines and then doing a show and for people to taste along with him Now he was doing that after he'd already built up the audience Yeah, I mean and that's a That's a crucial point because so many of these concepts only really work when you've got a big audience That's just big dedicated not big dedicated, you don't have to have a big audience a dedicated one Yeah, yeah true. I think my audience on My vine around vine around and page isn't particularly big But the engagement the engagements Average as a result But my face my personal page my first personal Facebook page is a little bit busier and the engagement as a result is is much better So that again is something you really got to take into account when you when you're trying to measure your performance or measure whether or not something was a success because At the at the end of the day you still at the mercy of some of these algorithms, so yeah I mean and how do you even how you even make how do you how do you measure? How do wineries measure? How do you measure what is actually successful?  I give you a Real a very real thing. So we did actually a tasting Not even not virtual. This was months ago Just a tasting of wines in a wine club that actually our first wine club I thought I really believed in and it really there weren't a lot of views anything. I was really open on the video I said I said I'm thinking about becoming an affiliate. I like some of the wines Okay, so I am you can use the code if you want didn't really get a ton of views, but it's been moving wine Yeah, so it's yeah, I mean So how do you measure? How could I I've known I actually felt bad sharing that with the club But then in the end it actually turned out into a result So you're an influencer, I guess I don't think nobody wants to look at this mug I don't think I can be an influencer plus our social media numbers aren't high enough. I would think Yeah, I remember I asked somebody how they thought my One of my videos went and they said yes, very, you know, wonderful wonderful face for radio That's right Thank you very much was the feet. So was a feedback. That's the thing like how do you know if it was a success or not? I Think you you have a feeling don't you?   I like the advice of you. Do you don't create your document? Yeah, you simply don't want Gary Vaynerchuk. Yeah. Yes, you just document what's happening, but it's hard.  I mean we could say that about this conversation, right? Yeah, no I Going on that is so funny because uh, I'm actually We're not influencers. We're not influenced. We're not paid to do posts plus our social media is not big enough Like for instance, a partner sure is she doesn't want to To have those kind of photos So we're kind of in between and I see pros and cons like you say I've been through been on trips with some with some and sometimes I don't know how much they actually know about wine some I actually have been pretty impressed with With the knowledge and then it's uh, like you said Is that are they really effective? influencers, yeah How do the people measure it? I mean for me I you know as a wine writer trying to um You know make his way in a in a very difficult world where it's not easy to find any paid column space and You know painfully aware that you probably got to build your own business first And provide an endless amount of value just so you can write write a column that somebody reads um You know influencers are a bit of an irritating concept for me to be honest But you know they serve a purpose and if If the their metrics can be proved You know if their results can be proved with so many from what I understand can't be proved Um, then then great. Yeah. I mean why would a winery or a wine retail shop? Not enlist the help of an influencer In order to you know gain more exposure I think From what I've seen I think the influences in the wine space are far less Evolved um than influences in other sectors Uh, you know I'm not sure something that I could actually measure Let's change my thoughts So I remember I told uh, we were talking about this one night actually in pulia On the rooftop. I was at a the wine writers symposium for what the symposium of professional wine writers at napa valley happens every year They pay 30 they paid the fellowship for 30 people. So I was selected I was there they have that year, uh, steven spur was speaking was the main speaker. They've had parker speak I mean they have some really serious people and One of the panelists mentioned influencer and all the writers in the crowd just moan And uh, I really wanted to ask them. I should have said something. I really wanted to ask them I wanted to say what is the difference a between an influencer's revenue model in your magazines That's that's just a question I wanted to pose. So I wasn't really opposed to it, but Last year it was a flip side something that changed my my opinion completely. I'd like to get your thoughts on this So you were you won the melissima blog award For what category we were in competing categories you were uh for literary Right editorial Editorial. Yeah But I was editorial I wasn't so I had to do the public vote. So I had to ask people I had to ask people to vote for me to win And this the same thing last year I was shortlisted and I didn't and last year I said I don't want to do the stupid thing asking for votes I really didn't want to do it And uh our friend fabian fabian was like just do it just do it. So I Last year I was up against a pretty big influencer Actually, I was in the same category with two And I didn't you have a whole week to vote and I didn't push for votes until the third day And I ended up finishing Serena ended up finishing second And we weren't even pushing her and this year I was also in a category with an influence Instagram influencer that had huge numbers And I was actually a little bit worried, but I said, okay, you know what I'm gonna I'm gonna push I'm gonna ask for votes publish things on our website or social media and I ended up winning and the the influencer she finished fifth Yeah, I mean So is that depressing? I mean, you know, we haven't actually mentioned whether or not the work was any good It's basically a question of how many numbers each person had in order to secure enough votes So for me, this is one of my issues with the whole Influencer circle, which is it it simply comes down to numbers and that's you know, that's That's fine. Right. That's how that's how business works results are all that matters at the end of the day, but I suppose The the kind of wine writing that I like to do and the kind of wine writing that maybe I I see myself taking forward in the future and Has slightly more of an artistic Nature about it, you know, I want to write about stuff that's interesting to me and And often that's a bit more obscure And often nobody nobody has any clue what the grape is or the producer is or even, you know I mean you you focus in on Armenia a lot, you know, most people don't even know where Armenia is so You know That kind of stuff can get squashed a bit when when the the focus becomes just about So you're saying this there's no there's no market for it at all. Do you think there's no market for it? Is that why though? No, I there's definitely a market, but I think for now at the moment it's wine writing wine journalism wine criticism and pr and and Everything to do with wine communications just lumped in this in this big blob together. I think They they are hugely different They're hugely different in in what they set out to achieve But as a wine writer who needs You know who needs access to things and need access to wineries and to wines and to people and events You know, I I have to essentially compete with you know somebody Who probably isn't really that interested in the grape or the wine, but they do have 200,000 Instagram followers and they you know In basic numbers they Just by posting a picture of them gunning with a glass You know that pretty much in terms of in terms of digital success of their work that puts What I do to shame over the course of and it's maybe take me a week to do what I've done that's the That's the whole case and then it's the argument seriously just thinking about that's the argument of If you want to write and be 100 independent, then why do you need? Like access to be to to be on those press trips and everything not you for example, but this is a bigger picture This is the bigger thing for everybody Yeah, I mean and this I think this is what Anybody looking to get into wine writing Or even, you know even now established wine writers already They are grappling with this question about where Do they sit exactly in this new media landscape? I think there was a fabulous conversation Going on on twitter a few weeks ago. I can't remember who it was between but it but somebody posed the question Who do you Seek to serve in your work, you know ask yourself at the core of everything Who is it you're trying to you're trying to serve do you serve the consumer or do you serve the producer? You know already great question, but somebody then somebody else chimed in with well, I seek to serve myself actually um But it but you know whether or not you are They he was actually right actually he was right in the in the midst of everything that guy was He got a load of a twitch abuse as you would expect of course You know, but I think You know Do you as a Are you there as a support for the producer or as a support for the consumer? And I think some of the people who've Probably had the most successful careers as wine writers certainly You know in the last decade or so Have have served the the consumer, you know, you can you can look at Robert Parker and you can look at the You know Genesis Robinson, I suppose although she probably slightly Um straddles the fence a bit, but you know that certainly the The group of of writers that have come through parkers publication no They've served the consumer and and as a result they've they've been required to be to be very strict about Um, you know, they're they're independence You can't just accept press strips But I don't know how many people can be Independent independent in writing In wine writing I mean, this is something I throw around with myself. I mean, do I do I even want to be independent? You know, yeah, okay If if I have a subscription base of 50 000 people who who Are interested only in scores and they value they value the The 91 points over the the 90 points and they want to be they will absolutely trust and faith that that there is Zero compromise in that score and it is that and it it's been allocated to the best of the taster's opinion at the time um Then yeah, that you know, that's something that You know, you've got to do and you've got to show and that's how you can That's how you're going to make your money. It's it's really I can tell you for independent for when we started We were 100 independent hundred. Oh, like The first uh, especially our last whiteboard cracking Croatian when I bought all the wines to taste through I paid for all the tastings to go through I mean hardcore and it's so funny. I get a I remember getting a review in jances robinson.com and they like questioned They questioned one thing. I was like, this is 100 independent on the flip side. I found In order to have knowledge to create content to write that Not being independent being on press trips and stuff. I've got access to weight Obviously you get access to humongous number of wines that you can taste you can compare You go places like for instance last couple years. I've been to I've been going to the duro. You can't go to the duro You can't go into the ketas into into the duro unless you're in The wine industry in some way she had performed So yeah, yeah, so I mean You have to be big and famous before you can get access and you can't be big and famous unless you get access so That is certainly a challenge for young writers trying to break in Well, I think the lack of the lack of paid column space is obviously another big barrier to entry You know, and I think I think because it's such a notoriously Difficult space a lot of people hedge their bets right so they They don't really say what they think because they can't because You know next next month or next year. They may have to be working in a different area of the trade No, it's very It's it's very tough. I mean are you uh, you would you call yourself a wine writer or an influencer or Something in between. I think a communicator. We're not we're not definitely not big enough social media audience to be influencer Nobody wants to see no way wants to pay for this mug Uh, I do find that, you know these days these days, uh, we're on we're on press trips a lot We are on um We're on we're getting we get lots and lots of samples to evaluate And then I can see where it can become a real problem for people Say like are they serving the consumer? Are they serving the producer? What I do and uh, I'm not 100 percent perfect on it But I've been trying to do the best I possibly can is for instance for for on a trip I I do make sure that produce some kind of content video or article What's going to be about something that I like I want to like You know, I you know, I just watched uh, roberts Joseph's, you know, one of his podcasts with editors.  So I actually have been thinking about that recently the last couple months actually thinking about that, uh But I mean that's very difficult, right? Yeah, it's really There is clearly a So for instance, uh for all our samples, I score all of them in vavino I don't write all about about them on our website Uh, but I write about the good ones on the website the ones that I I really think they recommend I'm behind so if you read the anything on our site, that's something that I really believe in vavino I I put everything in a hey, I had a pretty famous pretty powerful man from uh from Croatia actually Believe some pretty nasty comments on one of my scores of one of his wines It happens a lot actually happens a lot. I get a lot of emails stuff like that, but Yeah, well, you know, as as you know parka parka was always getting uh producers You know messaging him saying that they don't agree with this scores I actually thought I actually when the scores was good. We're good. Of course. I actually thought though recently Do I need to be a little bit more? Should I also write about things that are not be a little bit more critical? So speaking, but maybe and maybe not maybe not maybe that's not The way but There are things that people obviously have to think about I think I get more upset obviously When uh, I'm on Press trips and you hear kind of the old guard complain about the new guard or influencers But then sometimes when they go back they're not producing any content about the trip and not writing about the trip and then I'm thinking so why are you complaining about Not getting more invitations Yeah being on more trips I mean that is something that I think about a lot actually because You know, you're invited on a trip and You say yes, obviously Um, or at least I you know, I do because I don't currently have anything that I would call a conflict of interest. So I say yes Um, but you know, there is the implication that you're required to to produce some content and it's not called an article now It's not write an article. It's produce content.  Sorry, Matt. Go ahead. Go ahead. Just to embellish further. So one additional little um You know a bit of work you can do is start documenting Documenting your trip all over social media And then of course you are back into this circle of numbers and engagement with your posts and you know Round and round the circle goes I don't So funny, but where's the business model in this? Yeah, that's that's the that's the hard thing That is the difficult thing but uh, yeah, I think what you have up against You're up against so I do this full time. I do I have no side job.  I assume with with various people, you know, who's Who's got the Who's got the authority to be commenting on various places or producers? Um That's I have to catch myself I I feel pretty indignant sometimes and then I have to have to catch myself because I haven't really been doing this for a whole lot of time I'm really thankful for everything that's happened. I mean Really, I'm really super thankful, but I do get indignant sometimes when I see uh Like maybe more kind of famous Writers or maybe even mw's or whatever write about uh places we're quite familiar with and we travel full time So we're we're really in the thick of it Writing some of these articles or getting on some of these trips. I I catch but I always have to catch myself That's exactly what that's exactly what I complain about Yeah, well, it's it's it's hard then to be in golf by then Yeah, but I'm sure you know It will happen to you on the other side, right? As you say I know someone who knows more about something than you. Yeah, of course There's always someone who's prepared to tell you so that's why I caught that's why I catch myself We wrote about areas that we like of interest right now. I'm writing about shit enough to pop and I don't have I don't have I I can't recall I've tasted a lot of shit enough to pop last year was there tasted hundreds of 16s 15s uh Thanks to our friend michelle blanc who invited me over there this year I'm writing about the new videos, but I don't have a roll of decks of 30 years of vintages like producer by producer So that's why I have to catch myself to and not be indignant about About feeling sour Yeah, but I understand what you're saying I mean recently I was on the the end of a little bit of stick really because you know, it's certainly the last year or so last two years now that I'm completely uh free of Of business ties, you know to to to where I live You know, it can it can feel like I've just popped up out of nowhere and you know, who's this guy What authority has he got to be pronouncing on this and that? but actually You know that yeah, that's true, but also I've I've been doing this for 10 years Um since since I since I left university. I've been in the wine trade and and so Because I started at a time when the demise of wine publications and and column space Uh, you know we're starting I I feel a little bit like well blogging was the only platform that was available to me But I'm looked I'm now looked in this sort of slightly um slightly derogatory, you know stigmatized category of of your just a blogger there's real wine writers and then there's just bloggers I think like Jesus I've been doing I've been doing this every day for 10 years like More than a blogger me I actually don't get uh I don't get as upset when people maybe just will say just blogger, but I think from my point of view just I I actually looked to serve the the uh the crowd or followers basically so I can't go in for instance, uh, let's say like I Example I just use shut enough to pop I can tell the people that follow us They follow us for reasons. So I'm going to talk to them about shut off the bomb For instance, I guess if I guess if uh Some ron specialist doesn't want to read my they're not going to read my stuff anyway Yeah, well, I mean, so do you do you find it helpful to not pigeonhole your audience as either consumers or um You know all the wine trade So can you clarify the question? Sorry? I was I yeah, so I mean when you when you said there before You seek to serve your audience, right? Whereas I previously had articulated it as You know, do you seek to serve the the consumer or the or the producer or the the trade so Do you find it more? Do you find it helpful not to make that distinction and actually You serve people that follow your page and your work I think I think uh, maybe maybe it's a mistake of mine that I haven't made the I haven't distinguished the two but I do lump it two together because There's some dedicated readers everything from all actually a big a big chunk is retirees actually I just want to learn about new stuff that I've got stuff to but also winemakers follow us especially actually from the odd regions and they kind of want to know what's happening in the in the These new regions and I've also got for a stylish winemakers curious about what's happening in Eastern Europe or Mexico and all these weird things and then uh So yeah, I guess I just Just create in my own voice at this point in time Uh-huh. Do you do you have a do you have a big long-term view of Of the business model and what you're actually trying to do or or you I I actually actually think that honestly For we will do some side things as well, but as the website goes it's kind of what I see obviously just to build the audience more and more and more Like for us what we are off the website is uh, it's basically it's just affiliates And we always state it very very clear really really clear. It's at the bottom of everything I even state on the bottom if uh, if I was on a trip if I was on a press trip Or if I did everything independent because we still last year was in Germany for a month But it was all accommodation. Everything was on me visits. Everything was on me producers obviously were nice enough to let me in and Taste old vintages or give me a sample or two, but I state that really clearly and then for youtube. It's uh I'm on adsense. So it's youtube ad revenue. I'm not taking there was two sponsored videos and we we made No one I've only got paid for one. I it's very clear at the I we made a whole This is brought to you by yada yada yada Yeah, I think that some sort of blending of You know blending of business models like that is probably the way Things are gonna have to happen, you know, well the cantor's doing odd already Yeah, you know Yeah, you know, it's sponsored content is obviously Not new publications media companies have been doing that for For a few years now, but I think at the individual level Um because this there's still You know, most people Operating like this are still freelancers, you know, they're they're an individual Person first before there are a business in a brand, right? So I think And I think it's difficult for people to Have such a long-term view of what they're trying to achieve when everything is so unstable Yeah, you know, and that was before this This this lockdown and the fact that you know a lot of wineries and a lot of wine stuff's gonna not You know not make it through this phase sadly I I actually get people all the time asking, you know, like what the heck we're doing and stuff like that I think you're right. You have to have long-term focus. I looked at it. I looked at it as I guess it's the same thing when I was a practicing chiropractor and I eventually had a very successful practice but first of all, I went to school for undergrad for four years and then graduate school for another four so Well, America's a doctorate. So you're in school for eight years and I kind of spent a couple years learning what through the ropes where you Were it was just crap. I looked the same thing when we started EWT the first couple years I was paying for everything myself was almost like school Now I'm still continuously learning learning learning and biting the bullet a little bit for Longer-term reward Yeah, and I think As a result, you're probably painfully aware of the importance of networks you know in that scenario and I think Coming back to independence It's very difficult to build a network and yet You know, it's a build a network and not be clear In the short term, how are you going to achieve the the long term? Because the wine industry the wine industry is archaic in a way. It's all it's all it's 100% relationship Well, that's what makes wine so great anyway, right?  You've been in the industry for 10 years No, we've been in for longer, right? You've been long for longer, right? How long have you been in for? Uh, yeah, I suppose it's 12 now. So 2008. Okay, so we're into a financial crisis and So we've we've been in it full time for five now five years And then also before we were high level consumer more higher level consumers And I hate just because we're young and new some of the old guys some people think like Think we have no idea of the references and stuff I I I know I'm on trips with writers sometimes that haven't tasted a lot of references. I especially in Europe. I know a lot of people that Uh put their nose up against uh Like some wines from the new world How can you have reference if you haven't tasted like the great cabs from the HEPA for instance? Yeah, it's um, I actually get I actually got really annoyed by one writer one time and I was like, how many DRCs have you had in your life? Zero So I was like, okay, I don't want just be quiet. Don't don't talk to me like a much a five-year-old Yeah, I mean and that's the balance, isn't it because you know, you've You know how much you've had to learn to get to where you are right, but you also know Um, how far there is to go before you would feel comfortable, uh, you know talking about You know, you know, assuming assuming that you're an aspirational young man keen to make his mark in in wine communication Then you know, you know How probably how far there is to go and say same with me. That's unlimited. It's unlimited You know, but but it's difficult, isn't it? How how do you get to taste? Um, how do you get how do you do it? How do you get the knowledge required? I I actually look at the Yeah, you're right. It's you it's Access knowledge is increased exponentially if you're on if you're invited on on on media trips on press trips happens a minute It's way You learn wave the curve the learning curve is way shorter if you're on these trips and Have access to taste all these wines and visit all these estates and see things firsthand. So Yeah, I mean, so this this would obviously have been my first on-prem campaigning Bordeaux I actually what I was we were so far for everyone that doesn't watch poll I were both the molestinal blog award winners. I had to I had to ask for votes And okay, I shared that story earlier. I think and uh, you won flat out because you're a better writer That's just y'all can and uh, this would have been my first on premiere too But Bordeaux is not an area that I can Have taste love like some of the references older vintage. I love drinking old Bordeaux but I I don't know it professionally Yeah, yeah, I mean I I've sold sold Bordeaux and served Bordeaux in the bar and obviously been You know an admirer from from distance of the wines and the various appellations But but I think I was really looking forward to this this I was so bummed, you know, I It's okay to not know about areas professionally. That's what I've learned at first I thought I had to know everything but it's okay And I think one of the best pieces of advice is I have a guy that started a website in a very successful website in the Nordic countries Is read very well read. He's an he's an ex investment banker So obviously he here was tasting really really good stuff and now he's just in wine media I think just for something to do I remember him looking at me We were having a deep conversation and he said don't listen to all these writers everything So they're all insecure He's like you can't know Everything about wine. It's impossible Yeah yeah, I mean somebody Somebody gave me a couple of people recently have given me some advice which which is to um To specialize become an absolute world-renowned expert in one smaller area and You know use that to launch yourself And I think that is obviously sound advice. It's very difficult to to argue with that personally. I find that a bit Challenging because you know, I feel like if I'm working for myself if I'm freelance, you know, if I'm having to really build my way around You know If I'm having to make sacrifices to stay in this industry that I love and do the do things the way I want to do it Then I should be at least allowed to pick and choose and go where my interests take me on any given day But obviously that's probably not sensible advice So italy has obviously become my my Fall back area where I'll I honestly think because I've questioned that for ourselves obviously become kind of more specialist in uh eastern europe That's what people know us mainly for even though I'm in Italy by eight times a year. I'm in portugal every year uh california often but Spain is a blind spot. I love spanish one. I'm not there very often Uh, I think youtube still you know for website for kind of our books and stuff. Maybe specializations. Okay I think for youtube it doesn't matter Yeah, that's just that's just my thoughts just about feeding the content machine. That's that's just my thoughts. I think that's And I I've I've stuck with you. I've stuck with youtube from the beginning even though Even though my channel is so funny when I tell people I'm like Actually, we're one of the bigger wine channels channels and why Although it doesn't mean anything in the the grand scheme of youtube But I've always thought And I've heard other prominent critics talk about this if somebody With video if somebody could really really get it figured out they could be Really supremely successful and influential Yeah, well there's that word again influential You know, yeah In the same way you have to specialize in an area probably at first You probably have to specialize in a In a delivery method For me, it's not video video is definitely not my thing, but I could You know writing is my thing, but I I could maybe Invisage some audio, you know podcasting. That's probably something Especially now that I can't it looks like I'm not going to be able to travel for 12 months. Maybe more Which is obviously a complete disaster Probably podcasting is a is a method I might look at Personally Just to elaborate. Sorry in terms of in terms of How How do you do this now in the future? How do you get in? How do you break in? How do you? You know, if there is anything to break into What do you do? I mean, I think I've taken the view that It has You have to add some Value and and some people are amazing writers Whatever they write will you know go viral and you know, that's great.  Some people can achieve that with audio But I think for me, I I'm trying to to add some value through my been around them platform, which is obviously A very detailed database of of appellations and grapes and You know the relationship between them and the producers and the wines A long way to go obviously, but it but I do feel that That apart from contributing to my own knowledge and education Um, because it provides some sort of structure for me. I think can be useful to someone else, you know growing up Growing up and studying wine. I couldn't just there was never any way you could just type in You know got a gun again and find out what you want to find out and see everyone who's making it. Yeah That's my that's my little plan. Well, I don't think anybody's got it 100 figured out. That's that's That's the biggest thing, right Yeah, and that's why that that's why this conversation is so interesting and can take you to so many different places because I think it's clear Nobody's really got the answer Even if they had it, it's you know, probably no longer relevant because the technologies are shifting so quickly now Um, I think I've learned more and seen more in the last 18 months than I saw in the You know 10 years previous What do you mean what would you mean learn and see more just just learning And and witnessing the way people are utilizing different technologies Different different approaches both to to content As a product, you know, as a marketable product and content as As expression, I mean certainly some of the best some of the wine writing I love most is is probably more on the You know the the memoir and the the artistic The artistic side of things rather than being I'd like I liked your opinion the other day. You said I'm just going to go so niche and in hardcore that my audience will get into zero after I think I did that with Macedonia When me and Ivan I wrote a book on Macedonia. It was about 10 wines Couldn't get any couldn't get any more pointless a commercial project than that I often wonder Because I'm subscribed to for for the the the four biggest American publications wine spectator wine advocate venice suckling I have subscriptions to all four of those And I like I really enjoy like I really enjoying reading uh venice and venice and wine advocate probably the most because they're really hardcore geeky specialized But they're not the my style for our website for our videos And if we're kind of in between like geeky but trying to make wine accessible and then I'm just thinking you need to maybe Is that the way and just keep going that way? Or going more hardcore one way or the other? I think you've got to ask yourself what you You know where your passions lie and who you're If you had to trim your audience down to like three people Of your big digital audience if you had to just pick three people who would gonna who would be your your audience Who would they be? you know because I I think And then ask yourself that very difficult question of would those three people Pay you know pay for the for that content It's a good question very difficult. It's very difficult, but it's tremendous fun. Yeah Let's say Okay, I think that's actually that maybe we'll do another time. I think that's a good place to To kind of leave off and then we can do some spin-offs if people really like this If you like it put some comments down there. We'll be answering all of them too. So Uh anything else that you want? I think that's a good place to Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean I could I could The reality is I don't know the answer to to most of these questions And so I could talk all day on it. So okay, well, maybe we'll do another uh call like call like this too Or maybe get into a different subject altogether. So, uh, thanks for being on I'll put I'll put when a When this does actually go to youtube too, I'll put your website been a random and description box everything like that So people can check out. That's very important for traffic and metrics. Yes So guys if you like it, thanks for being on and if you like the video If you're watching on youtube, please subscribe to our youtube channel exotic wine travel If not follow us on facebook exotic wine travel and we will see you later


Here's a easy little question for you. Which of the following two people is more free? Person number one, a drug addict, or person number two, an average person who's only not a drug addict because he lives in a society where drugs are illegal and shamed and generally loathed by everyone else, okay? Think about that for a second. Now, most modern people, if they are ideologically consistent, will usually actually say the first person is more free. The drug addict is more free because he lives in a society where, hey man, the government isn't telling me what to do. Society isn't judging me. I'm doing what I want. And you know what? This is what I want, all right? That is the more free person in the modern definition of freedom. But I think everyone has at least some level of cognitive dissonance here because there's a sense in which, well, you know, really there's a sense in which the second person is more free.  But I mean, he's not addicted to drugs. I mean, that's good, right? In fact, he does have a better measure of freedom in terms of, you know, he can make, he doesn't have to worry about all the money he's going to spend on drugs or the lifestyle he's going to live because he's not beholden to this extra vice, right? So, I want to talk about this question specifically because nowadays, specifically after the Enlightenment, we have a very hobbled definition of what the word freedom means because a lot of people will say, yeah, well, I guess, you know, technically, number one is more free even though maybe he should think better about his decisions or something like that.  Everyone would say, number two is the more free person. Now, why is that? Well, you have to understand that in the classical world, there was a very different definition of what the word freedom means. And you can look at, you know, Greek and Roman philosophers talking about this kind of stuff, but actually, strangely enough, or maybe not really strangely enough at all, Christian thought is arguably the consummation of all this because, you know, they were reading, you know, Aristotle and Plato and stuff like that. But when you read, you know, when you look at the Christian tradition, they state this very clearly. I mean, Paul in his letters writes that everyone is really either a slave to Christ or a slave to sin, right?  Okay. Now, the modern man, of course, doesn't want, I don't want to be anyone's slave, man, I'm an independent, I'm my own master, you know, God's no master. Like that's the tendency of people nowadays. But there's a sense in which you have to acknowledge that Paul's dichotomy is sort of true to an extent.  And it really leads you to be very impulsive. Now, these do two different kinds of slaves, you know, slave to Christ slave to sin, they're not actually equivalent. Okay, these are not equal masters, right?  So, you know, sexuality is a good example of this where, you know, something might seem very sexually appealing one moment, and then that changes the next moment. Okay, that's something that happens to people all the time.  Now, the Christian definition of freedom that it was sort of, you can see here in Paul, and later is more overtly stated in St. Augustine, is basically that freedom is freedom from sin. It's a freedom from impulse, a free person is a one who is not beholden to inborn or acquired desires, acquired passions that lead people to do this, that or the other, right? A free person is someone who can sit back and say, okay, what is actually the best thing for me to do?  They're people who can really sit down and make impartial decisions. That is true freedom. Now, the thing nowadays, the modern world is so screwed, because many people, they don't just have impulses, but our society tells them to follow them. In fact, it tells them that that is their identity. Okay, for a lot of people nowadays, it's hard to even understand the concept that I exist outside of my preferences. Okay, that might seem like a, you know, people are born with an identity, with who they are.  You have to identify with, you know, what, you know, social media sites, you reflexively browse when you get home, or whatever TV show you happen to consume for hours on end, or the music that you always have blaring in your head, right? There, you know, the modern man sort of identifies with these superficial things, right? Ultimately impulses. They think of themselves as being extensions of their impulses. And that is a recipe for absolute personal disaster. Because if anyone ever comes along and say, hey, dude, you know, maybe you need to chill out on this, like maybe, maybe this isn't good for you. They don't take that as criticism. They take that as a personal assault, because they think of themselves as extensions of their sins, you know, extensions of their vices, right? So it's worse than even Stockholm syndrome. It's they people lose touch with themselves because they are governed by these kind of vices, right? Now, in reality, control of your impulses leads to your personal freedom.  I'm going to physically separate myself from that. That is actually where you truly become free. You truly gain the ability to sit down and think things through and act in, I guess, a really agentive way. You know, people who are constantly slaves to impulses, they are always being led around. They are always it's very easy, although they might be very unpredictable as individuals, you know, they might be arbitrarily changing. If you look at them as a group, they're actually the easiest to control, I guess, subjects of, you know, a society or, you know, they're very easy people to rule because it's easy to control what they want.  That's a very easy way to motivate people who are governed by their impulses, right? And, you know, people who are reactive, especially in politics, frankly, are always the losers, right?  They're always the people who are governed by something that they cannot control. And if you're governed by something you can't control, and someone else can control that, you know, someone else can control the extent to which your vices exist or that you can satisfy your vices, that makes you a slave, not just to your sin, but to the people who can control that sin, right? It is really a decentralized way, you know, sin is a decentralized way of controlling people, okay? Now, what is the contrary part to that?  That seems like a violation of freedom. No, that's not the point. The point of a sane society, the point of traditional morality, the point of a government that actually governs rather than leads people to vices, is that your goal is to actually increase freedom. And you increase freedom by being a countervailing force to people's impulses.   So that is the true, you know, a truly good government, a truly good society is one that does restrict one's ability to follow vices, because if you don't do that, people can't be free. They will just be automata that are seeking what they want. Okay. And that's that's it. So anyway, that hopefully is an explanation of the differences of the classical view of freedom, which I think is a little more wide than the modern view of freedom. It's not just about what you can legally do or what you can socially do with or without approval. It's really about what maximizes your ability to make rational decisions. And I think the most important thing for people is to separate themselves to firstly, to not identify with their vices to realize that those are different things that they didn't, you know, whether you have a desire that was inborn into you, or one that you've gradually acquired by habit, what, you know, whether that's a sexual thing or, you know, addiction to video games, or I don't know, the consuming product all day. Those are things that you should not identify with. And you should always be clear that those are your masters. Those are the things controlling you. And if you want to be free, you not only have to learn to abandon and leave those things, but you also have to be very amenable when someone tells you that maybe that's a bad idea. So anyway, that's about it.


Let's just do this problem. We threw alpha and beta negative decay. We go from a radon 220 to lead 208 and We don't know what sequence that is. We just want to know how many alpha and beta particles are we going to have in the end Now let's just write alpha decay again for ourselves alpha decay Remember that's going to start with some parent Atomic number, atomic mass number, and that's going to give us some of the daughter product We're going to lose two from our atomic number and we're going to lose four from our atomic mass number And that means we'll have the alpha particle on this side If we undergo a beta negative decay We're going to go from some parent To the A we're going to have some daughter. The A space is exactly the same and we actually gain one proton As the electron gets Decays into a proton plus an electron and that electron remember is looking like such Now we are going from 220 to 208. That's the difference of 12 That means if you look at it very simply 12 will be four of these If I do this four times, so I'm going to lose four times two This eight I'm going to lose eight protons, but I only need to lose We only need to lose four If I do this three times, I'm going to lose six if I do this three times I'm going to lose 12, which is what I want if I Do it three times. I'm also going to do six, but I only need to lose four That means I've got to make up to and I can make up to by doing this twice It's as simple as that think about it. I'll have four I'll have four mediums for alpha particles Because if I do that Where am I this morning? If I do this three times, I'm going to do this negative four negative four negative four negative 12, which is exactly what I want But that is going to leave me negative two negative four negative six So that will leave me at 80 208 80, but I don't want to be at 80. I want to be at 82 fortunately, I can do this twice It's not going to change my 208 where I'm at, but it won't change my 80 to 81 and then to 82 So we'll have two electrons We have three alpha particles and two beta particles This is an ultra-familiar problem Or the concept to solve it anyway the equations to solve it I have uranium 235 and the decays into Daughter products and we have some gamma-ray release And we noted those gamma-rays those gamma photons have a wavelength of one point one four times ten to the power Decent meters. What is the energy in mega electron volt? You can write our simple equation that we know so well and as much as remember this potentials at the speed of light So I can use HPC divided by the lambda and if I substitute that I get About 1.745 times 10 to the power negative 14 joule I need to convert that to electron volt. One electron volt is 1.60 Times 10 to the power using three significant digits because I can put a 2 in there But more accuracy Depending on how it's important thing actually depending on how you want to handle or how you are taught to handle significant digits Anyway negative 90 joule and that is going to give me 0.1 9 mega electron Simply not Let's do our last problem. We have phosphorus 32 there and it goes beta negative decay to solve for 32 We have one electron and I think in the next section. I think we'll quickly do Neutrinos and that would be an anti-neutrino because of the bar and carbide Positive decay will give you a neutrino. Beta negative decay is going to give you an anti-neutrino And this is the atomic mass Units of phosphorus 32 and the sulfur 32 and the beta negative particle Which is an electron has this 1.20 mega electron volt What is the possible energy of? Anti-neutrino what possible energy can it have well if we look at it this way if we combine If we combine these two if we combine those two It would mean That this electron is included in this which remember is what we have for our units So if I subtract these two from each other, I'll get the units It is the units of this minus this whole lot combined And that gives me if I subtract those two I get 1.837 times 10 to the power negative 3 units There is a difference between those two I can convert that into energy by multiplying by 9 3 1.5 mega electron volt one unit that gives me 1.7 1.7 1.1 Mega electron thought So those two combined should give me 1.7 those two combined minus this gives me 1.7 1.1 mega electron thought Now of that the beta particle because it has velocity. There's no velocity in there So no kinetic energy in there. Let's say it's all in there And that is 1.2 so if I subtract 1.2 mega electron volt from there I get the total of 0.5 1.1 Mega electron volt is the possible energy that this anti-nutriner can carry away


Welcome to part two of Hawaii after COVID-19. My name is Peter Adler and I'm delighted to host two friends and colleagues and to conduct a discussion today on what life might be like as we move past the medical and economic crises that we're in. I am a planner. I'm a mediator. I'm a strategist with a number of organizations. I'm on the board of ThinkTech just to be disclosing of that. And I'm delighted to be here. And I'm looking forward to a terrific conversation. Some of you may have been with us on April 30th for part one of this when we talked about what lies ahead economically and politically and we had two guests then, Colin Moore and Bill Tam, both experts in their respective areas. Today we're going to explore local cultural impacts that we think lie ahead and the quest for long term and scaled up sustainability. And with me are two really great thinkers and doers. These are not just thinkers. They're down on the ground where the goats eat the grass and they're working very, very hard to achieve things. So my friend Dawn Chang is a native Hawaiian lawyer and a social worker by training. She's an expert on land use and state and federal regulatory requirements as they pertain to Hawaii. She's especially well known for brokering, very sensitive to sometimes very sensitive and difficult discussions between developers and native Hawaiians and community groups. Celeste Connors is the executive director of the Hawaii Green Growth Program and the Aloha Plus Challenge, which aims for nothing less than seeing Hawaii become a world class model of sustainability. And Celeste brings a wealth of national and international experience, including work with the White House and the National Security Council and global work. So she's back home where she grew up and it's so good to have both of you on this show. Thanks for joining us. Dawn, I want to start with you and let's dive in. So when the current, I'm looking at my notes here, but when the current medical crisis passes and the state emerges from the kind of economic freefall that we're in, what do you expect will be different in the native Hawaiian community? What's going to be different? Well, generally, I'm a real optimistic person. But your question, my optimism is kind of tempered with the uncertainties of post-COVID and the social unrest by many of the Hawaiians in the Hawaiian community, even pre-COVID. So this is sort of my predictions. I worry there will be a tremendous pressure on the elected officials and regulatory agencies to facilitate economic recovery by either suspending, checking off the box, accelerating public notice, access to information, protection and preservation of cultural and natural resources, and genuine community engagement. Essentially, sort of all of those compromises that have created the environment that we had post-pre-COVID, environment of mistrust, disenfranchisement and lack of transparency and decision making. So I worry that the native Hawaiians in particular will be asked to make compromises for the sake of their jobs and their economic recovery. And because it's been already substantiated that Hawaiians are disproportionately impacted by COVID and the economic recovery. So, unfortunately, when you ask that question, in my view, I think the conditions of native Hawaiians may not be so different post-COVID. But I do feel like there's a potentially a bright spot that we could be different if the community resists the temptation to let the pressure of economic recovery compromise genuine community engagement to determine the future of Hawai'i. If we pay up front, then I think we can, you know, we may be able to change sort of that pessimism that I just shared. So I know that the three of all three of us are relentless optimists, but we're also pragmatic and realistic. And we work in a world that is highly political and economic. And what do you think will happen with the TMT issue as well as the efforts by the legislature, which started, but I think may have stalled out on reconciliation process? We've been hunkered down. Everybody's been hunkered down and sequestered. But we know at some point everything opens up or starts to open up. What happens to those two issues? Okay. When I saw that question, I was like, yikes, it's a little sensitive. So I'm not going to predict the outcome of TMT, but when you asked about what's new approaches, I'm cautiously optimistic that there may be a fresh approach. And I'm not going to go into a lot of details as this show isn't about, this session isn't about TMT or Mauna Kea. So I would just share with you that I've recently been tasked with conducting an independent evaluation of the University of Hawai'i and Office of Mauna Kea Management's implementation of Mauna Kea Conference of Management Plan. Had the opportunity to do that over 10 years ago. But with that independent evaluation is going to be culturally sensitive and robust community engagement process. So I hope that's a different approach. So I, like I said, I can't predict the outcome of TMT, but I think I'm, I'd like to say I'm offering a different approach. When I started out in the life sciences, what feels like 400 years ago, my comparative anatomy professor said, we know the temperature at which water boils, but we never know what molecule boils first. So that's what we, you know, I won't know that. But do you, do you think there will be fresh opportunities for a new kind of dialogue, a different sort of a discussion, a different sort of sensitivity? Yes. I mean, I think that there is a possibility. I think we saw some of that with, right before COVID. So again, my optimism is if we, if we look at really listening to the community and timely considering their concerns, I do believe that that will facilitate private and public development projects by minimizing litigation and protests. So I am optimistic is that if we, if we, rather than just jumping in and let's, let's move things as quickly as possible, let's sit back. Let's, let's not compromise the real, you know, who are the stakeholders here in Hawaii that's going to live here and, you know, talk about sustainable, sustainable Hawaii. Let's really listen to what they have to say rather than disenfranchise them. Good. We'll come back to this. I don't know. We'll come back to this. Excuse me. Celeste Greengrove and Aloha Plus Challenge have an ambitious sustainability agenda. And I love it.  One, this may be a moment when you can tell us a little bit about it. And, but the same question, what will be different after we come out of the current medical and economic crisis? First, tell us a little bit about it because people need to know. Yeah, no, I think, thank you so much. And so delighted to be here with you and Don and really Mahalo what you said. Very insightful. And I think it mirrors just to your first question, Peter, what we're hearing from our partners in our community. There is a deep concern that people are going to go back quickly to business as usual and not see this as a moment in time to stop and pause and to see how we can build back better. I think there is that desire to do that. And yet we also understand why people are eager to see the economy open up. It's about livelihoods, really. It's about the fact that our economy is suffering. There is high rates of unemployment. The social component, our economy, that's a core pillar of sustainability. And I think when we talk about sustainability, first and foremost, we have to remember sustainability is about economic, social, environmental, cultural well-being. It's the legs of the stool. So I understand the issue of the desire to get back quickly, to have people back in jobs and have the livelihoods restored. And I think like everything in sustainability, it's a question of how, how we do it. We want an outcome of economic prosperity. How we do it is critically important. And I think the different phases that we've heard, Alan Oshima as the appointed navigator and the COVID committee layout, there's a sequence to that of stabilization and recovery and resilience. And I think at some point, as sustainability practitioners, as people that were looking at the long game, there will be a pivot at some point, but it's to make sure that we build in thoughtfully at those moments. A pivot won't happen immediately overnight and at one moment. So how are we being mindful of the decisions that we make in the near term as we think about stabilization with a view to actually securing a more resilient future for Hawaii? You know, and if you ask about Hawaii green growth, I've been reflecting on this a lot as well, you know, having grown up here, but spent most of my time professionally away from home, working on sustainability, green growth policies. I was reminded that green growth, Peter, is actually an economic recovery strategy that emerged from the last financial crisis in 2008. And in fact, it was the leaders of the Organization of Economic Cooperation Development France, Germany, the United States under Obama's President Obama's leadership that came together as leaders and a leader statement about green growth and said that it's an economic policy, right? It's to pursue these, how you can have actually prosperity by pursuing one of green growth, green economy and green jobs. So that I think is actually very exciting. Now, this green growth policy was then further embraced by the APEC leaders when they convened here in 2011 and the APEC leaders of a regional trade group. So again, this is all through an economic lens, further committed to a green growth recovery strategy. It was that which inspired a group of really enlightened individuals prior to my returning home to come together and say, how can Hawaii get in a green growth strategy? So it was a green growth policies, economic policies that inform this. But at Tom's earlier point, though, there was a much longer history of inspiration in the Malama, Hawaii, and former Senator Kenny Brown's speech of how you can pursue economic development through a Malama lens. So I would say predicting or previewing what I'll say next is how do you actually pursue what we want to do through values, values-based conversation. And I am a pragmatic optimist too. I think we will achieve this, but it will take engaging the community and it will be looking at all of those different ways that we can do it as a collective effort. I noticed you had on the screen the dashboard just further background what we do is we over the last 10 years, or excuse me, at least six years have actually been tracking progress on these six statewide sustainability goals. And you can actually look at this on the state.gov website and 365 days out of the year. You can look to see how we're doing on our clean energy commitment, how we're doing on local food. And this has really now been recognized by the United Nations as Hawaii is being a model that can emerge from a crisis through a systems-based approach. Part of the, these track with the United Nations sustainability goals. And we have an, I think we have an unusual opportunity here to serve as a model that's exportable, not just other Pacific islands, but globally on how you actually do the mechanics. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's what's so exciting to me. I think that islands emerge as leaders in this, as inherently systems thinkers that build on a thousand years of knowledge. Hawaii in particular are leading on that. And again, it's not really what Hawaii aspires to do, which is what got the United Nations to recognize Hawaii as a model for sustainability. It's what Hawaii and the community together with our civil society partners or government or business are already doing together. And as the world, you know, they have these United Nations sustainable development goals that I personally helped negotiate. So I feel very strongly about the SDGs. I'm even more excited that Hawaii has a local framework for SDG implementation that is bottom up. That was a process of collaboration to Don's point with the community, because they say you measure what matters. So first you have to go into the community, discuss what matters, and then to be able to track that on the state.gov website as a benchmark with co-develop metrics, right? Time bound against the 2030 framework. It's hugely exciting. So the international community is looking for examples on how they can build that better. And Hawaii is very well positioned to lead that based on the social infrastructure we have in place. And that's where my optimism comes in. And your pragmatism too, because you were down on the ground where you have to actually do things and then you're monitoring a question for both of you. There are different ways that the recovery could unfold over the next couple of years. And there will be a pent up push certainly coming out of much of the travel industry and other, you know, the restaurants and so on, to go right back to the mean of where we were before, to the average, the drift to the back to the mean. And so the question is, will that, you know, depending on the scenarios, do you think that the recovery will accelerate or hinder the sustainability goals and the dialogue that we need to have, a better dialogue that we need to have with the native Hawaiian community? What's your thoughts on that? Let me, I'll just kind of chime in. I think, you know, Peter, that is, I guess for me, where I'm really anxious, because when you think it, when you look at who's disproportionately affected by the tourism industry, I mean, the unemployment, a lot of it, Native Hawaiians are people who are on the lower rung. So they need their jobs back. But I think if we can demonstrate, you know, leadership by saying, hey, let's really think about who do we want to attract? What is it going to take for us to, especially hearing from the Hawaiian community as to how do we protect these resources, both Celeste and I were talking about places that we remember going hiking, that we don't even do that anymore. But I think for me, a lot of that is education. If we don't want someone to do something, we've got to tell them why it's kapu, what's happened.  But I think if we can utilize the motto, the ahupua'a motto, but using more education, when you get on an airplane, there's a book you got to read about why you kind of do these kind of things. And you know, let's give people information so they can make an informed decision. That's my optimism, but I worry about that. So. So that's thought. Yeah, I agree with Don. I think it's about education and sharing, really inspiring other people to steward their place when they're inspired by what we can do here in Hawai'i.  COVID is inherently about disruption, and this won't be the first time or the last that we're going to be experiencing disruption. Just to go back to my further observation about green growth strategies emerging from the last financial crisis, one observation is that maybe that crisis wasn't big enough. It just actually wasn't at the scale that we finally need to get on a different pathway. And this might just be that because it is so global universal. But with the tourism component, I'm actually I was very impressed with the the recognition prior to COVID that we weren't on a sustainable path, that the numbers that we were seeing were not acceptable to the community. It was undermining our natural environment, our ecosystems, and then actually seeing the Hawai'i tourism authority in their strategic plan that they released in January this year was predicted that. In other words, they they were ahead of the curve, but with COVID the curve just tightened. So if you read the strategic plan, it is based in malama values, the malama mandate is in the back of that. It also looks at engaging the community constructively in shaping that tourism future. So I think that we I think that's a great state plan that has emerged from that. And let's just see how we can all come together to help implement that. I also on the education point and Don mentioned the ahupua'a. Again, this is another area that as we think about new opportunities for Hawai'i, as we diversify our economy, look for education opportunities, Hawai'i continues to be a place that can inspire and really I would like to bring the, you know, a youth voice into this conversation of how we're engaging Hawai'i's, you know, future leaders in being actively involved in that conversation. Because if you grow up in an island economy, you're very aware that what you do in your upper watershed affects your coral reef. And that might be an awareness that not every community benefits from. And that's another area that we should be looking at as we think about our future tourism economy and having that community engagement. So in crisis there is danger, but there is also opportunity. And we are at one of those interesting moments to think about pivots, to think about a reset. Now imagine that we had Governor Ige, Alan Oshima, the Senate President Pochi and the Speaker Psyche and all the other important people who control the levers, at least or influence the levers of power. What would we tell them to do more specifically, both on Native Hawaiian issues and on sustainability? So you could see the linkages between the two conversations, because they're very linked in my mind. But what would we tell them, you know, down on the ground where the chickens and the minor birds are and where, you know, where the grandkids run around in the grass? What would we have them do? What would we brainstorm and propose to them? Well, this is, if you ask me, I guess, Peter, this is what I would say. I would say leadership is recognizing and acknowledging that your community has the capacity to do a lot of that without you having to direct how we communicate, how we do this reconciliation, let the community actually come up and generate some concept and some ideas themselves. Don't, you know, don't tell them what they should be doing, but rather let's really listen to them and let's really ask the community what's best for you. You know, we're kind of caught in this Western world where everything is monetized. The more you pay, the more value you think. So if you got to pay more money to go into the low e-patch and work, maybe that's the kind of tourism or economy we want to start looking at. We don't want to. So there's something about that kind of very deep, and I know you're an expert on this and you practice it as well as Celeste, and I do a lot of that too, that kind of very deep consultation and engagement to solicit the specific ideas out of people where they live, where they live. And we know that we're very diverse here. The districts are not all the same. The islands are not all the same. The cultures are not all the same. Within the Hawaiian culture, there are many variations. And so your notion is, got to get down on the, get down on the ground and talk to people and ask them and collect those ideas up. Celeste, do you have other thoughts? What would we do down on the ground if we're talking to the important people here, the big leaders and all that stuff? And by the way, I give them credit because they are trying to do some of this. So I don't mean this as a criticism. But what would we have them do? Yeah, and I agree with you, Peter. I give them a lot of credit with the work that the governor and Allen and the Senate president and speaker are trying to do. Myself, having been in government for over a decade, it's a tough job. And it's about accountability and ultimately needing to make tough decisions. So I think, you know, first of all, I would give them empathy and thank them for showing leadership in this. And to Don the point too, as Mary Robinson actually said something in an interview this morning, what can, exactly your question, what can the individual do during this time of COVID? And she said, well, the individual is a consumer. The individual is a voter. The individual has agency in these different ways. And so I think it just goes to that sense that I embrace of collective responsibility, what we can do at the individual level, what we can do in the private sector in the community and in government being one ecosystem. And so, but, but, you know, I also want to acknowledge those exact leaders for this time last year, actually reaffirming their commitment to sustainability by signing the, you know, acknowledging the five year anniversary of the Aloha Plus challenge and signing on to the local 2030 commitment statement where they are committing to be a model for sustainability. So that takes leadership to come together. I think this will come down to implementation and action, as you noted. So if the final slide I would show that I sort of put forward here that I'm excited about is one about this survey. So again, everybody trying to do the part, what we as a network based organization with a diverse group of partners, over 100 individuals and institutions together said, how do we bring our collective voice and ideas to this? We ran a survey, as you can see, we had over 300 participants and responses with diversity sectors was very exciting. Then we actually had a conversation recently about this. We've just the survey is still open, but we are able now to see some of the actual projects that would connect green growth policies to action. And these are very innovative. It's how do we support our farm to school programs that so many folks in government and out of government are working on together as both immediate job opportunities, but getting us on that longer term resiliency pathway. Kevin Chang and Miwa from Kua wrote a really exciting op-ed over the weekend laying out their vision for what this could look like with investments in food security resilience. And then we also have some interesting projects that people put forward in the creative industries that we have, you know, university professors working with students in animation and these are types of jobs that you could actually do remotely. So I would love to draw attention to the survey and how we hope with Alan and others to share this data, connect the resources that we anticipate will be coming into the state to specific projects that provide employment livelihoods and build resilience. Perfect. You know, we only have a couple minutes left, but both of you have been leaders in different ways in different sectors at different times. The best definition of leadership I ever heard was what Winston Churchill said. He said leadership is just moving from failure to failure with enthusiasm. And really that's what is needed, this kind of core optimism, but really with the pragmatic look, the kinds of projects that are generated that sort of have that economic environmental job, you know, that they have a certain prospect that cuts across the usual domains that get in the way of the usual fights. So I'm very optimistic. I'll give you a one minute each just to kind of sum up any final thoughts or benedictions that you might want to add to this conversation. So Dawn over to you. But like I said, I am an eternal optimist. And I can I do, I mean, I think all of us have if we take this opportunity during this pause and really reflect what kind of a community do we really want and and really try to do something to make that happen, that we're not all caught in the hustle and the bustle. But let's really think about what kind of future do we want, not only for us, but for future. So I am hoping that as you say, we take this as an opportunity to self reflect, and then sort of do like what Celeste is saying, what can we all individually do. So I will continue to be that optimism. But again, thank you, Peter and think back. Celeste, any final thought, we still got a minute left. Yeah, no, as I said, I think this is really the discussion that we have to have today. How do we really make a commitment to build back better, a more prosperous future for Hawaii. And I do believe in Hawaii. And I believe that we are all trying to paddle in that direction. We might have a diversity of opinions at times and how we get there. But if we're coming together under that broad umbrella of wanting to do that, I would also say, you know, from a green growth perspective, we have the policies, we know what the green growth policies can be. We're now connecting them to the actual projects. I think it comes down to acting and implementing an action at this point, and then recognizing that again, it's the diversity of players that will come together to make that happen. So I would like to think about this as really acting on the things that we know, building on the many, many, a thousand year knowledge and history that Hawaii has that has been recognized. And other people are really wanting to support Hawaii's success in this and support the innovations that will emerge from Hawaii. Terrific. Thank you so much. You are both catalytic converters, and we're on the way. So thank you so much for joining us today. And we'll sign off. And best of luck, you know, all of your endeavors. Thank you very much. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Don.


Yeah, thanks for the introduction. So I will talk about on the run complexity of OT extension But before I go into the technical details I want to talk a little bit about secure multiparty computation Because that's the reason why it's so important why oblivious transfer is so important in this picture You can see two parties. So it's a simplified setting of secure multiparty computation We have a party R which has an input X and we have a party S Which has an input Y and they want to compute some functionality F and In the end of the protocol the party R wants to receive the output or the evaluation of the functionality on the inputs X and Y So in this talk I in particularly want to focus on a special round complexity Which is just two messages. There will be only one message sent by the receiver and a second message sent by the sender Realizing multiparty computation is easy until we consider security Security really makes it a non-trivial thing to construct and what do we ask for security? We want to have that the receiver only learns the very minimum You should only learn the functionality evaluated on the input X and Y But you shouldn't learn anything beyond that in particularly. You should not learn anything about the sender's input Y Further for the sender or for the party S It should learn nothing. It should not learn anything about the input of the party R Oblivious transfer can be seen as a special case of secure multiparty computation Where I have a very very simple functionality and this functionality it just takes as input to input strings Y 0 and Y 1 and the choice bit X which selects one of the input strings and outputs the selected input string So in case of oblivious transfer I will call this party R the receiver and the party S the sender and the sender will have these two input strings The receiver choose ones one of them and learns it While it doesn't learn anything about the other input string. That's required for security As well as the sender shouldn't learn anything about the choice bit anything But you shouldn't learn which of the string the receiver has learned So this is a very very simple functionality that we realize here But the very interesting fact is that this is a fundamental building block of realizing secure multiparty computation for any functionality And that was shown for example by Kylian, but also by Isai Prabhakaran and Sahay That's really amazing because we want to have multiparty computation for much more complex functionalities But it can really focus on the case of oblivious transfer But there's still kind of a drawback or the bottleneck that we need to consider and that is efficiency That brings me to the next question. How efficiently can we realize secure multiparty computation when we base When we use this fundamental base building block of oblivious transfer and the first observation that you make is The secure computation typically needs a large amount of oblivious transfers usually are like several thousands And there's another bottleneck namely that oblivious transfer implies key exchange and that means that it requires public key operations because Key exchange was separated from one-way functions by the result of impact lezio and rudic That is really one of the obstacles for realizing secure multiparty computation in practice But there is a nice way to bypass that issue and increase the efficiency by a lot By using OT extension. So what is OT extension and what is the goal of OT extension? the goal is that I start with a critical mass of oblivious transfers and Extended very efficiently to a much larger amount For example, if you consider a security setting where I have 80 bits of security I need to start with around 80 ot's and I need to use public key operations to construct these 80 ot's But in starting from these 80 ot's I can extend them very efficiently to thousands of ot's But what do I mean with efficiently here? Obviously, I don't want to use public key operations and I want to restrict myself to only symmetric operations And this is in fact also necessary because we cannot realize OT extension in an information theoretically secure way That was shown by weaver and later it was extended by lindel and sarasim showing that OT extension in fact Implies one-way functions. So one-way functions is the bare minimum that we need to assume and There are basically two kinds of constructions for OT extension one uses a PhD which can be constructed from one-way functions and the other construction uses some special kind of a hash function and in the following two slides I want to Go into the detail or a little bit more into the details of the two these two OT extension constructions the first one was done by beavers get by beaver and the great The great merit of this construction is that it only uses two messages when I start with a two message OT So I don't increase the round complexity and I preserve it and that's really really nice But it also has a drawback Namely that it uses non black box techniques and what do I mean with non black box techniques With black box access to a cryptographic functionality. I mean that we only look at the in and output behavior of the cryptographic functionality for example in that picture you can see that that I treat PRG as a black box. I don't look how the PRG operates internally I just care about the input which is the seat and the output which is the PRG evaluated on the seat and that is Typically the way we use cryptography, right? We just look at the input and the output but not at the code how the cryptographic primitive is implemented But unfortunately for the beavers construction, that's not the case I really need to look into the code of the PRG or better say set on the circuit and Even further I need to perform cryptographic operations for every gate of the PRG circuit And that's definitely an efficiency drawback, which makes this OT extension less relevant for practice But there's an alternative construction and that was is called the IKMP construction named after the authors who are Ishae Kylia and Nisman Petrang and the great merit of that OT extension is that it is black box Which makes it very efficient and that's also the reason why this is the one that people use to realize the key your multi-party computation in practice But it also has a drawback And the broad drawback is that it requires three messages when I start with a two message oblivious transfer That's really something that I wouldn't like to have in particular We already know an OT extension that only takes two messages that brings up a very natural question of Yeah, that brings up the very natural questions of can we get two message black box? OT extension And that's the thing that we really tried to solve and we somehow didn't manage to solve it and Then Mohammed Mahmoudi was visiting and then it was a natural question is it even possible and it turned out Yeah, unfortunately is not possible and We were able in fact to prove a very strong impossibility result and this is our main result in the paper There in one which says there is no secured to message black box or tea extension even if I start with an arbitrary amount of base or tease and I even if I would just want to increase the amount of a tease by a single one and That theorem might sound really surprising to you because how would you potentially prove such a result? Because we have all these constraints that we only want to look at round preserving or two message or tea extensions We also want to have black box constructions. We have some base or tease that we need to consider But at the same time we only want to allow Additionally to the base or tease only symmetric key operations to make the whole thing efficiently So before even trying to prove such a result We need to come a model that captures all of these constraints And in the following slides, I want to go a little bit more into the details how this model looks like So we have for our model. We need to consider the following or need we need to capture the following constraints The first constraint is that we want to allow only black box access to symmetric Operations because we want to have an efficient OT extension scheme the same time we want to allow only black box access and We also don't want to do allow any public key operations But of course I need to allow some public key operations because I need to start with this critical amount of base OTs in order to extend them so I also need to allow black box access to a certain amount of OTs and Further I also want to consider the round complexity. I only want to allow two messages So how do I capture these constraints the next three slides? I will go through all of these three points starting with the first point We only want to allow black box access to symmetric cryptography The straightforward way of doing that is giving access to a random oracle and Assuming an unbounded adversary in the sense in terms of time But we want to restrict the amount of queries that that adversary can make to the random oracle. So what is a random oracle? Random oracle is functionality that every party can query and some input Q and the random oracle will return a Uniform unique string that is consistent for all parties H of Q And it is well known that this Random oracle implies symmetric cryptography because it can be seen as an ideal version of a one-way function or hash function But this of course is only the case if I restrict the adversary to make only a polynomial amount of query queries But in general we really want to have an unbounded adversary in order to break all public key operations That one might use to construct an OT extension scheme But as I mentioned earlier, we need to allow a critical mass of oblivious transfers And that brings us to the second point So how would I incorporate? these these base OTS and The idea is to use a simple similar approach. I will model these base OTS as an ideal functionality And I allow the sender and the receiver to send their inputs to these this ideal functionality Which could be seen as a trusted third party and this trusted third party or the ideal OT will simply output the output of the oblivious transfer to the receiver and Again, this only allows black box access because here we only look at the in and output behavior There is no code of implementation but now to the third point that's maybe The least straightforward because how can we ensure that we you can only make two messages that there will be only one message sent by the receiver and another message sent by the sender and The way how we deal that is that we enforce that the Output of the ideal OT is sent after all the transcript is completed and after the Receiver has or the sender has sent the last message What do I mean with that? Let me be a little bit more explicit With a picture so we have a sender and the receiver both submit their inputs to the ideal OT functionality Then they are allowed to have some interaction and in the very end after the interaction is done The ideal OT will submit its input output to the receiver And that really ensures that we preserve the round complexity Because we can run the transcript in parallel to the interaction that is required when implementing the ideal OT in particularly, we don't need to wait until the Ideal OT has finished it or finished or sent their Output in order to compute some of the messages and that really captures what we want to have When we say when we want to have two message or t extension or around preserving or to extension So this is an overview over our model and now we can think of How could we potentially? Yeah prove prove it using that model and in our paper we Basically do two steps the first step is an information theoretic attack When we don't consider any random oracle, so we will only have access to the ideal OT But we don't consider a random oracle for simplicity and that will really help us to get Get this information theoretic attack in a very simple way and that on its own is not an interesting novel thing Because it has been known previously that we cannot have an information theoretically secure OT extension And further we also know That OT extension at least implies on-way functions But the merit of this attack It's really that we can easily extend it to the random oracle model And that's the reason why this attack is so nice And it's because it's like also really tailored to the specific case of oblivious transfer And in the following slide I want to give you an overview how this attack looks like In attack I will in particularly assume that the receivers input is picked uniformly at random Which is the input string B and there is also this string D which serves as the input to the ideal functionality So the standard in the receiver they both submit their inputs to the ideal OT functionality They have some interaction and after the interaction is done The receiver will receive the output of the ideal OT functionality So now how does this attack looks like I will use an entropy argument over the input of the receiver Which is this uniform string B, which has N plus one bits of entropy so first as a first idea I will look at Look whether the transcript is correlated with that input So I look at B conditioned on the transcript and If I lose some entropy when I condition on the transcript that would be a bad thing It would be a bad thing because because that would mean that there is some information contained in the transcript About the receivers input and of course an unbounded Sender could exploit that and learn apart some partial information about the receivers input And that would definitely constitute an attack against the security of a no take extension scheme Because the sender should not learn anything about the receivers input So let's assume that this is not the case that there is no attack by the sender That means that the end the receivers input conditioned on the transcript has still full entropy But what does that mean that allows me to also condition on the input to the ideal OT functionality D which has just n bits at maximum n bits of entropy because it's an n bits string So that means there is at least one bit of entropy left and that actually leads to an attack by the receiver and that's also Yeah, a bad thing, but why is this the case? If you look at the receiver if the receiver has still some entropy left in its input even conditioned on the in and outputs to the ideal OT functionality and even conditioned on the transcript that means that there are multiple inputs for which the receiver can can Execute the it's code right while using the same transcript and in an output of the ideal OT So there are at least two inputs for which he can compute It's output the outputs of the n plus one or t's that means There's at least one bit position where these two inputs don't match where the receiver can learn both of the input strings therefore in therefore if we have the be conditioned on the transcript has full entropy the Sender will able at the receiver will able to be attacked to attack the sender security by learning multiple inputs Which is also a bad thing But now how can we extend that to the random oracle model and the issue with the random oracle model is That the entropy argument fails because we cannot only look at the transcript anymore because the random oracle It creates additional correlations between the senders and the receivers view so far. We could use an argument Saying that if we condition the view on and of the sender in the receiver and the transcript They are independent But that's not the case anymore as soon as I consider a random oracle because they can query some functionality Which gives them some common entropy and we really need to incorporate that fact The way you typically deal with that is using black box separation techniques, which have also been used previously And it's really a nice way in a straightforward way of handle these correlations But in our setting this unfortunately does not work Because we also have access to this ideal OT functionality, which allows us to do arbitrary public key operations We could run some multi-party computation for arbitrary functions And we could also run some key exchange which also creates some some hidden entropy for that the sender and the receiver share So this is really an obstacle and that's also one of the main challenges that we are solving in our paper We don't need to only yeah, we can easily deal with the ideal OT as I have shown in the previous information theoretic attack And it's also easy to deal just with a random oracle because that's basically the result of impact last year in erotic that That OT is separated from one-way functions But the challenge is really to bring both of these ideal primitives together And here we really need to exploit that we want to preserve the round complexity And as I have shown you previously the way we deal with that is that we submit the Output of the ideal OT in the very end after the transcript is finished to the receiver And that allows us to use these black rock separation techniques before this output is being submit Because before this output being submit the ideal OT is actually not present It doesn't have any impact on the interaction of the standard in the receiver. That's really one of the key ideas I won't go into the technical details here But I would like to refer you for that to the paper and I'm also happy to to discuss that with you if you have questions On my last slide I want to repeat again our theorem Which is a very strong impossibility result saying that we cannot have two message black box OT extension and that Impositability result holds in a very strong sense because we were using this entropy argument just over the receivers input That actually allows us to do it for an arbitrary string length So even if you would start with a really long string length of The receivers input strength and even if you would like to extend that to n plus 1 ot's of a single bit string length It would be impossible Also, this result holds also in the common reference string model and it holds for all round complexity So if you start with a K round oblivious transfer, you cannot have a K round OT extension or you cannot Have a fixed amount of public key operations to have an arbitrary larger amount of oblivious transfers So thanks for your attention. I'm happy to answer your questions


Hi, this is Scott Haskins, after our meeting in Miami. I'm the new chairperson for CIPP for 2015 and 2016. We're making an effort to reach out to you as a member of CIPP to get the information that was presented at the annual meeting. We want it to be a valuable part of building your business. And as a member of CIPP, we know that you're interested in this information so that you can take advantage. Our meeting this year had some very important, practical workshops. I didn't see anybody fall asleep when we were teaching how to use videos, blogs, and articles in doing outreach to your public. We also had a very enthusiastic response during our session on how to estimate projects. And Chris DeVrude has got a great response when he shared his software that he designed for documenting and for helping to run your business. All of this information is here for you to download, review, and to go over again and again in order for it to help you have a more effective and profitable conservation practice.


IUC-4 is a novel IIB3 antagonist being developed as a subcutaneous SC, administered first point of medical contact treatment for ST segment elevation myocardial infarction, STEMI. In animal studies, it showed good safety profile and was able to reach dose-dependent peak levels within 5 to 15 minutes after administration. It also demonstrated significant inhibition of ADP-induced platelet aggregation, which correlated closely with its ability to block IIB3 receptors. This article was authored by Spandana Vutukuri, Jihong Lee, Mark Nedelman, and others.