The good thing about our industry is if you want to succeed, you can. If you want to help a lot of people, you can. If you want to make a lot of money, you can. And at the end of the day, I always think like, okay, how do I want to be remembered after this time is over?  Like, that's probably the first time I've actually heard me use that word on camera the whole time. Right? Because I don't, I want to be positive, right? I don't even, maybe I should watch the news, but I don't on purpose. I'm noticing a theme with all of our friends that are killers. We all are like the same. It's like, dude, it's up here, man. It's like all up here. I can tell you right now, nobody that I know that's a six-figure producer and up is worried about COVID in the insurance industry. Nobody. Zero. Zero percent. And if they were worried, it was for a short time reinvented themselves and now they're even more successful or just as successful as before. You are listening to the 8% Nation Podcast, created to help you become a top producer in the insurance industry. Enjoy the show. Hey, people. Welcome to 8% Nation Podcast. It's been a couple of weeks, Cody. I've missed you, my friend. Dude, it's been good, man. We are in the office now for what, two weeks? A week and a half? Was last week our first week back? Yes. Good grief. Yes. Well, I wanted to, we get a lot of people that are like, how did you guys do during this sort of crazy pandemic, walk us through it? And we saw some really interesting things. I talked to a lot of clients. I feel like we have a good kind of beat on the industry. I just wanted to kind of talk through some of this stuff. Also our own team and just kind of what we learned. And the key theme in my opinion is those, there are people that adapted well and there's people that crumbled and came up with excuses. That's it. What it comes down to, if you think about it, is if you go one direction or another, because you really didn't just do the same thing and the similar production, nothing changed with you, you most likely either started to do more and adapted like you said, or you did less. And I think a lot of that is, I think it's a lot of someone's mindset. I agree. I was impressed, because 92% of age fell, I was impressed by the amount of agents that actually adapted and that did more and that wanted marketing help and that wanted training help and that wanted to be on videos and watch stuff and soak stuff in. It was a good time to learn. Well, there's a couple stories that I heard that I thought were interesting that I think I'll share if that's okay. So I work with a couple large groups that have multiple teams across the country and I was talking to them, this one particular group, and you know them well, they're awesome. They're great dudes. And I was like, what's going on? How's production? And they're like, well, overall we're down, but some of my teams were way up. And it's like, and he was like, and I'm also like trying to figure out like, what was the difference between my teams that were way up versus the ones that let and just collapsed in the excuses, which I thought was interesting, because- You think it was the leader? The team lead? You know what I mean? Well, I think it was absolutely the leader. I think it was absolutely the individuals that are going to rise to the occasion versus the ones that are just going to use the excuse because man, it is easy to get out of work. Now is the time to make excuses. Yeah. Because really no one's looking over your shoulder and you always have that, well, production's down, but you know the corona, you know, I can't meet people. You know, but at the same time, we know several people. I know you're going to be able to share a story with one of our friends, Nate Offert, that really didn't like do much tell sales at all. Before. But zero. Yeah, yeah. And you just talked to him. I mean, what's his score? Yeah, dude.  I mean, he's closed in 30, 40K mortgage protection over the phone with videos. Like, nothing's changed. And he's saying that it's not, he's just getting people on Zoom meetings, you know, and it's not complicated. He's going through his same pitch. Yep. He's got some additional phrasing and verbiage that he uses initially, but it's amazing to hear. But his production was up after he totally reinvented himself. Yeah. What in the world?  Because and some people are thinking that some people are not, right, which is cool either way. But he's seen crazy growth. But for him, we had the 8% virtual conference a few weeks ago and the theme was if you don't quit, you can't fail. That dude's mindset is like so strong that it doesn't even matter. Like his entire house could have been wiped away from this thing and like had a massive tornado and or something crazy happened. And he would have probably still been up in production. And a smile on his face. Yeah. He's just a good dude. He's got a lock down. His computer could have got broken into. His car could have got trashed. Whatever, right? But he'd have figured it out. Well, it was just interesting. So I thought that this whole season really taught us a lot about our business. I mean, good grief. Before Corona, but first off, you were really hesitant to let everyone go. In the beginning, it was kind of like... Yeah, to actually let people go home. Yes. In the beginning, you were like annoyed. I remember we were kind of like... Always hated the idea of that, man. I don't know why, but I've always been so against it. Hard core. Well, we were like, you know, it's kind of getting maybe a little serious. Like, oh, what?  Well, I'm always the last person. And this is good and bad, right? It's good from a mindset standpoint. It's bad because I can be very stubborn. So like, what used to affect me is like eight years ago when they would come out with a new social media platform. I'd be the last one to get on it.  Now I'm like, I kind of need to pay attention to at least tech stuff like that or stuff that could impact our business. I need to, you know, adapt early. Yeah. Like the Tai Lopez's of the world with stuff. But when it comes to that, I was very hesitant to have our team work from home because I've been a hundred percent against it from the very beginning. Well, I, you know, it's interesting. So I left March 13th on vacation and I arrived at the slopes in Colorado on Friday night, and then they shut everything down on Sunday. So, and then I was, I had to hurry home because they were talking about potentially closing the borders of Colorado and I was going to get stuck. So I drove through the night. So I, you know, but during that whole transition, it escalated quickly. As Ron Burgundy said, wow, this escalated quickly. Yeah. I mean, it's like, so it was just kind of, it's shocking that, and then eventually it was like, absolutely okay. The right thing to do is to send everyone home and work from home. But what happened to our business when that happened? Yeah. It hit, I don't know. Did it double?  Like we, we, we're moving people home. Most people are letting go of people. Yeah. A lot of people we know, right? It's unfortunate, but it happened. We were adding people and we're like, well, made it to the office, we'll give you your stuff, go home and we'll figure it out. Yeah. You know, and I had my sales team. We had our sales team on zoom all day. Every day they were on webcam. The rest of the staff operations was not, but I was really impressed at how positive our staff was, how well we transitioned. We adapted well. But I mean, the thing is it comes from the leaders down. Like if leaders are worried and freaking out and negative and assuming bad things are going to happen. So they're letting people go ahead of time because they're assuming negative stuff. It's like, if I wasn't on a team member on a team like that, I wouldn't want to be a part of it anymore. No. And I didn't, I personally, I didn't know what the heck was going to happen. I didn't know if it, what was going to happen. I didn't know if this was going to shut things down. But then the more, because really Ramiz and North Star guys, they were the first to start transitioning of all of our friends, everyone working from home. They're the first people I heard from. And they did that early. And I thought, well, maybe that's a little early, but they just got ahead of it and did it. And this is public stuff. So they share this in their social. They had record weeks up and, I mean, all throughout the, these weeks. And so, you know, I also, you know, quick disclaimer, I don't want to like, there's a lot of people that are struggling right now. Sure. I don't want to be like celebrating and, and yeah, we double our business because there's a lot of pain and challenge that's going on. So I don't want to undermine that. And I also, some people, no matter how much grit you have, you're going to, you can't control your situation. Sure. But in the insurance industry, we were relatively unfazed if you don't let it phase you. Totally. Being in the insurance business is, we both felt super fortunate to be in this specific industry during this time because I was wondering, well, will inbound leads slow down? Will sales slow down? Like what will happen? And we got more inquiries than ever. More people needing help than ever with marketing and transitioning to phone sales. And it was, it was unbelievable. And you're right. You know, we want to be mindful that it's not, you know, it's not great that all this has happened. However, you, it is what you make of it. It kind of brought about this entrepreneurial spirit in me where I'm like, I have a new thing to figure out. It was almost like fun in a sense where I didn't really care about the numbers. It was more like a new challenge.  So we hired six people. Yeah. In the last six weeks, we took our staff. Yeah, maybe more. We took our staff up by 30% during this to be able to maintain the demand. But overall, Justin Brock said something that I thought was really interesting that really hammered in why the insurance industry is really not unaffected, but relatively unaffected. He said in Medicare specifically, all these individuals still have the same transactions that they have to make. Yeah. Whether they do it in person or not, they still need Medicare. They still need to shop their Medicare. They still need to potentially talk about this. So those that adapted to be able to meet their customers where they were are the ones that won. But the same amount of transactions happened. So I was already in love with the insurance industry. But during this situation, I was just like, we are so blessed and fortunate to be in the industry that was relatively unfazed. Because anybody that I know, most of them are up except for the big field forces. That's the only one that I'm seeing her down. But they're mostly recovered. They're starting to hit the field again. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that kind of woke me up, I remember about a week into this, I'm like, okay, what am I going to do differently? How am I going to? And everybody else is retreating out. We try to look for opportunities to advance.  And I remember thinking, if everybody watched social and events and we put on the 8% virtual, bam. I was doing free phone sales training webinars every week. I was doing night school. I was doing, you know what I mean? Like we almost, from a content perspective and a training perspective and an event perspective and everything else. And I viewed it as the best time to, like you always talk about people who work, people who educate them. I viewed it as the best time to give people's attention online, to grow and scale the brand and to really focus on bringing goodwill by doing five plus free events in a matter of a few weeks. And that, people responded to. You definitely doubled down on your content creation. And I think we got like thousands of YouTube subscribers too. Yeah, we're getting over a thousand a month now. Yeah, I mean, which is incredible. I mean, but that's also just speaks to your heart.  You know what I mean? Because really your actions are there.  Like, why did you choose? What was it that clicked? You said it clicked, but what clicked?  Well, I was getting... What really clicked for me is I was standing in the shower. Because that's always... You have ideas in the shower. We're talking about this often. I was getting probably easy 20, 25 messages a day of people that were trying to convert to phone cells. That's true. That I've successfully done in the past and I love selling over the phone. And I viewed it as a time for me to use my network to collaborate with people that are doing it and for me to share the knowledge that I have on the subject. And I said, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna put out... I'm gonna do several free events every single week to help people with this topic. I'm gonna give away tons of stuff for free. Yeah, I'll create a membership that if they want more access, you know, I'm doing a live Q&A later today with the members, stuff like that, then I'll do that. But even if they don't join the membership, they've at least got a ton of free content to help them be better and to make money in this current environment when they're not used to doing it. Well, and also too, a lot of our audience is like independent agents sometimes that don't necessarily have a leadership from top down. And really, I feel like it's, you're looked at.  And I hear that a lot. So that I think is important. And really truly, my heart was, like as soon as I realized that our, not just our business, but the insurance industry was going to coast through this thing, it's just going to be about adapting. Man, I was trying to talk to everybody I could because what I saw too is, a lot of the Medicare space was moving away from seminar marketing into some sort of digital like webinar or whatever. And I wonder how much that's going to, you think it'll tail off or you think we'll go back into seminar as much as we did? Or what do you think? I actually do think that those specific individuals will end up, they'll end up diversifying a little bit and maybe do a little bit of both, but they'll end up going back into, I think they'll end up going back to seminars. However, I think they're exposed to something that's working equally as well, if not better. Well, I heard, It's kind of exciting. I heard a blow to that business model. I heard Golden Corral is filing for bankruptcy. I don't know if that's true or not, but I heard it. That would be a massive blow. It's like all these events are at Golden Corral. They can find the next buffet. That's true. Well, okay. So do you have any other stories of individual agents that you were just impressed with that stand out to you during this time? Like, is there any stories you could share? Yeah, I mean, I remember, what was really, what I really enjoyed was we have this little, I have this little coaching program called Success Society and several people were reaching out. They were even sending audio recordings and then I was doing live, giving them feedback on their audio recordings and listening to agents and just trying to help during that time. It was cool to see people go from zero phone cells experience to I just got a message of the day that someone's like, I'm struggling. I don't really know anything about phone cells and I need some help from somebody. And I literally got to where I was getting videos from or I'm sorry, messages for people like this one. Right. Hey, thank you. I view you as one of my mentors. Tonight I wrote, I never did phone cells before. Tonight I wrote six applications for $3,429. That's so exciting. All telecells. You have no idea how much you helped me improve. And it's like, that is the point. The whole point. That's the point. Yeah. That's the point. And all along, that's what I love about, you and what you're doing with the industry and helping is your view as a the marketing leader. Like when it comes to marketing, no one views, no one actually views anyone else as the leader other than you. They act like it, but they don't really believe it. And I hear it nonstop, which is amazing. But what I truly love is what we are doing with specifically really adapting and innovating. Like right now, we've got a couple new crazy ideas that we probably can't even release yet that we're getting leads on different areas of the world, I guess you could say, that people haven't even considered yet. Well, I'm discovering these little niches that are underserved. So what's interesting is there's all these little niches that are active on Facebook that really no one's like meeting it. So when you look at the general, like Facebook or general Medicare or whatever, that's fantastic. But there's little niches like under 65 Medicare, right? Nobody's really marketing to that specifically. And it's interesting what we're getting. So if you write under 65 Medicare, for instance, we can walk these people through like a 16 question qualifying quiz and a lead for five, six bucks, dude. Like that's crazy. Like the Byron 10 on that is insane. And those types of funnels exist all over the place. And we've now finally have the tools that you don't need a $700,000 sales force integration like the big call centers have to automate the text and the emails and all that. So a quick plug, me and Justin Brock and Cody by proxy are doing a webinar May 27th talking about a CRM that's free. You have got to go to that webinar. It's free. Even if the CRM that we're talking about is really interesting, but it also captures all your leads and it's incredible. It's free. Just go check it out. Even if you don't use the CRM, I found it as a huge resource for marketing side, but just running your agency, it's huge as well. So that webinar is the May 27th. You got to go register for that. We'll put the link in the description or whatever. But that'll be fun as well. But anyways, between these little tools from beginning to end, there's just so many things that are coming out that are interesting, that are worth exploring. One of the things that I've noticed has shifted a little bit is people are asking about chatbots a lot. You heard that? I started to a little bit. Okay, well, I worked with some people that were really, really deep into the chatbot world. And chatbots are fantastic, sort of. But they're all moving towards these integrations on a landing page. That's some sort of qualifying quiz. So the whole point of a chatbot is to qualify these individuals and then turn it into a lead. Well, you actually don't need a chatbot to do that. You can do like an interactive sort of like quiz questions, which is interesting. So that's working in my opinion better. We're exploring that. There's just some things that are really interesting that we're going down the road on.  Oh, totally. And when you think about, you know, working with thousands of agents and companies and call centers, IMOs and everything else, like, we learn very fast. Well, somebody said it today. You got to, if you're going to work with digital marketing, you have to like have exposure to what other people are doing because you can kind of get down your own path and you can kind of be tunnel visioned on what's going on. Like for instance, we had, we started to see, we have one client that we have a great relationship with that runs their own Facebook ad account and then we run a Facebook ad account and they have us on retainer and half their, or more of their budget goes towards us, but they're still running just sort of as a control group. Well, they were essentially seeing, hey, what are we doing? $11 leads. I can't, I don't know what's going on. And I'm like, okay, well I'll figure it out. And basically we kind of re-tweaked some things, really reinvented the whole thing and got our leads down like $5.50 or something. So then they followed suit. But if their internal team would have never had that sort of collaboration to be able to know what's going on. And so that's been a lot of fun as well, just to kind of see this, because the Facebook landscape has changed a little bit during this Corona thing too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, we've seen several changes. Anyways, so I don't know. Do you have any other stories? Because really I just wanted to kind of like, the core of this is, we're okay, we made it. You know what I mean? I feel like we're back, getting back to normal. I know some of the industries are like still dying. I know people are crying because their personal fitness business is getting shut down unfortunately. I hate to hear that kind of stuff. You know what? I view it as like, and this, you can't do this in every state, but I view it as a time to like, my hairdresser came to my house. My fitness instructor, personal trainer, wherever you want to call him, came to my house. My massage therapist came to my house. The cleaning lady still came to the house, right? We even had, we even were like, having them come over and like, wash cars, like we were looking for opportunity during this time to help others that needed it while helping ourselves. So I think it's kind of a duty and responsibility everybody can do. I agree. If I'm paying for stuff and I'm doing stuff, I don't really have to stop doing it. I've heard several of our sales reps are supporting their brother, sister, because they were servers. Yes. You know what I'm saying? But how blessed are we to be able to provide that opportunity? That's like, to me, what it's about. Well, that was one of the coolest stories. One of the sales reps came to us and said, hey, he's a newer sales rep. He said, hey, I'm before I would have been worried about spending 40 bucks for Mother's Day and I went and dropped 400 bucks on some jewelry and I didn't even blink twice. He's like, it's because I work here now and I'm like, that's really freaking cool. It's awesome, man. But that's what we're here for. That's what it's about. We're here as a team to kind of go there together. But in this situation, there's people that need our help. In the insurance industry, we should be lending a hand to other industries because they're struggling, not like us. You know what? This time has taught us to adapt, get more creative, hyper focus more and to even think about how to scale everything we're doing. We're thinking about we're running out of office space and parking and we need more people. We literally have no parking spots left. No. We're doing letters. We have a whole team meeting at 8.30 start every day. Someone gets here at 8.29, 8.30. They're going to be late because there ain't no parking. It's almost like forcing you to be early just to find a parking spot. That's funny. That's funny. It's good and bad. Well, the way that I look at it is we are like, okay, I'm just going to say something bold.  Change your mindset. Mindset, activity, skill level, all of that. Get around a better leader. Find a better mentor to listen to. Find a better team to be a part of because we really have no excuses in the insurance industry. For some reason there's teams that are down and some reason there's teams that are up.  And also too, man, I heard Jared Mangum, one of our friends say, if you're starting to like, the people that are him and Haing about potentially getting back to work and is it too soon and all that, I need guys that I can sprint with. You know what I'm saying? If you're trying to convince me to stay home longer, you know what I'm saying? We got to run. Our team knows better than stuff like that. I'm not saying don't be safe with your... If you're sick, you need to stay at your home. Sure, totally. You know what I mean? But like, let's run. There ain't no time. Life's short. For sure. I mean, one specific client that we're doing marketing for and I'm consulting and training his sales team, they have tripled their field production by moving 100% to phone. Maybe some initials. AR. Okay. So did... Interesting, tripled. Tripled production. One of the weeks was tripled. Maybe even quadrupled. And they've doubled in size consistently. I haven't heard that feedback. Marketing and training and... Yeah. Dude. Unbelievable. That's so fun. And that makes me smile because that's why we do it. And they were 100% filled. Like, they were like, do not silver the phone.  Well, is there any other stories you want to share before we wind this thing up? Like, anything? I just... I mean, the good thing about our industry is if you want to succeed, you can. If you want to help a lot of people, you can. If you want to make a lot of money, you can. And at the end of the day, I always think like, okay, how do I want to be remembered after this time is over?  And like, you know what I mean? That's probably the first time I've actually heard me use that word on camera the whole time, right? Because I don't... I want to be positive, right? Maybe I should watch the news, but I don't on purpose. I'm noticing a theme with all of our friends that are killers. We all are like the same. It's not really... Dude, it's up here, man. It's like all up here. I can tell you right now, nobody that I know that's a six-figure producer and up is worried about COVID in the insurance industry. Nobody. Zero percent. And if not, and if they were worried, it was for a short time reinvented themselves and now they're even more successful or just as successful as before. Totally. The amazing thing about the industry is there's a lot of different ways to succeed in it. If your way was affected, you can find another way. Yes. And I just want to encourage you guys that if you are down in the insurance industry right now and you're feeling like there's a... You're not in this alone. We're here. Connect with some content. Reach out to your team, but you don't need to be down. Now should be a time to be celebrating because a lot of people that are going to make excuses, they're going to get out of the industry. Totally. There's more market share for us. You know what I'm saying? Yep. That's what 8% nations... Exactly. Do you have any teasers for 8%? Now that we're at the end, I do because maybe if you stayed at the end, you know what, I should have said that earlier. What have you got? Dude, it's looking like the same dates. Okay. There's a really good chance. If you were there last year, the scenery may look the same this year. There's a little hint. There's a little hint. There's several reasons why that's going to probably be the case. We'll know a little more affirmative in the next couple of days, but it's looking really positive. I'll just give you a hint. Another hint. I'll put out a Facebook post giving our attendees and our audience options what we should do because if nobody shows up, there's no point. There's no point, so I need to make them part of the process. They are 8% nation, and if you go to my Facebook post, you will see that about 70%, maybe 80%, chose one option specifically. All right. Well, I'm excited no matter what. You said so the dates are potentially the same. Yeah, so we're still looking at July 24th, this year. Cool. And we may have to make a couple adjustments from an event standpoint. We may have to limit ticket sales a little bit. We've already sold way more tickets than we previously had in the past, so we may have to cut off ticket sales much sooner so you don't have one and you actually want to go. You may want to consider getting one pretty quick. I may even be removing a couple ticket levels that are actually sold out based on the venue cap. They're actually oversold, so I may have to actually bump some people up for free. There's some weird stuff we got to do based on some specifics, but either way, I promise you, it will be the best experience I've ever had. Also too, I'll give you the people some independent insight. Whenever everybody was freaking out about their events, you and Lauren were like so chill and calm. Yeah. It was like a non-issue. Like, everyone else was kind of like nervous for you. Everybody kept asking me, I'm like, is it fine? It's fine. What do you mean? Well, and if they saw the Facebook post, you would have thought I'd have really been freaked out that the people that own the Palms, they own four different properties in Vegas. Three of them are staying open and are opening immediately. The one that's not is the Palms. They're actually closing. I think there's other reasons why they're closing the Palms that they're just not going to say. Gotcha. Because if the other properties are opening and they're open immediately, then everything's fine. Well, that'll make any sense. Well, the Palms is closing until at least November, if not the rest of the year. That's where 2020 was, so, but it'll be somewhere and it'll still be amazing. The thing is, people are going to still attend. The people that want to learn and improve and get better, I'm actually doing a webinar in a few weeks on how everything here has 13xed over the last two years. That's a big number. It all started because I went to an event and I got serious and we started getting attention. We started throwing events. We started bringing some freaking studs in-house and to join the team, et cetera. I'm here to tell you that events have been the one thing that have leveled me up more than anything else. Also, you're just getting around people that are equally yoked and you can sprint and look to your side and see guys that are also sprinting. You brought your sales, your key sales guys that hit the goals to 10x. They both said, obviously, it changed my life. It is true. Well, look at them now. Also, kind of interesting, I don't know that it's necessarily a coincidence. I went to 10x for February 21st through the 23rd. This all happened in early March. It's right now while we're recording this. It's been about two and a half months. Everything we've done has doubled. Oh, yeah. For sure. Are there other reasons why yes, but is being involved in stuff like that and wanting to learn definitely a part of that? I believe that because my focus in creativity has been an all-time high. I'm more aggressive and people thought I was crazy before. These last two and a half months, dude, I think we can 10x everything we have. Well, we got to. Yeah. So it's just a matter of time when. That's it. Well, dude, I mean, this is powerful. Anything else you want to share before we wrap it up? No, dude, I love it. I love it. I love it. And I want them to succeed better never and if they believe it, they can. Thank you guys for joining us on this episode of 8% Nation Podcast. We will talk again soon with a special guest. Hey, if you love this podcast, which obviously you, Dick, is going to land it and I, hey, we got a video right here for you. It's how to hire and recruit insurance agents with the wolf. All right, click on there and we'll see you over there.


and welcome to Stan Energyman. Stan Osserman here, and I have a new company now, so Tiger Shark Energy Consulting Hawaii, each two is my new company, so I'll send business cards to all of you, just send me a note. Anyway, today's show is a really special one. We've had Mike Stritsky on the show before, and he's talked about his hydrogen house, but a lot's been going on in the world of hydrogen. And one of the things that I found really interesting was the last time we did this show with Mike, he was calling in from California during all the wildfires, and sure enough, we got another spate of wildfires in California now. And it just so happens that PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric, was actually the cause of several of the major wildfires in California. So this year they decided to shut off power when conditions were especially too windy to keep their lines from arcing and starting more wildfires. And what that did was it caused a whole bunch of folks in California to go without power. When I say a whole bunch of folks, I'm talking hundreds of thousands of people are without power. And Mike has a hydrogen house plan or startup in California, and the folks in California have contacted him a little bit about what they can do to exit the grid and be totally off the grid using hydrogen. So Mike, welcome to the show, and if you could just kind of give the folks a brief recap of how you got started with hydrogen house and we'll get into talking about your off the grid system. Yeah, I've been doing hydrogen for the last 30 years. When I worked for the Department of Transportation, I built two hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. This was before anybody even knew what they were and they were just fresh out of NASA. Two companies went public, Millennium Cell, and H Power, which they are now is put there. So I have a lot of history in the fuel cell industry. I knew this with the solution 30 years ago, and that's why I've pursued it ever since. The hydrogen house project was started in 2006 and we've been off grid now for 16 years. So cooking gas, heating gas, fuel for the vehicle is all done from solar hydrogen that we make three months of the year. So there's no shelf life with hydrogen that's made from water and sunlight. 80% of all matter in the universe is hydrogen, so right now the world's waking up that batteries are not going to make it. So there isn't enough lithium in the world to supply less than 1% of the cars are now going to fuel cells. So the world's becoming a first and second place very quickly. And as we can see climate change for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction and the reactions all over the world. Exactly. So did you ever get the California Hydrogen House up and running or was the fire last time a game changer that you have to recover from yet? Well, we had lost the, there was damage to the buildings there, but we're still in the midst of putting the hydrogen house Malibu together. We did have a container home that we had run on solar hydrogen that survived the fire. So all of the, this was an immobile trailer park. Everything in the whole park burned. There was nothing left except for the hydrogen jewel box and the container home. So that's a tribute to it. There were a lot of more lives that were purchased and running around Malibu. Last year and now there were no incidences with those when these cars completely burned up. Hydrogen vented and that was the end of it. No explosions, no, nothing more than in fact, a lot less than having a gasoline car. So that's just a testament to the safety of these vehicles. That's outstanding. Cause I know that the movie you sent me and can we say the name of the movie? That's not classified or anything, right? Yeah, it's called, yeah, it's that war with the dinosaurs and the movie will release to the public within the next two months. Yeah, I got to see a trailer and watch the whole movie in advance thanks to Mike and it's an outstanding film. And I really like your quote in there that you basically said at the end that you're the only person that said it's even on the trailer about hydrogen being free and that's part of the problem. It looks like when Tesla and Thomas Edison were working on electricity, Tesla's view of electricity was everybody should have it for free. And that became problematic. We just buy and sell equipment. Yeah, and that became problematic for his technology because the big boys wanted to make money and they wanted to control stuff. So they wanted to have something that they controlled all the aspects of and Tesla philosophically was looking for free energy for the masses. I think that's part of one of the problems with hydrogen. It's like, it's free. Like you said at the start, it's the most common element in the universe and we can get it from water, we can get it from methane, we can get it from all kinds of places. And that's actually probably one of the reasons why it didn't take off in that movie at war with the dinosaurs. Talked a lot about that and some of the other stumbling blocks that have kept hydrogen from taking its rightful place. But the real good is- Well, what the problem is is the hydrogen is to cure for the disease not the treatment.   You broken the code and all that stuff, you're exactly right. And it's kind of the greedy side of capitalism and I'm a big capitalist supporter and small business supporter, but you know, when people get greedy and forget the big picture, which is a better humanity and better society, they lose sight of that fact and we're all in big trouble. Because like you say, we've been fighting cancer for probably 50 years or more and I know we're making heavy... You haven't cured your diseases all ago. Yeah, so it's pretty tough to break up those big monopolies and I think that's one of the things that our government needs to start doing is taking apart some of these big monopolies including some of the technology companies like Amazon's or Facebook, Twitter, Google. So if we drop dead here, it's because they're catching the bad mouth of them giving them, but those big companies control so much that we need to get some security and our country's built on personal freedom and personal accountability and we're kind of losing that personal control. Anyway, we're getting a little far off the subject. Yeah, we've stopped becoming the entrepreneurs that we're used to be. I mean, basically if we fail to keep evolving, we're gonna end up extinct like the dinosaurs were pulling out of the grass. You know, we have to evolve or we're gonna end up like blockbuster or Kodak. They created the technology, refused to adopt it. Look what happened to the species. We have to evolve with the technology, the linking that creates wealth. So we've got to do the right thing, not the political thing. And if we don't do it for any other reason, do it for your kids and your grandkids. Exactly. Leave a legacy behind, not just the balance sheet. Well, I know you also picked up recently a used Toyota Mirai. And you were telling me about those actually starting to show up on the East Coast. Can you tell us a little bit about that for the audience? Yeah, I mean, a lot of these Toyota Mirais are coming off at least now. So they've got about 30,000 miles on them. I purchased one that was non Toyota certifiable, which means that it's had more damage on more than two body panels. But that car, I picked up for $12,000. Shipped it out here and we're converting it to a generator. So these cars are available out on the market now.  So a friend of mine just bought a vehicle in Malibu, he paid $17,000 with $15,000 worth of free fuel and three year bumper to bumper.  Yeah, that's tough to beat. That's really awesome.  And I looked through all the electric vehicles and I didn't see any fuel cells, but the Toyota Mirai was actually listed as one of the top picks of all the vehicles. I mean, electric and hybrid and internal combustion. It was like right up there and they said it's a runaway bio-hydrogen fuel cell. The Toyota Mirai has 114 kilowatt fuel cells. Is that correct? And it makes 12 gallons of drinking water every tank wall. So if you get thirsty along the ride, you drink the same thing the astronauts do. They call it Godwater. Yeah, it collects it. And the hydrogen and the oxygen. It collects it, right? It collects it and you can actually dispense it. It collects about a half a gallon. Yeah. But it could capture all of it. That'd be great.  Yes. I mean, right now with all these crises going on, you know, we have a lot of energy in these battery powered fuel cell hybrid vehicles that we can't utilize.  You know, we wanna be able to utilize the whole power of the vehicle.  With a solid state system, you basically only consume the amount of fuel for what you're using. You know, so your efficiency quadruples. You know, in addition to that, you have a backup to the backup. You know, these engines are allowed, you know, run long periods of time. These generators all last very long. And especially now, where California is shutting the power off for three days to three weeks at a time, you know, people are really screwed. It's one thing to do without power for a couple hours, but when you start to go into a couple of day mode, you know, and then there is, you know, you can't get out to get fuel. You're really in trouble. So, you know, these things are gonna get worse.   So you're looking at, you know, these are large numbers and this is gonna, they said this is gonna become a yearly event because, you know, that the path of the fire takes a different route every time, depending on the way the Santa Ana winds are blown. So you didn't get it last year, but you may get it the next. Right. And then that grows back up again and you get it again. So, you know, the aging grid in these remote places, you know, it's gonna continue to fail because they put their money in their pocket and not into the infrastructure. And now the chickens are coming home to roost. You know, they replaced all these telephone poles in Malibu with what, steel poles? No, that makes too much sense.   Well, it's cheaper. So that's why they're doing it. Yeah, we found out how cheaper works out, huh? Yeah. In fact, we like to use the term fully burdened costs when you're trying to do real analysis because cheaper doesn't work in the fully burdened cost model. Well, we have to go back to do things, right? We have to go back to building things ourselves. We have to have to pride in our work and we have to have quality, again, the demand quality. You know, we've got to get out of the throwaway world where we build things rather than throw them in the landfill. Yeah. You know, it's really funny. I remember seeing a documentary one time and they talked about the term close enough for government work. And at one time, that actually meant very, very high standards. It was like, if you were going to do government work, you had to meet the highest standards in the industry or the government wouldn't accept it. Now we look at it as if it's just close enough for government work, it's probably the minimum standard. Unfortunately, that's what a lot of manufacturers and companies have adopted is. It's good enough, minimum, we'll wear data, it's only good for a couple of years, it wears out, we'll replace it, we'll throw it away, get a new one. And that's really not a very good model. You're right, we have to go back to the old ways. See what, Mike, we're going to take a quick break here for 60 seconds and we'll be right back and we'll talk some more about, especially about the California fires and maybe some more about your hydrogen house concept. Okay. Aloha, I'm Marcia Joyner and we are navigating the journey every Wednesday at 11 a.m., Think Tech, Hawaii. Please join us, Aloha. Hello, I'm Mufi Hanuman. I want to tell you about a great show that appears on Think Tech, Hawaii. It's all about tourism. In fact, we call it Tourism 101, where we talk about the issues and challenges that faces our number one industry throughout the state. We'll have some interesting guests, very informative dialogue and allow you an opportunity to maybe learn a little bit more about why this industry is so important for our state. It's been great for us in the past, we need it today and especially going forward. That's Tourism 101 on Think Tech, Hawaii. Mahalo. Hey, and welcome back to Stand the Energy Man, Stan Osserman here. With Mike Stritski all the way from, it's almost his bedtime now, all the way from New Jersey. And we're talking a little bit about the wildfires in California, but I want to get back to two things. Number one is his Toyota Mirai that he just bought used for like 12,000 bucks if I got the price right. You know, if you went to buy a brand new 100 kilowatt fuel cell, which is the same size or actually a little smaller than what's in the Mirai, how much would that cost, Mike? About $600,000 if you're buying a valid fuel cell. So you bought a car used for under $15,000 and in it is a 114 kilowatt fuel cell with probably 15 or 20 years more use out of it and you paid 12,000 bucks for it and to buy one commercial on the market. Yeah, to buy a commercial one from a professional company, just the fuel cell alone would cost 600, half a million, over half a million dollars. Right, and that's not counting the tanks and the help that are in the car. So the state would, you know, people used to ask me, Dan, where's your business case for hydrogen? And I'd said Toyota. Toyota is my business case for hydrogen because they've already taken most of the platinum out of the fuel cell which was a big cost piece. They've made it more efficient. They made it lighter. They made it smaller. They've done everything over 20 years to get the fuel cell as perfect as they could get it. And not only... They made it mass-producible and what they did that no one else has done was only to sell these things were to capture a market. Yeah.  Toyota says, look, we're gonna sell them like we sell them in mass production and that's what they did with the Toyota Prius. And they become the largest automaker in the world. So Toyota truly is betting the farm on this technology which is why they've released 5,500 patents free to the world as open source. So, you know, they're all in. You know, they're making, they're turning sewage into fuel for these vehicles in Japan. Yeah.  You know, the U.S. automakers aren't doing anything with fuel cells. No, the U.S. is... Yeah, they're waiting to see. The U.S. has lost their edge in this industry to virtually everybody, including China. And if I understood right, the 2020 Olympics, Summer Olympics in Japan are gonna be pretty much run on hydrogen. And I just... That's pretty much it, yeah. I hope that gets the attention of the folks in this country and they realize that hydrogen is what's gonna get us to that clean energy future and that carbon-free future and we need to take it seriously.   The problem is, is like I said, there isn't gonna be a planet to spend it on.   Yeah. Yeah, they're finding that out within California with all these homes that they're losing. Well, I think... Only people have nowhere to go.  All the companies that sell fuel cells and hydrogen electrolyzers and stuff, they were following that model that you said where, hey, they gotta make all their money back, all their R&D, all their capital costs up front. So the equipment's been way too expensive. Now you got Toyota that's, you know, said we're gonna take a loss for a couple years and eventually we're gonna own the market. And sure enough, they are. Toyota owns every piece of that car. They own technology, the tanks, they own the fuel cell, they own all the electronics, they own all the software. And by basically owning this, they're not paying markup for many of these other companies that, you know, normal industry act, I too. Yeah, exactly. So if you own everything, you know, you can control the, you know, what gets spent on the vehicle. You're not paying, you know, 100X on these things. I mean, a perfect example are these hoses for the cars. You're looking at $7,000 for a hose. All right, there's no competition and there's literally only two companies in the world to make them. Yeah. So we've got to get out of that mode. And, you know, we can't make the regulation so overburdened for no reason just to protect the gas companies. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.  Well, let's talk a little bit about the Hydrogen House project itself. I know that we've highlighted on some previous program for the audience today. Just give a quick rundown on how much PV and how you store your hydrogen and what's the cycle, you know? You charge batteries and then make hydrogen or what? Yeah, so what I do is fairly simple here. I've been doing this now for 16 years. I've perfected the system here to a point where, you know, I travel a lot and everything runs by itself. It needs very little maintenance. So first of all, we start with 27 kilowatts of solar and that provides all my cooking gas, heating gas, fuel for the vehicle, all my energy needs. So during the springtime, when I have long solar days and I should say longer than normal anyway, they're getting longer and I have basically no heat or air conditioning load. So that 27 kilowatts goes through my electrolyzer and it fills 12 1000-gallon grouping tanks full of hydrogen to 200 pounds, which is about 90 kilograms or 90 gallons of gasoline. So once that's done, I'm done for the year. I've got the electrolyzer off and all during the summer months, so from the end of June to the last week in September, I'm back feeding the grid and I'm making money. During the fall, I'm neutral till about December. So from the last week in September to about the first week in December, I have enough just between solar and batteries to be just fine, have enough energy for all my loads. During the winter months, December, January, February, March and part of April, I don't have enough energy. So the fuel cell runs at night anywhere from four to six hours to run my geothermal, which is my largest load in the hydrogen house. So that's about 78 kilowatt hours or 75 kilowatt hours a day I use for heat and air conditioning, where I use less than five in the summertime and I have the most amount of energy. So essentially my system bottles sunlight and I can use it wherever I want, weeks, months, years from now. I use the hydrogen during the winter and then we go back to the spring and the whole cycle starts all over again. So as long as a big nuclear ball and the sky shows up for work, I've got all the energy I need. And this system is reproducible. We went public with a company called H-cell Energy back in 2015 doing hydrogen homes for people. And that's what we're doing today. Right now the need is getting greater than ever and the cost of the equipment is getting to be less than half of what it was five years ago. So as increases in technology happen, as mass production happens and the codes are adopting all of the new fuel. So the hydrogen, we're now seeing that this is gonna become an industry and we're looking at this worldwide, not just America. There are 270,000 hydrogen homes powered off natural gas in Japan. I think I built the only five in the US. So we're really behind the stake here. Yeah, so taxes with all this excess wind and solar needs to be going out of the fossil fuel business and going into the renewable business.  Yeah, I want to point out to the audience you something about your house and you talked about your HVAC system, your heating and cooling system and how much energy it used. But I want to point out to folks that your heating and cooling system is actually more like a heat pump. You've got a heat exchange system buried underground and that same temperature of, it's maintained around around 70 degrees or so is your air conditioning in the summertime and you're heating in the wintertime when it's really cold because underground, the temperature maintains a constant and you have an exchanger down there that pumps 70 degree air into your house wintertime for heating and summertime for cooling as part of your efficiency in your house, is that correct? Yeah, so the geothermal system has a mile of thick wall copper tube buried underground eight feet. So I extract the 56 degree ground temperature which is virtually the same almost nationwide and during the summertime, I'm only moving the cold from the ground to the house so I'm not making anything up. I'm taking 56 degrees and making the house 70. That's why it uses no energy and for the air conditioning cycle. During the heating cycle, I've got to make up the 12 degree differential. So I'm bringing 56 degrees in and the heat pump does what heat pumps does. It makes the cold colder and the hot hotter and that's what heats the house. But I have used more electricity because I have to make up that differential in the winter. Yeah, that explains the difference. Yeah, it's far more efficient than your traditional heating system because you're extracting the energy from the ground. Right. So geothermal is used all over the country, you know, pumps, pump and dump wells, all kinds of things to extract ground temperature to offset heat and air conditioning loads which are the largest loads of almost any you know, home around the world. Well, I tell you, that's really a great model, Mike. And I know you only got a handful of houses out there to date, but I'm hoping for your company and for you that people start to wise up and start following the model and you get out there and build a bunch of houses that use your model. Well, what has to happen, Stan, is pretty simple. We have to start voting with our checkbooks. If you want to see change, you've got to vote for change. And the only vote that really matters is the one where you're spending your dollar because there'll be no force in industry will stop the trend where people are buying things. Okay, so if you want a chain, you can't sit there and talk about it, you've got to sit there and you've got to buy it. You know, you've got to vote for solar and wind and LEDs and energy efficiency and less waste. You know, you've got to vote for what you want and you've got to vote with your checkbook. That's good advice, Mike. And I think that really kind of sums it all up. You know, we're faced with choices every day and the choice for clean energy is not necessarily the cheapest but if it's a future you're worried about, you know, you need to step up and make the choice yourself. And I'm telling you, though, the price of solar's going down, the price of the vehicles is dropping, the quality is still there and then getting better. So the choice is getting easier and easier to make. So, you know, believe it or not, we really... I mean, the only reason that we have battery electrics right now is because they're going to give oil another 10 years. It's a known failure. No matter how many times I run the math, there's just no way that, you know, there's enough lithium on the planet that we're going to build the grid nine times bigger and we're still powering off some coal. We've got batteries that end up in the environment that you drink, you know, they're non-recyclable and these things catch fire.  And the companies have gone out of business. They just had a fatal fire recently, but remember, fully burdened costs. That's, if I can drive that one home, you've got to think about what everything costs, where it's mined, what it costs to manufacture it in terms of environmental impacts, end of life disposal, everything. Well, Mike, believe it or not, we blasted through 30 minutes already, and I know it's almost your bedtime, so I'm going to let you go. And I want to thank you for sharing information with me and sharing the movie with me, because I'm looking forward for it to come out, because it was a well-done documentary, and I'm looking forward to it. We'll see if we can get it to the Maui Film Festival in this summer coming up in 2020. But have a great evening. Okay, I, yeah, I'll tell you another AOL video we did last week. I think you'll find it interesting if you want to post it up on your website, you'll find it. Okay, thanks a lot, Mike. Until next week. All right, have a good one, Stan. Thanks, Aloha, Mike. Until next week, Stan the Energyman signing off, Aloha.


Well, thank you, and I'm happy to have the opportunity to address this interesting meeting. By way of disclosures, I've received research grants in the past from Denone, as well as Abbott, and the National Calamans Beef Association. I'm going to talk today very briefly about milk proteins and proteins in general with regard to health in the elderly. I've been asked to try to cut this down a little, and so I'm going to give an overview first here to tell you that there's two main messages that I want to get across today. One related to the role of protein in the diet in general and in health status in elderly, and I'm going to zip through a variety of slides to make the general point that we have focused very extensively on lean body mass changes in the elderly and the loss of muscle mass, and in fact the evolving definition of sarcopenia or the extreme muscle loss that occurs in certain percentage of elderly that is associated with a variety of health outcomes that are all negative, is predicated on lean body mass. What I want to really focus on more today is that the dietary protein and resulting amino acids has a variety of physiological functions, and that we have to look well beyond the effect on lean body mass alone as the criterion on which to base how much protein intake is recommended for the healthy lifestyle in elderly individuals. And then at the second aspect of the talk, it's going to focus more on protein quality and recent efforts to advance the quantification of protein quality in a numerical way. Well, with regard to lean body mass, the crucial question that we have to ask with regard to protein intake in lean body mass is whether increased protein intake translates to more lean body mass and improved health outcomes. And I can tell you that with regard to the elderly, this is a difficult issue. We know that the mechanism of action by which protein intake affects lean body mass or muscle accretion is by stimulation of muscle protein synthesis. There's a very simple demonstration here from a study we did many years ago that the net gain or loss of muscle protein is determined by the balance between protein synthesis and protein breakdown and in the absence of any dietary intake, in a circumstance where there's a net breakdown of muscle protein due to the rate of breakdown exceeding the rate of synthesis. And we, in just protein or amino acids, the rate of synthesis is stimulated so that we enter into a positive balance. So this is the fundamental basis. But how this translates to the effect of dietary intake of protein on long-term lean body mass is less clear. And I will specify upfront that we really don't have controlled prospective trials in which high levels of protein intake have been given over prolonged periods of time. So we have to look at shorter studies where there have at least been some dietary controls. And if we look at, there have been several studies, and this is one done by Dillon et al. in which elderly individuals were given dietary supplements of essential amino acids twice per day in addition to their diet. And this is, we don't know really what the rest of the diet was. And this is one of the limitations of supplemental studies, but we have to live with that limitation. And what this study showed was that there was in fact a gain in lean body mass in these individuals when they had an increased intake of essential amino acids. The thing that I would note here is that the change is fairly significant. But this is a change which plateaus and it doesn't continue to keep increasing. And in fact, other studies have not shown very significant changes in lean body mass over time with supplemental protein or amino acids. So how much effect this exerts in a long term is difficult to say in terms of lean body mass and elderly. Certainly the more loss of muscle that has occurred in older people, the harder it is to improve lean body mass simply through diet alone. Population-based studies are difficult to interpret often, but this is a result of the heart ABC study in which a large number of subjects were followed over a three-year period and divided into quintiles of protein intake. In all of these subjects, there was a loss of muscle protein over the three years in the elderly. Those that had the highest level of protein intake had significantly less muscle loss than those that had lower. The highest intake here wasn't what we'd really consider high level of protein intake in the range of 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram per day. But it provides some supportive evidence that there may be some sparing of the lean mass loss with increased dietary protein intake. But really, I think that the major point in relation to this, as I said in the introduction, is that I think the focus on lean body mass is probably not the main target when we look at health outcomes in elderly, that it's really very difficult to show significant changes in lean body mass even with resistance exercise in elderly, and that it seems that strength and physical function have much more of a direct relevance to health outcomes than lean mass per se, and that in older individuals there can be a wide range of strength and physical function for the same lean body mass, and this seems to be more important in terms of health outcomes. And this shows just a large group of subjects about close to 1,000 in which mortality and strength was looked at in individuals under the age of 60 and over the age of 60, and again, divided in terms of those that had the lower third of protein intake, the middle third, and the highest level of protein intake. And we look at the all-cause mortality as well as cancer mortality that clearly the individuals having the lower third of protein intake, a lower third of, excuse me, strength, not protein intake strength, those that had the lowest strength had the worst outcomes. Now, all the epidemiological studies suffer from the same problem, and that is, of course, we don't know that the loss of strength caused the mortality, but rather those that were sickest and on their way to dying probably lost muscle strength. So these kind of epidemiological studies are not very conclusive with regard to health status and the importance of strength, but I'm presenting it because it's pretty much all we have. We do know that in very tightly controlled situations that we can influence strength and level function with a dietary intake of amino acids and protein. The mechanism that I think is important to understand with regard to muscle protein synthesis is that the process of protein synthesis and breakdown remodels the muscle, so that as the protein synthetic rate is stimulated by a higher level of protein intake, even if the rate of breakdown is increased to the same extent, so that there's no real change in lean body mass, we still get an improvement in body strength, and this is from the laboratory at Srinair, in which the muscle strength is normalized for muscle mass and shown to be directly related to the rate of turnover of the muscle protein, so that the important aspect of protein intake on muscle strength is stimulating the turnover of muscle protein so that the muscle fibers are remodeled to function more effectively than occurs at a lower rate of protein turnover. What we see when we look at trials where this strategy has been undertaken is that we do see increases in physical function and older people giving either protein or amino acids as supplements. In this study, which was a 24-week study, we saw this is from a group in the Netherlands in which there was a significant increase with whey protein supplements given over a period of 24 weeks. Again, in free-living subjects, we don't really know what the rest of the intake is because it hasn't been controlled, but it's certainly supportive of the notion that stimulating protein turnover through increased protein intake can improve muscle strength. This study is one we did in our own laboratory in which everything was controlled completely because these individuals were maintained completely in bed rest for 10 days so that every bit of food and every bit of activity was completely controlled. You can see that this type of bed rest that is common in the hospital in elderly and why we endeavored to investigate this was because of the hospitalization procedure in the United States of generally enforcing bed rest in elderly. We see that these are different functional tests that are here on the side and that functional capacity was greatly reduced in these individuals when given a placebo, when they were given extra essential amino acids, it almost completely eliminated the decline in the functional capacity. So in this study there was a complete control of all extraneous variables and we see a direct effect of higher levels of essential amino acid intake on protein, on muscle function. I'm going to go through very briefly a variety of other areas that we have to consider when coming to the conclusion as to what level of protein intake we should recommend for older individuals. I'm going to skip that slide because it's an epidemiological slide and show that there's been a representative slide of a lot of work it was referred to in the previous slide that protein, in particular, has been shown to reduce blood pressure. In this case, this study was done by Ray Townsend in Philadelphia in which just one single supplement had a significant effect on both systolic and donostolic pleasure of lowering blood pressure and hypertensive patients. There's a complete literature in this area on the cardiovascular benefits of higher protein intake. We also know that if we give supplemental essential amino acids that plasma triglycerides decrease in elderly. And at the same time, we see a decrease in liver fat and this is work done in our laboratory in which elderly individuals were given a supplementation of essential amino acids for a month and we see a significant reduction of almost 50% in liver fat and as in the previous slide, dietary triglycerides. So that we have mechanisms related to risk factors not only directly related to blood pressure but also triglyceride and hepatic fat that can be modulated by increased intake of amino acids and protein. There's a considerable literature on bone health and protein intake. I think that many years ago it used to be thought that the acidification of the blood resulting from higher protein intake would cause a loss of mineral density in the bone but a number of studies have shown this to not be the case and in fact that higher levels of protein intake are beneficial for bone health. This is one representative study in which subjects were given either a placebo or a 30 gram whey protein supplement over two years and what we can see is the effect on bone, of the bone mineral density of those given placebo over this two year time period had a significant loss and those that had the dietary protein supplements in fact had this loss of bone mineral density prevented over this two year time period. So that we don't really need to rely on epidemiological studies. We have controlled studies, prospectively randomized control studies that demonstrate a beneficial effect in older individuals of increased protein and amino acid intake and I'm highlighting here results there are a number of studies that support each of these various areas of benefits. We've heard already about satiety today and thermogenesis and some reference of the partitioning of nutrients to muscle. So the point is that there's a wide variety of effects of higher protein intake that have physiological benefit in terms of health status in the elderly and that we have to go well beyond lean body mass or what's really been used to determine protein requirements and namely nitrogen balance which is only a surrogate for a lean body mass measurement as not relying on that as the sole criterion on which we base our dietary planning for older individuals. But the question of how much protein is optimal is really up in the air. We really don't know. We have different recommendations from the experts. We have the recommended dietary allowance which is 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram per day and we also have the acceptable macronutrient distribution range of 10 to 35 percent of the calories constituted as protein. These are both published in the same document published by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Science. The acceptable mac... The rationale behind this is expressing it as percent is to understand the fact that protein is not eaten as an isolated compound but rather as part of an overall diet so that if we have a low protein intake by necessity then you have to have a high carbohydrate fat intake. One of the things that's a little confusing here is that if we look at the RDA in relation to this AMDR that there is a sort of a dichotomy here because if we take the recommended caloric intake from the same document and look at the RDA as a percent of caloric intake we come up with 9.1 percent and realize that in the same document the minimal recommended percentage of protein intake in the diet was 10 percent. So that we can look at the RDA really as a minimal value that we should be able to be sure that everyone eats but that in terms of the dietary recommendations really it's at the low end of what the experts have recommended as dietary intake and this is from a paper from Victor Felgoni which emphasizes that point where it's a little complicated here but I want to go through it because I think it's important to understand the relation between recommendations and dietary intake. This is the lower level intake of the AMDR 10 percent of the calorie intake and this is the high end so it's quite a wide range. What this represents is actual protein intake taken from the NHANES data so that we can see in America most people are eating closer to 15 percent well above the RDA and what these values represent is he took the dietary guidelines from the USDA and broke down the meal plans into how much protein was in each of the meal plans and that came out closer to 1.5 grams per kilogram per day or in the range of 20 percent of calories which is kind of in the midpoint of the AMDR so that all of these things kind of come into the same area which is well above the RDA so the perspective that we should be eating more protein than recommended in terms of the RDA is really not a very extreme position it's supported by both what people are actually eating what the USDA guidelines recommend and in the pretty much the midpoint of the acceptable macronutrient distribution range we clearly need perspective studies in which higher levels of protein intake are eaten over prolonged period of time to really definitively address the question of how much protein should be eaten but I think that we can conclude from all of these different areas of physiology in which increased protein intake can have beneficial effects that we should be targeting a level of protein intake that's above the 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram per day The second aspect I'd like to touch briefly on is a project that I've been involved with with a number of people under the auspices of the FAO to revise the approach to quantifying protein quality The PDCOS is a system which currently has existed and this new scoring system has meant this a plant to try to come up with a way to quantify protein quality and the report came out was published this year by the FAO of the digestible indispensable amino acid score and there are two aspects of the score of a quality of protein One is the profile and abundance of the essential amino acids and in particular the relation of the profile of the essential amino acids in the protein to the requirements for the individual essential amino acids and the second aspect is the true ilial digestibility of the individual amino acids in the test protein So the way in which this varies from PDCOS is in this case not much other than the PDCOS is truncated at 1 meaning that any protein that provides that if you eat 0.66 grams of protein per kilogram per day of that protein, of the test protein that you can obtain a percentage of the essential amino acids that exceeds 100% then the PDCOS truncated that value at 1 whereas the Dias does not truncate the scores given the opportunity to classify dietary proteins over a wide range of quality according to a numerical score So this shows the Dias scores of common proteins and I'm sorry that they're so small but I can tell you just in grouping them these are fundamentally the animal proteins other than soy protein is in here one of these is right about here I can't read it from here but soy protein is one of these it's the only vegetable protein that's in here there are four quality proteins that don't provide and so what this number means again to try to explain it more clearly if we look at some of the milk proteins here if you eat 0.66 grams of protein per kilogram per day of the milk proteins that you will eat 140% of all the essential amino acids requirement how can we use these quality scores in a practical way to rank proteins well the first aspect is can we really extrapolate from these numbers to actual functional activity and the answer is there's a lot of work to be done there's some suggestion that this is the case let's just take a look at the comparison of whey protein versus soy protein and this is a slide from Stu Phillips lab in which the effect or response of muscle protein synthesis to 20 grams of intake of either soy protein or whey protein is compared and in accord with their respective diast scores we see a significant stimulation of the protein synthesis with whey that is considerably greater than with soy so that in terms of the relative diast values we see a functional relationship in terms of protein synthesis there are other types of studies like this that support the notion that this scoring of protein quality throughout the whole range of proteins is a viable approach but clearly more work needs to be done to actually validate these diast scores as a true reflection of protein quality on a relative basis but if we take for the moment the assumption that they do reflect a difference in quality we know at the very least that they reflect the difference in the ability to deliver essential amino acids in a given amount of protein I'd like to show the last two slides here to make the point in relation to the energy intake required to deliver the amount of essential amino acids required to meet all basal requirements and if we express it just in the energy intake per gram of protein we see that there are certainly some variations in different types of proteins but that fundamentally the energy intake per gram of protein is not particularly extreme if we now correct each of these proteins for the diast score meaning the fractional contribution of each of these proteins to the total ability to provide essential amino acids we get an energy intake per gram of protein which is based on the ability to provide the essential amino acid requirements and we see quite a differentiation in the proteins that peanut butter while having a very high percentage of protein relatively speaking almost 25% that the caloric density of the peanuts nonetheless means that you need to eat actually more than the total energy requirement for the day to meet your protein requirement whereas some of the high quality proteins and we look at whole milk or whey protein here are much more effective in delivering the essential amino acid requirements for a given amount of caloric intake and so I think that as time evolves when we get a better validation of these diast scores as really corresponding to functional capacity this type of approach of trying to express or develop dietary plans in terms of the ability to deliver essential amino acids those calorie efficient manner will be quite an effective approach to the nutritional planning and recommendations this just shows the difference between the two graphs where we've looked at here just expressing the kilocal's required per gram of protein and then in this case the kilocal's required to meet minimal EAA requirements and then if we look at the requirement to meet EAA requirements we have quite a different picture of the nutrient density of these different food stuffs in terms of protein quality so to conclude an older individuals that intake of protein greater than the RDA promotes better health outcomes by affecting many systems and to just sort of answer a challenge that's always issued is that there are many studies that haven't shown much benefit and I may have cherry picked some of the ones that have shown benefit the important point I think with regard to deciding how much protein should be eaten here is to recognize that in no study that the RDA has been compared to a higher level of protein intake has the RDA ever shown to have better outcomes than a higher intake the second point is that the high quality proteins such as milk proteins enable the targeted essential amino acid intakes as defined by amino acid requirements with less caloric intake than lower quality proteins and therefore we can't just consider a protein a protein that we have to look at the quality of proteins and in that regard the milk proteins come out very much at the high end of the spectrum so with that I'll conclude and thank you for your attention


The Iowa Department of Transportation has a rich history of working on transportation research that makes a difference. Four key areas we have been striving for research are in pavements, safety, bridges and structures, and winter maintenance. This video shows four projects in those key areas from this last year. By working with our partners in industry, universities, other states and agencies, we have transportation research that will make a difference to the traveling public and will lead to a safer, more efficient and long-lasting transportation system. Transportation agencies are under increased pressure to minimize lane closures during peak hours of the day while reconstructing pavements during off-peak hours. The bump at the end of the bridge is a common problem in Iowa that requires the dedication of considerable maintenance resources. Recent research in Iowa is trying to address both of those problems through the construction of precast bridge approach pavement. Precast pavement can be placed in lane closures in as little as five hours and can be opened to the public almost immediately after placement, thereby reducing the risk to workers and the traveling public. Although there is a added cost with precast pavements, the increased benefits to the traveling public can greatly outweigh situations where there is high traffic. Iowa is very fortunate to be a part of the research project with Mr. Dan McGehee and the University of Iowa on the research that he's doing for young drivers. This type of research will give us an insight into the behaviors that young drivers have on a daily basis in the different type of situations that they actually can see in the urban or rural type of driving that they do here in Iowa. This research will also give us an insight in the type of highway safety issues that we should be looking for, not only to give to our drivers educators so they know what type of training a young driver needs, but also to the parents so they know what to work on with the young drivers and what type of things they should teach them as they're driving and to be aware of. This also will give us a definite insight into what a young driver goes through as far as distractions when they have passengers, all those types of things that we need to use in making safety decisions on what type of restrictions and rules we should have for the Iowa young drivers. It's very important that we work with the young drivers and the drivers educators to try to stop any type of a major crash that would happen before it happens. We want to certainly get the message out there so that everyone's aware of what they can do before a major incident would actually happen. One research project we've been working on the last two, three years has been a multiple blade plow. The idea behind the multiple blade plow is to remove as much snow from the roadway as we possibly can with each pass of the plow. The plow itself would consist of the front carbide blade, which is typical on all of our plows in the state, but would also add to that plow a scarifying blade, which is used on working with ice pack and snow pack type situations. So it helps break up that bond between the snow and ice in the roadway surface. Then following that is a squeegee blade or a rubber blade that helps remove slush and any leftover snow and ice from the roadway. The combination or any one of those can be used individually or they can be used in combination to remove the snow and ice from the roadway. So we think that this is going to help us save a lot of materials in snow and ice operations because the blades will help remove as much snow as possible off the surface of the roadway and allow us to use less salt on our roadways. Signature of bridge like the one behind us require the state of the art technology to monitor quality during construction and make sure there's no over stress conditions. We place sensors in critical locations in the bridge components while it was being constructed and actually monitored forces. When we received the force data, we told the contractor what the magnitudes were and the contractor was able to make changes in the process to ensure that the bridge was constructed properly. Bridges usually are designed and analyzed using theory. That's fine for brand new bridges, but after 10 or 20 years, you really need to get the true behavior of bridges. Structure house monitoring using sensors can give you that. After the I-35 incident in Minneapolis, we felt there's a need to examine the condition and capacity of bridges of similar type like the one you're looking at behind us. So we worked with our state university to come up with monitoring system to examine the capacity and load distribution within the bridge. We place sensors throughout the bridge to major forces when heavily loaded trucks travel across. The force information was given to the IODOT bridge engineers who were able to do a more accurate safe capacity assessment. This close examination allowed us to keep the bridge open without reducing the weight limit. Thank you for watching. If you have any questions about these four projects or any of the other transportation research we are conducting, you can contact me here at the Iowa Department of Transportation.


Can't believe we're doing this. Just a couple of bros and their geese hanging out So I've wanted to make this video for quite a while Julian does Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which is a martial arts self-defense It's the best self-defense. Is it considered a sport? Oh 100% 100% sport. This is called the key.  I have a white belt because I'm a beginner And you have a blue belt because you're slightly less beginner still not really qualified to teach But I guess I know maybe you'll learn some Jiu Jitsu moves But maybe you won't I can't guarantee anything this isn't TLC What kind of hairstyle should I have for Jiu Jitsu? A bun? Okay, does Jiu Jitsu care that I just washed and did my hair? Jiu Jitsu gives no fucks. This doesn't sound like the sport for me Let me check. You good? You good to go?   There's no kicking and punching There's no strikes. We're not gonna punch each other fighting. No hair pulling. No, these are all rules that apply It doesn't sound like a sport at all. You can break each other's arms, though You can and you can strangle someone.  No. No scream lovely It's basically the same rule.  Let's do Jiu Jitsu It was okay. Oh, okay So that's something important to note though is that the reason that you wear a geek you are allowed to pull on people's clothes Yes, these are all handles. There's two different types though ghee and no Geek it's better and no geese just but but naked it's like rash guards Wait, do we have to say a like a bow or like a prayer or something first?  That's what it sounds like. I mean you can go like this when you enter the mat But we already on the mat. So you're why I just my academy. Did I say anything like ah? Jiu Jitsu Is there gonna be snacks? Everyone thinks that when you're in your back, you're not in control. Let me show you Okay, I close my legs. That means you're in my guard That's supposed to hurt sit up. Okay. There you go. That's what you want to do sit down All right, so you want to be gripping these like a puff grip. Yeah or like that I'm gonna show you do not remember don't break it. Oh, think about it.  I have a question what has a grown man ever farted on you I don't think so. So this is a good position if you were to do literally anything, but what you're doing right now Okay, but then I can just get Give me a seat belt. No to see but there you go. Okay You don't put your thumb down here you put your thumb up top It's down here. Oh, don't do not when you have my back. I have to protect my neck Okay Sing that while we play you can get this hand on this part of my key. I'm in trouble You're gonna grab the other lapel squeeze as tight as you can and pull it down as you pull this You gonna show There you go, there's your show Yeah What control do you have from here?  I'm gonna grab your knee right here.  No, I'm not like not shimmying Okay, there you go, and then this knee is gonna come up right here into your yes Like right in my chest. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Are you ready?  I'm gonna do it to you can eat so you can see how I work. Yeah My guard It's hard as you can Wait, oh, it's 10% okay. Can you do with that? This is Don't don't kissy-face in me try to get away like with all your might right now try to get away I'm gonna hop up Can I take a leave? Can I take all your knee pain? You actually could. Really? Yeah, please don't What are you gonna do what's the defense for tickling your knee?  I see a bounce So how did you do the show do you want me to walk you through it again? No That's the motion Keep going you can do it. I want to say that I know as little as you'd expect the blue belt to know So I'm not an instructor, but I do know that jujitsu is not for everyone. I'm one of those Escape is a very general basic skill you need only should have started with it. Okay shrimp on your side Shrimp. Yeah, so you go Can you grab away? I Put your weight on your upper half so your butt can scoot up No, but so it's like how an inch one moves like this I'm not literally That's not a hip escape. That's an inch work.  I basically have to show I can still roast you like this Don't you want to chump me? Yeah, close your legs First I go like yes, but okay, then I go like this and put my yeah almost I love you But don't do that.  No That's my god We're just do jits away. What do you call this? Is it called sleep over? So this is your first lesson in jiu-jitsu. I think I'm pretty well stick with it Because it's the best thing in the world. Please don't break my arm. I think about it I think that was a good introductory lesson to jiu-jitsu. I think almost to you're in a lot The whole time no everything about wearing makeup to jiu-jitsu. Don't do it. I try that. It's a bad idea It doesn't work out well. Thanks Julian for teaching us some jiu-jitsu. Thanks coach Chris for teaching me jiu-jitsu Thanks for watching make sure you subscribe to my channel I put out the videos every Wednesday such Thursday. Thank you Julian for teaching me slash us And just remember to keep your thumbs tucked in when you go like this Rip it off your hand I feel like I didn't even get a workout just got wet