Our second community spotlight asked Elaine to join us and I'll let Elaine introduce herself a little bit. We like became acquainted over the years through like some of her work in development and go to Colorado and those kinds of things. What's your like self bio? Sure. Autobiography I guess. Yeah I am so excited to be here. I don't get to talk to developers very much anymore. I even wore my developer con converse with my fancy dress just for this event. So my name is Elaine Marino. I transitioned careers from advertising to become a Ruby and Ruby on Rails developer seven years ago. It was when Jeff was still at Jumpstart Labs in DC. Galvanize didn't exist and I was in one of the very first classes here in Colorado and I got an internship and I was basically doing software development full-time for two years and experienced all the barriers to entry that are really now in the news and from that I actually ended up starting my own business and my own business ended up being in the tech event space kind of by accident. I was doing women in tech events. I did lady coders out of Boulder Colorado and from there got a contract with the state of Colorado to put on go code Colorado and I did that for four years and now I feel like the industry has finally caught up with everything that I experienced and I launched a diversity and inclusion consulting company called equally and I do trainings and workshops based off of all my experiences and a whole lot of research. So that's what I'm here today to talk about. People use research for stuff. I wanted to ask a couple questions. Yeah and kind of like bringing it home to Colorado as like most folks are here in the local tech industry you through like all these various initiatives have gotten to kind of like see and touch like a lot of different communities and even communities around the state outside of Denver and Boulder where like so much of our attention happens. Like what kinds of trends are you seeing especially across the state like as the tech industry is like growing. Yeah well new communities are popping up which is phenomenal. So which which ones are on your. I was going to say for go code Colorado I got to go all around the state which was pretty fantastic. Grand Junction has a really fantastic community. They have an amazing co-working space called factory. Same thing with Montrose. They have proximity space. Those guys Brian Josh Dennis is Montrose. It's like an hour and a half South ish of Grand Junction on the other side of Gunnison the other side of those mountains.  They are doing really fantastic work. Durango is a very good kept secret. Best mountain biking in the world right and they have something called Vantif which used to be Mercury payments which is the largest payment processing company in the world. They have a huge headquarters there. They staff thousands of software developers. I know it's just like little quiet secret and then Solar City is there as well. Elon Musk's and their developer group for doing payments is also out of Durango. So there's some really cool stuff going on in other parts of the state. Coming here at the tail end of like Denver Startup Week I think there's always been a bit of a push to say like oh Colorado's like the next Silicon Valley next and then there's always left with the question of like do do do you want to have a Silicon Valley too like there are lots of things I not prefer about Silicon Valley like what do you see about the growth of Denver Boulder Tech and statewide tech like with regards to kind of forging its own character versus other places. So the best parts of Colorado will be that we intend usually tend to be a little kinder nicer to each other. I lived on both coasts I grew up in Los Angeles I lived in New York City for seven years. People in Colorado are just kinder and nicer in general and I would really hope to see that spirit continue on and so as Silicon Valley really does get here and it really has and the VC money flows. I actually heard the best thing yesterday is one venture capitalist said we destroy more companies than we build meaning that when that influx of cash comes into those companies it pushes them to grow faster than them maybe were built to grow right and as developers you really see that like all of a sudden this cash lands and you've got to exponentially grow that product and it sometimes breaks it right it wasn't fundamentally meant to be that big. That kind of exponential growth is what causes a lot of the really bad parts of Silicon Valley right all the money flows in and all the bad behavior does as well and so I think what is really our task in Colorado is to stay true to our roots the work-life balance the being kind to one another and the true pioneering entrepreneurial spirit. Do you think do you think it's like a negative on people's career if they're in a for better or worse Colorado is and will probably always be kind of a secondary market in tech like is being here am I giving up a lot do you think like in terms of salary prestige etc or is it possible to like just be here and be happy for a career. I guess it depends what you want I will say Silicon Valley does have advantages it's an older ecosystem right and so the things that are smaller here are just bigger there and you can get a lot more done faster there is more cash there are more entrepreneurs there is more access to larger companies but I I really just depends what you want and I think no I think you can be successful here and it depends on your definition of success I heard the definition of success once that I follow which is you get to live anywhere you want if you get to decide where you live then you have made your life successful and so that to me means you don't have to be in Silicon Valley but you're still doing what you love. It's an interesting I feel like we have to remind ourselves if you spend a lot of time amongst tech people and so forth it's easy to forget this like extreme level of privilege which is like I can quit my job and then like move literally anywhere I want in the entire world and have a job like let's pessimistically say like two weeks from now unless as long as they don't like check references and stuff. Don't call anyone I know with I know you're not like organizing go code this year bring it up a little bit for folks who are not familiar can you like give the pitch on go code. Sure absolutely it is a business app challenge started by the state of Colorado it's the first and only of its kind at the state level so the state opens its data for developers and entrepreneurs to get in there and to build apps that then they go on kind of a journey so most of you probably participated in a hackathon and at the end of that weekend your idea and your app usually dies right there's no one to really carry the forward momentum on and so go code Colorado was created to try and carry on that forward momentum so it's a all weekend hackathon in five locations around the state so that includes Durango and Grand Junction Colorado Springs for Collins and Denver usually takes place in April and then from that to finalists from each location so that's 10 total go on to a mentor weekend and that mentor weekend is meant to mentor the application along and then from there it goes on for another month to a finals round and then the top three teams win twenty five thousand dollars each to either carry on their app or just to have some money for what they built. Yeah it's some pretty neat things have like come out of it and a lot of use of public data and like all that all that kind of stuff time back to equally work so I am a believer in the theory that like racism is generally a white people's problem sexism is generally a men's problem if I'm a man in software development and I'm aware of these issues and trying to create like a more positive inclusive culture what are some of the things that I might like subconsciously do to erode that kind of culture that aren't like the obvious you know the most obvious yeah yeah absolutely so in general tech has two problems they have a pipeline problem but they also have a leaky faucet problem and I actually think the pipeline problem is less an issue than it is minorities and women in particular and minorities leaving after a little while and they leave because they're always the odd duck right so you can be the odd duck for first year you can be the odd duck for the first five years but after ten years you're like oh my god why am I still the only why am I always the only and so the the things that can happen is is that if you are in an engineering team and you have just one female you gotta hire another female somebody else of a minority background and and you have to get to try at least three or four frankly kind of like a critical mass critical mass yeah and critical mass is still very small like once you have three or four you know then they start hiring their friends because what tends to happen is that it's not that we're all racist and sexist it's just that we like and know people who look and like ourselves and so when you go to hire you hire within your network and your network are people that look like you I am just as guilty you go on my about page all of them are ladies I'm like oh I need to hire a white dude and it's true you know a couple connected with those people because you hire who you know you know everyone that comes up to me that wants to help me they're female it's great so I have the so I get it right it's very quickly it's a slippery slope so you need to be very careful when you have the only woman in your office because she will leave or the only minority in your office he will leave the other things that are just small the culture tends to the culture of the companies tend to fit who the majority are and I actually said this yesterday at a tech stars talk and one of the tech star guys was like oh my god you described us so they basically said is if your office has ping-pong and beer and scooters and flip-flops and pizza on demand and foosball and foosball tournaments and I can go on and on right it's fine but you're only catering to a certain audience right and if you want to hire women who are let's say 35 years old you need to aspire in your culture to think about well what would a 35 year old woman care about and then include those things as well so don't overcorrect don't get rid of ping-pong and foosball and scooters and all of those things you're saying we're not allowed to have fun I'm not at all keep all those things but then add in a maternity leave policy a child care policy a sick children policy holistic healing like what would she care about right so don't overcorrect and get rid of all the things that the gentleman love because that's actually what causes the the the defensiveness right like you got to keep everything but then also include everything else because and even if you have no women on staff if you build it they will come they will see they'll be like oh they already have maternity care I can't tell you how many companies don't have maternity care and then one day a girl and staff gets pregnant and then they're like oh shit that's really expensive to course correct or I mean in the like nightmare scenario right is that people have said things like yeah we're nervous about hiring women because we don't we can't afford to have a maternity leave and it's like oh that's actually illegal not only are you a dick sir but you're also a criminal that's also illegal no but just think about it too it's like it's hard to also fathom at this point you know I the problem isn't just gender and race like that's what we go to first but let me just paint a clearer picture tech runs very young right the average age for a software developer is 29 the mean is 27 which means that if you're a 40 year old man you're aging out very quickly from your own industry and that sucks too right and there are a couple faces that are like shit right behind you work from home and don't tell them how long you've been in the industry no it's but the same thing and classism and religion and the LGBTQ community and veterans and the disabled like the list goes on and on and on and tech tends to fail kind of across the board and so in Colorado we think well we don't have a very diverse racial population but there are other ways to fix this issue and we just have to be a little bit more open-minded about it the other blind spot sorry I'll just say really quickly is slack you got to be nice to each other on slack and you can't be so juvenile it's I know I'm sorry but all of those like sexual harassment trainings you got and like in person like this crowd actually wouldn't do them in person I used to work in advertising they would totally do it in person they don't do those things in person here but man Twitter slack and our lives now are so public and private right our work life is both that you know don't be a dick on slack I'm not slack don't be a dick on Twitter just because you're not at work right your co-workers see that they can follow you your managers can follow you be a good kind person most of the time and if you wouldn't say it to your mother don't say it on slack that would be my piece of advice that's your mic dropper thanks very much Elaine you're welcome thank you guys


Awesome. Perfect. So Tom, would you pick off the meeting when you're around? Or should I start? I'll let you rock and roll, Andrea. I love rock and roll, so I'll go first. Hey Andrea, I'm sorry, we're still waiting on Steve, he's trying to get in for whatever I'm in. Nice seeing you Steve, by the way. You too. And welcome, Ray. So let's go. Let's go to rock and roll. First, very quick introduction today. We're gonna touch on topics with trade finance and digitalization of trade finance in CrossFit ESG. So this is DeFi and ESG entwined. So Lee and I, Lee's wrong, we've got to bring to the few weeks back in time and we started chatting. I found out some interesting things about him and being using some stuff from a high collager from Linus Foundation. So I decided to back up his project and grant him a space here in this community because I think it touches on some toxic topics we've been digging up for since the beginning of 2022. So I let the stage directly to the boy team for believing in the speech. Welcome guys and nice to hear from you all. I'll leave it on to you, Andrea, if you want to go to the start first, just tell me what you're doing on your end, will avoid. Sage is yours and welcome, by the way. Thank you. You're actually going to pass it right over to Lee to get us all introduced. Cool. So, listen, welcome to this little chat. Firstly, I'd like to introduce myself, Lee Turone, CEO of Boy Finance and intro the rest of my team. I'll leave you on to Andrew to introduce himself. Hi, I'm Andrew. I'm a CFO boy and I've been in the financial financial services industry for pretty much my entire career. I've been working with hedge funds as well as administrators. My latest sort of stuff has been working on some projects where we're really integrating a lot of crypto related investments and things like that into backend systems. And so a lot of these funds that we work with really have been getting crypto funds up and running. And so obviously, we need to service those. And so that's, so, you know, quite recently, that's sort of the projects that we've been working on. You know, work for several major global firms, financial firms, as well as accounting firms and so on and so forth. I think I'll pass on to RZ next. Hello, very nice to be here. So my background is in banking, international banking with special focus on trade finance, syndications, asset generation and secondary market transactions. So for the last few years, I've been working in blockchain ecosystem and I've been working with Boy for the last two years as an advisor on banking and trade finance. So on to Steve. Hi. Hi, everyone. Stephen Matthew. I'm the maritime and ESG advisor to Boy. I have a long history in the marine industry, shipping industry, a marine engineer, a shipping lawyer, and have been involved in clean tech for the last 14 years, based predominantly in Hong Kong. I have a particular passion for the oceans, but also ESG and how it's to be applied in the coming days, months, years in order for us to justly transition into a world that is going to be still around in the way in which we like to enjoy it. So thank you.  So everyone's given everyone's the whole tip of it. This is the small part of the team that's just focused on our discussions today, but we have an extended team as well. So yeah, hopefully one day you'll get to intro to the rest of them. I didn't say about myself, but myself was on an FX background, so in finance and then moved on to FX swap stallions. So the whole history of finances and exchanges and that kind of thing really has kind of led me on to where we are here today. So on that note, I was going to tell you a bit about how we got started. And I mean, that stems back from us, my position within the financial markets to see that there was a clear disruption or clear evolution that was about to happen, which we all kind of know, or people have become more aware of it now with the digitization trade, but from that whole arena of paper-based trade and inefficiencies and global trade, which then became highlighted. I greatly appreciate it. I don't want to say greatly appreciate it, but to us it was a good moment in which what I called forced adoption was to happen. And that forced adoption where it became longer from COVID, and that whole arena around obviously COVID and the slowdown of trade, etc. So that kind of really, that forced adoption was pretty strong really for us all. It kind of moved up from there from that forced adoption to the need for the digitization of trade and trade finance, which leads us on to the growth of trade finance gap due to COVID and other geopolitical and now geopolitical issues. So that growth of trade finance gap, which now stands up at plus $1.7 trillion. So it kind of looks like, where can we go from here in terms of what we want to do? We want to digitize trade. What can we do with these blockchain technologies? How are we able to apply this? So then that became one of our main focuses was to be able to digitize trade, digitize trade finance, and reduce that as a name to reducing that massive huge trade finance gap. And there's a lot of stuff that's happening now which is focused around digitization of trade from the ICC. So this was kind of, we've been working on this before that was happening, but even I think everyone knew in the environment that this was going to happen or at least hoped it was going to happen in this forced adoption and meant that it happened a lot quicker and which we're seeing now today. So one of the other things that we kind of looked upon was as we go back to the other slide. Yeah, one of the other things that was that was very relevant to us and was in fact the emerging markets and where we were able to best be suited to try and if we were at the point when we're able to issue trade finance, digital trade finance, where we'd be best suited, where it would have the most impact. So we kind of looked at focusing on emerging markets, SME markets in Latin, Africa, EMEA and APAN. So yeah. So let me look at the problems that we saw with the digitization of digitalized trade, the ability to then issue into trade finance. How could we do it with the use of the technology that was there? When we first started, it was a challenge. People sort of mentioned how you're going to, that's a whole lot of work to be able to do. You guys aren't going to be able to do it.  So we were able to, we kind of over the over time, we've actually been able to narrow down our focus because there were other companies, businesses that would support becoming a more mature blockchain space, more mature use of digital assets. And that ability meant that we could streamline and down to the things that we were able to focus on. So we kind of been able to focus on liquidity. So as a focus, what can we do if we're able to try to reduce the trade finance gap, where I want to have key focuses was to introduce new forms of liquidity. So then with the evolution of DeFi, the use of tokenization of assets meant that we could actually pull link bridge into these DeFi pools, which meant that obviously there's a huge amounts of third party liquidity and democratized liquidity to be able to introduce into reducing the trade finance gap and trade finance. But the use of to be able to do that, we needed the use of interoperability by connecting to multi chains, public change, private chains for the relevancy of those protocols. So we're able to go, when I was going to public chains, there's huge amounts of liquidity, which are now involved from previously from non regulated to now we're seeing with the introduction of asking institutional etc the ability to tap into institutional regulated forms of liquidity. So that also then moves on to the use of private chains for data privacy storage of documentations, which clearly within financial transactions and trade finance, these are information and documents that need to be kept private to to avoid all this sort of problems that really happen these days, which I'm talking about the terminology fraud and other regular regulatory compliance issues. This digitization helps us also then to focus on risk mitigation and remove risk for banking and SME growth. So one of the other things that we really focus on obviously the main focuses that we had in the discussion that we've had the topic of discussion today has really been around ESG. Now, for us, it was one of the most important things that we could we were had the ability to introduce. So for us creating this ESG solution, a SASB standardization meant that we could not only introduce finance, liquidity, digitization, but we could offer it at ESG stand stand up. So we basically can have the ESG finance that this was really, really key for us to be able to and we actually really pleased that we're able to introduce this to create an ESG sustainable finance. So yeah, move on. So as I've said from the slide before, to be able to do this, we meant us connecting with different forms of partners with both for both in regulatory space, which leads on to banking, as well as enterprise grade solutions to enable that regulatory viewing. So we're able to, for example, use of hyperledger fabric. Now, there is a layer of firefly. So with that use of firefly, we're able to view audit manage all the transactions on various blockchains, not just one, not just single blockchain, but multi blockchain. So we're able to see what's happening on our public chain, as well as on say quarter, as a private chain. So that audit layer really puts in a regulatory space with which we're, you know, it's paramount again for us. Next slide. Yeah. So as I said, the use of firefly for the audit layer is paramount. On top of that, there are we've also there's introduction on hyperledger, the use of trade lens for digital, which comes back to the digitization of shipping documents. Again, without that, we wouldn't be able to necessarily do as much as we could. That digitization of shipping documents means that on a private chain means that ability to have the data only shown to the relevant parties, which again within supply chain, trade finance is paramount. Next slide. So going back to the use of the various blockchains, that means that we're able to go and also the other relevant institutional grade solutions means that we're now able to move into an arena again, regulated where banks and and other regulated finance institutions are able to engage into trade into trade finance, but from a decentralized democratized standpoint as well. So with the ability of those of the private blockchains, we can then go into regular compliance privacy around data, risk mitigation, or civil transparency. And one of the key things that we're going to do is to enable ESG and sustainable finance. This also enables us co financing. So you're able to syndicate financing for banks and to defy and to see fine, which means that there is something that is again is very, very key to ours and which I'll see will be speaking about shortly. But the ability for banks to co finance means that they're able to have a juicy risk and exposure. So the introduction of these is a huge advantage to banks finance gap. And it enter into the bank, Ozzy. So Ozzy, thank you very much. We talking about the existing problems in global trade finance, the major problems and banking, and then what offers to SMEs and banks. And then I will touch up on the S side of ESG trade is the bad end of global trade needs financing right now. SMEs accounts for almost 90% for companies around the world, but most of them let access to affordable trade finance as banks are unable to meet the demands. Banks and in principle tend to focus processes, credit histories and less impact on their cost of capital. Of course, geographic political lens. And also banks and corporates can't be launched in emerging countries. So as of 2022, the global trade finance gap reached $7 trillion and a very big portion of this amount belong to SMEs rejected to get financed. Another issue, a big issue as we all know, the trade and banking cannot cope up with the opportunities offered by noble technologies. The documentation processes are manual paper based, slow, long, expensive, prone to human error, dependent on intermediaries, many, many archaic elements combined together. So this is where blockchain comes into the picture. So blockchain combines three different areas, computer science, economy and law, three fields which have not been used for common objective before. So it allows a lot of advancements to the existing technology used by banks. So if someone holds a 10 pound on the blockchain, an information chain identifies every trade that that 10 pounds has been involved in. So this is very, very different than using PDF documents. So using PDF documents is not digitization in order to have need to be versions as reliable. So of course, a lot of banks are investing in blockchain and blockchain's ecosystem and all the time, one of the biggest banks in the world estimates potential savings in banking each year is going to be around $20 billion. So what Envoy offers to do with blockchain and decisions it offers, if we can go through the next, okay, thank you. So as Lee mentioned, there is on a single platform which is secure, auditable and transparent and it enables end-to-end supply chain by tokenizing LCs and converting them into tradable assets, of course, which is also interoperable with public and private blockchains connecting to another very, very important feature of the platform is monitoring ESG and sustainability. I will touch upon S side before I leave the word to Steve in a minute. But the biggest advantage of Envoy platform is banks and corporates can treat it as a catalog and just pick up different combinations for different use cases. So on Envoy, everything is modular, it can be added, APIs can be added or removed, which gives a huge flexibility and practicality. So in terms of financing opportunities, tokenized LCs and smart contracts, they enable products which were not available to SMEs before through DeFi and also remodeling of existing banking products. So Lee mentioned co-financing and syndications. So under the current market conditions, syndications require extensive due diligence and they need to be arranged by different banks. And also there are a lot of underlying, high underlying costs associated with the documentation and legal expenses. So in order to justify those expenses, usually the amount generated is going to be over a certain threshold, which is usually at least 20-25 million dollars. So this of course eliminates the opportunity for SMEs and any company which cannot trade in these big tickets. So that's where Envoy and the platform and what platform comes into the picture. So we are able to offer to any SMEs or any corporates, any size of company actually, any ticket to syndicate with different finances with banks or with other DeFi suppliers. So on the other side, in addition to co-financing, we can offer secondary markets, trading opportunities, bundling transactions and also as the platform evolves, pre-financing and post-financing are also possibilities that can be considered. So overall, what Envoy offers to banks is definitely a lower lending risk. So trade finance is a low risk asset class and the transactions are based on the flow of physical goods and services. But the risks are further reduced due to transparency and elimination of intermediaries. The operational costs are decreased. Processes are automated, which lowers human error risk and also automated audit function provides a historical record of all activities for each customer. Immutable records increase security, due diligence is simplified and enhanced, which makes banks' lives much, much easier because onboarding is a big hurdle, a lot of documentation. If you consider that SMEs are not digitized either, all the paperwork that are submitted by SMEs, having them digitized and onboard makes banks' lives much, much easier, especially for the assessment times and credit reviews as well. So in addition to all these operations to other markets, which gives them the opportunity to maximize and simplify onboarding processes, they can reach more customers and increase their customer base and market shares in different parts of the world. So definitely access to, larger access to finance on the list, transparent cost of finance, science, much more. Envoys, well, the vision is to provide financial inclusion and S side of ESG is very, very crucial to us. So I will try to give a few examples of the benefits that we're offering on the S side. Can I ask a couple of questions? Of course. Yes. So the catalog that you mentioned a couple of charts before here, the catalog is that's kind of a standard issue. The catalog in a sense of here's the kind of things that you as a bank could offer. No, of course, go ahead. Yeah, I can speak to that. So in terms of the catalog, basically the idea here is that our ecosystem that we're creating has a lot of sort of stand alone pieces to it. We all know that supply chain from beginning to end is a massive operation. There's so many elements to it, so many stakeholders, so many players, so many things that are involved that have to happen in concert for all to work from A to Z, right? And so each of these different players, each of these stakeholders, aren't necessarily involved in the entire process from the beginning. In fact, probably none of them are. So the idea of having this catalog, where we can have these standalone products, which were, for example, if a bank has their own due diligence process, but they don't have any ESG application, well, they can come onto our platform and use the ESG application in and of itself to generate reporting and things of that nature. Now, you may have another bank, maybe like a regional bank, for example, who doesn't have any of those facilities on their own, well, they can jump into our ecosystem as a whole. They can then take advantage of the financing system platform that we have. They can take advantage of the ESG system. They can take advantage of the due diligence system. All of those things working in concert around smart contracts and automation to really streamline a lot of their processes. So it's really a pick and choose. You can use just one of our programs. You can use all the programs.  So in effect, it's templates that all these banks, financial institutions can use. Absolutely. And then standardization. Standardization is happening. So when it comes to the catalog, the idea of what we build is a series of solutions that create an end-to-end transaction, right? So for example, you're able to, you know, KYC and onboarding, the DeFi pool for democratized lending. ESG solution, which enables, all this running series, means a lot of this. You're able to then offer an ESG or as well as carbon scoring, you're able to then also sustainable finance. You add it to the digital lending solution, and then it comes back to having a complete end-to-end flow of ESG or sustainable financing. Again, as Andrew said, if you wanted to basically, we onboard a bank, and that bank has 50,000 corporate clients or business clients, and they want to give those ESG scoring, we're able to run those through so that they end up with SASP certification for each of those clients. Okay. Good. That helps. And then I guess one other question. If I'm an SME in Singapore, for instance, and I want to ship some stuff to DRC, you know, and I want some trade finance. Am I seeing the envoy platform and where am I going like a bank and I'm kind of shopping amongst a bunch of banks? Yeah. So one of our products is this trade finance marketplace.  And so we have this trade finance marketplace where you can essentially list your contract. We essentially go through, when we tokenize the whole thing, and financiers can then log into the same platform, look around, shop around for finance opportunities. They can then finance what makes sense to them. And then if you're sort of subscribed to the whole ecosystem, you can then start tracking things. You can track where ships are going, where goods are. You can obviously run the AML, KYC, all the DD processes and everything so on and so forth. Prior to that, they're prior to that as part of the onboarding for us to offer the finance, what would be, they would come into our marketplace, but to enable that, they would have to have the shipping documents, the EBL solution with trade lens. So they don't have shipping documents. What those shipping documents, this sense with the sensors into our algorithms and to enable and on offer the trade finance, whether it be from bank or from... So that's how you're doing the onboarding is via trade lens and saying that's about the story. Partial onboarding, but partial onboarding. It depends on which stakeholder you are, where you would enter the ecosystem and where you would essentially interact. Okay, good. Yeah, that makes sense because I was thinking through the letter of credit scenario and how do you make sure that it's not fraudulent, et cetera. Exactly. Yeah. So again, it goes back to the discussion we had and one of the points will be, we continually pick a big pick upon. It's, we can't do it all, right? And this is one of the things we had, people began before, you can't do all this. Yeah, you know, we can't. Right? So then it's picking and choosing. You see other LC solutions like Contoro, et cetera. There you go. And then I'm going to try and do this. This is why part of the IBM immerse behind trade lens for us to do that. That's their domain. We're not even going to try and do it. It's not what we do. We're on the financial side. And so, yeah, so that's where the usage of the use of the third party partners and probability between other chains is how it works for us. So I think, you know, this is the time, Tom, you guys finally find those great questions. So Arzu, if you want to take it from there? Yeah, Arzu and then we'll just, Steve. So I will briefly touch on the S side of ESG as well, and then lead the way to Steve. So Lee went through this slide, but I just want to mention where the areas that we're focusing on. So basically emerging market corridors are priorities. The importance of these areas are because of the potential that SMEs carry and also the benefit that the blockchain and more project is going to bring on the social side. This includes female inclusion to businesses, female inclusion to business world by supporting small businesses, democratizing trade finance by enabling access to small loans for all sizes of companies, closing trade finance gap, generating new businesses, increasing employment, decreasing poverty, creating social justice, distributed workforce, creating distributed workforce, and community reinvestment. All these aspects of S are very, very important and key, especially in the emerging countries, and these are the areas that we are focusing right now. So here I'm going to lead the way to Steve to talk about E and G of ESG. Steve, on to you. Thanks Arzu. So ESG, global standardization, basically we've come from a place in the world where it's a non ESG world and it's fast becoming one. What will then follow from that will be standardized world of tomorrow. We're not quite there yet, but we're making great strides to get there. That's because the world's increasingly requiring transparency and integrity through the entire supply chain. ESG compliance with recognized standards will provide just that. VOI is building the tools to empower all stakeholders to have trust in the system. Next slide. So ESG understanding and engagement is no doubt growing and that's because businesses are getting on board ahead of what could sometimes be called the least or guided under ESG. There's multiple ESG frameworks at the moment with which you can comply. Some of them are quite complex. What we foresee happening is that they will be somewhat standardized and improve the more that they are used, the more that they are understood. As I said, it's currently largely unregulated, but what will happen with the regulations is there'll be no doubt compliance to ESG standards. Disclosure will be extremely important and transparency and a lot of this will be to foreshadow or to reduce what's called greenwashing, which is of course something that's done to show that you agree or sustainable, that you're not really, all you're doing is ticking a box. ESG in its proper form goes much deeper than that and that's the journey that everyone's currently on and which VOI hopes to be and is at the forefront of and hopes to continue to lead that. One of the ways that probably the main way which it will happen is through technology improvements, automation and AI that continues to improve to assist in this reporting, disclosure, risk management. There's a lot of data out there. There's a lot of data that's going to happen efficiently and effectively is through the continually improvement of these technologies. What currently goes on and this is where greenwashing is important to regulate and stamp out is in order for the world to work in a sustainable manner, currently there's a bit of a green premium required to be paid. That's to make up for all the amount of time that we've been able to use resources from the earth without paying full cost of those resources. Now the cost is reducing as we are getting into that but what it does is those that claim to be fulfilling their ESG requirements but are not doing that puts them at an unfair economic advantage. That's one of the main reasons why this regulation will continue to increase and improve and become harder for people and businesses to avoid. This is what VOI is doing. We're being built on a building ecosystem to ensure that trust is maintained in the whole system. Next slide. How will VOI do this? Through the trade finance or the supply chain where there's three main players which are finances, which are corporate banks, insurers, logistics companies that covers everything from land, sea, and air and all the intermediaries that facilitate transportation in those areas and of course the suppliers, the commodity houses, the farmers, the manufacturers, things like that. Let's have a look at one little aspect of logistics area which is my background which is shipping. Now in order for shipping to live up to its pledges there's a lot for it to do. Shipping is totally powered by fossil fuels. Let's look just at the environmental issues relating to the shipping and the major one which of course is climate change. Shipping has pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 50% from 2008 levels by 2050. Now this isn't an net zero but just as 50% because people know the difficulty shipping will have to reduce its carbon emissions while still making them to maintain global trade. Cargo volumes will grow by 130% by 2050 on current forecasts. Cargo volumes have grown fourfold since the 1980s so you can see how much of a growth has happened since 2008 to now to which emission levels have to go back to before you can then start to look at a 50% reduction by 2050. The big issue is there's currently no capability to replace fossil fuels at the scale required. Shipping is an area which would be rife and easy to understand why players within it would seek to greenwash to a certain extent because it's a very very difficult problem. I'm not saying this is a loan to shipping. This goes throughout industries, throughout economies globally. One thing they can do is focus on operations to reduce carbon emissions whilst purchasing carbon offsets to bridge the gap until cleaner fuels are available. What gives people, consumers, governments faith that they're doing that as transparency in the measurement and the measurability of their reductions. Now the only way that that can happen is through robust ESG reporting and robust ESG regulations. So we're looking at basically this aspect throughout the entire industry. What Boye hopes to do and is doing is bringing those onto its blockchain and into its product, its ESG product. Next slide. You can see there's not only the emissions issues that are plaguing the maritime industry, although they're not plaguing, but they're going to need to be reported upon. As compliance and financial risk for changing regulations and sanctions, there's vessel tracking, screening inefficiencies, there's illicit activities, the shipping industry's global, that's often in the high seas. That's difficult or easy for companies to try and get around some of the regulations that are in place. Now looking at the ESG and Boye ESG screening for suppliers and corporates, we can see that obviously emissions is one of the really big issues that the world's facing, global greenhouse gases need to reach net zero. We're not on track to do that. That's one of the scorecards and one of the ones that's heavily weighted within the Boye ESG rating system. Energy management. So as I said before, it's going to take some management to reduce, to get the low hanging fruit, to make those greenhouse gas reductions quickly. Ecological impact. So this goes from everything from forest management to soil management to regular pollutants and the way in which products are produced. That of course includes the mining industry. There's a focus. The world has a focus on mining. A lot of that's hidden. And so one of the things that needs to be done is a close look at the manufacturing process from mines all the way through to the end consumer. And that obviously through mining, there's a close look at waste and hazardous materials. As for the governance side, we look at business ethics and competitive behavior. So antitrust, price fixing, other such things which are unethical. The management, looking at boards, looking at the operational boards, you're looking at vested interests. You're looking at regulatory environment under which they operate. So not all countries provide the same levels of regulations. One of the things that is very interesting about the way in which ESG's envisioned to work is that there'll be a level playing field. Yes, there will be some governments that maybe a little bit more lax in their regulatory policing of certain instances, but to engage in global trade, you have to reach a certain bar across the ecosystem. And of course, you're looking at safety and accident management and sanctions is another big one, which is of course very prevalent in today's world, given what's going on, what's happened to Russia after its invasion of the Ukraine. And you don't want to be on the wrong side of trying to avoid those sanctions. How do we do it? So basically, we gather data from over 47,000 publications and news sources and we use the SASB framework for scoring on each of the ESG elements within that framework. What that gives out is comparative screening for individual companies within industries and at ranks in performance of courthouse and against those peers. And the screening is involved for key sustainability topics. I won't go into what's involved with the SASB framework, but that's probably the best known or one of the best known frameworks that there are that seems to, from my point of view, cover the key areas robustly, but also does that in a way in which it's still operable and still as user-friendly as it can be for the difficulty in gathering data in relation to a whole load of data points to then come out with a framework scorecard. And then it looks at this impact and how the score it looks like. And next slide is this viola environment, who we all know viola is a water company. It's basically there to help manage not only water but waste and many other issues. So it's an environmental company, so it's starting at the right place. But of course, there's many other areas that environmental companies have viewed. You look at Tesla, which has been in and out of the ESG ETF in the US because of various ways in which it mines, nickel or perhaps labour standards, even though at its heart it's trying to reduce emissions, which has seemed to be, well, it is a good mission for a company to have. But at the end of the day, as I mentioned with blockchain being able to put the scorecards on their transparency, and voice committed to keeping abreast of best-in-class technology to ensure we maintain the leading position in clean green trade finance. So I'll hand over to Andrew who'll talk a bit more about the voice and envoy technology and products. Yeah, thank you. Absolutely, like Steve said, look, technology is enabling the change right now. None of this is possible without real technology, real path to change. And right now what we see is there is a very distinct sort of movement from legacy systems, paper-based systems to digitization. That's kind of where most people are at. And it goes back to what RZ was saying where PDF is not really digitization, but that's kind of where most of the companies are at. But the next step is then to move into tokenization, getting everything onto the blockchain, because that ultimately enables smart contract automation. And by being able to automate things, we're then able to really create efficiencies, creating efficiencies lowest cost, automation reduces risk. And it brings about everything that we need in order to move the whole industry forward. That includes things like enhanced data transparency, accessible trails. And then by having all of those items together, now we can bring in institutional third-party custodians. And one of the beauties of what we're trying to do is not just change the current landscape of shipping and everything, but also of what DeFi looks like, what certain current practices in crypto and things like that, we want to move that forward into a more mature space. Now, there's no denying that there's major changes coming. Right now, we already see major financial institutions that are forming crypto strategies within their hedge funds. They're implementing DeFi solutions into a lot of the core businesses. Now, the key point here is that current financiers are really only focused on increasing profits within their existing core businesses. Obviously, that's low hander for best easy stuff for them to do and make that conversion. But that leaves the trade finance gap, the $1.7 trillion of unservice financing. So this is a massive opportunity for us to fill an untapped market segment. Money's literally on the floor. We just need to have the solution and the tool to pick it up. And so what we've sort of identified and just still down was that there's two major catalysts that's creating this gap ultimately. It's risk and liquidity. Obviously, the major banks out there, the ones that are currently financing trade, they're very risk adverse. They have very low risk tolerances and SMEs are inherently high risk. And so they're picking up the low hanging fruit. They're funding those, but the tier one companies, but by the time you get down to tier three, well, there's no money left. There's no liquidity. So that brings us into the liquidity problem. Well, banks need to spread out the risk, but it's slow. Really, banking processes, one bank still needs to take on the majority of the risk before they can spread it out. Now, so our co-financing product or solution really helps to bring that onto the front end and allow SMEs and other companies to de-risk and to get funded. And so obviously, then the other piece of the puzzle is, well, simple solution. We lack liquidity. Well, let's just find more liquidity. Well, how do we do that? Well, that's when we cap into DeFi and where, as we all know, there's millions and billions of dollars sat in crypto, but crypto is kind of its own little world, right? Where everything's just kind of happening, magic internet money, some people like to throw around. Well, how do we capture that? How do we capture that liquidity? Well, it's captured using staking, it's captured using farming and pooling TVL as a total value lock by locking up crypto value because someone had to buy that, right? Someone still had to use real-world money to buy the crypto and then lock it into stake it and lock it into the TVL. Well, how do we then bring that over into the real world? Well, in order to do that, we use DAOs and the boy marketplace.  If a TVL is literally a pool of value sat there, well, someone needs to manage that and deploy it. The simplest solution from a retail perspective is using DAOs to deploy that cash. What we've done and what we've done is by partnering up with MetaMask institutional, we're now able to create a solution that allows that because everyone that's on there is DD, they run through all the AML processes and everything like that. Well, now we can get institutional investors also on board using our professional fund managers, using our professional institutional grade products to bring on an entirely other group of liquidity of defy investment that couldn't have happened otherwise before. And then now that we have two sort of TVLs, two different types of liquidity, well, how do we connect all this together? Well, as we were talking before, you know, obviously, there's a lot of different blockchains out there. There's a lot of different chains that all have their own TVLs. Well, we can connect them all together using cross-chain liquidity. It's all about standardization. So while everyone has their own sort of thing that they're investing, that they're purchasing and staked in, by having crushing liquidity, crushing bridges and slots, we're able to amalgamate all of that and then bring that as a whole onto our platform, onto our boy marketplace. And now we've bridged the gap between crypto and real world. There's no, in creating truly sustainable defy because what's happening right now also in defy is you're staking and you're generating a yield, but that yield really isn't real yield because there's no economic benefit behind it. They're just simply, most protocols are just minting more tokens and giving to you, which is just dilution at the end of the day. You're not actually gaining from economic standpoint, but what we're doing is we're connecting this to real world trade where the, where when you finance a contract, you're generating interest and interest and then builds up the TVL from the background. That TVL now has more value inherently within it, which can support the yields. So there's no magic. It's none of that. This is real gains here. And so, as, so we're kind of bringing it all into the new era, right? There's dire new changes. This is what we talked about before, digitization and tokenization is really what's going to get us there. Be able to do the automation and everything like that, massive opportunity in this trade finance gap. And so how do we capture that? It's again, by building the ecosystem with best in class solutions. And part of those solutions that we sort of are thinking about and building this continual innovation, right? So one of the things we were talking about before with ESG, ESG scorecards and scores, they're a thing, they're a product that sort of encapsulates, that represents a company's, they're sort of rating, right? But what we can do is then sort of build on this with using NFTs and things like that, that are actual containers that hold these sort of ratings and everything like that. And by being able to have those in sort of a built-in container, you can really easily trade and move items around. You're able to now create like an asset class and actual real world usage of something that was before just trading monkey pictures, right? Now we kind of bring it to the next level where you now are able to encapsulate say a full contract trade within NFTs, there's contract trade that NFTs would contain all the ESG data, would contain all the shipping data, all the AML, all the sanctions data, all so on and so forth, all those things together into a single sort of cohesive folder or product. But again, DOWS and DeFi, that's what's going to create that bridge between crypto world, the digital world and the physical world. And so this is actually, Tom, you asked about this earlier, how does that all sort of fit together? Well, we have multiple products that we ultimately create that fits the need of each of the players within supply chain. And by having sort of tailored solutions to each of those, we're able to meet the needs of each one of them. And then by bringing it all into a single ecosystem, everything can work in concert with each other, we've been are able to create efficiencies because that's where one of the major lacks of efficiencies are is during data handoffs or product handoffs or things like that, where you now have to go into a new system, a new place, a new thing. Well, by having it all in a single ecosystem, it can all talk to each other, it can all happen instantaneously. And so again, all stakeholders are on boarded onto the digital system. It's blockchain-based, secure, it's audible, transparent. It's all those things that we all know blockchain brings to the table. But now you have all of these players within the single ecosystem of standardization, we're all talking the same language. Now we can create a product, a service supply chain as a service product, where we can then break it down and say, look, if you need a specific use, it's there for you. If you need to see the bigger picture, for example, like if you were, say, a shipping agent or a logistics provider, you perhaps need to see some of the stuff at the beginning and towards the end, and as well as through the whole shipping process. Well, now that all that data sat there in one place, and you can access that as needed ad hoc, however it may be, you'll think about like customs agents and things like that. Well, customs can now access these things digitally. They're able to verify things digitally. We can even then begin talking about the next stage of automation, automating the customs process. That would speed things up and create so much efficiency. That's where tokenized LCs, tokenized bills of ladings and letters of credits all come into play. And then again, touching back on liquidity pools, the retail is able to now bring in financing from DAOs by using DAOs, bring in financing from crypto liquidity into trade finance. Similarly, institutional custodians and fund managers can do that on an accredited basis, on a regulated basis through our MetaMask institutional portal going through, again, they can create their own regulated DeFi product, DeFi pools and bring that into trade finals.  Like, you know, at the end of the day, everybody needs to be on the same page for data to really mean something has to be comparable. It has to be, people need to be kind of on the same page. And so that's what this does. If everybody's already in this ecosystem, if everyone's already using these other products, well, the ESG piece flows directly into it. And so hopefully all these solutions that we've put together really can come into play to solve a lot of the problems that are existing now, create a lot of efficiencies and ultimately bring about a better world. So I appreciate you guys taking the time. You know, if there's any questions, we'd love to. You need a great presentation, Andrew, by the way. Comprehensive, great talking. I think we're coming up to the end of the hour, it's on. Would you like to handle this? Or are we going to do? Or should we ask the attendance to go to some questions? We're okay on our side, just to stay a bit longer if there's any questions. Sorry if we dragged you guys on a bit, right? Yeah, let's see what questions. Let's give a few questions here. If there are any, since they can stick around. And while we're waiting for that, thanks, Lee, Andrew, Arzu, Steve, great presentation, you see some of the stuff in the chat there. Interestingly enough, back in 2017, I actually did some consulting for somebody who had a kind of, they were trying to solve the problem you guys solve. So I like seeing this, your presentation here, what you're up. Funny enough, we actually started Lee and I really got talking right around that time as well, where we discussed, trying to figure out, we're in a similar industry, we saw some of this stuff. My wife is actually a logistics provider. So this is all sort of in the realm of where we were thinking, where we were headed. And we saw a lot of these problems coming up, even before COVID and everything like that. And that was really just an affirmation for us, like, hey, we're on the right track. This is obviously an issue and it needs to be solved sooner than later. And so we've been really putting our head to the grindstone. We could have done a lot of other things and made our millions and then got out of it, not really created anything. But our thought here was that, look, there needs to be real change. There needs to be something there needs to be an evolution. And so we wanted to be on the forefront of that and took our time to really thoughtfully create a product. It took our time. Tried to solve some of these things that realized that we know that we couldn't and know that we wanted to. And then the rest of the tech catch caught up. And the ICC eventually kind of catches, you know, and then, yeah, digitization. Right. You've just made a lot easier. Now we're able to do some of the things that we wanted to do. A lot of that lead work is now finally coming to a head. Okay. Yeah. Good deal. So one last thing here and look at EnvoyDeFi.com. I had a little problem finding your website. So I'm glad you put that up there for folks who are still around. Any questions from anybody before we have? So we're moving everything to Envoy as an overall company that brands, you know, on the umbrella of Envoy, we have Boy. So Boy Finance is really the piece of the DeFi pools, DeFi, and the permission DeFi and then to lending. And then we have the rest of the shows. So if you want to check out boyfinance.com, it's kind of our latest stuff around DeFi and everything like that. And then the ESG stuff now will be, that will be going live for the rest of the, for everyone for deployment and for the new websites on the ESG as well. Any final questions out there from anybody who's still able to stick around? There are congratulations basically. Representation Lee, Steve, Arson. We didn't even board everyone or we just, we've just, we've gone on so long that we've answered everyone. You have nothing to worry about. He's pitchlessly rather, you see, when you tap into the trade finance gap and you see somebody that is striving in order to fix it, this is already very sub not so many things. You said it perfectly by the way before, this is an evolution, but as I always say, and you know it by the way, this is an evolution lead into a revolution in the way trade finance is done nowadays and needs to go through that revolution otherwise. Absolutely. It's very long review. Yeah. It's long, but it's going to pay off in the end because otherwise the industry will fade away literally. It's no longer sustainable the way it's done today.  And one of the questions maybe that I will pose you later on while we go for other meetings is that how you see the new frameworks being put in place for your solutions, namely URDT and VLPC. But I think we're going to have time to go back on these topics, guys, to dig out for more interaction to that space. It's interesting stuff. That's why I currently cherish this meeting to take place. Trade finance gap is definitely one of the arguments. I love them all since they finance in connection, especially with ESG and sustainable development goals. So I thank you guys. We go on to dig for more topics to be touched in the next meetings. On my behalf of all the group, I thank you so much for believing so many insights. It's going to be off. Cool. Thanks. Thanks for having us, Andreas and the rest of the guys. So yeah. Okay. You see, we have IHAN, I call it IHAN Bay, the salt and trade finance. We have been already talking, Andrea. Yes, yes, of course. I mentioned Andrea as well. Yes, IHAN Bay. Very nice. Thank you so much for that. You're welcome. You're welcome. And that's for the rest. We're going to be back in two weeks, Don. Have a nice evening. Have a nice evening. Thank you. Bye, guys. Bye-bye. Bye.


He's taken the internet by storm with his badass movie roles yet wholesome real life personality, and is becoming more popular than anyone thought possible. He's told amazing stories on screen, but what's his backstory offscreen? Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Matt Rogers and this is the story of Keanu Reeves. Now I got on the Keanu Train growing up with the Matrix trilogy. I idolise Neo for more years than I care to admit, to the point that I wore out the VHS of the Matrix Reloaded, but Reeves has been around long before then, so let's go way back. Little known fact is that Keanu Reeves was actually born in Lebanon back in 1964, which amazingly places him in his mid 50s by the way. He was born to an English mother and a Chinese Hawaiian father, so Reeves had no lack of experiencing various cultures growing up. In an interview back in 2013, Reeves said, quote, my grandmother is Chinese and Hawaiian, so I was around Chinese art, furniture and cuisine when I was growing up. I remember that I really liked haikus, I also liked anime and kung fu movies, so yeah I was exposed to Asian culture since I was a kid, end quote. But as diverse as his childhood was, it was not without its dark and heartbreaking moments. When Keanu was just 3 years old, his father abandoned him and his family, leaving them to fend for themselves. On the other hand, his father being imprisoned for selling heroin at a local airport. The family moved away, however, unfortunately this was the first of many divorces that Keanu's mother went through in years to come. After being expelled from a handful of Canadian schools due to his, quote, rambunctious behaviour, Keanu found a passion for hockey before dropping out of school altogether to concentrate on acting. Like most great actors, Reeves started out in the theatre before appearing in a few commercials in the early 1980s for brands such as Coca-Cola. Who's your coach? My dad. However, his career really started with 80s movies such as the Bill and Ted series, Permanent Record and River's Edge, where Reeves started alongside his best friend River Phoenix, older brother to Joaquin Phoenix. Keanu and River soon became inseparable and went on to work on a few movies together, one of which being My Own Private Idaho, where Phoenix during filming developed a serious drug addiction. Four years later, when they were both 23, River Phoenix took a deadly combination of morphine and cocaine and tragically passed away. A year later, Keanu Reeves' career changed gears to more serious roles, most notably in the fantastic thriller Speed with Sandra Bullock, and then famously turning down $11 million to be in Speed 2, Cruise Control. He did, however, accept a few roles such as Johnny Mnemonic, Chain Reaction, and Feeling Minnesota that all turned out to flop at the box office. But things took a turn for the better with the 1997 film The Devil's Advocate, which Reeves starred alongside Al Pacino, but our friend Keanu had bigger fish to fry, which is where we enter The Matrix, the worldwide phenomenon that launched Reeves into Hollywood's stardom. He starred, of course, in the lead role as the chosen one, Neo, who is plucked from obscurity to have his eyes opened up to the real world and then capable of performing unexplainable feats. You would be forgiven for thinking that things would only get better from here for Keanu, but tragedy struck during filming for The Matrix. His girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Syme, was eight months pregnant with their child, Ava, who was then stillborn, then resulting in the couple's breakup just a few weeks later. Just a year and a half later, Syme was on her way to a party at Marilyn Manson's home when she was in a fatal car accident, which took her life at the age of just 28. Keanu had this to say in a 2006 interview, quote, grief changes shape, but it never ends. People have a misconception that you can deal with it and say, it's gone and I'm better, they're wrong. When the people you love are gone, you're alone. Keanu being the amazing person that he is didn't let these tragedies get the better of him, and he went on to complete The Matrix trilogy with The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions, donating 70% of his salary to charity. He then had his directorial debut in 2013 in Man of Tai Chi, also in the lead role, going on to make many more outstanding movies. One that I really liked was the thriller Knock Knock, but more recently the John Wick movies, which are the best action movies I've seen in a long time. His deadly characters are dramatically contrasted with his real-life charm and charisma, always having the perfect thing to say in any given situation. What is your secret for always staying down to earth? Well, I mean... gravity. And ensuring he's dodging any potential scandals along the way. Plus, his humility knows no bounds, as he has been secretly donating millions to children's charities for years. Moving forward, we can look forward to Toy Story 4, Keanu playing Duke Kaboom, Canada's greatest stuntman. Huh. Oh yeah. Ha. Ha. Yes. Bill and Ted 3 is set for an August 2020 release, John Wick Chapter 4 in May of 2021, but sooner than that, we will of course see him in the video game Cyberpunk 2077, currently on track for an April 2020 release. I think I speak on behalf of everyone, but I say thanks Keanu for being you and don't ever change. This is Matt Rogers, and that is all.


Okay, we're back. We're live. This is think-tech. This is Hawaii the state of clean energy with the energy policy forum Wow, our flagship show on energy. We have meet a marita my co-host. Hi Mina. I do Yeah, we we we we can't go on like this people will start to talk We have Dave Ralph our principal guest a Hawaii automobile deals association and a ferocious moderate Thank you know you wear your heart on your coach leave. What can I say? ferocious moderate neutral is the Easter Bunny Don't fix eyes And I was telling you that I woke up on May 1st and it was extraordinary My wife pushed me out of bed and she said Jade don't you know that this is building code safety month? Indeed it is that's right. It's brown energy Energy engineers gonna tell us about that well we take for granted the importance of the safety and resilience of our buildings And so I'm here to spread the word that the month of May is building code safety month I mean it's important for the safety of our communities, but also our economic growth and with that I want to say thank you to the governor David E. Gay for officially proclaiming May building code safety month believe it or not and We're joining other states great states in our union here with this movement We brought a short video to show our viewers and let's check it out. Yeah, let's see what we got is an honor for me Along with lieutenant governor Shansu Tsui to proclaim May 2017 as building safety month all are from the state Building codes are meant for two purposes. One is to protect the public For lack of a better term fools who don't know any better how to do things and the other one is to protect the general public from Crooks who want to try and take advantage of them. So building codes are minimum standards to achieve these Two goals only energy is a part of the state building code council because with our march towards 100% clean energy The quickest and cheapest way for us to get there is through energy efficiency And one way to do that is to make sure our buildings are specified with the latest and greatest technologies that aren't the only cost Effective but also save his energy and really helps us get to our goal a lot faster I Mentioned the community safety before the video started and building codes apply to new construction as well as major renovations And while buildings are only a small percentage new buildings are a small percentage of the energy impact They'll last for the next 30 40 50 years as long as this building is around So it's most cost-effective to go in at the beginning make it as energy efficient and as safe as possible rather than coming back in retrofitting Until that's why we're at the state building code council You know if you talk to Howard Wade He'll tell you that energy codes is the way to go save you a lot of money save the state a lot of money in the future And it also save us a lot of energy which is where I come in and we get to encourage positive economic growth We get to help people make smarter energy decisions about their energy management while construction Projects are still in the drawing board really. Yeah. Yeah, so how is this? This is implementation of a better code. Yes, first you have to adopt the code I know how it works on that a lot out of T-bed And then once you adopt the code you've got to make sure that people are following it So how do you how do you do that? What role does Hawaii energy play in all of that? Significant role in compliance really with the code We like to free up Howard to go and look at the next iteration of the code 2018 version while we Do a lot of outreach and training a lot of education even industry specific training So we get all of the HVAC the air conditioning folks in one building all the lighting folks in one building and show them the difference between the previous code and how the new Controls and operations will affect their industry and how they can meet the new code really to to ensure compliance is there It's an ongoing process to it's not just one static impression as we always every day better every code better Oh, we try to put good provisions better provisions in the code Yeah, so I'd like to be on your show and have a web show and videos I can continually update the industry and a lot of these guys are working hard during the day And then if we can give them a five-minute clip at the end of the day that they can watch to learn a little more about the code That would be I think we've received feedback that that would be more helpful than having people come in during the middle of a Workday for a four-hour training. Yeah, absolutely. You can watch online. Yeah, especially the Millennials. Yeah, especially those We'll walk around like this and they'll get educated about energy code and maybe transportation, too Thank You Ramsey Ramsey Brown Hawaii energy energy engineer. Thanks. Really appreciate you coming down. Yeah, we're gonna take a short break and swap out And we'll be right back for more with Dave Rolf Steven Philip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and I'm the host of Shrink rap Hawaii where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at I'm here on Tuesdays at three o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too Aloha Hi, I'm Carol Cox. I'm the new host of eyes on Hawaii Make sure you stay to know on Hawaii join us on Tuesdays at 12 noon. We will see you then Aloha Freedom is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea at dive heart? We believe freedom is all of these and more regardless of your ability dive heart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and Defy gravity since 2001 dive heart has helped children adults and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before Dive heart has helped them transition to their new normal search dive heart.org and share our mission with others And in the process help people of all abilities imagine the possibilities in their lives to Bingo, we're back. I'm Jay Fidel. This is think tech This is Hawaii the state of clean energy and today we're talking with Dave Ralph about energy and transportation My co-host Mina Marina. Mina. Can you introduce the scope of our discussion? Sure, so This month the Hawaii energy policy forum is focusing on legislative issues and we divided up the program into kind of three segments the watchers the doers and The makers so the watchers being people like Dave who are at the legislator watching particular measures that they're interested in The makers of course the lawmakers and the doers the people that have to implement So it was our discussion last week was really interesting we were looking at at it from one perspective and it was mainly the Renewable energy advocates and one bill that surfaced is house bill 1580 which Setting benchmarks for reaching a hundred percent renewable energy goal in the transportation sector and so We thought we'd have a different perspective today as Dave watched the progress of this bill and while Some of the renewable energy advocates have Sort of intimated that this bill was killed in the waning hours of conference committee due to big business You know, that's one perspective You know, this was a pretty complicated bill and and I think the implementation was going to be Challenging so we'd like to hear from Dave on your perspective of this bill Well, they say that for every complicated problem. There's a simple solution. That's wrong So I was one of the watchers down there But I represented a group that's the doers because they're the ones that are I've ardently pursued trying to reach the Y-Clean energy initiative goals. I mean the auto dealers I work in representing them and this bill 1580 Set a goal of I compared it to me doing a 15-foot high jump But I mean it it just would be impossible for me to hit a goal that high The big business representative that you mentioned that Gary Sloven had an even more interesting Metaphor he said that he plays tennis and he said if he went to his tennis coach and said, you know I want to play Wimbledon coach me up to Wimbledon his coach would say get a different coach But if you said, you know, I want you to improve my backhand that they could do and so I guess I thought that was such a beautiful metaphor and I said Gary a metaphors be with you. It's sort of a You know, I said that that's a good point. What could we do? You know, how could we move the process forward? So that's what we worked on Yeah, well, I think one of the difficult things or one of the challenge challenging things about a bill like this is most this market is pretty this sector is pretty much market driven and Not regulated where you know, these kinds of goals in the electricity sector may be a Little bit more doable because you're talking about regulated industries For example the electric utilities, so how well that's such a perfect distinction because you with the PUC You have a regulated in the industry with regard to the utility and the electric company And so you could set down a bunch of regulations that would be needed to be required There were carrots and we can't tell the customers to purchase the vehicles that has there has to be a Benefit formula that works and and with gasoline, you know cheaper than water I mean, I know so when you think about it it's going to be cheaper than water for as far as the eye can see and that was one of the driving factors moving people over to the Electric vehicle and when gasoline prices went down the barrel price of barrel of oil went down That dramatically changed the formula for the adoption of electric vehicles I started changing my charts and so I think a lot of the manufacturers are trying to wonder about that too So it used to be there were about 50% Cars and 50% trucks vans and SUVs right and now it's 60 40 with you know cars are down at 40% And the SUVs pick up trucks and vans which use more gasoline But they have more attributes they can carry more and they can haul and have other capabilities People are buying those instead of the car And so that's a big factor that's changing the adoption rate the price of gas changing the adoption rate All sorts of things and then the hydrogen cars coming up on the turn So a lot of stuff and the driverless cars coming on the turn faster than lights be when I think the other challenge here, too Is you know cars have anywhere from a 20-year lifespan? So the the change out of of cars and old cars never go away. They Live on and on and on So it's beautiful that you said that I've never heard anyone point that out that there's about a lifespan of about 20 years on a vehicle. So we sell about 50,000 new cars a year But you know about 50,000 go off to the crusher after 20 years So they kind of go out the back end after 20 years and they come in the front end You know imported into the islands because there's no manufacturing here So the number of cars on the roadway over the past 20 years multiply that times 50 And you get an even million cars and trucks and that's about what's going to stay on the roadways all the way through 2030 and I've just done a chart that says that'll say never will stay on all the way through about 2045 because people will be walking commuting more with electronics and I mean doing electronic commuting from home on computers And and they'll be you know located more closer to their work And and you're just not going to have the growth of cars that you've had over the past few years And they're gonna just gonna remain pretty constant. So is this a good time to bring up that I think we have a slide Yeah, we have a chart that Dave brought. Can we see that chart? This is a call the golden let's take a look at it golden Golden Gate Bridge chart. We call it and Okay, how about a shot of this? Yeah, it's a call the Golden Gate Bridge chart because it resembles that famous bridge there in San Francisco And and this is surprisingly enough the rhythm of car sales They they go down to about 35,000 they climb all the way up to about 70,000 and down to about 30,000 35,000 Up to about 70,000 and down and up down and up and it looks like the Golden Gate Bridge and So what drives it? It has to do with the price of housing as as your house price continues to go up People use the house as an ATM and they pull out the money from the house and use it for the down payment by that new car and all Is going up in the house in the car industry on the housing industry together when the housing industry levels off People start to wonder who I wonder how my savings are gonna hold out and everything And so the number of car sales starts to drop off and it comes down Very directly related more than any other single big expenditures in your life. That's two big ones Yeah, yeah, but let me ask you this David We you know so the the measure did not pass and it's not clear that we have political will sufficient to actually get there with transportation Transportation is is a real challenge for clean energy and indeed Transportation last I knew was we were paying out six billion dollars a year Running out of the state for oil it comes from Indonesia and the like well to 2 billion for the ground transportation sector Okay, which was the other thing goes for air air 2 billion as we count. Yeah, well marine is another. I hope we do another show on marine. That's another issue But anyway, it's in the billions and it'd be better at home It'd be better for circle fuel or anything else or electric and so, you know, it's not it's not just an exercise to say We want to get into electric or hydrogen cars But people love their cars. I mean people. I know would never give up their cars They would always buy a fossil fuel car unless the price is just astronomical and they would buy a big one a truck an SUV as you said So government has to step in if we're going to do this government has to step in Government has got to make an incentive and disincentive combination of things to actually change the way the community people You know spend their lives in their money and if we want to you know have clean energy and transportation Government has to ask so my question to you is what exactly should government do? leadership Good management. Good leadership is the art of making solutions and problems rather so interesting that people would want to Participate in solving that and having the fun of doing it So if you've made that problem so interesting and and cool to kind of work together to solve I send a bunch of people a Million periods because there's a million people Million cars and in the islands and there's also a million people on Oahu Well, if you page through a million periods on on paper You just are paging and paging and paging and paging paging That's all the cars there are and to change them all to electric vehicles by 2045 It's almost mathematically 20 years is the useful life because the rotation out doesn't allow so hard to get rid of them It's what happens that's what if I said look you want to have a fossil fuel car It's going to cost you 500 bucks a year and that's our way of telling you You know that the government has a policy here and you better get rid of it We're going to keep on doing it and furthermore after 10 years or five years You know it's going to be double that and the longer you keep it the more it's going to cost you all of a sudden You have it in the center that maybe means something. Well, you have a market disruption That's what you have and those things okay as long as you get to your goal Well, if if the if the goal was participated in with everyone equally and Felder was fair to everyone But if you start penalizing people because they had larger families or penalizing them because they had to have a truck And all that all things to work there's a great deal of unfairness involved in that whole thing So we've said don't let market disruption come in with things like that We've even opposed subsidies when when they said let's put a bunch of subsidies on the electric car to get people to buy them We said no, let's let the electric car, you know live on its merits And and I thought you know when I came aboard with the auto dealers association I set a goal of saving each dealer About 40,000 dollars and I was it took me a number of years But each year I can show the policies that we put in that saved them about 40,000 per year in various policies One was eliminating a scrap tire tax at one point that after the scrap tires were cleaned up I mean so the tax has to go away and mean it was involved in that and did a wonderful job as you know The chair of the committee in those days Anyway, bottom line was if you can show people if you could hand them and say here's four thousand dollars But I think you can have because you won't have to buy gasoline I think that because you're gonna have an economy that's so happy for robust Yes, that's so that you could now get no get four thousand dollars from the whole Making a change that would benefit you through moving to a variety of different ways of transportation Why that I talked about the energy credit or I mean rather the Government Street I like that because it's it's free market I mean it's free market. I think you're in the same place free market 4,000 Let me suggest to you that hmm, it's not likely to work. Is this what's called dead air Defend that Their fossil fuel cars we haven't Go back to government mandates, you know There's a transition going on here, you know, and are we jumping to renewable fuels are or are we Transitioning and you know part of that transition is you know cars are a lot more fuel efficient In in the last decade. I mean we're we're we're moving in a different direction with cars and and technology is is Just Bearing down on us really quickly You know one of my personal concerns is that you know, we're focusing on a really small piece We're not setting the stage for Transportation transformation You know, what is the role of autonomous cars in the future? I mean are we opening up the door for that too? So there's there's a lot of changes happening every interesting point we and you and I have talked about that before I said I said to me No, and one of our guests. I think I said Autonomous cars will bring a hundred percent electric because an autonomous car is a highly computerized You know machine and therefore it's only likely is most likely a hundred percent likely that the autonomous car Electric phenomenon will be an electric car and you whether you or somebody else have you not necessarily Jay Because fossil cars are you know the very high-tech too and you could have an autonomous car that is a fossil car I wonder how you and for that matter the dealers feel about this. Well, excuse me But I think it was with the difference I'm seeing an awful lot of car companies coming out with that electric vehicle aspect of it But it has a gasoline vehicle backup range extenders So it kind of the answer is both ways and by the way that a driverless car is going to be here You know I can throw them on a poor from here to hit the date the date It's it's 2020 19 car makers are coming out with autonomous cars driverless cars by 2020 now We already had them at the auto show I mean we had a level one and level two and so there's five different levels of autonomy The first one is well the zero level is that they're warning lights and things that you have just on the dash But level one of autonomy is that it'll it'll have cruise control, but you still have your hands on that wheel So it's hands on then level two is hands off and it'll change lanes and to do a number of other things actually will park itself So that's level two level three is eyes off You can actually watch a movie during level three level four is I can be in the backseat asleep Mind off and level five is a robot taxi. I'm not even in the car. There's no wheel There's no brakes and it's just runs around five levels. I'm number five I have this image you want to send something a gift maybe to your friend your family You put it in the car have the car drive and take it there. You don't have to be in the car at all so before we run out of time, you know my question today is Okay, so we're at the early stages of getting a whole bunch of different interests at the table at the legislature and Discussing a vehicle. What's the next step? Do you think to come up with good policy that moves us forward? moves us forward and What do you how do you see that happening? Thank you You know to any hunter knows that to hit a duck in flight yet shoot ahead of the duck So we're all sitting out here to say let's shoot ahead of the duck and here's what we have to do First of all, you have to get control of the whole rail thing that that that that sucks a lot of oxygen out of the room It takes away a lot of our opportunities because money's fungible And if it's all sitting over here in this pile trying to solve that one point to point situation I think that'll help a lot with development of housing and development of jobs and all sorts of things That's what it's supposed to do the solving traffic and solving all the other things that we have to do That'll have to come with cars and probably autonomous cars and eventually electric and hydrogen cars And so we have plans that shows how to do that. I actually did the chart all the way up to 2045 I didn't put in the flying car which has now come across that my desk faster than I ever anticipated I was an able aviator, but you know, I was an able aviator But you know, I there's our chart that shows you know the the rise and fall the golden gate of Adoption and you could see I said there would be 300 electric vehicles brought into 11 Well, I couldn't get it could get them here because we didn't have them in the island So I I phoned a Nissan and they said yeah, we'll make you the rollout market And so most of those were you know leaves and then the next year was 675 the next year We hit those numbers, but when we got to the 2016 and 17 We said we'd have to have a real push up to keep this going and it would be a big education push And we thought three million dollars from Hawaii energy, which is you know Just sat here momentarily before you could have this massive amount of information about the pile of benefits that comes to all of us as a Society when we join in this gigantic effort to keep the money flowing in the islands. Well, education. Is that it? That's the driver. We don't incentivize or de-incentivize we don't tax or give credits We educate you educate and everything then the market stays smooth Otherwise you get like what happens with solar or the rooftop solar thing It had all sorts of credits when they dropped it all of a sudden people were unemployed They were the great disruption in the marketplace and we've seen countless situations where there's big tax credits and everything taken away And people are just left high and dry without jobs Mina we're gonna leave on this high point Where it's not clear exactly what exact policy or implementation, but can you summarize this discussion? Where are we, you know after talking with Dave? Where are we? Well, I think talking with Dave today. We've learned a little bit more about what the Auto dealers are up against and we have a little bit more information about the car situation in Hawaii and you know what we Can look forward to in the future what what the trajectory is for the future So I think we have to be a little bit more realistic on how we approach and that we approach in facts and always with Our mindset on how we create the best market solution Moving forward in this sector Yeah, this is an interesting moment even a tipping point moment and somehow, you know that 1580 the failure of that bill You know creates a challenge for everyone I wouldn't say it's a failure. I wouldn't say that either. I think it was good. We have that discussion Yeah, and the discussion has to happen But we have to be more aware of the challenges moving forward and really using fact-based Information as we develop the policy and understand the market Yeah, that's key here and deal with the deal with the distractions which are as you said Dave rail We've got to get we've got to get that what do you say under control has to be under control I mean and probably brought down on the ground and finished and so that you know we can move on I just don't see how it can be finished with the dollars that are out there It takes so many dollars away from all the other things like charging stations and like hydrogen fueling stations and all the Infrastructure and I'll tell you when the autonomous car comes in it puts in those little small wave transmitters That all has to go in on the on the utility poles So oh my goodness, I mean that's there's a lot of infrastructure that has to go in for the driverless car Yeah, and yeah, well if you had the five ten billion dollars you could you put a lot of charging stations out there Well, and I think you know again This is another area where large investments have to be made to have that supporting infrastructure and and so what we need right now is certainty You know you can't be changing policies every election cycle. Yeah, you know these are These are long-term investments that need to be made and I sound like a broken record But um, that's that's why it's so difficult Well, thank you mean a marita mean marita former chair of the PUC former legislator And now a blog writer with and a consultant with energy dynamics wonderful to have you here as co-host I'll see you again next week and Dave Roth. It's always great to talk to you Dave The bar to Bishop Street is so important for us to understand the nature of transportation in Hawaii. Thank you, Jay. Aloha