Brilliant, so my name is Wilhelm, I work at Babylon Health and it's a real privilege to be here, so thank you very much for having me. So to provide an affordable and accessible healthcare to everyone on Earth, that is the mission of the company I work for. And it's been a real privilege of the last two years to spend the majority of my waking life trying to solve this problem. And when I joined two years ago, we were a really small company, there were like 40 of us, and we really kind of honed in on the accessibility part of this statement. Because at the time, if you were sick, you would somehow have to physically transport your sick body to some health epicenter where there's a high concentration of healthcare professionals that can help you with your illness. And in an age where everything from information to cat videos was highly, highly accessible, it just seemed well within our reach that we could make healthcare a significant degree more accessible by leveraging the internet, smartphones and modern technology. So we went for it and in July 2015, Babylon launched their answer to this accessibility question with their telemedicine application that essentially allowed people to have a GP consultation with the doctor over the phone and the whole kind of healthcare service that goes around that. So after the team kind of recovered from literally doing like blistering hot fixes while our CEO is stepping up onto the stage at the Royal Albert Hall, everyone relaxed, pat themselves on the back for making healthcare a significant degree more accessible. But the affordability part is the tricky part because two-thirds of the costs of healthcare go to the salaries of doctors, nurses, healthcare professionals, etc. So we need to figure out how do we solve this problem. If we want to make healthcare more affordable, we have to somehow reduce the cost of healthcare professionals. So one way we can do this is by simply just increasing the number of doctors. And that seems like a kind of reasonable approach. But some people estimate that we are 5 million doctors short from providing affordable and appropriate healthcare to everyone on the earth. And not just that, doctors are expensive to train. They take a long time to train. It's a very difficult training process. So this approach just isn't going to work for us in the short term. So affordability is really tricky. We had kind of made good progress on accessibility and we just kind of put our heads down, fixed bugs, added features and just kind of went on our merry way. But then one day Ali, our CEO, watched the movie. And ever since that fateful day of the movie, this question came up again and again and again in meeting after meeting after meeting as this kind of idea was starting to take shape in his mind. And they say it takes 20 times of repetition before something starts to sink in. And after his kind of relentless repetition, this idea started to kind of take shape in the imaginations of the engineers as well. And the idea is basically quite simple, right? So we know we have lots and lots of doctors short in the world. And doctors are just inherently difficult to scale. But we know something that's easy to scale. We know that machines and software and computers are really trivial to scale. So if we could just figure out a way to kind of put some of the doctor's brain inside of a computer, just one computer, then we can just scale it really easily and then iterate on that. So this was kind of like, you know, it was a really kind of daunting idea and how are we going to do this, medicine is so complex. So before we did anything, we built a demo. We wanted to see kind of how people would take to this idea, you know, how people would feel like sharing, you know, their health care concerns with an app. So we built a demo. So I was in the IRS team at the time when we built this demo. And while I was building this demo, I kept saying to Ali, like, Ali, I don't know how we're going to build this. I don't know, like, the stuff that we're kind of suggesting we can do in this demo, like, I've got no idea how we are going to do this. But the reception of this demo was so amazing. People loved it. People were so encouraged. There are people thinking in this direction and the implications it has for health care around the world. That was just that, that gave us kind of enough motivation and inspiration to not knowing how we're going to do it, just kind of step in and see what we could do.  At the end, I'm going to talk just a bit about the role that Python played in this whole journey. And at the end of each section, I'm going to just share with you some of the lessons we learned because some things we did, we were like, oh, wow, that works surprisingly well. And lots of things we did, we were like, wow, that was a really bad idea. So let's start with medical triage. For those who don't know what medical triage is, medical triage is essentially you arrive somewhere with a set of symptoms and someone figures out what you should do. So should you go to the hospital, go to the pharmacy, stay at home, you know, monitor for a couple of hours, like not kind of, it's like the step below diagnosis. So just kind of suggesting what you should do. So we knew we had to do this. We knew we had to be able to take medical queries and suggest to people what they should do next. And building this medical triage system was a real roller coaster ride because we started off just being like, oh, you know, it's just a basic decision tree, you know, we just kind of build it up this tree, we get some doctors to help us, and then we just kind of walk down the tree until we get, there's no more questions to ask and we can, you know, give them the outcome at the end of that branch. But then it's kind of like, you know, we dipped the roller coaster and it was like, oh yeah, but this question is way more important than this question. And when these two questions are answered in combination, they kind of nullify each other, and our minds are just blown with the kind of complexity of this kind of medical sphere.  And we built it. The first, because essentially without kind of going into the details of how we wait questions and that kind of stuff, it is just a decision tree that you kind of walk down with some kind of intermediary logic in between. And we built the initial version in PHP with MySQL and it just wasn't working for us. Like it was clunky, it was difficult to change. Some of the changes were quite risky. So we scrapped the whole project and we rebuilt it with Python and a graph database. So this is a picture of the CMS that we used for this graph database. And it's a small kind of corner of this very, very large decision tree. So why did we choose a graph database for triage? I would love to say that there was no hype involved in our decision, but the truth is that at the time graph databases were all the rage. Like even now there's a lot of hype about it and it's solving interesting problems and we were keen to get our hands on this technology. But there are some good reasons that a graph database is applicable for this use case. So in this decision tree there's a massive sense of hierarchy. There's branches, subbranches, subtrees, et cetera. And this kind of data model is normally a good probe that maybe a graph database will be applicable. The next thing is that a graph database has all the semantics we need to reason about a decision tree just out the box. Like that CMS that I showed you, we didn't kind of build that GUI ourselves. Those are just graph database semantics where you have nodes, relationships, relationships have directions, all these things that we have in our data model. So reasoning about, we didn't have to kind of build this mapping from a relational database to our decision tree. And because the semantics kind of mostly match one-to-one, stuff like some of the tooling that comes out the box was really, really helpful without a lot of work on our side. The CMS being an example of that. So what are some lessons learned? The first thing I would say, and this is kind of just true for all software technology, is new technology is trying to not get carried away by the hype. Because when these new technologies come out, there's lots of attention, which means there's lots of hype on Twitter, et cetera. And if you make an uninformed decision on behalf of your company, it can end really badly. The second thing that I want to say is that, and this is specific to graph databases, don't get carried away by the cool animations. Because I've never seen a technology that can sell its technology so well with such really cool animations that looks like it's solving problems that you can't even imagine solving in your kind of traditional way of working. So when should you use graph databases? Now, the single most important question that you need to answer when considering whether or not to use a graph database is the following. Are relationships the most important part of my data model? Because if the answer to this question is maybe, or sometimes, or I suppose so, you're probably going to have a bad time. Because if relationships are the most important thing of your data model, they are just so much that you can do with a graph database. Now, the reason this question is important is because in traditional databases, like relational databases, relationships are represented or handled with joins. And joins can be expensive. And I use can there tentatively because there's many kinds of joins, there's hash joins, and merge joins, and index joins, and other joins that I'm sure I don't know about. And databases have done a lot of work to optimize these processes. But to get the most out of it, you often find yourself writing very specific queries that makes your data model kind of quite brittle. And the integration with your database quite brittle. Where with graph databases, because relationships are first class citizens, as long as that remains true, you're going to have a wonderful time in graph databases. The second lesson we learned is that data modeling is extremely important. And this is very true in no-SQL databases, but especially true in graph databases. And we unfortunately learned this the hard way. So we did our medical triage with a graph database. But because that worked so well, we also decided to use a graph database for our chatbot data model. So what you can see here is a typical thing that you would find in our database. So the red node is a user. The green nodes are conversations. And the blue nodes are elements inside that conversation. An element being basically everything that's in the conversation that is mostly messages between users, as well as conversation status updates and stuff like that. Ignore the purple nodes. We'll just call those hacked nodes for now. But what's wrong with this? So the first thing that's wrong with this, and you can't see it from the image, but the node most closest to the conversation node is the most recent element in the conversation. And at the end of the chain is the one furthest and the furthest in the past. The reason why this is bad is that every time we add new elements to the conversation, there's multiple kind of operations happening. We have to delete the one relationship, change the status of the other relationship, then recreate another relationship. And it's just a really heavy and error-prone operation that happens. And not only that, it exposed some bugs in Neo4j, which at the time they fixed this, but at the time when you deleted relationships, it didn't clear up the disk space, and because we were deleting relationships like crazy, eventually our disk space got used up. So what else is wrong with this? Also, you can't really see it here, so the red nodes are users, and initially we wanted to represent the Babylon user, like the chatbot as a user, because it felt like correct. So everyone who comes into our chatbot, initially they'll be chatting to Babylon, like the chatbot user, and sometimes like a doctor will come into the conversation. But what this meant is that because most users were talking to Babylon, it meant that the Babylon user node had a relationship to every single conversation node. And what this means is that every conversation node in our entire graph database was only one node away from every other conversation, and in graph databases this is called the super node, and the super node is like really bad. It's really bad for performance, and there's a bunch of ways you can do to get around this, but none of it feels good, and you really just don't want to go down that route. And all these kind of things we learned, like in production and stuff like that, which you really don't want to do, and we are way, way more hesitant now about adopting new technologies and making sure we do kind of proper investigation before we dive into something. So another reason why data modeling is important is because in graph databases, migrations are not trivial by a long shot. So what you see here is this should be one linear chain of elements in a conversation, you know? Just you said this, Babylon said this, you said this, it should be one chain. But what you can see is that it's just craziness happening, like nodes responding with themselves and stuff like that. And this is a result of a Cypher query. Someone committed a change to one of the queries and it just messed up the way that we were adding new elements to the conversation, and it was causing problems for users in production, so we had to fix it. Now, writing a migration script that fixes this is not easy because it's indeterminate and it's just really tricky. So you really want to pay a huge amount of attention to your data models. You don't ever find yourself in this kind of situation. So the third thing we learned is basically that the grass isn't always green on the other side. So the medical triage is perfect for graph databases, but chatbot not so much. So we're basically migrating the chatbot data model over to Postgres. And as we're kind of coming back to Postgres, it kind of feels anonymous to the protocol sign returning because we feel like we've kind of been over at Neo4jland promiscuous and Postgres who's just always been solid for us, hasn't done anything wrong and we're returning now and he's just greeting us with open arms. So stuff that we usually felt restrictive now feel so amazing, stuff like constraints on your columns, they're just like blowing our mind, stuff like familiar querying strategies and sharding that is easy to do in relational databases. Database migrations are like amazing. All the tooling that comes around it, like SQL Alchemy and just the general tooling around Postgres and relational databases in Python, it's just so great to come back to all that stuff. So yes, the grass isn't always green on the other side. Okay, so we have medical triage. Brilliant. We launched it, it did really, really well. We pitched it against real-life A&E nurses and doctors and it just did really, really well. We were really proud of it and we kind of felt this massive sense of achievement. But as Ali reminded us, we were still a long, long way away from where we wanted to be. So we knew we had to build a chatbot and we have since found that building a chatbot is really difficult and the reason it's really difficult is because natural language is really difficult. Natural language is like one of those problems that you approach the problem and you just imagine this is going to be hard. You have this idea in your head this is going to be really difficult. But as soon as your skates touched the ice, you realize you've totally underestimated how difficult this is going to be. And the reason it's difficult is because the scope of it is just so huge and you enter into it, you start solving one problem and you realize, oh well this means this and this means this and next minute you have you're trying to fit the entire kind of semantics and linguistic rules of and all the things that happens behind the scenes into your head and trying to solve that. And the biggest problem we had to overcome initially was figuring out how we could reduce the scope of natural language understanding to something that we could take a bite at and ship the production and serve our users. So what did we have to do? So the first realization we had to make is that we are not interested in helping you decide whether or not you should grow a man bun. We aren't going to help you with that problem. We want to hone in on focusing on helping you with medical queries. So that's over there. Over here we have a set of services. So we have this very well performing medical triage. We have a bunch of content about different diseases and this massive library of content. We also have doctors who are ready to if our machine can't handle your query to handle your query. So we have this very kind of contained scope over here and we have these services over here. So when we put it like that, all of a sudden it becomes a machine learning problem because we have this infinite space of inputs and then we have this kind of set of defined outcomes. And this is kind of called intent recognition. We wanted to take the inputs and map it to some output that we could do. If the mapping was not good, some generic fallback that would kind of redirect you to ask us medical queries. So if it's a machine learning problem, don't we need data? And medical data isn't easy to find. But we were really lucky because we already had this system running in production called Ask in our telemedicine application where you could just send a single message to a doctor and he would reply in a couple of hours with some kind of medical advice on what you should do. And the doctors and the nurses who were doing this had the good sense to tag each question and outcome. So we had thousands and thousands of these queries. So by the time that we realized we wanted to do this, we had this really, really rich data source ready for us to train on. So rich data source, some machine learning scientists and engineers, that's all you need, right? Not quite because the inputs that were coming in were still free text. And free text is just inherently unstructured. So we had to figure out a way to take free text and then represent it in a way that our models could understand. And our machine learning guys did a bunch of work building multiple different classifiers to transform the free text into slightly different combinations, some were just word-in-the-bag, word-to-veg things, other things were like medical entity extracted concepts passed into models. And at the same time, they did some classifiers around our content and our outputs to make those easier to map. So essentially what they are trying to do is take a sentence and then put it somewhere on a map. And then the hope is that sentences that are very similar will kind of cluster together in this map. So it's very similar to a point on a map on some kind of 2D map. But the difference is that these maps were 380 dimensions. So this is like, you know, a simplified kind of set with some test data. And what you can see is that in the top left, those red ones are all about your neck or something like that. On the right, we have some ones about hands and foot and stuff like that. And in the middle, those queries are like ones about urination and pooing. I don't know what the politically correct way to say that is. But it's unclear to our models, like is this about digestion or is this about your abdomen or reproduction or anything. So there's some parts that are quite hairy, but you can see that some of the things cluster really well together. And the guys kind of iterated on their models and it got to a place where it was doing really, really well. It was handling our queries with 95% accuracy and 99.8% safety. I'll explain a bit more about what those percentages mean in a bit.  They use TensorFlow as well. They use a combination of RNNs and other deep nets. And I got to a place where they were really happy with their entity recognition classifiers. So we were doing really well. And we were taking some of these medical queries and we were just like knocking them out the park. We were handling them so, so well. But then we would get a really simple query and we would just totally bomb out.  And then we would get another query that we just had an obligation not to miss. But we didn't really have good data for these queries. So the engineers told the machine learning guys to pipe down. They've had their time. We're just going to reject this problem. So we didn't quite do that. We used this tool called DriveScript, which essentially is this linguistic DSL that helps you kind of construct linguistic rules to catch huge variations of sentences and map them to a specific outcome. So this is an example.  And it handles a huge variation of sentences in this one rule and then maps to a outcome that we want to provide to the users. So we wrote like hundreds and hundreds of these rules to kind of handle those like non-medical but kind of important queries. We're busy actually moving away from that now because the machine learning guys have had the chance to build things that are more generic, that don't need as much data and can handle these simple queries better than these rules can. We learned that testing chatpots are really difficult. Since doing this I've become really interested in how search engines test their search engine because you just have an infinite amount of inputs. Unlike a website where you have a bunch of buttons and it's only a certain amount of combinations of how you can tap the buttons and stuff and you can write comprehensive tests that make you really sure that your system is working. But if you have an infinite input space you can make a change and not sure what your change has done to some corner of this massive, massive input space. So we couldn't come up with a really good way to test to give us huge assurance. So we just went for many, many layers of testing. So the first thing we did was machine the model validations which essentially is just putting some of your data aside as a test set, training your model and your training set and then passing the test set back to your model to see how well it's doing. That's where the 95% accuracy comes from. We then wrote just thousands of RiveScript examples to test that linguistic DSL thing. So we just had many, many, many of these things. We also then created this kind of client mock system that pretends it's a client and with kind of BDD approach just testing loads of different interactions throughout the chatbots. Before making major releases we did clinical validation tests where we would get a big number of doctors into the office and they would use the chatbots, go through examples and generate this report of how clinically safe it is. And we would then do post-market surveillance. So when the product is out there we have some doctors who their main job is to take a sample each day and run through that example if they were handling that query and then decide at the end whether or not this was safe or not and that's where we get that 99.8% safety from. The second lesson we learned is that the chatbot is only as good as your content. So we initially thought natural language is going to be really difficult and it is and we spent huge effort into kind of solving that problem but then when our first kind of, you know, prototypes started coming out we realized that this doesn't feel good even though our natural language understanding is really good it didn't feel good because our content wasn't like optimized. We didn't spend that much effort in our content and we've learned since that you need to kind of improve both at the same time because good content without good understanding is really bad but a good understanding without good content is really bad as well. So we now kind of as we're improving the ML stuff we're also improving our content so that the whole chatbot becomes better altogether. And then I asked machine learning guys like, you know, I'm doing this talk what can I tell these guys that you guys have learned that doesn't give away the current cool things you're working on that is still kind of under IP controller and they said to me that basically standard classification doesn't scale in the way that we've done it here and the sentence they told me to use is that information retrieval is better than classification and the reason classification doesn't scale is because each time we want to make a small change we have to retrain all our models and sometimes the new feature we want to add doesn't quite fit the way that we constructed those models and it's just a very kind of slow process we want to be able to iterate our chatbot really fast. So we have natural language and stuff and we have the medical triage, we're doing really good but we had no way yet to kind of communicate to mobile clients we had this really complex stuff happening in the back end but we didn't have this uniform way to communicate to our mobile clients so we had the dispatcher is where, this is like a simplified there's more services around this but the dispatcher is where the understanding happens we have leaflets and medical entity extraction services that it talks to and we have the RiveScript DSL service but we needed to build an API that kind of simplified all this complexity happening in the back end to a way that was consistent for our mobile clients to understand and again this is just massively simplified we have like 35 services running in production but it's this kind of piece that was particularly difficult to kind of take all this complexity and map it into a simple way for our clients and one of the lessons we learned is that just in this application was just an evil word because we started off like oh we're going to build this chatbot it's just going to be easy it's just a request response we can just use HTTP, it's perfect but it wasn't quite like that because we had to use web sockets and it wasn't just web sockets, we had to also kind of bring APNAS and GCM in there and initially we were like oh it's just one person talking to another person because there's other people and there's doctors and there's authorization of elements and our heads just exploded with how much more complex this was than we thought it was going to be a really useful tool we used that helped us build and the clients build at the same time was Connection which basically is this wrapper around Flask that helps you generate swagger documentation that your code is dependent on which means that your swagger documentation is always up to date so how it works is you basically build a swagger YAML file if you don't know what swagger is, swagger is like a standard for how an API document or API design so a standard way of representing what your API does and you can do it in JSON or YAML so you build your swagger file Connection then will map the endpoints on that swagger file to the entry point in your code and then it will do lots of cool stuff for you so this is an example of our conversation model so you can see there there's some strings and bulls and arrays referencing to other objects and then Connection will do that type validation for you that you don't have to do in your code and it also means because Connection is doing that you're really tied to making sure that this documentation is correct because it's going to impact the way that your code runs which meant that our documentation was always very very good which is very useful to our mobile clients and what you get then is documentation and not just documentation, you get an API client that your mobile clients can use to test out your API so cool so the last thing I want to talk about is just the role that Python played in all of this and I can really confidently say that we wouldn't have done as much as we did in the time we did it without something like Python and some of the lessons we learned were not surprising but were really welcomed and resoundingly true and some of the lessons were quite difficult and not ideal so one of the lessons we learned is that Maths and Python are like a match made in heaven there are just so many amazing amazing tools that take really complex things and make them really easy not easy but make them really accessible and then there's a huge community around this as well and there's loads of tools and stuff on the internet and tutorials and stuff to kind of get you on board so if you have like Maths heavy workloads Python is like an excellent excellent choice for you and not only that Python and the web is also this really good combination because again you have all these amazing tools like everything from you know everything out the box frameworks like Django to more simple macro frameworks like Flask and kind of everything in between you have like native support to all modern web technologies like Apache Spark and all the stuff like that you know database drivers all that support is just really really solid which makes building this stuff you know really confident about building some of these complex systems some of the bad things we learned though is that if you have async heavy workloads in Python you're probably going to get caught out at some stage even if you know what you're doing there's probably going to be something that's going to catch you out because of all the kind of specific knowledge you need to know about how async works in Python so this is a screenshot from Wireshark and why were we doing packets nothing you might ask no one wants to do this but we had this issue where like one in a thousand we were getting this SSL error that our load balancer was just throwing an error and the SSL errors were different each time and for the life of us we couldn't figure out what was causing this problem so we then went into the packets to figure out what was happening and basically what's happening here is the server sends like a hello message to the other server there's this kind of certificate key exchange and cypher and spec and handshakes and stuff and then right in the middle there the server just says hello again and they're receiving the service like whoa I wasn't expecting that like fail and we couldn't figure out why this like random kind of initial hello and the SSL handshake was just kind of getting in there and we still don't really know exactly why but we did find out that there's the compatibility issue with multiprocessing and a ventlet and a ventlet was the underlying async framework that our web framework was using and it was just causing some craziness another problem we ran into was when using AIO HTTP was that once a week this kind of internal server had running just kind of ran out of memory and crashed and there were just some specific implementation details that we didn't kind of completely read through our understand where you had to kind of release the object the response object if there was an error otherwise the memory just kind of hangs around and it's just this stuff that you really don't want to be dealing with but when you're doing lots of async stuff in Python you're probably going to find yourself dealing with these kind of like weird things every now and again so the last thing I want to say and I don't mean to be controversial at like a EuroPython thing is don't look to Python for your like main sense of engineering achievement so my relationship with Python is very much like an unstable romantic relationship where I move from being infatuated to being totally in love on like a daily basis because I'll be using really cool stuff like generators and decorators and context managers and coroutines and all this stuff but then I'll get something like this so this is just a function that has a return and a yield statement in it and if I was reading this for the first time what I would imagine is that the yield statement will just get ignored and it'll just return three and everyone's happy and it all makes sense but it doesn't do that it becomes generator function and returns generator so okay whatever I can kind of live with that but if you call next on this generator I guess if I read this for the first time I would imagine that maybe the return is skipped and it yields two but no in fact it raises stop iteration with the value of the return and if you kind of go and read there's a pep for this and it's got to do with coroutines and subgenerators and stuff like that but to a new user this just says return doesn't mean one thing in Python and this is kind of the it's stuff like this that I have to keep reminding myself that gives Python some of its characteristics some of its personality this is a quote from the Zen of Python and essentially it says practicality beats purity and this is really important to us because we are way, way more concerned about making healthcare affordable and accessible than we are about doing it in the most pure way and Python has that very same approach where it's way more interested in solving a problem and getting things done than it is about doing it in the most pure, special way which is very different to when you go to scholar guys or elixir guys and stuff like that and with that approach we've been able to build something that's really, really amazing and it's affecting people's lives on a daily basis and we're way more interested in that than we are about doing it in the most pure way and Python allows us to kind of do that which is something that is really amazing to us so that's it for me what's next for us we're moving into diagnostic space we're moving into a way more comprehensive health prediction and monitoring space we're making our chatbot international which I can tell you is not trivial so like natural language for English is hard natural language for Arabic is like and Chinese is like so that's me are there any questions? we have time for just one short question please really interesting talk did you for your chatbot take into account social situations or medical history of the patients asking a certain question because it can have a lot of influence on the questions the doctor will ask after he knows about the history of the patient or about the social context sorry I didn't quite catch the question for example when a patient asks I have had it what should I do it can really matter if the patient is a young boy who got it so at the moment let me think maybe two months ago no but recently yes so recently we take demographics and age and gender all into account into the kind of outcome and path that you're going to take that you're going to go through and what we're working on now is not just to take that but also taking everything we know about you how many steps you're taking a day the medication you take all into the kind of advice that we're giving to you and we have now a pattern that we can start adding these more kind of complex reasoning and deductions to so we're starting kind of down that path thank you very much William give him a big hand


journey to take your health back. We are coming to you live from my home office in Makiki and from downtown Honolulu, from the studios of Think Tech Hawaii. Today we will be talking with Stephen Ritz, the founder of Green Bronze Machine and learning how he grows with Aloha. He says, we grow vegetables and our vegetables grow students. I love that. The Green Bronze Machine has served more than 50,000 students around the world every day. The Green Bronze Machine has grown more than 65,000 pounds of vegetables in the Bronx while generating extraordinary academic performance.  What I would like you to take away from today's discussion is that when we invest in our KQ, the results are life-changing. So, ekomomai and welcome Stephen Ritz. Hello Wendy. Aloha from the Bronx. Straight from the Bronx, Hawaii. Straight from the Bronx. 12 stories up in my COVID classroom, otherwise known as my apartment. Alright guys, hold on to your seats because we're gonna go for a wild run here. So Stephen, tell us how the Green Bronze Machine got started. And by the way, I love that name. Well, I'm glad you love the name and Green Bronze Machine got started because we believe that we are all American's and that we can grow ourselves into new senses of opportunity, health, wealth, and performance. And that here in the poorest congressional district in America, we are growing something greater that has started a movement right here in the Bronx and has spread all around the world. Wow. And so that sign that on that slide there, that's your logo, I guess, your Green Bronze Machine logo. Yeah, we have a Green Bronze Machine logo. It's right here on my t-shirt. I hope you can see it. I usually wear a bow tie, but it's close to 100 degrees here today. So I'm not wearing a tie. Forgive me. And I'm known for my keys hat because the children call me the big keys. But 110 degrees today, they start melting on my head. Just the way I like it.  Please tell us about this because we got a photo, a picture of you when you weren't as thin as as fit as you are now. Well, yeah, I'd like to say I'm not I wasn't quite as sexy then as I am now. So there's a picture of me there. And you know, my story is not unlike many people. And I'm sure a lot of people listening and tuning in today will get this.  And I say that not to impress you, but to impress upon you well into my 20s and even into my 30s, I was in incredible shape. You know, I was very slender, very slim, very athletic, strong, was able to do the triathlon, tried out for some professional sports teams was always in shape. And old age older age started catching up with me. Along with older age, some bad habits started taking in. I started eating more junk food, more soda, the foods that were readily available in my community, which were not healthy. And you showed the picture, but I have the shirt. And to understand that, you know, I went from 180 pounds to 320 pounds. And this is literally the shirt that I used to wear that I out grew. How big I was. And believe it or not was all on my belly. It was affecting my heart. I became a diabetic. I became had a psorotic liver. I was on tons of medication. I was constantly sick. And I was just sick and tired of being sick. You know, my days started with big glasses of soda and big cups of coffee and lots of bread. And sadly, I had a heart attack in school in front of my daughter. And I decided right then and there, it was time to change. And of course, I got very inspired by Mrs. Obama and the Obama White House listening to Mrs. Obama talk about how the way we treat our children is indicative of the way we treat ourselves. And I just decided I couldn't talk about it. I had to be about it. And I started just literally, I lost 100 pounds in seven months. Wow, history. Your diet was just made for a perfect diabetic world. And so I'm glad he changed it because we fight very hard here in Hawaii as a board member to reduce those numbers. And yay, we reduced one with you, Steven. So that's great news. Right. Well, you know, the easiest thing is that it just requires one simple change. Yes, small changes add up to big changes. So I'm going to give all my friends in Hawaii some advice. You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start in order to be great. And the journey up the mountain starts with one single step. I'm on the beach with my surfboard. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. All right. So now we're going to turn to your students who you are in front of daily. So I want to see all their smiles and when the children are smiling, that means they're learning. So I love this photo of the kids with you and how big are their smiles? They love them. Yeah, so that's a great picture of me with the children in our classroom with our tower garden. And you know, when children are happy, it's indicative that they are healthy. So you know, smiling children, successful children, I think what you really see here are engaged children and children who are learning are children who will be earning and growing their way to success. And for me, of course, we live in a community that is just filled with junk food and poor options. You know, the fresh food is not available. Junk food is everywhere. The clown, the king, the carnal on every single corner. And I started noticing that the children who were not performing well in school were children who were not eating well. And it just really, it just dawned on me that children will never be well read if they're not well fed. So getting them access to healthy nutrition in school where they need it most, while learning how to grow their own food in the community where there was none was one of the greatest things I can do. And the rest has just been history. You know that you've been part of the story, Wendy. Wow. Yeah. And I know that you have curriculum. You have a whole course around the tower gardens because you can use the tower gardens in your classroom very easily. So I understand that you've developed a curriculum around the tower garden. So I want you to share with us a little bit about it and tell us who can use this curriculum and how can they get signed up for it? Super. So it is right here just to show you what this bad boy is. This is the green bronze machine classroom curriculum. It is over 300 pages, lesson plans, metrics, rubrics, data. There are 600 active links, but long made short, it is the art and science of growing vegetables using a tower garden, aligned to common core next generation science standards P 21 international baccalaureate and the United Nations Sustainable Development goals. And presently we are in more than 500 schools across the United States, hundreds of schools in Canada and five nations globally. And we are expanding around the world daily. And this is literally an all you can eat buffet of work of school. So it is not an add on. It is a build in designed for teachers to teach children reading, writing, math, social studies, art, literacy, project based learning, using, of course, one of my favorite teachers of all time, the amazing edible tower garden. Wow. That is a means, Steven, just can you rattle off your website so people can Sure, and the best thing about the tower about the green bronze machine classroom curriculum is that it comes with an unlimited lifetime site license, no annual fees, no tiered subscriptions, we do the data. It is available at the green bronze machine website that is www.green bronzemachine.org and simply go on the curriculum page, but visit the website, take a look at has professional development enhancement videos, you name it, we've got it. And of course, when you get the product, you get me and I'm available. Well, that's one of the best parts. But I love being involved. And I'm proud to say that to date, we've had 100% teacher satisfaction, 94% of the students use it want to repeat the program. And we were named the top 10 program in the United States and top 100 in the world for the work that we are doing. Wow. You know, I work personally with a friend named Dora. And Dora is with the community of schools and they love the idea and so they have to just get on board and get on it. They the problem is they have so many schools in the system throughout the islands. And I know that when you purchase a program or the the curriculum, it goes to the one school site, but they probably they should probably work on the main campus first, but they probably have a I want to see like at least 10 to 15 campuses throughout the islands. So they'll have to make that decision. But this is a curriculum. Let me share with you, Wendy. This is a curriculum that is data driven and 100% tested. We beta tested this with 30,000 students. And realize we're finding that we are moving the most difficult to teach and hard to reach children. Spheres of success that they've never imagined. So what are we seeing? We're seeing teachers teach longer. We're seeing teachers get tenured faster. We're seeing children that are not getting left back that are being promoted that are not suffering from summer slide. So in many ways, this curriculum pays for itself. Best of all, it is fully covered by a lot of grant programs, right? Clive for grants, people love supporting the Green Bronx Machine classroom curriculum and paying for it with grant funding. Wow. You know, Steven, your excitement is contagious. And Hawaii hears about your results in your classrooms.  And this is years ago from one of Hawaii's premier schools, the Kamehameha schools, to be a keynote speaker at their technology technology fair here in Hawaii and they know they sent for you. So I understand that it was a full house or over 400 teachers and staff standing room only. And I met you at that fair and we went and I brought my tower guard and you were on stage and please share a little bit about that moment with us while you were sharing your heart with Hawaii. Well, first and foremost, thank you, the amazing state of Hawaii and the Kamehameha School District for your amazing hospitality. But what the most important thing to realize was that I sat in a room of 450 teachers who gave me this resounding standing ovation. Yes, they are ready. Hawaii is ready. And they're like so many states, the people in Hawaii understand the challenges facing children around obesity, diabetes, lack of engagement, you know, farm to table movements, growing your own food, having access to healthy fresh food. So I was so grateful for the reception I've got. We've gone on to do amazing things. I hope to return to Hawaii soon. So I could also work on my surfing game. But yeah, that was made four years ago. It's hard to believe for quick years. But um, you know, I can't wait to get back. I know you've made Herculean growth and created tremendous opportunities with students, communities, NGO, faith based organizations who understand that with this technology, we no longer need to be dependent on boats. We can grow our own food and we can do it with 90% less water, 90% less space and engage children and meaningful academic experiences and workforce development programs. Because to me, I don't want to talk to edgy talk about education if you're not talking about opportunity. So this really creates spheres of success around entrepreneurship, health, wellness, add value products and most importantly, sustainability, which on that island is absent and on all of the islands and around the world is absolutely critical. Yes, so critical. And that's why when I first bought the tower garden to Hawaii, I knew that this was exactly what we needed. Yes, we have land, we have ag land, but we're not using all of our ag land. But you know what? We have a lot of urban land, and it's underused. And so why not do exactly what you've done in the Bronx of New York and create farms within the city limits. And I thought that was brilliant. Wendy, this is my farm 12 stories up in the middle of the Bronx. Stories up in an apartment building with copious amounts of food. And I'm doing it with 90% less water, 90% less space, no, no pesticides, no chemicals, no infestation. And the food that I grow, I grow there, I eat it here. It is as fresh and nutritious as anything in the world. And that's how I retain my boyish good looks and charming personality and endless energy. Amen.  And that's prices because, you know, people are always afraid to talk about their age. But you know, age is a number and no matter what we do, it's going to happen. But how do we arrive at the ages in the, you know, the upper ages? And that's most critical.  And you've learned a lot through the Targon and then what you've learned and acquired, you're passing it to your students. And that's why their smiles are even brighter at a younger age. You've given them absolutely. It's a life changing opportunity. Listen, learning to grow your own food is so critical on so many levels. Even if you don't eat the food, but you share it with other people. It's learning about water. It's learning about ecosystems. It's learning about inputs. It's learning about time. And it's really learning about nature. And I always say when we teach children about nature, and give them equal access, realize we have the first wheelchair accessible farm run by wheelchair students in the United States. I know you have an equally impressive story. We have foster care on farms where children who are unemployed and chronically underemployed are now growing their own food. There's my buddy, Jack's appearing on the screen. I think I know that good looking woman behind them. Let's take a good look at that picture and tell me more, Wendy. Wow, yeah. So Jack's he's a 19 year old young man.  So he said, you know what, you guys, you have a few tower gardens out there. And then I the family went into a powwow, and they decided together, you know what, Jack's needs an opportunity. And if Jack says yes, they're all going to stand behind and support him. So they quickly poured a 20 by 20 foot slab concrete slab, then they put the towers up. And then now Jack's is running the farm and their family's backing him up because Jack's was born with no use of his legs.  And so of course, some may ask, how does he reach the top levels? Well, that's where the big brother comes in, or the mom or the dad, and they'll help him harvest or put the plants up there. But the most of the work is done done below from his wheelchair where he can just bend over, fill in the water, fill in the nutrients, testing the pH and doing all the daily chores is done straight up from his wheelchair. It's just during harvest time that he needs the help and assistance of his family members. And of course, there's just the benefit of horticultural therapy. Listen, when I'm around these plants here, and I live in the urban jungle, there is a sense of peace, fulfillment, mindfulness and calm serenity. Yes, then sway moment that I have here, that is absolutely helping me in untold ways with stress reduction, relaxation, mindfulness, tranquility, and everything that connects me back to my inner soul. So there are so many benefits, plus you get to eat it. So there is it. And in case he's selling it. Yes. And that's the best part you save a lot of money. I mean, personally, I eat over $100 of produce from my tower, Steven. And that's for the last nine years. So can you read the proximity? Some people eat about a hundred. I can eat about $100. Listen, I hear in New York City, prices are insane. And that's why you don't know where it comes from, right? I can grow exponentially, you know, I grew 37 kinds of fruits, vegetables and herbs. I do all kinds of specialty products. I've never eaten better for less. You know, you buy the tower garden once and you have refills for life. So people don't think value, you know, you buy it once you get free refills for life. Yes, that's the best deal in town, man. And I say when people buy a tower garden, they're buying peace of mind. Because here in Hawaii, everything is shipped in. So yes, it was picked a week ago. And it has it's grown with GMO seeds, it has pesticides, chemicals, and a week old. So it's already on its way of rotting. And that's what we're consuming daily. And that's our hope to get healthier and better. So the hope is that we, the state of Hawaii can be more self-agriculturally sustainable, so that we can grow locally, supply our local schools, our local families with the best quality of food, which is only like a day or so old, but with the tower, it's five minutes old, and it's in my body. That's what I love that 100% correct. It's not a product. It is a movement. That's what I'm so proud to be part of this movement. And realize now with the COVID crisis, this is the perfect opportunity, because it's kitchen tables, and homes are becoming the new classroom. Here you have a wonderful project based learning experience that you can put in your home, and best of all gives children jobs, responsibility, things to do. And then it allows you as a family to come together and cultivate a healthier, more sustainable palette, your child's best interest, your family's best interest, and the world's best interest. So it's really a great time right now to be doing this kind of work. Exactly. And it's all wrapped up in the tower garden. So it's producing families and aloha, and it's creating better quality of food for all of us to consume. As we have the best project as well, to bring the family bonding stronger together right there in the living room, or on the on the lanais or in the patio. So wow, you know, I know you work a lot and Steven, and when you were here in Hawaii, I have a slide of you.  And that surfboard, I don't know how we found that surfboard, because you're pretty tall. And one long board.  I don't know what other slides you have. You may have a surprise slide for me. But there's my friend, Wendy from conference, but I will tell you the ability to be out on the beach with the people to go have some shaved ice to visit Ethels to see some of the farms to see the turtles to see the landscape. You know, your state has some of the most beautiful landscape in the world. And I urge all of you to not only embrace it, but to savor it and preserve it and treasure it. So thank you for that opportunity. I yearn for the days when I'm back at the beach hanging 10 and getting on doing my little wiggle. And you shall be here, Steven, you just put it out in the universe that is your heart. So you're coming back. And I'm working with so many people saying, let's bring Steven back.   We're waiting for you. I'll be there with my keys and my swimming trunks. You can we're excited. But before we go further, Steven, I want to share with others that we have a video. And I want to have a heart of what you do in the classroom. And what the green Bronx machine is all about. So it's just a short video that we want to share with everyone. I can't wait to see it. Let's roll it. There is a myth that marginalized communities want cheaper food. No, they want healthy food. Kids are getting fatter. They're getting sicker. I have 200 pounds, six graders. And to me, that's appalling. I can't accept that. It's just not right. Listen, when kids lose weight, and they go home and they're bringing food home to their families, and grandparents are getting involved, and parents are getting involved, and people are talking about what's going in their bodies. Plant by plant, classroom by classroom. We're changing outcomes. And we're changing destinies. I have kids who are teachers now. I have kids who are aspiring to things and jobs and places that they've never imagined. That to me is exciting. Put a seed in the ground. Put a seed in the ground. It's that simple. Go ahead, Wendy. I'm sorry. That's amazing. That's what you do every day in class. I mean, like, that's one of the videos that actually shows my high school program and realize that whole facility was once an abandoned building. So they've taken abandoned building in the middle of the Bronx and converted into a commercial farm where children are growing food, growing jobs, and growing opportunity is one of the most spectacular things. But what I love is it shows how easy the use of a tower garden is. Now, I'm not going to say they take care of themselves. That's where people come in. But the assembly, the maintenance, this is stuff that anybody can do. This is not daunting science. And best of all, is that, as you well know, Wendy, we're part of a community of over 100,000 people in the United States alone who are tower gardeners.  You know, our curriculum is available in Arabic. It will be available in Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian. Because the desire to grow food is universal. Wow. Okay. So now that we talk about growing on a tower, we have a question from our viewer. And that would, what would make a tomato start to turn black on a tower garden? First, I thought it was a joke, but it's a real question. So there, that wasn't planned. That's a really good question. My suspicion is that it is what is called end blossom rot. And what that means is you will probably have your water cycle up too much. So you need to reduce your timer. Because what's happening is the roots are consistently taking up water. And then they become what's called rotten. So the tomato goes from being red to really black very quickly. Sometimes it can be pH, but the beauty is if I don't know, there are more than 100,000 people on the tower garden Facebook page. If you post a question, you will get the answer you need. But my suspicion is without seeing it and realize I'm thousands of miles away, what it is is a simple timer issue and that you are over watering your tomatoes. That's, I think that's the same answer I would, I would share Steven.   And that's amazing. And it's mostly little guys right now. So I can, you can, we all can. We are Americans. Aloha. And you know, Steven, you've hidden right on the nose because our kids are getting fatter and they need help. And you know, they need skills. And this is basic skills. So that's why I resonate so well with this as well. Because this is, I'm a hands-on person.  And I'm not an academic. And so for me, this went right up my alley when I got it home. I was one of the first in the state of Hawaii to have it, put it together, saw the seed sprout. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm a grandma. So I was so excited. Put the seedling into the tower. And then it grew. And then it grew and I breathed air on it and I prayed over it. And I just watched it grow and grown. And it's been nine years, Steven. And you know what? The fact that we love it so much. And I just pray that most, everyone that does invest in a tower garden, that the passion for their health and their family's health continues, not just the day that they decided to do it. But the whole idea is to continue success and using it for the rest of their lives.  This to me is the ultimate project-based learning tool. And you know, I know you well. But I've seen tower gardens teach children responsibility, science, math, how to follow directions, patience, to merit. And those are some of the critical skills in life. I'm not an academic either. You know, I'm an ex-athlete. But the important thing too is, as I've known you through the years, is to see the amount of people you have touched and the lives you have changed.  And the outreach that you have had into your community is Herculean. So yeah, you're growing vegetables in your tower garden, but you're growing so much more. You're growing money. You're growing community. You are growing people and you are growing lives.  And I'm honored and privileged and proud to call you a friend. Thank you so much, Stephen. It means so much coming from you. You know, Hawaii is one of the most isolated landmass in the world. And we need this. Everyone does, but we need it truly. I mean, I want to say more than anybody else because when our ships stop coming to the islands, in two days time, Stephen, we have no food. Okay, the people- Well, we can all eat at Wendy's. So Wendy, I'm going to get ready to say goodbye. I'm going to urge anybody who wants to learn more about what I do to go to the Green Bronx Machine website. You can also follow me, Stephen, S-T-E-P-H-E-N, Stephen Ritz, I have my name right here. It's on a copy of my book, so you can learn about the power of a plant. Reach out to us. I'm here to support you. And remember, you don't have to be great to start, but you have to start in order to be great. And no one can do everything, but everyone can do something. So get out there, make it happen. Mahalo! All right, and Stephen, look at me, and thank you, Wendy. You gave this to me when you were in my living room. I got one of the first Green Rock Machine. You got one of the first hats ever. Yes, I did. I'm so excited. I don't let anybody touch it. This is my special hat. When I go to work, I wear it proudly because you gave it to me. I'm going to bring you a sustainable gangster shirt the next time I see you. All right, so Hawaii wants to say Mahalo to you, Stephen, for staying up with us and just sharing your heart, your energy with the people that you can impact. And there's so many, so many classrooms that are yet to be entered with you, with this video, so that they can understand the power of a plant. Right, so that's exactly what it is, the power of a plant. So thank you, God bless you. I'll speak to you soon and make epic happen. Mahalo! See you soon, Wendy! See you soon, Wendy! Yes, weekend!


And I'm Joshua Cooper, welcome to Cooper Union, what's happening with human rights around our world on Think Tech Live, broadcasting from our downtown studio in Honolulu, Hawaii, in Moana, New York, here. Today's episode I'm hosting is looking at Kraman Tatar Stand for Self-Determination, Tatar rights diminished during the Russian War. Today I'm very fortunate to welcome an associate professor of social sciences at the University of Ankara. Felix, thank you so much for joining us to share with us a bit about the struggle for self-determination by the Kraman Tatars over the centuries. Yes, thank you, thank you for inviting me. We know that Kraman Tatars, people maintain their unique history in modern Ukraine and that Kraman Tatars are Muslim indigenous peoples to the peninsula that have faced severe human rights hardships since this current Russian war, but also historically under various Soviet regimes. Could you share with us a bit about some of the struggles for self-determination that the Kraman Tatar people have dealt with while trying to exercise their fundamental human rights in their homeland? Yeah, the Kraman Tatars are indigenous people of Crimea, as you said, and they go back way into the ancient period. They derive from the Sarmatians, gods, Khmerians, Hazars, Kipchaks, all civilizations of the Black Sea area, but they consolidated their identity in the 16th century under the Crimean Hanate, during which they consolidated into one language, Crimean Tatar language and one religion, Muslim religion. The Crimean Tatars was a significant civilization on a par with Al Andulus in terms of their Islamic achievements. But however, in 1783, Crimea was annexed by the Russian Empire. And from that on, the calamities of Crimean Tatars started. More than two thirds of the Crimean Tatar population had to leave the peninsula to the lands of Ottoman Empire and only one third was left in Crimea. Despite the promises of the Russian Empire, the Crimean Tatars suffered in terms of their religious freedoms and in terms of their political and economic freedoms. They had to join the Soviet Union despite their will. And in the Soviet Union too, the attempts to de-tatarize Crimea continued. For example, Stalin deported the remaining Crimean Tatars, the one third, to the Central Asia and Siberia. And after 18 May 1944, not one Tatar was left in the peninsula. Actually, they remembered they forgot in a village and the Soviet soldiers went back and they put all the villagers in a ship and they just let the ship sink in the Black Sea. So that's how the Soviet regime was adamant to de-tatarize Crimea, to Sovietize and colonize the land completely. Yeah, this was some of the tragic history of the Crimean Tatars that is unfortunately being repeated today, but I think we'll talk about it soon. No, and it's horrible as you share the specifics because many people aren't even aware of the Crimean Tatars people at it being their homeland and making the connection, but showing historically over the centuries what hardships they face and the brutalization. We know that under Stalin, he accused the approximately 200,000 Crimean Tatars of working with the Germans. But of course, that's what we see happening with today with Putin making claims as well about everyone in denazifying. But your point about the de-tatarizing is absolutely crucial and it brings up many of the challenges that they're facing because they're looking at basic human rights, those civil and political rights of freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom to identify and have one's own nationality but then also the economic, social and cultural hardships that they also have faced over the centuries. And as you shared really just the humanitarian war aspects of burying them in a ship, sinking it, but also that trek, maybe you could describe of how hard it was to be moved from their homeland to Siberia and some of the other places and the hardships that they faced during that time and how did they ever return to be able to reclaim their land and understand and exercise their right of self-determination? Yeah, that's an excellent question. The Crimean Tatars were deported actually throughout 18 days. They were put into cattle wagons and it took 18 days for them to reach to Siberia, Urals and various parts of Central Asia. And there they were just dumped there. There were no accommodation, no jobs, no water. And the Crimean Tatars have lost 40% of their population due to the hunger and famine and diseases. After that, the Crimean Tatars lived in a special settlement regime and they had to sign a document every day just to show that they're not moving anywhere else. And only after Stalin died in 10 years, the Crimean Tatars were kind of free to live their special settlement regimes. And what they did was the families for the first time came together because the whole deportation thing, it's shuffled the population. So the mothers lost their children, sisters lost their sisters, grandfathers lost their grandchildren, right? So they came together in several Central Asian cities such as Tashkent, Chimkent or Bekabat, Chirchik. And there they formed neighborhoods and this is how they maintained their identities. They lived close by each other, they spoke their language and every night at dinner, they talked about their homeland to their children. And it was banned to speak Russian in a Crimean Tatar home. So the minute you enter from the home's door, you know, house door, you have to speak Crimean Tatar. So this was how they were so resilient to adamant about maintaining their identity and their attachment to homeland, their beloved homeland, actually may, you know, help them to strive against all these difficulties. So this is another reason we call the Crimean Tatars indigenous people because they have this very special ontological relationship to their land. So today they don't accept that they are any Tatars, right? They want their name to be used fully as Crimean Tatars because their identity emerged in the kind of golden cradle. This is what they call their homeland in the golden cradle of Crimea. This is anthropologically so interesting. We don't see many people who have returned their homeland after 50 years of exile. And they did it completely based on their own resources. It's not the Soviet state or Russian state or Ukrainian state that returned them. They organized themselves, they sold their houses in Uzbekistan and they put all their belongings in their cars, right?   It's been 50 years past. So the home population in Crimea who were Russians that were settled after the 50s, 1950s, right? They were not very welcoming. They thought, you know, these newcomers would return them, would take back their property. But that's not what Crimean Tatars did because as a tradition, they are non-violent people. So they didn't kick out the people who were actually leaving their very own houses, right? Using their very own furniture. They said, okay, I understand that you have been living here for 50 years. So what we will do is we will form new settlements, right? That's what they did. But even that process has been hampered by a very chauvinistic Russian politicians in independent Sula. Yeah, we can talk about it in a minute. Yeah, I know. And you really did share a lot about the rich resistance that the Crimean Tatars were persistent and passionate about returning. And this exodus really for equality and equity in their homeland is astonishing. And so it's great to share that. And that would almost be enough of a challenge. But now many people think the current conflict really began on February 24th. But for the Crimean Tatars, it's been since 2014. And we can almost say continuous as you share throughout history. Can you share what happened in 2014 and some of the most violent as well as violations of human rights that we see happening to the Crimean Tatars people just for being who they are as the indigenous peoples to the peninsula? Yeah, definitely. 2000, before 2014, actually, there was some kind of Russian, as I mentioned, Russian chauvinism in the peninsula politics. And these people were dominant in the administrative ordinance of this peninsula.  But these people were not very effective in general among the population. And the Crimea, you know, Crimea was part of Ukraine and it was in a relatively democratic atmosphere because Ukraine was not like Russia. It did not have a very authoritarian structure. It was not perfect democracy, but it had this kind of de facto pluralism, right? Because there wasn't one person like Putin who could monopolize power. In Ukraine, there was this kind of balance of different oligarchs, different political people, political personalities. So there was this plurality, there was relative atmosphere of freedom. And Kremlin Tatars, being the resourceful people they are, they took advantage of all these opportunities. They began to rebuild their national identity, their national culture. They opened the national schools. They started to teach their language to kids to the kindergarten level. They wrote new coursebooks. They opened museums, theaters, dance troupes. They recovered their former Hanate history or archival documents. Everything was going well in terms of rejuvenating their lost culture. But 2014, and it was, there was a relative peace in the peninsula as well. The Russians got used to Kremlin Tatars, Kremlin Tatars got used to the Slavic peninsula or Slavic people of the peninsula. But so there was no kind of a Russian separatism or Russian demand for Crimea to be a Russian peninsula or anything. The Russian people also were satisfied with living in Ukraine. But certainly in 2014, just after the Euromaidan Revolution happened in Kiev, Russia interfered in Crimea with force, with 40,000 troops on ground. They obtained all kinds of strategic points such as important military bases and important government buildings. And they actually instituted a kind of coup data. And this was also sudden. Ukraine did not have a government at the moment. So they could not defend Crimea. And the Crimean Tatars became the only Ukrainians in the peninsula. They sided with Ukraine despite a lot of pressure from both Russian Federation Putin and also from some of the Russian politicians in the peninsula. They waved the Ukrainian flag on the streets. They took to the streets without violence and they tried to resist the occupation. Unfortunately, the Nive rulers of the Crimea organized a fake referendum which wasn't appropriate in terms of in line with any kind of international law. And they declared one side of the that, you know, they annexed the peninsula, despite the Crimean Tatars boycotted this referendum. And after the war, the Crimean Tatars in a way were punished in different ways. For example, they were forced to leave the peninsula. Some of the Crimean Tatars, especially indigenous leaders, majorless leaders, the representatives in the Crimean Tatar parliament, right? National indigenous parliament, they were prohibited entering the peninsula. And some of them, if they resisted, you know, they were put into prison. And some of them, like 150 Crimean Tatars are right now in the Russian prisons because of all these kind of political crimes that was made by the, you know, Russian government. All the Crimean Tatar cultural institutions were shot, such as national schools, such as newspapers, media outlets, and Crimean Tatars are constantly right now under supervision. The other day I was talking to a professor who just came from Crimea to Turkey and he was telling me, even teaching in the university became a problem, you know? You don't know what to say because anything you say is punishable according to Russian law. So there is a complete lack of freedom of speech, freedom of thought. Right now, and Crimean Tatars are under a lot of political pressure. No, it really is so informative for you to share because people can't fathom, but it's an indigenous struggle for self-determination that has its own unique culture, own language, own history. And of course then seen as a threat to this invading force. And even Human Rights Watch reinforced many of the points you shared because they pointed out in March 27th and 28th in 2019, 23 Crimean Tatars were arrested. And of course they were labeled as terrorists. And this of course is just a tool that have been happening to indigenous peoples around the world to silence them. But as you point out, the Crimean Tatars are still struggling. And as you shared earlier, when there was that peaceful period, the Crimean Tatars still went to the UN working group on indigenous peoples, to the UN permit forum on indigenous issues and shared and demanded small gains and to continue to build the exercise, their culture. But what you're sharing since 2014 is really a continuation of the genocide that happened before then. Yeah, definitely. Crimean Tatars, yes, since they returned to the peninsula, they asked for rights of self-determination because the Crimean Tatars are only legitimate owners of Crimea because they have been there the longest. They are First Nations of Crimea and they respect the rights of all the other communities there. What they want is they want to protect the environment of Crimea, which is under a lot of danger from Russia right now because Russia is basically turning the peninsula into a military base. There are a lot of weapons and a lot of nuclear weapons also are placed in the peninsula as we watch from the news every day. And the Crimean, Crimea has been going under a drought because of the lack of water because it was getting its water from Ukraine and now all these channels are shut. And Russia has built this bridge and this highway without disregarding the environment or the culture of the people there without consulting them in any ways. And Russia also does not recognize the Crimean Tatars as indigenous people of the Crimea. And they, as far as their concerns, according to their Russian historiography, they recognize Crimea as a Russian land and Crimean Tatars as, prove this successors of the Mongolian Empire. But this is not true. This is like a one-sided reading of history without attending to the historical facts. Yeah, this, because of all this, the Crimean Tatars have been active in the UN mechanisms to defend their rights to self-determination in the international platforms because it wasn't recognized by Russia and it was only recognized by Ukraine after 2014. And the process is also still going very slow with regards to what does the Crimean Tatars of determination mean in Ukraine? What does it entail? What kind of rights? What kind of national cultural autonomy would Crimean Tatars be given after Crimea is liberated from Russia? So these are the main issues for Crimean Tatars right now because it's about their survival. If the Crimean Tatars does not have this right to sovereignty in Crimea, then their culture is in danger. Their language is already an endangered language. So right now, despite the war, it is very important for international bodies and Ukraine to attend the rights of self-determination of the Crimean Tatars because otherwise their survival will be in danger. Thank you so much for the representation of that rainbow of rights that are all being violated, but it is part of a larger wave of oppression against Crimean Tatars that Russia has been doing. We know there's different movements such as Crimean Solidarity that was established in 2016 and other movements. Can you share what's happening today since February 24th with that intensification of the war and as you shared more of a militarization of their homeland and how the Crimean Tatars are really struggling and standing up for their right of self-determination with the current war, but also as you shared that potential for a plural democracy after the liberation where the Crimean Tatars could have a much stronger role in Ukrainian society, but also have greater autonomy and exercise their self-determination? Yeah, after 2014, as I said, there are daily human rights violations. And today, the prison terms of Crimean Tatars, the last number I have is 1,221 years in total. The Crimean Tatars has got prison terms. So one of the important activists, Neri Manjalal, for example, he is the vice president of Crimean Tatar parliament. He recently got 17 years in prison. And just because he's a member of this Mejlis, this Crimean Tatar organization, not that he committed anything violent. 2,000 Mejlis members, you know, local parliament members are pressured every day with their families. There are more than one million illegal court cases against the Crimean Tatars. And there is currently a forced conscription. So the Crimean Tatars are disproportionately conscripted to the Russian army to fight against their own citizens because, you know, there can be Crimean Tatars working, so fighting for Ukraine in the Ukrainian army. And you have Crimean Tatars here forced to fight for Russia. So this is most tragic for any nation because they will have to kill each other, right? Other than that, the Crimean Tatars are not only in Crimea, but who are living in southern Ukraine, which are also under occupation, you know, part of Kherson, part of the Porosia, right? We know at least a hundred of them are kidnapped. We don't know where they're taken, but we know that Russia has this policy of taking them to inside Russia for the camps, which Russia calls filtration camps, right? This is similar to the camps used by China against Uyghur Turks, right? There they are kind of reeducated and, you know, they were interrogated to learn, you know, how loyal they are Ukraine and different FSB tactics are used against them to change their views, change their opinions, right? These are also some of the other pressures against the Crimean Tatars, other challenges that come from the current invasion. And it's horrible to realize how holistic these campaigns of repression are. And as you said, how people are, really, it's a culture of fear to try to make sure that they don't exercise their basic human rights. And for doing just that, of course, then they could face even more hardships. And then the sad part is you're talking about the humanitarian law violations of Russia to force conscription, but then also those rehabilitation camps that have gained greater attention in the media also show that we must stand together to demand an end to these horrible practices by the Russian regime. Yeah, definitely. I think this, I see them as part of another policy of the totalization of Crimea because Russia is in a way trying to force Crimean Tatars to leave Crimea by themselves, right? Increasing the pressure to such level, even threatening to conscript them, right? The Crimean Tatars actually have been leaving Crimea more than they did in 2014. So especially young men who are at the conscription age, they try to escape just like many Russians, we know they escape Russia because they don't want to fight in a war that they don't believe in. So this hybrid deportation, we call this a hybrid deportation, Russia, okay, is not deporting them by putting them into cattle wagons by preparing all the circumstances for them to leave their own, but this is so tragic because if we consider, you know, how much they try to return Crimea, right? The Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Cemilev, for example, he has suffered in Soviet prisons for 15 years and he had the longest hunger strike in the world, 303 days, and he fell into like 30 kilograms during this hunger strike. And he lost his hearing ability right now, for example, because of that, this leader of Crimean Tatars who is about, you know, 78 years old right now, Russia, after he, you know, but struggled so much to return to homeland and that's why, you know, he undertook this hunger strike. Right now, Russia prohibited Mustafa Cemilev to enter his own homeland, right? And he is in exile in Ukraine right now and trying to, again, trying again to return to their homeland. It's so unjust for the Crimean Tatars to be deprived of their indigenous land. Thank you so much for sharing really that line of liberation, the Crimean Tatars' rich history of always seeking their homeland to be able to exercise their right of self-determination, to speak their language, to have their culture, and to live where their ancestors have, which has been very informative and will keep this important angle of the current Ukraine war in the minds of humanity to make sure that they never forget the Crimean Tatars as we go forward. Thank you for bringing this issue into attention and I would like to say hello to all your viewers. Mahalo, thank you, aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.


Hi, I'm Matthew coast head dating coach and founder a commitment connection calm and today We're going to talk about how to text a guy So if you're struggling to know what how you should be texting a guy then let me put some ease to your frustration there So let's talk first about what you should avoid doing So the first thing that you should avoid doing is you should avoid and overanalyzing Whatever his text messages are so If you start overanalyzing things You might overanalyze your way into Thinking that he said something crazy that he didn't say and so you know take things at face value have fun with it Be playful avoid overanalyzing it And if you've already started overanalyzing it get away from it for a little bit and then come back and go if I came And looked at this from a fresh mind What would I think and then just you know get out of your head and Into your heart and just have fun The second thing to over to avoid doing is writing a book to him. So this can be Just too much for a lot of guys and it's you know Just typing away at a whole book if you have that much to talk about, you know, maybe you should get on the phone with each Other instead of talking to each other over text So what do you want to do the first thing you want to do is be confident You know and be confident in what you're doing be be playful have fun You know be confident in your messages and responses Don't get insecure about it. Just be confident and have fun with it and and enjoy what you're doing, you know, and Again, don't overanalyze The second thing that you want to do is end on a high note. So, you know, if things are going well, you know And you kind of run out of things to say don't hold on to the conversation and try to keep the conversation going You know, you can always just end it, you know I just let them know that you have to get going or whatever and that you'll talk to you'd love You know to keep texting with them soon or whatever so and things on a high note that's always better than you know trying to hold on and Suck the life out of a conversation that that that has ended. So ask him Questions if you want him to answer. That's the the next thing. That's the third thing that you want to do is is a lot of times women will send a message and they won't ask a question and they'll expect an answer and For a lot of guys, it's like, okay, I don't know what you want me to say and so if you want him to answer Ask him a question You know if you have something to say and you want his opinion on it Ask him what he thinks say, what do you think?   You know and and you will be like acting crazy if you get obsessive about it And so you just have other things going on, you know I have a life outside of Whatever relationship that you'd like to get into have an interesting life, you know that way a guy would want to be a part of it and You know, you don't get obsessive about about texting and what's going on with his text messages So that's it for today If you want more information on how to attract mr. Right into a committed Lasting relationship make sure you go to my website at commitment connection calm and take the quiz I'm Matthew coast and I'll speak with you again soon