And welcome to this episode of Psychic Medium Tony G. I am Tony G. This episode is being recorded live at the studio of WSCS. I'm so grateful for Ron and Rick and Scott, the station manager. They are just amazing at finding and helping to put this show out there in new ways. So today, we are actually going live with Facebook Live and YouTube Live. It should be streaming on both of those venues. So you can hop on to Facebook Live and watch this, listen to this YouTube Live, watch it and listen. And if you're watching right now, if you're on Facebook and you have a question about life, love, finances, career or just listening to your blog talk or iHeart or any of the other venues this is on, you can call in now<PHONE_NUMBER>. That's the number. Call in, ask a question or connect with a loved one, whatever it is that you're feeling today or wanting to do, that's what I'm here for. Before I get started with the show, I want you to know I do messages from above every single Monday at noon. And I do that for 30 minutes also. So you can call in then also. Now, yesterday I started talking about relationships on messages from above. So go back, listen to that show. It's really quite interesting what they channeled through me at the beginning of a show. And the one thing that they're saying with this new year and this new decade and how astrologically all the planets are moving and shifting and going into place, they're just setting us up for the beginning of a wonderful ride. So if you are right now thinking about, you know what, I want a new career, this relationship isn't working out, now is the time to jump. Everything is falling into place now so that you can make the moves you need to make, the moves you want to make, to have that life you've been wanting. As long as you're in the right place, doing the right thing. You've let go of what's not working. You will be moving into a decade. Wow, a whole decade, thanks guys. A decade of increasing your prosperity and abundance, increasing the amount of love you can give and receive, increasing the type of work you're doing or working towards your purpose. All of this will incrementally increase as long as you've let go of what is not working. If you're holding onto what's not working, what doesn't feel right to you or just what isn't making you happy in your life. Let's start there. What's not making you happy in your life? What in your life says, you know what, this isn't up to par. This is here, I want to be here. What's going on with that? Where is that? How does that affect you? What's going on with that?  Now, before you jump ship, make sure if it's a career, you have something else lined up. But more importantly, if you're here, realize is what's wrong this, the job, the person, the other thing, or is it my expectations? Am I not in my purpose? Am I unhappy with everything in my life?  Or do you need a clearing? Do you need to get refocused on joy? Get re-acclimated to that vibration and that frequency of joy. So if you're happy in all other aspects and there's just this one sticking point, then you have to look at that sticking point or that situation and say, what will make me happy? And then from there, make your choices. But this is not the time. Do not drag the old into the new. Do not drag the past and what hasn't worked in the past into the new because right now everything, everything is set up for you to catapult forward, whether it be love, career, purpose, finances. These first three months of the year could bring you beautiful downfalls financially as long as you're changing your mind. Now changing your mind means thinking differently, but it also means working in the direction of raising your frequency, having that joy and happiness. I'm going to tell you a little secret on national TV. Just a little secret. When I'm my happiness, happiest, when things are really rolling forward for me and everything's working out, anything I think of that I want just lands in front of me. Okay.  Sometimes I do, but it depends on my frequency. If I'm down and out and negative, everything moves really slow and nothing's coming to me. The happier I am, the better things get and the more of what I'm seeking from the universe just falls in my lap. I'm not saying this in a way that I take advantage of it. It's just the universe and I are in that frequency. And when you're in that frequency of love and joy, everything, everything just falls for you. Everything just is in alignment with you and for you. Work.  Then in that moment, in that very moment, all of a sudden other jobs get offered to you. What? Yes. It's so true. It's so very, very true. And as long as you stay in that frequency, those jobs that are getting offered or being brought to your attention will 100%, 100% be in alignment with your frequency. Now, people say, I'm afraid to jump. I'm afraid to go. I don't want to switch jobs. What if this job is worse? What if it's not? Seriously, what if it's not worse? What if the next partner is better? What if the next partner is everything you wanted? And you know what? Here's a little tippy-two. If it's worse, jump again. Jump again. Jump until you get to where you want to be. Keep taking steps incrementally until it's the person you want that treats you the way you deserve to be treated. Listen, women, my girls out there, we are princesses until we are queens. Never downgrade yourself.   Is copper valuable? Yeah, it is. Okay, wait. Thank you. My camera guy just said, yeah, copper is valuable. Is silver valuable? What's that you're hitting at? Tin, tin. You are. Okay, this is...  Okay. Oh, my God. I'm just going to get myself together here. Okay, you are gold.  Don't let somebody treat you like tin. There. That's it. And guys, the same for you.   If that's not happening, just, you know, do what you can to do what you can or jump out of this situation. Alrighty now. That's good. On that happy note, I'm going to go to the first color. The first color is area code 316. Hello, 316. How are you today? Hey, Brianna. How are you? Where are you calling from today? Awesome. How can I help you? No, where are you thinking of dealing with a guy named Dylan? Okay, first I'm going to tap into Dylan and make sure I'm getting the right intel on Dylan. So Dylan's a pretty good guy. He's really solid. He's resourceful. He's extremely logical. Almost so logical it makes you crazy at times. Is this the right person? Yes. Okay, perfect. Dylan has some quirky behaviors, but you can deal with them, right? Perfect. Okay, you and Dylan. So I don't want to be the one to go spoiler alert or anything like this, but I see this having the possibility and the probability of being a very, very, very long-term relationship. This is a significant relief. Oh, wow. This is so new. Well, this is good. It's good that it's new and that you know this. Don't rush him. He's very logical. He does things on his timeline. Okay, it's very important for you to know. He does things on his timeline. It's going to come. Don't freak out. It'll be there. You just have to let him go at his pace, okay? And here's a little something you might not know about him. He really likes to surprise people. He thinks he's hilarious when he surprises someone. So don't push. Let him surprise you with things and be very surprised. Oh my gosh. I'm going to tell you another thing. Yes. This is a relationship or a situation where the two of you have the opportunity to learn and grow, okay? So for example, when things get a little janky and they do in relationships, listen, relationships are the most difficult thing in the world. Even when you're 100% beyond in love with the person, trust me, I know they are challenging because everybody has different beliefs and different programs and different upbringings and you just have to figure out how to communicate things and respect each other. So yes, but it's not only in the communication that counts with the two of you. It's you two communicate a little differently.  And his verbiage means one thing in your head, but the way he's saying it might not mean the way he means it. So let me give you a sentence to memorize. And this is perfect for anybody. How do you mean that? What do you mean by that? How do you, how do you mean that? The way you're saying that, I understand it this way, is that the way you meant it? Let your communication go that way. See, see, that's it. You're going to have to do that until you understand the way each other communicates, okay? Because communication makes or breaks a relationship and this one has the potential to go very, very far. Now, you are going to be learning and healing in this relationship and you might just be learning to re-trust or trust in a different way. He's not the guys from your past at all. He's not those guys. So as easy as it is for me to say, let that go. It's not easy to let go of things like that. You just have to like keep reminding yourself he's not those guys. He's not them. He's somebody completely different. It's not, if you find- Wow, you're just gonna have to talk about this weekend. Awesome. See, there's that confirmation. Thank you for confirming that for me. Yes. I will hear from him. Yes, you will. You will. Be patient and realize every couple has disagreements and arguments. It's not the argument. It's how you get through it. It's how you communicate it. And then letting go of it and moving forward from then. So I'm going to go there having problems right now. I definitely get a yes. We're going to clear that right now. And that's a lot of hard stuff coming out. We're going to clear not only the problem, but what the source of this, because this has nothing to do with him personally. He hit a trigger. Some triggers were hit for both of you from past relationships that brought all of this back up like a wild boar running in the mud and just went crazy. I don't even know where that statement came from. When I channel just the weirdest things sometimes come out of my mouth. So good. Excellent. As long as it makes sense to you, that's what counts. I am going to tell you. Never have disagreements over the phone. If you can avoid and never text, never this whole texting thing is a big debacle in communication in relationships when things aren't going perfect or you don't know each other well enough because there's so much miscommunication and in our head we read it and go, Oh, he meant this or he meant it this way or he's yelling at me. It's it's words on paper. It's okay words on a phone. There is no way we can know the context of how that's being sent or the emotion. It's being sent with. Okay. Absolutely. And texting can make or break. So stay out of texting and this is what you need to do. Hey, when you have a couple minutes, can you please call me? Not call me. Can you please? Especially in the beginning of a relationship and don't whatever you do. Do not say, I need to talk to you about something because what is a person going to do? They're right away going to go into that defensive mode where they're saying, Okay, I am. She's going to tell me something. What is it? They're already panicking before you even call and talk to them. Hey, when you have a minute, can you please give me a call? That's it. That's it. And then when you get on the phone and you hear the tone nine times out of 10, once you hear the voice, all the panic and everything is okay. Everything's okay. You don't even need to bring up your issue because you've heard the voice. You know everything's okay. So you have some serious insecurities and so does he. So we're going to just work on clearing that now for you, anybody listening and anybody re listening. We're just going to clear all of that out now. We're going to let that fall by the wayside and by tomorrow, you should feel better and by the next day, you should be rethinking the way you think about situations. So just please know that.  If you go to my healing or clearing page, whatever it's called. Now, there's a button where you can get a once a week clearing just to make sure you're running forward. Everything is going well in your life. And I really do recommend that for people because so much muck is on us. Like just this is the way I describe it. Energy is like colds. When you're in somebody's energy, if they're nervous, if they're panicky, if they're angry, guess who's picking that up? We are because our energy is meshing and we just want to be in that right energy. We want to get all that old icky energy off of us. Let go of things from the past and run forward on those higher, whether we call it frequencies, vibrations, we're all energy. If you took a microscope and looked, you could look on a strong enough microscope, you would see right through our hands because we are beings of energy first and flush second and where that energy falls is what you are creating in your life every single day. Okay. It's important to remember. So everything is going to work out. Be patient. Just I'll give them the space. Yeah. And just say, you know, one of the best things we can say when we're going through something like this, I'm really sorry for all of the miscommunication. And then leave it at that. I'm really sorry for all of the miscommunication because that's, I think you're not owning it. They're not owning it. It's just out there that there was a lot of miscommunication. Okay, sweetie. Absolutely my pleasure. And I'm so grateful that you called in today. I look forward to hearing how this all turns out in the future. Okay. I'm going to go directly to the next caller and the next caller is 347. Hello, 347. How are you today? Good to my call. Absolutely my pleasure. What's your name? Where are you calling from? From New York. Katie, how can I help you today? You know what? Maybe you can tell me what's going to happen. Maybe I'll ask a loved one. What about love today? Where it's on to people that I like and things like that. Any insight about it or about the people of the day or the person? Okay. Here's what I'm getting in approximately a month that puts us toward mid-February. You are going to start... We're in January. Yep. We're in January, but in approximately a month, in approximately a month, you are going to start dating. Okay? You're going to go out on one date and you're going to be bitterly disappointed.  And here's one of my favorite lines that wasn't worth the lipstick I wasted putting on for it. But don't let that disillusion you. The first run out can sometimes be a little bit disappointing. You know what? I always say this. Don't be nervous to get up and leave in the middle of a dinner if it's not going where you want it to go.  I have to go to the bathroom and walk out the front door. Done and done. If you know, just leave them sitting there. That's their lesson to learn. And please don't ask me how many times I've done that because people might think I mean for doing that. But... But if somebody is... Like, if you just know they're not the one and they're rude or they're just really inappropriate, excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom, get up and walk out. And that's it. That's their lesson to learn. If somebody doesn't know how to treat you, you don't have to sit through a whole dinner with them. Now, I am going to let you know that mid-February you are going to start dating. You're going to go out on three or four different dates with three or four different people and then the fifth person, the fifth person which will be in March. And I want to say I'm seeing the 28th, right around March 28th. Someone's going to come in and this person is going to be... I don't like to say it like this but this is the word they're giving me. This person is going to be perfect. You're going to feel it. You're going to know it. You're just going to... You're going to be there with it. You're going to be in it, okay? So right around March 28th, this person is going to come in.  Go. Don't think, oh, there's a guy coming in on the 28th. I'm going to sit home and eat popcorn and watch TV until the note. Sometimes we have to go out on these dates with these other people so that we can learn what we want, what we deserve and definitely be in that space where we're like, I'm not settling and I'm not messing around anymore. The first people out can't be the people because we need to get our girl back, right? We need to be back in that space where we're like, oh, look at... I don't know how else to say it other than we need to get our girl back, okay? And realize how fun dating can be again and the right questions to ask to get the right answers and to be in that space where we are really, really solid and then that guy walks in and you're on that same energy with that guy and boom, magic happens, okay? Now you're going to think it's the third guy or the fourth guy. You're going to think it's him because he's really close but he's not as genuine as he seems. So the third fourth guy is not as genuine as he seems and you're not going to know it right away. So get your questions down and double ask them. Ask them one way. Let them have a few drinks. Ask them another way, okay? And you'll learn. And I always tell people, read Steve Harvey's book, Date Like a Man, Act Like a Woman. I did. Yes! I did talk before. Yeah, that's a walkout in the middle of dinner. Uh-huh. Right. Certain places. Right. You know what? I'm going to tell you. Keep moving forward. You're going to get there sooner than you think and I just keep hearing it's the fifth guy, okay? So I know you are going to meet this guy and you're going to know right away. Thank you so much for calling in. I'm really grateful for your call and I want to thank everybody who called in today who listened. I'm sorry if I didn't get to you, please. Try again Monday at noon for messages from above and I do Psychic Medium Tony G on WSCS every, the second Tuesday of the month. Boy, I am having some communication things today. I look forward to the next show. Until then, make miracles in your life and make 2020 everything it can be. Bye for now.


T.Athu's Update. T.F.N.N. giving you the mid-morning update. Well the market was down sharply through the middle of the night and then before the opening we began to search higher and now we have the Dow Jones up 150, the S&P up around 29 handles and the NASDAQ up 150 handles and this was a pretty clear two-day correction that we've had here. Now folks there's been a lot of news about these tanks that are coming in. I don't follow the news at all, these Abraham tanks that are coming to Ukraine. It's going to take several months to get them built and sent over there plus there's going to be a bunch of people going over there to show them how to use that. So when you see the news and what's going on, take it with a grain of salt because it's really really hard to get some of these things done logistically. Now as far as the markets are concerned we've only got one market that is down. That's the British pound is down just a tiny bit and one other market I believe in natural gas is also down. We're going to be talking about that on my show that comes up here in a minute or so. But the main thing to remember folks is that these markets have been rallying very strongly since mid-October and that is a good sign and then we had the higher bottom on December the 13th also a good sign and so the shorter trend is up the longer term trend is down. January has historically been a positive month and it certainly is a positive month because it's doing exactly what things are happening. So I'm hoping that the helping is terrible trading word but it's also a good word for looking positive but I think that we've got a chance if we break out to the upside we can see 4,400 in the S&P and still be a lower high than we've made it 4,800 back on January 4th and that's the main things that we're paying attention to. So that's about it from the standpoint of what's going on with the market so live every day in an attitude of gratitude and may God bless and we'll see you in just a few minutes. The reality is that navigating financial markets can be risky. Markets can be chaotic and difficult to understand.


What's good YouTube, this your boy She world back at y'all again with another art video man Fit in the work on this logo for this guy if you're new to the channel go ahead and subscribe Make sure you click post notifications, so you will be notified Every time I drop some heat and before we get started. I want to show y'all some fan art I got from your boy Kings art the designer. I want to say thank you man I really appreciate the support and the love you've been showing man. That's what's up Don't art y'all make sure y'all go check them out. I will have his link in the description and without further ado Let's jump right into this. Okay in this video.  I'm gonna show you what to do and how to do it We're gonna try to opacity layer add a new layer and then pick a bright color often We really finna make a blueprint first You don't have everything laid out go ahead and set our brush Pressure got a brush set now. We're about to start adding the detail Like the line work How you do if you want to duplicate something you select it you highlight it But your selection tool and you hold alt the alt key You just drag it and then to make a copy And why you still got to select it you right click it and you go to transform and reflect And click okay Now we got the color is since we we finished all the line work So what we finna do is we finna highlight everything for the object Expand appearance Go to your path finder and click merge And after you do that, we're gonna duplicate our line work on track it Drop it on a blank sheet of paper to make a copy of it And now it's on the start color I'm gonna pick something close to the skin tone. I'm gonna try to color over the whole picture right click it Click sent it to back And after you do that you want to highlight everything together We go back to your path find there click merge right click it again go to Isolate slit a group and start


Okay, good evening everyone. Thank you for coming. My name is Matilda McQuaid and I'm one of the co-curators for the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial and I'm happy today to Officially the exhibition is open And it was co-organized or co-curated by myself and Caitlin Condele and Andrea Lips and Co-organized with the Cube Design Museum in the Netherlands. So believe it or not, they have the exact same show almost Opening on the same day today So if you're in Europe, I would take a stop at Cube and Kerkrad in the Netherlands Which I'm curious when I'm going next week. I'm curious to see what their interpretation of all the projects is so Today on the opening we want to celebrate the designers that are featured. So this is the last of these Salons that we've had today We're bringing them together for discussion and exploration of the themes which are explored in the exhibition as well as in their work and I think all of the designers that we that are in the show and also represented in these salons are highly Interdisciplinary so they're not just architects and just designers or graphic designers They are have many other interests and collaborate with many other people So the exhibition nature Seeks to inspire ideas collaboration and dialogue to address some of the most significant and consequential Environmental and humanitarian issues of our time so we hope to be doing that here today and I Think these series of salons has been an incredible opportunity for Many known as well as unknown designers to speak so It's my pleasure to introduce. I'm hoping it's going to be for right. Oh, yes For architects so the first two represent ensemble studio and if you have Seen the incredible monumental installation of the garden called Petrified River That is by the architects In ensemble studio and the principles are Anton Garcia, Abril and Debra Mesa and I'm just going to read their bio because it's it's really interesting in both cases Ensemble studio is a cross-functional team founded in 2000 and led by architects Anton and Debra They balance Imagination and reality art and science their work innovates typologies technologies and methodologies to address issues as Diverse as the construction of the landscape or the prefabrication of the house Anton and Debra are committed to sharing ideas and cultivating cultivating synergies between professional and academic worlds through teaching lecturing and researching She is then to then to let chair and architectural design at Georgia Tech and Anton is a professor at MIT where they had co-founded the pop lab Standing stands for prototypes of prefabrication in 2012 Now they're about to complete ensemble fabrica then Madrid based counterpart of the pop lab a Fabrication laboratory that can take their investigations even further Petrified River for Cooper Hewitt is the first work created in this new space So it was created in Madrid and then shipped to New York City cave Kabaya and please you're gonna have to correct me because I wanted to ask you before I came up here Kabaya Karanja Kabahe Karanja and Stella Mutegi Okay Cave Bureau is a Nairobi based practice founded in 2014 by Kabaya and Stella They describe themselves as explorers of architecture and urbanism within nature Their work addresses the anthropological and geological context of the African city as a means to confront the challenges of Contemporary rural and urban life The Bureau aims to develop systems and structures that improve the human condition Without negatively impacting the natural environment in this regard cave navigates a return to the limitless curiosity of our early ancestors Conducting playful and intensive research studies into caves within and around Nairobi These studies form part of a broader decoding of pre and post colonial conditions of the city Explored through drawing storytelling Construction and the curation of performative ends So I want to welcome ensemble studio followed by cave bureau and then we will have a discussion upfront after Cave speaks. Thank you See how we can share the mic Thank you for Matilda for the invitation to the salon to the exhibition and all the team at Cooper Hewitt Thank you for all of you coming And I hope you got the chance to go in the garden and and check the our work there As Matilda was saying in some less studio or work transcend say disciplines programs scales Or team is based in Madrid and Boston and for us we Design the process as much as we care for the final And actually looking at processes of transformation of the landscapes looking at processes of extracting materials has always been great source of inspiration and of course of acquiring a way of acquiring a knowledge and certainly in the first works or visits to the quarries in Galicia where these images come from where Absolutely key for a way of looking at how our actions as architects impact The landscapes from where the materials are Extracted and therefore caring very much about not taking for granted what is given but really Rethinking many times the processes in this work. For example, we were recycling a spare material of the quarry to create a structural and sculptural a facade that then we transported to the site and And this is our our first I would say experiment of Of the language that we have developed for the petrified river. This is our first I would say project that tries to comprehend and so due to the rules and the messages of how to build With nature and in nature. We called it the truffle as a parasite and we used available materials Given from the mineral world the soil the branches all that dirt that Configured a ball of conglomerated mass a petrified almost a synthetic stone that truffled somehow Defied a lot of architectural canons of form space or tectonics. We just tried to emulate the processes of nature In its geologies and try to understand this as an opportunity to develop an architectural language that could be mimetic and could be a Sensible to what the landscape was giving us This was a decade ago as a small Cabanon and Remained a little bit dormant until we got the call of of Peter and Kathy who actually sponsored Our work in Montana and also help us to build a petrified river And they invited us to this beautiful landscape that Deborah is we try to Yeah, so so the commission here was to create an art center in in Montana in the middle of Very wild rough undeveloped place Absolutely new to us and so our effort here was how to read the landscape how to operate with the rules of the landscape more than in post-pre-established orders Into it. No, we even decided to create this art center instead of doing one Building one white box that didn't relate to the site to explode the center into a constellation of Spaces that would connect Visitors to the landscape now and here we are in the studio brainstorming working with our hands trying to understand How geology operates how the landscape? Transforms and morphs to build an architecture that could Learn from those those actions know how could we build a space through erosion through fragmentation through explosion? Through crystallization and we we created through these process different spaces that would feed in different spots of this landscape and would create a shelters and Spaces where the art program could happen in total connection with this landscape, no and then in these moments these Actions making the models where became kind of rehearsals of how we would operate on the site where we were at the mercy of the weather the elements and And where the collaboration with the local people was critical to make these Structures of landscape as we call them happen. No and we were controlling some variables like a thermal properties acoustic properties but other variables and Well left a bit and determined no so these exercise was also about relinquishing control not needing to control absolutely all the elements of the final a product the final architecture which came out also a bit of a surprise, you know, and and in a way we unearth these these structures and and there are some things like the scale and some of the properties that That we know would be there, but others like for example how these structures sound finally Are a discovery, you know for us and they become Places to host music concerts, but they become Instruments also themselves that are able to project the sound into the landscape, no and they become these hybrid Structures that can be read as art as a geology or as architecture indistinctly which takes us to New York City and or proposal for Cooper Hewitt these say petrified river that also tries to interpret the the landscape of Manhattan in its origin and Yeah, we will have to remember that before we arrived here there was a While the ecosystem full of rivers ponds creeks and Hills Manhattan is a place for many hills so When we had to think of a site a specific action over the garden in front of of central Park in this beautiful kind of canvas of of Of landscape framed in Into the grid of of Manhattan we always thought that we should revive that almost Natura morta no of of The previous nature of Manhattan so the the idea of of making an abstract composition Composition that could recreate conceptually and almost I would say spiritually the the idea of a previous existing nature took us to the to the paradoxical Decision to to prefabricate a river and here comes the mix technological and Artistical parts that we have been producing through ensemble studio. No, they this encounter between architecture civil engineering and art to To to create this this kind of narrative To give life to to to this I would say soulless material the concrete So these were the the first prototypes of this petrified river this conglomerate of concrete soil pigments and terrain that that morphologically was broken into Into Into the magmatic condition of the flow of concrete as if it was a river A river that is stiff and structurally resistant as a beam and engineered as a 40-feet spanning beam that weighs 20 ton and had to be Strictly and precisely engineered according to the prefabrication standards perfectly cut into pieces to be capable as an Sun Geological Ulysses to to to travel and to and to be compacted and delivered using the logistics of Contemporary transportation, so we were transporting and delivering like a landscaped Amazon a river upon Anna and a hill and all these kind of Delirious action Ended up in a in a Incredible maneuver where we cut fifth Avenue for six hours and we were escorted by policeman and a crew of dedicated technicians and And people from the museum and the curatorial team and and some everybody we orchestrated a very I would say audacious civil engineering maneuver a flying rivers among fifth Avenue and crossing them in giratorial Rotation through through the streets and putting together two parts of a pond that each of them weighed like two parts of a nutshell Around ten tons each so all these kind of human effort all these bravery and all these artistic sublime Desire ended up Into a Natural composition that when I see it on the garden. I always think it looks like it has been always been there No, I mean we should talk to the to the creators and let it here I mean we don't need to move it again and redo all the process and all the effort and all these Nerves so I mean all this is to recreate Very human Performance of of how we interact how we force nature into our own needs The same way Manhattan was turned into an abstract grid of beautiful buildings and infrastructure and life that we all love and hate mostly if you live in Massachusetts and And all these kind of emotions that turned The the nature into an urban Where to serve our our desires and our needs and this piece somehow tries to condensate all that all that Sentiment all that Emotion and all that Logic that make it possible. Thank you very much Good evening It's good to be here all the way from Nairobi which is in Kenya, which is in East Africa We'll start briefly with Just introducing who we are as cave and then just jump into our Presentation on the Anthropocene Museum Cave was founded in 2014 We worked together with Kabagan big architectural firm in Nairobi He likes to say we were fired, but I like to say we were laid off. I was laid off I don't know about Kabage, but I was laid off and maybe he was fired, but the same day On the same day But anyway, the truth is they they were going through financial problems. So they let a bunch of people leave and We happened to be in that bunch that was let go that was in 2014 around May No February March We went our own ways And then in September we spoke and we started cave And it's been a short journey a short intense journey so far And this is you know the intensity of it all here. We are in New York. So We're glad to be here. We are a small architectural firm obviously based in Nairobi we Have an ethos of how we run The project this is the whole team there We like to take quirky photographs every year. So if you follow us on Instagram or look at our Website once in a while our photos change and one of the things cave is about is Where architecture started And the name itself is actually where architecture did start with Ali man. They didn't have buildings they Used caves as a shelter. So that's the origin of of architecture really So we run it the two of us. They are looking like tribal chiefs But Yeah, so we run this we were three founders of cave, but one of the founders left because he Followed another path. So Kabaki and I have been left to run the ship So far I would say so good, but very tough. We are still sort of in the startup space So that's been Interesting Interesting, I would say when we had a salary and then now Sometimes we don't but I guess that's the nature of Startups and just to jump into some of the Things we are about escape We Have a manifesto in which we Try and run all the projects that we get in that sort of framework of the manifesto and in that manifesto really what we talk about is Three things that we have placed Projects in depending on where they are and what they are about the three things that we talk about is We call them the origin the void and the maid the origin is Where you come from and just based in Nairobi, Kenya as you all know or may not know we were a colonial We were British colony and we gained our independence in 1963 and That is about the age Our parents were just becoming Teenagers finishing university and moving out of home and what a lot of people who are now in their 60s 70s did was they left their rural homes and Went into urban places to go to higher education and to work and the origin we call is Where they have come from and then they go to the void the void is the cities and in the cities we have a Lot of people who still come Even to this day from the rural area and come and live in informal settlements What they are trying to do is get a better life for themselves and when they're in this void They are trying to work so hard to make it out of the void to go into the maid And the maid is now I guess sort of the people who live on the street that this museum is on That's almost everybody's inspiration to be able to Live such a life. So a lot of the people in the void are Struggling and working so had to get out of this void to the maid and What's funny then is that the people who are in the maid Now want to leave the maid space because they now Have their big houses on big acreage and drive big cars and all that They now want to leave because there's not too many people who've come into the city and They're all competing for the same Resources and the people in the maid now want to go back to the origin And that's been happening quite a lot That people are now leaving the cities and they are now going out back into the rural space to to Leave a better quality of life it's Funny because there's still people in the origin Coming into the city to be in this big void to try and get into the maid and then from the maid back to the origin so in that whole space we try and when we get projects and You know, we categorize them into is this a void is this an origin and is this a maid and then try and Address the reasons why people are moving from either one of these spaces and can we address those issues In what we give to them as the end product so that you're not trying to jump around All these places because in all these spaces. I think we can still get quality And be satisfied with where you are you're not all trying to move about and one of the projects then that we Have is what we have presented to the museum and I'll just let Kabaget talk a bit about that. Thank you Stella so My task this evening is to introduce the Anthropocene project Before I do that just to lighten up the room a bit Me feeling tense here Probably is So we we brought a bit of an artifact from Nairobi Well specifically the rift valley and it's it's obsidian and what we want to do is Offer it up to a as a gift to one audience member Who will ask the most interesting question? The judge for that I will leave it to Cooper Hewitt if you don't mind you can So yeah, that's a bit of it's as close as you get to dragon glass So let's see how it goes So begin this quotation or rather this presentation in the court from Relatively controversial, but extremely influential philosopher Martin Heidegger who coined The term and said we only begin to understand technology when we cease to notice it I think You could flip it and bring in architecture in between there and We're not the first to do it. I mean it's been done before that replacement of Technology with architecture and for the longest history. I mean Technology was not just something you hold it was a window It was you know a flooring how you do your flooring and it it was quite quite straightforward to do with how we'd progress as Mankind So in a way, what's interesting at least what we've taken out from this is Martin Heidegger had an interesting perspective of technology a view of technology as being a reflection of who we are just sort of My perspective of it where we look at the things we've created the materials and energies. We've extracted from the world as actually being us a reflection of who we are and Quite problematic in many senses But what's interesting in this age and time, which is the Anthropocene as it's been proposed should we say It's it's quite Quite seismic to reflect on how much impact we've had on the world and in a way Our project sort of begins with that This as many might know is Well, what should we say was in 1945 a nuclear test the Trinity project and This is one of the sort of Signals to do with our impact as humans in the world Flipping it entirely looking at it from the African perspective this is a clip from a video During a struggle of post for post Struggled for independence you'd we say in Nairobi and Kenya in general and these are people who would hide in caves to struggle and fight for independence and It was round about the same period should we say when Colonialism was extracting so much from the continent as well as other continents and Caves were being used to be that point of resistance If we look at the Anthropocene, it's quite a technical Term should we say technical investigation It began should we say and described first coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoma Who defined it? this slide quite simply is A chronostrack fig. Sorry. I always have a hard time describing that or rather pronouncing it chronostrack graphic chart and It's basically Defines the age We are in and should we say the geological stage That we find ourselves in the Anthropocene is not a Should we say it has not been ratified yet? and it's something that Is yet to be Identified formally within the whole chart Repetition is the consideration of the past not as a static event Know as a chronologically fixed date, which we can bring to our own age by mere visual or formal invocation But of searching the possibility that would have been in the creative work of our ancestors Araya at the end of now Again this a reference back to Martin Heidegger here Where he looked at our past and futures and What we're trying to do with this project is trying to bring the two together our histories as well as the present and specifically looking at our Habitation of caves now what we have here is Is a bit of a chart and description of the position and time in space that we find ourselves to do with The Anthropocene as a proposed time and epoch and as you can notice here 1950 and 1945-1950 is the proposed period when that should actually commence Seems like the image got slightly corrupted, but Makes sense. So what we've basically done we've overlaid obviously the Trinity project and the cave and Specifically during the Mao Mao uprising if you don't know Mao Mao are Basically the freedom fighters Sorry the freedom fighters who assisted us to gain our independence and And this cave which we've exhibited at the museum is One such cave that was inhabited by the Mao Mao and For us in many respects we Unfortunately, we don't take it as as a museum, but in many ways it is and Should be read as such and so what we did was to survey it Using point cloud technology to actually analyze each and every space each and every surface 3d print it and effectively model and cast it in bronze To actually represent the museum as it is So if if you don't mind I'll just go into Some some poetic narrative. It's not very Sophisticated but hopefully it makes sense So we read the origin as one a Singularity of architecture and nature when it all began See the baboon parliament in its true stature Flowing through lava tubes fashioned in power caldera of Steam and struggle we draw here to scramble For an Africa in architecture built on protest and geothermal The my cave is ready for visitors As we point in cloud Against a mapping the settlers chose to obscure and shroud it was a stone age cave Filled with obsidian tools and not too long ago a refuge against those dreaded colonial rules Opening falls watered doors and a nave with burnt up my walls So we unlocked the double helix on the left side To see it in chromosome Mighty sections etched on leather hide of zebo cow grown I'll see the incline to an epoch We narrative we natives resisted in Spiritual space shaping being and time so on the right You see the museum And its repository We trace it on contours of dormant drawings showing volcanoes and lava tubes a pent up geology So what we did was to draw it in scale and built to shell Tracing habitation that shaped this abstract nation jail the red spots as you can see mark habitation of the Mao Mao's at different points of the struggle so So much for this struggle and so much for these glorious journals Not much for the depository When it isn't architecture we look at but ourselves and obsessed putrid technology So we have a short film It's playing in the in the gallery It's online and we hope we can actually get to see it so we had three characters one zero and we have This young boy's husband Sirma and an artist Jackie, thank you very much Thank you very very much amazing presentations and It's funny when I was when we are curating the show. We didn't absolutely know what we were going to include and also receive from our designers and Specifically, I know we had a lot of back-and-forth with cave about what they were going to present We kind of knew with you, but What was interesting is when we finally kind of installed to see the model of Petrified River and to see the cave Right across from each other and it was like wow this is It couldn't have been planned and it wasn't planned But it was just amazing in terms of the similarities, but yet the kind of the the methodology Getting there is completely. It's very different. But what I loved is Spatially how you you each treat space whereas the void becomes You know Very important part of your work and I'm talking about the void not as part of the manifesto but as kind of a spatial quality and Where the solid becomes, you know a very important part of Certainly your work and sort of that Placing the solid in space and I'm just as architects, you know, we're always talking about or I'm not an architect But you're always talking about space So I'm just curious like how You know what your thoughts are about sort of space how you work in space specifically, you know with those two projects and I mean, I'm dying to know more sort of how you Decided on a cave as your kind of source for Both your name and your kind of what you do. I mean, it's it's it's pretty remarkable so dive in So I think for us the cave was quite quite An obvious choice having at least Bostell and I were probably the first of our family to have studied abroad and We came back home by our choice we could have stayed abroad But with a very reflective perspective of Architecture and what it can be and that you can actually question what architecture is and so for us We began to look back at our history to think about okay What what did we hold on to what did our ancestors really hold on to and in more recent times? You're talking about the 1960s. We had the Mao Mao freedom fighters actually using caves as a space to hold resistance and and actually find communion together as a community so We realized there's a lot of value here Let's just try to unpick it and look into a bit more detail. So We use technology to sort of unravel a space that's formed by lava. So they're lava tube caves and What you're seeing. I mean what you took us back to be honest because that's the first time We're seeing that cave or seeing the void of it because when you're in it, you can't perceive it at all so Yeah, it's quite important for us in a way. Yeah but in terms of the in terms of the space inside, I know you've you've Done what GPS not GPS, but what do you call it the cloud point cloud scanning scanning it Are you thinking kind of again going back to this the question about space? Are you thinking about because you mapped where they live the freedom fighters sort of took shelter? Live slept. Are you mapping those out as kind of? As you would program a building in a sense Do you see it in that kind of in that kind of way? I? Think it's reading of program definitely, but the fact that there wasn't very much Documented there's a lot to read into it There are parts of walls where you'd have fires that are burnt and you see the sort of blackened walls There were areas which was smoothened out where they would sleep and it's over time the rock started to smoothen out And so we we are just beginning to get into that, but there's a lot to read from it Because it's it's a history a very complicated history a lot of which was also partly erased and It's problematic for us to remember or at least very accurately so it's Interesting an interesting question actually yeah, and in terms of ensemble. I mean here you create something that Looks I mean it's completely artificial but it looks like it's been you know around for millennia and And what was the inspiration for that? I mean was it the landscape was it nature itself or was it? Something else that kind of got you started I I think that what we share with with our cave colleagues is that And By intuition We are not looking to disciplinary architecture or technologies to to get inspiration or a vocation and we still think that The manantial the source comes from from the correct interpretation of of landscape a contemporary That means that we can still use the The technologies that we have available could be 3d scanning laser scanning mapping or civil engineering or finite a structural design to make this decoding because the source is still the same so I think this this approach to the natural as As a still a mystery as an unexplored territory that requires every I would say every generation or even every Era no has to Reinterpret that the code again almost starting from scratch is something that in in architecture is is going on And And I think we're not alone in this research and And the more the better because they're like This kind of a citizen cane scenario. No, there's everyone's looking for a different perspective But I think that we're pretty much looking to the same place And these are the the Challenges of of our of our Time Some of some people call them environmental others call them Energetic or energy-based others come call them how to process our Residues and I mean it's pretty much the same what we're talking about We just have to tackle it in in a different perspective an architecture has a lot from from taking I would say in inspiration in the in the in the object over as a cave or as a Or as a landscape know that that really could be Transforming to that origin that cave explained so beautifully to to a complete Reinterpretation of transformation of the of the language of architecture, no escaping a little bit of the our Systemic methodologies to our kind of academia that have ruled how we design for Long time. So I think this this might be the Confluences rather than the differences Interestingly enough in the in the projects that we showed like the truffle or the projects in Montana And where the petrified river is a continuation of that research, but without Being an intention we ended up building Kind of caves know a cave-like spaces as these shelters in the landscape No, trying to follow or read the landscape the canyons know the the topography and all the kind of geological Mathematics we ended up creating Of course with an artificial material mixing it with the soils and the and the social set that up But the the kind of given a form relates know with this idea of the cave as a very primary Form of architecture know that no matter Whether you're an architect or or not, but I think we all as humans Relate to in a in a way know we feel connected with Understanding where it comes from or not. We read it as a second of shelter or No, I think in both of your works There's this really emotional and visceral response, you know to it Going I'm sure going into a cave or going underneath the domo or Bear-tooth portal. I mean there's just this immense kind of feeling of connection with nature and so I'm curious in terms of You know nature itself. I mean do you think there's Sort of a a shift happening. I mean an Architecture, I mean we're seeing it somewhat in design where there I mean this was one of the kind of observations in the exhibition is that We're seeing many more Collaborations happening between designers and other disciplines Because of you know the situation that we're in in terms of the environmental and ecological situation but I'm just curious if you see that in architecture specifically that architects are feeling and Wanting to connect more with nature and and how that's sort of affecting Kind of the process in which you are working with you know in architecture and You know ultimately what the the outcome is Yeah, I mean I'd say that Especially in the US there is a tendency to detach the architect from From the construction on the outcome and even the making of things no because There's a tendency to divide everything into parcels and liabilities and no and you get all these different players who have a very specific Responsibility and they don't speak to each other and I I do think that You know as architects and as a city sense as human beings Especially knowing what the impact of our actions are in You know we we need to to fight against that no because we need to to have more responsibility and and more Capacity to decide on on how things play out no and and therefore be able to instigate change No, otherwise we are fighting against In the current yeah, I mean in terms of Kenya, do you feel like it's Really siloed sort of what Deborah was saying or do you is there is there kind of a hands-on sort of? More hands-on experience with you know an architecture I Think there's a lot of Architects now that are aware that they need to be aware of the environment as They do their design, but one of the and there's goodwill in some of those Architects, they are not very many unfortunately in Kenya that are Observing nature as they do their design, but there's few that do that However, one of the big challenges also is awareness of the community and Even the developers because those people are not aware of Nature per se so they don't even know that what you might be designing has might have a negative impact On their lives until something's built and do you realize all? This was built on top of a river unfortunately that does happen in Kenya because We are a corrupt nation but and just recently there's a building that was Pulled down because it was built on top of a river. Everybody knew it was being done on top of a river But because you pay city officials the turn a blind eye and the building goes on and then what happens is when it rains The river needs to go somewhere. Yeah, but you put this building in front of me. So I'm going to find You know the river is going to find its own path its own cause and that's the negative impact then it has on people But slowly because of this awareness and a lot of buildings that are being pulled down now people are aware are starting to become aware of What? Needs to be done correctly because we must respect nature. We are using Nature we are Borrowing from nature. So at the end of the day, we really do need to Observe it. We can't ignore it. We can't go against nature because if you do go against nature It will come back ten times worse on you. So We are not probably where the West might be in terms of being aware of nature in your design But I think we are sort of getting there. I Don't know if we're necessarily the West's throw model, but I Don't know. I mean, it's like I it seems like there's a Whole nother kind of new system that we should be sort of striving for. I think we can be over Too many requirements and you know So it's I know there's you know issues there, but I think we have other issues here What were you gonna say? I? I was trying to to explain before and What you mentioned of this connection that? We have to have with nature and how architecture role plays and We have to remember that we humans are nature also. Yeah, and And architecture has to connect with ourselves and sometimes as architecture has been Silent to ourselves making our own Spaces and systems soulless to ourselves not connecting to ourselves not really reserving to a the main purpose of sheltering of of Being part as an as an extension of of ourselves. So Part of what? Ensemble has been doing in the its research and I think that this installation is Is a shot of these? Intention is trying to to make this kind of deep and I would say emotional connection to a To matter that ultimately is what architecture provides. No these kind of transformation in in into of matter into something that serves and Connects a spirit and I always Make this comparison with the art world where Art has been able to evolve and transform culturally the last big well, maybe not the last demo about One of the most intense moments culturally of this city Leading the art world was in the 50s through the abstract specialisms where all these artists Connected with nature with their own human soul nature to break all the prexisting disciplinary rules of of art and trying to Recreate them and suddenly the lines or the geometries became strokes and stains suddenly the forms and shapes became maps and and the fields and now almost More than half a century after that's part of our cultures part of our I would say a spiritual connection to to a to to the abstractness of of art and Architecture has not yet arrived to that and I think The source is The same the same way the extra expressionist looked and to some aspects of nature know to to to recode everything and Transform culturally the society I think architecture is not the yet there yet. No, we are still I would say we are still in the 30s in a in a post cubism figurativeism playfulness colorfulness you know and thing and We have not yet found the language the tectonics and and the forms that could connect our human soul to nature through space and I think that's something that I've just admired of your work in a in a very kind of analytical way and in a completely different way, but I think Following a similar path. Yeah, we are we are trying to to find that that language that tectonics materiality and that that expression to connect Thank you. Okay, maybe just to add on that briefly Because within our industry we're in a huge dilemma we're responsible for Probably the most pollution the most consumption of resources and as architects. We are the helm of that and Some of us yes, we reflect on it more deeply than others but we are still burdened with that immense power of Creating a situation where we are destroying systems on the planet depleting its resources and perpetuating sort of gross growth of economies In a really negative way, you know, I mean you just have to just look around and realize We're really messing up and As for in front of you actually we are the helm of doing that and I guess in a way what we are questioning is How should we continue, you know our reflections on material and we also love the work you guys do Reflections of how you build and respond to nature respond to the process actually being part builder part Conceiver Vital and in a way where we're sort of going through huge pains To come out of as you said this sort of baggage of how you produce architecture to be in a space where we can Almost arguably say we need to actually go back and reverse a lot of these impacts And so part of what we are talking about is saying a return to the cave to to literally almost return to the cave And if we don't do it consciously it will be done for us by nature and in in an interesting light There's some poetry in that But also some really hard truths of where we're actually taking ourselves So yeah, it's complex space Okay Thank you. I wish we could continue this, but I'm gonna throw it open to the Q&A and remember There's a prize for the best answer and Kara One question. No, no, we okay Kara. You're gonna have to decide. I'm not deciding who has the best question. Okay Hello, my questions for all the open to all the panelists But particularly in cave because what has was said in the presentation like I hear about channeling the past I hear about like thinking back to the ancestors and how art has Transformative transformer powers, especially particularly that your projects are essentially interactive art thing is that what what have you noticed in terms of Response from the public particularly in children how How they are interacting with your projects because they're learning They're learning to tap into their internal nature and learning about the past but is there any way to to do like to Explore how your projects are influencing Viewpoints, it's like from the young from the youngest to the oldest and how your work is Shaping communities and neighborhoods and how they're going to re react to nature in the future I'll just partly answer that. Maybe I won't fully kids are complex beings but That's their gift in a way But what's great is when you see children in nature in space, they just feel natural. It's like This is where I belong this way. I'm free, you know, and We are trying to tap into that when you take kids to caves It's a mix of fear intrigue and you know, this is Where I want to be, you know, and they have memories that are in green and everything and so At least for us. We're trying to tap into that space And Unfortunately within our industry It's almost trying to get that childish appreciation back to it where we really Look at these simple experiences of echoes of darkness of vulnerability and You know liberation back to it's almost that childishness that we need and for us what we try to do at least with at least our own children is literally take them into to those spaces and Help them relieve that And not disconnect how a kid experiences with what we experience almost say that they should be a shared Experience of nature in that manner and so we're bringing back ourselves into that space because yeah, we're all kids in a way Don't know if that answers it Thank you very much. Really great evening. What do you think? Large developers in urban centers can learn from your work or you would hope they would learn from your work. Thank you I wish I would know that one Well Yeah You know there was a Spanish architect that has a quote I'm trying to translate I said architect is either Popular or intellectual everything in the middle is just business okay, so How to connect business with the popular the intellectual and landscape that's that's the I mean Magic triangle, I think nobody has done Nobody that I know of Because the business has its own set of rules its own timing and But I'm very very optimistic that as soon as The human and market desires and trends follow What we've been discussing There will be a path that will be already Trace how to trace it is the challenge and we are all working on it It has to has to start with an Ethical position. I think we're pretty close as a society even though we I think a lot has been changed in the last decade and as a society we have at least The impulse or the inertia Not to go against what we are doing and to look forward in a in a clear path I would say an horizon in terms of architecture is very very difficult to to honor all these aspects with with design even though there's There's the technology and there's the craft and there's the professionals and there's the attitude to to fulfill it But yeah We don't know because every time we do this kind of work We look at each other and we say like we've ruined our career because I mean as architects We want to make Projects that have an impact in society We want to be making those spaces that people inhabit in their everyday life and that you know inspire them and make their life better but unfortunately, we're not the kind of architects building all the buildings that you know are You know our feeling know the cities and you know and you know we we really believe that we would do an amazing job, you know, but You know, it's it's this difficult cycle that we are optimistic like we really think that There's a space say for us that we are fighting for Who is the brave developer that will trust those who are actually trying to get things done differently? You know, there might be some I I'm positive that there are probably some good news is that Real estate and developer industry that you mentioned. It's completely obsolete And it's It's I mean is the only is the last maybe industry by the way moves almost a third of the wealth of Humanity and accumulates it And but we still do buildings pretty much like The renaissance like putting parts together in a side crafting it I mean, there's there's no there's no technological improvement enough in the in the process of building a building that could be a really really let's say Technological Advancement yet. Okay, so that's it. That's the good news that I think technology will help To achieve this mission Unfortunate we're gonna have to end the discussion at least formally You can certainly come up and ask questions afterwards, but thank you ensemble and Kay for a credible discussion and Presentation and thank you all for being here and please go up and see the exhibition another time


Okay, we're back on Community Matters. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech. And today we're going to talk about income and estate tax fraud by Donald Trump with the tax attorney and vice president and co-founder of the Asia Pacific Group, Roger Epstein. Hi, Roger. Hey, Jay. Nice to be here again. Nice to have you here again. This is so important, you know. We have all this very detailed discussion and analysis in the New York Times about a week ago, reporting a huge story for them with three separate reporters looking for, you know, an award in journalism, I think, and reporting that they somehow got all the records on Trump and have concluded after a lot of analysis that he was guilty of major tax fraud and also that he was not a self-made man, that his father, Fred, made him by giving him lots of money. So, you know, you're a tax attorney, and I wonder if you could help us understand what Trump did, and then we can analyze exactly whether that's legal or not. Okay. Okay. I'm happy to do that. And let's start with the second point you made first. I think there's no doubt that the New York Times article clearly established that Trump was not a self-made man, that he was not a person who got a million dollars that he paid back to his father. He got many hundreds of millions of dollars from his father, and that started his empire, and he lost quite a bit of that. So he's made some of it up. We're going to find out did he make it up by getting laundered money from the Russians. All this is to come. So that's point two. I think the New York Times shed a lot of light on that and things that can't be disputed. As to item one, first of all, let's get clear. This is really about dad's taxes. I think what it shows about Donald is his participation in dad's tax evasion, avoidance, whatever you want to call it. We don't know at this point. But mostly what we need is Donald's tax returns to see what he did on his own. What I think this shows is a clear family plan to use everything that the tax law offers and beyond to reduce the estate taxes that his family would have to pay, and that estate tax that his family would pay would reduce the money that he and his siblings inherited from mom and dad. So they maximized everything. They crossed the line. They crossed the line of legality in some ways. And let's talk about the estate tax first. How do you do tax fraud in estate tax planning and in reporting on estate tax? So estate taxes, I've done lots of estate tax audits with the IRS over the years. You were an IRS agent. I was an IRS agent, not an estate tax, an income tax agent for a couple of years. I worked at the National Office of IRS for a few years. And then I practiced tax law for 45 years. I've done a lot of estate tax planning. And I've done a lot of estate tax litigation with the IRS. Some people say you were or still are the premier tax lawyer in the state of Hawaii. But I just want to throw that in, yeah. I like those people. And I'm glad you threw that in. Okay. So let's look at this. I'm trying to explain. One of the things I like to do on the show, Jay, is try to get people to understand what was going on here. It's complicated. But basically, estate tax is a, and gift tax, estate and gift tax run together.  And there's a tax paid on the value of what you gifted over a certain amount. So you get an exemption amount. But the basic idea is you find the value of your assets and then you multiply that by the tax rate. In these years, the tax rate for anything over a few million dollars was 55 percent. And the article states that basically Fred Trump's values were $900 million that you could demonstrate from sales of his properties as well as others. And the Times got their information from public records as to those sales. Yes. And that's why I started out saying this is about Fred Trump. This is about a tax on Fred as the donor and the testator, the decedent, transferring his property to his kids.  You sit down with the lawyers, you go over everything. They tell you how you can minimize this and there are legitimate ways to minimize it. And then you decide, this is what I do as a lawyer. And I say, here's what we can do.  And you have to keep it within a fair limit.  You might say in Hawaii, a million dollars. Well, is it worth 980? Is it worth a million two? Is it worth 850? There's a range. So the basic way to get the value to start with is get an appraisal. So the appraiser can find a range of values. There's a lot of subjectivity. There's a lot of guesswork. When you go to an appraiser, and I apologize to all the appraisers, but they know this joke for a long time. The lawyer is a member of the ABA, and appraiser is a member of the MII, M-A-I, M-A-I is the name of their association. People say it's made as instructed, joke. But it's true, to a great extent, made as instruction because the first thing that they'll ask you is, you want a high number or a low number? Are you trying to sell this? Or are you doing this for the IRS? And what that means to me as a tax lawyer is I want to take the lowest in the range of reasonable values. The Trumps, as you'll see, didn't care about reasonable. They just liked the word lowest. So when you get past a reasonable value, now you run into an area of penalties for being careless and negligent. Or if you really go bad, it's fraudulent. So fraud is a crime in the tax law. Fraud is a crime. It's subject to a 50% money penalty, and you can go to jail. Now it's a felony crime? Yes. Now, you have to really understand this. The Times took a position in this that I think was very assertive for them. They used the word fraud. You know as a lawyer yourself, criminal fraud in any area requires a strong showing of intent. It would be very difficult to demonstrate intent just from the papers. You've got it. Willfully deceive somebody? Yes. That person is going to rely on what you have told him to your benefit and his detriment. Yeah. And in this case, the lie is told to the IRS for the benefit of you paying lower taxes and them getting lower taxes. Now, Trump has made it clear that he doesn't believe in taxes. He doesn't think when he was doing his campaign. Yeah. It is campaigned, but not only that, when he had the conversations with Hillary Clinton, she was taught, you know, he said, how did you get away with not paying tax? And in the background somewhere, he said, because I'm smart. I mean, if that's an example for the country, it's a bad one. He said that many times. He said, I don't pay any taxes. I'm too smart to pay taxes. All you guys after you pay the taxes, not me. I'm too smart. Right. So this is the example for the government. I can tell you as a tax lawyer for 50 years, people pay taxes. Everybody pays taxes. If you make the kind of money he's making, you have to pay taxes. You can reduce them and minimize them, but you have to pay taxes. Now in the estate tax area, if you go beyond a certain reasonable calculation, it can become criminal fraud. It's got to go really far. You've got to investigate what happens. It's kind of hard to know from the article in the Times whether they got to that level. But let me show you how this works. OK. All right. So how does an appraiser first come up with a value for a commercial property, like an apartment building? OK. It starts out, it's not just, sometimes it looks like they pulled it out of the air, but they start with the income. So if I said to you, your building is generating $100 of income. How much is the building worth? OK. You've got to work backwards. So let's suppose you're going to buy a Treasury bill that pays 1% interest. OK. You buy a $100 bill, it's going to pay you $1 of interest a year. So we would say in that case, the dollar, somebody would pay $100 to get a Treasury bill that only paid $1 a year income. So if your building pays $100 a year income, then it's worth 10, it's worth a multiple of the 100. Now the Treasury bill is the safest thing you can get. So it gives you a 1% return. So in order to decide how much I'm willing to pay for the building, you have to say in today's market, how much of a return would an investor be willing to get? An investor would be willing to pay $100 to get a 1% return on the Treasury bill. Let's say in the market that Fred was dealing, you needed to get a 10% return. So therefore, if you want to get a 10% return on $100 as your return, then you need to pay $1,000 to get a $100 return. That's 10% of the 1,000. So you work backwards, OK? So it starts with the income. So the first... That's the income method of appraisal. Income method of appraisal. Another way to do it is to compare to other buildings that were sold, to see when yours is sold, all these kind of things. Comparables method. Comparables method. But even the comparables method basically starts with a value. What's the income on this property? Now there may be unusual cases, all this kind of thing, but let's say that. Now so the first thing that Fred and Donald, according to the Times article, was the guy on the ground doing this with the lawyers on behalf of his father. He was the main guy. And as we know, he became the main protege for Fred. His father's favorite son. Father's favorite son, yeah, OK. But also his father's business partner, OK. And so Donald knows exactly what happened here. He knows all this stuff to the T. He was watching everything. He was agreeing with the lawyers. So the first thing they said was, well, look, if we're going to get paid on the income, if that's how we're going to capitalize this and we want to keep the values down, we ought to lower the income. If $100 of income gets you $1,000 value, $80 of income gets us an $800 value. Now we've skimmed $200 of value off the property. Which is not going to be included in taxing the estate. Right. Right. So they said, OK, let's set up a management and services company. And we'll get that company to be owned by the children. By Donald and his siblings. And then what we'll do is we're already running this business. Fred had his own management company. He was all, you know, a huge man. He owned, I don't know how many, 6,500 units. You can imagine what an operation was to get supplies, to find people to clean the place, all the bookkeeping. OK. We've already had that. But this company arbitrarily charged 20% on all the expenses, OK? So that means, let's just say we got another 20% of the expenses. That brings the value down by those additional expenses. In other words, you got $100 of income.  So what we've done is, we minus, we take these expenses off of the income. So it's way less than $8,000, and therefore it's way less than $800,000 for the value. Exactly. Exactly. So now we got it down. Let's just say we said 20%, but that's 20% of the expenses. We don't know how that compares to this at all. That 20% could have got him to $60 of income. So that would make the value $600,000, or $6 million, or whatever we're multiplying this by, assuming this 10% rate of return. So that's the first thing they did. That is not illegal, but it has to be justified. What did these people do to increase, to deserve a 20% return? Here's my company. It does all the buying. It does everything. And I say to you, you're my son, or you could be my father, or you'd be my son today. Okay. So we say to you, Jay, look, just put a 20% override on everything and send out a bill to all these people that this is what it cost. Instead of costing $100, it costs $120. We do these services really well, so our services can be billed higher. Yeah, only they're not doing anything. Right. They're not doing anything, extending out the invoices at a 20% override. So you mentioned before the show began that they managed to reduce the value of these properties to a 16th, or thereabouts, of what the value should have been by a reasonable appraisal. So this is the first methodology that they used. Okay. Okay. All right. So if you get it really low, then you're going to have a really small value. That million over there becomes $800,000, becomes $600,000, and so on. And then you get a value that's really low, even at 16th. So you get $1,000 value, and the rate was 55%. So now you owe $550 in tax. If you get that down to $500 at 55%, you owe half of that, which would be $275. So just by siphoning off this money, you get a huge reduction in the value. So you have to pay income tax on the 20% that's going to the management company? Yes, but the company that pays the management company has an increase, but the ownership company has a decrease. So the 20% goes from one pocket, the management company owned by dad, to this kid's pocket, and they pay the same tax rate. So it's a lower tax rate than 55%, and it's subject to expenses as well. So 20%. We're confusing, let's not confuse the income tax with the estate tax. So two things happen here. This $500 value moved over to the kids tax-free. So without the kids involved, the property would be worth whatever million, but we're using $1,000. Now they use this technique to get it down to $500. So that means that $500 of value passed to the kids without any tax. You said to me, well, in order to get there, they had to increase expenses by 20%. Let's say that's $1,000. Now that plays into the income tax. So let's say the real estate company made $10,000, and it would have to pay tax on the $10,000. But instead, it gave a $1,000 to the kids company. So now the real estate company goes down to $9,000 in income, and the kids go up from $0,000 to $1,000. They still pay tax at a 35% rate, which is a lot less than 55%. Well, yes. So they got $500 of value, and they didn't increase their income taxes at all. The income taxes stayed neutral, and they got all this value to the kids tax-free. They avoided the $275. They cut it in half. So when we come back from this break, Roger, I want to talk about how you catch somebody who has done this and who has done this to a degree where it has crossed the line. OK. That's Roger Epstein. I'm happy to talk about that. I want to tell you there's two other schemes they use to do this. OK. We'll get to those two. We'll see, right after this break, with tax attorney Roger Epstein, who is a vice president and co-founder of Asia Pacific Group, and a tax lawyer is telling us about what Trump was doing. We'll be right back. Aloha. I'm Wendy Lo, and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock live from ThinkTech Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body, and soul. Everything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means. Let's take healthy back. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of ThinkTech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on ThinkTech Hawaii. Every other Monday at 11 a.m., please join me, where my guests talk about law topics and ideas, and music, and Hawaii Ana, all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Okay, we're back with Roger Epstein, and we're looking at some tax law having to do with what the New York Times wrote about in terms of Donald Trump's and his family's tax fraud. So we talked about one thing, and that is the establishment of value for purposes of a state tax. Yeah. Now, you have two other points on the board here that you want to talk about. Okay. So here's what our... The razor, and what's the last one? Minority discount. Okay. Okay. So let's take a look back. The way they reduce their estate tax, which you've called a fraud, not me, but you've called it, is by reducing the value of the assets, the real estate they transfer to the kids. Beyond a reasonable amount. Well, yes, beyond a reasonable amount. So if the correct value, whatever that means, was a thousand, if you would start with a thousand, then you take off half of that, you get it down to 500 by creating this management company that did no work. So that... What they would argue is, oh, the management company did a lot of work. And what I would say to them is, if the management company did work, we can demonstrate what the work is, we can show what they did. What would a comparable payment be for that? And according to the New York Times, the comparable payment would be zero.  But again, we don't know. We don't know. They say that they did stuff when they didn't do stuff. That's not true. That's right. That's classical fraud. Yeah. Well, we don't know if they did anything. Maybe they did something. And you know, so... Then it's a valuation of what they did. Yeah. And you got to get into that. All right. So that's the first thing they did. The second thing they did was they got an appraiser who went beyond reasonable in terms of the value. So the appraiser looks at this and he has to decide. We talked about the income. We talked about comparable properties. The appraiser says, oh, this thousand isn't right. The low end of the value is really 200. So he goes way down. First of all, he starts with this low number. He's getting there by using appraisal methodologies. Yes.  Yes. And what happens here is the IRS comes in and they say, no way. This should be 500 is what we talked about. And then they argue about it and maybe they come up with something. In the real world, if you get an appraiser to say 200 and he's qualified, it's going to be hard to show it was fraud. You may have penalties for understating it and there's substantial penalties. But it looks like the guy they chose has some experiences in appraiser. But he's willing to take values that are way below what a regular person would do. Some appraisers do that on a regular basis. Yeah. And that's the industry. I told you, made as instructed. It's hard to value these things. It's hard to go after the Trump family if the appraiser is coming up with the value. Not if they know it's not the appraiser. Then you've got to show them not only that he was wrong, but that they knew he was wrong. Right. And so I wouldn't put a fraud in that category ordinarily. It'd be hard to do it in this piece. This piece maybe be hard to say fraud, but what the IRS would do is try to use comparables and other appraisers to show, no, that's the correct number. And then they'd be charged penalties. All this again goes to that. Nobody goes to jail that way. Nobody goes to jail that way. Okay. This is where I would think is the biggest. And in the overall situation, maybe you take it apart or, okay. So here's the third thing they did. They said the appraiser gave a very low, extremely low value. Okay. So now you've gotten the value based on the, now we're going to make it even lower based on the numbers he's using. Okay. Then what they did was they said, hey, if the building, if you go to buy a building, and you get 100% of the building, you're willing to pay 200. That's what the number they had. But you know what? You're not getting the whole building. I'm not giving you the whole building. I'm only giving you a fraction of the building. So what fraction? Well, Fred Trump owned 100%. So he broke up his ownership into 0.4918 for Fred, and the same number, 0.4918 for Mom, Mrs. Trump. And then the kids ended up with this small percentage. Okay. Whatever that is, 0.085. Okay. Now, then Fred said, well, my 49% is less than half. I don't even control this company. I can't force a termination of the company or a sale of the asset or anything. So you've got to give me a big discount for that. Now the IRS fought this when it was in the family and they lost. So the question is not, can they get some minority discount? The question is how much? How big is a minority discount in an ordinary situation? Say with those numbers, mom and pop have less than 50%. Somebody has a swing vote. They can argue they don't control the property. It's really hard to know. Appraisers come into that? Appraisers come in. Not a real estate appraiser, but a business appraiser. And when I do this work, I get one real estate appraiser and one business appraiser. And the business appraisers that are good, they go out and they get figures about how stocks or bonds are sold, how stocks are sold, what discount there is. The market. They're looking at market comparable. And then remember, it's not only a minority interest. This is not a marketable security, you know. Marketability is effective. It's really two discounts that sometimes control minority interest and marketability. Okay. All that considered, it doesn't sound like the general revenue service is going to go after him. I mean, for one thing, he can fire the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, which, you know, or take some steps that will stop the government from prosecuting any of this, even assuming there's no statute of frauds that bars that statute. Statute of limitations. Statute of limitations. I'm sorry. And Fred died in 1999. That's a long time ago. It's 19 years ago. Statute of limitations would probably bar at least some of these claims. But the other thing is a lot of states, a lot of attorneys general, a lot of state tax offices, where these things were happening, where state taxes and mirror image, you know, a state planning, a state tax, a state taxes and income taxes were being paid or not by this family. Right. They could go after the family. Right. And that's easier in a sense that it's not involved in federal politics the way the IRS would be involved. But it's still 19 years ago. It's still 19 years ago. So what is your sense in general about whether this really means anything, aside from the fact that maybe he overstated his, you know, self-made man image? Yeah. What does it mean in terms of the way he gets away with it or not gets away with it, the way he's prosecuted or not prosecuted, the way his family gets away with it or is prosecuted? I really think he's gotten away with it. And I think it just shows the incredible lengths that the family went way outside normal boundaries of what's reasonable, what's fair on the risk that they wouldn't get caught. These are clients that I wouldn't represent because they're too far out there. I told you, what is the most, what's the lowest reasonable value that we can substantiate? Now he's got $100. It was really $16 out of 100, according to the Washington Post. So this is one-tenth. So he really ended up with something like, what, $50? That would be 20. So he's got like $65, and he started with $1,000. So that is really outrageous. And this is just crooked. This is just beyond reasonable. This we don't know because we don't know what the facts were, what was the real market value. But again, like you said, this is hard to prove on a fraud basis.  So it's expensive. It's expensive for the IRS to spend the money chasing him around. It's expensive for anyone to get into an argument with the IRS about this sort of thing. And especially if you have the money, you can drag things for a long time before you ever have to pay the piper. Yes, but the IRS doesn't look at the expense. There's a lot of litigation on this kind of thing. And they have a whole separate group that, based on valuations, and they look at it. They woefully understaffed compared to the private industry. And their budget was cut last year. And they can't do fraud investigations in the same way because they don't have the money anymore. Well, what they do is they get somebody to come out and look at it from a civil standpoint. And then if they think it's fraud, they go to a criminal division to look at that, Jay. So here's what it is. This demonstrates that what they did was way beyond what an ordinary taxpayer who's operating in good faith would do because they didn't think they'd get caught. And you know what? For the most part, they didn't. OK. Well, the proof will be in the pudding. We'll see if those attorneys general in this state, in that state, especially in New York state, are going to pursue them and how much success they'll have. But as a matter of the politics of it, you expect that some of those guys will pursue it, at least they'll investigate it, and go into this very kind of analysis that Roger has made. Roger Epstein, thank you so much for coming down. My pleasure. It's wonderful to be able to talk to you now. And I know that beyond all the tax you've learned and practiced all through the years, you are also an expert in penmanship. Aha. That will never be demonstrated. But I appreciate it. Thank you, Roger. Thank you, Jay. It's a pleasure. And let's.


six sister stuff and I'm excited to share with you one of my favorite Halloween treats. Perfect for a Halloween party or even an after school snack, the kids can also get in on the madness and help you make these. Really simple, all that you need are cookies. My favorite for this is peanut butter cookies and we have that recipe on our blog, Perfect Peanut Butter Cookies. Then you'll also just need some marshmallows and you can use a chocolate frosting or my personal favorite is a Nutella. All that you're going to do is take one of your cookies and cut it in half. If you can break it in half, awesome, but to get a good clean sharp cut, I use a knife and cut it right in half and then you just want to put a little bit of Nutella on each half of your cookie as much or as little as you want and if you, like I said, if you are using frosting that would work perfect too.  You can fit as many marshmallows as you want on there. I try to get at least four or five on there. They don't even have to be perfectly straight. It kind of gives them character if they're not and then you're just going to stick it together like a sandwich and there you've got a funny, toothy grin perfect for Halloween party. Kids love these and think they're so fun, but for more Halloween recipes and tons of other family friendly recipes, check us out at SixSistersStuff.com.


What is the best advice you could give to somebody, man with their body, their mind, their spirit, their presence? What can a guy do right now to be the best man he can be, judging from what you've experienced with teaching people in your own life? So with the thing that I go back to what I kind of conveyed at the 21 convention, previously it was like, understand that you shouldn't treat your activity patterns like they're an intervention that they're only going to be done for a short period of time. Unless you're experimenting and learning kind of the things that work best for you, that's fine, but most people don't do that. They'll work out a little bit and they'll do nothing, and then they'll work out a little bit for an event and then they'll do nothing. And they'll do the same thing with diet. They'll sort of crank the diet widget and then they'll lose 20 pounds and then they'll not learn anything from it. And then they gain the weight back and then some and then it goes on again. So I think moving closer to a more whole foods diet is key. I don't think most people have to go as far as being strict paleo or I think for a short period of time, like my buddy Dallas Hartwig and his wife Melissa, they have the whole 30, which is 30 days of squeaky clean paleo. But their whole point is not like that. That's the magic. It's that you pay attention to the way in which your body starts to actually react and pay attention to how food makes you feel without that awareness of anything you do. Diet, exercise, lifestyle changes without the awareness of the feedback that you're getting. It's a fool's errand. You might, you might reach a goal, but you don't know how to sustain that goal because you didn't pay attention along the way. So that's my biggest, if there's anything, be mindful of the feedback that you're getting in process because that's the real lesson. Yes, you might reach the goal and that's great. No, nothing wrong with goals, but you're not going to have one goal in your life, right? There's not a punch card like up you get one goal. Your goals are going to change. And so if you're simpler or goals from when you were younger, allow you to kind of learn a framework with which to pick up and work on something new later because you paid attention to those small things. You're going to have a whole lot more of these peak experiences of feeling pretty good at learning something new. So that would be my advice is actually pay attention, be mindful of the feedback you're getting from your body, and then you can start to apply another areas of your life. Like you said with Jujitsu, but the hard work that you get from resistance training dilutes the difficult, the compared difficulty in some other areas of your life. And then with that in mind, you might be like, oh yeah, I can work on this a little bit more. This wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be because of X experience.   And so being open to finding the things that it seems so to find what works best for you. There are a few things that only actually work. Like you're not going to build bone density unless you do some resistance training period, full stop. You're not going to increase your strength unless you attempt to voluntarily do that past a certain point after puberty, full stop, right? But there are, like you said, you're not training the way we used to train anymore. And that's fine. I just care that people resistance train. Like at the end of the day, that is important. Help. Help. I currently, I'm doing a lot of hand balancing, like working on handstands and like press handstands and handstand push-ups and things of that nature. So I'm not training the way we train directly, but all the lessons I learned from the way I teach people apply in this new endeavor.