This lecture is going to look at Texas during the Depression and World War II from hard times to prosperity. When we think about the Depression, we often think about the unemployment, but there was also a great deal of under-employment. Unemployment, about 25% of the American people were unemployed. However, a lot of people had jobs, but they weren't very, they weren't full time, they weren't getting a lot of money. So it was still very difficult, even if you had a job. Towns, cities went bankrupt, banks closed. There was just very little money to go around, and this created hardship for everyone. Many farmers were put out of their homes, put out of their farms. The price of cotton went down, but the farmers are actually producing a lot of cotton. And so one of the things Texas tried to do was limit the control of cotton. Limit the amount of cotton being produced with the Texas Cotton Acres Control Law of 1931. It created a scarcity and actually increased the price of cotton. Texas also benefited during the Depression, ironically enough, because of petroleum. Dad Joiner drilled in Kilgore in East Texas, and the East Texas oil fields came in. And there were a lot of wildcatters or independent drillers out who were just dripping wells as fast as they could in order to get some of this oil. In fact, so much so that the state imposed martial law to try to control all these wildcatters. In 1931, West Texas suffered because of a drought and high winds that resulted in the Dust Bowl. A lot of this was because a lot of new farmers had moved out and were plowing up a lot of grassland that had been covered in grass for thousands and thousands of years. The drought and the windstorms came in and just carried the dirt away. And this is what created some of these worst blizzards. The worst one of all happened on April 13, 1935, and the dust was seen as far away as London, England. And so as a result, many left the farms. For minorities, it was a tough time. Mexican Americans, many were sent to Mexico. This was called repatriation. It went on throughout up until World War I. About 250,000 from Texas were sent. For African Americans, they suffered too. Last hired, first fired was the motto. They were wanted to protect white jobs. And you also see riots like in Sherman in 1930, where white communities attacked African Americans. As part of the New Deal programs, the federal government implemented to try to help out with the Depression. Two Texans stand out. Jesse H. Jones, who was head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. This was a federal agency that lent money to big businesses. Putting money in at the top and hoping that it would trickle down. Also, you had agencies that put young people to work, like the National Youth Administration, that London Johnson ran in Texas. There were also other organizations, two building projects that helped build a lot of communities. Buildings, a lot of courthouses, bridges, roadside parks. Was the Public Works Administration. And when they were declared unconstitutional, they were replaced with the Works Progress Administration. Also, the Agricultural Adjustment Act helped farmers. Help farmers who had been put out of their homes by finding new homes for them. The Rural Resettlement Act.  And they paid them for the beef, for the pigs that were killed. And for the crops that were destroyed. But many farmers resented this. Ironically, at the time of the Depression, was also the Texas Centennial. And at Fair Park in Dallas, the state spent $3 million to help celebrate its 100th anniversary. It also put up state monuments, like the San Jacinto Monument, the Alamo Cenotaph. All around the state and in every county put a marker to help celebrate the 100 years of Texas. One of the Texas governors was W. Lee O'Daniels, who was a flower-melt executive. And he started a musical group to help him sell his flower, to help advertise. It was called the Light Crust Doe Boys. Eventually, Bob Wills, who was one of the Light Crust Doe Boys, would start his own band. Papy Lee O'Daniels got his nickname because of a radio show and a song that was very popular, called Please Pass the Biscuits Papy. And O'Daniels wrote this song. And so he earned the nickname Papy O'Daniels. He was governor from 1939 to 1941, and largely due to his popularity, then ran for the Senate and served in the Senate until 49. During World War II, the war helped turn the economy around, largely because of massive industrialization. For Texas, the petroleum industry and shipbuilding were very important to the national economy. Also, you had about 7% of Texas residents who enlisted in the war. Many served 750,000, including 12,000 women. We also suffered a tremendous number of casualties, about 22,000 fatalities. Texas also benefited economically because of training camps. 15 major training camps, training about a million troops, were in Texas. We also had prisoner of war and internment camps. And the GI Bill of Rights after the war helped pay for community college and university to help retrain servicemen and women who were returning from the war. For African Americans, at first, many Africans were denied entry into the military because of segregation. Eventually, however, 80,000 served. And two of the most famous Texans were Dory Miller and Leonard Roy Harmon. Both were killed in their service and were recognized by the Navy. However, on the other hand, they were race riots. Two of those in 1943, one in Fort Bliss and one in Beaumont. For Mexican Americans, they were also segregated, but they did serve, especially the Pacific, five earned Medal of Honors. Hector Garcia, a doctor from Corpus Christi, was also well decorated. Mexican Americans, on the other hand, also had to deal with the Bracero Program. From 1942 to 1964, this was an attempt by the state to replace many of the men who were leaving the fields and farm workers who were leaving to join the war. So they made contracts with Mexico to have Mexican and former Mexican Americans come to the United States and work in the fields. However, the government in Mexico felt that there was too much racism in Texas, and so Texas wasn't allowed to participate until 1947. So the Texas government in 1943 passed two laws, one law, the Caucasian Race Resolution, which said that all members of the Caucasian race should be treated well and have no discrimination. And they also established the Texas Good Neighbor Commission to show that they were not discriminatory against Mexican and Mexican Americans. There were a lot of civil rights issues at the time. The president ordered the military to be integrated beginning with Executive Order 8802. The NAACP began fighting for court cases that would prevent segregation like the Smith v. Allright decision, which ended the white primary white control of the Democratic Party in 1944, laws that prevented schools from segregating it against Mexican students like Delgado v. Bastrop, and also the American GI form. This was an organization started by Hector Garcia that became prominent in fighting discrimination against Mexican Americans, especially in the Felix Longoria fair. Felix Longoria was denied services at a local funeral home when his body was returned from the Philippines because he was Mexican American, and so this got Lyndon Johnson involved and became a national incident that received a lot of attention. There were two parts to the Texas Democratic Party that emerged during the war years. One was the Texas Regulars. It was a conservative group, and they faced a big battle in the 1948 election. In the Senate race, LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, ran against former Governor Coke Stephen, who was very conservative, and although it was a disputed election, Johnson won that case. You also see the development of the 51st legislature as being the billion-dollar legislature. There was not that much money to spend, and so that was its budget because Texas benefited as a result of the war. One of the laws that came out of that were a series of reforms, rather, to help modernize the school system. This was the Gilmore Aiken laws. And so what you see in Texas are conservative Democrats, state in the state, at state office, liberal Democrats go to Washington, D.C. There was a lot of opposition to the president at the time, Harry Truman, because in 1948, he ran on a civil rights platform. He was supported by people like LBJ and other Democratic Party leaders at the national level. At the state level, however, we had Alan Shivers, who was our governor, and he was the longest-serving governor that we had at the time. He won four elections, and he was marked by controversy during his administration, the Tide Lands controversy, which put him in the Republican camp. Eisenhower ran in the 1950s, promising that the Tide Lands, who controlled the mineral rights, the oil profits from land on the Gulf Coast and into the water, who owned that? Was it the federal government or the state government? And Shivers asked Eisenhower to support the states, and Eisenhower did, and so many Republicans voted for Eisenhower. But there was also an insurance scandal and a race riot in Mansfield, a Mansfield crisis after integration after the Brown decision. Mansfield, a town south of Fort Worth, was going to integrate the Klan and other people descended upon this, and it became quite a national event. Showing racism in Texas. In the 1956 election, the governor's race, a liberal price, Ralph Yarber, ran against a conservative price, Daniel, and in the end, Daniel won the election. But his administration was also marked by scandal, and in fact, one of the commissioners for the Texas Veterans Land Board went to jail for taking bribes. There were civil rights in Texas, some cases that are probably important. Operation wetback, this was kind of a downside. In 1954, the Army started rounding up somewhere around a million Mexicans to send them back to Mexico. But at the same time, organizations like Lulac, the League of United Latin American Citizens, fought discrimination. The president from Houston, Felix Tijerina, who was a restaurateur, he started a thing called the Little Schools of the 400, and this was an attempt to improve education for Mexican-American children by preparing them with 400 words of English before they got into school. There was also the sweat versus painter decision. Heman's sweat, a Houston postal worker, was denied entrance to the University of Texas because he was African-American, and the state sought many ways to avoid allowing him going to law school at UT, including creating a state college for Negroes, as it was called in 1950. This eventually becomes Texas Southern University. In the end, UT lost the case, and they were forced to allow African-Americans into their graduate programs and law programs. Another important case that happened in 1954, just a week before the Brown decision, was Hernandez versus Texas. In this case said that the 14th Amendment applied to other ethnic groups besides African-Americans, and that Mexican-Americans were considered and treated in Texas as a class apart. And so this was an important Supreme Court decision. Also in 1958, you see the changes in attitudes towards race. Hattie Mae White was elected the first African-American to serve on the Houston Independent School District Board. So the war period, the Depression War period, was a time of mixed blessings and curses. Of course, many people suffered during the Depression and during the war, but at the same time, the Texas economy during the war rebounded, and Texas came out of the war with a tremendous amount of wealth that they were able to spend on reforms and other spending that the state needed. On the other hand, there were problems for minority groups and there were successes for minority groups. You see an end to some of the racism, but you see more entrenched racism on the other hand. So altogether, Texas benefited economically. And you see some changes going on in the state, society, and culture in regard to African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and other minority groups.


And here at the ID Tech X show, hi. Hi, so who are you? Good morning. My name is Thomas Eimann. I'm managing director of the ASIS Digital Health System. Yeah. So what are you showing here? So we show here printed films with drugs and these are 3D printed drugs. So tablets. 3D printed drugs. Yes. So you can swallow this, for example, in a field. That's the active ingredient of Viagra. And the other ones? They're different ones. Yeah. Some of them are without ingredients. What's the advantage of 3D printing films? The traditional manufacturing methods are designed for mass production. So we want to produce personalized medicine. So exactly the dosage you need. So we go from one size fits all to personalized medicine. So depending on your genetics, on your age, weight, metabolism. So give you exactly the dosage you need and not what you get off shelf. Is it also a good idea to mix different ingredients in a way that mass production cannot do in normal builds? Yes. We bring different drugs into one film or one tablet. So especially very handy for old people, taking five, six pills per meal many times a day. So we bring it into one drug or two drugs per meal. So you can put the five in one pill? Exactly. And exactly the right dosage for that person? Yeah. You just need one pill? Yes. And they can swallow it the same way as a normal pill? Yes, they can swallow it the same way. It tastes the same? It could taste. So we can also bring a different taste in it, strawberry, raspberry, whatever you want. The advantage is also that the drugs could have different release times. So we don't mix the drugs. So the drugs are independent. So one drug works in two hours and the other one in four hours. Inside one pill? Yes. So that's the standard way that pills work, right? That's the benefit of the drug combination we can produce with 3D printing. How? The pharmacokinetics, it's nothing we developed. That's already there. But we bring the different drugs into one pill, which is not possible with the mass production. They make millions of the same pill? Exactly. So 3D or the 2D printing is the key for us to make personalized medicine. So you can do it for food supplements? We can do it as well for food supplements, yes. That's a big market, right? It's a big market but also for pharmaceuticals. So keep in mind that, for example, a very known blood thinner, it only exists in a free milligram tablet. If you look around, all of the attendees here... Need the blood thinner? No, but that's different. So you and me, maybe of the same shape, are taking a girl of 50 kilograms. You can imagine that we both do not need the same pill. And this depends on many other drugs as well. But this is reality. This is a big headache for doctors, right? They're thinking like, you should get this, that. But actually you have to calculate based on how big people are. And it would be better if it could be precise. But this vital data is already available in many indications. So is it weight or is it your liver function, your kidney function or whatever? And also these algorithms you may need are, many of them are developed already. But the drugs are not there. So what we do, we translate the knowledge out of the diagnostic we already have into therapy. Can you show the machine how it looks? Yeah, you can... There? Yeah, it's on the floor. This is a 3D printer for pills. So that's a pony pill. That's the 2D printing. Is roll to roll? Here is the... What is that? It's a 2D, 3D printing. That's the 2D printing machine. It's a big machine. It's a big machine, but it's also until you pack it. So it's everything in one machine. And that's a pony pill. So with multiple drugs into one. That's also a pony pill. A pony pill. And what is this? This is oral dispersable film. So you can put it in the mouth. And then what happens? It dissolves and the drug can be immediately absorbed. So this is very handy for kids and for old people. We don't like to swallow pills. Exactly. We don't have all the same stuff? What do you mean have all the same stuff? When you swallow a pill, it goes further down the system, right? Yeah, but here it's immediately absorbed because it dissolves. Also the substrate dissolves. And the drug itself can immediately be absorbed. Did you say that the whole thing is swallowed? Yeah, no, it's dissolved. So you don't swallow anything? It dissolves on your tongue. And then there's nothing left? No. It's not paper you have to throw out after? No, nothing is left over. So this is a future of medicine?  This is a very well-known monographed oral dosage form. But the traditional method was that the drug was incorporated or embedded in the substrate. And then it's already designed for mass production. What we do, we print the drug on the substrate. It's similar like an inkjet, you know, from printing paper. So instead of ink, you print the drug? The drug is in the ink. And what we do is not only developing the printers. We do the formulations for the printable inks. And for the 3D printing, it's a filament. So we embed the drug in the filament. The filament will be melted and then built into a tablet layer for layer. Do you see it in the film? What is this? This is the 3D printer. This is the polypill? And these machines right here? That's just a 2D printer? Now it's printing a 3D printer. Is it 100% safe? Yes. Is it FDA approved or what's it called? No, it's not yet FDA approved. But it's GMP compliant. So GMP is good manufacturing practices. So that's the regulatory we have to obey across the world. FDA is the USA, right? FDA, that's the authorities in the US. But it's the same in Europe? It's completely similar. It's not the same, but it's almost the same. So how soon you will be FDA and European FDA approved? Yeah, we hope end of the year. Because it's new? All this? It's pretty new. But it looks like big machines. Is it the same machines you would use to do all this other 3D printing stuff? Or is it custom made for this? No, no, no. Our customers will be hospitals and pharmacists. So we're aiming for desktop printers. So they will buy the printer from you? Or do you print the drugs for them? No, no. We want to enable them to print it. So the hospitals and the pharmacists will print. Wow. Is this also going to revolutionize somewhat the R&D and research in medicine somehow? Yeah, of course. How can it change that? Clinical trials can be done much more quickly with digital printing. So it's also interesting for pharma companies. And of course it could change the supply chain because nowadays drugs are bought and sold by wholesalers. So if it's printed by hospitals and pharmacists themselves, this could change the supply chain. Because a normal way to make a pill, you have to do a mold for it or something? It's a tablet press. It's pressed? It's pressed. An extended pressing thing? Yeah. But that's fast. They don't have a machine, they can do quick samples. Yeah, but this is mass production. What we are aiming at is precision medicine. So that's, yeah, individualized. It's not for mass production. So where are you based? Between Stuttgart and Munich in Germany. All right. What do you think about the IT Tech Act show? It's very interesting. So we're kind of an exotic company. But yeah, we're looking around because we're also looking for partners and looking for, yeah, let's say the newest technical equipment. Who's your partner going to be? What kind of partner you need? We need partners in the IT field. And so the formulation, so the pharmaceutical development and also the printers we do on our own. But also we need partners in the app for the printers. We are coming from the farmer side. So yeah, of course we're looking for technical experts also in the printing part. Farmer is big. Yeah. It's a big industry, right? Yeah. Don't they have a lot of interest right now? What are you doing? There is a big interest but it's also a very conservative industry. So it takes time to change. Do you have competitors? No. There are. There are companies and we know in the UK and in Asia. But you're the best. Yeah. So we're coming from farmer. We have more than 25 years experience all of our team and farmer. And different farmer companies or what? Farmer companies, development of pharmaceuticals and so yeah we hope we're still ahead of the others. So in the farmer world and in the state of science right now we have a lot of diagnostics. Yes. And it's possible to know a lot of things but they're not put into practice. We don't know everything, right? The doctors don't know everything? We don't know everything but we have a big know how in diagnostics and it's coming more data every day. And what we want to use, we want to use this data out of diagnostics and translate it into therapy. And of course the doctors have to know all these algorithms or vital data. But if the doctors are provided with this data giving him the opportunity to calculate then the exact dosage, it was helped the patients a lot. So personalized medicine is putting the patient in the centric, giving him exactly the dosage he needs. So for sure in the way that doctors work today and in the way they have diagnostics today, there's a lot of potential in what you're doing already? Absolutely. And still the doctor is the one deciding on the dosage. So he is the one deciding giving the patient the right pill, the right ingredient, the right dosage. And is it possible to use AI for this? Yes, of course to developing the algorithms if we know which factors are important for the effectiveness of the truck. So AI would help a lot to develop the right algorithms. Because you input the weight, you input the size, you input what? The metabolism, so the kidney function, the liver function, whatever. And even blood tests and even environmental circumstances, habits for example. Is it possible that something like a smartwatch that would have maybe a humidity sensor, heart rate sensor, all this could be incorporated? Yes, for some indication it would help a lot. And then automatically it would print out, customize, exact. But there's still a lot of margin for improving the understanding of exactly who needs what, no? Of course, of course still. But is there like a requirement to do it differently now that you can dose everything precisely? Does the industry need to understand something differently now, maybe potentially? Today we have just, yeah, the Dosage Forms Pharmacos Produce, so 10 milligram, 10, 20, 30. And we are aiming at to get you 8 or 12 milligram or 45, whatever you need. And so are you having a speech here? Yes. What you will talk about? I will talk about personalized medicine and that digital printing is the key to that. So with digital printing we are able to produce personalized medicine. You have some examples also? You just talking about the pizza for example? Yeah, you know, everything in daily life today is getting more and more individualized again. So we started from individualized getting into mass production and now everything is going back into personalization and we want to do that in pharma. Because, for example, pizza people can choose what they want on it, right? Exactly. But for the drug, yeah, you are forced to take what you get off shelf. And we want to make the patient able to get the medicine he exactly needs. To get, let's say, as much effectiveness but to lower the side effects. And we have in many countries already the so-called pay-for performance in place. So that only the drug will be reimbursed, that works, and have less side effects. This is what we are aiming at with personalized medicine. It's a huge problem in the industry of pharma with the people who get the wrong medicine. Yeah.  We have false medication in hospitals. Huge amount of people, right? Yeah. So this also would help a lot. So as you see here, this is a barcode where all the information is included. Name of the patient, dosage. And also gives him a recommendation what he should not drink or take together with this substrate. I'm just thinking, it's just a short idea, but maybe because you want to prevent bad medication, what you call it, false medication. You want to maybe, for example, give them a small dose and immediately measure the effect and then increase the dose so you can have the pills increasingly get more of this thing. Yeah, it's much more... And then you can know exactly how much they need for, for example, somebody doing... No, it's much more easier. If a patient comes into hospital, for example with Parkinson's, today they test every day giving, yeah, increase the dosage, but only with, yeah, let's say the standard pills they have. Here, with this possibility, you can precise giving not only the one cream or more, it's maybe 10, it's just a 10th or whatever. So it's much more easier to tight rate this high for the patient. Easier to reach the right dosage. The standard therapy right now giving 1 milligram, 2 milligram, and then they go up to maybe 5 or 10. Here, you can much more do it precisely. And if you look for pediatrics, for example, this is for children. The hospitals, they do it right now manually so they destroy the standard pill and then try to make an individual dosage. But of course, it's a lot of work and yeah, we have a lot of mistakes. Because a baby is a small human being. Yeah. You need to have exactly the right amount. Yeah. And what about people that have maybe let's say drug addicts that try to get off the drugs. Yeah. And maybe they also need to slowly get into a certain way of getting off their addiction. Yeah. Of course, this is also very handy for, yeah, all kind of drugs like cannabis or whatever. But it would be nice to have it in combination with some kind of way where people maybe can test themselves at home to check after the pill, to check the results without having to go back to the hospital every time to check or maybe, I don't know, if that makes sense. Yeah, it depends. It has to be controlled by the experts. All right. Cool. All right. Thanks a lot.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com coming at you with our last break of jaspys big hit express multi-sport series five Remember break 32 filled after 33 so 33 or we already did So pretty exciting stuff folks. Thank you so much. I know I've relayed all of the compliments That you gave us about this product to Nick so he's very happy about the feedback and the response He's been watching the chat, too. So big. Thanks everybody who got into the action. We really appreciate it Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. These don't come around very often this special repack product that we curate for you So I appreciate everybody kind of diving into it even though we know it's a high-risk high-reward sort of situation Everyone here knows that We appreciate you trying Let's grab the combos of teams for the final time Thanks very much everybody. Let's roll it and randomize both lists three and a two five times one two three four and and fifth and final time After five we've got Aaron Pettit all the way down to Nick Stover All right once again three and a two five times for the teams one two Three and fifth and final time after five We've got the Indians Giants New York football Giants and Nuggets combo all the way down to the Seahawks Cardinals Celtics combo. All right, so Aaron there your group of teams right there Ben Daniel Rory Arturo Michael Golder Matt Russell Adam and Adam Name Adams Ron Aaron Levi Lizzie Al Taylor Kevin Arturo Lizzie out Chen John McGee Robert Brad Eric Lizzie Al Brad Kyle Arturo then Ron Taylor Chen Rory and Nick Stover. I'm gonna alphabetize by your first names and just a tick Let's get it all there Sort by column B and there are your Teams again Remember this is the very last case so a lot of these teams remember there's only six in here six hits in here All out of these teams probably have been Have been pulled already So let's keep that in mind All right any trades got some trade offers out there. No, maybe not. Let's just roll. It's the last case TWC trade window closed and The last case right here is is this one Case 26 Right there. So thanks everyone for getting through all of these Really appreciate it. Let's see what we got put this way. There we go All right, don't forget to follow us on social media at Jasper's brakes on Instagram live at Jasper's brakes on Twitter And if you haven't done so already subscribed to our YouTube channel first hit I think it's gonna be landscape first hit is this way. Oh Dual relic printing plate one of one Lamar Jackson Wow It's from 2018 that is nice 2018 NT football NT baseball dropping tomorrow folks pre-order now jasmine's case breaks calm purple birds Who's got the Ravens? Let's search on my list and that goes to Ron held and the Braves. Nope I don't know why I got Braves. That is RV Then with the twins Ravens and nicks combo. I'm like Ron Burgundy. Just reading everything on the screen twins Ravens nicks combo for then and All aboard the Big Head Express Rookie here, right? Yeah, I think by our by by Prim's Sort of semi-official count. I think we still have a couple Cell sheet hits still remaining We've got a nine file. This is one of them nine five It's the rated rookie Luca Donchich Grated a nine five centering edges cornered all a nine five surface a nine There it is Nice, who's got the Dallas Mavericks? That's Taylor with the Mavs Orioles combo That's very nice is a nine five just a nine five and it's Deshawn Watson prism silver rookie silver Deshawn Watson Centering corners edges a nine five surface a nine. That's a great-looking card for Houston And that goes to Adam cupperman and the Angels Texans combo Think someone I think prim was mentioning that we had not seen any Texans yet. That's a pretty big one right there Nice and and he's playing he's just grinding it out in spite of The struggles at the Texans have been having so They put some pieces around him We got a thick card here a book card here and it's Wow Treasures of the hall Mike Singletary one-of-one. I want winners. I want players that want to win Look at that NFL shield Popping out of the book who's got the Bears Da Bears Arturo to var With the Bears Bucks Grizzlies combo and all aboard the big hit Express By Prim's count that should be the last cell sheet hit right there. All right, let's see what we let's see what we got here Still should be a couple strong hits in here. We've got another football player. It's George Kittle Poor George Kittle. He might be out for a better part of the season 15 out of 70 15 out of 15 That is nice low number From 2020 legacy football. That's strong. Who's got the Niners? That goes that goes to Taylor with a different Combo spot the Niners Tigers Pistons spot and the last one here in big hit Express series 5 I don't know when series 6 is going to happen Nick Jaspie Series 6 who knows This year no, probably not this year. It'll probably be next year All right, so the last hit out of big hit Express series 5. Thanks everyone for making this a Wonderful and fun time. We appreciate everybody getting into all of the action on Jaspie's case breaks.com The final hit is going to be Momentous material We're going to end big and express series 5 on a train whistle 3 out of 5 two-color patch and auto Miguel Cabrera momentous material A nice one from museum collection baseball. That's from 2019 tops museum collection baseball and that goes to Taylor and the Niners Tigers Pistons Combo right there. There you go Taylor All aboard the big hit express Series 5 I'm Joe for Jaspie's case breaks.com. Thanks for watching all of these breaks. We'll see you next time for the next one But bye


All right, everybody, it's 12 o'clock, let's get this started. So today I want to introduce Greg Taylor. He's got over 12 years of business development and marketing experience. He is a co-founder of Trinity Web Media, and today he's gonna be speaking about a topic that I absolutely love about solution, about problems, figuring out the problems before we start this building stuff. Let's give him a warm welcome for Greg Taylor. So, how was Saturday, was it a good day here? Yeah, yeah. So, I talked today as we stopped selling and start solving problems. Now, the beginning that I kind of designed this talk, and, honestly, I spoke at a ton of work years before, but today we're talking about content marketing and content development. So, this is a brand new talk for me, new topic. So, I hope to learn as much from you guys as hopefully you learn anything from me. So, originally it was stop selling websites, start solving problems, but that's so niche to our world here in this talk, this word press community, that I wanted to just expand it to selling, and you can exchange, interchange Wordpress or websites with stop selling marketing, stop selling social media, stop selling anything and start solving problems. So, what I want to hit on is how often do we really talk about, and look, how often do we talk about, and what don't we, and how often do we talk about what the client doesn't need, what doesn't matter in the client, what only matters about us. So, first off, thank you to the work teams, the NDA, the organizers, volunteers. Anybody who's first working out here? What is in your second? Yeah, that's my sixth. I thought you had that. I thought you meant, what's that for? Oh, no. So, working out, for those of you who may not know, they're solely working on my volunteers, they donate their time, they donate their energy, they donate, actually, it can be quite disruptive to your business. You're not going to get it, right? And so, thank you to everybody who moves here, the speakers fly in from wherever they do it on their own dot, all for the love of the community. So, that's how working out works, and it was all, thank you for being here. It's a beautiful day in San Diego, and you're in a room listening to me, so, I don't know what's the matter with this. I don't know what's the matter with you guys, so, hopefully, casual, informal person, having no trouble. If you have a question, raise your hand while I'm talking, let's talk about it. I don't want to just have a, I just want to speak about what's your information at you, I want to have a discussion with everybody. So, please, please, please, if I say anything, does that make sense? That's anything you want to, maybe challenge, you say anything that you have experience you want to add onto, raise your hand and let's talk about it, right? So, who am I? So, when I was a great tailor, I started, we were impressed around 2008, and I just fell in love with the platform, I fell in love with what was about it. I fell in love with Matt's philosophy of democratizing publishing. I always felt like I had something to say, but nowhere to say it. And even if you don't have anybody who's gonna listen to you, as long as you have something to say, eventually, you know, another friend shall get together and listen to you later. You know? Not calling my screams, I'm sorry.  There's always an audience for someone. So, then I love it. So, I've been in work, involved with WordPress since 2008. I fell into the development side and the agency side sort of backwards. I'm a marketer by degree, don't hold that against me, please.  Look at Instagram. So, I fell into it backwards. I started the content agency, but what happened was, we were developing all this great content, all these strategies for companies and launching on terrible websites. We were not set up for success one bit at all. So, I fell in love with my love for WordPress. I went ahead and I started what was called marketing press at the time, which has then been acquired in Trinity Red Media, where now I'm a co-founder. I am 100% highly unemployed. I have a feeling that a lot of you guys got there. They're unemployed also. I started the company with $400 on my bank account, this is a true story, $400 on my bank account, a laptop with a will of do things a little bit different. And I don't know if anybody else identifies with that story with that. The will of do things differently. I got fired this pretty early. I didn't even see it in 18 months. In Arizona, which is like, I don't know you laugh, but you've been employed in Arizona without work, that is. But only because I wanted to do things differently. I was looking at things differently and they didn't always fall into a revenue model. They need to see how it's working to work. They're working with it. And they showed me the tour quickly. So who's this talk for? This talk is for anybody who is in front of clients, anybody who is passionate about WordPress, anybody who maybe runs an agency, maybe anybody who is talking about your passions or are talking about what WordPress can do for a business in Illinois. So big question. Who are you? So raise your hands. How many business owners do we have here? How many developers do we have here? He says, don't you guys do this a lot better than me?  Every time I speak, don't you guys have to go talk about Bloomberg somewhere? Right? What's that? That was yesterday. That was yesterday. For all that you need to figure out. I bet, right? So you're gonna listen to me, okay, cool, okay? Do you have any creatives and designers? I love the fact that a lot of you guys are raising your hands more than once. That's awesome. So, do we have any writers? So, I was speaking at War Camp Orange County a couple years ago when we were speaking before and I asked the same question every time. So I can get a game to see who we're talking to and what happens is, I said, any developers, any of this, any of that? And what lady interrupts me? I said, hey, please interrupt me. You forgot me. I said, what's your name? She's like, Susan. Well, any writers, never leave the writers out. They're the first ones to blast on the internet. They'll write about you. Right? The dumbest mistake to make is the one that you make twice. So I'm never gonna make that one again. But, you know, I think that more importantly than anything, I think we're all creatives. In one way, shape, or form, I think that we are all creatives. And I know that sometimes, you know, like my business, I'm abstract in there. You know, I'm gonna get from A to D, how I'm gonna hit WXYZ before I hit the D. My business partner, he's very linear. Where he's gonna go ABCD to get to that point. But in what doing what he does, he's not creative.  And I think that we are all creatives in one way or another. Because what we have to do is, we have to think, even if we write the code, right? How many ways is there to do certain functions? You know, maybe there's, wait, you have one way. You have one way. How many ways is the right way? Well, I guess that was a talk. That was yesterday's talk, right? But I think that if you don't believe that we're all creatives, there's a discipline. So if you ever say we're all creative people, creative, because what we really are is, we're creative problem solvers.   You know, we have to think in a certain creative conduit. Now, did anybody here solely, okay, is there anybody here who doesn't touch WordPress in their job function that solely runs the business? Don't bring this all together. The two things that bring us all together is we love WordPress. You guys are here listening to a guy who's doing a Sunday, a few o'clock, saying you ain't no, and we're creating things. I mean, that is the most important thing. It was that commonality right there. So why is this concept important?  I think that somebody coined that phrase already, right? So, I hate to say that because that's the obvious thing. Different is always good. Different isn't always good. Different is different. And which is fine. You know, you may do things one way, I may do things another way, but as long as we're doing something creatively, different is cool, you know, I'm all right with that. But nowadays, there's more noise in our space than ever. Anybody agree with that? Where does the noise come from? You know, Gary Vaynerchuk, I don't know if everybody's fans of Gary Vaynerchuk know what I'm saying. You know what I'm saying. I went back from New Jersey to my high school, played his high school in basketball, and I'm like, I'm still not a fan.  I wrote a blog just about this, he's a fan. He's that right. But, you know, he says he's day trader. He day trades attention. That's what he does. And that's what people always really stop with me, is he day trades attention. So what happens is, why is everyone always like that? Who's this guy? Who's this? No, it's his snake, well, I don't know, I don't speak to you about it. Don't sue me for other reasons, by the way. But anyway, the snake well says, the guy who comes in, and the guy who comes in with no experience, that gets in front of somebody and says, I'm gonna build your house. Do you know that guy? You know? Is he on your Starbucks? Or are you on your bed of wells here locally? Exactly. So what, okay, this is a perfect discussion right now that we can cut it. You know, actually, I like this slide, I'm gonna get right back to it. People are skeptical about things that you don't understand. So when you deal with somebody, you can tell me that guy. If you're logical, maybe that big in the top 10 is how your crap was there. So give me one second here. Well, what makes the watch like crappy here? I mean, what's, let's hit that. What makes it crap? I don't know what they wanted to hear. Told you what they wanted to hear? It wasn't so strong. That's my favorite one right there. Yeah, I like it. Can you find it? It doesn't work. Does it work? I recently encountered a client website where the entire thing was built. This took more effort than disability at HTML. They injected the entire website in JavaScript. Yeah.   That's incredible, right? What happens to our community when we're dealing with that? So, exactly, so like, you know, I kind of got sidetracked, but I love this thing. What did you... Well, basically, that scenario, the person who requires a site from the start of my career, because they told that person what they wanted to hear, they reflected everything they asked for, forget about what's right or wrong. Sure, how long did that? And I'm gonna get to this a little bit different, a little bit later in the presentation. Well, why did they come to that solution? Who's problem they solved with that? They're solving the road. What's that problem that you're solving? I don't have money. They have no money in their account. Hey, listen, okay, we're mostly business owners in here, right? How many times have you guys been a week? Like, I was called ceiling fan folks. Like, a lady in the middle of the ceiling fan.  Or how am I gonna make payroll next May period? Or how am I gonna do this? Or how am I gonna do that?  But that doesn't do anything for anybody. It doesn't better our community. It doesn't better your business. It definitely doesn't better WordPress. And what does it do? It puts us back to this. Well, in the end of the day, is it very complex? 100%. 100%. So, you talk about, oh, I'm sorry. So, going back to that. So, I don't know about the problem where I came in after a snake oil sale came in. And they didn't want to listen to a word I had to say, because they used WordPress, and did work for them, and they hated it. It poisons our community. Right. I'm sorry. It poisons, you as a professional, it minimizes what we do as professionals. And like, look, let's face it here, right? We are a highly skilled group of individuals in this room. I don't care what you do. I don't care what your expertise is.   I don't care if you want to do this. We're skilled individuals. One way or another. That's nothing. What do you think? Nothing. Well, you know, we're a highly skilled group of individuals. That's exactly what it does. So now, they're skeptical of you, because what you're saying is wrong. Because they've already been, their mind has been dead. You know what I mean? Absolutely. Now, does that happen within WordPress also? Let's not kid ourselves. So let's not kid ourselves. That happens within and amongst us also. Well, in one way, that's one of my, I have to be Gutenberg track yesterday. And that's one of my biggest concerns about Gutenberg. And I've heard other people say the same thing. The problem, if you want to call it that, with Gutenberg is it's going to make it even easier for anybody who doesn't know anything to build a website, to build a website, and make it look good. But maybe not be secure, maybe not function well, be fast. I totally hear what you're saying. I think that still remains to be seen. Oh, yeah, I'm not saying it's going pretty quickly. It's a potential issue that we're going to have to look at. But there's always a potential issue where the visual editor came on.  You know, I've had people say, oh, you've got some WordPress that's just moving and dragging and dropping and doing this. cmn.com is built on a WordPress, you know. Agency, you know, that dream is to work for it.  You know what I mean? So it's like, while I hear what you're saying, I think that it remains to be seen. Well, instead of just fear, that's what I mean. Right, what's your concern? It's a concern. And it's a valid concern. It's a valid concern. Yeah? As a designer, it's going to be my life all that easier. Okay. It's going to allow you to be a lot more responsible than you would be for a website. All right. Kind of. It's like, who's waiting for who's got the countdown to a loop or a countdown? There you go, all right. I knew that I was in super hot topic. It's like, it remains to be seen now. It's going to help you, maybe going to bring people in that don't fall in here. The common violence cycle, what's the problem? Yeah. No, come on. We're talking. Well, so I can say the most. Where's the release of 4.0? What was the big thing about them was the post types or 3A, whatever? I think that unless you're in the 14th, unless you mess with it, I think that a lot of things remain to be seen. And education is a key factor to get the student. It's Y2K, I'll look over again. Who wears Y2K? Y2K. I'll have that hold. Yeah. No, did you? Yeah. What it is, is people want to do business with people they know, like, and trust. That's only 75% correct. Now, my math is not skewed. I understand there's all three things. Your math magicians would be 66%. People want to do business with people who can solve their problem that they know, like, and trust. Solve the problem is the key. So the thing is, is from there, the common violence cycle is solve the problem, get them to know you, like you trust you. Then they're going to meet with you. Hopefully they hire you the one that wants and then they're going to refer you. So the way that I position that is, in a more clever way, is know you, like you, trust you, try, buy, repeat, refer. That's the violence cycle we all want to go, that's the lifeblood of our business. No one likes to be sold with people like the buy. True, not true? Anybody not like the buy anything? But what we were talking about, there's no real barrier in entry. We're a person of the source, if ice cream, you have a laptop, or if you're really coming to a smart room, I don't know. You know what I mean? You can go ahead and you can get into this arena. But you're not going to be one of us, a highly skilled professional. So, here's a math game here. I had to look this up, that's fine, this guy's named Gene Rayworth. Gene Rayworth, I've never read a game with this thing, I don't know. So, there are only a couple goals, I say, any website that you're building. You're only, in my mind, there's only three goals. There's three goals that are, creating content for search positioning, for branding, to show that you're a subject matter expert, to build a community around your product service in Iran. Wordpress does that for you? You mean societies do that for you? And conversion. Conversion, in my mind, and when I'm using it, is getting a user to behave in an intended manner. So, conversion can be getting an aside for newsletter, get a buy socket, get a lot of content for it. That's conversions, that's what we do. Any goals I'm naming out? That's conversion. Every once in a while, I get somebody who says, my goal, the goal of my website is revenue, generated revenue. I always say, generating revenue is not a goal in itself. Generating revenue is a buy product of meeting one of these goals. I appreciate that, thank you. So, what are common business problems that we all experience in Iran? What common business problems that we hear about when we're meeting with clients, potential clients, or anybody at a happy hour, or whatever. The ones that I typically hear are these six.  Lack of revenue, that's a business problem, it's not. Brand perception, lack of loyalty, inferior product, inferior team, inferior XYZ, that's a business problem. An inexperienced team, an inexperienced business. Any other business problem that people face that they hear about? These are the six that popped in my head when I was business. Lack of time is small, lack of time, that's agreeable. Lack of direction, lack of direction. Don't care what they do, that's kind of like invisible like that one, but yeah. Where it's kind of, it's like, yeah, that, yep. A lot of companies where the problem that I got in is trying to transition to the modern world, so maybe be able to face people younger to. That's a good one, so lack of support, lack of support, that's like also almost inexperienced a little bit, but here we go with this, right? How many of these can be solved by what we do? I don't think, if you have an inferior product, there's nothing, there's not that anybody can really do it, it's sort of to help you. I mean, we can position it differently, you know. I did go to school for marketing, so I do, too.  Yeah, that's like, building on that, that's not a product or their site or whatever it is that they're just a structure, and they're trying to improve something that's just fundamentally broken, it's like trying to put, you gotta have something that's built from the ground up to be able to handle it. She said, look, take on a pig, I always say, lack some pinto. But who found a pinto, poor pinto, man. You all right, everybody with me? Nothing's like, we're not done with space yet? What's not a business problem? What's not a problem for the client? So actually, let me back up here. So a couple of these, I think that these two are operational problems, and the other are web slash marketing problems. Your great website that you built is not gonna cure or fix a shape of your organization, no matter how you try.  Eventually, they're not gonna be a good client for you because no matter what you do, it's a failure, it's not a success story. You know, we wanna work on success stories. Who here has had a great success story with the word dress for a client? You know, something proud of it. You know, I believe in collaboration. I think collaboration is greater than competition. So if you collaborate with the operational side of things, or sales side of things, and I would just find our client, my agency, because operation side wouldn't get the hell out of the way and the marketing side. Because operations are something they could do marketing. When marketing, while we had internal discussions from meetings about their operations, we never said, you need to do that. That's not our business. We stay in our own range. I think my deal with the top four, we can stay in our own land and effect change. And like, you know, I love what Dre would say that, you know, he got into the whole world, word dress world, et cetera, et cetera, because he wanted to effect change. And that's the same as when I started my thing. So these are not problems. You have no money. You don't have an expertise in what they need. That's not their problem.  How do I pay you to sell that? Oh, that's 3,000. Perfect. Oh, he's the right number one. Sure. I guarantee you top ranks for these search stars. I'll pay that. Anybody ever hear that competition?  You know, I try to run away from those people holding my wallet. My wallet, my hand, my back pocket, which I think it'll take. But the problem is never that the people you're talking to do not have it yourself. That's not a business problem. A lot of times people will say, oh, well, the problem is you don't have a web server. Problem is you don't have a good marketing. Problem is that it is it. That's not the problem. The problem is you're invisible.  That's the problem. Also, not problems. You're broke. Your business needs a new brand.   All that stuff. They're not problems. The problems that you must have that night is business owners, right? But they're not common problems. You can't sell to your problems. You can't sell solutions to someone else for you to solve your own problems. You can. You're gonna do it once. They're never gonna repeat. Be a repeat client. They're never gonna refer you to anyone. Right? So, let's crack the code a little bit. Let's look at this a little bit differently and just play a quick brand game here. So, just a change of paradigm here. And it looks like I don't even have to do this because you gotta see the same page. It's just pretty cool. Red Bull, what is it? What kind of company is this? What do they do? Entertainment. It's a medium company that sells an energy drink. 100%. Who's an action sports? Somebody. Well, they are so immersed in skateboarding, motocross, sky diving, weird stuff. I don't even know what to call it. Right? Plane racer. The blue, I used to put that on there. I used to put that on there. I used to put that on there. Blue Top. Everybody know the Red Bull, Blue Top? That is so cool. They built these like big platforms. They built these like, it's kind of like a soapbox derby. They have to fly in the air and they don't tell you that. It's like. It's like. GoPro. What's GoPro? It's a content creation company. That's what they saw. That's the problem they saw. They helped us create content. And Nick Woodson, actually the CEO, he did a 60 minutes interview a while ago. He said they actually think that GoPro sometimes is a content enabling company. Does anybody have a GoPro in here? Any, okay. After you guys, how long have you been using anybody from like version like one, two, or three? How hard is it to get content off of that guy thing? It doesn't even get content barely even shows up. Right? It's like, it's a content enabling company. And they help you create content. But then it's like, what are you going to do? This company. I've never seen this logo before. It's a fashion company, they name it. Clothes for people who are active lifestyles. So what they are is they're a lifestyle company. You see somebody wear a Louis Louis logo, you know that they're in a certain thing. So there's some examples of this fashion. So let's talk about your company. Who's business owners? Who wants to share something about your company? What do you do? Where is it? What's your name? I feel like I should go to Bob. Yeah, nice to meet you there. You can see we do digital media marketing and video production, photography, web development. Have you been listening to me? You saw about the improbables. Yeah. I know I have to talk a little bit about that. Okay, but that's what it is. Have you repositioned that? And you start asking the questions to the client.  One of the, why do they want to make the video? Yeah, actually I did come up with something that I forgot, because it's too kind of a spot, sort of, but, no, I mean, not a family, but. Oh, you're on a spot? Are you? No, I'm not. No, I know. No, I was thinking, you know, something more like, we help people tell their stories online. That would be more of a direction that you're. Absolutely, but how do you do that? Through video. Yeah. Anybody else? I think you know the punch line here. Yeah, tell me about your company, what you do. You help people, you, the problem you're solving is you're making people top of mind. You're making your friends top of mind. Now they get emails.  You're right.


Okay. We're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidel and this is our flagship energy program. This is Hawaii, the state of clean energy every Wednesday at four. And we are together. Maria and I, and she's wearing a lei today because it's lei day. It's lei day. It's lei day. It's law day too. It is. I wonder why May 1st is such a big deal. Huh. Okay. There you go. Maybe it's energy day. Could be. Yeah. Well, it is now. It's energy hour. Okay. So, we're going to talk some more about the structure of the institutions and organizations that form the landscape in energy in Hawaii. Energy in the state, the clean energy in Hawaii. Yeah. So, today, let's talk about the energy office because that's been in the news lately and in the legislature. So, some remarkable things are happening or maybe not in the legislature. Yeah. So, there was a bill this session to change the energy office. Now, I should back up a little bit and say that the beginning of this conversation was a list that the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum had put together about who does what in the energy area. And we had gotten through page one out of four pages. We're working our way through it. There's plenty to go. And we had kind of talked about what the state energy office does. But this year, the legislature has changed somewhat where the energy office will be. So, the bill has had its third reading. So, it's pretty much through that part of the process. And since it was part of the budget, it seems that whatever they have in mind is going to take effect. So, at some point, I would love to hear from the architects of the bill what it is they have in mind. In general, it looks like... We lived in a democracy where transparency is important. Yeah. But you got to spend your time listening to the hearings. And I haven't honestly been to the hearings. So, there was openness and transparency, but I didn't attend to those. I just read. So, the part of the transparency I participated in was reading online. Okay. All right. The bill. So, it does maintain the energy office, but instead of being in D-bed, Department of Business Economic Development Tourism, as one of the divisions, it's being moved out to become a separate entity administratively attached to D-bed. And the head of the energy office would then be appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate in a term, coterminous with the governor. So, it's an appointed position, essentially. It will be, as far as what that... Let's unpack that for a minute. Just that one item. We'll get to the budget issue later. But that one item, you know, when Neil Abercrombie first became governor, he actually approached the energy policy forum for advice on an idea that he had, which some people thought was not a good idea, which was to create an energy authority, a separate entity, separate government entity, sort of like the board authority in New York, or the airport authority, various states. And he was considering an energy authority. And the industry, and for that matter, I think everyone, at least in the energy policy forum, tells that that was not a good idea. And there were some who did, but mostly not. And they advised him with various opinions from various people that he really shouldn't do that. And he didn't do it. He listened. But there was never an energy authority created as a separate entity. And I might mention that that idea had actually come up.  So, that idea actually is fairly common. It's very interesting. You know, in the legal administration, I got to learn a lot about attached agencies, okay? DBED, I don't know about the other, you know, departments in the state, but DBED has attached agencies. Let me name them for you. There's not very many of them. One is the High Tech Development Corporation, now known as the Hawaii Tech Development Corporation. It's an operating entity. It has classes and programs. It gives grants out. It does mixers. Wetware Wednesday. You know, it does tech things. And it has, it had, you know, innovation centers and operating kind of entity. And it'll have the sandbox at AkoAko now next to the medical school. So, that's an operating entity. That's one. And it's always been, at least in my time, always been on a pretty thin budget with a small staff, smaller now, Robbie Melton left, you know, a few months ago. I'm not sure who's running it right now. It's future is not assured. The next one is the H-C-D-A that runs, that runs AkoAko. That's an attached agency attached to DBED, I think. And then there's a Kalei law. I think that's attached to H-C-D-A. That's part of H-C-D-A. There's, Nelha is an attached agency. Nelha is in AkoA and it has roughly 900 acres of, you know, tech park or agricultural type tech park out there. And that's also kind of an operating entity. It has real assets, real rent, real expenses. It has deep sea water, all this, it has a lot of people, a lot of things going on all the time. It's a major, you know, institution in AkoA, right next to the airport. That is the Strategic Development Corporation, the Hawaii Strategic Development Corporation. I think that's been put into H-D-D-C by another bill, but I don't. Okay, all right. Well, it's okay to reorganize them because that was not very active and nobody ever granted it very much money. Carl Fuchs was running it. I think he still is technically. And did I miss any of them? I think there's another one somewhere. So these are attached agencies. They're technically, I guess you could say, they're state corporations which are attached to the underbelly of D-Bed. And they all have their individual executives. They have a board of directors. They have a board of directors. I served on some of those boards. They all have their own arrangements. On the other hand, they're all subject to the sunshine laws and the procurement code, ooh, the dreaded procurement code. HRS 103D? So they act a lot like government, you know. And the appointments of the executive usually made with the governor's involvement and then sort of ratified by the boards. So it's not that we have no experience with, you know, these rocked-down attached agencies. They have a certain culture about them. They've been functioning for a long time. They, they, we know how they work. Attorney General knows how they work. You know, it's got all kinds of policies and programs. So if they're, if the legislature and its infinite wisdom does create the energy office as a, as an attached agency to D-Bed, rather than an internal office division of D-Bed, there would be a certain culture, a certain experience factor that helps. Furthermore, it would, it would respond, I think, to the reasons, whatever they were at the time. I'm sure there are many reasons to create a separate independent, quote, independent authority in energy. And what I come away with, and I'm sure interested in your view of this, what I come away with is this probably a good idea. What do you think? Well, I certainly am glad that the energy office continues. Yeah, but there was a question about whether it would, eh? Yeah, yeah. So the first sense is relief and the second is, okay, well, that'll be different in some ways. And I'm very interested in hearing what they have in mind at the legislature and elsewhere as this, as this idea begins to grow into the reality, I guess. Yeah, so it seems that, you know, so they did some rearranging. They eliminated existing language and replaced it with other language. But to me at first, it seems that it will have similar functions. It's still going to be the entity that does a lot of the analysis and understands how the pieces work together and communicates that to the legislature and to private industry and the public and so forth. Well, we talked about this before, didn't we?  More like, you know, backroom record keeping and promulgation than actually finding new policy, creating implementations. They have definitely done a lot of the policy stuff, but it goes through the legislature and very often it's not obvious, you know, if a legislator introduces a bill and agencies comment on the bill, you may not be aware of, you know, how much effort was behind that because the original RPS was the energy office, a creature of the energy office, Hawaii Energy Strategy. Yeah, so there were a lot of policies developed within the energy office that then were enacted by the legislature and then carried out by whatever agencies were tasked with it. But there was one part of the bill that may indicate an increased focus on sustainability and carbon because they are tasked with doing a carbon B study. So that's one of the things that they are explicitly tasked with and given money to complete a report on carbon pricing. So, you know, so that seems to be at least one of the areas that they want additional focus. And they specifically mentioned vehicle, the electric vehicles, you know, the transportation side of things as well as working with projects. For example, if you task them with doing a study, I'm not too interested, I don't think that serves much of a purpose. If you task them with, you know, tracking and how many electric vehicles we have in the state, I'm not too interested, it's easy. If you task them with finding initiatives, recommend to the legislature on policy and implementation, on how we can increase the number of vehicles, then I'm interested. If you task them with determining and implementing a plan for charging stations, Hither and Yahn, then I'm interested. In other words, I would like to see some real delegation of authority to this organization, like an authority. And I think those were in there. But I would, as I said, I would love to hear from the folks who had the ideas about what they want implemented with this new structure to be able to kind of expand upon it. One more point I'd like to make and see if you agree, because I know you're big on climate change. We are all big on climate change. But I have felt over the past few years that climate change has got, it's got, you know, all mushed up with energy. And so we have an energy initiative, clean energy initiative. We have goals and targets. We have, you know, these grand plans to improve clean renewable energy sources and distribution in the state. Very important. But it's so easy to throw in climate change and say, Oh, you guys got to do climate. We have other organizations that do climate change. There's a number of organizations, commissions, state and federal. We have people who are paid well to do climate change. We have a lot of people at the university are doing climate change. Why throw climate change in the energy office? Why not let them do their namesake energy? What do you think? Well, actually, I think that one of the tasks that they have added was to help fund, to the extent possible, some climate change efforts. So it isn't their primary objective, but it is in there. And since energy is the sector that is emitting a vast majority of the CO2, it's inescapable that what you do in energy will have a climate change impact. So if you had an energy office and told them you don't have to worry about climate change, you could be working at cross purposes with the folks who are worried about climate. But what everything they do has an impact. If I give you a completely renewable state by 2040 or 2045, if I give you that, you know, that's about as much as we could possibly do, isn't it? You know, then you wouldn't have to worry too much about the carbon emissions because there wouldn't be any carbon emissions. Yeah, it's not that simple. I know it isn't that simple. And because it's not simple. But if you can give us that, Jay, I think we'd accept it. We're working on it. You and I, we're both working on it. And we're going to take one minute off to, you know, think about more about this subject. And then we're going to come back, we're going to talk about other initiatives and other issues that are pending in the legislature and not, you know, in the landscape around energy leadership in this state. Wow, stay tuned. We'll be right back. Hi, my name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii with ThinkTech Hawaii. We come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich and lighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, mabuhay and aloha. Aloha. This is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week, Mondays at three, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation and world and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at three o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. Okay.  And Maria Tomei is wearing a lay today to celebrate that day. And we're talking about what we've been talking about for the last several weeks. We're talking about the landscape of leadership and energy. And we agreed during the break that we really need to spend a little time on science and technology and who is leading the charge on those things here in Hawaii. Because after all, you know, there's a lot of technology being developed elsewhere. But we are supposed to be a leader. We're supposed to be at the cutting edge. We have these ambitious goals. And to reach them, we're going to need the best technology we can get. So how are we doing in terms of science and technology and energy, Maria? Well, I think that Hawaii is one of the most fun and interesting places to be applying a lot of the technologies. And very often when you're building new systems, you realize new ways to do things and synergies. And so you can actually develop, you know, develop some of these ideas. Now, I'm not sure how much of that needs to happen here and only here, because the strongest products and the most successful products are sometimes results of teams. And with the ability to work remotely, you can have the best minds working on these. And you also have to have good communicators as well. And so what we see being developed here sometimes gets taken another step elsewhere. And then eventually comes back to be applied here. Hopefully. Yeah, you know, it's it's a global system, right? So and the key role that we play, I think is two fold. One is we're applying and we're using the technologies that we and others have developed. And second is we are communicating about the successes and the failures and the improvements to others. And so if we can keep those lines of communication open, not only on the policy side, I know you're very interested on the policy side of developing good ideas and having leadership communicate that idea, those ideas and others to adopt them. But the same thing happens in tech, right? You have an exciting development, you have it demonstrated somewhere. If you have the ability to take that story out and then take back several years later, the next generation of that, that benefits everybody. So we're seeing a lot of the projects that are going to be going in in Hawaii, not just on the solar and the storage side, but also on how do you manage your energy system and on the energy efficiency side, because it all it all connects. If you have an unused room and it's got the lights and the air conditioning and everything else go, that's waste, right? So to the extent that you can control and reduce your waste, then you're improving the efficiency of everything. You can also do that on smaller scales. And a lot of the nanotechnologies are doing that as well. Some comments. Yes. You know, we had Dave Carl, he runs the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education at UH, a very successful research organization. Why is it important? Because it's here in these waters where he has a station of 100 miles, 100 kilometers north of Hawaii, where he can do research in the ocean. It's a special ocean and it's near Hawaii. So he has the environment to do the research. There are other organizations on the mainland and elsewhere that do marine biology and oceanography. But this is a really good place for it. So he has achieved and retained a leadership position nationally in this area. It's quite impressive. But part of it is because we are in an environment where we can do that. There are other good examples of the same thing where we are in the right environment to do the research we should do it. So if you take that same concept and you move it over to energy, we are here. We have been, I don't know how we are doing this very moment, but we have been a leader in renewable energy. We have all these systems going. Utility is on board. Utilities are on board. They're all interested in willing. Willing could take a chance to some extent. They're willing to adopt new technology. They look on the mainland. But reality is, wouldn't it be better if we were in the place where the energy is happening, in the place where people are talking about and committed to these targets? It reminds me actually, I'll stop in a minute. It reminds me actually of a program that ThinkTech did back in the day, maybe 10 years ago, of hotel software. And my fellow got up and he said, and I'll never forget, he said, I do not understand why the hotels in Hawaii go buy hotel software on the mainland. We have all the hotels. We're a destination resort. We have all these experienced people who day to day spend their lives with guests in rooms and all the symbols of hotel software. Why don't we develop the hotel software right here? It really touched me, but we haven't done that. So the same. Here we are in the middle of Energyville. We should develop it here. We have the people. We have the university. We have the people who can do the time. Look at HNEI. We could be doing all kinds of projects right here. We're the best ones. Let me add something else and I'll stop. What Dave Carl said and what many people say is you do better science when you collaborate and you refer to that. So you've got to collaborate. So the question is, do you collaborate by losing your people to the mainland when they do the science there? Or you do the science here and collaborate with people on the mainland, but you act as a principal investigator. You act as the leader of the science right here. And the collaboration happens. It must happen because you can't do science without collaboration anymore. You've got to have multiple disciplines and experts come in and talk to each other. But you can use communication technology to do exactly that, like what we do when we do our remote shows. So what I'm thinking is that it would be best, and it's achievable if we get our minds together, to have the leadership, the science leadership here, be the principal investigators, talk to people on the mainland and everywhere, and develop the technology that would serve our development of energy right here in Hawaii, without giving up, only always holding on to that leadership position. We can be the center of renewable energy right here. We're not really doing that now. We should be doing that in science. Yeah, definitely. In fact, it is happening, but the people who are working on it are extremely busy working and collaborating, so we don't hear about it unless we go look for it. Tell me about it. Tell me about those people. Who is doing what? Well, HNEI is one of the institutions you mentioned. And then the University of Hawaii, College of Engineering, and at the various disciplines. And even some of the folks in the private sector who are working with the researchers, excuse me, in the universities, and they write the papers that are so exciting to people who know about the topic. But how do you communicate those advances, which may be just a tiny bit of improvement in the output from a solar cell or in the efficiency of a process it's creating? So how do you communicate that to the public? They want to go buy something, or they want to see it installed somewhere. And so the distance from the research that's being done and the successes and what the public is interested in is quite large. So we don't really hear about it as much as you might... You don't really have to listen to our shows. Don't hear about it. Well, even our shows, you know, I mean... We have to bring those researchers in. And they come. IEEE has conferences here. I had the photovoltaic conference here a couple years ago and whatnot. But as I said, it's very esoteric. You know, we had the Energy Storage Conference on the Big Highland. It's extremely interesting if you're involved in those industries and you can be excited about the changes that are going to double the efficiency of whatever in five years. But... Well, you know, last year there was a program... How do we tell the story? Organized by HNEI and others, but I think it was a principal organizer with the Germans. I don't know if you went to that. It was to the east-west center. And they had a lot of Germans come. And the Germans are into energy. You know, for them it's harder because it's colder over there. The sun doesn't shine as much. But they came and they were really good and fun. They were very affable and willing to share all this. And they really liked our people and our people really liked them. It was a good move by HNEI to have this kind of collaborative connection. At the end of the day, they were trying to sell us their technology. And we were trying to sell them, I mean, to the extent we can, sell them our technology. Now, you know, there's lots of reasons for organizing a program like that. And you want that program to happen. But you also want, at the end of the day, that we should be leaders in this. You want them to come and get stuff from us rather than us, get stuff from them. Or a combination of those things with us at the lead. And I think we should do more of that because that's the kind of collaboration that can go a long ways. International is dealing with the best of the best. You know, it's learning not only what the solutions are but what the problems are because there can be multiple solutions to a given problem. I think we have, you know, tons of issues here, tons of things that need to be solved, tons of opportunities to make it better. I was waiting for you to say that word. Yeah, because we have a lot of challenges ahead of us. And we can solve them. Yes. And it's interesting if we can get the storyteller, not the ones who are making up stories, but the ones who can take the actual advancements and come and explain what people can be excited about. Because there's a lot of speculation. If you're saying, oh, can we get 200% renewable by whatever year, there's a lot of stuff that will happen, needs to happen, will happen. A lot of stuff that won't happen as well. So you can't really tell where it's going. But you can be involved and interested and follow along as the progress is made. Yeah. But you need someone to explain it to us. Yeah. And think about it all day long. Yeah. So if we can get some of those folks to come and explain what HNEI has been doing or what the College of Engineering has been doing, you know, I don't know if UH, OTED still does Office of Tech Transfer. I haven't heard. Yeah. But I think that's very relevant to our discussions about Hawaii's energy future, not just what are the plans and who's doing what, but also what could we envision happening? Yeah. Yeah. And who's doing it and celebrate them because very often they don't get celebrated. Yeah. They go home and if they try to explain it to their family and friends, their eyes are glazed over. So they just kind of work in their own little groups and make their progress by celebrating their successes. Absolutely. So I guess what I hear you saying is that we are going to get these people from HNEI, College of Engineering, wherever it is happening, wherever somebody could figure out a better inverter or better software for the grid to communicate with itself. These are huge possibilities and we can do it right here. We can do so much right here if we just have confidence in ourselves and see ourselves as the principal investigators on these solutions. So would you make some calls? If you'll make calls, I'll make calls. Okay. You got a deal. Let's do that. Thank you, Maria. Always nice to talk. Thank you. See you next time. Okay, thanks.


Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Accelerate 2017, brought to you by Fortinet. Now, here are your hosts, Lisa Martin and Peter Burris. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas at Fortinet's Accelerate 2017. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, joined by my co-host, Peter Burris, and we're really excited about our next guest. We are talking next with Derek Mankey. Derek, you are, first of all, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. You have a really important role at Fortinet. You are the global security strategist. Correct, yes. You have a, established yourself as a thought leader with over 15 years of cybersecurity expertise, and your goal is to make a positive impact towards the global war on cyber crime. That's a big goal. It's a very big, big goal, but it's a big, hairy goal, but it's critically important, I believe. I firmly believe this over my whole career, and I'm starting to see some good traction with the efforts that we're doing too, so. And it's becoming more and more critical every day as breaches and hacks, or it's a daily occurrence. You're also the leader of FortiGuard Labs. You've got a team of over 200. Tell our viewers who camp here today, what is FortiGuard Labs? What are you doing to leverage threat intelligence to help Fortinet's customers? Sure, so we're trying to manage complexity because that's always the enemy of security, right? And we're trying to make it simple to, across the board, right? So we're managing security for all of our customers, 300,000 customers plus. That's a big deal, right? So we've had to invest a lot into that in terms of how we can do that to make it simple to the end users. So what FortiGuard Labs is, is it's services we deliver to the end user, protection services across the spectrum, our whole product portfolio, right? And so we have world-class expertise as a security vendor, right? 200 plus people on the team, experts in each domain. We have researchers and experts looking at things like industrial attacks, mobile problems, malicious websites, ripping apart, so what we call reverse engineering, malware samples to find out digital fingerprints of who's creating these attacks so we can work also in partnerships with that too. At the end of the day, we have the humans working on that but we've also invested a ton into artificial intelligence and machine learning. We have to comb through over 50 billion attacks in a day and so the machines are also helping us to create a lot of this automated protection. That's all driven by our patents, by our world-class development teams. That gets down to the end user so that they don't have to invest as much into their own security operations centers because that's a big OPEC's expenditure. So we're helping to alleviate that issue, especially with, as everybody knows today, the big gap in cyber security professionals. So that helps alleviate that issue too. You said 50 billion attacks a day. That's correct sir, yes. So clearly, potential attacks, oh, potential attacks. Okay, so clearly that means increasing percentages of the total body of attacks are no longer coming from humans. They're coming from other things. Absolutely. And how's that playing out? It's a fascinating landscape right now. So with every legitimate model, there's a legitimate model to follow, especially with cyber crime and what we see in the digital underground, dark web, all these sorts of things. You rewind back to the 90s, right?  Nowadays, of course, the attack surface has grown tremendously, right? You look back to DARPA and back in 1989, it had 60,000 systems connected on the internet. Now we have IPv6, 20 plus billion connected devices. Everything is a target now, especially with the internet of things, smart televisions. And a potential threat. And a weapon, yeah. Exactly, yeah, exactly. And so to capitalize on that, we've seen what we're seeing now as cyber criminals developing automated systems of their own to infect these systems, to report back to them. So they're doing a lot of that heavy work to, the heavy lifting, using their own machines to infect and their own algorithms to infect these systems. And then from there, it'll escalate back up to them to further capitalize and leverage those attacks. But there's, on any given minute, we're seeing between 500,000 to 700,000 hacking attempts across, this is our own infrastructure. So we're leading in terms of firewalls and unit ships, so we're able to get a good grasp on intelligence out there, what's happening. And yeah, on any given minute, well over 500,000 hacking attempts on systems worldwide. So every hour, 30 million. So quick math. Yeah, I'm amazing, I'm amazing multiplication. I almost got it wrong though. But 30 million hacks an hour. Yeah, and so our job is to identify that. We don't want to block things we shouldn't be, so there has to be a very big emphasis on quality of intelligence as well. So we've done a lot with our machines to validate attacks, to be able to protect against those attacks. And that, especially when it comes to these attacks, like intrusion prevention, that attack surface now, we got to be able to not just look at attacks on PCs now. So that's why that number keeps ticking up. Right, proliferation of mobile IoT. Directly related, absolutely. Is it clearly something that eyeballs are not going to, are not going to solve? Not alone. So I'm a very, very big advocate saying that we cannot win this war alone, just relying even on the brightest minds in the world. But we can also not just rely 100% on machines to control. It's just like autonomous vehicles, right? You look at Tesla and these other vehicles and Google what they're doing. You can never, it's a trust exercise again, right? You can never pass 100% control to that automation. Rather you can get up to that 99% tile with automation, but you still need those bright minds looking at it. So that's your question. Eyeballs alone know, but the approach we've taken is to scale up, distribute, and use machines to identify, try to find that needle in the haystack, and then escalate that to our bright minds when we need to look at the big attacks that matter and solve some more of the complex issues. Speaking of bright minds, you and your team recently published an incredible blog on 2017 predictions. Yes, yeah. Wow, is it on, that's on the Fortnite blog? Yeah, that's correct. You can find that really incredibly thorough eye-opening and there were six predictions, but take us to maybe the top three. We talked about the proliferation of devices, the attack surface getting larger, more and more things becoming potential threats. What are the top three maybe biggest threats that you're seeing? And is there any industry in particular that pops up as one of the prime targets? Absolutely. So I'll get into some buckets on this. You know, I think first and foremost, what's prime right now and what we're seeing is what we're calling autonomous malware. So this is the notion of basically what we're just talking about to your question on what's driving this data, what's driving all of these attack points. First of all, the internet's been seated with what I call ticking time bombs right now. We have 20 plus, you know, whatever the number is going to be, all of these billions of devices that are connected that are inherently, in my professional opinion, insecure. A lot of these devices are not following proper security development life cycles. Is there accountability to begin with? No, not at this point. Right. And that's something that the DHS and NIST just released some guidelines on at the end of last year. And I think we're going to see a lot of activity on accountability for that, but that has to be taken care of. Unfortunately, right now, it's been seated, right? This attack surface is there. So we already have all these open avenues of attack and that's why I call it a ticking time bomb. It's been seated and now these are right for attack and we're seeing attackers capitalize on this. So what we're seeing is the first indications of autonomous malware, right? Malware that is capable of mapping out these vulnerable points, the machines doing this and the machines attacking the other machines. So it's not just the eyeballs and the cyber criminals doing this. We saw last year, unprecedented DDoS attacks, right? This is directly related to the Morai botnet. We had gone from a 600 gig to terabit plus DDoS attacks. That was unheard of before. They are leveraging all of these different IoT devices as a horsepower to attack these systems in a massive distributed denial of service attack. The interesting part about Morai is that it's also using open source intelligence as well. So this is something that humans, a blackhead attacker would typically have to do. They would have to get reports back from one of their systems and say, okay, now I've found all these vulnerable systems. I'm going to go attack these systems, but they're the glue. So they're now removing themselves as a glue and making this completely automated where a botnet like Morai is able to use Showdown as an example, it's an open source database and say, here are a whole bunch of vulnerable systems. I'm going to go attack it. And so that's to my point of view, that's the first indication of this smart malware because malware has always been guided by humans, right? But now I think we're starting to see a lot of more that intelligent attack, the intelligence offense being baked in to these pieces of malware. So I think it's going to open this whole new breed of attacks in malware. And obviously we're in a whole new arms race when it comes to that. How can we get ahead of the bad guys? And so obviously this is what Fortinet's doing on the autonomous defense, right? Our security fabric and fabric ready approach. That's all about beating them to the punch on that, having our machines, the defensive machines talk to each other, combine world-class intelligence like FortiGuard so that it can defend against those attacks. It's a tough task, I really firmly believe that this year is a year that we have the advantage, we can have the advantage as white hats to get one leg up on the blackhead attackers. As I said, for 15 years at FortiGuard last, we've invested a ton into our AI machine learning intelligence. So we're experts on the automation. I don't believe the blackhead attackers are experts in automation. So I think for that reason, we have a really good opportunity this year because you always hear about the blackheads, another data breach and all this stuff happening. They're always at the advantage and I think we can really turn the tables this year. You have some great experience working, not just in the private sector, but in the public sector as well. You've done work with NATO, with Interpol, with CERT. What is your perspective on public sector and private sector working together? Is that essential to win this war on cyber crime? Absolutely, we need everybody at the table. We cannot win it as one single vendor alone. And so I'm a very, as a good example of that is work we're starting to do across the board. This is something I firmly believe and it's really near and dear to my heart. I've worked on it for the course of well over six years now. And we have a lot of the existing partnerships across organizations. So other security vendors and experts, Cyber Threat Alliance is an excellent example. We're a founding member of that. And these are competitors, but security vendors getting together to level the playing field on intelligence. We can still really remain competitive on the solutions and how we implement that intelligence. But at least, it's like a Venn diagram. You look at that attack surface out there. You want to try to share all that information so that you can deliver that to security controls and protect against it. So the Cyber Threat Alliance is a good example, but that's private sector. If you look at national computer emergency response, law enforcement, we have made great inroads into that working with the likes of a computer emergency response to give them intel. If we find bad stuff happening somewhere, we're not law enforcement. We can't go take the server down and disrupt campaign. We can't arrest or prosecute people, but they can. But they don't have all that expertise and intelligence that we do, all the data points. So you're starting to see a lot of this spring up and we're doing a lot of leadership in this area. And I think it's absolutely essential. President Obama last year mentioned it, the Cyber Threat Alliance and the public private sector needing to work together in one of his beaches at Sanford. And I believe it's the only way we can win this. You have to go after the head of the snake too. If we are always on the defense and we're always just trying to disrupt cyber criminals, it's just a slap on the wrist to them. They're going to go set up shop somewhere else. We need to be able to actually go and prosecute these guys. And we had a really good case last year. We took down working with Interpol on the EFCC, a $62 million crime ring U.S. They went and prosecuted the kingpin of this operation out in Nigeria. There's an unprecedented win in an example, but we need to do more of that. But it's a good example of a healthy working public private sector relationship. Wow, what an incredible experience that you have, what you've achieved with Bordegaard Labs. What excites you most going forward? We're just at the beginning of 2017 with what's been announced here, the partnerships that you guys have formed. What excites you most about this year and maybe some of the key steps you want to take against cyber crime? Sure. Yeah, so I think we want to, so Cyber Threat Alliance is a very big machine. There's a lot of exciting things happening. So that's going to be a really good initiative. That's going to carry forward momentum this year. What excites me most? Well, it's not always a good thing, right? But if you look at all the bad news that's out there, like I said, I think it's just going to be, there's so much fuel that's being thrown on the fire when it comes to attacks right now, right? I mean, like I said, these time bombs that have been planted out there, we're going to see the year IOT attacks for sure. Mariahs, a new version of Mariahs already come out. They're selling this, they're starting to sell this, commercialize this, and it's even more advanced in terms of intelligence than the previous one. That sort of stuff, it depends on your definition of the word excites, of course. But these are the things that we have opportunity. And again, I think going back to my first point, the white hats having, for the first time in my point of view, a leg up on the black hats, that opportunity, that really excites me. When we look at what's happening moving forward in 2017, healthcare, I think is going to be a very big thing in terms of attack targets. So we're going to be focused on that in terms of attacks on not just healthcare records, which are much more valuable than financial records as an example, but medical devices, again, the IOT play in healthcare, that's a big deal. We're starting to already see attacks on that. Smart cities as well. You look forward to the next three years. Building management systems. A lot of people talk about SCADA and industrial control. This is definitely a big attack target to a certain attack surface, obviously power plants, electrical grids. But building management systems, these automated systems that are being put in, even smart vehicles and smart homes is another big target that's unfolding over the next few years. Hard to air gap a home or certainly not a city. Absolutely, yeah. And again, it goes back to the point that a lot of these devices being installed in those homes are inherently insecure. So that's a big focus for us and that's the big thing FortyGuard is doing is looking at what those attacks are so that we can defend against that at the network layer, that we can work with all of our business partners that are here at Accelerate this year to deliver those solutions and protect against it. Well, it sounds like, and I think Peter would agree, your passion for what you do is very evident as those bad actors are out there and as the technologies on the bad end are getting more advanced and intelligent, as you say. It's great to hear what you and your team are doing to help defend against that on the enterprise side and one day on the consumer side as well. So, Derek Mankey, global security strategist for Fortinet, thank you so much for being on theCUBE and sharing your expertise with us. It's my pleasure and your time, thank you very much. Well, on behalf of my co-host Peter Burris, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE, but stick around, we'll be right back.