I'm Rusty Komori and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. My books Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game are about leadership, character, and creating a superior culture of excellence, which is what this show is all about. My special guest today is the CEO of the very popular Hawaii Food and Wine Festival. She is the highly respected Denise Yamaguchi, and today we are going beyond leadership. Hey, Denise, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you for having me. That introduction was kind of cool. I thought I was getting married. Denise, I know you grew up in Hawaii, but tell me where you grew up at and what schools you attended. So I grew up in the Liliha Pu'unui area, and I actually went to Ma'imai school till sixth grade, and then I attended Iolani school and graduated from Iolani and then went on to college on the mainland. I went to Santa Clara University, and then I graduated with a master's degree in business administration from George Washington University, so that was my educational background. So when you were in high school, did you play any sports or what kind of activities did you do? So in high school, I actually ran track, so I did that for a number of years. I was a cheerleader for one year, but most of my time was spent dancing hula. I actually was part of a halau and did that for maybe 18 years, and actually danced my first marimharic when I was 17, and then left to the mainland, came back, and then went back to dancing hula for another maybe eight, 10 years before I retired. So tell me about hula. I mean, why is hula so challenging? So hula was important in my life just because of the discipline. I mean, it was, it's kind of like a team sport because you have a hula troop, right? It's a group of girls or women that get together, and we competed, and so in competing, of course you have to try out, you have to make the line, and then you have to practice, and practice is so important, and it's not just practicing in class, but in high school I danced once a week at a small hotel in Waikiki. We had to make our own lathes, our own tee-lees skirts, and so all of that was part of being part of the halau, but in addition to that, you know, I was in school, so it was, it was challenging, and then when you're on the, when you're on the marimharic line, you practice more than once a week, and so that is also kind of manage your time, manage your homework, manage halau. That was, that was all part of it, and so it was a big part of my life. Denise, I have to ask you, what was the first job that you ever had that you got paid money for? So when I was 16 years old, and I, I don't know why, but I think I've always wanted to have my own money, and so at 16, I told my parents, hey, I want to get a job, and so my dad knew the owner of zippies, and I applied for the job, and I got a job as a countergirl at the Dillingham zippies, and so that was the first job I got paid for, and I remember the first thing I bought with my first paycheck, I bought a watch, and I wanted the watch, but I didn't want my parents to buy it for me, I wanted to buy it myself, and I still have that watch till today, because it meant something to me to earn my own money, but that was my very first job, is working as a countergirl at zippies. Wow, and you, you also ended up working as an intern for Senator Daniel Inouye, right? I did, so after graduating from Santa Clara, I moved to Washington D.C., and spent the summer there as an intern, and then later got hired on his staff, and then was then hired again to work on his 92 election, but I was an intern over the summer from 1990, in the 1990s.  So Senator was an amazing person, right? He was part of the greatest generation, and, but one of the things that stands out is, he led by example, I mean he was always working, always working, and you know, we didn't feel that working late at night was, was really working, because the boss was always there. We also, he also had an amazing ability to understand compromise, and a lot of times, when you look at, you know, politicians or policymakers, they don't understand that in order to move the needle, you can't just get from A to Z, you have to make compromises. So he was all about compromises. And the other thing he had was, he had the ability to make friends, so he didn't only have friends that weren't Democrats, but he had friends that were Republicans. And so by having friends, he was able to really move legislation and move things forward. And the last thing he had was, I think he had the ability to keep his ego in check. I mean, that is so important. I think, as great as he was, he always understood that he was a public servant.  His paycheck was, was given to him by taxpayers. So he really understood that he was a public servant and he worked on behalf of the people. And I think that made him an amazing leader. No, I love hearing those insights, Denise.  Why, why is Chef Roy successful? So Roy is an amazing person as well. I mean, Roy has the ability to just put his head down and continue working. I mean, he is one of those people and a lot of people think they work hard, but I don't know that everybody defines hard work the same way. Roy works seven days a week, but he's also very interested in, in his business. So, you know, he has an associate's degree, right? He graduated from a community college, but beyond just that AA degree, because I have an MBA, he's able to, to talk about business in ways that, you know, amaze me because he's studied, like he's done things in business that I've never done, like negotiate leases and talk about human resources, work with attorneys. I mean, he, he's interested in the business. And he also pays attention to detail. And I think that's what makes him successful. He's, he's there 365 days a year.  You can't be there, you know, part time. It's a full time, 365 days a year, you live it. People are depending on you. For someone like Roy, he has maybe 800 employees and they all depend on him.  So I think that's what makes him successful. Oh, I love, I love Chef Roy. And I want to ask you, Denise, how, how did the Hawaii Food and Wine Festival actually begin? So before I, I have no background in food or wine. I actually have a governmental affairs background and I'm a fundraising professional. And in 2010 or 2009, Roy said, Hey, I think, you know, it might be interesting if we start a food festival because every destination in the world has a food and wine festival, but Hawaii, we don't have a food and wine, you know, major food and wine festival. And so we got together and I said, he was going to put his own money into it. And I said, Hey, wait, let's see if I can get some of HTA or somebody to fund a project like this. And so we want to talk to HTA and Roy had this vision of leaving a legacy for this date, making Hawaii a culinary destination and making this one of the biggest festivals in the state of Hawaii. And not, and it wouldn't just be about our local people, but also it would be about bringing other chefs into Hawaii to expose them to the great agriculture we had. So part of it was also to introduce the great agricultural products, great the beef that we grow here, as well as the fish. And so that became the basis of how we started the festival. It started very small. We had three events in Waikiki. And, you know, it was interesting. We invited 20 chefs that year. And I remember one of the chefs telling me the second year, Wow, I can't believe I'm here again. I wasn't sure if you guys are going to do this again. I, you know, I just didn't, it just didn't, we didn't think he wasn't thinking that this was going to go on and on and on because it is expensive to bring chefs from all over the world to Hawaii. But we've been able to know we're in our 10th year, we finished, just finished our 10th anniversary and we'll be on our 11th year. So as CEO, what are some of your top goals for the, for the festival? So, you know, the primary mission of the festival is to put Hawaii on the map as a culinary destination. So of course, that's very important. And second of all, I think, you know, part of it is, is getting the industry and especially right now, you know, we're in COVID and we're going to have to restart our economy. And so one of the things that I think is so important with this festival is that it brings people from the industry, from the visitor industry together to work on this food festival. So I think one of the big goals for me this year is to see how we can incorporate as many partners as we can to get our economy started. So that's, that's another major thing that I'd like to see. And the last thing is, you know, we have about a hundred, in our ninth year, we had about 150 chefs that we brought in from all over the world to cook with our local agriculture products. And one of the things that I've always wanted to do is to share stories about culture and food. And so we started our first edition magazine and it's a digital platform called HashiLife.com. So we are starting a digital publication and it'll tell stories about food and culture and how that intersects. And that's one of the bigger things that we're doing this year. And the last thing I'm doing is I'm trying to create a video series called The Bounty and Beauty of Hawaii. And again, it's to help the industry. And it's showcasing Hawaii's national beauty and agriculture through the lens of chefs. So that's, I'm hoping that we can get that series off this year. We've started filming our first episode and we hope to have a series this year. Oh, that sounds good.  Why is that? The festival has been successful because there are so many people who contribute to the festival. I mean, there's, there, it's, it's been amazing in terms of just how many people the festival touches. It's, we started this as an opportunity for the industry to come together to work on something together and to create, to create something beyond, beyond just one entity. So normally festivals, when you look at them, they're resort centric. This festival works with numerous competitors across the state. They're all hotels, right? All the, all the festivals, the festival events are held primarily at hotels and they're all competitors, but it was a way to get the industry to work on something greater than itself. And so that's why it's successful. It's because we have so many people working on this festival. I mean, from the farmers, ranchers and fishermen, to the chefs, to the students, to the resident volunteers, I mean, even when we're doing the festival, the valet people know what the festival is all about. And so it's just, it's just a culmination of a whole lot of people working together for the, for the betterment actually of the state of Hawaii. Oh, I absolutely love it. And I know that you're the key ingredient, Denise, as a CEO.  And I also want to ask you as executive director of the Hawaii Agricultural Foundation, what are some of your top goals? So for the Hawaii Agricultural Foundation, our number one goal is to grow future farmers. The average age of the, of a farmer in the United States and in Hawaii is 60 years of age. And you can have all the land and water and inputs and resources, what, what, you know, what have you. But if you don't have a younger generation that wants to become farmers, we're never going to grow our agricultural industry. And so one of our top priorities is to encourage kids to, to take up ag as a career. We have a K through 12 program in the public schools. And we have programs like where would we be without seeds? We have a program called veggie you, we have a program called in the fields. And again, all of these programs touch kids lives and encourages them. And we hope to spark an interest in them to want to become our future farmers. Another goal of the ag foundation is to really support the farmer. We have a 288 acre ag park in Quinnia. We have about 24 farmers on the land. And it's all about trying to help those smaller farmers scale. And so this year will be about trying to take some of that land and actually get that one acre or five acre farmer to become 10 acres. And then to become 15 acres, because, you know, when you think of an acre, it doesn't seem like that much land, but you can grow a lot of food on one acre. And so it's about providing some technical assistance to those farmers. And then the third thing is, is to create community awareness and outreach about the importance of agriculture in our community. So we have programs like eat, think, drink, which bring leaders together to talk about food and ag issues. We have another program called local dishes where we celebrate restaurants that buy local. And so it's just about those are the three main priorities of the ag foundation. And it's been great over the last, again, that organization is about 13 years old. Well, agriculture definitely affects all of us.  So it's interesting. You know, before the pandemic, I really feel the local community didn't understand or appreciate local agriculture. Once the pandemic hit, I think people realized, Hey, you know, these people, we're going to need these people if we're going to survive. And so the pandemic has actually been good to agriculture. In terms of the farmer, some of the farmers who were growing for the visitor industry, those farmers have had to pivot a little bit because now their market is the consumer. We don't have as many visitors today. We have 7000 versus 30,000 before. So a lot of the farmers that were growing for the visitor industry have now had to change their, what they were growing and grow now for the consumer market versus the visitor market. And that's totally different because if you think about it, you know, like you can only grow so many pineapples for the local market. So those growers are probably having to now change what they're growing and grow something different for the consumer market. And again, even the tomato farmer, you know, some tomatoes are grown for the visitor industry may not be grown for the consumer market. So that's all about how farmers have had to change what they're growing. The other thing is a lot of the farmers are now selling direct to the consumer. We have a lot more farmers markets. We have a lot more CSAs. And so it's just a matter of finding how you're going to get your product to market. But I think the farmers in general have been doing okay. I think it's the restaurant industry that has had a real tough time. And if it's been hard for the farmers, it's because the restaurants aren't buying. So those farmers that were selling to the visitor industry on the restaurants have not had to change what they're doing. All these domino effects, Denise. And Denise, I know that you have my books and I want to ask you, do you like the books? Yeah, it was, I mean, I'm on chapter seven. And as I said, it's an easy read. And there's a lot of things I think you talk about that I can relate to, especially the discipline part. I know we were talking about that earlier. But the discipline part and also coaching style, I think it was interesting to hear a little bit about your coaching style and how you've handled a couple of the players you had. And I think back to my experience dancing hula. And I used to think my kumu hula was so strict. I mean, if we were late, being on time is so important in, I guess any sport and in anything you do. And I just remember, if you were late to halal, you had to only in front of everybody yet to chat in by yourself. So usually the group would chat in and you could chat in with the group. But if you got there late, you'd have to do, you would have to chat by yourself. And so just those lessons about punctuality and about how you train your players, I could relate to when I was a young student dancing hula. No, I like hearing that. And I like that you're liking the book so far. And Denise, you're also an author. And can you tell me about your kid's book that you have? So a couple of years ago, I think in 2016, we, I think it was 2016, it's been a while already. 2016 we published a book called Kiki in the Kitchen with Mika the sous chef. And it is published by the Hawaii Agricultural Foundation. I licensed my real dog Mika to the ag foundation so we could create this character. And she tells a story in the beginning of the book about where food comes from. So she teaches these three kids, actually who are my kids, Hoku Remy and Stone, about where food comes from. It doesn't necessarily, it doesn't come from the supermarket. It comes from the farmer's rashes of fishermen. So she tells that story. And then it goes into, now let's get cooking. And then I had 39 chefs, local chefs who are gracious enough to donate their recipes for the cookbook. Oh, I love hearing that. It's such a cute book.  So much. She's really good. She's a really good, she's a good sport. So she's been on a number of news stories with me and she's really good about just saying it up. So yeah, really lucky to have her as the, as a little mascot for the ag foundation. She's also come out with a doll and we have a wooden spoon and she even has masks for kids and masks for adults. And so all those products are now being sold on the ag foundation website and it benefits our ag education programs. Denise, you're also on a number of boards and it seems like wherever you are, you make significant improvements in every organization. So I want to ask you, why are you successful?  I don't know that I'm successful, but if this is what success looks like, part of the reason I always tell younger women, you know, if you work hard now and you really put in the time and you really don't cut corners, right? You really do the work. Life gets easier. I mean, I remember struggling at 25 and working at, you know, 10, 11 o'clock. And when I worked at Bishop Museum, I was in my 30s already. And, and I was there and you can look at the museum records. I was there almost every night, so 10, 11 o'clock, one o'clock sometimes, depending on if we had a grant due, but you know, putting the time in and not cutting corners and not thinking you can get somewhere without doing the work, I think has been part of why I feel that, you know, I'm successful is it's because I put in the time and the work. I can do everything that everybody in my organization can do. So that that's important is making sure that I'm not just the person calling the shots, but I can also do the work if it need be, you know. So I look at that as, as part of my success. That makes sense. And I want to ask you, Denise, besides family, who's a leader you admire? You know, I was thinking about this one. And I think, and I've always answered the question this way. I think when I look at leaders and I think of people who are of influence, I really think of Oprah Winfrey, and she's not on television anymore. But I still subscribe to her magazines. I love what she does for women. I love that she celebrates people who are who may whose stories may not be told. And so I look at people like like her who have really tried to encourage young women, but also to just tell stories, just tell the right stories and be that person that that, you know, celebrates success. And so when I look at leaders, I think of her. So let's go a little further now, Denise. So what do you feel the best leaders do?  I think the best leaders are the ones that lead by example. I think they're the ones that get their hands dirty.  And I asked him, why are you, why are you washing dishes? And he's like, well, I want to make sure everybody understands that, you know, the most important position in the restaurant is the dishwasher. But I give him credit because, you know, he, for a number of years went to work and he goes to work seven days a week.  And I think leaders lead by example. I really feel that he's one of those special people who is not told to do something, he just does it.  And so that's what I think of leaders. I totally agree with you and I like hearing that.  I think one of the biggest adversities in my life, and it's a little bit hard for me to talk about, I was married before, but one of the things that I went through was I went through divorce and, you know, I'm Japanese American, my parents were never divorced. And, you know, I just didn't think I was ever going to get divorced. And what I learned from that is, you know, I saw divorce as a failure and it, it's not a failure. You know, I think my sister and other people feel, have told me, hey, you know, when I was going through it, you can't control another person, you can only control yourself.   Because it's something that's beyond your control, like you can't control another person. And so it took me time to process that, but that was one of the biggest challenges I had was to get over that fact that, hey, I failed, which was just a perception, right? I just had to change my perception and figure out that it wasn't a failure. It was just sometimes things don't work out. You know, I've had to, I've had to let people go. I've had clients that have let me go for whatever reason, right? And maybe it's circumstances, it's COVID or whatever, it's not your fault. But if you see as, let's just say, you know, during this COVID, we had to furlough people, you got furloughed, some people might take it as a failure, I got let go, other people didn't, but it's not, it's just a matter of circumstance. And so it's just a matter of how you perceive things and whether you're resilient enough to get up after that adversity. So that's another thing is, you know, I think one of the things successful people have is that they're resilient and they're able to move from adversity and get back on track pretty quickly. And if they're not, as long as they can get back on track, that's success to me is you got to be resilient. You can't, you can't let that bring you so down that you can't function or you can't move beyond it for a period of time. And I think that's, that's what successful people are about.  And I'd be thinking about it and Roy would look at me and he's like, are you still thinking about that? I'm like, oh, what do you mean? He goes, well, I've already accomplished 10 things and you're still thinking about that. So when I look at successful people, they know how to take adversity, process it and then move. So changes, change is going to happen, right? Life is all about change and good and bad, right? There's good things that happen and bad things that happen. And it's how you take that change and you're able to move and move forward. So that's what I think in terms of my adversity, but also how I think, you know, successful people are when they meet adversity. Denise, I completely agree with you. It's all about adapting and adjusting and finding our way. And I want to thank you for taking time to share your insights about leadership on the show today, Denise. Well, thank you for having me. Really, it was fun today. Thanks. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, please visit RustyKamori.com and my books are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I hope that Denise and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.


When we're going out and we're moving cattle from one pasture to the next, you can just see how it benefits both the grass and the cattle, how much better nutritionally we can offer different grasses to our cattle by letting that grass rest. As you see, the cattle get excited. They want to come. They want that new grass. You can see a very big difference in some of the more continual graze systems versus our rotations in your extended grass, in the health of your cattle, in the wildlife and all of it.


The Course is really teaching us, Spirit is teaching us that we have to bring the illusions to the truth.   Would you please fix it? More like the Spirit is saying bring everything you believe about your life in this world and time and space actually to back to me and it will disappear. Bring all of your crazy beliefs to the light and you'll see it was just your imagination. It was just this dark dragon, this crazy tiny mad idea that you had buried and kept hidden and then you kept trying to fix it in form, you know, trying to smooth it over, make it work out. Well, it's going to get better. Just give him one more try. Just give him one more try, one more, just one more try.  Let's do this with true empathy. Let's bring the darkness to the light. So I really feel that both what played out before and in the dream that the Bible had taught us let your yea be yea and let your nay be nay. And for some of us, we have associated yes with God and no is a bad word but actually not so to the Holy Spirit. If you authentically go on this journey, you're going to end up having the Holy Spirit say no to a lot of things. I've had to say no a lot in this parable and I could feel the joy of the presence of the Spirit behind the nose. It wasn't a no in the sense of dismissal, there was no sense of rejection, there was no sense of putting down or wrongdoing. I remember the first time I started to practice this was years ago when I would be praying, meditating, I'd be getting into these deep mystical states and my mother would come, would invite me to all kinds of different things and the way the Spirit would come out would be thank you so much for asking me or thank you so much for including me, thank you so much for inviting me. The graciousness of the Spirit was always there with the thank you and no, I don't think I'm going to be coming or sometimes it would even be say I'll just have to be in the moment because I was living more in the moment instead of doing so much planning even though that was the old way, everything is planned out days and weeks and months in advance I was becoming allowing myself to be more spontaneous and just let the Spirit guide me moment by moment which seemed to be reflected back as come on just give me a yes or no sometimes I would have to say I'll have to see and leave it at that and stay in the strength of that and sometimes when the time came I would go or not go I really started to become 100% intuitive, 100% in alignment with Spirit so that took away all of the conflict but I did go through that what you're describing where I followed what truly felt was in my heart and then I would see the role of the accuser rear up I would see fear, doubt, guilt all these accusations we're all going to have to walk through it we just have to be able to see all that like you did with those characters that look like the KKK we could just kind of walk right through them and when we really get into the strength of choosing with the Spirit that can threaten us at all the fear leaves now I live just a completely fearless life there's just no fear whatsoever but it's just been allowing all the darkness to come up and say I'm not going to hide and protect it it's not worth not going to use any kind of defense mechanism I'm not going to stuff it down anymore I'm just going to let it fully come up and really come and go go back to the light


So there's actually a reason that you really need to shift now and I don't just mean like whenever you feel like it I mean right now today ideally or this week in 2021 even if you're watching this in kind of early 2022 you need to be reality shifting now and I'll explain why. So the idea of reality shifting is taking off its trending but largely because it's based around obviously the trending idea is based on TikToks and things just you know trending on social media platforms but the reason it's trending is because it's underlying a basic truth that we all know to be true it we just kind of forgotten about it over time and that is that we create our own reality everything that you're experiencing is a result of something you have created and I know that might be hard to hear it's not hard to hear for people who are I guess you could say successful I don't I don't really like using that term because success in a material sense is kind of meaningless but if you are living here's a better way of explaining it if you're living an experience or life that you enjoy then you will know this to be true you create that experience the people that are living a life that they don't necessarily enjoy are not going to be as quick to admit that they create that experience because no one likes admitting that they they made a mistake you know or that they are the reason that they're not having a good experience but the truth is that everyone's life is self created self manifested and people realizing this in enormous numbers all around the world in especially in the last kind of six months it's been absolutely unprecedented the amount of people realizing this if you want to know more about kind of how and why this is the case then I would highly encourage you to check out some books which I some of them I can't mention here but if you go to my telegram channel I can actually give you direct links to these books they're available online one of the best ones I would say is the holographic universe which is an enormous shift literally to your mind which will explain how the the universe everything that we think is physical reality now is basically a hologram and that might become that might come as a shock to you but that's good news because that means you can change what's projected on the hologram screen so you can decide what you want to experience and this is kind of how reality shifting works it's also how how things like lucid dreaming works is also how you in this reality I guess you could say can create things you can manifest things and you hear these incredible stories of people using things like the law of attraction which is really just kind of like a popular way of saying the holographic reality theory waveform reality and they do these incredible things like I've heard of people just deciding on a specific amount of money they want to manifest and then like a few days later some random completely unrelated thing will happen and just out of the blue they will get that they'll get that money you know maybe it's like some random person just calls them up and says hey there's opportunity or I want to buy your whatever for a higher price or they get a job opportunity or it could be anything right completely right or they find money on the street someone sends them you know completely random opportunities and ideas that come in to their life seemingly randomly but it's not random of course because they decided to manifest it and then the universe or holographic waveform reality unfolded I speak about this a lot unfolded and unfolded the holographic reality unfolded into the reality that the person wanted and it's really I have to say it's quite a rabbit hole you know if you dive into this stuff the further you look in quantum mechanics the further you zoom into a specific thing right you zoom far enough down and then they've discovered that actually there's nothing there like it's just a waveform a vibrating illusion there's nothing there no there's no specific thing that you can point to and say that is what makes up this molecule or this particle or this whatever and more interestingly they actually have no space and no time if you zoom in far enough there's no look there's no locality non locality which is exactly how quantum entanglement works which is the idea of you if you affect one particle that's entangled with another particle you know the effect that you produce on the first particle will affect the other one no matter how far away they are from each other so they're literally like you can affect this particle here the other particle that's linked with that one can be in Australia and instantly you know faster than speed of light they will have the same change how can that possibly be true if things are physical as we thought they were well of course it can't so that's they explains how the universe is a hologram so going back on track here the there's a kind of a battle going on at the moment for the direction of the planet and you might have noticed this already it's kind of hard to avoid at this point and the dark side or the dark force wants things to go in a fearful more specific strict control direction i don't want to say it too much more and then the light side wants things to go more towards freedom creativity love and enjoying things right good experiences and so what happens is these realities or these different paths are diverging at the moment the good or the bad the light or the dark these paths become more and more likely the more people focus on them so if you focus your emotional energy on something positive even just for a few minutes a day that has an enormous impact on the collective consciousness of the world and the direction we go in as a planet so this is why you need to shift right now you need to start specifically thinking about what do you want to experience your desired reality however crazy however seemingly unrealistic it seems okay what do you want to experience and then just shift to that to that reality shift to that experience and hopefully you the experience you want to have is a positive one right hopefully you don't want to go and live in some dystopian horror reality because that's not what you should be doing but if you want to experience something positive then by doing that so by focusing on the positive you will positively impact the collective humanity and like i said it's more important now than ever before in 2021 maybe early 2022 this is really important you need to be doing this so if you haven't already decided what you want to shift to now is the time if you haven't watched my other videos about shifting or if you're just purely interested in lucid dreaming now is the time honestly try and try it out for yourself like if you'd like lucid dreaming you're gonna love shifting because it's real like it's physical reality that your physical reality that you're experiencing so the main aspect if you take away one thing from this video and this applies to shifting lucid dreaming and what you might consider to be real reality right now physical reality the emotion of love and positivity if you hold that emotion at the same time as thinking about visualizing or you know concentrating on something you want or even something you don't want you know whatever you focus your attention on you will get more of okay and that's such a universal rule like if you you might know people who just seem to always be negative and complaining about things and then seemingly randomly right they seem to always attract and get those negative experiences someone who says they're you know they're so unlucky you've always heard about that person they say oh i'm just so unlucky i always attract these bad situations well that's because they tell themselves that story that they're unlucky and so what happens is they literally magnetize these negative situations to themselves and then they experience them and they wonder why it's random and this is the same reason that you can have these people who are just enormously successful they seem to get things handed to them and they seem to be so lucky but it's not really luck it's just that they've decided what they want to experience and then the experiences they want can't help but being drawn to them so just about that in mind where attention goes energy will flow so if you want an experience think about it focus on it give it your emotional energy if you don't want an experience and i'm specifically talking about you know what that's going on right now the control mechanisms the restrictions okay if you don't want those things don't focus on them don't don't even give them your attention or your energy because that's how they're becoming reality so by ignoring them by you know just laughing at them essentially because it is silly or just laughing at these things laughing at the experiences you don't want to have and instead focusing on what you do want to have you literally create that reality i can't stress this enough if you want to learn more check out the holographic reality book check out my other videos on shifting and just decide more than anything else just decide what you want to experience and then have that experience it's literally as simple as that


That in Brazil, the liberal voices are new, and the liberal voices are young. And you've got a young generation, so I've spent a lot of time with young people in Brazil. Now yes, the majority of young people have left us like they are, if you will. But you have a vibrant, large community of pro-free market young people, which is unusual. Mr. Brook, thank you for accepting our... It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure to hear you. So, you know, I would like to begin asking you, how do you see the debate about liberalism in the whole world?  Well, I think those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe in individual liberty, we're losing. It's the bottom line. You see that throughout the world. Europe is moving away from the classical liberal free market individual liberty perspective. You're seeing a rise of kind of authoritarian right. You're seeing a rise of an authoritarian left. And those of us who believe in actual freedom, in actual liberty, have no voice in Europe. You're seeing the same thing in the United States. You know, Donald Trump is far from kind of a classical liberal perspective, a free market perspective. He is a central planner, just a central planner of the right instead of a central planner on the left. And of course, what he has done is he's made the left even more radical, even more extreme, so that both are becoming more authoritarian. And then, you know, before the interview, we were talking about China. You're even seeing in China for many, many years, China was heading in the right direction, what I would consider towards greater freedom, towards more liberalization, towards more free markets, but also more free speech. I used to go there regularly and give speeches and I was never interfered with. Now we're seeing an authoritarian, the current president is very authoritarian, restrictions on speech, restrictions on books published, and restrictions now on economics as well. So we're seeing state-owned enterprises come to dominate the economy more rather than the free enterprise. And then you come to Latin America, you know, where you're seeing the same, you know, the same tensions here as well. You know, you've got Venezuela, obviously it's kind of a symbol of what happens when you take on a completely leftist view of the world. You've got Chile, which has been this amazing success story in Latin America, but nobody wants to copy them. We are trying to, but not successful. It's a challenge, but everybody's trying. You would think 30 years ago you would have copied them, or Argentina, and Argentina of course is heading in the wrong direction dramatically. So I think generally in the world one can say that the cause of individual liberty is losing the battle, and it's scary. It's a scary time. Where does people were hide all this time? Well, the ideas, the anti-liberal ideas are always there. And I would argue really, and this is what Ein-Rans... They were ashamed to speak loud? No, they've changed their minds, people changed their minds. And what has happened is that the ideas of individual freedom have not been defended properly, and have not been grounded properly, grounded philosophically, grounded in ideas.  And they go up and down. So sometimes they're a little bit more popular, but they're never really popular. They never really see them fully implemented. So when somebody comes up, when they're problems, like I don't know, the mass immigration in Europe, or economic problems, or economic slowdown, and demagogues on the left and the right rise up, and they say, you know, it's that individual freedom. That's what's bad. We need more control. We need more planning. People always seem to, that seems to resonate with them. And until, I think it's incumbent on us, those of us who really believe in freedom, those of us who believe in individualism, those of us who believe in the human mind and reason. It's incumbent on us to be better at how we defend the case for capitalism, the case for freedom. I think we've been weak. I think we're not philosophical enough. We're not foundational enough. We're not radical enough. You know, the left has no problem being radical. And even the right has no problem being radical. But we on that, you know, we want a little bit of capitalism. We don't want to shake the boat too much. Well, I don't. I want capitalism. I want the privatization of everything. I want two free markets. And that's something we need to fight for, and we need to present, you know, young people want to believe in something. They want an ideal. They want something they can fight for. And socialism is very, very good. And so to some extent is conservatism in presenting them with an ideal worth fighting for. We're not. We need to romanticize capitalism and to provide a vision of what a capitalist liberal world looks like and get them excited about it. And that's, I think that's the only way we can, we can, we can change, we can change the direction of, that the world is really heading in. Well, Mr. Brook, let's talk about Brazil now, you know, and that we are coming now, maybe a little bit late in the liberalism world. So we are coming from the social democracy and we have this transition with the new president, Jair Bolsonaro, which is here for nine months now. And are we late for this debate? Can we, you know that Brazil has a very big state and we fight for privatization for years. And, but now it seems that the liberalism speech is gaining force here. Do you see that we can thrive in there? I mean, first it's never too late. It's never too late to be free. It's never too late to advocate for freedom. It's never too late to advocate and to implement privatization. It's never too late. So yes, I think there is, I'm optimistic about Brazil. I think you have a chance. You are suffering from the tension that is all over the West I think and that is the tension between conservatism and the true kind of classical liberal free market ideas. Conservatives want to conserve. They don't want to be radical. They don't want to change too much. They don't want to change too fast and they are wedded to control because conservatism by its very nature is a controlling philosophy. Mainly they want to control our spiritual values, right? Our social values. Because this is the difference between the left and the right, right? The left thinks everything is material, Marx. Marxism is materialism. And the spiritual is unimportant. So it's fine to be free in the spiritual because it's not important, but we want to control the material because that's important. The right thinks the material is not important. The spiritual is important. So they want to control the spiritual, all our social values and they're willing to let us do the stuff in the material. I believe that we should be free in both realms because both are important. I want to be free socially. I want to be free spiritually and I want to be free materially. I want to be free, period. That is, I want no coercion. I want people to stop telling me what I can and cannot do, what I can and cannot think, what I can and that's true in my bedroom and that's true in my boardroom. That's true in every realm of my life. So there is this tension between conservatism and these ideas and you see this tension in America. You saw this tension with Ronald Reagan. That's what we are facing now here in Brazil also. Ronald Reagan made a deal with the devil and the devil in Ronald Reagan's case was what's called in America in those days the moral majority. He made a deal with evangelical Christians and he brought them into the Republican Party and made them a big force in the Republican Party and the deal was, you let me do the stuff in economics, you let me deregulate, you let me cut taxes and I'll give you what you want, which is power. What they really want is power. And the Republican Party has been basically destroyed by the religious right in America, that the conservative religious right and the voices for, kind of the Ronald Reagan voice for the American exceptionalism, for liberty, for freedom, for capitalism, for individual rights. You know, maybe, maybe we are going, yes, maybe we are going to this path. I mean, I don't know because, on the other hand, the flip side of that is that in Brazil, the liberal voices are new and the liberal voices are young and you've got a young generation, so I've spent a lot of time with young people in Brazil. And now, yes, the majority of young people are leftist like they are, I view it, you have a vibrant, large community of pro-free market young people, which is unusual. You know, there's more free market young people in Brazil than they probably are in America. And, you know, there's an organization which I think is a good news for us. Which is good news for Brazil. It gives a good perspective. It gives you a future and it gives, and these are people who go out into the streets. If they don't get what they want, they are passionate, they're engaged, some of the young people who brought down your former president who supported justice being imposed on another former president. So these are people who engage in a debate and who believe in individual freedom. And to the extent that it's a young movement, I think that there's a positive future for Brazil. So right now you have this tension between conservatism and liberal, in a liberal view, which I think exists all over the West. And I think that the deal that the liberals get the economy and the conservatives get the rest is problematic, but better than nothing in a sense. And the question is how is this going to play out? And the hope is that those forces that are trying to liberalize the economy, privatize it, get the government off of our backs, get the government out of our lives in at least an economic realm, can be successful. And then once people realize that this is a good idea, then you can get a liberal voices that want the government to get off our backs on everything. And you move more towards a more liberty oriented future. But it's going to take time. These things don't happen overnight. And it's going to take fighting. It's going to take the people who believe in liberty to be persistent, to be principled, to not give in, to not compromise and to really fight. Again, we need to be fighters. Otherwise we'll get trampled all over. Let's talk about the business environment here in Brazil. You know that we have in one side, we have a big state. In the other side, we have a huge economy made by small and medium companies. We have large companies as well, but the fundamental is in small and medium companies. How do you think we can include or save or protect if they have to, if they should be saved? This kind of a business, because we have a transition to go from taking down the state and make the business environment more powerful. And we just had a huge recession here. So how to manage this unbalanced environment now? You have to be very careful not to try to manage it. It's going to be messy. It's going to be painful. There's no way around that. It already is. And it's going to be more. And what you need to do is liberalize, free up, get rid of regulations, get rid of controls, overwhelming in large numbers. And yes, some businesses are going to fail. Some people are going to lose income. That's just, that's what Schumpter called creative destruction. But that's what happens under freedom. But what will arise from that is going to be so much better. It's going to be so much more dynamic and innovative and exciting. And people's attitudes are going to change. Because today, you know, in Brazil, but in any country that's gone through the kind of statism, socialism, central planning, there's a certain passive mentality even among businessmen. You know, things are the same. They're not going to change because the regulator is protecting me, right? The state is protecting me. Yeah, that's what happens in Brazil. You're used to have the state to save us for everything. You're rid of that. And until you have that mental change where business becomes what it should be. A challenge. Exciting. That you have to actually engage. That you have to work hard. You have to think. You have to produce. You have to innovate. You have to compete. You have to cooperate. You have to do all the things that business do when they're free. We have to get away from this nanny state, from protection, from protectionist policies. And the more you wait to do it, the more we need to protect them. The harder it's going to be, the more painful it'll be. It's much easier. Expensiveer. Much more expensive it'll be. It's much easier to get over with. Do it quick. Do it fast. You know how ripping a bandaid? If you do it slowly, it really, really hurts. If you rip it off, it hurts a lot in a minute, but then it starts. Then at the healing, the pain goes away. So the faster you move towards capitalism, the better. If you would do a list of priorities, should we begin with fighting the bureaucracy, do privatizations, or eliminate some taxes? Is there any list, or should we go with everything at the same time? I think you have to prioritize. And I would prioritize. I would prioritize privatization, and cutting regulation, cutting subsidies. So I would prioritize... We're good at that. Giving subsidies. Yes, I know you're good at that. That's the cronyism. That's the corruption. That's all the bad stuff that leads to all the negative outcomes. The thing you have to work on is to separate government from business. All the corruption comes from government involvement in business. And now I'm a businessman. I'm trying to protect myself from the government. Well, a bribe here, a bribe there, or just schmoozing, or just being nice to them. There's all kinds of forms of corruption. Gets me favorable regulation versus bad regulation. Gets me favorable deals. You've got to sever that. I would... If you had to do one thing, I would zero out subsidies. So you would say, within 12 months, there are going to be no subsidies in the Brazilian economies, not the farmers, not the business owners, not the big business, not the little business, not a medium-sized business. Zero. And then at the same time, we are going to reduce regulations by 25% a year for the next four years of the presidency. 25% a year. And at the same time, we're going to privatize. But not privatize like some countries do. Where you privatize and regulate. And then you haven't done anything. So you've given the people a sense of private ownership, but the government still controls everything. All the important decisions are still the government. Privatize means privatize. It means the private sector gets to make all the decisions. So you've got to really privatize. And if you do those three things, then you get rid of bureaucracy because all those regulators don't have a job anymore. You get rid of them and you start shrinking government. Then you tackle taxes and you tackle maybe the welfare state and other things. Of course, the other side of this, which I think is really, really important, particularly in Brazil, because you have a problem with this, is the rule of law. Nothing matters if you don't have the rule of law. So there has to be a credible way to convey to the people that you have an independent judiciary that is truly independent of politics and that it's uncorruptible. Power institutions. So some judges have to be fired. Some judges have to be replaced and maybe raise their salaries. Maybe make it more lucrative to be a judge so that they're less tempted by bribery. But you have to establish the rule of law and then get the government out of the way as quickly as possible. And yes, it'll be painful. I'm not saying it's going to be easy. But now's the time in the first year of administration is the time to do the painful thing because as you get closer to re-election, the politicians become more and more sensitive to the vote. But you get the pain done in the first two years, then your benefits on the upswing once the election comes around. If you wait, no change will happen. Mr. Brooks, as you know, we are a poor country and we have one of the biggest inequality rate in the world. How can we deal with that? Making this huge change that you're proposing because, you know, a lot of people that don't have anything to do with the corruption or with the business system or with the regulated system, how can we protect these people? I'd say two things. One, forget about inequality. Inequality doesn't matter. What matters is poverty. Inequality doesn't matter. What the gap is doesn't matter. If everybody's doing better, I mean, it's irrelevant. It has no economic consequences and it should have no social consequences. Focus on the issue of poverty. And the way you solve the issue of poverty is make it easy to start businesses. Make it easy to grow businesses. Again, if you get the government out of the way, there will be huge job creation. That is the best way to solve the issue of poverty. It's to give people jobs. If you get rid of the cronyism, if you get rid of the corruption, then people will earn wealth only if they produce value. There won't be the sense, he's rich because he knows people in the government. Everybody will say, he's rich because he's producing something. He's creating a value. So the first thing to do is everything I said about separating the government from business. But the second thing to do is you've got to empower the poor in Brazil. And you empower the poor in Brazil to take away all the barriers to them creating jobs and getting jobs. But the second way to do it... I'm just cutting you, because what is the role of education? Because we... It's big, but it's the next step. It's very hard to start with education because if you start with education, you're starting through the government schools, and government schools can never be improved significantly. So the way to solve the education problem is to privatize it. That is hard, and that is difficult. The first thing you want to do is create economic opportunities. And one of the things I would do, and it's hard to do in Brazil, but I think it's necessary to do Brazil, is you've got to give poor people property rights. So you've got favelas all over Brazil. Give them the ownership over the land. For example, I mean, I was in... I walked into a favela in Rio and went all the way up, right? They have the best views in the world. There's no more beautiful city in the world than Rio de Janeiro. And the people in the favela on the top have the best views in the world. If they had property rights, if they owned the land, they would be rich, not poor. Because I... I mean, a lot of people would love to buy that land, would love to be there, and they would get the money, and they would go and start a business, they would go... So, Henanda de Soto, the Peruvian economist, has a whole book about how property rights are so crucial for poor people, because then they can leverage that property rights to create capital, which then they can start businesses with and they create economic activity with. Brazil has this amazing opportunity. You've got millions and millions, tens of millions of people who live in these favelas. They don't own the property. Nobody owns the property. It's state property. What have you got? You lose zero. You lose nothing by giving them that land, by giving them ownership and making them owners of something which creates self-esteem and creates capital. So, I think there are lots of opportunities to deal with poverty in Brazil that are not being taken advantage of, that unfortunately nobody's talking about for all kinds of political and philosophical reasons. And to really solve the problem, and of course, as an economy grows, look at China. China over the last 30, 40 years has brought almost a billion people out of poverty. How? Just freeing up business. Just they don't redistribute wealth. They don't have welfare. They just liberalize business. Brazil is in a much better situation than China is to do that. And they didn't invest in education. They're investing in education after fact. And education at the end of the day, the only way to solve that problem, and we have the same problem in America and I think all over the world, is to privatize it. You know, Mr. Brook, I used to think that I am a liberal, but here I'm far away from that because I don't know if it's a romantic way of, or there's some compaction because we see the poverty every day here in Brazil. It's hard for us to think or to, you know, take. But the passion, that passion about poor people that everybody has, that the left typically has, has done them harm, has brought them nothing. All this welfare, all this redistribution of wealth, everywhere in the world, has not brought people out of poverty. What brings people out of poverty is jobs, is work. And the only way to create jobs and work, and private property, is to privatize, privatize, privatize. And they will, you know, again, if we look at the places in the world that have brought people out of poverty, that where people have come out of poverty, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, it's through capitalism, not through empathy. It's through expecting people to work for a living and creating the environment in which jobs are created. That's what will create these opportunities. And then, once Brazil becomes a richer country, then you start thinking about education. But again, the way to think about education is through the private sector, not through the government sector. Look, I believe the problem we have as liberals is that we're not radical enough. It's time to become really radical. The other side, the conservatives and the liberals, they have no shame in where they want to take the world. I want to take the world to where the government is not involved in my life. It's there to do one thing and one thing only. That's to protect me, which the Brazilian government doesn't do very well at. So the Brazilian government took all its resources and just put them into police, justice, and I guess in military, although I'm not sure who your enemies are, so I'm not sure you need one, but you really need police and you really need judiciary. You need to be focused on those things and let the market solve all the other problems. I mean, this could be one of the richest countries in the world. You have the natural resources, you have the people, you have the ability. It's just a matter of not stepping on your own feet.  We have to believe in that and not be afraid of it. So my last question is, who would you call a genuine liberal as a leader today in the world? Or do you have someone that you can point and say, this is a genuine liberal? No, unfortunately, there's nobody. Unfortunately, you know... It's not you. I'm not a leader, not a political leader. There's no political leadership today, unfortunately, in the world in terms of a genuine perspective on freedom and on free markets and on kind of a free world. In the past, like 10, 20 years ago? No, it's been a long time. It's been a long time. There might have been better people. Certainly, Margaret Thatcher did a lot in the UK, but even she, partially, I think because of all limitations, particularly because of the political context she was in, she couldn't go further and she didn't go further. But you know, the last real liberals probably have to go back to the 20s. You probably have to go 100 years to find political leaders who are really oriented towards individual liberty and individual freedom. They might have been in a country here, but there's no difference with it. But it's failed because we haven't set the foundations from an educational perspective. So I think my job, the job of people like me, is to educate people about the beauty of freedom, the potential of capitalism and of true individual liberty. And until we educate large numbers of people, and that's why I'm excited about young people in Brazil because I think they have that passion, they have that interest. I educate millions of people before we will see real change and Brazil might move a little bit towards more freedom right now, but it will not sustain itself unless all of the people watching the show and all of their friends join the cause and get passionate about it and are willing to really fight for it. Well, Mr. Brook, thank you very much for the interview. Very interesting views. It takes courage. We need courage these are times. Yes, it takes courage. So thank you very much.