Hello, and welcome to Under the Dome from Town Meeting TV. My name's Bobby Lucia. Under the Dome is a program on Town Meeting TV covering Vermont legislature, and this year's session wrapped up back in June, so we've had a couple months now, and we have a chance now to speak with the leaders of the Vermont legislature to take a look at what was accomplished in the first half of the biennium and what's to come in 2024. So for today's program, we're joined by one half of the legislative leadership, President Pro Tempore of the Vermont Senate, Phil Bruth. Good to be here, Bobby. Yeah, thank you. We'll also have a program with Speaker Jill Kowinsky in the studio next week, but today we'll start off on the Senate side of things, so. Thank you so much, Senator. This was your first term as President Pro Tempore of the Senate, how'd it go? What was the transition like? So you served on the floor, and now you're in the leadership position. So what did you learn about the position, what's the job description like? Yeah, sure. I think you'd have to ask other people in the state house how I did, but I'll just say my experience was fantastic. I've always loved the Senate as an institution. The Pro Tempore has a really particular responsibility in terms of bringing things to the floor, making sure the votes are there for those things, and then moving them through not only the Senate, but the House and then past the Governor in the best case scenario. So at all points, committee, floor, House, Governor, a bill is under fire in one way or another, and it's the Pro Tempore's job to be running defense and offense simultaneously. Right, and so yeah, there are hundreds of bills that were introduced this year, and only a portion of them actually advanced, and so your office is kind of stewarding in a way those bills to decide which ones actually get hurt on the floor, is that correct? Yeah, I wouldn't underplay it all the role of the committee chair people.  I will sometimes bring a chair in and say it's crucial that we have hearings on this and this bill should move forward, but basically committee chairs make those decisions with the exception of maybe four or five bills that the caucus, in this case, Democrats and progressives all together decide our must pass bills, and then once we have those kind of top priorities, then they become my top priorities, and I make sure that they move through the process and don't get bogged down by silly things like missing a deadline or lacking a vote here or there. Okay, right, and so do you have a sense of how many bills were introduced versus how many actually were read and how many were kind of left up on the board this year? Yeah, so I would say hundreds of bills were introduced. With the House and the Senate together, I wanna say, I would guess maybe 600 bills. About 60 went to the governor, ultimately, and Phil Scott made his decision to veto a number of those, a relatively high number, I think eight or nine vetoes. We overrode six of those vetoes, which was historic, had never been done before that I know of. So I think that's a testament to the fact that voters have continued to press for certain things and those things happen to be, some of them things Phil Scott didn't wanna sign like the childcare bill. And so we passed the childcare bill over his veto and that's now law. We'll get to a couple more of those specific bills that you worked on this year, but I wanna also back up. So does your office also choose or somehow decide who is chairing what committee? Is that also? Not just my office. So Jill Kroinski has, in her own person, complete power to do that, which I envy. But in the Senate, it's called the Committee on Committees, believe it or not. And the Committee on Committees is composed of the pro tem myself, David Zuckerman, who's the lieutenant governor, and Dick Mazza from Colchester, and he's what's known as the third member of the Committee on Committees. Those are all elected positions, but once the three of us come together, we sit down with a little map of the open committee chairs and we hash it out and come up with a slate that we think is most effective. Right. And how did that go this year? I thought it went brilliantly. You know, I hate to give names because then I'll leave somebody out, but I will say that we had some new chairs and among those new chairs were Keisha Rahm, Ruth Hardy, they did fantastic work.  And so I thought our chairs, the other money chair that I'll mention is Ann Cummings. It was a very smoothly functioning operation and those people are, you know, many of them operating with decades of knowledge about how to advance their bills. So that's all to the good. Right. And you mentioned Speaker Kwinsky. What does it look like for your office to be collaborating with the Speaker's office and making sure that the House and the Senate are on the same page as best you can be to collaborate and move those forward? Yeah, so Jill and I have a very solid, very positive relationship and we agree on many things and we work very smoothly on almost everything. But I would say that, you know, the Senate and the House are different chambers. They are meant to be contesting one another. That's part of the process. So there are certain moments where we can't agree and then there are extra procedures that we can use to reach agreement. Sometimes you never do. So I'll give you an example. And it's an example where nobody's right and nobody's wrong. So for years, the House wanted primary seat belt enforcement. In other words, they wanted a policeman who sees you're not wearing your seat belt to be able to stop you for that. Currently, you can't do that in Vermont. You have to be stopped for something else and then if they see you're not wearing your seat belt, they can add that. Makes sense and I think they're right that it would probably over a couple of years reduce the number of accidental deaths. On the other hand, in the Senate, the argument has always been that that sort of primary seat belt enforcement is used around the country in a systemically racist way to single out drivers of color and use the seat belt as an excuse to pull them over and harass them. And so Senator Tim Ash was always eloquent on this point that he didn't want to have primary seat belt enforcement for that reason because he felt it might wind up being used to single out drivers of color. So each side had a strong argument but at the end of the day couldn't agree and so we don't have a law in that area. Right, it's interesting that both bodies are representing ultimately the same larger constituency but can end up voting differently on a couple of issues like that. It just makes me, what are the, are there different priorities? Were there different priorities this year in the House and the Senate? I know there were a couple kind of bigger disagreements but what did that look like? How do you characterize the differences there and priorities? Yeah, so recreational cannabis was another area that the House and the Senate disagreed on traditionally. Took about five or six years for us to really reach agreement to get to where we are today. We had a disagreement over how much to do how quickly in terms of paid family leave and childcare. Both very expensive, very broad based programs that would require expansions of government as well as taxation. And so at the end of the day, the Senate's position was we can't do both. We'd like to work on childcare. As it turned out that's where the House and the Senate went and as I mentioned earlier, we managed to move that historic bill through the process. That doesn't mean we're not interested in paid family leave but typically in the Senate, that's been a lower priority than in the House. We'll see what happens this coming session. Yeah, so is that paid family medical leave is something that's on the top of the list for the coming session? I think in the House it's at the top of the list. We don't have a list in the Senate yet. We won't develop that priority list until November, December. Once we're back together, all the senators, 30 of us, we can begin to talk about what we think the priority should be. And then as we come into the session in January, that'll translate into which bills go to which committees and which come to the floor. Right, so you mentioned the childcare bill. I know there are a couple other pretty big bills that passed this year. You can talk about a couple of those bills that you're most proud of that were passed this year either with the governor's signature or without how they'll impact Vermonters. Let me just mention gun safety because that's a big issue for me. And this was an amazing year for a couple of reasons. Amazing because of what we were able to pass. So we passed a 72-hour waiting period to purchase a firearm in Vermont, which we've tried many times in the past. We, four or five years ago we passed a 24-hour waiting period that the governor vetoed. We couldn't override. This was the first year that we had the solid 20 votes to override a gubernatorial veto. For that reason, I believe, the governor decided to let our omnibus bill become law without his signature. But that included the 72-hour waiting period, safe storage of guns, and it expanded our red flag laws, our emergency risk protection order laws so that family members who feel threatened by a family member with a gun can initiate the process. And then if a judge determines that that person is an actual threat, those guns can be removed from the site. Now those things together, any one of them five years ago would have killed a bill. And so for that reason, they kept being held out, kept being held out. We decided to move them all together in one session and that was successful.  The Supreme Court has made gun laws tougher to get through and tougher to have withstand constitutional scrutiny. The federal Supreme Court of the Vermont. Yeah, the Supreme Court of the United States. So we'll see where they go. They've accepted a case. So they've indicated they are gonna rule again on guns this coming session. And so I think it's smart to wait and see what that decision looks like before we try to advance something at the scale we did last year. Just to talk about a couple of those other bills that I know the clean heat standard was one that got a lot of attention. It's also a complicated bill. I remember we had Jared Duvall and Matt Coda in to talk a little bit about that bill. It must have been a fun conversation. It was a fun conversation. But as you can imagine, it got really into the weeds and trying to pull us out of the weeds was really difficult.  How do you describe what that bill actually does? Well, there was a lot of misinformation about that bill. And without putting too fine a point on it, I'll say much of it was deliberate misinformation. The fossil fuels sector feels that it's in a fight for its life because the rest of society has correctly decided that we have to get off of fossil fuels because we are flooding, we are burning, we are at the mercy of our environment because we've made bad decisions in the past. So S5 was this year's comprehensive climate change legislation. I think of it as a way to create slowly, but surely a new business model for fossil fuel dealers. So what we ask them to do among other things are to help people move in the direction of more sustainable energy sources, help them get heat pumps, help them get other things that are better for the planet. And Vermont Gas and some other dealers made the decision to help out with that bill because they realized that's where the future lies. So Neil Underville was I think a very smart voice on that issue and he made exactly that point that the business model has changed, the industry needs to follow that change and that's what S5 is directed to do. So looking ahead to next year, the second half of the biennium, what's different about the second year in a biennium than the first? And you mentioned some of those things that you think will come up, what do you expect to be deliberated on in 2024? Well, a couple of basic things are different about the second year. So in the first year, when you adjourn, nothing dies, anything that didn't make it through the process is still alive on the wall. In the second year, when you adjourn, Sina DA final, that means every bill that's on the wall is now dead.  Constituents, advocacy groups, special interests all get a lot more worked up. That coincides with the start of the election year and so put all those things together, there's I would say usually more drama in the second year and less achievement often because the lights are so bright on everything that's going on, expectations are so high, partisan considerations become more a thing because the election is moving to the fore. And for that reason, I think people are less inclined to swing for the fences in the second year. It gets a little more cautious. People don't wanna make big mistakes if they're gonna make a mistake. Right. And I just wanna backtrack to something. The House having such a strong support for a family and medical leave or family leave bill and then the Senate, if I remember correctly, not even having the votes for a simple majority or is the House had a super majority, is that correct? Well, I would say that it was a little hard to tell and in part it was because you had childcare on the table which was gonna be funded at the cost of about 125 million a year. And if we were gonna pony up that much money for childcare, there were some people who had childcare and not been on the table might have been in favor of paid family leave but given that the two of them, the price tags were so high, I think it was questionable whether we could have passed the bill but probably we could have but there was no way we could have overridden a gubernatorial veto and there would have absolutely been one because the governor has rolled out a voluntary plan that he's very protective of. So he made it clear in no uncertain terms that he would veto paid family and medical leave as conceived by the House. Right. Is there more of, I mean you mentioned kind of the considerations behind why the Senate was a little more reluctant to pass both big bills. The House was excited to pass both big bills. Do you, how do you characterize, is the Senate a more frugal body or is the why value one over the other in the Senate? Where is the House representing again the same groups of people are coming forward and with support for both? Yeah, I wish it was as easy as saying that one is more fiscally conservative than the other but it just doesn't work that way. It's absolutely issue by issue. So if we go back to recreational cannabis, that was something that the Senate got behind and strongly behind and sent over, I wanna say five or six times to the House and only to have it die. From that you might say well, the House is more socially conservative. They're leery about increasing drug use even if it's a recreational drug but I don't think that's true because there are other moments for instance in harm reduction where the House might be further to the left let's say or a little more left leaning in its thoughts about harm reduction when it comes to opiates than the Senate. So we switch identities all the time given whatever the particular issue is and as I say, the Senate has a history of support for paid family and medical leave but less so than the House I think. You mentioned sort of drama at the end of the session or that you anticipate in 2024. One issue that got a lot of attention towards the end of this session was the Motel Housing Program. So this was a program that was funded by federal COVID funding during the pandemic to house as many as over 3,000 people during the pandemic and that funding was set to expire this year which meant that the program was set to end and at the beginning of the session it seemed like the legislative leadership and the governor were not prioritizing extending this program and then at the end of the session there's this big push from advocates to keep some form of the program alive and when all was said and done some form of the program was kept alive about 2,100 people were allowed to stay in motels until April of next year. There's another cliff on the program and the state is now footing the bill and now that the federal funding is expired. So can you just kind of walk us, I think there's a really interesting example of the legislature, what informs the legislature's position maybe moving on something? You walk us through just what changed in that time that brought that issue up in priority towards the end and how it deal was actually. Sure. So I sit on the Appropriations Committee among others and in that committee we had testimony from AHS, the Human Services Agency, again and again that they were in favor of ending the program and that they were prepared to care for the people as they transitioned out of the program. So to the extent that we take testimony in appropriations it's not like a standard committee where you might have two weeks or a month of testimony on something in appropriations you have to move relatively quickly because everybody's bills are coming through your committee. So we did our due diligence in terms of talking a number of times with the agency about what they felt they had going on the ground that would support these folks. With that said, originally the administration wanted to close the program in March. The House went along with that. The Senate said let's wait till June 1st when the warm weather comes. So that carried the day. We wrote the budget that way and then when the budget had been passed we went out of session. We began to get briefings from AHS and the first briefing, which was about an hour was eye-opening for me and others. It began to seem to us that they did not have plans in place. They had in effect plans to get plans. So they had just a couple of days prior they had issued a call for proposals an RFP asking municipalities and others to come forward with ideas, concepts about how to care for these folks and other homeless folks. So we realized very quickly that they were not where they had thought they were. And that hearing was when? That was, I guess the beginning of June. So we adjourned middle of May and a couple of weeks later. So with that said, I don't attribute any bad intent or motive to AHS. It's a complicated job. I think they thought they had the resources in place. Clearly they didn't. So my office began to work with Emily Kornheiser from the house, Emily is as smart as they come. And I enjoyed very much working with her on that. And together we put together what's now Act 81 which extended the motel program out to April and calls for monthly joint fiscal committee hearings where we provide oversight of the administration's attempts to move this cohort out of the motel program into equivalent housing. Something that's not a congregate homeless shelter but an apartment or some other setting that is suitable for their condition. Right, and so there will be, there's a process in place to move to, at the end of April, make sure that these folks have housing. Is that? April's the drop dead date. So funding is there until we get back in session and then we'll add a little more. But we will... You'll add a little more, what do you mean? So in other words, we, on the fly, because we were out of session, we scrambled to find the money that we would need to get the motel program until we're back in session in January. Then we do what's called budget adjustment. And in budget adjustment, once we're up and running again, we will appropriate more money to the motel program to make it whole. Then I think the important thing is the agency is now engaged on a person to person basis with this cohort of, I think it's a little less than 2,000 now. Trying to place these folks, do they need something like assisted living? Do they need an apartment? There's a new apartment complex going up and opening, Champlain Housing Trust is opening in South Burlington. And there'll be apartments there for some of these folks because they have priority over others as we're trying to move them out of this program. So come April, it may be that there are no motel occupants left, in which case we would close out the program. If that's not the case, let's say there are still 400 people in the motels, then we will extend until we place all of those people individually. Do you see the motel, there was an episode of the podcast Brave Little State that came out a couple of days ago from Vermont Public that a question asker said, well, why doesn't the state just buy the motels to provide a permanent solution for, well, a permanent approach to a temporary solution for housing for these folks? Is that something that's on your radar, the Senate's radar at all? The answer is we have. We've bought 13 so far. The intent is to buy more. So we're using what's called the Oregon model where they did this, they purchased motels. Oregon, a much, much bigger state and more populous state has only done, I think, 19 motels. We've done 13, which per capita is more, but there's a weird dynamic in place which is the state is now paying 24 seven to fill those motels. So if you're the motel owner, you're making really good money at this point. So the price you might ask for your motel has gone up. So if the motel is valued at a million and the owner wants three million or four million, the state's not gonna pony up that money. So one of the things in Act 81 requires the state to renegotiate the amount we're paying per room and that's designed to save the state money but also to bring it down to a more realistic level, how much money these owners are making from the program and hopefully that changes their calculus so they're willing to sell more often in more places in the state. And you mentioned this a little bit, but it sounds like you sort of painted a vision for a housing solution for these folks that leans on existing infrastructure, that there might be rooms in the state that these folks can reach with help from AHS and others, it's, yeah, go ahead. If I gave that impression, that's only half. The other half is that over the last three years, since the pandemic, we've infused a half a billion dollars, 500 million plus in building permanent affordable housing. So you see it in the pit in Burlington where the mall used to be, there's affordable housing going up there. I mentioned the units coming online in South Burlington. Champlain Housing Trust and others are engaged every single day in taking the money we put forward, trying to remember what the final number was in this budget, but on the order of 150 million into housing and all with the idea of bringing it online within the next few years, so two, three years. So can we build our way out of the problem? No. Can we just use existing housing and get our way out of the problem? No, but the thought is if we're operating on all those fronts at once, it may take three or four years, but our hope is to get us to the point where people are not on the street because they can't find a house. If they are on the street, it would be other issues. I wanna move to a related question here which is about the overdose crisis that the state is facing. So at least in Burlington, I live in Burlington, you live in Burlington, there's been a lot of discourse about public safety as well as drug use. This summer, I mean, over the past few years, and I live on Elmwood Avenue and I've seen a huge increase in drug use on the streets, property theft. There's been an unprecedented amount of overdose deaths recorded, you know, as thus far this year. We put out an ask on our social media channels before this program to say, hey, we're talking with Senator Bruce. What do you want us to ask about? And the majority of those questions came in were about the overdose crisis. What is the state doing to address the overdose crisis? So how are you thinking about the state's approach to the overdose crisis, as well as the state's approach to public safety? Yeah. So first of all, I've lived in Burlington 30 years and I would say we've never been free of the problem of homelessness. It is a problem that goes up and down. Right now nationally, there's a homeless crisis, San Francisco, among other places, Portland, Oregon, places where the homeless crisis has overwhelmed municipal governments. Fortunately, we're not there, but we do need immediately more congregate shelters. So Burlington put forward a proposal that I supported to use the Cherry Street complex, which the state is considering selling. It's state-owned. But Burlington came forward and said, let us use that building. We will refashion it for overnight homeless folks and move them off the street. The state, for reasons I still don't understand, rejected that proposal. But I am still in talks with AHS about trying to get them to support it because rather than sell the Cherry Street complex to a company like dealer.com or some other great company that would turn it into a nice office building, it is state-owned. It is something that with some refurbishing could be used to help this crisis. So those efforts are ongoing. Public safety, I've had a couple of people this week reach out to me from the Old North End, frightened about conditions where their kids play, frightened about walking on the street, et cetera. That's something that is at a point that's probably among the worst since I've been here. There was a time in the 90s that I think was equivalent in terms of the concerns about public safety. But when you look at the opioid crisis and what we're doing and especially fentanyl and its role in deaths by overdose, I think the steps that we took last year are important, obviously not enough. But among other things, we were trying in several different ways to increase testing of the drugs that people are ingesting. So xylazine strips that would allow people to test for themselves what their drugs might or might not have in them. But we passed something a little more controversial which was a law that would allow people to bring their small bag of narcotics into a site, have it tested, given back to them and their free to leave. Now, obviously there were critics of that policy in the House and the Senate who said these drugs are illegal, if they bring them to the authorities, how can the authorities not arrest them? But the analogy that I made was we have folks in Vermont who are undocumented, who work on farms and they help us save the dairy industry by providing that labor. Sometimes they're called to go to court to testify on behalf of a friend or something like that. And what ICE and immigration were doing is they would wait for the person to finish testifying and then they would arrest them as they came out of court and deport them. And it made those folks afraid to go to court for any reason and that undermined our justice system. So we passed a law saying if you're gonna testify, you can't be stopped going to the courthouse and you can't be stopped leaving the courthouse. This is a very similar thing. You can't be arrested with those drugs going to get them tested or leaving the testing lab. But after you've left and you're elsewhere in the city they remain controlled substances and you can be arrested. And that was proposed but not passed? That was passed. That was passed. Okay, and in New York City, I know there's a safe injection site. I know there was discussion about that concept in the Senate, where did that end up? I think it's still, that is still a question of competing legalities, municipalities like Burlington. I believe Burlington has now satisfied itself that it won't be liable if it opens such a site. But there are concerns that if the state is running those sites and someone leaves and commits a crime or has a crash because they've ingested at a state sponsored site, there are public safety concerns attached to it. I would say that that has not reached consensus in the House or the Senate. And so we haven't really voted on it as such. But I expect in the next year or two that we'll come to the Senate floor. We've talked about a couple smaller approaches. I just want to back up and try to think big picture. I know it's a really hard question to answer, but do you see kind of a pathway? Like what's the overarching vision for getting out of the overdose crisis? It's the combination of some of these things.  Investments and regulatory changes needed to actually get us out of this overdose crisis and support the people over drug users. I don't think anybody has the answer to that. I don't think any government, any advocacy organization, the opioid epidemic is, well, I mean, opiates have been around for thousands of years and they have plagued civilizations going back thousands of years. So the addictive power of those drugs is so intense and fentanyl is not the be-all and end-all. There are more powerful opiates coming online even stronger than fentanyl. So I think clearly economic desperation drives it. We are a society where income inequality is at historic levels. People have a difficult time buying a house, getting a college education, et cetera. So if I pull back to the largest extreme, it seems to me that the opioid epidemic capitalizes on the ways in which American society is systematically unequal. And the fact that we have eight or 10 multi-billionaires who control the vast majority of wealth in the country, to me that seems like part of the root cause rather than a parallel cause. Do you see the Vermont legislature having any leverage points to deal with the wealth inequality that you're talking about? Yeah, I mean, our approach, Democrats and progressives alike has been that if we're going to make society more affordable, and this is where we differ with the governor, the governor talks affordability constantly, but his vision of affordability is really preventing legislation that he thinks will make things worse, right? And that's the root of the conservative idea. But any active attempt to make things affordable by, in terms of childcare. Childcare, as we passed it, does two major things. It subsidizes parents so that they're only paying a much smaller percentage of their income, but it also increases the wages for the people who supply that kind of care. And by hitting both of those points, we're looking to make that instead of a system that depresses the people that are taking part in it, we're looking to make that a kind of hopeful system where people can get a slot for their kid. They can afford it, and the people who work there and love it can make a living. But that means that we have to have a dedicated funding source to pay for that. And that's where the governor parts ways with us because he would like to leave the system as it is. And his move actively toward affordability is to say the state can't raise DMV fees, which, you know, those fees pay for our roads. They pay for the services. And that's not where the affordability crisis is coming from. I wanna shift now to talk a little bit about the flooding from this summer. So it looks like over 4,000 homes have been damaged by flooding this year. Many small businesses are really struggling to open up their doors again and will probably have to close.  How do you see the legislature approaching climate resilience, building climate resilience across the state so that we're more prepared for climate disasters like this one in the future? Yeah. So my first biennium, we had a tropical storm Irene. And it was regarded as a once in a hundred year event. And it was horrible. I mean, I was mucking out people's sellers with them. There were people who lost everything. The state did a lot to help out and we got smarter in some ways. So this flooding, you know, the floods of June or I'm sorry, July, it happened that I wound up in Barry in the basement of the old Barry labor house. And I was part of a team that was taking out all the dry well in the basement which had all been drenched and was turning to mold. And so I was down there with a group of 30 or so people and we were removing everything. And my job was in the bathroom and it was a learning experience for me about the worst place to find yourself after a flood. But I also saw something hopeful in that basement which was after Irene, they moved the electrical and the heating system out of the basement to the first floor in case there was another flood. And so we were working with drywall and that was bad but we weren't working with the electrical. We weren't working with heat. So in addition to Vermont Strong, we had gotten Vermont smart and started this kind of resiliency thinking 10 years ago. And in part, it helped us this time. Another example I'll give you. So once the flooding happened and it became clear that people who hadn't moved their furnaces out of the basement, people who hadn't moved whatever they were using to heat water in their homes out of the basement, a lot of that stuff was wrecked and they were gonna have to start from scratch. So what we worried about was that FEMA money and grant money from the state would be used to buy fossil fuel based systems for these new homes. And nobody was down with that. So we worked very quickly with the governor's office, the house efficiency Vermont to create a program to direct the money into grants so that people who lost their furnace, lost their hot water heater, lost their heat pumps can buy those more sustainable options with this grant money. And to me, that's an example of how the normal function of government, which is to move money to people in need, gets inflected by climate change. Right. There's so much devastation from this flooding as you saw firsthand. Do you see the resources, do you think the resources that are needed for the recovery are available and ready to, and I know they're being deployed in some cases, but do you see there being a need for additional resources for recovery or do you think that the resources are available and sufficient right now? I think if you talk to people on the ground, they'll say they haven't gotten the money they need. And that's a flat out way to put it. But for instance, the unemployment aid that was gonna go out to people who were temporarily unemployed because of the flood, none of that has gone out even as we speak. The business grants have started going out and that's a good thing. But I think in general, people would say they're gonna need more in the way of resources and especially that unemployment aid. The administration is now saying this coming week, they'll get those checks in the mail, but when you think about it, that's July to now, that's a long time for people who are not enjoying their normal wage. Right. I know we have just a couple of minutes left. I wanna transition over really quickly to the issue of language access, which is one that we pay attention closely to here at CCTV, which houses the Vermont Language Justice Project, which creates, produces informational videos. Which I've seen and those are great. Yeah, thank you. Those are providing life-saving information for folks in the community that have language access needs. The Office of Racial Equity released a report earlier this year with some recommendations about investing in language access. But there's still a huge need and we're kind of just sort of catching up in terms of translating documents on websites, but what we've found at least in the language justice project is there's a lot of the folks who can't, who have language access needs, also cannot read or write in their own language that they do speak, which is why videos are an effective way to reach them. So how is the legislature thinking about language access right now and has there been anything passed this year coming up next year that you see expanding language access? Yeah, so before we leave the flooding, I'll just say that Senator Keisha Rahm, the minute the flooding happened, she was on this issue in a very effective way in terms of making sure that people who had been affected by the flooding but who weren't English speakers were gonna be able to get life-saving information or even not life-saving, but quality of life-saving information, where to get help, where to get grants, et cetera. And so she worked with the administration to make sure that they were getting that spectrum of information out. The one other area I'll mention, because it comes to mind, we had a complaint a couple of years back that non-English speakers who were looking to become policemen were having trouble because they were having trouble studying for the exam and then taking the exam to become a policeman. And so that was one area where we worked on making sure that there was funding to go into that particular area, but it might be that we need some sort of standing government office to direct funding to these kind of needs. Right. Thank you so much, Senator, for your time today. I think we're all out of time, but really appreciate you coming in and chatting about this session and what's coming up next year, and yeah, thank you for being here. Good to talk to you, Polly. Excellent, and thank you so much for tuning in to Under the Dome from town meeting TV. We'll see you next time.


The People's Democratic Governors Forum has urged the National Assembly to entrench electronic transmission of election results in the nation's electoral law. They also called on relevant authorities to ensure information and communication technology services are provided in the rival areas before the 2023 election. The forum of the PDP condemned the attempt to foist on all political parties one method of conducting primary elections, which was direct, a direct method through the Electoral Act Amendment Bill. The call was contained in a 10-point communique issued at the end of the Governors Forum meeting in Bolchi. The communique was read by Governor Aminu Tambur of Sakato State.


Hello everyone, I'm Sam Markell. I'm an extension plant pathologist at NDSU and I'm going to bring you an update for the Carrington Research and Extension Center field day. And I apologize I can't be there in person to be with you today, but I thought we'd shoot maybe from another location on NDSU's campus that's interesting. So I thank Coach Ends for being welcoming and let me shoot from the main office. So Greg Endress asked me to give you an update about soybean cyst nematode and on dry beans and soybeans. So a little background on this issue. This is an invasive pathogen. It's a parasitic worm and it first showed up in the U.S. about 70 years ago. It started in North Carolina and very quickly moved to the Great Plains. And over the course of the last half century it has consistently spread throughout the United States. And it was first found in North Dakota in 2003. And we now know that it occurs in 19 different counties. Now this parasitic worm will infect the roots of soybeans and dry beans and it'll form these little cysts. So there are little white cream colored structures that you can see. And each one of them is full of eggs. So about a month ago I was in Castleton for their agronomy seed farm field day and we dug up a bunch of roots. So you can see them really clearly here in the middle of the season. And so I expect that these cysts are developing in quite a few locations in the state and I strongly encourage everyone in the eastern half of the state to check for these. So there's a sampling program that can help you do this. So the North Dakota Soybean Council since 2013 has been sponsoring this program where they give sampling bags to each of the county offices, each of the county extension offices. And growers can go get those bags, take a sample and the fees are covered by the North Dakota Soybean Council. So it doesn't cost you anything. And so since 2013 I'm going to animate some maps for you.  So eggs are the way that we measure the density of SCN. So the black circles are negative. The gray boxes, those are inconclusive. So the best way to look at this is you may or may not have it. But remember there's lots of other nematodes in the soil and so they all lay eggs. So they're inconclusive. But any of these colored boxes are real. And by the time you get up to these yellows and reds, it's really high egg levels, you're going to take yield loss and even good solid resistant soybean varieties.  The market classes are different and there's susceptibility. So kidney beans, which we know we have SCN and kidney beans across the river in Minnesota, you can see some pretty high yield loss from the kidneys. Blacks tend to be a little bit more resistant. But the pentose and navies are in the middle. Of course that's what we grow most of. So I'm strongly encouraged in everyone this fall to get in their fields and look for soybeans this nematode. Use the North Dakota Soybean Council sampling program. The lab fees are covered by the North Dakota Soybean Council. So go get a bag at the county office, take a soil probe or a shovel into your field, make 10 or 15 cores, mix it up and send it in the lab. You'll get your results in the mail. So to soybean sample, you can do it any time before or after harvest. Take a soil probe or a shovel and get into those roots. So instead of going between rows, go right at the roots and try to capture those eggs, those cysts that you see. You know, they grow on the plant, that's where you want to stab them. And if you're sampling for the first time, go to the place most likely to see soil enter a field because SCN moves with soil. So in most cases, that's the field entrance. Most of the time, if you bring in soil into a field, it's on a piece of equipment. You drop that piece of equipment down in the field and you've got new soil, introduced soil. The other ways that it could spread are through water. So if you have an area that's got a lot of flood water moving through, SCN moves that way and also in wind. So sometimes we see hot spots show up in ditches in the winter or along shelter belts from blowing soil. So if you find soybeans, this nematode, which really at this point, I'd say any grower in the eastern part of the state is at risk, you can manage it if you find it early. So sampling is really, really critical. If you can find it while those egg levels are low, you can really manage it. You can manage with genetic resistance in soybeans. You can manage with seed treatments a little bit. You can manage with crop rotation. At the end of the day, you want to put these tools together. And if you keep those egg levels low, you're going to mitigate your yield loss really well. So each one of these small white cream colored structures are an SCN female. So they've infected the root and they swell up and they become lemon shaped. And you can see them with your naked eye. It's kind of difficult because they're really small, but you can see them. Now each one of them is going to have maybe 100 to 200 eggs. And those are the eggs that we measure when we start sampling for SCN. And one thing that's important here is the life cycle. You can go through three life cycles in a season. So you can multiply your eggs very fast and you can go from having just a simple confirmation to being really at a level where you're going to take pretty dramatic yield loss in just one season. So I would strongly encourage everyone to sample. For soybean growers, there's one additional reason that you might want to sample. So soybean cyst nematode is really tied tightly to two different types of two different diseases, sudden death syndrome and brown stem rot. We know we have brown stem rot in the state and sudden death was confirmed in 2018 in Richland County. If you have SCN, you're at risk for these other two diseases. And you can manage both of them in part by managing soybean cyst nematode. Again, so soybean cyst nematode is sampling is very important. It doesn't cost you anything if you use the North Dakota soybean council sponsored sampling program. Pick up your bags at the NDSU Extension County office and sample this fall. Thanks again to Coach Enns for letting me give you an update from the NDSU Head Football Office. Appreciate your time and good luck this fall on Harvest.


Welcome to Psychic Medium Tony Green. This is my Tuesday edition, which I normally do not have a Tuesday edition. So this is a special edition of the show. And I'm really excited to be here this morning to answer questions, help you make connections to loved ones on the other side. I'll be getting to my callers in a moment.  And an exact question or connection would sound something like, I would like to connect with my dad Bill or my friend Susie. Not just give me whatever's coming through. You know what? On the show, I don't do that. I don't even do that in my office. If you schedule an appointment with me, I ask you to have your questions ready. It's just the way I work. That's the way my angels and my guides work. That's the way I work. It is what it is. If something else comes through, I'll give it to you. But to start off with, I want an exact question or connection. An exact question isn't, tell me about my next three months. Well, that is an exact question, but that's a reading. I'm not gonna spend my whole show doing that. Okay, now that once again, I've gone through all of the rules except for one.  And I think that is everything. I am going to go over to the switchboard now and I'm gonna go to the first caller who is 443. Good morning, 443. How are you today? Hello? Hello. Excellent. What's your name? Where are you calling from? Okay, Suzanne. How can I help you today? Grandmother Delilah. Oh, okay. She is awesome. Okay, I'm gonna ask you. The woman I'm seeing is a little bit thinner. When she was older, she was thinner, more petite. Yeah. Okay, this is her.  She, at first I wanna ask you, do you have a direct question for your great-grandmother or is there just what a, do you have a question for her? Whatever. Okay. No, whatever, fine. Okay, the first thing she wants to say is, it doesn't make sense to me, but hopefully it makes sense to you. The very first thing she said is butterflies, so many butterflies. And the second thing she said is hybrid. I'm cracking up. Because I try to make everything so logical and I try to make everything make sense. So I'm like, oh, does Suzanne have a hybrid car? Is she thinking of getting a hybrid car? Are these hybrid butterflies? Like I'm trying to figure out what she means, but the bottom line is whatever this means for you, you might not know right now. You might have a recollection of a memory of a time when they were like, oh my gosh, look at all these butterflies. Or I don't really know. All I can say are these are the two words she brought through hers. Now the next thing, if I will let her keep saying is, you know, they all want us to know that they're with everybody. When you see her orb or her spark of light, her spark of light is like a mint green. So if you catch out of the corner of your eye, a little spark of light that is mint green, that is her. She's showing me that now. And again, whenever you see butterflies, that's her. And I don't know what the hybrid means. Maybe whenever you're driving down the street and you see a hybrid vehicle, that's her, I don't know. That you'll have to figure out. I wonder if it has to do with gift. Yeah, I think it has to do with gift. Okay, possibly, possibly she, you know, when people say, when loved ones on the other side give me a word, I always try to make it make sense. And I know really, I know I'm probably not supposed to do that because it's not supposed to make sense to me. It's not supposed to be my definition. It's supposed to be what makes sense to the person receiving it. So I'm gonna leave it at butterflies and hybrid for you. And she really, she wants, she's showing me, okay, she is showing me, I go to Target a bit and she's showing me in Target where the cards are, like the greeting cards, you know, like the happy birthday cards. For some reason, I don't know what this means and if this is gonna mean something to you or not, but she's showing me just cards. I don't know what that means to you. These are really the most vague, vague messages that I would, and I'm gonna be, she's actually showing me a birthday card. So I don't know if her birthday or somebody's birthday. I wonder if it's my grandmother and my grandmother. It could be, it could be. I'm gonna say, well, even if it's your great-grandmother, she could still be showing me the birthday card to let you know, like they're all together. I don't know, I'm not gonna discount anything at this point. So that would be great. Yeah, with these messages, they're so vague and I'm sorry they're so vague, but what I am hearing for you, what I'm hearing is within a couple of days, all of these messages are gonna make sense to you. Within, within, I wanna say, I always give it a little bit more time and I wanna say within a month, all of these messages are gonna make sense to you, but they're saying within a couple of days, they're all going to make sense to you. So I would love to hear back and know how these messages played out and made sense to you. I would really love that, okay? Maybe you'll find a recycled birthday card with a bunch of butterflies on it, I don't know. I really don't know, but you're so welcome and thank you so much for calling in and I do, I really do, you are welcome. I hope this was helpful, you're welcome. I am going to go directly to the next caller and the next caller is 270, 270, how are you today? I'm sorry, what's your name? Okay, Joy, where are you calling from? Oh, Joy, you do not sound good today. You normally sound so happy and so bright, what's going on, Joy? I figured about something in the past and I kind of wanted to make a connection with my grandmother, many roots to see what she has to say. Okay, so she shows up all the time and you know, her grandpa is here or her grandpa is here also. So the two of them are here and I see them and one of the things I'm hearing, okay, so she has some, I hear tough medicine coming through for you and I'm gonna say it the way she's saying it, so please do not say, girl, girl.  Okay, here we go, I'm gonna, I promise you, Joy, I'm gonna focus, I'm gonna focus right now. Okay, life is short, we need to laugh. Okay, girl, you know better than to let other people get under your skin. Why are you listening to nonsense? What are you thinking? You are so much better than this, you're stronger than this. Okay, so here's what I'm gonna do because you know what, this has been a heck of a couple of days for everyone. And I do not know what is going on but people be hella entitled to think they can say whatever they want, okay? Uh-huh, uh-huh. And so I'm gonna do a clearing and this clearing is going to be, to clear our triggers because I wanna work with the people who are on that healing journey, who want to be better and so we get triggered and I get a yes, so I'm gonna clear that. I'm gonna, there is a source to our triggers, I get a yes, we're gonna clear that. And these clearings are healings, it's just your angels, the Holy Spirit coming in and taking that energy, that incident, that pattern, that belief, that program of whatever happened that started this trigger and not only this trigger but any trigger because everybody has triggers, everybody has triggers in different areas, okay? And we handle these things different.  So let's clear out as many triggers as we can right now. Oh, and I feel that like pulling from everybody's going to feel it in a different area, you might feel it in what they call that root area between the hips, you might feel it in the abdomen area, I'm personally feeling it pull out of the heart area and the head area and that is where it sits because those are our beliefs, those are our patterns, our programs that we've been operating on for so very long.  Like this is where they are and they're just trying to pull you to where they are, okay? So if somebody calls you or says something and they're pulling out something negative or garbage-y, that's what's inside of them that they're spewing at you. Okay, so don't let them bring you to their level, okay? It might, they might do it for a minute but we need to pull ourselves back together and go, I don't live at the city dump anymore. I moved away from there, right? Like if you wanna live in that energy, that's your energy, I'm over here now. And then that song, to the left, to the left, everything you own in a box to the left. Oh, so to the left, that's all I can say. The other thing that I'm getting from her is that you're gonna feel better in a minute and people who trigger you, we can look at them as teachers or we can look at them as triggers. So whenever we get triggered, we can make that choice to say, okay, I understand that I'm being triggered, I wanna heal this and I'm gonna, for anybody listening, re-listening, watching, re-watching, whenever something triggers us, just say, angels, take this. Take it now. And they will, your angels will do that. They're in a place where they really want to heal you and help you on this journey because we are here to evolve, we are here to grow, we're here to be in that place where we are having just this amazing life. And sometimes in order to do that, somebody needs to show us what isn't healed so that we can work on that and heal it. Now, the other thing I'm going to do is for everybody listening, re-listening, watching, re-watching, all old, outdated, lower energy has cleared from us. I get a no on that. Let's get that out of us now. Let's get rid of all energy that isn't serving our highest good, isn't taking us where we want to be in this life because that truly is all that matters, okay? So Joy, I'm really happy that you called in because it helped to trigger a bunch of clearings for everybody. And your grandparents want to say that they're with you always. They work with you and they want you to start making, start taking or making power moves. Don't stop settling, stop settling and start stepping, okay? I like that. Stop settling and start stepping. Yeah, and remember, it's not the leaps and bounds that get us where we want to be. Sometimes it's just that having that one thought or that baby step that is what takes us where we want to be okay, love. Okay, I appreciate you so much. Oh, sweetie, I love you. Please know that they are there with you and they are working to help you and to help you heal, okay? You are welcome. You have an amazing rest of the week, love. Thank you. I am going to go to the next caller. That is 727- 727- Hi. Hi, how are you today? Good, how are you? Good, what's your name? Where are you calling from? I'm calling from Florida. Okay, Lisa, how can I help you today? I wanna know when you see me. Okay, so- Or anything else you pick up. What I instantly heard, which I don't feel like it's accurate. It just, I know what it means, but I'm going to tell you what I heard. I heard tomorrow. Now, tomorrow doesn't always mean, I think what they're picking up on is you wanna be out of your situation immediately. You want to be gone already. I think that's the energy that they are picking up on. What I'm gonna say to you is the way they're saying it to me is in your mind, you're already, I know this sounds so whatever, but in your mind, you're already where you wanna be. You're already, like you're already removed from your current situation. You just have to let your body follow the steps. Now, if I'm talking about in real time here, I feel like I hear anywhere from a month to three months. It depends upon how diligently you, like the steps you take or how diligently you move on this. I don't know if that makes sense to you. Like obviously the more energy you put into it. Yeah, go ahead. I'm waiting on like a settlement, so that's kind of fun. I won't be able to go until that happens. Okay, so what I'm gonna say again is, and these are the answers they're giving me. Maybe I don't know how long it's gonna take for this to come in. I should, right? Because like people tend to think I should know everything in the universe because I'm a psychic. And well, for the record, I don't, okay? It's not like I magically get every single answer. But what I can say is I hear anywhere from a month to three months and maybe the timeframe, the difference between the month and the three months is a negotiation process. But I feel like by the fourth month, which I think, let's see, this is October, November, December, January, February, which puts us at February, perhaps by the fourth month, you will have what you're seeking and be making steps to where you want to be. Now, I'm not, I think the reason that they're not giving a straight answer is because a lot of this is up to you and possibly the negotiation process. Okay, so if, for example, if you're waiting on a settlement, if they come through with an offer and you say, yeah, I'm gonna take it, just get it done and over with, that's one thing. But if you don't settle and it ends up being something that gets long and drawn out and like with a, possibly like a hearing situation. No, I'm not. It's gonna be another. It's not that hard. Well, before, even for like disability, they can do, they can make it more long and drawn out. So what I'm getting is, there's going to be a back and forth on this. Whatever it is that you're waiting on, there's going to be a bit of back and forth whether that means back and forth with information or we need this or whatever it is, I feel like there could be a bit of a back and forth on it. And what I wanna say is either whatever if you, and I hear, I hear there's, now negotiation can mean a couple of different things. Negotiation can mean they're gonna negotiate the amount of time or the amount of money or the amount of whatever it is. So when the time comes and it's in front of you, you may understand it better. You may look back and go, oh, that's what this meant, right? That's, listen, angels and my guides and my angels say things to me all the time. And I instantly go, oh, I know what you mean. And then when it happens, when everything starts to happen, I'm like, oh yeah, I didn't know what they meant. I had no idea that this meant that. So for whatever they're saying right now, I feel like maybe you're gonna get some information tomorrow and then in one month and three months or one to three months, you will get whatever more information. I don't know, but we'll see. You know what? I do wanna hear back from you to see how this plays out because the information they're giving me just isn't very solid right now. I'm just hearing a lot of this is up to you. A lot of it is up to you. Whether that means getting them information or negotiation, whatever it means, I'm just hearing a lot of it is up to you. And I know this might not make sense to you right now. And I'm sorry, I can't give you a more clear answer about that. Okay. So. All right. Watch for calling in. I am gonna try to get one more person in today and that would be four, one, five. Hey, four, one, five. How are you today? I'm sorry, can you say your name again? Kate. Okay, Kate. How can I help you today? I would like to hear from a friend of mine that Paris Young named Paul. And it was recently his birthday that I've been thinking about him a lot. Okay. So, okay. Was Paul a little at one point in his life? Was he a little, did he have kind of a belly on him? No, he was an athlete. Okay. There's someone who instantly showed up and I'm gonna describe this guy to you because I feel like this guy's showing up for a reason also.  He's wearing a zip front. Like it zips all the way up. Tan, like I don't wanna use the word windbreaker but he's calling it a windbreaker. So we know the timeframe that they called coats windbreaker. It's a waist length coat. Like it has that cloth elastic around the waist. It's tan, it zips all the way up the front.  He's a little bit older. I feel like this could have been a father or a grandfather type of figure. And he's saying his heart, his heart, his heart. So whomever this is, I feel like they passed from something to do with their heart. And I hear cardiologists. So yeah, they definitely passed from their heart. So here's what I'm gonna tell you love. I know you called to connect with Paul but whomever this is, if this isn't for you they're coming through strong for somebody else who's listening or watching. I hope this is for you though. Cause that would stink.  Right, that's okay. And this guy wore glasses, at least sometimes and he had a round square face. So on the sides it was more straight but then the top and the bottom was a little bit more rounded. And he had like great, like the dark gray with the light gray hair at one point. But I feel like when he was younger, it was light brown. So whomever this guy is, he's stepping in. Okay, he wants to step in. I don't know why. If this guy is familiar to you, good, I'm happy. If not whomever this guy is familiar to that's listening or watching or whatever. Thank you for it now. Yeah, he's my father, that's my father. Oh, okay, thank goodness. Oh my gosh, I'm so happy to hear. Oh my goodness. Okay, so your father wants to say, oh my God, you don't know how relieved I am right now. So your father wants to say, I need to ask you, was your father like a baseball fan because your father is saying, or was Paul, because the statement I'm getting for Paul is he slid into home, he slid into home, like a baseball player would slide into home. So they're just letting you know, like your dad saying, we got him, he's here. And he is saying, he's trying to give you a message, Paul. Paul is trying to give you the message and Paul wants to give you the message of thank you, your kindness was always appreciated. You were always very real with him. You were always very real and very honest and you were always up front and I'm getting goosebumps on that, like you didn't, you weren't like, sometimes people can say things in a way that's very honest, but it's not cruel. And that is pretty much how you, you could always say things accurate, like you could always say things in a way that was very, I don't know why I can't get these words out, but just like very kind but honest. So he's just thanking you for that. He's acknowledging that you're very empathetic with him, very empathetic with him. And they both wanna say they love you and they're going to be around now. Your father is the little blue spark, a little blue spark whenever you see this blue orb or spark that is your father. And Paul is, I don't know what color his orb is yet, but he's saying thank you for taking the time to reach out to him. Thank you so much for taking the time to acknowledge him and reach out to him. And he's bringing you, I'm talking really fast because my show is ticking down. I have like less than 30 seconds left. He's bringing you a gift. He's bringing you a gift. It's gonna be in your dream. It's not a physical gift, but a spiritual gift that you're going to get in your dream. And on that note, I wanna thank you so much for calling in. I wanna thank everybody who listened and joined us here today. It's time for the show. It's time for the show.


Live from Washington DC, it's Cube Conversations with John Furrier. Over on, welcome to this special Cube Conversation here in Washington DC. We're getting all the stories. We are at the Halcyon House here with Kate Goodall as the co-founder and CEO of Halcyon for Cube Conversation. Thanks for joining me today. My pleasure. So talk about Halcyon and your mission. You're doing something really important here in societal entrepreneurship. It's a nonprofit. It's a really interesting mission. You're having an impact. Talk about what you guys are doing. Yeah, we believe in the power of human creativity and the power of compassion to change the world for the better. And by that, I mean that we take some incredible change makers with really bold ideas about how they can affect societal change through business and art. And we give them a number of supports, including a free place to live in this very expensive city, a fantastic mentor, an office, a community around them, money. And we don't take equity in their ventures. And this house that we're here is a mansion in Washington DC. Talk about the story about this house and this residence. Yeah, it's got very revolutionary roots. It was built by Benjamin Stoddard, who was the first secretary of the Navy during the Revolutionary War. And from then, it exchanged hands several times. And one of them was a relative of Mark Twain. And he is responsible for most of its 30,000 square feet. And then, lastly, it was in the hands of the Dreyfus family before it was bought by Dr. Kuno, who is my co-founder and the chair of Halcyon. And Halcyon Mission, you guys have a unique formula. Talk about how the fellowships, how do you guys select the ventures? What's the program? They live here. It's a residence. So it's an interesting thing. Yeah, we give them three things. Everything breaks down into three things, space, community and access. We believe that if you give people not only physical space, which is important because we have to remember that not everyone has a parent's basement they can live in and friends and family they can go get money from. So it democratizes the playing field to just be able to select people with the best ideas and the most talent and the best drive. But also headspace, what does it mean when you give someone with a brilliant idea five months to just work on their idea? Then community is very, very important. There's a lot of atrocious analogies for entrepreneurship. People compare it to staring into the abyss or chewing glass. And it creates a lot of emotions, lots of ups and downs. So having a built-in community, which we have here is very important. Then lastly, access. And by that, I mean there are not only investors, but these days governments, philanthropists, others that are seeking solutions to some of these very hairy 21st century problems. They want access to these ideas. And if we do our job correctly, we're creating a bridge for these entrepreneurs to those people as well. Yeah, entrepreneurship certainly is hard. And it's even harder when you're trying to crack the code on societal problems. And so this brings up an interesting trend that we've been seeing emerging really rapidly in the past few years with cloud computing and other big data, internet of things, technologies on a global scale is the societal entrepreneurship model, where you're accelerating and opening up new ways to democratize, crowdsource, fund, and change the game and reimagine philanthropy, policy, education, diversity, all in one. You guys are kind of doing that here. And it really is a ground zero here in Washington DC because of the access and the ecosystem of governments and everything's here. So you're seeing this building up in Washington DC. Talk about this new force, this new driving force of change called societal entrepreneurship. Yeah, so we believe it's definitely one way to really change the game. It's a way to use business principles to attack some of these enormous social problems. Many would argue that philanthropy and perhaps government have failed at some of this recently. Philanthropy was originally designed to solve problems, not to become a charity machine. And certainly the government finds it hard to do some of those things today as well. And so figuring out how to really attack some of these enormous, hairy 21st century problems using these business principles so that the solutions can then also be scaled effectively is absolutely what we're trying to approach. It's interesting. You see the old guard, the old ways of doing things, policy, people just checking boxes, philanthropy kind of a big donor kind of model. And then now with cloud computing, new things are emerging. In your mind, what's changed the most now from just even five, 10 years ago? What's the big difference in today's culture, in today's environment, in the world in Washington DC? Oh my gosh, so many things I could talk about. One of the reasons I think that social enterprise really came into being partially is because there was a recession and millennials didn't have jobs. So they had to create them and they created them in a new model. They created them in a way that gave them satisfaction beyond just getting a paycheck. The Jobs Act gave foundations the ability to invest in for profits and gave us crowd sourcing and crowdfunding. And these things have really made some of this cross-sectoral polarization possible for the first time. I think people generally are frustrated that this amazing pace of change and internet of things and all this stuff still hasn't solved some of these big problems. So there's so many forces in at play. And I think one thing that I'll also point to, because as I explained to you, I'm an archaeologist and historian by training, and if you look over the course of human history, any time when you've had rapid change in technologies or you've had vast inequalities in terms of wealth, you end up with a depression or a war or both. And I really believe that the power of social entrepreneurship can for once maybe let the gas out of the balloon a little bit more gently. And I think that's something really great to be optimistic about. How do you see that happening, honestly? We're connected to society now. We have our mobile devices. We have our things on our body, internet of things. And it's all there. Is that how you see it?  Yeah, I mean, I think that's the point. We have tremendous power now, right? Just in our hands to be able to solve some of these problems. Human ingenuity is a great thing. I think creativity and compassion are going to be the things that the machines replicate last. And so we support that wholeheartedly. And I think maybe we can talk about some examples of some of our ventures and what they're doing, because I think that's the best way to paint. What does this mean? What is it? One of our current fellows, Ryan Socia, has created JDo, which is a way to anonymously unite victims of sexual assault so that they can take legal action. It has a business model. But it's been proven that victims of assault are much more effective when they go as a group instead of alone. So it's a really brilliant way to use technology. Another one from our past cohort, Brandon Anderson, is using a chatbot, Rahim AI, to collect better data on policing, and then is working with police departments to use that data so that they can have better community relations. So these are both very relevant and timely issues that we're approaching in a non-partisan way using technology to solve. One more I'll give in our current cohort, Peleve, which is a company that's thinking about the internet of things and how it can solve for the opiate crisis. They've created a pill bottle that connects to your phone or your family's phone and can give data and control over medication so that you can really start to attack addiction. Kate, talk about the power of weed and capital, what you've been doing with the women's network here in Washington, DC, because it's not just a women in tech inclusion issue. There's a lot of disparity we've been covering, certainly on a silicon angle. But there's really a lot of powerful women and talented folks, whether it's creative or on the business side or technical side, where the societal problems, these are products that are used by the entire population. And so there's an effort to have more women involved in not just designing products, but actually being part of these new reimagined solutions and technologies. How important do you see that here? What are some of the hurdles and successes that you've had here? I agree with that analysis completely. And I will, I'm biased, but I think that Washington is an amazing city for some incredibly smart women. And when we created Halcyon, we created a committee that was diverse and reflective of the diversity we wanted to see in our cohort.  And what that's resulted in, happily, is a Halcyon community that has 52% of our ventures founded or co-founded by women. And 58% of our ventures founded by a person of color. But then when we looked around, the investor base didn't exactly reflect our fellows. So we started to think about how we could engender and cultivate investors that were also diverse. And one of the ways to do that was to create a group of women in DC that wanted to fund social impact, leaning women-led ventures. And it's called We Capital. It's led by Dr. Kuno, who's my co-founder and chair at Halcyon, and Sheila Johnson, who was one of the founders of BET and has now has founded Salamander Resorts. And there's 13 other remarkable women in that contingent. And they're all paying it back. But in a very smart way, they get some market rate returns. I mean, this is interesting. The community paying it forward has been the ethos of very robust and successful communities, Silicon Valley here in Washington DC. How do you scale that? How do you go global with this? Because now you have a global model, Silicon Valley DC, and all around the world, where you now have different communities coming together, kind of all with the same mission, potentially. How do you blend it all in? How do you take that to the next level? That's a good question. I mean, we're kind of gradually building what I call a kind army. Just this amazing community that has ripple effects. We don't feel that we have to own or control this in any way. Just over 3 and 1 half years, we've had 55 ventures come through here. They've raised nearly $40 million, impacted half a million people around the world in a positive way. They've created nearly 500 jobs. So you start to see the exponential growth, even just as we sit here in this building. But I do think that there's a long way to go in terms of people understanding. This societal entrepreneurship or social entrepreneurship, people have different definitions for it. And there's a long way to go in terms of government and philanthropy really being able to understand it. Because in some ways, as I mentioned, they've sort of lost touch with who their customers are. Kate, I've always been saying on Silicon Valley and my Facebook page is also on theCUBE that Silicon Valley doesn't get DC. They try to come in, wave their arms around. You don't get it, and they try to be, they're impatient, I would say, if I categorize. They get DC, but I don't think they have the patience for it. It's a new culture here. I'll see the pace of change is accelerating in DC. But there's a formula for DC. What is the secret to be successful in Washington DC? If you're a tech entrepreneur or an investor or someone from Silicon Valley or not from here. We do get the advantage of being able to see who does that well and who doesn't. And tech is obviously leading ahead of policy, policies trailing tech. And I think that can understandably make policy makers nervous. They've got a lot of understanding to do to be able to make sound policy decisions. And these tech solutions are very complicated. So the people in tech that I see being successful around policy are those that will take the time to really sit down and pick through a problem with a policy maker and help them to understand it. Policy makers are actually very smart, but they're dealing with a lot. And... So education. Education, education, education. Absolutely, you can't sort of come in here and be impatient that they're not getting it. So yeah, but I think that that's going to be essential. We've got to figure out how to talk to each other and how to talk across different languages, different domains, different sectors, and create some better intersectionality. So what's next for Halcyon? What's the vision? What's your vision of how this will go forward? Obviously you've got a great model, batches coming through cohorts. You have demo days here. I notice you set up downstairs for a demo day. So it's very robust, classic incubator accelerator model with the residents, a little unique there. What's next? Where do you go from here? Well, so we don't take equity in any of our ventures, but we are thinking about creating a fund because so many of our ventures are performing exceptionally well. And we are actually going to be launching a festival that really takes the power of creativity and compassion and art and technology here in DC, and that will be in June. And we're hoping that that way we can reach a wider audience. And that's going to be very exciting. But the long term vision really is, you know, how can we harness the power of compassion and creativity to solve 21st century problems? And how can we do that at scale? The classic disruption model is gatekeepers are being disrupted by the new guard, as Amy Jassy would say in Amazon. But there's a new creative as well. I mean, I did a panel at Sundance a few weeks ago where we talked about this new creative where a democratization is happening in the artist level and the filmmaker level. And that seems to be happening across all industries. A new creative is developing. So what's your view of the digital impact?  It's kind of coming together. Is that kind of the vision, how you see art and science coming together? Yeah, I mean, artists are fantastic disruptors, right? Sometimes they don't even need to paint a picture. They just use their abilities as an artist to do things other people can't. And that's why they're awfully fun to be around. But yeah, I think that you're absolutely right. You know, I point to Dee Reese as a great example who didn't get her funding for her film Mudbound through the Hollywood machine. She said she went straight to Netflix and now she's getting an Oscar. That's a new way of doing things, right? We have one of our fellows, Dishana, who created Quelle TV, which is Netflix for the African diaspora because Netflix just doesn't have the kind of black filmmaking that she wants to see. So yeah, I absolutely see people using digital to do different kinds of disruption, including sort of, you know, on the art side of things. We have another program, The Arts Lab, very similar to this, but working with excellent artists who are thinking about social justice. One of the artists there, Georgia Saxelby, is doing a project called Two Future Women. And she's collecting letters that women are writing to other women 19 years from now. They're being archived by the museums in DC and will be displayed on the eve of the Women's March. I mean, wouldn't it be great to know what the suffragettes were thinking? And that all requires technology to be able to successfully collect those, disseminate them, archive them, et cetera. So new channels to the marketplace, breaking down the barriers for the gatekeepers seems to be the trend. How is that happening in your world, in DC, and in philanthropy? Because you're now creating a new model of entrepreneurship. Yes, yes. Not just philanthropy, hey, nice job, or policy checkbox, it's real change. And arguably a new model for philanthropy, right? Because very rarely is philanthropy so immersive where we're literally taking these people and we're living with them for five months and giving them all of these supports. And I think it's also a new model in that it's risk-taking. It's not like a safe and secure metric-based proven solution. Some of these ventures are gonna fail. And I think that that's okay, right? That's just testing and trying and finding the best and moving forward. I was gonna make another point.  Obviously, I made a comment on Facebook kind of joke. We're saving the world at the same time because you mentioned you can actually get ahead of some of these trends with these gaps, whether it's inequity, inequality, or however these gaps are, causes either war or depression. As history points out. Now you have an opportunity to use not just diagnostic capability, but predictive and prescriptive mechanisms. What are some of those things that someone could see and kind of connect the dots around an example of something that's prescriptive? To say, wait, whoa, time out. We got something going on over there. There's a problem, space we can solve with a solution. What are some examples that you see playing out where this model could work? I'm not sure I quite understand the question. If we had the ability to use technology to solve some societal problems, what are some examples that you're seeing here in your incubator that are kind of pointing to this new trend? Yeah, I mean, I think that our fellows are fantastic examples of that. Many of them are tech enabled, whether or not they're using apps or the cloud or just a new actual technology product I mean, one of our fellows is using, he's created a new product that disrupts the vestibular system so that you don't feel motion sickness. Now, this is actually a product that is obviously very valuable for just everyday people who are going to be in driverless cars trying to do their work. But it is also, it turns out, very useful for the military and very useful for people who are trying to create virtual reality. 40% of the people cannot put a virtual reality headset on and not feel nauseous. So, I do think that it is tech's job to solve some of these problems that we haven't been able to solve yet. In many ways, the internet and the internet of things is our biggest leap forward since fire, right? So now how are we going to use it to create the kind of disruption that fire did? Fire allowed us to eat more things, grow bigger, then start to farm. And I think that we haven't even hit the cusp of what the internet can do yet. It can do way more things than deliver products to our doorsteps.  What is the tech wheel? I think it's going to be really... Personal question for you. What is the big learnings that you've had over the past few years?  What was your big learnings that you've come out? Oh my gosh, do you have like an hour? We've learned how not to do and how to do mentorship very well. You can't take mentorship lightly. This is human chemistry we're talking about, and even if you think you've got the perfect match on paper, it may not work. We have certainly learned a lot about how it is really important to have investors that reflect entrepreneurs because to your very point it's going to take everyone to create technologies that work for everyone. It also creates, we also need investors who look like everyone because otherwise there is inherent bias. Really good people have inherent bias, and that needs to be solved for. Because I straddle both art and entrepreneurship in my role, there's some really interesting things that I've noticed in terms of how entrepreneurs see the world as infinite resource, and artists see it as very finite, and how some of our systemic problems are reflected almost identically in both fields. This is an interesting statistic. 5% of venture capital goes to women, we know that, and 1% to African-Americans, 0.01 to black women. In the museum world, in museums in the Western hemisphere, 5% of their art collection is women artists, 1% is African-American artists. That's not a coincidence. That's a clear picture of how power structures have evolved to make certain types of decisions about who should get capital, who is worth collecting, and we're definitely solving for that. And certainly having a lens on that and exposing that to sunlight is the way to cure that. Absolutely, it's very important. Talk about artistry. One of the things we've been talking about in the software and the tech business is the role of artistry and craft. And we see that swinging back in with cloud computing, kind of, I wouldn't say took the craft out of software development, but you're seeing these integrated solutions where craftmanship and art are coming together. We're seeing examples, certain in Asia, in China, we've seen examples where the development world, the technical world has come together with the artistry world to create these new solutions. So you have creative and you've got technical coming together, that's what you're doing. Yeah, no, absolutely. What's the success formula, is there one? Is it right brain, left brain? What's the... I don't know, we've just got this bubbling cauldron of creativity and we're pulling stuff out of it as we go. But I think it is important for us not to forget about art. Art has been at the forefront of every social change, every movement. If it does its job, it's of the moment and it tells us a lot about ourselves. But there's also that important thing about art with technology and with consumer products. The reason that the iPhone was so successful is because it's a thing of beauty. And everyone is sort of in awe of it. So design is critical. It's absolutely critical when you're thinking about scale or consumer products or tech that works. And having a good taste for good art is also a skill. Knowing what's beautiful. Of course. And that's... Tech guys love to have that skill. You could argue that that's getting democratized and disrupted as well. Kate, thanks so much for spending some time here. My pleasure, this is fun. It's a cube conversation. Kate, co-founder and CEO of Halcyon, here in Washington DC, changing the world's societal entrepreneurship. A lot of great actions through cube coverage. Thanks for watching.


Welcome to World's Best Videos! We've compiled a list of facts about the famous YouTuber Faze Blazigan. Let's get into it! Lucas Mossing, or better known as Faze Blazigan, was born on August 19, 1996 in Vienna, Austria. He is currently 20 years old and resides in Los Angeles, California. He confirmed in the Q&A that he stands at 6 feet 2 inches. His biggest dream as a child was to become a professional soccer player. He attended Gun High School in Palo Alto, California. He created his YouTube channel under the name Blazify in January of 2013, uploading his first video, The UW Polar AON Montage, edited by me. When he first got his favorite Pokemon game, Pokemon Emerald, he picked the starting Pokemon Torchic, which evolves into Blazigan in its final evolution. He thought it would be cool to name himself his favorite Pokemon in tribute to playing the game. He was the owner and founder of the clan XJMX, which is a knife-only Call of Duty team. He got into trick shotting because of watching Faze Rain and Faze Apex videos that encouraged him to start. He joined Faze Clan on January 3rd, 2015, and joining Faze Clan would be the biggest influence on his YouTube career. Blazigan joined Faze during a live stream with his friend RedRandom. During the live stream, Faze Rain tweeted at RedBlazigan, This is the only time you'll see your name next to a check mark. He and Random both had no idea of what Rain meant on his tweet. For some reason, Blazigan didn't notice that Rain's name is Faze Blazigan. After a short while of being puzzled, Faze Rain tweeted saying, At Red Blazigan, this means you're in Faze. He would later move to New York to live in the, at the time, Faze House, New York. Now the Faze Clan resides in Los Angeles in a mansion. He mentioned that if he wasn't a YouTuber, he would be in college. His most embarrassing experience in high school was at a school dance with his girlfriend at the time, Jessica. Jessica's friends told him that Jessica wanted to kiss him by the end of the night. When they were slow dancing, Lucas asked, Is it fine if I kiss you on the cheek? He was full of embarrassment and cringes when he thinks about this moment to this day. His favorite genre of music is rap. His favorite musical artist is logic. The reason for it is because he respects his worth ethic and how he came from nothing. If he were to have any superpower, he would have the ability to fly. Well, that concludes the video guys. Hopefully you guys did enjoy the video. And if you did, remember to smack that like button. Let us know in the comments section below what you'd like to see next. And if you haven't already subscribed, please do subscribe to keep up with the world's best video.