The discovery of the phenomena known as localized surface plasmid resonance, LSPR, has provided the basis for many research areas, ranging from material science to biosensing. LSPR has since been viewed as a transduction platform that could yield affordable, portable devices for a multitude of applications. This review aims to outline the potential applications within developing countries and the challenges that are likely to be phased before the technology can be effectively employed. This article was authored by Jules L. Hammond, Nicol Bala, Sarah D. Ruffey, and others.


news update. Hi everyone, Basel Chapnir for the 11 AM Tiger Financial News Network update. We're looking at this on Thursday, the 24th of February. Dow's down 635. It was down all the way to 232,272. So it's come back 200 points from the low, but it's still down 647 points. This is a tough market because even with insecticide, just the geopolitical economic situation is now spread out to the point where the uncertainty for the market has become a little bit more certain because now we know that Ukraine has been invaded, but at the same time, you've got crude oil, you've got gold, you've got a whole bunch of things going on, interest rates, so the factors are there as a worry. That's why we could be looking at the Dow holding to the lower range. It doesn't have to smash to the downside today. Now, that's the VIX index, which is trading off its high of 3779. It's down to 3440, still very high of 3.38. If the VIX index goes anywhere close to the 36 area, 3650 later on, you could have another wave to the downside. But wow, look at the red candle. If that starts to pull back sharply and you've already got gold coming off its high, look at that all the way from 1976 down to 1929.  If you're looking at crude oil holding very well, crude oil is still up in the higher range, 9751, but it did touch 154. So those are the factors that are going to give you clues because the S&P then would need to be at instead, oh, turned a green candle from the low of the day. It's still down 42 at 1841, 82. But this is the most important opportunity just to have a relief balance to give some kind of pressure come off the indices. And look at this green for the QQQs, although it's down 85 cents, 328.47. It went all the way down the smooth to 318. This is a big comeback, 10 points. So this is really important, just some kind of relief. And most importantly, look at the TLT. Fails again. It tried to rally. It went to 139.23. It's now at 137.88. And that's just saying that yields are determined to stay in the higher range. All of these are worries. But in the meantime, back what we're looking, back at the ranch, what we really want to look at is we're making the dating charts and cell modes in the key indices, the weekly charts and cell modes. We've been talking about it on my show tomorrow in my Tiger's Admissions Hour at 10 a.m. Eastern time. We're going to talk a lot about the candles coming up for the end of February into Monday. So that's going to be really important. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for having me because I've entered great shows coming up and I'll be back to box.


Hey everybody, Dr. O here and this video we're going to talk about the fed versus fasted state. Let's just get some of the things out of the way. The fed state, the key thing to note, its other name is the absorptive state because it's when you're absorbing nutrients that you just ate. The fed state is usually going to be in the window of up to four hours after you eat and the fed state is dominated by insulin. The fasted state is also known as the post absorptive state. It's going to be anytime when you have an ate in at least a few hours and it's going to be dominated by glucagon. Let's go ahead and take a look at the fed state first and then the fasted state. We're going to look at what's happening at the liver, at the muscles and at the fat tissue. Here, let's just start after you eat. There's an influx of nutrients coming in unless you're on a very low carb diet that's going to involve the absorption of a lot of glucose and as your blood glucose rises that's going to stimulate insulin. Insulin's primary job is to lower blood glucose but it's actually an anabolic storage hormone. As you're going to see it plays a role in fat storage and amino acid storage and synthesis as well. Let's start at the liver. At the liver, the key thing that's going to happen is this excess glucose that's not being used for fuel elsewhere will be stored as glycogen. The liver turns glucose into glycogen. That's the storage form of carbohydrate in the human body. You also see that you can certainly see some extra amino acids being converted into ketones as well or ketone bodies if you're on a higher protein diet potentially. Muscle cells, same thing. They're going to take in that glucose and they're going to use some for fuel and store some as glycogen. Insulin is also going to lead in muscle cells to absorb amino acids and use them to build muscle as well. Then adipose cells, your fat cells, they're going to take in excess energy and store it as fat. That's what's happening during the fed state. After you've eaten, your body is going to use what it needs in the moment but primarily it's going to be storing what you just consumed. That's the fed state. Now we have the post-absorptive or fasted state. Notice there's nothing coming in through the intestines now because you haven't eaten in let's say four or more hours. Maybe if you think about it, it's called breakfast for a reason. If you had supper at 6 p.m. and you wake up at 7 and eat, you've gone 13 hours without eating. So that would be the fasted state. So as blood glucose levels drop, insulin levels should also drop and glucagon should take over. Glucagon's primary job is to keep your blood glucose up. So at the liver cell, you're going to see this glycogen that you've stored is going to be turned back into glucose. And then also we can be burning some ketones for fuel if needed. Muscle cells, same thing. The glycogen your muscle cells took up are now going to be turned back into glucose and used for fuel. And you can also be, if you need to increase blood glucose levels and you don't have carbohydrates, we'll see what that can do. But you can also break down proteins and use them for fuel as well. And then thirdly, we have the adipose cells. They stored the excess calories, excess energies as fat. Now they're going to be releasing that fat. So it can be oxidized using beta oxidation to generate ATP or can be used to produce ketones. So that is the fed versus fasted state. What's happening in your body, whether it depends on whether you've recently eaten or you haven't. But in the end, every cell needs fuel every second. If we don't keep our mitochondria churning out ATP, we don't have a metabolism. And if you don't have a metabolism, you don't have life. So all right, I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.


So with that chat with no more questions, let's go on to our first EP of the night. Rafa, who are we listening to? We are going to listen to Unfa's EP. They're a super cool community. Everything is open source, everything. I've seen them kind of hard code their own servers and their own plugins and they don't like using proprietary stuff so a lot of their SPS was building out systems that they didn't have. Awesome. Can't wait. So super cool. Let's see what they have to offer. Benji, if you could play that EP, let's get started. Oh my goodness, that was crazy. So much different stuff in one EP. Yeah, round of applause. My goodness. Thanks so much, guys. Yeah, we're joined here by two wonderful gentlemen from Unfa. Welcome, guys. Welcome. If you could introduce yourselves, please. I'm Unfa. The server is named after me and yeah, I'm the guy. And with me is John the Bard, who has been a driving force behind the whole collaboration on my server. And he's been pretty much the lead of the project. Maybe even a little bit more than me. Awesome. He also recruited like five guitarists for the project. So and vocalists and rapists and whatever. That's awesome. Yeah, we were having a bit of trouble finding. You guys can hear me, right? Yes. Yeah, okay. We're having a bit of trouble finding contributors at the beginning. We had a lot of people the first week and then we had not much going on for a bit after that. So then I kind of brought on a bunch of my buddies to do a lot of cool guitar stuff, I guess. And then yeah, the last week, we suddenly had everybody on not to jump the gun on talking about it a bunch, but yeah, it was kind of funny. Awesome. Thanks for having us, by the way. Yeah, absolutely. Huge thanks to Story for inviting our community. Yeah, I'm very glad you all pulled through. It's an amazing project. Chaz, do you have any thoughts on the EP? I think the mic is muted. Yeah, we can't hear you, Chaz. Sorry. Oh, that's too bad. Oh, no. We'll just talk about it for a second. And then when he has sound, we'll let him give us thoughts. Yeah. So I don't know. Yeah, I guess you want to talk about what your community is kind of about? Sure. So as we've already been introduced, we are focused on open source software, which also by extension means most of us work on Linux. So we're kind of the proof that it's really possible to do music on the next end with open source software. And some people think open source, is that the same thing as freeware? And the answer is no, because SYNTH1 is freeware, but that means all you have is the DLL you can use. If it was open source, you'd also have the source code and you could upgrade it and make it better. So that's what we are about. And that's what we use and we try to promote. So, yeah, I've been making video tutorials about making audio production on Linux with open source software for quite a few years. And the community on Discord formed around that. Awesome. How many people are in your server? Oh, man, got to check. I think a couple hundred. On 9, 150 of line, I don't know. I think it's about 400. No, 600. Okay, so it's about like 700, 750 people, something like that. Awesome. So I know your community is kind of split up, you're unique in that you have a Discord and a Rocket Chat, right? How do you guys kind of handle collaboration with sort of a divided community like that? Rocket Chat is for those who don't know, because I assume most people have never heard about it. It's like an open source version of Slack. So when I was looking for an open source of something, something open source to be an alternative to Discord, because Discord is proprietary and closed source and also has a problematic terms of service document that so I don't want to force anybody to use it. And we decided to set up Rocket Chat as an alternative so everybody can talk to each other from, it's like a once community that just has two outlets, two portals. Yeah, because the chats are bridged. So you're able to see all the Discord messages on Rocket Chat and vice versa. So it's not a split in that regard. We actually, they're testing a matrix server too, but that's beside the point. So yeah, it's not exactly split. Yeah, it's not exactly split in that. Where's my overcoat? But it does. Yeah, it is kind of interesting. I think the coolest thing that we did with being the open servers that we, although I think a couple servers are, I didn't hear everyone yesterday, but doing something similar. But we're passing just project files back and forth instead of stems or anything like that. And we're doing our best, we were doing our best not to bounce anything that didn't need to be bounced. So all of the synthesized drums, synthesized tones in general, amp simulators, whatever can be changed by anybody, which was pretty neat. Yeah, we have, since we're only using open source software, it doesn't cost anything for us to just add more plugins or be like, Hey, I like this. Can we all use it? If we, I mean, it could be like bias effects is my favorite plugin. So we all need to spend $200 in order to pass, you know, projects back and forth. So we didn't have any of those kind of issues. So we tried our best to make use of that. And yeah, I think it went really well. Awesome. Yeah, we wanted to use the strengths of what we are doing with the open source software and try to utilize the unique stuff that we can do, which is, for example, legally distribute the software. And also, we did something, we didn't want to work on stems, as John said. And so we set up a difficult thing for me personally, was that right when the theme was dropped, I just started a new job. I was having issues adjusting my work schedule and everything. So it was really hard for me to contribute. So what I've done is I tried to set up a proposed way of working, figure out the workflow for the collaboration. So I've set up a shared network folder where we can add anybody. And then... Hold on. Yes. Benji, there's some audio playing on stream. And nobody heard anything that one just said. I'm so sorry. Is it better? Are we done? It's gone. Awesome. Okay. Should I repeat? Yes, please. Okay. What's the last thing if you think went live? I think you started a new job. Ah, okay. So yeah, the challenge collab was difficult for me because right when the theme was announced, I was just starting a new job and I was having issues kind of adjusting my rhythm. And I also didn't have much time and energy left for the collaboration. This is where John pretty much like took over the leadership. And without him, this collaboration would have never really fruited anything. So thank you, John. Yeah, I handled a ton of the, I guess, administrative tasks between... It's called sync thing was how we were sharing files. It's sort of like Dropbox, I guess, but open source naturally. So any files we put in a folder would appear on everyone's computer, which is how we passed the binaries for the programs along with the projects themselves. So I have a machine that's just dedicated to that that we had up and running. Things of that nature was a lot of... I wanted to do more sound design, but I wound up kind of watching over what was happening much more often. But oh well, fun times. Gotcha. So secrets. I know you guys took it kind of literally and used the word secrets in some of your lyrics. How did the theme kind of inspire the EP? And what other secrets did you guys hide that chat didn't get? I think there's quite a lot to discover in this EP, hidden. So yeah, take out your tools and ears and have fun. We can of course provide a bandcamp link for anyone who want to release and download flags or whatever to have lots of fun. Although I did see some people in chat mentioning Morse code, so your next step is figuring out what we said. In case that was true, of course. There's plenty more. They can get one. Someone said, are you going to share the background binary code? Can you read binary? I think it's kind of possible to extract it if you just stitch together the frames. You got an afternoon and a photo editor. Just take a bunch of screenshots. Just hand write down the binary. Or you can train AI to do it for you. There you go. That's the time for way. What else is going to deal with your GPU power laying around? Yeah, chat. By the time we finish this EP, someone have that AI ready, please. Someone's got that binary. Story, you asked about the theme and how it inspired us. Yeah. I guess it was that a lot of people started tracks and everybody had their own idea on how the theme is going to be portrayed. There wasn't like a master plan for the EP. It definitely wasn't a concept album. It was a collection of different ideas and tracks that were developed. Also funny enough, during the last week that was added, the fifth week of work, we went from four tracks to seven because we kind of realized, oh shoot, we are under 10 minutes. Hey, what else do we have? Oh, now we have time to finish it up. Okay. Oh, we have seven tracks now. Okay. All right. Let's do it. And then maybe we could make a visualizer too. All right, I'll do it. I like that. Unfortunately, our mixing phase suffered a little bit as a result. But I think the variety is really cool. I think it was the right way to go, instead of just having barely 10 minutes. Otherwise, that, what's it called? The realm, that's the name of the track, was going to have an additional two minutes of guitar solos. And there's a meme release that's going to happen that's going to have all the guitar solos. If you really like that track, you got a solid 40-ish, 45 minutes. It's going to be great. Just guitar solos. Wow. Chas, I think you're back. Can you try speaking? Oh yeah. It's not working. I don't hear. Does anyone know sign language? Oh yeah. Do you sign it? That's weird. No. Yeah. All right. It wouldn't be an SVS stream if there weren't any technical issues. Oh, he's gone. Maybe if he reconnects, then it's going to work. Yeah, probably.  Sorry. It's pretty much the solution. While we're, while we're waiting on Chas, you guys have a lot of genres. How, I guess like, how do you sort of describe your guys' sound and then how did you sort of meld so many sort of ideas together in 20p? I don't know how I would describe our sound. Because there's a lot of sound in there. I guess all over the place. Some word like that. Pull out your thesaurus for a better one. But yeah, it's, we have two metal tracks. Two 80s style tracks. I guess 50s spy track. Drum and bass and orchestral ambience or orchestral synthetic ambience intro. So there's a quite a variety. I'm not sure there's too much even connecting them other than the theme, of course. I would say it's eclectic. Yeah. Although surprisingly, a lot of the same people worked on a lot of the variety of tracks. So I think our non-destructive workflow has contributed a lot to how the music itself emerged. Because we weren't limited by things like, oh, I got these stems. Now what I do with them, everybody was able to take anybody else's MIDI data on the timeline and just rearrange it or take to somebody's synth patch and change it or add automation to the synth patch or replace the synth altogether, which is what I done a bunch of times. Or just re-synthesize the drums or replace them or remix them or rearrange them. There wasn't this limitation of exchanging audio files and there wasn't any necessity for people to say, hey, can you fix this for me or do that and then wait until they do it and turn around with new stems for you to pull into your project? No, you could just do it on the spot yourself because you have all the power, all the tools. Everyone opens the same projects using the same plugins. Actually, setting this up was like, this is the idea I had that this would be so cool if you could do this because, actually, why shouldn't we do it like that? It would be silly if we tried the standard way because we can do this. So I decided, let's do it. Let's set up file synchronization, standardize a set of plugins and the DAW we're going to use, which is our door. It's an open source DW, kind of similar to Cubase or Proto, so Logic, whatever. Well, it's standard stuff. That's all the things you need to do. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for our interview. Thank you, Anfa. Thank you, John, for joining us. You can stick around for the next EP, talk to the next people. Thanks for having us. It was really great to collaborate and be able to be a part of this project. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Chaz, I think we could hear you now. Around the world, 15 minutes. I loved it. I was trying to say that for so long, but yeah, great work, you guys. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. Good job. All right. So we're going to move on now to the next EP of this awesome afternoon, night, morning, wherever you are, by the Untitled Virtual Ensemble. Very excited to see what they bring. You're an online orchestra, right? Yes. Yes. I dig the name. Very cool. All right, Benji.


I'm Craig Hardgrove, and I'm leading a team of researchers that's sending this spacecraft to the moon. This isn't a scaled-down version. This is the actual size of our spacecraft. It's called the Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper, or Lunamap for short. Lunamap will launch on one of the most powerful rockets ever built by NASA, and this tiny spacecraft will propel itself into lunar orbit using its own propulsion system. And that's a first for a spacecraft this small. As with any first, it's also very risky. I want to tell you about this mission, why we're going to the moon, and why it's worth the risk. We're sending Lunamap to the moon to sniff out just how much hydrogen is beneath the surface. We're looking for hydrogen because it's a key component of water. Water is geologically interesting on the moon. How did it get there? It's also important for future human exploration since it could be used as fuel. The moon could be a jumping off point for the rest of the solar system. But the moon is a harsh place. It barely has any atmosphere at all. The temperature can change by more than 100 degrees from day to night. And in that type of environment, any ice or water that's hit by sunlight would immediately be lost to space. But there's a lot of scientific evidence that suggests water ice could be present on the moon within special, eternally dark crater floors at the South Pole. These regions are in permanent shadow. They're some of the coldest places in the entire solar system. So that's where Lunamap is headed. Lunamap will carry a tiny science instrument called a neutron detector, which is sensitive to the low-energy neutrons that are leaking out of the top meter of the moon's surface. We can use that total number of neutrons to determine how much hydrogen is trapped below. And that, too, is something that's never before been attempted on a spacecraft this small. But in order to improve upon the previous measurements of ice at the moon's South Pole, Lunamap needs to get very close. Really, really close. It turns out we need to be about 30,000 feet above the surface of the moon, which is the typical cruising altitude for a commercial airplane. But we need to make our measurements while orbiting over the moon at about 4,000 miles per hour. And that's eight times faster than your typical commercial airplane. All of this, you guessed it, is a first for a spacecraft this small. So you might reasonably wonder where an audacious idea like a shoebox-sized spacecraft capable of doing all these things came from. About 10 years ago, a university professor wanted to come up with class projects for his engineering students. The idea was to have them build small, functional, bench-top components that might be used on a spacecraft, but with the added engineering challenge of making them fit into a very tiny box. These were just student learning tools and demonstrations. So when thinking about the dimensions of his tiny box, decided on a beanie baby box, 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. He called them CubeSats. Surely he thought something this small would never fly into space and never actually do anything useful. But as a student training exercise, they were perfect. The idea of CubeSats was a success. Universities across the country adopted CubeSats. They became a successful teaching tool and development platform. Perhaps a little too successful, because piece by piece, over the last 10 years, the components that make up Lunamap have been developed at or in partnership with universities, their faculty, their students, and staff. So over the years of students were lucky enough, their CubeSats would be launched into low-Earth orbit to test their designs in space. And they wound up not just testing designs, but developing new, miniaturized spacecraft technologies. Eventually, university students developed radios, instruments, reaction wheels, propulsion systems, and many other components until someone asked a really good question. Don't all these components put together make up an interplanetary spacecraft? And they do, as long as we accept the inherent risk of using any new technology. Take a different industry from our own lives, for example, smartphones. No one gives up on smartphones entirely if there are bugs in the first version. New technology always improves over time, but the first version is a little risky. And there's a funny thing that happens when you start accepting risk and accepting a lot of it. With a risky spacecraft, you can do risky things, things you wouldn't normally do on a typical big NASA mission that takes decades to design, build, and fly. Think about it, would you risk your spacecraft after a decade of work? It's not likely, but with shorter development times, smaller teams, lower costs, it actually allows you to embrace risk and hopefully reap the rewards. In fact, I'd argue that this is fundamental to what makes tiny missions like these worth doing. You may remember probe droids from Star Wars. Expendable robots deployed to capture unique, hard-to-get data about, say, a rebel base. Imagine if we had a dozen or more tiny probes on every NASA mission. They could fly low over the icy surface of Europa and transmit valuable data from the atmosphere of Venus on descent just before being crushed by the intense atmospheric pressure. These probes can act as interplanetary scouts deploying from a primary spacecraft, maneuvering to intersect with asteroids that no spacecraft has ever before visited. And these are just a few examples of the type of risky but highly rewarding missions that these tiny probes might take on as we venture out further into the solar system. Now, risk is a part of all of our lives and it can be scary, but very few rewards come without risk. Personally, I chose to pursue this mission as a postdoc at ASU. It's uncommon to give a moon mission to someone who is essentially fresh out of their PhD. But despite the risks, I put everything I had into it. I devoted many months of pulling together our team and working on the proposal. And our team, despite the risks, put everything they had into it too. I'll be honest, we all knew the chances of success were low and the risk of failing was high, but the rewards were even higher. And that's what kept and keeps us going. It should sound familiar. High risk, high reward. The concept of these tiny spacecraft is something that we all truly believe in. It represents a vision of a future world that we want to live in where space is more accessible than ever and to many more people than ever before. And that makes the risk of working on Lunamap worth it. I wouldn't have done anything else. And the best part is I get to lead this visionary team of people and work with colleagues every day who believe in it too. Thanks.


What's happening fellas? You see what's going on? Complement to the shelf. Ain't nothing like when you eat good and healthy at the same time. I went vegan like my whole life has changed, man. Vegan is a state of mind, like a lot of people think. Vegan is what you feel like it's vegan. You know what I'm saying? That makes sense.  That's organic, gluten-free chicken wings. Everything plant-based. You know what I'm saying? Everything... Man, I don't know. I'm not going to force my healthy habits on anyone, but healthy as well. That's all I'm going to say. You said the impossible wing. Yeah, it's definitely impossible like this. Just close your eyes.  State of mind. Eat all that unhealthy food and then wonder why they body sluggish. Wonder why they can't get up and go. I can eat this and it lasts me the whole week. Because it's healthy. It's healthy. Plant-based. So it's definitely... Like, I'm not telling you to cross over or transition, but do it. If it makes you feel good, just try it. Yeah, this is definitely plant-based. Plant-based. No.  This nigga, that's the big niggas be doing. Niggas be making up facts about shit, because you know the niggas they talking to.  Yeah. I got a cousin used to work, man. Veganism, all that shit, man.  You just sound like you know what they talking about.  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's plant-based, man? I'm gonna call me a niggas. You know that. Y'all swipe up. For other recipes. Yeah, I got a feeling about that.  I got about a trampoline now. No, you haven't been here.  Yeah, man. Damn it. We didn't say that. I don't need to talk about it. Talk about those things. She said, Daddy, what I gotta do to get a trampoline? I like to get a four-poor, though. Motherfucker said we had a picture of that report card. Yes, they called me right after. She said, Daddy, what day are you coming home? It's a wrap, niggas. Girl.  Like, just a girl-a-girl. That turns. Ew. Ew. That's cute, baby. Oh, that's cute, baby. Motherfucker, I've been told the niggas things. It's your mom. Okay. The niggas that got taller since I- Mr. R and the niggas that never grew up since I- When I met the niggas, he was a fag too. Look at me. They always say you're not a muter. Mr. R. Like, you said they walked off. I can see that. Hey, that's all I can say.  I mean, the attitude. You know how they always say, you represent like crypto and like, are they cool?   And he ain't scared of nobody in the crowd. Won't you say something? That's a good reference.  He was talking about veganism and all that. Like, yeah, this is plant-based. He was talking about plant-based salmon. I know about it. I don't practice it, but I know about it. What made you read up on it? Because I don't practice it. Vegan from now on. I'm vegan though. Vegan, in spirit, state of mind. Vegan spirit, I think. I tried going vegan one time.  I'm just crazy.  Don't talk about it. I said, you know what?   I'm peeing twice. I'm the best.  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You get what I'm saying? Trust me on this. Use the promo code. Get your first shipment for free. 85 South. I put that on everything. Times is hard out here. You're living, man. Got going, ladies. How are you? Here we go. Here we go. Man, it's been sitting in the bed. It's been sitting in the bed. We post this. You guys are now on the 9th shop. We open last May. You guys are number nine. That's what's hanging. We are number nine. We are number nine. You go to church. That's how I thought. We are number nine. Hallelujah. I should have been number eight. How's the tour going? Good. Everything's good? Yes, sir. We take a little shot. Come on with it. Sorry. We are number nine. We are number nine. You want to get in it? No. One, two, three. One, two, three. Thank you. I appreciate y'all having us. Thanks for coming out. We appreciate it. We are number nine. What time did you... I cannot walk. I cannot walk.  Anytime I'm in the Apple. They ask me if I'm real. I don't need 99. Anyway, what do they got new today? In the technology space. What do they got new today? They got them new guys. They don't charge them. They don't see it. Nobody has to see it. They take away all the Android. And to be honest, Android is probably the best thing they ever had. They look up to everything. I need an iPhone and an Android. You know what I'm saying? So it won't crack on me. They do never do. They take money out of their packaging. And Stanley made the new screens out of glass. So when you break it, it's $150. Look at this. Apple charge is more than that. Apple charge is so much. Apple charge is much better.  Break the wall. You just can't tell them. They see it. As soon as they open the phone, it's a steal. They break the ceiling. Alright, bro. As soon as I come out, as soon as I come out with a sweatshirt, it's too high. It's fitted out. It's too high. After you got a guy from an area, fix your file box.  Dude, what is going on, bro?   Dude, what's going on? Let's go. Who don't play? It's all sirens and nothing, man. What a rule. You're using the coaches.    You never ran a play, coach.   What a bitter tear. It exposes flies to the safety of the free skin.  I'm going out there, bro.  I'm gonna throw it. I'm gonna throw it.  Dude, come on. So, how you want to do it? Naked bootleg option. Naked bootleg option.  You know, naked, bro.  It's gonna be there when you get there.     He can't see me on the line. I go left, he go left every time. I've never been sold before. Everything goes the plan.  Ain't no real lie, man. Hey, can he guard you?  Look at him.  Exactly.   I'm ready to get home and eat.   Come on. Look at their niggas. Got my thing. Hello. Name up here to Tisburg. Name up to Tisburg. Tisburg. Tisburg. Tisburg. Tisburg, Pennsylvania. Yeah. Shit, that's what we do. And we came outside. And we jumped on the plane. Turn the show up in your town. Just like in a Wu-Tang clan. It's my still up. Get the rope. We bout to go white.  Bout to go head and tail. Shit, I'm in a roaded tree.     You know what I do? You know what I do? You know what I do? Pick up the phone and open the DoorDash App. Yeah, they bring you everything, man. DoorDash has something for every lifestyle. On the go with no time to waste or to pick up and pass the line. Delivery is more than just pizza in 2020. With a selection of your favorite flavors from across the globe you can order World Cuisine promo code 85south so you can get $5 off your first order of $15 or more. That's promo code 85south. You've got big plans for 2020, but when will you find time to do it all?  We use it, we want you to use it, that's why we giving you the promo code. And for the people who don't know what a promo code is, it's kind of like a coupon before the internet. So if you go in there and they say end of the promo code, always enter 85south so you can get the best deal possible. 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Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California for a special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Pleasure to have here Medora Meskowski, co-founder and VP of product at platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this cloud native at scale conversation. Thank you for having me. So cloud native at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the next level of mainstream success of containers, Kubernetes and cloud native develop basically DevOps in the CICD pipeline is changing the landscape of infrastructure as code. It's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on super cloud as it fits to cloud native at scales up? Yeah. You know, I think what's interesting and I think the reason why super cloud is a really good and a really fit term for this. And I think I know my CEO was chatting with you as well and he was mentioning this as well. But I think there needs to be a different term than just multi cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model where you have a few large distributants of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of micro sites. These micro sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving that direction. And so you got to refer that with a terminology that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think super cloud is an appropriate term for that. So you brought a couple of things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere and that's just the beginning. We don't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got IoT, OT and IT kind of coming together. But you also got this idea of regions, global infrastructure is a big part of it. I just saw some news around cloud flare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale, these new challenges there. Can you share, because you can have edge, so hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that, it's a steady state. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un-engineered area yet. It hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water. It's happening, it's going to happen. It's only going to get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because there's some business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud across multiple edges and regions? Yeah, absolutely. So I think in the context of this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two axis. I think on one end, you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have deployed a number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other axis, you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site, right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these axes, you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when your scale is not at the level. Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there. The technologies are also getting better. We're seeing Cloud Native become successful. There's a lot to configure, a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because what about at scale challenges here? Yeah, absolutely. And I think I like to call it the problem that the scale creates. There's various problems, but I think one problem, one way to think about it is it works on my cluster problem, right? So I come from engineering background and there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is it works on my laptop, which is I tested this chain, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, it's not working. Only the exact same problem now happens in these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there. Or it could be sending these applications and having them run at my customer site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it. Or they configured the cluster right, but maybe they didn't apply the security policies or they didn't apply the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors add their own layer of complexity and there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just one example of an issue that happens. I think another whole new ballgame of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you're deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. Okay, so I have to ask about scale because there are a lot of multiple steps involved.  Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is and when companies transition from, I got this to, oh no, that's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? Yeah, so I think it's interesting, there's multiple problems that occur when the two factors of scale, as we talked about, start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, it was fine on my cluster problem, which is back in when I was a developer, we used to call this, it was on my laptop problem, which is you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment, but the moment it runs production, it comes back with P0s and P1s from support teams, et cetera, and those issues can be really difficult to try out, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi-folds, it escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters, and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically hand-crafted or a combination of some scripting and hand-crafting, and so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say your radio cell tower site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins, and so the things don't work, and when things don't work, triaging them becomes like marriagely hard, but it's just one of the examples of the problem, another whole bucket of issues is security, which is as you have these distributed clusters at scale, you've got to ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that the security policies are configured properly. So this is a huge problem, I love that comment, that's not happening on my system, it's the classic debocking mentality, but at scale, it's hard to do that with error prone, I can see that being a problem, and you guys have a solution you're launching, can you share what Arlon is, this new product, what is it all about? Let's talk about this new introduction. Yeah, absolutely, I'm very, very excited. It's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now, because we are very passionate about this problem, just solving problems at scale in on-prem or in the cloud or at edge environments, and what Arlon is, it's an open source project, and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end-to-end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters, all of the infrastructure that goes within and along the site of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally, your applications. So what Arlon lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components and at scale. So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what dissolves in terms of the chaos you guys are raining in, what's the bumper sticker, what to do. There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line in a traditional, let's say, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings. Arlon, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot, and it's because when we think of Arlon, we think of these enterprise large-scale environments sprawling at scale, creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line which is taking each component, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage where again it gets processed in a standardized way and that's what Arlon really does. That's like the elevator pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure that is distributed, Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for those problems. So keeping it smooth, the assembly line, things are flowing, CI CD, pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. Yeah, not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of applications that they interface with. But then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secured properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability is integrated and so it solves problems of both those things. Yeah, it's dev ops. So the dev ops is the cloud-nated developer. The options have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? Absolutely, yeah. Kubernetes really introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because Kubernetes clusters or your specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in a declarative way and Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so online addresses that problem at the heart of it and it does that using existing open source, well-known solutions. Madhura, I want to get into the benefits, what's in it for me as the customer developer, but I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the current state of the product? You run the product group over there, platform nine. Is it open source and you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic and first of all, why open source? What is the consumption? I mean, open source is great. People want open source to download and look up the code but maybe want to buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through. Can you share open source and commercial relationship? Yeah, I think starting with why open source, I think it's, we as a company, we have one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies, components and then we make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model. But so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty and contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so we have always held that strongly as one of our principles and we have created and built independent products starting all the way with Fission which was a serverless product that we had built to various other examples that I can give but that's one of the main reasons why open source and also open source because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, behind a block box. Well, that's what the developers want too. I mean, what we're seeing and reporting with SuperCloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also if I wanna use it, I'll do it. Great, that's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way it is long but that's the benefit of open source. This is why standards in open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of a way for developers to try before they buy but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Cockroft uses the dating metaphor, you know, hey, I wanna check it out first before I get married and that's what open source is. This is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. Absolutely, yeah, yeah.  I think one is just this cloud native space is so vast that if you're building a close-flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprise's use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us a SaaS hosted version of it as well for those customers who choose to go that route. You know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need a partner to collaborate with who can, you know, support them for that production environment. I have to ask you, now let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer. Why should I be enthused about Arla? What's in it for me? You know, because if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not going to be confident and it's going to be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why should I be enthused about Arla as a customer? Absolutely. So, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers where this is a very kind of typical story that you will hear, which is we have, you know a Kubernetes distribution, it could be on-premise, it could be public cloud native Kubernetes and then we have our CI CD pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera, and then there's this gray zone.  And as these things, these things start by being done hand-grown and then as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home-grown DIY solutions for this. I mean, a number of folks that I talked to that have built Terraform automation and then, you know, some of those key developers leave, so it's a typical open-source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course, technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits that problem. So that's that pitch. I think OpsFico would be delighted the folks that we've spoken with have been absolutely excited and have shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on EKS, Amazon, and we want to scale them to a few thousands. But we don't think we're ready to do that and this will give us the ability to do that. Yeah, I think people are scared, not scared, I won't say scared, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale, small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises and I think this is gonna come up at KubeCon this year where enterprises are gonna say, okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record. I wanna see other companies that have used it. How would you answer that question to or challenge? You know, hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source, trying to free, fast and loose, but I need hardened code. Yeah, absolutely, so two parts to that, right? One is Arwan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically, one is Arwan uses Argo CD, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD open source tools that's out there, right?  That's one. Second is Arwan also makes use of cluster API, CAPI, which is a Kubernetes sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community, users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or open source projects that will find Arwan to be right up in their alley, because they're already comfortable, familiar with Argo CD, now Arwan just extends the scope of what Argo CD can do. And so that's one, and then the second part is going back to your point of the comfort, and that's where, you know, Platform 9 has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy Arwan at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your dev test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, and then Platform 9 will stand behind it and provide that SLA. And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to, Platform 9 customers that are familiar with Argo and then Arlo? What's been some of the feedback? Yeah, I think the feedback's been fantastic.  They start opening up. They say, we have standardized on Argo, and we have built these components homegrown. We would be very interested. Can we code develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of Arlo. Before we even wrote a single line, of course, saying this is something we plan on doing, and the customer said, if you had it today, I would have purchased it. So it's been really great validation. All right, so next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I ask you, look, I'm so busy. My team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project. I'm so tied up right now, and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform9 help me? Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform9 has always been that we try to bring that public cloud-like simplicity by hosting this and a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS-hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment, as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like Arlo will integrate with what they have, so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will even, in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and give you an inventory. And that's cool. So customers have clusters that are growing. That's a sign. Correct. Call you guys. Absolutely, they have massive, large clusters, right? That they want to split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today. Or they've done that already on, say, public cloud or otherwise, and now they have management challenges. So it's basically operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure and or scale out. That's right, exactly. And you provide that layer of policy. Absolutely, yes. That's the key value here. That's right. So policy-based configuration for cluster scale-up. Profile and policy-based declarative configuration and lifecycle management for clusters. If I ask you how this enables SuperCloud, what would you say to that? I think this is one of the key ingredients to SuperCloud. If you think about a SuperCloud environment, there's at least a few key ingredients that come to my mind that are really critical, like they are life-saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way. So that all on solves. Then you need to complement that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately, issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out how to solve them fast. And our lawn, by the way, also helps in that direction. But you also need observability tools. And then, especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make SuperCloud successful. And, you know, our lawn fills in one place. Okay, so now the next level is, okay, that makes sense. It was under the covers kind of speak, under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers of the cloud-native, modern application workflows? Because the impact, to me, seems, the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact? If you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to. Because the right checks and balances have gone through and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them. Right? Because developers run into this challenge today where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code. I'm responsible for some of these other plugins. But I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them the right tooling for that. This is actually a great kind of relevant point. As cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point I have to ask you because if this Arlo solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be do but they're designed to do, the question is what does the current pain look like? Are the apps breaking? What is the signals to the customer that they should be calling you guys up and implementing Arlo, Argo, and all the other goodness to automate? What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it failed apps? Is it latency? What are some of the things that would be indications of things are effed up a little bit? Yeah, more frequent down times, down times that take longer to triage. And so your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they have a number of folks in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners and they're extremely interested in this because the rate of failures they're encountering for the field when they're running these apps on site because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges and those are the pain points, which is if you're looking to reduce your mean time to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one.  So those are the signals. This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where IT used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the mini terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now, if technology is running the business, is the business, the company is the application, so it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on CSOs and CIOs now and boards are saying, how is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Do you see the same thing? Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO-CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that the technology that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on providing those goods to their end customers. So I think both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. Final question, what does cloud native at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want them to happen, the magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee. Production is running absolutely smooth and he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are just taking care of themselves. And the CIO doesn't exist, there's no CISO there at the beach. Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on theCUBE. Thank you for your time. Fantastic, thanks for having me. Okay, I'm John Furrier here for special program presentation, special programming, cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with platform nine. Thanks for watching.


This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters Here. And Meli Kalikimaka. And instead of today talking about this cannabis, this dear old beautiful plant that we have talked about for the last year and a half, the plant that's a 10,000 year that we know of anyway. Today we are going to talk about one of those things that an industry like cannabis needs to exist or to exist better. We have a new best friend, and you know I only talk to best friends, and this is Michael Sang. Hi. Pleasure. Nice to meet you. He is the CEO of Super Processor and for all of you that are working in the cannabis industry, this is the man you need to know. They are the first company to provide credit card processing for cannabis services in Hawaii. That is so necessary in a cash business. So tell us about Michael. I'm 5'10". Well, I'm short, so. I've been in payment processing for about 18 years, so the payment processing space has seen a lot of changes from 18 years ago when we were still phasing out of just imprinting credit cards and mailing them in for payment, which is pretty crazy when you think about it today because everything is so in the digital virtual cloud world. And I've been really passionate about solving problems in the payment processing world for years. And 10 years ago, the cannabis industry crossed paths with myself, and I had a regional sales person come to me and say, hey, these customers of ours out in Oakland, they want to meet you because they have a problem and they think that you can solve it because you're kind of out of the box kind of guy. And I said, sure, what do they do? I said, they're in the cannabis industry. I said, what's cannabis? So that was the pivotal moment that I said that marked the milestone of the point of no return because they showed me their dispensary out in Oakland. They said they have this problem that they see just 10 years ago. So now today, fast forward today, it's been a 10-year-old problem. So they said we have a problem that we see that's coming upon us that it's going to become all cash. And back 10 years ago, there was still gray area credit card processing. Dispensary is still getting credit cards, but without being shut down officially. And so then we spent time figuring it out. And it was quite a journey. We can talk about many different twists and turns. So you do all those things that make it happen that we just slide the card in and something happens, right? There's a lot that happens behind the scenes. Yes, so you're the CEO of the company that does all of that that we don't see. So when you swipe your credit card, it touches our servers. It touches the card association that work with Abuse and Masked Card Marketing Express. And then it goes to your bank that issues their credit card. And this is full circle that happens. And many companies are involved in that one split second transaction, right? And all these employees, so many people behind the scenes because of that one transaction. One transaction, yes. Now, so this is cannabis is a, because of the feds, this is a cash business. So can you explain to our audience what it is that the feds are objecting to that you can't use a credit card or a bank account or insurance or whatever? Well, first of all, cannabis is on a schedule one. Which is ridiculous, but okay. Which is ridiculous, absolutely. So, but it's there. You can't do anything about it at this point until it gets overturned. And the states have its own individual rules about whether what the position on cannabis is. There's always been a state versus federal. And the same goes with banking. The issue, the challenge that the banks and the credit units have had is that who ensures the banks? FDIC, which is federal. A federal. And then you have the NCUA, which is federal. And then so the touches upon this very sticky area of federal versus state of what's actually allowed. Then it's really to sum it up, it's really the financial institution that has to take the risk really to say, I'm going to get behind this. I know I might get a slap in the wrist or maybe more. But because the state level is allowing this. Me as a financial institution in that state. Should be able to should be okay. So it's not a very black and white message from the federal government on what will happen to the local financial. It is black and white. This will punish you if you do this. But there's not really an official action. Okay, because of the state's rights, it pains me to say that. But anyway, the state's right. So the state made it legal to have medical cannabis. So everything that's involved with that is within the guidelines of the state laws. So that the dispensaries can only service people that have the medical card. Right. And so they can only grow certain things that these people need. And all of these things that happen to make that industry move is within the state. So they don't cross state lines. They don't do. That's right. No cross-border. No. Because you'll be it'll be considered money laundering. And all this craziness. Yeah. No, no, that's really crazy. So then you come along and you say, well, we can assist you. We can build out a, what do you call it, a platform for them that is generic or indigenous to the state of Hawaii and the cannabis. So the solution we have is not just for Hawaii. It's actually for multiple states across the country. And we had to find a few components. We actually found the first component a few years back in Hawaii, which is a sponsor bank, a bank that's willing to clear the transactions for the cannabis industry. What we didn't know is that we had to own the switches, the data center, because when we went out to the processors that are in the market, they said, go find a bin sponsor and we'll let you then process using our technology. And we found out that that wasn't the case. We came back and said, look, here's our bin sponsor. Let us now help the industry. And they said, absolutely not. You can't use it. And we were like, why? They said because we were just not allowing you to do it. And that became the case for every processor we came across during that time. And we had lost that bin sponsor through years ago. And fast forward to today, we found another bin sponsor. And now we own that other piece with the technology. What do you mean, bin sponsor? So in order for a credit card transaction to be funded, it has to have a, almost like a clearing house where a bank has to, a bank or a financial institution has to clear those credit card transactions to fund it. So when you swipe your credit card, there is a bridge, so to speak, that is the processor and the financial institution that sponsors that transaction. Every day, they have to reconcile all the transactions and pay everyone. And it's a pretty crazy system when you think about it because of the amount of transactions that happen all day long. Because I use a debit card and I can pay for something here, walk over to the bank and it's gone. Yep, that's right. That's fast. You know, walk across the street and the money's gone. And it's only going to get faster because there's real time payments coming into the very near future that's already here where instant transfers are going to happen and payments even to merchants are going to happen faster and they'll have better cash flow because funds will be transferred right away instead of waiting. But going back to the BIN sponsor, the BIN sponsor is very important because it was very hard to come by. It took us many, many years to find someone that would entertain it and then sign it and then get behind it and then put the proper compliance behind it because now whoever is regulating that financial institution has to be able to say, okay, these guys can do it because we're comfortable with them handling it based on federal regulations. Right, and pass, perform. Exactly. Yeah, pass, perform. We came across that in 2008 when the market crashed. We actually formed a bank just to try to solve this problem and then the market crashed. And then we tried to buy a bank and we saw these really horrible balance sheets on banks and we couldn't find a good bank at the time to buy it. What could you create a home, not a bank, but savings and loan or something, credit union? We've explored and tried various models including an industrial bank. Many people don't know what an industrial bank is, but it has a sole purpose for a certain business. An industrial bank was the extent of what we thought could be close to being coming or checking and sponsoring the credit card transactions. But we realized at that point is that it was better for us to go and find the bank and convince them and help them get to that point with, because they just needed help. Most banks or credit unions that were willing to do this didn't have the infrastructure or the resources to handle the compliance, because it was so heavy, the amount of work that they had to do, they didn't have the staff to really comply. So they were afraid of that. Oh yeah, of course. Now, could you create a hometown bank or give it a different name, wouldn't call it a bank? Like credit unions are devoted to certain people only. So there was an effort in that, and it failed because they were focusing on a credit union that was all cannabis, and back in 2008 when we were forming what's called the Novel Bank, New Bank, we talked to all the regulators that we were immediately regulating the area that we were at, and we said, hey, which model would you support if we did an all-cannabis bank, we did a business bank that was friendly to cannabis or various versions of that, and they said it has to be diversified. It can't just be a cannabis bank, because it would... Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, just for risk reasons, for getting your bank charter, you're getting a federal charter. Right. So it's hard to say, I'm going to... Well, now that they have passed this hemp thing, farm bill, with hemp, you can come back and try again. Yes, yes, absolutely. It's quite an endeavor to start a new financial institution. It is, I'm sure. And we went down that route, and fortunately we're at a stage where we have the ingredients that we need to launch the solution to help the industry. But I think starting a financial institution again is probably out of our wheelhouse. No, the thought of that is just... I was just thinking what could be done because the amount of cash that is turned over every day in this industry, and I'm sure that people aren't feeling safe. There's definitely a lot of liabilities. My business partner in this endeavor, he co-founded the harborside, which is one of the largest dispensaries in the world. And he told me his very first payment that he had to pay to his local tax office, he had to carry $300,000 in cash in a backpack in California. Oh, California. So he'd go to his local tax office and say, I'm here to... He called ahead of time. And he says, I'm here to pay my taxes, and they hand counted that tax payment. Three people had to hand count it for them to receive the money. Now they have bill counters, but when they first started taking it, they didn't realize what was gonna happen. Well, yeah, I did read that the state of California had to hire more people. Oh, yes. Would we have... Do we have the state of Hawaii? Will they have to hire more people to handle this? Because dispensaries have been open a year now. I don't think the volume is there yet, because California is very different compared to Hawaii. And the volume has to pick up a lot more to make that more considerable of an issue. And there are some forms of electronic payments today, so it's not completely all cash. And that helps a little bit. And once we roll out our solution, a majority of it should be electronic payments because we can deposit into a dispensary or a cannabis related business as long as they have a checking account. So that would be any of the people that are selling products that are not the dispensary, but they're selling products. Yeah, it could be ancillary. They're open to you also? Yeah, we can not just do dispensaries, but we can handle ancillary products, any type of vertically integrated area which they're in, as long as they are compliant and they have their papers and everything else in order. We have a pretty rigorous underwriting process with the PIN sponsor that we have just because they already take checking accounts. They already provide service to the industry, the one that we have in California. So they're not new to the space, but the credit card processing is new as this next step they're taking to really help the industry. Okay, we need to take a break and we'll be back in 60 seconds. And then let's talk about where we go from here. Okay, great. Thank you. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. It's choose to treat it with the help of a physical therapist. Physical therapists treat pain through movement and exercise. No warning labels required and you get to actively participate in your care. Choose to improve your health without the risks of opioids. Choose physical therapy. I'm Jay Fidel of Think Tech. Come around every Tuesday at 2 p.m. with John, David, Anne and me. We're talking about history, history lens, right, John? Exactly, seeing current events through the lens of the past. Absolutely. See you next time. Okay, Jay, thanks. Aloha. I'm Marcia and we are back. This is Cannabis Chronicles, a 10,000-year odyssey. So we are right here today in this new world, digital world, in that 10,000-year process. And we are talking to my new best friend. And Michael has a company, he's the CEO of Super Processor. And they are on the cutting edge of the digital world and all of the cash that goes through the cannabis industry. Did I get that right? Yes, so it's one thing I wanted to add. I forgot to add this, but the division at Super Processor that handles the cannabis is called ViridiPay. And ViridiPay, Viridi, means green in Latin. That's how we created this division to handle solely cannabis. Wonderful. So yes, I didn't have that. ViridiPay? ViridiPay, V-I-R-I-V-I-P-A-Y. Viridi. ViridiPay. GreenPay. Okay. GreenPay. GreenPay. Wonderful. So does this take a lot of rooms and computers and all the kinds of... Sure. It needs a lot of servers and data centers. We use data centers that process transactions and it needs a lot of technology. Software is a huge component to our platform. It requires a high-velocity payment processing platform that can process many, many, many transactions at a time. Okay. Do we have the students in Hawaii that are learning to go to work for you that are training in those skills? Are we training people for that? We do. There are several initiatives that I'm aware of. There's something called Dev League that the founders of Dev League, it's a school that trains... It's a boot camp that trains anyone who's interested in becoming a programmer in 12 weeks. Pretty cool school and we would source from there. There's also the universities that we went to HPU a couple of weeks ago. We attended one of their competitions and fairs and blown away by the tech talent that existed there. I was like, wow, these students are just at a different age than when I was in school. Oh, yes. Unbelievable. And we came across someone who actually had a product that we were blown away by the way that he was thinking. And we have a professional services division and we have a CTO that is our programming genius and he was blown away by a student and that said a lot to me. I was like, wow, it's pretty impressive that he's blown away by the student there. So we have students now in high school and that are using all kind of technology. So do they move into this or do they learn these tech skills in high school or do they have to go to separate schools? They have to go to separate... Well, yes and no because there are a lot of really, really great programmers who don't go to school at all who just are self-taught. Really? I know two handfuls of really great programmers that never went to school for but just they learn it out of their own fascination and they just trial and error. Okay, what I want, and I say this all the time, I want this cannabis and the hemp, especially hemp industry as an industry, not just a dispensary but a whole industry so that our children can learn all of these engineers, architects, all of this so they can stay home. My sons all went off to college and they're still gone. So yes, I'm very selfish about wanting, that's why I'm asking you about these kids growing into this industry. Well, first of all, we're building out the operations, our call centers, our support centers on the west side of Hawaii in 2019 to keep the jobs in Hawaii. And that's something different because the opportunities are somewhat limited for someone who's a programmer or a development and we're going to have more opportunities for developers to keep them at home. We have a hard time like everyone else sourcing tech staff here and retaining them here because they do go off to other cities unfortunately. Yes. But I think we're one of the companies that are going to try to help with that and keep the jobs here because we have real initiatives to hire them because it's not just about coming up with solutions and jobs for them to service Hawaii but outside of Hawaii too because we have customers all over the country, it's not just in Hawaii. And by that opportunity it allows them to have more opportunities in their jobs and be able to hire more people in the tech space. Like I said, that's been my whole thing is that we need to take this and make it into something that our kids can grow into. Sure. Agreed. So where are you located? We're in Kapolei, on the west side, in Las Vegas. So we're in two areas, Las Vegas and Kapolei are two home bases. Vegas is booming, yeah. Yep, it's the 9th island. Yes, everybody's from Hawaii. The food, everything, yeah. Our data center is out in Las Vegas and we co-locate here on the west side. And then the call center is where you call in for customer service will be based on the west side here in Hawaii as well. Oh, I am really thrilled. The schools understand that this is where they can go. We actually are working with some high schools to help them with some of their entrepreneurial programs and like Campbell High School is a good example. Oh, they're close to you. They're very close, they're in Kapolei, they're close to Kapolei. And I've been sharing some time to help them with their students with some of their programs. So we're trying to think to the future because I think it starts at the root in the schools when the kids are young, to help them on a path to a career that they can stay at home or do something because they don't have to travel out. A lot of people think that they have to leave Hawaii for the opportunities. There are a lot of opportunities here that they can keep them here. Well, that's like I said, that's especially with the hemp industry which can grow into who knows what. Yeah, especially in Hawaii. Yeah. So you have even more transactions once they get going. Exactly. Or were they just descheduled? They were descheduled. My understanding is descheduled. Well, it's allowed to, you're allowed to do everything you wanted to do as a business person in hemp now. There's a restriction on how much you can build. I'm not that familiar with what the restriction is of how much. But it's not, we can process credit cards for it now if we wanted to because it's not, the CBD is also, there's also places that the CBD at certain levels. We would also process for CBD transactions. Now with CBD, can you open a account at the bank? Yes and no. So the problem with, even though if you have a legal CBD business with the federal legal limits and you open an online store and sell CBD, a lot of banks because they lack of education, they just cluster CBD with all cannabis. You know, they flag your account for CBD. They say, hey, this is a cannabis business. We have to shut it down. So the CBD industry has had a lot of the same pains that the cannabis industry has had with banking, unfortunately. And that's true for a lot of the banking solutions for larger banks. For all the banks a little more, I think easier because you can have a conversation with the risk person directly. Or the risk person. Because there's a risk person that they have these complaints from. I haven't thought about the banks having a risk person. So they have to make an assessment of what's a lot and not because then they have to answer to their regulators, their bank regulator, otherwise they'll lose their charter. Oh my, yeah. So what do you, how do you educate the bank? Or like you said, at least with the small banks, you can get to meet people. We used to do that ourselves. It was more about compliance. So the banks didn't have a compliance program for cannabis or cannabis related businesses because they just never thought about it. They weren't allowed to do it. And because of anything new, there isn't a precedent of how to handle it. And then there's a question of money. Yes. Who's going to pay for it? Who's going to pay for the new policies that the banks need to handle those accounts? And what we did was early on we helped share information. We were freely sharing information all the time with anyone who needed it behind the scenes because we were just interested in making sure that financial institutions and dispensaries would keep their bank accounts and we would say, hey, look at this court case. Here's some anti-money laundering policies that you might be able to use and use that as a foundation. And we would help that. But today what's great about today is there are several companies that specialize in these programs for financial institutions to help them so that they don't have to create and invest heavily in that division. Well, I would think the way things are moving, especially with the states that are legalizing for recreation, that at some point the bank has to come on board. Yes. Well, there are over 400 financial institutions around the country who do service cannabis related businesses. You just can't Google it and find out who does it. You have to be in a know and be introduced and then there's an underwriting process. I've seen on television that, not television, on the internet people selling shares in holding companies and different things like that. What is a holding company? Holding company is a company that holds the interest, the rights of... It's the way I've seen it. The holding company can be used for many reasons, but the way that I've seen it for the cannabis industry is for the purpose of protection because if you have a holding company you might own the rights of a dispensary and then it might hold the rights for the vertically integrated part of it where they cultivate the product. And they don't want to keep the rights at the touching flower level because if something happened then they can preserve the assets of the company. What about shielding for protection on if something happens? So could the holding company have a legitimate banking account? Sure. So what a lot of companies have done in order to have banking accounts they've created a holding company where that company doesn't touch the flower at all. Right. And it just becomes a management company to manage the finance of that company and the bank's okay with that as long as it's not touching the flower. Oh. Yeah. It's a little complicated. It's not the best way to do it because that has to be done the way it's done today because it's following the rules. Yeah. Well locally now how much is an annual income from all of the dispensaries? Do you know? I don't know that number. You have a sense of how much? It's not a public number so I don't have a real number on that so I can't give that to you. Yeah. I can probably query. No, no, no. I just wondered you know at what level does it make sense? I don't need to know their exact numbers. To make sense for what? That the bank has to say look at all of this money here, tax money, everything. We ought to have a part of that. At what point does the bank say? It's unfortunately the cannabis industry as a whole is too small compared to many other industries. So if you look at the total billions of dollars that the cannabis industry generates on revenue, there are companies that just generate billions alone. So when you compare the risk, the risk rewards is very hard for banks to make that decision based on money because they rather just deal with it and say that if something happens we stand to lose many, many billions as opposed to this. What could happen? They can lose their charter. No, I meant what could happen? You mean with the dispensary or something? Oh, you're talking about the banks, right? I was talking about the banks. Yeah. You know why they would not want to handle the business. All the local banks that, as far as I'm aware, all the local banks have taken a position to not bank cannabis because it's something called reputational risk. That's very real for them because they have that, every bank has a list of things that are risk, something risk. Reputational risk is one of those top categories and this falls along the lines of reputational risk and then the regulators have to, they play a major part in that also and right now it's not an environment where they're looking to do that yet. Hopefully they will. Okay, now, what I would like for you to do is to look right over here in this camera and tell our audience that may want to have an account with you because we have a lot of people that sell CBD and other things. So tell them how they can reach you. Sure. Right over here. If you're looking for a merchant processing account, we're launching them in 2019. You can email me at Michael at superprocessor.com. That's M-I-C-H-A-E-L at superprocessor.com. Can you spell that? Super-S-U-P-E-R-P-R-O-C-E-S-S-O-R.com. Good. Thank you. Well, thank you and you will come back. Yes, if you have me back, I will come back. Thank you so much. And Meli Kalikimaka. Aloha. We'll see you next time. Aloha.