Welcome back to the Cyber Underground. I'm Dave the Cyber Guy. I must go over who I am again. I'm Dave Stevens. I teach IT and cybersecurity at the University of Hawaii Capulani Community College. And I'm here with the president of the Hawaii Advanced Technology Society that's our cybersecurity club for all the UH campuses. And Max here, Max Rietta, welcome. You're the president of the KCC chapter of CAPCC, Capulani Community College, right? Yes. Welcome. It's good to have you. You're only a second year and you're our second president of this chapter. Yes, apparently. Yeah, we've only, we just started this a couple of years ago. And I wanted to talk to you today about, about your experience, you know, what caught you into it, where you think you're going, what you're getting out of it. We just got to emphasize that there are more ways to get into cybersecurity than going to YouTube and these other hacker sites and trying to figure out how to hack computers and doing it illegally and joining things like Anonymous and doing hacktivism. You can do it legally. You can do it safely. You can get your education in a formalized way. You can do clubs. And that's what we're here to talk to you about. So tell us a little about you. First of all, how did you get to the islands? Or are you from here? I'm not from here. I'm actually from California, but I moved here in around third grade. So I technically am. That's pretty from here. I mean, before third grade, we're not too much to count before that, right? This is true. Where are you from this island? Oahu? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Good. And the high school, folks who want to know what high school, right? Are you grad? Kaiser. Okay. Good. One of my daughters graduated Kaiser. Okay. That's good. So Capulani is right down the street. Yes. Right. So that's good. And is that why you chose Capulani? Because it was just the best regional match for your location. It was right there. It was cheap and it was there. You had a lot of choices, though. We do cybersecurity at three of the four community colleges out here, right? We just started at Windward, too. So four community colleges on Oahu plus two four-year universities, and you chose Capulani. And when you're done, will you be going on for a bachelor's degree? Yes. West Oahu. West Oahu. Will you be doing that then? They have two routes, right? They have the IT and then they have the information security and assurance. So which path? I believe it'd be the IT. IT. Yeah. But you're doing cyber while you're at CapCC? Yes. Okay. Let's talk about your journey. So you grew up here, basically. And somewhere along the line, you decided information technology? Yeah, I was actually going to be a pilot. And then I realized I didn't want to do that. Okay, so I had the similar journey. So mine was motion sickness. Okay. I decided I'm really sick in the air. This isn't going to work for me. Yeah. So what about you?  I was thinking about it and I was talking to other pilots and they said they had to go through a long process of just flying cargo and other things. And I didn't really want to be like a bus driver in the plane and like in the air.  You get a lot of flight hours. Yeah. Unless you go in the military. Yeah. Right. A lot of my friends. Even then you could fly a cargo plane. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. But at least with the military, the cargo planes can be massive. Yeah. So those things, they carry tanks. I can imagine that get kind of fun. Yeah. But you know, if that's not your gig. So, so many other things to choose from. Why IT? Why did that bubble up to the surface? It was, I wanted to do piloting because of the mobility I could travel. But IT, you could do that too. Sure. Everybody needs it. Yeah. So you can work from your computer. As long as you have a computer, you could work. So I could travel and work. So that's why I felt IT was a good choice. The roaming thing. Okay. Good. And more and more people are hiring for remote positions. Most especially in cyber security, right? So you can do remote vulnerability assessment and things like that. Is that what got you towards cyber? Because once you get into information technology, there's so many paths. There's databases, web. There's programming for desktop and mobile. What took you to security? Security has everything within it. So I feel it would give me more options to choose from. If I didn't like networking, I could learn coding, but I could still be in security. So that's why I chose security. That's a good point. A lot of people don't understand when you get into cyber security, you are the pocket knife of the IT industry, right? You have to be jack of all trades. Yes. Master of none, but just good enough to know that element. And it helps in two different ways, right? It helps when you're doing the attacking and testing the boundaries of a company, hopefully legally. And it also helps in defense, right? Because you know how to defend because you know there's an avenue, a vector of attack. So you can prevent it. Yes. Right? So that's great. You're in your first year. You just completed your first year. Yes. How to go. What were your feelings in the program so far? You've taken basic networking, probably basic programming. Yes. And you did cyber security fundamentals, right?  Not yet. Not yet. You still got to take that. Yes. It's a fun one. All the first year stuff is pretty fun. What did you think about it so far? I loved it. I didn't realize there were certifications that you could get to become an ethical hacker. I never knew there is ethical hacking. It's a little bit of oxymoron to most people. Yeah, it doesn't match. You kind of do the, what are the, scooby? Yeah. Yeah. It's ethical. How does that work? But you know, that's just a signed piece of paper. That's the only difference, right? You're still hacking, but someone says it's okay. Yeah. That's and we're going to do some of that pretty soon here, right? Yeah, we got one coming up. So our audience should know about once a year, sometimes hopefully more. We get companies to volunteer. Thank you for volunteering companies. We really appreciate you volunteering. We know how hard this is for you to trust us. So we go and we test the boundaries of companies. We do vulnerability assessments, internal scans. We do penetration testing. And we're going to try to do one this year coming up in October for our next victim customer. Sorry. The next customer is going to say, thank you so much. And we teach all kinds of weird stuff. You're going to be in our next year's classes now, network security, and the cyber attacks and defense, basically the ethical hacking. Yeah, right.  We teach everything, including lock picking, which is a great one, right? So you wanted to do that as a club event. Yes, right? So let's talk about the club, right?  And that's the formalized training, right? We also hook you up with internships, which we'll talk about in a second. But during that experience, we also give you the chance to do club activities, which is outside of class. Tell me a little bit about your experience, how you got into it? And why you chose to lead the club? Because you're the president now? Yes. Well, I got into the club because I realized people are a very good resource. And if I was having problems, not understanding how to do security, it's looking it up is going to help me. But if I had like a resource of an actual person, it would that connection actually helps me learn a lot more. And I feel that for everyone else. So we actually did a pen test in last year in March, over break, and it was an event that I learned so much in. And the club members also agree with me. We did it was with UH Manoa's gray hats. So we we did a mock pen test, we went through the entire process, even doing the write up at the end. Well, let's let's go through the steps in that process. Yeah, five or six steps. Go ahead and outline the process that you went through. That's the formalized part of that pen test. Okay, so first, there is the scanning reconnaissance reconnaissance. Yeah. So we would do the recon figure out or we would first do the scope and figure out what the what they're asking us to do. Now, that's important. Yes, right, because if you do something that they didn't say was okay, you're out of scope, you went out of the bounds and you could be in trouble, right? Because they didn't actually sign the paper saying you could do that. Yeah. So the first thing you had to determine with the customers. Can we do? Yes. And also, you can, you would do more than like more work than you're getting paid for true. So I was like, Oh, okay, like that's good point. Yeah, they really hammered that in like, you know, the scope of the project. So after doing that, doing the recon, going into the machines, it's all fun from there. But the documentation after was what got me. But I feel like that's something that's very important. That needs to be taught. Because I think not many people realize that's your mission. Yeah, that paperwork that's so boring. To come up with, I get it. You know, it's not the fun part really. But that's your mission. That's the product you're supposed to deliver. So taking copious notes as you go through all these steps, massively important. So you did you did recon, of course, you did open source intelligence, right? You went out there and scanned websites or looked at social media. You looked at the company's websites, probably, right? And then once you determined all those elements that you can you can use in things like phishing emails and things like that, then you can do some scanning. Oh, were you allowed to do internal scans or external scans on this network? I believe we did both. I'm, it was my first time actually doing a pen test. So it was a little hazy. But I remember having like internal knowledge of the computers. So So did the customers give you a little bit of information about the the network itself before you started out? Yes. Okay, so that's, that's what we'd call either gray box or a white box. Okay, yeah. Right. So a white box, let's let's go through the different boxes, right? We have white box, the customer tells you everything. And you just go test. Then there's a gray box where they tell you a little bit. They want to know if you can find out more, right? That sounds like what you went through. Yes. And then of course, the hardest, which was the first pen test we ever did with the club is a black box. And it took us months. And we really didn't get very far.  But we had to do a tremendous amount of research. So if you sign up for a black box test, it is the toughest know what you're getting. Ever, right?  And you you ask for six or nine months to recon and people really have to be liberal with that. And customers, when you're talking about the scope, we've done pen tests where they say no, just email us. And that's it. Just do the phishing emails. And then other customers have said you get it's weapons free. And we actually broke in to some of the places and use lockpicking and other other methods to get in. So after the scanning, did wait, did you use just like nmap? Or did you use Nessus or one of the other tools for scanning? Yeah, we used nmap, a lot of nmap. So that's a lot of high hand coding. A lot of bash scripting. That's good. That's great experience. And so well, yeah, you did this with UH Manoa. Yes. So UH Manoa, our viewers should know out of the 10 campuses in the University of Hawaii system, UH Manoa is the mother ship, first campus, and then some of the other community colleges sprouted up. And then we got a couple of other four years, including UH West, also on this island, but on the other end of the island, right? So you did that for the the original campus, which has a club called the Grey Hats. Yes, right. Okay, that's great. I'm glad you guys are working together. Tell me a little bit more about this experience. Well, I want to do that more with our club this year. Yeah, because it was so beneficial for everyone. I was, I didn't know much going into it. But after coming out, it was a three day kind of bootcamp experience. So I really enjoyed that. It's good that you know this too, because now when new members come in, they're going to be, you know, first years, they're freshmen, you can mentor them. Yes. And I find that when I mentor somebody, when I teach something, actually learn more. Yes. I absorb more of the of the material by teaching other people. So this is a great experience. You're not only getting the formalized education, you're going through the homeworks and the labs and all the other things we do. But now you're mentoring others, which helps you absorb that knowledge to get better at it, gets more practice. And one of the things that I love to tell people was the club is one of those activities you can add to your resume when you're out there trying to get a real job because they ask you three questions.  What are your certifications? What have you done? What's your experience, right? And most of the time you get out of like a two year degree, really haven't done much.   You can actually say, Hey, I've done four pen tests already.  So it adds to that entire experience. You know, and if you go on to UH West, you're going to find Dr. Matt Chapman, who is in charge of that program out there. He's a tremendous asset to your career. He's going to boost you and put you into more more activities that give you the real life hands on experience. So you can translate that into a real career. You're looking forward to that. Yes, I am highly. Okay, what we got about one minute to break. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about your club experience, and then we're going to take a little break. So last year in the club, we also did a networking event. And that was very fun. Other than meeting people within the industry that could give us advice and tips on how to do things or like what route to take, what certifications to get. I think it was very helpful. And the under we also did NCL and National Cyber League. Yes. So those are the virtualized labs that you can do individually or as teams, right? And that happens a couple of times a year. Yes. And it's nationwide. How did you do? I did all right for my first time. I was getting pulled along by my other team members, but it was very fun. And I'm going to plan to do it again this year. It's quite an expensive, right? It was 25 bucks. I think this last time. Oh, yeah, it's it's quite reasonable to get into this competition. And most people don't because they have this fear of failure. And I encourage everyone to just go in and fail. Yeah, just so you can see the environment. I'm glad you enjoy it. I'd like you to keep it up. We'll try to coach you more as you get through our classes as much as we can.  What's your membership right now? What's your roster? What are your numbers at? I believe we have 14 members. 14 members. Yes. We're gonna have a great pen test. Yes. Okay, we're gonna take a little break. Come right back out of the commercial. Let's pay some bills until then. Stay safe. I'm Jay Fidel of Think Tech.  And we have a history professor. It was wonderful to have him, John David and HPU. And we do this thing, a history lens. We see the world through history. Very important, critical to understand our world around us. We do this on Tuesdays at 2 p.m. whenever we can get him. Right. What would you add to that, Jay? Just tune in, folks, because we're talking about incredibly important issues. And we're projecting backwards into history, looking through the lens of history to add to our knowledge about these very important current issues, like white supremacy, trade and tariffs, impeachment, all of these important issues that we've been addressing on this show. Yeah, it runs all the way from terrifying tariffs to historical history. John David. That's it. Thanks a lot, Joe. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech, Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech, Hawaii. Welcome back. Thanks for staying with us. I'm Dave, the cyber guy. We're talking with Max Rietta, president of the Kapiolani Community College chapter, the Hawaii Advanced Technology Society. I can't say that fast. It's not going to happen. So it's hats, caps, you see. Welcome back, Max. We were just talking about where you're from in California. You're from here, but, you know, way, way back, your family was from Pasadena, right? Yeah. So I was, I was from just north of there. We were talking about the horrible traffic in LA, which we can almost get a taste of here in Honolulu couple times a day, right? Can I get that experience at West Oahu soon? Oh, that's right. So our audience who's not from the island should know. UH Manoa is in the Honolulu area, and then that, that's the east part of the island and the west side of the island has just become heavily developed over the last 20 years. They call the second city or Kapolei. And just shy of Kapolei is UH West Oahu, another four year campus. But there is only one road that goes between here and there. It is a massive freeway. How many lanes across is it? I'm not sure. It's got to be 10 or 12 lanes, right, all the way with both ways. And it locks up tight, like a parking lot. Yeah. And then you get, it's a horrible commute, man. I don't envy you. Do you get to drive? You have to take the bus. I will be getting a car. I actually had a motorcycle that broke down. Oh, but I realized with these new responsibilities of being a club president, I need to be able to get places consistently. Good for you. Yes. Wait, how old are you? 22. And you're responsible. I know. That is just amazing. You're kicking the millennials to the curb, man. That's great. All my daughters are millennials. Listen up, girls. My daughters. Listen up. This is a responsible person. You see this person's doing things the right way.  Let's talk about your journey now, what you expect and what you really want to accomplish. So your next year, you're going to be president of the club. We're going to try to do a pen test. We want to do more club activities. So we just did a club activity just before the summer started with the US Army military intelligence. The PowerShell Empire. That's a tool in Kali Linux. Or did it come with it? Or do we have to download it? I can't remember. I think we downloaded it. We installed it. Yeah, we installed it. So let's subscribe what you had to get ready for. So have you installed your virtual machine of Kali Linux distro yet? Yes, I have. Good. That was one of the first things we had to do last year for the club. And I believe it would be a good thing to do this year as well. Describe the Kali Linux distro and why we use it. It's customized for pen testing. It has all the applications we use. And so you don't have to download them onto your other computers. There's four hundred something tools are already in there. Yeah. And we still download more. Yeah. And we still download. There's more stuff out there. Yeah. And Kali Linux is a Linux distro or distribution of flavor of Linux based on deviant for our viewers out there. We're going to inform them. It's not windows. What you'll see coming up in your new courses here, the labs that we do are mainly use your Kali Linux virtual machine, which can be on a Mac or a Windows machine, right? And then we use something like the metasploitable download ISO, which is just the wide open stuff full of vulnerabilities. Linux distro, probably Ubuntu or something like that. And I will teach you guys how to hack that and find out how to realize that it's been hacked. We'll look for the clues, which is the two levels you want to know. You want to know how to actually break in, but you want to know if you're defending that system, how do you know it's been broken into? Yes. Right. So that's a massively important thing. But we do that on your machine. So you can repeat these labs. And the great thing is once you get those two things installed and they're communicating, you can isolate them from the rest of your network so you don't kill anybody else, right? And you can repeat experiments that you've seen done on the web.  Have you seen vulnhub.com? I have not. Okay, we're going to go to VulnHub. A lot of fun. Okay. So people say, Hey, look at I broke and they step by step instructions. Oh, this is how you do it. And for the majority of the time it works. But as you know, people put up instructions and then the system gets changed. So sometimes it doesn't work. You got to figure it out. Yes, right? That's the thing that I think most people in it don't understand that if you haven't set up instructions, it's good for the 35 seconds until the next edition comes out. And then they'll leave the instructions up and they just don't work. Yeah, it's up to you to figure them out. That's why I teach people are so valuable. Yes, because there's no instructions problem solving, right?  So I am a superstar problem solver. I am not a superstar star problem avoider, which is probably why I'm so good at problem solving is because I make those bad decisions or I have in my life. It's better if you learn from me. Don't make all those mistakes. Just do it right the first time. Learn from your elders. I did not. It looks like you're going down the right path. This next two years you get to learn and I'll share some stories with you about what to watch out for and how to keep yourself on the straight and narrow. And then you got to choose where to go with us. Now, do you know within the cyber security realm? What do you might want to do? I would rather be on the defensive side defense. So blue team. Yes, right? Okay. What part of defense? Now you don't want to be the guy that scans logs all day long or you want to be the firewall configuration guy or you're going to be defending the office 365 cloud version or? I'm not sure. I want to own my own company. So if anything, I would be managing people doing that. That's great. But yeah, right? Entrepreneurial spirit. That's I encourage that, especially in the security field. It seems that if you if you go to work for a company, you do make a good paycheck. You will. And there's always a need for you. So you'll never be out of work. The problem is you're really not in control of your career. Right? Yeah. But if you open your own company, especially in cybersecurity where the unemployment rate is 0%, right? There's always work for you. So as long as you're good with finance and you get the right CPA to handle your accounting and you know how to do a business license, you can be okay. And it's a good life. Just get used to saving money. Yeah, because you make money and then you make no money. Yeah. Well, it's kind of like acting.   This is true. Yeah, most of my friends when we were growing up living outside of Hollywood, you know, a lot of actors, right? Yeah. A lot of my buddies would would would work for six months doing gaffing or you know, sound on a movie set.  They went surfing in Bali or, you know, toured Europe. My dad was a stuntman for in California. Really? Yeah. You've got that look to you. You do. You got that swagger. So bring that to the game. It means a lot. You know, the self confidence goes with security. You're going to do well. Oh, thank you. So your journey now is the next two semesters with us at least. What then? What then? I would be getting an internship and pursuing my degree at West Oahu. So our internship, we do one at West Oahu and you'll do another one, I believe, at West Oahu, right? We do one at, sorry, Capsic and then West Oahu. So Capsic is the one you haven't done yet? No, I'm preparing. Okay. Did you sign up for the class? Because it's a class. Yeah, I signed up for it. Okay. I talked to the teacher already and I was asking if he could help me get one. He's like, no, I have a lot of kids to help. So I was like, okay, well, I'll try to get mine right now then and figure that out during the fall. After the show, I've got someone for you to call. So you can have a job right now. That's really not a problem at all. Like I said, it's zero percent unemployment. So I have employers calling me all the time. Hey, we need somebody right this second.  Don't embarrass me. Okay. The internship teacher, you'll be happy to know Dale Nakasani. He's going to be our guest in a couple of weeks. Okay. Yeah. So next week, you're the president of hats Capsic and Cappy Elani, Rochelle Monslungan was the previous president and is now president of UH West. Yes. Right. And she's graduating, but she's going to host the show next week while I'm at Black Hat, which we missed you. You need to go out to Black Hat and Def Con. Yes. Something you should should make that pilgrimage once a year. Yes, I would like to see that. It's it's a little pricey, but you get student rates and hopefully this marathon with thing we're doing, we're going to get you some some money for next year. Yeah, let's hope that that happens. Okay. So with our last minute, tell us about your expectations and your journey after you graduate UH West. So after I graduate, I would like to work a little bit, save gain experience, professional experience and then work and start to develop my own company and more of security for homes, because I know homes are becoming smarter with the internet of things and all that. Smart homes are built without security in mind. Yes. Yeah. If I fit that niche, then that would be good. That's a good plan. I like that. The Underwriters Laboratory, UL, who comes out with some of the standards for electronic devices, is coming out with a whole security standard, because things like webcams, nannycams, automatic door locks, garage door openers built with so little security that they're going to put the security standard in there. So maybe that could be your specialty. Yes. I hope, I hope because that's a perfect niche that is yet unfilled, especially in Hawaii, you could be the pioneer, be right out there in the vanguard of the assault. All right. Thank you very much, Max. Thank you for having me. All right. I know I want you to host another show coming up in a couple of months, right? You said you were comfortable with the October slot. Okay. So, ladies and gentlemen, be prepared for Max to come back around October and do a show all by himself and he's going to get some experience hosting the Cyber Underground, which is another one of our tools to get the students up to speed. Okay. Thanks for coming by everybody and thanks for listening to us. And next week, I will be in Black Hat Def Con in Las Vegas, Rachel Monsalungan, our former hats, CAPCC and current UH West Oahu president of the Hat Society will be hosting a show with Todd Nakapoy, our state CIO. That's going to be an interesting show and then I'll be back the following week on the 17th. Until then, everybody, stay safe.


Hi, friends! A lot of students, I'm doubt related to the question that when can they appear for UGC Net? Some students are wondering if they can appear for UGC Net in the final year of post-graduation and some people are wondering if they can do it in the first year of their masters. The answer to both these questions is yes, a big yes. However, there are two conditions. Firstly, you can appear for Net at any age, at the age of 15 also and even at the age of 98.  Secondly, the minimum marks required in the post-graduation is 55% without rounding off if you want your Net certificate to be valid. This percentage rate is for general category of students for ST, SCP, WD. A slightly relaxed lane that is 50% is applicable. Hope this video was helpful. I am going to see you again in the next video.


Good morning. This is the morning meeting of the House Appropriations Committee on April 27th. And we are appreciate representatives of the Vermont Housing Conservation Board for coming in and helping us to understand the governor's proposal as it relates to housing and the creation of more housing and without any further ado, let me turn this over to Mr. Selig. I assume you will kick us off, Gus. We try to get formal when we have guests in here. And so forgive me if I lapse occasionally, but Mr. Selig, thank you. And Ms. Holler, thank you for joining us. Okay, Madam Chair for the record, Gus Selig director for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. And I think we're here primarily to talk about of governor's proposal to use ARPA funds to meet the state's housing needs. And I will get into that in a moment in terms of his $249 million request, which I think also came with a request to appropriate at least something over $100 million in this year's budget and talk about what the other body has done. Before I get into that, I guess I just wanna first say a thank you to the committee because as you began the session, the governor had recommended a one time of $20 million and you decided to double down on that and increase the funding by to $40 million in one time funding. The appearance of ARPA changes the calculation somewhat. I understand that the other body has actually taken your recommendation and increased it by about another $10 million, but they have not appropriated ARPA funding to any significant degree beyond the VHIP program in the budget that they voted out of committee yesterday. Let me back into the need issue. And I think Representative Fagan's remarks before you went live just speak to the tremendous need. And so although we have moved lots of people out of motels with the work that you, the monies you provided us through CRF last year, the problems that the state is seeing in terms of its housing needs continue to strain our system dramatically. And while it is certainly better for people to be in motels than it is to be in the woods in the midst of a pandemic or doubled and tripled up with neighbors, it causes its own problems. So there's as of a couple of weeks ago, my understanding is there were 2,700 Vermonters about 1,900 families still in the motels. The depth of the problem we're facing and I think the reason the governor is proposing what I've called a moonshot on housing is that people with section eight vouchers are not able to find housing, which speaks to a supply problem all over the state. And I think as we testified at the beginning of the session, there was lots of information, data, anecdotal and both borne out in the transfer tax revenue of folks from out of state seeing Vermont as a great place, safe place to be and buying properties up. And we have a really hot real estate market today that is driving the costs of housing up. My friends at the Housing Finance Agency report that the average single family home in Vermont last year, new home, newly constructed home was a $450,000 proposition. There was an article in The New Yorker a few weeks ago about out of state investment groups, not just in Vermont, but all over the country looking for real estate investments, particularly in mobile home parks. We're seeing that play out with the proposed sale of several parks right now. And there is reason to think also that out of state investors are looking for rental investments as well, where they can jack rents up. So those are the factors that are driving our problems today. On a personal level, I was just thinking about when I got out of college in the mid-70s and I rented an old farmhouse in North Calus with a pall of mine for 150 bucks a month. I'm sure that that house, if on the market as a rental today would be 17 or 1800 a month and the entry level salaries since that time have not gone up by 10 times when you're leaving college and getting your first job. It just speaks to a great imbalance between what Vermonters earned and what it costs to rent housing, to buy housing and what it costs to build housing. And we have seen great increases in construction costs over the last year. Some of that is related to the pandemic in terms of supply chain interruptions, but the price of plywood apparently went up greatly after the power outages in Texas where lots of plywood gets put together. So the problems are getting worse. And I would say that what you did last year with CR with your fast track bill signaled to everybody that you were ready and serious to take aim at the housing issue and that resulted in lots of applications. Similarly with 315 this year, you provided $10 million. We asked for letters of intent to apply for that money to do fast track housing. And within two weeks we had applications or letters of intent to apply that total $27 and a half million with a variety of different kinds of projects to relieve the pressures on motels and the GA program. So we think that there is more, if we put out a second letter, we're sure that that would double. To talk about what the needs are or what the program would be around increased appropriations, the biggest need in the state is rental housing and more multifamily rental housing. Obviously there is a significant and that will be part of the solution to the problem of homelessness and the problems in the motels. I would say that it is important as you consider the governor's recommendation that what he put together was a proposal for adding shelter capacity, fast track housing to relieve homelessness and more integrated housing. And I think the problems representative Fagan was talking about before you went live speaks to that the best practice is absolutely to integrate people into the communities not to isolate them and to create mixed income housing with a multitude of folks. That's what we did with a housing revenue bond. But obviously homeless relief anything we can do quickly should be a priority. I've spoken in the past about mobile home parks and that need that is being driven in part by out of state investments but I've also talked about the need to invest as in a project like Tri Park and there are many others around the state where the infrastructure is worn out and without help people are really gonna struggle. The two parks on the market right now if there's no public intervention the rents would go to $530 a month to rent your lot before you get to your housing costs. We had a report issued about a week ago on the need for farm worker housing that two other committees in the house have taken testimony on. There's a big need there. There is home ownership that needs to be a part of a focus and is part of the governor's proposal and what I'd say to you is that today nobody is building in Vermont on any scale entry level starter housing unless you're building your own home. Nobody's building a 1200 square foot cape or ranch. It's not, it costs too much to build. It's not profitable and we need some incentives and this is part of the governor's proposal to do that. The VHIP program has been a great success. There is money that the Senate approved to continue that program through ARPA. We've had discussions with the committee and the other body about innovative ideas like accessory dwelling units. We did some of that with technical assistance with the revenue bond. That's something that could be done across the state. And then finally, I just don't wanna forget it. There's a need for recovery residences across the state to deal with the opioid problem. Since it became clear that you were providing more resources and since President Biden announced his jobs and infrastructure package, we are getting lots and lots of requests for our feasibility grant program. This is a small grants that help developers explore a can of project really take place. So we usually spend $150,000 a year at max on a program like that. In the last two and a half months, we've had 10 requests that would exhaust that fund. So people, once you signal that there's an opportunity, people are going to develop it. I know that I don't think I'll be repeat myself, but in terms of the opportunities, what we wanna do is not just look at the issue of shovel readiness, but shovel worthiness. In 315, I think it was, you asked for a working group, that working group that would include, that would be led by DCF and the Department of Housing and Include Us and VHFA, that group's been meeting about weekly to talk about how to integrate capital dollars with service dollars with rental assistance and is beginning to form the outlines of a plan to help do that. We don't have all the answers yet, but I think it speaks to what the governor's goals are with his proposal. To give you a few examples around the state, this was not in my consciousness when I talked to you early in the session, but Chair Stevens let me know that Stanley Hall and on the Waterbury campus has been taken down, and he says, Waterbury thinks that would be a great place for housing. Two weeks ago, the director of Washington County Mental Health called me about a building she owns, her organization owns in Montpelier that could be converted to housing. The folks at Christ Church in Montpelier with the failure of the garage project are ready to use their land and an end in addition to the church to provide 25 units of housing. There are four or five projects in the Brattleboro, Wyndham County area that have been in some stage of discussion to take place over five years that would provide close to 100 units of housing that could be done much more rapidly. I saw in the newspapers, and I don't speak with any knowledge about availability, that the city of Rutland made a deal to buy a facility for recreation on the St. Joseph's campus. I don't know if there are other buildings on that campus that could be converted to housing, but we would wanna look at that. We looked at a building up the road a few years ago across from the Marble Museum that I think is still vacant, and I think there are gonna be opportunities across the state to convert what had been used as office space into other sorts of facilities. One of the fast track projects we got was a project like that in St. Johnsbury that can provide 10 units of housing that had been more of an office location before. So across the state, I think there are opportunities. We did, after meeting with the committee, talk with the chancellor and her CFO, they asked us not to visit the state colleges until the students left for COVID reasons. So shortly after May 17th, we are gonna look at buildings at Johnson and Lyndon and at VTC as you had suggested. We know that there's a big hole on the ground in Newport. We know that there's a neighborhood in Windsor called Jarvis Street that the community very much wants to revitalize. There's also an opportunity, I think, in downtown Windsor. So what I would say to you about the governor's proposal is if you move it forward, it will signal to the development community that the state is serious and gonna go on a multi-year effort to fix the imbalance that we've all had in the housing market. And again, as I said earlier, I'm sure that if we send out a second request for letters of interest as we did about the wrap of the $10 million you made available in 315, that the need would more than double or the request for that funding would more than double. So I think with that, I'd be the governor's proposal is in five different buckets. The, I think it's imaginative, creative, it's powerful. Obviously, it's sort of the sort of moment for somebody like me has been waiting my entire career for this kind of an opportunity to really do more than make incremental progress on this issue, to really change the balance and have a much more balanced and equitable housing market and be able to meet more people's needs. The one thing that I would just say as you consider that is that it would be good, again, to create the best practices to create housing for a range of people and not to isolate people who have had great financial and other difficulties in their lives all into one single locations. And we've done that successfully. Usually there's an executive order that requires that 15% of the publicly funded housing in the state be provided to Vermonters who've experienced homelessness. Most of the providers we work with have provided more than 20% of their housing to families that experience homelessness, but it is in a mixed income setting. So with that, I'm happy to answer questions rather than to go on at length, but I do want to just convey my enthusiasm and support for what the governor's put forward. We had a feedback session with a number of stakeholders yesterday. I think there were more than 70 people on the call. There is great interest and great enthusiasm. This was done by the working group and people would like to know just how to get started. There were a lot of questions like, how are you gonna really do this? How are you gonna pull it off? And I guess I would just going back to the notion of a moonshot, there's enough people on this call that are near my age that when Jack Kennedy said we're gonna go to the moon, he didn't know how we were gonna get there. I can't give you all the details. I can't promise you that we'll get exactly to 5,000 units today, but I think that the times call for and COVID has shown the need for a dramatic response to the state's housing needs. And you can look at that from the perspective of the problems that you were talking about in the Rutland Motels or you can look at it from the perspective of employers who are looking for more opportunities for their workforce, given where our wages are to be able to afford quality housing in the state or as part of the state's, meeting the state's demographic challenges. So I'll stop there and take your questions. Thank you very much, Mr. C. like for laying it out so eloquently for us to understand what's being proposed. We have a couple of questions. Representative Helm, Bob. Oh, he's looks like he's still having Bob. Yeah, I thought my telephone company was making headway. They spent all day Friday and it's as bad now as it was when I started. I'm gonna just unplug here. It's awful. Bob, I feel for you. I'm actually at a neighbor's house because consolidated is not delivering internet to my house and hasn't, they promised a call back in 24 hours and it's been two days. I have no idea when they're even planning to show up. That's the same company I'm working with. Anyways, so I just wanted to say you were giving a list of possible purchases or development projects that you might look into in the future. I just came from a meeting where there was a group that thought, yeah, I'll look at buying the quality in and roll. But I won't go any further than that. That's it, man. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Bob. Representative Yacoboni. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Selig. Always good to see you. I'm trying to, what's behind my questioning is total capacity needed and total resources necessary to meet that capacity. You use the number a little while ago, 5,000. I didn't know if that was for illustrative purposes or if that's the assessment on the amount of the number of affordable housing units that are needed. That's the number the governor used in his proposal for $249 million. And I don't know that we can achieve that goal but that's the goal that he's set forth. And I think it's a mix of both market rate and affordable units as I understand the proposal. What's, what capacity do you have? What's the total amount of money you could process annually? Is there a limit on that where you just your systems couldn't do any more than a certain amount? I'm trying to find out how many years it might take. Well, I think that the question of capacity, again, these are the kinds of questions people were asking on our call yesterday. But the first thing that I would do quite frankly is to make some investments in the capacity of our community providers, because most of them with a few exceptions of the larger organizations are used to doing one project a year. And so we wanna strengthen that capacity. We do have a statewide group called Housing Vermont. They actually have a new name ever north and they work all over the state and they can strengthen the local capacity greatly. So, you know, one of the proposals we just got in with the $10 million would give us nine units in Stowe and two in Morrisville with a capacity to add on the Stowe site in the future. And that is partly because the Memorial Housing Partnership has a relationship with them. So we will definitely invest in, we will invest in capacity, we'll invest more in our feasibility program so that people have the dollars to do the investigation of is a project feasible or not. What I can tell you is that during the housing revenue bond we moved up to the place where we were doing $20 million of investment per year. Then last year you said to us, can you move $33 million in nine months? And we did that. And I don't know today where the limit of our capacity is. One of the things that will have to happen necessarily is that we will get less leverage depending on when President Biden passes the infrastructure and jobs package. And that means we're gonna have to put more dollars per unit into every unit we develop. There's a limit on something called the low income housing tax credits, 9% tax credit program, which is what we usually work with. So once we've maxed that out, we have to provide more funding for every unit we do. So I don't have a precise answer today other than we'll invest in the capacity to speed things up. I feel like I need to go find a book about how FDR and Harold Vicki's scaled up the new deal as quickly as they did. I think it's that sort of a challenge that's in front of us and that's what we intend to do. But I'm also very mindful and I've heard Secretary Buttigieg use this phrase. And so now I'm using it that there's a big difference between shovel ready and shovel worthy. And we wanna make sure, I think the reason the program's been successful is that projects, if I'm thinking about your district like Arthur's have enhanced the community. And if you look back to housing from many years ago, it was poorly constructed and poorly located and it isolated low income Vermonters or low income people, not just in Vermont, but around the country and was not well received. So we wanna hit that balance as well. So there's quality and quantity. So I know there's many variables involved. One is an averages are misleading, but there's the cost per unit. And then there's the dollars you can leverage from various sources to bring the cost per unit to some type of affordability. And it sounds like both of those variables are in play, given factors beyond our control. Absolutely. The price of materials has gone up since the pandemic began. We did a project in Representative Fagan's district with a great contractor and huge cooperation from Act 250 who moved it way faster than they usually do. But the reason it got done at a high cost is that the contractor, Naylor and Breen had their employees work 10 days, 10 hour days and Saturdays. And we would not have met the CRF deadline without that. So the cost went up because we were paying overtime. And I can guarantee you, I wish this were not the case, but there will be sellers who see that there's a huge amount of public money and the price is gonna go up.  If there's a lot of public money available, we will see prices rise in terms of what people's expectations are. I hope that because the commercial real estate market is likely to change as people need less office space that there'll be some offsetting pressures that will temper that, but we will definitely see prices go up. Thank you. One last thought on the price issue, which is I've been doing this for a long time. As you know, some people would say too long, but everything we did 10 and 15 years ago that we thought, oh my God, this is so expensive. Today looks like a bargain. I don't have any reason to believe if we waited five years that prices will go down. Thank you. What you've evoked some of our history, some of our positive history in terms of getting to the moon or the new deal. I'm also thinking of one of our not so great history points where we did urban renewal and knocked down neighborhoods to put highways through them in the name of some good. When you look at projects, you have criteria that you follow that looks at mixed income and how it contributes to the community. Can you just talk a little bit about how you do that to assure that the developments are integrated into the community rather than isolated. We have an example here of an old project a way old project that's down a road and kind of isolated and gets a few more police cars than other places do just because we've packed a handful of people into kind of dense area, isolated area. Well, what I would say is that when you look at the enabling statute for the Housing and Conservation Board, historic preservation is part of our mission. And so that has always made the renewal of the state's historic fabric really important and why a project like the French Block in Montpelier, the Tuttle Block in Rutland, the project now called the New Avenue Hotel in St. Johnsbury have always been priorities for us to invest and that means putting developments in places that are gonna be in to some degree convenient to services, whether those services are a grocery store, medical services, all the public library and so on and so forth. And so that's a part of our mission. And the historic, when you look at our mission it is also about preserving the countryside. So we don't want to develop sprawl projects where people will be isolated. So those are, and over the years our board has developed a series of policies that speak to that. The governor, when he proposed the Housing Revenue Bond was very strong on, you do a great job on serving people up to 60% a median. I'd really like to see us, which is a limit that the tax credit program uses, but I'd like it to see you guys invest a little more and go beyond those Vermonters who are below 60% a median and be able to serve somebody who's at 80% a median which for most of the state for a family of three or four might be $40, $45,000 a year. And we made that part of the program and we certainly would within the context of the work that we need to do going forward. So those are some of the things that we do to try to ensure that projects are not isolated locationally. We have done, I have to say several smaller projects, 20 units and below that are sometimes single purpose housing. We try to make sure that services are there. We help Orange County Mental Health buy a four unit building for its clients that's right in downtown Randolph. Again, convenient to services. Not everything can be in a downtown or neighborhood adjacent to a downtown. So then we look to, is there good bus service or is there not? Or is the community willing to extend bus service? So those are all the things that go into how we think about and plan for projects is what's the location? What's the service mix? Can you walk anywhere to services? Is there any public transit? Can there be more public transit? And the program mix calls for different levels of affordability within a project. It doesn't call for just, with a few exceptions, just having folks who all have great difficulty in one location. Thank you. Representative Fagan. Thank you. And Gus, thank you for coming in. I really do appreciate it. I always enjoy talking to you. So the governor's got, there's a lot of proposals out there and it's not just the governor's. It's some are ours and some are everyone's. And for example, I'll just use an example. And what I'm asking is cross coordination between all of those projects such that there may be some things that are being worked on like Brown's fields, projects that might actually, if located in the correct place, I'm thinking the old Rutland Dress Factory that's been sitting vacant for a hundred years. I don't know. That's a long time. That might be really good place for yours. So I'm not asking about my specific, like the Rutland Dress Factory. I'm asking cross coordination between programs. Are you starting to, is there starting to be a work group put together somewhere that can talk about, hey, we've got something that I think you can be a part of, that type thing? Yes, the short answer is yes and yes. So we are talking regularly with Commissioner Hanford. We are, A&R is actually represented on my board. So to the extent that there are cleanup funds in either of those agencies, we're talking about how can we put them together? Should there be money for infrastructure that A&R is administering? We want that as part of our thinking as we work with the residents of a mobile home park who want to buy their park, because most of their water and sewer systems are ancient and some of them are not public systems, they're onsite systems. And so whether it's this Dress Factory, which I'm not particularly aware of or the Jarvis Street neighborhood in Windsor or any number of locations around the state, we are looking at, how do we put the different resources together? And I think a chief value of the work that we've always tried to do is to get multiple benefits for a community. One of the hardest things to do is to combine housing and retail, but we've done that on a number of occasions with downtown buildings where that becomes part of the program. Thank you, we're looking for multiple goods is the short answer. Thank you, good. Representative Yacoboni. Yes, thank you. I don't expect you to present the administration proposal, but you may be able to comment on this. If I take 249 million and divide it by 5,000, that's like 50,000 a unit. I must be missing something because how do you address the problem at 50,000 a unit? Unless the leveraging is just incredible. Well, I don't think you do need more money. You do need to leverage more money. And that's why we did not go over the numbers carefully with them before they announced their plan. So that number may be optimistic without significant leveraging. It has to be optimistic without significant leveraging, but we can't attack the problem significantly with 249 million dollars. And we can leverage some dollars. We just will not leverage as much because there's a limit to the 9% low-income housing tax credit that the state is allocated. There is a proposal in Congress to increase that program by 25% so that will help, but we will need more leverage and you're absolutely right about that. And what I'm trying to send the message, also to this committee's conferees, that there's so many different needs and frankly, I don't have my ARPA spreadsheet now to know if there's anything left over being held for the future, but housing may be another one where even more might be needed. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. I think this, you raise an interesting point. I, and Gus has talked about this as a moonshot and I think the governor's numbers are aspirational. I'm not sure any of us know what the right number is and in five years, I hope we're not critical of each other because we didn't hit a target. I think what we're hearing is we have an extraordinary opportunity to actually make a difference in the fabric of our communities and in the lives of Vermonters. And so how can we best take advantage of it? The moonshot makes us look out. I'm concerned about what the next year looks like and this is not the HCB's problem, but one of the other issues that we have is the, and you've opened with, Gus, what you said, 2,700 folks living in housing that we've provided that we're going to lose and we will not have an ability to replace that lost housing in the timeframe that we're looking at. So, committee, I think we have to put our arms around what that means. This afternoon, we're going to hear from DCF on their housing proposal, but we need to be conscious of what the challenge is there and I think to the meeting that Reps Fagan-Helm and Harrison were in this morning, we need to also talk about the services that are necessary to avoid the problems that are created by folks living on top of each other in very difficult circumstances and not even mentioning the difficult circumstances that folks bring in when they're in these sort of situations. So we don't have a solution for that problem. I wonder, Gus, to bring this back to you all. I mean, one of the concerns over the years has been the state's ability to provide ongoing services within some of the housing that you help facilitate the development of, be it vouchers, which is less of a concern right now, but also the mental health, healthcare, substance use, et cetera, services. Not your problem, but would you care to comment on what we ought to be thinking about in order to make, because these places are not going to be successful unless we also put that ongoing support in some of the places that we're talking about. So let me differ with you a little bit to this degree, which is it is our problem because when projects are not successful, when there is dysfunction from a single tenant, it affects the whole building, because it can affect the neighborhood. And so, you know, when representative Yacovoni had our section of the budget, we would have an annual discussion about the need for services and housing to be integrated. There's an excellent program that many of you are aware of called SASH, and it is a population-based program centered in housing. And it brings together all the folks who work with elderly people, whether it's from a AAA, a mental health agency, a home health agency, in a team approach to help make sure that when somebody's having a problem, they figure it out and address it. There is a proposal to do that, and we help to fund it at a family level. I know that the Agency of Human Services through the group work we've been doing with them is gonna propose some changes in their Medicaid waiver to do some work. There's a demonstration program right now at two housing locations in the state where a clinical social worker is embedded into the nature of the housing. The Champlain Housing Trust would tell you with one of the motel projects we did with them because they were able to buy it without debt with the CRF funding, that's allowing them to use the rents they're collecting to have social services on site. So this is absolutely a critical issue. I don't know that we'll solve it in perpetuity. There is an allowance for some of the rental assistance money to be used for services, that's short-term, not long-term, but it really gets to the issue of, how do we make sure that Vermonters can be as successful as possible? There's a model that we have worked with and this is the model that's gonna go into the former ICM school in Rutland called Permanent Supportive Housing. It's one that we used at Great River Terrace, which is a similar community that opened a couple of years ago in Brattleboro, but the Mental Health Agency is going to be providing an on-site person there for a number of hours a week as that property is repurposed as housing for people who've experienced homelessness. So this cross-agency collaboration is absolutely essential to ultimately a successful outcome, particularly for those Vermonters who've struggled the most. Now, there's a whole other range of Vermonters who may just be struggling with the dislocation from the pandemic having lost a job. They may need some temporary help rather than ongoing help, but people go through cycles in their life where sometimes you need some help and many, you may go years where everything's just fine. But we absolutely need to be able, as we do our work and we do our planning and we do our project development to integrate that kind of thinking into the design of the housing we build. Thank you. And to my knowledge, there are not dollars from in the governor's proposal that are explicitly tied into the support services, et cetera around housing. I mean, we've added some money and we've talked about what the challenges are with the DCF population, but I don't recall there being a pot of money. Am I going to be wrong? There is not in the capital proposal that he made. Jen, do you, I believe that there's a plan, but correct me if I'm wrong for some of the rental assistance funding to be used for services. Actually, I do know. I believe that there is some funds but they have to do with the requirements around the federal requirements around use of that emergency rental. For example, you have to guide people through attestations. You have to, on S or two, there's more requirements about income. So you'll have to get the tax documents. You have to get all of the income verification through and that's a lot of what I understand. And we can confirm this later this afternoon with DCF is what those 17 temporary serve or limited service positions are, but I don't know that beyond that it's getting at some of the factors that we're hearing this morning about what makes something successful in the long term. And I think that's vital as everyone has already noted. Okay. Jen, did you want, Ms. Holler, did you want to add anything to that? My understanding tracks representative steps, of course. And I think what we're understanding is that the governor's proposal for the $1 billion is really around capital investments, okay. That proposal assumes that some of the other categorical grant programs that are included in the American Rescue Plan Act, such as the emergency rental assistance and others would provide some of those services supports. But as representative Gessup just said, there are a good number of strings that come with each of those. So maybe this is a time for me to be able to say that the Senate budget, as it's coming out of the Appropriations Committee, strikes the Housing Recovery Working Group, but regardless of where that lands or not, the funders have been meeting historically, but when you passed that charge in your version of the budget, we formalized that group and focused specifically on how to use the ARPA resources. I've been developing a number of strategies and planning tools around that and we'll continue to do that regardless of whether there's a specific direction to us to do that or not. But because ARPA funds aren't here yet and there's some guidance on the one billion or nor is there for many of the other programs that are included in that act, we are focused on kind of strategies and tools for being able to break services, capital and rental assistance in a way that's gonna be able to absorb whatever resources come our way, which are gonna be driven by what you and the Senate decide that you wanna make in terms of appropriations, what ultimately the rules for all those programs are and then whatever additional federal resources may come, whether it's in the form of additional sort of low income housing tax credits or something in the infrastructure bill. Although I will say that at the listening session Gus described yesterday of the working group, we heard clearly from the congressional delegation staff that we're best focused on the resources that we have because they don't have clarity at all on what might be coming in the infrastructure bill. And in fact, the Republican counter proposal in the Senate is based on the premise that housing is not infrastructure, it wouldn't be included. And that's all to be negotiated, but I don't think we can count on that coming. Healthly it will. Thank you. Committee, other questions or thoughts? This is likely our last chance to have a conversation with the folks from VHCB. We don't know what the, we follow what the Senate does. We kind of have a general understanding but in the next couple of weeks we're going to make a decision and set ourselves on a path. So, one last call for questions. Representative Yacoboni. I apologize. Like our friends in Rutland this morning, in LaMoyle we had our housing meeting yesterday. So this is fresh on my mind. There's no numbers, but we heard a lot of testimony that much of our long-term rental housing is being converted to short-term rental housing through Airbnb's and such. Again, I don't know how much that means, but I've also heard unsolicited from constituents helping me, asking me to help address this issue. So I do think it's real. What's behind this thought is that our net gain will be reduced for rental housing opportunities because of the conversion of long-term rental housing into short-term, which is driven by several factors. One, you can get more money and that drives the market. Two, there's different kinds of landlord eviction obligations and management of tenants that our current laws don't allow us. Having said all that, should I be concerned that whatever we're putting into this won't be enough because of the conversion of long-term rental property? And is that yet another pressure that we should be increasing the number of resources on this issue? I think you should absolutely be concerned. Short-term rentals are a two-way street. So if you have an elderly retired person with a big old house and it's in pretty good shape and she supplements her income by renting out a room on Airbnb, for her that's a really good thing. To the extent that it makes housing less available to the general public, to other constituents of yours who need rental housing because people can make more money this way and it decreases the supply of affordable housing that has an impact as well. So when you get into the issue, it's a two-edge sword and it's good for some people and not as good for others and good for in some communities and not as good in other places. And so I think it's an issue to pay attention to. I think it's something that the legislature is gonna have to deal with as a policy and regulatory matter. And I don't think it's a simple, like most issues it's not, there isn't one simple fix to it. Thank you. Okay, Jen, Ms. Holler. I wonder if I might add that your House General Housing and Military Affairs Committee is looking at S79, which includes a rental housing registry and that would incorporate short-term rental. So you will have some additional information there and unfortunately representative Yacoboni, the impact of short-term rentals is much greater in resort communities. So it's consistent with what we see in terms of statewide data that you're hearing about that issue, particularly in your area. Thank you. So Mr. Selig and Ms. Holler, thank you very much for joining us here today and but more importantly, being willing to be the kind of one of the central partners in accomplishing what could be an extraordinary thing for the state. It's an exciting moment. It is. And again, I understand the, some people may wanna hang back a bit, but I would just finish up today with you just say that as with the CRF, if you put, when you and your colleagues in the other body get to negotiating, if you put dollars into the budget from ARPA, it's gonna send a signal.  I wouldn't try to say that, but it's gonna send a really important signal. So I hope you'll take the governor's proposal and that it'll end up in your budget when you get done negotiating with them. So thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. So committee, we are almost at 10 and so floor at 10 back here at one for S 102. And then at 2 30, we have folks from DCF in for, to talk about their proposal around emergency housing. We may, I surely hope that we're not gonna spend an hour and a half on 102. So maybe we can slot something else in there. So see you guys in the afternoon.


Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here at Google Next in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier, Dustin Kirkland, I'm a CUBE analyst, CUBE contributor. We also got Lisa Martin here and Rob Stretchy who heads up our CUBE collective research team. We've got a great guest here talking about search, value of data, Elastic is here. We've got Kathleen Walker, senior director of product marketing on the search side for Elastic. It's you, it's Sudeep Joseph, principal engineer at Cisco Systems. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Welcome. Thank you, thanks for having us. You're now CUBE alumni's, where'd it go? First time in the CUBE. Look, this is, we're in the middle of all the action here. The ecosystem's booming. We're seeing a lot of traction around Google's messaging around, hey, get cloud scale. The AI wave is here, and the demos are impressive. I mean, you're seeing like how AI is crossing first party applications in the demo, providing action, and so having that data and surfacing those insights and unlocking that value has been the promise of the big data for a decade and a half. We're finally here. Well, it's interesting, because I would say from the Elastic's perspective, we've been democratizing search for over a decade and search the amount of data that you have to process in order to do that continues to grow. We've been in AI for a long time, but there's really interesting things happening in the market right now, like it's a really exciting time to be in search if you think about the explosion around generative AI and the kind of improved customer experiences that you can build off of that. There's just the possibilities are endless. You guys are very well known, Elastic's great company. We're a small customer, but it's been great benefit to us in our CUBE data and our transcripts and just the agility and the flexibility of getting value.  How are you guys looking at this? Because you're in the position. Again, you guys have been doing this for a long time. Unstructured data, structured data is good too, but the unstructured data is even better. How do you guys see this AI wave? How well positioned are you for this? Well the good news is that we've made some great product decisions over the last several years and we're in a position because we've built our platform to be so flexible that we can really meet teams where they are in terms of their development resources, their data sciences backup, all of that. So if you think about a customer who's really still in the early phases of adopting something like Symantec Search, we just released our own machine learning model which is actually pre-trained so now that takes that burden completely off of you and you can start enjoying the benefits of that without having to do the training yourself but then also get the benefits of the increased relevance that it can provide and then you consider all the way on the other end of the spectrum, you might have somebody who's been very sophisticated and wants to build their own model as part of the differentiation for their experience. We're flexible enough that we can use that model in our search with our platform as well. Awesome. Yeah, so tying that to Cisco, can you talk a little bit about the architecture, how you've integrated Elastic and these models into your solution? Absolutely, so three years back during the COVID time, we started a journey of migrating our Enterprise Search platform to Elastic. So Elastic being the foundation search engine, we build an ecosystem of components what it is needed to build a platform on top of GCP. For example, all of the connectors are based as SparkJob, whether it's a crawler, REST API, they're all based as SparkJobs, they're run as DataprocJobs in Google Cloud. Now, we have content management systems pushing in data in real time to Google Cloud storage and sending the links to PubSupp that goes in an event-driven architecture based on GCP and components like GKE, data flow for text extraction and all the business logic transformations. And ultimately, they get indexed in different Kubernetes clusters in different regions in Asia and US so that we have global coverage and the latency is low in APGC regions. So for us, it is the humongous transformation where we moved away from an on-premises code data center into a cloud native platform based out of Elastic as well as AI and based on the foundation of Google Cloud. And when you guys did that architecture, what was the main thing that you were trying to solve? Was it you wanted flexibility with the data? Was it you were knitting a solution together? What was the driver? So I worked on Enterprise Search for 19 years. So I've seen variety of vendor products over these years and we knew what it takes to build something in what product to use like Elastic. Elastic is the most stable search engine I've seen across these years. So building upon that stability and the functionality that Elastic offers, we were able to design an architecture which helps us in such a way that I could sleep well at night. I don't have to worry about busy duty calls. So trust me, it's not easy to get things right. It's not easy to get the speed right. It's not easy to get the accuracy right. With the combination of AI and Elastic and GCP, you know, we did it right. And some of the applications we have seen, humongous, tremendous feedback, positive feedback on what we have rolled out. I think Cisco is a really great example of a company that was able to take an emerging technology and execute on it really quickly to create a great experience. And I think I'm hopeful that the work that Elastic has done to build our product and then the partnership with Google because we're obviously both very interested in providing these great experiences for our customers to build off of.   It's like the most intoxicating revolution for the young people coming in. So as you have more experience or stable solutions like Elastic, people are worried about making the wrong bet right now. And it can be fun to jump on the new wave and go the hot, the cool kids. And there might be some great starts that emerge out of this, but from the boardroom, they're like, okay, we're architect, is it going to be reliable to your point about pager duty calls? So there's an airman experimentation with the new stuff. And as Google brings more stuff out, how is that working with you guys and the partnership because Google's trying to create trust. You guys have a trust relationship with your customer and vice versa. Trust and innovation have to go along, but now you've got compliance and legal challenges. So, you know, the embeddings on a vector database, does that cross-pollinate into another cloud? You know, these are the kind of questions people are worried about. So how do you guys navigate that together as a customer? And what advice would you have for practitioners out there that are looking at this who want to jump in the deep end of the pool, so to speak, and get in and start building with confidence? Well, I think it's interesting because I think most people were introduced to things like chat GPT and generative AI through like a more consumer experience. And so it's, you know, really exciting, really wet the appetite of the possibility, art of the possible. But then when you think about it as a business, all of a sudden you have to consider the fact that I'm only going to be able to provide the best answers, the most relevant answers, if I point this towards my private data. And that kind of changes the game because to your point, all of a sudden you have to think about privacy and security and is somebody going to see information that they don't have the right to see and how do I protect my customer's private data as well? And so that's where a company, a product, a platform like Elastic comes into play where we can serve as an intermediary. If your customer, if your employee has a question, query the information that you already have in Elastic and then we'll provide just the information that's appropriate to that user, serve it up in a context window to a large language model and then they'll build that conversational experience off of just the relevant data that that person has the right to access. So as you can imagine, that takes a lot of the risk out of pointing your private data to something like a large language model. And that's your recommendation for customers. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so connecting that to the Cisco solution, Kathleen's talking about those consumers who did, what is the consumer experience, your customers, the Cisco customers, how are they interacting with this generative AI back end? So what is interesting is we've been rolling out generative solutions right when we launch this new platform. So we call this reimagined search. So one of the first things that we did is we were used to chunk these documents in smaller paragraph. I have two sets of indices, one for chunks and one for documents. And what we had is an AI model, back in the day it was UniLM model from Microsoft that we used to generate questions out of it. And these questions becomes auto suggestions to the UI. And then we store these questions back into the chunk. Now we know where, which chunk cost, created this question. So when the user clicks on that auto type ahead, you're directly directed to the right chunk. Or if there is a similar question, based on elastics of similarity and semantics of similarity, we are able to bring in the right answer to the question. So here's the thing, bringing the right answer to what the user is asking for and leading them to a paragraph within the document. And that's the key experience that we are able to bring in using AI. On to the support side of things, like for example, we powered the support search at Cisco, all of the historical 10 years worth of support tickets, historical bugs in the last 10 years, we search it using elastic. And it's almost like 50 million large documents, one of the documents you're talking about, and it's not easy to find the needle in the hair stack. Getting relevancy right with 50 million documents is extremely difficult. So what we've done is we have rolled out things like birth attention weights for keyword based ranking. We've used embeddings based key phrase extraction to augment the original query and then send this query to Elastic to get the right set of results. And Elastic's able to help with the citations and attributions and ensure that trust is there, that there's an answer coming, but is it the right answer? Is it a believable answer? Absolutely, I mean, if you think about other use cases like legal situations as well, like you have a large corpus of data that you're trying to search for the appropriate information, and it's critical that you have all that citation information returned along with the information. So yeah, absolutely. I mean, I love that some of the language on the signage in and around the place. Unlock value, I love that. Always unlocking value is really what we're seeing. You guys are enabling. The question I have for you guys is how hard was it to go into production? Because, I mean, again, we're familiar with Elastic, we're a customer of a small level, but I can imagine how great it could be for you. You want to be, you want the headroom, you want the future value of the data. You don't want to be foreclosed, right? So that's the promise. But then getting stuff into production with some of these AI tools out there could be challenging. How does it work for you guys? How did it work with Elastic? Take us through that little experience of ideation, grinding it out and putting it in production. You will be surprised to hear that we built this platform in six months. It just took two months of the POC, and then six months to take it from there to production, the entire platform they're talking about. Now, most of the time, ideation needs proof of concept to be developed, and you've got to do a little bit of risk-taking to see that there is a value to the consumers for the use case. Now, as I mentioned earlier, if you don't mind me asking, what made it so easy? Two things. One, the extreme support that we had from Google Cloud, our cloud team, and as well as from Elastic. So, before we started this, none of us had any knowledge in the cloud. We were all in on-frame shop, and we had experience in Docker because we used to use Elastic services service using Elastic Cloud Enterprise. So that, I had Docker experience, but the team was new to Kubernetes. The team was new to cloud. What we did is we mandated everyone who would join this project to pass the CNCF certification for CKA, that is Kubernetes Administration, or the CKAD's application development. So, within two months, pretty much, we had 12 to 15 people in the team. Everyone passed it so that we avoided learning on the job. We spoke the same language, and the cloud, the Google Cloud Doc conditions, amazing enough to be learned. We did the right way. And one of the most important things to get right is security. We focused on that from get go, and we had amazing support from the Google account manager. And talking about the AI things, like, for example, taking an AI model and doing a piece is easy, but taking the production, you need to optimize the model. We did things like TensorRT back in the 2020, Triton inference server from NVIDIA were the ones that is available to serve it out in a very low latency scenario. Like, so it seems to be fast, and if you have to have a good user experience, the AI alerts in front of it needs to be super fast as well. So, we always focused on latency. We wouldn't take anything to production if it doesn't meet our cutoff. Yep, yep, in terms of latency, yep. Awesome. As you can imagine, we have a lot of people within Elastic who are really interested in search experiences and are the possible there as well. And so, really quickly out of the gate, we had some very creative engineers who realized the possibilities of pairing with our security solutions. I'm getting an alert that this is happening. We also have a lot of data as you can imagine on what should you do if that's happening and instantly matching the two, I'm getting this alert. Here is a set of information about what you might want to do next and the steps you might want to take right away. So, that was our first, the use case that we started exploring there. We actually took that and built our AI assistant off of it, which we just recently launched. And it's gotten a lot of really great feedback from customers. Kathleen, if you don't mind me asking, I'd love to get your perspective on, and again, following the success of Elastic from the beginning to where you are now and quite a cloud journey. What was it like inside the company with the engineers and the staff when the chat GPT wave wakes up the average person in the middle of a main street tech world? Oh my God, magic. Look at AI and so like, and then also the market started moving much faster. Will you guys change me moment? Oh my God, this is our time. What was it? We got to build more stuff. What was some of the conversations inside Elastic? Because I can almost imagine the whiteboard frenzy going on and the excitement inside the company. Really in all parts of the organization because you can imagine that from the top down, they recognize this is a great opportunity because there's so many eyes on search right now because this is a market moment. We really want to capitalize on that. But even outside of those conversations, we had an engineering organization that was like, this stuff is cool. And so the awesome thing about that is that we really empower the engineers to experiment, have space time to really see what can you do with this technology. And we started getting some amazing blog content and articles coming out of the team that we've just been continuously dripping out to the market. It's just a really exciting time and I think all parts of the organization from engineering to marketing to all areas are like, I see a potential for us to use this in my part of the org to make my life easier. So G, talk about Cisco from your perspective, to getting everyone on the same page with Kubernetes. That's a hard task in and of itself. So one of the things that's interesting is even before TATGBT was rolling out, right? We visited General DA, for example, the question generation, the summarization. We had something or the SEO query generation from support tickets using fine-tuned. So I have fine-tuned T5 models which were taking a support ticket, generate a bunch of search queries. Then we used that to hit elastic and then generate recommendations and cashed in, file store, et cetera. So when TATGBT came out, what we realized is how fast the LLM world has moved from the early days of birth into a very powerful ecosystem which can turn to an AI agent. Now imagine the possibilities of running an AI agent to do things that you had to manually do earlier, improving the employee productivity a lot. So that's the power that TATGBT and Vertex AI is going to bring into the enterprise. Yeah, so have you, I assume you've looked at and played with both. You've clearly decided, at least for this product, to go with Vertex AI and the Google APIs. But compared to open AI, how did you and your team evaluate those two? So we do evaluation across all the major APIs, whether it's Azure Open AI or Google, Vertex AI, Bison models, or even Lama 2 models, right, fine-tuned Lama 2 models. So the thing is, depending on the use case, you've got to decide when it makes sense to use a fine-tuned Lama 2 model on your own hosted inference rather than paying by token. You know, ultimately, and you know, you cannot compare GPD 4 with Bison or you cannot compare Bison to Unicorn. So it all depends on the use case and what are the only main differences that you have to decide to choose the right product. And for search in particular, you found a good match with Elastic and the Google infrastructure. Yeah, so. That makes sense. A lot of use cases that require generate AI using the RAG approach or retrieve logman generate AI. We have done full-fledged constables soon go live in two months to Cisco.com where anyone in Cisco would be able to ask, anyone in internet would be able to ask questions on Cisco.com content. What you also see is internal content, you know, for our sellers, for example, you know, they have an ability to generate PowerPoint presentations on the fly by just putting in a prompt, leveraging the data from a variety of places and generating, and you know, it amazingly improves their productivity and that's an exciting time to be in. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate you guys sharing the story and the insights on around data. Kathleen, give us the last word, take a quick 30 seconds we have left, put a plug in for less. What are you guys are doing? What's the pitch? What's going on? What's new? Yeah, I think, as you can imagine, lots of talk about AI at the show. So we're really, you know, making sure that people understand how we play in this space as well. So we feel really strongly that again, this is a great opportunity to both increase the relevance of search, which you know, is a journey and that will probably never end, but this is a moment where you can really leapfrog and create better experiences by leveraging this technology. So we're here to talk about how we're doing that with our, in our own house and then also with great customers like Cisco to kind of take this, take this new experience, point it towards your private data in a safe way and then also in a cost efficient way as well.  Secret of search, right? Yes. Good to see you, thanks for coming on. Okay, I'm John Roy Dustin Kirkland here in theCUBE, winding down day one of our two and a half days of coverage. We'll be right back after this short break.