I'm Jim Kelly. I've been a resident of Hawaii off and on for 38 years. And during the times away have been involved with Asia-Pacific and political and economic matters over since the mid-1970s. Most recently I was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. In the time ending in 2005, a period of just short of four years. I'm very interested in Korea and my friends Bill Sharp and Jay Fidel have asked me to come today to talk a little bit about that constantly vexing topic. Well, welcome, Jim. It's really a pleasure to have you here today. A person with your background and expertise, I'm really quite fortunate to have you here today.  Talk about a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile being rolled towards a launching pad. Maybe it's there now. And supposedly this missile can hit Alaska and Hawaii. Talk about leadership succession in Korea, the suicide of a former president in South Korea. What's happening? What's all this mean? Well, North Korea is a very old problem, Bill. It's back certainly some 60 years. I think an argument can be made that North Korea is sort of the last real residue of the Cold War, which has been over for 20 years in most of the world. But there are some really new things that have happened, although nuclear weapons is probably not one of them. The North Koreans have been trying to obtain nuclear weapons since the mid-1960s. As far as we know, they may have started earlier. And they probably had them for 15 years or so. But there are some new things that are going on. There is an internal leadership transition going on in North Korea. There is a special economic dependence on China that is unique in that this is the first time that China has been the focus of so much of what's needed from outside. And North Korea has always argued that it was completely self-sufficient. But the fact is it's never been self-sufficient. And it needed things from the Soviet Union for so long. It needed things from Japan. It got a great deal from its South Korean neighbor. And now Japan and South Korea are simply not providing anything. The Soviet Union has turned into Russia and it's not in a giving mood. And so it's all the food and the fuel and the money that North Korea needs, at least the vast majority of it, has got to come from China. And China is unhappy about this. And so this makes it also a new and complicating factor. We also have a government in Seoul and South Korea that is more interested in reciprocity. It doesn't want to just pump money across the border. It'd like to see some results from it. We have a Japan that is frightened by North Korea's missile capabilities and alarmed by them. And very much in deeply concerned going through to a vast majority of Japanese individual people over the abductions that took place over many years of Japanese even children off beaches that North Korea did and are a part of this. So as a result of all of these factors and many others, we have had North Korea acting up. It has rejected the hand that was put toward it by the Obama administration. And it's playing a very difficult game with this nuclear test, some missile tests and the possibility of some others. And so it's a change, I think, of attitudes. There's now more of a deterrence, more of a containment that may be going on of North Korea. There's a great concern for its non-proliferation, for concerns of proliferation of nuclear materials and missiles, in particular to Iran and to Syria. So this is a pretty serious matter. North Korea is acting up for its own reasons. I don't know that we need to be alarmed, but I think we do need to be concerned. Who really holds the power in North Korea in your view? I think Kim Jong-il holds the power there. Kim Jong-il is the son of the longtime leader, Kim Il-sung, who died in 1994. But Kim Jong-il spent some 20 years getting ready. He has clearly, within the last year, had some sort of a serious health setback. It was significant because he opened the country's legislature just within the last couple months in a televised appearance that was shown throughout his own country. And he looked awful. He was visibly aged, much lost in weight. His hair had visibly thinned. He did not look well. And I think that's important. I think that he was sending a message to the people of his own country and to the factions that may exist there that there's a transition and there's not going to be any nonsense going on while it's there. And meanwhile, if other countries want North Korea to think about stop this behaving, they better pay up. I see. Nowadays, there seems to be so many theories that pop up in the news every day. One theory is, well, his brother-in-law is moving into a very prominent position. And then, of course, just, I suppose it is in the last week, stories have surfaced about his youngest son. He was only in his 20s, if I recall correctly. That's right. Being put on the fast track to the top. And then other people say, well, it's really the military that holds the power. And periodically, I haven't heard this recently in the past. I've heard stories about generals within the North Korean army trying to organize against him. And they either were captured and executed or were able to run off to Russia or South Korea. I don't know. Is there any of that going on these days? I think all of that is going on. On these days. There is a succession process that is going on. And this brother-in-law, Mr. Jong Sung-Tek, has been officially named to the National Defense Commission recently. He has long had an influential role. He keeps the family efforts together, although he too was on the outs just a very few years ago. And a number of his key deputies were executed. So the stakes in the North Korean bureaucracy are pretty high. I've read that an official responsible for the recent relationship with South Korea has been executed in this process. So this tends to focus the mind of North Korean bureaucrats on getting their talking points correct. And that's been my experience, that that is what they do. But there are three sons of Kim Jong-il and a transition to one or another of them has been rumored for a long time. The eldest son, who I understand is 38, became widely known in the world when he appeared in Tokyo with a passport from of all countries, the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean. I'm not sure he looked like every citizen of Dominican Republic, but at any event he was on his way to Disneyland, he said. And the Japanese were not patient with that, but they sent him on somewhere else. But it looks like perhaps his partying lifestyle, and I'm not referring to political parties, may have rendered him out of the chase. Then there are two sons by a third wife that Kim Jong-il had who herself died just a few years ago of cancer. And these two sons, the elder for odd reasons that I don't think outsiders really understand, has been ruled out. And I mean the best information they seem to have about him comes from a Japanese man who was a sushi chef for some time. I'm not sure that that's necessarily the freshest of information. But at any event what we're hearing now is that a 26-year-old, approximately that old man named Kim Jong-un is being groomed to be the successor to his father. Now the important thing is that at most we really only have about three years for this process to happen in a much more complicated environment than the 25 years that Kim Jong-il had to be the successor. So there are a lot of stories. The closed nature of this lends itself to imagination by observers from a lot of different countries. And so one needs to be a skeptical reader as we see this, but clearly something important is going on. So okay, if the third son stays on the fast track, how might Kim Jong-il seek to placate the other son so they don't, you know, try to disturb the political process as I'm following? Well, from what little I know, I don't think that's necessarily a big problem. I think if it's decided and other family retainers accept one son over the others, I'm not sure there's very much that can be done. Since we're ruminating about this topic, I've always been struck that Kim Jong-il himself has a half-brother who is younger, who has for the last 20 years occupied diplomatic posts in Eastern Europe. Most recently I think ambassador to Poland. And if you look on the web, here is this gentleman going around to Polish festivities. He seems to do anything he wants to around Poland, but he hasn't shown his face back in North Korea in many, many years. Presumably he's not on the best of terms with his half-brother. The stunning thing about this man is he has a striking resemblance to Kim Jong-il, the former leader. So there's an endless variety of options and things in a closed circumstance such as this in which some party official, some group of military officials, some people close to the head man may be able to achieve power. But as we mentioned earlier, this is a high-risk undertaking. There's period-like theories that surface, maybe conjectures of their word, that Kim Jong-il really wants to open up to the world. And certain people in the foreign ministry share that point of view. But he's stymied in that effort mostly by people in the military. I've heard that story and there may be something to it. I have no basis to know one way or the other. I think, though, that if Kim Jong-il had really wanted to open up more to the world, I think he's aware of the dilemma that faces him. If he opens up to the world, if he joins the international community on a stronger basis, he's got to open his economy. And he's got to let the people of Korea, at least many more of them, have a clear view of what the rest of the world has been going on. And in particular, what's happened to what, 50 years ago, were their poorer relatives to the South, who now have incomes that are what, 30 times that of people of the North. If China had had another country of over a billion people close by that was doing really well, I'm not sure the Chinese leadership could have gone through the reforms that they had had. This presence of South Korea, the realities of North Korea make it extraordinarily difficult, I think in the minds of the leaders, to do a serious kind of opening up to the rest of the world. So they've chosen these halfway measures that don't seem to work very well, mid-famine and loss of life to insufficiency of food and all kinds of problems. I've read various accounts or assessments of the Korean Workers' Party, the only official party in Korea, as you know. And some of these accounts say that after the devastating crop failures of the 90s and the famine, the Korean Workers' Party's image was really tarnished and that it lost a lot of its influence. And the Central National Defense Commission gained influence. Has the Workers' Party regained any of its old esteem and influence? Well, it's very hard for outsiders to know that. I think the Korean Workers' Party did lose a lot of influence, but I'm not sure that it was for poor performance. I think what happened was that Kim Jong-il's associations during his years of obtaining power from his father were close associations with the military, less close with the party. And so I think that part of his assumption of leadership was a diminishment of the party authority and a rise. And as we saw in 1998 with the Songun ideology that essentially replaced the old Juche ideology. Juche had the Korean Workers' Party at a central role. Songun is a military-first, army-first policy in which the first call and any and all resources goes first of all to the army. So there was that shift. The party didn't disappear. It still had some useful roles. And it may be obtaining more power now. I don't know. So much talk about sanctions these days. And of course North Korea has a lot of sanctions levied on it already. Are sanctions really a way to deal with North Korea? Well, it depends on the sanctions. There are somewhat fewer sanctions than one would expect. From the last nuclear test, a couple of years ago, there was a UN Security Council resolution number 1718 that set in motion a whole series of sanctions. But these have essentially never been observed. The real problem is that any sanctions on North Korea begin and end with China. If China is the first and last resort as a supplier, if China is the country that shares this long border with North Korea, if China's interests are primarily in stability in the region, and if the leaders of China think that if they really put the pressure of serious sanctions on North Korea, that it could result in some 20 million refugees coming across their border. That doesn't interest the leaders of China in the slightest. And put in the best way, and there are other ways to put it, put in the best way leads to a great deal of caution in doing this. So that kind of sanctions are unlikely to work. But that doesn't say because I happen to think that China is very unhappy with the way these things have developed. There may be other quieter kind of sanctions, limited sanctions. And I know the Bank of Delta Asia business was one that did work for a while. And there may be things with and without Chinese participation that will come up from the deliberations or around the deliberations of the UN Security Council that are going on right now in the aftermath of the recent nuclear test. It seems like the U.S. might get lucky in the Security Council and get some sort of agreement or resolution that everybody buys into. Yet it seems the U.S. is also moving ahead on its own track of, as you said, the financial sanctions, re-implementing those. Well, that's what we're hearing from today's news reports. But in the end, it doesn't matter what kind of resolution the Security Council passes. It's how the resolution is implemented that will spell the difference. And so there are a series of degrees of support from China in particular that are going to be very important in this case. It seems to the Six-Party Talk process that the Russians were never really all that involved. They played a pretty distant role in the Six-Party Talks. But now, in the last couple of weeks, I sense some sort of growing Russian enthusiasm. Well, Russia has a whole set of problems in its head problems, and the orientation of Russian leadership is much more towards the European part than the Asian part. But I'm not sure that I really agree with you about the role in the Six-Party Talks. What you suggest was my expectation back in 2003 before the first round of the Six-Party Talks. But I found the Russian participation to be quite energetic, always well-informed. And I think they're perhaps not as significant a player as China in the Six-Party process, but they have a very useful and important role to play, and we shouldn't lose sight of it. I mean, it is clear that Russia does have at least some influence in North Korea. I'm not sure anybody outside has all that much influence in North Korea. They have influence according to whatever last gratuities that they gave them. I thought it was significant that Foreign Minister Lavrov of Russia visited North Korea recently, and he didn't get an appointment with Kim Jong-il. So that suggests that there may be some bounds to the influence that they have. The fact is the Russians have made it perfectly clear that they do not approve of nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles, that they don't support this, and that they would like to see this process reversed in the case of North Korea. Just as we speak today, where are North Korea's arms coming from? What portion come from China? What portion come from Russia? I think that they have had technology transfers over the years, but I think just about all of their arms come from themselves. I think there was more leakage from Russia in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, not necessarily with the support of the Moscow government, but part of those chaotic days of the 90s, that I think there was some flow of military technology. But other than the sale of some Russian airplanes almost 20 years ago, North Korea doesn't have money to buy things, and their principal effort of industry has been to work on these themselves, and they have considerable capabilities in that line. The sunshine policy of the two previous Korean presidents, was it a mistake to stop that? Should that still be going forward? Well, I don't think that it was a mistake to stop that. I think that almost any South Korean president was going to raise these issues of reciprocity after all sending money in exchange for not much of anything for year after year after year gets tiresome. That said, President Kim Dae Jung, who was reversing things, I think had very high hopes of improvement, and a certain amount was achieved then. The late, recent president, Noh Mo Hyun, was less involved with North Korea over that time. His policies have by no means been completely reversed. There is no sentiment in any of the larger segments of political life in South Korea and hasn't been for a long, long time to get into any kind of a war. South Korea has developed so successfully, so effectively over so long, if only with a great deal of use of borrowed money, and every time tensions go up and CNN sends a team in to Seoul to observe whatever nastiness may be going on, in effect, the interest rates, the Korean premium on all this borrowed money goes up, and it amounts to a tax increase instantly on 47 million South Koreans. South Koreans don't like tax increases of this sort any better than anybody else does. So there's a powerful influence to keep these guys quiet in different ways to try to do that. And so the Sunshine policy may be gone in name, but it hasn't all left, but at the moment North Korea is playing very hard to get in terms of this reciprocity, including this K-Song industrial zone, which really had potential for serious economic benefits to North Korea, much more so than South Korea, and appears to be in the process of drying up. Yeah, that's an interesting phenomenon, because I think that was to North Korea's advantage. It was kind of an easy way to get hard currency. And the current South Korean administration has certainly not shut it down in any respect, but they have seized one or more managers there and are holding them. They've demanded big increases of pay for all of the workers there, who were not getting very much of the pay that was being provided them in the first place, and as a result, in the end, these were private South Korean businesses that were using that, and they're starting to look to other places, a field like Bangladesh or far away places with low labor costs. Is it a mistake for South Korea to join the PSI? They seem to have played a very active role in it now. Well, I think that was a political choice that they made, but we'll see where the PSI is going. The PSI is no panacea and hasn't been. The PSI stands for Proliferation Security Initiative, and it's far from complete. It requires really some significant changes in international law. It is acceptable in international law for a country to seize a vessel that may be carrying illegal drugs, but it is not permissible to seize a vessel that may be carrying military equipment for use against anyone, and so there is some real changes of international law that have to be done as a part of that. There are so many ways to move material around the world and to move technology around the world that this is an interesting decision that the South Koreans have made, but we'll have to see what it actually entails. Well, the PSI is ongoing now, correct, with the United States, Australia, and Japan. Japan and Singapore, and there are a large number of countries that have signed up to it. Have they actually stopped North Korean ships on the Hasees? No, which is an interesting aspect of it. The only example I know of in which a North Korean military shipment was interdicted was by the Indians, and it was in an Indian port when a ship came in to move some cargo around, and the Indians said, whoa, what kind of cargo is this? And either confiscated it or sent the vessel back on its way. I think they confiscated the cargo. So that's the only real PSI example that I know of. That's interesting. I didn't know that. So we hear about it. It's there kind of on paper, but it's not really being implemented. Because of the changes in law that are needed? No, that's partly true, but I think it's also partly true that North Korea has many ways to send its inappropriate exports, specifically weapons of mass destruction and missiles. Most of them can be flown. I guess they would have to cover Chinese airspace during that process, but that may be going on. There may be not the shifting of hardware so much as movement of software or small amounts of fishable material. That's the kind that really have to concern us of moving fishable materials or that sort of thing. We're talking about things that would be considerably smaller than this table and the ability of any international system to interdict that kind of a shipment is likely to be limited. It's a process that's going on, but we shouldn't look at it for instant results. Has the U.S. overplayed the China car? That's commonly said and I don't accept it because the fact is we can't get away from China. I had a discussion with some young people in Washington, D.C. just a very few days ago. They said we need to get the five-party talks and assert more U.S. leadership in the process. I said that sounds good. They said yes, and if China comes up with ideas that we don't like, we won't acquiesce in these things now. But in that case, you're not going to have a five-party talks. The fact is China geographically is in a very special position here. It has an important role to play, and so persuading China is a big part of this effort. I don't agree with those that have said that the U.S. has just contracted out its North Korea problem to China. China and the U.S. and South Korea and Japan, in particular, all have extremely important interests in here. But none of the four, and that includes the two U.S. allies, have exactly the same perspective on this problem. The U.S. always seems to be so disappointed with China, though. That's, I suppose, the fate of many in America, especially American politicians, to be disappointed in China. But that really depends on what kind of expectations we set up and just how realistically these expectations are based, whether it be for China to appreciate the U.N. or Renminbi, to make U.S. exports easier to China and China's exports more costly to the U.S., whether it has to do with standards of manufacturers that are going on in China. The fact is we have an enormously complex economic and political relationship with China. I think we're doing rather well on it, but there is inevitably some disappointment, particularly in Washington because the tendency there is for people to have what they want and be bitterly disappointed if any other country doesn't quickly go along with it. And that's just not the nature of the world we are now finding ourselves. It seems to me China's feelings about North Korea are also very complicated. In one hand, some of the Chinese researchers, scholars, officials I've talked to, they're very irritated with North Korea. They find it very difficult to deal with. Yet on the other hand, they say, well, we were kind of like North Korea, not all that long ago. We understand the kind of situation they're facing. So they seem to be very conflicted. Yet it strikes me as kind of interesting as something I read in The Economist fairly recently, that I think it's 200,000 Chinese soldiers died in the Korean War, helping to shore up North Korea. And yet you can go around North Korea, according to The Economist, and there's no kind of commemoration plaque or any kind of public display of thank you to China. I think that China maybe at times is just as frustrated with North Korea as maybe some other countries are. I've heard many of the arguments you have had from Chinese acquaintances. China views North Korea, as we said earlier, in a very complicated way. China is first of all interested in stability in the region. It is not interested in North Korea exploding nuclear weapons or firing ballistic missiles. And an interesting element now is what we're seeing today. This new ballistic missile launching site is over on the Chinese side. I noticed that. And I see the North Koreans have been chasing the Chinese fishing boats out of the offshore area there. That can't be making China even happier over what's going on. It's a very complicated relationship, but China is concerned. The aversion of Chinese to chaos is pretty understandable when you think about it. Anyone who lived through the famines of 1959 to the early 1960s, anybody in China who lived through the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 has seen chaos. They don't like it, and they are deeply fearful of having such a thing happen again. And so there is this inherent caution in what's going on and not wanting to cause, in any way, a chaotic situation in North Korea. So it leads to a very difficult process in what China will do. There is hopes and expectations that they will do more than they do. My guess is that when China does do more than it has, we probably won't hear about it a lot. They will do things quietly while publicly portraying themselves as continuing to be very cautious and perhaps privately. There are many, many ways that they can put kind of quiet pressure on North Korea, and perhaps they will do that. I understand what you mean. The Chinese act like that. They do things in a quiet way. They don't advertise them. On the other hand, might it be said that China was more enthusiastic in going along with America and North Korea, until it seemed to them that the U.S. main goal was perhaps regime change. And when they detected that, their support became more qualified. Well, that's that period from the earlier part when I was an official, and I don't really agree with that reading. The truth is, I think that the Chinese in the period of the late 2002 and 2003 thought that there was a real chance that the U.S. might take military action against North Korea. They didn't want that. And they thought that that could lead to the kind of instability that they saw. And that's what led to the three-party talks and then the six-party talks that started in 2003. But by the spring of 2003, the U.S. was deeply involved with Iraq militarily. And the Chinese assessment soon after was that, no, it was not very likely that the U.S. was going to seize any military option with North Korea, mainly because the military options are so very unattractive in dealing with North Korea. What are you going to bomb? Where are they hiding this stuff? The answer is that I don't think anybody knows. And yet there are still thousands of artillery tubes aimed at Seoul, South Korea. And so the cost of combat on the Korean Peninsula are very great and something that the North Koreans have taken considerable advantage of in the seek of at least their more modest objectives. It always does seem many military options would mean the obliteration of Seoul. That's a real possibility. The only person I can recall ever talking about a military option fairly actively was Secretary Perry. Yes, that's... Well, there have been others at different times. Some people I respect who have talked about bombing this part but the fact is there was a sense that the U.S. in 1994 was headed more in that way. My guess is that we were saved from being seen as an emperor without clothes by former President Jimmy Carter. I went over and made that deal with Kim Il-sung and said in motion something that even showed some results after Kim Il-sung died shortly after then. We'll never know how things might have been if Kim Il-sung had lived on longer. I enjoy the speculation that maybe things could really have been significantly better. That maybe the old man was ready to make a serious change but it didn't happen that way. Conjecture lately that Bill Clinton might play a role similar to the role that Jimmy Carter played. I think every senior position in a former position in Washington past including George H.W. Bush, former President Clinton, former Vice President Gore, the names are legion of people who have been tossed around Henry Kissinger every week as some sort of an emissary to North Korea. At some particular time and particular set of circumstances that might be a useful option to pursue. Right now it seems to me to be probably not opportun with this internal upheaval that's going on in North Korea. So I think that's fairly unlikely but someday we'll wake up and some familiar name may well be going over there and if so we'll wish him well. Getting back to the Chinese angle isn't it the Chinese that are the ones that essentially gave North Korea to build missiles? That's not my view. I think the Chinese have been very careful about providing military technology to North Korea for a very long time. In the 1980s I had a lot of discussions about this with people in government. Chinese government or US government? In the US government. With the Chinese government. But at that time it was Soviet military technology although even that was pretty limited. But I do recall all kinds of reports that we saw in the early 80s that there were Japanese mobile cranes being ordered by the North Koreans and they would put in the order to niss on for a great big prime mover crane hold the crane. They just wanted the prime mover all of the machinery and the heavy duty. So it occurred to some people around that time that what is it they want to put on top of these crane movers without a crane and it happened to be mobile ballistic missiles happened to be what they were going to put on there. But all the American experts were saying no the North Koreans just don't have that capability they don't have any capability at all. And after I left government in 1989 it was twenty years ago we had the so-called war of the cities going on between Tehran and Baghdad. Iran and Iraq were in a warfare. And all of a sudden an Iran Air plane showed up on the runway near Pyongyang and in the sight of everybody's satellite out came nine ballistic missiles to be loaded on the Iran Air 747 and they flew them off to Iran and then fired them on the Iraqis. And then another 747 came over and nine more of these things went out and all the American experts were saying they didn't have any of these at this time. So I think this is something they've been working on for a long time and have picked up the technology wherever they could get it. And I don't think China and the Soviet Union, much less Russia have tried to make North Korea militarily stronger at least since the days of the 1950s which is another world. Always the story about Pakistani assistance and I can remember reading some stories in various publications about even when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister that on her own official aircraft flying to Pyongyang there were all kinds of forms of nuclear technology. I don't think that... I've never heard that story before but AQ Khan was on the airplane. Okay, there you go. I think as early as 1990 and he certainly visited numerous other times and his footsteps are now pretty well defined. Musharraf in his book refers to movements of complete centrifuges to North Korea. The fact is there has been a great deal of cooperation of North Korea and Pakistan back in those days. Supposedly it's all over now, we hope so. But that was cooperation I think in both the nuclear area and in the ballistic missile area. And it's not clear who was helping whom out more. There was a story in U.S. News where a report not all that long was suggesting that China had looked the other way on numerous occasions. It essentially had helped Pakistan get started with its nuclear effort and along came Mr. Khan. You don't buy it today, I don't think. Oh, I probably do buy into that. But the time and details I think are probably important and who in China was buying into this. The cooperation of Pakistan and China on military matters goes back a long, long way. And how much China was supporting AQ Khan, my guess is that they probably weren't supporting AQ Khan particularly much, but there may have been some earlier cooperation that he built on. Ah, that's interesting. And he may have moved things around with the knowledge of some Chinese. When you were dealing with the North Koreans I should say the Chinese on the North Korean situation. Do the Chinese ever approach you and say something like, well, you know, if you could give us a little more help on Taiwan we could give you a little more help on North Korea? No, they never did that. There was no implied clear protocol? No, they frankly I think would have known that it didn't work. Various Chinese academics were talking to American academics about that time, and months didn't go by that I would read and perhaps deep in the recesses of the minds of some in Chinese there was that hope. But the fact is one of the things that struck me after having been out of government for 12 years when I came back in in 2001 was that the Chinese diplomatic establishment had been upgraded. That the education the experience of sophistication of the Chinese was considerably greater than it had been before and it was not insubstantial before and the fact is I have a great deal of respect for the vast majority of the Chinese with whom I interacted during this period in 2001 and they didn't suggest that and I think they knew if they had that we would have turned them down flat. That's not how it works. If we sold out Taiwan in a serious way that would allow a military takeover American credibility would be lost with everybody in Asia and it would never be recovered. Do you support the sale of F-16s to Taiwan? I don't know if I do or not. I haven't been active in that particular question for some time. I do think that it's important that China never think that it can easily militarily conquer Taiwan but the cooperation that's going on now suggests that maybe that's been overtaken by events but whether Taiwan needs new F-16s for modicum of air defense there's no question that China's military buildup is considerably greater than it's been whether they need new F-16s focusing back on Korea here. So much talk has been seems to be current that if North Korea doesn't tame down if it keeps up these nuclear explosions it keeps shooting missiles over Japan but it's going to force the Japanese to become a more significant military power yet the other day at the Pacific Form just a couple of seats down from me Skip or seem to dismiss that possibility and I agreed with him I don't think that as long as the U.S. and Japanese alliances are intact and have meaning there is little sentiment among Japanese people for achieving nuclear weapons or some sort of serious rearmament Japan doesn't want to spend the money on it it doesn't seem to have the desire to do that politically there are obviously some individuals in Japan who might see that differently but I think that as long as the American nuclear umbrella is perceived by most Japanese as meaningful and as long as North Korea misbehavior is somewhat limited which it has been even with nuclear tests after all they don't have an unlimited amount of fishable material and this blowing a hole in one of their mountains is better than some of the alternatives of how it might be used so where does North Korea really want to go they just really they want one on one negotiations with the U.S. they really don't care about the other parties well it's very difficult for them to have the other parties and they have dreamed in the past that somehow the U.S. would support them in the way that they would like to become accustomed but the fact is no U.S. administration past or future is likely to provide that kind of wherewithal if North Korea wants to change its behavior in serious ways if it really does want to start opening itself to the rest of the world I think there would be a lot of U.S. help and support so that is really a way of avoiding having to deal with for the North Koreans to have to deal with the realities in the end this is a Korean problem and it will only be fundamentally resolved by the two Korean sides and so dealing directly with America a long way away is really a way of postponing coming to grips with the true issues of course South Korea has been a very very long time U.S. ally when you were assistant secretary were you happy with the intelligence sharing from South Korea from South Korea to the U.S. as far as I knew it was I think generally generally fine there was some refocusing going on I think in South Korea but the truth is that notwithstanding press reports of difficulties the cooperation that the U.S. had from its Korean ally during the administration of President Nomu Young was excellent we made this arrangement to move our forces further back from the demilitarized zone to the operations South Korean forces went to Iraq acquitted themselves with great credit they are doing some helpful things in Afghanistan the fact is the cooperation all along has really been very good with South Korea and so the rumors of difficulties I think are that people like to write about not that everything was in every day in complete agreement the fact is we need now to have a more equal relationship between the U.S. and Japan and the U.S. and South Korea both countries have changed enormously and they've grown up in so many ways in sophistication economics and their technology and their role in the world and that needs to be shown and I don't see any reason that we can't do that thank you very much for joining us today Jim it was really quite a pleasure to have you here and I'm sure everyone will enjoy your comments thank you


I know some folks in here, if you don't know who I am, my name is Steve Greenberg. About a year ago, a little over a year ago, I founded a company called Resilient Scale. And we're going to talk today about growing your Cloud Foundry organizations. My goal for this session is to talk a little bit about some of the challenges, but also how we advise our customers on effectively growing their organizations, because it's actually a bit of a big challenge. I'll try to talk slow. I don't speak German. Apologize for that. But we do have a lot to cover. So how many people have actually seen the developer report from the Cloud Foundry Foundation that they put out in November of last year? Anybody? One. Wow, OK. It's available on cloudfoundry.org. And I highly recommend everybody go take a look at it. This report is aimed at looking at the developer market and talking about the state of that market. A lot of what we're seeing is actually the challenges that were highlighted in this report. The first thing that I want to talk about is 64% of the respondents for that report said that there is a real shortage of developers. And not only is there a real shortage, but it's a threat to their business. So think about that for a second. 64% of the respondents not only said there's a shortage of developers out in the market, but that that's actually threatening their ability to deliver business. Of those, 57% have said that they've already been impacted. They're having problems finding skilled people. Those are kind of scary numbers, right? I wanted to understand this a little bit more. And so I did a bit of an informal kind of experiment. And what I did is during one of our two-week customer engagements, I just started to make a list of all the things that came up. And I wasn't very diligent about this. But I started to make a list. And the first thing on that list was Cloud Foundry, because most of what we talk about is Cloud Foundry, right? But as I started to make that list, more and more things started to pop up. Actually, a lot of things started to pop up over this two-week period. And I'm sure there's tons of things that I missed. But these are all things that came up in the context of a two-week training around Cloud Foundry. It's kind of scary when you look at it, right? That is a massive mountain of information to try to keep a mental model of. And all we're doing is talking about Cloud Foundry. That's kind of scary. That tells us something, though, right? When we actually put that together, sorry, my clicker's not working. It tells us that hiring is actually extremely competitive. There's not enough developers out there, and how many of those developers can keep that mental model in their head? I know I struggle with it. I can't answer every question about all of those things. That's a really significant challenge. Sorry, I'm having problems with this thing. And what that means is that we really have to look within. We have to look to scale and build our existing teams. It's the only way. If you open 50 RECs for Cloud Foundry developers, how long do you think it's gonna take you to fill those? A long time, right? We have to use the resources that we have. Hiring's important, but it's not gonna be a way to effectively scale your organization in the short term. If we go back to this developer report, they said that training's the answer. My company does a lot of training. And I'm here to tell you that if you think training is the answer, you're probably wrong. It's an important aspect, but it's not the most important aspect. If you just go out and sign up for a class and think that that's gonna solve your problem, it's not. Culture is the answer. Establishing the right culture is the only way that you're gonna effectively grow a Cloud Foundry organization. And we'll talk about that a little bit. There's a reality here. Cloud Foundry's not a magic pill. I can take Cloud Foundry and I can do horrible things with it. I can be completely ineffective. There is no tool out there that will fix your broken culture. I don't care what that tool is, Cloud Foundry doesn't fix it. So again, my company does a lot of training.  And I would actually encourage you to just not even try. So let's talk a little bit about how we advise our customers on building their Cloud Native organizations. Kind of broken it down into five things. You've gotta get going. Starting small is important. Cultural change across organizations is extremely, extremely difficult. I've seen customers go out and say, we're gonna take on 10 different projects all at once and what do you think happens? They can't enforce the culture and ultimately those projects end up failing. So we wanna start small because we can control small environments. It's really important that we also have the right goals. Have the right goals when you start with a small team. So I've seen a lot of companies have goals like, we're gonna train 200 engineers in Cloud Foundry. Well, that's a vanity goal. Why? Why are you training 200 engineers? It might be good for marketing.  It'd be a heck of a lot better if you actually had projects for those engineers. If you think that's a good reason to try to build a Cloud Foundry org, you're probably gonna fail at it. We want impactful goals. We wanna build something real, build a real feature, do something useful for your business or for your customers.  So we wanna start small and we wanna have the right goals. Impactful goals are measurable. You have to be measuring these things. Your goal is to scale and that means that you're gonna need to talk to a lot of people about what's happening and what you're doing. And you want empirical evidence that shows how fast things are happening, how much you're achieving. Our goals have to be demonstrable. We have to be able to build something that we can demonstrate and show. It might be, hey, we had an idea on Monday. We got it in the user's hands on Friday. That's a measurable, demonstrative thing. And that's really, really important. And you'd be surprised how many customers overlook this. And then lastly, we need this thing to be useful. It should impact your business. Don't pick some pet project that nobody's ever gonna see or use because it's not gonna help you when you're making the case to actually scale your organizations. So start small, understand your goals and most importantly, control the culture. In a small organization, you get to set the culture and you should be able to create a little bit of an island around everybody working on those teams with the right culture. This talk isn't about what that culture should be but hopefully enough of you know what some of those things are. Creating a blameless culture, having transparency, having cross-functional teams. These are a lot easier to do when you start small and you have a well-defined goal that impacts your business. It's critical that you control your culture from the start. Hopefully everybody knows who Grace Hopper is but I love this quote from her. I think it's one of the most important quotes in computing, the most dangerous phrase in the language is we've always done things this way. Won't work. It won't work with Cloud Foundry and it won't work in Cloud Native. So control your culture. Then you can assemble the right team. This is pretty critical too, right? We can't take who's actually gonna be involved lightly. These are challenging things. So think back to that big mountain of information that comes up in the context or topics that come up in the context of Cloud Foundry. Things are gonna go wrong. We're gonna make bad decisions. We're gonna have to learn a lot. We need people that are empathetic. Empathy is probably the most critical thing that your initial team members can have. If they start pointing fingers at each other when things go wrong, they're gonna take the entire project down. You obviously know there's a lot to learn. It's a lot of new things and a lot of new features. We need people with aptitude. We need people that wanna learn. If they don't wanna learn, they shouldn't be on your team. I don't know everything in that mountain picture. I don't know if there's anybody in this room that would confidently raise their hand and say they do. We need to be able to learn and think and reason. And the last thing is try to create a diverse team. Teams that are made up of all the same people have one perspective. The chances of having one perspective and interpreting requirements correctly and building the right thing is very small. And actually diversity is really important even in small teams because we need those varied perspectives. We need to be able to challenge each other and build the right thing. If we don't build the right thing, it's not useful. If it's not useful, you're never gonna scale. So how many people were involved in Cloud Foundry before Pivotal was even formed when it was still in VMware? Anybody? Oh yeah. So two, think about the people at Pivotal Labs that took over Cloud Foundry from VMware when you start thinking about your team. They were given a project that they didn't write, that they didn't use, that they didn't know anything about. And they had to learn all about it and they had to build it and support it. And think about it in the context of those values. Those are the types of people that you need in your organization and on your team. So start small, understand the right goals, control your culture and assemble the right team. We good? Okay. Sorry, I have to keep walking over here because this doesn't seem to work. Education is actually important. My statements about that report initially are not that training's not important, but it's important in the context of everything else in the culture. We think back to the mountain and there's a lot to learn. And if you were gonna take your engineers and send them to a class for each thing on this list, you'd probably be in training full time for at least five years. And you'd come out of that training and you probably wouldn't know anything, right? Because you wouldn't remember, because keeping a mental model of this is really challenging. So we need to pick and choose what we're educating on and we need to maximize the effectiveness of that training. So how do we do that? The first thing is that concepts in context actually matter. Developers have to make decisions. You have to be able to reason over that mountain of things. And in order to do that, you have to understand things that are beyond the bounds of cloud foundry. If you just understand I can do CF push, you're not gonna write a very good app. I'll give you an example, kind of contrived example of the aviation industry. If I'm sitting in the cockpit of a commercial airliner and I grab the yoke and I turn it left, the plane goes left. Is that all I wanna teach my pilots? I hope not, right? They need to know about what the aircraft is doing and the mechanical systems and the flight surfaces. They need to know about physics. Why? Because it helps them make better decisions. If I know a little bit about how apps are staged and how apps are run in cloud foundry, I can make better decisions about my apps and I can build better apps. It's pretty simple. In order to do that, I need context so that I can reason and understand. When you're looking at training, the experiences that you have in the classroom matter. It's funny because some people actually in here have trained. So the experiences matter because we're creating a controlled environment. And we wanna train people in a way where they can learn without the risk of failure. How many people have gone to training classes where all of the exercises were cut and paste and you could literally cut and paste everything and do everything in the class? Is that useful? It's not useful. It's not useful because you don't actually learn anything. You need to be looking things up. You need to have things crafted appropriately and keeping with that aviation theme, that's the whole purpose of having flight simulators, right? You crash? Fine. We've removed the risk of failure, but we've created as realistic of a scenario as possible. And we've given them a safe environment to go through that in. So context matters and our experiences in the classroom matter. This one's overlooked a lot and I know this is gonna be a little controversial but who you learn from matters. Do you wanna learn from practitioners that know what they're doing or do you wanna learn from somebody that learned a script? Do you wanna learn from people that actually know, right? Because it's a lot of things to keep track of in your mind. So again, keeping with the aviation theme, if I'm gonna go learn to fly a fighter jet, do I wanna learn from Lieutenant Colonel Christine Mao, a highly decorated US Air Force officer, the first female to ever fly the F-35, or do I wanna learn from an actor? Think about that when you're figuring out who's actually training your people. Have you done it? Have you written code? Do you actually use Cloud Foundry? Have you used it in production? There's a lot of people and a lot of companies that do training that don't take this into account. I don't wanna go learn from Tom Cruise, I'm sorry. The last thing I'll say about training is don't train without real work. If you send a whole bunch of people to a class and you don't even have a pipeline of work for them to do, what are the chances that they're actually gonna remember what they learned? It's pretty small. They need real work. Training is just the beginning. The rest of the education comes from on the job. So they need a job to go do that relates to these things. You've educated them, you need to support them. I hope a lot of people in this room know who Adrian Kockroft is if you don't. He's over at AWS right now. But he was actually instrumental in starting and getting Netflix really going, right? And getting their online streaming service going. And he had a quote that I think sums this up perfectly. You can get many, many times more out of a good senior engineer by getting behind them and pushing instead of getting in front of them and getting in their way. And you think about culture changes and process changes, this is at the heart. So how do we do that? I highly encourage you to make it a priority to be involved in the community. When you're first getting started, who do you think your support structure is gonna be?  It's gonna be the community.  It's really important to get involved in the community but also give back because then you actually start to actually learn more by teaching the next set of people. We've got a great community here. And it's important that you dedicate time for that. The other thing that's important is constant improvement. I've seen too many customers have a knee-jerk reaction to a bug going into production, to a bad decision being made on the interpretation of a requirement. And their response is always to start introducing a process. And process creep is a real thing. Constant improvement is about what happens when things go wrong. Constant improvement is critical to your team's success. So I'll tell you a little bit of a story here. Some of you know this story but when I started, I actually used to work for Pivotal. When I started at Pivotal, I spent the first two months in San Francisco working on Cloud Foundry. And I didn't know anything about Ruby at the time and what was going on with these projects. But they had a very early customer that had a bug, had a problem, couldn't figure out what was going on in financial services. And in most of my career, that would have resulted in a lot of meetings and a lot of finger-pointing. And that's counterproductive. What happened was a question, right? How many people might have worked on this? Who might know what was actually going on? We went around, figured out who those people were, all sat down in a room, looked at the problem, figured out what the problem was, wrote a test, implemented the solution, shipped it to the customer, took less than two hours. That's a culture of constant improvement, right? You gotta fight the urge to introduce process just because things go wrong. The other thing that you need to do is measure and report appropriately. And appropriately is a key word here. I've seen too many projects and too many customers where they do things like measure lines of code, number of commits and git, how many bugs the developer introduces. All of those things have negative impacts on the output of your developers, right? But the reality is you're trying to scale your organization. So you're gonna have to talk about these things. So you need to measure the right things. The things that show off what you're doing. Things like how long did it take when I came up with a new idea till I got it into a user's hands. How long did it take me to fix that bug? Was it two hours or were we too busy fighting? Those are good measurements. Those are real measurements that will help you as you make the case to scale your organizations.  So you wanna take those measurements and you wanna publicize those achievements. But it's not just about the achievements and it's not about bragging. It's about being ready to start answering questions. Because if you have a small group that's being effective in your organization, the rest of the organization's gonna start looking around and noticing. And you wanna be able to empirically answer them. But you also have to talk about the culture and you have to talk about the challenges and how you overcame them. Nobody thinks this is gonna be perfect. It's not. It's impossible to run a project with zero issues. But how you respond to those challenges and how you respond to those issues is what matters. The good news is that people flock to cool projects and good culture. It's in their nature. If you're a developer, you wanna work on something that's impactful and work in a good environment where you can just impact the business and do something good. So if you're measuring these things and you're able to talk about these things, the good people in your organization are gonna start putting their hands up and saying, hey, I wanna do that too. Think about how many people actually apply to work at places like Google and Netflix and why that is and this is why. When it comes to hiring, whether you're hiring internally or externally, you need to be careful because hiring the wrong person is more damaging than not hiring. It'd be better to be late on a commitment than to have the wrong person. I think we've probably all heard the old adage that One Rotten Apple spoils the bunch. It's very true of cloud-native organizations. So I'm gonna divert a little bit here and just say one other thing about hiring. Whether you're hiring internally or externally, make sure you have inclusive job postings. These slides will be posted. Grab this link and read it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you will after you read this. When I was at Pivotal and I was hiring people, I created one of these ridiculous job postings that we seem to do in technology, right? Where we say, oh, I gotta have 15 years of Cloud Foundry experience. They've done studies on that. You know what happens? Men apply because they go, I don't care. I'm just applying. Women don't. They've actually done studies on that and it's not that hard to rewrite your job postings to be more inclusive, to attract a more diverse team. And that works both internally and externally.  You've created a utopia.  I have seen customers do this really well with 15 people across three different teams. As soon as they added that one other team, everything started to fall apart. Culture creep is a real threat to your ability to scale. You cannot compromise on bad process changes. What I mean by bad process changes are, we're getting bigger. And so now we put this check in place. And that check has a negative impact on the rest of the organization. We're trying to create high-performing software organizations. I really like the way that Netflix talks about process. They say that good process allows people to be more productive. Bad process attempts to mitigate recoverable risk. And recoverable risk is the important factor. Somebody introduces a bug. It's more important how quickly they fix that bug than why that bug got there. Think about that when you start talking about the processes that are involved and what you're injecting into your organization. There's one other really hard part of this whole thing. Not everybody is cut out for this. Not everybody is a good fit. If you read any of the Netflix literature, you'll hear them talk about brilliant jerks. You might talk about underachievers, people that don't wanna learn. Inevitably in every group, there's somebody that thinks they know everything. Those are cancerous to your organization. And they have to be removed. Not everybody's cut out for this. I know that's not the politically correct answer, but if you wanna be a high-performing software organization, you need to prune them.  Responsible people thrive on freedom and are worthy of freedom. Developers wanna do, for the most part, wanna do the right things. We've imposed process for our own vanity, and we need to stop that. And those of you that know who Adrian Cochroft is, I'm sure you've heard this quote, but I'll leave you with it. It's a little story of when he was working in Netflix, he was in a meeting of CTOs, and one of the CTOs raised his hand and said, we can't possibly do what Netflix does, because you guys have all these rockstar engineers, and we don't have any. And he stopped, and he looked around the room, and he looked at all the name tags, and he said, look, I hired him from you, and I got out of their way. That's what we're trying to do. That's what high-performing software organizations do. They enable people. They get behind their developers and they push.  If you do these five things, you can actually scale your organizations. You can find the right people within your organizations. You can give them the right education. You can give them the right support. All of that success and all of that culture is just gonna make more people get attracted to it. And as long as you defend that culture, you defend that process, you'll be successful. So thanks.


Hey everybody! Hey guys! Hey Dino! It's that time again! Yay! Happy Wednesday everyone! Welcome to another edition of JSA's Fast Forward. We're broadcasting live. This is very live so if we sneeze, God bless us. And we are online by not just LinkedIn but also YouTube and our own JSA TV newsroom. So hey guys, I'm Jamie Scott of Cataya, founder and CEO of JSA. And I'm Queen Perrion, executive vice president at JSA and we are here to bring you the latest and greatest from around the world of tech, telecom and data centers. That's right Dino. So let's go ahead and get us started. Okay we'll do Jay and it looks like the hiring theme from last month is picking right up where it left off. Definitely definitely and it's not shocking at all. You know what we've seen is so much expansion news. We have infrastructure bills. We have facility expansion. So we also need the people power, right? So business is getting done. Absolutely. Okay so to go ahead and get things started, Light River has hired former Sienna executive Scotty Benda as chief product officer. Now number one, Scotty Benda sounds like a famous person. The first time I read his name out loud, I was just like, I want this dude's name. Anyway they have hired him as chief product officer. The appointment further maximizes market opportunities while accelerating its growth through increased scale scope and scope across all operations. Yeah and Scotty was a big deal at Sienna. So it's a really great get. Really great get. Good job Light River. Good people. Scotty Benda. Seriously, that's a great name. Absolutely. All right and moving on to the next question. So in October, also in Volta president James Buie was recently appointed CEO of the company, which we love. He now holds the title president and CEO to lead the company into its new phase of growth. Yeah and Buie succeeds current CEO and in Volta founder Bruce Lerman who will transition to vice chair of in Volta's board of directors effective Yeah, we love Bruce. What a thought leader and what he's done with in Volta up to today. It's it's been an amazing run, amazing group of people, amazing company and I'm sure I'm sure James he's got big, big shoes to fill but I'm sure especially as he was president right in step with Bruce for so long it's going to be a great transition. Okay and less than two weeks after announcing the addition of Jackie Steinberg as channel chief, Dart points has appointed Charles Carlos as general manager of the Midwest. Carlos will help customers benefit from Dart points extensive infrastructure in the Midwest. You know I love a good Midwest story. Anyway sticking with Dart points for a hot second, the company also announced that it will provide the University of South Carolina with a custom software defined data center solution which replaces the university's current data center and will significantly improve its IT agility. Software defined data centers. This is a relatively new thing for me and a really cool thing to be talking about so hopefully we'll hear more about that. Especially to that higher education market really great. And talking higher education, I love my city of Boston, a tough grad myself. So let's talk big news ringing out of Boston. Global telecommunication software and service provider NetNumber has now announced the separation of its business lines to form two new powerful companies. We've got NetNumber Global Data Services and Titanium Software. That's right NetNumber credits this strategic move to an explosive growth period and the evolution of its independent solution portfolios. The separation allows each company the ability to flourish individually with focused missions to meet complex security and evolving market demands. All of that to say that the two the big pulling apart makes each entity that much more effective. So congratulations NetNumber. Yeah I know in those guys there too it's a one plus one equals three situation. Really really great people great products from both lines of businesses and it makes sense that they do that under separate brands. All right so back to hiring. This is a big one Dino. A rep powerhouse data centers has just added two key players to its leadership team and that is really to fuel the powerhouse data centers deployment of next gen data center growth in northern Virginia hot spot there. Jamie this is what we like to call a two fur in the industry. Did you just come up with that? Two fur? A rep congratulations. Luke Kipfer hopefully I'm pronouncing that right has been named vice president of data center development and construction and Jarrett Applebee to data center strategy consultant and senior advisor. So congrats to A rep and to Luke and to Jarrett. Yeah yeah Luke and Jarrett top industry vets very cool very cool. So yes congrats A rep you've got an all star lineup there. Now jumping from team expansion to business expansion again those two hand in hand data bank our fabulous data bank team recently announcing the completion of its data center expansion in hot Lana. Yeah hot Lana that's right the expansion adds over 22,000 square feet of data center space resulting in total capacity of more than 44,000 square feet of white space and an increased total raised floor space of 72,000 square feet. Wow yeah yeah talking numbers QTS data centers recently acquired 200 acres acres and it's Richmond mega data center campus for expansion that could encompass up to 240 megawatts across one and a half million square feet of additional capacity. Wow these things are mega mega data centers right. That's right that's right and our friend our friend Vinay Nagpal it was quoted as saying in order for the business to succeed in our modern age the digital world has to be accessible and operational 24 seven we have developed a rock solid infrastructure with resiliency and diversity as top of mind that's from our friend and co-founder of QTS Richmond NAP and president of our favorite publication one of our favorite publications Intriglobix that's Vinay Nagpal Yes QTS Richmond now absolutely Vinay a fabulous thought leader in our space so many years and and now co-founder of QTS so I feel like Vinay is everywhere. He is absolutely absolutely and he has been for as long as I can remember so good peeps to know it was actually it was Tim Kaiser former or founder and former CEO of and Marietta 56 Marietta thank you Colio ATL Colio ATL who introduced me to Vinay many many Jamie this might have been like the first or second year that I actually worked at JSA so it was very very long time Vinay is everywhere yeah everywhere talking everywhere DR Fortress now expanding its global partner network to be everywhere with the addition of TBI the nation's leading technology services distributor y'all know TBI TBI now partners all their partners TBI partners have new access to DR Fortress's data center co-location neutral connectivity and cloud solutions in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands good place to be yeah I could really use access to Hawaii in the Pacific Islands yeah tell me about it absolutely Jamie don't you live in Southern California the Pacific Ocean and nearby okay so let's let's go ahead and move on yeah good point but we won't we won't harken that I'll bet it's terrible there in Southern California right now oh yeah it's terrible to have perfect weather every day I mean I lose this conversation people like it's so cold here and I'm like I just gonna be quiet anyway um let's talk 5G talk about a transition as you know Dino in the years to come 5G adoption is going to be so amazing driving cool new advancements in so many different sectors like healthcare manufacturing entertainment robotics automotive energy sports broadcasting I love agriculture we're gonna drop that one in and so much more yeah absolutely it's gonna touch like every facet of every business and every you know even even how we how we live and we work and we play and all that good stuff but 5G provides lots of benefits including ultrafast speeds expanded data center expanded data capacity greater network reliability and enhanced user experiences all that to say that you should head on over to 1623 Farnham's website and download its latest 5G infographic for a detailed look at why next gen innovation like 5G needs the edge again head on over to uh 1623 farm website to uh to download that infographic oh I love that I always love a good infographic and on 5G you know it's it really is so cutting edge and talking innovation we should uh segue now over to the port authority of New York and New Jersey I don't know about you but um the folks that do the path um port authority in New York New Jersey they actually have an impressive history you might not be following but let me tell you it gets it dates back to 1876 when construction of this rail system first began and now thanks to a strategic partnership between global internet inter exchange gix as well as our friends over at Highland there's a new innovative technology underway for this heavy rail rapid transit system jimmy that was a mouthful I'm glad that you're able to get that out um that's but that's right uh a metro dark fiber network build via the port authority trans Hudson path that's acronym path tunnel will make gix the first carrier neutral dark fiber company to construct a Hudson river crossing in over 20 years and gix has selected our friends as jimmy said at Highland as its contractor for the new fiber network which will run between 60 Hudson and 165 Halsey so a lot we're dropping a ton of names in this bit of news but you can see where that coefficient cooperation all that stuff is happening right there in uh in New York City and in New Jersey yeah 60 Hudson 165 Halsey imperative into connection right there but also an amazing partnership between gix and Highland I love that as well which brings me to another great partnership light river and independent data solutions or IDS these two companies now have partnered together to provide optical network management for organizations in Australia and New Zealand that's right this first of a kind partnership is the result of IDS's focus on making complex technology simple I like that ensuring that businesses can keep their eye on what matters most I love that let there be more light uh so our in other news light specific light path executives will discuss why both diversity and density are important to carriers and enterprises in an upcoming virtual lunch and learn opportunity on august 4th just around the corner yeah I always get excited about those those 30 minute like virtual events especially the ones with the the great lineups including our friend Phil Olivero at like path he's their CTO can't wait to see that one yes I love Phil yay Phil and he's such a great speaker he can talk about anything I tune in seriously um and I I love that we're talking also about the importance of quality network which again another great transition here we go guys to talk about extinet systems one of our newest jsa clients we're very excited um and they just announced some great news as well uh they will now provide circuit of the america's coda that um that arena with new 5g cellular and a private wireless network infrastructure yeah that's a great story and extinet welcome to jsa we love having you um extinet will be expanding both cellular coverage and capacity throughout the coda complex enhancing its radio network coverage as well as upgrading existing fiber infrastructure now that's one way to see a formula one race those cars are fast as is the extinet network oh i like that yes yes yes and you know what there's over 400 thousand fans that attend the formula one grand prix at coda so um yeah lots of folks going to be excited about uh that additional network and and ability to cover such a great event absolutely and so now we move from network enhancements for fans those people going to watch the cars go around uh to keep financial players from fans to finance with nova financial networks i feel like i'm writing a commercial for them love fans to finance okay nice transition just you know i love that one um you must be thinking of course about an ova's new news which now delivers a nova financial networks now delivers its proprietary wireless platform from mawa new jersey direct to ny4 located at 755 sikakis new jersey exactly and of course this mawa i always messed that word up but i think i'm getting it right mawa to sikakis corridor is key as it interconnects leading financial services and trading in in ecosystems and is of critical importance for us equity price liquidity and discovery interesting very interesting yes key key channel there um good to see um that um our our friends over at an ova are all about it all right it is a wartime guys channel vision magazine has now recognized zenlayer as a winner in the 2022 visionary spotlight awards or vsa of course we all know annual vsa's highlight both channel and service provider innovation and communication so that's a big one for zenlayer right absolutely zenlayer was named a spotlight award winner in the emerging markets deployment category highlighting the provider's commitment to high performance computing and interconnectivity at the edge so congrats to the gang over there at uh at zenlayer and it truly is award season i know myself and a lot of the other jsaers we are uh kind of heads down making sure that we're putting the uh the best best possible proposals together for some of these awards right now and you know what that also brings us to our own jsa marketing team cranking out some some great prestigious awards i'm really excited to announce that jsa us we have been named to the prestigious ink magazine's best workplaces list the renowned list of america's best places torque yeah and you know who are we to argue with ink right i mean if they're going to tell us we're one of the best places to work then we we got to believe them right because you got to go with that yeah after 11 years for me personally i i think that they're probably on to something but you know we'll we'll definitely take their word for it yeah i mean it's really such a recognition out of thousands of businesses uh applying for for this list they they chose the top 475 and off of surveys by your own employees so um really really prestigious one really one that um we're we're so excited about so thank you ink we appreciate that and thank you to our our family here at jsa for um for your love and support and you know commitment to our core values and our clients and our industry and the planet i just i i'm gushing i can go on i go on oh and we know what we should also not forget that jsa tv uh right here what you're seeing i want to speak my elbow um we will be broadcasting live because you know we do live like this uh and kind of happen with it right we love us live we sneeze we bump our elbows it's all good um but we will be live at both platform congress and data cloud usa which is coming up in september two huge events you definitely want to check them out reach out and say hi at jsa.net to go ahead and schedule an interview if you plan on being at either event say hi at jsa.net that will never get old to me i love that you are so much i remember and remember all you need to unlock here is an internet connection to stay in touch with all the latest news and info from the world of data centers and telecom just check out telecom news now blog at jsa.net yeah jsa.net slash blog 250 000 readers now um so i'm really i'm proud of our are just so thrilled and honored that our industry supports us and reads our stuff so thank you guys keep reading and also keep watching and as always stay safe everyone and happy networking see you later


The Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010 was one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Tons of oil poured into the Gulf, messing up the sea big time. It was a nightmare for the marine life and people relying on the Gulf for work, like fishing and tourism. In the aftermath of the spill, many solutions were proposed to clean up the oil and restore the Gulf to its former state. One of the most interesting and innovative solutions involved the use of the 528 Hz frequency. So, this dude, John Hutchinson and his partner Nancy from Canada, who know a ton about electromagnetic energy, decided to try this out. They played this 528 Hz frequency to the polluted water, and guess what? It actually worked. They managed to break down the oil in the water, making it easier for nature to do its thing and clean up the rest. They even had this chemist, Dr. Robert Naiman, test the water before and after they did their frequency magic, and he confirmed the complete removal of oil and grease from the after treatment sample source tested.


Good evening and welcome back to Byline. This is a public affairs show of the Amherst League of Women Voters and Amherst Media. And we're using this show over the course of this year to help people understand how our new government is coming together. And most of our guests are members of the government, either town councilors or staff or people who serve on specific committees. But today we're taking a little bit of a left turn and that's not a political statement. It's a turn of a bit, a different kind of show because we have two guests from the Amherst League of Women Voters. But there is a connection to our new town government because this is the first time we've interviewed anybody on the show who's using provisions of the charter that relate to citizens coming forward and presenting resolution to our town government. It's not the first resolution that they will have been taking up, but this is the first time we've had the opportunity to talk with some people about their effort before the town council. And so we'll talk about the substance, but we also want to talk a little bit about the process because we want people to understand how to use the tools of our local government. But in order to really get the context and the frame of reference here, we should start first by knowing who you two are, Diana Stein and Barbara Pearson. And you're both members of the league. You've both been in town. You've been in town for many, many, many, many years and you've been in town for less, but not that many, not none. And you've both been active in around town. So let's just take a minute here and Diana talk a little bit about what you've done in town government because you've served in town government. And your role in the league. Okay. In terms of town government, I started with town meeting. I was on the select board for six years. I am also was a member of the Charter Commission that helped draft this charter that's running the town government. And currently I'm a member of the Community Preservation Act Committee, which I love being on. In terms of the league, I have been a member of the Health Care Committee probably for 20 years. And I currently am that the League of Women Voters Health Care Committee is working now with other members of Western Mass Medicare for All. We are part, Barbara and I are part of the hub, it's called, for the Amherst area. So you've been active in town and you've been active in the league for many years. Barbara, you're newer to town but you've been active with the league and your affiliation, you're retired from the university, is that correct? And so tell us a little bit about. So I retired from the university about a year and a half ago and I had been following my neighbor, Jackie Wolf, whose name is synonymous with single-payer health care in Massachusetts. And I had looked forward to, I actually joined the meetings a little bit before I retired into it. And so I joined the league a year and a half ago so that I could work on the health care committee with Jackie Wolf, who then moved. Who then left town. And so I was willing to, I was still very enthusiastic about it and so I've taken over the chairmanship of the league's health care committee. But as Diana said, we now ally ourselves with a more, a broader grassroots organization. So you're part of a larger coalition here in the region and across the state. Also not quite the same. Working on this concept of single-payer and now Medicare for All. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in the distinctions and if there is a distinction that you want people to understand. But let's also take another minute. That's good. So we'll dig into that in a minute. But let's also take a minute and refresh people's minds, especially for those who may be younger and may have never heard of the league or those who have not been involved. So the league is quite a senior, mature organization. Indeed. It formed as soon as the right to vote came to women. And we'll celebrate its 100th year anniversary next year. Very good. And the Amherst League is 80 years old this year. So we started roughly 20 years after this movement became a national movement. And the purpose of the league is to encourage voting. That's a primary one. But we study issues and develop our programs based on that. We are nonpartisan. We do not support candidates. That's an important thing to know. But when we study an issue like health care and decide that the appropriate way for a country or a state like ours to carry out health care is through a single-payer system that came to be, actually, it's even a statewide position. And they've become much more directed saying that they support the bills that our resolution supports. That is related to that. And when you say nonpartisan, it doesn't mean that members of the league have to register as independent voters. But you have to check your party affiliation at the door so that you can engage in a robust conversation with your friends and neighbors. And your differences may be rooted in ideology and party, but you're not there to promote your party's interests. Barbara? Well, the current theme for the league is making democracy work. So doing whatever we can to make democracy work. When I was deciding, well, where was I going to put my focus and all that energy that I had since I wasn't working, I saw health care as a kind of a way to make sure that we could make democracy work. And in fact, I'm on the national committee for health care reform. In the league? In the league. Okay, good. And we have a, it's not a bumper sticker, it's a slogan. It's a slogan. It's a bookmark. And it says, healthy people for a healthy democracy. And we just don't know which way it goes. Healthy democracy for healthy people or healthy people for a healthy democracy. But it seems to me that it's integral. So with the, yes, I'm sorry, please. Well, it hits on social justice and racial justice and disparities and corporate malfeasance and all kinds of things that we would be very incensed about. So in a way, if the government and society can produce the health care access quality affordability that people need, then they know that their governmental system is working. Well, then we'll have a more democratic system. And that's a small D again, not big D because it's a nonpartisan organization. And so the effectiveness of government affects how people think about their government and therefore how they will either participate or not. Which is all part of small D, democratic engagement. So now we should talk about the resolution. Well, we'll talk about that in just one minute because I want to know why you decided to file a resolution and what did you learn by reading the charter and working on understanding what the benefit would be of taking this resolution to the town council. Well, the first thing is in terms of the charter, you've covered it. This is a free petition. That's the aspect which allows citizens to bring in issue and it really can be a single person. You don't even have to be a group like us according to the charter. Why are we bringing this to, we had a change in government from town meeting, which I might say right now supported this single payer Medicare for All back in 2000 and 2006 again. And the town voted 88% in an election on a nonbinding ballot question favoring single payer health care, Medicare for All. So this is something that town has cared about for a long time, but with the change in government, we wanted our town council to be on board as well. Excellent. And the process for doing that was? To draft a petition resolution, which we have. And you're going to be describing that in just a minute. I agree. Yes, indeed. And when you draft that, you submit it, do you need a certain number of signatures that you just submitted? No. And when you submit it, it starts the process in the council? No, what will happen was we find a counselor who agrees with us and is working with us. The draft is 95% complete. We are still tweaking it. And then you decide when you want to bring it to the council. And we want to make sure that we have dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's. So we, at this moment, haven't set a date. But probably sometime this fall, we will bring this resolution to the council to asking them to support and endorse an act establishing Medicare for All in Massachusetts, which is the title of a bill, S683 and House Number 1194. And that's what the purpose of this resolution is to get them to support. And so now walk us through the. I should have one other thing. Encourage our state legislators to work on this issue. And we're lucky in that our Mindy Dove, our representative, and Senator Joe Cumberford support single payer health care and Medicare for All. Terrific. So why don't you start to walk us through the content of the resolution so we understand the arguments, because I assume there's a bunch of warehouses. There are. Okay. There's more warehouses than you want to hear today. But give us the highlights. Okay. Because we need to talk to the public needs to understand what is the reason we should be supporting this. Sure. I think we should start by clarifying whether it's single payer or Medicare for All. That seems to be a big confusion. Okay. People ask it all the time. Well, single payer is that a system under which the health care bills are paid out of a single trust, just like Medicare bills are paid for out of a single trust. This would be a state trust in which all the funds would be gathered and the bills would be paid from it. That's what a single payer system is. The point that I want to make is that although the bill says establishing Medicare for All in Massachusetts, it should, in my mind, be read as improved Medicare for All. And the reason is that a lot of people say, but my Medicare only pays 80% approximately of my bills, and I have to pay for an expensive Medicare insurance policy. If this is gone under the bill, okay, you would have all of your medically necessary bills paid for by this trust. You would not have to buy a Medicare insurance policy, and it covers far more than the current Medicare does.  So it's a very comprehensive bill that is described. So do you know why people shifted from just talking single payer to starting to use the nomenclature of Medicare for All? Because I found that confusing myself, understanding and having sponsored and supported legislation around single payer, and I understand Medicare, I understand Medicaid as a former legislator, and I was just puzzling because I think it added confusion to the debate rather than made it easier. The idea was to add clarity or to add something that people could relate to and understand and recognize. So, for example, the Canadian system, helpfully or not, is called Medicare, and we are very familiar with Medicare, and it's the mechanism of Medicare where you get to choose your doctor. You choose your doctor, you don't have to worry about an insurance company telling you which doctors you can go to. And what services they can provide. And what services they can provide or not provide. Cosmetic is not going to be included medically necessary. But acupuncture is even in the bill. But if cosmetic were necessary as a result of an illness, it presumably would be covered because there are diseases in medical condition exactly that would produce a situation where for the health of the individual you would need to do some reconstruction, and that can be cosmetic. Sure. So people don't really understand our system. For example, when I worked at the university, I really wasn't aware how much the university was paying on my behalf. I knew how much I was paying, and if you had asked me, how much does your insurance cost? I would have given you what I pay. Your share, right. I pay four times as much, which turned out to be a huge percentage of my very low salary. But people don't really understand, they don't know what a single payer is, and don't really appreciate that we have a multi-payer system. I mean, not just a multi-payer system, a mega-payer system. But they do appreciate Medicare, and when there were the debates going on about the Affordable Care Act, people would say, I don't want the government to my Medicare. I mean, it showed their love for it, but also an ability to really understand it. And that's also another distinction. A lot of times people say, I don't want government doing this. But we're saying, okay, right now we have a good portion of our health care is provided through public funding, and another portion through private funding. So we've got that distinction. If somebody wants to say, I don't want a government run one, well, I personally don't want a corporate run one, because a corporate one has to worry about their shareholders more than they worry about me, their patient. And profit-driven. I mean, people have to understand having profit-driven health care means you're paying a lot of money for something that doesn't deliver any improvement in health care at all. And I just would like to set the stage a little bit in that the U.S. as a whole is doing very poorly in terms of health care if you take the statistics. For example, life expectancy. There are countries that are living where the people have a life expectancy four and five years longer than we do in the United States. And as Barbara will tell you, it's going down. It's not going up. It should be improving. And part of that relates to what percentage of the people actually are covered as well as the availability, the access, and the quality of what they're receiving. And when you have 10 percent of the population uncovered in a particular jurisdiction or in the country, nationally what do we have 15 percent uncovered at this point? And we're much lower here, but we have another huge percentage who are underinsured. Underinsured, right, as well. So we have somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 people who still aren't covered, even in Massachusetts, which does better than a lot of other states. But the point that Barbara raised is this underinsurance thing is terrible because the way you make insurance policies cheaper is you increase the deductibles. So if somebody has to spend $5,000 out of their own pocket, a lot of people just don't bother to get the health care until they end up in the emergency room, which is the most expensive form. And it also goes to your point earlier about equity. And because if you have insurance, but you can't get the level of service you need, it's going to affect our overall data. Because let's face it, in a community of this nature that we're living in has a very, very high level of insurance, high quality insurance. So you see people are living very long and productive lives. The number of people over 90 that I associate with now is stunning. But that's in part because they have such good health care. And they take care of themselves, and they have the income, and they have the insurance. And so if you don't have... But it's costing the state big time. The amount, the proportion of the state budget that has been going up from I think 2001 to now has gone from 30% of the state budget spent on health care to 45%. And every time you do have that kind of an increase, money gets pulled away from the infrastructure, education, and so on. When I went into the legislature, we were spending about 18% to 20% of the state budget. And at that point, it was a fraction of what it is now. I'm going to say it was about 17 or 18 billion. We're now over 40 billion, and it's closer to 42, 43, 44%. Exactly. I haven't checked it in a while, but you see that. And it's of a much larger number than a much larger percentage. And in terms of the inequality. So one of the things about the profit motive of the, even for insurance companies that are non-profit, which just means they don't pay taxes, they still have huge salaries, they still have advertising, they still have all these other things. But it doesn't, it seems that the whole country, not just Massachusetts, but Massachusetts as well, doesn't cover the rural areas very well because it's not profitable enough. And so they're really pulling back on that, and it just keeps getting worse and worse. What would be the benefits to the town and the town's residents that the town council would consider as they're trying to decide what to do about this resolution? Barbara would be really good to speak on this issue because she has studied the finances and it's astonishing how much of a help it would be. To help us understand what that looks like for the residents and the town of Amherst. Well, as you know, we want to save money. And the corporations, for example, who are doing this, they don't care if they charge more for health care because they have no incentive. You charge more, then you pay more in premium. But we have to put, you know, the town has to take out of our $85 million dollar budget. Currently they're taking out a little over 10%, about almost $9 million dollars. If we follow the law on the books, just for the active employees, the teachers and the government workers, not the special funds and stuff like that, we would save more than half. We cut it in half. More than half. And that's money that could go to, we have big capital needs there. When you cut it in half, if you're uneducated about this, you might think, well, if you cut it in half, we're going to be losing something. No. No. So how do you cut it in half without losing something? You have a more rational system, a more efficient system, a system that doesn't waste almost a third of your medical dollars on non-medical things.  So advertising and promotional and... And price increases are outrageous and the state legislature tried to get some controls in place. And that failed due to lobbying. Anyway, so tell them about some of the other things. Some of the other things, my goodness. So it's basically, there will be significant savings and there's data and studies to back up, back this up. And it's actual savings from the beginning, not just savings from increased saving, a percentage of the increased cost, it starts right from the beginning based on your analysis. But it has to have strong cost containment. So you can't just, like ACA, you can't just expand who gets health care if you can't rein in the costs. So that's why you want to have the single payer because you have more control over that. And so a big portion of what you're going to save relates to things that are non-medical. Absolutely. And in fact, you'll have better, in fact, we're not talking about the nine million dollars that I mentioned, that's for insurance. That's not necessarily for health care. So we're talking about paying half that for all of your health care. And that's a different proposition. And other points that- Well, one of the points of the wastage that Barbara referred to is the number of billing clerks that a practice or a hospital or such as Mass General has to hire to put the right codes in and send the bills to the right insurer. It's outrageous to me that Mass General has as many billing clerks as patients, 450. And a similar sized hospital. That's waste. That's just total waste. And then there's the drug situation. I have to go back to it. In Minnesota, they took a bus of patients who require insulin and drove it up to Canada because the insulin up there was something like $32 of whatever the aliquot is. In our country, it's 10 times as much. That's just profit. And I read of another drug that's $50 that they're now charging $20,000. That's got to stop. It's just we cannot go on doing this. So that's got to be attacked through policy because the federal government in particular, but also state governments, have to do what needs to be done to control that no matter what the system of delivery. But the single payer system allows negotiation of veterans administration hospitals pay 40% of what we pay in the industry. And again, that's the policy at the federal level ridiculously says you can't negotiate over seniors drug prices. Exactly. And there are drug prices for the veterans. That's absurd. So meanwhile, we have 30 seconds for you to make that final point. Did you lose it? I think I lost it. But it was about the fact that people think it's a free market. Oh, we have a free market. And what you just mentioned, it's absolutely not a free market. We don't have any of the market forces for competition or anything for for drug prices is a great example, but also for well, on that note, I'm going to thank you both for being here. And I want to thank you not only for the work and explanation that you're doing around our health care costs, but also helping us all understand how to use our town charter to bring an idea to the town government and our elected officials so that they can make a public policy statement in support of the kind of change that you envision as local residents you'd like to see happen. Thank you for giving us the opportunity. Great. And thank you for joining us and we'll see you again soon.