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Jason Schwartz with Clyde McClain Lewman, Gubernatorial candidate 2022 Hawaii\
Summary
In this in-depth interview, Mack Lehmann (Clyde McClain Lumen), a gubernatorial candidate for Hawaii in the 2022 election cycle, shares his vision and priorities for the state. Mack discusses his unconventional entry into politics, motivated by a desire to address critical survival issues facing Hawaii, especially food security, environmental sustainability, and community cohesion. He emphasizes Hawaii’s geographic isolation and vulnerability, advocating for greater self-sufficiency through local food production, agricultural innovation, and community-oriented living. Mack critiques the existing political and economic systems, particularly capitalism, which he views as unsustainable and divisive, and proposes a shift toward cooperative community-based governance—what he terms “community-ism.”
He highlights the urgent need to prioritize agriculture over non-essential land use, such as lawns, pushing for policies that incentivize productive farming on agricultural lands. He also supports abolishing private schools in favor of a unified public school system to foster equality and community spirit. Mack advocates for mindfulness, self-awareness, and youth engagement in education and environmental efforts as key components in creating a healthier society. Additionally, he stresses the importance of clean islands, reduction of plastic pollution, and a cultural shift toward collective responsibility.
Mack envisions a unicameral legislative system inspired by Nebraska’s model to reduce partisan gridlock and increase accountability. He also supports greater sovereignty for Hawaii, aiming to create a unique identity and governance separate from mainland United States influence. Throughout the conversation, Mack expresses both realism and hope, acknowledging the challenges of political change but emphasizing leadership as the catalyst for transformation. The interview closes with encouragement for public engagement in elections, highlighting the importance of ideas and participation regardless of electoral outcomes.
Highlights
- [03:26] Mack’s core campaign focus: Survival through food security and local self-sufficiency.
- [10:41] Advocates for increased funding and technological innovation in Hawaii’s agriculture sector.
- [18:50] Promotes small, cooperative farming communities sharing resources and knowledge.
- [28:28] ️ Proposes stringent laws to protect and prioritize agricultural land for food production.
- [36:05] Emphasizes community-building and environmental cleanliness as keys to a sustainable future.
- [40:42] Critiques capitalism’s privatization trend and advocates for a cooperative, sovereignty-based economic model.
- [47:09] ️ Supports unicameral government to reduce partisan conflict and improve representation.
Key Insights
- [03:26] Food as Freedom: The Cornerstone of Survival
Mack repeatedly stresses that food security is fundamental to Hawaii’s survival given its isolation. His notion that “food is freedom” reflects an understanding that reliance on imported food leaves the islands vulnerable to external shocks, such as supply chain disruptions or geopolitical instability. This insight underscores the importance of reshaping agricultural policy to prioritize self-sufficiency, which would reduce external dependencies and enhance resilience. - [10:41] Investment in Agricultural Technology and Innovation
Mack points out that current state funding for agriculture is minuscule (one-third of one percent of the budget) and advocates for increasing this significantly. He recognizes the unique challenges of island farming—limited arable land, diverse microclimates, and lack of grain production—and calls for adoption of new technologies and farming methods tailored to Hawaii’s environment. This reflects a realistic and forward-thinking approach to revitalizing local food systems. - [18:50] Community-Oriented Farming as a Model for Sustainability
Drawing from examples in China and local farms, Mack envisions small farming communities where resources, labor, and equipment are shared. This cooperative approach contrasts with mainland large-scale industrial agriculture and aligns with Hawaiian communal values. It also addresses social isolation of farmers and builds social capital, which could improve mental health and productivity while fostering a spirit of collective responsibility. - [28:28] ️ Land Use Policy as a Tool for Food Security
Mack is adamant about protecting agricultural land from residential or commercial development. He proposes penalizing landowners who do not actively produce food on their agricultural lands, thereby discouraging land speculation and underutilization. This policy insight aims to ensure that limited land resources are dedicated to their most critical use—food production—highlighting the tension between housing needs and agricultural preservation in island contexts. - [36:05] Environmental Cleanliness and Community Pride as Foundations for Change
Mack links environmental stewardship directly to community identity and well-being. He highlights the problem of widespread litter and microplastic pollution, which not only harms ecosystems but also infiltrates human health through the food chain. By engaging children and schools in cleanup efforts and mindfulness practices, Mack advocates for grassroots cultural shifts that can build lasting community pride and environmental responsibility. - [40:42] Critique of Capitalism and Call for Sovereignty
Mack openly critiques the current capitalist system in Hawaii and beyond, associating it with privatization, inequality, and unsustainable greed. Instead, he calls for sovereignty and a community-focused economic model, suggesting Hawaii could pioneer a unique system detached from mainland economic pressures. His vision involves blending traditional Hawaiian values with modern governance to create a cooperative society, which could serve as a global example. - [47:09] ️ Unicameral Legislature to Improve Governance and Accountability
Inspired by Nebraska’s unicameral legislature, Mack argues that a single-party, district-focused legislature would reduce partisan gridlock and improve direct accountability to constituents. This structural reform insight acknowledges the inefficiencies of current multi-party legislative systems and offers a way to streamline decision-making and enhance responsiveness, which is critical for addressing urgent issues like food security, housing, and environmental protection.
Additional Contextual Insights
- Mack’s emphasis on involving children in education reform and environmental activism reflects a strategic investment in long-term cultural change, hoping to break cyclical patterns of behavior and foster a more mindful future citizenry.
- His ideas also recognize Hawaii’s unique cultural and demographic makeup, advocating for unity beyond ethnic and cultural divisions to build a shared sense of humanity and community.
- Mack’s recognition that political leadership must be active and engaged—not bureaucratic or passive—speaks to a leadership style focused on grassroots involvement and hands-on problem solving.
- The discussion of housing, though secondary to food security, also points toward the need for smaller, more affordable living spaces and community-centric designs, challenging prevailing norms of real estate development.
Conclusion
Mack Lehmann’s campaign is rooted in pragmatic survivalism and visionary community-building. His focus on food security, agricultural reform, environmental stewardship, educational equity, and governance reform presents a comprehensive platform aimed at ensuring Hawaii’s resilience in the face of global challenges. His critique of capitalism and call for sovereignty position his candidacy not just as a political bid but as a social movement toward a more sustainable and equitable future. Whether or not he wins, Mack’s ideas contribute valuable perspectives to Hawaii’s ongoing conversation about its future direction and identity.
Timestamped Transcript
00:00
[Music] aloha out there in tv radio and internet land i am jason schwartz your host here at the neutral zone mauineutralzone.com wherever you are in the world we hope to have you tune in with us today we have a very special guest we have mack lehmann mack is over in a neighboring island oahu and he’s running for governor this is the 2022 election cycle some of you see under my name and i’m running too i’m in kali county council and everyone in maui county all three islands votes for all
00:52
the seats so you get to know who i am through seeing me with other candidates and knowing me over the years but mack is relatively new to the island and he’s taken a big step and uh mack welcome to our show thank you nice to be here you are on the ballot as clyde mclean lumen um we know you as mac but on the ballot clyde mcclain lumen um democrat party so you have an august 13th uh election if you will the primaries is really your spot to showcase and if you win one of the top two spots you go on in november
01:36
there’s some big money big interest running against you what made you decide to run what made you think i think i’m going to do this well i often off-handedly made a comment to a friend in nebraska on a phone conversation that i said i think i’ll run for a political office because it’s very simple here all you need to do is make a sign and stand out on the h-1 and uh they kind of both laughed about that but um a couple of months later when i went to register to vote after i registered i went upstairs to
02:10
the city council and uh because i wanted to volunteer to do something less than governor run for governor and the secretary had a city councilman come out he was kind of surprised he gave me the name of my district representative i sent her an email no response i sent her another email no response so i just said well heck with this i’m just gonna run for governor and so that’s was my thinking that was three four years ago and so as time what came went along i just you know once you put something in your mind like that
02:48
it’s it’s even though it seemed like a joke at the time it stayed there was a serious note in me about that about doing that and so i just kept thinking about it and now uh when i registered you know i had to get 25 signatures and uh pass them off amount of money to do this and uh it’s just one step at a time i just kept doing it now here i am and and uh as i go along i think of things that i would like to see happen and number one uh my agenda is survival and uh i say i would call it as surviving into
03:26
the future for the hawaiian islands and i felt geographically this was a very good place to be given what given what’s happening in the world today uh being very isolated being in the middle of the ocean uh what i call the center of the the center middle of the ocean the center of the world and so it’s just been uh kind of a series of steps coming this way and thinking about surviving and one of the things i the most important thing to me is food we don’t grow enough food here so i call
04:03
food is freedom and before we can be free of our our our dependence on the mainland we have to start growing more food so that’s one of my big things is to grow food create food boxes take part take yards out remove parts or all of yards you know there’s been a lot of talk about drought conditions here and talking about watering your lawn only once or twice a week and it seems to me that we’d be better off watering food crops than grass and so i think we need to shift our focus to surviving
04:49
we are at coming up on eight billion people on the planet and supposedly this year will pass 8 billion and in 1800 after 2 300 000 years of of homo sapiens on this planet we reached 1 billion people and that was in 1800 and then by 1900 we were at 1.5 billion you know then 1950 we were about 2.5 and at 2000 we were six and now we’re at eight and the planet can’t handle this we’re supposed to supposedly we’re going to peak out at around 11 billion and we could go up to 12 billion let me ask you
05:32
a question um that’s a lot of people and i think a lot of people know that we’re getting more people and our resources are being depleted how does that relate to what you’re doing as governor i mean i’m you’re right we got lots of people here we are in the middle of the ocean center of the world we need to be independent and self-sustaining because if there are problems anywhere else we’re on our own and uh that’s right and so those little garden boxes may be fun but we need major programs so i’m
06:10
guessing that as governor i’m really putting words into a direction as your governorship you would be aggressively finding ways to implement these programs and i imagine give incentives um and i i say that very lightly but uh what i found in my experience at these elections is me and others yourself we have ideas that are i think we all recognize as common sense that um we all say hey we need to grow our own food oh we need to do this but when you get to the government it’s like okay i’m here the government is either we’re
06:53
telling people what to do or we’re making laws and directing things so i’m only bringing up as a general thing because i always wonder you know i want to go in with good intentions some of the people that i see in running they accuse each other of not creating enough programs that are making the change they’re going along with the old status quo moving along an old system um do you see anything in what’s going on that you feel is uh unnecessary you want to ramp up food security you’re absolutely
07:33
i totally agree with you and i’m sure you can see most of our audience is going to agree hey all right if i can grow my own food man i have to be doing something because we’re stuck out here we only get i don’t know about oahu but here on maui i think it’s something like 15 of our food is from here and the rest of us from somewhere else so absolutely major deal food yeah very very major and you know right now on the mainland there’s some food shortages happening like with baby food
08:06
that that came up overnight you know and grocery stores don’t have big warehouses you know they rely on distribution and food coming in every day and uh we could run out of food in a week we could be in trouble and uh you know with what’s happening in russia and ukraine right now what’s happening on the mainland with people dying being shot mass shootings the world is slipping into chaos and i blame it i well i don’t blame it but i say population is a big reason for that overpopulation you know there’s a energy
08:45
there’s a vibration to uh to crowding to being there are too many people here you know like um i think it’s uh like eight eighty-three million people go to bed hungry every night uh in the world or eighty-three what is it i gotta write down yes right well that might be 83 million in the united states but it could both be even more i’m sure zillions of people are hungry wow people are hungry i know people go to bed uh hungry every night on an empty stomach and people drink contaminated water if something like two
09:24
billion people drink water with feces in it um we’re just not keeping up with uh what we need to do for a healthy world you know so um so that’s my objective as focusing on the state you know some people said well why didn’t you run for a city council or something like that but i’m not interested i’m more interested in the survival of the entire state of hawaii and uh keeping it from slipping into chaos like i see the rest of the world like it’s happening in the world have you um
10:02
uh any specific i mean i’m just i’m just really thinking as governor you would be kind of leading policy but also making any big changes that you think that we need to do to accomplish some of the things you’re talking about or i mean there’s so many facets to being governor i’m just really looking at um how and you would go about that role what your your thinking is yeah well i think last year the state uh budget allowed one-third of one percent that’s one-third of one percent for agriculture
10:41
we need to do better than that and uh we need to do uh improve all the agriculture technologies you know we need to do uh uh different kinds of farming with uh and growing crops that will grow well here on the islands because islands can’t the doesn’t does not grow all crops evenly like there aren’t any grains here to speak of you know so uh but between but i think the technology we need the technology of people experts and i know there’s already groups uh working at that you know there’s some
11:17
groups that are offering to come to people’s houses and pick up crops when they’re harvested if people grow crops we need to expand on that um so we need to uh plant food we need to plant fruit trees i think about ten thousand more fruit trees fruit trees take six seven years before the producing crop but we need to do it and we need to get started on that if everything falls apart we need to be able to like if we could supply 70 of our food supply i think we could survive if things got tough you
11:54
know we could we could grow we catch fish have you been have you been to some of these neighbor islands uh not recently i’m the only reason i’m bringing up when you talk about food security we have groups here on maui like food security hawaii and uh the farmers union is here teaching and setting up lots more farms and hawaii organic farmers we here on maui i i guess it’s more visible here that this thing about food security is much more in our face in oahu it’s to me i think of it as a
12:33
new york city or los angeles with extra humidity i i’m it’s a city but here on maui we have open lands mahi pono which was a a pension plan in canada teachers bought 41 000 acres and is doing what you said a major major plant of crops they’ve already planted better than a million new trees and there are all kinds of things they’re growing and some of the environmentalists think they could be doing more and that their mono cropping nature all kinds of stuff but some of that is going on but i can
13:14
imagine in oahu you almost don’t see it so what we’re doing in maui you know they all have to make profit god knows where that product will go or how we can commandeer it and get it to be staying here and have to find ways of incentivizing you know those growers to bring their products keep their product here yeah any thoughts on how you might do that or what you can lead a charge on that kind of effort i would plan to be i’m a very active person i don’t like to sit at a desk all day long and i would
13:49
be out there participating you know working with farmers maybe not like plowing and planning but i would be out there connecting with people and and i think that uh i think we can just raise the consciousness of farming and make it a a an island effort rather than just isolated farmers doing the best they can farmers are under a lot of stress and a lot of pressure and it’s not easy here to work the soil it’s a it’s a lot of work and so i think of things like uh providing uh different types of tractors or
14:33
equipment for farmers that they could share amongst different farms in different regions you know fertilizers bringing in anything that’s helpful from the mainland and like i said new technologies i uh i am again only interrupting because i think if you would come to maui you would see that you will find tremendous support for those ideas here and they’re already kind of beginning and some are aggressively in action right now because your ideas are right online with what we really need to do um i’m
15:13
wondering again i’m only questioning it because i question myself i we have all these good ideas and if we had the money you and i we’d implement them ourselves so if we don’t have the money and we’re looking at the private sector and we’re talking about good things but we don’t have the money we can only influence them so much it’s based on their profit and their heart and whatever obviously profit’s definitely in there and and uh but what can we do that’s why i say legislatively or what
15:50
kind of things like we talk about gun violence or things like that here in these roles of government i often thought i want the government to help what the private sector is doing that the government says yes that’s good we can make it better in this way or the private sector says we need help with this or that well we need to fast track this thing because the needs are so great and if we can fast track it we could bring the price down and make this affordable if we aim that’s how i am looking at this government thing you
16:26
know someone said well you’re sort of green why are you so fiscally conservative i don’t know if it’s called fiscally conservative or balance we got to find the money somewhere and i’m always screaming it at private sector but you can see how effective that is private sector does what makes them money now there’s the government up what can the government do well we’re not we let’s see president biden he wants to stop russia and so he does things and now people are saying well
17:02
look what it’s doing to our country we weren’t prepared to do that so it’s you’ve got your hearing it’s like a maze of what do you do and have everyone think it’s or many people think it’s a good idea any um i hope i’m not breaking up the train of where you want to go with this i’m i’m really looking at this whole election thing in a way of exploring what you know where people say i don’t want to vote because it doesn’t make any difference well why doesn’t it
17:39
make any difference you’re running because you want to do something and i’m reaching because i’m also reaching to myself and saying okay you want to sit there on the seat and as people bring things to you you’ll know what to do but something’s sparking you inside after thinking about as a joke and you’re starting to get serious about it something sparky something like here on maui the big issue could be there too housing oh my god rents are crazy there’s not enough rents
18:14
there’s not enough fairness with what they have as rentable places people are worried they’re being blackballed and sidetracked and hud doesn’t have enough vouchers and not enough properties steadfast housing is closing down because they don’t have properties and that’s an issue some people run on so what you said about population and food i’m i’m just fishing really looking for other important things and things that you might want to do to make those changes well i mean i have radical ideas you know
18:50
like i i think small communities like farming communities is one way to go i see farmers working out on a piece of land by themselves you know in the middle of the afternoon and i’m like how do you do that and uh i was recently at a at a mushroom farm in waimanalo and uh uh there was like a group of people young people and they were working hard it was hot and sweaty but they’re all kind of just talking and jabbering back and forth and kind of joking around but they’re having a good time you know and i think
19:25
that’s kind of the way it has to be you can’t expect one farmer to go out there like on the mainland they got all this big equipment and they got nice flat land and healthy soil and run these big monster tractors and grow tons of food it doesn’t work like that here and i think like communities small communities uh living within you know a certain area like i’ve been to china and i’ve seen out the countryside like a cul-de-sac that little lane with four six seven eight houses and each one of those
19:59
houses has the lands divided up around them and they work together and they share equipment you know they share ideas and they kind of work to help each other out you know so i think that’s the kind of concept that i would like to see more of here i would also like to see the state all this the state owns more land than any other any other entity and i don’t know how much of it is agricultural land but i would like to say it would put put it all to use and basically uh give it or set it up so that it’s
20:39
it’s not expensive you know like uh like some of these estates owned hundreds of thousands billions of dollars in land and a lot of that’s agricultural land you know on agricultural land uh you can’t you can’t survive you know paying five hundred thousand dollars an acre or a hundred thousand dollars an acre to grow crops it just doesn’t work you know so somehow we have to subsidize farmers and it’s more important than oil because we can run out of oil and survive but we
21:10
cannot run out of food so we have yeah i’m hearing i’m just knowing that land you speak of someone owns it and if the market rate and it is let’s say the market rate is a hundred thousand dollars may not be the place to do farming and you say well that’s the only farmland we have well the the control of that is not us you know it’s that’s to me the biggest issue especially on an island we can’t just put that farm a little further out where land is cheaper we have to deal with precious land that
21:47
we’re fighting for its use many people want to make housing there and you’re saying well yes we need food and the food is a constant need there’s so much need probably more than our land and we can grow it all but by the time we grow it all half of us will be dead yeah i mean seriously that’s what we’re taught we’re so far behind in that you know this has to be a direction you know it’s like when they talk about the goals we are going to have no electric or no gas vehicles by 2035
22:28
great goal how are you going to pay for the new vehicles for the people that are struggling to figure out how to pay their high rent well they can’t buy their present things so the system is i don’t want to say being forced to change it’s exploding or imploding because of what you said earlier too many people people that think they’re living in a dream world but the reality is if i help you and you help someone else many people say you’re just a fool you’re a i think our whole society has to change
23:10
its whole attitude we’re all doomed to die a slow and torturous death and the whole earth the same way we don’t really wake up to where our priorities are you know i want to say you’re not young you’re like me we’re here and our experience shows us that all is running around and all these things we do called life maybe we’ve taken too much from this planet how are we gonna survive and food is one of them absolutely what about housing uh how’s housing doing there are rents
23:44
pretty high in oahu i imagine oh yeah they’re high they’re too high i mean we need to well i have ideas about housing but uh we just have to learn to live differently you know we don’t need uh thousands of square feet like right now being retired i have like 400 square feet in hawaii that’s plenty you know it’s like i have a little lanai i’m on the second floor walk up uh i have a great view i’m in manoa valley i’m very content i spend most of my time 80 of my time out of here but also uh you know
24:24
most people uh psychologically we repeat the same thing one the thing we did yesterday we do today like 80 90 percent you know ours we have the same thoughts from one day to the next so it’s really hard for the average person especially if you have children uh family trying to survive to do anything other than what they did the day before so it takes people like me like you who have the time and the experience to to get out there you know like some of the people that are running for governor i see they have families and i
25:29
not rely on uh the outside world providing us with our happiness you know there’s a there’s a measurement of happiness and we’re we’re not up there very high in this country because we have to struggle and work so hard if we change our thinking so that we’re aware of self-awareness you know and with little children they can do this sort of thing really well like with schools i’m against private schools uh i think that they’re very elitist and i don’t see much difference between elitism and racism
26:06
and uh i think that it is detrimental to the children that go there to start feeling like they’re better than and for the children that don’t go there feeling like they’re less than and that statistically the children that graduate from the elite schools like punahou and midpac and iliolani and a commandment they don’t really they get better jobs get better placement but not because they’re any better educated it’s just that they have some status you know that that gives them
26:36
uh like a opening to higher and better positions and i’m totally against that because this these islands need to come together and we can’t come together when we’re all creating these divisive programs you know i think that the public school system should be much better than what the private schools can provide and i think that the public schools can do that and i’m just looking around i know there’s like 40 thousand fifty thousand children going to private schools and uh somebody said well where are you gonna
27:11
put the schools you don’t have classrooms i’m against classrooms here in an island we could have covered outdoor spaces and there’s i’m against sitting in rows and sitting in columns in a classroom looking at each other’s back we have more diseases coming up in the future we need to deal with we should not be creating closed spaces we should be opening up spaces the same with like where were you before here where where were you what kind of work were you doing i mean as you’re speaking i’m
27:49
i’m listening when i hear that i think of what came to mind was my hawaiian friends who say hey we hawaiians we were here we had lots of people we had different kind of customs and different kind of housing we need to bring back a lot of the the natural successful hawaiian plans for housing and for planting is when you talk about open spaces that means sounds like you’re ready to make some changes to laws that’s why i’m coming back again around to as governor where will you put your
28:28
emphasis so go ahead i’m just i’d make it i would make it very difficult to build on agricultural property to develop agricultural property any place you can grow food is sacred and needs to become sacred and uh i wouldn’t allow people to just sit on property and hold it if you live on a farm and you don’t produce food uh you know i don’t for example if you had five acres and if you aren’t producing on three acres you’re going to pay a higher tax you’re going to be
29:00
penalized for not growing food because we can’t afford to waste people just to sit on land well we have those kind of rules in maui by example ag land to be designated ag you must have so many trees or so much ag producing on your land and we’ve seen a lot of people try to skirt the issue planting things that uh truly allow them to be residential use and the crops they grow may not be as valid for food source like you’re talking about so maybe we could tighten up that did you know that maui actually
29:40
passed in the last election or the council set up for a department of agriculture so we here in maui it sounds like we’re running a in the mindset ahead of what you’re seeing going on at the state level so and you’ll be happy to know that some of those people that were here creating those kind of plans are going to be running for state offices from maui because they’re also frustrated just like you at what they see happening and i guess that’s why they’re jumping they’re
30:16
thinking their legislative reach should be at state level rather than local level for some of these same ideas yeah uh those are my feelings exactly i mean i i see a lot of small programs that uh they don’t have much underneath them i mean they’re little pockets of people working together trying to make something happen and they are making something happen but it’s not enough for what we need in the future we don’t have time to let things just you know pick up look inch by inch year after year we
30:54
have to make leaps and bounds well you’re sounding like me because i’m keep thinking it’s because what would we trade to get some of this wisdom that we’ve spent all these years acquiring to gain another 50 years so we’re now okay you guys you’re 20 you’re 30 you’re 40. get a move on here it’s like where were we as a generation dropped the ball and went toward that self thing you know we really drop i think we dropped the ball i’ve been talking about this for years and people think i’m a
31:32
whack job still talking about environmental things you still and now it’s all everything’s exploding they don’t remember that we’ve been talking this a long time they now on their own trajectory do you know that there are ways of taking water out of the air effectively and so we can leave that open space that you thought was ag we can use it for other things because we can grow things in all kinds of environment we don’t have to we don’t have to ship our power we don’t
32:05
have to ship our water we can create them more locally these kind of things in my mind need to be encouraged through tax credits and real incentives to get these things happen because if we’re going to speed this up those that have the resources need to be strongly encouraged to do things i keep thinking when i was in real estate i remember they talked about the power of the government for eminent domain that means we like your land and think it is important for the people thank you very much we’re going to
32:42
acquire it well i if i was a landowner i wouldn’t really like that how about another option called equity sharing let’s find ways to do whether it’s ag or whether it’s building partner with that owner so that without even moving anything their credit and financial ability coupled with others that are in the building process financial ability we could get a lot more going on it has to be somehow encouraged and that’s again as gov as governor me and the state law at the local level
33:23
i want to create incentives but if i create an incentive and it’s not supported by you at the at the state level sadly state law trumps i hate that word trumps decision we here in maui an amazing election we had a few ago where we decided we don’t like gmo crops and it actually won but then it was overturned because oops it’s not federal or state law it’s decided so all that effort came to naught so all this local activity needs a support of someone like yourself at the government level supporting and
34:07
creating a framework so that again i like to think we on the outer islands maybe because we’ve had more breathing room we can see and look at oahu and say we don’t want to build like that we don’t want to do it like that you don’t want to do that that’s why i bring it up to you and realizing that your ideas have a lot of support around the state i’m just always playing with that thing about so what kind of law can i pass that’s fair to everyone but clearly uh creates an incentive and um
34:49
you know it’s it’s a difficult you know there’s an expression i learned called sometimes it’s difficult to remember that your original intention was to drain the swamp when you’re up to your ass in alligators and we have alligators here whether it’s the traffic and the roadways and not enough housing inadequate water supply food like you said know the pride and the people to come out and help each other and change our society to be an example i’ve been talking about it a long time
35:28
and i’m glad to hear that you know you’ve been talking about it now this is a very you know the world doesn’t always conform to my view of the model in mind um what other things would were you thinking i mean i’m again i’m exploring your areas of interest as governor what i call this is community-ism not communism but community-ism if you have a community if everybody feels a part of the community that’s why we’re very divided here i mean we have respect for different cultures and ethnicities but
36:05
uh we’re not it’s not enough we’re not a community the first part of community is being human beings underneath that we have cultures and races and ethnicities but we have to focus on the humanity aspect of who we are we have to create a community when you have a sense of community one feel people feel a spirit of community they’re willing to sacrifice they’re willing to make sacrifices they’re willing to make uh contributions to help their their community when they feel a part of their
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community and that’s why i’m so focused on schools having one school system is to bring people into a sense of community the other thing about community that i think is important is cleanliness this island is just littered with garbage and i’ve gone to parks like over a pearl a city and a park there’s not an inch without some sort of garbage compressed into the soil chicken bones and gum wrappers it’s awful and a plastic in the ocean we have nanoplastic along the beach uh over
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kailua kind of a beach and you can see this i took pictures on my blog nanoplastic gets into the gets into the rainwater gets picked up as tiny tiny particles of broken down plastic it rains into the soil and the soil picks it up goes through the roots up into the fruit of the plant and we all have plastic going through our blood veins now because of nanoplastic so we need to focus we need to create a sense of community and that we all need to share in this and so and the only way to i think to do that
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is to start being proactive like one thing i would like to do every day is to go to a school a grade school a junior higher high school every morning would be one thing i would do to kind of get people to acknowledge that they are part of something and once they sense that they will they will do the right thing and i think when children know these things they will press their parents to do the right thing when children understand about going out and picking up garbage around their school putting on plastic
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gloves getting the little things you pick up things with when they start doing it they will influence their parents more than anybody else and so children are important part of changing the world we live in and starting you know right away mindfulness training and like i say i i like sports i love sports but there’s some sports that are too they aren’t really mindfulness sports i mean in a sense you think people would argue i mean i’m a big football fan but i think football is a very horrible
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sport causing brain damage and other injuries you know and boxing is another sport that is interesting but it’s again it’s too aggressive like if you take all the martial arts they’re they’re all meditative you know they’re all meditative practices and if you have a practice that makes that gives you a sense of well-being that’s all you really need in the world you need that and some food and some water you know well if you and i agree then we can do it but as a government
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you know i you know it’s like all of our recommendations like you just said i think that we should abolish private schools i think we you know not abolish but in this next election cycle i think you’re going to have a lot of resistance to things like that and you know more likely talking about going into the schools and educating there are programs like that many people would argue we just don’t have enough money to afford to send people in and we our monies are so stretched uh how do you get a dollar to go five
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dollars direct you need five but you got one and well i’m not really uh capitalism has run its course i’m totally against capitalism you know and like conservatives one of their ideas is um uh what is it capitalism where they privatization of everything privatization of health care privatization of police privatization of education because with privatization there’s a way to make money for people that have money to invest in these things to manage them like there’s helicopter services on the mainland that
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i’ve seen that somebody’s injured they need to go have a flight to some other place and the bill is eighty six thousand dollars you know and their insurance pays fifteen thousand dollars of that eighty thousand dollar flight bill you know so that’s pri that’s what privatization does i read a little cartoon that said your house burns down the fire department comes and puts it out that’s socialism that’s what some people would call socialism your insurance company denies the claim
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that’s capitalism you know so uh this is all wrong everything’s been turned upside down capitalism has turned into a very greed based way of living and we all are stuck and sucked into that and that’s why hawaii has an opportunity because of where we’re located geographically isolated we can do something totally different than the mainland with with a million and a half people we can make a change if you have a small community of say 500 people it’s very simple with 300 million like
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on the mainland 330 million it’s next to impossible to make this kind of changes but i think here creating a sense of community if you can do that if people get behind it you know because i know there’s a lot of divisiveness even in the different uh ethnic groups you know but i think by participating in cleaning up the islands having a day uh once a month or whatever to close down the highways and go out there and just pick things up go on those beaches pick things up i see people doing it like you’re talking
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about with growing food they’re small little groups of people that do take this on but it needs to be a statewide effort and when you take the children involved children that will go right up the tree to their parents and their parents will be forced to look at it you know because the kids will be into it little things like that but cleanliness as they say is next to godliness but it also changes our outcome out outlook if your car is filthy when you clean it up you wash it you wax it vacuum it it feels
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really good you feel good about yourself having a clean car same with your house if you clean up your house we need to clean up the islands that’s my priority food and cleaning up the islands i don’t like capitalism i’m into sovereignty i would like to see hawaii separate from the mainland i know that’s a big huge step but i would like to see i think hawaii could be of more benefit to itself to the mainland and to the world if we’re a separate entity we have we don’t have a horrible
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history uh like a lot of countries do like russia’s history like american history colonialism all that stuff but we have we can do that we could be we could be a place of solution conferences that’s what i call them to have solution conferences this could be a gathering places people like to come here we need to take advantage of what we are where we are because people all over the world know hawaii we need to it needs to become more than a surfing destination or a tourist destination if we have
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if we become united and a community of people doing the right things people will come here and people will support the islands you know they’re not anyway no i you know i’m listening to you i did an interview guy he told me you’re a dreamer i’ve been dreaming this for 30 years i am wondering if we are on the wrong planet at this point you know i’ve been talking about this for 30 years and here i am now running as a litmus test to see if anyone here has been listening you have big media
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there here before there was internet everyone knew my face and that internet comment i kind of got diluted down people don’t know i’m that same guy that’s been all these years promoting all these things and so you and i agree and we have a massive job in waking people up to their responsibilities in this idea of making hawaii and allowing it to be great again the hawaiians the you know they would many of them would agree and then there’s the mechanism of how does that happen well i think the first part you really
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identified we all have to be better people and to get out there and be participating in these solutions you can’t expect to point at someone else and say oh there’s where you find the housing solution that’s how you do the agricultural thing those guys and those guys if we don’t get ourselves involved politics like this to me that means you are involved and interested and in my mind whether you become governor or not your being out there is a way i hope of getting some of these programs
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identified and then they people will come toward you and they can really understand where you’re coming from and you can help being that champion and if you’re governor i’m gonna ask you i’m gonna ask a lot of you as governor because i’m a dreamer and i i don’t know how to force people into doing the right thing it has to come from their heart and yeah my my direction through is thinking that arts and music do a show have tickets and then tell that audience how brilliant they were because of them
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coming to this concert we’re able to build that park we’re able to have cleanup in the park because we put on music shows to raise the money to get see what i mean sort of a alternative advance and people realizing they can do good and maybe they’ll realize they can do that good and they don’t only have to have concerts and do music but if that’s the way it’s going to be to save our world that’s my direction because i i’m wondering whether we can legislate i’m hoping but
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i don’t know how do we legislate the conscience of people to get out and be supportive of you whether it’s governor or otherwise my laptop fell over well i think no i agree with what you’re saying i think community but also uh i support a unicameral governance nebraska is the only state that has a one-party system there’s no democrat no republican there are because of part of the united states but within the state their legislature is made up of senators each senator is elected from a district
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that senator is responsible for that district the whole state doesn’t vote for a district senator so the legislature is made up of senators they have committees they meet they discuss then they present to the body and they vote there’s no philosophical basis to seek fight each other like republicans versus democrats you know they just object just because they don’t want them to win anything so when you only have one party there’s no winners except and then also the public sees what’s happening you
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don’t can’t blame it on the other party because there is no other party it’s your responsibility to get it done and some people argue against us you know camel because they say they need the two parties to offset each other and to really struggle to get the best deal but what happens is a party that has a good idea that they have to give up things and they get the other party gets to slip nonsense proposals and bills into that to get in order to agree with something you know that and it takes too long it takes forever
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but the unicameral government to get things done quickly and there is a unicorn and that each senator is responsible for his district he can spend more time out communicating with the people and he can get feedback from the people that people feel more like they’re part of the government i can tell you when i’m listening to you that you need to move to maui because number one that we’re much more in touch with the ideas that you’re sharing here than you may know that um you know i’ve been talking about
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district voting for 30 years did you hear when i started here i said we’re in maui and i’m running for council and i well i’m one of seven running in the primary and i have to get known over three islands and there’s no tv stations here and there’s a few radio stations how are we gonna get known those that are known those that have the names right money money so here we go so i’ve been on tv for 30 years that’s why i say this is my litmus test if on local tv and the people here know me are they
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going to respond are they going to even know it or say who’s that guy where is our direction going i’m really proud of you for stepping up it takes a lot to say i’m gonna run for a political office in my mind i didn’t do this lightly and i know you didn’t do it lightly all along the way i’m asking myself what you know what am i doing i hope that you get more i hope you get more forums and places to be able to put your ideas out and get the kind of support you need to to make you feel
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like you’re making some progress here with it all yeah and i say keep it in your heart and i don’t know what to say i myself could get knocked down almost daily by the resistance oh yeah to some of these co-operative i say cooperative they say wait you’re changing the system the system is tasked to change you got all these people don’t you see that it has to change but you know you like we say education there’s so many different areas that need to change and people need to feel
51:14
their responsibility in new ways it’s gr i i’m a little overboard here but i know that you’re running is a really great thing because you get to put your ideas out there whether you win or not yeah isn’t that it’s a really challenge to get known over the whole state you’re like you are you know how many times you’re going to be able to go to maui and see the support that you could have here yeah but i’m watching here i watch politicians who are going to run for state
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they do an alternative advance and they’re looking for which race is the one that they’re going to get and they’re going to be able to take it it’s politics is a not a fun game at that kind of a level but our level is where the real ideas are shared and i hope uh really for you i’m going to give you a chance to kind of do a summation here and then but i’m hoping that you have the kind of uh good time out there that gives you the support that makes you realize that this was a good thing to have done
52:26
yeah it’s not an easy thing to do i think democracy is much more difficult than say a dictatorship a guy just has to get a little army take over and then tells everybody what to do if they don’t do any they just kill each other so but to do this to go out on the streets and try to get people to believe in you listen to you uh that’s hard you know it’s much easier to be a dictator you know to go out and just you know take over and say this is the way it’s going to be but i i don’t like that that’s why i like
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unicameral government community-ism have a community of like-minded people going in the same direction and that can’t happen over at night but it can happen quickly with the right leadership and that’s the purpose of leadership you know like what’s his name in india took over bled the country got rid of their the british people peacefully without too many deaths happening gandhi you know but he created uh he created a mindset a concept that people believed in and that’s what got
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him the dream that he like you talk about he had a dream and he created a concept and he made it happen just by his leadership people believed in him so you know that’s a funny one i think about that i always there’s a hawaiian song called 1978 which you’ll hear or written by uh israel camacho viva ole who passed away and it talks about what would the queen and king say if they came back today and so what we’ve done with their paradise well what would mahatma gandhi say if he went back to india now and saw where
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they’ve taken his dream but there it’s because of people like you and the freedom to stand up and share your ideas that we have a chance and hopefully we’ll save the what are this what’s that book let’s say i have a friend who wrote a book saving the cosmos till tuesday you know he’s uh one day at a time well it’s a really it’s a fun struggle um let me give you a spot for him to kind of say goodbye to our audience but kind of sum up your uh campaign a spot to say well
55:00
i hope i win uh i would like to win i would like to try to lead this state into a different paradigm than what we’re doing and if we just elect another person to come along and stamp and sign his name to bills that the legislature puts through we’re not going to survive we just are not going to survive into the future and we need to take radical change but the people don’t have to do that it takes the leaders that’s my responsibility to go out there and create a atmosphere where other people will want to support
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what i’m taking on and that’s what we have to do you know food education homelessness money yeah and i even have a picture for uh you know sovereignty where we have a system like in the united kingdom where we have hawaiian king or queen and then we have a governing body and somehow they work together i’m not sure how but it could be done to satisfy the the native issues which are real and legitimate you know so but also of people that aren’t native also have a right to be here you know so
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it’s not like i everybody has to just be together we have to rise above our uh petty differences and become a community of like-minded people with a focus of survival from your lips to god’s ears i wish you the very best here in the election august 13th i want everyone to know is the election day for people that are running now we need to pass that primary barrier and so mack i wish you the very best remember everyone on the ballot when you see clyde mcclain lumen that’s mac and you’re seeing his
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name and stuff on the screen and his web address which again you see mac 808.com go up there and visit and take a close look at what’s going on here and if you like mac no matter where you are in the state you can vote for them so i want you to know that thank you mac thank you for being here on the show i know it’s a little informal and not typical kind of an interview but i appreciate you being here and showing people who and what you are and to me that’s what what we’re doing is all about is sharing
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these ideas so no matter who’s in the seat these ideas can move forward in the lips of the people and those that are in in control you know thanks for inviting me it’s been a pleasure mahalo you’re welcome and all you out there in the television radio and internet land stop back at mauineutralzone.com you’ll see lots and lots of candidates and interviews and you’ll be able to see i’m this same guy so i’m sitting in some seat i think you know what to expect much like me
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in fact i’m sure it’s exactly like mac thank you it’s really been a pleasure nice meeting you you’re welcome i’m good to meet you as well as my double shotgun hello everyone take care aloha [Music]
