 I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Today we're going to discuss ethical voyages across the sea. What does that mean? What does it mean to live an ethical life? My guest is Will Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein is a financial and investment advisor and a money manager. He is currently hosting the Will Weinstein Conversation Series at the University of Hawaii. Now that series is very interesting. It examines the ethical issues with knowledgeable professionals from the worlds of business, law, medicine, politics and athletics. He puts the questions out there and I am going to hopefully get some answers for Mr. Weinstein today. Good morning. Will? May I call you Will? You may indeed. Will, what is the Will Weinstein series about? Please tell us. Of course. This is the 15th year that we've been doing this and it's about the things that you just mentioned. It's actually called Ethics in the Real World and so it's not so much about the philosophical aspect of ethics, but much more about what happens to all of us every day, decisions we have to make, ethical dilemmas that we have to recognize and how to process them and never tell anybody what decisions to make, only how to get there. Okay, so what are ethics? I mean, what does it all mean? What is the idea behind it? And how did you get started in doing this? And some of your background, I'm guessing, played a role in this. Of course it did. Thank you for asking an easy question. Let's start at the end of that. I got involved because in the last decade, things got so completely ridiculous from an ethical perspective, starting with Enron and MCI, all of the notorious criminal things that happen. And I was in that industry, or remotely at least related to the industry, and I was embarrassed by it and I felt that I needed to try to do something. So this was my avenue. And I've been fortunate. I've been able, I've taught actually all over the world. I've taught in China. I've taught in Vietnam. I've taught in Australia. It's been a great opportunity for me, so maybe I chose the right thing to do. Okay. Well, okay. What is the purpose of your series then? What is your goal in your series? Well, the ultimate goal is to help my students figure out how to deal with ethical questions as they arise. And as I said earlier, recognizing them, which is really one of the most important things. If you don't recognize the issue, it's going to be difficult to deal with. But by bringing in people who have been very successful and who can do well and do good at the same time and exposing not just the class, but we open it to the public. So it's open to, I think we had a hundred and some odd expert people on last Thursday, which was the ethics and capitalism class. And we had four very prominent people on that panel, including one, my friend Roger Berkowitz, who's a professor of sociology and other things at Bard College in New York. And he couldn't make it, so he did it electronically. And so for him, he started at midnight. And along with his red bull, he made it until 3.15, his time, 9.15. So your goal, you found in your business, I guess, Wall Street, is that appropriate thing to say? There were things that you felt weren't right personally. And so you wanted to be out there, perhaps as a representative of your profession, saying what is right. And so that young people can learn. That's what I hear you saying. My classes are young people, but probably the average age of my students is in the 30s. A lot of their law students, their MBA students and executive MBA students, and they tend to have real lives and real concerns. And it's an elective class. And so you wouldn't be there if you didn't have an interest in it. And it's to show them in their daily lives how to deal with these questions that come up. And to arm them with an ability to see the problem and solve for it. OK. So I'm going to go back to the hard question. What is ethics? I mean, what is ethics? How do you determine what it is? That one's not that hard. We have morals, which are the list of the various values that we have. Call them moral values, ethical values, call them what you want. And then ethics is a system by which it all gets applied. So the entire system is what ethics refers to. And I use them actually interchangeably because I don't really think there's an important distinction between morals and ethics. But my point to my students is always that ethics is everywhere. Ethics is in everyday life that you today, you today, Mark, probably faced five or six ethical decisions so far today. Maybe you recognized them, maybe you didn't. But the matter in which you deal with those things is extremely important to you today, yesterday and tomorrow. OK. All right. How do you know then? I mean, I think you're right. I probably, you know, should I cross the street against the light? Or that may be a, I don't know if that's an ethical type of a question, but every day you come up with a, how do you know which are the ones that you should deal with that are they all important? Are they or is everyone dealt with these questions that they have to deal with all the time or how do you decide which to address? I think you know in the course of events which ones are more important. It's obvious. To you. It should be. To you. This is, again, this is a decision that you will make for yourself, which you need the tools to make it. So that's what this class is about. And it's about what you do when your boss comes to you and says, I want you to change the numbers in the earning statement. And you're fairly new on the job. You have two children. You need the job. You like the job. It's a good job, but are you willing to do that or not? And what means, what mechanism should you use to figure out whether it's okay or not okay? And the choice is I have a job and I have to support my family and I'll make money and if I change these earning numbers is that a bad thing? You say you use moral and ethics as the same. So how do we determine the code? How do we determine what is moral or not? Or what's ethical or not? How do we know? Okay, so ethics has reached a stage where it's now a profession in and of itself. So in other words, it has a different kind of legitimacy and it had 25 years ago and people would say, well, ethics is relative, it's not relative. Honesty, integrity, compassion, those are things that we'd all agree constitute an ethical mind and there are 12 of them actually, I'm not going to bore you with them. But those kinds of things we can all easily agree upon and as things progress and as we get more and more deluged with things that I think are clearly questionable both politically and economically but mostly politically at the moment, we'd have to start to learn how to make those decisions for ourselves and be comfortable with them. Never ask anyone to do something which he or she is not comfortable with. That's how do you get comfortable? Well that's the point, that's what this is all about. Where do you draw the line? Is there a line in the sand? And if so, how do you handle it? I always tell people if it's not an ethical issue, walk away, you don't need to find it, you don't need to become an ethical priest, you just need to find a way to live with yourself and be comfortable and feel that you've done the right thing and that you're, you know, we have lots of tests like the kid on your shoulder test. What would you tell the kid on your shoulder about the action you're about to take? What would you tell your mother? How would you like to see it on the front page of the local newspaper? How is this going to exist over time? Those kinds of tests are really important. The field test, the smell test, we want people to learn all these various things so that they can't, when faced with a problem like this, they can make a decision for themselves that's informed and comfortable. And so it's kind of a, I'm hearing you say it's inherent. We know what it is. We've been brought up. No, well if I'm saying that, that's not what I mean to say. To some extent it's inherent, but to some, you know, people will say, well my parents taught me this and that or my religions. That's all interesting, but that's really not what I'm saying. I'm saying that by teaching you a mechanism, a series of tests that you can use, some are philosophical, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, people like that who are pretty boring. But we have one class that's devoted just to them and then the other 11 classes are not philosophical in nature at all. It's all about the real world and what you do when you're faced with that kind of thing. I had a guy in one of my classes who, we always make people do ethical exercises in the last class and so they actually live an ethical dilemma. And this guy came in and he said, you know, I work in a liquor store. We sell corked wine, right? We sell wine that's dead and gone. If we can sell it for $22, I get $12. Something about that is bothering me. The class started screaming at me, you kidding, you got to quit this job. This is the, you know, that kind of thing. And two weeks later he did quit and he ended up as a food and beverage manager at Hyatt or Married or one of those places. It was great. But, you know, this happens all the time and people come in with their problems and sometimes the class helps them solve them. People in the class occasionally get involved. But again, I'm much more interested in the process than I am. And I don't want to tell Mark what he should do. I want to tell him how to get there and how to feel comfortable with it. There's something called confabulation, which is a very interesting phenomenon. And confabulating means that you tell yourself the same lie over and over and over again until you start to believe it. And that's dangerous because that's where it all starts. And then you go this way. And it's a slippery path. You're changing the reality. Yeah, there's a guy, I think his name is Payne at Harvard, who says, you know, I lie in bed at night and I really worry about my smartest students because the line is very thin. They're really going to become the next chairman of the board of such and such company or they're going to jail. I need to be able to predict that. I need to be able to make sure that the latter doesn't happen. So how do you predict it? Well, if you have a class long enough and you get to know the people and they get to know themselves and they are able and many of my students are able to do this, come to me and say or come to each other and say, hey, here's what I'm facing. What do you think? That's called ventilation. And that's a very important element. You give them the tools is what is what I hopefully. Yeah, that's it to make it. Now, in your course, and if we have I think we have illustration of your course, your first course, the first class was Ethics and Capitalism. And that was on July 5th. And you have some more going to come up next week. And I guess, right, these are the seven classes that we have where we invite panelists and we think are really special. And they're all there except the last one, the ethics and politics. So far, Senator Barbara Boxer is coming and Colleen Hanna-Boos is coming in. I'm going to invite a few other people so it needs to be filled in. Okay, on your first topic that you already had the class on. Yes. Ethics and Capitalism, is there such a thing? Of course. I mean, what is it? How does it work? Well, people always say to me, gee, ethics in whatever. It's an oxymoron. Yeah, right. It's not an oxymoron. Okay, there's a way to do it. Can you do it right? Can you do it well? And can you be successful at it and feel good about it? And it turns out, and there's an enormous amount of data to support this, that the companies who do things well, meaning that they're ethically tuned in and pay a lot of attention, those companies actually make more money and their stocks do better. So you can do well and do good at the same time. And that's one of the themes that comes across. And there's a, you know, and I have a friend who, I'll clean this up for this, who in one of my classes said, listen, if you have even a sense that what you're about to do is questionable, just don't do it. And that's oversimplification, but it's a way to think about it. It's a way to think about what will I do that will make me comfortable, that I can tell my children I did the right thing. I can go home to my spouse, my husband or my wife and say, here's what happened and here's what I did, including possibly refusing to make that change and losing your job. Very hard decision. Very hard decision. But you need to be equipped with the knowledge. Okay, I want to, we're going to take a one minute break right now, and then I'm going to come back and I want to ask you to tell me the names of some of the companies that are making money acting ethically. Okay, so sure, we'll take a short break. Okay, thank you. I'm Jay Fidel, ThinkTech. ThinkTech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco and Me, which is Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator, and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangostorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks, we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays, every two weeks on ThinkTech. Aloha. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark, and every Monday at one o'clock, I'm the host of ThinkTech Hawaii's Research in Mana. And at that program, we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university, ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the Earth from space, going underwater, talking about earthquakes and volcanoes, and other things which have a direct relevance, not only to Hawaii, but also to our economy. So please try and join me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon to ThinkTech Hawaii's Research in Mana and see you then. We are back with Will Weinstein talking about ethics and getting across the ocean of our lives and the tools, maybe the ors that we need or the way to do it, the way to get across and live with ourselves in business. And we're talking about capitalism, Will. And if you give me some examples of just some companies that act ethically, and maybe if you can, some that there's some questions about or... Well, it's easier on the... I'll give you... Johnson and Johnson is the classic act ethically company, although recently their history has been shaded. But when Tylenol, when somebody put arsenic on a Tylenol, they pulled it immediately. And it cost them millions and millions of millions of dollars, but their attitude was, I can't afford to have anybody die from this. Okay. That was obviously the right thing to do for an ethical perspective. It gets a little bit technical in here, but the reality of it is that the new major technology companies, okay, we're talking here about Facebook, and we're talking about Google and Amazon, they're doing things that I think are questionably ethical. They're using your information, your data, and in many ways changing your life without your knowledge, without your acceptance of it, without your approval. Right. And we're all on it. And we're all on it, and it's an addiction for many people, and people touch their telephones 260 times a day or some number like that, which is horrendous. But that's not an ethical issue. The ethical issue is whether or not these companies can, without your permission and without your knowledge, take your information and sell it to other people and use it themselves. And that's what they're doing. That's exactly what they're doing. And that's not a decision for us to deal with as an individual in business, but how do we address it? Well, we hit accept. We don't read it. We don't read it. That's probably the first mistake. And the second thing is, can you live without it? Can you or can you find some way to, and by the way, right now the SEC and a bunch of other people are after these guys, and we'll see what happens. But my sense is that they're going to have a prolonged difficult period because what they're doing is really, it's more than questionable. So we have to wake this out. We don't know how. And that's not an ethical decision for us to make. It's for them to make, and we have to watch that. Well, it's for them, for the government. There is a government, sometimes hard to find, but there is a government. And they do have regulatory authority, and they go to do something and they're doing it. What they're going to do, I don't know, but at least the process has begun. You have a program coming up. And I think it's your next program on athletics. Athletics, money, and we're talking millions of dollars in pro-athletics. Well, that's why it's so important. I mean, how many businesses do you know where the employees don't get paid? And that's exactly what's happening in college athletics. Okay. And the question is, how do you feel about that? Is that right, wrong, or different? From an ethical perspective, is it okay to have these kids come to college, never go to class because they don't have enough time? They're practicing all day every day. And not have enough money to go home when their aunt dies. Those kinds of things. I mean, these are serious ethical issues. They're also questions about CTE in the head. There are lots of, I mean, what would you do, what would you do, Mark, if your team was out on the field and the other team started doing dirty tackling and those kinds of things? Would you tell your team to do it back? Think about it. Those are the kinds of questions that we discuss, and we have some really good people, people who care about their students, care about their lives, and... Yeah, you have Nick Rolovich, I know this as one of your speakers on that, and that's, I mean, how do you deal with these questions? Is tough. It's very tough, and he's very smart, and he's very concerned about his athletes, and he goes through extraordinary lengths to make sure that they're protected. So, you know, the NCAA is a very, very hard to understand organization, and some of the rules that come out of the NCAA are absurd. So, when you have, if you have, for example, if you have a violation of some kind, they take away scholarships. Who does that hurt? I mean, that hurts the kids who need those scholarships to go to school. The whole thing is... So, we've got mixed questions of ethics here. I mean, the coaches, the players... Well, you know, you ask a coach what's more important, doing it right or winning. Yeah. I mean, and many of them will say, you know, if I don't win, I don't have a job. You're going to say winning, right? Yeah, well, you know. And these are many, in many cases, not in Nick's case, unfortunately for him, but these are very highly paid positions. In many, many states, the athletic coach for the state university is the highest paid government official by far, by a factor of, you know, 10 or more. Yeah, we've seen that in basketball teams. Yeah. We've seen the road to the final four. Yeah. It's an enormous moneymaker. Who gets the money? Where does it go? And if you win, you get a bonus. You make a choice. Do I put that guy in even though he may have some problem? I see that. Where should it go? And if your image is portrayed in some kind of a game, should you be paid for that? I mean, some of these things aren't that difficult. So that's what you talk about at your series. I think it comes up about law. And I'm a lawyer. There's ethical standards and then there's moral standards. I don't think they're always the same, Will. I don't think you're going to... By definition, they're always the same, but I hear you. I understand what you're saying. How does a lawyer deal with this? Did you ever see the film Liar Liar? No, no, no. Well, many people who are watching this, I think probably have. According to her young students, I think they're probably 6 or 7 years old, what does your father do? And the father of the character in question says he's a liar. And she says, oh, no, no, no, no, no. And she says, I think you mean lawyer. And he says, yeah. So the question is lying okay in negotiations, those kinds of things. There are lots of questions around that. And then one of the things that I tell my class is that the legal standard is far below the ethical standard in general. And in addition to that, very often laws are used to justify immoral acts. You know, Nazi Germany killed 12.5 million people legally. So these are the kinds of things that we get into. Well, I get a little riled up when I'm with these kids. I understand. I hear the situation of a lawyer, his client tells him where the body is. He can't tell anybody. Well, we have a problem with that. We do the one on the 26-year secret where this guy is in jail for 26 years and the two lawyers who represented somebody else know he's innocent. And they leave him there. And they leave him there because they can't turn a client privileged. Well, we in the ethics side fight like crazy with the lawyers over this. So what do you tell the lawyers? Find a way to get them out of there. To disclose that. There's got to be a million ways. And the answer is, well, I'm going to lose my... Here's one. Here's the line of the sand. I think I might... I may not be allowed to practice because I'm going to lose my license. Is it worth it to you to let this go? By the way, the guy was... I think it was 11-2. His sentence was going to be the death sentence. And 11 people... Not 11, sorry, 10-2. Maybe it was 11-1. But that one or two people saved his life. And the lawyer said, well, if he was going to die, we would have come forward. Give me a break. Instead of life in prison. Yeah, which he says... which the man in question says, there's no difference between life in prison and death sentence. So, again. You said you've done your class all over the world. I'm interested in China a lot, but you said Vietnam also and in various other places. Is there any commonality in all this? I mean, I hear a lot about China and their ethics in business don't seem to be the same. And our president says that. So, well, I mean, how do you... They're very different. I mean, there's no question. But even between those three countries, they're very different. Australia is much more like our system. Very much more. And so it's easier. I taught in the law school there for a month, which is interesting for me. And I addressed the... I think there were 85 professors or something in the law school. And I got the opportunity to address them. And my point was, you guys all should be teaching ethics now, you know, as part of your class. And so this one guy, this was out of Hollywood. This one guy raised his hand and he said, you want me to teach ethics? He said, what does it have to do with what I do? And I said, well, what do you teach? And he said, taxation. I mean, it couldn't have had, you know, the other 85 people broke into laughter. But, you know, these are kinds of things that you have to work your way through. Vietnam is interesting because Vietnam is a communist, corrupt nation. And a lot of the people really would like to change it. So the question is, how do you empower them or enable them or, you know, at least help them along that road? And I don't have any silly expectations that tomorrow morning everything's going to change. But, you know, that's something that I... How do you help them? I mean, what do you do? Is it being there and giving them your knowledge and your feelings about these things? Your teachings? Is that the right thing to do? Is that the ethical thing to do? For me it is, but I think and this is hopefully answering to some extent your question. When I started in Vietnam, I've been there twice in both Saigon and Hanoi. And when I started, I was very careful to say, listen, I'm not here to tell you that we're great and we do it right in this and that, because I think our system stinks. I don't think that we're any better really than you are. And so we got down on a level where we could talk to each other about what was wrong in both systems. Very important because if you come in and proselytize, you know, I mean, and I'm not proud of our system at the moment. In fact, I'm very concerned about it. And so sharing that was a way to get them to talk about it. And at one point near the end of one of my classes people said, you know, we really would like to change things. How do we do it? And I said, well, you guys are all executive MBAs. A lot of them were real serious executives. I mean, I had a big companies in this and that. I said, there are 47 of you in this room. Why not start here? So those kinds of things. But when you do things like this as you well know, because you're teaching also, any little reinforcement makes you happy. And in China, same same type of feeling. The educational system in China is enormous. I mean, you go on a college campus, there'll be 65,000, 70,000 people on it. I mean, think about that. And technologically extremely advanced, et cetera, et cetera. And the notion I mean, one of the important things that these people should recognize and they finally I think are recognizing is that if you have a background in ethics, you're much more likely to get the job. You talk about the value of money, value of these kinds of things. If I'm General Electric and I'm hiring people in China, and I know that you have a background in ethics and you understand the culture, you'll get the job and she won't. That's a big advantage. Huge. Yeah. Now, we're going to close in about a minute. But I want to ask you. Oh, it's too bad I'm enjoying this. I want to ask you about politics. I mean, you only have a minute. What can you tell me about politics and ethics in today's world? I can first of all say come to our class because you'll find I mean Barbara Boxer is not going to pull any punches. What I think our system is completely broken and I think it needs to start all over again and how we do that is another question I'm not in a position to but I can recognize the problem and the problems of course being exacerbated at the present time because if the president of our country lies three, four, six times a day which by the way is not as much as you and I supposedly lie ten times a day but probably his way beyond that. But if you have that kind of leadership and remember leadership is a huge, huge issue in ethics. When you have the chairman of the company doing things openly that you know are unethical, it just says to everybody else go for it. It's okay. Right. It's the you don't care. The person that Enron stole a stapler and the next person said well if he can take a stapler and take it home maybe I should take home the Xerox machine and you know pretty soon that kind of thinking is what dominates. Well your class on politics is when? When is that's your... I think it's August 7th but I could be wrong. It's done at the end of your series here at the bottom let's take a look. Yeah, August 7th. August 7th, ethics and politics. Barbara Boxer and Colleen Hanabusa are going to be in your I've invited a few other people we're waiting to thank you. Depends whether the center is in session or not. Okay. All right. Well that sounds very interesting. I appreciate you being here today Will. My pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Good to have you. Thank you.