 at Think Tech Hawaii for our last Think Tech time for responsible change. Difficult conversation to make good trouble of the year 2023. And because we're in transition, as we always are, we're going to talk about that. Where are we headed? What's up ahead? Where are the minefields? Where are the safe harbors? Where's the good places and the bad places? Where are the heroes and villains? All that good stuff. And we have with us for the first time, fortunately, Professor and former president of Hamlin University, Professor Emerita Linda Hanson in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. We have also in Minnesota in the Twin Cities and also with the Mitchell Hamlin School of Law, Professor David Larson, past chair of the American Bar Association section of dispute resolution. And as past chair, he's now focused more on resolution than disputes, which makes his life easier and more pleasant, as it does his lovely white patties. And Rebecca Ratliff, problem solver par excellence in the insurance industry, which is a minefield of its own. Fortunately, it's a your field, not a mine field. It can be yours. Rebecca's in Atlanta, Georgia, and Ben Davis, the irrepressible Ben Davis, the living legend spirit of Jerry, the Jerry Garcia of dispute resolution. Ben is a young professor at Washington and Lee and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toledo, School of Law. And Ben's shirt reminds us that it is what it is. And if you were a baby zebra and you were curious and you asked your mother zebra, do I? Who am I? Am I black with white stripes or white with black stripes? And the mother zebra would of course say go see the elder, the zebra guru. And of course, the baby zebra would do that and come back with a big smile on the baby zebra's face. And the mother would say, did you find out? The baby zebra would say, yeah, I'm a black zebra with white stripes. The mother zebra say, how do you know that? Because I asked the zebra guru and he said, you is what you is. Okay. So what's up ahead for us, Rebecca? Well, you know, Chuck, I'm an optimist. Thanks for having me on the show again. Pleased to be with all of you tonight. What is ahead? My hope is that unity is ahead and that thoughtfulness is ahead and that justice is ahead and democracy is ahead. And we all play a part in that. So what I'm hoping is that we all step up, you've heard me say before, stay safe, but don't stay silent. It's all of our responsibility to play our part in making sure that humanity is recognized. Of course, I'm a dispute resolution professional. So my hope is always that we are working together and having the conversations that we need to have in order to make the world around us better. So how do we get there? What motivates enough people to make that a movement? What generates that level of momentum? I think action. There are a lot of us who have ideals around the American dream and the way we can all live harmoniously here, but we have to act. There's action. You've also heard me say, I've been published to say that in the dictionary now an ally is a noun, but in the context of really trying to work together, those moments that turn to movements, those movements that turn to missions, my hope is that people will take action. So it takes conversations, but it also takes a call to action and people who will rise to the call. Okay. So getting from talking about it to doing it. Linda, your perspective, how might we motivate people to do that? Moving from talking about it to doing it? Well, you know, I've reflected on this since last Sunday in particular. I was at a holiday kind of a dinner and there were about 15 of us from my neighborhood here in Lakeville. And at the end, someone said, this is a great neighborhood. And what occurred to me is that it almost seems like since the pandemic in particular, we've been waiting for some momentum to get started, waiting for ways of change to come. And I began to internalize that and think about, well, it really is an individual thing. And I began to say, well, what neighborhood do I really want to be in? Not my physical neighborhood necessarily, but mentally, what neighborhood do I want to be in? Socially, as I think about a lot of the issues of our time, you know, we allow it to come into us. And then we let it mill around within ourselves. And then we began to think, well, okay, I'm going to choose to do my part to do something that can help to promote movement that can promote action. I agree wholeheartedly with what Rebecca said, but it really does start, it sounds like it is a cliche. It does start with us individually. You know, what neighborhood are we living in? And we choose to be in certain neighborhoods. And we avoid certain other kinds of neighborhoods. And I mean, that's metaphorically, of course. But since the pandemic, I think that we still have that cautionary sense of isolation. We still have not quite gotten over that isolation that makes us a little bit fearful to cross over and maybe experience something new, something different that would help motivate us to be a part of the change we want to see. What a great insight. So how, David, how do we get from disconnected to connected? I don't know how this happened, but some of my dearest longest friends are pretty conservative politically. And maybe my closest friend is somebody who watches Fox News frequently. And we just had a text message exchange. And he was complaining about how Biden has destroyed his retirement account. And if you're following the market right now, it was a record high yesterday. And a record higher today broke yesterday's record. And that's an all time record. So, you know, one thing I could do is I could just, for the sake of our friendship, not say anything and let him kind of glide along. But it's, and it's delicate. But I feel I've got, you know, this is risky. But I feel I've got to say to my friend that, you know, you've been listening to Fox News and following it closely. But are you aware what's happening in the stock market and what happened yesterday and today? So I think part of what we have to do is to the degree we want to be comfortable with our friends and our acquaintances, I think sometimes we do have to speak up maybe in ways that maybe we didn't in the past. That because there's, I think there's an onslaught of misinformation coming more than ever. And people are getting rotted with it. I'm just overwhelming amounts of this information. And I think it's incumbent on many of us to try and point people back to pretty reliable facts. And so as I think about 2024 and the kind of possibility of generative AI to create more confusion and more information, I'm very worried. And so I want people to be aware of the limitations of generative AI to know that there's going to be a lot of deep fakes out there, that there's going to be representations of people saying and doing things that they didn't do, and that we really have to be vigilant to make sure that what we're seeing is factual. So I think as moving to 2024 verification, reliability is really important to me. That's a brilliant insight. So Ben, let me turn that into a hard question for you. What's the role and value of truth and choice in connecting people with exactly the values that Rebecca and Linda and David are talking about? And I guess first, would you agree we need to get back to truth and choice? So I would agree, but I'm going to kind of be a wag here, I guess, a little bit. One of the things that I was thinking was that I was I was thinking that Linda has the absolutely perfect title for now in universities, which is President Emerita. Yes, I'll be honored and none of the stress. Well, Ben, you realize, right, in Latin, he means ex or from away from, right? Right. Why would you want to be away from merit? The reason I'm thinking of that is, of course, there were all the presidents who were having fun in front of Congress about a week or so ago that we've had the firestorm about. And I guess my main feeling is kind of one is that there's a lot of chaos, okay? And the chaos just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And I think that for somebody, chaos works for them. That's why they want more and more of it in this environment. I don't know exactly who those people are. But I come back to it was a quote that has been ascribed to Escalus that I'm not sure if actually he actually said it, but he said that the first casualty in war is truth. Okay, so that when we're talking about getting back to truth, it's like there's a lot of people who have interest in making truth a casualty for their own interests right now. And I'm sure that's been true in many different periods. But that's the thing that I am confronted with at this point in time. I mean, to the extent that there is little interest in truth, there is only interest in sort of power, getting power somewhere or the other. There are things that are just like very hard to wrap your head around. Like, I'll just take one. I don't know if you've seen this little scandal about the moms for liberty down in Florida where it turns out there's a complicated relationship situation that was operating by one of the heads of that they're all sitting there talking about all this stuff for the last year about, you know, parental rights and all that stuff. And then you find out this like this salacious craziness going on among the exact same people, right? You know, and you're like, that's very bizarre. I mean, if you're going to hold yourself up like that and then have all that come out afterwards seems very bizarre. The number of times that it seems that you're having that kind of experience with people who are holding themselves up as being upright citizens and all that seems to be increasing. Okay. And I'll leave to side, guys, like George Santos, right? But it's almost like there's a, I used the phrase once of sanctimonious barbarity. I mean, it was, I mean, the idea of a little empathy. How about that lady in Texas with that horrendous pregnancy? And the judge said, yeah, you're right. You can go ahead and terminate your pregnancy. And then the, what is it? The attorney general files something with the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Texas blocks it. And I'm like, that's very bizarre. You know, I mean, and she ends up having to go out of state. To me, that is, why would somebody do that to this poor lady in a terrible situation? You know, it just seems very weird. Some people say that the cruelty is the feature, not the bug, right? But I'm like, where does all this cruelty come from? This intensity cruelty, and I don't have an answer. Obviously, I could say we all should be nicer to each other. And I hope we are, but I'm saying more of like people getting some kind of pleasure or getting their interest in being more cruel. Cruel is that cruel is the new cool to some people. And I find that very disturbing, but I don't know what to do about it. But I just find that part of the chaos right now. Yeah, then I want to jump in. And when I think about that cruelty, you know, when I think it's human nature, when things aren't going as we hope they would, there's two things we can do. We can take the difficult path and try and figure out what went wrong and work on it and try and improve it. The other thing we can do is we can scapegoat. We can demonize. We can say, oh, it went wrong because of them. We can blame. And I think that's where a lot of the cruelty is coming, that people are looking and saying that things haven't unfolded as we'd like. And sometimes it's completely out of control because the pandemic caused a lot of the difficulties that we've experienced. But rather than working hard and thoughtfully to improve some of the problems, it's much easier to demonize. And I think one thing we can do is kind of expose that to say that, you know, why are you pointing at this group? Why are you being so cruel this group? Why are you blaming them? Why do you think that being so cruel will make everything better for you because it won't? But I think that I think making people recognize that kind of human impulse to do that is something we need to do. And you've drawn a really, really insightful connection between the cruelty and the chaos because it's not cruelty and chaos that are self-inflicted on the zero-sum one percent who use it against others. It's cruel chaos that's inflicted upon the people who are most underserved, most undervalued, most in need, most vulnerable, and the most at risk of the harm that that can do. But if you're zero-sum one percent, that's your life strategy, right? Heather McGee has it right. The sum of us. Great book. Rebecca, how do we counter that? You started us with solidarity. What does that solidarity look like? Who is that solidarity? We are the solidarity. I like Linda's statements about the neighborhood. In what neighborhood do I want to reside? And she wasn't, of course, talking about a physical neighborhood, but we're talking about like-minded being with like-minded people, making a difference by our activity, by the conversations that we have, by making sure that voices are heard. If we have a platform, share it. When David was talking and Ben was talking, I thought about, we were talking about misinformation, which is obviously giving false information. But during the pandemic, I became acquainted with the word disinformation. I wasn't sure that I had ever heard that. And so misinformation is false information. Disinformation is false information on purpose is what I found. And it's, people sometimes, again, David was focused on facts. We know in just regular conversation that sometimes people state their opinion as fact. That can be misinformation. I'm sure all of you have had conversations where somebody says something and they really believe it to be true, but it simply is not. And it is based on their opinion, what they know or lack of what they know. So I think that we all have to decide what neighborhood we're going to be in. How can we be good neighbors? Linda said, be the change that we want to see. So again, the movement that's already happening, we have to keep that alive. Conversations about how to be better, how to stand together, how to speak out against injustices. And you said it, Chuck, the disparities are affecting the people who are most underserved. And so those of us who have a voice can share a platform. And anybody at some level can be an ally, even children. I was talking earlier this week about how even children, of course, we know have conflict, and it's important to teach conflict resolution, even at the elementary school level, because children are experiencing a lot of what they see at home. And so if you're listening to children have conversations, sometimes you realize that they have some of the same challenges that we do in the sandbox. But our knowledge, obviously, is more sophisticated. But that human condition is affected by the ability to communicate and to resolve conflict and to show respect or to be shown, to be given respect by others, to give respect and get respect. So, Linda, let me ask this because you have provided the Lighthouse, the beacon for us, that Rebecca just identified. What is the forum in which those essential conversations to connect people might best take place that is sufficiently open and unjudgmental and capable of thought and communication to connect people? What's the forum? It's certainly not politics. Where might that happen? Well, as I was listening to Rebecca, I began to think about how I was raised, how my family and my siblings and I were raised, and responsibility was a big part of it. You have a personal responsibility and we were taught, you know, we were basically taught how to be good citizens. And a lot of that, frankly, came from why our public schools, I went to public schools. What did we learn in our schools? We went to church, another institution that, you know, there were things that we were taught to be grateful. I often think about gratitude. We have the opportunity that so many people throughout the world would give anything to just have a tenth of a piece of the life that we are allowed to live, the opportunities we have. And we seem to kind of just bounce around from, well, I'm not somebody said this earlier, I'm not responsible for that. Well, yes, you are responsible for your own little part of the world. And what are you doing to contribute to someone else's betterment? What are you doing as an individual? So that was ingrained in us as kids, so that in we're parents, then as parents you try to pass that along. And something has dropped, something has gotten lost, I think, generation to generation, that a lot of this what we're talking about misinformation, disinformation, the truth has gotten lost in a lot of that. I'm thinking of two words, responsibility and gratitude. And I think you've given us here in our conversational kitchen, the five of us, with you four chefs and me to serve our waiting to see what you serve up for me to take out to the public. I'm hearing Michelin star stuff here. If Michelin had four stars, you folks would get the four stars because you've provided the ingredients, truth and choice, the forum in which those open communications can take place, the necessity of starting it and having children be at the center of that forum. Maybe those communications have to be for the children, about the children, they have to not only be what the children need to understand and learn, but they have to model what the children need to see that connects us with the values, that truth and choice set of values. And maybe then, if those conversations in the schools with the children that bring them in the teachers, the students, the administrators and thereby the parents, the Steve Jobs Apple model, okay, don't go beat IBM in the business market. Go to the communities, go to the people, where are the grassroots? They're in the schools and their public schools. Can the conversations take place in those forums that are open enough, critical thinking enough and safe enough so that and that's why they're being opposed. That's why those who are the cruel chaos merchants of the 1% zero sum guys, they're attacking exactly those forums, not just higher education, but all schools at all level. They're attacking books. They're attacking teachers. They don't want those conversations to take place. And you're all exactly right. This is in a true sense of the word. And Linda, you're right. It is figurative war, but it's real. And it is civil war at its most elemental. Linda was offering a kind of a forum, Chuck, when you asked her. And, you know, it's important to have those forums. And I think another thing when I look forward to 2024 is I hope we remind ourselves of the importance of civility. And we can have different forums. But I'm thinking about some of the school board meetings and how crazy they've become and how violent they've become. And if these conversations are going to be productive, we've got to elevate that principle of civility. And I hope we talk about it more and remind people that that it's just essential. If I could jump in there, one of the thoughts that sparked from David and Linda and Rebecca's comments were in yours, Chuck, was that one of the difficulties I think that we have is there are, I think, significant people. I don't know if it's the one percent or whoever, but who, you know, trade on fear, on trade on fear and causing people to be fearful, fearful of the other, whatever, but just this emotion of fear that they are encouraging in us. And it's really quite a complex emotion. Okay. I mean, we think of fear as sort of one-dimensional, but actually fear is a very wonderful book by a guy named Hans Falata who wrote called Every Man Dies Alone, where it was about this couple who rebelled against Hitler in Nazi Germany in 1942 in Berlin by writing little cards with things on it. Like, don't trust the Nazis. Then they go to public places when nobody was looking. They would throw them on the ground and, you know, they got arrested and all that. But one of the things about that book that is wonderful is that the emotion of fear is, like, presented in all its splendor, if I can say it like that, where you become conscious of all the kinds of ways you can be fearful. Okay. And one of the lines in the book that I loved was that the guy says, you know, the main thing is you fight back. That was like the essence of what they were doing is you fight against the fear and the mechanisms of fear. Now, you know, the word what fight means is in that book was, and it's based on a true story, by the way, is putting these little cards out, right? So, you know, it's like a lot of times they're trying to sit here and try to figure out, okay, what's making me fearful? And then what is making, how can I fight against it? You know. So, in our last minute or two here, for last thoughts for each of you, let me pose a question. Who can and should convene and inspire and help conduct those conversations to help us go in that direction of truth and choice? Linda, your thoughts? I think convening forums for people to exchange their ideas has to start small. Sometimes we have the big town halls or the big conventions or we have the big programs. We certainly see it in our politics trying to reach millions of people on TV. It ends up just being a mess. So, I think that kind of going back to where I started today, that concept of smaller neighborhoods, people who do encourage one another and talking is not listening. So, to me, that convening is something that we choose to be a part of. So, I think it can happen anywhere, but it has to be very thoughtfully put together and it has to be taken as a genuine undertaking. Authenticity, being genuine, meeting and listening. Well, Rebecca, last thoughts? Could not have said it better. And in those small groups where we are attempting to discuss what can make a difference and make plans of action to make things better, just remember the golden rule to treat others as you want to be treated. David, last thoughts? Yeah, I think that when you're in a small group, it's easier to talk across the aisle to use that analogy. If you're in two large groups where people have kind of huddled together based on their positions, and you try and communicate when you watch the House of Representatives, try and talk to each other across the aisle as a group, it just is not very effective. So, to break it down on a smaller level, I think it is, as Linda suggested, definitely the route to go. And I think we need to make an effort and keep talking, even though it might be uncomfortable. And again, I referred to earlier, sometimes it's comfortable with your best friends because you don't want to jeopardize your friendship. But I think we do need to keep talking and we need to do it in our most civil manner. Ben, last thoughts? There's that slogan, silence is complicity, right? And so, in the sense that we're all talking about talking, it's basically, don't be silent. In the small group, to the extent you can, it might be in your Facebook or your LinkedIn, I don't know where, exactly, but that not to be silent in the face of the onslaught, I think is an important thing because to 10 people trying to make you fearful, one of the ways to make you fearful is that you're not going to say anything. And that's already, if you're feeling that feeling of being silent, then you're saying, that's what you have to fight over. That's fantastic. I want to thank you all and to wrap it up, I think the question in front of us, let's go ahead and put it right out there for people to think about and we'll take it up as we enter 2024 in the next session. Can it happen? These things that we're talking about, can these conversations, this convening, can this movement toward truth and choice really happen? Look at the 60s. Isn't that really exactly what happened in the 1960s in civil rights and peace? With that thought, we thank you all. We leave you in 2023 to finish the best way you can with the best people you can, making the best memories you can. We'll rejoin you in 2024. Thank you for being part of our lives and letting us be part of yours. Aloha.