 Hello and welcome to my program, Elderhood, Aging Gracefully. My name is Larry Grimm and I'm privileged to welcome you to our Think Tech Studio and the opportunity to think about Aging Gracefully with me and with my guest, Jay Fidel. We'll turn to him in just a minute, but first of all I'd like to do a quick review of this program and my ongoing program with Think Tech Hawaii. I've been a chaplain for two years here on with Bristol Hospice, Bristol Hospice Hawaii. And I'm proud to be a part of a company that really lives its tagline, embracing a reverence for life. We serve families all over the island who have terminally ill patients in their homes and in facilities so that we can do a high quality of compassion and care for them. I'm also a professional coach, life coach, personal life coach, specializing in the elderhood. And I think of elderhood as something a distinct stage of our life. We had our childhood, we had adolescence, adulthood, and now we have elderhood. And when we think of it as a stage of life there are those tasks that we need to do that come up before us and these tasks present themselves to us. If we ignore them, I think we do so, we miss out on the value that they can present us. But if we follow them, if we look at them and we engage them, then we can make our life, our elderhood, really, really real and wonderful. These tasks are grieving, sorting out our stories. And we'll turn to that today. We did grieving last week, just touched on that. Sorting out our stories, forgiving, and that's not a religious compulsion. It's something that comes from within. Preparing both externally and internally and then finally letting go. And so my program here with Think Tank, Think Tech, is scheduled around and formed around those five spiritual tasks. And today we're looking at sorting out our stories and I am very, very grateful. And I'm privileged to have as my guest the president and founder of Think Tech Hawaii, Jay Fidel. Jay, thank you so much for being a part of my show. And how do you feel sitting in that chair instead of this one? I sit in this chair once in a while as a, not a host but a co-host or possibly a foil. A foil. Excellent. So you're right at home anywhere you are here. I am. That's great, Jay. Well, Jay, Think Tech Hawaii is in my estimation, of course, personally I'm so grateful to have this opportunity to partner with you in doing what we're doing with this show. But it's also such a gem to the intellectual community both here in Hawaii and in the world because we have people around the globe that are tuning in to these shows all the time. And this is a contribution that is really unparalleled in any place that I've ever seen. So what I wanted to know today to start off with you as founder is how did Think Tech Hawaii come about? What's the story of how it came about? Okay. How much time you got, Larry? We got half an hour. In 2001, in February, an American nuclear submarine sank a Japanese high school fishing training vessel off Waikiki, the Ehemi Maru. The Greenville was the American nuclear attack submarine. And since I had been in the service back when, back in the 60s and early 70s, PBS called me and asked me if I would cover that story for PBS. The story namely the court of inquiry that followed the incident, the accident. And so I got to meet some of the press. I got to meet, for example, a lot of people in the press because there were hundreds of people who came from all over the world to cover the story. And one of the people I met was from Hawaii Public Radio. So later on in that year, we established a radio show with our connection with the White Public Radio. And that lasted eight years into the late 2000s. And that was a very stimulating experience to cover the story and to report on it to the nation. I'm not kidding. It was a heavy experience. It went on for months, by the way, as long as the court of inquiry went on. So then thereafter, we had a radio show about technology. That was our thing. We were driven off the Hawaii Oboma, the Building Owners Association, Building Owners of Managed Association, because I was a lawyer serving that market and I was the program chair there and we sort of got into technology and then Think Tech was established in 2001, roughly. And we started doing technology on Hawaii Public Radio. And we had a weekly show on Wednesdays. It still exists. Our successor is still there. It's called Byte Marks Cafe now and we covered technology and related fields. And as time went by, we actually expanded beyond technology and covered all kinds of stuff as broad as you could possibly imagine. 2008, we left there and I started writing for the newspaper. We also did some AM radio shows and by about 2010, we had our own studio in the Davies Building down the block and then ultimately by 2000, and I want to say 12 or so, we started a studio here in Pioneer Plaza. And that's all history. But you know, I went this afternoon, not anticipating this discussion with you, but it just, as a matter of nostalgic curiosity, I went and looked at one of our shows from that time when we first started doing this kind of video and, you know, it was good. It was good. We had green screen. We had good chroma key. We had good sound. We covered important things and we were articulate and helpful and all that stuff that you spoke of trying to, you know, make a community contribution. So we've been doing it actively on video I would say since radio before, but video maybe since 2012 or so, we really got started. Super, super. What was the, what's the mission then, as you conceive of it of? Well, it's sort of like what you said. It's raising public awareness and more than that, we learned over time that we could provide a platform for citizen journalists to come around and do shows. And so we have selected and we have had a number altogether, hundreds of hosts from the community who come and do shows like you do. And they take the platform and they try to make, be part of making a community contribution. And what military were you in? Coast Guard. Yeah. Saving lives. Excellent. Beautiful. Now, where did you grow up? New York. I grew up in the borough of Queens and then I went to law school at NYU, I went to Queens College in Queens. I went to law school at NYU and I moved, of course, to the Lord dormitories in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. And so you started off in law. What was the story that you lived out? I maintain that we have stories that we tell ourselves, about ourselves. And those stories really determine a lot of, well they don't determine, but they become so much a part of the decision making that we make about what we do, who we are. So in that childhood, adolescence into young adulthood, everybody else is telling us who we are, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our school teachers. Or fate. Say that again? Or fate. Or fate is telling you. And sometimes we dig deep and we find the answer in our own selves. Well, and that's what happens in elderhood, but tell me about the story that you heard about. Okay, I went to law school at NYU, I finished in 1965, thereafter I was admitted to the tax school at NYU Law School, which is a very elite tax school, probably the best tax school in the country, the law of taxation. And I started that in September of 1965, right after I graduated from law school. So I was going to take that degree and become a tax lawyer. But a few days into September, I got a draft notice, remember Vietnam was hot and heavy at the time, and I said, you know, you're no longer exempt. If you were in undergraduate law school, you were exempt. If you were in graduate law school, you were not exempt unless you were married. You had to be married. I wasn't married. So I got this draft notice and I said, gee, this is something I have to act on. And I made a decision, you know, one morning I made a decision, it was probably the most important decision of my life actually. I looked at this letter, I said, I can't let this happen by itself. I have got to intervene. So I cut classes, I walked down to the battery at Lower Manhattan. I looked for a recruiting station, any service. I didn't want to be drafted into the army to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. Already it was known how troublesome an experience that was. And I went to the Navy, I went to the Air Force, no soap. And then I went to the Coast Guard and the fellow by the name of Artie Johnson was his name. I only met him one time, but I remember his name. That's to show you how important this was. He said, the funny thing is, you know, this morning an hour ago we got a directive from Washington that said we have to recruit a dozen lawyers to be directly commissioned into the Coast Guard right now because we're having Vietnam. And you just have to walk in an hour after this directive comes down. It must be some divine inspiration. He said, let's establish an interview process, an application process. So we did it. And this was wartime. Everything happened very quickly. It was all an emergency. So the day after I was back there again in the Custom House is where their office was, overlooking New York Harbor. And I was being interviewed by three senior Coast Guard officers and we had a very interesting interview. And I asked them at the end, well, you know, what does it look like? I said, oh, it looks good, OK, all right. Like two days after that, if that, maybe less, I get a call from Washington from a guy named Peter Gitman, G-E-T-T-M-A-N. I remember that name too. And he said, you've been accepted. You're going to be a direct commission lawyer in the Coast Guard. We're going to make you a, I think it was Lieutenant J.G., it was pretty good. I passed over through the ensign part, and I was now Lieutenant J.G., and I'm going to commission you immediately. I'm going to send you to Yorktown, Virginia, which was the officer training school in Coast Guard. And then you're going to have two weeks of orientation because you're already commissioned. And then we're going to send you off to, you know, your duty station. And I said, what do you, you know, he said, let's talk about your duty station. I said, what do you got? He says, well, you go to Cincinnati. You can go to St. Louis, or you can go to Honolulu. I said, you can stop there. That was it, Jay, we got to take a break. But that's terrific. And what impresses me is that you weren't a victim in this process. You weren't just waiting for something to happen. You took some action. Also, I was very lucky. We'll get back, I knew we were lucky. We'll get back. We're going to take a break for a short moment and then return with our show with more of Jay Finell. Hello everybody. My name is Walter Kauai. I, I'm your host for a monthly live streaming video entitled Ukulele Songs of Hawaii, where I bring on guests. We enjoy talking story about the music industry here in Hawaii, sometimes going back 50 decades, if possible, and always having some good fun talking with entertainers. We're here located at Think Tech Hawaii downtown Honolulu at the Pioneer Plaza building and in their studios. And so join me next month for Ukulele Songs of Hawaii. Welcome back, our viewers in Hawaii and around the world, to elderhood, aging age, and gracefully here at Think Tech Hawaii in Honolulu. We are joined today by Jay Finell, the CEO and founder and president of Think Tech Hawaii. And we're talking about stories. Joy is a consummate storyteller and I say he's a consummate story listener. He has that ability to listen to stories from other people that is really quite a gift. But one of the things that I wanted to ask you, Jay, is about the stories that informed you about who you are. How did you learn about who you were? What were those stories that you got from childhood, from young adulthood or adolescence and young adulthood that really kind of empowered you or became a part of your decision-making process? A couple of short vignette stories. Sure. As a kid, I lived in Forest Hills, Queens, which was the bedroom community for the United Nations. So it was very polyglot and a buddy of mine, a good buddy of mine, was in the next building in our neighborhood, which was all six-story apartment houses. And just for fun, by the way, a few days ago I went on Google Earth and well looked at that building. Did you look at your place? And then I sent a copy of the photographs that I made of that building. You can do that with Google Earth to my brother and he was equally stunned by how good these buildings look. Forest Hills is still a very nice neighborhood, nice clean, safe, all that. Anyway, my buddy down the block was a guy named Jeff Masuda. He was Japanese and was part of the quality of that neighborhood. It was a polyglot neighborhood. And indeed, New York was becoming more polyglot, but it wasn't completely that way. And I remember how much I liked him and I liked the idea of being friendly with a Japanese guy. And that was a story worth telling you about in this connection. The second story that comes to mind in that regard was when I arrived here in the Coast Guard, I went to Alamo on a beach. And I saw for the first time in my life a Hapa Hale woman here. She was a teenager of maybe early 20s. She was stunning, stunning. And I said, well, I never saw that before. She didn't look like Jeff Masuda. She looked something in the middle, Hapa Hale, you know? And I figured it out. This had to be both Caucasian and Hale, or who knows, but it wasn't pure anything. And I said to myself, this is the future of the world, is what I'm looking at, is something special in Hawaii that you don't find anywhere else. And indeed, it was really not very prevalent anywhere else. And this place, Hawaii, will be leading the world in Hapa Hale people. They are the superhumans of the future. Of course, everybody got the word after that. And the fact is that there's a lot of places you can go that are Hapa Hale, but at least at that moment in time, it was a message to me. And I remember how much it endeared the place to me at that time. The third thing about it is cultural. I remember in those days, you know, even though there was a certain amount of resistance to Hale men in uniform, whatever uniform. Give people some of our viewers an understanding of Hale, what the Hale is. It's Caucasian. There was a certain resistance, a certain difference, a certain animosity, if you will, based on the Massey case and other issues, maybe the overthrow back in 1893. And that still existed between native Hawaiians and people in the service who were largely Hale. And I remember there was, you know, that was visible, but it wasn't helpable. In other words, nobody ever said anything or did anything. But you knew that there was a resistance. However, however, I found that the native Hawaiian people that I ran into, sometimes just literally running into them, were so friendly to me. Maybe it's my winning smile, but they would invite you out for a beer. They'd take you out. They would want to spend time with you. They were so friendly. It was unbelievable. And it wasn't just them. That was the nature of the state of Hawaii at the time. It's not quite like that anymore. But in those days, I said, gee whiz, this is a gem. This is heaven. The Elysian fields live right here. Between the Hapa Hale women, you know, and these guys who were so friendly, why you would beer any time of day, I said, this has got to be where I ultimately make my life. Lovely. And I made my wife. I met her here not too long after I arrived. She's Japanese. And we've been married 51 years. Lovely. Well, the story that you heard was that you're going to be a part of this. Yeah. You're going to be a leader. One more story. Yeah, please. Back when, before the Kahala Hilton got to have its name changed, my family in the mainland introduced me to a guy named Johnny Apple. He looked just like you, by the way. No kidding. Really? He was this great big guy, and he was the chief correspondent of the New York Times. Okay? And he could fly around the world, go anywhere he wanted, and write any story he wanted. And that was the benefit of being the chief correspondent of the New York Times. So he said, why don't you come down and meet me at my hotel, which was then the Kahala Hilton, before it changed his name. And we sat in on the lawn there, looking at the water. And we spoke. He didn't realize that he was interviewing me the way you are. And he asked me about how I had evolved since I first arrived, probably 20 years after. So that would be in the 70s, I guess. No, the 80s. And he didn't tell me he was interviewing me, but he was the kind of newspaper reporter that doesn't have to write it down, so I couldn't tell. But at the end, he said to me, you know, your friends from high school are going to be calling you. I said, why? He said, they're going to be reading about you in the New York Times in a few days. I'm going to write this up, and I'm going to be quoting what you said. Johnny Apple had a business card that was half the size of an ordinary business card. In those days, you didn't do that. It was too cookie. But what it said was, Johnny Apple, chief correspondent of the New York Times. What kind of a card is that? Simple. Anyway, I remember it because our conversation was all about what I had learned, what I had seen in the evolution of Hawaii in terms of business, social, a whole polyglot experience, people coming from the mainland, settling in. My generation of people trying to find a home here. And that's what Johnny and I talked about. And indeed, in a few days' time, there was an article in the New York Times, and all my classmates from high school called me. Super. Super. These stories come to us, and part of what you're saying is that the fate gives us these stories, gives us the opportunities and openings. In 2012, something occurred for you that changed your life, I mean, around that time, early 20s, early 2000s. And what I'm maintaining is that we can rewrite our stories. People get stuck in their stories sometimes from the past, and well, I have to do this because that's who I am. And they don't think about that. That's not who they are. But what about the new story that comes about? And what has been the new story that keeps you so energized in this elderhood stage of your life? I'm not elder. I'm still adolescent. Oh, excuse me. I'm a well-nourished 16. This is one of the aspects of elderhood is denial. What you said is interesting, indeed, you always have to know what chapter you're in, and you have to try to move ahead and have a new chapter. You can't just stick with it. I know a person who has never left the island of Oahu in her whole life, and she's in her late 40s or early 50s now, can't do that. You must have new chapters. The question is two things. One is what motivates you to get to the next chapter? It's so easy to get into a channel, a rut, if you will, and just stay there, because it works, and I change it, and a lot of people do that. There are a whole lot of cradle to grave, the same thing, just as expected. Do the right thing, the predictable, the predicted thing, or have another chapter. And indeed, I wish I had many chapters to come, because I can find them. I'm telling you now, ThinkTech has helped me identify things that I would like to do in my life. Unfortunately, I have more chapters than I have remaining years, I'm sorry to say. The other point I wanted to make is, of course, you have to identify new chapters. You really have to do that. The other thing is, sometimes it's hard to move from one to the other. It's hard to conceive of it, you know, how you're going to do this. Then once conceived, once you conceive of it, it's hard to actually do it, because it's always, you know, there's a discomfort. You're not in a comfortable zone. You have to work at it. And in my case, I've been lucky, it's either been fate, such as a letter from the draft board, or in the case of leaving the practice of law, it was one of the people in my firm said to me, it's time for you to consider something else, because you're evolving to it anyway. And she was my guru and my soulmate in that regard. And she helped me understand how important it was. And so without that, without that consultation, if you will, I might still be practicing, honestly. I might have lost out on this chapter. But luckily, I had that advice, I acted on that advice, I moved to the next chapter, and I found that although it was hard, you know, there was a certain, you know, you had to put in a lot of time and energy and take a certain amount of risk. I was able to do that and it worked out. And it was, gee, almost 20 years ago. So I'm very happy with this chapter. And I believe everybody ought to see their lives as a serial of chapters. Absolutely wonderful. And the fact that there was someone who was there, the fact that you called her your guru, the fact that there was somebody that could be a third listening eye or a third observer who could stand outside of your, your, who was standing outside of your internal dialogue that goes on and say, this is what's happening in you. This is what I see. And that is a profound, important piece to that transition. That takes a lot of courage to make that transition. And it takes a lot of, I think, an awareness that there's something you're leaving in order to move into something that you're creating. Creating is the operative word. I'm so glad you used that word. I was going to use that word too. You know, the magic of any chapter is you, it's like there was a movie on last night about, I really enjoyed this movie. It was about Herbert Hoover, the president, who served from 1928 to 1932. And he was followed by FDR. And in both cases, both Hoover and FDR, there were a lot of challenges. And when they got in, they didn't know exactly, maybe this is every president. They knew exactly what they were going to do. They had some general ideas. But you never know until you're there on the scene, on the spot, faced with that identity, that situation, before you can create a chapter. FDR, of course, created a chapter that was a much better chapter than what Hoover created. But the point is that he didn't know Hoover, neither Hoover nor FDR. FDR did not know what the new deal was going to look like until he got into it and tested this and tested that. And his genius, if you want to find genius in him, is he had the ability to listen to people, a brain trust. And everyone needs a brain trust. I had my guru in the law firm, you need a brain trust to do the creative things that let you flower out into that new chapter. Very hard to do it alone. Some people have the talent. Other ordinary human beings, they need to have a brain trust. And so that's the way it worked. It was creativity, which is what really gets me off. And it's dealing with a brain trust that helps you massage the creativity. That's beautiful. And when we get to Elderhood, and you'll find this once you get there, thank you, it's more difficult to identify that brain trust because people start falling away. They start, you start isolating in some ways. I thought about how many people have come to this island and come to the state of Hawaii who back in their 40s, 50s, 40s especially said, man, my dream is to retire in Hawaii. And you come to Hawaii and you leave everything behind, people behind. And you have to establish a new brain trust, so to speak. And it takes some activity and some intentionality about it. But I love what you're saying about having that dialogue, that capacity to engage people and have them feed what you already have as a vision. Of all the elements that we've mentioned, brain trust, mission, vision, story of passion and possibility, what's been one of the most important elements for you? A lesson, which I'm still learning. Always trying to learn. Always, always, always. Is that it's, you know this. It's all on the record. Everything is on the, your life is on the record. That's true. And you've got to build it the best way you can. And it has to be integrated from day one, the time you can first remember, till the time you drop dead. It's yours. It's exclusively yours. Even if you screw up, it's exclusively yours. You're writing a unique story, or a combination of stories. And you've got to see it as having the value of being yours. Isn't it a wonderful thing to own your life? That's beautiful, Jay. Thank you so much. And thank you all for joining us on Elderhood, Aging Gracefully with Jay Fidel and his great insights. Come back next week, next Friday, 2 o'clock Hawaii time. And we'll look at some more stories and what's the importance of stories and sorting those out. Thank you all for joining us. Aloha.