 much for joining us on Think Tech Hawaii. Talk about travel as a learning experience and just plain fun, okay. So sit back, pop to top of your favorite beverage in whatever manner you choose and think about your favorite travel experiences and enjoy with our friends David Louie, former attorney journal of the state of Hawaii and one of our most respected litigation attorneys out there being misquoted on a daily basis. So he's now ready to run for politics again being misquoted on a daily basis. And Jeff Portnoy, who is our primary defender of the people who do misquote people on a daily basis and also protect First Amendment rights, which is Jeff's job. Jeff, David, when people ask you what favorite travel experience, what most vivid memory of a travel experience, and they may be two different things that come to mind for you. David, you want to start us off? Sure. So my most memorable travel experience was when I was a young man and I went to the People's Republic of China in 1972, which was right after Nixon. I was like a month after Nixon had gone in. I was in the first wave of Americans who went in. I was considered as an overseas Chinese and I had been studying in Hong Kong. I was on a fellowship for my college and I was over there and I was hanging out with a group of Chinese Americans who were students over there. They were also studying and they said, hey, what are you doing this summer? We're going to China. They had arranged, they were sort of Marxists. They were very enamored of China and they had arranged an official government tour. And so for the next two months, I went with them and I went all around China. We went to Beijing, Xi'an. Before the warriors were discovered, we went to Ye Nan, Mao's birthplace. We went to Shanghai. We went all over the place and we got a complete tour. It was a propaganda tour. But it was fabulous and because I'm Chinese, it was wonderful and it was an opportunity to see sort of a closed society that had not really been opened up prior to that. And so I learned an awful lot about my heritage in China and then I spent two and a half months living in my ancestral village in the growing rice in a village where there were 300 people and they were all surnamed Louis. So they were all cousins of a sort. And then I just hung out and I learned to speak Chinese some and I ended up dreaming in Chinese and just enjoying myself. And it was a fabulous cultural immersion experience that was probably the most memorable for me. Wow. Have you kept the language since? No. I came back. I wrote my thesis about my travels and then I went to law school and because law school was not easy for me, everything kind of pushed out of my head, all the language skills. And so I have, I retained some modicum, some small facility to speak Chinese. Jeff, what comes to mind for you? No, I've been fortunate to be, last time I counted with 72 countries. Wow. And, you know, there's hundreds left. I mean, I'm asked all the time by people, you know, what's your favorite place? And my answer is always the same. Every place is my favorite place because every place I've been has been different, obviously. Different continents, different weather, different culture, different sports, different food, different people, some more history oriented than others. So I really have hesitated to, you know, put it in any kind of a chronological or numerical order. And David's experience is great. I think my closest experience is I've spent three two-week terms teaching law in Eastern Europe as a professor of constitutional law, all in Eastern Europe, all right after Des Tantes and these countries became democratic. And it was just a fascinating two weeks to be with young law students who were so excited about being in a democracy after being under communist rule. I taught in Poland, Hungary and Estonia. And, you know, that's an experience that that is a little bit like what David, David said, although there were no other port noise that I know in the class. But, you know, I just think I love traveling in the US. I mean, I think there's so much in this country, although depending upon what happens in November, I might move to Canada, I haven't decided yet. Oh, we're not supposed to talk politics. I'm sorry. That's not political. That's a life choice, right? I'm sorry. So anyway, I mean, you know, we could all, all of us, I'm sure, talk about experiences that we've had and everyone's different. So, you know, it's not like kids, you know, who's your favorite kid? You know, you like them all equally. At least that's what you tell people. So what I love about Jeff's experience there is and a few of the experiences I've had when traveling outside the United States is the opportunity to be with the culture, be with people and not in a tourist bubble. I mean, I like these experiences where I go somewhere and they show me around and I see all the sights and we're in an air conditioned bus and we're all taken care of or something like that. But actually, you know, living with the people traveling the way the people travel and dealing with the vagaries and the uncertainty of, you know, a new culture and all that stuff. That's really something, okay? And you don't get that if you're luxury travel, but you get that if you're working there like Jeff did or if you're down to a little bit lower on the scale, I think. I mean, you know, I went to Northern, I went to Ireland in July, which is a fabulous country and it was a tour and it was great because it's too big a country for me to do on my own. And we spent three days in Northern Ireland and like David said, you know, everything is planned. We're going to go to this museum. We're going to go to the Titanic Museum. And this is not the only time I've done this. I've done this repeatedly. I left a group on one day when they were going to do the museums and I hired a company that was filled with former IRA soldiers. And we spent the day learning about what happened in Northern Ireland. And it was fabulous. We went to places the tour bus would never go into neighborhoods that they would never dare to go, talk to people, you know, on one side, but I thought we got pretty well as well rounded reporters we could. But those are the kinds of experiences that David was alluding to that I think, you know, make travel. I mean, it's great to go to the Eiffel Tower, you know, and the Great Wall. But there are things sometimes you need to do. And I try to do that if I can in almost every place I go, sometimes not possible. But if you look hard enough, and I try to go on group tours where they take you to someone's home for dinner, I always find that fabulous. I mean, the restaurants are great, but spending four hours with a couple that have lived in, I was just in Australia, so you know, people that lived in Sydney their whole life, you get a perspective that you're not going to get somewhere else. So Chuck, you were recently in, where was it in Miguel again, the day I end? Miguel de Allende, Mexico. And so were you with in a bubble? Were you with expatriates? Were you with local people? How was that? He's in charge of illegal immigration. He had to go down to make sure all his runners were doing their job. That's right. Okay, the truth comes out. My grandmother's name was Cortes McSon. So I'm probably illegal in somebody's view. But yeah, San Miguel is wonderful. It's 62 feet up. And there are a lot of expatriates, depending on the time of year, but particularly during this time of year, when especially Canadians and many Americans from colder climates come down, they spend not two or three weeks, but like six to eight months. And then they'll go back during the few good months that they have in Vancouver or New York or Pittsburgh or wherever they're from. Lots of those, thousands and thousands. And San Miguel has maybe about 140,000 people, including the surrounding areas. And there are times when as many as posted 15 to 20,000 expats may be there. So that's a lot. All rich white people. Yeah. Yeah. All rich white people who are escaping their communities. Yeah. And some of them very, very rich. More people who were former advertising agency people and people who were talking about eight, nine figure investments and things like that. So out of my league, but very, very nice people and all that stuff. I did not have the opportunities that I might have liked to connect locally as broadly or as deeply as I would have liked. But we can work on that. Whereas on the other hand for me, for Vietnam, because I lived there, I taught English for five years. I worked with street kids. I worked with farm families central Vietnam for a couple of years down in the Delta for another year. And then I got a full ride back down in the Delta teaching. So my five years living in Vietnam, I spent a tiny, tiny fraction of my time with people who were not Vietnamese. And most of those were people who were in my volunteer group who also spoke Vietnamese lived with the local culture. And we rode all over Southern Vietnam at that time on our little motorcycles. And we had a fabulous time. One of getting buried over there in 1971. So my kids are Vietnamese American, my grandkids are Vietnamese American. And I love it. And they're amazingly diverse, wonderful people. And we just went back in October for another three and a half weeks. In 55 years, it's the best visit I've ever had. It was because I hadn't been during the pandemic, it had been four and a half years. And can you imagine being out of your second homeland for four and a half years, which is what Vietnam is for me. So just the people, the most wonderfully welcoming, generous, kind, thoughtful people, people change their travel schedules to be able to spend one evening with us. People blew off award ceremonies to be with us for a dinner. It's just people gave up. I'm with their families to take us to see parts of Vietnam in the outskirts of Hanoi that they thought we would enjoy. So if you ever want to go and have an experience that is very Vietnamese rooted, go with us. That's how I feel about Brooklyn. Yeah. If you go back in October, let me know. We are. I might take you up. We went in 2015. Joanna and I went and had a wonderful time. Vietnam is such an amazingly interesting country and so, so industrious. I will tell you one short story to board Jeffrey and not leave him any time at all. But we went to and we were amazed at how industrious everybody was. Every single square inch was cultivated. People were working hard. They were busting their butts to do stuff and get ahead. And then a few months later, we went to Cuba and on a cultural tour and the exact opposite. The climates are roughly the same, you know, but the exact opposite Cuba. There were all kinds of fallow land people. All the entrepreneurs had left and and the government rationing system has brought up the bottom. But it really is, I think, sapped the will of the people given given the way their government works there. And so it was very disappointing to me about how the people were not particularly industrious. The infrastructure was crumbling. You know, it did not look like it had a great future to me. I had a different experience in Havana. It is a city that at one point must have been like St. Petersburg was 100 years ago, just magnificent and now crumbling and all the paint is off the walls. And I think I went before you. I went maybe the first year Obama was president and we were just going to open up Cuba. But I spent a lot of time with the artists and with some of the farmers. And I had a different experience. They were totally enthusiastic. They were just opening up some of the paramours, which are the small little independent restaurants of which there had been none. And there was an excitement. Of course, everything changed under Trump. But there was this light at the end of the tunnel, which apparently was extinguished. Shortly thereafter, the government became much more autocratic. But you know, there was this there's an undercurrent of hope and liveliness. At least there was maybe not maybe not anymore. So I had a great experience of being in them a long time ago. I must have been there 30 years ago. I love the north. I didn't like the south at all. I thought the south was like New York City on steroids. Oh, so I got. Yeah. Yeah. But the north was fabulous. I mean, every morning, everybody out doing their calisthenics around the lake and one family. Yeah. And the peacefulness and and it was still close enough to the war that you go to the War Museum and and you see John Glenn's tennis racket. You know, because when he was in prison, he was playing tennis every day. Those are just great experiences. Yeah. And for me, Oh, not John Glenn. What's his name from Arizona? I'm sorry. I didn't mean John. John McCain. John McCain. Yeah, his tennis racket. Sorry. John Glenn left his on the moon, I think I was confused. One small lob for mankind. He can hit that ball pretty far up there. Lots of serves, not much volume. No, no. No, but if you get the chance to go and do family stays is fantastic. For me, like David, if you get to teach, take any opportunity because the learning experience for me as the so called teacher was exponentially greater than anything they could have learned from me during my time there. I had executive MBA students who all had at least five to 10 years experience in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City as business leaders. And it was striking to me that my very best students were with very few exceptions, incredible women leaders, and they have become leaders in different companies. One of them is on their, well, two of them are on their third or fourth companies already. They go in, they rehabilitate the company, and they make it successful. They spin off, they keep some shares in it for an income stream, and then they go off and do another thing with another company. And these are international companies with usually older male leadership, some western, many of them Asian. I've seen them do it with Japanese companies, Korean companies, Taiwanese companies. But women leaders in Vietnam are just, it literally chokes me up to think how incredibly gifted and talented and wonderful they are. There is a pretty significant difference traveling now, and it's the way that the people in these countries want to interact with you as an American. I have found it to be fairly dramatic. Up until four or five years ago, the conversation was always about how great America is and tell us more about America. They would raise things like gun violence and things like that. If you really got down with people who wanted to have a conversation, because most of what they knew about the United States is from television and the movies, but I find the conversations in my last five or six years have been dramatically different, much more critical of America, not being the country that they had heard about and what's going on in your country and why are you doing this and why are you letting your president do that, and it's dramatic. It's dramatic. It's not like this is a place I always want to go to and boy, you live in Hawaii and now it's like, what's going on in your country? Mass shootings every day, racism, police rioting, people rioting, it's different. Their view of America is totally different and as an American tourist, it really puts you on your heels to try to explain what is going on. That's interesting because it used to be the ugly Americans where the tourists who would be misbehaving are not respecting the local culture and now with all the media coverage of all the stuff that is happening in Hawaii, the ugly Americans are the ones who live in America and are misbehaving at home. I find that fascinating I agree. I think people are very concerned about what is happening. Like many other things, I think the picture that people in other cultures get of America is distorted in a number of ways. Luckily, we here in Hawaii don't have, that's one of the things we can count our blessings. We don't live that ugly American life that seems to be showing up everywhere else. That's a blessing we can count and that's a good thing. That's a really good point, Jeff and David. One of the things that I've noticed also, in fact, I noticed it even back when I was in Vietnam, 60s and 70s during the war, people across all spectrums, not only educated people but in the countryside, older people, middle-aged, younger people, they distinguish between the people and the government and the military. They understood that we have to live with leadership that makes our lives harder just as they do. It's kind of a unifying factor. Jeff, you're exactly right. Conversations are much more open now. They're much less differential. In fact, the last time I was teaching there in 2019, for my first few days, the students didn't mention anything about American politics at all. I finally just asked them, how come guys don't even bring it up? I mean, don't ask any questions about it. They said, oh, we didn't want to embarrass you. And I get that. I totally get that because in 2019, I left one day before Trump arrived to making. As a dispute resolution professional, if you were ever going to approach bargaining in the worst possible way, he provided the premier example of that. I almost wish I had one more day of my students say, watch this guy. Everything he does, do the exact opposite and you will be a good negotiator. But it was embarrassing. So where have been the most fun places for you? The places where you connected with people and it just felt so good you wanted to come back or extend it and spend more time with the people in that place? Well, I find Australia to be at the top of the list in that. I just find the people there are incredible. Their lifestyle, for the most part, is filled with sports and culture and fun and food. Not that they don't have a million problems. Not they don't have aboriginal problems. Not that their politics can be screwed up. But I just find them to be the people now, the most welcoming. You can't go anywhere with somebody initiating a conversation if they realize you're not speaking with a slight British accent. It's not alone. But I've always put Australia at the top of my list as what I think is in Ireland. Those would be the two countries that I think were the friendliest to me in the last few years. I'm sure there's a lot of others, but you asked and those are the two that I find the people to be more engaging and the culture to be just really interesting and fun. You know, and that raises a point that you raised earlier, David, and I found certainly, and I continue to find in Vietnam, when I went back this year after four and a half years, okay, I'm way beyond rusty. The first day, particularly in the north, because I had been in Central and South Vietnam for the five years, I lived there back in the 60s and 70s. It was a little slow. The second day, things started to come. By the third day, we'd get in the cab. My wife and the friends from Baltimore and Singapore would sit in the backseat. By the time we got to our destination in 10 or 15 minutes, I could give you three generations of that cab driver's history. They were so happy to have somebody that could sit down there and just ask them in their own language. And one of the things that a friend said to me after a dinner that we had together at the end of the trip, he said, you know, I've been putting tourists together here and arranging tours for visitors for 25 years. And I've seen a lot of foreigners who speak Vietnamese, but nobody speaks Vietnamese the way you do. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, I mean, I can tell you're an American when you speak Vietnamese, but the way you use the language, the way you listen, what you hear, what you respond to, it's the way that Vietnamese would use the language. And I said, sure, because I was trained by students and teachers and they told me, everybody knows in this small town where you learn to your Vietnamese, if you go out there to the market or the store or the school and you embarrass us, it will not go well for you. So it was definitely minding my language uses. And it's challenging, but language opens doors that nothing else does in that way. So it's a learning experience. Where would you most want to go as we go into our last couple of minutes here? Where have you not yet been or where have you been that you most want to go back to? David? Well, the places on my bucket list right now are Machu Picchu, the Galapagos, Egypt, and Jordan, all places that are politically fraught. So I'm not sure I'm going to schedule anything. I looked at scheduling and then there was political unrest and instability, which on the one hand, I don't think the governments want to screw with tourism, so they're probably going to keep it safe. But on the other hand, political instability is instability, but I think I want to try some of those places. Jeff? The turtles aren't rebelling. You could go to Galapagos. Ecuador is unstable. Well, yeah, but you can get right to Galapagos. Anyway, I'm going to India next month not to see the cities, but to go, this is what I'm doing lately, is go to national parks. And I'm spending 10 days, 12 days looking for tigers and Asian elephants and things like that. So that's what I'm looking forward to now, not to hang out in the slums of Bombay or whatever they call it now, but to get up there in Australia, I went to national parks looking for wombats and Tasmanian devils and things like that. I'm finding talking to animals is becoming a lot more fun. They rarely talk back. Okay, it'll be like that scene in Ghostbusters. That's right. Rick Moranis goes up to the horse and says, you know, we're going to free you. Don't worry. You know, there are so many... Before he shrunk the kids. That's right. I mean, there are so many places in the world that, you know, I'll never get to. And again, you know, I'm big on US tourism. I mean, I've almost been to every state and I just learned in every state I'm in. I mean, I've talked to you previously about my civil rights tour in... Yeah, in Alabama, which was one of the most fascinating weeks I've ever spent in my life. You know, it's just like when David went back to his home, you know, where his relatives are. I mean, I thought I knew something about civil rights and after a week on a civil rights tour, I was just like wide eyed talking to people involved. So you don't have to leave the country. You know, you don't have to leave the state to be honest. There are so many stories and so many cultures here that most of us never even get to see, whether it's on Molokai or parts of Kauai and even this island. So you don't have to go that far to experience good things and fun things. David, for you? No, I totally agree. There's lots of places in the United States to go to. I will say this one thing. What was very interesting to me and it wasn't was the opportunity to travel as an attorney general and I did that. And to go, I went four times, twice to Taiwan, once to Turkey, and once to Israel on AG trips. Who paid? You know, I'm going to call civil beef. There were these friendship organizations that wanted to underwrite it because they wanted to bring AGs in who might become governors or senators, friends of the country. And we had the opportunity to meet with, but we got the opportunity. One of my favorite things is the opportunity to just sit down and shake hands and listen to Shimon Perez, who was a great man, just a great man. I'm sorry, I'm kidding, choked up. It was such an experience. And there were others and just the opportunity to be at that level. I was a nobody, just an attorney general. But it was fabulous and then we got to see all kinds of things. So those were terrific experiences. Those are opportunities that only come to people like you that have that chance. That's fabulous. Yeah. No, we're out of time for today, but I took all your time, Jeff. That is so disappointing. Helpable disappointment. But I wanted to leave us with a thought here is after four and a half years for me getting back to Vietnam, and I'm going to choke up on this one, but the way that the people completely re-energized the importance of just seeing, understanding, appreciating, respecting, honoring, and serving the value in other people, they just took contact with another human being as an opportunity to do that. I've come back. I'm trying to carry some of that with me. Doing it with lawyers in mediation is challenging. I get a lot of pushback for that, but it offers us a chance to see people and ourselves and the value of connecting with people and to value the differences in ways that at least recently in this country have not been honored the way that traditionally we have. We need to do that. We need to revel in and honor and respect our differences because that is what connects us in the most kaleidoscopic rainbow ways. And on that note, David, Jeff, thanks so much. Let's do this again. Thanks, Chuck. Well said. It's always fun, man. Good to see you, David. And of course, Chuck, welcome home. Okay. Take care. All right.