 much for joining us on Think Tech Hawaii. And not only joining us, but if you like these things, if you encourage these difficult conversations to make good trouble, if you think it's worthwhile to get this stuff out there and make people think about it, click the icon, click the donate button, and whatever the spirit moves you to pitch in, please do. We have with us today the preeminent, Ben Davis, the equally preeminent, Tim Apichella, and the posteminent me. So whatever the heck that means. And we're actually going to look at travel experiences, not only for the joy of travel, but for the learning. And so Ben, Tim, I'm going to ask you, think of a trip after which you got back, and maybe it was a day or a week or a month or a year later, and you thought to yourself, what an incredible learning experience that was. Ben, what comes to mind for you? Thanks, Chuck. What comes to mind is probably the most is a trip to India in 1994. I was in New Delhi working for the International Chamber of Commerce, and there was a conference on international arbitration that was being held. And I was sent out to be on one program because the president of the court couldn't be there. And then I participated in another program. So I arrive, there's a car waiting for me. They take me to my hotel from the airport, and I go in and I'm so exhausted. I want to go to sleep. But I'm saying, Ben, you're in India. You're in New Delhi. So get up and get out. And so I got dressed up, came back. There was a car and went down to the first conference, which had already started. And I arrived at the conference, and there was a dais up front there. And all the dais was a little name tag for me, Benjamin Davis. So I was supposed to have been on the dais from nine o'clock that morning. And so I think the part of the day, it was several days. One of the things that was really moving was there was a guy who was there, was a seat who took me around an older fellow. And I went to the seat temple there in New Delhi one morning very early. And towards the seat rituals, that was really quite an experience. The other thing is that on that first night, I was there alone, the other people from the ICC had come. And they held a cocktail party in my honor at some person's house. And there were a lot of Indians who were there. And they were saying, Oh, you must talk about, you know, while you're here, how long are you going to be in New Delhi? And I said, I'm not really here to do the first thing. I'm here to meet Indians to talk with Indians about what's going on. And one of the guys said, Well, you see that woman over there? She's from Bangalore. You see that man over there? He's from Mumbai. You see that person over there? They're from another town. You know, I said, you have all of India in this room, you know, that was like really heavy, you know, just the idea of the whole subcontinent being represented in the room. So that was there's a lot more with that experience. But there there was it was very moving and an opportunity to work with the Indians who asked for help on the drafting of their arbitration law. So that was pretty amazing. So I just got to ask the woman from Bangalore, that wouldn't happen to be Lila Olapali, would it? I don't know. This is 1994. She's she's been doing this for a long time. She's she's a world experience in and of herself. And her daughter Tara in Boston is now one of the leaders of mediation development in India. So the legacy continues. Women's leadership. Yeah, I actually see more of it in Asia than I do in Western countries, including here. And somebody yesterday asked me about presidential and vice presidential candidates. And their phrase was simply, where is Michelle when we need her most? Tim, travel experiences that really register deeply with you? Well, that would definitely be my travels to Africa, been Africa, eight separate trips. And in this particular case, it was 1994 to Tanzania. But before I give you that experience, I just want to read two quotes that I think helped me sum up why travel is so important. And the first one is a quote from Ray Bradbury. Half the fun of travel is the aesthetic of lostness. And then the other quote is by Anatoly France. Wandering reestablishes the original harmony which one once existed between man and the universe. And so I would definitely say it was Tanzania because it was independent travel. I take one backpack. It was for two months and just traveled the local buses, hitchhiked construction lorries, whatever, whatever mode of transportation you can get on because transportation in Tanzania, the infrastructure was little or nothing. So you just made my way around the country for two months and, you know, ran into all sorts of issues. So when you're traveling independently and there's a language issue and Swahili was spoken and my Swahili was limited. It was okay. But it wasn't great. It actually got me out of trouble once because I was able to put a phrase together that got me out of being robbed. But so the reason being is, you know, you just find yourself in really wacky positions and situations. And I guess what really, really always impresses me the most about travel is the willingness of people to help you, the willingness for them to extend a hand, take time out of their their very busy days and actually escort you or take you by the hand and walk you to a place because you're just you're just lost. You're lost. You have no idea which way is north, south, east or west. And you try to do all your preparations. You do your logistic training. You have to make sure that, you know, your bus connections are right because if you miss a bus connection, you could be stuck in a village for two days. And two days out of two weeks is quite a quite a long time. So but even with all the logistics planning and, you know, you're trying to read up in certain guidebooks like the Lonely Planet for backpackers back in 1994, nothing was assured. And so I guess the greatest thing I took home was one is how really blessed Americans are, because we have an abundance of many things. Whereas most of the world, they don't. But what I learned is most of the world is very, very rich that I think Americans are lacking. And that is the camaraderie of family and friends, the connectedness between neighbors. Strangers are welcome. And they're treated, they're treated with dignity and respect. And I think somehow the United States, we've lost that, you know, you hear of southern hospitality, which is true. But there's nothing like Islamic hospitality when you travel the world. And I know it's part of the religion, but guess what? It comes so natural for them to do it. And they do it in grand style. I mean, you'll be invited to people's homes that you barely know and sit down with them for a meal that you barely know. I doubt that happens very much in the United States. And so it was refreshing. And it's always a renewal of what we call the human condition to see it alive and well in other countries and places you wouldn't imagine in the first place. And it's in addition to being a learning experience, broadening, deepening all of those good things, I can kind of hear in your voices and it certainly strikes the chord in me. It's really moving. Just to see and feel people who see, respect, value, and treat people with that level of understanding, that service, that the word hospitality, as you indicate, Tim, doesn't even begin to approach what we're really talking about here. And what I like about your first quote is, you know, I think all three of us have experienced, it's almost worth going to a place and wandering out and getting lost, just to see who's going to step up and look at this obviously lost person and say, how can I help you? And they will. Every single time it can be in the middle of a rainstorm and they run out and bring out an umbrella. And they walked you all the way back to the door of where you need to go. Could be somebody who explains your inner restaurant, you have no idea what to order, what impact it's going to have on either your taste buds or your digestive tract. And they help you make incredibly good choices. Yeah. Yeah. I started to learn Chinese after I went to Hong Kong once. And I have much Chinese, okay, but there's one phrase in Chinese, which is basically, excuse me, that character, which is like, you character on some side. What is that character? Right? You know, so I'm wandering around Hong Kong, basically, going up to people saying that, you know, you know, that's the only thing I know, right? You know, proceed to talk, you know, like, oh, that's the thing. And they explain the history of it and all that. I have no clue what they're saying, right? But you're nodding, but you're nodding like a bobblehead, like you understand. But, you know, that was sort of like trying to get that connection. You could see the the human language between us, right? But the human connection with this other person, right? Even though we don't have, you know, the ability to really understand us in the in terms of language, you know, that was that was wonderful, actually. Him, I can see that's triggering some both thoughtful and moving thoughts and memories in you as well. Hey, well, you know, I go back to I go back to why I travel. I choose one country per year. And I stay within that country for a month, sometimes it's two months. And I've been doing that since 1991. And since you were 11, huh? Yeah, right. Thank you, Chuck. And for me, you know, there's there's I don't find meaning of life. I don't I really don't care what the meaning of life is. What's important to me and has been for many, many years is the meaning in life, which is to say, somehow I departed the great divine, this realm of blissfulness. And I departed the creator and said, Hey, I'd like to spend 6070 maybe 80 years on this little planet called terra firma planet Earth. And I'm going to leave the state of blissfulness. And I want to say, put me in this environment, it could be miserable, it could be great. It could be everything in between. But why would I do that? Because in my philosophy, I believe that we don't get this experience. The experience of the eternal is here and now there is no eternity. Time is non existent. The time is now. And what does that mean? So it's why you why you departed the blissfulness of eternity, the great divine is to experience experiencing in your your your skin and your bones, your olfactory nerves, all your senses, and to experience pain, pleasure, bliss, despair, all these things. And so what's a big part of our experience is definitely traveling, traveling around the world to see what how other people experience their lives, what commonalities you have, what differences you have. The joy of cultural, how should I say unification that your culture, my culture, although dressed differently, painted differently, is trying to attempt to get the exact same thing. We could call it mausoleum, the hierarchy of needs. But what I realized most in traveling is that human beings all need the same thing. They need safety, they need food, they need shelter, they need to see their children prosper. They need to see their families prosper. They'd like to be in a living environment where there's no war, crime, and there's education for their children. We all have these same needs, regardless of what boundary we resided. And there is the hope for mankind is to recognize those common needs, those common wants, and be able to see across the borderline and say, we share that as human beings. You know, and one of the things that I'm hearing in what you're both saying, a friend put it in a way that just seems to really kind of encapsulated as beautifully as you've just articulated, which is, you said, Chuck, the best thing for me about traveling to places where the people, the culture, everything are as different from what you can experience and imagine and have as possible is it reminds us how much we need each other. Go live in a collective collective society as you have. And as I have for a month or six months or a year or several years, see what it does to how you see people, how you relate to and connect with people, how you treat people, and in return, how they see and treat you. Let it make the difference that people who value each other. And what we're talking about is something that has been seriously, seriously eroded in this country, intentionally, violently, both physically and verbally. And yeah, you're making me think of a couple of trips along the way. One was to Ireland, to round Dublin. There's a, you know, one of sort of those lakes that were created in the Ice Age dug out there. It's called Glendalach, you know, and, you know, we go out there and I'm telling you, brothers, you see the druids. You know what I mean? I mean, the spiritual feeling of the actual space, you know, you see, you know, elves and all that. I mean, in your mind's eye, you feel them right there with you, you know? It's a really powerful spot. And then out in the west of Ireland, there are these islands called the Aron Islands that are right off of Galway. And I went out there because James Joyce talked about them a lot. And in your list, he's in other places. And, you know, I went out to one of the smaller ones called Inesir and you're walking around on this island. And there was, you know, places where the Irish had lived for 5,000 years, right? I mean, there were these sort of things that had been dug up. There was a, I remember there was a castle at the top that I think Oliver Cromwell had, you know, you know, you're just like, this is amazing. And just kind of wandering around in this Irish experience, you know, it was just really something, you know, just feeling the call come in. And I had to, you know, obviously, once the public had a Guinness, which was awesome, excellent. But I remember the end of the afternoon, you know, I had to wait for the boat back. So I was, I don't know, maybe an hour, hour and a half to wait. And I just sat on at the port there. And I started singing songs just to, you know, singing to the horses and stuff, you know, just like sitting on the dock of the bay or something like that. You know, just sitting there, you know, it was really, I don't know, everybody must have thought I was pretty weird. But for me, I was so happy, so, you know, in touch with this Irish thing, it was really beautiful. See, and that's another thing that we forget is, you know, you can do it in literature, maybe sometimes in movies, things like that. But if you really want to transport yourself, not just to another environment, both physical and human environment, but to a completely other time, go wander through the Colosseum early in the morning in Rome. Sit down in Stone Hedge, right around dusk, when it's transitioning between day and evening. Go to Stratford on Avon at sunset, and watch this summer night stream. I mean, just sit down in the countryside along the river, in Vietnam, or Laos, or Cambodia, with friends, and just break bread together, share stories, share experiences, just connect for the pure sake of connecting as human beings. No ulterior motives, no nothing to be gained, nothing to be measured, nothing quantitative about the experience at all, simply the quality of human connection. Besides Africa, Tim, other places that have done that for you? Oh, yeah. Certainly in the Far East, specifically, you look at a culture, and you can tell a lot about a culture on how they treat their dead, the deceased. And so I think one of them was on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, and there's a little village called the Taranja, the Taranjan village. And what is expected of all the inhabitants of Taranja is that you save every nickel you have from the time you can save money, from the time you earn money as a child, and you save every nickel for that eventual day where you have to say goodbye to your parents or your grandparents. And what you do is you save enough money so that you could buy water buffalo, because in the Taranjan faith, which is a combination between Animas and some Christianity, they believe that the departed will basically ride the back of a buffalo and ascend to the heavens, if you will, to heaven. And so you save all your money, and kind of like betting statistics, the more buffalo you can bring to the funeral, the better the chances that your relative will be able to land on the back of one of those buffaloes. So during this big event, they bring in one water buffalo after another with a machete, they'll slaughter the buffalo right there in front of you, and there's blood spraying all over the place. But they're cheering because they know that there's another opportunity for grandmother to ascend to the heavens. And so after about 25 buffaloes, you're ankle deep in blood, but it's a very festive and joyful occasion. And so that told me a lot about that you save an entire lifetime for this event, this one-time event. And that's not easy to do, because I'm sure with Western influences, there's the idea of gameboys back in the day of Nintendo. And these kids, they know what Western civilization offers, and all the cool little gadgets that you can buy. And so it's tough. It's a tough thing for them to have that discipline. And sometimes they fall. Sometimes they hide the money, and they don't necessarily save it. But one of the most touching things I saw in Suluwe or in this village is that when an infant dies, and if the infant is less than one years old, there's a forest. And in this forest, there's a soft bark tree. And so they'll cut out a rectangle, and they'll hollow out the tree, and they'll put the infant in the tree, and they'll cover the whole opening with burlap. And over time, that burlap now is covered with new bark. And the idea is that the soul of that infant will ascend through the branches, through the leaves, and up to the heavens. What a beautiful thought. What a beautiful way of saying goodbye to a child that you'll never see grow into adulthood. Simply beautiful. And so it's touching to see how different cultures revere their dead. I think of Mexico, the Día de Muerto. Several cultures have this special affinity of Vietnam. You know, you have those days where the line between life and death is very thin line on a particular calendar day, and it's a beautiful thing. And I love how cultures honor their dead. You know, and you bring up a really great point, Tim, because it's not only an incredibly diverse and essentially infinite level of connection among the living, it extends multi-generational. The collectivism in those societies extends to everybody that can even be remembered or recorded in the entire extended family, not just the immediate family. So it's extremely inclusive. And they treat you like that. If you come into the home, you are welcomed as if you were family. So Ben, any moments like that where you just experience something where it just stopped you in your tracks and said, this is what life should remind us? Yeah. Well, I'm thinking of when I worked for about a year as a development consultant in Sobo in West Africa, and we did these trips as this team to look at all the different projects that were being done there. And we went up to the north of the country, and there was a Togliese guy who was working on a project, and he invited me back to his house to have a meal. And so it was there with him and his sister and his mother and his grandmother. And of course, you know, there's like a boat right next door, right? And then he and I went off to buy sodas, and we come back, and the boat's not there anymore because, you know, the boat's going to be there, you know? And that was going to get pretty quick, all right? But one of the things that he said that has always stayed with me was that, you know, his grandmother was kind of old, right? And the way he describes it, and this kind of expects the Tim's point about that, is that she's packing her bags. I thought it was just this beautiful image of the idea of, you know, the steps from, you know, taking your clothes out of the drawer, putting them all in the bed, putting the bag on the, you know, filling the bag, all the process, and then going down the stairs with the bag and putting it by the door, right? And then going out the door. I just, you know, I use that image a lot in my, in my, I've got another cat that's come here. I use that image in thinking of that when you see someone who is, you know, frail, if you, everyone knows that they're going to be passing soon. But the, the, the likeness of spirit of saying they've packed their bags, you know, maybe the bag is by the door, you know, and all that. It makes it a much more less sad kind of thing. It's a journey that they're getting ready to go on, you know, and that's kind of cool, too. Kind of like the journey on the, with the water buckle of going up to heaven, you know, or those, you know, those, those little, less than one year olds in that tree going up through the tree, you know, it's, I think it's an interesting moment for me. You know, and the two of you brought something out that I think, as we run out of time here, encapsulates what's at the very, very heart of the very best of travel experiences of connecting with a very, very different people and culture. And that is, it doesn't just exceed expectations. It provides you completely new and different expectations that you never had imagined or even possible. And to share them with people for whom it is their heart, it is their culture, it is their life. So to wrap us up, my kind of little story like that is I not only fell in love with what is now my second homeland, Vietnam, when I lived there for five years, but also with one of my fellow teachers. And we wound up going to her father, who was very, very traditional from the old Imperial Citadel in Hue, Vietnam, to try and convince him to allow an American Vietnamese marriage under very, very difficult circumstances for anything like that to be considerable for a very educated, lovely young woman from a very, very proud Hue family. In fact, actually from Old Royal Stock. And that process took several weeks, and it was really interesting in and of itself. It was my first really major mediation, but it turned out successful. And the guy sitting on the cape was when my mother, a single mom, I've lived, my dad had flew over all by herself in the middle of the war in Vietnam, very, very politically charged time, and came up and sat down with my fiance's father. And the two of them connected so beautifully. It was just, it was amazing. And the day before our scheduled wedding, there were big demonstrations in the streets of way out at the Perfumer River Bridge, including burning an American army jeep. So the oldest brother came and said, you know, might not be the right time. Maybe we should put this off. I reminded him that when the father finally gave his approval, the oldest brother said, well, if we're going to do that, if you're going to get married my sister, we're going to go see my soothsayer. And he's going to pick the date, the time, the circumstances. And he did it was, we floated out on a little kind of boat in the middle of the way river and spent two and three hours as he walked us through how to bring the year of the dog person and the year of the monkey person together in the most propitious way time. So we did that. A very, very traditional Vietnamese wedding. And I tell them, you know what, your soothsayer picked this. I don't think we want to mess with that. And he exceeded because of that, his culture that I respected and acknowledged. Anyway, long story short, we did the wedding. The oldest people in the community came and brought the children, put them on their hips, they stood by their doorways, the windows, they watched, they explained all of the traditions because it was at a point in time where very, very few people had the resources to be able to do a fully traditional Vietnamese wedding and especially with some of the old royal Vietnamese, oh yeah, clothes and things like that, which I also wore. And it was just such an incredibly community unifying event, culturally, emotionally in every one of the best ways that I remember coming out after we did the family prayers and ceremonies and stuff. And one of the older gentlemen with little kid on his hip just looked over at me and he just nodded his head just a little bit. And I understood and nodded back that we have not only acknowledged, we have joined each other's cultures and we have joined each other. That's what we're here for. Folks, thank you all for joining us. Support Think Tech Hawaii. Come back. We're going to do this again next week with more stories, more lessons and probably a little more ocular moisture. Yeah, that's okay. Hey, as my grandfather said, tears are just hard overflowing. May your overflow, may you enjoy your day and your weekend. Ben, Tim, thanks so much for all you share. If you liked this show, why don't you give us a like or subscribe to our channel? Thanks so much.