 Yeah, welcome back to Community Matters. I'm Jay Fidel here on Think Tech, and we're talking with a peacemaker today. Are you ready? A peacemaker. Peter Adler, I'm gonna talk about Civil War. We're talking about a novel that he's writing and has written, which is now circulating for publication, which reflects thoughts that he has had in which I agree with him about concerning the ongoing civil risks, disturbances, and possibilities of civil war. Have we ever finished fighting the Civil War? Peter, welcome to the show. This is gonna be kind of an important show. Thank you for coming down. Thanks, Jay. I so admire what you are doing. The citizen journalism effort, and that's partly why I'm on your board, because I just believe strongly in this and what you're doing. Congratulations to you and Carol on standing it all up and moving it along. Thank you. We enjoy it. It becomes a dedication for us. So peacemaker, tell us about being a peacemaker and how you look at the world through the eyes of a peacemaker. You know, for the last 30 years, I've been working in one way or another as a mediator, as a facilitator, as a planner, and a strategist when there's a lot of disruption. And it's been the work that I've done. I was head of the Neighbor Justice Center, which has now evolved into the Mediation Center of the Pacific. I worked for the Supreme Court for a number of years. I headed up a big science and public policy program in Colorado for a number of years. I was sort of wooed away for a little while. And then I realized the surf wasn't that great in Colorado. So, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. And I also have a number of senior folks like myself who've done this for a long time. And we have a lot of conversations and we compare notes about our cases and without revealing confidences and strategies and tactics where I was on the hunt. And I'll just tell you, when I work on something and it achieves a good resolution, I feel like a million bucks. I still feel that way. I don't make a million bucks, but I feel of that way. And so I love what I do. It's in my DNA and it's the only thing I know how to do. And your book, you know, reflects your experience in peacekeeping and the Peace Corps, your experience in peacekeeping in your Operation Mediation Company, Accord 3.0 and your career in general. But now you have this book and the book that it's called Defiance at Duck Springs, the story of small town America and the next Civil War. That is a long way from peacekeeping. But it sounds like you have created at least, you know, for the book, a world perhaps that goes further and explores reality as it is coming upon us. The sea change of our world here in COVID, the sea change of our world under Trump. It's a new world you're looking at in this book. Can you talk about the relationship of your peacekeeping experience and the world you've built in the book? Well, it's probably an odd thing that I wrote this, but, you know, I am an inveterate scribbler and writer and I write mainly for my own self and I've written four books and you've seen one, The India 40 and The Circle of Demons book, which was the Peace Corps story. But this, I wanted to write, I tried my hand at writing a novel and it takes place in 2037. So it's out in the future, but it's not that far out. And it's about a guy named Danny Goodman who's a disbarred lawyer and an ex-marine and a kind of a secular Jew and a rather foul mouth philosopher who's had some hard times. And he kind of runs off to a cabin deep in the woods of Washington state. And it's actually a place where I sort of lived for a short period of time out in the woods. And he is slowly drawn into, he really wants to escape everything. He's running from some miseries. And he really wants to stay secluded. But he actually falls in love with a local woman who in this little town and while they're doing that, a new civil war is breaking out in the United States. And it's a pretty fulsome war. It's a real fight. There's been a coup d'etat, a lot of the Washington DC and some of the state capital governments have been decapitated. And so it's about this violent coup d'etat and about this small town which puts up a resistance. And after the president is assassinated, so it's a novel. And I wrote it partly out of my own fears for what lies ahead and as a precautionary tale. But I also wanted to write a good story. I wanted to write a yarn. I like writing. I like reading stories and I like writing stories. I like going to movies and when I have the time to do all that. So I worked on this for a couple of years and it is now sitting with a literary agent through a friend of mine and moving around to some publishers presumably in New York and elsewhere. And we'll see if it comes out. And if it does, I'll be very happy. It's not about making a lot of money. It's much more about kind of sending a warning flare up, a warning signal, not that there aren't enough of them in and around. That's the story, Jay. So did you fold in the insurrection somehow? Yes. I mean, it takes place through an insurrection, a right-wing insurrection. And there are characters in there that would vaguely resemble certain guys like Trump or Flynn or others who are really bent on separation and takeover. They think the country's gone bad. They think it's really gone deeply bad. And they really stage a revolution and they want to, the cities are on fire. I mean, they've built an army. They've united militias and protest groups, right-wing protest groups, you know, and they've pulled them together. They've created something that looks a little bit like QAnon, that's called, that I call Faro. And they've managed to pull it off. But at the end, there's a lot of resistance and this small town is one part of that. So happy ending? Yes, but I don't want to. We need a happy ending, you know? It's got a good ending in it to it, it's got a lot of, you know, grim stuff that happens to people in between. Well, I guess you explore the whole social compact and the social chemistry, if you will, that has created our bifurcation in this country, our divisive, you know, world that we live in. And so, I mean, to me, that's a fascinating part of the story because I think we're living in that. You are writing about what we are living. Well, you're absolutely correct because I think you can, we will be able to look back on our time and we'll see the seeds of things that we either, that really pulled us apart and destroyed us or that we overcame politically, socially, culturally, economically. And my hope, I'm an optimist. I'd always stay optimistic. And, you know, you can't do the kind of work that I and my colleagues do if you're not optimistic, but you scratch an optimist and you'll find skeptics and a little bit of cynicism too and worries. So this book was kind of the result of all that. You know, I want to, I did a poll recently to a lot of my colleagues. I sent a poll out to about 50 people and I said, what do you think the prospects are for a civil war? And I got a lot of really interesting numbers. I said, seven high, one low, what's, give me your number on the, on if you're making a prediction. And most people said, it's probably around four. It could be a serious outbreak. And then another said, you know what, gee, it all depends on how you define civil war. But I've been watching politically and socially and culturally what is going in on the country. I'm like you, I'm a veteran observer. And there's a lot of white noise, but there's also a lot of signals that come through in the noise. And one of the ones, I just want to read you one that came my way that I went, my goodness, that's us. And this is from a Sri Lankan guy, Indy Samar Niva who dealt with a prolonged civil war in Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers and all that. And he wrote this. He said, I lived through the end of a civil war. I moved back to Sri Lanka in my 20s just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don't understand. They're waiting to get personally punched in the nose while ash falls from the sky, but that's not how this happens. As someone who's already experienced societal breakdown, here's the truth. America has already collapsed. What you're feeling is exactly how it feels. It's Saturday and you're thinking about food while the world is on fire. This is normal. This is life during collapse. If you're waiting for a moment where you're like, well, this is it. I'm telling you, it never comes. Nobody that comes on TV and says things are officially bad collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit. Most of it happening to someone else and that's all it is. I was struck by this guy who said, we kind of adapt. It's sort of like the frog in the water that's being heated. You don't jump out. I mean, it just dies eventually. And we're kind of like that. We're sort of immunized. And it's very hard, given all the white noise in the social media and in the television set on Fox News, on CNN, on MSNBC. It's very hard to put the signals together and read the signals in the noise. Yes, absolutely. Yes, it's like the frog in the water. And the job of the ardent observer is to connect the dots, to remember. You know, what you describe is a scenario where you forget what happened and how this week is different from last week. And as you say, punctuated by events that are surprising and unpleasant, but your day goes on, your week goes on. It's just somehow different. And it's on a decline. You know, for example, it takes a little longer to get to see a doctor. There's not so much bread on the shelves in Safeway. You know, maybe some of your favorite restaurants are gone. Maybe the retail stores aren't around. And you're not dealing with as many people as you used to deal with. And the newspaper is reporting things that are unpleasant, but it still reports and so forth. So one of the things you've said, Peter, and I would like to explore is that the world is on fire. And if you do connect the dots, you could easily come to that conclusion right now today. And I suspect that your book covers that. Your book is a look into the future as you might see it. So why do you think that the world is on fire? What are the indicia that you would point to for the proposition that the world is on fire? All you have to do is just watch yesterday's news about what's going on with Russia and Ukraine. And when you see the external version, there's a part of a group that has been talking a lot and exploring a topic called gray zone conflict, that hybrid warfare. And it's an interesting situation because the definition of gray zone conflict is one in which there's, you have neither war nor peace. You're in between, you're in a kind of a limbo land. And that's kind of what I think is going on today, both internally in the United States as well as internationally. I think we're in a odd state of gray zone conflict where we're not fully at war, although we might be in Russia now, who knows what's coming there. But, and we're not really at peace. We're in this new world. And one of our other colleagues, Fig Newton, he can talk about this. He knows what's going on. He's a former three star, air force guy. And he thinks a lot about hybrid warfare and the challenges. And that's why he calls his part kind of point zero. What do we do before it all breaks out? And, but we're in this odd state. We're in a very hot zone state right now. And you don't know what, sort of like we know what temperature water boils at, but we never know what molecule boils first. We don't know where it's gonna erupt. So the novel was a piece of fiction kind of speculative and certainly a precautionary tale. But, you know, I'll just say one more thing, Jay. In my day to day work, I talk with colleagues who are like me mediating very complex cases all around the country. And it's been amazing to me how much this world of gray zone conflict is preoccupies us. And so that's part of reason why I wrote this blog piece, which I think I sent to you. And basically I said, what do we do? You know, what do we do about this? And at the end of the day, we guy, we these, you know, would be peacemakers and mediators have to go out and just do our job. We have to do our work. We have to go do our job because I don't have traction on what's going on in DC. I don't want, you know, don't look up. It's a movie with that. Have you seen that movie? I haven't seen it, but I know of it. And I've heard about it. I heard it's great. It's extraordinary because it tracks on exactly what you're saying. There's what you don't, you don't really have power to change things. You know, a lot of people say, oh, run for office. That's not going to really change things. You can run for office and you can articulate positions. You can come on think tech, okay? Every day and you can warn people about, you can write books every day and warn people. But that may not change a thing. And that's the premise of this movie. And if you watch it carefully, you will see, you know, it's funny, but it's not funny. In all of humor, there is tragedy. These people are sitting around a table at the end and they're astronomers and they know that there's a meteorite or something, you know, the size of Manhattan coming to really destroy the environment in Earth. And they know that they have six or seven minutes to live and they're talking about what brand of coffee do you like to shop for in the local grocery? Why? What else are you going to talk about? That's why. Well, yeah, that's kind of where we're at, isn't it? And you know, I always wondered, Jay, because we think of, because we live here in Hawaii. What does that mean for us? Because we are far away from other places, we're distant from a lot of these kind of bigger politics that go on, and we have our own set of problems and miseries that we wring our hands about and we're worried about and rightfully so. But, you know, we have a little bit of distance on that, but that could collapse in a minute. It could collapse in a minute. Well, that's what I, you know, you use the word a little while ago, erupt. And the guy from Bangladesh, was it that you quoted? That's very interesting, you know, you live your life, you go every day, and it's pretty much the same, but it's a gradual frog in the water kind of experience. And at some point along the way, you say, hmm, this isn't really working at all. I think I'm boiling. What in here? But the word erupt is really worth focusing on for just a moment, because things are changing and the changes are not necessarily good. And they speak of the possibility of an eruption of a cataclysmic event that changes everything for us. You know, another insurrection, an insurrection that works, an insurrection destroys the federal government, while the government in general, trouble in Europe that crosses the Western boundary of Ukraine, which is entirely possible now. So I guess that's, how do you build that in? Because that eruption could be a very bad time. And I was gonna say, let me throw it in before I finish my question, your book and the notion of fighting a civil war and the notion of, you know, having social disruption as the kind that you and I have never seen or even imagined in our lifetimes, this kind of violence kills people. People will die just like in COVID. And the problem with dying, I'm gonna articulate this now, the problem with dying is you can't speak anymore, you can't write books, you can't run for office, you can't, you cannot come on a Think Tech show and talk about this because you're dead. And the history is spoken, history is written by the survivors, not the, and so in all of this possibility of a civil war and disruption, people die. How do you factor that in? Well, you know, Jay, one of the realities is you and I and a lot of our good friends and colleagues, although some have passed away, but most of us are still on this side of the grass. And so while we have a breath and while we can do things and while we can think about things and while we can act within our orbits of action, wherever we can do, we have that capability. But the world is really, I think is melting, it's melting away and it is a hot zone now. It's really a gray zone with a lot of different kinds of conflicts. And I don't know the points at which they did. The book I wrote, the speculative novel, it's a novel and it's a fiction, but it's speculative and it takes place in 2037. And then after a lot of, you know, historical traumas that run up between now and then, none of which would be surprising. But all of a sudden it does erupt. All of a sudden there is a decapitation. All of a sudden a right wing militias are connected. And all of a sudden there are characters around who would love to decapitate the government and take over. It's a real, it's one of those distant realities and my fingers are crossed that it doesn't come true. And it's sort of like, you know, y'all were confronting your worst fears, Jay. We, you know, there's something about confronting those worst fears, which is kind of what I did in this novel. And then it's back to work. I gotta go work every day and just do what I do. But it was a real interesting experience writing this. I do hope it gets published and eventually it'll come out someplace. I know that, you know. No, I suspect it'd be a great cable movie too. Maybe a series, you know. It's more exciting than some of the things that I'm seeing on cable now, frankly. So what does your world look like after the decapitation? What is life like in that next model? Because, you know, to me, I know there will be changes. I know some of them will be very unpleasant. I know there's a real possibility that I, my friends, will not survive. But assuming I do, I won't have democracy around. I won't have a lot of the trappings of civilized communal life of a social fabric that is mutually supportive of a caring community. I know those things are at great risk. What is your world like as you portrayed in the book? Well, remember it's a fiction. So, and it takes place over in 2037 and 2038. And by 2039, there's a civil war is over. It's been fought off. It's been a resistance that's popped up in many different places. And everybody, what's really going on is rebuilding. All of a sudden we have to rebuild. We have to rebuild Congress, the presidency, small towns, small communities. Everybody has to rebuild because there's been a lot of carnage. And that's my guess is what would happen. We'd go through these episodes and it will rebuild. Just like our people rebuilt after World War II and you can't say they did everything nice, but that's what life is like. It's a series of very, very hard moments and then a carrying on. I have a colleague of mine who's a very, very fine mediator. He's an attorney and a guy. And once in a while, no, maybe three times a year, we go down to the beach and get some coffee and sit and talk about the meaning of life. And my conclusion always has been the meaning of life is possibility. It's all about possibility. It's all about the remaining. When you run out of possibility, you run out of life is what you do. So for me, there's always, I'm optimistic. I'm sunny side up. I kind of look over my shoulder. I'm pretty careful. As Woody Allen once said, the cup of life is more than half full, but it may have a little arsenic in it. And so we're mindful. We're trying to stay mindful of, but we're trying to also, you know, stay optimistic that even through all the ups and downs and the horrors of the last century and the perspective horrors of this century that possibility exists and we will redo things. Remember, it's a fiction. It's a piece of fiction. It's not meant to be a perfect prediction of what's gonna go on. Who nobody could do that. I mean- Oh, it can only speculate. Absolutely, I accept that. It's a novel. I hope it's a good read for when it gets published that people enjoyed the story too. Cause- So we have some overwhelming things, you know, that are going on in our lives aside, aside from, you know, the political Misha Goss, both here and in Europe and elsewhere. Don't forget Latin America. Don't forget China. Anyway, the question I'm interested in is, where do you put these non-political social events like for example, COVID? Like for example, climate change, which is inexorable. You know, I wonder if Vladimir Putin has thought about wasting his time with an adventure in Ukraine when climate change is happening all around us and wildfires are burning and will burn all over the world. What is he wasting his time about? Anyway, my point though is where do you put them into the fiction, the speculative fiction that you're writing about? Well, there's a lot of things that, you know, and one of the writers calls black swans, unpredictable events, things that we nobody could see. They just came along and they have big reverberations. COVID is a little bit like that for us. Climate change is one that we have foreseen, but the consequences of it have really come to the point where we take action, serious actions. You know, when Sputnik went up and scared the hell out of all the Americans, that was a black swan, nobody expected that. Nobody expected the breakup of the Soviet Union and nobody would have predicted Putin would try to put it all back together. These are kind of black swan events. Black swans are very rare. A lot of white swans, but every once in a while we get a black swan. And so we can't predict the feature with any certitude. All we can do is try and manage the messes that we have at the moment with the hope that it will come together and prevent some other one. But I have no delusions about this. I think that life is imperfect. The future is imperfect. We won't be able to predict everything that goes on. And all you can do, Jay, is do what you do so well at Think Tech, which is bring about the right conversations and alert people. And all I can do is my work as help people have these difficult discussions on snarky problems, try to solve them. It's all we can do. Well, that takes me to another question though. So you're the peacemaker and you deal with human relationships because at the end of the day, we are mammals. We have biochemistry that drives us, I'm afraid. It's not necessarily intellectual process. It's biochemistry. And we come before you and we express our hostilities, our hatred, our bigotry, our failures of the human spirit. And you try to put us back together again, okay? And you have observed this your whole professional life, okay? And right now, and it was especially visible, it emerged in the time of Trump, let his name be erased. And you saw the social fabric tearing being fragmented. People dividing on every bloody issue, every single thought has been, is being arguably politicized. So here you are trying to put Humpty back together again in your arbitration, mediation practice, your peacemaker practice. And I'm asking you about the dynamic of our country and our community here in Hawaii. It seems to me that we are on a trend while we're boiling in the water, we're on a trend where the social fabric is being torn. People don't get along the same way they did. They're not tolerant, they're not willing to accept the predicament of the other guy. They're not willing to negotiate. They find political divisiveness in everything. Do you see that in your mediation, your peacemaking? I do see that. And my limitation is I can only work with groups or people at the moment that they are ready to negotiate. And if everybody is absolutely convinced that their strategy is perfect and they're happy with the way a conflict is unfolding, I'm not that helpful. I can't be that helpful. So a lot of the heart blood of what I do is involved in negotiation, communication, right kind of convening at the right time in the right way with the right people. And if people aren't ready to negotiate, with the right people, and if people aren't ready to do it, I can't help them. I can't force them to do things they don't wanna do. But people begin to assess risks. We use the word risk, you use that. And people begin to assess the risk and say, how is this gonna come out? What's my upside and downside? Just like lawyers do that in thinking about their cases, what's this gonna turn out to be? What's the best and the worst that can happen? And they do that. And every once in a while, people go bonkers and they make a misreading on it and they get bonged. Sometimes in some of the mediations I've done, walking into a conference room lined with law books, I'll remind people that as the 50% of the people lost. 50% of those people in those law books lost. So we'll talk Turkey today and let's do it with civility. It's very worthy. The other thing is, you know, in COVID, you know, the last couple of going on three years and, you know, they say the numbers are down and I'm happy about that. But at the same time, deaths are not all that much down. And, you know, who knows where the next variant is coming from? And it's a long-term thing, just like the Black Plague wasn't in the 14th century. You know, there was a 10-year period where everybody was, you know, dying, half of Europe died. But then it kept coming back. And in fact, until they figured out what it was with bacteria and fleas and all that, it kept popping up all over Europe for a long time. So anyway, COVID has been instructive, you'll agree. COVID has changed our lives, not only here, but everywhere in the world. When Joe Biden gets on the phone to talk about, you know, trying to settle things in Ukraine, he's talking to Europe on Zoom or Skype or one of those. And so the whole world is kind of closer together somehow but somehow further apart because you can manipulate your image. You can, you know, do things that are not the same, do not have the same genuine quality or authenticity that a personal contact in the same room would give you. And so Zoom has changed us, virtual connections have changed us. And I wonder your thoughts about that because on the one hand you say, well, I can talk to somebody in Bangladesh today, no problem, and it isn't, it's no problem. And I wouldn't have the chance to do that. So I'm connecting all around the world, but at the same time, it's not personal. And so if you're trying to make peace, for example, in a given matter of mediation, can you get the same result? Can you get the same emotional investment? Can you get the same emotional transparency that you would have in person? How is this working for you? How is it working for us? How is it working for our future? Well, a lot of the work that I've been doing on these mediations and bringing people together for difficult discussions and trying to solve problems, for the last couple of years it has been on Zoom. And I'm glad that Zoom is there and we still are able to utilize it to try our best. I recently had a labor management matter that came my way, oddly, that's not the area that I do most of my work in, but I was approached and we actually had some face-to-face meetings in a meeting room in a conference room downtown. And it was stunning to me what a change it was to be in the room. And people had to kind of cough some bones out of their throat, both on both sides. And they did that, we did that. And then we could settle down and start to work on, well, how are we gonna craft the future for you guys? Use labor union and your company counterparts. And it made so much difference being in the same room, having, breaking bread together, bringing donuts and, you know, malasadas and drinking coffee and we were all masked up and sitting separately and all that, but it was kinetic. There was something kinetic about that that was so refreshing. And I kind of think it really helped at this moment where people were at a bit of a standstill and impasse. So, you know, we're gonna keep doing a lot more on Zoom, but we will also, for certain things, try to get people in the room together, COVID permitting, COVID permitting. I think the world has changed. I think the way we deal with each other is different, but there's something about getting together and sitting around that kitchen table or that conference table and really trying to talk to each other as humans and not as electrons. There's something about that that I don't think we will get away from. I just, I think we're gonna always be wanting that. And a part of a lot of us is hungry for it. We're hungry for those kind of interpersonal reactions. I like coming up and visiting with you and having a coffee. I like that much better than I like talking on Zoom, but this is bad. So I think- But Zoom enables us to talk. Zoom enables me to have a very, you know, you can say this is a public conversation, but it's also very personal, very private. It's you and me. It's what it is. That's because you're skilled at this. You're so skilled at getting people like me to yakity yak and talk story. So, but you're right. I mean, it's not gonna help with trying to connect with the Sri Lankan or the Bangladeshi. Those are gonna require long distance communication. So we're in an interesting new hybrid world on this stuff. And I think we'll keep learning about how to use it to a maximum ability and maximum efficiency and a maximum utility. Let's assume that for a minute. Let's assume that we find that Zoom has changed our lives. So we like Zoom. You don't have to drive or park. You don't have to fly anywhere. You just sit down in your, you know, any part of your house and talk to anybody in the world. And this is, you know, and for Think Tech, this has been a tremendously lucky break because we were ready for it. We already were using Zoom. But here's this though. You talk in your book and you talk in this show about people in the next civil war, about the stresses and strains of a social fabric which is torn or at least tearing. And I give you now a country of 330 million or a world of 7 billion where X% of the human communications are conducted or will be conducted electronically, not in person. Does that bring us closer to the disruption you're worried about, to the civil war you're worried about or further away? Yeah, I worry about some of that because we have this explosion of social media that is sort of out of control and can be used by anybody for anything, promulgating anything. And that's part of what's creating this white noise out there which makes it so hard to reach out and create the right discussions and read the right symbols signals into the white noise. And that's part of the challenge here is what are the signals telling us as we see Twitter and Instagram and all the different social media channels which can be used for good or bad purposes. We know that, we know that. But there is something about, I'm finding at the right time and in the right moment in the right way, getting people together to look each other in the eye and begin to fashion solutions. There's something, now it's rare it's not gonna be the prevalent thing but that's what we do. We get people together, have these hard discussions and try and find solutions, partial solutions, fulsome solutions. We're gonna keep doing that. There's always gonna be people who want to try to find a way forward. I stay optimistic about that. I'm very optimistic. We're not gonna go away. Last question. As a professional in mediation, arbitration, resolving disputes, finding, may I use the word truth, you have to be very, very concerned about truth. And there's a lot of untruth out there. We have seen it up close. I can turn my television on. You know, I have a thing about Fox News. I will watch Fox News until the first lie and then I turn off Fox News. I have never been able to get past about 10 seconds. There's just me. So the question is this. We talk about critical thinking. Everybody talks about critical thinking. Critical, I mean, they use it loosely in critical race theory, but critical thinking is what you're talking about. And maybe critical thinking is the difference between being in an electronic environment than being in a personal environment where you can see this, the roar of the grease paint and the smell of the ground and all that. So what is critical thinking? I'm asking you to leave a message from your experience, your speculative novel and your life experience in general. You know, what is critical thinking? Talk to the kids out there for a moment, Peter. Tell them what it really is. Well, you're asking me a hard question at the end of this conversation, my goodness. I actually do, I like critical thinking, which means examining assumptions and applying some systematic rigor, asking people for what is the evidence that we can put on the table and weigh on particular things. So I like using that. But, you know, I think the world is not made of truth or data, it's made of stories. And part of what I and my colleagues do, we do something that has an old Latin name and so it goes back into Blackstone's law and it's called tertium quid. And it's about trying to hear one story, hear the other story and then get everybody to fashion the new story going forward. I believe the world is made of our stories. The law is a story. Philosophy is a story. Science is a story. And critical thinking can apply in all of those. But at the end of the day, it's really getting people to say, what's our next chapter? And can we begin to agree on that? Can we get some foresight and some imagination and some strategy? So critical thinking, wonderful stuff. And it's a means to other ends. It's not an end by itself. I knew I'd get a fabulous answer on that question. You ask hard questions. I tell you that's my love. Peter Adler, a mediator, a truth teller, a peacemaker, and a member of our board. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been wonderful to talk to other folks and see you again soon. Thanks, Dayaloha. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.