 Charles Toftar is with us this morning. This is Community Matters. I'm Jay Fidel and he's here from Arlington, Virginia to talk about his books and some advice he might give us based on his very diverse career. It's a career where he was in the military as a ranger, where he was in business as an executive and where he was teaching for almost two decades. And all those three things all focused together and making Charles what he used today, which I guess is primarily an author, a blogger, and a speaker. And a guest on St. Tech Hawaii, very important. Good morning, Charles. Hey, good morning. It's good afternoon here, but it's good morning there. Well, we're together. So let's talk about your books. Let's flash them on the screen and you can describe each one of them and talk about what's in there and why you wrote that particular book. Let's look at the first one. Amazing fireside talks. When did you write that and why? Okay, that was written in 2014, but now I'm beginning to give book talks on it again because of the situation right now is so desperate with people that, but now let me answer your question on why I wrote it. I had, and I'll make it quick, the short version of a long story is that I had written two thriller novels, suspense. And my wife told me one day we were crossing in the dining room and she says, why don't you write something that helps people? I'm tired of you meeting with these homicide detectives and studying all these serial killers and that kind of thing. And I thought about that. I didn't say anything. And I thought, you know, I'm gonna do that. So at that time, I've got a little stubby note here, but you know, it's effective today. You know, the problem was there were, people were down in the dumps, Jay. There was a loss of job, health costs were too high and they still aren't mortgages, foreclosures, just a lot of grief, PSTD and all those kind of things. And I thought, you know, that's what I'll do. So what I did was I took a look at the most important issues of life and spent three and a half years researching that before I got that book out and I took everything in those particular areas and actually they're on the back of the book. Yeah, let's see the back of the book. We have a secondary cover. Let's take a look at that because you have, yeah, there it is, a number. You can see there, like I'll just mention a few of them, rescue yourself, vision, quest, soul, dignity, inspiration, integrity, happiness, anxiety, trust, depression, hope, denial, patience, love. And so each chapter's on them. And I researched each one of those and got the best from all the research and squeezed it into a chapter. So each chapter are really like in bottom lines. It's not any fluff in there. So each chapter, like I said, is an important issue of life. I feel good about that book. I'll tell you, Jay, at one reason is I met a young fellow and he bought my book and he came to me one day and said, you know, my sister was gonna commit suicide when she read your book, she decided not to. And that really makes you feel good because whenever I write a book, I'm writing it, not for me, but for the general public because a lot of the, our general public don't realize a lot of things that's out there. And especially when you get into blunders and read each chapter, which is a- Yeah, I'm gonna talk about that. But one thing strikes me though, Charles, and that is that I recall a fellow who was a lieutenant in the Second World War, army, I think it was. And he did the island hopping and all the battles in the Pacific. And he was a very courageous man and he had, you know, he's always commanding a certain number of groups came with him and he cared about them, you know, a lot. He cared about, you know, giving him advice, making sure they did the right thing. And it didn't end with the war. Right. He kept on caring about them and he kept on giving him advice whatever they were in the world. He was acting as their commander, their platoon leader, whatever the title was as a island hopped around the Pacific. It was a great contribution to their lives and it kept him good. And I wonder how much of your style of reaching the public, of caring about people, trying to help them and give them advice such as in the fireside tales book is like that based on, as I said before, a combination of the elements of your career. But I'm thinking mostly about your military ranger career where you were supervising a bunch of rangers and working with them and caring about them and maybe that carries forward. Am I right? Yeah, you're right on target, Jay. I don't really talk about it too much but I had two tours in Vietnam. I was wounded twice, probably in over 30 battles over there as a ranger and master parachutist, made a combat jump, was surrounded twice, was shot down a helicopter and it crashed and it went through a lot of things. And but the bonding, what you're getting to the bonding is so important and different in this career field than any others I know about because you're so close to everybody. I'm in situations where like, for example, one, I'll pull it out of the air, we got ambushed and I looked behind me and the handler of the canine dog, the German Shepherd, they were both dead right behind just a few feet. And you go through things like that or having somebody blow up right next to you and or somebody like one young, very nice-looking athlete, black fellow, sergeant, he was in my arms with both legs off, you know, it's that kind of thing. You'll do anything for your buddy, you know, and you never leave anybody behind, Jay. I think that's what you're talking about. It's a strong camaraderie. I'm meeting with four, five of my classmates tomorrow for lunch, that bonding has gone on for, oh my gosh, 65 years probably. And you never lose it. I know every non-commissioned officer that was in my company in the 82nd Airborne Division by name to this day, they meant so much to me. And, you know, Jay, I think we're in this life to care about other people and to help them. So that's what these two books are about, but you know, it goes further back and you had Steve Trackenberg on the president of GW, you here in DC, that I was a professor in a business school there for 17 years. And by the way, he was the greatest president of all time. I mean, just incredible person, but the bonding goes there too with students. And one thing I think you'll like, Jay, that, you know, we, I set up a program where the final exam in the courses, undergraduate MBA and executive MBA was a project that they did during the semester. They worked with the CEO of a company in student teams and they had to help the CEO with the most urgent problem that that company had, but he just didn't have time to get to it. We would take care of that form, whether it was straightening out the parking, that was all messed up in the theater or a restaurant, redo the menu, get more traffic in there, an engineering company, high tech, low tech, boutiques, and probably over 500 restaurants in this area and help them out the best we can. Then at the end of the class, they would make a PowerPoint presentation with the CEO present, and that was their grade for their final exam. So they got hands-on actions there, with working with the CEO, finding out what it's like to go to business, and I'll just go one step further, you know, because this really gets to your point about caring for people. I know that that's what Think Tech Hawaii is all about, everybody's got something to say, something to contribute, and that you wanna raise public awareness, which I really commend you all. There is times when students would, you know, I've had an open door. Let me give you a couple examples quickly. This is off the top of my head, just remembering, but like I had a student come in and he was talking about the course and everything else. I said, what do you really wanna do? I mean, let's cut through it, cut to the chase. What do you wanna do with your life? He says, you know, I would like to run a vineyard. And so I said, okay, go out, write a business plan on running a vineyard, an action plan, action business plan. And he did that and he's got a vineyard here in Virginia and it's doing very well. My wife, I went to visit it and when I walked in there in the wine tasting big room, he felt with his knees, he couldn't believe I was there. And so that's what happens. And another one, he wrote a business plan on a business that he wanted to do and he's CEO of that business today. So you see when you lean into these people, whether they're troops in the military, whether they're rangers, whether they're students, you can help them out. What I feel good about is I think about a lot is that I really feel like I've changed their life. And in some cases, that's true. And some of the students were from Russia and different countries that you've gone to Ethiopia and it's great. Well, it does remind me of that fellow I mentioned and there is a common denominator. And speaking of common denominators, it seems to me there's a common denominator between fireside tales and blunders. And I might add that I thought I was losing my eyesight when I looked at that book because blunders was spelled B-L-U-N-N-D-E-R-S. And of course, when I saw it repeated a number of times, I realized this was intentional, Charles. Why did you misspell it that way? Well, I thought that I don't wanna be like this rigorous author speaking down to people and everything and that I wanna let him know that I'm kind of the guy that walks down the middle of Main Street too, just like most of us and that you can make mistakes too. By the way, Jay, that's a very good observation on your part because I'm glad I did that now because when you look up blunders on Google for like novels, there are books with blunders in it, but there's no book with two Ns. That's very, it separates it. I immediately concluded that it was a way to make you unique on any search site or YouTube, whatever. So it was a great, very clever idea, Charles. But tell us, what is it now? This is what military blunders was doing. No, no, no. No, this is the, okay. This are the blunders, the worst blunders in the world, not of course all inclusive, but no, they're a mix, they're not just military. I mean, there's 9-11 in there, slavery, the poor treatment of the Indians, native Indians. There's a lot of other things too. And of course, there's a few of the military things in there, like why we shouldn't have gotten into World War II, things like that Hitler was attempts to assassinate Hitler was over 40 times. Actually, it was about 60. So there are other things, I didn't wanna make it military. I reviewed over 30 blunders, oh excuse me, 300 blunders. By the way, this book took six years to write. The research that I did was I have to tell you, when I do research, it's really intense. A lot of writers walk along the beach and pick up every shell and look underneath it and I pick up every little pebble. When I do research, because this happened in this case, I got to a certain level, but then I thought, you know, there's gotta be more there. Now I dig deeper and sure enough, not every time, sure enough, something would pop out of there. For instance. I guess, go ahead, go ahead, please continue. I wanna hear the story. Yeah, well, no, there's just, I mean, there's a lot of these blunders that I mean, I could talk about, but they come from discussions groups, books, journals, archives and things like that. For example, two real quick things just to show you on research, what maybe you have to do if you really wanna dig deep. I found that there's an archive of Adolf Hitler about an inch of dust on it and that's how I found out a lot of things. There's a Fidel Castro special archives that a lot of people don't know about and that's how I found out how many people really died at Bay of Pigs and how many forces that Fidel Castro had were actually in it and most of the writings are not correct. I try to be as correct as I can, whether it's the Titanic, which is in there or the USS Indianapolis, where of course, a couple of torpedoes hit that ship and it went down. Maybe you've seen some movies on it and Titanic, by the way, let me tell you a quick one about the Titanic. It's really interesting and a lot of people don't know this. They're always saying, gosh, I didn't know that at Southampton before the passengers boarded the Titanic, there was a fire going, a thousand degrees Fahrenheit and the people working on it down there, boiler room people, said that it was a quote unquote, a raging hell and that fire was going 10 days before the passengers were supposed to load on and it was supposed to go to Pure 54 in New York City in good tack. What they did was they switched the, they turned the Titanic completely around because that was on the starboard side, which showed a streak a few feet wide and 30 feet long along the ship from the fire and on the port side, it was clear. So everybody entered the ship on the port side. It's just those little things, you know, that are there, but I'll just let you go on it. There is, but a lot of this research has led to conspiracies, lies, things like that that none of us knew about. For example, King George V turned to Colonel, Watts Wilson, who was President Wilson's executive in London and he turned to him and said, what would happen if that ship sunk with Americans on board? So it was that set up and that's in that chapter. That's an interesting chapter where they weren't given any destroyer escorts. They weren't going around the kill zone where all the submarines were to two submarines that put down two merchant marine ships. It's exactly where the Titanic was. What ship was that, the Titanic? Titanic, Titanic, yeah. So was that set up or what? But boy, cause I'm not one of his conspiracy guys, but there's a lot of things when you dig down that the general public didn't know about. And so that's what Blunders is all about to bring forth to the general public what they deserve to know. And then they, in a lot of cases, they probably don't know. Well, let me suggest the possibility of another thing about Blunders. In every Blunder, obviously there are mistakes and in every mistake, there's a lesson. Yeah. So I'm sure that at least some of the Blunders that you have dedicated chapters to have very valuable lessons. Oh yeah. You could pull one out for us and talk about one of the chapters, one of the Blunders and one of the lessons that you are giving us. Okay, I can pull one out. There is, again, just so everybody knows that each chapter is on a specific Blunder. And then it goes from one Blunder to the next chapter, another Blunder. The Challenger is a good one. Oh, first of all, a Blunder is different than a mistake. A Blunder is like in the macro view, like the umbrella over a bunch of mistakes that have been cumulative over time leading to the Blunder. Like Hindenburg, what happened there was kind of an accident. The other things like that. I had to kind of weigh those. So a Blunder is really something that has to fit that definition. And okay, Challenger, just real quick off the top. Big argument at midnight before launch day, the next day in Florida between NASA and the scientists at Viacol and some of the other companies in Texas. And they said, long story short here, but you get all the good stuff in the chapter. We recognize strongly, we're falling on our sword over here in Texas that we just don't want that launch to go. And they did it anyway. Okay, it had never been approved for launch under 53 degrees. It was 28 degrees when it shot out. There were two feet icicles hanging off of the Challenger. It was, there was a weather bulletin. Never put out before in Florida like this one, which said this is an emergency, that this is the worst weather possible tomorrow morning. They fired it anyway. So you see, there was things like that. Okay, well, we mentioned the USS Indianapolis. Because this gives you an idea of what I found in some of these. There what the Indianapolis went down and those poor crew people, 300 went down with the ship in 12 minutes. But others were scattered all over, sharks were getting them, suffering all kinds of ways. But the reason it took four and a half hours to find out that it went down was that person on duty, out at an island somewhere where it had just come from was supposed to track a ship, every ship is tracked. And he was supposed to have reported that normal procedure to his superior, that, hey, it still hasn't landed yet. He didn't do that. A lot of the things, Jay, that I found in Pearl Harbor, which is in there and a lot of these other things, was somebody sleeping at the switch or bad communications or poor leadership. Not really taking action when it's needed. Take another one, you wanted me to pull a few out of the air. Another one is 9-11. Bottom line on 9-11 was the cause of 9-11 was poor communications between the FBI and the CIA. You can look at the volumes written on it and look at documentaries, but it all comes down to that. The ego fight between them. They didn't want to share information. They didn't trade the red spots that were appearing, the dots, they didn't connect the dots. Nobody connected the dots. The two guys training in Florida who only wanted to know how to take off. The guy over here doing this and that and all these things came up that nobody... I don't think cumulative, cumulative mistakes. Commutative mistakes leading to a massive blunder that affects all of us today. These blunders in this book. Yeah, but you're not done though, Charles. You're not done because I'm sure however many dozens of blunders you've covered in this book, there are others that you could cover now. Do you contemplate a sequel to this book or another set of blunders, number two? I'll have to think about that, Jay. You're just giving me an idea. Well, I think it's great that you wrote that one. In fact, I was telling you before the show that I had heard of it somewhere and I wonder years ago whether we did cover it or somebody talked about it because it is a very provocative idea and it's a learning experience. It's a lesson. All of those blunders are... In fact, it's not just one lesson, it's a number of lessons, as you said. So what about the other books? Let's see the covers of them and you can tell us about some of your other books and the books that you contemplate. Let's take one of them. Okay, the Highs of Cold Case Killers. What's about Charles? The first one was... I know you're getting to that. Highs of Cold Case Killers was led to that from the first one I wrote, which I guess will come up on the screen in a few minutes. It's in the eyes. And it's in the eyes, but I'll be frank with you. I don't say this to many people, but I was still teaching at GW and I had one of my best students in my class, human resource management class, wonderful person, and she was brutally murdered in her apartment, two blocks from the university and raped and everything. Both the guys got a life for it, but I never forgot her and I never will, but I decided to write a novel and make a tribute to her. So matter of fact, I think it starts off saying that it's in memory of her. And so that got me going on. It's in the eyes. I spent a lot of time with the chief of police here in Northern Virginia, all of them. Homicide detectives became friends with a lot of them. They spent a lot of time with me. Make sure that, see, I gotta go back. I like to be correct and accurate that I had the right language and everything like that on these things. So the cold case killers was kind of exciting. That's one of those cliffhanger type things. And then just before that, it's in the eyes. That's the one that caused me to lead to a cold case killer. Well, okay, man, that sounds very interesting, especially the fact that it's based off a true story of somebody that you knew that is killing. Well, I triggered, oh, excuse me, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, no, it triggered me to write thrilling mysteries like that. Yeah. And I think that what comes out of the amazing fireside thought of thongs is that, again, like I said before, people are kind of down in the dumps. They particularly are now. And so we need hope that this book gives you hope. And there's a chapter on hope and dignity and trust and honesty and that kind of thing. Because what we need to have right now is a lot of hope. Of course, hope for Ukraine, but hope for maybe yourself to overcome a certain thing. But like I've told some students before, one of them said, I wanna go to this particular university. I hope to go there. Okay, well, you gotta take actions then on your part to achieve that hope. So, wow. Well, let's go to names again. The Blunders is a very interesting provocative name. So the other books, but what caught my attention was the use of the word fireside. This is one person in American history who was famous for fireside. And I wonder whether that occurred to you. And FDR reached millions of people in fireside chats and he was saying something. He wanted you to gather by the fireside and listen carefully to what he had to say, because what he had to say affected you. And as we discussed before, it was his advice to you. And he was a terrific communicator. And fireside had a place in that. Were you thinking of FDR when you chose that word? You know, that's really a good question, Jay, because that hadn't come up for quite a long time, but somebody has asked that before. Is that why you got it? You got it from FDR? And actually, I gotta be honest, I wasn't even thinking about that, about FDR's fireside talk. I remember about that, but that isn't why I did this. I did this kind of like what you just said FDR's purpose was, I wanted people to not have the author, writer, be kind of talking at them or maybe even down to them, like what's happened, you know? So it's one on one, it's me and you, the reader. So it's a team, I have an alpha team, I call it. An alpha team is composed of Lars and he's a previous Norwegian type of fellow, and he's the captain of this team, along with Nathan Grain, Brenda Little, Doris Wagner, and the five of them meet at Metro Diner, which is up the road here, a refriated eight o'clock for breakfast and they talk through each of the issues in Amazing and they talk through each Blunder in Blunders. So it's like a comfort thing. And so what Nathan Grain, we call him Tiger because he says whatever he wants to, they each have their own way of talking and handling themselves. And so my research comes out through their voices, so through this dialogue that they have. And so it works well that way. So that's kind of like where I came up with the fireside talk thing, but you've got a real good point there. Well, you know, Alas, you're the team leader and it shows how, you know, your life and the various things you've done in your career, you know, has integrated into what you do at the diner. The diner is the point of the spear somehow. And my guess is that you're gonna continue to do this as long as you possibly can. And my guess also is that you'll come back on ThinkTac at one point in the future and we can continue our discussion, Charles. Well, that's amazing because I really appreciate that. I'll be frank with you. I'm kind of honored to be on this program because back when we were helping those small businesses, I used to work with Voice of America and they would come to my room in my professor's room at GW or sometimes I'd go to them at Voice of America here in DC and we would do a two to three minute audio on a particular subject of a small business and then they would take that and interpret it in 48 languages and send it out to 60 countries twice a week and there'd be a new one each week for them so that they wanted to start a small business, they wanted to find a location, they wanted to know about advertising. They wanted to know about whatever and business plan and all that kind of thing. They got a shot in three minutes. And so again, maybe Jay, that's where I got these bottom lines from. So, because people don't want fluff. There's no time for fluff. I noticed that your books are very succinct. Your books are not long. They're very direct and you're a good communicator, Charles. That's what it's all about. So if I had to integrate all the things you've done and all the things you've talked about, I would say it's about communication and communicating with the right attitude about what you're saying, your message and taking the steps necessary to make sure that you reach people and give them value. So therefore I would like to have a further discussion with you. Charles Toftoy, this is on Think Tech Hawaii Community Matters. We appreciate you coming around and giving us your advice and telling us how you will put your life together. We appreciate that. Thank you very much. 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.