 Welcome and aloha. Thanks so much for joining us on Think Tech Hawaii. And if you like what we do, please donate and support us. And if you don't like what we do, put some money in there anyway to try and discourage us. We accept donations. In our view, the best nation is a donation. So we strongly encourage it, as Jeff does, in his role as one of the leaders of Manoa Valley Theater for many years. Also our leading First Amendment attorney, partner at Cade Shuddy, a raconteur, and sports color commentator, Hawaii's answer to John Madden, if you know who he is. Professor Vanilla Randall, Professor Emerita, University of Dayton School of Law, the leading internet compilation, racism.org, race.org, or is it racism.org? Racism.org. Yeah, it's got everything you would ever want to know about racism in all of its many manifestations and impacts. And Tim Apichella, fellow Think Tech host, and one of our most lucid commentators. I only get halfway there. I'm loose, but not yet lucid. So I'm still striving. It's aspirational for me. So today we're going to talk about choices, just being an election year. But we're not going to necessarily talk about that choice, although we may get there. We may touch on it. That's up to you, folks. So, Professor Randall, are there any really difficult, challenging choices facing you before we get to choices facing us? Not really. Actually, I fundamentally don't believe in choices. I don't believe we have free will. I don't believe we really get to direct our life. And at most, we get to decide if we're in a good way, we may get to decide what we're going to eat on any day. But even that choice, many people don't have. So, no, there's no challenging choices about the mate. Okay. Let me see if there might be some exceptions to that. Certainly, you have choices in the way that you see and treat your children and your grandchildren, right? I mean, that's like the food. That's in the same category of food. Yes, I have those choices, but do I really? Because so much of how I see and treat my grandchildren is based on choices that I didn't have. I didn't choose for my mother to die. I didn't choose to be raised in a certain way. I didn't choose to be of a certain income. The most I get, I guess the choice I get to make is whether or not I give them a kiss on the way out. And even that may not be a choice. I think that this, I don't know that. I don't think I've always believed this, but as I look over my life and think about the choices, and I've been thinking a lot because I'm in my mid-70s, I've been thinking a lot about the choices I made. And I just feel like there's so much out of my control. I made a choice, but I'm not sure that I could have made a different choice. Sure, we're up to a really, really, really optimistic start to the show. I don't think I felt so optimistic in weeks that I haven't the last five minutes. Okay, so Jeff, what about you? What are some choices that you're looking at that might make a difference in your life? I'm too depressed now to even think about that. That's a choice you make. Chosen to view Vernandio's comments, Professor Randall's comments as depressing. For me, they're challenges. I think you make choices every single day and every single minute. They may not be choice. You may not be happy with the options, and I can understand that. But you make a choice to get up in the morning. I mean, it's seven o'clock or to set the alarm, or then you make a choice as to whether you're going to have breakfast. I mean, these are mundane, and obviously that's not what we're looking at. But I don't disagree with Professor Randall that options can be extraordinarily limited. And for certain groups of people, their choices are not what they would want. There are limitations on what they can choose. I mean, if you're living on the street, I think if you choose to have a steak dinner, that's wonderful. But it's very unlikely that's going to be an option that you can choose. And I'm using a very common term because Professor Randall talked about food. But we make choices every day, almost every minute. And most of them are uneventful, but some of them are life-altering. A choice as to getting married or not getting married. A choice as to going to college or not going to college. A choice in political elections. So the topic, Chuck, is just so broad that I think it's very difficult. I mean, I got to catch a plane at 205 and I have to make a choice of what time I'm going to leave for the airport. So I mean, it's a choice. Do I want to get there when they're closing the door or do I want to sit for an hour and wait, hoping the plane's on time? So anyway, it's very difficult. It is. And I want to especially thank Professor Randall for reminding us that it is still possible for many, many, many people in this country to go up feeling that there really are no meaningful choices for them. That's a choice for us as a people as to whether we continue to let that happen, whether we pay attention to it, whether we decide we're going to try and do something about it. The choice of whether we really can effectively do something about it or not is yet another one, but whether we choose to try maybe something that we can distinguish. Tim, how do you look at choice coming into 2024? Oh, well, if you specifically say 2024, the big choice obviously I think is the election for me personally. But if you look at choice as a general topic, choice suggests that there could be the invisible hand of destiny that even the minute choice you make could in some ways down the road shape something that you had no intention of having been shaped. And those small decisions that you don't even see the importance of actually can accumulate and actually be something of consequence or reality. And so it's a very esoteric topic that you've chosen here for today and I like it. For me, I used to be a financial portfolio investor for some banks. And so given my background is always the risk reward equation when I made a choice. And I transferred financial choices into personal choices and what was the risk versus the reward I would get out of that decision or the choice that I made or didn't make. And then for me, you know, you look at choices that are intuitive versus choices that you make based on data and information and evidence. And you weigh the pros and cons. That's the right side of your brain. But what about the left side of your brain as you make intuitive decisions that you've come to learn to trust? And over my life, I have entrusted my intuition and it's served me quite well. And then last but not least, you know, you look at the standard my mom would tell me, the choice I made, would I want to see that on the front page of the Star Advertiser? Would I want to see my friends and family and acquaintances see my choice that I made all over the front page? And how would that look? There's another side to this. And I don't know if Professor Randall was kind of alluding to it. And that is other people making choices for you. Choices that you may or may not like or want or have an opportunity not to accept. And that's a very interesting aspect of choice. I mean, you know, other people making choices forcing you to adopt a certain lifestyle, philosophy, economic status, you name it. So, you know, choice works both ways. You know, in sort of a worst case, I mean, when we talk about choices, I mean, certainly, you know, there are options in which you get, you're given the you pick between those options. And I tend to be a worst case scenario person. I, a lot of some people ask what what's the best thing that can happen? I ask what is the worst thing that can happen? And then from there, I kind of, that kind of dictates my choosing. But it is a, I mean, I mean, how deep down you go, there you more people, some people have more choices than others, and some people have fewer people who dictate their choices. But I still think that all of that is controlled by the hand of faith. You didn't choose where you were born. You didn't choose who your parents were. You didn't choose how you were raised. You didn't choose. There's just so many things you didn't choose. And so, yeah, you have options in the cumulative effect of those options. I, I'm living proof of the cumulative effect of those options, but I'm also living proof of people who made the same kind of choices that I have, and who are doing better or worse than I'm doing. That it, even though I don't think that it was just my choosing, that that affected me. It, what I think it was the whole, the whole environment. I was saying earlier, Barbie has a scene. I don't spoil it for you. Well, Barbie has a scene in it where they're, where they're giving her a choice, the, the, the matrix choice. One is she can wear her high heel or she can wear this sandal. And in order to fix what's wrong, she has to put the sandal on. And she's like, I don't want, I don't want to sandal. I want the high heels. I want things to stay the way they are. Give me the high heels. And the Oracle, no, no, no, no, you can't pick the high heels. You have to fix it. And, and then Barbie is like, well, then I don't really have a choice. Do I? And this Oracle is, yeah, that's right. You don't have a choice. You got to go fix it. And I think so much of our youth, I mean, we can choose to be 15 minutes late or 30 minutes late, but we get, if we want to keep our job, we got to be on time. We don't, you know, is there's, you got to get up at a certain time to get ready. You got to deal with the traffic. You got to make the lunch for the kids. I mean, there's the other side of that is, you can not do all of that. And then you have put yourself in a worst case scenario, because there's things that are going to happen that you don't have control over anymore. That, and so I wonder, I thought I had choices. Now, in the last few years, I've decided I had the illusion of choice. Yeah, I thought I was depressed 10 minutes ago. Jeff is choosing to be even more depressed. And now our dialogues have progressed to where we're quoting Barbie. I mean, what else can anybody say? I mean, obviously, that's a good example of Professor Randall's view on choice. You know, look, nothing can be added to that, I think. And we talked about internal and external forces. How much of the choices you make are really within your control. I mean, that's a fascinating question. You know, if you're earning $5,000 a year or you're earning $5 million a year, I think you have different choices. You know, so how much of the choices you make are controlled, as I say by factors, you don't control. So, you know, I don't have much more to say about that. Tim has alluded to political choices. And I'm not even sure that's not out of our control, to be quite honest. Even that choice has been made for us, hasn't it? So, we can only vote for one of two people. So, there is that really a choice? I mean, I guess you could write in somebody's name, but I mean, that's an example of you have a choice, but really, do you have a choice? Two O white men. I wasn't talking about that race. Thank you, Professor Randall. I don't know what you're referring to, but you and I, Tim, I think she's talking about you and I. I was talking about the election. Oh, I know you're talking about the participants of this show. I'm feeling much better now. I was talking about the election. I was agreeing with you that politically, we don't have much of a choice. And I'm like, no, we don't. We've got two. In the presidential election, we have two really flawed candidates, one more flawed than the other. And the truth of the matter is we don't have much control over who they're going to pick as their running mate. And so we're going to end up in law likelihood. One of whoever it is is going to die in office and we're going to end up as their running mate as president. And that means you are full of optimism today. I'll tell you. Yeah. So maybe the choice is between flawed and the fraud. Maybe that's the choice. I had a choice whether I would be on the show today. I made the wrong choice. Sometimes it comes down to the best, worst choice that one can make. The least worst choice, right? The least worst choice. It's the best, worst choice I bring to the table. But you can choose not to choose. Professor Randall, you mentioned about choices being made for others, particularly depending on the power structure involved. But it is a choice not to allow someone to make a choice for you. I don't understand. I could choose not to participate. If someone's making a choice for me and saying, well, you are going to go to school today, Johnny. And Johnny says, okay, you're making a choice for me. But by the time the school bus gets to the school ground, Johnny is not on it. Johnny got out before the bus took off. He went to see Barbie. Yeah. So Johnny made a choice by not participating in someone else's choice for Johnny. And I think we do a lot of that in our lives. We're faced with multitude of choices. And sometimes by not choosing, we've made that choice. But also, it's a conscientious decision that someone's not going to make a choice for us. Someone's expectations of us in life and how we proceed in life and how successful we may or may not be in life. We choose not to agree with that. And history is filled with people who chose not to accept that which people have their expectation of. And that's a good thing for human nature to kind of rely on is we're the captain of our own ship, so to speak. And right or wrong, I guess we get to make those decisions and choices for ourselves. You always have the crutch of fate, right? Which Professor Randall alluded to, that you're not really making choices. It's preordained by some superior entity, a lack of a better word. Oh, I just agree. No, I agree. I agree. But I mean, you know, it's not uncommon. In fact, it's very common for people to say when something happens, it was fate. But most of the time it was a choice you made along the way, either consciously or unconsciously, or somebody made it for you that caused whatever it is that you want to either accept as being blame on fate or thanking fate. You know, I mean, all of us do that in our lives. You know, Jeff, I'd like to tag on to that, because in the medical world now, hospitals are not using the term accident. Because it really wasn't an accident. It was a choice that people made. Perhaps I chose not to have my brakes tended to properly on my vehicle, and the vehicle ran through a stop sign because the brakes were poor, and it caused, quote unquote, an accident. But it wasn't an accident. It was a failure of maintenance. And that was a choice that individual made months earlier. So let me pose another question. I mean, we got a lot of rabbit holes we could go down here. There's choices and illusory choices. But let me focus on one particular rabbit hole. And that is the distinction between the choice and the consequence. You have choices that we make for desired consequences, choices that we make because we anticipate expected consequences, and choices that we make to avoid anticipated expected consequences that are adverse and lots of other. So what's the disconnect between the choices and the consequences that we're looking at in these times? Is that really what Professor Randall was talking about here? That we can make what we believe are choices, but we can't achieve desired consequences? That's a good point, because I think part of the first time for everything. You have a lot of first times. I think if there was a more direct connection between choices and consequences, I think that people would that there wouldn't be maybe such a feeling that it doesn't matter. But the problem is, is so much of the consequences are disconnected from the choices. And the only time we can see consequences for the choices we make are in the immediate arena. Johnny missing school and his parents dealing with that having him having she or him she or he having skipped school. But oftentimes in the larger arena, the consequences I think are not always connected to the choices we make. But you know, the other side of it is, and we've heard this repeatedly, maybe in our own lives, but certainly from people we know is the expression I had no choice. That's even a bigger issue. I had no choice. Why did you do this? I had no choice. Well, you had a choice. I mean, you may not have had much of an opportunity, but I had no choice. We hear it all the time. Why did you do this? I had no choice. So it's the opposite of choice. It's the excuse or the expression I had no choice. That's why I did what I did. That's what I did what I did or circumstances gave me no choice. Well, the greatest example that was in the Nuremberg trials after World War Two. I had no choice. I was following orders. There's another variation. Let's bring it back to a real life situation and story. As Jeff and all of you have pointed out, our choices are directly impacted by choices others make that restrict or alter or change our choices or the ability to achieve the desired consequences of our choices. So you can have two people or two groups make a mutual choice. For example, it will shut down the border if you provide aid for Israel and humanitarian aid and Ukraine. And then somebody else says, no, I'm not going to let you do that. And the guy who made the mutual choice says, no, I'm not going to do that because I didn't change my choice. But somebody else told me to change my choice and I'm doing what they say. I'm choosing to do what they say. So their choice is now overruling our mutual choice and my choice. I'm not sure I got all that. Right. It sounded very profound, though. Speaker Johnson said, I didn't change my mind. Trump changed my mind. We have no deal. You can't engage in mutual choice with someone like that because there's no possibility that the consequence that's desired can be achieved by that choice. Well, I think what you're talking to is this is when you're in, when you have people who have their own motivations interacting with you on some choice. But their motivations, the thing that is motivating them to interact with you can be overwritten by something higher, some more important value. So Johnson's more important value is to stay aligned with Trump. Even so that, so yeah, he's going to ditch whatever plan he's made with other people in terms of immigration because that doesn't align with what Trump wants. And that's part of the thing, that is the lack of control that people have in their lives. I mean, that's a big level thing, but that happens. You think you have control over some choices that you make, but some outside force, some outside entity, some outside person who has a different set of values comes in and interrupts that, interrupts that choice, take it away from you, make you force you or somehow gets you to change your mind. Okay. And so let's say that Jeff makes the choice to go to the airport just in time to make his flight because he don't want to sit there for an hour with all of the conditions around whatever that entails. And so he does that and he arrives five minutes before they're about to close the boarding gate and then they announce your flight's been delayed for two hours. Jeff's choice and the desired consequence have now been detached by something completely beyond his control. But Jeff has a choice as to how he deals with that. Does he turn around and go back out to Mitch's and have some nice sushi and then re-arrive at the airport five minutes before the departure gate closes? Or does he stay there and do whatever he does during that time? So the question is, are the only choices we have so mundane that no one else can interfere in them? If I lift the spoon of granola and banana to my mouth and put it inside, I can then chew it and ingest it. That choice I can make, that consequence I can achieve. If it's anything much more than that, is it getting beyond my control? So where on the spectrum first Professor Randall, are there any meaningful choices left in our last minute? Every bit is going to get last words on this. I'm sure I kind of agree with some of the things that Jeff and Tim said. I think that there can be accumulation of the that each choice can put you down a line, a road, and that those choices can affect other choices that you have. I don't want to say that the choices even mundane as they are can't end up having some cumulative effect in an individual life. I mean, I think that's absolutely true. But on the other hand, I also don't think that the big choices that we have, we don't control what those choices are. We don't control when the plane leaves. We don't control whether they put the door in right. We don't control whether there's another passenger on the plane who's going to act out and cause the plane to be sidelined and we have to be deported. Those are things that we have no control over and things that will happen. So I think that's to me, yeah. Jeff, last words? I made it sure it's not to say anything more. But you didn't make a choice not to think anything more. Well, that's always a problem. You actually said something more. Well, I made a choice not to summarize. I can't do any better than what Professor Randall has said. And I think it's an extraordinarily interesting topic that would probably take weeks to try to figure out. And a bunch of psychiatrists would have to be on the panel to help us along. Yeah. And so one of the questions that comes to my mind when you say that is, what would be one of the thoughts that you're choosing not to share, that if you did, we would appreciate your sharing? I'll plant that seed. Tim, last thoughts? Oh, last thoughts. You know, my mind goes in the direction of how choices influence our future or knowingly or unknowingly. And I'll go with Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol and the scene where the ghost of Christmas future is present and Scrooge asks the ghost, are these the things that will come or may come? And I suppose the choices we make determine how the future is shaped may or will occur to us. And I'll leave it there for the mystics to digest. And thank you very much. And for Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, right? Which was exactly about be careful about the choices you make if you go back. Those could have huge effects. Yeah. So to wrap us up, as we're a little bit over time here, one of the things that I think we're all hearing is that choices can be doors. And if those choices are doors to other doors that open good choices, choices we like, choices that at least have the possibility of connecting to desirable consequences. Maybe there is enough of an element of choice that whether it's the illusion or the reality, the belief in choice, that faith that you folks talked about, that may be something that gives us just enough connection to the possibility of choice to make those desired outcomes possible at least some of the time. We'll let you folks dwell on that. And we'll come back next time and ask, Jeff, what was one of those thoughts that he chose not to share with us, which he's now going to be roiling over in his money as he waits for his plane when his flight is delayed for two hours? I told you I made a wrong choice by agreeing to be on the show. Wrong for you, but not wrong for us. All right. Thanks everybody. So Jeff's choice has had positive consequences for the 75% majority of us and negative consequences for only 25%. That in itself was a choice. So we're now going to let everybody go before this goes into all of the rabbit holes at the same time and we lose control of all of our choices. Aloha, Think Tech Hawaii, come back, rejoin us, support us and indulge your curiosity in seeing where we go and what we talk about next time. Thank you all and Aloha.