Lawrence Meisel and Chris Krieger

00:00 It. Well, I've participated in a couple of these before, but they were facilitated. So this is my first time. And normally I use my laptop, but it's got some problems. So I thought, okay, I'll just do it from the phone. But I have a rural address with usually pretty good connect activity, but not as much today for of course, that's how it all works.

00:31 Okay. Better living through modern technology.

00:38 Have you done some of these before?

00:40 I have done a facilitated conversation. Let's see. I'm trying to turn my volume down a bit. Okay, there we go.

01:00 Do you prefer Lawrence or Larry?

01:03 I go by Larry.

01:05 Okay.

01:07 Lawrence is just. Whenever I have to fill out forms, I use the Lawrence, but nobody besides catholic school nuns ever really refer to me as Lawrence.

01:19 Sure.

01:26 I got some questions written out. There we go. Okay, so I forget what I wrote about in my bio. If there's anything from my bio that you want to ask about.

01:40 We're supposed to read each other's bio.

01:43 Yeah.

01:46 You want me to start?

01:48 Yeah, go ahead.

01:50 Okay. Larry from Columbus, Georgia. Male, 65 plus, democratic party. A little more liberal than conservative. Interests are health related, fitness, running, swimming, strength training, nutrition and weight management. Aspiring YouTube social commentary channel, the examined life. Creator and active member of the Unitarian Universalist fellowship. Turned 71 years old mental health professional. Semiretired after a 50 plus year career. Grew up in the suburban New Jersey, filed successful claim for conscientious objector status and served two years alternate civilian service in the national health, safety and interest. Relocated to Auburn University in Alabama for graduate school. Married while at AU, 38 years now. No kids, two cats, one dog. Fascinated by theology and cosmology. Think of myself as a believing agnostic. I describe myself as an animal lover, religious or spiritual, tech savvy, creative and life events. It says another major event.

03:12 Life events. Another major event. Okay, and what would you like to know more about?

03:21 Well, I was curious about the major event.

03:25 I don't know what I was referring to. I may have been referring to at age 13, I had what at the time it was referred to as school phobia. And so my parents had to sign a complaint against me as being incorrigible to get some help. And so I spent ten days in the Essex county youth house in Newark, New Jersey.

03:58 Wow.

03:59 And that was a major life event. We were sitting in the hallway waiting to go to breakfast one morning, and there was a kid to my left, black kid, and all the guards were black. So I don't know what happened. I don't know what the kid did, but the guard was walking past, and he leaned down and hit the kid in his forehead with the heel of his hand, which knocked the kid's head into the brick wall behind me. To which the kid responded, keep your black motherfucking hands off me, you son of a bitch. To which the guard responded by grabbing him by the wrist, slid him down the hallway, took him around a corner, and sounded like he was beating the hell out of the kid for about 20 minutes.

04:58 Wow.

04:59 So I vowed that I would. I vowed that I would never do anything to wind up in a place like that ever again. And I took my white little ass back to suburban New Jersey, and it was a major turning point.

05:17 Oh, wow. Okay. So you went back to school.

05:20 I did. Not only did I go back to school, but I went back to school until they told me I had a terminal degree and I couldn't come back and I had to go do something else.

05:33 Okay. All right. Well, I understand that. I like to keep going to school, too. I saw the YouTube, the examined life. What is that all about?

05:46 It is a YouTube channel that I started to raise money for. Doctors Without Borders, feeding America, Amnesty International, and a world hunger poverty relief organization called Oxfam.

06:03 Oh, okay. I've heard of all those. A friend of mine. Just go ahead. I'm sorry.

06:11 And then the purpose of the channel is to stimulate civil discussion of diverse opinions about ideas and interests, from the tremendously important to the trivial. But interesting.

06:26 Sure. Is it hard to set one up and get people to participate in it?

06:35 Yeah, it's a very steep learning curve. I've been out for a while.

06:43 Okay. Are you comfortable at the rate that you're expanding, or do you want to study how to do it differently? A little bit?

06:56 Both.

06:58 Okay.

06:59 Yeah. I've been studying tutorials and taking some online courses to get better at it. The hardest part is when you sit in a quiet room by yourself talking to a camera. If you're public speaking, you get feedback from the audience. Some people nod and some people shake their head so you can kind of tell. And if you say something funny, people laugh. Or maybe not. But when you're just staring at a camera, you get nothing. And so it's very awkward. So there's an awkwardness that you have to get over.

07:44 Right. Okay.

07:45 I decided to start the channel because I realized I need to develop compassion and understanding for those with whom I disagree.

08:01 How is that going?

08:04 Really well. It's doing things like this.

08:08 Okay.

08:10 And I've never had a bad experience.

08:13 Oh, good. All right. Neat. Now what about if you were, say, walking past some MAGA protest demonstrators and you stopped to talk with them, do you anticipate something might get a little tense or heated there?

08:36 Donald Trump showed up in town a couple of months ago, and I went down to look, and there were some MAGA protesters. We didn't have anything to say to each other. They ignored me, and I ignored them, and we walked by. But in doing more formal things like this, it's been a real good experience. And I had this experience. What got me started on this thing was on Donald Trump's inauguration day. I went into Dunkin donuts, and there was a group of conservative guys sitting around a table talking loud. And they all had their cell phones out, and they had countdown timers on their cell phones because they were waiting for the very last second when Barack Obama would no longer be president. And I was outraged. And then as I calmed down, I realized I need to develop compassion and understanding for those with whom I disagree, because this has gone too far.

09:54 Okay.

09:55 Have you heard the word schadenfreude?

10:00 I have. It's german, but I forget it's something. Go ahead and tell me. I can't remember what it is.

10:08 It's taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.

10:12 Okay. All right.

10:18 That's the essence of the polarization that has happened.

10:22 Sure.

10:26 It'S a dead end street. It doesn't work. It won't help. It's a lose lose situation.

10:35 I've tried to engage with people on evidence, and I have a lot of very clear, I think, uncontestable reasons to not like President Trump and to passionately dislike him, frankly. But I find people who really endorse him are not prepared to discuss it based on empirical evidence that's remotely proven. So I find that very frustrating.

11:10 Yeah. Well, let me read your bio before we go on too far.

11:19 Okay? Sure.

11:20 So let's see. Your interests. And you're on the conservative side almost on the extreme end, but you're about a two standard deviations beyond the mid range.

11:39 For conservative or for liberal?

11:42 Toward you. Your bio has you two stripes to the conservative side.

11:53 Wow. I think I filled that out improperly.

12:00 Oh, here, let me see if I can show it to you.

12:06 No, I believe you, but I was.

12:10 Just wanting you to see where you wound up.

12:13 Yeah, I need to change that, because that's not correct.

12:17 Oh, really?

12:20 Well, that explains it, though, because I've had really good conversations, but I haven't had as much difference as I anticipated having. So now I know why.

12:36 Let's see. So, reading suspense fiction, socioeconomic, historical, environmental, nonfiction, woodworking. Woodworking twice. And cooking. And you describe yourself as quirky, well read, world traveling, divorced father with one daughter, comfortable in the woodshop, and comfortable in the woods in the library. In the. Interesting. I'm really interested in this. You are familiar with spss? You are the first person I've encountered since Auburn who knows anything about spss and word and ArcGIS. I had a client who was trying to get a job in gis. Okay, but you just got your first smartphone, which is occasionally requiring profanity to boy, can I relate. And you read a lot. And tv only linked to your dvd player for about ten years and convinced that our grandchildren will rightly curse us for the Mad Max life if we don't change soon. And so I'm curious about how you know about spss. I'm also curious about world traveling because my wife wants to go to Europe, and I'm one of those Americans who is, like, totally uncurious about foreign countries. And how do you manage to read fiction? Because I can only read nonfiction. And your military service, I'd also like to know about, as well as your involvement in the community and your spirituality. And what do we need to change to prevent a Mad Max world?

14:54 Well, I mean, you could write books about all this stuff, I think.

14:59 Yeah.

15:01 I learned about spss going to graduate school. I did everything for my master's in geography, except finish writing and defending my thesis. And then I timed out in my studies due to some personal struggles that just came on at the wrong time. Life, sure. But I learned how to use spss and a little bit of SaaS. Not much. And of course, the newest version of Excel lets you do quite a bit of statistics there. Yeah, and ArcGIS will let you do certain types of spatial statistic formulas right there in that program, because when we were taking stat classes, some students would get the answer from ArcGIS and then backtrack it in excel trying to figure out how to get it. But I was new to know when I came in. I had been out of school for a long time, so I only knew about eBay and email before I started. So I actually had to drop back and take a computer literacy for dummies that kind of just ran you through the whole Windows office suite and basic computer security and that sort of thing. And I found it very empowering because computers are where it's at. So not learning a computer today is the same thing as a farmer sticking with his horses and not learning how to change spark plugs in a tractor. It's that big of a difference. Good analogy.

16:46 Yeah.

16:48 Let's see. I went to catholic schools, too. I skipped a couple of years. I went to an all boys geeky school in Covington. High school and college were really awkward, especially when we moved out here for my last year of school. And my mom had gone back to school and got her doctorate in marketing. So we moved out to Oklahoma when she got a job. Go ahead.

17:18 Where'd you move from?

17:21 Cincinnati, Ohio. And so I dropped out of school and worked and partied, and then I joined the army because my folks were going to kick me out. I was a mechanic in Germany. It was during the cold War. I took my job. Really. You know, I was promoted super fast and I had a lot of disciplinary actions for insubordination and sometimes drunken disorderly. I was a young, cocky kid and I worked really hard. I came back, I was going to become a history professor. I was really excited about that because I'm to this day, a very nerdy guy. And a summer job turned me on to the mountains. I went on a nine day backpacking trip after driving a grain truck for a wheat harvest crew in Colorado. And so the next year, I got a job with the forest service on trail crews. And that led to me. I actually was accepted into graduate school and I walked away to become a seasonal worker. And I ran trail cruise in the spring and summer. And I ran a pack mule string either for Glacier National park or mostly for the hunting outfitter in the biggest wilderness area in the lower 48 states. And then in the off season, the winter, I would take off and travel. I go through a lot of the United States, western Canada. I've been to India, Nepal, Germany and England. I briefly stopped in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, and I was a carpenter at the south pole for three and a half months in the Antarctic. So I've only hit four continents, but I've had a good time.

19:18 What a broadening experience.

19:24 It really has changed how I look at the world for mean. When you go to India, you will see incredible poverty and incredible cultural wealth. That is just the Taj Mahal. Just fantastic. It is a gorgeous building. So let's see. Trying to think what else you. I'm not a big fan of capitalism, I guess, at all. I think that's a problem because the problem with capitalism, as we practice it, is not everything that matters has a. And not everything that has a dollar price really matters. What's the price of a job well done? And so.

20:19 And one of the things that I wrote about my worldview was that the success of capitalism depends on a broad, deep middle class.

20:35 Yes, that's very true. Well, and the other thing too, that's even more fundamental is capitalism assumes that unlimited growth is an automatic good and it's necessary for business survivability. But the problem is fundamentally, everything on this planet is either the direct or indirect product of solar energy. And that's a fairly finite amount that the earth receives, pretty constant throughout a long, long time. The whole idea of capitalism is predicated on a couple. It doesn't measure the right things and it has a core assumption is false. So it's not sustainable, and it makes it really hard for a lot of us to even make the right decisions. And that's it. So it has the net effect of destroying our seed cord. In the old days, the old farmers would go through their crop and take the best of whatever the weed or corn or what have you, and they would see the seeds for the next year. And if it was a bad year and they had to eat that seed stock, that was the beginning of just an inevitable downhill trend without getting seed stock from somewhere else. Whenever we pollute, or we don't replant in a full diverse range or destroy the water or whatever, that's what we do. We destroy our seed corn and there's not enough. And now, in a lot of the developed world, people don't have the practical skills. They don't know how to tan hides or split wood or build anything with their hands. It's not going to end well. People are not going to be able to google everything. And when people are hungry and thirsty, they will do anything. And if it is okay to label somebody with a bad term to make that more justifiable, that is what's going to happen. And it is going to make the movies, the horror movies look benign. I believe that's my prediction.

23:04 So that's where the fear of Mad Max comes in. That's a Mad max scenario, right? Yeah. If you get them hungry and thirsty enough, yeah, the whole thing starts to break down.

23:24 Well, the problem with I'm a hoarder, I suppose, because I've lived seasonally, so I try and stock up on non perishables, and when I have money, I fill up the freezer with extra meat when it's on sale and all that sort of thing. But all these survivalist types, they focus on the beans, the bandaids and the bullets. But somewhere down the line, to really live and survive, you have to create and maintain a resilient community that can accommodate difference. And that's what one small step is interesting to me and conversations like this, because we don't have that. And I think what's probably going to happen is there are going to be some people that are going to be fundamental evangelicals, which are really keyed into this survival type hoarding thing, and they're going to have their act on the ball, but they have pretty harsh ideas as a monolith, if it's dangerous to do, but about non believers. So what happens then? Is it going to be like the middle ages? The Catholics weren't really good to right.

24:46 The pope promised the crusaders that if they died in battle, they would be martyrs to the cause and be guaranteed a place in heaven. Doesn't that sound familiar?

25:00 Right. And so I don't really feel like I fit in anywhere because I'm not a super woke person on some things. And some of this transgender stuff, if someone is biologically something, I don't think they should be allowed to play sports in the other gender. But we have a close family friend who's trans, and she wants to become a man. And I help him out all the time, and I call him by his preferred name out of know. I don't care if someone's know. Consenting adults should be able to do whatever, know, kiss whoever they want. And that's not in keeping. Out in Oklahoma is one of the hardcore buckles of the Bible belt. But I don't want to spend my whole day watching every single thing I say about everything. I worked for a nationwide company that does canvassing for various political issues, and they did the whole pronoun thing. And you really did have to watch what you would say, because this idea that anytime someone is offended means you can't say something. I don't quite know where you draw the line. You know, I don't want anybody espousing, you know, nazi fascism dogma around me. But at the same time, some of this other stuff, I find it a very difficult boundary that isn't a black and white.

27:06 I was listening to. Do you know of Nikki Giovanni, african american poet, radical during the 70s?

27:17 Nikki Giovanni? I don't.

27:23 In her 20s, during the 60s, she was a revolutionary poet. She hung out with the Black Panthers and those kind of folks. And I recently listened to a podcast where she said that she's now a professor of poetry at Virginia Tech. And she said that she tells her white students that they didn't do anything to create slavery so they don't have anything to feel guilty about. And that kind of thinking, it struck me when she said it, because it's now politically incorrect to say that.

28:14 Right.

28:17 And she also mentioned something about race, and then she apologetically said, I don't mean to bring race into it. And I was like, nowadays, nobody would apologize for bringing race into the conversation.

28:37 Right.

28:41 It's gotten much more touchy that you have to walk on tiptoes to not step on. You have to be super careful of stepping on toes. And I will be as polite as I can. That's my understanding of politically correct, is it's just another word for being polite. So if I know the polite thing to do, I will do the polite thing, like you say. But it's gotten so complicated. They keep adding initials to the LGBTQIA, and finally they just added a plus and all the other. So it's gotten very difficult to.

29:36 Well, and the thing, too. I always remember something my grandfather said, which, you know, he grew up in a family of very recent german immigrants. He was the first born in America in his generation, so he could read and write German up to the 6th or 8th grade level as well as he could English, if not a little better. And he would speak German in World War II because he was a convoy leader in Germany. I guess one time they got lost and he had to ask for directions, but he always said, I'm not a German. I'm an American. And when a society starts to. When everyone in that society starts to identify by something, by a subgroup before the overarching group, I think that could and often does spell the end of that group, the overarching one, in this case America, because we have all these. The sex things, the race things, the countries, and somewhere down the line, it has to stop. And the only way it's going to stop is if people feel they're going to get equal time, equal treatment, equal opportunity. But then sometimes people's estimation of what's equal may be pretty slanted. It's hard to be optimistic sometimes.

31:13 Yeah. Which is why I'm interested in things like one small step, because one of my things that I pay, I don't know, that I assign a lot of responsibility to, is human negativity bias. We are evolutionary psychology wise, we are hardwired to pay more attention to the negative things, and we overestimate the prevalence of the negative things because during caveman days, if you were walking and there was a rustling in the bushes and you thought, oh, my God, a tiger. And you turned out to be wrong, it was just the wind. There wasn't any negative consequences of making that error. But if you're walking past the bush and you say, oh, well, it's just the wind, and it turns out to be a tiger, you're kitty kibble. So the ones who were not hyper alert to danger didn't survive. And so we magnify the negative stuff. And then the other thing that I attribute it to is, by definition, the news is the bad stuff. I say, yeah, if a twin engine plane flying from Greenville, North Carolina, safely lands in Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta, that's not news. But if it crashes in a suburb outside of Atlanta, it'll make the news. And if it's a 747, it'll make the national news. And if my view of the world comes from watching the news, then my view of the world is overwhelmingly negative.

33:32 Sure.

33:36 And I find it's not so much what they report, it's the adjectives that they use. Like on the decision with the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

33:50 Right.

33:51 They said Supreme Court guts Roe v. Wade. Well, they could have said Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade, but we're talking about abortion, and we're talking about that's, that's emotionally arousing. So I find that things like that magnify our perception, because I think most of the folks are you and me.

34:31 I remember back in the 90s, late 90s, early two thousand s, I heard an interview on NPR, and this guy had come up with a computer game. Before, everybody was playing computer games. And this was a role playing game where different people took the identities or the roles of different cabinet members for the president. And then there were several different disaster scenarios of different types, military, weather, disease, all kinds of stuff. And as you played, the game went through these crises, before you played, you filled out a questionnaire. How old were you? Were you a Democrat? Republican? And what they found was it was somewhere between 68 and 70, or 71% of everybody, regardless of party, had the same basic idea of how to respond to just about every single crisis scenario. And that told me that, okay, we have a lot more in common than we realize sometimes. But now, I think in the past 20 years, the media, our inclination to just sort ourselves by the social media we use and the news that we take in, and someone who listens to MSNBC or watches that compared to someone who watches Fox, I'd call it Foxaganda. So you know how I feel.

36:12 And I was going to tell you about another book that I like a lot, is, have you heard of Jonathan Height. H-A-I-D-T.

36:28 No.

36:31 He wrote a book called the Righteous mind, why good people are divided by religion and politics.

36:39 Oh, wow.

36:44 The main thesis is that liberals have two values, fairness and do no harm, don't hurt people, and fairness and justice. But conservatives, they hold those two values, but they also hold honor, authority. What else was I thinking of? Tradition. So they also honor those things. And those things have their place. He's a social psychologist, and one of the experiments that he did was to come up with these moral scenarios and ask people if, did the person do anything wrong? And the one that I remember is a guy owns a chicken and he kills the chicken. Did he do anything? So he was professor at University of Pennsylvania. So he goes on campus to this Ivy League school and he asks people, guy owns the chicken. Guy kills the chicken. Did he do anything wrong? And people say, well, no. I mean, it's his chicken and maybe he wanted to eat the chicken. That's fine. And then he says, okay, guy owns a chicken, kills the chicken, and then he has sex with the chicken. Did he do anything wrong? And liberal college students will say, well, no. I mean, it didn't hurt anybody. So then he goes to West Philadelphia, working class area, and he says, guy owns a chicken, kills the chicken, has sex with the chicken. Did he do anything wrong? And the conservative, working class, blue collar people say, of course he did something wrong. He fought the chicken. Crazy.

38:46 Right?

38:53 Liberals can get so narrow minded about authority is wrong, tradition is wrong. And as long as you don't hurt anybody and as long as things are fair, no harm, no foul.

39:13 Right?

39:14 And then in order to overcome the gap, he says, you have to learn how to talk the other person's language.

39:22 Okay, sure.

39:24 You have to appeal to their value of tradition, things like that. What were you going to say?

39:32 No, that makes a lot of sense. That's one thing I've always tried to watch myself for, is I'm spiritual, not religious. I think it's too easy if I take up a political label or religion or several different things that they do my thinking for. Know, if I'm a Baptist in Oklahoma, I know exactly how to vote on liquor on Sundays or abortion. And if I'm a Democrat, I know how to vote about global warming or whatever it is. I look at everything as I look at by three things when I'm trying to make up my mind about an issue or a candidate or something like that. Does it promote equal opportunity? Does it promote equal responsibility? And is it sustainable? To me, I think that's a wonderful set of criteria. I try not to use too much more criteria than that. That works for me here in Oklahoma. I've worked elections since the 2016 presidential election as an inspector because I'm an independent and this state is 65 70% republican registered voters. And by state law we have to have people of different parties at every election, voting booth or voting station throughout the entire state. So I'm in high demand on election day and for some reason, because I'm an independent, I can't be one of the two other major roles we have as a clerk or a judge. So I get to be the inspector, but I'm glad to do it.

41:30 That's an interesting job. What's one of the most interesting scenarios you have run across?

41:40 You mean just in life or in terms of what's right or wrong?

41:44 I was thinking, doing the poll, watching.

41:50 One of the actual election workers was she came with a whole bunch of political bumper stickers and decals all over her vehicle. And we have a law, in state law, you cannot have any political advertising within 300ft of the voting. So we had to get her to move her vehicle and she did not want to move. And I said, well, it's that or get towed. I don't know what to tell you. And the other thing too is we were having a local election on. It wasn't a state one, it was for a small tax thing. Most of the money was going to go to the fire department and our voting station caught on fire because I had turned on the heating system and the rubber belts in the system at this church where we had the elections overheated and it blew all this smoke in. And so we had to move the election outside and continue having it for about an hour until the fire department made sure it was safe and cleared the smoke. It was quite an experience.

43:06 So the referendum to fund the fire department passed, I assume?

43:10 Yes, it did. You know what? And they were there in literally four minutes from the calling 911. Now, when we train election workers, I get to tell that story, but I try and make a difference and work with habitat or work as a literacy tutor and the elections, and I haven't done the literacy stuff for a long time, but I'd like to get retrained and do it because I pretty much isolate ever since COVID and before. I don't go to bars, I don't follow sports, I have my own spiritual beliefs. I practice at home or with one or two friends. And I don't know how to talk about reality tv. I really don't care. I don't give a flying fig about survivor.

44:22 One small step really has you on the wrong side of the spectrum.

44:28 I'm going to contact them and say, hey, I need to change. If you walk in my house, there's books everywhere down the hall. My hallway looks like the wall behind you. Now are you a faculty or do you work as a counselor or a social psychologist yourself?

44:53 I had worked as a counselor. That's my 50 year career. Okay. At 18 years old, I started working for a crisis helpline. And so I've been doing counseling ever since. And I did work at the local college here in Columbus for about ten years. And then I worked for about, for another ten years. I was in private practice and then I worked for about five years in a group practice that is called the Pastoral Institute. An interesting story. And now I'm working part time for the online counseling service betterhelp. You've probably heard their commercials. That is really interesting because I work with clients who are in Georgia because that's where I'm licensed. But I also work with international clients. So I've got a young girl who's, she's like 27 years old and she's trained as an architect and worked and is in Hong Kong. And I've got two folks doing couples counseling with two people from England and just got another client who is from Germany with a spanish boyfriend of five from, she's german, he's from Belarus. And they're living in. That's so it's really interesting. Cute. And then I'm trying to get this YouTube channel started.

46:47 Sure. And you also do a lot of exercise. It looks.

46:57 Wilderness. I chaperoned a wilderness survival camp of high school students. And then I got my degree in counseling and I got interested in combining fitness training with mental health counseling.

47:18 Okay.

47:20 And there was a guy who was studying that at Auburn and so that's why I went to Auburn. One of the reasons I went to. So I've been interested in health related fitness for long, long time.

47:36 Yeah.

47:36 Are you familiar, do you know of Knowles? No. Ls national.

47:40 Oh, yes, I do. Yeah.

47:42 I took a Knowles course back in 1979, 79, 80, I took a Knowles class.

47:52 Wow. How'd you like it?

47:57 It was four weeks long, totally off trail. Absolutely fantastic.

48:05 I've heard really good things about the program and I have a book that talks about general camping stuff, but it's not an instructor training book or anything like that.

48:19 Like Bushcraft?

48:22 Not so much. It's more of a general overlay, I think for education students that might be trying to learn about it. I was a carpenter at Oklahoma State for a while, so I got to know everybody in all these different buildings, and they'd give me stuff. And that Knowles book was one of the things one of the faculty said, hey, take a copy. I said, okay.

48:49 Yeah. It was started by the guy who brought outward bound to America.

48:56 Oh, I did not know.

48:58 Um.

48:58 Wow.

48:59 And so he started Knolls to teach low impact wilderness camping skills.

49:06 Okay, sure.

49:08 Because outward bound will, they'll drive a piton into, you know, and leave it.

49:23 Sure. Have you always stayed in the south since you went to. Or have you gone back to New Jersey and then come back to Georgia?

49:34 We lived in Louisiana for a year when my wife was doing her internship, and then we lived in Indiana for about two years. Basically, since 1980, I've been in the south.

49:49 Okay. Do you like that transition, or do you wish to go back to New Jersey someday?

49:58 The way I put it is I know what I'm missing, but I don't miss it.

50:03 Oh, okay. All right. Sure. That's a good way to put it.

50:11 New York, New Jersey, it's too crowded, it's too expensive, and it's too.

50:18 That's a. So when you think about trying to go to Europe, you don't really want to go, but your wife does, and.

50:29 I will enjoy my wife enjoying it.

50:32 Okay.

50:37 And in between now and then, I will also study up on where we're going so that I'll kind of have an appreciation of what to look for and what I'm looking at.

50:48 Have you ever seen the movie the way?

50:51 The way. No, but I'm going to find it. But I'm going to find it.

50:55 It's got Martin Sheen and Emilio esteves are in, and what it is, is something happens. Emilio, he walks away from his phd, and he's going to go travel the world, and something happens to him. And so his dad is this conservative, wealthy, californian Republican optometrist or ophthalmologist, and he has to go to Europe to take care of things. And then he ends up taking an epic. Think you're, I wouldn't classify you as, like, martin Sheen at all, or his character, but it was the growth of, since I've traveled a really. I like the movie. I have it on dvd, and I watch it a couple of times a year because I can relate to all the, when you travel, you make friends, and things happen that you don't expect. And that's what makes the trip. The trip is the stuff you didn't plan sometimes. And you get to learn how people respond to crises that are so unplanned and something that's so foreign. It's a lot different than when something doesn't quite work here.

52:22 I have two apprehensions. One is not knowing the language, where everybody around me is speaking nonsense syllables and I can't understand anything people are saying. And then the other is the inauthenticity of tourism being a herd of people who are being herded around. Get on the bus. Get off the bus. It's a curated experience. Because of time wise, I don't know what to go look for. I did go to. My father's mother was from Ireland, my father's father was from Germany, so an irish friend of mine from high school, american kid, but his last name was Fitzgerald. So we went to Ireland for a month and that was fun, I bet.

53:23 Yeah.

53:25 Pub?

53:27 Sure, sure. My mom gave a couple courses in the summer at Regents College in London, and so my dad went over with her and he's never been much of a traveler, and he got to the point where he loved it. And later on, even after my mom retired, dad and mom went to Scotland, too. They really got into, you know, when I was stationed in Germany, I found just the act of being a little humble and trying to learn the german language was very appreciated in Germany and Belgium, Holland in rural France, not Paris and England, of course, you'll find people who speak English. The english accent in England can be particularly hard to understand sometimes, just like Ireland probably was.

54:18 Right.

54:19 But in Germany, the people often speak better English than a lot of Americans.

54:25 That's what I've been told is I expressed my concern about the language and everybody said, don't worry, everybody in the world speaks English.

54:36 I think some people will be, especially with this whole Gaza thing. And America is not looking good right now, so that might cause some problems. But Europeans don't hold a country's national or international political history against individuals as much because they all travel so much because it's easy for them. They're not geographically isolated like we are, and they really like it if people just show some effort, show some interest. When I was in the army, the young people weren't very political. They didn't like the idea of us being there and they weren't so friendly. But the older people, I could just sit outside of a guest house with a dictionary and a book and people would stop and say, oh, are you traveling? I didn't wear the metallica t shirt and the Levi's jacket. I wore a shirt with a collar and a sports know because it was cheaper than the Levi's when I needed to buy another. So because I had lost my other one at. But it turned out to be a really lucky mistake because people really responded. And that's what I found the most, I think, is just because we all have to do the same things as individuals and as groups and cultures, but how we all do it is very different sometimes. And it can be fascinating, and you'll find, even if you can't understand the language, if you're sitting at a restaurant, you'll be able to see, that's the Romeo, that's the jokester, that's the grumpy old eeyore, that's the know. You'll be able to identify just with a little bit of observing, and I think that's part of the fun.

56:53 Yeah. And as you're talking about that and reflecting on it, I'm thinking, and whenever I have encountered a person here who is from a different country, I have gone out of my way to be helpful.

57:07 Oh, that's people in America.

57:12 I can expect that when I'm the foreigner, people will go out of their way to be helpful. It's just a common thing that helpful.

57:25 A lot of times they do. Well, I hope you have a great time. Are you going to take a tour? Are you just going to go from.

57:33 A to b on your own now? Have you heard of Elder hostel?

57:43 Yeah, sure.

57:46 They were bought by a different company. It's now called Road scholar, but we took one of their trips to see if we would like it, a tour of Charleston, South Carolina. And so we're going to use those guys to arrange the tour.

58:02 Oh, cool. And they changed their name to road scholar. I'll have to.

58:07 Yeah.

58:09 Well, you know, I like to prepare for traveling. I'd like to read travel logs of people who've know, like, Eastern Europe or Asia or wherever. I'm interested. I also. I'll read the guidebooks a little bit. But when I went to India and Nepal, I used these guidebooks by lonely planet. And I found as I traveled around from a to sometimes I kept recognizing people. And so what I started doing is I would use it to get from a to b because it was hard for me to determine how to do that without it. But once I got there, then I explored on my own because I didn't want to constantly see the same Europeans and Americans with lonely planet guidebooks in their backpacks. And just wandering around like that was a lot of.

59:09 Ireland the fellow I went to Ireland with, he's a world traveler, and the more exotic, the better. And he will go up an alley and say, I wonder where this goes.

59:25 He sounds fun.

59:27 Oh, yeah. He took me because of his adventurousness. Two catholic kids from America wound up in a protestant irish pub in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

59:44 Wow.

59:45 Until 02:00 in the morning.

59:49 How did that go when you had to leave?

59:52 Oh, it was fabulous. It was absolutely terrific. They closed the bars at 11:00 at night, and it was this really big bar that had been closed down into one small room because of the bombings.

01:00:12 Okay.

01:00:13 And so they knew that we were american, and they knew that we were catholic, and so they just loved being able to tell us the protestant side of the story. And just like the friendliness thing, the guy took us in and showed us the big back room that had been closed down, and he gave us two irish Guinness mugs to take home with us. Okay. And it was really interesting because they thought of the Irish as non white people.

01:00:51 Is that right?

01:00:53 Because the Irish were indigenous people and the Scots in Northern Ireland were white people.

01:01:00 Wow. Okay.

01:01:03 And since they've been in Ireland longer than we've been in America, so they thought of themselves as Irish.

01:01:16 All right, that makes sense.

01:01:20 They thought of themselves as white race, but Irishmen. And they said about the Brits out, they told us they'll have to kill every Jack, woman and child of us. We're not leaving.

01:01:35 Right. I believe.

01:01:42 It was wonderful to hear what life was like from their point of view.

01:01:48 Sure. Yeah. Well, when I was in college the first time, I lived in the dorms my second year, and the guy next door to me for the spring semester was a Palestinian. And on Friday nights when they start their sabbath, the other students, a couple of other palestinian students would come. So I got to hear a different version of what it's like for them for a long, long time. I've had a different take because they look at it, of course, very differently than a lot of people in America do. So that was interesting to see.

01:02:32 Yeah.

01:02:33 It gave me a little better sense of empathy, I think, for what's going on there.

01:02:39 Until recently, America has had an unquestioning loyalty to Israel because of the Holocaust and the second world War. It was just beyond doubt that the Jews had to have a place to go to because the last know, they tried to dock to Louis in New York City, and we wouldn't have.

01:03:10 You.

01:03:11 Know, so it just seemed like the right thing to do. But Israel, especially under Netanyahu, has acted horribly, in the last 20 something years.

01:03:28 Well, to me, the whole thing is it was kind of a myth that it was a land without a people and a people without a land, and that wasn't really true. The Palestinians had been there for generations upon generations, spanning hundreds of years. They could have gone. The reason, I think, to come to Palestine was because there was so much resistance. The French didn't want them. The Germans didn't want them. Poland didn't want them. America didn't want them. This country was 25, 29% pro German. Right. On December 6, 1941, they had a big convention with thousands of people doing the Hitler salute. What's the big. Madison Gardens, I think, in New York.

01:04:26 Yeah. Madison Square Garden. Yeah.

01:04:31 That was nuts. And you never hear, we don't acknowledge that part of our history today. But that's why we were so eager to just kind of out of sight, out of mind. And starting in 1947, they killed 15,000 people, mostly innocent women and children, and they moved 750,000 people out of the area. I mean, there's people that have been in refugee communities for more than 2025 years. They can't get a passport. I couldn't imagine. I would be really mad if I was a Palestinian. I don't know.

01:05:16 Compassion for those with whom we disagree.

01:05:21 Exactly.

01:05:24 And with the Palestine situation, it's so obvious that the victims are the civilians.

01:05:33 Yeah, I see videos sometimes it brings tears to my eyes, frankly.

01:05:41 The israeli citizens and the palestinian citizens, we haven't seen video of dead soldiers on the battlefield. We've seen video of children who don't have any parents anymore.

01:06:00 Right.

01:06:04 The line I came up with was to pray for softening the hearts of the aggressors and relieving the suffering of the victims.

01:06:16 Oh, yeah, that's a good way to. A lot of times, I don't quite know exactly what to pray for, or I'll think that my picker. I like to say my picker is broken. So when I think something might be really good or really bad, I might be completely wrong. So a lot of times I try to just pray about an issue or for people, and I don't pray for a specific outcome. I'll just say, God, please give me strength and knowledge to do what you want on this thing. Sometimes it works.

01:06:55 Let's see, we're kind of overtime, and you need your father some dinner. And would you mind giving me your email address? We want to exchange email.

01:07:08 Yeah. Not at all. That'd be great. Mine is small letters. Chriskrieger 23 23 at gmail and that's all lowercase in the numbers with no punctuation.

01:07:35 Okay. And I'm at drmeiseldrmimeimeisel. [email protected].

01:07:58 What net?

01:08:01 Bellsouth.

01:08:03 Bell. Okay, got you.

01:08:06 I liked it better when they called it southern bell, but they changed.

01:08:09 Right. Is that all lowercase?

01:08:14 Yeah.

01:08:15 Okay. All right, well, Larry, that's.

01:08:22 And I will. I'll send you the link to my YouTube channel. And we will continue to exchange information. And I hope that one small step gets your classification.

01:08:35 I'm going to reach out to them and say, I think I did that wrong. Guys, I hope you're not too disappointed you didn't get to talk to a raving conservative guy.

01:08:51 It's been really good. We're gone to something good here.

01:08:55 I've really enjoyed meeting you. Thanks a lot.

01:08:58 Me too. Okay. All right. Enjoy the rest of your day and we'll keep in touch.

01:09:03 Sounds good. You too.

01:09:04 Okay, bye.