everybody welcome to the Future Trends Forum I'm really excited to see you all here today we have a great guest and on a vital topic and we have so much to talk about back in the 1980s the American libraries got together and decided before the web launched that it was gonna be a challenge to find stuff online and they launched what they call the information literacy movement it's been going strong ever since trying to help people figure out how to sift truth from falsity the bogus from the right online there've been many many projects I've worked on this off and on in my years but the leader from my mind the guru in this field is Michael Caulfield he's been doing groundbreaking work in information literacy for years and years he's been writing fantastic opinion pieces inventing stuff winning grants writing books he has an incredible incredible intelligence for helping us figure this out I've been hoping to get on the program for a long time and my reason for this now is because he has a new book the co-author called verified feel good bottom left of the screen you can see there's kind of tan mustard colored button and click that you can grab a copy of verified but better yet let's bring him up on stage let's introduce him and we'll see what we think about information greetings Mike hey Brian great to see you sir yeah good to see some comments as well oh you've got a bunch of fans there already Lee Scalar at the set is especially eager to find you all kinds of good people I've got to ask but first of all where are you coming from today I am in Seattle Washington sunny and warm Seattle right yeah we had a good run but it's it's it's the rain or mud season now I understand I understand well I do miss that city's public library but but but even more I miss you Mike I'm glad you're here listen we have a tradition on the forum where we ask people to introduce themselves not in the usual obituary academic way but describing what they have done but by talking about what they're gonna be working on the future so I'm curious what does 2024 look like for you what are you what are the big ideas the big topics the big projects you're gonna be working on so a lot of my current work is is monitoring the spread of online rumor particularly around crisis events and elections and that's going to be a big piece of what I'm doing in 2024 as we go into the 2024 election more in sort of a broader sense and looking at in the information literacy landscape the thing I'm interested in right now is looking at critical thinking how we teach critical thinking sift is a piece of that like a subset of that I think there's sort of a broader way to start rethinking some of the ways that we teach critical thinking then line up a little more with how we encounter interesting interesting are you focusing at all I know you have lots of free time are you focusing at all on disinformation and either the Ukraine war or this week's fight between Hamas and Israel yeah we've done both we actually have a piece coming out about the dominant voices in the Israel Hamas discourse on Twitter and should be out hopefully tomorrow oh very cool well that comes out let me know I want to see that right and and when you say we that sounds like you have an army of supporters but I do have a postdoc in a graduate student that we're working with to produce some of this stuff excellent excellent well I'm glad to hear that and it sounds as usual you're doing very very important work that we need to know about and I fear the next 12 months will give you plenty of fodder to work on yeah absolutely well I'm really curious about verified and and what you've discovered both in the writing of it and in the responses to it I mean you've been working on on information literacy disinformation for a long time I'm curious what surprised you in the writing of it and the research for it or also what surprised you in the reception of it well I've been so so far I mean so it comes out for real on November 17th we sent it out to a bunch of people for review in blurbing as far as the writing of it I mean it's a book that is really summarizing the work and insights you know particularly since 2016 so you know part of it was to get a lot of stuff that we've been doing in the past down in one place the the start of the book was actually a person I've worked with a lot with us on named CM Weinberg called me up and said you know I have this idea that it's a it's a it's called a struck and white guide for the right there were a lot of books out there that talked about the problem of misinformation sort of outlined it in broad terms and then there were kind of these very sort of you know thick textbooky things that had maybe a chapter or two that dealt with the sort of stuff that we were talking about in sift actually there's a lot of textbooks out there now that do have a chapter on sift but yeah we kind of wanted something that was sort of narrowly focused cheap and could be used across a lot of across a lot of courses and so that was that was the impetus for for writing the book I think you know as we wrote the book you know they were I guess the surprise for me really writing the book is is that I think I think I think we've realized how we find the ideas had become that is the the last work I did on this was an open text book called web literacy for student fact checkers and that was very early in the process and there's a lot of things in here they're very similar to what was done in that textbook but I think we we've learned a lot of other stuff in the process and that it was kind of exciting to to take a lot of things that really we had only explained in like workshops with faculty and finally have them make their way into print those are good findings those are very very useful to see I think and I keep hearing these questions that I heard back in the 1990s still being asked by people in academia by faculty by deans by students yeah how do I how do I true how do I tell truth from falsity it seems just to be endemic right now do you do you find institutionally our libraries the real engine of making this kind of information work on campuses or our faculty picking this up or is there any other institutional support for for the kind of work that we should know about yeah so I mean the real engines of this if you if you're the map this out the real the real engines of change here our librarians and people in first-year programs that that's where a lot of this work is being done it's not particularly surprising because that's where this work has been done for a long time you know in particularly in libraries libraries very early on took on the mantle of you know as the the web became a thing that students had to navigate it was libraries that really took on that role of educated students about it and then first-year programs you know very often have you know apart from teaching students writing they're interested in teaching students things like you know how to vet evidence you know and they're interested in some of these critical thinking elements and so those have been the places where we've really seen sort of broad adoption and we get a lot of feedback folks in those in those areas of the university very good well if any of you in the audience right now are working on information literacy if you're a librarian teaching information literacy workshops if you're a faculty member or support staff working on how to teach first-year students this kind of stuff say so in the chat it'd be good to know that we have a cadre of workers and while people are doing that Mike let me just let me just turn over my podium to the audience because the future transform is based entirely on what you will want to do we're based on your questions your comments your thoughts and so I'd really like to make sure that we focus on those we have a couple of questions already and I want to start off with one from Kate Herzog a librarian and she asked a question about specific technology to what extent does the rise of AI affect the way we approach fact-checking yeah so in some ways not much like that's a weird answer that people sometimes don't like hearing but it actually makes a lot of the things we talk about in the book that much more important so so the the rise of AI makes it more important that you know where things are coming from right so if you think about how people judge credibility one of the things we found in our work is that people who you know get a traditional education in in how to approach things online people that kind of use their native instincts often look for what we call surface features of credibility right credibility signals that are on the surface isn't written well to have a scholarly tone or the footnote that's right in AI renders that useless right because anybody used to be that it was relatively hard to write anything in a scholarly tone now you can get chat GPT to do that for you now chat to be he might be writing nonsense but it's gonna sound very authoritative and so these older signals that we have pushed students towards sometimes of what's the tone does it feel you know authoritative does feel scarly these are things which are increasingly already have led people down wrong paths but I think it I think it just gets amplified by AI the real questions that we look at and this is really what the book is about is we come back to the question of like who is it from and why are they in a position to know right also you know are they do they have a history of being careful with the truth and then what do other people in the know have to say about this is their disagreement is their disagreement is is our people reserving their judgment and those are the sort of two controlling questions when we approach information and for both of those we really got to get away from looking at the thing itself and we've got to you know open up that tab do a couple searches and figure out again who's who's this who's the source and what have other people said about this issue that sounds like sift to me that's sift yeah well well excellent excellent thank you thank you for that answer and Kate thank you for the great question by the way you've got a wonderful play of light Kate in your avatar that just looks really dramatic and lovely speaking of which if I get a quick question of my own in like whatever happened to your check please project that would build an animated gif of sifting oh yeah yeah yeah so as we built that out and as sometimes happens in these things the the piece of that that was the sort of the instructions for how to how to check things so that people people knew the check please course got a lot of got a lot of traction but the the graphic we just found that people people were really really sort to produce them people like sharing them these little graphics that showed you how to do the stuff but people I think have a nervousness around this stuff and I think you know and I think it's a paradox right the power you know what I call it a gates effect right that that the people who are of course the most careless are relatively assured of their powers right are of their righteousness etc. and so they share things all over the place right but the people that are actually the most careful and wanted to things the right way are often the most reticent to engage and part of the idea of this book is not it's not just this traditional advice of you know think more share less I know I would actually like to happen is for the people to think that think more to share more that's that's what I would like you know to happen I would like I would like people who read this book to feel like to feel empowered when they see something that may be a relative or or someone else is sharing that is that is maybe wrong and dangerous to do a couple of these quick techniques get an answer and and feel confident enough about about their abilities that they say hey you know I you know thanks for sharing this but I did find this I just find this other information on it looks like the situation a bit more murky than that and I think that's really part of what the way I see it it's not it's not just this sort of hey you know stop stop sharing stupid stuff it's also about helping people out it's about making sure that good information gets traction and that's just as important okay well thank you thank you for that I was I loved the idea and especially that you were targeting the celebrities who would share I really I really wish you know we might maybe know that the book is out we might retarget it we will have enough of a audience of people it's it's generally a small number of people that if you you know try to correct people online but they're an influential set it really does work and not for the person you're correcting off often but for other people that are seeing that who are trying to get a sense of this a single person stepping up and saying hey I don't think the situation is as clear as that or this seems to be contradictory information helps a lot of other people that are looking at that for the first time and so I do I do hope that we get I think we got to build the culture first and then maybe we'll revisit the tools well let's let's work on that culture then friends we have all kinds of questions coming in so please join them please ask with your questions and again remember we're we're very open to your questions and comments here so if you want to know more about sift if you'd like to know more about how to build this culture of fact-checking if you please the forum is yours right now we have a question from our excellent friend Tom Haynes in the Houston Texas area and he asked a typically deep question is the real problem with information literacy the fact that we have too much information but can't see the connections if we had a better way of quote seeing information that reduced the problem so I've looked at a lot of ways to try to visualize information and I really haven't seen anything that substantially I mean we have our own tools for visualizing the spread and stuff like that I haven't seen anything that you know substantially improves it that way however I will say that there's an important point here which is that the way we're often getting information is sort of in this stream of events right that we hear this thing happened and this thing happened and then of course people turn that turn that into evidence and I think there is a piece of this that we we have as a culture come to really engage much more in this evidence foraging behavior that we all get into this this sort of evidence collection behavior and we're not often taking the time to consolidate that knowledge and I think there's a piece of that question that relates to that that information has become for a lot of people sort of an endless stream of often out raging events and the point where we go and we sort of zoom out we get the contact we understand how that fits into the larger issues as news has become a little bit unbundled from you know the events presentation events have begun unbundled from the presentation context I think a lot of people feel a bit unmoored and I think it gets to that point what would that kind of consolidation look like I mean with this consolidation look like I mean what consolidation looks like is at a certain point to stop mainlining the most recent outrageous video and and you know put it in context I'll give an example that's going on right now there you know there was a there was a hospital that took damage in the Israel and what we're looking at right now over the past few days is sort of endless people presenting evidence that it was either Israel or that it was was Hamas from the very minute actually that it happened when actually there was almost no relevant evidence to be had right and as it comes at you it's just it's just overwhelming and there is a sort of sense that I think we have sort of almost a moralistic sense that just the more information we consume about that the better informed we will be but you know this is a case where you know waiting for a bit of better information is probably good it's a case where if you're just looking at the new thing that people are sharing marked up with a bunch of circles and things like that maybe you want to step back and you want to you want to ask yourself some questions like okay in my ideal world who would I get the who would I get this information from right and who is going to do their best to put this in context of both the history like you know is this does this make sense in terms of the history it is is this relevant in terms of the history in terms of the larger questions of how do we how do we answer a question like this of who is responsible what what are sort of the standards the professional standards for making an assessment of this or am I going to keep mainlining these sort of endless videos that kind of whiplash me back and forth and so consolidation is getting the context that allows you to start plugging that evidence into a framework and we often see the evidence first that's the way things happen you make assumptions about it but at some at some point you're going to have to find someone you trust to help put you put that in a larger framework and I think that's the thing that often is not happening online what do you what do you sorry I kind of downplaying myself there how do you what do you think about the the growing emphasis on curators and curation I mean Apple does this for their music streams but you know there's a there's more more people are using the term more and more often is that something that we should try and support well I mean it's a double-edged sword actually the report we have coming out is about a set of people on Twitter who sort of take all these reports like hearsay news reports and so forth and send them and you know kind of put them out in front of people but you know if the curator is really just a pass-through mechanism for things right if they're not adding the the vetting of the information if they're not saying oh this is where it came from and so forth then the curation your curation has to be more than that I mean you kind of think of this is museum people in here museum people often get a little bit upset that people call the thing that you're in is you know where people think very carefully about what is included people think about how to present it people think about the information that they add to the piece that they add you know is you don't just you know grab the first 10 paintings and throw them up on the wall you know with no labels right you think about that entire experience for your and I think very often online curation doesn't look like that so so yes I think curation could it can be really important but we have to understand that the value of curation is in providing the larger context is in before you share something if someone hasn't sourced it or added a link you're going to be the person that sources it or adds the link before you share it you've got to do that because that's the ethical thing to do in people need to think about the ways in which they can add value to these things as as they move we want to internet where it's things move through it be a crew value instead of lose value and I think because people don't have a lot of these skills or don't feel confident in these skills we often have the opposite things add value we add things to that we add value to things as they move through this yeah I mean that's the that that was the original vision right you know if anybody here remembers you know Vannevar Bush or Ted Nelson you know the idea was as things move through the network they accrue value from from the work effort in insights of the people they pass through and we actually have a phenomenon in rumoring that describes what happens on the internet more which is leveling which is things things sort of lose the detail and nuance as they move through the system and that's that's not where we want to be that's just a brilliant way of putting it and I I love the way you're giving us more more details about this cultural transformation about how we become different participants and in all this but forgive me this is me asking questions I but there are better questions coming from other folks here and I want to give them a chance Chris Aldrich has a really lovely question speaking of metaphors here what might better distinguishing between your garden perhaps more prone to be serious or true and stream far more prone to entertainment factoids information would that metaphor help in the literacy battle all right Chris playing the old hits yeah so for people I don't know the garden the stream is is a reference to a piece I wrote quite a long time ago about two ways of thinking about online activity right and the stream is sort of this endless stream of events that we sort of plunge ourselves into and share and so forth and the garden is this idea of information as topology right so if you think about wiki wiki is a very garden yeah approach and yeah I mean he's exactly right on that you know people often ask me well what happened to your garden the stream work and because yeah you know I've gone into this realm but it's this work for me is really an extension of that the early work I was doing talking about how we get back to a balance between the stream which is sort of this endless series of events which are which are important right I mean we're wired to love news for a reason right in the garden which is this way of thinking about consolidation connections sort of larger larger structures that are more stable over time more contextual and the truth is that one led to the other but I feel like my work back in 2013 2014 with some new technologies was really exploring like how do we look at how do we look at technologies that are not so stream based I think when 2016 rolled around and we saw just how much people were sort of lost in the stream it just occurred to me then that look the pressing thing at the moment with teaching people how to live in the stream you know in a way that's not absolutely confusing and refuddling today and so I focused my work I focused my work over the past years on like how do you live in the stream without you start making stupid stupid errors how do you live in the stream preserve your your mental health but you know a piece of that a piece of that is a piece of that still is is this is this distinction I feel like I feel by zooming out by making sure that we're not just constantly like being let down the path to respond to every single thing that we're zooming out we're finding context I feel that there is something garden-esque about that and yeah I still hope we can come up with the technology is that not only feed people sort of the latest you know I told you so but that help people you know connect things to their larger narratives to their larger to their larger concerns and maybe show the relationship of a lot of things that seem connected that first of all Clark thank you for the great question I tossed in a link of someone writing about this writing about Mike's thought Chris that was a great question Mike thank you for that rumination which it's a beautiful metaphor and I love the way you've updated this and up you're thinking about it friends these are more questions coming in so please feel free to join we have another one coming from our dear friend John Hollenbeck way up in the Wisconsin area and John asks it's always left to librarians to do this they probably have the time shouldn't truth identification be a core disciplinary priority yeah that's how that's well that's our dream here I we have benefited so much for like from librarians but it is true that you know you can't you know this is so important they can't be a one and done you know in you know a library session or two library sessions it has to be something that yeah is is not only in you know a course but is is is taught reinforced in multiple courses you one of the things that we've looked to for a model here is writing across the curriculum about the ways in which writing across the curriculum sees writing as the entire university's job and I know sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't some piece of you know but we have we have a lot of evidence that when the administration is supportive when people buy into these sorts of things you can have these you know these sort of cross course focuses that that makes sure that students are not getting something and seeing it as oh this is just a module in a course but you're seeing it repeatedly across their experience at the university and it's getting reinforced in ways that make it really stick well I'm glad to hear that and I support this message too so John as usual thank you for the good question and like these answers are terrific I know you do a check please course and it feels like we're getting an extreme version of that course and just to finish here which is great Kristen Palmer who's a Butler University she has a question which takes us in a different direction which is terrific she asks I appreciate your insights on misinformation can you tell us more about missing information the voices and stories that we don't hear from Egypt not Western viewpoints yeah absolutely and so one of the things that we we did or I did early on was look at a lot of the a lot of literature on epistemology was formulating that first textbook web literacy for student fact-checkers and in one of the things I was trying to figure out is like how do we deal with this question of knowledge which is knowledge is a social production and it's and it's often you know identified with with sort of this particular sort of institutional production of knowledge which is important right the instant understanding the institutions you know that produce knowledge and how central they are to our intellectual lives I mean we're all we're all here like most people are from universities we understand the importance of that right I were here because we do but at the same time you know some of those models really filter out important voices you know one of the things that I was thinking about quite a lot with the 2016 book as I chose the language for it was the issue of missing American Indian women and the ways in which that story was a was considered like a rumor among other people because not because it wasn't true not because these women were going missing at relatively high rates but because there just was no one in a traditional newsroom that was plugged into those communities right and it wasn't until much later that places like the New York Times you know and the Washington Post started to take that story seriously and so part of the thing I have been very aware with as we talked about as we talked about you know fact-checking and things like that is that we have to be open to we have to build an understanding in students that yes the traditional institutions of knowledge are important but there are that there are other forms of knowledge there's other ways of thinking and that those are relevant to these questions so a lot of this stuff is that we don't say it explicitly in the book but for example the choice of the word the phrase position to know comes from a epistemology certain strand of epistemology and the idea there is is that we're not we don't say expert right sometimes we say expert but we don't we don't say expert expert is a certain type of institutional knowledge but it sometimes is not thought of as applying to other people but a person can be in position to know because they're witness to something they stop what can happen and they're not an expert on it but they were there right they can be in position to know because of their lived experience this is a person who has grown up you know as a a black trans youth or this is a person who has fought in a war and understands the experience of fighting in a war they can be in a position to know based on indigenous indigenous knowledge so part of what we're trying to do we don't always sort of wear that on our sleeve in the book but we tried to think very carefully about the terms we use in the way that those terms very often fact-checking I hate to say this but very often it can be a little bit of an exclusionary affair that look there's a set of people designated a set of people to know the truth and you must go to them but we we we try to present this stuff that's also giving sort of underneath the pros we're trying to give people I think a more nuanced understanding of what we what we mean when we think about the social production of knowledge that's a very very subtle response I want I admire just how deeply you go into you know the the connection between the trusted sources doing this work of exclusion this negative work of exclusion that's that's very frustrating that means well that fixing that may be part of your culture your cultural shift yeah sometimes it's flipped to right so one of the really interesting things when you think about epistemology and the issue in epistemology called testimony right like knowing something by someone else saying it which is which is really the basis of work but work is a book that's really kind of practical skills around this issue of testimony and you have you have people who are in a position to know and then you have people that are you know have a history of being careful with the truth and then you have this other third thing which is someone that maybe shares your values right because ideally you'd like all these three things you'd like someone to be careful with the truth being in a position to know and shares your values because the whole package for you would be someone that knows their stuff is very careful and can talk to you about how this stuff relates to the things you care about that would be our ideal world one of the problems we hit is very often the people in a position to know are not careful with the truth or have incentives to lie sometimes the people in a position to know don't share our values and so we're left sometimes with this issue of you know who do who do we trust you know come back to the conflict that's going on here the the United States right now is probably in a in a in a much better position to know what is the truth of that recent bombing then then anybody here in this in this group and certainly then a lot of journalists they have access to a wide variety of technology satellite imagery all this stuff so they're in an extreme position to know but then people look at the US and they say well does the US have a history of being careful with the truth in these elements and people remember well the Iraq war not so much right and then we say well do they share our values and some people feel that that's that's not really clear that that the strong support for Israel might might you know might undermine that right and it's a very nuanced situation I'm not coming down on a side here with this particular incident but that's the stress point right the stress point is very often the people in the position to know are people that might have might have other incentives the issue though is you've eventually got to trust somebody right and so maybe maybe you trade a little bit of them being in a position to know maybe the US is in a strong position to know but you're a little unsure about these other things maybe BBC verify which I think is really good work if you're looking for a source in this conflict BBC verify I think has been one of the one of the best maybe BBC verify is in less of a position to know but they seem to they match your values more they have a history being careful with truth and maybe when you average all those things together that's where you go but you got to choose something right you got to choose something is that the the link for that is BBC news reality check reality check it's the verified team it should say the BBC verified team thank you yeah the link might be reality I think that might be what they call their stream okay their stream up but not their garden or perhaps their their rocks in the stream right we have a whole bunch the checkbox is just on fire if I can completely trash the elemental nature of this metaphor we have all kinds of comments coming in I really I really appreciate that Mike and I think there's there's still more questions coming and there's one from our good friend on the West Coast Mark Corbett Wilson who ramps up the politics of this he asks to think about critical digital fluency as self-defense in these times of total war and information warfare yeah I mean so we do deal with this we do deal with this and we've dealt with this quite a while yeah a piece of this is just people getting things from a piece of this is sort of traditional rumoring people trying to make sense and you know in ambiguous situations and so forth but a big piece of this is yeah there's lots of people out there trying to manipulate you and and those can be you know those can be foreign state actors absolutely like it's right now Twitter is is crawling with that those can be corporate entities you know I you know I smoked for a lot longer than I should have smoked you know before I quit you know partially because you know the back of companies were feeding everybody research that created just enough just enough doubt you know and it's so so so so stupid now right but um you know just enough doubt that well you know maybe it's this subset of people that are really you know they have the product you know and so forth none of it was you know if you dug into it none of it was credible but for people that want to believe something very often you know it's just got to have sort of some sort of facial validity and and and that's enough that's enough to deal with your growing cognitive dissonance so I do think I do think that it's protection I do think there's a lot of people people often say well you know are you gonna you know people believe what they want to believe are you gonna change any minds here people are just really out to prove what they believe in all of that's true um to some extent but I I do think over time um I mean people get people do get manipulated people do get manipulated to act and and uh express things and um uh you know just just uh go through life in ways that do not reflect their values because they've been misinformed about uh something or or because someone's feeding them stuff that allows them to I think a lot about cognitive dissonance these days um yes it's true we all go and we try to find the information that supports our our position but the nice feature of cognitive dissonance is it's really painful it's really meaningful to be in a state of cognitive dissonance and so you you in a perfect world new information starts coming in in the in as you see that new information yes you dismiss some of it and so forth but it becomes a bit of a project to try to maintain a belief in a state of cognitive dissonance it takes up it starts taking up a lot of your time and uh in an ideal world eventually that cognitive dissonance becomes so much that you say you know what why am I still holding on to this belief you know and I I think um I think there is that possibility I think one of the things that people often talk about misinformation is changing people's beliefs I actually think it's the opposite I think misinformation more often allows us to maintain beliefs that we know deep down are not true but but misinformation is fed to us as as sort of a sort of um you know sort of a analgesic against the against the pain of cognitive dissonance that allows us to not sort of face up to our own inconsistencies and so I actually I actually think uh it's it's not a way people talk about this stuff much I actually think that one of the core the core effects of misinformation is that it doesn't prevents us from living our values because it allows us to live in denial much longer than we otherwise by disinformation is an analgesic against cognitive dissonance yes that's the best best phrase I love that um I should have introduced you differently like I should have said Mike is the poet of this is fantastically um thank you so much I and we have a we have a not a question but a good example uh from Laura Gekler at the University of Notre Dame which I can't help but say is not for them but check this out this is really nice uh this this this is a link uh to a bbc website or to a bbc article on the web which gives an example of that kind of fact checking and I'll throw the link in the chat too directly but prominently featured on that page is the big blue bbc verify button yeah so you can see that here's the link I just put that in the chat there thank you Laura that's that's really helpful um and we have more questions coming in uh we have one from Robin at Buffalo Robin tell me if you have any tree leaves left or if they've all gone down already um but before that you have a better question to ask which is can you make any comparisons between your publication web strategies for student fact checkers and your recent publication yeah so web strategies for student fact checkers um was very much sort of a collection of techniques uh and uh you know so I would say look here's how you you know here's how you uh check for the spread of a news story here's how you here's how you look up the history of an organization right so very much a collection of techniques like that um over time we found that a much smaller set of techniques generally was more useful um that sort of the wide range of techniques that we taught most of them didn't stick but some of them did and so so um uh verified actually has a smaller set of techniques uh than uh web strategies for student fact checkers personally the ones that we found were effective over time so we kind of I don't know people have to tell me if we sort of repeat ourselves too much in the book but we try to we try to sort of hammer these home in a couple places for our student reading them and just try to show in repeated ways how you use a smaller tool about a strategies to deal with it there's also a second half of the book which is um very much about more of these epistemological issues and trying to give students some some grounding and how to think about uh how to think about information how to think about expertise uh we have uh stuff on thinking through what it means to say there's an expert consensus uh you know we have a thing that i'm actually quite excited about that talks about how fringe viewpoints are different than minority viewpoints right and it defines that in network terms as um minority viewpoints may not be widely adopted but they they they attempt to dialogue with the discipline they attempt to dialogue with the profession uh whereas fringe viewpoints are really that they they they exist uh in a world um uh that is not engaged with the profession it's not engaged with the discipline it has really no desire to convince the discipline or the profession of their views and so there's some stuff we've thought about quite deeply about how how do we explain epistemology to students uh in ways that are just really accessible using very simple terms uh but in ways that we feel really reflect um in some cases some quite recent thinking uh on on how to think about these issues well thank you um uh problem thank you for uh for reaching back in uh Mike's publications um and uh and thank you Mike for that honest answer a very clear answer in the chat by the way uh Laura Gekler is doing a great job of diving into that bbc story and she's got some criticism so well that's good too yeah yeah yeah take a look at that uh we also more i mean this is great that the questions are coming up and uh our friend uh christin palmer from butler university speaking of philosophy has a question along those lines which is what are the impacts of cultural relativism on misinformation yeah so this is a debated issue like to what extent did cultural relativism you know um create you know an environment you know where um you know where you know facts are devalued or something like that and i think there's not really a causative line that i can find there i know that some people have tried to make that case um there's a there's a book of the name is is uh escaping me uh name something like fantasy land or something like that there's a book that tries to take that case um uh but i i actually i don't believe there's sort of a causal route in this i do think though that we haven't really when it comes to explaining to students what knowledge is um you know and and why we have the systems of knowledge we do and what are some of the strengths and weaknesses i do think that we haven't really fully engaged with that i think one of the things the cultural relevance relativism tried to do was really engage with these issues you know of of of how we know things i i don't think that students really get a lot of that and i think there's um um some great sorts of things like uh you know standpoint epistemology um uh a lot of the stuff that i read is is is a feminist epistemology and feminist theory on on knowledge production um i think is is can be very informative um and there's a great book by no uh Naomi Areskis uh Why Trust Science in one of the things that she points out is a lot of that critique of knowledge systems actually forms a good basis for understanding why we trust knowledge systems right that the critique uh the feminist critique of knowledge systems uh in the uh in the 1990s um uh actually if you look at it there's a there's a core in there that is also a set of principles about how we construct should construct knowledge communities knowledge infrastructure um and ultimately it makes a case for for why we can why we can ultimately say that one system of of of knowledge uh you know production um let's let's say physicists looking at um you know physicists examining the universe might be better than another system let's say flat earthers um uh not the pick on flat earthers but flat earthers trying to prove uh something or another from you know putting a balloon up into space and there's a whole bunch of of things around that like how do how do you talk about that but ultimately it's really this is an interesting way in which i i think feminist theory um is is a interesting corrective to some of these more expansive cultural relativism approaches oh thank you thank you for that answer that's probably a little too dense i'm sorry we write for the science i think it's i think it's a good attempt at at pulling together the critique of science uh in the defense of science well thinking about feminist apology feminist epistemology in the chat we're seeing um aggression gibbs thank you share to link to uh white trust science uh we have people talking about how they teach um some arguments here about uh about the sciences i would wonder about uh the replication crisis here um but we're almost completely out of time um and i i wanted to if i could jump in with a kind of future oriented question what what might a college or university look like if they took verify seriously and deeply you know what if they what if they put these questions and principles institutionalizing them at the core you know part of the core curriculum for example part of how departments work what might that campus look like after a few years of that work yeah i mean i think what it would look like if you think about a classroom i think what it would look like is that you as a instructor teaching anything in the classroom or as as staff doing an activity with students um could at some point where a question is raised in the classroom say uh hey let's let's let's do some lateral reading on this let's sift this uh and the students would know what you're talking about just as much as they would hope uh you know if you if you you said hey you know let's uh you know do a turn and talk or something like that uh they would know oh okay let's let's go and and apply these sorts of things and then it would just be i think very fluidly incorporated into the curriculum in some of the places that we did early stuff that's that's what happened right there's a interesting thing that interesting anecdote that i remember from some of our early pilots where um one of the instructors um teaching in uh eastern kentucky um you know very sort of pro-gun students uh um uh had said something about had said one thing about guns and um and the students and one of the students said well you know um um you know uh we should we should at the time it was the we didn't have said but they they said they said we should fact check that and then she and she said yeah go ahead and all the students got on they did there you know she didn't have to show that they all got on they did it it turned out she was wrong and of course um i think the thing that um the people miss as they politicize this this environment and say oh who are you to be the arbiters of truth is probably something like most instructors they're over the moon about that like the day that your students fact-checked you and and and did that well and you turned out to be wrong that's one of your better teaching days and so i i would like a world uh where uh the the students uh the teachers feel like at any point when they're talking about any subject um that they could turn to the students and say hey let's verify that the students have a set of tools and techniques they can use jump on in the classroom get that done in a couple minutes come back and discuss what they found and and if that was to happen i think that we'd truly be graduating people prepared for this new information environment that they're gonna go out into what a fantastic vision i might thank you for sharing that at the at the end of our session here today and thank you for all of those answers today this is this is just terrific in the chat you'll see lots of people thanking you and praising you i'm my last question is where where do we keep up with you and your work what's the best way uh well usually i say twitter uh i'm not sure how long much longer that's going to be but i'm at hold it on on twitter um if if i pull off a twitter entirely i'm on a platform called blue sky i'm just mike callfield uh about blue skies dot social uh there and so i would uh you know sometimes you got to wear a bell dance suspenders uh so uh i would i maybe maybe if you're interested in what i'm doing follow me on both in case i detach from twitter entirely well what kind of man has to wear bell dance suspenders i remember a very careful man um thank you thank you so much uh this is such such not just necessary but really vital work and i'm so glad you're doing it i'm so glad you took an hour or two to share with us thank you thank you all thank you all friends for all of your contributions all of your great questions uh anybody in the chat i'm gonna i'm gonna try and post these notes to a blog post to come up so please let me know if you don't want me to uh if you want to keep talking about this stuff uh speaking of socials just use the hashtag ftte and here you can find me on twitter me on mastodon me on threads me on blue sky and of course on my blog which is a section for information literacy if you want to look into our previous sessions on libraries information literacy and all of that just go to tinyurl.com slash ftf archive and you can find them looking ahead we have more sessions coming up on still other topics around the future of education everything from intermediary organizations to online education the resistance to change just go to forum.futureeducation.us and you can find them thank you again once more for all of the contributions all of these thoughts all of these comments greatly appreciate it i hope you're all doing well here in the northern hemisphere things are getting chilly so those of you up here on the side of the planet i hope you're staying warm i will see you next time online take care bye bye


Welcome back, this is Y254 and our topic of discussion is personal development that is in case you are just joining us. And now to my next question Angela, how do you understand your identity and how do you develop it? Well there are many ways of developing yourself and the first one is being aware that you need it. And when you are aware that you need it you need to go back to the basics of life. Basics of life are how you are brought up. If you are brought up in a church you need to just look at the things that you were taught when you were young and try to embrace those things. Because most of the times we kind of ignore or maybe not ignore but we put them aside the things that we were taught that were meaningful in our lives and try to poison ourselves with whatever now the society is pushing us to. So you need to look at it like an individual and see what it is that you can do to change your life. And it's all about changing behaviors and having the right attitudes. So once you discover that you can now start working on yourself. Having the right attitudes and the right behaviors that will lead you now to achieving what you want. Yeah well and now maybe as we talk on that I understand you hold a lot of training and mentorship so in personal development. And what are some of the challenges that you personally faced and what are the situations or experiences you have had from people who really want to improve themselves? Some of these challenges are financial because some of the coaches we have in Kenya are a bit unaffordable to many. But if you want to develop yourself you must have a budget for it. You must have a way of working towards it. So it's like learning going to school to get a skill. You have to pay for it of course. But if you are not able to then I think there are ways of working towards those things. There are so many forums that are open for free and even online that you can learn. If you cannot access internet I think you can talk to someone who is of a higher level than you, a mentor. Mentors really work so well and they help us move to the next level. And everyone should have a mentor. I once was watching an opera and she said she has four mentors and I asked myself if me, Angela, I have maybe one mentor and opera has four with what she has achieved. What am I doing with my life really? So we need to embrace the fact that we need mentors.  Okay, so let's get to Yvonne a bit about what difference does it make in a person's life. First shine light on the importance of self-development and how will it help me if I decide to take on help improving myself as opposed if I just decide to stay like that. First of all, knowledge of personal development is very key because immediately you know about personal development like there is need for your personal development. You'll actually grow one because you'll understand yourself.  You see you've understood yourself and what you want so you are in a position like to know what is it that I want. And immediately you are cautious about personal development. You'll be in a position to relate to the people. You'll be in a position to follow your goals to define your values and you'll understand yourself more because like there is nothing you do that can prosper without you understanding yourself. You have to understand yourself first for it to be in a position to know that when I do this thing it is going to lead to negative consequences. When I do this it is going to have some positive consequences. So first you have to understand yourself, have a private conversation with yourself, talk to yourself. It's not necessarily talking to any other person but then the first conversation is talking to yourself. Then as she's just put it that have mentors. When you have mentors like those are the only people that you'll approach that are priceless. You will not pay them anything because when you have mentors they are usually priceless. And the only reward that you can give them or the price that you'll give them or any money that you'll give them is only by your success. If you succeed your mentors will be very happy. And I'm sure if you succeed everybody will be happy. So the first step is understanding yourself. And that understanding yourself is what it is now the journey you are starting of personal development. Immediately you start the journey of personal development. That is how you're going to identify your values, you're going to define your purpose, you know your purpose and you'll pursue your purpose. And it will actually lead to your success in life because you'll not have a lot of challenges. When you have challenges you'll know how to tackle them because challenges are inevitable. They always come but then when you are you are cautious about yourself and you know yourself and you understand yourself very well. You'll be in a position to tackle all the challenges that will come forth. Yeah as well as minimizing your weaknesses. Exactly. Well talking about validation and acceptance by family and society. Do you think as we groom our young kids maybe the young daughters. Do you think as parents do enough to help on this topic on self development. That is maybe you have a girl. What do you think the impact is? I don't think the current parent is doing what they are supposed to be doing. Teaching your child to know who they are and their value and their space in the society and how they are supposed to treat each other. How they are supposed to react to issues. So it comes from us as parents not just the teachers and most of the times we leave it to the teachers which is not good. Because the child will trust the parent first before they can trust anyone else. So I think currently what we have our parents current parents are not really doing as much as they are supposed to be doing. Maybe as time goes by people as we speak about it more and more people are going to embrace it and work on it because it's very important from the young age. Well so I can imagine well what are some of the things that parents can do.  It's important to approve their ideas even if you know to just give confidence in that. So yeah talk about that. The bigger percentage of what the children learn is by watching us by what they see from us and the smaller percentage is what we tell them. So we need to lead by example by even showing them who we are and showing them what we are achieving by knowing who we are. And we need also to encourage them to learn their skills to discover them, be close to your children and learn and know who they are before they even grow and even go to the teachers. So it's our responsibility to train them. So Yvonne you are a student leader and I'm sure you've had a chance of interacting with very many people. What would you say is their state in terms of how is it seen? How can you tell that this one is confident? How is it seen? Actually you see this one I think I can drive it through. I can use dressing mode. Like you see we ladies dressing really speaks a lot about us. When you see a lady in heels and very high heels and is very confident about herself. Like you see this lady has already identified herself. She's comfortable in the heels but then you find another one she's comfortable in flat shoes. You see she's very comfortable in flat shoes. So immediately you identify yourself. That person sometimes myself I wear high heels and then there are others that approach me and tell me I'll never put on high heels. Then I'm like why? Then somebody else tells them they tell me that you know high heels you guys talk about high heels and you talk about confidence then you're like this because high heels gives you confidence then I'm like no that is not the way to go. Because high heels adds on your confidence. When you've already identified yourself you are in a position to do the high heels. But then there is no problem with you doing the low shoes because they are what gives you your worth. They are what you are like you identified yourself with those flat shoes so you are comfortable in them. So you don't have to fix yourself with the heels when you know you will not be comfortable in it. But then when somebody is confident they are in a position to speak out. Whenever they see a problem they'll actually speak about the mistake. Whenever you find me and you know this is wrong you'll just tell me this is wrong. And if this is right this is right. That is the definition of somebody who is confident and who has identified herself because they'll not keep quiet and watch. They'll be on the watch out and tell you this is wrong and this is right and they'll always speak out. Yes then I imagine that also helps minimize peer pressure and influence from their other mates. Because somebody who does not speak that is now the birth of depression. You see those people who don't speak up they are not in a position to tell us when they have a problem.  Well now even on that you can also give us your final thoughts on this topic as we wind up. About personal development I actually recommend people to surround themselves with mentors. You can have as many mentors as possible based on the fact that to go for the transformational classes they are very expensive. Now the only way you can approach the personal development way is surrounding yourself with mentors because mentors are priceless. They'll not ask you for even a single coin. They are priceless. And the only reward that they want is seeing you having tremendous success. Whenever you succeed the mentors you've already paid your mentors. So let's surround ourselves with mentors and you will actually find yourself like you've already grown. You are personally developed. You are strong. You are confident. You have strong self esteem. You'll be in a position to speak out and watch out and be on the lookout. Well thank you so much Yvonne. Angela your final comments as we wind up for comments thoughts. I want to leave you with something that I read somewhere that said many people die at 25 and they are buried at 70. And this is because after 25 that is after maybe college or university they stop learning themselves. They stop improving themselves and we need to keep on improving ourselves. You get a job and you settle but you need to keep on learning your environment.  So you have to take the initiative to keep on learning yourself and learning your environment in and putting in more info about yourself. That is all self awareness. I mean personal development is all about. It doesn't stop at a certain age. Neither does it start at a certain age. It is a lifelong process that we all have to embrace. We keep doing it every day. So well thank you so much for that. And with that we will have to wind up. We would have wanted to continue with a discussion for a whole hour but time is not on our side. So in case you missed this discussion or you would like to visit it just go to our YouTube page that is at Y254 channel. You will find this and much more for you. So with that it's bye bye from us and keep tuning into Y254 for more amazing and useful vibes. Bye.


Okay, here we are at the two o'clock clock. Think Tech, I'm Jay Fidel. We're talking about community matters. We're talking about the global community this time with Cynthia Tai, she's a, what do you call it, a human rights lawyer, an activist lawyer who has really put it on the line for human rights. Her foundation is Project Expedite Justice. She operates out of Kona. And she's here to talk to us about how COVID has affected human rights in the world today, which is a big, big subject, hard to get your hands around it. But if there's anybody in the world who can do that, it's Cynthia Tai. Hi, Cynthia. Hi, Jay, thank you for the kind introduction.  And it's troubling in every way I can think of. And it has effects on every institution, everything in the world, in the world. Isn't that interesting how that happened? And it has an effect on human rights. And so now it touches you because you care passionately about human rights. And now you have still another problem in human rights. Can you talk about it? Of course. So let me give you a bit of a backdrop just because it's been a while since we've connected. So Project Expedite Justice, which is, of which I'm the executive director, focuses on primarily four areas. Genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and then trafficking. So they can generally be thought of as mass atrocities, although trafficking is sometimes thought about a bit differently, but they are the four most prevalent problems, I would say that face humanity, not politics, but humanity today. COVID, with the advent of COVID, I should say that we primarily operate in Africa and Southeast Asia. We have a very, very strong guiding and mentoring, knowledge-based assistance program for our local partners. We advocate very strongly on access for justice on all fronts, using all available tools. COVID, while we're working on it. What's operate mean, Cynthia? What are you doing when you operate? That we support local partners and we identify cases. We discuss available legal options for them. They may be regional options, national options or international options. With that full explanation and looking at their case file and they make the decision on what they choose to do with their cases. We provide technical assistance like brief writing, advocacy strategy and help them sort of bridge that gap because many of these communities would like to engage with these institutions, just like our judiciary at home, they just simply don't know how. A footnote for our viewers is that Cynthia actually spent seven years prosecuting war crimes and investigating them in the Hague, the war crimes tribunal there. And then she came back to Kona and started this foundation project, but justice where she is investigating and collaborating with other organizations who investigate, collaborate and prosecute war crimes all around the world. So she can't get it out of her system, I think. No, I think I found my purpose in life and I have to say that I'm not the only organization. My hat is off to my 10 colleagues, my admin support and everybody else that makes it happen. It truly is a village effort. And a big shout out to Kristen Mozella who is our legal and program director who has worked very tirelessly trying to find us a solution for connecting with our clients with lockdowns happening on both ends, shall we say. So for us, connecting is very difficult. It's not a simple Zoom call. We have to consider security. We also have to consider, not everyone has sufficient bandwidth. They're not as lucky as we are in America. For example, our South Sudan partner, internet costume, sufficient internet, which is very tiny, just enough to upload and download, cost him $1,000 a month. Whoa. Yeah, and so for people that live in these developing countries, it's not a very simple solution. So we should be grateful that we actually have the ability to press a button and to connect safely, yeah? So Kristen, I wanted to say that we've been relying a lot on the internet and have identified some sources that operate kind of like airplane internet in as much as we can deliver our materials to our clients, even though they're in lockdown, we would have a box delivered to you and you could still learn and still upload your own materials. So we're looking at very advanced IT solutions to solve our bandwidth issues, if you will. So we've been doing a hamster wheel shuffle, if you will, with the advent of COVID because all of our regular means of communication have just not been, you know, it's not enough. Nothing beats face to face, nothing ever will, but we know that that's just not available to us now. So we're adapting. And the reason why it's so important to adapt is because while COVID lockdowns keep us safe for our most vulnerable customers or clients, if you will, it's also a tool, you know, that is used sometimes for oppressive reasons and also Western solutions aren't necessarily a one size fits all, if you will, for our partners in developing countries, right? Well, now you're looking retrospectively, right? You're looking at human rights violations, war crimes, that have already happened. And you're investigating. We're looking at temporary situations as well. Temporary situations mean that are happening right now. Yes, happening now or have happened in the last year, we're trying to advance, basically. Let me dwell on that for a minute. You know, COVID has in many ways unleashed dark forces in our world. No doubt. A number of countries have seen, you know, the lid come off, the membrane of civilization, you know, gets torn somehow and bad people do bad things with impunity. Right. And I would like to ask you this, I mean, and I have a theory about it, is that when you have COVID, do you find that people are doing more really horrendous, hellacious things in the war crimes area? Are they taking advantage of the fact that COVID is locking people down? Are they seeing it as an opportunistic moment? Yes, it can be manipulated in that fashion. And while some countries, I mean, I think a lot of countries on continent in Africa really recognized their limitations. Let's talk about the good and the bad, shall we say. So on the good side of the fence, a lot of countries really have robust programming. They recognize the limitations of testing of their own health systems. And for that reason, impose lockdown for very legitimate reasons, right? Recognizing resources and all of those things. They've also developed very innovative solutions such as, I think it was in Rwanda and South Africa where they have used, I know Rwanda for sure, so let me stick with that, where they have like used drones to deliver medical supplies to more rural communities. So some countries have really stepped it up. Other countries, I think, are struggling more because of the fragility of their situation. Several countries in Africa are facing transition. They're in that transitional justice period. And with that, a lot of, you know, that transition happened because of human rights advocacy, right? And because of peaceful protests. But now that tool is kind of taken away. Yeah, but it could all be reversed in a very short order. And let me ask you this, in terms of the disease itself, I'm afraid I haven't followed the numbers, but I imagine that although Africa, talking about Africa, got off to a slow start, it picked up. In Africa, I mean, I remember that the number of people in the Lagos is extraordinary. Many tens of millions in one city, and they're all close to each other, and they're all breathing in each other. And so there's got to be an epidemic for sure. And then you find that in a whole country of, I don't know, say pick a number of 50 million people, there might be three ventilators, three. They're obviously not equipped. Right, they're not, that's right. So it's been an interesting situation. They've been hit very, very hard. We've been seeing that in Sudan. And at the same time, they have different challenges. Like for us, you know, it's stay at home, and I would say for people like you and me, we don't need to go to the grocery store every day to look for, to find something to eat. We have the luxury of waiting it out, right? Waiting it out, wearing a mask, and operating fairly comfortably, if you will. But for most people, they don't have that margin.  They need to go out, they're daily workers. They make their living by selling tea on the side of the road. That, a lady like that can't go very long with staying inside and with COVID restrictions. And also with that comes this inherent distrust of, well, this government hasn't been nice to me for a while. Why should I trust what they're telling me today about this COVID thing that I've never heard of before? So it's a huge educational barrier and trust issue as well. Well, when you have, you know, when you have government that not to be trusted, then the people, you know, well, obviously they don't like it and they rise up, such as they did in Black Lives Matter a couple of weeks ago. But then, you know, the powers that be, the police as in this case, you know, the skinheads, I suppose, they retaliate. And in fact, I was just coming to see you just now and learned that there was a shooting by a young African-American kid of a cop. I forget the state, it was, let's say it was Michigan or Wisconsin, something. And obviously the cop is reacting to the demonstrations. And so what you have now is like a little civil war going on where one side shoots the other and then the other protests and then that side shoots somebody else. So before you know it, the streets are not safe. And I suggest, like you're thought on this, this happens elsewhere too. You can push the people, the people push back and then that gives you cause to violate their human rights in the name of stability and public order. Is this happening in Africa? Yes, I think that what happens in Africa right now, I mean, we can't look at the continent in total like that. We have to focus on, they are different countries. It's a huge continent with many different countries, right? But I can give you a couple of examples about that. I think that for the peaceful protesters, I'll give you an example. In Sudan on June 3rd of last year, there was a peaceful protest. It was called the Khartoum Siddin. It soon became the Khartoum Massacre because the authoritative powers that be, shall we say, got tired of the people's doing their peaceful protests and they were attacked, resulting in many, many missing, many arbitrarily detained, many men and women raped, horrible violations across the board. So yeah, it does happen, of course. I think the issue that I focus on the most really is the effect of COVID in terms of how does this affect human rights activities, right? Their whole power, if you will, is the power of gathering, the power of staging peaceful protests, of being the opposition, of being the critical, the critical voice in the crowd, if you will, just like you, right? But- You can't do that without a crowd these days. I mean, that's clear in this country and it's gotta be clear in countries in Africa because it's the only way, you know, they don't have the same kind of electronic network and so they have to go out in the street. This leads to a big problem. Can you talk about that? Sure, so I think that what we're finding is many of the opposition parties and many civil rights, human rights defenders that are on the ground fighting the good fight along with me and our organization, they've really lost, we've lost our opportunity, our tools and our platform, right? If you really think about it. So, and in what was received in place of that, our emergency order is declaring that you can't, you have to do social distancing or can't drive in a car with somebody. In some countries we've seen, you're not allowed to even have a private car on the road. So people are forced to walk to the market, carry what they can carry and then walk back home. If you can imagine that. So, and resources are being redirected, right? To COVID, medical, trying to find a vaccine, to more medical, the medical sector I would say. I'm not gonna say it's wrong because I believe that that needs to happen but I think that there's also a cost here for human rights and we can't ignore that these are really fundamental root problems that are not gonna go away. What we know is that one remaining channel is free press. And so we've really been focusing on that and it has unfortunately, as you well know, come under sustained attack. If you don't have the freedom of assembly, then at least you have the freedom of speech, right? That's what we hope. But in countries where the judiciary operates and can operate unfettered, shall we say, they will look at the parameters of an emergency law and determine what is proportional, what is necessary and what is right. But that isn't, we are not always working with an independent judiciary. I think that's a million dollar question. Well, and you're not only always working with an independent leadership. What I mean is, the implication of a minute ago was that the leadership would take health care, public health measures in order to sincerely deal with the epidemic. But I suggest that there are a lot of leaders, you can tell me if there are in Africa who don't really give a rip about public health. They see the epidemic as a weapon to be politicized and used against the people. They wanna preserve their power. And so they will lock down things and limit civil rights and human rights in order to confirm their positions of power in those countries. Am I right about that? You are. I think that, I mean, we can't say things in broad rest strokes. I would never dare to do that. But I think that we can safely say that emergency laws, if not well thought out and if not stated with particularity, if you will, are manipulated or can be easily manipulated for political reasons, like quelling the opposition right before an election also used to, let's say move the goalpost of the fact that the election is supposed to happen this year, let's kick that can down the road and retain power, right? It's a seductive, it's a seductive possibility for a despotic leadership. That's, I mean, it's an obvious possibility. Exactly. So, I mean, I think that what we really need to know, think about is that the measures that appear to be legitimate today, they need to, what we know from history is that they tend to stick around after the pandemic wave leaves us. And that's really, I think what we have to be conscious and focused about, are the measures today stated with particularity proportional to the harm and really protecting the health and safety and leave it there, right? And then lift it when appropriate. So you have to make a choice, you have to make a choice on whether the measures that are being taken are mostly legitimate or mostly illegitimate and deal accordingly. You have to make a value judgment on how far these people are going. Yes, I think that value judgments are being made by, I mean, I'm not from continent, so it's not for me to say and I'm very clear about that. But what I'm hearing from my local partners is they are concerned about, you know, the misuse because they've lost their tool and their platform. So I can understand that. Yeah, if they haven't lost the press though, I just wanna go down that path for a minute. You mentioned that the press is still alive and well, at least in some of the countries you're dealing with. Yeah, it is. Maybe under attack to a certain extent. So it sounds to me like there is an evolution going on that in this crucible we have described here that the press is the last bastion. You can't have an assembly, so you have the press and the press speaks for the people. That's right. The press reveals the, you know, the dictatorship and what it is doing in the politicizing. I mean, arguably they have the power to do that, but query, if I were a dictator, I'd be shooting for the press. I'd be trying to undermine them. Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, I thought of you today because I was actually reading up on a situation and reading a report on Ethiopia and there was a journalist that I wanted to bring to your attention who alleged on his personal Facebook page and on a YouTube channel that the government ordered the preparation of some 200,000 graves. He was summarily doorknocked. The government immediately said that his claims were false. The police, along with the intelligence service, arrested him where he was later questioned on his political views. And they seized all of his, his notebook, his tools, his cell phone, et cetera, without a proper search warrant. And in this particular country, a search warrant is the proper process to seize those items. That's not always true, right? Every country has different laws. He was charged with, he was left in jail for three weeks without having any notice of what if the formal charges were, when he did get in front of the proper judicial body, they said that there was insufficient basis for his arrest and he was arrested, but it didn't end there. Federal police then intervened, re-arrested him for violating a revised anti-terrorism law.  So that's kind of the way that the emergency law is manipulated. Well, Cynthia, that's chaos. Yeah, it is. If it happens systemically, it is. Yeah. So that's- What can the public, if the public presumably knows about this, hopefully through the press, they're gonna lose all confidence in the system to see it come and go and left and right, never really coming to any kind of stability. That's right. And I mean, and I think that that's even more pronounced in these countries that are facing a transition, right? I.e. an election, or have come out of an ouster and are in that transitional justice period where they're trying to move towards a free and fair election, but then COVID lands on top of them. And it tends to create even more chaos than existed before. Yeah, I mean, I guess it just boils down to trust, right? There's no trust already in what, in the governments. Everybody's a little bit skeptical. Your common citizen, of course, is skeptical and they're not familiar with, you know, Western medication. They don't know what this COVID thing is really means for them and they don't know if it's a trick. Right. So what do you do? I mean, your goal is what? Is to prevent violations of human rights, whatever that may be. And you defined it early on, but what can you do? You and the organization that's on the ground in these various countries in Africa, what can you do to preserve human rights there? Well, to support them. So we realized very early on, I would say my team realized early on, like we can't leave the most vulnerable populations alone at a time when this is a very critical time for their survival, right? And so we have been working around the clock. Again, my hats off to Chris and to try to find tech solutions to reach out to them. And we've been fairly successful in doing that. So what do you do? What do you actually do? You're gonna do some research in the laws of that country?  It depends. So basically what we do without saying too much about, too much about what we do is we really mentor and guide, right? So we teach the principles of international law, humanitarian law. We talk to our local partners about what cases they would like to bring. We present options. Now we're using all video, et cetera, but we're hoping to advance to more high-tech tools such as the one that I described that provides them with the internet boost and allows them to communicate with us more readily. Those are areas of greatest concern. I don't know if you recall the Darfur genocide that occurred around the mid-2005. Well, it never went away. And it's still going on now. And many of, I mean, they're under transition. Al-Bashir was ousted in 2019, but yet they are still suffering. So do you ever communicate to a particular political official that he or she are engaged in the violation of human rights and that could be construed as a war crime and when this is all over, they may find themselves prosecuted in the egg or otherwise? Do you ever try to modify their conduct directly? Yeah, we try to do like, through our cases, yes, we try to engage. We're very mindful that we don't want to create more tension, right? And so in these transitional governments, we really want to see a win-win situation. We want behavior to change. We want an acknowledgement for those that have been harmed, for example. And so we don't want to further antagonize a situation and we are very, very mindful about that. It's never a threat. It's just, let's make this come together and work. We haven't found that approaching people and telling them that I'm gonna, it's not our country. I am walking into somebody else's theater and I am working with partners that are of a different nationality than I am. So we don't approach it like that. Cynthia, we've talked a couple of times already and I must say I hold you in such admiration for what you do. But it strikes me that when you were prosecuting in the egg and now you're dealing mostly with Africa, African countries, African cities, African governments or pretenders and some human rights in Africa. What about other continents? I mean, is this same sort of thing happening elsewhere? If I gauge myself by human flow, the I-Way-Way movie a couple of years ago, I come to the inevitable conclusion that this sort of outrage happens really everywhere, does it? Yes. Well, I would say, well, we don't always work in Africa. We have a very strong Southeast Asia program. But in Southeast Asia, we focus more there because for example, in Cambodia, you recall Pol Pot, right? So they're well past that transition. Are they out of it? No, it takes decades. So we work there on the things that we can, which is trafficking, and because that's a very prevalent crime, to ask a family to sell their daughter is normal. For the family to say yes is normal. It doesn't mean they're bad parents, Jay. It means that they don't have any options. So we work to protect those individuals and try to identify the networks that are exploiting them as well. Would you say that this sort of thing, this sort of violation, this sort of disrespect for human values is a cultural thing? You talk about how it takes decades to correct it, decades to sort of get it out of town, push it out of the system. Why is that? Why can't we just say, wait a minute, these are fundamental principles of the human experience, stop. Right now, stop. Why doesn't that work? Why does it take you so long? Well, that's a, I mean, that's the million dollar question, right? It's because I think a lot of the root causes are oftentimes not addressed. And, you know, taking a very Western approach, we are very much interested in, and, you know, let's have these individuals that live in X country. Let's strike a peace deal now, you know? And so we're very keen on the output, which is the peace deal, but I don't think that we're really good listeners. And we need to listen more carefully about the root grievances and work more towards like a restorative justice approach where we can really repair those communities that have been hurt, you know, the hardest hit, if you will. You know, Cynthia, I keep on thinking about John F. Kennedy. That's just me. I keep thinking about- A lot about it as well. The Peace Corps. Yeah. And the Peace Corps was more than just helping and build a bridge across a creek somewhere. The Peace Corps was about showing them American values and sort of somehow blocking outrageous things.  Well, we gave it up and we're afraid now, maybe legitimately so, about going into some of these dangerous places and exposing young people a la the Peace Corps to environments where, you know, they could be kidnapped or hurt or killed. And I wonder your feelings about trying to address these root causes right on the ground, just like JFK did, by sending our American kids overseas and having them engage with other cultures on the ground everywhere and instilling a sense of respect for humanity. You think there's a chance of that, would that work? And will we ever be able to do that? I mean, the Peace Corps is alive and well. What I wonder is what happened to, I mean, and I say this carefully, but I wonder about the generation that JFK was speaking to and the morals and values and the things that those individuals who joined the Peace Corps wanted, right? Were they engaged in the process? Were they interested in other cultures? These places that I go to, I mean, honestly, they're not any different from here. And I have actually had more negative experiences in Hawaii than I have outside in the, you know, in any of these so-called scary places. They're not scary, they're people just like us. And if you look them in the eye and you take the time to listen, you'll get there. But I don't know if the profile of the Peace Corps candidate today shares those values. I myself am 55, so I'm not, I don't think of the target audience, but I can say that, you know, I don't know. I think you'd have to pull the, pull that audience. Yeah, okay, okay. And maybe we have an audience like that. I mean, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations do suggest that we have a youthful and idealistic, altruistic group in this country who may have better values than the previous generation. One minute. But you know, I wanna ask you this.  Well, I know that we can only lead by example, right? And I would suggest to you that there's nothing different about me than the next person. It's just about will and purpose. And to me, I think that, you know, I'm not playing in the US political game. I don't care about politics. It's important to know what's happening and it's important to be engaged, understand the dynamics, but I'm more committed to just having a more peaceful world and making sure that everyone has equal opportunity. And so that's where I'm coming from, right? So I don't think that there's anything different about me. I just think it boils down to what you're willing to do. And I would say that as much as I give, I get gold in return because the people that I work with are gracious, thankful, and they have suffered the most horrendous things.  I'm looking at my notes. In Darfur, it's 9 million people, 600 health facilities. It's the size of Spain. It's huge, you know? So we just have to do what we can. That's how I see it. Okay, well, you know, you are unusual for me, as you know, but I wonder if you could, we're out of time, so I wanna ask you one last question. You know, there are a lot of people out there, especially including young people who may not exactly know you know, what's going on out there in Africa and other places in terms of human rights, in terms of the way, you know, people have to struggle to simply live. And my view, we have to make them aware of that. We have to make them global thinkers. That's right, global thinkers. And what I would say is good listeners and kindness. You know, let us not fight. I was at the open market the other day and someone was fighting about the mask and I was like, I don't see why that's worth complaining about when somebody's, you know, we're in a safe place. Let us not be entitled and complain. Let us use our superpower for good, right? Yeah, let us appreciate our good fortune. And let us be kind. Yeah, and play it forward. And play it forward, yeah. There she is, now we know Cynthia Tai playing it forward. And dedicated to making the world a better place. Thank you so much, Cynthia. And you know what? We got to do this again. I know we understand all the points you wanted to cover, but we will next time. I promise you that. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Namaste, aloha.