Biohazards and Vaccines

Shawn faces the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the 2PP works it down to the ground. Extra credit for those who know which of Shakespeare's plays "slings and arrows" comes from!!

What is 2 Parachutes Podcast?

The Two Parachutes Podcast is a collaboration, well, more like a conversation, between a CEO and an FBI Agent. Shawn Baker-Garcia and Scott Olson first met when they were working at US Embassy Baghdad; Scott for the FBI and Shawn for the US State Department. Over the years they’ve worked together, given advice and assistance to each other, and now see that the synergy which comes from open, civil, and thoughtful discussion is very much needed in the modern discourse. Join them as they dive into everything interesting to humanity. The goal of 2PP is to recreate the experience most people have had when they stumble into an insightful conversation with a new acquaintance at a conference or a dinner party. The kind of conversation that makes the rest of the room stop talking and listen. The kind of conversation that gets your mind working as new thoughts tumble out. Let the 2 Parachutes Podcast drop into your world!

Scott: 00:02

Hey, Sean.

Shawn: 00:03

I apologize. I'm in a weird spot today because of my back. I have to sit in a certain type of chair. So I hope I was hoping I I don't know about the lighting if it's gonna work or not, but I'm gonna try to get myself adjusted here. It's it's I've got one of these wing backed kind of parlor chairs, guess, like living room chairs.

Shawn: 00:27

They're really nice, but it's, you know, I, yeah, the only place that we have one is in the living room facing outside. Open them, of a cosmetic mess today, Scott. It's okay.

Scott: 00:43

No, it's, yeah, the lighting isn't great. Love the background.

Shawn: 00:52

I wish I had

Scott: 00:53

heard it on your face, but

Shawn: 00:54

I wonder if I could turn it around here a little bit, you think? If I might be able to squiggle somewhat. Is that a little better?

Scott: 01:03

Yeah. It's just it's it's a little better.

Shawn: 01:08

A little better.

Scott: 01:09

We're not always gonna have a great one, particularly with your back. I can see pain in your face. Yeah. How you feeling today?

Shawn: 01:22

Yeah. Today, I'm feeling better. I you know, whenever it's like when I can't get out of underneath stress, it exacerbates things and last yesterday was a, well, I had a rough sleep night the night before. And then yesterday my, I have two cats and one of them, they're both 11. And Chucky, the orange one, had a procedure to remove a tumor, a lung tumor last December.

Shawn: 01:50

And then, you know, he went in for x rays checkup, I think two or three months ago, he seemed fine. But yesterday, Greg and I found something, a rather large, aggressive feeling lump that just kind of appeared overnight he's wheezing and coughing. So a little stressed about that. I think that, you know, sort of did me in a little bit, but we're taking him tomorrow to go get him checked out. So, you know, I'm not gonna try, I'm trying not to think about it.

Shawn: 02:22

You know, it'll be what it is.

Scott: 02:24

Just be

Shawn: 02:25

what it is, you know?

Scott: 02:26

Old is this one?

Shawn: 02:27

He's 11. We've had him, you know, and I would have assumed that my indoor cats, because again, I have two, they're both 11, would have lived kind of like longer, robust lives. They have been healthy mostly, but I had a street cat that lived to be 15 and he contracted feline AIDS like the second year of his life. And they were just like, yeah, he's not gonna And this was back in the nineties where it's like same I don't know that they could do much about it. He ended up living fifteen years.

Shawn: 02:59

That's pretty good life for a cat I think you know.

Scott: 03:03

You trigger memories in me and I just love that so much I think it's part of what makes chatting with you for me interesting but yeah so you just triggered this memory of years ago I would, watch that show Hoarders

Shawn: 03:23

Okay.

Scott: 03:28

Remember, you know, over the episodes one of the issues was, you know, people who are living in that hoarder situation with, sometimes a lot of garbage around. It's so unhealthy and it's so unhealthy. I remember this one episode where they were in a kitchen and they were throwing things away and they had these little waxed containers full of soup stock, and there were a number of them that were past their date and were actually ballooned out like they were growing bacteria.

Shawn: 04:03

Really bad, yeah.

Scott: 04:05

And so the family was throwing them away and the hoarder was really angry that they were throwing away perfectly good food. And the facilitator said, you don't eat this, and she goes, yeah, it's perfectly fine. As long as the seal isn't broken, I have no problem with it at all. And they couldn't believe it. And then they talked to a medical person, and the medical person said, Yeah, she's living in this environment and it hasn't killed her.

Scott: 04:36

She's eating this food and it hasn't killed her. Her system is really resilient because it's been exposed to so much biohazard that she's actually really, really strong. And so that's what your outdoor cat made me think of. Mean, I juxtapose with my dad, and he passed earlier this year and you know it was sad because he's my dad and he passed away, but he was 91.

Shawn: 05:10

Oh good for

Scott: 05:10

him. Yeah, which is great, but his big thing was I've never been an exercise guy. So I've never been an exercise guy and I don't exercise and I don't do this and I don't do that. And part of what caused him to pass was his systems were just shutting down because he never exercised and he was never exposed he wasn't a hoarder he was never exposed to any of this stuff and so he may have lived longer although 91 is great but his system was not resilient and isn't it funny that we go to the gym and exercise but make sure we clean all the surfaces. It's like okay I get that but now I'm starting to think you don't want to immerse yourself in toxic biohazard but in some ways

Shawn: 06:04

Have we over sanitized our life?

Scott: 06:06

Well, yeah. I mean, some ways, little kids going to school is important. It sucks if you're the parent and they bring home all these colds and so you get sick, but part of being communal animals is being exposed to things so our systems get resilient. So it's just wow what a little thought train while you're sitting there.

Shawn: 06:32

Right, that was

Scott: 06:33

a I'm over here just being entertained.

Shawn: 06:36

Side questing is my favorite hobby conversation side questing and I think that you certainly have hit on something that I have instinctively felt for a very long time. And I don't know that either of us are super prepared to go into sort of the vaccine debate or anything, but understand why people are concerned from both sides of the spectrum. It's like, you know, human sort of natural ability to resist disease and infection and viruses, obviously is something we should care deeply about, particularly if it's deadly. I think that's gonna be an automatic no brainer for me. But I do have to wonder, in this current climate, you're not really, it's still sort of like overly sensitive to question, are these sort of vaccine cocktails, like with the frequency in which they're generating them?

Shawn: 07:40

And by they, I mean, the scientific community that is trying very hard to help humanity, I believe that. But, you know, are we moving too fast? Are we doing too much? Are we skipping steps? Are we, you know, waiting around long enough to see what the long term effects are going to be, you know, from issuing some of these new vaccine types.

Shawn: 08:02

Again, I don't have answers, and I'm not telling anybody to do anything or not do anything. But I do think that I've only recently seen debates open that are where there are individuals or platforms willing to take those conversation questions on. Because up until then, you know, I think everybody was in this COVID mode of just like, don't question any of the science and don't question anything. Well, I get it, know, I mean, if, you know, I don't want to go back to the days of, you know, polio and, you know, Spanish flu or whatever other, you know, horrible diseases we've been able to conquer. But I do I just I don't, I don't know.

Shawn: 08:40

Like there, there have been a lot of stories that I've seen online and material that I've read that are saying that we're either, you know, over inundating our system with stuff we don't need to, especially among younger kids maybe, but also going to your point, it's like, you know, maybe we're not exposing ourselves to enough of certain things. But what does that look like? Is that just sort of at the community level where it's like your kid's school system or your neighborhood or your city or township or whatever? But yeah, I think these are all human problems that come from expanding our human collective experience and moving outside of kind of contained tribes, right? Like contained townships.

Shawn: 09:27

And where it's like now we're solving problems for human interaction, because the human interaction is exceeding those tribal contained experiences, you know, that probably had and I'm sure that there's some perimeter historically that like, people could subsist and coexist in a way that it strengthened the community that it was like that herd community was built in because it was a small enough community to be affected. But those are I love those questions. I love that kind of conversation angle. So I'd love to hear, I don't know, maybe what your thoughts are on all of that.

Scott: 10:03

Yeah, and it's complex, and there are so many threads to follow, I think that it is useful in the conversation to try and follow all of them, try follow many of them. The one that really jumps out to me is you have this notion of a vaccine, which as I understand it at least is designed to make the body trigger and produce antibodies to fight off the smallpox or polio or whatever it is. And, you know, at the same time, there's going to be a very small number of people who get that vaccine. I mean, if we're talking about when I grew up in the 60s, there wasn't a don't get vaccinated, things are going to be bad sort of presence in dialogue. It was or there's going to be a very small minority of people who actually get the disease.

Scott: 11:10

And my question is how do you resolve that now? It becomes a Star Trek thing. Are the needs of the many truly more than do they truly outweigh the needs of the few or the one? It's very easy if you are one of many to do. Becomes much more difficult if you know one of the one that suffered the disease and maybe didn't survive the disease.

Scott: 11:45

It becomes more difficult if it's your child. It becomes even more difficult if it's you. How do we actually reconcile that not in a academic way? Know, here are the numbers, here's the data and the bad is so you know minutely small then this is a good outcome. What do you do when you see that child in the hospital bed?

Scott: 12:11

What do you do if you're the doctor having to tell the parent of that child that they are the one tenth of 1%? A session or two ago, were talking about fairness and justice. That takes us over into, you know, these notions of right and wrong. I think we need to grapple with that. Not struggle with it, but we need to acknowledge it.

Shawn: 12:43

Yeah, just confront it, yeah.

Scott: 12:45

Yeah, it's like we were talking about veganism and vegetarianism a couple of sessions ago. It's how do you go to a place to choose what you're going to eat while also acknowledging the biology of your body rather than rejecting it because you don't like it? How do you, acknowledge that overall trying to get rid of something like smallpox is good, or get rid of the measles is good, even though there's this very small but very terrible human cost. I don't know the answer, but I think the pathway, and maybe the answer is just the conversation. Think an easier way to quantify the conversation is what parents go through when their kids have a sniffle.

Scott: 13:45

It's something that you alluded to a little bit, which is, my child feels bad. I'm going to go to the doctor and get medicine to knock this thing out. One of the first things I learned is there's a difference between a virus and a bacteria. I think the virus is the one that just needs to run its course. What do you do as a parent, particularly if you don't have generational support?

Scott: 14:11

If you don't have sort of groups of grandparents and aunts and uncles that have been through this to tell you, yeah we get it, your child is sneezing up green goo and crying and doesn't understand what's going on and it feels terrible for the child but it also feels terrible for you and you're struggling with I'm a bad parent and I just want medicine so that I don't feel bad because my kid is sick and I'm powerless. What happens? End up making resilient strains of everything because we're over medicating our kids. But how do you tell an otherwise successful young man and young woman that their child just needs to suffer when they're focused on problem solving? Yeah.

Scott: 15:04

You know,

Shawn: 15:05

and that's a big thing. That is, you know, because I think that there are some who are more built more to kind of withstand the, you know, because sometimes as a parent or as a caregiver, you know, you do have to steal yourself a bit and know that there's just going to be times when, you know, even if it's not actual, like suffer suffering, it's just discomfort and it's just unpleasantness and, you know, just generally just not going to be having a good day or week. You know what I mean? And when to kind of fight through that and let your body grow its own resilience as opposed to introducing a constant stream of pharmaceuticals to maybe artificially cultivate that resilience. I think the body is probably always stronger, you know, in the end, if it's allowed, and if it's safe to do so, you know, within those sort of parameters of, you know, life or death and relative risk of that, you know, kind of outcome of life or death.

Shawn: 16:10

You know, how do parents responsibly gauge whether or not this is something that they want to introduce? And I think the problem stems in 2025 and beyond. The reason why I think this is becoming so much more difficult for people is because it's directly in my opinion, it's directly related to the bifurcation of our political system. And because how much more of politics now it used to be that certain things were kind of the rules of engagement of politics was that there's certain things that are sort of off limits, you know, and maybe not entirely. I'm sure if you look far enough back in history, you can always find examples of something being politicized.

Shawn: 16:51

But I think, you know, beginning probably with the Obama admin well, no, probably, or even earlier than that, the the sort of rise of of the executive order and and, you know, the politicization of governance, I think, in our country where we don't, it's almost like we don't, we truly don't have any truly apolitical government entities anymore. Like it seems things are getting more and more politicized, where it's like appointees are taking over or, you know, the CDC, you know, people didn't trust that the Biden administration was not sort of shaping the science, right? Like, you know, or so, and again, this is not a me stating, I feel one way or the other about it. This is, but what I am saying is as a constituent of this nation, I can see that people don't trust, you know, half of the country doesn't trust one administration, the other half doesn't trust the other administration. And on top of that automatic built in constituent like mistrust is the fact that I do think it is within the realm of possibility that the science is being sort of coached.

Shawn: 18:01

It's not that they're coaching, not that political people are doing the science, but that I think political people influence the direction of where the research goes. And that there is a narrative there that's saying, well, we can't have this as an outcome because, you know, even if that's true, it's going to undermine the greater goal, which, you know, is to get people to act in a certain way with regard to vaccinations or testing or whatever treatment. Don't know. So I just think it makes it difficult because I think humans in America, at least, we're having a hard time knowing what we can trust anymore. And it's not because we don't trust science.

Shawn: 18:44

It's because that we fundamentally know that there are so many stakeholders involved, whether it's the big pharma or, you know, politicians or, you know, scientists being directed by one or the other, or you know what I mean? And to some extent that even extends to doctors, right? Like, you know, plenty of people in private practice, I think are really credible and good. I think there's probably credible and good doctors in non private practice who belong to these big sort of medical conglomerates that do medicine. But I've heard from doctors who are in the private end of it that it's not great.

Shawn: 19:18

It's not great. How how they get managed. You know, and and that's why so many doctors who are in it for the love of practicing medicine are are frustrated because they don't want to become part of the machine, you know, that that basically controls how they practice medicine. So, I think it's right to be skeptical. I don't think it's a rejection necessarily to say, Oh, we wouldn't have taken the polio vaccine when it was introduced.

Shawn: 19:42

Well, probably would have, and I think most people did, but clearly most people also had more faith in their government and their government systems back then than they do today. That shouldn't just be shut down and ignored, right? Like, you know, for those who are super hopped up on like pro vaccine everything, you know, it's a little disrespectful because it's like, you have to understand, like look around you. Do you really think that there's no reason for people to be skeptical or to ask, want more information or better information or to want to proceed with some caution, especially when it comes to the life of their children. But that's just one person's one humble citizen's opinion.

Scott: 20:23

Yeah. But we're not here to be arrogant. So I appreciate the humbleness, but we are here to charge the conversation. I think that we're in this space where maybe the core of the current is, what happens when the heart and the head are in conflict, and how do the heart and head push each other in ways that maybe aren't accurate? And when we're in this medical field, I mean, are so many different ways to quantify it.

Scott: 21:12

I mean, it's this notion of, well, care is a human right and therefore nobody should be not treated, whatever their problem is. Okay, I get that. And as a human being, I agree with it. But what about the doctor? Is the doctor now having chosen to you know learn how to help people now obligated to do it for free?

Scott: 21:48

How does the doctor eat? How does the doctor not be homeless? What's the price that we're going to put on this stuff? And then it gets more complex again, which is I have emphysema because, and this is the easy one, right? Because I smoked for twenty five years and so now I want medical treatment and I don't have the money to pay for it for what is essentially a well known self inflicted wound.

Scott: 22:19

And you still have people that are saying, Well, you can't just let somebody die because they can't breathe. But it's not a simple, we should all get together and try and get rid of human suffering regardless. Human suffering is a difficult thing, but when you're afraid, you make different decisions than when you're not afraid. Back when the polio vaccine was created, everybody was in fear of polio. You had parents who were having kids and they didn't know if their children were going to survive.

Shawn: 23:09

They often didn't. If

Scott: 23:13

a child got polio the chances are that child was gonna either die or live life in a wheelchair or live life in an iron lung, and it was horrific. So now you have this thing that is extraordinarily likely to solve that problem. There are gonna be a couple that still, have to deal with the tragic outcomes, but most people are safe. So in that world, when you have people that are scared of this thing and there's what appears to be an answer in that context, of course people are going to line up. And now decades later, when, you know, I've never even met anybody that knows anybody who had polio.

Scott: 24:04

I mean, I know that FDR had polio, but it's such a rare thing. I don't fear polio even though I can read how bad it is, and so it makes it a lot easier to go, oh well you know what do we do now with the people that take it and you know potentially setting aside the is there actual causation between any sort of vaccine and any sort of other disorder in the world setting aside that causation what do we do now when we're not in fear? And I think part of understanding decision making is understanding that today, when we're talking about medicine, we're talking about it from the standpoint of our children probably aren't going to die from the diseases that were killing children eighty years ago.

Shawn: 25:05

Generally,

Scott: 25:08

you don't expect infant mortality is a stat. It's not like you know somebody whose child died before the age of two. Used to be common. It's not common now. And so our fear level is different.

Scott: 25:28

Our concern of the bad thing to prevent is much reduced because we've prevented the bad thing. And it's very human, I think, to circle back around and go, well, we solved smallpox, but is this really the best way? What do we do with the people that are still facing this tragedy? And I think recognizing that the people who came before actually made a rational and good decision is a start point instead of saying, well, those people decades ago were wrong. It's easy to do that because you want to be right and if you're right, then they have to be wrong but I I I don't think that that makes us better.

Shawn: 26:14

No. Well, And were

Scott: 26:15

you on on that hard head thing?

Shawn: 26:17

Yeah. I think it's also just those were different times. Like, I think we would be better off as we like, people like to use talking points on both sides of the political spectrum to, you know, kind of make their case about, you know, if you're just looking at COVID, for example, you know, whether or not those vaccines, you know, are good or not good, like you should get them, how frequently, you know, what utility or necessity of boosters, again, with what frequency. And, you know, I think that a lot of times people are quoting things from prior, you know, sort of moments in history, where it's like, you have to be a good researcher if you're going to do that, though, because what you have to do is objectively look at what was influencing those human reactions and those outcomes for that time period. And you may find that there are a lot of dynamics and variables that are very different than what we are dealing with today in the COVID environment.

Shawn: 27:17

And so I just think people aren't willing to do the work. When they make their case, they're they're I, you know, because this was kind of, it's dampening down now that COVID's kind of in the rear view mirror, but like when it was at its height and there was a lot of fear and you did know people who were coming down. I mean, you know, I had it twice now. Like, you know, Greg's had it at least once, maybe twice. Like, Sadie's had it twice.

Shawn: 27:40

So, you know, it's happening to pretty much everybody. Now, can I say that I knew anybody who died from it? I mean, I don't know actually. And the reason I don't know that is because my biological father, I believe he had contracted COVID while he was in hospital he ended up dying. I don't I never saw the cause of death because I'm not close with with I was not so close to him that I would know the details.

Shawn: 28:07

I just knew that it happened. And I just knew that he had COVID but it didn't sound like COVID was the thing that killed him. If that makes sense. He had dementia and some other things going on. I'm sure it didn't help, right?

Shawn: 28:20

But again, think that if I were What I would love to see is a world where people if your goal is to get more people vaccinated and you firmly believe that's what needs to be done because it's the safest and you feel like you've done the work and the research, I think that's great. But I guess what I would tell my friends and folks who I know take that position, it's like, if your goal is to protect people, then the way that you're trying to get them to buy in is not to disinvite conversation and questions about the veracity or the validity of vaccines themselves. Let those conversations take place and don't just start calling people stupid or, you know, backwater or whatever they like to say, you know, because again, if you're genuinely interested in protecting these people and you just want, then, maybe the approach is what I would say. You probably want to alter that because you don't know what you don't know and they may have a lot of really valid reasons for questioning this and and so, it was hard for me to watch those those brutal online battles where people are just slinging mud at each other.

Shawn: 29:32

And it's like people that I care about on both sides of that conversation and people I respect on both sides of that conversation. It's not like the dumb and the educated, right? This is not a daytime soap opera like that, you know, it's it's it's the educated and the educated and and, know, yeah, somewhere rural or urban and somewhere, you know, suburbs but like, I just felt like it was it was interesting to me how hostile the conversation got so quickly.

Scott: 30:02

Yeah and it's

Shawn: 30:03

And that doesn't help us.

Scott: 30:05

It doesn't, but again it's very human and

Shawn: 30:09

you

Scott: 30:09

know I think it bears repeating that you know fear drives anger, you know, when you're afraid, you're not happy. When you're afraid, you're not calm. You are spun up and on alert and you want to protect. And generally that drives anger, whether you're angry aggressive or angry withdraw. Fear and anger are parts of the same emotion set, and we definitely saw that.

Scott: 30:40

And we saw this fear that came from this new thing. I have a hard time getting away from what the appearance of it. I mean, this was made to look like a new thing. And yeah, it was a new, you know, it's not a chemical, but I can't think of a better word. Was a new virus.

Scott: 31:12

It was a new thing. It was different than other viruses. But I think I heard at one point that, even at the height of COVID, more people were dying from the standard flu bug than died from COVID. And if that's true, that simply means that if you're compromised by other things, then an illness that your body will otherwise fight off, it can't fight off, and it's just like the hoarder, and it's like your outdoor cat. If your immune system is strong, then it can fight it off, and we found that in the twentytwenty hindsight that the people who died from COVID were people who were already compromised with other things.

Scott: 32:01

I I have a friend who lost most of her family, but they were all chronically suffering from conditions, for decades. They were all 60 to 80 years of age, and none of them cared to go to doctors. And so they were compromised and they didn't get health care. And it was tragedy for my friend to lose. She lost her parents and a bunch of aunts and uncles, but it also wasn't a particular surprise.

Scott: 32:38

And again, when you compare COVID stats with regular flu stats, I mean, there are a lot of people who always get a flu shot. There are a lot of people who never get a flu shot. And anytime you get a sniffle, the first thing you do is, Oh, well, the flu shot gave me that, or, Well, I didn't have a flu shot, so of course I just suffer through it. But for me, where that takes me is the individual person generally, as individuals make their own decisions about how to deal with something like COVID, the general outcome is always going to be better than a centralized government decision about what to do. Most of the things that government did either made it worse, what Andrew Cuomo did in New York where there was a hospital ship that lay vacant while he required nursing homes to take residents who had gone to the hospital for COVID and were still contagious back into those homes.

Scott: 33:52

That was taking people who were ill with COVID and putting them in environments where the most vulnerable people to COVID already were. That was just flat out a bad decision. And then there's the whole mask thing, and we went from masks aren't going to make a difference to you can't get on an airplane or be in any federal place or go to a restaurant without a mask, and masks demonstrably now didn't make a difference. But I think that there's something here to the appearance question. Appeared that COVID was different, and so our response was this huge thing.

Scott: 34:38

We needed to do something, and so the most visible thing that you could do is put on a mask. It's not effective, but it shows that you're paying attention. If you're getting on an elevator with somebody, don't know if they've had a vaccine, but you can tell if they're wearing a mask. And so it almost becomes, we talk about performative presence or virtue signaling on, you know, philosophic matters. Know, I'm a vegan, I'm not.

Scott: 35:15

I believe in green energy, I'm not. You know, too. I'm paying attention, you know, to my health. You can't and to your health too. And so I don't know what the discussions were like that led to the promulgation of these, you know, shutting schools down and wearing masks, but it brings me back to something.

Scott: 35:43

I don't know if you remember Dick Gephardt, who was a leading Democrat years ago and I remember there was some issue that was pending and the criticism of what the bill was was that it wasn't effective and I remember him in front of the camera with a really frustrated tone going, well, we got to do something. Sure. We need to do something. And I think that's the fundamental problem with government is when you have these problems that aren't We have COVID and people are going to get sick. Well, our job as the government is to make sure people aren't going to get sick.

Scott: 36:23

It takes a certain amount of willingness to be honest to say, COVID is coming and we can debate the causes of it and it sucks, but a lot of people are going to get sick. And so take care of yourself. And It's not not caring to say, Hey, take care of yourself. Wash your hands. Who knows?

Scott: 36:48

Do those kinds of things when there's a segment of the population who says, hey, we got a problem and government should do something.

Shawn: 36:58

Yeah. But this is No, not kidding yourself. You're hitting a chord so hard on me right now. Like, this is that idea of like, has our federal system grown too large for what it was intended or what it responsibly should be intended to do? And there is a weird metaphor that's growing in my head that I think is there's a there for us about that.

Shawn: 37:23

But it's like, if you keep your, at the state and local levels, kind of keep the care contained. Like, yes, you can have federal guidelines that kind of issue information and travel advisory warnings and like maybe even set up in major airports or train stations like, you know, because again, we do, we're a country that moves from states to states to, you know, facilitate trade and, you know, family and everything. So that's fine. But, you know, I think you inoculate your state from the country, from it killing itself by maintaining smaller enclaves of control over these things, because then if one part of the system fails, it doesn't take the whole system down. You know what I'm saying?

Shawn: 38:14

Does that make sense? Makes

Scott: 38:16

perfect sense.

Shawn: 38:17

And that's a metaphor for kind of healthcare, right? Because you wanna inoculate, you wanna keep the system protected. The other metaphor that came to my mind. So, in other words, my, I agree with you. I think this, it's too much and it's too big for the federal system to handle and I don't think it should because of that size because again, you're going to take the whole system down because if the federal system fails, the whole country goes down.

Shawn: 38:41

If you have one state system fail, the whole country does not go down. You know what I mean? And you can put the appropriate checks in place to manage that or contain it. The second metaphor that I think resonates with this in that whole using that inoculation and well-being is because again, you know, whatever era where we discovered polio, which I think it was at the turn of the last century, right? Like in the early 1900s or something.

Scott: 39:07

I'd have to look it up.

Shawn: 39:09

Yeah. I'd to look. I just know that f I know, like you said, FDR had it. So, you know, I know that it probably was still an issue, you know, in the first decades of of, you know, the last century. But if you look at what was society, what was American society like then versus what it was in 2020 when COVID became a thing or 2021, you know, you're talking about a dramatically different ecosystem and and a lot more people and a lot more diffusion and a lot more differences among the different population centers, Even among the urban centers, it was probably different.

Shawn: 39:44

So one of the things that is being introduced into American and global sort of societies is with the rise of technology and more access to fake content or skewed content or non objectively conducted research, etcetera. That is a danger, right? That's the same as a virus. It represents a danger to like our societies. And so I actually think people on the left, what I think would be important for them to maintain perspective is to say, well, what if people pushing back and people asking questions and trying to validate things, that's the body trying to protect itself from a virus that's coming, which is misinformation and disinformation.

Shawn: 40:30

And it's out. You know what I mean? And it's actually good that they're starting to push back. Whereas maybe in the early 1900s, we were more homogenous of thought, we had less distrust in our elected officials. Like, you know, for the most part, scientists were not, you know, sort of politicized and their work was not politicized potentially as much.

Shawn: 40:49

And again, I could, maybe I'm wrong on all of this. I don't know but where my brain was going was like, when you start to enter into a phase of your existence where it's getting more and more difficult to verify or validate what is true from what is not, the body mounts a response to protect itself. And that is to be skeptical. That is to like hold those scientists and researchers and government officials feet to the fire because that is our way. That's the only way we're gonna protect ourselves from a future of being taken out by a virus that is intended to, like the AI virus, right?

Shawn: 41:26

Like, because everything is a deception now. So, I think it's a natural evolution. It's not that we're being difficult or, you know, disbelieving in sort of the math, right? It's that we sense that there could be manipulation and there are reasons why those spidey senses are tingling. And we shouldn't encourage people to ignore that because that is to do that is to ignore a very real human and really powerful human instinct.

Scott: 41:57

Yeah.

Shawn: 41:58

Of survival. So two two little metaphors using the inoculation. You know I think that's cool.

Scott: 42:04

Yeah, yeah, love it and I think they track and it's I think sometimes in my opinion it's not that instructive to look back at the way it was before because you get stuck in this compare and contrast loop. Now, I was a history major in college, so

Shawn: 42:24

Same.

Scott: 42:24

At some level, think history is instructive because you're recognizing that you're not the first person to trod a particular path and that helps you make better decisions today. But I think being aware that there's history, but also understanding that decisions that were made decades ago, it's useful to understand why those decisions were made so that we can understand, like you say, we're in a different environment today and we're doing different things. Because we interact with the world differently. One of the big differences that I see is that we can look anything up. I mean, we talk about not knowing when the polio vaccine was created, but if we just hit pause for ninety seconds, both of us are going to find it on our phones very easily and that was not possible twenty years ago.

Shawn: 43:28

You

Scott: 43:29

would have to go to whatever encyclopedia your parents had in your house and you could look it up that way. But the impact that I see is since we can know anything immediately, we think we can know everything, and that really is the problem. I'm going to pick a scab here, for a lot of people, but when we look at anything where people are saying follow the science, science doesn't provide answers. It doesn't because we can't measure things. We can't know things.

Scott: 44:14

Climate science, if you actually read it, recognizes that we don't know if the planet is heating because we can't measure it. It would be like me taking a thermometer and sticking it in the lake that's outside my back door here and saying, oh the lake is 62 degrees. Well the lake is a mile wide and 25 miles long. The place where I put the thermometer is 62 degrees, but if I take it out and put it in again it might stirred and changed and now it's 61 degrees. And so it's not that we can't measure something, it's that we can't extrapolate it and then we say well you know we can do 800 data points and get the average of the lake.

Scott: 45:03

Okay, and that kind of tells me if I want to jump in and swim or not on any given particular day, but it doesn't really tell me if a particular, for example, bacteria is going to grow. If that bacteria needs to be within 59 plus or minus one degree. And so we think we can know everything. We have COVID coming. We think we can know what the answer is and we just need really smart people to come up with the answer.

Scott: 45:34

I think the answer and this comes back to know Ludwig von Mises for me Frederic Hayek, which is individual people making individual decisions always produce a better global outcome than a small group of experts or really smart people working in government or an NGO saying this is what we got to do. Because the diffuse decision making always produces a better outcome. I'll illustrate the point to you. How many times have you gone into a store just because it looked interesting, and you're shopping around and then the person comes up to you and says, oh can I help you find something? And you're like, well you know I guess I'm looking for a pair of shoes and all of a sudden you're stuck in this conversation about shoes when what you really want to do is just explore and look around.

Scott: 46:38

Can you imagine if the way stores were was that as soon as you hit the door you had to go through a screening process where you had to say this is what I'm looking for and then you were escorted making sure you didn't bump into anybody to that place to buy that thing. Well you look at stores now to the extent we go to stores and people walk in and they don't bump into each other and they generally avoid contact and they might say hi and each individual going into that store doing what they want to do makes the entire store work. It it works.

Shawn: 47:16

So let me ask you a question because I have an an observation based on what you say from this. So in your analogy or this metaphor you're using, for example, it's it's like you walk into a store because something piqued your interest and you saw something from the outside and you said, okay, I want to go in there and I want to like explore and look at things. What what's the counteraction to like not being, like, like, so then, there's a scenario somebody intercepts you, which I all, we all, I, I, surely, everyone must hate it, because I hate it, I, you know, I just want to be left alone to like, do my thing, but, you know, they've got a mission and their mission is to sell you on things and to make sure you walk out with things in your pocket and hands and you know, or maybe not so much things that that, you know, take what's in your pocket out and give it to them and and they'll exchange by putting things in your hand. What's what's the benefit of the alternative? Now, I know instinctively what I would say is the benefit of being left alone, right?

Shawn: 48:14

But what what is your analysis of like what that represents when you're when they don't do that to you? Why is that a good thing?

Scott: 48:22

The benefit of structuring a person's walk through the

Shawn: 48:26

Well of not doing that because I think what you were saying is that kind of is limiting when they intercept you or maybe I got it wrong. Maybe you are saying that that's actually better than you just meandering.

Scott: 48:37

Yeah. So I'm using the metaphor to distinguish between centrally controlled behavior versus individually controlled behavior.

Shawn: 48:47

Sort of

Scott: 48:51

freedom versus central planning the political sense. I think freedom is always better because it leads to happiness. And I think central planning goes off the rails because it thinks, well, things will be more efficient.

Shawn: 49:09

Yes.

Scott: 49:09

Therefore better if we just control everything. Yeah. And it it's it's this human nature thing, it almost comes back to what you were talking about about, you know federal, state and local. Know and it's this notion of well if we don't control what everybody's doing then we'll have different outcomes and that's not fair. And that's a very heart intuitive thing.

Scott: 49:32

But you know in my view it's actually false. What's that?

Shawn: 49:38

It's limiting, it's so limiting, it's not giving people the opportunity to do the right thing.

Scott: 49:43

Yeah or to just to be exposed to something else. I walk into a store and I think I need shoes and I walk out with a jacket because it's a really cool jacket.

Shawn: 49:54

There it is. But

Scott: 49:56

it's the freedom that comes from, again you're not swimming in a pool, you're swimming in surf, and you may get pounded by the surf, but the surf may take you somewhere that you didn't know you wanted to go. I think that's part of being human, but know, it's freedom for me but not for thee. I want to do what I want to do but I want to make sure that you don't do anything bad. And that's that federal state thing. I know I'm skipping around a little bit, but the point I wanted to make was for a long time in the history of The United States, murder was not a federal crime.

Shawn: 50:36

I see.

Scott: 50:37

Was generally if someone was being prosecuted for harming another person at the federal level, it was a civil rights violation. I should remember the amendment, but it's a person's life, liberty, happiness shall not be harmed. The federal crime was, you have deprived this person of life. You have deprived this person of liberty by harming them. But murder was a state crime, or usually a state crime, not even just a local crime.

Scott: 51:17

Well, you know, we need these bigger things and that's the eternal tension when you have bigger and bigger groups of people that need to figure out how to get along. And I love your metaphor, but I wanted to ask you your opinion on the education department, because that's exactly what this is. We have this thing that I think was created by President Nixon, or President Carter, President Carter, which didn't exist before. And now is being made much smaller and maybe done away with to the howls and cries about how terrible this is going to be. But you know, parents really not care about how their children aren't educated?

Scott: 52:05

Do local school boards really not care? Do they really need to be told to, you know be nice and wash their hands?

Shawn: 52:15

Sure yeah well so I think that's a wonderful question and I think there is a I have all the opinions but you know recognizing we're about you know four to five minutes from our hour which is shocking to me. I, like, I want to just before we, I say, let's, let's table that for the next session, because I would love to dig into that. I think there, it's a rich discussion point, and I think there's a lot that people would be interested in hearing because I think a lot this is on a lot of people's minds right now. I want to close out where we were going with your last metaphor though or your example because you hit me. I mean, my whole body is just like energized right now because you're exactly honing in on something that I think is so, so essential for people to just realize and I think they have an intuition about it but there's a lot of people who are not maybe able to articulate this is that there is power in freedom of choice in an individual.

Shawn: 53:15

So, it's it's not like hyper individualism in the sense that like, you know, every individual should, you know, have, you know, the freedom to do anything insanely and and they do and they can, I guess, but but there's that's there's another concept out there going that's like hyper individualism is actually destroying us right now on some level but but but not in a not in the context that you're describing? It that's a whole other thing. What I'm I love about it is that as as somebody walking into that store, you're you hit it exactly right. What what you're doing is you're prefabricating the experience to rob that person of agency to discover things and which, if they step foot there in the first place, probably means something caught their eye anyway. And chances are they may even walk out with something even more valuable than what you were trying to shove down their throat and they'll be more likely to return.

Shawn: 54:08

And so that is a metaphor for letting individuals choose what their experience is rather than to hover and to shape and dictate. And where this is happening in a really scary way which I know you're aware of but well, I'll just make the link to it because we talked about mis and disinformation before. This is this sort of like monitored market mercantilism is happening to us online every single day, Scott. If I go on to Facebook or if I go on to X or if I go on Instagram like the ads, the advertisements, like the minute I show that I've been on a link or a site for five seconds or more, all of a sudden, that is all that fills my feed.

Scott: 54:56

Yeah.

Shawn: 54:56

And so that's the same I just thought that was a phenomenal illustration of what's happening in the real world. But now that is transitioning over to the digital world and it's even more insidious because you can't tell that digital ad to go away. Gonna be the you know, you can set your settings but they're constantly finding ways to circumvent you. You know what I mean? And so it's whereas I can tell the shoe salesman I'd like to be left alone.

Scott: 55:28

Yeah. It's it's it's much more difficult than the digital.

Shawn: 55:31

Yeah.

Scott: 55:31

I think I that's exactly right. It's so funny though because you make me think of Pandora which is where I get my music. Sure,

Shawn: 55:40

oh yeah.

Scott: 55:41

And I think Pandora is wonderful because it kind of does that. Can, The way that I manage is I go in and I pick artists. So I'm not picking genres necessarily, but I'll pick an artist that I like and it plays similar artists and it allows me to thumbs up and thumbs down. And I have discovered so much music that I never even knew existed which I adore because I'm listening to Pandora and it fed me similar things and so again it's like fire it can cook your dinner and burn your house You look for Clorox wipes and now you've got ads for 30 different kinds of sanitary, I would put in the bad column. Listening to Led Zeppelin and finding Joe Bonamassa

Shawn: 56:40

is

Scott: 56:42

a good thing. We definitely need to talk about freedom because there are so many ways to understand what it is and what it means, and it really is, I think, a fundamental way of how people get along. But I think the discipline we need to observe is recognizing that maybe people aren't going to listen to us for two or three hours at a time.

Shawn: 57:09

Yeah. Yet. Maybe someday we'll

Scott: 57:11

get there. Maybe someday. So we got to sign this one off, but I hope we were able to distract you from your back at least for an

Shawn: 57:19

hour. Yeah, thank you. My tailbone's killing me right now, but I'll be okay. Yeah, it's weird. I got like, you know, but no, it was a fun conversation and it was an important one.

Shawn: 57:29

And, you know, I hope just in our going back and forth on on something like, you know, the condition of health care and people's choices and you know, what level people want to participate in their system at Like, hopefully, that was enlightening and leads to bigger conversations outside of this. This is is the conversation appetizer to what I hope are many conversation meals around the country. So

Scott: 57:53

That's right. We're gonna have a lot of appetizers. Yeah. Alright. Well, feel better, and, I will

Shawn: 57:58

see you next time. Thanks.

Scott: 58:01

Alrighty. Bye.

Shawn: 58:02

Bye.