Scott Loses Cell Service

Another cherry-picked episode. At this point we've worked through most of the rookie errors. Scott comes in needing Shawn's advice and perspective.

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!

Shawn: 00:03

Hi Scott.

Scott: 00:04

Hey Shawn.

Shawn: 00:05

How are you?

Scott: 00:07

I'm doing good. I need your advice on something.

Shawn: 00:09

Oh, bring it on.

Scott: 00:11

I had an interesting experience over the weekend and I think it's relevant to some of the things that we've been talking about, with regard to being present.

Shawn: 00:26

Oh okay. All ears. Once I get my headset situated. Yeah, yeah.

Scott: 00:32

And yeah, it'll give you plenty of time to get yourself together. You got a contact Well, place. Are you

Shawn: 00:37

I get my eyelashes are really thick and, you know, and we have animal fur and lint everywhere, so it's like I'm constantly battling something or other in my eye every other minute, but I think I'm good to go.

Scott: 00:51

Awesome. So earlier this week I flew down to California to see my middle child who's my boy, it was his birthday, he turned 32, and we went hiking and it was beautiful, did two nights in the Sierra Wilderness, this place called the Lower Twin Lakes, which is absolutely gorgeous, Northern California. Yeah. And it was beautiful and the funny thing that I've learned about going hiking, because I do a bunch of day hiking with friends here in the summer, is when you get far enough out, your phone loses cell service. But what happens now is your phone transitions over to a satellite connection.

Shawn: 01:38

I don't

Scott: 01:39

know if you've ever seen this, just like a normal iPhone, but all of a sudden you have this satellite connection and you're getting these little messages that say, hey, if you want to be in touch with everybody and do email and text and stuff, just hit this button and connect to the satellite and it never says how much it costs. But when you come back out, your cell service automatically pops back up. Well, what happened was we're driving out and for neither of us, we both have iPhones, for neither of us did we reconnect, and we are coming down the mountain and we should be reconnecting, but we're still in satellite, and we're going through these little resort towns, everybody's on their phones, and we can't because we're stuck in the satellite mode, And we stop down in the valley and get a bite to eat, and everybody's on their phones and ours are still stuck in satellite. And it was about a six hour drive for us from Northern California to South Of LA where he lives. So we're on the road for four hours with no ability to use our phones because it's stuck in satellite.

Scott: 03:05

He's driving and I am on my phone trying to problem solve this and of course I can't Google it because I got no connection. And it really made me start thinking about some of the conversations that you and I have had about connectivity and about putting the phone down. And I'm one of these guys that I do not sleep with the phone next to me. I feel like I do a pretty good job of separating myself. But here's the thing that I wanted your opinion on and your brain on.

Scott: 03:38

When I had my phone and I couldn't use it, it was stressful. Was like, it's one thing to put your phone down and choose not to use it, and it was a bit of a unique experience for me to have my phone there. It was just different to not be able to use it. And the funny thing was after four hours, my phone cooks off and then about ten minutes later, his phone cooks off and we have our connectivity. I'm looking over him and I'm saying, what I told him was, I have this really strange feeling of relief that I didn't expect to have.

Scott: 04:27

Like I didn't even realize how stressed out I was and there was just this difference between choosing not to use my phone, choosing not to have my face in the screen, and actually not being able to. That was really new and different.

Shawn: 04:47

So if I could ask a question, I guess the question I would ask is what is it that you thought would be missed? Like what were you afraid to miss? Because that's what I would have asked myself. I've had to talk myself down from anxiety a lot, you know, in my And so I've gotten good at asking myself questions, like probing questions that help me get to the root of what the anxiety inducing situation is or condition is. So, because there may, you know, maybe there was something there that, you know, it's not just a generalized and it could also just be a sense of I've never been in this or it's rare I'm in this situation.

Shawn: 05:35

I'm not super comfortable with it, you know, overall, but.

Scott: 05:38

Yeah, I mean I wasn't upset that I was stressed. I'm pretty good at coping with stress. I was just surprised that it mattered to me. And the thing was it had absolutely no impact on what we were doing. We knew where we were going, we didn't need the map, we were in a car, we could drive anywhere, credit card in the pocket, could buy anything, we had to go hungry, we didn't need to call anybody, We weren't on the hook for anything.

Scott: 06:12

We actually didn't need the phone at all. But there was this gap between choosing not to use the phone and not being able to use the phone, and that gap was more significant. I guess part of it was I wasn't even aware that there was a gap between those things. Put it down versus it's not connected. Yeah, it's fundamentally the same thing.

Scott: 06:48

And so the level of stress that I felt, I mean, did feel stressed because that's what I wanna sort of get your, opinion about, but it wasn't, Oh my God, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? What am gonna do? It was, Wow, I can't believe that this is a stressor. This is strange.

Scott: 07:11

There's nothing here to be stressed about. And I didn't start carrying around a phone until I was in my early 40s. Have lived still at this point, I lived two thirds of my life without a mobile phone, walking out the door, driving places, calling when I get there. And this was just an interesting illustration of how, I guess in some ways how dependent even a guy from my generation is on the phone. Don't if it's dependency.

Scott: 07:55

There's something about being able to if I choose not to. Sorry to interrupt you.

Shawn: 08:01

No, no, wrote three things down because this is really interesting to me. Again, I've had these struggles with different situations where I'm trying to assess what the core, you know, what might be the core reasons behind a certain feeling I'm having. And so I wrote three things down. All are just, I'll just say them as conversation starters, but I don't know that it So dependency is a consequence of something else, right? So there's other things going on that then make you dependent on a thing.

Shawn: 08:34

For drug addicts, it's like escapism or despair, and then the thing they're trying to combat is the addiction. And I see dependency in a lot of times similarly as, know, it's a less aggressive form of an addiction of sorts, but everybody on the internet says that this is a thing, right? Like our phones are becoming addictive in terms of like habitual use, unexplicable need to have it at all times and to check it. So here's what I wrote. I wrote control, agency, or self determination, right?

Shawn: 09:14

I'm making a choice and then expectation of conditions to change. So those are the three things that I know stress me out is if I want control or assume control, it's not even an active thing, it's just I assume I have control over this issue, which is very closely linked to the last thing I said, is expectation. So I find I'm least, I stop being stressed when I know I can't change it. So like when I was in Mongolia riding horseback for those two weeks and my luggage didn't show up. I very quickly recovered from that situation even though you would argue fully dependent on what was in that luggage because it was all my horse riding gear and it was very specialized stuff.

Shawn: 10:03

So I actually did need a lot of that stuff. I knew I wasn't in control of the situation and I had no expectation that the condition was going to change because we had a hard stop. Group had to leave the city within twelve hours and it was zero likelihood that my luggage was going to show up within twelve hours. Now, there was a slight chance and I did hold hope, but I actually had the plan as if we weren't. So, I had to go buy everything else.

Shawn: 10:29

I had to go into Ulaanbaatar City Center and buy a bunch of stuff. Again, if it didn't show up, then I still was going to need stuff, but then I was going have no window to go get it. That kind of forced me to just accept that it wasn't happening. Then agency is that very human natural desire to be self determining. Like, you know, that's the choice piece.

Shawn: 10:53

Well, I can choose not to do it, but I don't not having a choice in that. So I think I don't know if that's the same thing as dependency, those three things. I think they might be different, right? Because you're a very strong, you know, kind of I don't know if you think this way of yourself, but to me I see you as sort of an alpha male, you're self determinate, you do things according to your will. So those are all things that were sort of taken away from you, sort of unexpectedly.

Shawn: 11:29

I could see that, but then you went right into like, no, I'm going to try to problem solve it. It sounds like you were on your phone trying to do work, which is normal. I think most people would do that anyway. But again, doesn't sound like it was working. I would say, I don't think it's a phone dependency.

Shawn: 11:49

I think it's more you were just robbed of choice and you weren't expecting that. And so you weren't prepared to wrestle with that. Then there was still enough of a window or a sliver of hope that you were going to be able to find a workaround, which just elongated the frustration because as long as we little humans have hope, we're going to persist and try to get to a conclusion that we want. I do think that's different from dependence. My kid would have been dependent and she would have been cranky and probably fussy and frustrated, but that would be because it's like she was jonesing, you know what I mean?

Shawn: 12:32

Needed that outlet to the world because so much of her world, I think, it revolves around her virtual community is almost a replacement for community. So that's a different sense of urgency that they have when their phones are not with them. But I do think there's a there there about the phones and the role. That's why immediately when you first started talking about it, I went through the checklist. I was like, okay, well, if you're alone and you need to get access because if there's emergency, okay, their 911 access still activated?

Shawn: 13:16

If I wanted to take a picture of the beautiful scener, can I still do that? But you went through that checklist and it sounded like you had all the necessities. Yeah, don't know. What do you think after that I little sort of

Scott: 13:31

mean, so the way my brain works is that I'm gonna try and understand a specific thing by looking at things that are similar and going through a comparison to see if the similarity tracks or doesn't, and then I'm gonna throw away the stuff that doesn't track and try and grab the stuff that does track and use it. First example that comes to mind is, what if your car doesn't start? You're trying to get to work and you go and you have no reason to suspect that there's gonna be anything. And most people certainly in my generation have had this experience. I don't know if the analog would be, there's no Uber available or there's no Lyft available, but that creates a sense of, here are some problems, here's some troubleshooting that I didn't think I was gonna have to do, my entire timeline for my day is now thrown off.

Scott: 14:41

And so I do think that there's part of, and I can't remember specifically the phrase you use because I'm not enough of a detail guy, particularly when my thoughts are going, but, talk me about how you get that feeling of losing control because you no longer have a choice When a thing that you rely on to work no longer works, what is the coping mechanism and what's the impact? Maybe So it's not about the phone, it's reliance. I mean, I rely on my car to get me around. If I don't have that car, I have to do other stuff. I rely on my phone for checking in for my flight and communicating with people.

Scott: 15:39

And so of course the coping mechanism is I can go to a Starbucks and get Wi Fi. And so I don't have cellular service, but I can still connect my phone. And that's the coping mechanism. And as I'm thinking out loud through this just sort of recognizing that experience and the reliance on something and what the stressor is when the thing you rely on fails, it's not specific to the phone, it's specific to things that you rely on. And okay, the generational thing, I get that part but it's because from a young age, people are relying on phones.

Scott: 16:25

If you are 14 and you need to get to soccer practice and your parents' car doesn't work, you're gonna be stressed out even though it's not your car. You're relying on the parent to solve that for you, but it's still something that you, even though you can't drive yet are relying on. What happens when the electrical power goes out? It used to be that when power went out, well, the phone still works and the gas still works. And now, more and more, when the power goes out, your internet goes out, cell service goes out.

Scott: 17:01

So you actually, it's more of an impact, but it's more of an impact because of the infrastructure that we rely on. And I think that it's a universal thing. And we're looking for the, at 2 Parachutes Podcast, we're looking for these universal things, right? We're looking for the human experience and how it works. And so maybe where we're getting to, where you're pulling me to as I sort of randomly throw my problem at you is, you know, the human experience is to build things around you that make your life easy.

Scott: 17:43

Indoor plumbing, insulated walls, being able to get out of the weather, being able to keep warm in the winter, cool in the summer. What happens when that stuff that has been built around you fails? What's the human experience? Mean, what do you think of that? So

Shawn: 18:03

yeah, no, I like where that turn went because it broadened my aperture from thinking about how your experience was, oh, am I more dependent on the phone than I realized I was? And is there any kind of meaningful takeaway I should know about that? Right. And now having had you kind of take it to the next description after I kind of offered up what I initially heard was like, okay, I'm hearing maybe there was that like sense of control expectation of things going a certain way. I think the expectation of things going a certain way feeds into that reliability piece because you expect your car to start in the morning.

Shawn: 18:44

You expect your phone to start when you exit a dead zone. But then you took that a step further and what I'm now realizing is that the phone represents, it's more than just a tool of entertainment, it's actually now been bundled as entertainment, one part socializing. It's a socializing tool, which I guess is entertainment, still qualifies. But then there's this utilitarian or functionality piece of it, right? Which is credit cards now you don't need to carry around.

Shawn: 19:24

We're seeing less and less women with purses and men with not those big chunky wallets like they used to have. Now they're getting slimmer and slimmer. That's because the phone is now adopting all of these other storage roles, right? Stores your data, it stores your information, it stores your tools that allow you to function in society. It can open my car, it can pay my gas at the pump, it can get me into Costco, it can do all of these things that the phones until now have not fully been able to do so much.

Shawn: 20:03

It increases every single day. Like every day, I'm just mind blown about, I never used to look at my, if you go into your iPhone and you go into the, I think it's the wallet setting, right? Literally never used, up until last year, I never even looked at it. It was just not a thing I used. Fast forward 2025 and I live and die by my wallet.

Shawn: 20:30

Everything is in there. Everything, my credit cards, have a random, now it's like I've got Apple cash and an Apple savings account. I didn't open a proper bank savings account. I have an Apple savings. It's all digital.

Shawn: 20:44

It's fully I never had to go into a bank. I never had to sign any paperwork. Well, I did. I just had to do it on the phone. So that's an important evolution in terms of how we use technology and the function that it plays in our everyday life.

Shawn: 21:00

Again, it's like going to Verizon and getting a bundle, you know, where you're getting your cable and your phone and your Internet and everything literally in one bundled package for pleasure and for function. And the phones now, that's and maybe that's why it was a little bit surprising to you, I guess, that you wanted it more than you thought you would, or you thought you needed it maybe. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it's just that core realization that we use it for so much more.

Scott: 21:32

Yeah. And maybe that explains, I mean, the stress that I felt. And again, it wasn't debilitating but it was not stress.

Shawn: 21:46

It was enough to notice. And

Scott: 21:51

that's what it was. And I think there's something important here because I mean, we talk about how we interact with infrastructure and maybe there's not anything fundamentally different between your phone not working and, the metal key not working when you're trying to get into, the place where you live. We're surrounded by things that we expect to work and it's not a function of, well, this modern time, we're relying on all this technology, you know, that a person who is, you know, gets home from market and is putting their horse away, one hundred and fifty years ago, if the latch on the barn doesn't work, it's the same thing. It's, okay, now I need to deal with this. It's exactly the same thing.

Scott: 22:49

And maybe understanding that it's not this modern thing that's a problem but problems really are kind of universal and I would even take that we're getting entertained through our screens. We used to, just to pick from the wave tops, we used to be entertained by going to the theater. We used to be entertained by going to the music festival outdoors in a public place, and then you had a radio in your car and then you have a streaming service on your phone and now you're interacting with people through your phone. Okay, you're relying on the phone and you're not talking to somebody in person, what we're doing is hybrid, right? We're across The United States from each other, but we can see each other and we can interact and the technology is great for that.

Scott: 23:55

So it's still valid and it's still entertainment. And if a person is entertained scrolling through Instagram or they're entertained by putting on nice clothes and going to the theater, not a movie theater, but like an old time actual play, is that fundamentally different? If the difference is I'm being entertained, but the mechanism is different. And then I'm starting to see, news reporting on, people interacting with IA or AI for entertainment. Not to look things up and it's not to do work.

Scott: 24:45

I even saw an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago, where they're talking about people who think they're in romantic relationships with artificial intelligence.

Shawn: 24:55

Yeah, I've seen that. And

Scott: 24:57

I saw one a couple of months ago, where, there's a service in elder care facilities where a resident can pick up the phone and have a conversation with artificial intelligence. And it's good for their mental health, even though they know it's artificial intelligence. And I wonder if you have thoughts on that level of interaction. Because if we're distinguishing between interaction itself and entertainment itself, that is a separate entity from the mechanism that you get that. Is a play better than a movie?

Scott: 25:45

Because a movie is just on a screen. A play is actually people so that's better, right? Yeah. And how do you get your brain around that?

Shawn: 25:53

I think that there have always been mediums for human entertainment forever, I'm sure. And who knows what it was like in, you know, caveman, paleolithic times, you know, maybe they had less time to be entertained because life was much shorter and much harsher. But you have to have the sense that at the end of the hunting days, they were sitting around a campfire and had a minute to think and had a minute to just ponder or just observe at least in a more meaningful way when life wasn't sort of like kill or be killed kind of, you know, tempo. But I think that I think that as with most introductions of new widgets and toys and tools and technologies, I think that there will be a learning curve for humanity and that we will overindulge and we'll go too far and then we'll realize we went too far and then we'll pull back and we'll adjust and we'll find some sort of medium ground where it's like a sustainable way to use that technology, you know. Now, I'm sure there's probably plenty of people who would argue that we don't actually do a very good job at that, which is why we're in such dire straits as kind of a human civilization right now across the globe.

Shawn: 27:25

But it's funny, you mentioned example of going to see a plane versus seeing a movie theater. My little 10 year old potty brain head went immediately to the fact that I used to literally read, I remember being a little kid in the bathroom and I'm like, What can I read? And I'm grabbing hairspray products or something just because I don't know what that is. I don't know why people, and surely that hasn't always been a thing because was a time people couldn't read. You know, I don't know what were they doing in the woods?

Shawn: 28:01

They were probably actually, well, maybe that's it. Maybe I never thought about this and maybe I'm way off, but before reading and when you were out in the wild, you would be very vulnerable is when you would be relieving yourself, right? You're hiding behind some tree and you're in a kind of a compromise. So what were you probably doing? You were probably scanning around looking for things and trying to assess your relative safety while you were in your compromised position, right?

Shawn: 28:29

I don't know, maybe that's the thing. Maybe that's why we need something to read in the bathroom. I don't know because your brain is still trained to want to do something while you're doing other things as it were. But it just reminded me of that. It's like, yes, there's always, now we just take, because that's one critique you'll hear a lot of people.

Shawn: 28:48

It's like, Oh, you can't even go to the bathroom without taking your phone. And I'm like, Well, for me, don't think it's because people are, well, yeah, maybe some people are addicted to their phones, but I just think it's like, what do you do? You watch something or you read something? You're not fundamentally changing the human behavior, It's just a different expression of it.

Scott: 29:10

Yeah, and that's so funny. You pushed me like you always do to a thought and an example. I mean, remember going the first time that I toured Mount Vernon, where George Washington lived, that place doesn't have internal plumbing. So when George Washington needed to go, he had to walk across his lawn and go to an outhouse. And what's funny to me is how many people now don't know what an outhouse smells like.

Scott: 29:43

And when you go to the bathroom with indoor plumbing, it actually is a place that gives you solitude because you're gonna be in there by yourself, and since it's solitude and it's quiet and it's not unpleasant, you're relieving yourself and it doesn't smell. It has become now a place to relax, but up until indoor plumbing or if you're going hiking somewhere and, oh, good, before we go up the trail, we're in the parking lot at the trail head and I'm gonna go to the bathroom. I mean, the years, as you take mixed groups, there are people, women and men, that will not go into a forest service outhouse because it has flies and it's dirty and it's terrible and it's icky. And I'm going, Yeah, but what are you gonna do? Hold it until you get to indoor plumbing?

Scott: 30:48

And what's funny is some people do. And they actually get I've seen people get really upset that there isn't like indoor plumbing at a trailhead.

Shawn: 31:02

Yeah, wow, it's never bothered me ever, not once in my life.

Scott: 31:07

Yeah, but it's not the kind of place where you sit and relax Maybe what this is, is that when you're in a place where you can relax and your senses aren't being inundated with other things or you don't have risk, then you do need to fill that space and so again it's not a function of I can't put my phone down, it's a function of I want to be bored, but it has a funny push. I live next to a bike trail and a couple of weeks ago I saw a middle aged man with a little kid. The little kid is on the bike, the kid is probably six years old and is riding in front of what I presumed was the dad and the dad was riding his bike reading his phone. And I'm going, there's so much that is unsafe and bad decision making about that.

Shawn: 32:08

And

Scott: 32:11

maybe it's this, and I'm struggling with this now, but maybe it's this level of feeling like your bandwidth isn't full. I mean we pay money and take classes to meditate and then you know we go to the bathroom and we need to read something because otherwise we're going to get bored.

Shawn: 32:34

Well, and the board thing, wish I now I wish I had clicked on the article. I came across an article just this morning talking about the importance of allowing yourself to be bored. And all I saw was the headline and I didn't actually click and read through it, but my brain automatically was like, yeah, I know. Like, you know what I mean? Like, was like, I know.

Shawn: 32:58

And I've heard this before in other contexts, which is that part of our issue right now is that we are not allowing ourselves the quietude that is required in order to do the deeper thinking and to give your brain the deeper rest that it needs above and beyond just like obviously a good night's sleep. You know what I mean? But when like in throughout your day, if you're and I'm very guilty of this, very, very guilty of this, I I have a really difficult time, like kind of how you're characterizing it of like, quote unquote, being bored. Like my brain, I feel like it's inefficient if I'm not doing something. That's a theme you'll hear come up with me time and again is the efficiency thing.

Shawn: 33:49

Like, I feel compelled like I should always be doing something, but I think I sacrifice a lot of effective thinking for a lot of background noise thinking. Then I think I am the victim of my own. Like I constantly tell my staff this, it's like, you know, don't confuse just like motion with progress. Like it's not always the same thing. And so, you know, but I think I do it myself, like where it's like, if I'm filling my brain with something, I don't know, it's an experiment I should try out.

Shawn: 34:32

I don't know what will happen if I just don't pick up the phone. Again, even if it's a really long stoplight, I get fidgety and just like, Oh, I can just check this quick message. Know what I mean? And it's exactly what you're telling your kids not to do, right? But somehow you justify it in your head because you're like, Oh, I'm a digital.

Shawn: 34:56

I have more self control. Won't get distracted at the point where I'll miss the fact that the light has turned green. You know what I mean? But we do. You know what We I do.

Shawn: 35:05

It's no different than that. So I don't just know, know. Think that bordering's probably important and we probably need to figure out a better way to let it integrate into our lives beyond just pain for meditation sessions.

Scott: 35:18

Yeah, and it's that interesting tension I guess between you're doing things because you have the capability and if you have the capability then it bothers you to not do it. If you don't have that capability then it doesn't bother you. Before cell phones, people didn't worry about being bored sitting at lights even if you were in the car by yourself because there was actually nothing for you to do so you didn't feel like you needed to do something.

Shawn: 35:55

Or you listen to music, you know, you have your station on or you have talk radio on or you know what I mean?

Scott: 36:00

Like Right. Just whatever it is, but didn't sitting at a stoplight wasn't a stressor when, now it is, it's, oh, well, I'm not rolling so I can do this other stuff. And I think that's an interesting thing just in terms of how to quantify it that as capability increases, as the set of things that a person can do increases, the set of things that a person does increases. It reminds me of the old illustration that you always see when you are doing any reading about Ulysses Grant and the civil war and Abraham Lincoln. It's, one of the things that made the civil war different was the advent of the telegraph.

Scott: 36:57

In the old days before the telegraph, commands were issued in person and then the commander went and took the soldiers and did the best he could. But with the telegraph, you could have, you know, continuing orders, you want to report back because you can get it, and that is the beginning of sending somebody a text and then calling them and saying, hey, you get my text? It's actually harder I think to make decisions about what to do and what not to do when you have lots of choices. It is much easier to do what you're describing, which is to find that peacefulness if you don't have lots of things to do, but it circles us right back around to my experience, because what do you do when you're trying to find that calm state, that meditative state? You go on a retreat, everybody puts their phone in a bag and what you're doing is not finding solitude.

Scott: 38:04

What you're doing is trying to create an environment where you have fewer things that you can do and so you're actually limiting your choices down to what you can do, just went camping. And it wasn't about the phone, but it's, what do you do when you're out in the woods and we're not gonna hang out and watch TV and if you wanna cook something great, you gotta make a fire or you gotta figure out how you're gonna boil water and do whatever, but the thing is it's all planned. And so, you know what you're gonna have for dinner and so what do you do now? You sit and stare at the fire, and so again, this how do you find peace? How do you find stillness?

Scott: 39:03

Maybe a part of that is recognizing that what gives you the rush is when you can choose a lot of things, and if you remove yourself from those choices, from those opportunities, now you're in the stillness. I don't know. As I'm talking to myself, it's resonating with me, but I don't know if

Shawn: 39:23

it's resonating Yeah, with I think that, you know, for me, I think people just should I would encourage everybody to take a hard long look at their relationship with their phones and with technology and to just have this kind of a self find a buddy, find a partner and just have this kind of a conversation with that person to kind of help you figure out better about like, you know, is this a healthy relationship? Is there something about myself that I should be aware of that I'm not aware of? And maybe think about different ways handle how you integrate different ways to integrate that phone into your life. And, you know, be the person in control of it though, right? Don't let the phone dictate how you live and how you work.

Shawn: 40:20

I mean, use it as a tool and don't let it use you as a tool, right? That's the main thing. And I think for balance, it's going to be different for each person. Like the amount of quietude that would benefit my brain may be very different than the amount of quietude that somebody else's brain might benefit from because we are all inherently different. And so, all you can do is seek the best balance that's going to allow you to be the best version of yourself and then work with that.

Shawn: 40:54

Because some of us, if you're on the road constantly for your job, this phone has to be with me. I don't have the luxury of turning it off or putting it away or setting it down necessarily. Now, my workday isn't all day, so of course I can do that. But you know, for the most part, I'm interacting with it pretty seamlessly between personal and professional, you know, for a fair amount of my day, but especially so when I'm on the road, because my time zones are gonna be different and I'm gonna wanna, it's gonna be more of a, I need to get it where I can get it and take it rather than have planned. I don't have the luxury of like, you know, Monday through Friday, eight to four, and then I have my phone time and then, you know, so, but you know, but I do think that also how you interact with that phone is going to eventually determine, so what you do right now as humans with your phones is eventually going to set a foundation, and this comes back to your other kind of question that you dangled out there, which I thought was great, how are our relationships with artificial intelligence evolving and how will we handle it?

Shawn: 42:14

And I'm going to go ahead and just reject not well because we don't ever handle anything super well, don't think. Again, you're going to have your zealots who go overboard and who marry their bots and who, you know what I mean? And then you're going to have your wilderness survivalists who are rejecting the technology inherently. Then you're gonna have the rest of us clumped in the middle on varying ends of that clumped spectrum. Some people will be more adventurous, some people will be more precautious, some people will figure it out faster, what that healthy balance is of it, how we use it.

Shawn: 42:56

But I mean, it's also not new, the idea, right? So when you think about science fiction from, well, the earliest that I would say for myself is 1977, which next year is the fiftieth, I think fiftieth anniversary. Or no, it can't be because it was 1977. So it's coming up on the fiftieth for Star Wars, but C-3PO was essentially AI in a way. You know what I Well, think it's fair.

Shawn: 43:32

He feels very analog. It's funny how technology can be old, but it was supposed to represent something very advanced. But by our standards, it feels very old and outdated and anachronistic because he was very analog y, right? Then you fast forward to the 1990s when you had Next Generation or 1980s even with Alien, right? And now you're talking about synthetic life, right?

Shawn: 44:02

So the whole idea of artificial intelligence in the form of synthetic cyborgs, you know what I mean? So this is not new. We've known this is coming for a really long time and I still think we're gonna do terrible. I still think we're gonna do terrible. And I don't mean to say that to be mean to humanity.

Shawn: 44:22

Like, I have a lot of faith in humanity, but it's just such a powerful creation. It's a powerful invention. I just I worry, you know, we've seen what happened in Terminator. We've seen what happened in Alien. We've seen what happened, you know.

Shawn: 44:39

Well, none of the cyborg. Well, guess don't know if any of the artificial intelligence in Star Wars went bad. I guess you could kind of say the drones

Scott: 44:49

or

Shawn: 44:49

the clones, Clone Wars, they were cyborgs. It always goes bad, Scott. It

Scott: 44:57

goes bad and yet we survive and it's just the interesting thing to me is so many people see it in terms of, Oh, things are going to go bad and this is new and unique Because we have this IA that's gonna become this Terminator thing. It was like the late 1940s when several countries invented atomic bombs in The United States.

Shawn: 45:26

They

Scott: 45:27

exploded both, you know, exploded two of them. That is bad.

Shawn: 45:33

But that's what I mean when it's like we do that. We kind of overdo it and then we come back and we're like, woah.

Scott: 45:41

But that means that what's happening with AI right now is it's unique because it's AI and not an atomic bomb, but it is exactly the same in terms of, here's this new thing that we've created and we don't know how to use it. It's like being a test pilot. It's like, well, we're pretty sure the math is right, but we're actually not gonna know until we put somebody in the chair that's the human process. But I want to adjust a little bit because this is one of the ways that you and I are really very different, is our approach to stuff like this. Because as we've been talking about this phone and I'm listening to you, this phone issue, what you wanna do is you wanna focus on that phone, you want to focus on that issue on the phone and analyze it and disconnect and be functional with it and all of those things.

Scott: 46:44

And my instinct is 180 degrees the opposite direction from a standpoint of trying to understand the problem. You want to understand that problem by voting on the problem. I want to understand that problem by looking for other stuff because I think that I'm going to understand the way that I interact with the phone if I think about the way that I interact with my car or indoor plumbing or electricity or natural gas or whatever. Just the phone is something that I rely on and that's new, but I have a lifetime of relying on things that make perfect sense to me that don't bother me the way that I rely on my phone and I think maybe it's because I've relied on those things for so long, it's not that big a deal and what does that do for me now? I'm looking at younger folks, whether it's my kids or teenagers or grandkids and saying, Oh, well, don't even give a thought about how they rely on that phone.

Scott: 47:59

And I'm going, Well, I don't even give a thought about how I rely on indoor plumbing. Plumbing and I only notice it when I go hiking and I don't have indoor plumbing and it really, really sucks not to have indoor plumbing. It sucks to be somewhere in the woods and need to go And I don't feel bad. I don't feel that I'm hamstringing myself as a human to rely on indoor plumbing, but I do feel like I'm hamstringing myself to rely on my phone and the way I problem solve that is I try and make those two things come into some kind of correlation because if I can find a way to correlate them, I feel like I can understand both. And it's a completely different way of grappling with a problem and it's wonderful for me at a professional level, but also at a personal level to be able to speak so easily with somebody who really problem solves at such a diametrically different way

Shawn: 49:06

It's like you no, I'm a very, for me, I liken it. I feel like that's probably there's a consistency there with my personality on some level. I've always liked things that are very direct and like, and again, I'm sure I probably if I had a dime, a dollar for every episode, I say it's probably some childhood trauma. You know, it's like, you know, I like the concrete. I like to assess the sort of the visible thing in front of me to understand it as deeply as I can.

Shawn: 49:38

I'm always scanning to figure out what's the connection, knowing that there is a contextual ecosystem that surrounds that thing. And to me, that's like the difference between looking at an oil painting, which I'm a big fan of Renaissance oil painting. It's the vividness and the precision. Give me that big old basket of fruit really clear. Want to see it and I want to like have the person have recreated that feeling that they saw or that they felt when they made that.

Shawn: 50:12

And then there's this other way of looking at things. These are not the exclusive only, There's probably a million different ways to think about things. But I'm wondering if partially how you're describing your process is what I would call negative image like sketching. And it's that you're sketching everything but the thing. As you pencil sketch in everything around that phone, the phone then appears out of the middle of it all of a sudden.

Shawn: 50:45

That becomes a different way to look at, so you're still fundamentally looking at the same thing, but you're just taking a different tack for how you look at it. People are interesting and I bet people don't even realize that everybody has a different way of thinking about things, let alone trying to break down what theirs might be. So that would be a fun exercise. Someday we should, I'm sure there's some online test that somebody has created that can tell you something about that. But if not, maybe we should look into it.

Shawn: 51:19

Yeah.

Scott: 51:20

We're not relying on it.

Shawn: 51:22

No, no. Yeah, definitely. No. The only thing you can rely on is change, right? That's it.

Shawn: 51:31

But no, so that was a really fun journey from phones to AI, you know. But is there anything else on your mind today?

Scott: 51:40

Yeah, and I wanted to ask you this question as we're talking about sort of how the brain works and looking at what technology allows us to do that's good for us and not. And just being at a light and dealing with I could be doing something but how do I find the stillness? For me, one of the challenging things is, tedium, things that are tedious. I hate tedium. But I wonder what you think about tedium, particularly as it relates to clearing the mind and finding a way to find that calmness.

Scott: 52:35

I don't know, and I'm interested to know how you balance those two things. What do you think about things that are tedious and tedium in general?

Shawn: 52:43

Yeah, it depends on what version of tedium it is. So for me, immediately when you said that, I broke it into two buckets. There is the mentally or intellectually tedious sort of experience, and then there's the physically tedious experience. So I would say for me, I have a much harder time with intellectual tedium than with physical tedium, because I actually find physical tedium to be and let me define that because other people may define that something like that differently. So for me, folding clothes is a very physically tedious task because you're doing more or less the same motion.

Shawn: 53:29

You pick something up, you decide how it needs to get folded, you fold it, you set it aside, you pick something up. It's very assembly line. You know, you're just doing, know, cleaning the house just generally can probably be seen as tedious. You know, this is not the thing that people are grappling, you know, clamoring to do. Right.

Shawn: 53:47

And everybody. For me, I actually find that is a very satisfying brain calming endeavor. I have actually replaced caffeine in my life in the mornings with some kind of housekeeping routine that I do

Scott: 54:08

Wow.

Shawn: 54:09

Because that's how like much it turns my brain on and my body because I'm moving. So Greg takes the dog for a walk. We like our separate time in the morning. He goes and does his thing occasionally. I might join him, but for the most part, that's his and Lani's time, you know, and then I'm up doing like my little housekeeping routine.

Shawn: 54:28

And that I find that while tedious, there is a pleasantness and a calming there and the house is quiet and everything's just quiet and I can just do my thing. When it gets to the sort of intellectual seeding part, I have I that is not something I find peace or joy in. That is a real active, like, willpower for me. And that's like, you know, I've got a ridiculous 1,500 word paper that I have to get submitted in the next couple of weeks that 900 of the words have already been written because I had co authors and it's this paper we submitted to this big defense security cooperation conference. And I cannot, Scott, get off the chalk.

Shawn: 55:13

Like I cannot get into the document and just all I have to do is write an intro and a conclusion and do some editing to weave the three case studies together. And again, we're talking about 300 word case studies. It's not war and peace by any sense of the imagination. I just can't, I won't do it. And so what I'll do is I'll wait and I'll procrastinate until it's critical because now I have to do it and that gives me the adrenaline boost I need to power through it.

Shawn: 55:46

But I can't just do tedious tasks unless it's like filling out my timesheet. I can do because usually sometimes they go a couple of weeks and I go, I should probably go fill that out. I'm bad. Because that'll take like twenty minutes because you have to go back through your calendar, you have to look at what you did and you have to allocate all your time. If it's sort of like lazy brain tedium, I can do it.

Shawn: 56:13

You know? That actually might feel good I feel like my brain's occupied, but it's not pressed. Not like super pressed, then there's the tedium that actually requires like brain effort. And so you're telling me it's tedious and I have to think hard? No, I reject that as a concept.

Shawn: 56:36

So, yeah, but I don't know, what about you? Do you feel like there's a different?

Scott: 56:41

It's funny that the things that you describe, the tedium of folding clothes is, I mean, I like the result, but I need to put on music and go, okay, this is only gonna take me ten minutes and I want the result, but I dislike doing it. The writing stuff, I'm like, oh, you already got a first draft? Oh, okay. I'll dive into that. And so that may be more a function of preference than tedium.

Scott: 57:14

But I'll tell you a story and maybe we need to talk more about tedium. So

Shawn: 57:19

Maybe we need to barter. How do I get you How do you get me your clothes and I get you my paper? Well,

Scott: 57:26

I think it's a lot easier for you to send me a writing project Yeah. Than this would be

Shawn: 57:30

your clothes. You. I'm gonna need that teleportation technology soon.

Scott: 57:36

My family owns a big chunk of land here in Seattle and, we have a couple of rental houses and so there's a lot of yard work, I forget yard work. But I live on the lake and so stuff grows all the time. My mom is 90 and she's sharp as a tack, she drives, she drives fine, She gets around, her hips bothering her, she doesn't want the surgery, but she just goes and goes and goes. And so one of our rental houses, the backyard is 40 by 60 feet and it was full of horse tails, are these, yeah, most people know what horse tails are and they were like four feet high. And the thing with horse tails is if you cut them down, all that does is spread the seeds and they'll grow back up.

Scott: 58:29

So my mom spent a week, she would work for twenty minutes and then go take a break for ten minutes and work for twenty minutes, but she was out there for at least eight hours a day and she had this little place to sit and she very carefully snipped each one and then she had a medicine dropper with some sort of weed killer that was specific to, horse tails and she would drop two drops of that weed killer down the rootstock that was left. So she would sit there and go clip, drop, drop, clip, drop, drop. I couldn't do that for five minutes. I would lose my mind. And able, she's not only able to do it, but she's able to think and let her thoughts go while she's doing that.

Scott: 59:30

For me, I get a, from my place down here on the lake, I get a weed whacker and I whack things down and then I go, okay, I've got this section of blackberry roots and so I'm gonna do this for this hour and then I'm done. And so I'm amazed at her and she's laughing at me. I know you just like using the weed whacker and you cut it down and it comes back.

Shawn: 59:55

That's such a funny thing.

Scott: 59:57

Do what you can do, mom. I just

Shawn: 01:00:00

can't. Yeah, I can see it though. I could see how that would be like, what's the word? I'm not necessarily therapeutic, but just sort of like a calming, you you just get lost in your thoughts. Like, I think sometimes, I don't know if we've lost the ability to daydream.

Shawn: 01:00:20

I, you know, I think that's probably, I think I used to do it a lot when I was a kid, you know, I remember being, you know, just sitting in a field, you know, at my aunt and uncle's house, you know, you get lost in here.

Scott: 01:00:34

Yeah, that's not a problem for me.

Shawn: 01:00:37

Yeah.

Scott: 01:00:39

Maybe tedium and think time is something that we should do on our next hour because we're coming to a close here. Remember seeing a thing on Aristotle Onassis, who's the Greek ship of Magnate, a long time ago, married Jacqueline Bovieu, Kennedy Onassis.

Shawn: 01:01:02

Yeah.

Scott: 01:01:03

And he would, I remember seeing an interview of him and he said every day, seven days a week, he would go down to the harbor where he lived and sit on the back of his huge yacht, because he's very wealthy, and for four hours every afternoon he would just sit there and think. And that was remarkable to me. Then Bill Gates had Think Week where once a year and then twice a year and I think maybe three times a year, he would go, there's a big island that has a lot of vacation homes called Whidbey Island. I think for a while he would go up there and he would just isolate himself and think. And I think maybe there's something for us to work through that is in this interaction between thinking and tedium and choosing to do things because you can do them and not being impacted by choosing things when you can't do them.

Shawn: 01:02:02

I like it. I think we should explore it.

Scott: 01:02:04

Yeah, we got a plan.

Shawn: 01:02:06

I think we do. I think we do.

Scott: 01:02:09

All right. Well, that wraps it up for this episode. Yeah, I will see you next time.

Shawn: 01:02:16

See you next time, Scott.