Pain and Suffering

Is something that's hard to do also difficult? Is difficult stuff hard to do? What about pain and suffering? Do you have to suffer just because you feel pain?

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: 00:03

Hey, everybody. Scott Olson here, and you are into another episode of the 2 Parachutes Podcast. As you all know, I'm a retired FBI agent and now a private investigator. And alongside me is Shawn Baker Garcia, the other cohost.

Shawn: 00:19

Hey, guys. It's a pleasure to be here. And as Scott mentioned, I'm Shawn Baker Garcia, and I am a happy accidental CEO and not so secret global security wonk. So it's great to be here and see you, Scott, and let's get into it.

Scott: 00:36

Yeah, let's definitely get into it. As we were working through our prep session, We started talking a little bit about how your day is going and how my day is going. And we started talking about the difference between things that are difficult and things that are hard. So I wanted to throw that pitch across the plate at you, and see what happens when you take a swing at it.

Shawn: 01:01

Let's do it. I, you know, never really put serious thought into it, but I immediately had an answer when you asked me. So somewhere in the back of my head, clearly, I have given this a think. And my humble opinion, and I'm sure others can agree or disagree, but is that something that is hard does not have to be difficult. It can be simple and hard.

Shawn: 01:26

And I think he used the metaphor of a good workout. Something that's difficult I see is involving more complexity, or intellectual, you know, brain work that has to happen, either to understand or navigate it, or to process in some way. And so, yeah, that's the kind of distinction I made when you asked me the question. And then we kind of started getting into the second piece of that, which is also things can be hard and pleasant, but they can also be hard and unpleasant. They can be difficult and pleasant.

Shawn: 02:06

It's like a- I'm seeing that. I think in quadrants. I'm thinking of that quadrant now. It's like on the scale of, you know, difficult to hard to easy versus, you know, is it is it something you enjoy doing to something you really just don't enjoy doing? You know, experience versus versus effort, maybe.

Shawn: 02:27

Maybe those are the x y axes on that.

Scott: 02:30

Yeah. Yeah. That four box grid is useful in a lot of different ways. But as talking about this, you know, my brain is spinning already, and I've got some old memories but I want to make sure that we're keeping this relevant to our principal theme and our our reason for talking with each other and and letting the world listen to our discussions on the two Parachutes Podcast which is doing the hard work of interacting in the public domain, in the public conversation, and leaving people with some practical ideas that they can begin to toy with when we're talking about what's difficult and what's hard. Yeah.

Scott: 03:19

And it's it's interesting. I was talking with a friend of mine a month or so ago. And he's having difficulties in his marriage and he has teenage kids and it's it's hard, right? And I've been there when my first marriage ended. My kids were in their early twenties, late teens, and early twenties and it was difficult for me, difficult for the woman who became my ex wife, their mother, and difficult for the kids but what he's really struggling with is, you know, does he stay or does he go?

Scott: 03:59

And it's hard. And it was funny because what popped into my brain, he's a military guy and a special forces guy. And so I said, how is this different than going through the process that you have to go through to become a special forces guy? Going in, you know it's gonna be hard. Going in, you know it's gonna hurt.

Scott: 04:27

Why did you do it? Because you knew the outcome was valuable. How is this different? And his eyes kinda got big, which was great because it was a useful thing to him, but pulling us into the current discourse and the difficult conversations people who don't get involved in the discourse because it's too hard or people who get in the discourse and just yell because listening is too hard.

Shawn: 04:59

Mhmm.

Scott: 05:01

We do hard things all the time in my opinion. And it's it's certainly a Western value that we value hard work. It's a human value in some ways that we value hard work. And so it's fascinating to me that people will look at something and go, well, I had a really great workout this morning. It was so hard, but I'm not gonna listen to people because that's too hard.

Scott: 05:32

And I wonder if that shakes anything loose for you in the context of how do we evaluate what's hard and what's difficult and what we're willing to do and what we're not willing to do.

Shawn: 05:43

That's right.

Scott: 05:44

Get an outcome.

Shawn: 05:45

Yeah. So a beautiful thought popped into my mind listening to you. It was, as you know, I'm a big fan of the TV series The Chosen, which is a, know, chronicles Jesus's ministry from sort of his earliest days, recruiting the first apostle, and then making the way the final season will be, I think, his death and resurrection, sort of what happens in the immediate aftermath. But I remember it struck me, one of the apostles, it was Peter, who was speaking with his wife, I think, at the time, you know, and and what he was saying is something about how how hard, you know, that they they had it, and, you know, both I probably, I think it was in the context of both as a married couple, but also as as being Jews, you know, who at that time, of course, had already, you know, as a people, undergone a lot of challenging trials and just existence was often very difficult or very hard, right, for those for those people. And and her comment to him was, you know, any and I'm paraphrasing, but alluding to the fact that it's not easy is not the way of our people.

Shawn: 07:02

You know? And I thought it was such a neat statement because, you know, it conveys a certain grit and resilience and understanding or acknowledgment that life is hard. And life is hardness. And this goes to your point where even before we had sophisticated civilizations and languages, know, life was hard. We were born into a hard world.

Shawn: 07:24

And, you know, it it's not always difficult. Sometimes as, you know, cavemen and women, I'm sure it was just a matter of surviving each day. You know, what's gonna kill me today kind of a thing. And so it was probably very, very hard and also very rewarding because if you live to see the next day, you know, then that's that's your reward point. But, it also shook loose this concept that I think was also in The Chosen, and I don't even think it was related to that scene.

Shawn: 07:52

But it was all also related to the apostle Peter, where he was really mad at Matthew, who maybe some of you familiar with biblical history is Matthew was a tax former tax collector, which at the time was like the worst of the worst possible humans, you know, on earth because you're betraying your people, you know, and making money off of it. And he's kind of in a little bit of an argument because he kind of was having a hard time forgiving Matthew and didn't understand why Jesus had made him an apostle. And, you know, he said, you kind of ruined it's like the you know, our life is hard. Again, this was a a reference to the Jewish community at the time. Our life is already hard, and then you willingly chose to make it harder, he said.

Shawn: 08:37

He's like, the one thing that we have going for us as Jews, he said, is that, yes, it's hard, but it's hard together. We do it as a community. And so for him, it was particularly insulting that he would pull himself out of the community and then also make it even harder on them. So I just it's funny that those that we're talking about this because those immediately, those two things popped up in my mind. And I don't know.

Shawn: 09:05

And again, maybe we're just now doing a little bit of volleyball here, like, you know, volleying back and forth. But what is the does that shake anything for loose for you, or does that take you in a different trade win direction?

Scott: 09:16

Yeah. And I love the volleyball metaphor because that's what conversation is. Right? That's what we're modeling here because the hard work of interacting is speaking and listening, and you see it everywhere.

Shawn: 09:35

And I would throw in after that, Scott relating. Right? So that's the where the give and take comes is that we're bridging what the other is saying.

Scott: 09:44

Right. I agree. And it's it's the listening that's the relating. And it it's interesting on your advice. I've started watching the chosen and I'm Oh.

Scott: 09:55

I am yeah. It's and it's it's wonderful. I am yeah. For those of you listening, she just gave me a heart.

Shawn: 10:03

Oh, sorry. I forget that. Yeah.

Scott: 10:05

No, it's it's it's all good. And so, as many of you know, I am not a religious person but I was raised in a variety of churches and so I understand the the story of of Jesus and the the Christ aspect of his life and so it's it's all very familiar to me and it it's wonderfully done. The thing that came to my mind as I was listening to you and you were talking about how in ancient times and and in prehistoric times when success was getting through the day and and living to the next day would immediately jump to my mind was some of the of what you see in the chosen where people are waking up in the morning and their prayer is, you know, thank you lord for putting my spirit back in my body. Yeah. Which is a fundamental sense of gratitude for living another day and and you see that across different philosophies and different religions, you know, of of living for the day.

Scott: 11:16

The Buddhist concepts are pain comes from thinking of the past and living in the past or thinking of the future and living in the future, live in the present in Christian traditions, give us this day our daily bread. There are so many things there, but as we're living in today and we're deciding what to do and we're we're faced with the reality, which is life life is hard. It's hard to get up in the morning. It's easier if you have something to do, but that's still hard. You are facing a commute or facing an early meeting and it's hard.

Scott: 12:01

And I think we don't we don't make it easier by saying, oh, it's easy. I think we make it easier by accepting it for what it is. And that's what resonated with me when we were doing our prep session before we started recording this episode where you were talking about how you were having a difficult day. But you were embracing it, and it it comes back to the the workout for me, which makes sense to me because I've been exercising my whole life, which is something that was not is not unusual for my generation. And for those of you who don't exercise, my apologies that the metaphor won't track.

Scott: 12:47

But everybody loves to talk about how they had a really great workout that was hard. But then, you know, when it comes to work things, oh, this difficult thing is is easy for me. No. It's not easy for you. It's it's difficult.

Scott: 13:02

But getting your brain around and and another metaphor is common. So, get ready. Getting your brain around doing something hard that is actually painful but is good. Years ago, I was a personal trainer before they called them personal trainers. I was the gym guy and I would take people who had never exercised before through the old Nautilus machines and I remember client after client, the first time they would move their body on a Nautilus machine, about half of them would get big eyes and go, oh, that hurts and it confused me for a long time until I realized that they had never done exercise and so they were processing muscle fatigue as pain.

Scott: 13:48

And they needed to learn that there's a difference between muscle fatigue, pain, which is growth and injury pain which is damage.

Shawn: 14:01

Yes.

Scott: 14:02

And I think we need to take that into how we interact with the world, how we do the hard work of interacting, how we communicate, and recognize that all communication is different, whether we're speaking, trying to articulate the thought that we have, whether we're listening, really trying to understand what the other person is trying to articulate, sorting through those difficulties, but there is the difficulty of communicating, which is growth. Then there are damaging things that are also that pain, the difficulty of communicating, are damaging. And getting ourselves into a presence of mind where we distinguish between those two things. I'm not suggesting that we take some sort of moral high ground so that we only do the things that improve and never do the things that damage. That's a value judgment that each individual needs to make.

Scott: 15:08

It's also something that I think each individual needs to be aware of so that they can see when a person is choosing damage or when they're choosing growth. But it's the awareness of those things that allows us to begin choosing, which is the responsibility part, which is the hard work, but it's still hard. What do you think of all that? I mean, I see you taking notes.

Shawn: 15:36

Yeah, I am.

Scott: 15:37

People who are watching us will see note taking, which is brilliant It's important. It shows me that your brain is working and I just, I love that.

Shawn: 15:46

And I will also say, because I do think this matters in this sort of a format, that in a normal conversation, if, you know, Scott, you and I were in a room or at a coffee shop having this conversation, you know, of course, I'm not sitting there taking notes, right? Because that's unnatural and a little bit weird. But it also, when you're in a natural setting, it's easier to have a more fluid conversation because we're right in front of each other, and we're picking up our body language cues, and we're able to like, oh, into it that, oh, they have something, they wanna jump in. In this format, I love the fact that I can take notes because I don't wanna lose anything that you said because that's the value of my doing the hard work of listening. Because then the things that resonate with me, I can keep track of and then come back and follow-up on those points with you.

Shawn: 16:39

So it hopefully makes for the conversation to be a little more easy to follow along and structured. So I love all of that. And I see it in my everyday life quite regularly as well. And, you know, we are- well, not- I guess we don't all have teenagers. But you have had teenagers, though they may not be now.

Shawn: 17:00

But I have a lot of teenagers in my life right now, whether it's my stepdaughter, Sadie, or if it's, you know, my nephews and, you know, nieces or cousins that kind of feel like nieces and nephews because they're second cousins, you know?

Scott: 17:14

Sure.

Shawn: 17:14

And what I see, and this is gonna be in the context of generational sort of relevance to what you were describing, is a lot of them have, you know what did my friend and colleague once say? She's like, Oh, oh, when referring to somebody, or I think it was maybe even in this context, an animal, it's like, they've never known sadness except all the sadness, right? Which is to say that people who live a very comfortable life relative to the rest of the world, I think you can see where I'm going with that. In America, we have a very high standard of living comparatively to other countries, is that, you know, it's sometimes it's difficult for young people particularly to know what they're going through. And they may be interpreting it as damage or pain when it's really just discomfort or growth?

Shawn: 18:17

You know? And then how do you respond to that to to be able to push yourself through embracing, you know, the struggle or the discomfort to condition you to be more resilient, to be stronger, whether that's mentally, emotionally, physically, and then being able to see the value of that investment in pushing through that pain, which pain being in this context, just it's temporarily uncomfortable, you know, but it's not damaging pain. It's not like, you know, I broke my ankle or, you know, it's not anguish. It's so this I might, you know, might have my six, 17 year old listen to this because I actually think the way that you had described it could help her to start visualizing, oh, like, so, like, am I having pain, or am I having discomfort? And is is it a permanent condition, or is it a temporary condition that I just have to push through so that I can get to the value on the other side of it?

Shawn: 19:31

Right? Yeah. And I love it. I love all of that because it's really difficult to tell your kid or anybody's kid, right, that you're not really in that much pain. You know what I mean?

Shawn: 19:42

You've known all the sadness and none of the sadness. It's you know what I mean? And and the real world is coming for you. She's getting ready to graduate. And so Greg and I were just having this conversation that we're worried because she is a miss it's miss or not misrepresented.

Shawn: 19:57

She has a skewed perception of what suffering is Yeah. In some way, I think. Like, or what the baseline, what your body on a baseline level is supposed to be feeling like at any given moment.

Scott: 20:12

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, there's so much there. And it's, when you're in a relationship with somebody who's going through a hard time or who is facing a learning experience and you have a sense of what it is and you can see that they don't, it's difficult to watch somebody as they embark on that learning experience because you know it's going to be hard for them. And when it's hard for them, it's hard for you too.

Shawn: 20:49

Yes. It's so much.

Scott: 20:51

Hard to watch. I mean, my illustration is my my son who just retired as a professional mixed martial artist, and he was never, you know, highly ranked UFC guy, but he fought in a lot of local tournaments. And I was a certified corner man in the state of California because I would go and, you know, help him as he went through fighting. And it's awfully hard watching your own son step in and either throw somebody a beating or get a get a beaten thrown at him. So it's it's hard watching your stepdaughter go through this even though it's a learning experience, but it it pulls another old memory.

Scott: 21:37

And this is what I love about you and what I love about talking with you is as we're talking about things that are so important to both of us, it pulls back these old memories. So this goes back to my days working on summer camps at the with the Boy Scouts, and I would lead hikes, you know, taking 15, 16 year olds for a week into the woods hiking and some of these kids had hiked and some hadn't and they get blisters and they'd get sore They would have all of these things that cause pain. So we talked a lot about the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is a physical symptom. Suffering is a choice.

Scott: 22:25

Yeah. And sometimes it would take a day or two before the light would click. Sometimes they would click immediately. You can have a sore ankle or a sore knee or a blister that makes it painful to walk. Mhmm.

Scott: 22:38

But you don't have to suffer. You can choose to recognize that the pain is unpleasant, but you don't have to be sad. And it's one of those things where if you understand it, you understand it. If you don't understand it yet, it's very difficult to comprehend what somebody is saying about it. But there is a fundamental difference between pain and suffering.

Scott: 23:05

And there's an even more fundamental difference when you are witnessing somebody in pain who is also struggling with suffering. And it's not that they're choosing to suffer. The choice is getting yourself to the point where you understand that you don't have to suffer. Yeah. And it's different and it's interesting and what's fascinating about it in today's public discourse is there are lots of people out there who seem to not understand the difference between pain and suffering.

Scott: 23:44

They see something that offends them, they immediately get outraged offense is different than outrage. Something offends me, okay, I don't have to have this visceral emotional response. I can do something different and still be offended.

Shawn: 24:04

Yeah. I wonder, if you don't mind me prodding the litigator in you.

Scott: 24:10

Please.

Shawn: 24:11

Because, and this may take us off of a side quest that we don't want to go down, which I'm totally satisfied to just get a quick answer, and we can go back to what we were talking about.

Scott: 24:22

We're under the canopies, and the wind's blowing us, so

Shawn: 24:24

Yeah. Let's do Is, you know, and I have a few things that popped up as you were talking, but this is the immediate question, inquiring minds want to know, is, you you see a lot of TV ads for legal firms that are ambulance chasing type entities, right? And they always say, Get compensated for pain and suffering. Is that a real legal distinction? That's my question.

Scott: 24:53

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Shawn: 24:55

Okay. Tell me about that a little bit if you think that's worth talking about.

Scott: 25:00

So what I have to say before I get into the description is two things. One, I have been a licensed attorney. I was a prosecutor in the early nineties. And when I left that job and became an FBI agent, I moved across the country. And so I was licensed to practice law in Washington state, but I ended up living in New York and it was before the internet.

Scott: 25:29

So I couldn't do the continuing legal education to keep my license current. So I've not been a licensed attorney since 1996. I wasn't disbarred or anything. But I'm not licensed so I can't give legal advice. Right.

Scott: 25:42

Also my recollection of what pain and suffering is legally goes back to law school and I graduated from law school in 1988.

Shawn: 25:54

So it may have changed since then. Well, that's

Scott: 25:56

okay. The bottom line is this, and this is in civil law, not criminal law. So the litigation result is not about putting someone in jail. It's about extracting from somebody money to compensate for an injury. So you get banged in the head and you've been hurt and you have to get medical care that costs money.

Scott: 26:23

So if liability is established and I got banged in the head and it's somebody else's fault, that person has to pay for the services that I needed. Basically the money that I lost and it can be everything from paying for the doctor to I had to burn a bunch of vacation time at work and so I lost that income. All of the things that actually cost me money as a result of my bang on the head, I can get money recouped for. But then there's this concept in the law that I was also hurt and it sucked. And so if you establish liability for the injury and you get what are called actual damages, you can also sue for pain and suffering which is you know, I got banged in the head and now, I have headaches and there's nothing they can do about em but now I I have these debilitating headaches for the rest of my life.

Scott: 27:31

You can sometimes get trouble damages. For pain and suffering. The challenge is hanging a monetary value on what the pain is and that's what the jury, the trier of fact will struggle with. I've had these debilitating headaches that I didn't have before. How much money will adequately compensate me for having to deal with my my headaches.

Scott: 28:03

Now, there are a bunch of attorneys out there and paralegals and people involved judges who are probably screaming at their online podcast services right now saying Olsen, you got it wrong. Know, that's not what it is, but that's my best explanation. And it all comes down to this notion of, you know, when somebody gets hurt and it's difficult to figure out what the compensation is, we kind of got to do the best we can. And so it's actually a good question in the context of this, because what are we really trying to do in the public dialogue? We're trying to do the best we can.

Shawn: 28:53

That's true.

Scott: 28:54

You you're going to do the best you can and do things that are, you know, causing damage, not causing growth. But it's not that it's okay, it's that we're human. And if you make a decision to go down the damage road, you can always make a decision to come off that road and go into the growth road.

Shawn: 29:19

Well, that is a choice, right? I mean, I think that, and part of my faith background is, you know, understanding that we're born into this world carrying across, and that life is gonna be difficult and hard, insofar as you make the distinction between those two terms. But you're right. When in early episodes, you and I talked, I think, at least on one occasion, perhaps more about the difference between joy and happiness. Well, and again, this is perhaps subjective to each individual, but for me, the difference is that happy, a state of being happy is temporal, whereas a state of joy as a Christian and a follower of Christ, I have a permanent, or I should feel, I should have this permanent sense of deep joy.

Shawn: 30:10

Because regardless of how tough life gets, I have the the sort of privilege of knowing that, like, I got somebody looking out for me. And in the end, there's gonna be a time when when all of that suffering and pain is, you know, just an afterthought, right, as I I make my way on to, I deeply hope my eternal reward But in you know, but I think even without the religious angle, you know, or sort of perspective, you can still say that your point about the pain versus the suffering is valid. That, you know, it's one thing to experience pain as you're going through something, whether again, it's emotional, psychological, or mental, or physical, But the suffering piece is, you know, you said it's a choice, and I think that's mostly right. I feel like there's probably some circumstances where if somebody is in a chronic condition of pain, but it's not their choice, maybe that can also be considered suffering. I'm not really sure.

Shawn: 31:16

I'm not well versed enough in the English language to be able to, you know, speak definitively on that. But I just think that it's, whether you choose to bathe and cloak yourself in the pain, right, and just to agonize about it day in and out. And I think some of the hard work of interacting, whether it's in person these days or online, is that there are some people that just tend to live in the negative. And they just live in the suffering. And they just It's almost like a badge of honor or accomplishment.

Shawn: 31:53

Or they think that if they stop calling attention to, you know, the bad stuff, that somehow people are gonna forget. And then, you know so I I actually also think that sometimes people have really genuinely good intentions. It's like, no, no, no. You have to stay angry because that's how you get progress is by not being complacent. Or you have to stay complain y or kind of constantly agitating and keeping this at the top of people's minds because the world is super messed up.

Shawn: 32:28

And it's so there's probably some case to be made for that, I think. But unfortunately, the online world is, as it is, is kind of like it over reinforces that loop because of the algorithms that sort of are self reinforcing. So if you're looking to be angry, you're going to find that content that makes you angry because you keep looking at that content that makes you angry. And then pretty soon, you are now, potentially without even realizing it, caught up in something that if you were to, you know, scope out and say, Oh, like, there's a lot of people who aren't consuming that. It may just be me.

Shawn: 33:15

May just be me. And so, am I working myself up, you know, more than I need to be? And am I exporting suffering because of what I'm saying, or how I'm saying it, or what I'm doing? And that's not pain for growth. That is genuinely suffering.

Shawn: 33:29

Because now you're not there's nobody being helped. You're either preaching to a choir that already agrees with you, or you're isolating people who don't agree with you, or you're tainting people who came in without any like, who didn't come in with that sadness. And now after being exposed perpetually to chronic negativity and cynicism and rage, now all of a sudden they're being poisoned by that. Whereas before they came into things very innocently, and not naive, not naive, but innocently, because they hadn't been exposed to that sort of that type of an experience. Know, because again, if you're in the room with somebody, you're not constantly raging.

Shawn: 34:13

You know what I mean? So that's where this digital, our relationship with each other in a digital space is really essential for us to get this figured out, because we're practices that we would not adopt in person, and that is impacting, and I would argue, and probably in not the best way, or even a good way, you know, human interactions. So, yeah, over to you. Yeah.

Scott: 34:37

And it's, in my opinion, it is driven by what certainly online, whether it's social media or the news or whatever it is, when you're interacting with a screen, it's actually not a conversation. It is a, in, in some ways it's a, an exchange of data. But when you're online, the online system does not facilitate listening. And that's what makes interacting hard is listening. And I want to make sure we, we, we scoop the, you know, suffering is a choice into this.

Scott: 35:29

Saying it's a choice is accurate but just leaving it as, you know, suffering is a choice is way too shallow because.

Shawn: 35:38

I agree.

Scott: 35:38

When you're in pain, the most intuitive thing to do is be upset about it because it hurts. So it's not gee you're in pain and you are choosing to suffer just make a different choice it's so simple. No it's not simple. It is hard. And this is, we have talked about the amygdala before.

Scott: 36:02

And the amygdala, the lizard brain, the reactive brain as opposed to the prefrontal cortex, which is the reasoning brain, the thought brain. They're two different things. And so the idea that there's a difference between pain and suffering is absolutely the difference between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.

Shawn: 36:24

Yeah.

Scott: 36:25

And we're, it's very easy to take what the amygdala does, what the reactive brain does and think that that's all that the brain does because going to the reasoning brain takes work. It takes effort. And I go to my friend Daniel Kahneman, I've never met and he's passed away so I won't meet him, but Thinking Fast and Slow, his book describes this much better than I can, that the amygdala, the reactive brain, doesn't take work, it just reacts.

Shawn: 37:02

Getting

Scott: 37:05

the issue to your prefrontal cortex by itself takes work and then being in the prefrontal cortex to think about the issue takes work. And that's what not only the difference between pain and suffering is, you have to choose to do the work to figure out how do I get through this? You know, I'm a I'm a military guy. I'm a seal and I'm tough.

Shawn: 37:31

Yeah.

Scott: 37:31

And so pain don't hurt. Mhmm. I'm a green beret. Pain don't hurt. I'm a mismartial artist.

Scott: 37:36

Pain don't hurt. I want my next fight. That is a reasoning mind decision in the face of something that may damage your body. Mhmm. But it's it's a reasoning mind.

Scott: 37:52

Now you come to the the public dialogue. And what's difficult there? What's difficult there is if I am doom scrolling and posting as I see things that make me want to respond, I'm actually not listening. I am speaking. I may be thinking about it before I speak, I may not be thinking about it before I speak, but I'm not listening because I don't have to and because really in a lot of ways I can't.

Scott: 38:27

I may be waiting for somebody to text back, but I'm just waiting for them to text back so I can shoot another zinger. And what this makes me think about is I saw something the other day, which I had seen before, but it sort of brought it back to the present. And it's this notion of it's the phrase that I heard is you know somebody is your friend when you can argue with them. And I think that it is different when you are disagreeing with a stranger than when you're disagreeing with somebody you know. The way I used to illustrate this when I was teaching leadership was if somebody rear ends you, you're driving along, you come to a red light, you stop, and somebody plows into the back of your car, you're going to have a response, whatever that is.

Scott: 39:20

Usually you're going to be annoyed that the person plowed into the back of your car. When you get out and you see it's your mother, you're going to have a different reaction. It may calm you down. It may, make it worse. If it's your brother, it's different.

Scott: 39:39

If it's your cousin, if it's your sister, but if it's someone you know, all of a sudden it's different. What I'm interested in, if I can throw a question to you, what do you make of this notion that you know somebody is your friend when you can argue with them? Which is different than is it easier or more difficult to argue with somebody you know or who's your friend? What do you make of that you know somebody's your friend when you can argue with them?

Shawn: 40:12

Well, so I'll answer that and we can talk about that as the primary next topic. I want to get back to one thing, though, for the other stuff that you were referent you were throughout what you were talking about. It triggered something to me. I don't want I wanna put it as a placeholder. Is when when you are let me read my notes because I took it, and then I wrote with pencil, so it's kind of light.

Shawn: 40:37

Oh, right. So you were talking about the neurological sort of functions of the different parts of the brain and how they play a role in your interactions with other human beings in terms of how you respond to them. The one thing that quickly crossed my mind when you said that is that if we one of the problems I think we're seeing in society is a diminished willingness, desire, or aptitude to interact with other human beings in what would otherwise be considered very normal interactions. Interviewing for a job, making friends at a park, a dog park, you know, like children, you know well, just getting them out of the house first of all is the problem. But then, you know, having them interact at a at a kind of a unfamiliar social setting, right, where you take them to a friend's party or something or, you know, they're accompanying you in some capacity, is that if the longer that we go without interacting with other human beings in as many possible scenarios as as we can, the more that those reactions and responses are going to alter and or those those those it's like a muscle.

Shawn: 41:54

It'll they'll atrophy. Our human interaction skills are rapidly atrophying. And the more they atrophy, the less we're gonna get on with each other, not just online. But then when it comes to real life, what you're describing, which is that you can argue with a friend or that if you, you know, get a fender bender and you realize it's your, you know, somebody you care for, you know, you're reacting differently, neighbor, whatever, though even those sort of forgiving relationships will start to eventually erode and deteriorate because if our other human interaction skill sets are atrophying, then eventually they will trickle. Now those might be the last ones affected, but even those will eventually become impaired.

Shawn: 42:42

And so I just thought that that was a really important sort of, you know, connection point to make because, you know, you and I are talking about other projects that we may have in the works. And, like, you know, doing that hard work of human interactivity begins with with keeping our human humaning skill, you know, sharp and and current because that that's that's a big part of it. But going to the specific question about being you know you're in a good friendship or relationship when you can disagree with somebody, I just think there's sure. There's a lot of truth to that. I think that it means that, you know, there's trust and that there is curiosity and you give people the benefit of the doubt.

Shawn: 43:30

Or, you know, they've got a built up credibility that even if they disagree with you, that you're gonna then you may not be converted to the point, or you may end up parting ways on that conversation, still having opposing viewpoints. Hopefully, what you will have built is a deeper understanding of why the person on the other side of the conversation holds the position or the opinion that they do. But that, yeah, you need to be able to, in a good friendship or partnership or working relationship, yeah, hopefully, you guys have enough of a connection that it can weather those sorts of. And sometimes that's where you have the best disagreements, is because you can give those people a little bit more space to push you and your assumptions because of that trust and respect in the relationship. I would say though, to add on that, and then to pass it back to you, is that if we conduct ourselves as human beings, and I think we've touched on this in prior episodes, so apologies if we're being redundant right now.

Shawn: 44:37

But, you know, if we can work harder at approaching even stranger relationships or acquaintance relationships with a sense of curiosity and, you know, you can come at something from a very principled perspective and and still find shared ground. Or demonstrate that you're willing to hear them and to at least acknowledge that you understand where they're coming from, if even you disagree. And so, yeah. So I think that we can we the the first battlefield for that where we sort of sharpen our our ability to have those less familiar interactions, honestly, is by doing it, you know, with the people that you love. And that's that's how you're able to to, you know, then transition and pivot.

Shawn: 45:27

And hopefully, negotiation and human interaction skills you develop as a child with your friends, family, eventually colleagues as you start going to work in education and university or wherever you're off to, then that evolves. But right now, it's like, we're regressing. It's like we're not even having these good conversations at home or with people that we love and trust anymore. People are so divided in this country right now. And potentially, I don't know if this is happening, probably not to the extent here, but in other places around the world, it's that, you know, you're basically being told, no, don't do the hard work.

Shawn: 46:04

Just cut them off. You know what I mean? Because it's all my way or the highway, you know, kind of a thing. And yeah, so I think that that's how I would respond to that. Think currently, it's still true.

Shawn: 46:19

I don't know if it will remain true, you know, moving forward, depending on how our societies respond to adjusting to life in the digital age, you know?

Scott: 46:30

Yeah. And I as I'm listening to you, and and I'm letting you I'm I'm letting your thoughts sort of chisel away at sort of my edifice of thoughts as I've gone through my preparation and and you've gone through yours, and then we go through our preparation to sort of find our start point for these episodes. It's still an edifice and it is a conscious choice. At least for me, it has to be a conscious choice to let it be modified But the strand that I'm seeing through through all of this is listening. And it's not just listening to the words that are being spoken.

Scott: 47:24

Mhmm. But it's it's hearing the words with an eye to understanding the perspective and again really hard.

Shawn: 47:34

Yeah.

Scott: 47:34

When someone has an opinion that you disagree with you fundamentally don't understand how a person could have that opinion. And so it is a difficult act to stop, set aside, or step away from your outrage that somebody would feel that way to truly understand their opinion. Because truly understanding their opinion requires you to truly understand them. And so I'm seeing listening, also understanding being a driver of human connection

Shawn: 48:24

Yeah.

Scott: 48:25

That is the root of so many problems, like any sort of prejudice, whether you're prejudiced because they like the Jets and you like the Seahawks.

Shawn: 48:39

Yeah.

Scott: 48:40

There's that sort of, yeah, how do you like them?

Shawn: 48:43

It service

Scott: 48:45

could be, well you have this skin color and I have that, you have this religion and I have that. It's very easy to sit in your reactive brain and your amygdala and go, well, I'm not going to understand that person anyway. So, I'm not even going to try. And that in my view is the push for I'm not going to do the hard work. And if we use our exercise metaphor, why do you exercise?

Scott: 49:19

It's hard because you're gonna get a benefit from it. You're gonna get some sort of health benefit from it. Well, if we circle back around to we're the 2 Parachutes Podcast, we are here to model conversation, but to also be very pragmatic. The advice needs to be practical. So what are you getting out of the hard work of understanding somebody?

Scott: 49:47

What you're getting is human interaction. Mhmm. You know, you're you're getting what you get when there are fireworks and all of a sudden, everybody is in this scene together focused on it.

Shawn: 50:00

Yeah. You

Scott: 50:01

have, you know, name the tragedy around the When something blows up, everybody shares that experience.

Shawn: 50:11

Yeah.

Scott: 50:12

And there is that human understanding and human understanding feels good. It actually does feel good. It's hard work, but it feels good and maybe that's why you say, or some say, you know a person is a true friend when you can argue with them. It's not the arguing, it's that to argue with somebody means you have to listen to them. This part of the prep work I was doing for this episode started with thinking about the difference between debate and rhetoric.

Shawn: 50:56

Mhmm. Oh, yeah.

Scott: 50:58

And the the difference between debate and rhetoric, just, you know, doing a a AI definition poll, is the purpose of rhetoric is to convince. It's to win. The purpose of debate is to figure out a better way. It's to say, this is my idea. I wanna listen to you poke holes in it Mhmm.

Scott: 51:27

So that we can find something better. This is my idea. This is your idea. Let's tear them down. Yeah.

Scott: 51:34

And see which one survives. Not to tear down damage, but to tear down grow. Mhmm. And so when we talk about, you know, the US Congress, when you look at the purpose of debate, the purpose of debate is this thing that's not popular nowadays, is compromise, but it's not compromise. It's better.

Shawn: 52:00

If

Scott: 52:01

you debate and you say this is what's wrong with what you think, oh, that's what's wrong with what I think? Oh, okay, well let's make something better. The purpose of debate is to be better. What we see right now is rhetoric. It's I'm passionate about this, so how dare you say anything against it?

Scott: 52:23

Because if you say anything against what I'm so passionate about, then you're insulting me. And that is a win mindset, not a let's make this better mindset. It's this notion of I want to have the good idea rather than I want to be a part of a process that produces the good idea. And I think part of this is understanding that there is a difference between debate and rhetoric. And you might have talked about how words matter.

Scott: 52:59

Debate and rhetoric, understanding what those things mean, help us understand when the conversation is damaging. It's an injury rather than it's just the pain of the workout that is actually creating growth. And it's complex, and I feel myself speaking complex words, but it matters. And it's the hardest to interact with.

Shawn: 53:23

Yeah. Yeah. So okay. So I've got a couple things. Wow.

Shawn: 53:27

Okay. I love okay. Let me just collect myself because the first thing I just wanna call attention to is on the listening point. There's a commercial. I guess I'm gonna be the pop culture girl today.

Shawn: 53:38

There's a commercial that, it's Progressive Insurance, I think, and you've probably seen it. It's called The Backup. Mhmm. And you have somebody in a human interaction doing a thing. And, you know, and I actually don't really care for the for the commercials a lot because I don't like the how they portray humanity.

Shawn: 53:56

But it's also kind of becoming a little bit more true than than what I'd like to admit. So there's two scenario like, two that I can remember off the top of my head. One is a a mom getting frustrated because a dad isn't doing something in the way that she wants him to do it, so she calls in backup dad. You know, and then he tags out, and then backup dad comes in. You know, too bad in life there aren't backups.

Shawn: 54:15

And then in the other context that I didn't care for was a friend having a conversation with her girlfriend at a cafe, and the girlfriend is just staring at her phone swiping while the other girl's trying to explain, I'm going through this really hard time, and it's difficult. And he's like and then it's like you know? She's like, mhmm. Yeah. And she's just not paying attention.

Shawn: 54:35

You know? She's just swiping. And so then she calls in the backup, you know, and so they swap in. And it's somebody ridiculous, like a famous football player or something, and he comes in. So but that really speaks to the psychology because if they are using that in in commercials right now, Scott, trust and believe, then you know that this is a phenomena that they're watching.

Shawn: 54:58

Because people are just not again, and that goes back to my previous point, which is the less we human and the worse we get at it, and the less we want to do it, those muscles start to atrophy. And listening is one of the most important skills and muscles that you, as one human to another, can exercise. And so when you stop, if you are sitting in literally the space with another person, and you still can't stay off your phone long enough to listen to them and pay attention, then you are atrophying your visual observation skills. You're only registering at a superficial level what the other person is saying. It's a deeply disrespectful thing to do because you're not at all invested in that interaction that you're having, and it's obvious.

Shawn: 55:49

You know? But the problem is is that the more people, especially those coming up on our, you know, hind rears here, is they don't they will maybe potentially grow up not even knowing that that's rude, disrespectful, or that they're being impaired in any way from having a better relationship or interaction with that other human being. So that's the first thing, and I'll set that aside. The second thing I would say is that, you know, on the debate versus rhetoric thing I hope for the listeners this doesn't feel totally disjointed in my brain. It's making a lot of sense.

Shawn: 56:29

But we'll try Scott and I, I think, between the two of us, by the end of this, we each have that little special skill of hopefully being able to weave it all together so that you feel like you walk away with, like, okay. I think I know what that whole conversation was about. But there's two people that I will say recently. I've and and it's funny because this is actually recently that I've come across both of these quotes from these folks. Something tells me that's not a coincidence.

Shawn: 56:58

The first one is from a former, actually this is your kind of, you know, area. Chris Voss, who I guess is a former FBI hostage negotiator. So you'll you'll

Scott: 57:12

He's he's great.

Shawn: 57:14

Yeah. So you'll correct me if I get this wrong then. But basically, you know, the quote that came to my mind when you were talking about that is if you feel like you got a great deal and the other side feels like they lost, the deal isn't stable because they're either gonna resent it, undermine it, or walk it back later. And then kind of as a book end to that quote is Alan Grubman, who is a, American law he's a he's a lawyer, but I think he works, like, in the entertainment industry. And his take on, you know, you know, sort of, like, whenever you're involved in in because you were mentioning compromise, you know, and and kind of how how do we see compromise right now in the world.

Shawn: 57:56

And and his quote was, when you walk away from a negotiation, both sides should feel the same way. Happy, but also a little sad because because in a really good compromise, you're not you're and again, this goes back to Chris Voss' point, is if you get everything, somebody's coming for you later. You know what I mean? First of all, because it was imbalanced and probably wasn't the right outcome. You know?

Shawn: 58:24

And Grooveman's point is basically that, like, look, like, you know, again, a good compromise means that everybody got enough of what they want to be satisfied and happy, but they didn't get everything they wanted. You know, again, but sometimes not getting everything you want is not good for you, is good for you, Right? You know? And and that's kind of our government, how I think the original founding framers, you know, structured it was through the sort of the expectation that there would be this deliberative process where that involved necessarily a lot of compromise because I think they also knew the dangers of all or nothing politics. You know?

Shawn: 59:01

Yep. And that, you know, getting everything you want is not always good for you. That actually can be quite bad for you. It's like, no. Don't eat all of the candy in the candy shop.

Shawn: 59:09

That's probably not it may be what you want. You do not need it. It is not what you need. So I think both of those sort of takeaways for me, you know, both on sort of the necessity and importance of compromise and not getting everything you want, again, let's circle it full back to pain, suffering, or, you know, struggle. Like, just because you don't get everything you want doesn't mean you're suffering.

Shawn: 59:33

It doesn't mean it's bad. And it doesn't mean it's you know, you may be sad or in discomfort, but you are not damaged. You know? So I don't know if that kinda helps bring it full circle a little bit. But

Scott: 59:47

I I love that. And the thread you're pulling for me, and and I love both Grubman and Voss. Familiar with both of them. Yeah. I've read Chris's book, and Alan had a interview in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago, which is how he came onto my radar.

Scott: 01:00:06

And I think that the the things that you pulled out from both of these guys are right in this hard work of interacting. How do we do we human which I'm getting more and more comfortable with.

Shawn: 01:00:27

Yeah. Yeah.

Scott: 01:00:29

You know, taking a noun and turning into a verb has never been one of my favorite things but I'm. Yeah. I'm getting it and I'm getting on board. But all that's popping around my head right now is Maya Angelou. People

Shawn: 01:00:41

Oh, I love that.

Scott: 01:00:42

Did, but they're always gonna remember how you made them feel.

Shawn: 01:00:46

And Yeah. It's,

Scott: 01:00:48

you know, in a negotiation, if you left them feeling screwed over, then, yeah, every sports team ever in the history of the world, when they lose next season, they're gonna kick the butt of that team. Yeah. And it's the same for people. And I think I think the thing that saves us as we are going through a phase where we're losing this skill of interacting is we actually know what it is. Everybody wants to be understood, but few of us realize that for a person to be understood there has to be somebody else in the role of being interested in understanding them.

Scott: 01:01:37

And it's much easier to be understood than it is to be interested enough in somebody else to understand them. And it it starts with bits of technique and you can see that in Voss's book. There are some other, authors out there that talk about the little things that you can do that communicate to somebody I see you as a person. Yeah. I'm interested in you as a person just because you're there and you're drawing breath and that's that's the fundamental thing that at times we forget.

Scott: 01:02:16

But we always remember. Mhmm. Because we're all fundamentally the same. We all want to be understood. And and it's hard because when you're doing the hard work of understanding said every person who's ever been in a relationship ever, well, I'm understanding them, but they're not understanding me.

Scott: 01:02:38

Got it. Okay. It's pain. You're to suffer. You're gonna figure this

Shawn: 01:02:44

out? Exactly.

Scott: 01:02:45

You know? And and it's it's it's the hard work of it. But I think we're over our hours, so maybe we should meet with Maya Angelou.

Shawn: 01:02:53

I think that's a beautiful close. Yeah, I think so. And teed up a lot of things for the next conversation. I thank you for a really great hour and five, seven minutes here.

Scott: 01:03:07

Yeah. That's right back at you. Everybody out there, I hope you enjoyed this, and keep coming back. We got more.

Shawn: 01:03:15

Yeah. See you next time.

Scott: 01:03:17

See you next time.