Don't Force Don't Fight

2PP takes a rare turn (for us) to talk about current political events.

What is 2 Parachutes Podcast?

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

Scott: 00:02

Hey, Sean.

Shawn: 00:03

Hey, Scott. Happy New Year.

Scott: 00:05

Happy New Year. We are we're recording our first episode here in 2026.

Shawn: 00:12

Yeah.

Scott: 00:12

And we we meet a couple times a week for our followers to understand and a lot of times what happens is we just start talking and we forget to start recording and that's what's happened today. So we've actually been talking for about a half hour and and Sean, you know, pulled the rip cord this time and said, we gotta we gotta pull back and and record what we're talking about because we've been talking about a number of things. So I'm gonna push this to you, Sean, frame out where you are and let's rock 26, man. Let's go.

Shawn: 00:54

Let's do it. This is a great, I think, topic to kick off 2026 with. You know, Scott and I are, just, you know, overall humble citizens who like to pay attention to what's happening in the world. We don't position ourselves or or pretend to be news people or media people in the traditional news journalism sense, but we are citizens of this country and we are citizens of this world. And so we pay attention to what's going on around us.

Shawn: 01:22

As many of you probably will be familiar, 2026 has not been quiet. We started off with some pretty serious things in our geopolitical world. There was The US kidnap and arrest of Venezuela's president, which happened in the last couple of days. And, well, by the time you all see this, it might have been much prior to that. But, and and then, you know, there have been some interesting media statements issued by the new mayor of New York, Manhattan, Mamdani, and some of his deputies, you know, where they've they've used some language and and, you know, have presented some ideas under their new sort of socialist construct or framework for governance that I thought were all very interconnected and a lot of these things kind of tie together.

Shawn: 02:19

So thought we'd kick it off there, Scott. We of course are coming mid conversation into this for our viewers. So what we're gonna try to do is rewind a little bit of it to cover some other ground that we'd already tread for context. But I think maybe starting with Mamdani and his director, I forget what she's director of, but it was one of his colleagues who is in charge of something over there perhaps to do with housing because that was the topic of her talking points, have recently issued some statements. And so let's maybe just start with those.

Shawn: 02:59

Two things out the gate that I was talking with Scott about, I introduced into our discussion were some things I just didn't feel super comfortable with. One of them was sort of by the deputy, his deputy, she had referenced pretty generally putting people into two buckets. It's like you're either part of the whites, which I just think is a horrible superficial generalization of people who have some kind of Caucasian ethnic identity. And then of course, who doesn't fall into that category, I was shocked to hear this woman referencing pretty much everybody else, right? And as I called it, everybody who has some arbitrary pantone skin color that's beyond whatever she seems to think white includes, right?

Shawn: 03:49

So referenced as POCs. And I didn't even know what that meant when she said it. She kept using that term. Well, the POC is the P and I'm like, what is the POC? I So looked it up and I didn't realize she was a persons of color.

Shawn: 04:05

It was, talk about like West Side Story, like the sharks and the jets. It's like the whites and the POCs. And I'm like, what a bizarre and dehumanizing way to reference also somewhat arbitrarily anybody who shares some melanin composition percentage, right? So I was mentioning to Scott that I, as somebody who is a little bit of a tan here, even though genetically, I probably actually, I think my genetic profile is predominant, it would actually higher on the Caucasian side than it is on the ethnic minority side. I guess I still qualify as a POC, Scott.

Shawn: 04:46

I don't know, but it's weird. And I'm just like, what does that even mean? So that was my first beef that I brought to the table today. And then the second slab of meat I laid on the table was this whole statement by Mamdani, I believe, who was talking about how he's gonna replace or there, we're somebody's gonna replace the frigidity of individualism in this country with the warmth of collectivism. And I was like, what?

Shawn: 05:17

The warmth of collectivism? And so I'll leave you with one final thought on that, which is my opinion. I was so fired up about that because I just thought, man, that is a real misleading statement. Because in my opinion, what they're referring to is this sort of warmth of collectivism is essentially the outsourcing of compassion to the government as opposed to very organically developed family units and communities, sort of as stakeholders who have a vested interest in your well-being. And that that's not compassion, because as you rightly said, and then I'll pass it to you Scott because you had some great thoughts on this.

Shawn: 06:02

Whenever you put sort of, you have to force or voluntell people to do a thing, that is not charity, that is not compassion. And also it's a mistake to believe that that system, if you're talking about governments or if you're talking about in the case of one person who's sort of on the fascist side of things in control of a whole country's direction, that also is not compassionate because that whether it's the system or the individual as a dictator, those entities are going to live to serve themselves, not the people. So it may start off as being perceived as this warmth of collectivism and warmth of of intense. But unlike your family that has a natural and and real bond with you or your preferred communities that you may reside in, whether it's your neighborhood or your school or your professional community where there's real human bonds that are forged and built over time, those are much less breakable and shakable than what the left is proposing, which concerns me because over time that government isn't gonna care about you as an individual. It's going to care about just feeding the perception of its benign sort of magnanimity.

Shawn: 07:23

And that is a dangerous unchecked power to afford a government because it's too easy to disassociate from the humans that that system is then impacting. So we'll start there. I'm gonna pass it. I'm gonna like kind of slump in the chute here and let Scott take over and guide us a bit. But that's where we decided, oh, better start recording this because that's a good conversation to have and for people Yeah.

Shawn: 07:52

Maybe to

Scott: 07:53

And there's so much there and it bears reiterating for the folks that are following us and listening. We always sort of smile and even though we do what we can to stay away from ridicule, we kind of ridicule ourselves for forgetting the name of this person and you know, not remembering the numbers and you know, we understand that sort of by personality, we get caught in the concepts and the ideas and the philosophy and the emotion. And we're pretty light on particulars and we're open to that criticism and we wanna hear people say, it's this many of this and this is the name of the person who spoke. But Mike, with due regard for that, what we want, what we're creating here is a free space to talk. And my first sort of flag on the play with regard to what is coming out of, in particular New York and Mundamy.

Scott: 09:12

But I'm in Seattle and I can't point to anything at this point that the progressive socialist New Mayork here has done. But there are real problems when you start speaking in code. When you say POC and what you're meaning is person of color, but you don't say the words. And one of the things that I mentioned to you before we recorded and I'm gonna say it now is, you know, when you look at the word Negro, which is not an English word. It is, the Spanish word and the French word for black.

Scott: 09:53

You can buy champagne that is cordon Negro which means black label. And so it has become through usage something that has become offensive but at its core it was not offensive. You look at Spain in particular. I had a friend, who was an analyst at the FBI and her last name was like yours, Garcia and she would get really angry when people would call her Hispanic because she said no, I'm not Hispanic, I am Spanish and if you go to Spain, Spain is Caucasian. It is Spanish speaking people in the Spanish culture who are white people.

Scott: 10:46

They're Caucasian in heritage and you know England came to North America and so The United States speaks English. France came to Far North America and so you have Quebec which speaks French. And Spain came to South America which speaks Spanish but just because I have my skin color and I speak English doesn't mean that I'm English and just because somebody from Mexico or from Peru or from Rio De Janeiro, California Brazil or from California, you know, has has a skin color that, is visibly different than mine and speaks Spanish doesn't mean they're Spanish And we get very caught in this, know, well you're in this category and you're in that category. And then we stop talking about the categories and we start talking in code. So the big flag for me is when somebody's talking in code, POC, what I wanna know and what I don't know.

Scott: 12:00

But what I wanna know is why are we saying POC instead of persons of color. You have Mendhami and this is actually a kind of code where he talks about the warmth of collectivism rather than the cold of individualism and you know, my smart ass side immediately came out when I heard that. I'm like, well, if we go your way, if we go the socialist way and the data points are every socialist despotic government ever in the history of the world, It's gonna be warm particularly in the summer because there's gonna be no air conditioning because there's gonna be no power and it is gonna be unbelievably cold in the winter because there's gonna be no energy for warmth and that's a smart ass thing Sort of responding in kind but again the flag on the play is you're talking in code and you're not really talking about what you mean until we come to this notion. Again, I don't have the name of the person who said it and it's something that you mentioned that somehow people who aren't persons of color are gonna have to adjust to a new relationship with property.

Shawn: 13:20

Yeah. I got the name just so we can be clear because I wanted to confirm that because it is important people know who this person is and that these are things that this person has stated. It's I don't know how to pronounce her first name, but it's spelled c e a. So I imagine Cea Weaver and she is Mamdani's new tenant director. So housing obviously is the implication there.

Scott: 13:43

What's the last name?

Shawn: 13:44

Weaver, just like a

Scott: 13:46

Cea Weaver, okay.

Shawn: 13:47

Yeah. And what I will say is the part that I want to kind of go back to that you said is the point of issue I took with that sort of expression was twofold. One is that what you are doing when you say, when you reduce people to an acronym, first of all, right? It's not endearing, it's not cool, it's not interesting. This isn't like you're calling AOC AOC, right?

Shawn: 14:15

Which we understand to be Alicia, you know, or Ortega Cortez or whatever her name is. You know, this is the lazy shorthand perpetuation of linguistic imprecision. The same way that we go from Negro or some other Latin based romance language origin of a word for black person is the same lazy, imprecise shorthand of a designator for a group of people that ultimately has a very superficial meaning. And so what I find ironic is that the left purports itself as sort of the champions of not that. But then they adopt the same linguistic vernacular shorthand sloppiness that they're purporting to fight against.

Shawn: 15:09

And I think that's just kind of absurd, know.

Scott: 15:12

And I'll I'll depart from you on the on the lazy sloppiness. I agree that it's lazy and sloppy, but I don't think they are. I think it's intentional. I think Sure it's purpose. Yeah.

Scott: 15:25

Because if they're specific then all of a sudden the public dialogue is about what they actually mean and so they're using categories and they're using code to get where they want to, which is they want government to be the thing that owns everything. And there are a number of problems with that. The biggest one is it depersonalizes people and it hurts them. The example that I saw and I saw it very briefly, I don't watch my news, I read my news and I saw something where an apparently Caucasian female was speaking publicly and she talked about how much she hates being white. And that is a terrible sense of self loathing And when we look at the public discourse, we have been trying, at least in The United States for one hundred and fifty years to say that everybody is equivalent.

Scott: 16:39

Don't feel bad, feel good about your culture, whatever your skin color is, whatever your heritage is, wherever you're from. It doesn't matter where you're from, it matters who you are. And what progressives have done and I will attach this to progressives because it's what I see. They're saying well, African American people have felt bad about being African American. So we are now gonna make white people feel bad about being white people.

Scott: 17:14

And I think that's wrong because it hurts your fellow human. And the global issue, one of the global issues I have with somebody like Mendhami is in order to promulgate the policies and you can look at all of them and see this on all of them, so I

Shawn: 17:35

won't go through them.

Scott: 17:37

Happily do it yourself or with anger do it yourself. Every single one of his policies sees people as a commodity. It sees people as a thing, not as people. And you know, read Marx, read Engel, read all of those things. We are looking at people as a resource that are to be utilized and fed.

Scott: 18:04

And my question is, and everything's gonna blow up, how is that different than slavery? Yeah. If people are a resource to be utilized and fed. Yeah. And offends me greatly because it dispersonalizes people and it hurts people.

Scott: 18:25

If the idea is we want everybody to be happy then telling people to be happy and forcing people to be happy is a fail. People are gonna be happy if they choose to and what we need to grow up about is some people are gonna choose not to. Some people are happiest when they're miserable And giving people the freedom to be miserable is difficult but it's also important. Because if you're looking at people and you're saying, I don't want people to be this way, I want them to be that way. The only way you can do that is by forcing them.

Scott: 19:15

And in my opinion, force is always wrong. With one exception. But force is always wrong. The only exception that I countenance to force is the use of force to stop the use of force.

Shawn: 19:29

Right.

Scott: 19:30

And that's because there's no other way to stop the use of force. But what Madame is doing is using force and it's Well,

Shawn: 19:41

he's gonna try anyway and who knows how far he'll be able to get with it because I think there's some very real structural impediments to what I think he's trying to accomplish over there. But, you know, it'll also give him a pretty easy out if he's unable to do things because then he'll just see, like, see, look, the system is preventing me from helping you. You know? So so that's why you have to fight the system. It's like constant, like, you know, revolutionary sort of rhetoric, which is, you know, you gotta fight the system.

Shawn: 20:06

And you do have to, you know, there's times where the system absolutely has to be fought because, you know, the system lives to serve itself as we kinda discussed earlier, but, you know, but it's not everything. There's a lot of individual accountability within the systems that you should exercise and can exercise to keep your freedom and your contribution And

Scott: 20:29

that makes me laugh because I was actually thinking about this the other day, this concept of fighting. You know, everybody talks about fighting. I mean I've been in relationships with women I love who tell me that you know, Scott you need to fight for me and I'm like, who am I fighting? The problem that I see is that almost everybody who says we need to fight or I'm a fighter or I'm gonna fight for you, have never been in a fight. And you know, you look at soldiers who have been in combat, they want nothing to do with combat anymore.

Scott: 21:03

Yeah. You look at people who have been fighters. I mean there are some people in combat sports that truly love the fight but they also love the hug at the end of the fight when the fight is over. Most people who come into the public discourse talking about fighting, they don't know what fighting is. They haven't been in a fight and they don't understand that in a fight, everybody in that fight whether it's two people or a mosh pit, everybody gets hurt.

Scott: 21:41

And so when I look at fighting and full disclosure, my exposure to fighting is limited to training in Taekwondo for twelve years and fighting in local tournaments. And you know, everybody gets hurt. You know, jam a thumb, you stub a toe, you get a bruise. Everybody gets hurt and you know, one person in the category wins and that's my exposure to fighting. But you know, fighting doesn't solve anything.

Scott: 22:12

Sounds great to people who don't fight, but there is almost nothing that is better because you fight. And the problem with that language is it takes us right down to where poor souls like Nick Fuentes get to which is the world is pain. You look at that kid and I've not met him, I don't know who he is but just looking at him, he's hurt. Yeah. And there are lots of people in the world like him that are hurt and he doesn't wanna be hurt.

Scott: 22:49

I get it, I don't wanna be hurt. But his solution is dictatorship. It's somebody else, not him. Somebody else who is gonna make the world be nice to him. The problem with that, it's not absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Scott: 23:08

It's when you have the ability to force people to do things, you very quickly force them to do things that are good for you. Force is not altruistic. It's either the fun of combat, which is the very small category or it's wow, I can force people to do things so this is now what's in the public interest and what is it? It's good for me. Every dictator ever lived in an opulent palace and was surrounded by people who lived in mud and cholera.

Scott: 23:46

Every single one. And the problem, one of the fundamental problems is living is hard with people when you disagree. And you're always gonna disagree and you can't force them. That's part of what this podcast is about. How do we in a civilized, dignified, non ridiculing way interact with each other when we disagree and we disagree about things that are really important to us.

Scott: 24:16

And it starts with dignity and not ridiculing and it starts with recognizing that force doesn't work. And I'll give you one more thing to sort of maybe draw a bit of emotion out of it and inject something else into it, which is the reason why I think that government across the board should not be involved in running programs. And the big thing that most people don't understand is sovereign immunity. You can't sue government unless government says you can. So if you aren't getting the social security benefit that you think you should, can't sue.

Shawn: 25:05

Right.

Scott: 25:06

If you go get government healthcare and it hurts you, you can't sue. If you go to a hospital, private hospital and you don't get appropriate care, you can sue that hospital for negligence. You can't sue a government hospital for negligence. Sovereign immunity means that government is not accountable. So all the things that a guy like Mandami says he's gonna do, if they don't work he doesn't lose his business.

Scott: 25:41

He doesn't go to jail. He doesn't get all his money taken away to compensate the people he's hurt. There is no consequence because it's government. And that's the huge thing. There are a number of other things.

Scott: 26:01

Not the least of which, and I'll throw this into the mix is government only comes up with one idea. Right. The private world comes up with a 100 or a thousand or 10,000 ideas and the ones that work succeed and the ones that don't get sued and go bankrupt. But government has one idea and government is the sovereign. And so you can't sue them.

Scott: 26:27

And that's exactly why that all these government programs are doomed to fail. No surprise that Tim Walts is being thrown out.

Shawn: 26:36

Yeah, that was. Well, as I was listening to you, was kind of like, I'm always trying to synthesize, I'm the synthesize, I'm the keyboard player of our team. What you know, I'm the synthesizer here, I see being described is for every action, there's a reaction and for every movement that sort of takes things too far, you kind of have a backlash and then you kind of end up taking, it's the Goldilocks thing that I always say. It's like too hot, too cold till you kind of figure out where your just right center is. And on, if you look at it sort of, because you mentioned Nick Fuentes, is it Nick Fuentes, the kid?

Scott: 27:16

I think so, yeah.

Shawn: 27:16

Yeah. Yeah. He he he kind of represents this sort of extreme weaponized paternalism, right? Where, you know, it kind of then starts moving into the fringe far right which eventually evolves into some form of fascism, right? That dictator mentality that like you said, I have to, I need a strong dictator to tell everybody to be nice to me, right?

Shawn: 27:36

Or to not hurt my feelings. In the twenty first century, that's, you see that manifestation, I think coming about, which eventually, if left unchecked, leads to Hitler's Germany, right? At some point. Yeah. Right?

Shawn: 27:50

As a direct reaction and response to the what I'm calling the weaponized maternalism that has been characterizing the West for so many decades now which is sort of more on that like ex socialism expression which is, you know, fringe far left, embodied in the twenty first century by people like, you know, mom Donnie or now, you know, like again, which let's look at what happens when a mom Donnie grows up to become an adult and like actually has more control. You know, we kind of mentioned off the record before we started this call, you know, what's going on with Maduro over there in Venezuela, right? Like, that's the manna. So Fuentes is to Hitler's Germany. If left unchecked, Mamdani is to Maduro.

Shawn: 28:32

So it's it's this imbalance, you know, this Goldilocks conundrum where it's like, if you get too far one way or the other, you can be sure that the other side is gonna try to balance it out and it's gonna come up with a equally ludicrous reaction just going the other direction. But for my brain that needs structure and ways to conceptualize, I need frameworks to think about things, is fascism is weaponized paternalism, socialism is weaponized maternalism. Neither are good for government, period.

Scott: 29:07

Yeah, and I actually struggle with this. I mean I love the way that you've structured it because it does give you sort of a framework to anchor in and to think about it. And it's, I guess I'll observe that you know the scaffolding is important but it's not the building. So scaffolding is useful as long as you need a scaffolding. What you wanna do is build the building, build your understanding and when the scaffolding becomes superfluous, it needs to be torn down so that you have that more solid understanding in the metaphor, the building.

Scott: 29:52

What I don't really understand is how people say that there is a difference between socialism and communism on one side and fascism and dictatorships on the other and one is a product of the left, one is a product of the right. Because I see them both as the same thing. They are the use of force to get what you, aren't willing to do the work to obtain by agreement. Right. And you look at The United States system of government now, and you know, everything is close.

Scott: 30:40

You know, the Senate is split pretty closely. The House is split pretty closely. It doesn't take much to tip one one way or the other. And you know, we have this big election of for who's running the executive every four years. And that you know gives us a chance to you know, throw the scoundrels out.

Scott: 31:00

That sort of thing. And what I've heard over years is you know this system is terrible because we can't agree and I've actually have friends who are intelligent, informed people who say we should have the European Parliamentary system. And I always end up topping off everybody's glass of wine and giving them the speech which is you know the parliamentary system is a majority system. So if you get the majority you control everything. And as soon as you lose the majority, you control nothing.

Scott: 31:41

You are His Majesty's loyal opposition. But you have this pendulum that goes back and forth because if you have the majority, then you can do whatever you want. And in The United States, if you actually really read the constitution, the constitution is designed to create a structure of government where decision making is done not by majority but by super majority consensus. And that requires trade offs. And when people come to this part in the cycle where they're upset that government isn't functioning, it's because you've come to that part in the cycle where it is now unethical and immoral to give a concession to the other side.

Scott: 32:37

And what The United States Constitution requires is that both sides concede something. So the agreement isn't the best thing to happen, it's the thing that people who disagree are least offended by. I remember years ago talking to an old guy that was an antiques dealer and he had this particular antique, I think it was like an old parlor rifle. This is antique rifle that was used for, you know, to shoot BBs in the, you know, eighteen eighties or something. And he said, I came into the shop and it was gone.

Scott: 33:25

I said, what happened? He said, I sold it. I'm like, you love that rifle.

Shawn: 33:29

Right.

Scott: 33:30

He goes, yeah, a guy came in, he loved it too. We talked, he paid more than he wanted. I got less than I wanted. We both cried and I sold the rifle. And to me that's always been the story about how do you come to an agreement with somebody that you really disagree with and you really don't like.

Scott: 33:55

And the problem that I see in today's sort of modern 2026 culture is that nobody wants to do the work. Nobody wants to really come to agreement because it's just easier to say that you're gonna throw a punch. And this comes back to, these are people who think they're fighting because they're screaming on social media, not fighting. I'll tell you one more story before I shut up here for a minute. But I mean, started life as you know, climbing in the mountains around the Pacific Northwest and my first job was as a climbing guide on Mount Rainier.

Scott: 34:47

I was 15 years old and I'm climbing on Mount Rainier which is 14,410 feet And it's the mountain in The United States, particularly at that time that people trained on before they were going to the Himalayas and to climb Everest in K2. It's a dangerous mountain. When I was climbing in the late 70s and early 80s, more people had been killed on Rainier than had been killed on Everest. It was dangerous and I spent my summers there in this dangerous environment. And then I came to the FBI fifteen years later, ten years later and I saw people who legitimately believed that going into a meeting in a conference room with senior executives was dangerous.

Scott: 35:34

Like they were physically shaking and if somebody asked them a question that was, you know, dangerous to their career and physically dangerous to them. And I'm looking at them going, that's not dangerous. It may be unpleasant, particularly if you don't know the answer to the question, but it's actually not dangerous. Yeah. Well I could get transferred, I could get disciplined.

Scott: 36:01

Yeah, and that's bad, that sucks. But it's actually not physically dangerous. I think that's how we get this concept that words are violence. Now, violence is violence. Words are not violence.

Scott: 36:13

Words can be unpleasant. Right. But they're not violence. And you know, fight means everybody gets hurt. So let's stop talking about fighting for Christ's sake.

Scott: 36:25

And let's talk about what we really mean. Which is we freaking disagree and it's important and we're angry and we're sad and you know, we want things to be different but let's grow up too and say, well, we want things to be different but the people we're engaging with, they want things to be different too and let's find our way, not actually physically hurting people, but let's find our way. Find our way. And so many people think that's a cop out and I'm here to tell everybody it's not a cop out.

Shawn: 37:00

Yeah.

Scott: 37:00

And when people are deriding you for being weak, that actually means you're strong.

Shawn: 37:06

Right.

Scott: 37:06

And I've fought that battle. Sometimes I won it, sometimes I've lost it. And that's, you know, this is kinda personal to Scott Olsen. It's deeply frustrating to me. Yeah.

Scott: 37:17

When people talk about fighting when they don't know what it is.

Shawn: 37:21

Well, that's a you know, so I think a lot of where I get I lose my patience and as somebody who used to be a card card carrying, you know, very, sort of active Well, I don't know if I'd ever call myself progressive. I was a Democrat, registered Democrat anyway. You know, I think a lot of times people in that party, you know, just your average Democrat, you know, has probably really, you know, valid instincts that that are meritorious, that they they, you know, they they genuinely don't wanna hurt anybody. They're they're trying to to do something that they think is, you know, improving some group's life or somebody's life or or something like that. But the problem is that the majority of them, this goes back to your point of, you know, people never been in a fight.

Shawn: 38:10

So my problem is that a lot of those folks on the left are mostly suburban armchair activists and they lack both coping skills in the real world as well as a real world understanding such as never having been in a fight. They lack a real world understanding of both many of the assumptions and the terms that they throw around, right? And so I think that that is part of that problem is, and actually I have a lot of examples of where that I have seen that manifest in people that I know and deeply care about who are self described progressives and liberals. And it's not to say they aren't smart or they don't know things. It's just, I think a lot of times the things they think they know about are not at all what it's like on the ground, in a real context.

Shawn: 39:02

There is a lot of context missing from their assumptions and things that they are using in terms of verbiage. But I wanted to also just quickly note that your point, I took it very, very seriously, what you were saying, if I can go back to it for just a minute, is that this idea that there's sort of like fringe left, fringe right, and that the actual political manifestation or ultimate apparatuses that manifest from those far, you know, kind of fringe ideologies or, you know, kind of instincts, they do often end up looking the same, right? So there isn't a real distinction. And the only reason I was kind of putting them on a spectrum of one to me just feels more like weaponized paternalism versus the other one feels more like weaponized maternalism. The balance or where they start to come, I see it less on a linear spectrum, like where you have far left and far right and more on a circular spectrum whereby the further they get out from a centrist sort of moderated sort of posture, which I don't see as being the same thing as ideologically, what's the word I think they would use is like squishy you know, or non principled, right?

Shawn: 40:29

I like, I think a lot of times where we get these fringy types is they're like, oh, well, you're just, you know, you're a pushover. You're, you know, you're not ideologically pure. You know what I mean? Like, you're willing to sacrifice things or like AKA maybe compromise in a complex society. I don't see that as a bad thing and I don't see it as an abdication of my ideology or my principles.

Shawn: 40:49

I just see it as you live in a complex society, you're going to have to, there's going to be trade offs. That's it. You know, but yeah, so I agree with you though that the expression ends up looking exactly the same because it is. It's it's the use of some centralized power in some form or fashion to control the outcome. At the expense of probably a lot of people.

Shawn: 41:12

So I just thought that was worth kind of highlighting because I think you're absolutely right. I think you're absolutely right on that.

Scott: 41:20

Yeah, and I really appreciate that descriptor, that metaphor that everybody sort of starts in what appears to be the middle. But as you progress and depart from each other, you're not going on a bell curve and you're not going on a line, you're on a circle. Eventually you're gonna meet back. If we take a turn to the practical for a moment, as we're telling people, hey, don't fight. Be reasonable and talk to people.

Scott: 41:58

Like, okay, great advice. That's like saying, hey, go be rich. You know it's the how, the how do you do that is what's critical And in my opinion, the how starts with the flags on the play. Well, little idiom, flags on the play. It's like what are the indicators that will tell you when you're getting away from that?

Scott: 42:37

Name calling, what I would generally call ridicule, can also, even if they're not you know, personal attack ridicule things, you know, be these you know, purity tests. You know, what's your stand on abortion? Okay, boom. You're boxed, you're in one of these camps now. You know, what's your stance on you know, who can and cannot be married?

Scott: 43:04

Boom, you're in a box. What's your stance on taxation? Boom, You're in a box. We are none of us boxes. We are people.

Scott: 43:18

And so the thing I think that everybody should look for in themselves is when you're in that conversation, what's making you enthusiastic and what's frustrating you? What's making you be angry? And then examine that. If what you're hearing yourself say is, well you don't understand me because you're just stupid. That's a huge flag on the play because it may mean that the person that you're talking to doesn't understand because they don't understand but it also may mean that you don't understand what you think well enough to be able to describe it well.

Scott: 44:05

And you can't do anything about the person who's listening to you and their willingness to understand, but you can do a better job at understanding it yourself and describing it and refining. And it comes back around to this notion of form opinions, be thoughtful, but be willing to be convinced. And one of the things that you learn when you're in counseling. I have an unfortunately long history with marriage counseling, which didn't produce any successful marriages for me, but it did produce some useful thought processes. And one of them is, when you're in a conversation and you're not really listening to the other person, you're just thinking about what you're gonna say next, it is a huge flag.

Scott: 44:58

I think that social media allows us to do that. It gives us anonymity, You know someone may see your name, but they don't know who you are. And so it allows you to not have self control. It allows you to ridicule. It allows you to be undignified and offensive because it's how you're feeling in the moment and it's not the pragmatics of be careful what you say because you know it may come back to bite you later.

Scott: 45:27

It really is about taking ownership of yourself And it's a hard thing to do. Ten minutes ago, I was pretty animated and I was letting a lot of emotion show and right now I'm feeling like, okay, I let that emotion show. Was it anger? Was it frustration? Was it appropriate emotion?

Scott: 45:50

And one of the things I get because I'm not the smallest guy on the planet is, I'm a six footer, got a couple hundred pounds. What I have often got is, well, when you get animated, you're overwhelming and I can't say anything. I'm like: Okay, I get that but how much of that is I'm actually being articulate? And I'm saying things that my listeners haven't thought about or haven't heard and they're struggling with Oh, I didn't realize that and I'm kinda convinced and like most people who are changing their minds, I'm embarrassed that I thought this before instead of after. And so it becomes very personal because it's a conversation.

Scott: 46:39

And it's difficult and I guess the thing that is in my top three things of what bothers me about the world is, when it's difficult, people bail. They don't wanna do the difficult thing. They would rather have it be easy and that's why whether you're on the right and the paternal side or the left and the maternal side, you know this notion of because I said so, I'm cold so you put on a sweater.

Shawn: 47:13

I like that. I'm cold so you put on a sweater. That's really good. That's really good.

Scott: 47:18

And it's, you know, that comes from a good place. I don't want you to be uncomfortable, but it also comes from a bad place, which is that hidden presumption of I don't think that you can understand whether you're too warm or too cold. I don't think you can figure out whether to put a sweater on because you're cold and you know, every mom in the world right now is screaming at me saying, well I took my kids to the beach and they all jumped in the water and they didn't realize they were gonna be freezing cold and now all of a sudden, you know, I'm dealing with, you know, two or three or four freezing cold little kids and I don't have enough towels because they're all wet and yeah, so it is a problem. I'm like, yeah, fair enough. Get it.

Scott: 48:09

Been there too, and I get it, but part of that is learning too. That's Letting even kids, feel forward. But I think it begins with giving people the freedom to make their own mistakes and to not dictate.

Shawn: 48:32

Yeah. And I think that's a that's a great kind of closing sentiment is like, you know, the the idea here, and I actually just had a conversation with my sister. We got off the phone and we were talking about this in the context of her new college students, Her one of her younger ones and and just like where the line like sort of starts edge, like where do you edge back as the parent and give they have the information now give them the freedom to make the choice. And then as long as you've presented them the information and you have said for every action or decision you take, there's a reaction or a consequence, then now they have the information, they understand the cost benefit analysis of the outcome, and then they have to live with the outcome, right? Like that's the best you can do.

Shawn: 49:20

But to try to intervene at that age in life probably will do more harm than it'll do good if you get over. At least my perspective is it probably would do more harm than good. It's like present them with the information, illustrate how there's a cost benefit analysis that should be performed about what happens based on if I take course A, B or C of action and then they will need to choose and make those decisions. But I do, before we close out, Scott, I wanna just introduce something that maybe for the next episode we could get back to, Because one of the things that you also had started, and I kind of thought you were going here at first and then you took a slightly different turn on me, is great because it still works. But your emphasis on the, okay, so we've just spent X amount of minutes sort of griping about this or that manifestation of this sort of political party or this other one, but what's the solution?

Shawn: 50:15

What's the how and how we avoid this or how do we positively react to any of this? And maybe we kick it off the next episode. I would love to go back to that how, because I think I always wanna leave people with something that they can do or use as a tool or an idea. And you had mentioned a really, I thought, really cool illustration of your private school when they had there was a whole situation surrounding a tennis court. We will do spoiler alerts because I I don't have time to continue here.

Shawn: 50:51

But that was an example of something that worked and it was a proactive thing that I thought was related to a good outcome versus another action they had later taken, which didn't yield such a good outcome. And I think we should talk about that as a whole episode focus because right now in the world, it's too easy to destroy things. It's easy to tear things down. It's easy to talk about how bad stuff is because it is in a lot of ways. The hard work is where you were going.

Shawn: 51:24

You were going towards that. The hard work. People don't want to stick around. Part of why I think they don't stick around for the hard work, Scott, is because a lot of times they don't know how to stick around for it. They don't know how to do it.

Shawn: 51:36

And if we can be a little bit of a part of giving people some tools to cope or to think about things in a different way or to then act in a different way that produces a better outcome for themselves and others around them. Would love to do that in the next episode if you're amenable.

Scott: 51:52

Yeah, absolutely. As always, as we're coming to the end of an hour, there's always a lot of steam in the boiler left. So it's a lot like today. Sometimes there's some but in terms of sort of maybe putting a comma rather than a period on this one, because I agree talking about the hard work and it's not the hard work of compromise, it's the hard work of interacting. Interacting with people is wonderful and it's hard, it's both of those things.

Scott: 52:30

Talking about the how, there are so many examples out there, love that and let's definitely do that. Sort of what I offer for everyone's consideration whether it's moms and dads, parents, or anybody else in the world. When you're letting somebody fail forward, when you're sending a college student off or sending a kindergartner off, what's worth considering is this, you know, having the conversation, you know, warning them what's on the footpath, Asking them this question, which is: If this happens, what are you gonna do? You're going down the trail and you're probably gonna be fine, but if you stub your toe, what are you gonna do? Dad, I'm stub my toe.

Scott: 53:25

Yeah, I get that. But if your plan doesn't work, what are you gonna do? And if you don't have a fallback plan, okay, it's legit and answered the question. But do you want a fallback plan? So having that conversation and then always having a first aid kit.

Scott: 53:43

Because even your college student, when they go off to the world and they know and everything's gonna be fine and they get pounded, they're coming home. And they need a place to come and cry. They need money. They need having that first aid kit a big dollop of empathy. Not saying I told you so, but okay, let's talk about what the plan should be now.

Scott: 54:09

And next time when you go out, what are you gonna do if this happens? What's your plan? Absolutely. And it's hard to do because it's hard to see somebody you love hurt. But it should be a lot harder to hurt people you don't know.

Scott: 54:25

It should be so much harder to hurt people you don't know. And that's what a lot of people out there are doing. You hurt people you don't know and I think that's wrong.

Shawn: 54:35

Absolutely.

Scott: 54:36

Awesome. Awesome. Well, I think if it's okay with you, that'll

Shawn: 54:40

Yeah, leave it absolutely. And,

Scott: 54:44

all right, see you. We will see you all next time when we talk about how to do all this stuff.

Shawn: 54:51

Absolutely. Sounds great, Scott. Thanks so much.