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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!
Hey, Scott.
Scott:Hey, Sean. You there?
Shawn:So, yeah, can you hear me okay?
Scott:I can hear you just fine. You got me?
Shawn:Yes. Okay. So that was good timing. I literally, like five minutes ago, just received the first round of concepts, logo concepts from Nikki. I just forwarded you a link.
Shawn:I'm so excite I mean, I barely had a chance to look at them, but I already think I see like, I really like the more robust ones that I think she clearly took liberty with. I really like the last page. I think it's the last page, which is
Scott:That's totally exciting. I cannot wait to take a look.
Shawn:Yeah. Proof three. So there's one, two, and the third one, I think has some real potential.
Scott:Okay, very cool. I yeah, I can't wait to see. I mean, I'm excited to see her work in general. Just, you know, what you've shared with me about her and the and the way she works.
Shawn:But yeah,
Scott:yeah, Very cool.
Shawn:Yeah. So yay. Now I'm, like, so worked up about it. I'm just like, oh, I don't know what to like.
Scott:Yeah. No. It's So cool. I think that's good. I think it's good to get worked up, and it's good to get excited.
Shawn:Yeah. Yeah. So I just wanna start off by saying I shared a little bit of our conversation from was it yesterday or was it the day before? The day before. Yeah.
Shawn:With one of my youngsters, Emily. She's really, like, I mean, fresh out of I think fresh out of undergrad, potentially, maybe grad school. She's probably would be upset for me for not knowing, and that is my bad. But it was real I don't know why I was sharing, like, some of our conversation. There was something that she had said and it triggered something, and then I kind of went off on what we were talking about.
Shawn:And she was so funny. She was like, I'm so fascinated by the whole vegetarian thing, like your take on the vegetarianism thing, because she's a vegetarian. And she received it really well. But it was funny because she said my response to that would have probably been something along the lines of, you know, we now have as humans access to so many different options that can replace that protein or whatever the meat sort of nutrients is with other things. And then that was funny because I was like, but you know, that kind of actually covers a different point than I had made in the discussion with Scott, which is that as humans, we, at least in The United States for sure, but you know, most of the metropolitan cities around the world, we have grown accustomed to an artificial scale and access of goods and items that we normally wouldn't otherwise have been, you know, able to access.
Shawn:So therein lies the question, just because you can import this from India, like, should you be importing that? You know what I mean? And, you know, anyway, it was really funny because my little micro conversation with her, our primary conversation sparked a really good micro conversation with her on something that I thought reinforced what you and I were both trying to get at, you know, and it made her like she literally left that little discussion with me and was like, I now have to take two days to go and think about all of this. But that's good. That's really good.
Scott:That is such great news. Thanks for sharing that with me. Love that and now, as always, my brain is spinning because I had a similar conversation yesterday with a friend of mine, but before I get into that, you know, grabbing on to the vegetarian thing, it is, I think, exactly what we can do with this podcast, which is to make people think and and not vegetarianism is bad or vegetarianism is good. Let's think about why we're doing what we're doing and not to criticize, but critical thinking, because I think critical thinking is what leads to fulfillment, not necessarily to happiness. You're going to be happy or sad, I would hope, every day because
Shawn:That means you're experiencing something.
Scott:Yeah, it means that you're seeing what's real in life. I mean, as an aside, when I am in a negotiation, in a business negotiation, if everything looks good, I throw a flag on the play because if everything looks good, I'm not seeing everything. It's not that there's something bad.
Shawn:I love that.
Scott:It's that I'm just not seeing everything. When you're making a decision, whether it's about how you eat or how you sleep, You need to understand everything. And I think having a plant based diet is absolutely legitimate if that is your choice. I think what leads to the mental health issues is if part of your decision making to eat a plant based diet is rejecting the reality that your body is specifically designed
Shawn:built for it
Scott:to use plants and to use animal flesh as nutrients. And if you recognize that it can and you don't put a value judgment on it, you just say, I'm not going to do that because I choose not to kill animals. That's fundamentally different than I hate that my body can process animal flesh, and the way I'm going to deal with that uncomfortableness is a plant based diet.
Shawn:Well, the value judgment I
Scott:love your niece or whoever it is. I love that she's putting her teeth into this. And instead of saying, well, partner in the podcast sucks. Don't ridicule. She's just saying, need to think.
Shawn:No, she's great. And for the record, she's coalition, one of our program research assistants and she's American, but she's based in Scotland right now. And she graduated from St. Andrews. So she has a year after graduation to work from Scotland.
Shawn:She's doing that. But no, she just had such a positive reaction to that because of how I think I presented the information. Wasn't, you know, and again, my presentation in that game of telephone is just replicating how you present information, which again, I think you and I both, at least we try, you know, I don't know if I can say I'm 100% successful every time, but it's in how you present the information that opens up that portal for people to feel comfortable to actually self reflect. To me, there's not enough of that in the world right now because of how information is currently predominantly presented, which is in a very judgmental, forward facing, out the gate, you're wrong, I'm right. And you see that all the time in clickbait headlines, but also in, you know, sort of these very minimized post.
Shawn:You know, you have restrictions on how much you can post on. What's it called X? I don't know, it's Twitter. I don't know what it's called, I don't use it. And it's funny, I don't use that platform precisely because I don't like being restricted in how much I can or can't say because now you're controlling my speech with even if they you know I get that they're not like from a constitutional rights perspective controlling it but like you when you're forcing me to have like you know such a narrow amount of space then you know by default you're hemming me in a bit.
Shawn:But at any rate, it's just what you're saying is right. I think that what our focus here, I think our goal in many ways is not just to share kind of what we know or how we think about things, because that may or may not be of value to someone else or someone else, but it's really calling to mind or, you know, it's putting forward the fact that we should, as humans, whatever our choices are, whatever we decide should be done mindfully. Shouldn't just be an auto response against something. But we should really, you know, and I think people will build enrollment to their way of thinking, you know, more so if they reject the instinct to be hyperjudgmental about those who are not in agreement or in alignment with that particular worldview. And so what a great outcome.
Shawn:Less conflict, more enrollment, potentially, you know, most likely if your whatever the thing you're advocating for or lifestyle choices is actually generating tangible material benefit or, you know, or other benefit. So I don't know, you know, to me that was almost like a little test case, like for how our content might be understood and received. I thought it was a good indicator. But yeah.
Scott:Yeah, I mean, I think that's awesome. And you're spot on on so many things about what you just said. There's so much content out there that's answers. It's not, know, here's the question of veganism and here's where you should be. I don't think that's useful in public discourse.
Scott:I think for each individual, again, the path to fulfillment that I see is thinking about things and making choices for yourself. But it's also the notion of not being completely open minded because if you're open minded, I remember back in college hearing a professor say an open mind is an empty mind, because all you're doing is following what's fashionable. Somebody says, Oh, that's right. Somebody says something else. Oh, that's right.
Scott:So you need to anchor yourself based on what you think. But I also feel that you need to be open to being convinced. And a lot of people grab on to their opinions because it's what my family does, or it's what a relative did, or it's what my peer group does, and this is what we do. What does that lead to in business?
Shawn:Group think.
Scott:Yeah, it's group think, and it's the thing that we struggle with in business and in leadership consulting and in leading, which is everybody agrees, well, the way we've always done it is a bad thought process. But when you look at life opinions, a lot of it's rooted in, well, this is what I do. I've always done it this way. And I remember hearing a quote, I remember hearing an interview of a guy, and I can't remember this guy's name, I can't even remember the circumstance, but he's the one who gave me this phrase, be thoughtful, have opinions, but be open to being convinced. And more and more now, even in non political people, if you're running for office, can't be a flip flopper.
Scott:But even in our lives, it's, well, oh, you can't change your mind. You know what? 25 year old Scott Olson is not the same guy as 53 year old Scott Olson. The same guy as 45 year old Scott Olson. You got to grow, but you again, I think the path to fulfillment is not being arbitrary, to grow, to think.
Scott:And I just love the conversation that you had, and I love the impact that it had on you. It's like,
Shawn:what are we
Scott:doing here? We're not discussing answers, and we're not just saying, well, here's an issue, discuss. We're trying to put people on the road to think about it, and where does it come down for you? And tell me about your decision to be vegan. You might convince me.
Scott:Mean, now I'm a unrepentant carnivore.
Shawn:Love that.
Scott:Open to being convinced. I want to hear somebody who is vegan or vegetarian address that issue of, I want a plant based protein diet, but I don't want to eat highly processed foods. You know, for me, that's an easy one. If you don't want, highly processed foods, then you don't want plant based protein, you want meat and vegetables. You know, convince me.
Scott:I want to listen to that.
Shawn:I want to be
Scott:a part of that decision.
Shawn:And I think that that's, you know, so true. And hopefully that's what our interactions will will do is to spark those types of conversations all over the country and eventually maybe the world. But, you know, but also to get us to think because it gives us more content to work with because now I have a different way to kind of look at it, or at least a different lens through which I'm seeing our conversation. To me, that's really helpful. Even though I am, it's funny, I wouldn't call myself an unrepentant carnivore per se.
Shawn:I have a much more pragmatic view on it. I'm just, you know, we were built to do it. I love animals. All if I ever have options to, you know, not participate in like the unnecessary harming of an animal, I'm I'm okay doing that. But I'm also, again, a pragmatist and one of my biggest sort of, you know, revelations when I was, you know, earlier in my life is I did this fourteen day or twelve day, two week journey on horseback throughout through the Mongolian Steppe.
Shawn:And part of that was we lived like the nomads. Like there was we had no technology, no access to anything. It was whatever we could carry and that was pretty much it. We weren't near the city. So we were, again, making our way through the step.
Shawn:And the one thing that became crystal clear to me is just how inappropriate urban moralizing is in a purely rural setting because these Mongolian herders literally lived off the literally. They made whatever income that they had based off of what they could make from a textiles perspective or from cultivating their sheep and yak herds to provide byproducts, whether it was everything, I had everything from, I'll say yak smoke, but it's knack smoke because I learned the distinction is a yak is or a yak is a male and a knack is a female.
Scott:Oh, annoying.
Shawn:So knack smoke, vodka, I think, it was some sort of liquor, But like for meals, was a lot of dairy because they would make the dairy products and vegetables obviously because they could cultivate certain things and then they would move on or maybe they're bartering, I didn't actually see that part, but like basic staple vegetables. And literally one day they were like, okay, like we're going to go have dinner out here and whatever. And next thing I know, I'm watching this guy come through on his little moped and he picked one of the little goats from the herd and it was a big herd, you know, and he lays out a blanket and the and the goat was totally fine. Like, you know, you know how you've been probably in certain scenarios, especially in America where we do like mass, cultivation of certain types like the beef industry or chickens and stuff. But this was not that.
Shawn:These were all free range. They lived their life until the minute they didn't. And he had just plucked one up and he set it down and it did not seem distressed or upset or anything. And I tell you, Scott, it was the craziest thing to watch. I didn't even realize what I was about to see, so I was fully fixated on the situation.
Shawn:But he just whips out like a tiny little knife thing. He nicked an artery, I guess, or something in the smoothest of ways. And the little goat just kind of, meh, like, I mean, was just very soft and like there was no violence, there was no distress. I mean, obviously there's some stress associated with the taking of life and I get that, and I think that's a very powerful moment, but you know, it wasn't cruel, right? It wasn't sustained cruelty they had to eat, and that's the only source of serious protein that these people who have to live in the most intense conditions, weather conditions, they like to say that Mongolia has four seasons in a day.
Shawn:It can go from snowing to baking in the sun in like, you know, eight hours. My point being is, you know, we're basically rejecting the most natural way of human existence when we say that. And while I understand modern like mass production of meat products and how that can be inhumane and cruel, most definitely. Again, you see how the reaction like the reaction then becomes counter at its purest form to what is essentially survival requirements for other cultures and ways of life and that are much closer to harmony, a harmonious, sustainable relationship with nature and animals than what somebody living in Manhattan understands. So perspective is everything, guess.
Scott:Yeah, but I think you're right. I mean, as we have grown in population, certainly in what we call the first world and we're living in cities, it's sort of how do we feed people who aren't farming, who are doing other things. And so we create this pretty incredible food logistics system, we fundamentally lose something, and it's like your bedsheets from last time, your connection to the earth. When you don't see, the sacrifice of the animal, when you're not witnessing, even if you're not necessarily witnessing every bite of animal protein that you eat being slaughtered or being, taken and processed for food, if you never see that at all, you really begin to lose the solemnity of what it means to be a part of ecosystem on the planet we live on. It's not just, well, humans are apex predators and biblical.
Scott:Everything is here for our use. Okay, it's all of those things. But when you look at people who are still involved in living off the land, They recognize that this is not an arbitrary thing and they're grateful for it. Right now, an unrepentant carnivore like me, I walk into a supermarket and I'm having tacos tonight and so I grab a pound of ground beef and I'm missing it. I'm missing the solemnity of the sacrifice of the animal that produced this pound of ground beef because I just I'm hungry for tacos and it's I try and remember that and I try and pull that in anytime I'm you know putting sausage on a breakfast sandwich or having a steak and I miss it.
Scott:But I think we, as people, miss it and it robs us. It robs us of the gratitude of this is how all of us fit into the ecosystem, and animals aren't just things for us to eat. They're living, breathing. Maybe they don't have as much of the life force that gives humans intelligence, but they're still, if you scare them, they get scared.
Shawn:That's right.
Scott:And they get angry and they'll fight for their life. But for me at least, I think the mistake is to turn away from that. Equivalent is mindlessly embracing it. I don't care, it's just an animal and I want steak. I think that that doesn't do justice to what's really happening there.
Scott:And just acknowledging. Again, it's funny how for me at least it comes back around to mental health. Acknowledging the hardest questions, acknowledging that everyone is going to come to a different answer allows us to know that we're seeing everything clearly, and so everything is right with the world because everybody's looking at the same thing and coming to their own answer about how to live and how to process it. I've been watching, Anthony Bourdain's No Reservation series.
Shawn:He's a good one.
Scott:Yeah. And just listening to you talk, me of an episode I just saw where he was up above the Arctic Circle with Inuit natives, and they harvested a seal, and it was part of you know okay and the great thing about No Reservations in particular he's done a bunch of different series but it's he's going into cultures and seeing how they how they eat, what their food is, and the Inuits brought the seal into the kitchen, put a piece of plastic on the floor, cut it apart on the floor of the kitchen, and the entire family grandparents down to, little kids they ate it raw. They didn't cook it. The blubber, the organ meat, the brain, they ate it raw, and it's because their bodies were hungry for the fat because of the extreme environment they live in. And gratitude it for the sacrifice of the animal, and then the hunger of what their body needed in that environment.
Scott:That's most people who are, you know, send back their tapas plate because it isn't cooked properly are not going to, you know, dial into. You know, looking at a seal being butchered on the floor of a kitchen and eating it raw as as something that is.
Shawn:That that you just made me think of something like, yeah, I rarely send food back just because I am conflict avoidant as we have learned, but you've now given me a different way to think about that is like, we are so spoiled that a perfectly good plate of food has been provided to us. Even if it's not what we, now I get it if it's something that just isn't to your taste and it's gonna make you sick because you just don't like it. But like, may, you know, I don't know that I've, if I was gonna send something back, I'm gonna now think about it twice because it's wasteful and it's an, you know what I mean? All to dissatisfied my own like spoiled little like desire, I guess. So that's the first thing and that actually, that I because it gives me another way to practice gratitude and to not be wasteful.
Shawn:But the second thing I was going to say after hearing you chat a bit was that, again, it all comes down to this, you know, I think people would mostly be fine with how other people want to live, particularly in this kind of a context, because it's not hurting me for you to be a vegetarian. Like, doesn't negatively impact my life in any way until you go on the offensive and start holding your way of life up as somehow superior to mine and thusly are now deliberately making wishing to make me or others feel as if we are morally corrupt because we are not in alignment with your lifestyle choice. So I think that's an important point. And then the last thing I'll say is mostly just anecdotal because it was a funny image that came in my head while I was thinking that, which is, you made the mention of animals and how they don't have quite the developed level of intelligence that humans have, which is true. But let's just say they did for a moment in time.
Shawn:They still don't have the physical aptitude to make the choice to not eat the thing that they're accustomed to eating. They don't have opposable thumbs. They can't cook food. Even if you gave a fox or a bear or any of these wild animals the intelligence to discern that eating prey is morally questionable. They wouldn't be able to change the behavior.
Shawn:So now what you're saying is, you know, okay, so how is it morally superior if we haven't been created to eat anything other than what they eat?
Scott:Yeah.
Shawn:It kind of takes a little bit of the fire out of the argument, in my opinion, but maybe I'm just taking this too No,
Scott:I think that that's part of sort of what might be called the human condition, right? Someone might say, Oh, but that's how humans are different. Do have that different level of brain functioning. We do have opposable thumbs. Pretty much every animal on the planet that has opposable thumbs can make tools.
Scott:I mean, they used to think that primates didn't make tools, but then they saw, you know, primates taking a twig to fish bugs out of a crack in the log and and so they. If you have opposable thumbs, you can make tools. Okay, now it's our responsibility, and it's our responsibility operating at this higher level to not take advantage, and all of a sudden it becomes exactly what you're saying. It's this moral high ground type of argument, and I agree with you. I think the problem with moral high ground arguments is that it presumes I'm better than you.
Scott:I am coming from moral high ground and if you disagree with me you're not as good morally as I am.
Shawn:Or smart and that's important too because now you're calling me dumb, know what I mean? You know for doing the thing we're built to do.
Scott:Yeah, exactly. And that's not, sort of dignified interaction. I mean, is going down the path of ridicule, which I think is what a lot of people do in our current time. And I think that if you find yourself heading down the path of ridicule, flag on the play. I think you need to pull back and go, am I so not confident in my decision that I have to personally attack people who don't agree?
Scott:Why do I not feel like if I'm doing this and the entire world disagrees, I'm still good because it's working for me. And I don't know really that that takes an act of courage, although maybe it does. But I have always thought, or at least for half of my life thought, that moral high ground is tactical low ground. If you're making an argument from moral high ground, you've lost that argument because all you're saying is this is my opinion and it's correct because I'm better than you. I don't find that to be compelling.
Shawn:It's not compelling or persuasive and it actually accomplishes the opposite of what the alleged goal is. Yeah, I just, I don't, I will never understand people who take that approach in anything, you know, because it undermines the credibility of your position so much. But that's a whole podcast session for another day, I think. But yeah, so I don't know, I guess what I have been taking out of this kind of continuation of the day before yesterday's conversation is just simply that, you know, be more mindful about what choices that we're making in our individual lives and be less judgment outwardly judgmental. Well, probably inwardly judgmental too.
Shawn:It probably doesn't help you to have judgment in your heart, you know, but but start by trying to less outward judgment and then eventually you'll get better at being less internally judgmental. And, you know, you probably will find that a lot more people will be open to hearing like, you know, why do you do that? Why is that your choice?
Scott:Yeah, and I think it's important to distinguish between what we mean when we say judgmental and what we mean when we say have an opinion. Because I think I've seen people choose not to have opinions at all because they don't want to be judgmental. I think if you don't decide what you think is right and wrong, if you don't decide what works for you, I think you're just being pushed by the current. You don't have an anchor. So you need an anchor, but deciding that people who don't agree with your anchor are bad, that's the judgmental piece.
Scott:And I think part of being anchored is to be thoughtful, because thoughtfulness gives you the confidence that your decision works for you. And I really do believe that if you're making a decision that works for you and you've thought about it, that leads to the confidence of, I can now have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with me and not have it shake me to my core. And what I see across conversations today is a complete lack of that. If there's a disagreement, the argument very quickly becomes
Shawn:Escalates, yeah.
Scott:It becomes ridicule. It becomes accusatory because everyone in the conversation wants to be right and doesn't want to be wrong. And that's it. It's not what it's about. It's about being thoughtful.
Scott:And I think that that's what naturally you draw out of me and why I love having these conversations with you, because you draw the thoughtfulness out. And because when we're talking, there's no ridicule. There's no danger of ridicule. It's just, well, here's another way to think about it, here's how it makes me feel. And I think part of the strength of what we're doing in 2 Parachutes Podcast is modeling interactive, thoughtful conversation.
Scott:And the reality of it is whether the world realizes or not, the world needs this.
Shawn:So much so.
Scott:Conversation based on feelings and not based on an agenda.
Shawn:Yeah, well, and you totally are on my wavelength because as you were saying that what I was thinking, it's about it's about demonstrating the practice of thoughtful exchange, not honing. The capability to facilitate debate skills with an agenda. Are different goals, and I think those are different podcast styles. I think there are people out in the world who are super important right now who are honing the debate skill piece because they have a specific principled position on important issues of our time. But that is not this, not because we don't have those positions or feelings, but because those people I see as serving the function of supplementing, frankly speaking, the chasm, the Grand Canyon Gap that has been created by the demise of credible journalism.
Shawn:So people are increasingly seeking credible outlets of information where they can feel like they're getting an informed perspective on something they may be on the fence about. So I think that's what those types of interactions are doing. But for what we are doing, you nailed it. It's more of a, how are them people listening to those people and then having their own conversations about what they feel about those things? And it's a skill and an art that I think we're losing because more and more of our interactions are happening online and disassociated from the actual human, even in the example of us doing this conversation, we're doing that.
Shawn:Yeah. So it's trying to bring a little bit more of the humanity back to the human exchange because we're forgetting how to do that. If we Yeah. I think we used to know. I I won't say that we never knew.
Shawn:I think we probably were really quite good at this a long time ago. But yeah, we're losing that art, I think.
Scott:Yeah. And I agree that it comes in cycles. But it's also the it's a skill and an art. But I think in some ways, it's also a choice. It's a choice to be interested.
Scott:It's a choice to sort of let go a little bit and let a different perspective in without being concerned that, oh, somebody might convince me to change my mind. I might have to think about this. Reminds me of that old '38 Special song, you know, hold on loosely, go, if you cling too tightly you're gonna lose control and it's talking about love relationships but it's about relationships, it's about you know, a light hand on the tiller.
Shawn:I love that you went with the music analogy and in my mind all I kept thinking of was the great line in the first Star Wars film which was, you know, I think it was princess Leia who said to governor Tarkin the tighter your grip the more star systems will slip through your fingers you know same idea.
Scott:I love that and and the thing is it's everywhere. The stuff we're talking about is everywhere. It appears everywhere in art, in culture, in interpersonal, interactions, small and large. It's all there for people to see. And having a forum, you and I creating a forum, one of many, many, where people can come and get the pump primed, get liquid flowing through the pipes so that we don't have air bubbles and we can do this thing.
Scott:It's a place people can come, not the only place, but a place. And it's right on.
Shawn:I wanted to circle back to something you referenced earlier in the conversation because I think there's something to unpack there. You mentioned the idea of something anchoring people and what motivates their behavior changes or choices. And I think that what part of the problem is that I'm seeing in society these days is that the thing that people are anchoring themselves to, meaning it's the belief or the principle or their why in terms of why they are, you know, rejecting something or why they are making a different life choice or change is the anchor is very important. And if your anchor is a vegetarian or a vegan, let's just continue with that analogy or that example. If your anchor is that I cannot bring myself to eat animal flesh because I associate it with the murder of a living being and that is so deeply upsetting to you that you just can't abide by it, that that can be your anchor.
Shawn:But if your goal is to then convince others of that decision, you have to acknowledge that not everybody's going to have that level of sensitivity and we couldn't because otherwise we couldn't exist. Humans would have died out, you know, thousands of years ago if we all felt that way. And it's not that we don't care for the animal or respect it or like recognize that that life is being sacrificed to enable us to live. But, you know, so does the fish, you know, or so does the shark who eats the fish or the fox who eats the chipmunk. You know, I mean, is the world we live in.
Shawn:Where I think people go off the rails a little bit is that they don't agitate against, they don't use their anchor as like more people would subscribe if you could say, hey, let's maybe minimize the unnecessary cruelty associated with the meat industry or with the poultry industry. How about we don't treat What is it? What is veal? I don't I swear I don't even know. Is veal deer?
Scott:It's, no.
Shawn:Is veal meat It's or
Scott:infant beef.
Shawn:It's Right. Okay. So that's the one where they put it.
Scott:It's very young.
Shawn:It's really bad because I heard that like how I haven't eaten veal my entire life because one time I heard, and this was before Google, so this predates everything, but numerous credible sources in my life said, here's how they treat the animal before it's slaughtered because they're trying to get the meat of a certain quality. And that horrified me. And I was like, nope, I'm super not on board with that. So I'm just not going to eat. But I don't tell people that.
Shawn:That's a personal choice I made. That's my sort of I don't go around judging others. I kind of wish people would join me in that. But I have other things that I prioritize in my life that if I can expend my time soliciting enrollment to change people's minds about that wasn't one of them. But I think it's an easy one.
Shawn:If I was a vegetarian or vegan, I would focus more on maybe that or focus on the fact that the living conditions for cattle or for chickens. And I think they have done that to their credit. I think there has been a movement since the 80s at least to kind of improve those living conditions for those creatures. But to me, the anchor should be not to get everybody to become vegetarians or vegans because that's ultimately not a sustainable way of life for humans. That's telling humans to ignore their biology and their evolution, which is too frequently happening these days.
Shawn:It's basically saying stop trusting your human instincts, which will get you further away from being human. But rather focus on just minimizing or eliminating the unnecessary cruelty and trauma that are associated with how we treat the animals during the meat, I don't know, making process or something. Don't know. Do you see where I'm going? It's like, you can have an anchor, but just make it an anchor that's worth fighting for that people can subscribe to because most people are going to be okay with that.
Shawn:They're not going to be mostly okay with saying I'm a bad person if I eat meat or chicken period.
Scott:Right. And I think I love what you're saying, because it's making me think and it's triggering sort of two different concepts for me. But to stay on track with the anchor, I mean, it's a great illustration of what an anchor is, which is, you know, this is an issue that matters to a person and that person isn't just sort of willy nilly going from opinion to opinion to opinion. No, this matters. This is where I am.
Scott:And it's not that you have one anchor in your life. You have as many anchors in your life as issues there are that matter to you. But again, it's it's the acknowledgment of this is where I am. This is this is where I come down. This is my opinion, and I'm open to being convinced.
Scott:I want the conversation. That's the choice. I want the conversation mentioned in what other people think, but this is where I am now. I think for your example about the way that food sort of is processed, I see sort of two supplemental issues. The first is, you know, what do you do as a person when you feel pain or hurt or you're offended by something?
Scott:And what I see a lot of people doing now is if I'm hurt about something, I scream that hurt to the world and I demand the world change so I'm no longer hurt. It's really difficult because when a person is hurt, when you're hurt, when you're hurting, that takes a toll on you. Anyone who's had a chronic injury, you sprain your ankle or your bum shoulder's acting up and you have that nagging ongoing pain, changes how you process the world because you're dealing with this burden. If you are hurt because you know in the world right now, are many different kinds of animals that are being maintained in essentially abusive environments just so that they can be slaughtered and eaten. The question then becomes, how do you, as the person who has that pain, deal with that?
Scott:I think there's a real problem with launching at the world and saying, I am hurt because of this, so the entire world has to change. I also think it's a problem to go to the other end of the spectrum, which is, I am hurt by this and it's just me, so I'm going to swallow my pain. I'm going to deal with the pain and do nothing about it. I do think we need to be thoughtful about what we do when we're struggling with an issue of hurt, and when we see somebody in our community that is struggling with an issue of hurt. We need to find a way to help.
Scott:This is, maybe it's going to sound like a cop out, but it's actually not. This podcast does not identify an issue like this and say, here's the answer, because there are so many different answers based on what the issue is, what the people involved are, and how we can improve our world. The path to the answer is thoughtful interaction, what you call mindfulness. It's all of those things. But the problem with I'm hurt and so I'm going to rage at the world, that's ridicule.
Scott:And what I see a lot of people do is I'm hurt and so now I'm going to hurt you. I'm going to hurt you until you do something that takes my pain away.
Shawn:I think that And let me add one thing to that, Scott, because you just touched. I don't want to forget this point. It's also here's my bigger concern. It's partially that, but it's also when you project your hurt in a mass distributed way like social media allows us to do at this point, you also export your hurt to others who may prior to that not have been feeling hurt by this particular thing. Now, I'm all for advocacy and awareness raising, meaning that if people are living in happy ignorance, that isn't always a good thing because if they were more aware, then they might rally to do something to address the thing that's causing the hurt.
Shawn:But what I find to be slightly more irresponsible is when you know very well that you're not offering any kind of pathway or solution to removing this harm that's causing the hurt, and instead you're just letting it all out on the internet. Now you're going to upset innumerable amounts of other people who are going to get fired up about this issue. And again, it could all very well be legitimate hurt and legitimate grievance. But if you export your hurt and your rage without any kind of proposed solution, then you are not actually you are creating more suffering in the world than I think is necessary. Because if I am horrified by the veal industry and I'm like this, this is an inhumane, cruel humans at this point in 2025, we should know better than to do these sorts of things, you know, then I need to take some responsibility because I do have access to online media and tools and it doesn't take much to start a Kickstarter fundraising campaign or to write your senators or congressmen or the meat industry or like, you know, there are so many tools that you've been provided now to actually do something from the comfort and safety of your home, if you choose as your only response to just unleash unbridled rage and pepper the universe with your just emotionally wrenching stories of how they're torturing these things.
Shawn:And you get very graphic about it. You are now exposing so many people online who maybe have no alternative way to fix this. Now they have to just live with this hurt and this sadness and this grief and this trauma and this rage. Maybe they're sitting somewhere in a part of the world where they don't have an opportunity that you have from your suburban Middle America comfort level to do something about this. It may not even be in their own country, and yet you've now infected the world with this upsettedness, as I think I would call it, for what reason?
Shawn:You're not doing anything about it, and that to me is more distressing, It's just, you know, inflicting your trauma on others without any concern for what it's doing to them.
Scott:Yeah. And, you know, and yet I think there's there are a lot of examples and a lot of people who, when they're hurt about something, they're going to feel better, less alone, less isolated if everybody else is hurt by that thing. But then they get upset when not everybody is hurt the same way that they are. We're going back to that, Am I right or am I wrong? Am I good or am I bad for feeling this way?
Scott:I want everybody to agree with me so that I can feel like I'm right. And it gets cloaked. Of course, I want everybody to know about this because it's terrible for these people to be in ignorance about this issue that's hurting me, and so I'm not trying to hurt them, I'm trying to inform, and flags on the play, flags on all those plays with all that stuff. But it's a wonderful segue, and it takes me to the other thing that you made me think about, which is causation. And we see this sort of across the world many different ways.
Scott:See a thing that we think is bad, and we say, you know, we must stop this thing, but we don't know why it exists. Okay, Animals are kept in these terrible conditions, and then they're inhumanely slaughtered just so people can eat animal flesh, and isn't that awful? But we never consider the question, how did this happen? Why is it this way? And a lot of times, personally, when I'm in a conversation with another person and they're hurt by the animal food processing issue set, and I say, Well, why do you think chickens are kept that way?
Scott:Why do you think, cows and pigs are raised that way? They don't know, but what inevitably they say is it's bad people hurting animals. It's not. People who get involved in raising animal protein for food are not sociopaths and they're not psychopaths and they're not in that business to hurt animals, but they are in this level that the people on the Mongolian Steppes that you talked about earlier, they are in this level of engagement with the world where they understand what they're doing. And when a person is hurt by the behavior of somebody that they don't know, it is much easier to demonize and say, A good person would not do that, instead of maybe understanding that part of the problem is you, the person who's hurt, are so remote from the reality of their life that you don't understand.
Scott:And I think there's an obligation, and this is as I do when I'm preparing for our conversations, I read my notes. One of the notes that I read today is appropriate to this conversation, which is if you see somebody doing something that you fundamentally disagree with, I, Scott Olson, believe you have an obligation to go and do that person's job, because you're never going to understand why they're doing what they're doing unless you go and do their job, not their job in the way that they're doing it, but go raise cattle and see what you do to address the issues that come up that you don't even understand. I'll give you one more thing that really got triggered for me listening to you about the food industry and about taking action. You made me think of, and I had to look up her name to get it correct, made me think of Temple Grandin. Temple Grandin is an inventor.
Scott:It says that she's a spokesperson, an animal scientist, and inventor, but she was born with autism back before autism was a thing. She, as an animal activist, and as she was trying to deal with her own autism and trying to figure out how to function in the world as somebody with autism before the medical community could really support it, she was horrified at the way beef is slaughtered, and what she did was she invented the slaughtering process that is used now, which keeps cows from understanding or from seeing what's going to happen to them, and it keeps them from panicking and being scared before they're slaughtered. She invented it. She's a great example of someone who said, I think this is wrong, and here's the solution. Here's how to make it better.
Scott:But she started by going to slaughterhouses and understanding how they functioned, understanding what they did, and then coming up with something better. And maybe it's a unique thing for humans. It's easier to point out problems than it is to come up with solutions. But I think part of the problem is correlation. It's, you know, this is a problem, so here's the answer, rather than this is a problem, Here's what's causing the problem, not bad people doing bad things, but here is the reason why this thing that I don't like exists.
Scott:Now we can craft a series of solutions that gets rid of the cause, and by getting rid of the cause we get rid of the problem. We don't see that. I mean socialism, and I'm going to go there, socialism is exactly this, and you read Friedrich Hayek and von Mises, I can't remember his first name, Ludwig von Mises. And socialism looks at bad things that happen in economies, but it doesn't take the time to understand why prices are the way they are. When you don't understand why prices are the way they are, what do you do?
Scott:You come in with force. Here are price caps. We're not going to let these unregulated farmers do things. We're going to take control of the means of production so that we can set production and set price caps and solve these bad things. But that's not what causes prices.
Scott:You have to understand before you can do. And that's why socialism fails over and over and over again, because it's things that everybody agrees are bad.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:That we want these clever, simple forced answers to and force never works.
Shawn:Well, it's funny that you ended on the socialism piece because the whole time I'd been listening to you prior to the previous time I'd been talking was I was going to jump in and be like what most people are actually probably going to say who take the position of like, you know, animal cruelty and like, you know, the food industry bad, ergo, you should be a vegetarian and vegan, is most of these people are not going to say it's because Mongolians are bad people or farmers are bad people, but because they're all trapped by capitalism. And we don't have enough time in the day for this today to talk about that, but that is frequently the argument that I hear put forward is that capitalism is making everything worse. So we'll have to potentially revisit that. But because I know we like to keep ourselves in about an hour, I do want to close with one example of, you mentioned Temple Grandin, and that is a terrific example of how somebody can make a difference. Not everybody obviously is going to be able to do that, I get it, you know, but a girlfriend of mine who I've known for years since high school, I don't know if her degree is in botany or horticulture, but she was a professor at Fresno State for some years and that's her field of study.
Shawn:She started volunteering and I think she's still now she might actually be working for them now, but basically going into prisons in California. And it was originally called the Insight Garden Program, but it's called something else now. Was trying It's Land Together, I think is what they're called now. I apologize if I got that wrong. I only knew them as the Insight Garden Program.
Shawn:It was one of the two charities that Greg and I actually picked for donations to be made when we got married in lieu of gifts.
Scott:Wow, that's cool.
Shawn:And the reason why is because she had very well, still has strong feelings about prison reform and how we manage prison and criminals in this country. And so her contribution to changing that was to just go with this group and teach inmates how to cultivate something with their hands, like in the earth. Wow. And it is such a cool program. I cannot speak highly enough of that program because it's a perfect example of what we've been talking about today, which is like have an anchor.
Shawn:It's okay to feel grievance in the world. We all do. There's always something there that's going wrong. But how you engage with that trauma or that hurt or that pain that you're feeling or injustice that you were perceiving is more important than the actual feeling itself. Because if you do it in a way that just exports the rage and the pain and the trauma, people feel helpless and then they just get angrier and angrier and more and more hurt and it's almost paralyzing, okay?
Shawn:And you just can't do anything. But when you go out and you lead with, I'm doing this program because I feel this way about this particular thing in society. It's so uplifting and I was able to get lots of donations and I still, you know, anytime she's posting stuff about it, I share things, try, you know. So I guess what I'm trying to do is end it on a high note that like we know there's a lot of rage out there and there's a lot of injustice and you know you may agree with what my perception of those injustices are or you may not, and you may have your own versions of that in some other area. But I think it's just so important how we humans grapple with those feelings of injustice and, you know, and just go put good in the world.
Shawn:Replace the light with the And I think Martin Luther King said that. It's like, you cannot create light out of dark. Only light can create light. Yeah. You know?
Scott:Yeah. It's I love that, and this is a great way to tie this one off. It's okay, this is the situation you're in. This is the thing that has you aggrieved. What do you do now that is not just shouting your rage to the world?
Scott:What do you do to be productive, to be fulfilled, to be satisfied, to be less hurt? And part of that is making a difference, but part of that is self care. I can't wait for our next conversation. Mean, I always sign off looking for the next conversation, but what a great way to sum up a great hour. Thank you, Sean.
Scott:It's awesome.
Shawn:Thanks to you. Yeah, no, it's a pleasure and I really feel like we're hitting that stride now and this is becoming more abundantly clear to me, like what a cool thing this will be. Hopefully we hope it helps lots of people learn how to talk to each other and, you know, feel better about the world around them and make it a better place. So
Scott:Yeah. Hope so too. Alright. See you next time.