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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!
Okay. Hey, Sean.
Shawn:Hey, Scott. I'm doing well. How about you?
Scott:Oh, not too bad. Not too bad.
Shawn:You started
Scott:cruising through another week. It's it's early in the week for us. I don't know how we're sort of tracking episodes just for our our listener group. We usually record on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and this is Tuesday. So this is early in the week.
Scott:That's right. In November, as you can tell, dealing with the
Shawn:Yeah. Sweater weather.
Scott:Definitely sweater weather. Yeah. I mean, what's what's going on in your world these days?
Shawn:I mean, gosh, there's always so much going on. I I have a lot of joy this last week. You know, it's just been a great time for sports. I always like to go back to sports stuff going on in my world. You know, I'm not an avid Major League Baseball fan, but I do know when a fine, know, competitive, you know, sort of effort has been made in this in this world series was I only caught the last, two games, but it was pretty that last game was pretty phenomenal.
Shawn:So I'm I'm pretty stoked about that now. As a former high school softball player, I appreciate I love baseball and all my sibling or not my siblings, my cousins and stuff, they all all the boys played baseball and, you know, were quite good at it. So I I just I love baseball. I love going in person. I'm not so much watching it on the TV, but series, that's a different beast.
Shawn:So Yeah. Definitely. And as a former Giants fan, I I don't love the Dodgers back to back winning, but I, you know, I was kinda I was maybe secretly not so secretly rooting for Toronto as the end I don't know if they were the underdog, but but certainly when there's an incumbent, you wanna unseat the king. Right? So Yeah.
Shawn:You know? Yeah. So that's it. We've just been lots of sports over the weekend, you know, between that and college and NFL ball.
Scott:That's cool. I didn't, I didn't know you were a softballer in high school.
Shawn:Yeah, I was catcher.
Scott:Yeah. Oh, you were catcher.
Shawn:Wow. Yeah.
Scott:You. That's Mhmm. That's that's interesting. Yeah. It's it's funny.
Scott:I'm I'm not a baseball fan or a football fan really at all. And it's it's funny growing up in Seattle in my generation when I was a kid, I mean, the the mariners came to Seattle. The mariners expansion franchise was, I think, in '77, '76, and the Seahawks came the year before, like '75, '76, somewhere in there. So when I grew up, you you had the Seattle Sonics basketball, but you didn't have dads taking their sons to baseball games in Seattle because there wasn't baseball here. And so, you know, there's just this generation of us that are sort of into other sports, but not really into that.
Scott:But I'm kind of like you. I, when when the Mariners are in the playoffs, all of a sudden I'm watching and particularly since I lived for a long time in New York and all three of my kids sort of grew up in New York when the when the Mariners play the Yankees in playoff, then then I might watch. And it was, you know, heartbreaking for the Mariners to lose to Toronto in seven because I think the Mariners currently are the only franchise to have never played in a World Series. And so there's all that. And so, yeah, I I definitely understand the sort of the the playoff mentality and it's it.
Scott:It is an interesting sport, but it's I I think the funny thing to me and and having played, maybe you understand this better than I do. You know, just the the way that they run pitchers. I I don't understand. I mean, I I get that it's really hard on a a person's arm to throw pitches, but I always thought, you know, you had your pitcher start the game and, you know, throw the game until something bad happened, and then you bring in a reliever. And apparently, that's just not how it works these days.
Shawn:Well, certainly not like that for yeah. Certainly not like that for Major League Baseball. I I couldn't you know, I mean, the level of sport I was at, you know, was just high school stuff. So we weren't we weren't switching pitchers quite like that or anything, you know, and maybe even and not that this is anything to go off of any historical precedent, but like I remember even in the I don't know if it was the eighties or nineties that that film, A League of Their Own, which was the girls love that film. They never changed girl baseball pitchers.
Shawn:You know what I mean? They kept them in until, as I recall the quote by Gina Davis, her sister, she was on the opposing, she's on the pitching for their team and she said she's throwing grapefruits, puller. So yeah, you had to start pitching pretty badly for that to even consider bringing in a relief pitcher for that. But it seems like it is pretty common and you're like me, I don't watch enough professional Major League Baseball to know if the men when this trend started if it because I don't remember it being like that in the eighties and the nineties when when I was actually probably watching more Major League Baseball because of my cousins and my uncles and stuff. So, yeah, I don't I don't recall that being a thing, but it does seem kind of like an interesting, you know, thing to do.
Shawn:Now I will say I know enough about the game and about the athleticism required and and the the risk and the vulnerability to know that that Yamamoto kid freaking killed it. Like, he just he killed it. Like, you know, and the fact that they brought him in to the to the final game, you know, apparently was everybody was like, oh, they're bringing him in for the final game. You know, nobody expected that to happen because he had pitched a full, almost a full well, I don't know if a full game, but pretty pretty much a full game the prior day.
Scott:Yeah.
Shawn:You know? So that was kind of incredible.
Scott:Well, so now I kinda wanna pull this threat. And so this is the the gust of wind that's gonna push my parachute away.
Shawn:Right? Alright. Let's do it.
Scott:So it's and and what I'm thinking about is is performance standards. You know? Because when when you think about how pitching in particular in professional baseball has changed, I, you know, it I can't tell if it's mission creep or not, but the performance standard is so high that you you have the ability to to pitch at that level, to, you know, to throw, you know, over 95 miles an hour and to also throw, you know, maybe maybe two, maybe three other pitches. So, it's it's possible for a person to do it but the the thing that I took from the Yamamoto news that I was reading was, you know, not only can he do it and there are others who can do it, he can do it over time. You know,
Shawn:he can
Scott:do that back to back thing. He could do it without rest and so I'm I'm trying to take that now into the the economy whether it's your world in nonprofits or, you know, a bit of my world in, you know, training and and leader development.
Shawn:But,
Scott:you know, are there things and maybe this is even the pour over into AI as we are I'm seeing a ton of news of companies that are no longer holding on to employees with the expectation that they will have work for them in a year. Big companies are letting people go now. And a lot of those tasks that AI can do are being pushed to AI and people are getting laid off. I want to not go down the, what I call the New York Witmaker's Guild complaint. As cars took over one hundred and thirty years ago, the Wip Makers Guild went out of business because nobody needed nobody was driving horses and so nobody needed whips and that's part of the the development and so that's that's something that is happening now in our knowledge worker world is some knowledge worker jobs that are going away because this new technology, it's today's car, the AI is coming in to take over those jobs and it's funny to hear.
Scott:It's interesting. A curious funny to hear people talking about, well, what am I going to do now? Which is the same thing that the Whitmaker said. This is a skill that I've trained for and I've learned how to do and I'm good at and now it's no longer needed. This is bad.
Scott:It's actually not bad. It's just disruptive. But are there things in in the economy that the performance level has been pushed so high that it's not something that can be it's something that can be done but it's not something that can be done over time. So, you you sort of need relief pitchers And I don't know if it shakes anything loose with you, but that's
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:Might be anyway talking about relief pictures.
Shawn:Alright. Well, this is me pulling my cord and coming in like, you know, so so, yeah, I I I definitely, am intuiting, you know, some takeaways there from that that I think can we can look at them individually or maybe sort of at a macro level. It sounds like, you know, what you're kind of referencing is what I kind of in my brain, the first thing that I thought of was like sort of the decentralization of everything, right? Like, know, if you three things pop to specific mind, the way that we work, meaning that not just the type of work we're doing, but the expectation of what that work life looks like. So, you know, I know growing up, it was very common.
Shawn:And this is the school of thought under which I was raised by the different mentors and parent figures in my life, which is you get a job, you're loyal to that job, you stay at that job, you have that job for pretty much your whole life if you can, because that seems to be the gold standard that that the generation prior so the boomers would have would have adhered to. Right? And and so so there's that, which is nowadays it's like you'll be you'll I will I'm shocked when we'll look at Aaron, you know, he's doing all the things, right? He's going to do the podcast in coalition and he's going to I'm sure he's doing other side hustles. Shana, one of my other employees who recently left us, she was working for four or five different companies like doing part time control.
Shawn:So I think how people work is very, very different. What they are doing in terms of the work has become very, very different. And I will loop back around to the excellence and performance thing because it will come up in a second here. I also see this trend in education. So education, it's like, you know, again, following that same line of boomer thinking and probably preceding the boomers for hundreds of years was the classic education.
Shawn:You know, you either go to the trades or you go and get your higher education, and there is certain expectation of what you would do after you get that expectation, you know, with those fancy degrees or with those trade skills. Whereas now there's a lot more talk. And when I say talk, I mean in the social media circles that I tend to follow, which is, you know, certain like podcasters and just social media presence type folks where there's this conversation starting about, is it time to rethink higher education? Because we're expecting to shove 30 kids, 20 to 30 kids in a in a room and have them sit there for an hour and just be talked at. You know what I mean?
Shawn:And, like, that's not how kids in this in in any of the after Gen X, you know, starting with the probably tail end of the millennials going into Gen Z now, Gen Alpha, whoever the next ones are, that's not how they learn. It's not how they're going to learn. It's not how the technology is teaching them to need to learn. And so you're going to see increasing dissonance between what the higher institutions are offering and what these kids are graduating, able to do. There is a total disconnect there.
Shawn:And then the third thing is what you were talking about, which is the performance piece, which is the individual. And I see top athletes. You mentioned, you know, you started this conversation with the pitchers and you don't remember, nor do I such frequent you know, I think in game six or something, they set a record by having, like, 18 pitchers or something, like, rotating through 18 pitchers or something crazy. I don't remember that ever being a thing. There's probably a reason why it was a record, you know, is because I don't think that has historically been super normal.
Shawn:You know? And then, and I but I see this also in how top athletes just in every sport are acting. Like, if you look at professional football so the NFL, I don't remember having two and three quarterback. I mean, we always did have second and third string backup positions. That was always the case, but you never know their name.
Shawn:You know what I mean? Like, nobody knows those guys. I can name all three quarterbacks for the San Francisco 49ers for second and third string, like, because I know each of those players, and they're all getting time on the field Yeah. Up to the third string. You know?
Shawn:And so what is that telling us? So it is that you know, it used to be very abnormal. Like, I can't imagine Joe Montana ever not quarterback unless he was on a stretcher. He was quarterbacking. Yeah.
Shawn:You know, now you guys got you got guys walking off the field because they're tired at halftime.
Scott:Yeah.
Shawn:Right? And and that's weird to me. Like, you know, so there's a self awareness bit too that I think these younger generations are bringing into certain things where they're like, no, I'm not gonna I'm not, as I call it, Carrie Strugging and I don't know if you know who Carrie Strug is.
Scott:I know Carrie Strugge. She's the she's the the the gymnast who did the the the horse. The.
Shawn:Yep. The pommel horse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Shawn:I think it was a pommel horse. Oh, no. No. No. Not the pommel.
Shawn:The pommel's where you do this. It's the
Scott:It's it's the
Shawn:I forget the one it's called.
Scott:The women's the women's event horse, and she's with a busted up ankle and stuck
Shawn:the landing. She stuck the landing on a broken ankle, basically. You know? Yeah. So, like, are we losing and and is it okay to lose that level of performance because that's just insane commitment?
Shawn:Like, you know, but it's the Olympics. You know? So, like, how do you you know? So so that's I think you just there's three different examples of where I see what you're talking about taking place, but I don't know what it means. You know?
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:And it's it's interesting because if we're if we're looking at sports, it's really easy to see, a durability. You know? Do you do you play through an injury? Because, you know, even injured, nobody else can do what you can do, or the rules don't allow for a substitution. So it's either, you know, Carrie Strug makes that or
Shawn:Or you're done. Yeah. Like, it's goal. Forfeit.
Scott:As a team or you're not in the medals. You know, there there are no substitutions in that sport. That you know? And and then it's you know, is the performance level so high that it materially erodes when when you're tired. And so it makes sense to have a deep bench of people who can all perform at that level so that you're not dealing with, you know, towards the end of the game, you're tired.
Scott:It's, you know, it it maybe that's an interesting aside, you know, back in the, you know, back in the old days, you know, when and this is the generational argument that I I don't care for too much. So let's let's, you know, push it, you know, back to our grandparents day where you just sort of gritted it out and you and you did that because there really wasn't an alternative. And the performance level compared to today for everything wasn't the same. So if we if we recognize that that maybe this isn't a generational thing because, you know, performance levels, not necessarily technology, but performance levels are are different today. The expectation of what an athlete is capable of doing, the expectation of what somebody in sales or somebody in management or somebody who's going to be a CEO is going to be able to do is is different today and so the question then becomes, is it reasonable to have that performance level over time and so I just realized that there's another sports thing.
Scott:One of the things that I'm I'm seeing just as I read news is college football coaches are are being fired. Apparently, regularly and they're getting multiple tens of million dollar buyouts to lose their job. And it's not necessarily because they're losing. Some of them have winning records, but they don't have winning enough records that, you know, they the the schools wanna try somebody else, and they have enough money to throw tons of money at it to to try somebody else. And so as I'm I'm trying to yank this into the into the the the non sports world, the the business performance world, you know, how do you, you know, how do you extract performance?
Scott:How do you understand sort of what you need? And I'm I'm still looking at, okay, a machine AI can do some things better. That that's a ground ball. Yeah. But one of the things that I, you know, really loved about what you said a few minutes ago is the whole college thing, you know, and it's the the presumption that it if if you have been to what we call higher education, you you've been to college, not grad school, but you know, regular post high school, you know, four year college that if you do that, Yeah.
Scott:The presumption is that you are a better quality employee than if you have not done that and I I see that that is being really challenged today which is wonder wonderful to me for a very specific reason which is I don't know, six years ago, seven years ago, I wrote a book with a partner on hiring. It's called Can Trust Will, hiring for the human element in the new age of cybersecurity. And I'm not going to show the book and advertise it here. We'll get the advertising when our our customer base is bigger. But one of the things that we talked about in how you're going to hire, you know, over the next fifteen years, how you're going to successfully hire people into your IT pipeline, into your tech, your your computer tech worker pipeline is you gotta look for skills more than you gotta look for training.
Scott:You know, the the the autodidact who has, you know, sat in his or her parents basement and and taught themselves to play the guitar might be a better guitar player than the person that's gone, you know, to. I want to say Juilliard, but I don't know if they teach guitar.
Shawn:Berkeley School of Music or something.
Scott:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You know, the the the person who's who's gotten training, you know, may not necessarily on average be better and it it brings to mind the article I saw just a couple days ago where Palantir, the the big, you know, data monster that we learned about when they landed a government contract and and Palantir came and and started managing data for the FBI.
Scott:They've they've actually created a class of 20 high school students that they're going to train up and and they specifically hooked into this program people who hadn't been to college. Yeah. Specifically because they think what they need for what they need, college is is not a is not going to produce the result.
Shawn:Right.
Scott:But then you go right into a lot of the stuff that we learned when we were writing the book which is well, gee, if we bring people in and we train them, we're going to they're going to leave. Uh-huh. And so we put all these resources into training them we're going to leave. I don't want us to, you and I in our conversation to succumb to one of our weaknesses, which is we start talking about so many things, we're not really focusing. It's I want to really crunch through this question of our performance levels in non sports getting to the point where that performance level is so high that it can't be done over time.
Scott:It it it requires more rest. And I think of simple things like, you're you're in a Amazon fulfillment center and you're picking boxes. And and the way it works is they have machines that do the work that machines can do, but they haven't been able to develop a machine that's able to move a box from a general category into a specific delivery category. And so they have pickers who stand there and move 100,000 boxes over an eight hour shift. And I can imagine what that's like.
Scott:Yeah. It's such a high performance standard. It's a physical thing. It's an attention thing. And and people are doing that work.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:I mean, I don't know if that shakes anything loose for you in terms of the the the durability of high performance.
Shawn:Well, for for me, I don't understand as much of it as as you probably do because you have focused really deeply on on sort of performance in in business and things in a more academic sense, certainly, because, you know, you are writing books and you're researching things and you're you had a business kind of dedicated to coaching and building leaders. So, you know, where for me it's more practical experience and just watching the workforce. I do think there is I do think things are skills based and practice based, and I think there's not enough attention paid to that. I think, again, it's at the expense of like pretty at this point, insignificant papers, pieces of paper that say I have a bachelor's degree in X. You know what I mean?
Shawn:And so I think there are gaps in our talent pipeline because we're not adapting our recruitment or at least I think it's in the process of evolving. I don't think it's quite there yet to meet us where our people are coming from in as they graduate high school and decide to go or not to go to college. I think more people are thinking about it from that pipeline, the college pipeline itself. Sort of like those were sort of some of the conversations I was alluding to where people are talking about the fact that classical education isn't cutting it in today's modern workforce. Mostly, I think because of what you're describing, which is the need for that skills practice based excellence that they're not getting taught that in sociology or in history or in English.
Shawn:And these are all still the prerequisites. And I'm not saying that these things are bad to learn. I think to be fair to our predecessors and our forefathers, I think classical education, the idea of the Renaissance man, is what classical western education is based on, was that you learn kind of everything, right? So that you understand the world, so that you can relate to the world and contextualize yourself within the world. And that's, again, for a subset of society.
Shawn:That's for the elites, the intellectuals, like, you know, and then everybody else just goes and does the practical hands on stuff, which is the woodsmithing or the, you know, cobbling and things that we've talked about before. They're very practical sort of cottage industry type things. The world we live in today is not that there's a devaluation on intellectual learning, but it's been but there's too much at the expense of not enough of this other one here. And it's been so segregated that these people need a little more intellectual learning and these people need a lot more practical learning. And where are they going to go to get that?
Shawn:Because there currently isn't a modality for them to do that. And so you've got kids with master's degrees at 23 years old starting out in the world and having to take, how do I hammer a nail into a wall and hang a photo at fricking Home Depot because they're teaching a course on it because they know these people don't know how to do basic stuff like that. You know what I mean? So so I don't I don't know what the answer is, but I see the problem that you're kind of like that I think you're illuminating and trying to bring to the forefront of the conversation. I can tell you, and then I'll pass it back to you, is the work that we've done in our nonprofit in a way kind of gets at what you're talking about.
Shawn:So Coalition, you know, which is a nonprofit in the DC area that, you know, implements capacity building programs that are for part of foreign assistance programs and security cooperation where it's like, you know, the Department of Defense or state gives us money to go and implement a, you know, a training for Iraqis or, you know, Philippines, people of The Philippines nation or India, how to do a certain thing to protect, you know, sensitive things and to make sure that they don't have certain types of sensitive materials exploited and that they hone certain response skills, like if chemical weapons are being lobbed in your backyard, do you have a civilian team that can respond to that? So, you know, and what we saw going wrong was that there was too much intellectualizing content and not enough hands on operationalizing of what we were trying to teach or not of what we were trying to teach, but what others were trying to teach. And so we kind of came in as as the operationalizers to say it doesn't do any good if they understand how to break down a chemical compound if they can't like pull out their kit, get the right strip, put it in the detector and detect.
Shawn:You know what I mean? Then do the thing, you know what I mean? And I feel like I resonate organically with what you're probably getting at, but you understand the topic at a much deeper level, I think, for the audience to understand.
Scott:Yeah. I mean, this is is really making me think at at sort of a mental level because we're not I feel like what we're struggling with is is how to how to frame the the question that matters rather than really doing a a our usual sort of deep dive in into something and I'm I'm almost feeling like the the conversation has gotten me to a decision point where I wanna I wanna go from one win current to another win current and and this is kind of what I mean. You know, the I have when when teaching and and certainly when teaching leadership, I've used sports metaphors a lot because they they really illustrate the points. They're very useful. They illustrate the points that I'm I'm trying to make when I'm talking about things like, you know, where does leadership start?
Scott:You know, what what is it that you are feeling that drives you to needing to lead people instead of to be an individual contributor and and sports metaphors really help. But I I think this concept of high performance levels in sports that are limited by the physical ability to do that. You get tired when you play football. You get tired when you throw a baseball, you know, 30 times or 50 times. I don't think that metaphor easily translates.
Scott:It may translate, but I'm not seeing a way for it to translate in this conversation. Yeah. To the business world. So it's AI can be faster. I get that for low level jobs at this point.
Scott:It's much easier to say, you know, AI sort this data instead of, hey, team, you guys need to go in by hand and sort this data. But that's not really the metaphor and it's not feeling like an interesting question. But something that you said a few minutes ago really triggers an interesting question for me. And you were talking about, you know, how about classic education and about, you know, understanding the sort of the theories of people and the functioning of people and the difference between learning that in an academic environment as opposed to a practical environment. And I think you know there are some overlap matters, but I think you actually need both pipelines if you are just practical you are an auto mechanic and you're a brilliant auto mechanic you can fix every car that comes in there you're providing huge value If you're an electrician, you're a plumber, you're in construction, you're in what we now call the trades and you're good at it, it's it's you're you're providing good value in the economy.
Scott:Yeah. But if if you've never read, you know, Plato, you've never read Shakespeare, you've never read Hayek, and you've never read oh my gosh, I'm spacing on the marks. You've never read marks. If if you've never read these things, it's not that you're not going to be aware of them. It's that when you think of them, you're thinking that you're developing something new and you're not understanding that you're sort of reinventing the wheel.
Scott:You're not standing on the shoulders of giants. And so when you're in that practical world, branching out and learning what came before when you're interested in a thing is probably really important. In the academic world, you get exposed to all those things. But the problem with academics, and I don't just mean higher education, graduate school, PhDs, I mean grade school. The the problem with learning in a structured environment is that the way you succeed is by doing what somebody else has told you.
Scott:The way you get a good grade is by doing what the teacher wants to see to give you a good grade. And I think the misdirection that we've seen at the college and and grad school levels is whether it's intentional or not intentional is that what's approved, is good as opposed to what is bad is being more and more narrowly defined by the the people that are giving out grades and so what we've done with everybody who is a student is we're saying what's right is what that person believes is right and so you're exposed to everything but you're not really exposed to making up your own mind. Because particularly now, but you know, I went to college and law school in the 80s. And even then you saw it a little bit where if you had a different opinion than the teacher, you had to be careful with that because that would get you a B but it wouldn't get you an A. Full disclosure, I didn't care and so I would get a B that was fine with me.
Scott:But even back then, who wanted to get A's and A pluses, they were very concerned about making sure they agree with the teacher. And and I think that you you learn the content, but you you don't learn how to form your own opinions. On the other side, you're you're learning how to form your own opinions because you're in this pragmatic world but you don't know what's what's already been done. So, you're standing on the shoulders of giants but you're blind. You're not standing on the shoulders of giants and so you're reinventing the wheel.
Scott:And I don't know what the mechanism is for for for joining those things.
Shawn:I have an idea about that. I don't know if it's the right one. But it's this so and I've always thought this. I mean, I can remember being in high school thinking this. So, you know, it wasn't a very sophisticated thought at the time.
Shawn:It was mostly driven by the sense of that all high most normal high school students feel, which is the absurdity of what you're learning. Right. Like, but but the absurdity of what we were learning, I always felt was not because the information of its own significance was wrong or bad, it was because it wasn't applicable. They kept telling you the line they would always feed us is that, and again, I think it was well intentioned, I think they fully believed this. To some extent, I'm sure it's true, maybe just not to the extent that I think they were believing in it, which is that, you know, oh, well, you know, what's the classic response to math?
Shawn:Like for a kid who doesn't like math is when am I going to use So the bottom line is you're going to use math a ton. You will use it. Are you going to be asked to solve for calculus and trigonometry equations or whatever to utilize proofs and all these other things, probably not so much. And what a teacher or the parent would say is like, well, but it's teaching you how to think. And that I think was supposed to answer the question that you raised, which is to not be blind, you know, not question things, but understand the logic behind a thing so that, you know, but where I think school goes off the rails back when I was in high school and to this day is that there's no pragmatism the curriculum.
Shawn:And so there's so many things like when I got out of college or not out of college, when I got out of high school a couple of years after high school, I attempted one semester of community college. I actually could have done quite well, but I got caught up in partying and having a good time and socializing and getting a job that paid. Okay, you know, so I got derailed for a bit. Yeah. And, you know, but what when I landed a job, I ended up working for Kinko's Corporation, which was, you know, of course, in the early nineties was kind of the it would be it company to work for.
Shawn:It was like the Starbucks of its time. It had benefits for people who hadn't gone to you know, you could get full benefits, a good paycheck, and all these stuff without any education, without a high or a graduate. All you needed a high school diploma. What I learned at Kinko's, you know, I got a lot of practical training and education, you know, obviously customer service stuff, But it was actually a pretty technical job too, because it involved computers at that time. We had desktop publishing services and it involved utilizing pretty sophisticated black and white and color copiers that could actually do things like if you bring me a photo that's three by five, we can blow take that scan and blow it up to, you know, a, you know, eight and a half by 10 or eight by 10 or or an 11 by 17.
Shawn:But you had to do the calculations on it. So, like, I would have to measure one side and then so I learned math pretty fast because I was like, if you divide this side by this side, you'll get your percentage that you have to blow the photo up. You know what I mean? And then you'd have to deal with the fact that, well, what if it's not perfectly consistent for each side and they want some weird sizing, there's cropping and things. So the point is that there are so many different ways that students in high school particularly and going into college now, they could be learning things that would not only teach them the math or teach them the science, but it would also teach them a life skill simultaneously.
Shawn:Why isn't our curriculum that? You know what I mean? A little theory to frame it so that they know that this came from whoever Euripides or whoever the mathematicians were. I forget the names of all the famous mathematicians. So give us a little bit of the context backdrop story, but then fast forward through everything else and then bring me right to the point where here's how you balance it.
Shawn:Well, don't balance checking books anymore, I guess. I'm already outdating myself. Don't put me in charge of the curriculum, but there are things that these kids are gonna be using and that we use every day in life, how to scale things, how to blow things up, how to measure for corn. Again, the whole hanging a picture, that sounds like a dig at kids for not knowing how to do that. It's not easy because you have to measure down from the ceiling if you're gonna get it at a certain height.
Shawn:And then you have to like factor in that the hook part, if it's one in the middle, it's about four inches, three inches down, and now you gotta factor that all in. You got levels, there's a whole thing that goes on with this, right? There's anchors, all of this has some engineering math quality to it that's gonna teach you how to think about things spatially, metrically, all of these things. And you're gonna learn. You're gonna learn stuff.
Shawn:But as me suffering through geometry class for an entire year? I it taught me nothing, Scott. Nothing.
Scott:Yeah. No. And I and and I get it. And and even even taking into account the, you know, the, you know, you you the the the counter argument that, well, you think it taught you nothing, but you probably don't even realize Yeah. When you you know, when you're, you know, using the Pythagorean theorem
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:You know, to to solve some little issue. And and, you know, okay. I get that maybe you don't, but I it it you know, we're we're really sort of talking about a much more global, you know, how do we take children and put them in an environment where they grow and there there's a hidden presumption that I'm beginning to see and it and it's making me laugh a little bit which is that school needs to teach all this. And and it really it reminds me of a a really funny thing that happened to me when my oldest daughter was in school. She was.
Scott:Yeah. You know, in first grade and I'm going in with my first wife to my very first parent teacher conference and I am all excited about this and I'm, you know, we're we're in New York and I'm working for the FBI and I have these long days and I take a half a day off to go to this parent teacher conference and you know, we sit down with this teacher and she was great. I mean, she was towards the end of her career, but it it what it meant was she'd been, you know, teaching grade school for almost thirty five years and you know, how are you? And and you know, she's very used to dealing with new parents.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:And one of the first things that I said was, I I just want you to understand that I it it is my responsibility to educate my child and I see you as a very important integral component of that.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:And she got angry. She she actually yeah she got viscerally angry because it was insulting to her, which really surprised me.
Shawn:Yeah, that's not what I would have expected.
Scott:The reaction was good. What I expected, but she believed that she was responsible for educating my child and that my job was to look at what she was doing and appreciate it. And she wanted me to not be involved at all. And it's it really surprised me, but it also really underscored to me sort of the the difference in the way that that I approach that and some other things because like, you know, hanging a picture, if I was hanging a picture, I would see if any of my kids were interested in in seeing how that happened. I wouldn't make them do it if they weren't interested.
Scott:Yeah. But I would show them what I was doing and why I was, you know, you you have a little wire on the back of the picture. So, when you place the picture on the wall, you can't measure from the top of the frame. You have to measure from where that little wire once you take up all the slack is and. Yeah.
Scott:It was one of those things where they would think that was amazing. And I would say it's only amazing because you've never done this before.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:Yeah. Everything is amazing when you haven't done it before. Once you've done it, then it's it's less amazing. And, you know, I felt it was important to create that environment where if they wanted to learn things they they could and one of them ended up spending a lot of time in the kitchen and now she's in the culinary world. Know, one of them, you know, ended up sort of understanding, you know, how things were made and and, you know, now he's able to kind of build his own stuff and starting to get into construction investing because he understands how that that working.
Scott:But it's it's just it's it's interesting to me that we we still think that it's somebody else's responsibility when it's it's all our responsibility. Not just it it takes a village. Yeah. But, you know, if if you're living in a village, it it does sometimes take a village. And I think the mindset that, oh well, you know, you yelled at my kid, and so that by definition is bad.
Scott:It's like, no, your kid was in the middle of the street and I yelled at him because a truck was coming. Yeah. And it's amazing to me that there are still people who think, well, you shouldn't have yelled at my kid.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:And and I just I don't know how to get my brain around that, but it's
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:It it seems to me there's more than just just just school.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:Just pragmatics and you know, I've been married and divorced twice so I'm not the poster child for, you know, here's a, you know, parents need to be involved in the classic mom dad. Mean that obviously is ideal and
Shawn:yeah
Scott:you know my in my own defense my first marriage didn't end until my kids were late in high school and in college. But I think there's more to it than just, well, we need to improve schools. Do.
Shawn:Yeah. No. It was funny when you were saying that, two points of clarification. So the one is that, when I was saying, you know, like teach them how to do something practical, what I guess I really meant is like, I had a teacher who just sat in class. She opened her book.
Shawn:She read from the book. We did the thing. Like, the examples that were being given in the book were as foreign to me as like, you know, like the Czech language. Had, you know, you know, I always hated the ones, and I know you've had them. It's like, you know, you're in a car.
Shawn:It's going a 100 miles an hour. The wind shears, like, 50 push and I'm like, I could care so less about that. Like, you know what I mean? Like, give us what I guess I meant was just, like, I wish they would, one be more performative, like bring in some props, like bring in something like bring in like the cooking is a fantastic one for fractions would have been amazing. If you just had like cooking, like, you know, the tablespoons and the cookie or the measuring cups and stuff, show us what the, and where does this show up in our world?
Shawn:I'm not gonna go on and be a great chef or cook or anything, but we're all gonna be in the kitchen at some point. You know what I mean? Like, that was mostly kind of where I was going with that. Two though, I love your point about the presumption of education being the driver of teaching your kids things because recently, and again, you always seem to be saying things that are on the cutting edge of where I've heard things. So like, there's this little murmuring going on.
Shawn:I actually experienced this in some of my own family and my life is like a lot of people are questioning public schools and funding public schools and the need for that. And should this be continuing to be sort of in the mandate of the state, meaning the big state, not little state by state, but federal government. That conversation is taking place right now as they think about the Department of Education, what they're going to do with it, right? Like that is a big question on people's minds. But a lot of other people have already taken it into the situations into their own hands.
Shawn:Like my cousin and her family homeschool. They've done it for all three of their kids, they're gonna continue to do that. And I know a lot of other homeschoolers. I know like in our community, I think it's fairly prominent in the military community, like with spouses that stay home with the kids and stuff. And faith communities, I know it's becoming increasingly popular.
Shawn:So you're asking a question that I think is currently being challenged, which is, is the school responsible for teaching my kid? If so, to what extent? And if so, to what extent do we fund it as a society? And, you know, what I would challenge the world to think about is, yes, let's question this because I think the the framework is eroding. And and the more that it erodes, whether through actual, like sort of ideological support, which is then followed by, you know, fiscal support.
Shawn:Right. Because the money will follow the ideology where where the world where our country is is at mentally, the money will dictate that will dictate where the money goes. And as the money gets pulled from these schools more and more, the quality and the type of education is becoming questionable. I mean, they're teaching all kind of questionable stuff in schools right now, Scott. And and the parents have very little visibility or very little control over it.
Shawn:You know what I mean? And so so, you know, that gets us into a whole other thing that we don't have time for today. But but I'm with you. I I don't I don't know. I I think that we need to take a hard look at that.
Shawn:But insofar as there is school and there remain school and college and things like that, I think to bridge the two sides so that each one has what they need to succeed. Yeah, it's make it more interesting, make it more interactive, make it more relevant to what we're doing and what we're going to do. Teach the theory because that's our heritage, that's our legacy, and that's human shared human understanding is what got us to this point in time, you know, where you are the miracle that was born and you're here now in this world. Okay, you do have a responsibility to know that. Maybe just not all of it.
Shawn:To the extent that it's been taught, let's make a little bit of room for how to apply, especially as we go deeper into digital learning and these kids are on their tablets and they're not experiential because they're not out touching grass and getting into things, we've got to make up that gap somewhere. And maybe we do it in the classroom when that's appropriate.
Scott:Yeah. And it's funny. I mean, public education at least in The United States has its roots in the unfairness of if you're from a poor family you didn't get educated at all because you didn't have access to instructors. If you're from a wealthy family the wealthy family had the means to purchase instruction and the the idea that everybody should have access to this. Everybody should know how to read.
Scott:Very quickly became everybody should know these, you know, the three R's, reading, writing, arithmetic. And now it has grown into this thing, and so you don't necessarily want to tear down an edifice that has been built for a good reason. But at the same time, you know, the tablet again, it's like fire. It can cook your dinner and burn your house down and it's you can scroll, but if you're interested in something in my day, if you're interested in something, you had to go and find an encyclopedia or go to a library and leave through an actual set of drawers, the card catalog. You remember those?
Scott:Where you actually had to flip through little cards to see if you could find a book on that topic and it could take you days to get access to the information that you can get in seconds on on the computer.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:So, I I'm not saying that's bad and I'm not really even saying it's different. I think it it's good and we need to leverage that. But it it still doesn't answer what I really think is the critical question, which I could never get an answer to even in grade school. You you talk about word problems, you know, a train A is, you know, going to
Shawn:parts the station like
Scott:train, you know, person B is on a bicycle going south and and my question was, you know, I I can sit here and and figure this out and you know, you can give me a formula and I don't understand formulas as much as I understand, you know, moving the parts on the on the table but my question was, why is this useful? And the answer, like you said, would be, well, it helps you to learn to think. And, you know, even when I was in in grade school, fifth and sixth grade, my follow-up question was okay what happens to my brain? How going through this exercise, which I do not like, how is it impacting my brain? I physically I I didn't like the way that I felt when I was in front of a word problem.
Shawn:Same.
Scott:Trying to understand what it was and and how to get the answer. And you know there were some people in the class who who could look at a problem like that and in thirty seconds get the answer. Mhmm. Other people in the class who had absolutely couldn't figure it out at all and I was sort of in the middle. But none of the teachers were able to say well this is how your brain functions and this is how figuring out this kind of a problem is going to change and elevate how your brain functions.
Scott:And they would get angry and I didn't understand why they would get angry. And the reason they got angry is because they were being asked a question they didn't understand.
Shawn:Well, they didn't know how to answer it. Yeah.
Scott:They didn't know how to answer Because they hadn't been equipped to answer it. And they were generally in an environment that they were in control of. And when they were asked a question they didn't know the answer to, were no longer in control of it. Made them feel off balance and they and they didn't didn't like it. Yeah.
Scott:You know, at the same time, it I imagine, is really challenging for teachers who are teaching a subject which they love and they have a room full of students who don't care. Yeah. And and I think I think you gotta balance that.
Shawn:Yeah, and I don't know,
Scott:I think
Shawn:I haven't been in school in a long time, but for me, I don't know that it was the teachers. I don't think the teachers who actually loved what they did ever had the problems or at least not to the same extent. I think it was the teachers who hated their jobs, who did it because that's what they got a degree in. And they, you know, especially at the elementary and middle school level, you didn't have to specialize really in anything. Just, you know, and so I think that, like, I'll never forget my high school geometry teacher.
Shawn:She was one of the most, I mean, so it was a perfectly normal human being. I think she was probably in her sixties, which at the time felt like 80. You know what I mean? Like, because people just looked older, I think, back then, and maybe we thought they were older. She she was the quintessential, drab, you know, meek.
Shawn:She wore nothing but tan and gray. Like, you know, and her hair was mousy brown gray. Like, you know, and and it was very austere cut, and she never smiled. She never she never I mean, she just didn't seem interested in any of us. And and and and I don't even think she felt interested in the content, you know?
Shawn:And then I had another geometry teacher who's a male who's kind of the the counterbalance to to her. He was more charismatic. He was more interesting. He was a little bit more colorful fun. You know?
Shawn:But, I didn't learn from either of them because geometry was just it it is my Achilles heel. I don't know why. Nothing was resonating. And I remember being But I will say, I hated myself less in his class. You know what I mean?
Scott:That's a pretty high standard.
Shawn:Right. Yeah. I really, I hated myself less in his class. I still barely passed with a C, but I flunked hers.
Scott:Right.
Shawn:So room for improvement there for both, because I'm not stupid. So it's not that I couldn't get it. I can, I'm sure in the right circumstance, I could understand geometry and it could, but I think the way my brain functions, it has to be more visual. Then that goes into types of learning, right? And some kids are more kinetic and tactile or visual.
Shawn:Others are auditory learners or can read and things like that and pick things up. But then again, it's funny because I am a reader. So if you put me in an English class or literature class, I'm reading and I'm grasping and I'm A plus, A plus, A plus, I can reason it. Those word problems, I love that you pointed out the physical sensation. It literally gave me panic attacks.
Scott:Yeah.
Shawn:Reading those stupid math word problems. Like, you know, because I didn't even know where to begin.
Scott:Yeah, oh yeah I'm with you and it's yeah you're talking about brain function and hopefully we have time for just one more story because this is when I realized because I for most of my high school career I thought I was stupid because because I I couldn't do the the math stuff and the stuff that the smart kids could do and you know it it it made it more challenging because I've got two brothers and a sister and they both all three of them, their brains function in that way. My older brother went to Caltech on a full ride, got degrees in physics, and now he runs computers. My sister was pre med and homeschooled the children. My younger brother is an engineer, and I understand Shakespeare. And I just I remember, you know, wondering you know why do I have to take calculus?
Scott:Why do I mean I understood geometry better than I understood calculus but calculus and chemistry and you know all this stuff and what happened to me is I mean I went to a private high school here in Seattle. We all did and so you had to take all this stuff and you had to take Shakespeare and so I'm in this Shakespeare class and I remember the question we were in Hamlet Fifth and we have read this section and the teacher comes in and he goes well here's the question we're gonna talk about today. What do you have to do to get Harry Hotspur, who's the Prince, the King's son? What do you have to do to get Harry Hotspur to do anything for you? And I'm like, and all of a sudden I look up and the class is quiet because my hand is the only hand that's in the air.
Scott:And I'm in this room of people who are straight A students and I am a straight C plus student. And the teacher is looking at me like, why is the dumb guy got his hand up? And he looks at me and goes, okay.
Shawn:You will give this a go.
Scott:And it was sort of like, well, nobody else has taken a shot at this really difficult question. Yeah. So I guess we'll let Olsen take a shot at it. And I go, well, you flatter him. You just tell him how great he is and he'll do anything for you.
Scott:And I look around again and everybody's taking notes and the teacher's like, well I guess we'll have to talk about something else today because yeah, that's all you do. Flatter him and he talked for a couple of minutes and then we went on to something else. And it was that moment that I realized, wow, all these guys and, you know, boys and girls, men and women Yeah. Yeah. Who understood things that were opaque to me actually didn't understand this at all.
Scott:They didn't understand people at all. That
Shawn:that was their math word math problem. They were just like
Scott:Yeah. And and it it was it was the beginning of me understanding not that I, you know, I'm different, but that everybody sees, everybody looks to the jewel through a different facet and everybody understands it in a different way. And it's just, it's
Shawn:funny. Yeah, well humans are complex organisms and I think that it's, yeah, we're constantly walking between the fine tradition and change and history and a future that has no limits. And whether, you know, going back to the professional sports metaphors and examples, you know, those people are going through shifts of an evolution and how they compete and how they play the games that they play. You know, our education system is going through shifts in how our children are going to be educated and to what extent the parents are involved or to what extent, you know, pedagogical strategies are pursued and evolved to make it a more enriching experience. And I think in the workplace, again, I think it holds true.
Shawn:The three main categories that I kind of reflected on early is the trend here is that this trend is happening across many different facets of our life. And the question is, how do we respond to it? And what does it mean for all of us, both in terms of ourselves and personal development, our children, our communities. And so, no, I think that was a really fun conversation to have. I think it offered a lot of thought provoking things for people to think about.
Shawn:I hope all of you will. Certainly I know I will. I think that was a beautiful way to conclude because, you know, it's like the optimistic endnote.
Scott:That's such a great summary and I'm happy to be touching down on the ground with you Sean. Yeah, fantastic episode.
Shawn:Great job.
Scott:See you on the next one.
Shawn:Will do.
Scott:All right, have a great week.
Shawn:Take care, you too.
Scott:Bye.