Kiev and Justice

A few more rookie mistakes on the 2PP trip through the podcast learning curve! We talk about Shawn's trip to Poland and Ukraine.

What is 2 Parachutes Podcast?

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

Scott: 00:03

Hey, Sean.

Shawn: 00:04

Hey. How's it going, Scott?

Scott: 00:06

Pretty good. You're multitasking. I can tell from here.

Shawn: 00:09

Yeah. I'm just trying to get my phone turned off so we don't get

Scott: 00:13

Oh my god. I gotta do that too.

Shawn: 00:15

Rudely interrupted. And then I'm trying to find my charger because I definitely my phone is very much in need of a charge. So we'll that is multitasking. If I can have that going while I'm here, I am good to go. You?

Scott: 00:34

Yeah. You're good at keeping a lot of balls in the air

Shawn: 00:37

because you're good. Well, I don't know if I'm good at it, but I definitely play one on TV. Right?

Scott: 00:46

Well, that's that old saw, right? Your own capabilities and your own life look pretty ordinary from the inside out. Yeah. But it's different from the outside in. Mean, like Oh, man.

Scott: 00:58

Yeah, I have to make sure that I got everything lined up and then I can go through so I just appear like I know what I'm doing.

Shawn: 01:06

It's wonderful. That's the best any of us can do, I think. It's, you know, life life is a constant, like, marathon. You're just running, running, running. But

Scott: 01:16

Yeah, so I'm pretty stoked to hear what's on your mind, hear about how Poland was.

Shawn: 01:22

Yeah, yeah.

Scott: 01:24

Kind of stuff. Mean, it's been

Shawn: 01:26

I don't know.

Scott: 01:26

Just it's been, I think it's been a couple weeks since we have spoken. Yeah.

Shawn: 01:32

It has. I meant to send you some things as well, and then I forgot, but I think I had them in my notes here. I just yeah. It was a it was a good trip. You know, we were we we went actually into to Ukraine.

Shawn: 01:52

Poland was, like, our sort of, like, transition slash staging country. And then we spent four days in Kyiv, and it was you know, it it's a war zone. Right? So it's it's Yeah. Very it's just very weird because it's it's it's a war zone in in the most honest sense of the meaning.

Shawn: 02:15

But then where we were at, you didn't quite We drove from the Polish border to Kyiv, that was pretty uneventful. We've done that before last November and similarly uneventful. But then you get into Kyiv and they were the participants that we were working with, a lot of them coming from Kharkiv, which is in the East, which is where a lot of the action is taking place. That's the front. Right?

Shawn: 02:40

And and, it was really emotional for them because they see us as courageous, being willing to come into their country to assist them with capacity development at a time when, you know, they're they're fighting for their their freedom and their lives. And, you know, I don't like to give a lot of political commentary on, you know, kind of these sorts of things, even though you would think it's sort of in my wheelhouse to do so. But, you know, I'm very vested in a post conflict, like, peace that you know, where where there are, reconciliation and and that you know? So so I don't really jump on the, you know, bashing Russia bandwagon because in the end, it's a government that is making decisions. You know?

Shawn: 03:27

Their people have entrusted them to be a good steward of geopolitics and, you know, they're making decisions that a lot of people don't agree with and, you know, that I'm certainly not qualified to expound upon. But what I do know is that people, in my opinion, should never be in a situation where, you know, it's like war war should always be the last resort. And and in this circumstance, I just it's so unfortunate, you know, because I think that there could be so many diplomatic sort of interactions or solutions before we got to this point. So it's just it's just distressing. You know, here's my takeaway from it is war sucks.

Shawn: 04:05

People shouldn't be dying, over something, know, such as they are fighting over, which is, you know, territory and people like, you know, well, we feel more Russian than we feel Ukrainian. Okay. You know, there's got to be a negotiated way to get through stuff like that without like, you know, pointing barrels of a gun or bombs down each other's like throats. What I also kind of realized is, and this is a constant narrative for me and my organization, or just my personal views is that we're just, you know, all governments, all leaders of all governments are just running geopolitics off of an outdated old school Machiavellian post West failure playbook. And those mental models of zero sum and, you know, winner take all chess strategy, you know, kind of machinations on the geopolitical chessboard, if you will, to me are yielding consistently poor outcomes that are leading to things like the war between Russia and Ukraine, because the the chess board has the the the players or the pieces on the chess board have fundamentally changed in in value and in capability.

Shawn: 05:20

So, you know, and I wrote a little piece with a buddy of mine, Steve Royal, who's this British guy that is used to be on my organization's international advisory board. But it's it's, you know, chessboard strategies, you know, in an era where, you know, the kings and queens have fundamentally less power than they used to on the board. The pawns have fundamentally more power than than they would on a traditional chessboard. And those middle middle brokers, right, which is, you know, continues to be, you know, the wealthy elites and the, you know, multinational organizations and big companies, big pharma, things like that. You know, so everybody is sort of like approximately the same in potential to influence or, you know, impact the landscape.

Shawn: 06:03

But the strategies, so again, it's a leveling. Kings and queens come down, pawns go up, and everybody's approximately at this middle level, but they have different superpowers. They all have different ways to wield that power. And they don't always know that they have it. I think it's certainly not the pawns particularly who represent us average Joes.

Shawn: 06:22

But, you know, our playbooks are written for the traditional chess setup, which is that the heads of state and nation states represented by probably the most powerful piece, which is your queen, you know, are are the sort of like key power broker on on the board. And then, you know, everybody else is sort of ancillary, right, to to that. That's just not the case anymore. Know, I mean, just so to me, it's just like when is somebody in the international relations theory or, you know, community going to stand up? Look at all these, like, think tanks in DC.

Shawn: 06:56

When is somebody going to acknowledge that we're just we're we're executing strategies for an entirely different game, than what we're used to? And and and nobody seems to understand that's why we're yielding the outcomes consistently and with increasing devastate like, you know, so it's like we're ramping up for wars all over the place right now. Right. You see a conflict happening all over the world. You know, China and India are having skirmishes.

Shawn: 07:21

We got the Gaza Israeli issue. You've got, you know, Cambodia and Thailand exchanging, you know, unpleasantries, you know, over things. So it's it's almost like the world just feels like it wants to ramp up for another major world war. Or maybe somebody said the other day, maybe we're already in it. They didn't call World War II, World War II until after, many years after the fact, probably same for World War I.

Shawn: 07:47

So, yeah, I'm just struggling with the fact that here we are in 2025, knowing everything that we do. And one, we're operating off of broken human engagement models and geopolitical strategies. And two, you know, we just don't seem to be interested in peace.

Scott: 08:06

Yeah. So much there in what you're talking about and I'm gonna try and exercise a little discipline and instead of hitting the 12 things that are on my brain, just maybe take us down one avenue, not a rabbit hole, but an avenue, and I think the thing that's right at the top of my brain is, you know, if you look at any great world event that's been recorded in history and it doesn't matter if you, you know, go back to Rome or, you know, ancient Greece or any conflict that happened in the world in the twentieth century, whether it's the famous ones, or the more well known ones in the West, like the two world wars, or the lesser known ones, sort of the ongoing actual genocides that happen in Africa, seemingly every few years or every ten years, everybody is, I think has that same attitude of, why are we deciding to do this? Why are the people that are making decisions, making decisions based on the old model? Isn't the old saw in the military, we're always planning to fight the last war, not the next war. It's the diplomatic version of that.

Scott: 09:40

And for me, the question becomes, why is that? Separate and apart from whether you agree with somebody, people, in my opinion, actually don't do things that they believe to be wrong. People may do something and then realize that and get to a place where they say, well, what I did before was wrong and I need to apologize, usually because they're facing a consequence that they thought they could evade or that they didn't expect. But in the moment, when a person does something, what they are doing is what they, as that individual in that situation, actually instinctively or thoughtfully believes to be the right thing. And it seems to me that if we're gonna understand these decision making processes to try and understand why the things that we see happening are happening, maybe we need to start there because it's very easy to presume that the person that's across the negotiating table sees the world similarly at least to you and wants the same thing.

Scott: 10:56

That sort of takes me to the big thing, is peace. Many people want peace, but many people don't. I mean, are world leaders who would prefer war. They would prefer the fight. They don't necessarily want somebody to roll over.

Scott: 11:19

They want to demonstrate their strength. I think the key in those conversations is not just to understand that maybe somebody wants something that you can't comprehend a person wanting, but to also try to understand as best you can, recognizing that since you're so far apart, on the scale of what you want, that you may not really understand, but to have the conversation be there, and it creates problems, right? Because if you sit across the table with somebody and your assessment is they wanna fight, if you say, gee, why do you wanna fight? They're probably gonna say, oh no, I don't wanna fight. I just want all this land or I want my corner of the schoolyard or I want my girlfriend or boyfriend to come back to me and not be with you.

Scott: 12:13

It's whatever it is. So do you have that conversation? And it's a challenging aspect of human nature to sort of recognize that, and we've talked about this before, that you can be sitting across from a person who believes that he or she is rational and they are engaging in behavior that you just can't comprehend. And what do you do then? And I don't know how this works in your world when you're going into countries that are outside The United States and you're putting yourself in the middle of it.

Scott: 12:57

You're not at a negotiating table. You're in, I love how you pronounce I pronounce it Kiev. You pronounce it Kiev. That's probably how they pronounce it there. But

Shawn: 13:07

Yeah. That that's the first lesson you learn is because, you know, I think one is a Russian and then see like, for you Kiev is probably Russian, and I think Kyiv is how the Ukrainians would pronounce it. Got it. Yeah.

Scott: 13:20

You're physically there, not in a conference room. You're in an actual big place. And it's one thing to talk about this kind of stuff at a negotiating table in a conference room, but it's another thing to have this conversation with people that are actually being shot at, and that are actually being targeted to be

Shawn: 13:40

And that's the other thing I picked up, which I think is important to interject into this, which is that I had a chance to speak with some Ukrainians, obviously, from different parts of the country, and there was one particular person from that Eastern front. So getting a pretty bird's eye view of the action. And from what I could gather, this person was taking a really pragmatic approach to assessing the condition of being at war with this big country next door and was really in a way refreshingly optimistic, if I can say that, like in the sense that, well, like, think that, you know, I can't exactly remember what the person's exact words were, but but when I heard it, I was like, this sounds like people, a person representing a people in a particular part of, you know, this conflict that have the most invested in it. And what he was saying was extremely prudent and pragmatic. It make basically saying, you know, I wish there was a way we could find a piece of a way to end this.

Shawn: 14:47

Like, didn't in other words, didn't come out guns blazing and just be like, you know, I hate Russia and I hate Russians. And I you know, was much more conciliatory. And that could be for many different reasons. It could be because potentially what we're hearing is true, which is that, you know, there may be a significant population in Kharkiv who are either ethnically, directly tied. I mean, look, borders are arbitrary in the end.

Shawn: 15:11

Right? So just because you're on this side of a border, you know, well, and then there's that other side. I mean, were at one point families there who probably crossed those borders. So I'm sure that there's some kinship there and some, you know, familiarity and cultural continuity. So maybe it's that.

Shawn: 15:28

Maybe he's just like, I mean, I am half Russian or I've got Russians in my family. So I'm not looking to demonize or dehumanize the other side. We want peace. We want, you know, territorial integrity to be maintained. Like, but they're not demonizing.

Shawn: 15:43

Right. And it's really sometimes the Americans like and I won't, you know, say any names or anything. Not that I think this person would care because I think that this person is pretty vehemently vocal about, you know, dislike or, you know, I won't say hatred, but, you know, just really unafraid to bash Russia. Like, just like, Okay, this is all the things that Russia is doing wrong. And, you know, from my perspective, I just I try to fancy myself a peacemaker.

Shawn: 16:13

I'm like, yeah, we all come, you know, we're all going to have an opinion and we're all going to have a sympathy, you know, But I try to separate out the people, you know, from the regime or from the leader or from the actions, whether I agree with them or not, because in the end, the people are just you know, they're just they're only going to be able to be as good as what their leaders and government are doing on their behalf. And, you know, even America, you know, half the country in every given moment or probably not half, but like a quarter of the population at any given moment is super mad at whoever's president. You know what I mean, and doesn't agree with anything that person's doing. So I just for me, I think sometimes I see the United States government retired government officials, because they are so wedded to this old zero sum playbook and they go all in on, like, bashing whatever country they're mad at, that the rest of the world takes a lot of times a more pragmatic approach, which I think is an evolved approach, which is let's just acknowledge we're human and we're going make some really shitty decisions and, you know, we're going to have these flare ups.

Shawn: 17:25

I mean, like how many times have, you know, I come to blows with somebody on the road just because they cut me off? You know what I mean? So like so getting us mad to the point where we want to inflict physical harm is probably not unusual. When you then put that in the context of state stuff frictions, then that's how you get wars, right? Is because somebody gets upset over a thing.

Shawn: 17:44

But is it ultimately resolvable without violence? I think it probably is if we challenged ourselves to basically, you know, accept that as a rule of engagement, which is no, we're not going to get to the point where we're threatening human lives over something that we should be adult enough to sort out through diplomatic channels or through negotiations. Right. Otherwise, mean, think of it as this. All governments are really are corporations.

Shawn: 18:09

So, PepsiCo isn't lobbying missiles at Coca Cola. They're sorting it out. Because the rule of engagement is that that's not a thing you get to do.

Scott: 18:21

Right, but you're attacking in different ways and I'd, you know, I'd go, I take that in a couple different directions. If you go to a major city where there's organized crime and the protection rackets, certainly physically threatening violence. Nice restaurant you have here would be a shame if something happened to it and you need to fill this envelope once a week So that's maybe the counterpoint to Pepsi and Coke, they're not necessarily doing that, but it does happen. I think there may be a bit of an issue here to explore in understanding the granular versus the global, and the context I wanna sort of put in the middle for us to maybe consider is, actually PTSD. Years ago, I read a fascinating book called On Killing by a guy named, Dave Grossman, who retired as a colonel out of the US Army.

Scott: 19:33

And it's a fascinating psychology book about how the human changes, how people change when they are confronted by violence or they are brought into a military and trained to execute violence, and you see it across the board, whether it's a Western military or an Eastern military, all the way down to Hutus and the boy armies in Africa and stuff. The psychology is all the same and it's based on this notion that it's actually very difficult for a human being to kill another human being. And that doesn't mean that there aren't that small category of sociopaths and psychopaths who don't feel that restraining urge, set those aside. It doesn't mean that there aren't people who have brought themselves or been brought to the point where they can kill, but the point in this process is it's very difficult, in general for humans to kill other humans and the impact, the PTSD impact is much greater the closer you get. So if you kill somebody with a knife, the PTSD impact on your psyche is much, much more elevated than if you're flying over an airplane dropping a bomb.

Scott: 21:03

You know you're killing people, you know you're killing more people, but you're distanced from it. And I think that understanding of sociology is something that might help us to understand governments, because if you have a world leader who's saying, I want to attack this other country and is sending an army, they're gonna say, Oh, is this really worth sending our boys into harm's way? But the person giving that order is very remote from the damage. And so it's like dropping bombs from an airplane, the psychological impact is much less. If you are in Kyiv and you are on a farm and you're dealing with the owner of the next farm over who wants to tell you how to grow your crops, there's much more impact and it's much easier to ask the question, for what purpose do you try and control your brother?

Scott: 22:06

And I can't give you the Bible quote, but it's in Romans or in Corinthians or something like that. For what purpose do you do that? And so you have Ukrainians who may be at least in part ethnic Russians who want to live their lives in peace, and then you have a government, and I think you see the Russians do this, you see the Chinese do this, you saw Britain do this during the American Revolution and it was the same thing, right? When you read the history and I was on a plane myself flying cross country last week and started watching a show that I had seen before, which is the John Adams. It's six parts and it's Paul Giamatti and he's brilliant as John Adams.

Scott: 22:59

But all they're talking about, it reminded me, as the Continental Congress was being assembled, it wasn't their rights as Americans, it was their rights as Englishmen. And so you have Ukrainians who probably see themselves as Russian, but they don't wanna be told what to do. You had British subjects, which is what all of the big names who signed the declaration of independence saw themselves as Yeah. Who wanted the freedom to do what they wanted to do in this new country and saw no alternative, but to form their own country and basically sever ties. So now if we're talking about 2025 and Russia and Ukraine, you have Ukrainians who severed when the Soviet Union fell apart and they want to be free and have arms reach interactions with other countries.

Scott: 23:59

And you have Russia, who may see the situation kind of the way the British Crown did in the 1770s, which was, no, this is a part of my country and they can't go away. They have to stay. I'm not gonna allow my country to fall apart. And we take this moral high ground up. Well, countries fall apart.

Scott: 24:25

Okay, let's go to 1860s. The US civil war, the great emancipator Lincoln decided that we would go to war, the North would go to war with the South rather than allow the country to sever. Okay, so we like to be on our moral high ground as Americans, but we're people too, and we've done the same things too. And I think that in order to understand the things that you're talking about that are difficult to understand, a part of that understanding is to realize that people are not doing this because they're bad or they're wrong. People are behaving this way because they're people.

Scott: 25:08

And I'm not saying, Oh, it's human nature and not worry about it. I'm saying it's human nature, so understand it as human nature and figure it out from that standpoint. Countries invade not because they feel secure, they invade because they feel unsecure.

Shawn: 25:28

Yeah, absolutely.

Scott: 25:30

I could keep going on, I'm even born

Shawn: 25:33

out No, of no, it's one of those things where, you know, you get thrust into the middle of it. I just sometimes I feel like Americans because that's my unique experience is to be around a bunch of diplomats or, you know, government officials and retired government officials. So I get my more than my fair share than probably most Americans on a weekly basis of hearing what they have to say and or hearing like online or just in person because I engage with them and I'm working around them is just sometimes it feels like the people out there banging the loudest drums for hating the Russians or, you know, and that's mostly what I get. I've yet to come across people, even people who are sort of pro Russian in my life. There are people I know who are either ethnically Russian or, like, you know, they're trying to make a case.

Shawn: 26:25

They're making the case a lot more gingerly and a lot more delicately and saying, you know, we don't want to be at war and we don't want to stay at war, you know, but here's the historical context for why this particular issue matters and how it rose to the level of an open conflict between these two nations. It's it's always the the aggressive Americans who are like down with Russia, down with and I'm just like, yeah, but like, you're you're you're messaging to a whole community of Russian. This is the same thing like, you know, which I thought was damaging during the turn turn of the century after nineeleven. It's just like down with Muslims and Islamic fascists. Again, there's nuance there.

Shawn: 27:07

There's billions of Muslims all over the world that were not responsible for nineeleven and that live peaceably every day. So just to, like, you know, grossly stereotype and categorize everybody into one bucket, I think is just it doesn't it is not a recipe for, you know, peace, even if we're in the middle of the conflict there. What is it? The book. Presence.

Shawn: 27:30

I'm trying to find it on my bookshelf. Yeah, Presence by Peter Seng and Otto Scharmer and a couple other coauthors where the thing that stuck in my mind the most was, you know, you have requiring some sort of a different outcome, you have to be able to envision an emerging future. Right. Like and and in that emerging future, Russia has to be a good guy. If you aren't creating conditions for an emerging future where the Russians can see themselves as a as a good stakeholder in the sort of post conflict environment, then you are not on a path to peace.

Shawn: 28:12

And the more you beat on them, the less they're going to be able to see themselves as a good stakeholder in that imminently emerging future. And so because of that, there is no imminently emerging future where we have a peaceful cohabitation with that particular stakeholder, you know, in a post conflict situation. And the same could be said for, you know, the Palestinians and the Israelis. You know, if the Palestinians can't stakeholder that is a good actor and good to them, and if the Israelis can't see a Palestinian stakeholder that is a good actor and a good and good to them, then there is no path towards sustainable or imminent peace. Right.

Shawn: 28:54

And so to me, that's a that's a huge problem in how we conduct the narrative. And this is why I don't like the chest beating zero sum, which is you got to like, you know, basically on your knees, Russia, and like you've got to like basically submit and, you know, surrender, you know, without any sort of like, surrender without any, like, conciliatory terms. Right. And I'm not saying they deserve anything or they that we should give them something because it's not my decision to make that or anything. But, you know, I just don't know why there can't be more brokering of negotiations and why the world can't, like, come together and just say, look, we're not gonna we're not gonna, like, pull the guns out.

Shawn: 29:36

You know, we're not gonna bring a nuke to to the okay corral, like, pistol fight here. You know? Like, it just it escalates so quickly. And and maybe not. I mean, that's probably not the right way to say it because this has been brewing for decades.

Shawn: 29:51

So it's not like it just, you know, went from zero to nothing. But in a way, it does feel like because it's like, okay, well, held the line, we held the line, we held the line, and then boom, conflict. I guess my last thought on it, you know, because again, I tire myself speaking, you know, frequently, is just that, you know, I think that we're all really It's kind of like me. Remember we talked about my personality type and it's like I'm conflict avoidant. I can be patient for a really long time and then all of a sudden, because I've been actively avoiding dealing with the underlying issue, all of a sudden that it appears like it's all of a sudden, but really it's like I'm holding the door, I'm holding the door, then I just can't hold it anymore, and then I fall.

Shawn: 30:33

I think that's kind of where things sit. So we got to figure out how to get better when we're all avoiding the conflict or not dealing with the underlying root issue so that we can potentially get better at avoiding the eventual break, you know, where everybody just goes to war.

Scott: 30:50

Yeah, and it's difficult because it's, again, it's people, right? You know, expecting a person to behave in a way that is not their character, Everybody's character is different. And early on in our process, just for 2 Parachutes Podcast, you and I both did those personality assessments just to see where we are, and we get along great. It makes me feel so good speaking with you as a person, but you and I are different and that makes the point that everyone's different. So the idea that somebody is conflict avoidant, the answer is, well, become not conflict avoidant.

Scott: 31:38

Pay attention to the little things before they become big things. The problem is not everybody's wired that way. Another problem is there are billions of little things. You don't know which little things are going to become big things, and so it's revisionist history. Oh, this one blew up, so it was a huge mistake for us not to tamp that down.

Scott: 32:00

Well, we tamped down 400 other things and we didn't tamp down that one. It's actually not a fail and I think

Shawn: 32:09

Yeah, it's a great point.

Scott: 32:10

Maybe part of the answer is we have this human instinct to punish and it's not necessarily the lash out. I mean, for some people it's the lash out, you get pushed and you get pushed and you lash out. I will not continence an insult and so we're going to go into the street immediately because you said I was cheating at cards or whatever. It's not even that, it's that at the end of the conflict, the human instinct is to punish. That is a real problem because when you look at any conflict, you can go back to the previous conflict that led to it.

Scott: 32:50

The easy one is the armistice after World War One, which eventually led to Nazi Germany. There's a counter example, which is the unconditional surrender of the Japanese in World War Two, which did not lead to something. But I think if you compare and contrast those, what happened after World War I with Germany was the system that was put in place was designed to punish and hold Germany down. What happened in post World War II Japan was some form of reconstruction, and I just talked about the civil war, so I have reconstruction in my brain. I don't know that that's the word that they used, but I think in general the thought process was, you know, we have an unconditional surrender with Japan, but let's put them on a footing where they can grow and succeed, and do so peacefully.

Scott: 33:57

And so it's that question of, okay, I really, really am offended. I disagree and I'm offended with what Russia is doing in Ukraine now. And yeah, I should go through a process where I try and understand it. But fundamentally for me, for Scott Olson, it's not okay to start a war because you wanna reassemble your country. There are other things that you can do to try and get there other than violence.

Scott: 34:23

Okay, I can recognize in an academic sense that the people in charge of Russia at this moment don't think there's another way. They may very well think that they tried everything else and this is the last ditch. That'll be difficult for somebody to convince me of. I'm not opposed to being convinced, but I'm seeing somebody who thought, okay, this is where I am, this is going to be pretty easy, and then it turned out to not be easy. But the way forward, which really that you're talking about that really resonates with me is, how do we manage somebody who made a decision that we really disagree with to create an environment where they don't do it again, but they are not left struggling with what they consider to be something unfair.

Scott: 35:19

And this goes straight to what you see in The Middle East. And even if you distinguish between Hamas and Palestinians, my view, know, having lived in the region and having consumed news on this for most of my life, is that, you know, the fight isn't between Israel and Palestine, it's between the Israeli government and the Hamas organization and some of the other militant organizations that happen to be Palestinian but they're not Palestinian people and there's an organization I read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about two months ago by the leader of a new organization in Palestine that basically said, the time for Hamas is gone, the time for my organization is here, let's do this. But if you distinguish between Israel and Hamas, and you start saying, well, you know, who threw the first punch? You have to go back and read Thucydides, and, you know, old text you have to read I don't even know if some of this stuff was in the Dead Sea Scrolls or where it was, but you have to go back three thousand years to try and figure out the initial injury and then understand that culturally, the people who are living now feel those offenses sometimes viscerally.

Scott: 36:56

Something that happened millennia ago is still a bleeding wound, and they already feel like they were not treated fairly. And the challenge is, particularly when it's emotionally charged, how do you come to an agreement with somebody when you feel treated unfairly and they feel treated unfairly? And the human drive is to punish. How do we

Shawn: 37:26

Well, on the punish piece, you first said that, the first thing that popped into my mind is yes, that is our human instinct, which is to, like that's again, going back to my car example, like if I'm out on the road and you see these maniacs, right, who are bobbing and weaving in traffic and they're like, they're creating an unsafe environment for everybody because they want to get one car ahead and gridlock traffic. Just, you know, and so my you know, I think most of us always have that thought like, oh, where's a cop when you need one? Right. Because we want that person to be punished. But what maybe the more noble version of that instinct is is justice.

Shawn: 38:10

It's like creating a situation where they kind of get what they deserve based on their behavior, but not in a way that's so punitive that it's like, you know, they go to jail, but like maybe they get a fine and learn their lesson. And, you know, hopefully that yields a safer driving experience. That person's behavior, right? It's behavior shaping for that person, which if you think about it, the reason why people get so mad about it is partially ego because, you know, I hate it when somebody passes me. Right.

Shawn: 38:43

Like, I just have to admit that's a thing. I have a competition about that and it bugs me. It bugs most people probably. But the other piece is because somewhere primitively within your psyche is, you know, that this person is putting you, yours and others in your tribe at risk. And that then creates that sort of emotional visceral reaction of rage initially because you're going to war because you're putting us at risk and I need to protect my community, my tribe, that's my personal tribe or my broader community tribe.

Shawn: 39:18

And so, I do think it's a very natural instinct. But I think because when you then apply that instinct to the international stage, now you're talking about countries going to war, mass casualties, disassociation from the humanity of what war means, we have to look for justice, not punishment or revenge. Because, again, that's when you get into that Hatfield McCoy situation where, you know, like you're always tit for tatting, you know, because you've got unresolved harms or hurts because, you know, you treated my country a certain way post World War Two. I'm still mad about that, you know, or, you know, what does justice look like? I mean, you know, Japan sort of post World War Two, I think that was you could argue that was a justice oriented outcome because, you know, within thirty, forty years, they were like, you know, rehabilitated on the global stage as a credible, like contributing member of the global community.

Shawn: 40:20

Their economic and sort of societal reconstruction was astonishing, right? The rapidity and the sort of impressiveness that they not only recovered, but then seemed to jump leap years ahead of a lot of nations in terms of innovation and cultural development. I don't know. Know, it's an interesting discussion and it's just one that needs well, and maybe there is attention being paid to it and I'm just not hearing or seeing about it. But I just think everybody's fighting about these in these very Machiavellian terms.

Shawn: 40:56

You see the thought pieces coming out of like, you know, renowned think tanks and I'm just it's just a snooze of just like yawn, like, you know, there's nothing innovative here. There's nothing creative that's being said. And it's just to me a load of garbage that like, you know, we got to you know, we're better than this. But but what I guess my point is from the very beginning was based on just interacting with what I would consider to be mostly just normal people, like meaning not people who are like assistant secretaries or deputy deputy secretaries, you know, are just like, yeah, man, we're really tired of this. We just want it to be fine.

Shawn: 41:31

We just want it to be fine. Like, we don't hate Russia. We just want it to be fine. We just want the bombs to stop. You know what I mean?

Shawn: 41:38

Everybody else in the the, you know, in in the diplomatic and government official circles are they're doing their best to keep this an active flame and to ramp up hatred against the communities that are fighting one way or You the know what I mean? You're pro Israeli, it's to hate the Palestinians. If you're pro Palestinians, to hate the Israeli. If you're pro Russia, it's to hate the Ukraine. If it's pro Ukraine, it's to hate the and, you know, and I I'm tired of those voices.

Shawn: 42:07

Because they're driving stuff, Scott, and I'm just like, that sucks, man, because nobody's innovative and I have to figure out a better way to do this than you.

Scott: 42:16

It's because it's an effective tactic. If you know that the people on the other side just want this to go away, then that's your negotiating strategy. You're going to keep pushing so that you can win the negotiation and get more of the things that you want. That's why negotiation is difficult because when you're the one who just wants it to stop, you have to understand that you can't go into the negotiation with that. You have to go into the negotiation with, yeah, I'm tired, but I am not going to balance.

Scott: 43:02

And so it becomes complex, but again, it is complex because it's human. I mean, I love your metaphor of the chessboard, but you know, the chessboard isn't inert pieces that are being moved by two personalities. Chess pieces themselves have personalities, and then they're being ordered. But I did want to go back to your concept of justice, because I wanted to share with you that I completely lost faith in the concept of justice a long time ago.

Shawn: 43:41

Oh my gosh, as a former FBI guy, I'm like, I don't know how to take that.

Scott: 43:45

Yeah, so I want to share with you the story of how I did and it actually goes back before the FBI to when I was a prosecutor. I was a trial attorney. I was a deputy prosecutor in the West Coast, which deputy DA in the East Coast. And I was in court, and I was handling some motion. And what came on after my motion was a sentencing hearing.

Scott: 44:09

And it was a sentencing hearing for an unbelievably tragic case. A woman and her infant child, like a two year old kid, had been killed when they got T boned by the guy that was being sentenced. So it's an evening thing. She had run a stop sign and didn't have her child in a seat belt. He was right at the legal limit for intoxication, which at the time that was a point one zero.

Scott: 44:46

Here's a point one zero or point one one, which is, you know, by today's standards is pretty intoxicated.

Shawn: 44:53

Yeah. Was like, he's drunk. So Yikes. Yeah.

Scott: 44:56

He's drunk. She didn't secure her child and ran a stop sign. Yeah. And she's dead. The child is dead.

Scott: 45:03

So you have in this courtroom these and so this guy is being sentenced for vehicular manslaughter. And so you have these two families in this courtroom and they are both outraged. I was astonished at the level of anger and frustration and vitriol because both families, eight or 10 people on each side, were almost shouting at each other that it was the other guy's fault. Right. He was drunk.

Scott: 45:42

She ran a stop sign. He was drunk. She ran a stop sign. I don't even remember what the sentence was, but it was a fairly standard middle of the range sentence, so it wasn't appealable or anything. And I remember, after that sentencing hearing and and the judge had to, like, calm the courtroom down two or three times.

Scott: 46:04

You know, the the husband who was crying, you know, after he spoke to the judge, walked by the defendant's table and said something to the defendant and the defense attorney got all pissed off and it was just everyone was outraged. The hearing is done. Everyone leaves the courtroom. I waited to get my paperwork and I walk in the hall and both parties, there's a group around the defense attorney he's getting shouted at, there's a group around the prosecutor he's getting shouted at and then they're shouting at each other and I'm going, there's nothing that that judge could possibly do to make that right And that's the problem with punishment or revenge. I mean, and I'm I don't want to say I'm a revenge guy, but I believe in settling accounts.

Scott: 47:05

You know, if I have an account payable with somebody, I'm not gonna like chase that person down and engage in an act of violence. But if something happens where, I can settle that account, I'm probably gonna do it because it just for me personally, it makes visceral sense to me and I'm not doing it to make it better, I'm doing it because to not do it seems wrong to me. But about six months later, or maybe it was a year later, I had to handle a sentencing on a rape case, and it horrific was case. It was a rape of a child case, and it was one of these heartbreaking situations where a family had needed some childcare and so there was this really young victim or a young victim who was sent to the neighbors for supervision and there was a teenager there who molested this kid, and so everybody felt guilty. The defense was arguing that kid shouldn't have been left unsupervised with this developmentally disabled.

Scott: 48:33

Also a kid who was being sentenced and you know, the the family felt guilty, you know, both families felt guilty and so everyone had their chance to speak. And then the defense attorney, you know, made this impassioned sort of teary eyed, you know, please don't, you know, establish too harsh of a sentence, because all we want is justice. And I'm like, okay. And I got the last word, because I was representing the state. And I basically spoke to the judge, about five minutes about all of the pain that was in the room and about how the judge couldn't do anything about it.

Scott: 49:17

And while the plea for justice sounded great, there was absolutely nothing the judge could do to create justice, to unrape this child, to unguilt these parents, to make it better and all the judge had was the sentencing guidelines. And so I asked him to impose a sentence within the sentencing guidelines. And so it's not that justice is a bad thing. It's that justice, I think, in a lot of ways is a shimmer. It's when people don't know what else to say to either get what they want or to get a person to stop doing something that they're doing, then they start talking about justice, but it's not a pragmatic thing.

Scott: 50:11

It's a wonderful principle, but you can't unpunch somebody. And so the question becomes, what do we do now when somebody has been punched? And humans don't like to feel helpless. Nobody does. I don't like to feel helpless.

Scott: 50:29

And maybe that's part of as I'm kind of thinking out loud here, maybe that's part of the need to punish my highfalutin sounding evening accounts, it's because you don't want to feel powerless. You want to feel like you didn't let this bad thing go, you did something. Because the last thing you want is to see bad behavior, not do anything about it, and then bad behavior again. And it's the uncontrollable child all the way up to, some of these experiments that some cities have made with, granting cash bail. So you have criminals that come in and, within twenty four hours of being released, you know, commit the same crime again.

Scott: 51:19

Right. You know, you want to have done something. And so the geopolitical challenge is how do we take that human desire to do something and make it productive so that what we're aggrieved at now, countries attacking each other, doesn't actually happen again. And it's made more difficult when you have a country that believes it's in its best interest to attack. And they're there.

Shawn: 51:53

They're there. It's a really challenging situation, you know, especially when you break it down by conflict area, because, you know, I'm much like you. I've been rooted in the Middle East conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis most of my life. You know? I mean, I I remember being first introduced to this concept that there were Jews in Israel and Arabs in Palestine who did not see eye to eye.

Shawn: 52:26

And, you know, from a young age, we were at when I was 10 years old, we had Saudi Arabian college students living with us. And so I knew from an early age what a Muslim was, what a Jewish person. You know, we were we were also a very faith oriented house on on the side of Christianity. But we we, you know, I always like to say I was I was before all else, I was testament Christian when I was a kid because that's that, you know, I mean, it was I always joke that my I feel like my dad was more Jewish than he was Christian because we just, you know, we really hammered out that that old testament. That's what I knew, you know, growing up and all the like.

Shawn: 53:00

And so I've been very aware of this since the early eighties. For me, I just think that it's unfortunate because a lot of people, feel, on some level, are also a victim of whatever the controlling powers are at the time because of how they reinforce or react to certain conflicts that are not maybe in your specific interest. But, you know, you have you're the power broker on the global block, so you have a disproportionate say in how these things are either resolved or not resolved. Right? And and I think The US has, for the most part in its history, tried to be a good broker in that conflict between Israel and and Palestine.

Shawn: 53:47

But then there have been a lot of times too where I feel like, you know, we've kind of allowed the situation to to just sit on the simmer, you know, and and where maybe we could have taken a a more proactive approach with Israel to say, look, like, you know, you're going to keep your country. There's never a question about that. But, like, you also can't create a situation where it's a permanent penal colony, because if you expect people to not react in that circumstance, then that's just a delusion. And it's also a precondition for eventual war. You know what I mean?

Shawn: 54:24

Because people will get disillusioned and exhausted and fatigued of all of that. And then, you know, it makes it a lot easier for Hamas to, you know, not even just influence or sway the people that they're, quote, unquote, governing, but it allows them to take over because people are just trying to live, you know, and they're like, I don't have time for this. Fine. If these jokers are gonna do something, you know, be the mafia guys on the block. I don't care.

Shawn: 54:50

You know, it's kinda like, you know, let the the prison you know, it's like letting the prison wardens run the prison when nobody's looking except for the prison wardens were all bad actors.

Scott: 54:58

Yeah.

Shawn: 54:59

So they're actively, like, sowing division among the ranks within the population. And, you know, so it's just it to me, it seems very frustrating that we can't just be adults about this and be like, look, this has been this is a shitty situation. It has been for probably about fifty years. It's long overdue for the you know, I mean, look, the global community created that condition, you know, in many ways, like, you know, with arbitrary sort of, like, you know, country map lines and things like that. Let's take a little responsibility for it and just be like, hey.

Shawn: 55:33

Let's let's let's everybody just simmer down here. We gotta knock this off. Israel, you've got your borders. It's fine. But we gotta have a two state solution.

Shawn: 55:39

Like, there's just no way because we're not gonna uproot, you know, except for now, as it turns out, maybe they can do that. Right? Like, know, and and that's you know, but I just to me, that is a deep injustice, and I will use the term justice because it's you know, these are just normal people trying to live their life. And, you know, if we don't have any control over what our president and our congress do 80% of the time, how are you gonna expect a bunch of impoverished, powerless Palestinians to have control over anything Hamas is gonna do? It's just it's it's you know?

Shawn: 56:09

And they never got any credit, by the way, for when there were quiet moments. Right? They never got any benefits or, you know, not even just benefits, but any benefit of the doubt. Like, okay, we've had some quiet times where we're not blowing shit up. Like, let's maybe build off of that piece, even if it's a negative piece.

Shawn: 56:28

Right? It's not an active piece. It's a negative piece. But let's just, you know, and so I do hold the Israeli government accountable to that, you know, because I think that's just, you know, it's it hasn't none of this is fair and none of this is going to be just going to your point. But I also think that there are some things that are less just than others.

Scott: 56:47

Yeah. And there are certainly I mean, the concept of fairness, and I'd have to really think and parse to really give an intelligent distinction between fairness and justice. They're very similar, but they're very different and every child ever screamed at some point, it's just not fair. Yeah, it's not fair.

Shawn: 57:12

Life is not fair.

Scott: 57:15

It's easy to say, yeah, it's not fair. What did your mother tell you? Life is gonna be fair. A lot harder to say that's not just because pretty much everybody's mother said, yeah, there's justice in the world. But I think that's where we sort of set our teeth.

Scott: 57:36

I find it useful to look at the situation that the counterparty is dealing with and look for the analog in my life so I can understand it. So you have Palestinian citizens who some choose a group like Hamas, tolerate a group like Hamas, And it's very easy for non Palestinians to say, well, they should just throw Hamas out. That's exactly like the mom and pop store in Brooklyn.

Shawn: 58:09

Being governed by the mafia.

Scott: 58:11

Yeah, that says, listen, don't call the police. I give them the envelope every week and my shop doesn't burn down. But dad, that's not fair. That's not right. Yeah, but if you get rid of them, the next person that's gonna come in is gonna charge me more.

Scott: 58:28

So it's okay now. It's not hurting me. And Palestinians don't wanna be hurt any more than anybody else doesn't wanna be hurt. And so it comes back to behavior. And I think the problem with analyzing human behavior is it's very easy to look at somebody else's behavior and go, that's wrong.

Scott: 58:50

And it's very easy to look at behavior in another that you engage in and go, Oh, well, that's very different. When really the only reason that it's different because when they do it, it's wrong and when I do it, it's fine. Because I understand me. But maybe the way forward is to really talk about behavior. And it's not to understand violent behavior to find a way to excuse it.

Scott: 59:20

It's to examine violent behavior to understand it so that it can be stopped. And if where you come down to is a person is engaging in violent behavior and they're not gonna stop because they think it's getting them what they need, then I think the answer is down the lane of how do you physically stop them? And the challenge with that is all of a sudden you're using violence to stop violence. But the reality of it is, when somebody walks into any location with weapons to do a mass shooting, at that point, in that instance, the only solution is to draw your own weapon and to kill that person. In that moment, that's it and that sucks and a lot of people, including me, will say, well, don't live in a world like that.

Scott: 01:00:15

It's the world we live in. And so maybe analyzing all this stuff from the standpoint of behavior rather than the follow on concepts is a way to go. But I don't know because I'm the academic here, which is not a comfortable place for you to be, and you're the person that's on the ground.

Shawn: 01:00:36

But I but so one thing that you touched on, and and I think I I would definitely. I am interested in in your blueprint. I am interested in the behavior as the starting place. I think in addition to that, what you have made me really have to think hard about, maybe there's a there there to explore is in your very two very powerful examples. What I loved about it was, you know, dare I say, borderline biblical and it's it's teaching is that it was you described two situations where there were never going to be winners.

Shawn: 01:01:21

Nobody won in either of those situations. Therefore, justice cannot be achieved because justice carries a connotation of balancing or of writing a scale of some sort that has been imbalanced or that has been, you know, skewed in some way. And so it's idea of correction to balance, right? There's something that's off. So what that makes me wonder is, you know, maybe we're entering into these like negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians and Ukrainians and Russians in the wrong way.

Shawn: 01:01:59

Maybe what we should be leading with is not only looking at the behavior patterns and then trying to deduce where can we do it differently so that we can minimize chances that we're going to escalate to this, like, level of war that people are dying, you know, on a massive scale or even on a little scale, it shouldn't really matter. But the other side of it is just managing the expectation of the outcome. And maybe we've been so fixated for so many decades on this idea that there is a justice solution when how can there be a justice solution? How many thousands of people on both sides have died? How many thousands of people have been PTSD or traumatized to a way that, like, you're not going to ever right that wrong.

Shawn: 01:02:49

Like, there is no balancing. All you can do is say it stops now. We cannot go back and make it right. We cannot go back and negotiate some kind of it's like reparations in the I mean, you just it doesn't you know, sending $5 to every person of, you know, black heritage in America isn't going to right the wrong. You know?

Shawn: 01:03:13

And it's also, by the way, just gonna be entirely ridiculously hard to do because, you know, we're all I guarantee you, we probably all have some level of something in us. But, like so so, you know, so I guess it's just like and that's a very powerful epiphany for me is the idea that what if there isn't an adjust adjust outcome?

Scott: 01:03:34

Yeah.

Shawn: 01:03:35

What the like and we have and and it didn't occur to me that that could be a thing until you and it's not the like I'm sure I've come across situations or scenarios such as you described where it was like, this is this is bad. This is and and I think it's what we call a no win situation. Right? Like, there there's no you know, there are no winners in this. Right?

Shawn: 01:03:52

Like, it's so I'm not unfamiliar with that as a concept, but it only as you spoke it in this this forum made me realize that I think we've just keep setting ourselves up, meaning like the Israelis and the Palestinians, particularly for just like an outcome that is unachievable. Like, it's just unachievable. So then so then what? So, Okay, let's look at the behavior patterns. Let's minimize the, you know, let's minimize the killing and let's figure out, you know, what is a blueprint for, if not cohabitation, proximate habitation, you know, in the way of borders and boundaries.

Shawn: 01:04:32

And I don't know if you recognize how big of a paradigm shift that is for me. I I'm like processing it like very like the hamsters are running very fast in my brain right now because they're just like, holy shit. Like, I have been thinking about this. I know it never occurred to me that there isn't a just solution. And not because not because people can't go on to live a peaceful, cohabited life or anything like that.

Shawn: 01:05:03

It's just simply that, like, we've got to stop promising that we're going to make up for all wrongs. Done. We because we're not going to be able to do that, I don't think.

Scott: 01:05:14

I Yeah, I agree. So we're over our hour.

Shawn: 01:05:19

Yes.

Scott: 01:05:20

And as usual, we're ending with more things to talk about than we thought.

Shawn: 01:05:24

Yes. Which

Scott: 01:05:28

is great. And I am beyond fascinated with what's going through your brain and how big of a change this is and we definitely need to come back to this because this is not a well, let's just deal with the behavior and everything will be fine. There's so much more to it, but

Shawn: 01:05:45

agree. Yeah,

Scott: 01:05:47

let's make sure we have this on our list and come back to it.

Shawn: 01:05:50

Yeah, absolutely. Good conversation.

Scott: 01:05:52

Yeah, as always. Alright, I will see you next time.

Shawn: 01:05:56

See you next time, Scott. Thanks.

Scott: 01:05:58

Yep. Thank you. Bye.