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The Two Parachutes Podcast is a collaboration, well, more like a conversation, between a CEO and an FBI Agent. Shawn Baker-Garcia and Scott Olson first met when they were working at US Embassy Baghdad; Scott for the FBI and Shawn for the US State Department. Over the years they’ve worked together, given advice and assistance to each other, and now see that the synergy which comes from open, civil, and thoughtful discussion is very much needed in the modern discourse. Join them as they dive into everything interesting to humanity. The goal of 2PP is to recreate the experience most people have had when they stumble into an insightful conversation with a new acquaintance at a conference or a dinner party. The kind of conversation that makes the rest of the room stop talking and listen. The kind of conversation that gets your mind working as new thoughts tumble out. Let the 2 Parachutes Podcast drop into your world!
Hey, Sean. How are you?
Shawn:Hey, Scott. I'm doing well today. How about yourself?
Scott:Not too bad.
Shawn:Awesome.
Scott:How are things going on the India front? I know that you're pretty pretty busy at least for the next month or six weeks as you launch into your trip over to India and the conference you're putting on over there. How are things going?
Shawn:Yeah. So funny, good good and timely question. So I woke up this morning to, you know, basically learning that the government of India has decided that they have a whole other event that they'd rather do and attend that same couple of days as ours. And without the primary government of India stakeholder, which of course is the India Semiconductor Mission, we don't really have an event. Because it's so that was a fun wake up.
Shawn:I mean, you know, not for nothing, you and I both have worked government. We know that these poor officials and ministers and their staffs are not always, this is not catastrophes of their making, crises of their construction, but it does impact on the work that we do, of course. And I know you and I have had lots of conversations about the relative merits and challenges of working as private sector entities with government as clients, and you've got strong feelings about that and I do as well, but for different reasons, of the different business models you and I have employed in our respective businesses over the years, I come down on a little bit of a different kind of position on that simply because I I can't I can't. My my business is is predicated on working with them. Yours is sort of optional.
Shawn:But yeah, so that's that's what I'm wrestling. That's the alligator I've decided to wrestle this week.
Scott:Yeah, so does that mean that you're actually canceled? Are you postponed? I mean, what's the impact of this particularly arbitrary decision on you as a, you know, it's a nonprofit, but you're still a business owner and you still have people to pay and it's what you do. And now what are you going to do?
Shawn:Well, I will say this, always get to continue to pay people because we work off of a federal Department of State cooperative agreement, which is like a version of a grant. So we're always working even if it's to undo the work that we just did. We still get paid to do that work of undoing the work. So that's kind of the good news. And for all of the conscientious taxpayers, US citizen taxpayers out there, that's not as wasteful as it sounds actually.
Shawn:We don't actually get any more money to do this. It just means that we kind of take steps to pivot and in this case postpone. This will be our second postponement. I like to say The US postponed the first year and now India is coming back and meeting them in kind and saying, okay, it's our turn to postpone. So it will go proceed as planned and with no, hopefully no major cost or scope disruption.
Shawn:We of course have to negotiate very practical matters like relationships with the venue on-site in Bangalore, India, which is where we would be hosting this event. But they've proven to be a very flexible partner and they understand better than anybody that when governments get involved, anything goes. And maybe that's an interesting thread for us to pull, right, on just what are the challenges and sort of the dynamics surrounding when your client is the government, and what does that mean for what you and I both know about how government operates as kind a of a unique actor in its own little ecosystem, market ecosystem. Right? And then how do they interact with those of us outside of that market ecosystem, but who are sort of adjacent and working sometimes in partnership on things.
Scott:Yeah, it's it's it's funny when I retired from the FBI and, you know, began sort of building out sort of entrepreneurial, you know, little companies that that did the things that I was interested in. One of the things that I was interested in because I had come from the FBI's leadership development program and this goes back to 2016, 2017 when I was at the FBI doing leadership development and building out programs for, you know, identifying leadership talent, getting those people into the promotion pipeline, dealing with you know how do we how do we actually identify talent without falling prey to either actual bias or or hidden bias, you know, dealing with our blind spots. I thought, you know, it was it was great building those programs out for the FBI. And then I thought, you know, let's let's go into the private sector and either, you know, build those back for other government agencies or, you know, build them out for, you know, take take what I learned at the bureau and the successes and the challenges and and bring it to the private world. One of the things that I ended up deciding pretty early was that I wasn't going to prioritize government as a client, because government was really unreliable.
Scott:Government was fairly deeply into DEI at the point. So I'm I am a 60 white male and it was You
Shawn:don't meet the profile.
Scott:Yeah. Well, it was and and it was it was remarkably specific. Mean, about about 80% of the of the contracts that I looked at across federal, state and local governments were things that I was specifically prohibited from applying for because I'm a white male, being over 60 doesn't get you anywhere. I'm not a veteran. I I spent twenty seven years in public service as a state prosecutor and FBI agent but that didn't give me any sort of, you know, veterans preference or disabled veterans preference.
Scott:And so, there was actually no way for me to compete, even if the service that I was providing was point by point a descriptor of what they needed. And it sort of clicks into the question today of all of those things regardless of whether any given person agrees or disagrees with them. It's, you know, folks are trying to do the right thing even if the result ends up being not the right thing for some people or for everybody. But I think government has unique challenges in how it does business and I'm curious as to your optic on what those challenges are as you interact with government, because in the counter proliferation world, there really aren't any private entities that are your customer base. Your customer base is government.
Shawn:Is government, yeah.
Scott:What the challenges from your
Shawn:So, it's a great question. And I take your point really well about all of the set aside programs for small business particular that I think are designed to give advantage. They say to small business, but then they, you know, take it kind of one step further from that. And then they have subcategories within small business, such as this sort of women owned, minority owned, veterans, disabled, all of those things. And I think a lot of those are, you know, very noble sort of like aspirational goals to ensure that there are pathways, to allow sort of like, you know, maybe communities that are either prior disenfranchised in some way or and I say prior because I believe that is prior.
Shawn:I don't believe that they currently are. I'm a, you know, a perfect example of that. You know, I managed to get my nonprofit up and running. Just a small caveat with nonprofits, 501c3s, is no ownership per se, like I don't own it, I founded it. I'm the senior executive, of course, sets the vision and, you know, the operational sort of strategy, but it's really governed by a board of directors.
Shawn:The board of directors then selects the CEO, and thankfully they agreed that it could be me. So as a sort of, for those of you out there who are trying to figure out what's the difference between foreign nonprofits that might be a good sort of data point for you. Wasn't as a nonprofit, I wasn't actually able, nor did I really want to, because I have too much stubborn pride, want to try to leverage any of those set of what they call set asides, which is they carve some niche space out for a quota of people to hit those. And so that's one thing government does because they have such a large contracting pool of entities that they try to work within the private sector to outsource and do a lot of business. And so rather than kind of focus on the DEIE piece of this, which I don't really care for too much because I don't really think it's as necessary as people think it is.
Shawn:And I'm a case in point of that being, know, I took my business from zero to almost $2,000,000 after four years without any of those set asides. So, you know, so let's just talk about, you know, for me, was more about knowing that there was a gap to fill that government was failing at filling and then being able to properly market that solution to that gap for the right government clients. That is a very specific niche avenue to get with the government and somebody like you who has a vastly more polished, I think, specific product for leadership particularly, which on the one hand I would say they desperately need it, but on the other hand I would say they don't recognize that they need it and so they're certainly not going to pay for it, know what I mean? Which is why you probably had the struggle you did, partially at least. But I think part of the thing that people don't really appreciate about government when there is all of this discourse, especially in today's news cycle where you're talking about, like, different, political models, right, moving away from capitalism into something that's a little more citizen friendly somehow, I guess they think it is.
Shawn:And understand all the cartoonish stereotypes of old capitalism, which is sort of the pre Teddy Roosevelt trust buster generation that came and recognized, okay, we have to, you know, there has to be some manipulation of the free market because if you don't, then some of these outcomes are not gonna be optimal for the average citizen. But government fundamentally is just not designed. It is its own beast. It is its own sort of within its own ecosystem in the marketplace. And I think one of the reasons why I think this current administration has the right instinct is because regardless of what you want to say their intentions ultimately are, know, as somebody who's lived and breathed inside that government ecosystem, I can tell you it's inefficient, it's bulky, it's bad at what it does a lot of the time, and there's reasons for that.
Shawn:And so the solution isn't to introduce more of that because the system's also not designed to wanna fix itself or to want to, you know, and it is designed to want to survive, right, at any cost because that is what systems do. And so, you know, the question then becomes, what does that, you know, how can I impart to people whatever little I know and what I've witnessed and seen about sort of government as a stakeholder in an economy, you know, and try to just shed light and say, hey, think what you will about this actor or this actor, this leader or this leader? But a socialist communist model to me is just like, it's not even scary. It's just, it's like, I literally start laughing because I'm like, Good luck. Good luck with that.
Shawn:They can't even make it work in a moderately structured capitalist framework, let alone if you imbue them with all the money and all the sort of centralized power to control you know, sort of the means of production and stuff. You know, can't even control what little they control they have over what they have now. And the reason being is that it's almost too egalitarian, too flat, too redundant. Then it gets turf wars, you get turf wars where people get territorial about what they control and what they own. And so all you'd be doing is basically introducing the worst of capitalist instincts into now the government sector because they're gonna have all the access to the resources and the means of production, and then they're gonna fight about it.
Shawn:And if you think they're not, you're just naive. You're just because they already do. You know what I mean?
Scott:Oh,
Shawn:yeah. And so they're slow, they're not self reflective. And again, you could probably say a lot of this is true for the private sector as well, but there are natural checks and balances embedded in the private sector and the capitalist sort of market, like sort of framework that helps to self regulate a lot of that in many ways, right? And we can talk more about that. But, you know, where in the government, there's just no incentive.
Shawn:There's no incentive because everybody ultimately wants the same thing, is control. And they have no incentive to cooperate on making anything better, even if they know that it's like, oh, well, it's this agency kind of creeping in on this agency's mission, we're really not gonna like address it because as long as I get to keep my share, right? Keep spending the money to keep getting the money, that's the model. Well, that's a self licking ice cream cone defined. You take the focus away from what's the objectively valid need for why you have these resources and what you're doing with it.
Shawn:So not only are you outsourcing management of your home and life budgets to this entity that you think somehow is going to work in your best interest, but you're also outsourcing basically what essentially is the moral compact amongst societal citizens to take care of one another in small clusters of community to this big large entity because you're like, well, you can't rely on people to actually do this and take care of each other. So we're gonna just, well, but who do you think makes up the government? People. Just, well, no, it's the same people. It's the literal same people.
Shawn:They live in your community, just like anybody. So like, if you can't trust them to do it at a community level, why on earth are you gonna entrust it? Again, noble aspirations, I think it comes from a place of well intent and good intent, but having seen how government doesn't function and can't, like we need to be shrinking and streamlining and redefining parameters for what they can and should be doing. And part of that should be to set good strong parameters for how the rest of us all interact and live and play together so that we don't fall victim to just a full private sector. All the billionaires are oligarchs and now control everything that we all do and we're all surfs again.
Shawn:So yes, there is that tension and you do need But that is exactly why you need to narrow Congress down. You need to narrow down or not narrow Congress down per se, but like narrow down the government as sort of the doer of all things and focus on making good legislation. Focus on making good legislation that then prevents the capitalist market from doing all these corrupt things that it would be want to do if those checks, balances, and levers fall or fail. But off my soapbox rant over to you, I'll not speak again on this because I've already said too much.
Scott:Oh, no. I'm going to poke at you and ask you what you think about a couple of things because this is, I mean, it's it's what we do here, right?
Shawn:Yeah. We're, this is the wind taking us in a gust. So, here we go.
Scott:We got we got gusts of wind and it's, you know, and and again, it's it's the metaphor for what we do which is which is very real, which is understanding that we we live in a world that that isn't stable and isn't grounded. You know, we we are in a world that that shifts that you know, is is subject to gusts of wind. And it's calm when you want wind and there's wind when you want calm. And I think that's part of the the challenge that, you know, folks who think, well, we should just have government do it. Don't understand is that there's that stability that comes with it.
Scott:But at the cost of that apparent stability really is you no longer get to to choose what you do and how you do it. And that's that's a huge problem. It's interesting if you talk to folks who are not wealthy, who are not politicians, but who have come from countries that that run non capitalist non democratic republic, like The United States is a democratic republic, or a constitutional republic, that, you know, even countries that call themselves democracies that aren't, you know, like the like North Korea calls itself a Democratic Republican, it's and it's not. The people that come from places like this will just laugh at the news because they know because they've heard people saying the same stuff, and they know it doesn't work. I think that the question becomes, okay, why doesn't it work?
Scott:Why don't we have sort of better legislation that will fix all this stuff? And for me I think it's two things that are sort of the strategic derailers if you will and I think the I can't tell what order to put them in so I'm gonna put them in random order. First thing that I see when government does something is that bad ideas don't have a way to fail in government. If you say we're gonna solve fill in the blank crisis, know, we're gonna solve the housing shortage and then a government does something and it doesn't work, that idea fail it doesn't choke and die by itself it will continue because the person who had that idea is going to continue to want to put funds into it and you see it with ethanol Ethanol is an abject fail, and yet the representatives who have in the areas they represent, farmers who are relying on selling corn for ethanol, it's a bad idea. It doesn't work.
Scott:It blows up engines if you put too much in. But we keep pouring money into this because we started pouring money into it. And there's there's no way for that idea to dive its own accord in the private sector. If you start a business and you don't have customers, your your business goes bankrupt. So in the private sector, when you have individual entrepreneurs or individual people that are running businesses, if the business is a bad idea or the business doesn't have customers, it dies on its own and so I think that's one of the things that distinguishes a government economic idea from a non government economic idea is that the government economic ideas don't have a way to die if they're bad ideas.
Scott:The other problem that I have is sovereign immunity and it's amazing to me how many people who are intelligent and well educated don't even know that sovereign immunity exists. And it's this concept that you can't sue the state unless the state allows you to and people don't realize that.
Shawn:That's a fun loophole.
Scott:What's that?
Shawn:I said that's a fun loophole.
Scott:Yeah, yeah, it's amazing and I think you see this probably most actively but still with a huge blind spot for a lot of people with government run healthcare. If you go to any of the systems around the world where healthcare is run by government and a patient doesn't get the care they need in a timely fashion and they are harmed, that patient cannot sue the government and get compensation. That lawsuit is just not continenced by the courts because there's no legal authority for it. If you go into a private hospital, you have non government health insurance and you have some malady and you go in and you are misdiagnosed and you're harmed or your family is harmed as a result of your early untimely passing, you can sue, can get compensation, you can modify that behavior, but the issue with government run anything is that there's no remedy. My favorite current example is the Boeing seven sixty seven MAX issue where there was an issue with the software and with the training protocols for pilots in that software and there were two plane crashes of a Boeing aircraft.
Scott:All of that work was done by Boeing and all of it was approved by the U. S. Government. And now I'm spacing on what the organization is and all my friends are going to criticize me because this is a simple thing that you should know Olson and I don't know it, but the bottom line is over the lives that were lost for the crashes of those two aircrafts Boeing was sued and the government wasn't even though they both had a hand in creating the problem and saying everything was okay and people don't see that, they don't get that, that you had two bad actors, a big company and government and government got off scot free,
Shawn:they
Scott:could do it again. Yeah, I mean you have the power authority in California approving what the power company did and then a year later when it sparks a wildfire issuing a penalty for the company that did what the managing authority said they could do. And it's that that is a fundamental problem with government is that there's no there's no accountability. So you can have a bad idea, it doesn't die. And there's no accountability for the bad idea.
Scott:So even if there's a good idea, that just gets added to the bad idea. Yeah. But bad ideas don't die. So yeah.
Shawn:So were you just to ask you, were you talking about the FAA? Yeah, FAA. Yeah.
Scott:Thank you for that.
Shawn:Sure, sure. No, just yeah, because we know these things. We know things guys. We do. We like, you know, But everybody has a brain meltdown at least 10 times a day in this world.
Shawn:So you said a lot of important things there that sort of were reinforcing illustrative points to what my broad points were, which is that the checks and balances that exist in the private sector, which you gave a great example of the malpractice lawsuit, you have that option in right and can pursue that as a course of action in the event of wrongful anything. But again, if the government is the one making the rule book, where is the incentive for them to allow themselves to be held accountable? So the check-in balance, that's a great example clearly of where the check-in balance is not the same. So while we may live in an imperfect private sector, like capitalist sort of environment, it's still more choice, more control, more recourse to take some sort of action against something that harms the citizenry. The other thing that I think that you illustrated really well in those examples is that ultimately, I think the government doesn't really have a lot of embedded incentives to actually, one, create those rules, those checks and balances for themselves.
Shawn:The other sort of example that, or not example, here's what I'll say to this, is the other point I wanted to make is you don't promote somebody who's been failing at the job they're currently given, okay? So if the United States Congress for the last however many years of their existence, hundreds of years or whatever now at this point, two fifty to be exact, guess. I don't know, I assume the Congress, yeah.
Scott:It's been around.
Shawn:I cannot tell you, and this is just a small example I'll give you is, you know, how many times I a day, I see practical things that are plaguing the American people, the American constituency that they have within their control to address except for, you know, they're either too busy playing partisan football politics or they just are too busy fighting for dumb dumb stuff that like doesn't that that only, you know, impacts the the like 1% as opposed to like the majority of, the moderate majority, right? And this example I'm gonna give is this. So the other day I got a credit card offer because as you want to do, Like all of us get them. And it was from Wells Fargo. I'm gonna call Wells Fargo out on this because I think it's garbage.
Shawn:It was from Wells Fargo. I used to bank with them years ago. I never had a bad experience with Wells Fargo to be fair. But I opened this credit card letter and it's talking about offering a 0% transfer all your balances for the next twelve months. Okay, do you know that the rate that they were then gonna default to was almost 30?
Scott:Yeah.
Shawn:That is criminal. That is criminal. And that is a clear example of government having the means to control the private market, the private sector, and choosing not to. Again, you don't reward the entity that's not doing a good job of exercising their power with the power they have by giving them more power. So to me, and this isn't just a new thing.
Shawn:I mean, I used to years ago, so I'm gonna tell you guys a fun story. So like one year I was really hard up for cash and I had like a month, two months that I could be in California or in my hometown of Fresno before I went to study abroad for the year. And like, go ahead and try telling somebody you only need employment for two months, nobody's gonna hire you. So what I did was I tried to do the least offensive thing. I went and got a job at a fast food joint and then I got another job at some shifty old check cashing place, which was horrible.
Shawn:So the check cashing, because then I was just gonna not give notice and just bounce. Collect my check and get out. And I know that's not ethical and it's horrible, but you do what you gotta do to survive. So I did that because I needed the cash for those two months. And one of the things that opened my eyes to was like, again, the predatory nature of the check cashing industry, right?
Shawn:But now it's become, it used to be that it was just relegated to the, in the shadows, these shifty little stores that are in bad neighborhoods and terrible beat up like strip malls. But now it's like Wells Fargo is institutionalizing this and it's the gold standard for how you get credit. And now nobody can get credit. Like my credit is amazing. My credit is amazing.
Shawn:Why are you trying to charge me 30% interest Wells Fargo, if I have a like almost 800 credit score? That's absurd. Like, so you can see my point. My frustration. It's just it's ridiculous.
Shawn:There's so many practical things they could be litigating and legislating to create the framework for a sustainable capitalist experience, and they just don't.
Scott:Yeah. See, and I I I'm gonna depart from you there.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:Because, you know, for me, I I have kind of the same, outrage. Yeah. When when I see something like that and I I get those things too, not only from Wells Fargo, but from a number of different banks. It's always, you know, here's the 0% is big.
Shawn:Yeah,
Scott:of The small print is for the first year. Yeah. And then, you know, when you read the disclosures, it's this huge thing. I don't know that I've seen 30% or north of that. I'm presuming that that 30% is the current, you know, government mandated ceiling.
Scott:But, you know, for me, I think you're still in control because regardless
Shawn:of how
Scott:annoyed you are, know, the answer is no. Yeah. And and you know, to me this goes right to this question of affordability. It's like, oh, wow, you know, this isn't affordable and that isn't affordable. So the government needs to come in and control prices and separate and apart from an examination of microeconomics and what happens when an outside entity artificially controls prices separate and apart from that.
Scott:You know if Wells Fargo or any other company you know issues a credit card offer like that and nobody takes it,
Shawn:yeah
Scott:then they're gonna change their offering and that's sort of my point of if you're out there and you're offering a product and nobody takes it, your choice is to modify your offering or you're going to fail. Now I know the argument that's coming, right?
Shawn:You know,
Scott:people don't read the fine print, You know, people, not everybody has great credit. You know, some people the only place they can go is to one of these little stores and get a payday loan that you know has this you know huge vig attached to it. Know people that don't know how to manage money they'll you know borrow from the guy on the corner and now all of a sudden you know some huge dude with a baseball bat is coming and saying you know $200 a week every Friday.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:You know, is is what keeps you even. And I I think it it does at some point become a bit of a moral question. You know, what what do we do as a society to help people who are essentially engaging in self inflicted wounds? Why would you take a credit card if you don't read the fine print? Yeah.
Scott:Why would you sign an agreement if you don't understand what it is and I I get it. I mean, I'm a lawyer.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:For god's sake. And I I remember being in my contracts class decades ago and my contracts professor said I never read the contract for when I buy a car, I just never read it and there's this thing called a contract of adhesion, which is this take it or leave it contract. It's it's a contract that's basically non negotiable and so if you want the car you got to sell the thing or you got to got to sign the thing. Since he knows it's not negotiable, you know, he knows what it's going to cost him every month. He is agreeing to that.
Scott:He just signs it because the rest of it really doesn't apply because he knows he's going to pay. But I think the point of this is that it it immediately gets messy because the person lending the money wants to get paid back and not everybody pays you back. The people borrowing the money want the stuff, they want the money and most people pay back. Most people who don't pay back actually have the intent to pay back, but they they get into trouble. And so, you know, what do we do?
Scott:How do we how do we create a system that's fair, that doesn't go back down to this notion of, well, the only way you can buy a house is if you put, you know, 20 or 25 or 30% cash down, and then you can get a mortgage for the rest of it. You know, the reason that we had the housing bubble and those issues in 2008 is because, you know, it's not fair only for people who happen to have, you know, 50 or 60 or $120,000 on hand in cash that they can spend on a house to have houses. We want everybody to have that ability, but then what happens to the companies that are providing that service, are providing that money, that are actually taking the economic loss for the small people that don't pay. There's another government service and this goes back to health care, right? The whole point of Obamacare is you get everybody in the insurance pool, everybody puts in and only the people that have health issues get a take out, which is, you know, it's the old phrase from each according to his means to each according to his needs.
Scott:In the original quote, which is you know Karl Marx, which sounds great until you're the person who is working and producing and you see somebody you know who maybe is injured, maybe is suffering from self inflicted wounds, who's consuming and now all of a sudden societally we have a challenge and so it's very easy to look at the people that are in pain and going we got to do something about this.
Shawn:Sure, yeah.
Scott:But you know part of this and it even goes back to education, you know, where in the course of secondary and post secondary education are you taught? Are people in The United States taught read the contract before you sign it?
Shawn:Sure. Yeah.
Scott:Well, didn't really even get that from my parents.
Shawn:I Oh, went God to
Scott:law school, but I didn't learn that in college.
Shawn:No, nobody ever talks about this stuff and so just to circle back to the point, I think my point, even if people you can agree or disagree with, like, whether or not, like, we should as a society, litigate or negotiate or legislate that type of a transaction, That isn't fundamentally, that wasn't my My point was that as citizens of society, we have the control to vote for the people, to tell them to do the things that we want them to do. So if the majority of citizens decide, yeah, I would really like interest rate on credit card to be a more controlled thing, even if it's not perfectly controlled, they have the wherewithal to lobby their Congress people to actually try to make legislation to make that change. If we don't, then that's fine. As a society, you've taken that as like your stance on that particular issue. I guess what my point, and that just happened to be the first thing I thought of because I thought that would be a clear area where they could potentially, some citizens might take issue with that and they could do it.
Shawn:I personally probably would if I had time on my day, I don't, but that's the problem is most of us don't have time in our day to really do the boring unsexy work of lobbying our local legislators or Congress people to say, oh, I really want you to take action on this. Meaningful thing that might actually in my day to day life have a much bigger impact than some of this other stuff that's going on that they are fussing about and sort of using as a political shiny football in Congress right now. So what I'm saying is the framework is there for us to have more control over the things that people are bitching about, but they don't actually exercise their levers of power to do it. And so now their solution is to just abdicate full responsibility over to the government to just do it for You know what I mean? And I guess that was what my big point was.
Shawn:It's like, you have the tools to manage this. You're complaining about this hyper capitalist society, and you say that you're powerless, right? Because of special interests and all the money that goes into politics and all the money they go, but there's just such a hypocrisy there from people. Like they don't do the boring, lazy work. They'd rather like spend all day protesting on Facebook than actually doing the hard work of like trying to like organize at the local level to make small incremental change that eventually then could become bigger change.
Shawn:Because everybody who engages in work that is designed to impact change, you know that that's how you have to do it. It is brick by painful brick. And then eventually over time, you know, as you convince people and you show them and you offer different ideas for how to address a problem differently or better, you usually can make some progress. But, like, you know, it just becomes so easy to be lazy and just scream and then and then expect the people in government to fix it all. When there's zero incentive for them to do so, even though there's tons of average day citizen problems that could be being addressed that make it a more capitalist, like, you know, citizen friendly capitalist, like, sort of model.
Shawn:It doesn't have to be pure capitalism unbridled, right, is all I'm saying. And I think we're not taking advantage of our citizen tools to do that. We're giving up on the model.
Scott:Right. I understand that point.
Shawn:What
Scott:I don't hear in everything you're saying is what about instead of going to this third party that's government, do all that organizing and know put in place a rule which is essentially force. It's you know telling this actor whether it's an individual or a company you can no longer do this. If you do do this, we're going to do things to you that you don't like, like fine you take a bunch of your money or put you in jail. You know what about I you get the thing from Wells Fargo, you know that the the descriptor of the credit card is great, but the interest rate sucks and go to Wells Fargo and say, yeah, I really like your card and I really like your offer, but I want to pay 12% instead of 30%. Sure.
Scott:And I think the reason people don't have those conversations is because they think well I'm just a little person and I'm going to go to this big company and the big company is just going to say no little person screw you and it's equally hard you know to be an individual and go to a company and say you know I don't like your price I want to buy the product, but I'm going to wait for the sale or I want a different interest rate. What's funny though, I mean, I've bought and sold a couple of houses and I remember each time I was buying a house, would and it's a huge hassle but I would shop around for interest rates and for terms and for deals and it's just it was amazing to me how varied the different terms were. Now, what it requires is what it required me to do was actually learn the transaction, you know, learn what it means, you know, learn what an annual percentage rate is and how it impacts, you know, what check I'm writing every month. And it required a lot of work to marshal all of the things in that transaction so that I could decide, you know, do I want to buy this house with this bank or that house with that bank?
Scott:And then, you know, bring my spouse into that, bringing the kids into that. It takes a lot of work, but I think the problem with there should be a law is we think it's easier. And it's easier because we're saying, you know, these people we elected should solve this problem. And the problem is that the people we elected who, like you just said, are not just like you and me, they are you and me. They are people in our communities that get elected to do these jobs.
Scott:They haven't done a deep dive into how to buy a house. They haven't done a deep dive into how you're going to pay if your grandma has a stroke or if your dad has a heart attack. They haven't done this work either and so they come up with these ideas that we see in socialism which is well this price is too high so we should cap it. And the implication is that'll solve the problem and it doesn't solve the problem. It's just like saying well I saw somebody trip and fall down and they bang their head, so we're going to lighten up gravity.
Scott:And if we can just lighten up gravity, then fewer people will bang their heads when they trip and fall.
Shawn:Yeah,
Scott:great. But it's not doing anything and that's why I circle back around to this idea of affordability. You know, see it with houses, but we don't see it with cars, you know, Lamborghinis and Koenigseggs and Ferraris are those affordable? Those are affordable to people who have money. Is an apartment in Manhattan affordable?
Scott:It's affordable to a person who has the money and the problem is when you have a person or a group of people who don't have the money to purchase something and are angry about that and instead of focusing on how do I go and earn the money so that I can buy this thing that I like, they're just focused on you know how can I force the price down so that without doing any extra work I can get it? And you know it's easy to hate people who are wealthy. Hey, I'm not wealthy. Easy for me to feel left out and feel sad and sorry for myself, because I don't have this and I don't have that. But I think we have to consider what's the answer.
Scott:And is the answer dealing with our own problems? That's much harder than just railing against the machine, getting a piece of cardboard, putting some words on a sign and standing up by an intersection and seeing if you can get cars to honk and support.
Shawn:I think there can be a balance of
Scott:Is relationship still on? Are we still
Shawn:No. No. It is. I think there can be a I think it's just that there can be a balance of both of those things. Right?
Shawn:Like, because again, we we live the original civilization came about because it was a society. People wanted a society that they could kind of coexist together bound by some social constructs that they agreed upon. And I think that there's still a place for legislation of things maybe, and again, like you reduce the size of government, you reduce the sort of focus on what they should and shouldn't be legislating. But I think your point is well taken about what I think, how I interpreted much of what you were saying is that people have a lot more potential to solution for themselves than what they give themselves credit for or what they will acknowledge, right? So it's That's a good one.
Shawn:Yeah, right? Like, and I think that's the sort of positive, you know, 2P spin is that like challenge yourself to think about these things a little bit. Like it's what are the responses that you as individual humans in a society can do? Because again, the legislators are only as powerful as you allow them to be, and they will only focus on what you allow them to focus on. And if they're not focusing on the things that you prioritize within your collective grouping, which is by district or by congressional, mostly congressional district, guess, then get to know your neighbors, do a thing, like set some rules for yourselves.
Shawn:You can come to an agreement among your own community about different ways to problem solve. And if you don't like check cashing places in your neighborhood because you think it's predatory, then start something that people can go to alternatively. You know what I mean? Like give people like some kind of an option, you know, to kind of have a different solution than the only one being present. But I think in the end, regardless of, you know, if you can take topic by topic, issue by issue, it's really distilling down to the same thing, which is that you cannot over lean on your government to do the hard work of interacting.
Shawn:You know what I mean? Yeah. You just can't.
Scott:And that's, I love that, that bears repeating you can't rely on your government to do the hard work of interacting. That's really what it is. It's hard when you're speaking with somebody or in contact with somebody with whom you disagree on something that is important. It's easy to force. And I think that's one of the signals.
Scott:That's one of the flags is anytime any system uses force there's a better way because the only way that you can force is if you depersonalize and that's challenge with a lot of these non constitutional republic systems is we're going to keep you safe because here are all the rules and we're going to make sure that nobody's better off than anybody else because here are all the rules and all of a sudden you have to live according to these rules. If you don't live according to these rules, what does the authority do?
Shawn:Bring it kind of full circle, it's like I can't even get my two government partners to do the hard work of interacting in a two day exchange. You know what I mean? How are, you know, like, let's just bring it to, you know, on the macro spectrum, like, you know, because again, there's always something taking their time and their attention away from it. And I leave people with nothing else, again, knowing the environment that we're kind of sort of the moment that we're sitting in, because there is a lot going on in the world and we haven't even scratched surface on some of the current events, but maybe for a future episode. But I would just say that right now as average citizen, as your average humble citizen sitting here in Alexandria, Virginia, what I see are two parties at war.
Shawn:And one of them you know, one accuses so this is what it is, is on the left, you've got everybody screaming dictatorship, right? And it's dictatorship by decree. It's like, well, one person is a big personality coming in and they're just decreeing all this and that's why it's a dictatorship. But the only thing that they're offering is a solution, even if you agreed with that to be true, is that you're offering dictatorship by design. That's it.
Shawn:It's either dictatorship by decree or dictatorship by design. These are the choices the American people have been given. You buy into the current narrative of party's platform, this party's platform and how they're sort of positioning themselves to govern. Now, I think that those are hyperbolic statements. I don't necessarily agree with that on concepts, but at the sort of like political cartoon level, you know what I mean?
Shawn:If you were to characterize the two fringe elements of the parties that are fighting each other, that's kind of what their argument is. And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, okay, if this is what sort of the loudest elements of your parties are like lobbying, those are the grenades that they're lobbying at each other, why on earth would any of you want government to be bigger? Like, it doesn't make any sense. And not to say that the Republicans do, I don't think that their intention is to make it bigger, but they are certainly wielding it in a pretty forceful big way these days that I think probably does need to take a hard look at how we're executing some of what we're doing out in the world, I guess. Again, the alternative is just so unappealing.
Shawn:You're never gonna convince me of dictatorship by design. I think that it's just So I guess maybe here's the big finish. Where's the solution? We need solutions. I don't see, certainly not coming from the left right now, what's the alternative?
Shawn:Because if what you're putting forward is the alternative and the solution is to turn us into a socialist communist sort of model, you've already lost the war. You know what I mean? You've already lost the war. You may make small gains in small areas, but ultimately, I don't think there's enough Americans in this country that would ever get behind that. I just we're too American.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:And and, you know, and and I think that it it the the payout, the the path is a path that we're really already on, which is in my view at least when you look at constitution itself, you read that document, not the amendments, not the first 10 amendments, not any of the amendments, but when you read the document itself, to my mind, it becomes pretty clear that it is as its purpose. It is a structure for how we decide stuff and it is it recognizes that when when people are disagreeing about things that are important, it becomes very messy and what the constitution rejects is the notion of the majority shall rule because when the majority rules and I am not, I haven't read much of the federal federalist. I have a brother who's read most of the federalist and I remember hearing this from him. You know, it's the tyranny of the majority or the tyranny of the minority, which is what you see in parliamentary systems in Western Europe and parts of the world where whoever has the majority in parliament as a consequence of the general election can pretty much pass whatever they want and so you have these swings back and forth and I think that you'll find somewhere in the Federalist an analysis and a statement that those pendulum swings back and forth are more destabilizing than having a very difficult process to gain super majorities because super majorities require something that is currently not in our current public discourse and culture which is compromise, which is you know giving a little bit of you know what the other person wants to get a little bit of what you want that now in our current discourse is you know, is morally bad.
Scott:And I think that it's difficult, but it's actually morally good. And so I think the reason it's messy now is because our constitutional system allows it to be messy. And we just have to remember that you know messy gets you fair and fair means that nobody is completely happy because if somebody is completely happy somebody else is completely miserable and that certainly includes these you know force types of governments where we say you know we're going to be we're going to keep you safe because what does that mean? Go where we tell you to go. Here's the curfew.
Scott:You can only eat this. Here's when you sleep and there's there's not much difference from that level of control in society to the level of control that you see inside correctional institutions, the way prisoners are managed. There's just there's not it. It actually as as we talk, I get these funny little memories and actually reminds me of a interview I saw of Norman Schwarzkopf and maybe a lot of folks these days wouldn't know or wouldn't remember who Norman Schwarzkopf was. He was the four star commanding general of Gulf War one, which was, you know, the the the run to Baghdad and and it was seen at the time in the Western world as you know this this great military victory.
Scott:And so they were interviewing the great military Victor Norman Schwarzkopf and they asked him what it was like, you know, to be on the field of battle and you know to have everybody do what he says. He said, yeah, it's it's an amazing thing, you know, to be on that field of battle and to say, go do this and to see, you know, hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment go and do that thing. He goes, and then I go home and I can't get my teenage daughters to brush their teeth and that's the difference. That's the difference between you know freedom and compelled and you can't force somebody to brush their teeth, even though you know it's good for them because they're a teenager and they don't want to.
Shawn:Yeah, that's right. That's right. No, I know. I think that's that's such a a great quip, you know, because we all have that experience. All work for somebody ultimately, even if it's our teenage daughters, know what I mean?
Shawn:Like it's, yeah. So
Scott:it's really, I mean, I think the key is what's kind of becoming a bit of a byline for us here at 2PP, which is, you know, remove ridicule, you know, ridicule never helps and it's cheap and it's easy.
Shawn:That's right.
Scott:But it never helps. And then, you know, the second sort of paradigm, I don't want to call it a rule, but maybe it is a rule, maybe I'm, you know, establishing rules when I hate rules. Know, but the other is, you know, be thoughtful and be open to, you know, being convinced to change in your mind. Be thoughtful about what you think, how you feel and how you think things should go.
Shawn:Absolutely. That's it.
Scott:So are we up? I'm losing track of time.
Shawn:Think we are. It's about at that hour. So it was great chatting. Great doing again. My latest obsession, which it's entirely your fault for introducing it to me, is that concept of doing the hard work of interacting.
Shawn:It's okay to disagree. You've got to talk it through. Because I think one of the beautiful things about when trust somebody and you're able to share openly with how you feel about certain things, that allows you to actually go deeper into conversations and you may reveal, oh, that was not really the intent or here's where that is coming from and this is actually what was intended. And I think most often you'll find that most people are probably not too far off from each other about certain things, with minor tweaks and adjustments and it's just getting, you know, but we have to be willing to go and do the hard work. You know, we have to be able to do the hard work of of kind of peeling off the layers and and getting down to the heart of of what we're we're thinking and feeling because it's almost always coming from a place of legitimacy, legitimate lived experience, legitimate sort of struggle or success.
Shawn:And those are all very valid experiences that form our worldviews and our life perspectives. And I don't know. Maybe they help someone somewhere. So guys yeah. Get out there and do the hard work of interacting.
Shawn:Make it painful. Yay. Yay.
Scott:Alright. Well, have a great week, and I'll talk to you soon.
Shawn:Sounds great, Scott. See you next time. Bye.