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The Two Parachutes Podcast is a collaboration, well, more like a conversation, between a CEO and an FBI Agent. Shawn Baker-Garcia and Scott Olson first met when they were working at US Embassy Baghdad; Scott for the FBI and Shawn for the US State Department. Over the years they’ve worked together, given advice and assistance to each other, and now see that the synergy which comes from open, civil, and thoughtful discussion is very much needed in the modern discourse. Join them as they dive into everything interesting to humanity. The goal of 2PP is to recreate the experience most people have had when they stumble into an insightful conversation with a new acquaintance at a conference or a dinner party. The kind of conversation that makes the rest of the room stop talking and listen. The kind of conversation that gets your mind working as new thoughts tumble out. Let the 2 Parachutes Podcast drop into your world!
Hey, Scott.
Scott:How are you?
Shawn:I'm doing great. Hey, everyone out there in podcast land.
Scott:Hey. We're another episode of
Shawn:the 2 Parachutes Podcast with Scott and Sean. As many of you already know, what we do here at the 2 Parachutes Podcast is pretty similar to jumping out of a perfectly good airplane and seeing where the air currents take us as we ride the parachute to the ground. And we do this, because we think there's value in jumping into today's dynamic environment of opinions and seeing where the conversation could go. So we're ready to jump. You ready to jump?
Scott:I'm ready.
Shawn:I'm ready to jump, so strap on your gear and jump with us. Let's see where we land. What is on your mind today? If any Oh.
Scott:I have barely had five seconds to have a thought today. I have been in respond, respond, respond mode. So, that's a terrific question. I know that, I don't know, we've got a lot of things on our plate right now at the organization. Talk about shifting currents and winds.
Scott:We just have to respond almost on a weekly basis to the different sort of realities unfolding for our federal clients. And I can only imagine what that is like, you know, for them being right there in the belly of the beast as it all unfolds. But yeah, other than that, not too much going on. We're, you know, just kicking off the fall season here at the Hillside Chalet, as we like to call our homestead, and, just enjoying the change of weather and, looking forward to a fun discussion with you today, Scott. I don't know.
Scott:What's shaking in your world?
Shawn:All that's wonderful and I feel just a little bit bad to yank you in the direction that I am because as I've been drinking my coffee here this morning, I'm feeling kind of existential in an interesting way. It just from reading news and seeing all the things that are going on these days. And as you know, I like to pull threads from things that are, unrelated and see if I can weave them together into one thing. The question that I wanted to run by you is kind of a little bit of a challenge is What do we do? What do we do and what should we do when we think another person is dangerous?
Shawn:And it's not just the active shooter, but know what do we do? A lot of the roots of this for me are coming from Charlie Kirk being murdered and assassinated because one of the things that the guy wrote or said was that he thought Charlie Kirk was dangerous and he had to be stopped. And so what do you do when you think somebody's dangerous? I mean, what do you do if you think Bernie Sanders and socialism is dangerous? That it's a dangerous idea and people are beginning to think it's a good idea and what do we do?
Shawn:What do you do if you think Donald Trump is dangerous? And there are a number of examples of what people and governments have done. And I know that I'm stirring the pot pretty deeply with this, but I think it's kind of what we do. I mean, I am clearly in the camp of, you know, Charlie Kirk was was murdered, and that's wrong. But then I'm thinking, okay.
Shawn:President Obama assassinated, Osama Bin Laden. I don't have a problem with that. President Trump assassinated, Qasem Soleimani, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, the leader of Quds Force. And I I I don't have a problem with that. And so is this, is this subjective right and wrong, what I think are good ideas and what I think are dangerous ideas?
Shawn:Or is there a more universal ethic that we as all people, not just across the political spectrum in The United States, but people around the world. Is there something here that is sort of a more universal approach to this that makes better sense and makes us better. That's kind of what I'm kicking around today. It has absolutely nothing with being a sick yo, so
Scott:you're welcome. Oddly enough,
Shawn:you're on the plane and you're on the parachute.
Scott:Yeah. No. It's it's okay, though, because, you know, my I'm CEO of an organization who, you know, the our mission is to, in many ways, improve global security and national security. And as someone with a master's in security policy studies, I went through a lot of courses as university student, you know, talking about the ethics of war and, you know, talking about things like life and death through the context of international theory and frameworks. And then of course, there's the individual who, as a person, you have your own beliefs.
Scott:You know, I'm as a firm Catholic, you know, I find other than immediate harm, you know, for myself, I'm not super in the camp of like, it's okay to take another life. That's just because I believe that that's for God to decide and the judgment of those people will be their ultimate sort of resolution, whether that's forgiveness or condemnation for eternity. But here's what I do know is, I think that that question on a grand scale is difficult to answer because there are so many different layers to impact as you sort of like descale or descope down from the macro perspective, you know, in the absence of giving an opinion one way or the other on things like the assassinations of the two public figures that you were just talking about. For me, what it comes down to is more of a what happens to the individual person. And I'm gonna take you through this little side quest story because it will matter and you'll see why.
Scott:So when I was early in my career, we were working in an office, in a nonprofit in this Northern Virginia area, and there was a person who was hired, and this person was palpably off. Like, it's the kind of thing where you walk past this person and your hackles just go up, and it is so difficult to defend or explain compellingly why that was happening. And I think that a lot of us, particularly the females in the office, were just really unsettled by then, this person was male. It turned out that there was a meeting in which he had been doodling, and then after the meeting, he came to my and my colleague and I, it was a young woman about ten years, my junior young woman who we shared in office and he had stopped in to say something about something. Then he left.
Scott:Well, when he left, he had left a stack. Well, I don't know if it was a stack of papers or if it was just one or two sheets, but he left his something. And so the young woman who I shared the office with, it was on her desk and she picked it up. And all I remember is her saying, Sean, I need you to look at this. And so I kind of pivot, right, because we were back to back.
Scott:And so I kind of pivot and I look and she handed it to me. And what I saw was something that it would have been like in a movie about a serial killer. Right? Because his entire eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper was covered with nary a speck uncovered of of just the most wild doodles, the most wild rhythmic, like he was writing in spirals and it was all just scribbles in writing. And what he was writing was wildly violent.
Scott:It was things like, you know, wanting to, I mean, I won't get as graphic as what he wrote, you know, on this open forum because it was really horrifying and it was about- But
Shawn:you remember it.
Scott:Oh, crystal clear, you'll know, you don't forget something like that because it was about the physical, how he was going to physically assault one of the women in the office. Oh, okay.
Shawn:So it was very specific.
Scott:It was very specific. It was very detailed, very specific, but it was like in a conch shell pattern. He had written it, handwritten it in a spiral and we had been watching him scribble on that paper in the meeting. So he was actively doing this during a team meeting. Wow.
Scott:Okay. So fast forward, we take it to HR. HR is paralyzed. They're paralyzed, Scott. And I'm like, Why are you paralyzed over this?
Scott:This seems like a very open and shut situation where it's like he has named somebody, he has basically given you a blueprint for what he intends to do to this person and your hand wringing over lawsuits or whatever it was that they were fussing about. Right. So I'm going to fast forward again. I think they put him on leave. I don't exactly know the circumstances surrounding what his punishment was or anything like that other than like it was, I think they let him resign, you know what I mean?
Scott:Or something. But there was a lot of discussion during that whole kind of deliberation process about, well, shouldn't like, you know, are they were saying? It was just like, we really have to like not stigmatize people with mental health issues. I'm like, he threatened to hurt her, possibly murder her. And you are worried about him being on the receiving end of some kind of like shaming?
Scott:Are you kidding me right now? Like, and you look, I grew up in a household, like when I was a young teenager, my uncle, I lived with him for many years and he was an HR professional. So he was the one who, when I got fired by my first fast food job for no cause or reason, he marched me back in there. He's like, You go in there and ask for your vacation. And I'm like, I don't want to fight with these people.
Scott:And he's like, Do it. So I had pretty a good insight as to what the job of the human resources department was and how these sorts of personnel issues get sorted and dealt with. So I was just stunned. I was like, You guys are just, you're risking a lot by just letting this happen. Letting him off so easily and without any kind of judgment.
Scott:So fast forward, Scott, your mind's about to be blown.
Shawn:What year was that?
Scott:This would have been 2000, well, when were we in Baghdad? It would have been been like were
Shawn:Baghdad in 'thirteen.
Scott:It would have been two years prior.
Shawn:Like 2010, 'eleven. And
Scott:that matters. And the reason it matters is because fast forward to me being in Baghdad, okay, 2013, 'fourteen, I'm across the street from the embassy compound. They had that like shopping center area somewhere. Couldn't Yeah, the Corniche. Yeah, well, no, but off campus.
Shawn:Oh, it was across the road.
Scott:It was across the road. There was like a little souk and like you could go and it Yeah. Was all very Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Scott:Yeah. And so the RSO would obviously accompany, for those who don't know, that's the regional security office, you would not be unaccompanied, so you would have people with you. But it was pretty chill. They would take you over, you would get some shawarma and you could come back. I was in line and we weren't the only people in that area because it was all the other embassies that had representation in Iraq and the United Nations compound, etcetera.
Scott:I'm standing getting my little shawarma and the hair on my neck stands and I hear this voice behind me and he's like, Well, hello there, Sean. Oh my God. I around like almost, I don't even want to tell you what I almost did. And I turned around and there I am face to face with this guy. Okay.
Shawn:Holy shit.
Scott:He was now working for the UN. Okay? And I was like, that is a nightmare waiting to happen. Fast forward one more time and we'll get to the end of this journey. Not two, maybe three years later, my girlfriend who I shared that office with, who had now, she was in a different job, I was in a different job, she forwards me an article that the FBI had apprehended this guy and brought him up on charges of like all the things.
Shawn:Wow.
Scott:All the things that he was doing while he was working for the UN that involved the assault of women.
Shawn:Wow. Wow. So he was actually doing those things while he was at the UN?
Scott:Yes. Wow. Yes, and so the reason why I think that story is so important is because we know when something's dangerous and our human instinct is often subjugated under the It's like we talk ourselves out of the risk because of our enlightened systems and processes, right? Well, now we have to factor in. So risk to the person gets relegated as inferior to risk to the institution.
Shawn:Yeah, and there's also, you know, the self preservation thing. It's like somebody cuts you off in traffic, you know, and you know, do you honk? Do you follow them for two miles? Do you cut them off again? Right.
Shawn:A lot of the reason most people don't do that stuff, I mean there's road rage incidents, is because you don't want to get involved in a road rage incident. You don't want somebody getting so angry that they ram your car with their car because they don't care if their car gets damaged. It's that and the HR people, I mean, they're on the hook for that but they're looking at somebody who's dangerous and they want them to go away because they don't want them to be a threat
Scott:Right.
Shawn:You know, to them personally and to the organization. That's and that's it's it's sort of two things, right? It's it's identifying the threat and then what level of responsibility do you take? The idea of, well, we don't want to damage this guy's reputation and career. Yeah, I think that is a palliative for the conscience, but it's really, okay, I now see a problem, what do I do to address that problem?
Shawn:And it's interesting because there's actually, you know, I'm gonna put my legal hat on even though I'm an attorney, but I am not licensed to practice anywhere anymore. I was a prosecutor for about six years and then went to the FBI and didn't practice law anymore. But in criminal law, there is this concept of the substantial step, which is what you have to prove when you charge somebody not with a crime, but with an attempted crime. So when you're looking at this piece of paper, for example, that has all of, these, this is what I'm gonna do, in in American law and and probably in Western law because American jurisprudence, particularly in the criminal realm comes from England, but I I can't specifically answer for what Western Europe does. A person thinking about committing a crime cannot be punished.
Shawn:Can't punish somebody for the thought. But then the question becomes, what is a substantial step? Where is the line from thinking about it to not doing it, but there's that open water between thinking about it and doing it, which is beginning to do it, planning to do it. And the framework is the substantial step. And so the debate of what do we do in your instance, which is a wonderful illustration of the issue, even though it was a terrifying place for you to be personally, is the writing down of it, and then further, is the sharing of it.
Shawn:And you got to think that that was not an oversight on his part. You got to think that that was, even if it was a subconscious thing to do, at some level it was his way of communicating what was going on in his head, is that a substantial step towards the commission of this crime?
Scott:Right.
Shawn:Somebody who wants to give this guy a break would say, well, he wrote it down and communicated it, but that doesn't mean he's gonna do it. Versus the person who actually got injured later when this guy was at the UN who's saying, well everybody knew he was going to do this and now here he comes into my environment and I'm defenseless because I don't know and that's wrong. And so it becomes complex, which is I think why we need to talk about this. Absolutely. I don't know the answer.
Shawn:And it's so hard to say, well, we gotta do the best we can do. But I think we can do better. Even though I don't think just, you know, pulling out a hunting rifle and killing somebody, I don't think that's the answer.
Scott:No. Yeah. Well, and I just want to also kind of frame it against what you were originally talking about, which is, you know, the Charlie Kirk situation, because again, here you have a situation where, you know, there was a guy and, you know, his presence in the workplace was making things really uncomfortable well before that document was revealed, right, to anybody. So the questions are kind of be like, you know, in the lead up to that, what are the mechanisms that we have at our disposal in any context where humans habitate, whether that's in the workplace or the school or, you know, certain sort of social settings. I mean, it's easy if you're in a bar, somebody starts getting weird and rowdy, you boot them, right?
Scott:Like, there are rules for each of those environments. And so I wonder sometimes if we haven't over systematized things, but also under systematized them in certain other contexts, because you can't always predict. But if we are in a situation where there are clear indicators that something's off, then that, you know, because for example, most big companies will have, particularly where sensitive materials are handled, they have something called sort of an internal compliance program where you also can kind of assess if you have an employee who's disenfranchised or his certain profile has, Oh, well, he's just gone through a bad divorce and he's having financial trouble. And there's all these other potential little red flags that are like, that becomes somebody who might be vulnerable to some sort of insider threat, like in some context, right? So, I guess it's just looking at sort of like the example.
Scott:So then you go back to this other guy and the example I'm giving you, and I know I'm taking you on twists and turns here, but here you have a situation where there was precedent for making women uncomfortable, regardless of what those indicators were. There was then a defined evidentiary intent, even if it didn't mean he was actually going to go through with it, of what was happening in his brain, how he was thinking about this other person that we worked with and others. By the way, she was the target of his ramblings, but it was also just a broad hostility against the organization, about celebrating mediocrity and how gross the organization was. It was just really, generally, really hostile. And using very clear violent language, I will do this to this person, specifically to this body part.
Scott:So that is violent language. That I don't think it's unequivocal. Now, what the punishment or the response to that is, is for the lawyers and the legal minds to figure out or law enforcement. But what I want to do is juxtapose that against what people I think are really easily and quickly jumping to as saying, Charlie Kirk used violent language. And I'm like, these are not the same friends.
Scott:These are not the same.
Shawn:No, they're not. And it's, you know, notion, I think finally we're seeing that language isn't violence. Language is language and violence is physical. And the impact that language has is still not violence. It may have an impact on you, but it's not violence.
Shawn:Maybe this is the air current that we need to grab with our shoots today and ride down because when you look at and I'm I'm gonna take a step back now. When you look at, the law and and and you look at the the legal structures, particularly in criminal law, which is how we, one of the ways we try to structure behavior. It presumes mental health. There are affirmative defenses that go into the realm of, this person's brain was so broken, they didn't know what they were doing, or they have a mental health issue and so they get an actual get out of jail free card and they go into a treatment program and they're released only when they are, certified as having been treated, and there are famous examples out there of that. And those kind of things happen every day.
Shawn:But maybe the mental health piece is the piece because if you look at somebody like Charlie Kirk or Martin Luther King, Plenty of people agreed with both men. Plenty of people disagreed with both men, but nobody's gonna say that either man, had a mental health issue. If you look at every, public shooting, assassination, school shooting, in the last ten years, in the last fifteen years, and the history of those types of shootings, the person doing the shooting had a known and diagnosable mental health defect. And so what do we do with that? Particularly, and, this is sort of the last link in the chain, and feel like I'm going a little too far, but I gotta go here.
Shawn:I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal that talked about, how Gen Y is unemployable, And they had done a, and I think it was actually Susie Welch, who had done a bunch of research and surveys and stuff. And the thing that struck me from that article was you have a group of people that are looking for jobs and the people hiring are looking for people who wanna show up early, stay late, and work hard. And apparently this general group of Gen Y, are very concerned about feeling anxious and they consider anxiety and being upset to be a mental health issue that requires their attention in a mental health realm. And it's fascinating to me because I actually have, acquaintances, people that are in relationships with people that I know or at parties and that sort of thing, who they say they suffer from anxiety. And when you start to listen about the things that are making them anxious, it's paying my bills.
Shawn:And some of these folks that I, have had conversations with admit basically to a stranger that they're on medication for anxiety, and all I see is the rough and tumble of living. Yeah, you gotta pay your bills. Nobody's gonna feed you, you need to feed yourself. Nobody's gonna clothe you or house you after you grow up, and your parents are no longer doing those things for you. You need to do those things for yourself.
Shawn:And it's not a mental health issue, to be stressed out about those things. It's one thing to have clinical diagnosable depression. Another thing, and that's the current, right? It's another thing to say, Well, the chop on the surface of the water, I'm happy today, but I'm stressed out today. I was stressed out yesterday, and so I gotta stop and talk to a therapist or be on medication because I don't want to ever feel anxiety because that's a mental health issue.
Shawn:So the reason I'm going there is because I think at some level it's easy to say any person who does a bad thing is mentally deficient.
Scott:But
Shawn:one of the things that I see in the current time is that everything that is other than joyous happiness is considered to be a diagnosable mental problem. Not only do I not think that's true, I think that is really, really dangerous. Mean, it's that old adage of, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you're the mental health world, everything looks like a mental health problem. If you're in the HR world, everything looks like a threat to the company that needs to be removed from the company because we can't solve all the ills of the world, but we need to protect our company.
Shawn:And you know, I guess I could keep going on, I need
Scott:to Yeah.
Shawn:Well, I myself in.
Scott:I'll just jump in on that because I think this was something that I had brought up to you in one of our early, early podcasts potentially. And if not, it was just an early conversation you and I had leading up to the formation of the podcast, which is I had been listening to a Brene Brown podcast episode about a year ago, and there was a woman, or maybe six months ago, but at any rate, she had on this woman, and I don't remember her name, I'd have to go back and I tried right now just to find it quickly so not to disrupt us. Basically, whoever the woman was, she was an expert on such topics, and what she was saying was exactly what you're expressing, which is that there is a very serious overpathologization of otherwise normal responses to normal stressors. And that that is a massive widespread problem for not only just society, but particularly the youth that are coming up in this next generation, because they are unable to distinguish between what is a normal physiological or emotional reaction to something that is arguably normally difficult, right? Whether it's you got to do extra homework because you have a big test coming up or if it's you have to go mow the lawn or you have you know what I mean?
Scott:And so everything is being blown out of psychological proportion. And it is, you know, all of these sort of Anytime you are in a bad mood or if you're tired, if you're, whatever, emotionally just feeling unhappy or something like this. So, And I think it's like this weird pendulum swing. We went from the kids of the '80s, '70s and the '80s, our feelings not only were not pathologized, but they didn't even matter most days. Nobody was like, You stuck it up, buttercup.
Scott:Move along. You know what I mean? Life is unfair. Tough cookies, right? We all heard some version.
Scott:We all heard some version of that. And so, you know, that was sort of on the extreme, like low sort of empathy, like sort of spectrum. Whereas now we've sort of the reaction just as one might over course correct to avoid hitting the deer and run into the tree, in your haste to overcorrect, now have a different problem. We're on this other end of the spectrum, which is every little boo boo, every little ill, every little inconvenience, every little hurt, every little struggle is now, okay, let's diagnose this. Let's diagnose this and let's medicate it.
Scott:Let's pathologize it. That is just, one, it's horrible, horrible for these children, Horrible. And it erodes accountability. It erodes confidence. It robs them of agency and an opportunity to excel.
Scott:And it muddies the waters for what a real disorder is. So if everybody's got a disorder, how do you find the kid who really, like this one guy, who really legitimately had a disturbance, like a mental sort of disorder that was potentially making him a threat to not just others, but himself at that. That because he ended up now he's in prison as he should be, right? Because he hurt a lot of people. But if you have empathy for everything, you have empathy for nothing.
Shawn:Fundamentally, you have empathy for everything, you're protecting yourself.
Scott:Because
Shawn:if you understand everybody, then you don't have to make a value judgment.
Scott:That's right.
Shawn:You don't have to take a stand.
Scott:Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. So I don't know where that leaves us in this grand scheme of conversation, Scott, but I appreciate you bringing this up. Just to make sure that we hit on your original sort of the thought that I think you were coming into this wrestling with is that, you know, from the micro workplace environment where I have a very real experience, where there was a clear and present danger, there was a threat to the macro, which is like Osama bin Laden orchestrated an attack that hurt my country. And you know what I mean? And that is clearly dangerous.
Scott:There are different inflection points along that micro to macro spectrum that I think have to be looked at, not just in isolation, because each ecosystem of inflection point on that spectrum has its own dynamics and rules of engagement or rules of the road people But have to adhere then take that in the context of broader human civilization and how we do or don't cohabitate with each other. At the international level, there are regimes and treaties in place that dictate what are the rules of engagement for this sort of thing. And we, as a country, are either a party to those or we are not. Or we're a party to them and we sneakily maybe color outside the lines, or we don't, I don't know, but that is a big debate topic and I think it's worth the attention you've brought to it.
Shawn:Yeah, and I think that answers your question about what do we do with this? Where do we go? And I think we have to take the conversation and make it pragmatic because it's all great to be academic and think about what the structure should be and what the rules should be and what they are and how we can change them. But when that committee meeting is over and people are heading home, what do you do? What do you actually do in that moment?
Shawn:What do you do in your situation where you see this thing? What do you do if you're the HR person? What do you do when somebody cuts you off in traffic or jams on their brakes and tries to wreck you? All of those things because you don't know if they're being stupid, if the car in front, stopped or if they have a mental health issue. Always want to take the time to share the flashes that you pull out of my brain.
Shawn:And as you were talking about kids and diagnosing everything that whole, because that's part of it, right? It's figuring things out and it's letting folks as they're growing up, struggle with things so that they find their own answer to it. Have two things to share. One is, it reminds me of the scene from The Bourne Identity, and, my apologies to people who haven't seen the movie, but it's Matt Damon who's this super CIA hitman, who's had his brain bent by a bunch of drugs and, who forgets that's what he is, and so he's sort of trying to figure out all the craziness in his life. And then, this, girl who's played by Franco Potente, if I'm pronouncing her name right, they run into each other as she's struggling with a set of problems, trying to get a visa or a passport renewed.
Shawn:And at one point they're sitting in a car somewhere in Paris and he is trying to get her to leave and he goes through this really panicked diatribe of, I don't know what's going on and I need to figure this out. And then there's this pause and she looks over at him and she goes, So figure it out. Figure it out. And what she doesn't say is, I'm not going anywhere. I'll be here.
Shawn:I'll help if I can, but go ahead and figure it out. And I love how that scene feels and I remember doing that with my kids. And it's hard when you've got a nine year old that is struggling with something and you know the answer, but you need to give that child the space to figure out their own answer. And what I used to tell my kids, even when they were small, is you have to trust your own instincts and you have to figure out what works for you, not because you're gonna be right or wrong, not because you're gonna have a better or worse answer, but because when you make decisions that affect your life, there's never a right answer that's gonna result in everything being fine. Whatever decision you make is always gonna have positives and negatives.
Shawn:There's always gonna be stuff that goes better, and there's always gonna be stuff you have to deal with. And this is the important thing. If you make the decision, the things that you have to deal with are the things that you chose to deal with. If you take somebody else's advice when you're going down the road and dealing with this thing, the negatives that you're dealing with are their fault because it's their decision, and that makes those things much more difficult to deal with. And what I discovered is the average nine year old kid can figure out a solution that I never would have thought of that works really good for her or for him.
Shawn:And that not only teaches them decision making, it empowers them as a little person and nine year olds can do it. I remember when my son was like seven, what he thought was a funny thing to do when we would go to the park is he would climb up on something really high and then go, mom, I'm gonna jump. Of And course, my wife at the time was a good mom and she would lose her freaking mind.
Scott:Right. And
Shawn:after sort of negotiating that pathway for a while and not wanting to be in the middle of that and not wanting to punish him for driving his mom crazy and not wanting to talk my wife off the ledge. What I started doing was I would say, okay, and my son's name is Nick. I'd say, oh, okay, Nick, just stop for a minute. So I'm down and he's up on some parapet. And I would say, just look down.
Shawn:Do you think you can make it? And about half the time he'd go, Yeah, dad, I think I can make it. And about half the time he'd start crying and I'd have to go up and get him. But I remember there were two times where he looked down and he'd go, Dad, yep, I think I can make it. And I didn't think he could.
Scott:Exactly. Your adult brain is doing the math.
Shawn:Yeah, and this may not be great parenting, but he thought he could make it. And so I sort of got myself ready to pick him up and take him to the hospital. I said, okay, Nick, if you're sure you can make it, go ahead. And both times he made it without being injured at all. And it was great for me to build my confidence in his decision making, and it was great for him to just be able to be told to stop and be thoughtful.
Shawn:And I think that it takes courage on the part of the parent And to do I think a lot of parents, and I feel bad saying this, but I've seen it, A lot of parents don't have that courage. They don't wanna hurt kid, and so they put themselves first. They don't want to be the parent of the kid who's in the bottom half of the class, and so they yell at their kid and make them do homework. I remember my kids coming home, you know, saying they got a bad score on a test. And I said, listen, I'll help you with your homework if you don't understand it.
Shawn:But I've been to school. You know? I've been to fourth grade. And it's in the rearview mirror for me. And if you wanna do better on a test, if you wanna be successful in your life, then you gotta study instead of watch TV.
Shawn:And I am not gonna be your cop. I'm just not. I'm gonna point out to you that I think you're making a mistake. But this is on you and again, average nine, 10, 11 year old kid, they know that, they do, but it takes courage on the parent and I think that's what we need. Can I
Scott:point out something to you that I think is cool? Because we I'm
Shawn:having a hard time stopping today.
Scott:No, no, it's good. I just, because it's so, I want to capture this because it ties back to a conversation we had prior to this a few sessions back, but it's that idea, the reason why, you know, in both of those examples, whether it was the homework example or whether it was the tree example, whether you realize that or not, it's kind of what we talked about before, which is kids are going to be more likely to take calculated risks, which is what you want them to take, right? You don't want them being bonkers and suicidal, right? Because if you have no filter and no fear, there can be danger in that. But you provided just enough of a structure for him to feel comfortable pushing his own boundary.
Scott:Yeah. And I love that because that is what they need. They need to see your confidence because if they see your confidence, then they know I'm safe to take this risk. Even if he would hurt himself, you were not gonna let anything horrible happen. You know So what I he kind of knew.
Scott:I guarantee you, he might've made a different choice if you hadn't been there and if he'd just been with a bunch of his little friends and nobody was looking. He might've made different choice. So that's actually a really good indicator because that's what you want. You want them to be making informed choices based on the perceived risk to themselves, which I think he probably saw you being there as it's less risky because he's not going to let me really do it if he thinks I'm going to get hurt. You know what I mean?
Scott:That kind of a thing. And then the homework part is also, like you were saying, it's so essential for kids because it is one thing to put every decision on them and every responsibility because kids are not always equipped to make every choice and because they may have insecurity about what that choice is because they don't have the benefit of wisdom of forty years on this earth. But when you make their success, they're an active part of their success, that is then empowering them. They have agency. They have some sense of control in their little life, which is mostly not controlled by them at all.
Scott:And I think that's such an empowering, important thing to do for them. And I just love it. And I think we need more of that in parenting today. But the other point you were saying about the parenting, instinct to kind of maybe not do as much of that for whether it's because they're afraid, they lack the courage. I think courage is right.
Scott:And I think sometimes what it is is, again, this ties back to the empathy piece. There's too much fear by the parent of the child experiencing even the slightest discomfort.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:Life is discomfort. It just is. And so you are, by not letting them experience all those little micro discomforts throughout childhood, you are setting them up for a massive cliff fall when they enter adulthood because nobody's going to be around to coddle them or to tend to their bruised egos or their you know what I I mean, if you call out sick from work habitually once or twice a week because you're fatigued, you just won't have a job. I mean, it's that simple. But again, maybe that's what's driving this pathologization of things because if you have a doctor's note, then you can get out of it.
Scott:And then the employer has to deal with the fact that they've just got an employee they just can't rely on because they're constantly getting a get out of jail free pass, right? That they can't fight. So, I have so many thoughts on all that and I won't bother you guys. I won't bother the audience with that right now. But suffice to say, there are many little threads on that that we could future discussion would be great.
Shawn:Yeah, but I think this is kind of a sweet spot for us because we pull forward to, if we pull away from, let's advise people on how to parent their kids when they're little, what do we now do as the 2 Parachutes Podcast advising people of all age ranges and what's the pragmatic thing? And I think part of it is not to overthink. If you're having a bad day, there doesn't have to be some external or internal cause. You're just having a bad day, so pack it in and wait till tomorrow. Go get some rest.
Shawn:Whatever it is that you do to decompress, If you're overwhelmed and you need a day off, don't need to call it a mental health thing. If you need a break from something, you don't need to call it work life balance. I mean it's the crocodile Dundee thing. Why would you go into therapy? Don't you have mates?
Scott:Don't you have
Shawn:friends to talk to? And if you don't, maybe you don't want to go out into the world and try and find some. That's difficult too, but okay, so it's difficult. It's I guess it's funny to me that people who are driven to success will work really hard at work, but they don't take that same drive and that same work ethic to their personal life. In their personal life, it's for miserable me.
Shawn:And I think this is actually one of the disservices that has developed in some way, to women. Women are told, well you can have it all, which implies that women can't have it all and need to be encouraged. We don't tell men that.
Scott:We
Shawn:don't talk to men about work life balance. You go to work, you come home, you coach your kid's soccer team, and you try and be the best dad that you can, but for women we say, Oh, this is hard and you can have it all. For me, it's like, Of course, you could have it all. You're a woman. Women are remarkable and remarkably capable in ways men aren't.
Shawn:Men are remarkably capable in ways that women aren't, but the idea that women need to be specifically encouraged to engage in life. No, and part of that comes back to what we're telling little girls, but part of it comes forward to what we're telling young ladies. And it's the presumptions that are the foundation for the ways that we think we're helping is really the challenge. And you know, some of the most impressive people I worked with and I worked for who were women who were unrepentant. I mean, would have children and come back from the health cycle that, the female body goes through, when you have a child, and they would come back as though nothing happened because it's their personal life, it's her personal life, and she was just back at work and it was never an issue.
Shawn:And so being told it's an issue I think is a huge disservice. It's just living and for anyone who's sort of in that middle part of their life, 25 to, I don't know, 45. It's life, and there's nothing wrong with it. There's really nothing wrong with it. Just because it feels bad doesn't mean there's wrong with it.
Shawn:It just means you need a nap or you need a sandwich or you need a glass of wine or you need some electrolytes.
Scott:Or the sun. I keep to this generation, that's my big thing is like stop being little mole people, go get, like touch grass. You know what And I
Shawn:you don't have to go to the other end of the spectrum where, oh, well, you know, I'm gonna shut down between 12:30 and 01:30 because I need lunch and I need to take care of my body. Just live.
Scott:To your body listen to your sort of like soul. The hardest thing about, I think for me in the child rearing sort of space, since as the step parent, I often didn't have a lot of agency or any agency or control over what was happening. But that allowed me also to be a really intimate observer of watching the child rearing process sort of unfold was that, I always thought it was super important to always provide that, you know, well, in my case, my stepdaughter, you know, children just generally give them reasons to want to succeed and to want to persevere through tough things. Because, you know, if it's always about placating them or bowing to every sort of little, like, fussy whim or, you know, lack of sort of, you know, I don't know. It's not motivation.
Scott:Like whatever you call see through it in this, right? Giving up when it gets hard. That to me is if parents can crack the code on getting kids to understand how to tell the difference between when something is unreasonably hard and not good for you and reasonably even embracedly hard, because in being such, it is sharpening you in some way. It is honing you in some way. It is improving your character or your aptitude or your performance.
Scott:That, because again, they have to be able to see that once they break through the hard stuff, there is its own reward at the end. But if they never break through the hard stuff, they're never gonna feel that reward, incentive, because they will never have achieved it. And that is what drives a lot of, I think, just great people is they knew enough somehow, some way, whether it was just their own internal sort of they were born with it or they were in an environment that really allowed them to experience that. That is what in the end propels them to probably throughout their adult life. Because once you experience it, it's a little addictive.
Scott:You like that success.
Shawn:Yeah. And you're right, it doesn't come without doing something that's difficult. It's another hidden thing. If everything is easy, if everything is solved for you, you think everything's fine but you have this sort of emptiness inside you. I And think it has a tendency to pull people, a person, down this pathway of anytime it's hard, anytime it doesn't feel 100% good, it's a malady.
Shawn:It's an illness, it's a problem that we need to stop and solve instead of, know, some things are hard. I remember years ago, this goes back to maybe 1983 or 1984, my last year of college, I wasn't rowing anymore, I'd run through my eligibility to row and so I got a job as a trainer at a high end health club over in Bellevue, which is on the other side of the lake from Seattle. And so, I'm this college kid training wealthy middle aged men and women. And it was so funny when I was taking new people who wanted to get in shape and I was taking them through the Nautilus machines, which were the big thing back then. And I would show somebody how to do the first machine and then they would get on the machine and do some very light weights and about half of them would go, Oh, that hurts, that hurts.
Shawn:And I would have to help them understand that there's a difference between pain that indicates an injury and the discomfort that comes from just moving your body when you haven't moved it in a while. And it's the distinction between those two types of pain, and it really surprised me at first, but it's that different perspective. And I think what we're seeing with a lot of people is if I'm anxious, that's a mental health problem. And the 2 Parachutes Podcast message to the world is if you're stressed out about something, that's not a mental health issue. That's just being stressed out about something.
Shawn:Not me. That's just being alive. Psychologists will disagree with us. But you know, I have lived for sixty three years and I've seen a lot of stuff in my experience as a denizen of the planet. When you're stressed out about something, it's not a mental health issue.
Shawn:But I think when we do see mental health issues, to circle back around to your example of the dude who was throwing these violent things.
Scott:Complete predator, yeah.
Shawn:Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we were allowed to do or that we had a system for when I was a supervisor at the FBI is what they called a fitness for duty evaluation. And so if you had somebody and usually it was somebody who had gotten injured and they were ready to come back to work, and so you would take them, you would do the little bit of paperwork to have them go see a doctor and have the doctor say, yeah, this person is physically functioning at a levels that it's safe for them to carry a firearm and do all those things. But there was mental health fitness for duty as well, and you gotta do those things, and it's not an act of courage. I think that's the pragmatic part of this, right? Is that it's not an act of courage to do the right thing.
Shawn:It may be hard, and you have to decide what you think is the right thing, but it's not an act of courage to do that. And I think that's the message for what do we do now, is do the right thing and talk about it and share
Scott:it. That's right.
Shawn:Have an informed opinion, be willing to change your mind, have that opinion.
Scott:Yeah. I think. And also be willing to be willing to, like, self assess, you know, or look in the mirror and say, like, what do I really think about this? And, you know, where do I land on on these topics? And what can I do in my own context or environment to make sure that we're building resilience in human civilization and not inadvertently undermining that resilience through misplaced empathy or or, you know, again, it's it's not that we don't want to be sensitive, understanding, compassionate, you know, people?
Scott:I think everybody at their core, for the most part, I'll take the charitable view of humanity and say that I think we all do. It's just, you know, when is too much fear and too much anxiety and too much pathologizing become a detriment to the rest of what is otherwise a healthy functioning human system, right, with individual humans that are healthy and functioning optimally. Every day is a gift and life, as you were saying about the life work balance, all that, that is such a twenty first century interesting way to think about things. For a lot of places around the world, life work balance is just life. It's not this sort of live, love, pray sign on a house wall that's like, okay, like I do that.
Scott:And it's, you know, in whatever context I have and you don't need, you know, some precise ratio to be sort of defined for you. As an individual, what's going to work for you in Rwanda is going to look different than what it looks like in Serbia than it looks like in sort of Nicaragua. You have to just live in the sort of ecosystem in which you're at and you may have different tolerances for what makes you happy or sad or upset or what a bad day for you looks like is going to look different for people in North Korea or in Beverly Hills. But it's also not to say that all of us don't. Sometimes I think the biggest disability is affluence because it's too easy for people to become lazy and to become apathetic and to be disincentivized to go through the tough daily grind stuff that actually sharpens you as a human and makes you a lot more resilient.
Scott:So I don't think anybody is absent of struggle. It's just it's experienced in a different way, you know? So nobody gets out unscathed is my closing remark.
Shawn:That's a great summary. Nobody gets out unscathed. And I'll only add to that, but it's okay because you heal, you get a scrape, you heal, but nobody gets out unscathed. Awesome story, Rishon. Yeah,
Scott:right on Scott, thank you.
Shawn:All right, that ties off another episode.
Scott:Hey, I'm
Shawn:loving this. Hope you are, too.
Scott:All right. We'll see you for the next jump.
Shawn:See you for the next one. All right. Bye now.
Scott:Bye.