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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:Hey, Sean.
Shawn:Hey. It's nice seeing you, Scott. How are you?
Scott:Doing good. Good. How are you?
Shawn:Good. It's been a busy week. I don't know if that surprises me or not, but it's definitely I always feel like it seems like I react as if I'm surprised.
Scott:Yeah. Well, I think I definitely have the advantage being on the West Coast. You're on the East Coast, so it's my morning. This is generally the first thing that I do and you have to take time out of the middle of your day.
Shawn:It's a nice If break
Scott:you can
Shawn:get used to it, that's a good, because it forces you to disengage and exercise a different part of your brain and both physically, it's also good to just get up, you know, and move to a different location and do a different thing.
Scott:So how do you manage that? I mean, is that a is that a thing for you or is it an ordinary
Shawn:Well, I'm still getting accustomed to it because, you know, we are still in the process of figuring out what our regular recording schedule is. So, for now, I think I'm just getting comfortable with the idea of interrupting my normal work day, you know, but it's okay because at the same time, we just had the school year start and we have our daughter, my stepdaughter, 50% of the time, which is a little bit different. Last year, we didn't. So, you know, now it's, you know, we kind of go back and forth. Some years we do, some years we don't.
Shawn:This is a year she decided she wanted to be with us, every other week, which we love and we're so excited about. But it also just means, you know, okay, now that's a pickup at 02:45 that I get to do. So you know, and and working that into the schedule, as well. But we're all doing that on some level, I suppose. We're all balancing what we have going on.
Scott:Yeah. Yeah. That's great. So, what are we talking about today? I mean, we've often said, excuse me, when we're wrapping something up, Oh we got to talk about that next!
Shawn:I know!
Scott:And you know, we got a little bit of a list, but, I'm not I don't have you know sometimes I come into this with
Shawn:a
Scott:desire to talk about something and I'm just, I'm in the calm part of the river today. So I'm just, being drawn by the current and it's okay, it's good, it's different. And I think that's part of what they say mindfulness is, is not trying to rail against where you are on any given day, although sometimes it's difficult not to. But to extend the metaphor, can always paddle if you want to go faster. Absolutely.
Scott:But I'm curious to know where your mindset is today, because I think, when we talk about interacting with people, when we talk about conversations, when we talk about how do we get along or get in sync with another person, part of it is understanding where you are in that moment, a part of it is understanding where they are in that moment, and then making a decision about which tributary you're gonna go down. Where are you? Well,
Shawn:thing I've been thinking about a lot lately and apologize to this. I feel like I have a phantom piece of hair or lint on me, I keep trying to get it and I'm not succeeding. So you'll, you know, if you see me doing this, you'll know why.
Scott:It's so normal, Shawn.
Shawn:Am painfully normal. Yeah, so one thing that has been on my mind the last couple of days is I am a consumer of different kinds of social media. I really enjoy podcasts. I really enjoy reels that, you know, I enjoy on their own, but also as a segue or pathway into, you know, somebody's more extended content, you know, such as I think we're going to do. And and one thing I've been witnessing a lot of lately and really actually probably for the last few years is when you're on social media, maybe this is just everybody, but maybe it's just more obvious on social media.
Shawn:I don't understand why otherwise really strong communicators and really principled people who have a platform tend to at some point they're there, you know, I'm with them, I'm with them, I'm with them. And then it's like they veer off to the right or the left. And I'm not trying to make a deliberate political statement when I say right or left. I just mean you're on a road and you either go off one way or another. Although there is an applicability here to the political system in America today.
Shawn:But, you know, they veer off one way or the other where it's like they start changing and maybe they're just having a bad day or a bad week or a bad month or a bad year, or maybe they have just gotten so accustomed to being on a visible platform that they lose self awareness of how they're coming across. And part of why I go after people, you know, is if I feel relief from watching them, I'm like, Okay, I don't have to agree with everything they're saying, but I enjoy the content and I enjoy how they present information. But invariably, they always end up it's kind of like when you're, you know, walking and you have a natural tendency to go to some people go to the right, some people go to it's like that. How do people get to that point? And, you know, I'm just trying to figure out as a it has implications for me as a consumer because it makes me have to rethink, Okay, do I really want to keep following this person?
Shawn:And sometimes they'll get so far gone that I'll eventually just stop following them, you know, because I'm just like, okay, well, now they're kind of just off the deep end. In other times, I think I see course correction and maybe that's their staff or their people saying, but I think it's a very human quality. I think it's a very human trait, regardless of whether you have a platform or not. And I, you know, I just thought maybe we could dig into that a little bit to identify what is it that makes us kind of kind of dig in. You know, we can be balanced as possible and live in our lives in such a balanced way.
Shawn:But then we ultimately just, you know, in Christianity and my Catholicism, I'd probably say, Oh, well, that's just sin. That's the devil. You know, he's constantly after you. You can't be perfect all the time. And those are the things you got to look out for.
Shawn:But, I'm sure other people have different worldviews and, you know, we're all human, so whether you're religious or not doesn't really matter. It's still happening.
Scott:I'm struggling a little bit to follow you and to understand Yeah. Exactly what you And I want to understand, I mean is what you're feeling when you're following somebody who's speaking, know, whether it's a podcast or whether you're you know, in any environment where you're in a conversation, does it feel like you're losing interest in the conversation or in the person or is there some sort of so it's a change in you, you've sort of had enough or is it a change in in them where they're doing something different?
Shawn:Yeah, I think it's a change in them and to simplify it, it just it's kind of I'll give you the example it's like, you know, it's one thing to say, oh, you know, I'm having a tough day at work and this person has contributed to that tough day and here's what they were doing to do it. And then to try to, you know, analyze what went wrong and how could you make it different or how how can you approach them to make it different. It's another thing to just go fully on a character assassination bent, you know what I mean? Or tear where you're just like, you know, maybe it starts off and you're being reasonable and rational about it and you're trying to figure out how to how to make it better. What did you learn from that?
Shawn:And then you just give up and you just stop trying to be rational and then you just start attacking their character or just, you know, and I see this with a lot of Podcast celebrities, people, you know, who do really great principled work. And, you know, but then they'll go on this sort of like tear where they're just it's not principled content at all and it's borderline obsessive and, you know, schoolyard bullying, you know? And so that's those are the two examples in just a very, you know, normal human context and then on a platform in a platform context. And I just what is it about us that we just can't leave well enough Like, you know, we always end up going too far and then and then it starts undermining our our our integrity. And if we had, you know, a good point, then it starts undermining that.
Shawn:And in a really macro sense, I would argue, and I'll probably get in trouble someday for saying this. But I think Israel is a good example of that on a macro level. It's like you had a really strong argument, you know, at the beginning of the sort of, you know, was it October where I don't remember the date where they had their terrorist attack and it was horrible and like they had to take some action. But, you know, years on, we've got, you know, starving children and, you know, a massive refugee crisis, health crisis, all these things and allegations that are hard to look away from from pretty objective people now who are saying, you know, this is no longer just we're trying to protect ourselves, but now it's a full on, you know, you know, word like, you know, and I won't say that because I don't think that's fair to say at this point. But you know what I mean?
Shawn:It's it's it's so from that individual petty one on one at work to like this grand scale, you know, kind of atrocities, like, you know, what is it in the human condition that gets us, you know, to a point where we lose sight of kind of what was good and right and objective.
Scott:Yeah. And that's a really interesting one. So I've got, I was gonna say two stories for you, but I've kind of got three. Okay. A perfect
Shawn:trinity. I love it.
Scott:Look at me being religious when I'm
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:Yeah. Maybe that's another thing to dig into because everybody sort of weaves their own tapestry. And I am not a particularly religious person but I've had a lot of experience with religion and this is not one of the three. But I was raised in a congregational church When my parents divorced, when I was about 12, we stopped going to the congregational church. But a couple of years later, as I was learning to drive, my driving practice was driving my grandparents to church.
Scott:So I would drive them to church and then, I was not permitted to wait in the car. So I became an usher at the Baptist church, and got involved in the youth group in the Baptist church and was baptized by full immersion when I was 16 in a Baptist church. And then when I was in college, I was in a long term relationship with a born again Christian girl and went to those charismatic meetings. My first wife was Catholic, so my children were raised in the Catholic faith with not just my consent, with my agreement. When I looked at the Catholic church and began to understand it better, my concern was that my children understand religion and faith.
Scott:And I thought that what the Catholic church offers was good. So I have a lot of those things and you have commented before that you're sort of an old testament Catholic. I've read several times, various parts of the New Testament and I find that useful. So I get that part of it. But I think what we're talking about paying attention to conversations and what keeps you in it and what keeps you out of it.
Scott:For the speaker, I think a lot of that is what I call integrity. And integrity is being integrated. It's the practice of showing the world externally what you are internally. And I remember when I was at the FBI, I was a legal instructor. And so you would have quarterly legal instruction, which was basically a lecture that all FBI agents had to go to, every three months.
Scott:And there was a small cadre in every, field office that had gone through the training that could provide these lectures. And I was one of those people. And so, you'd get the schedule for when you were teaching. And so I got a schedule, at one point, and one of the classes that I had to teach was at 03:30 on a Friday afternoon. And I am assigned to the New York Field Office at that point.
Scott:My commute in the New York Field Office was two hours and fifteen minutes each way. And if you were doing that on a Friday evening when everybody was out because it was Lower Manhattan, it was much longer. And so I'm going, Well, this really kind of sucks. But what I was expecting was I would walk into the room and nobody would be there. And so I could go in, touch base, Nope, nobody was there, I can leave.
Scott:And I walk in and there's two guys there.
Shawn:Of course.
Scott:Yeah. And so the expectation was that the legal instructor would come in and say, great, we're gonna have a great hour and a half, and we're gonna do this thing, and it's so important, and it's wonderful. And that is not what I did. I looked at these guys and I said, are you fucking kidding me? You guys are here on a Friday afternoon to listen to me talk about legal stuff and we should be going home?
Shawn:Know, what went wrong in your life that
Scott:you're Yeah. And it was really interesting because it was one of the first times that I had done that. I mean, I was probably in my late 30s at that point and was trying to not, thoughtlessly just launch at the world with whatever I was feeling. I don't think that's integrity. Because if you launch, you're just doing what people do now, which is I'm angry and so I'm gonna scream my outrage to the world, and not really be concerned about the content.
Scott:But what I found was I shared how I was feeling and they both kind of chuckled and said, Yeah, it sucks for us too. This is the only time we could come to this thing. And then a couple more people dribbled in. And because I was honest about how I was feeling, they were honest about how they were feeling. And we got through the class honestly instead of what would usually happen, which was everybody would pretend that it was a really important and wonderful thing and it was a good use of time.
Scott:And it wasn't a good use of time on a Friday afternoon. But it became very productive because everybody went on record saying, we gotta do this. It sucks we have to do it on a Friday afternoon. But that allowed us to sort of sink our teeth into it. And I think that's part of, not all of, but part of what you're seeing when somebody goes off on a rant.
Scott:They're not exercising the discipline, I think, that comes with dignity because there's a filter, I think that there needs to be a kindness and a gentleness with integrity. It's not just about here on the outside is everything that I am on the inside. It's saying, this is what I'm struggling with. This is what I'm dealing with. So, it's like if you're the greatest chef in the world, you're gonna put food on the plate and put it in front of somebody.
Scott:You're not gonna take a handful of your great frogwah and rush out into the dining room and cram it down somebody's throat. You're not gonna do that, that's not the way to share great food. And I think that's the same thing. So that's one of three, but what do you think? I mean, is that part of what you're seeing
Shawn:with Yeah, and I like the use of the word, you know, how you described integrity. What it makes me realize too, though, is that integrity is also, you know, for something to preserve its integrity, if you're talking about a person, it's, you know, you associate that with preserving your perceived, you know, credibility, your honesty, your candor. It could mean other things. I'm sure all bundled up into that one word. It also has the implication for preserving your case.
Shawn:Like if something is is remain like, you know, for me to not disrupt the integrity of this desk means all four legs have to be like tightly, you know, attached and that it's not wobbling. You know, that's another use of the word integrity is to preserve, right, like something in its form. And so I think people are human and I do and we even as as new podcasters or aspiring podcasters, we strive to preserve that you mentioned earlier. It's like I'm so normal. We want to preserve that authenticity of humanness and of interaction because I don't think enough people get that in their podcasting, although you do see it more and more.
Shawn:I think Joe Rogan does a good job of that. I think Bill Maher does a good job of that. But there's kind of diminishing returns point where if you are showing everyone the full spectrum of emotion, even getting to sort of the extreme edges of your emotional reactions, then it starts to diminish the integrity of not just how you're perceived, integrity, but of the case that you're trying to make. And people will start to tune out or they'll start to question like, you know, I get why there's emotion behind this. And you can't rob somebody of that because if, you know, if somebody has a very powerful emotional response, you know, to the Israeli Palestinian war right now, which, you know, you would get that from both sides assuredly, then, you know, I don't want to rob anybody of their authentic emotional reaction to something that is in their, you know, hurting them or hurting those that they care about.
Shawn:But at the same time, you know, if you just come out the gate and are, you know, even if you're speaking truth, objective truths that are verifiable and, you know, validatable, I guess, you know, if you are saying it with a smear or with condescension or like, you know, doing it in a way that attacks somebody or somebody's on the other side of the argument or the case, it is going to turn away a segment of your prospective consumers. And that's and if the goal is to podcast to influencer to open up, you know, something, then wouldn't it just seems that it works against the interests. But same thing as an individual, Scott, like if I go around bashing somebody in my personal context, you know, eventually, yeah, initially people are going to like empathize with me. But at some point people are going to be like, like, Okay, enough already. You know, you're killing me with the negativity or, you know, the hostility.
Shawn:That's not going to work for my interests or towards my interests.
Scott:Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that's the ridicule piece. And I think what a lot of people don't understand is that you can strongly express a strongly held opinion without ridicule and it's that you have a lot of emotion behind your opinion or that your opinion is more belief that's driven by what you think should be the truth of a situation rather than opinion which is based on facts that you can glean. I think either of those two things can be communicated very well as long as the speaker, is paying attention to not going into ridicule because ridicule goes back to what we were talking about last time, which is, I believe this and if you don't, you're bad. You're either wrong or you're either immoral, but if you don't agree, then here's the negative thing about you, that's what ridicule is.
Scott:And so I think part of dignified, mature, what you might call adult communication, you see, like William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal debating, they did not like each other.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:They did not agree really on anything. But what you notice is even though they said things that can be easily construed as personal attack, they never ridiculed each other. Yeah. And I think that's huge. I think the other thing, that needs to be part of, well, our discussion and is a part of what you observed is when an audience, whether it's a person or a large audience, is listening to something.
Scott:I mean, they're listening to music or watching a movie or listening to a speaker or they're in a conversation. And this certainly happens to me. I'm interested until I'm not and I'm bored and I remember, as a younger man, you know, trapped. I'm in a movie with my friends and this movie now really sucks and I don't want to be here but I didn't have the self confidence at that time to say, you know what, I'm not going to spend any more time, I'm going go to the bar across the street and I'll meet you guys. I had friends that could do that, They're like, this movie sucks.
Scott:And sometimes I would say, yeah, this movie sucks, but I feel obligated to stay. Sometimes I would say, you go, I love this movie. But I think and it's funny because I in the last week, I have had, experiences where I'm talking to somebody and they are fascinated by the topic and I'm struggling with how do I be polite because I am losing the ability to participate in this conversation because I don't care anymore. Over time I'm getting better and better at, I'm watching something, and I turn it off, because I realize I'm just not interested in it. I think that's human.
Scott:Not everybody is gonna be involved in what you say. It was, fascinating. One of my brothers lives in this part of the country, lives up the hill from me, his name is Mark, and he was giving me feedback on the podcast. And he was doing this. He was going through the content and essentially saying, well, when you guys were talking about this, it was really interesting, but then you talked about that and I almost turned it off.
Scott:Part of me wants to say, oh, we need to be more interesting. But what I realized as I was listening to him is that's just the ebb and flow of a different listener and the stuff that he found fascinating other people might find boring, and that's just part of it. But to circle back around to what's the solution to that? I think that it is being willing to go from topic to topic, sort of as mercenary podcasters who want people to watch, going from topic to topic so no one topic becomes boring, leave them wanting more. But also part of it is recognizing that that's a very human thing and that we do that too, and that the big barrier, is ridicule.
Scott:And while there's sort of a human instinct to push away those who disagree, If what we're trying to do is have a conversation that's dignified and inclusive, we need to find a way to express ourselves without ridicule. And I don't think that's too big of an ask. And if it takes us directly to, well, I'm not ridiculing you, it takes me to something that has happened to me over my life in relationships. And this is my first wife and my second wife would both say, Well, I understand what you're saying, but I don't appreciate your tone. And I'm like, okay, so my content is good, but somehow the inflection of my voice, I would not, certainly as a younger man and sometimes even now, that would be a point of frustration for me.
Scott:It's like, can we just talk about what I said instead of my tone? Because I don't even understand what that means. I mean, wasn't trying to be rude to you. Yeah. But we're talking about something that we don't agree on.
Scott:And then, of course, I'm going in that direction and I'm going down the ridicule path and all of a sudden, we're in a fight about nothing that it's not where we started. And so for me, having to understand that my tone, even if I don't understand it matters. And it's not necessarily the person listening to me doesn't like what I'm saying and they know that the content is a loser argument for them so they're going to attack me this other way, which is what I think, which is very rarely true. But that's, I mean, what do you think?
Shawn:Right, well I love that, so there's a few things that came through my mind and so I may not get to all of these, but three things came up, the last being the most recent, which is that, you know, tone is a big deal because it's one of the many ways in which a human being communicates to another human being. Before we were speakers, we were emotors and we were, you know, and so, you know, I think that tone would be a very interesting topic, like all on its own and how tone, you know, impacts personal and professional relationships. And, you know, I might do a little research after this on that because it would be interesting to see, you know, I mean, even look at like chatty PT, like, you know, when you're engaging with it, it's very friendly. You sense a tone just by how it constructs its phrasing and frames its responses or queries back to you. So that's one thing, and I think that, you know, we can set that aside and revisit that.
Shawn:But I do think it's huge. Right?
Scott:Could you ask it to be rude?
Shawn:I could. I bet you I well, no. You can ask it anything. And now what it would say back is that's the experiment. We should each go and do that.
Shawn:And then on the next episode where we're, you know, dedicated to tone, we should see what our you know, did we create chat GPT monsters, you know, and we may very well be able to do that. The second thing that made me laugh because, and this brings us down to our, you know, normal terra firma, like we're just average people. As I watching an episode of the old show, Everybody Loves Raymond, couple nights ago, and I never watched it when it was first out. I think I was too young as a demographic because that would have been like, I would have been out partying and being grunge and whatever. But as I now watch it as a married adult, I'm like, this is so relatable.
Shawn:It's so relatable. And there's this one episode where Tim and his brother, and, they're getting into it. They're super mad at each other. You know, the brother's a cop and he's like, you know, he's he's mad at him for something and and they're in the car and they just got a ticket and he couldn't get them out of the ticket. Now everybody's just mad, right?
Shawn:And he's like, the brother who's a cop, he's like, Basically, I don't like your tone or something like, or you need to bring your voice down, like stop yelling. So the lead character, Raymond, he's like, Oh, okay, I can do that. And then he, in a perfectly Mary Poppins voice, he utters a string of insults. And I don't know what it was about the comedic timing of that, but I was like, it made it funny. If I had been in that situation, I can't tell if I would have been mad or if I would have died laughing.
Shawn:It might have actually broke the tension because of how ludicrous it sounds. And that's the thing is when we attack people, if we were to just even pivot to say, Okay, I'm going to do this, but it's like when you're getting visibly worked up and angry, it's like then you become kind of deliberately menacing and scary. And that's in nature. That's what you are trying to do, right? In our primitive form is to look bigger than you are and to look angrier than you are because that's going to hopefully deter whatever the threat is.
Shawn:So I get that that's our inclination. As rational thinking, people with advanced brain capacity to say, okay, what happens when I say this sentence? Even just practicing in your head in a normal tone, sounds ludicrous. It sounds crazy. That's my say.
Shawn:And my third and final point, I'll close on because I loved your reference to Buckley and what was the other? Gore Yeah, Gore It reminded me of the Stephen Douglas debates. President Lincoln And and Stephen one of the things that, you know, for anybody who's ever seen a film or a documentary or read the, you know, there's a play actually, I think that they put on at Ford's Theater here and to see it's really, you know, this is cool stuff. If I'm not mistaken, throughout the course of the debate, they were very civil to one another. It didn't mean that they pulled punches.
Shawn:It just means that they preserved the integrity of the interaction by saying, you know, they addressed each other formally, you know, Mr. Lincoln, Doctor. Douglas or Judge Douglas, you know, etcetera. They actually answered whatever the assertion was or the point was, they would take the time to respond to it versus what in today's media happens is just somebody's get on their sort of moral high horses and then they sometimes will give context or answer a direct, you know, accusation or, you know, assertion. But more often they'll just kind of denigrate the opposer or the opposing idea or the you know what I mean?
Shawn:And they'll just be like, you know, well, you're not a scientist. And the other people will be like, well, you know, you're a chicken or, you know what I mean? Like, I mean, it just gets sort of, know, it diminishes down to like schoolyard tactics, you know, like your hair is stupid and you're ugly. You know what I mean? Like, I think my favorite unfavourite when I was a kid was like, Oh, well, I may be stupid, but you're ugly and I can always get smarter.
Shawn:You know what I mean? That's how the argument was won. Well, do you, there's no comeback to that. So anyway, so those were my immediate reactions, whether that makes sense out of anything we're saying, I don't know, but it just, yeah, I do think we could, I guess the moral of my story is we could do better and people, I just wish people would be, don't kill your emotion, obviously embrace your emotion. But if they could just express it in a way that doesn't harm the cause, because sometimes I really believe in the cause.
Shawn:And I see that if it's being proselytized or pushed in a way that hurts the cause, then I'm like, just by adjusting how you engage, and maybe it is tone, maybe it is like, just being civil, we could be making so much more progress.
Scott:Right. And so the question becomes and I agree with you, but in terms of, you know, the statement of the issue, but I think there's presumption in here we need to examine, which is, you know, we're presuming that civil is better. We're presuming that, not having, ridicule is better. And I think we need to maybe try and answer the question that might be asked to us, which is why not scream and yell? Why not be aggressive?
Scott:Why pull my punches? Why hold back? And I think to answer a person who asked that question by saying, Oh, well, it's more effective. What I see in the world is that the people who are being aggressive, the people who are going out into the world protesting and we can go right into the Israel Hamas issue. And as an aside, I frame this not as an Israeli Palestinian issue because I don't think it is.
Scott:I think it is an Israeli Hamas issue. And, you know, to have the leader of Hamas say, we are the victims so no one can criticize anything we do. We can do anything at all that we think makes our cause better and no one can criticize because we're the victim. And what is the conversation with a person who, believes that compromise is bad, that, a dignified conversation is actually bad and what I'm not certain is, does that person feel better when they express the anger? Because they might.
Scott:Or do they actually think that expressing anger is more effective than in their view perhaps holding it back and filtering it and not just screaming outrage to the world, but trying to convince. And it makes me wonder, do they really value, do they see something good in being aggressive or are they fundamentally scared that if they try the rational path and they lose that they're going to lose? I don't know the answer to that.
Shawn:Just want to tug on that a little bit. So it's interesting you frame it that way. For me, historically, I probably would have been on the side of you know, the Palestinians as a people are tied up with, you know, you can't separate at this point. Well and certainly, I think that's Israel's argument is you can't currently separate Hamas from Palestine because, you know, they've woven themselves all throughout Palestinian, what's left of of that society in Gaza. And, you know, they're saying it's impossible to get to Hamas without, you know, going through Palestinians.
Shawn:And that's a whole moral argument that we obviously don't have time for and can't take up here today. But what you got me thinking about is that aggression is you see a lot of passion and a lot of aggression in this discourse for obvious reasons, I think, because anybody who has a pulse and a heart, you know, is like this is just, you know, a heartbreaking situation. It's been going on for so many decades and it's just, you know, it never seems to be in a place of resolution, just maybe a negative piece if we're lucky, right? Like, you know, moments of that negative piece. But there are a couple of people, so I'll cite two examples of people I think are super effective.
Shawn:Both actually happen to be what I would consider to be on the pro Israeli side of this, which is unusual because I do strongly have opinions about what I think is happening right now. I love my Jewish brothers and sisters. Like I said, I'm an Old Testament girl one way or the other. I have a deep reverence for those people. And I have a little DNA in there that, you know, it's very manu, but it's there for me.
Shawn:So, you know, I feel for the situation. But what I see them doing in effect, people who are advocating, there are some people who affect advocate for Israel more effectively than others. Ironically, you'll see fewer, I think, aggressive. Well, no, that's not true. Fewer of the people I listen to.
Shawn:There's probably a lot of people out there who are prose daily who are very aggressive. I'll concede that. But the people I listen to, because again, I tend to not gravitate towards those types. I just see one is a British comedian. They label him, the internet labels him as a British comedian.
Shawn:I'm stunned if he's a comedian because the only time I've ever seen him is giving thoughtful discussion and discourse on Israel and other things. He's like a podcaster too. Konstantin Kissin, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but he lays things out. You can tell his natural personality is pretty chill. Like, don't think he's somebody that gets wildly energetic or not energetic, like excited or not excited.
Shawn:Like, he just kind of maintains like this baseline temperament. He's very easy to listen to. He makes very good cases. And I find myself being very frustrated listening to him because I want to argue with everything he has to say. And so I was just like, oh, Constantine, you're missing the point.
Shawn:Like, oh, Constantine, like, you know, but it is a privilege to listen to him because I'm like, you are a thinking man's, like, you know, debate, you know, partner because, like, I I want to know because I do believe at the heart of it, regardless of what side you're on of that issue, I do believe it's driven by a deep sense of fear and protection, all of these really good instincts, you know, that are just surrounding a really bad, you know, kind of interaction, what's happening. And then the other person is just the opposite, and he's one of the few incendiary people I listen to. But here's the kicker, I listen to him because he's funny. And that's Bill Maher. Bill Maher is the biggest dick.
Shawn:He can be the biggest dick. He is so cocky and you know, and condescending. I find that when he's engaging with somebody, like, you know, there's a soft side to him. He can laugh. You know, He's really clever, he's really witty, nobody would ever fault him that.
Shawn:He's willing to talk to anybody, which out the gate I automatically respect because you can't He went to dinner with President Trump even though he's a huge anti Trumper, you know what I mean? And then it's funny because a lot of his positions these days are not necessarily anti Trump. You know what I mean? It, you know, and so then, of course, now he's getting it from the left, you know? So so he's not making anybody happy, which means you're probably in the right place, you know?
Shawn:But sometimes he gets over overly emotional and agitated about things and he's just difficult and overbearing. And so his guests, you know, sometimes have a hard time get if you are not operating at his mental speed, even if you have the most thoughtful, you know, responsible answer on earth, it's difficult to make it because he does not have patience to wait. You know what I mean? And hear it. So I think aggressive can be good.
Shawn:I think it can be even welcome for me at least, as long as it's channeled in a way that I can still relate to what you're saying and don't feel personally attacked by it. Or even if I feel personally attacked, you're maintaining some semblance of of, you know, levity about the situation, of a sense of humor. You're like, you know, because ultimately then he always comes back to we're just humans. And he's an atheist. He's actually interesting because Bill Maher was raised.
Shawn:His dad was Roman Catholic and his mom was Jewish. So either way, that's a religious upbringing, you know. And so, you know, but now, of course, as an adult, I think he pretty early on, as my understanding, rejected all of it. It was just like, this is But he still asks questions. But so anyway, so I don't know what the answer is.
Shawn:Guess you're challenging me to dig in deeper for what I'm getting bothered by because I don't mind aggression in that context. I don't mind it if there's humor and if it's smart. So maybe those are the criteria. If it's smart and it's humorous, I can deal with it. I think maybe it's when people get so emotionally charged that they lose all semblance of, you know, A, self awareness, B, humor.
Shawn:But three, they're doing it in a way that like if you're on the fence, somebody's turning that off because they're just like, I to get don't lectured at from my own home. If I wanted to get lectured, I could go to my job or I could go to my husband or my wife or my kids. So people don't go to TuneIn to be shamed and to be condescended to. They want to hear something that gives them some sense of like, man, I just I really I want to be able to think of things because I think people are fundamentally good, Scott, and I think we want to do the right thing. It's just it's hard to get the right information and you know anyway, so I don't know if that any of what I said makes any sense at all, but yeah, that's kind of
Scott:where I I would think it does, and I think that it's important to challenge presumptions. And you know we have this language which personally I think is a red herring that's been happening maybe for the last fifteen years, whole confirmation bias thing which is true but it's sort of like saying I'm dehydrated instead of I'm thirsty. You don't need this term to understand that you kind of see things the way you want to see them, each individual does, you see things People have a tendency to try to live in the world they wish existed instead of the world that's actually there because it's hard to deal with reality sometimes, particularly when your reality is not what, not you, but small YU when your reality is not what you want it to be. I think the other thing is across all of humans, not everybody has the same level of intelligence and not everybody has the same strength of personality. And I think that that drives everything too.
Scott:And it's most people are in the middle of the bell curve, but not everybody is. And I'm not suggesting that one side or the other is the problem. I think both sides have struggles. I'm sure it's not easy for Bill Maher to sit there with somebody who can't keep up with them. I'm sure that's very frustrating for you have somebody that, and everybody had classmates, right?
Scott:The person who takes a while to understand, but then really understands. The person who takes a while to understand and then sort of barely understands it. It reminds me, and this is a communication thing, right? I had a boss when I was, at the FBI. He was the special agent in charge of intelligence and I was one of his assistant special agents in charge.
Scott:And I am not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm not the stupidest guy in the world. And when something, matters to me like my job, I really struggled to communicate with this guy and I couldn't understand it. He would say, I need this, this and this. And I would give him a tight four sentence paragraph that described exactly what he wanted to know. And he would look at it and read it and go, I don't understand this.
Scott:And I couldn't understand what he didn't understand. For six months, I over and over and over tried to find the words to get him to understand something. And one day, and I don't know why I did this, but one day he asked me about, some conclusions that had been extrapolated from data. And I started writing a tight four sentence paragraph, and then I thought, this isn't working, I just need to do something different. So I put it in a chart.
Scott:I put it in a pie chart, I think, and then, did one sentence on what the extracted, data meant. And I handed it to him and he went like this. He took it, he looked, he put it down, and then he talked for fifteen minutes in detail about that data and he extracted more data from it than I did and I'd had two days with the same data. And what it was, was his brain worked visually, not with words. My brain works with words.
Scott:That's why I found myself, in college studying history and then going to law school and being a trial attorney. It's all about words. And what I didn't realize is that he didn't function with words. He functioned visually with charts. And I'm like, okay, know communicate And how with this so when he would ask me anything, I would have my people find some way to put it in a chart.
Scott:And he was absolutely brilliant. He could see through things and he became really useful, for lack of a better word, to me. Because when I didn't understand something, I would put in a chart, give it to him, and then go talk to him about it, and he would help me to understand what I needed to understand. Wow. That's That's how people function and so I think continuing to work through to get into another person's brain is important, but at the same time, it's important to me.
Scott:And it's very easy for me to say, well, if it's important to me, it's important to everybody. And here's Scott Olsen's solutions to the world. You just need to see it Scott Olsen's way. And I gotta understand that whoever is on which side of the issues of the day, Russia and Ukraine, Palestine and Israel, the issues of, you know, yesterday, what caused World War two? What caused World War one?
Scott:Why did The US go into Vietnam? You know, it's chock full of people who really believed they were doing the right thing and really thought they understood. It also reminds me of raising my kids, this whole arguing thing, violence thing. And I really do believe that it's good to share how you feel. And if you're frustrated, if you just do the Ray Romano thing, oh, I'm very frustrated.
Scott:No one can criticize your tone, but also
Shawn:nobody
Scott:really believes you. When you have this range of intelligence and this range of personality, the person that has a quieter personality, my old man, rest his soul, lived till he was 91, And he was a physically big man, he was over six feet tall and two fifty, two sixty, played Santa Claus without any padding, kind of big dude. But he had a very small personality. Nobody noticed when he walked into a room and there was a certain level of frustration that he would have when he wasn't getting the things that he needed, but he didn't have the force of personality to get it and so he would be frustrated and maybe lose his temper a little bit, but then he would just move on and that's who he was and it's very easy to look at somebody like that and go, Oh, well, you're a less capable person. And I think that is not true.
Scott:And I think that a person can have a mild personality, a small personality and still be extraordinarily capable if they understand how to be that person. And so when we're in this current context where the value seems to be yelling and the value seems to be not compromising, then we really get stuck and I think people agree that being stuck isn't good. So when my kids were little, like under the age of 10, have three kids, and it was usually the two younger ones, my son and my youngest daughter. I'm sitting on a Saturday morning having coffee, reading a newspaper or watching TV and I would hear the argument starting and then pretty soon it would be, Dad! One of them would come running to me and then I would be on the hook for negotiating a settlement.
Scott:Settlement of peace. I did it a couple times and then I realized that when I negotiated a settlement they would keep arguing. So I would say, well, here's the outcome and then they would go argue about that and they would come back and I'm like, I don't wanna do this anymore. So what I started doing was, and they were probably six and eight at the time, I said, Okay, it sounds like you guys have a problem, so go in the living room and sit on the couch and figure it out. And you can't hit each other, but also you cannot get off the couch until you figure this out and bring the solution to me.
Scott:And if I approve the solution, then you're good. If I don't approve the solution, then you're back on the couch. Because what they would do is they would just go on the couch and go, let's not do this anymore. And then they would come back, dad, we're just not gonna do this anymore. No, that's I not a
Shawn:love that.
Scott:And they would actually come up with really creative solutions to their problems. I mean, they're in the kitchen and one of them is making a bowl of cereal and the other one's making toast and they start yelling at each other. And I would send them on the couch and they would come back and one of them say, Well, I just really wanted the kitchen to myself. And he came in and he was ruining it for me, I got mad. And he would go, Yeah, I mean, I understand that.
Scott:And so our solution is I'm just gonna come in and get my bowl of cereal and leave. And then if it's okay with you, dad, I'm just gonna eat my bowl of cereal in the living room. I'm like, okay, that gets us there. But the funny thing was, as time went on, I'd hear him start yelling, and then one of them would go, shh. Dad's gonna send us on couch.
Shawn:To the couch.
Scott:Let's, you know, let's just go upstairs and figure this out because I don't wanna be on the couch.
Shawn:Scott, you may have just resolved, like you may have just provided the pathway to resolving the Israeli Palestinian crisis. Not even kidding. No, can you, no, like you think I'm kidding. Like, how insane would it be if you had two delegations not
Scott:made
Shawn:of politicians, not made of conspiring entrenched people, but just like a representative sample of the two different peoples who basically got put in a couch, you know what I mean? It's put on the couch and basically said like, come up with a creative solution because you know what, your leaders are out of ideas. Yeah. Your Yeah. Leaders are out of ideas.
Shawn:I mean, and who has more at stake than those people who are just trying to live their lives?
Scott:Yeah, yeah, and it might be.
Shawn:I love it.
Scott:Well, that's part of why I kind of stick with my, you know, this is the issue is between Hamas and the Knesset. It's not Israeli Palestinian.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:You know? Yeah. Any more than, you know, there's a tariff issue between Scott Olsen who sits in Seattle and one of my extended cousins who sits in Vancouver, BC. We just wanna be able to get across the border and have a beer together kind of thing. And I think in some ways the world is more complex than that, but in some ways it's just really not.
Shawn:I'm on the side of it's really not. I'm on the side of we've made things that complex, but there's always ways to decomplexify something, right? Especially when you've put your finger in the same light socket for fifty, sixty, eighty years. Know what I mean? Like at some point That's you a just metaphor.
Shawn:Right? Like you at some point you got to think about something outside the box and, you know, in my opinion, and it's not worth anything, you know, obviously, but I love that. Well, I mean, just,
Scott:you know, like the Knesset. Okay. But like, what I by that
Shawn:is like neither Hamas nor the Knesset are interested in what I have to say. But like, you know, but what I would say is that, like, I do think putting this problem in the in the hands of the people whose lives are most impacted by it, not obviously giving them the power of enforcement, but not reconciliation sort of sessions. This is like, we need ideas and we're all suffering and you are the groups most represented by the suffering. So let's engage you and let's have a people summit where we just talk about options.
Scott:A people summit. It's an interesting out of the box concept and maybe that's what we need to move forward
Shawn:Couldn't hurt.
Scott:Is something different. Yeah.
Shawn:Yeah, I mean, at this point, it doesn't get worse than where we're kind of at right now. I mean, it's pretty bad. But what I love about that is, and I know we're kind of rounding up, we got a little bit of a late start, so we have a little bit of time, but, I just, I wanted to also come back to the point that your, was it the example of the couch or was there something you said before that? Now I have to regain my train of thought because then you got me on to this whole people something and I but there was something that I wanted to close with because I thought it was essential. Oh, the balance, you so what you gave an example about something we were talking about like, darn, I lost it.
Shawn:So essentially what you made me realize is that as I'm consuming the media that I consume, as I'm watching people on these podcasts, what I hadn't really thought about or factored in was that they were, oh, it was your dad, maybe how your dad learns or no, no, no, no, not the dad. It was before that you were talking about the boss, the guy who learns by tricks. There it is. Okay. Saved by the bell under the door.
Shawn:Han Solo slid under the door on that one. So that made me realize that maybe I'm looking at this through the wrong lens and maybe that when I see my favorite podcaster start sliding into a different kind of what I would consider to be personality or not personality, I think their personalities are consistent. When I see them harping on something or just being a little bit unnecessarily, in my opinion only, unsavory or unpleasant or just rude, condescending, whatever it is that I have to keep in mind that different consumers will respond to their content in different ways. And the principles are unchanged. They still feel the way that they feel about things.
Shawn:But, you know, Sean enjoys comedy and a cerebral analysis using clear words, not so high up in the intellectual sky that a normal person couldn't understand it. But I'm a Stephen Douglas, I like clear, cogent, respond to the issue. And if you throw humor in it, may have me for life, most likely. Where other people are just, they want to see that passion. They want to see, you know, maybe not bullying.
Shawn:It is easy to go down that pathway. It's a dangerous, slippery slope because once you start going there, the clicks get easier and, you know, it does ratchet up like engagement with your shows. But it's just one tool in the toolkit. Those people learn that way. So for them, as podcasters, I have to assume they're trying to reach as many demographics as possible to respond favorably to their output.
Shawn:And that is a demographic. The people who love being angry, the pitchfork people want that content. That's how they absorb. That's how they absorb, just like your boss absorbed through graphs. You know what I mean?
Scott:And I
Shawn:may not like that, but that doesn't mean it's not valid on some level, you know? And at least for that person who's trying to reach a majority. So I kept thinking it was, oh, but they're going to lose people because, and this goes to your point, presume everybody's like me and wants the same wants it the same way that I want it. So what they're doing is they're threatening to lose me and my demographic, not everybody. And that's why it probably doesn't matter to them because they're just like, you're going like some stuff, you're not going to like some stuff.
Shawn:It's, you know.
Scott:Yeah. And it's going to be interesting to see as we podcast, if that's intentional or not. And I'm skeptical and so I have a hard time thinking, oh, we're gonna be reasonable from minute one to minute 15 and then we're gonna be outraged from minute 16 to minute 22. And then we're gonna be back. Things are, if they're good, if they make sense, then they're more organic, and they're less highly produced, but, to be seen, to be determined.
Shawn:And I agree with you. What I would say is what I think will probably and this will only come with a larger dataset. So meaning, like, after maybe a year worth of content is to go back and to review those sessions and say, okay. Like, you know, I would be willing to bet there's probably going to a natural ebb and flow will emerge where in the course of a conversation, depending on the volatility of the subject matter, like Israeli Palestinian issues, that's going to be very sensitive. And so it may be a slightly more elevated conversation versus, you know, some other noncontroversial sort of topic, organizational management.
Shawn:Like, you know, I don't see either one of us getting overly excited about that. Right. Like, you know, but but yeah, I think it'll be natural. I do think that it would be difficult to fabricate like what you were saying, where it's like, know, I would be willing to bet some really famous podcasters probably have it down to a science and probably potentially do that or could do that if they wanted to. But you're right.
Shawn:I think it'll happen either way. I think it would be impossible to have a podcast where you unless you were just like Constantine kissing. I don't think his tone will ever change, but that's just who he is. Know? So I don't see us you are more temperate than I am, but you're not without personality.
Shawn:I feel bad saying Constantine, he's not without personality. It's just, you know, you do have personality though. So even though you're operating at this temperate level, you still have your emotional up But and
Scott:part of communication is emotion. I mean, if you think of something like Stephen Hawking when he was speaking through a voice box, The content is great but it's difficult to really understand who he is if that was the only Stephen Hawking you ever heard and you never heard his actual voice, which I didn't. You don't really understand a person if that person really tries to withdraw their emotions. So I'm not suggesting never be angry, if you're angry, be angry, but understand it has an impact on people and understand that if you have a huge personality and a lot of emotion, that there are going be people around you that are overwhelmed. It's neither good nor bad, it just is.
Scott:And communication, I think, comes from recognizing what is. We get wrapped around the actual level. I have a big personality, so it's bad for me to show that. No, it's not bad, it just has impact. Oh, I have a small personality, so I need to be bigger.
Scott:No, people can tell if you're trying to be something you're not. Anyhow, we're gonna be launching right into the next session, which probably isn't a bad thing, but, yeah, maybe we should just spend some time on the couch and figure all this out.
Shawn:I love that. I love that so much. And thank you for a spirited conversation. It really felt like we talked about a lot more in one hour than we normally do. And it was all really important stuff.
Shawn:And you changed my mind. Well, not changed it, meaning I had one position and then went to another. You have expanded my thinking when I listen to some of these podcasters, get so, why they change, why they're different sometimes. And now I think I better understand that. So thank you.
Shawn:I'll listen with a different set of ears next time.
Scott:That's awesome. I mean, hope people get as much out of this as I do and as you do. Yeah, okay. So until next time.
Shawn:Bye Scott.
Scott:Have a great week.
Shawn:You too.