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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, Shawn.
Shawn:Hey, Scott.
Scott:How are you doing today?
Shawn:I'm doing great. How about yourself?
Scott:I'm doing great. And I'm really excited about today. This is the first episode of the 2 Parachutes Podcast that people are going to see. And so what everybody can expect, as we talked about before we turn the recording on, is we are going to take people through who we are, who Scott Olsen is, who Sean Baker Garcia is, how we're friends and how the 2 Parachutes Podcast came to be. But I want everybody to understand, and I think we want everybody to understand that this today, which is a couple of days before Christmas of twenty twenty five, is really not where this began.
Scott:I think it's important for everybody to understand that we've been recording sessions now for about six months. So to the extent that we're polished at all, know, interrupting each other and talking over each other and doing things that don't work. It's because we've actually been recording now for about six months. But what people are gonna see in this podcast is all the warts and scars. So as people work through our episodes, they're not going to be in chronological order.
Scott:We're starting with a great episode that we call the one, which is episode two on the podcast for those of you who've already looked at us. It's happened. We recorded that about a week after Charlie Kirk was murdered. It's about Charlie Kirk and about a lot of the things that we care about. But you're also going to see in the episodes that are to come, we're not as good at this as we are now.
Scott:And we're going to get better from here, but we talk over each other, we try some things that really don't work, and we're going to intro those things at the beginning in the notes to those episodes, but we're doing it on purpose. We're doing it because what we want to do is share. We want people to understand who and what we are, and why we're doing this podcast. And so we're going to spend the next hour sort of working through that and the way we work. So to start off, you get to start, Shawn, we've agreed in our prep for this.
Scott:And so the question is, who is Shawn Baker Garcia? Who are you, my dear?
Shawn:Well, it's great to be here on this sort of kickoff episode, even though it's not what I would consider to be, as you said, our inaugural episode. But to echo Scott's sentiments is, we thought it was super important to give everybody sort of a foundation of knowledge as you go to absorb our content, we hope. And to give you a little context that on the one hand is, you know, buys us a little capital where we make mistakes in our early, and we probably still make them, that hopefully endears you to us and you sympathize and empathize with our journey as we go to learn a new skillset, leveraging what our current skill sets are. And so segueing from there into who am I? I am a postmenopausal 52 year old woman from the Central Valley Of California, Fresno, that's of course backwards to all of you, born and raised, and now living here in the Washington DC area with my husband and my stepdaughter, and just living our best life, trying to do good things for the world.
Shawn:My background academically is in global security policy, and that quickly translated into running programs for partners abroad, focusing on capacity building. So giving them education and training on areas of their own national security where they could be stronger and develop capabilities. But I got my of my start in the world goes back to that Fresno origin story where, you know, I was, you know, just like any other kid in the late seventies and early eighties, you know, running around like a maniac with very little parental supervision. And I think that my unique experience as a human was just simply and what I bring hopefully to the table in our podcast is just from a very early age, I was in situations where I constantly had to adapt and to other environments, new environments. I think I went to something like eight elementary schools, which is a lot when you're little.
Shawn:Even going to two or three is a lot, you know. And so as somebody who is naturally inherently introverted and shy, that is not the person most people who meet me, certainly not the person you met in Baghdad in 2014 or '13, whenever it was we met Scott. But that is because I have been conditioned from a very young age to, you know, be in front of people and be speaking and engaging, even if it's exhausting emotionally and mentally for me. The podcast for me represents something I've been wanting to do for a really long time because it's how I enjoy getting a lot of my news content these days and just learning about the world and culturally, you know, just being entertained by the antics that, you know, our fellow human beings are putting out on the waves. And I'd love to be part of contributing something meaningful and useful to, you know, the podcast community, which I think is where the direction, you know, the pointer is headed for a lot of how people consume their their entertainment, their news and just, you know, other content.
Shawn:So for me, it's an outlet to express myself creatively, to contribute a little bit about what I know to the world in a hopefully interesting conversation forum. And so with that, I will pass it over to you, Scott, to introduce yourself to the community.
Scott:Well, that's awesome. And what is about to happen is what we do, right? I'm not ready to talk about me yet and one of the things that you'll find that we do when you're listening to us is one of us is going to take us down a path and we try and steer clear rabbit holes, but there's a lot more to you, and certainly a lot more to you or anyone that can be summarized in a few minutes. But I'm really curious about how you got from your sort of post high school education into college, how you got from college to State Department. Because as you indicated, we were both assigned to US Embassy Baghdad, and that was long before you started establishing your own nonprofits, and sort of going from a freelancer to the CEO of your own company and being a serial entrepreneur.
Scott:When I met you, you're with State Department, and you're doing some cool stuff. What's that part of the story?
Shawn:Yeah, so I guess the part I did leave out was just, you know, sort of like the Batman origin story. Like, how did I land in that career? Like, you know, global security, like caped crusader, you know, fighting the good fight on behalf of humanity, you know, if I had to kind of summarize what my goal was. But it really did start sort of as a child with the whole Cold War environment. And it was a really I was a sensitive kid.
Shawn:I felt things very deeply. When I saw news and heard adults talking, I tended to understand as well a lot of what was being discussed and, you know, I sort of emotionally absorbed the stress and the anxieties. I think that a lot of people might have had around that time, both personally from sort of a tumultuous home life, but also, which is implied by my number of schools changed. But then also just in terms of what was happening in the 1980s, that was a very powerful decade for current events. And, from a young age, I was just just aware.
Shawn:I I knew about what, you know, for example, the Palestinian Israeli crisis was or the conflict. I, you know, I was aware of sort of the differences between, you know, Jewish and Christianity and Islam, all of these different sort of things that maybe most five to 10 year olds aren't really as savvy about. But I did know. And so I was very traumatized by the Cold War. I would have nightmares, recurring nightmares for about, I don't know, I think between the ages of like eight or nine to like maybe 11 or 12.
Shawn:Particularly that period was a little bit sort of spicy for me. And, you know, I can just remember thinking to myself, you know, something along the lines of why are the adults letting this kind of happen? Right. It was really scary for a kid to have to to to kind of grapple with the idea that at any moment we could be annihilated by a nuclear warhead. And I knew exactly what that meant.
Shawn:And I, you know, and our drills, you know, under the table and, you know, the the silo sirens going on. I mean, it's just it's horrible. Later on, you know, I mean, so I pursued all of that. Like, you know, a lot of the books I would read were history books and, you know, political science type books. And then as I made my way through high school, I was very involved.
Shawn:I was in student leadership. I was freshman class president and I was, you know, model United Nations. And, you know, I did all of the things that kind of would give you an indication that's what I'm interested in. But then I decided the nineties were too excited for school and I just kind of dropped out, you know, of everything, got myself a good paying job with benefits, by the way, without even a college degree and decided to kind of just financially support myself until I felt to me education was a luxury and I didn't have that luxury. I needed to get a job first sustain my physical ability to live.
Shawn:Around the time that I decided to go back was when nineeleven happened. And that was, of course, formative for me as it was for many Americans, particularly in my age group at the time, which would have been, oh, I don't know, I would have been around 30 at that time and maybe a little older. But at any rate, it was or maybe a little younger. So regardless, that was a big deal. And I just thought to myself, Okay, like enough is enough.
Shawn:Like, I would like to no longer be a passive citizen in my own world. I would like to know why these people, meaning Muslims from the Middle East, why they hate us. What what do they think that we've done that's so bad that it would warrant this level of planning and, you know, patience? Right. Because that didn't happen overnight.
Shawn:That was a very thought out campaign of of attack, and it was very complicated and complex. And so I went back to school. I got a degree in history. I focused on The Middle East and Islamic civilization as part of my, you know, focus regional focus area, did a study abroad program in Cairo in 02/2005, and then graduated and rolled right into a master's in global security policy at George Washington University. So that's how I moved to DC from California.
Shawn:And that began my career because then of internship that got me to then I kind of climbed my way from working nonprofit for profit jobs to working directly for the State Department and later the Department of Energy, working on security programs. And specifically, was working in counter WMD nonproliferation, which included, you know, chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, what we call in the community CBRN security. And so that's that's trying to teach people, you know, why chem bio rad nuke things can be dangerous if they get into the wrong hands and how you in your capacity and whatever role you're practicing and where you come into contact with those materials, whether it's a professor in a laboratory to a first responder right on the scene of a hazmat incident, what you can do to, you know, help keep your country safer from people diverting or exploiting those types of materials to do harm in the world. So that's the sort of short origin story from child to adult and, you know, sprinkling the academic with professional resume in between. I hope that answers the question.
Scott:Yeah, it does. And it just makes me remember that from the inside out, when anybody is looking at their own life from the inside out, it just it seems ordinary. But from the outside in, almost everybody's life is fascinating. And it just your trajectory continues to fascinate me, which is one of the reasons that I love doing this podcast because it gives me a chance to ask you questions and hear what you think and run stuff by you. That's part of what we're doing here.
Scott:My turn to do the same thing about me and I'll kind of start where you started. I am 63, almost 64, in another month I'll be 64 year old grandfather. I have three children who are all in their like late 20s early 30s and I've got two grandsons who are grade schoolers. And so the trajectory for me started growing up in Seattle, which is where I currently live now. So I'm kind of the prodigal son returned.
Scott:I left here chasing jobs and came back after being gone for about twenty five years, but I grew up here. My family was in the Boy Scouts, and so I spent a lot of time not doing what you did in school, was not on the student council, I didn't run for any office, but what I did was a lot of stuff in the outdoors, and I spent a bunch of time hiking and climbing with my friends in the Pacific Northwest, which was a great place to do it. The very first job that I got, the first paying job that I got that wasn't pulling weeds in my parents' backyards, was through the Boy Scouts in an outdoor program and they hired me to be a climbing guide on Mount Rainier when I was 15 and so I was young but I had the experience to do it. I was one of you know two or three people that they brought on, which they would do every year to develop their more experienced leaders. If you've ever seen Mount Rainier in a picture, it's not photoshopped, it's a 14,410 foot stratovolcano that sits in mountains that are about 6,000 feet high, and so it dominates the southern skyline from Seattle and I spent a couple of summers on the mountain every week climbing and doing a terrible job at being a leader because I was 15 and I was a rope leader and I was trying to figure it out.
Scott:But that's where a lot of it started for me. And that's where the lens that I look through the world sort of began to form. So a lot of the metaphors that I use and a lot of the way that I explain things come in terms of climbing, which is how do you get to the top of something when you're not sure what the route is? Even though you were there last week, it might have changed. So I did that for a couple of years, they closed that program down, this is the late 70s now, the early 80s I went to a different scout camp, I taught sailing for a while, while I was going to college and then we started an outdoor program there, so I led hiking parties into the Olympic Mountains.
Scott:I too got a history degree from the University of Washington, but for me, when I got done with my history degree, I still didn't really know what I wanted to do. Most of my college years were spent focused on athletics. I was on the crew team, was a rower and you know, like a lot of athletics, we had some good years, we had some bad years. My senior year, the varsity boat and the JV boat, the second boat, which is what I was in, were both undefeated and so we went to Henley and we got a row in Her Majesty's Royal Henley Regatta, which was fantastic trips. First time I'd been outside The United States other than going to Canada.
Scott:And it was, you know, two weeks in The UK racing and touring around. But I realized that with a history degree, could be a history professor, which I didn't really want to do, or I could keep going to school, and so I went to law school. After law school, I became a prosecutor, a deputy prosecutor here in Snohomish County, which is just North of Seattle. And I did that for about six years, I got married, the kids started coming in the early 90s, and I wasn't happy, I wasn't sad, but I wasn't really dialed in to what I wanted to do with my life as a prosecutor, and then fortune smiled on me and I had a witness who was an FBI agent, we got to be friendly and he recruited me and when I found out about the counterintelligence mission in the FBI, I thought that's for me. So I applied, it took a year and a half to get in, and in early nineteen ninety six, my wife and kids went to stay with her parents in New York, out on Long Island where she was from, and I went to Quantico and became an FBI agent, and I was assigned to the FBI field office in Manhattan.
Scott:So, you know, the kid from Seattle is now running around the United Nation community assigned to identify Russian military intelligence officers, GRU officers, that were operating undercover out of the UN, as I have for decades in New York. I was on the ground for nineeleven. I was six blocks away, standing in front of our office building when the first plane flew over and hit the North Tower. I was about a block away in front of the old post office at Church And Vesey when the South Tower collapsed, so I was one of the people that was running out of the fog and life changed, and so I spent twenty one years with the bureau, I did my time at headquarters, learned a bunch of stuff there, came back to New York, they promoted me to assistant special agent in charge at one point, and so I was running programs, counter intelligence programs, across a number of threats. Some, you know, like the Chinese, you can talk about a little bit, some are still classified, and the interesting thing about New York is, you know, there's the presence in New York includes countries that The United States doesn't have diplomatic relationships with, So there are Iranians and North Koreans in New York, even though there aren't any in Washington DC, and just learning how government worked like that was fascinating for me.
Scott:And then 2013 rolls around and I'm looking for something new and different. My kids are all almost off to college or off to college, I was single at the time and so I applied for and was given the job to be the legal attache in Baghdad and the legal attache work is law enforcement liaison, it's establishing and curating the relationship with local law enforcement and intelligence organizations so that when the bureau needs those agencies or those agencies need the bureau, the relationship is already there and it was fascinating and I loved every minute of it, even though you and I sort of went down that difficult road of Al Qaeda in Iraq becoming ISIS, you and I were both on the ground during that big drawdown, lots of controversy, of challenges, and we got out of there. I spent almost two years in The Middle East, and then finished up my career in doing special projects in the FBI's leadership development program, and then retired in 2017, and since then I've sort of been a serial entrepreneur. I've done some leadership training, I've done some private intelligence work for high net worth individuals, tried by myself and with a bunch of partners to do a variety of different things, wrote a book, I partnered with a really remarkable, intelligent young lady called Lisa Garber.
Scott:She's out in Pennsylvania, that's horrible, I can't remember, I think she may be in New Jersey, but she is a cyber security attorney, brilliant, and we wrote a book about how to hire staff for your cyber security component. We're not quite to the point on the 2 Parachutes Podcasts where we're selling stuff, but the book is out there and it's a remarkable book and it is still, even though it's been out there for over five years, it's still relevant today. And it's, you know, another thing that I tried and so when I approached the world and I, you know, having raised kids and now being a part of my grandkids lives and not really feeling like a teacher, not really feeling like a coach, but looking at the world and trying to understand what's going well, I think, what are the challenges, I think, and how can I add value, how can I make it better instead of making it worse, and you look back over the trajectory of your life and you see a lot of times, I see a lot of times for me, where I've gone into a situation and I haven't made it better and I've made it worse and I've broken stuff and I've had to fix stuff and apologize to folks that I've hurt and that sort of thing?
Scott:I'm sure there are a lot of people that are listening to us going well, he needs to apologize to me too, he hasn't gotten around with that', and that's true. But when I look at things, I'm always trying to pull threads, and I see similarities across disciplines. I mean, you look at the religion of Islam, the religion of Christians, the religions of the Jewish tradition, there are some things that are different. There are plenty of areas to disagree, but there are core threads, there are backbones to all three, and they run into the less broadly followed religious traditions as well. There is similar, it's kind of like martial arts, and here I am drawing a thread.
Scott:It's kind of like martial arts and if you go to a martial arts school, I took my son to Taekwondo when he was a kid, He convinced me that I should go to Taekwondo, and so I trained in Taekwondo for ten or twelve years and went and fought in tournaments and did all that. There are so many martial arts schools that will say, you know, come and learn our martial arts because ours is better, and our martial arts is so good it can defeat everybody else'. And my approach is, everybody has one torso, two arms and two legs, with limited exceptions. If you have a functioning body, one torso, two arms and two legs, all martial arts start there. And so there are different theories, different strategies and different ways to proceed, but they're all kind of doing the same thing because they're working with the same raw material.
Scott:And I'm always looking to pull those threads. And so to pull myself to ending where you ended, as we transition into how our partnership for the podcast developed, I've been looking, sometimes actively and sometimes passively for how do I do this? Wrote a book, didn't have the impact, I posted on LinkedIn, spent a year writing stuff, didn't have impact, for me writing is hard, I don't love doing it, it's a chore, but it's funny, you circle around and you know my drug of choice always has been a captive audience in the sound of my own voice, and so when you called and you called me, which is a wonderful experience for me, and said hey, I got this idea. It bloomed into something that I truly do hope that people who are listening to us get value from the things that we talk about, but it is such a wonderful thing for me to have a place to go a couple times a week where I can think and I can speak, because speaking is how I develop my thoughts. Some people write to develop their thoughts, some people think to develop thoughts and I speak.
Scott:So I'm always taking notes, because something tumbles out when you and I are speaking and that's I think where we're trying to get to, but it is, I gain as much value as anybody listening to this gains, and really where we're trying to get to, and now I'm going get ahead of us, is we want people to think, because I think, we, you and I, think that the world is better when people are thoughtful, have opinions, but are thoughtful, and that's why I love this so much. So that's me and, you know, fair opportunity, what did I miss?
Shawn:Or do you want to
Scott:launch into our partnership? It's up to you.
Shawn:Yeah, think you covered so much insofar as I know about you. I will say that it was pleasantly I like being surprised by things that you say because I think that friendships are very, you know, works of art, you know, insofar as there's just always something interesting to look at that, you know, maybe you didn't notice the first time you glanced at it or that over time you notice different things. So, as long as we've known each other, which has been over ten years now, I don't think we've ever exchanged nine eleven where were you stories. So I don't think I knew that about you, which again was an extraordinary. But but and it's and I think the reason why that's the case is because we always have so much we want to talk about that narrowing down what we talk about becomes the priority because even as friends, like we don't you know, it's not like we're talking every single day on the phone or, you know, and so like when we usually did have our occasional, sometimes it was as infrequently as a couple of times a year, Sometimes it was quarterly.
Shawn:Sometimes during different periods of our lives, you know, it might have been monthly, you know. And so what that just tells me is, and hopefully we can convey to the audience, is part of why Scott and I wanted to do this is because of the value that we get out of having these sort of regular conversations with each other, both sort of from just a friendship, personal gratification and, you know, just enjoyment. Then also we frequently had, and of course now continue to have, now we're deliberately curating those conversations that also have some other professional element or objective attached to them. And so what I guess we kind of figured out is that, you know, you've had such an interesting life and there's so much more to you that I'm sure you could say because again, you're a three sixty degree human being with sixty some odd years of life experience. You know, same would go from my side.
Shawn:There's lots we haven't uncovered or revealed about each other in this initial session, but I think that whatever is left will unfold and you will discover as you listen to the podcast. You know, we will reveal a bit of ourself in each of those sessions, in all of our imperfections and dynamism and intellectual aptitude and curiosity. And so we hope that people will enjoy getting to know us in the coming days, weeks, months, years, however long this lasts, or you last as the viewer and the consumer, you may only get through this episode and then be done. Don't know. But if you're in it to win it and you think we're interesting and you want to get to know us, I think that's possible just by being a consumer of our content.
Shawn:And I think that maybe in the interest of time, because I don't know how long, I don't remember actually what time it was when we started this whole recording, but if we're to get through what we wanted to talk about, which is, hey, here's how this evolved into a partnership and here's what the podcast is really about and sort of like why we kind of branded it the way that we did, I'm totally happy to kind of segue into that. And I can give a quick, from my perspective and then kick it over to you for yours. Me, as Scott mentioned, I just, you know, I picked up a phone and called him because it occurred to me, he was like this one constant presence in my life, you know, since twenty thirteen, fourteen, where he saw me through a lot of professional changes and was, you know, a great confidant, allowed me to kind of, you know, sort of run ideas by him and Soundboard and to some extent, you know, vision board for my future professional endeavors. Like him, I became a serial entrepreneur, not really intending to, but that is where life found me.
Shawn:And so it was funny, since about 2015, I'd been wanting to do a podcast because I thought, man, like there are just things that are not being talked about in sort of the broad online community. People were getting sort of worse and worse at communicating with each other. Today, you'll see it in full force. It's like a complete it's like an apocalyptic social media landscape right now where everybody's just blowing each other up. So the online comments are just horrifying.
Shawn:People don't take and cultivate thought. They just react typically and allow themselves to get riled up. In some cases, they probably seek to get riled up. You know, at this point, it's become a bit of a drug, I think, for a lot of people. And so I thought that there was space and room for a show type, you know, podcast where, you know, we just had a discussion with one or more people.
Shawn:I mean, I didn't like the idea of doing it on my own so much, you know, but I really wanted somebody that could be a good counterpart who had sort of a different perspective, might have been a good balance, a yin to my yang kind of a situation. And for whatever reason, it did not occur to me that you were the guy until it smacked me in the head one day, like, oh my gosh, like, you've been having these great conversations for so many years, like, duh, hello. Don't know, God was just like, You are so thick, but like, figure it out. And I'm like, Oh, okay, I get it. So that's when I was probably gonna call you anyway, but I went ahead and brought it up.
Shawn:Know, gratefully from my point of view, didn't even hesitate. Like, it just seemed like a very immediate, that's intriguing, let's keep talking. And then it kind of flowered, or I think the term you used was blossomed from there. And so that's how the partnership formed. Maybe if you wanna take it further, you can, or we can also start segueing into what we decided this was going to be all about.
Scott:Yeah, I mean, do want to speak a little bit to the way we communicate what makes our friendship unique at least to me sort and of a little bit of why we are the way we are when we're speaking together because it's very organic. I remember you know meeting there was this outdoor place at inside US Embassy Baghdad, is sort of this walled fortress. And it's called the Coronation. It's where everybody would meet in the evenings when it would cool down a little bit. And, you know, people are drinking soda, people are drinking booze, and just hanging out and talking and we got acquainted a little bit personally there but also professionally because some of the work that I was doing was pouring over into the work that you were doing and we ended up in one or two sort of working group situations as well but one of the things that struck me with you is I could say what I was thinking without having to really worry about anything other than being polite.
Scott:I didn't have to curate what I was thinking or nuance what I was thinking in a way so that you would either understand it or not be offended by It's not that I was saying a lot of offensive things, but when you're doing the agency to agency, at least that's what we call it in the bureau, everybody has different command structures, different bosses, different agendas, different different and it's really easy for folks to very quickly get personal and get offended because everybody's under a lot of pressure and I was able to come to you and get honest feedback, which I found to be extraordinarily valuable. Now, move forward to, I got back and was at FBI headquarters, I'm in Washington DC, you got back from overseas, you're now in Washington DC, I'm getting ready to retire, but I'm not retired yet, you're beginning to launch the first of a couple of your companies and we still have that connection, and it's the what do you think connection, and what's really interesting is, I think there's not enough of that in the world and the reason there's not enough of that in the world, I don't know, but I know that it's been rare for me, I have a couple of old friends that I've known for forty years which is crazy to have known anybody for that long but they know you well enough and you know them well enough that there's sort of, I don't know if it's forgiveness or it's safety or whatever because they understand where you're coming from so they get past the language that you're using and for us I've always felt like we got past the language and it's not that you wouldn't say or I wouldn't say, woah, if someone else is listening to this, that's not good, but a couple of weeks ago as we were doing some prep work, you said something which impacted me enough that I wrote it down and this is kind of what resonates with me when it comes to our connection, you said to me that when we speak, I create art in your head, we create art in the other person's head and I think that's the beginning of this is if you can find a person, if you can find people who make you think and you make them think, one of my phrases is what shakes loose, what thoughts shake loose, because what's interesting is when you're talking to somebody about something interesting, what's boring is when you're talking to somebody about something that's interesting to them and not you and so we have that sort of special place in each other's brain, our hearts are elsewhere but our brains are in tune is what it feels like and so when you called me and said 'hey I got this idea' what was great is that the timing was very good for me because I had finally gotten to the point where I'm not a consumer of podcasts but it was like oh I've tried everything else, this might be the outlet because it's talking And it was funny because you process in terms of, you know, you're a little thick headed and you didn't figure out that you should talk to me and you would actually try to do this with a couple of other people.
Scott:But I think I got to own part of that because if you had called me two years ago, I might not have been open to it. I remember, it was probably three years ago, you called and asked me to be on the board of your company. At that point I said, you know, you're a year too late because I'm getting out of that business and I'll still be here for you, but I can't commit to being on your board because I'm off doing other things. So that timing didn't work, but this timing did. And I don't know
Shawn:if
Scott:your perspective matches my perspective on that, but it's, you know, when you have a confluence, you know, a zipper works if both sides are in a line, not if just one side's in a line.
Shawn:Well, and I'll just contribute to that, that I see us as all on God's timing. For me, deeply faithful. And I really try to listen for what God is trying to call me to do in my life and how to be a good servant of the Lord. And for me, I'm always telling other people kind of what you're just saying, which is like, oh, there's I had a buddy this this morning on a call, you know, kind of beating himself up over. I wish I had done this last year and we kind of maybe avoided some of the mess that we found ourselves in earlier this year.
Shawn:And I said, you know, it's all in the Lord's timing, man. Like, there's a reason, right? There's a reason for it. And and and it's exactly as you stated there. You you you probably weren't in the right season, you know?
Shawn:And maybe the plan was that I would continue to hit dead ends until you were ready kind of a thing, you know? So I just look at it that way because I think that makes imminent sense. And, you know, I just I don't feel like there are any accidents or mistakes on this. You know, we'll do what we think we're being called to do and what we think is going to bring value to the world. And I agree going back to if I could just quickly close out on that idea of of, you know, that creating art in someone's head.
Shawn:What I think is so wonderful about our conversations is, you know, when you say a thing, it what I meant by that was that it's like two musicians sitting down to sort of jam. You know what I mean? This is the equivalent for us of a jam session. So we're you know, where if music is the output of that jam session, you know, which then goes on to maybe sell or not, You know, for us, it's the podcast is the output of the jam session, which is the our two brains kind of synchronizing and creating that art, that unique sort of product out of kind of what we're discussing. What I think consumers may at first find a little bit unfamiliar, but hopefully will increasingly get comfortable with, and maybe we'll just get better at doing this as well, which helps.
Shawn:But we're not here to like sell you a an opinion or, you know, to at least from my perspective, like, you know, if by consuming our content, you go and change your thoughts or your feelings on certain topics, that's great. Like, I mean, hopefully you find this as just an additional data point in your journey, you know, to come to truth. But as mere mortals, I don't profess to have the answers to all solutions. Like with most humans, I have evolved in my thoughts, feelings, views, perspectives and beliefs over the years. And so the Shawn you see today, you know, while at my core, I would like to believe, and I think it's true, I'm the same person I've always been fundamentally, you know, how I express myself in that truth, it takes sometimes different manifestations, right, in sort of my behavioral practices and spiritual belief practices.
Shawn:So but still the same person, you know, I still care a lot about the world. I don't want people to be subject to, you know, horrifying atrocities. And I love animals and I love I love adventuring. And, you know, I love being out in the world and with people who I deeply care about. But, you know, Scott, I don't know.
Shawn:Do you feel so that's our partnership, I think, in a pretty good sort of nutshell. We did sort of delve into now as we I can feel myself naturally gravitating towards the podcast's purpose, you know, aside from just, you know, sort of catering to our need for creative outlet and, you know, to produce art because I think we're both creative types and have a lot to contribute to to the world and and to society. How would you sort of characterize, you know, what is this what is 2 Parachutes Podcast really about?
Scott:So I love that because you're sitting in my brain and I two things that you've mentioned were the things that I was going to rely on to segue us across to, you know, what's the brand? Why is it 2 Parachutes Podcast? Why is it 2PP? How are we trying to, you know, set the table, recognizing that the food is always going to be different, but we're always going to set the table the same. And one of the things that I appreciate very much about you is your willingness to share your faith and your faith journey.
Scott:Because I do not live in that world. I have been a part of that world. I was raised in a congregational church. I was baptized by full immersion when I was 14, in the Baptist church that my grandparents went to. My first wife was Catholic.
Scott:My children were raised Catholic. I've received the sacrament of marriage from the Catholic church. I attended Mass for probably fifteen years. So I understand religion and I understand faith and I have my version of faith, but it is very different from your path and your faith and how rooted you are in that and I think that is part of what gets us to parachutes. The other thing that you made a bit of a comment about is, you know, how you've changed over the years, you know, and you grow and you're sort of still the same person, but it manifests itself differently in different situations and I think that's part of what we're trying to recognize as well, is that as people spend more time alive, they change and some people change a lot, some people don't change much.
Scott:I used to make a joke when I was doing executive coaching and teaching leadership with more of my time than I am now, which is to say that you know, some people have twenty years of experience, some people have one year of experience 20 times and so some people actively grow and some people don't and it's something that is one of the threads that goes through a lot of the episodes that we've already recorded, which is this notion of it's really important to be thoughtful. It's really important to have opinions, but it's also really important to continue to be thoughtful and to change your mind and I think one of the things that we see certainly in the political world is that if you change your mind, if you say something different, that's bad and then the labels come, right? You're a flip flopper and you're this bad thing and you don't stand for anything and there are certainly people out there that are flip floppers, people who will say what they think this particular audience wants to hear. But there is a ton of value in taking in new information and allowing that new information to change you and sort of unrepentantly saying I used to think this and now I think that and here's why and so when we talked about what are we going to call this, I think one of the things that we were trying to create with the brand is we have an anchor, we are going to talk about the things that we talk about, but we want to recognize that there's more in that conversation that we don't control than we're maybe really comfortably recognizing and we did a bunch of sort of metaphor talking about, you know, currents in rivers and waves in the ocean and stuff, but the great thing about two parachutes is this concept that we are willingly jumping out of a perfectly good plane, not because you know we want to take the risk but there's value in jumping and seeing where the environment pushes you.
Scott:You know, you push me, I push you, Somebody gave us feedback on an episode three episodes before is gonna say this and we're gonna draw that into our conversation, but it's two parachutes because we recognize that we're not walking down a road. We are going into an environment that's inherently unsafe, we're mitigating the risk, but we're also willingly allowing ourselves to be pushed around by the wind, which you can't control all that well when you're under a parachute. And so, that's sort of my reason for agreeing to calling this 2 Parachutes Podcast and establish that as our brand. And I'm curious as to how you got there.
Shawn:So I agree with all of sort of what you just said. I would add to it that for me, you know, you and I making a deliberate choice is us as humans having free will to choose to discuss something specific and then knowing that that discussion will evolve based on where the currents of the wind push us. That's one way to look at the metaphor. I think another way to look at the metaphor is that we represent the humans who can control how we we might not be able to control where we're going to land or, you know, exactly. I think there's a little bit of control there just based off of, you know, what I understand out of how people plan.
Shawn:You know, people don't jump out of planes and then not end up landing in a tree. So you should have some control over at least knowing you're going to have a safe landing. But I think for me, what the wind also is an indicator of, which those currents that jostle you around as you're trying to get yourself navigated down to the earth is, like you said, when you're walking, there are things that can impact you in your environment. Like, you know, a cougar could jump out and attack you and then that's going to impact your walk. You know, you could a rainstorm could happen.
Shawn:Like lots of things could impact. But when you're in the sky like that, it's like, you know, it's it's it's also to me kind of conveying this idea that like whatever we're lived, our lived experiences is happening to us. We're not controlling that. And so so sometimes the conversation is is, you know, the jump is the conversation. The wind is sort of the environment we found ourselves in.
Shawn:And like, you know, again, you mentioned the Charlie Kirk episode, the one. Right? Like, I didn't know that was going to happen. We didn't know that was going to happen. So that is an uncontrollable.
Shawn:We're not. I don't think we were being reactive, but we were responding to that environmental change. Right. And so letting that kind of direct where we were going to jump for the day, we're going to go to that meadow instead of that one. You know what I mean?
Shawn:Kind of kind of a situation. And so so, yeah, so I so I think that the metaphor still stands. I don't remember how I came up. I know there was a thought process between 2 Parachutes Podcast, I don't remember exactly what this full origin story there was, how we ended up exactly to that specific name. But what I did remember is that once we got there, I loved doing the co creation on the logo and the color scheme.
Shawn:You know, I have to say that it was just such an interesting creative experiment because I would not on my own have landed there, I don't think. But what that logo represents is sort of the melding of both terms of color schemes and visual aesthetic. And, you know, because there's so many infinite ways to create a logo or a graphic. And so we had a good partner in my good speaking of knowing people for thirty some odd years, you know, Nikki, who's back in California, shout out to Kolmar Design. Thank you, Nikki, for a wonderful, you know, logo.
Shawn:It was just a delight to to co create that and provide something that really captured both the motion, but also who we are as people. I just think it's such an optimistic little logo. I love it.
Scott:Oh yeah, me too. It's funny when to prepare for this episode, I went back and looked at some of the beginnings of it and nothing that either one of us proposed got us there. Or none of the things that either one of us proposed really ended up in the final logo. And so, yeah, shout out to Nikki, she took our intent and made it real and that's an art form and a skill that I certainly don't possess, that I value highly, but it's, you know, willing to be in an environment that you don't control, I think is unusual today and it's what the world needs. I mean, when doom scrolling, whatever algorithm you're using, whether it's a big word model in AI or the older versions, they're pushing you what you're comfortable with and when's the last time you went out into the world just to see who you might run into, just to see, you know, sort of, not what's similar, but what's different, you know, go to a place to eat that's different, go to a place and don't have a glass of wine or a glass of gin, you know, have a really good root beer and comes, see what's different.
Scott:There's value in being uncomfortable, not from the standpoint of I'm uncomfortable, so I need to solve it, So I'll be comfortable. But there's value in recognizing that being uncomfortable and getting comfortable being uncomfortable is what makes us grow as people. And we need to find the dignity in that and get away from the panic and the ridicule of it. And that's part of this metaphor of going to a dinner party where you don't know anybody, jumping out of an airplane where maybe you've jumped 100 times before, but all that means is that you really know what you control and what you don't, having it be okay. And we're going to spend a lot of time with that metaphor, because metaphors are what help people understand.
Scott:I mean, fundamentally, and I'm going to pull a little bit of thread here and we're running out of time, but communicating by making noises with our mouths, which is if you were going to develop a way to move information from one place to another, making noise based on agreement of what those noises mean is one of the most inefficient ways to do it, but it's the path that matters. It's, you know, from 13,000 feet to the ground that makes it fulfilling, not necessarily just in joy, makes it fulfilling, and I think that's what we want. When somebody finishes one of our episodes, we want them thinking and we want them fulfilled. We want them happy and fulfilled that they're thinking, because we're going to be better if you think, if I think, and if all of you listening to us think and then speak, which is what pretty much every old person told every young person ever. Think before you speak, you know, everybody's grandma or grandpa said that.
Shawn:That's the truth. That's I guess us in a nutshell. That's our partnership in a nutshell. That's the podcast in a nutshell. I think, you know, the last thing I would say, and then I'll hand it over to you to kind of close this out, is just that this is our attempt to put goodness into the world to illustrate what good constructive conversation can and should be like.
Shawn:Going to introduce there are going to be times when Scott and I are in lockstep on things. There's going be times where we bring a different perspective or interpret something differently. And that's okay. Our conclusion or our goal is not to convince the other person of any particular thought process or, you know, point of view, but rather to just demonstrate good, healthy, old fashioned human communication. And, you know, what we, of course, we're sure most of you definitely, you know, think we're not suggesting you don't, but just looking, listening to our podcast.
Shawn:Hopefully what we, you know, want it to do is to just present you with a different way to do that thinking on certain topics and, you know, on how we see the world and operate within it. And yeah, we just we hope, you know, you find it interesting and you learn something. We learn and again, I'll just go back to what you said very early on is, you know, Scott, you said you spoke for yourself, saying like you always get something out of conversations that we have, whether it was the podcast or even before we started all of this. It's the same for me, you know? I don't think that our Scott and Shawn as two distinct individuals in the world, I don't think we're all that different from so many of you out there.
Shawn:And so if we're getting something out of it, especially something as much as I think we are, as much as I think we think we are, then we should share that. You know, I feel like we have kind of a it's incumbent on us to share that with others because you all might find something useful out of that. We're all kind of in this together. So, you know, whatever we can do our little part to kind of occupy some useful space in your day, I hope we can do that. And so, Scott, you know, I'll hand it over to you for the big finish and welcome aboard for those who stay, you know.
Scott:Well, I got at this point is thank you for that wrap up. Was wonderful. That's where we're trying to get to. Everybody out there, if you got time, click into the next episode. We'd love to tickle your brain a little bit, see what thoughts tumble out and let us know.
Scott:So, all right.
Shawn:That
Scott:wraps us up for this one. See you on the next one, Sean.