Just The Facts
Hello everybody and welcome back in to another episode of the 2 Parachutes Podcast. I am one of your co hosts, Scott Olson. I'm still a retired FBI agent and a private investigator. With me, as always, is the other half of this team.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Hey, Scott. It's Sean Baker Garcia here, and I am still the happy accidental CEO obsessed with all things global and national security. So with that, I'll kick it back to you, and let's see what we're gonna talk about today.
Scott Olson:Yeah, so I just always like listening to you introduce yourself, because you're the happy accidental, emphasis on happy. Yeah. I'm kind of curious about today, we were doing some planning earlier in the week. And you had told me that recently you weren't quite so happy because you had gotten the Shingrix vaccination, the second phase, and you know, for those of you that aren't old enough to know what this is, us old folks get advised that shingles can come back around. I'm pretty sure shingles is sort of the second iteration of chickenpox and it's supposed to be hugely unpleasant.
Scott Olson:I have had both of the shingle shots, but you as somebody who had not gotten the second one yet, you indicated that it kind of put you on your backside, the
Shawn Baker-Garcia:second shot,
Scott Olson:and this for a person, and this is my question to you, and this is, I find this highly entertaining, for a person who has never gotten a flu shot, you decided to get this Shingrix vaccine.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:I did.
Scott Olson:So we are gonna launch into the vaccination world, And, you know, with our usual angle of talking about how to talk about it. I'm thrilled to get a better understanding of how no way I don't need a flu shot. Ended up being in bed for forty eight hours on a Shingrix shot, so
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Yeah.
Scott Olson:For you.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Well, Scott, I'm a complex creature, I guess, like, you know, and not easily sort of falling into any one pro or anti vax camp for sure. And that got us to thinking a bit about, you know, how have we gotten to this point in our national discourse where we simply don't have the space or luxury, it seems much these days, to have a nuanced position on vaccines generally, or specifically on certain types of vaccines, whether that's shingles, as we've been discussing, or the flu shot, or, you know, some of the more recent, you know, discussion around COVID vaccinations and and boosters, etcetera. And then, of course, there's all the the old school usual suspects that we've all got, you know, the polio and mumps and rubella and all that. But you're absolutely right. I was somebody who well, and to this day, and and I still don't have any plans to get ever get a flu shot.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Now I I say I've never gotten one in my life. I think that's true based on my, like, brittle memory. You know? But but it's possible somewhere along the line in some of my predeployments, you know, to to The Middle East and Asia and stuff. I may have gotten one at some point, but but the point is is is I don't get it regularly by any means.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Like, I you know, and I can't remember ever having actively went in and said, nope. I'm going in for the flu shot this this season. Mhmm. Why I feel that way is just comes down to, you know, I think initially it was just laziness, probably. I I I didn't have any strong feelings as a young adult, you know, going into my life about vaccines.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:In fact, it was probably one of the things I thought about the least. I I just didn't, you know, I knew I had to get my penicillin, or not my penicillin, sorry. What do they call it? What's the ones that you have to have? It's not rabies.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:There's a really common one that is kind of consequential that I tend to I definitely have that on my little yellow card.
Scott Olson:Probably tetanus.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Tetanus. It's the tetanus one. Yeah. I'm real accident prone, so I like, you know, for any number of reasons, rusty knives, all the things. Like, I always get the tetanus because I'm like, at some point, I'm gonna, like, you know, be grateful I got that.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:But other than that, I haven't unless I've been told, you know, by my employer, you know, which is like the usually the state department had requirements when you traveled on their behalf, you know, as a even as a contractor. You know, okay, so if I'm going to Asia, might get, I don't know, whatever, malaria or something like that. But in general, I I I it's funny. As I've gotten older, I've started to make the deliberate choice that I don't really feel the need to get the flu shot. I don't hardly ever get the flu.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:I you know, and if I do, I can't tell the difference between that and a cold. Like, doesn't keep me down for long, etcetera. Shingles, however, and I told you this before, Scott, I had the unfortunate, like, you know, fortune to be in a hospital bed some years ago next to a woman who came in to the ER with shingles. And she literally, like, screamed for, like, four to six straight hours for however long I was in there. And it was miserable.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:And I was just like and so then, of course, I paid attention because I was like, what is this whole shingles situation and why? I mean, like, it was just heartbreaking listening to her. And, you know, and, you know, being of a certain age, was like, okay, well, I guess I need to pay attention to that. And I spoke with my doctor, and she's like, yeah, you know, when you're when you turn 50 or thereabouts, like, probably is the time to start thinking about it. So I finally just bit the bullet, and I did.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Now I've got to tell you, I was a little nervous, because I'd heard some pretty nasty things about the Shingrix, as you call it, which is I think the brand or the type of vaccine it is. But really unpleasant things from family members, from, you know, people who in my family I know refused to get it. Like, so, I was a little cautious going into it. I was a little trepidatious, I guess you could say. But, first one didn't bother me at all.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:It's a two dose series, you know, you gotta get it, and then two to four months or six months later, you gotta get the second one. And I just wanted to get it over with. So two months went by, and I'm like, nope. Let's do it. Let's get it over with.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:The second one, like well, first of all, that's the first time I'd felt like I had the flu in, like, twenty years. So, you know, I don't know if getting the flu vaccine would have made that less hard, but it was awful. It was miserable. Like, I couldn't lift my arm, just barely lift it, kinda at the hinge, and it was so, so sore. I couldn't even sleep on it.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:None of that. And full on fever, the whole nine yards, I was I was down for the count. So so, yeah, that's that's, you know so the shingles vaccine, I was fine getting because, you know, even though I'd heard it, you know, it was kind of nasty to get it, like it, you know, you would get sick and it wouldn't feel good, I felt the risk the doing the cost benefit analysis, I was like, I'll it. You know what I mean? Like, any potential side effects, you know, to avoid that woman's fate.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Like, because I knew I wouldn't. I'm like, I don't I don't need that in my life. That's for sure. So I'm not gonna tempt fate, but yeah. And, you know, and and now I'm fine.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:You know, it took three days of my life away from me a little bit, but, you know, it's fine. It was over the weekend. I planned for it, you know, to be on the safe side. And and there we are. But I will say I am not a regular COVID booster vaccinator either.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:I got it the first time because everything was crazy, and I felt like, okay, this is a thing. We're all being told to do it. So, I did it. I generally don't have any trepidation about vaccines. I do think that there are quite a few people in this country who probably have better and more direct experience with why they might be trepidatious about over vaccinating.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:And I think those people should be listened to, and their, you know, I don't know, their concerns heard and addressed. Yeah, but there it is. So, and I don't even know why, Scott, I just, you know, for me, the COVID thing, I've caught it a couple of times, even after being vaccinated, but within the first year and a half, right? So it's not even like you can say, Oh, well, didn't get booster, that's why you caught it. Well, no, no, that's not why I caught it, because I got the vaccine, and then like two, three months later, actually caught it.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:So maybe that was it. Maybe I was just like, well, this is kind of nuts. Like, I get the vaccine, and then I get a booster, and then, you know, less than a year later, I'm still catching it anyway. And, you know, honestly, and getting COVID, well, it was probably a little worse than the shingles vaccine. But not too much more.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:You know what I mean? So I don't know. But, yeah. So that's there it is, laid bare for the world to hear. Awesome.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Over to you.
Scott Olson:Yeah, I mean, that's it. There's there's so much there as usual. So I'm going to sort of make my pick of, you know, which gust of wind to push my parachute, and we'll see if this resonates with you. Seems to me that the, you know, what's sort of shaking loose in my brain listening to you is what I would call the awareness thing. So there are a number of facets to this particular gemstone that we're looking at, the awareness thing.
Scott Olson:I wonder if you hadn't had the experience of actually seeing somebody with shingles, would that have changed your decision? And I think that the personal impact of things actually changes a person's opinion in stronger ways and deeper ways than a lot of people recognize. And what I would offer on the other side of that is the thing that we see often in the world that, you know, childhood vaccines cause autism. And there's a great debate about that and I think part of the debate is driven by the parents that are dealing with kids who have autism and you know having raised three kids was always concerned about whether my children as they were born and then as they developed in their very early years, you know, are any of these things that can really impact a family going to happen to my kids? And I was very fortunate that, like most people, my kids are normal and they didn't have any of these significant health problems.
Scott Olson:But looking at the experience of having a child that has something like autism or has these other health issues, you know, we talk a lot about the amygdala, the reptile brain, the reactive brain versus the analytic brain, and when you are impacted with something that changes your life, you're in that amygdala, and you are looking for explanations, and that the real challenge is, you know, if you see somebody with shingles or you don't, that's gonna drive a decision that in some ways is more benign than you know, you have a child that has a significant issue and it breaks your heart and you wanna know why and you're looking for those things but since it's emotionally charged and it's immediate and it is a threat, it's very easy to be in the confirmation bias. This is the only thing that my child was exposed to, therefore. It's the, I'm going to give you Latin now, post hoc ergo proctor hoc, which is a legal term that means after this, therefore because of this, and sometimes it follows, and sometimes it doesn't, and part of the challenge, and this is going to pull us right into COVID, is these are all fight or flight situations.
Scott Olson:These are reactive brain situations, and you look at what happened with COVID, COVID came through and it very immediately became a reactive brain issue. Oh my, this thing is coming around the world separate and apart from, you know, whether it was a wet market or a lab, it's this thing that's coming around the world, and nobody really knew whether it was immediately dangerous or not. It turns out that it was very dangerous for people that had compromised immune systems and compromised health, so the very young whose immune systems weren't fully developed yet, and the very old who had comorbidities. But, you know, people like you and me, I'm in my mid 60s, I got COVID at least once, and I'm like you, my experience was I got both shots, six months later I got COVID, or a year later I got COVID, and for me it was a bad cold, even though I was technically close to the age where it became threatening, you got good genetics and get to the gym regularly, you know, you're you're going to be healthy and again I'm happy to be the beneficiary of good fortune, but the the fact of the matter is as a country and as a world we rushed out to, you know, we gotta save the world from the bubonic plague, or, you know, the dark ages that are coming, and we did a lot of things in that rush that, in hindsight, were incorrect.
Scott Olson:The question then becomes, and this is the 2 Parachutes Podcast question, you know, what do you do when people disagree? And we're not disagreeing about who you should vote for. The impact of putting a chemical into your body is much more personal and much higher impact than whether your candidate of choice wins or loses the election, and it doesn't matter if you were one of the people crying that Donald Trump got elected the first time or the second time. If you were one of the people that were crying that Joe Biden got elected or that Hillary Clinton didn't get elected.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Yeah.
Scott Olson:That is still less impactful, even though it's impactful, than, you know, putting something in your body, and so the question becomes, how do you decide what to do when the circumstance is so rapidly evolving that you may not have good facts, and then people that are, you know, trying to do the right thing, whether they're in government or not, are struggling with what to do, and what do we do with people who agree? I mean, I saw plenty of stories where, you know, people who didn't get the COVID vaccination, you know, were socially shunned, not invited to the party. If you wouldn't mask up, you were socially shunned, and it turns out that none of those things were effective, but they had a huge desperate impact on people who didn't agree, and the discourse was not civil. So I don't know if that shakes anything loose for you, but it frames this question of, you know, what do we do when we're in our amygdala and we don't have facts?
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Right.
Scott Olson:Whether we agree on those facts or not, we just, we don't have good facts.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Well, think that part of what my take on this is simply that because of the tribalization of our American society into two political camps, regardless of whether half the country wants to be in one or the other, you know, I would argue probably they don't want that. People like myself certainly don't want that, because I'm much more complex than a red or a blue jersey, right? Like, you know, but part of the problem is that we've, we have let those two partisan platforms dominate the discourse on very complicated societal issues, like, you know, vaccines and our public health. And so, you know, it's minimized the arguments to, you know, you're either pro vaxx or anti vaxx, and then that's, you know, that's it. And so the conversation is, oh, you lose all credibility depending on which, you know, camp you you you, you know, are perceived to fall into.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:So it's a bit of a loyalty test. Right? Like, you know, how you come down on vaccines. But there's no room for people like me who I am probably very middle of the road on this. Again, there are some that I just don't feel the need to get, and I probably will not get in the future, like future COVID boosters or the flu vaccine, I'm done.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Like, I don't have any you know, I I just don't feel compelled to do it. You know? And that's my choice, and I don't really have to defend it to anybody, you know, so long as it remains my free will. Now if my government all of a sudden decides that it's gonna take that free will choice away from me, then then we're in a different conversation paradigm. So, you know, but what it does is it also reduces the sophistication of the conversation surrounding these issues so that otherwise very reasonable people, you know, are not heard or not paid attention to, and they're relegated to kind of, you know, just being an idiot depending on what position they come down on.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Because half of the country thinks the other half are idiots at all times. Right? So I just I just must be an idiot all the time, Scott, because that's how you know what I mean? Because I you know, there's things over here I like. There's things over here I like.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:You know? And I and I think that the other thing that I would say is that, you know, asking questions, like an average citizen trying to ask questions and get clarity on any medical kind of intervention should be perceived as a normal citizen duty of that citizen. Right? Like, and it shouldn't be treated like some kind of red flag, you know, that says, you know, oh, you don't believe in science. Well, science isn't a belief system.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:It's a process. And what I want to be able to do is have trust in the process. And if what I'm saying is that I have questions about this process that have led to this conclusion, that should not be treated with vitriol and disdain. That should be embraced as good patriotism because you are, you know because here's the other thing. You and I, before we started recording, we were just kind of shooting the breeze about our respective last couple of days, and I had mentioned that I had had a kind of a a really weird conflict with my primary care physician's office, you know, yesterday, and that it was really upsetting because I've been with this doctor for almost twenty years.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:I love her. I think she's an amazing doctor, but her staff really, really did me dirty. You know what I mean? And for no discernible reason that I could understand. And so rather than you know, I felt like rather than her come in and try to say, hey.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:I I I you know, sorry this happened. Like, we're we're working to resolve it. You know, it was kind of like she just basically completely took evasive maneuvers and and, you know, changed the entire discussion of something else. And so, you know, so I was a little bit already having the thought that maybe I need to change doctors. You know, it was about time, you know, because of the distance, kind of far from where I live.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:And, you know, while I love her, I kind of get the sense that, you know, she might be retiring at some point in the near future, and may as well start the hunt for a new primary care physician anyway. Well, this expedited that timeline because I was like, well, I'm not gonna you know, she can't even acknowledge, you know, and I won't go into what happened here. But it you know, it was very upsetting. It was very upsetting what happened, and it was very invasive, and it was borderline illegal. You know?
Shawn Baker-Garcia:So I was gonna say, hey. This isn't this isn't acceptable. But what you said in response to that was actually, I think, can apply to this situation as well, which is that, you know, sometimes it's good to shake things up. Sometimes it's good to dust, you know, dust off the playbook and say, let's take a look at these strategies. Are they actually appropriate for this day and age?
Shawn Baker-Garcia:And and, you know, because because everything changes. I mean, you know, yes, of course, you want to learn from history, and you want to trust the good work and the good research and the good sort of science that's been facilitated, you know, that have, you know, led to they being millions, if not more, alive since the 1920s with the, you know, introduction of certain types of vaccines against polio, against smallpox, and all sorts of other things, you know. But at the same time, we live in a very kinetic and evolving, you know, human existence, and so, you know, it doesn't hurt to every now and again take pause and say, well, let's just look at all of the sort of variables surrounding this particular human response to these conditions, right? And I think, you know, that's not irresponsible, and that's just not blind loyalty to something that, you know, somebody told you to do one hundred years ago. I think that's healthy.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:And it's not to say you didn't trust those people or their work. It's just that we live in a different day, age, and time, and, you know, it's dynamic. So let's take another look, and let's just make sure that we're, you know, we are keeping what we still need, and we're discarding what we don't, and that we're refreshing and doing something new for whatever is in our new sort of, you know, operating condition or environment. But yeah, those are my initial thoughts on it. Yeah, and that's the
Scott Olson:accessibility dynamic. I mean, you start talking about polio and I start thinking about malaria, back when Salk came up with the polio vaccine, there was a certain number of, and I haven't looked this up, but there was anticipated that a certain number of people per 100,000 children that got the polio vaccine would actually contract polio. And the question for today is looking back at that, why did people accept that? How could you possibly inject this stuff into all these children knowing that you were going to hurt a small percentage of them? And the reason why is because the people that were making that decision, the parents of these children saw how many children got polio if they didn't get the vaccination.
Scott Olson:So it was the, you know, in that environment where a huge percentage of children ended up dying or ended up unable to walk because of polio, a much smaller percentage facing that negative consequence was to be preferred. And now, you know, we're in the modern age, having had the benefit of all of the vaccines, we no longer face that stressor. And so we forget what the public health issue was that started it and there's nothing wrong with that. That's rational human behavior, whether it's amygdala behavior or reasoning mind behavior. It's still you're not faced with the person screaming because they have shingles and therefore it's not really on your radar to get the shingles vaccine.
Scott Olson:The question then becomes how do we deal with that and how do we have a dialogue and an exchange with people that we disagree with that is better than is so, is not, is so, is not. And you know for me the flag, the thing that alerts me to a way that we can do this better is if we stop talking about what the facts are. Because if we have an agreed set of facts, my experience and I'd love to hear your experience is that differences of opinion about what the facts mean are much less emotionally charged than if people are arguing about what the facts mean, but they don't have an agreed understanding of the facts. I would say with climate change, and climate change is less emotional an issue now than it was maybe five years ago, and I'm sure that our listeners are going to start taking a piece out of me for that because some of them are going to say, oh no, it's everybody's important. Okay, I get that part.
Scott Olson:But the flag on the play for me is, if people are saying the science is settled, what they're saying is you're not entitled to a different set of facts, you have to take my facts. And yeah, if I accept a climate change advocate's statement of the facts, then I'm probably not going to be that far off on what I infer those facts to mean. But what I want to know as a skeptical person by nature, I mean, I'm an investigator, right? Started as a trial attorney, started as a prosecutor, became an FBI agent, was a counterintelligence operator, worked overseas, there are so many things that I didn't know that I couldn't function unless I did a deep dive into what the facts were, rather than just relying on somebody who may or may not have an agenda telling me what the facts are. So, for example, in the climate change world, we talk about how the planet is warming.
Scott Olson:And my question has always been, how do we know? Well, know, we measured it. Okay, I live on Lake Washington in Seattle and it's a mile wide on average and 25 miles long, it's a big body of water. If I go and take a thermometer and stick it in the lake off of my dock, it'll say, you know, now we're in the spring so it'll be 53 degrees or something like that. Is that the temperature of the lake?
Scott Olson:I mean, lake is huge. Deep down in the lake it'll be colder, up at the surface it'll be warmer, in a shallow part of the lake it'll be warmer still. So what's the temperature? And we're talking about, are we measuring the ambient air? Are we measuring the crust of the earth?
Scott Olson:What are we measuring? And the few times I've had that kind of inquiry conversation with people who are claiming that we're going to die in twelve years from global warming, they actually haven't been able to explain to me how the measuring is done to show that the planet is warming.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:And
Scott Olson:that's a huge red flag for me, because if you can't help me to understand why you think your facts are correct, how can you possibly expect me to agree with you? And the obligation is on the person making the allegation, Whether if we get back to vaccines, vaccines cause autism, great, show me your facts. Vaccines are 100% safe for everyone who gets them, Great, show me your facts. But in terms of how do we proceed with a civil conversation, I think part of what will take the outrage, the ridicule, the emotion out of a conversation is if we pull away from the conclusion, pull away from the inferences and go back to the facts. It's not even asking people why do you think that, but you know, what's the foundation, and it's very telling whether a person is willing to have that discussion or not, and it doesn't mean, in my view, that they're intelligent or not intelligent.
Scott Olson:It means are they sitting in their reactive brain or their analytic brain? Do they actually really understand why they think what they think or do they not? And it's not bad if they don't understand why they think what they think. It's hard to move from your reactive brain to your analytic brain, but it's also really useful, and so interacting with people in the world and wanting to live in the analytic brain and engaging in the conversation based on that desire, I think is part of what leads to civil discourse. You want to raise taxes?
Scott Olson:You know, what are your facts? How much money are we drawing under the current tax scheme? What's the number of dollars? What are we spending the money on? Do we need to spend more?
Scott Olson:Do we need to spend what are the facts? You start talking to any politician, they will probably not want to have that conversation. But that's the conversation we should be having. And it's not emotionally charged, just money.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Well, and so I think that's what keeps bringing me back to the trust question, because in the end, you know, when there's no or significantly diminished trust in the process that leads to the conclusions that inform positions that are being advocated for by these political and media sort of operatives, I think that's that's the beginning of the end. Is is, you know, because then you can't trust any piece of it. That, you know, I don't know how or when this was fully weaponized, but, you know, I just, you know, and again, I just remember Fauci being paraded out by the administration, and just, you know, and it's like, it's not to say you can't and shouldn't use experts to sort of convey important, informed ideas to a public that needs to know. But the problem is that it only works if you can do it in an objectively, like, honest way. And there was a lot surrounding him particularly that I think was not particularly honest or objective.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:But, you know, the other thing on trust that I'll say is and and I don't know, obviously, I wasn't alive in the twenties, so I don't know. But but I I wonder, this is the question, you know, and maybe a soft hypothesis, is that in addition to just seeing the death and destruction caused by diseases like polio and measles and mumps, etcetera, back in those early years of sort of the introduction of vaccines to fight those diseases, I would wager that there may have been a higher trust factor by citizens in their elected officials and in their public health officials, you know, potentially. You know? And and maybe not. May maybe I'm wrong on that point.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Maybe it's always been polarized and tribal and but in just different ways. You know? Like, maybe the Italians didn't trust, you know, the president because it was Kennedy, and he's an Irish. And, you know, I don't know. Like, you know?
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Or or they trusted him because he was Catholic and but not but the Protestants, the, you know, the Western European, Northern Europeans didn't trust them because they were all Protestant. I don't know. But I would say maybe that was another thing is that experts held more esteem maybe back then because they were not seen as political at at the very least, if even they didn't maybe have fully, you know, objective credibility. The other thing is that I wonder if this is sort of a if this is a problem that'll sort of take care of itself in some ways. Right?
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Like, so recently in headlines, you know, I've been seeing that there is a global increase in the case of measles outbreaks. Right? And and, you know, so is it a situation where if we see a resurgence because there's a reaction to over vaccinating, whether it's informed or justified or not, and people stop doing the vaccination, then by extension, you'll see a resurgence of some of those older diseases, and and then you'll start seeing, you know, kids dying again or people dying again, you know, which will then kind of bring them back to that moment that you were pointing to, which is that, well, it it's it's much easier to sort of trust the science when the alternative is very evidently increased, you know, mortality rates for your children and for your loved ones. So so who knows? Maybe if if that becomes a thing, the pendulum will just naturally swing itself back.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:You know? It's possible, I suppose. But again, to your point about, you know, giving the example of the climate, you know, situation, again, I think the problem here is that trust has eroded to such an extent that individuals institutions who are doing a lot of this research and coming up with these conclusions, that the general public doesn't trust that they're not skewing their research toward a specific outcome. You know what I mean? Which then taints the the the conclusions.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Right? Because, you know, because there's always somebody on this other side who's quick to politicize the finding. And this so then you just can't trust anything. Right? Like, you know, because now you don't know, was this scientist just a puppet that was used to produce a finding that was conducted in a sort of nonobjective, like, environment, you know, so that these political and media operatives can champion their political or institutional interest.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Right? Like, you know? So it's really tough, Scott. It's really tough. You know?
Shawn Baker-Garcia:So yeah.
Scott Olson:It it is. But I I think there's a road, and I I think there are there are signals along the road that that you can use, and, you know, part of this is is my own personal frustration and annoyance when people have, across the course of my life, when I've asked questions and said, well, you wouldn't understand.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Ouch.
Scott Olson:And to me separate and apart from you know how patronizing and insulting for that me after I grew up enough to not stop at becoming angry because I was patronized and insulted, it became a flag for me that either the person didn't understand themselves or they didn't want me to see the data because they had an agenda. The thing is, just because you're a scientist doesn't mean you don't have an agenda. Just because you're a researcher or you deal hard cold data doesn't mean that you don't have an agenda. When you learn to understand data sets, you also learn how to manipulate those data sets. And so the flag for me is a person's willingness to share their data and that's a huge flag.
Scott Olson:Whatever the excuse for not sharing it is, if they're not willing to share it, that's a problem. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're lying, but it does mean that they are not willing to help me at least have a chance to understand. And okay, sure, things can be pretty complex and can take a while to understand, but most people are smart and the people that want to understand generally aren't the unintelligent ones. You know there are going to be people that struggle but how many times have you heard a story of you know somebody whose children had a medical problem and the doctors couldn't help and five years later they are the leading expert on whatever malady their child actually has because they have spent their entire five years learning that and they now know more than the doctor. They haven't been to medical school but that just means that they're not a generalist.
Scott Olson:They understand this one thing. People can figure things out. And so I think the trust issue is legitimate, but it's not a creeping issue. It's not a, you know, things are complex and people feel like they're getting screwed over, and so now they don't trust. I think that there is some of that, but there also are situations like Fauci, and this is my opinion that you know Fauci came in and wasn't sure what to do, but he didn't want to reveal that the CDC had funded the raise of function or heightening of function research at the lab in China that used the coronavirus and so he intentionally kept that out of the public realm and I get the reason why, but we don't want to start a panic, we don't want this, we don't want that, but that is a very short slippery slope to we want people to feel better so we're going to tell them to wear masks because we got to do something.
Scott Olson:We know it's not effective but we need to make it look like we're doing something let's do this. For me that evinces a troubling lack of confidence in your fellow human, this takes us back to the flu shot. I've gotten the flu shot regularly over the course of my life. Sometimes I've forgotten to get it and I'm like, oh, it's March and I didn't get the flu. But where I am now is I recognize that if during flu season I don't make a conscious effort to wash my hands, keep my hands away from my face, so like during that season I'm really aware of scratching my nose, you know rubbing my forehead, that sort of thing, and anytime I do something and people will laugh at me, go, I fuel my car and use the little hand sanitizer.
Scott Olson:You know, I go and get coffee to Starbucks, I get back to my car, I use hand sanitizer and that generally keeps me away from getting a rhinovirus. Why is that? Because I'm actively putting several barriers between the things that I touch in the world and my mucous membranes that are in my nose and mouth, and that is my version of dealing with the flu, and I think I should have the freedom to do that, which pays the consequence if it doesn't work, me. The extension of that though is, when I'm sick, I let people know so that there's nothing worse than the person who has never taken a sick day, because that person who comes in, even though they're sick, because they're a dedicated employee, they make everybody else take a sick day because they make everybody else sick. And so I think there needs to be a certain level of I'm making this decision for myself, but I understand that my decisions have impact on others, and I'm going to take the responsibility for that.
Scott Olson:But the flag continues to be, please do not tell me that I am not capable of understanding the reasons why you think the facts are what they are.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Right.
Scott Olson:And this will be emotionally charged, but one of the most interesting books that I've read is a book called More Guns Less Crime, and it's by John Lott. And yes, our listenership, half of us, half of them are hitting the pause button and half of them are cheering, but the great thing about John Lott is, as he has done statistical regression analysis about the impact that concealed carry firearms has in reducing crime, he is, and I think so far, the only researcher who provides his raw data and lets other people perform the same analysis, statistical analysis that he does, people that quarrel with his outcomes generally do not share their raw data. They share their conclusions but not their data. Oh, well it's complex. Oh, well, it's proprietary.
Scott Olson:It's this and it's that. So I think a lot of the solution to the anger in the public discourse that leads us into these areas of ridicule and I'm gonna stick to my guns and I'm gonna go protest, I think a lot of that has to do with either the failure to or the unwillingness to take a step back and go, let's agree on the facts. You know, let's, you know, make a determination metaphorically, you know, how many bricks we have and how do they measure out, and then we can opine about whether, you know, it's enough to build a wall or not, but we gotta have agreement on facts, Yes. And even if our agreement is we don't know enough to know. Oh, okay.
Scott Olson:Well now we don't really need to get angry with each other about what the facts mean, if we both understand that we actually really don't know what the facts are. That gives us a whole different decision making paradigm, but it keeps the ridicule out.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:And I think adding to that, I would just contribute, it also matters how, you know, sources are conveying the risk to these things. Because I think part of the problem with going back to, you know, the vaccine stuff, well, and and probably is true for climate change as well, is that, you know, we've lost the ability to isolate relative risk to absolute risk. And what I mean by that is that, you know, five shark attacks happen globally a year. If the next year 10 happen, then the headline says, shark attacks doubled. You know what I mean?
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Without giving you the context of the the absolute risk that that represents to an individual human being who lives in Omaha, Nebraska. You know what I'm saying? Like, it it's this is and and we do hear a lot of griping from both sides of the political spectrum when they're having these debates and discussions online is context context con well, you took it out of context. Well, you know but but what we don't tell audiences or listeners is what does that actually mean when you say you're you know, we could just loosely interpret that as, oh, you're not telling me the full story, and I think that would be an accurate summation of of what just happened. Right?
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Is specific background information was omitted to isolate a single truth that out of context appears much worse on its face value than it is, practically speaking. And so just arming the average citizen with just the ability to say, listen when people are giving you statistics and ask yourself the question, what is the relative risk of what that statistic represents to the absolute risk to me or my family? You know what I mean? Like, or my community. And I think that's just such an important little hot tip, right, when you're listening to a news story, you know, to try to help you contextualize it for yourself, you know, or to go and research.
Scott Olson:I think you're really onto something there. And it it is why we talk about the hard work of interacting. And the reason it's hard work is because an executive summary or a social media post can't possibly give the level of detail for any issue that will allow an agreement on what the facts are. There are plenty of videos, the videos that I'm thinking of now on whatever social media site is your favorite are the karma videos where it's a video of somebody driving a car and they cut somebody off and then they crash twenty seconds later and it's you know karma and you have no idea if the person behind the wheel is having a heart attack or is having road rage. And you can't because it's a 30 film clip that has no context.
Scott Olson:So again, our challenge is in our modern communication age, we do sound bites. Why do we do sound bites? Because we live in our amygdala and we don't, we have so much information coming in, we snip, snip, snip, snip, and so the hard work, maybe the discipline part of this, is not to do a deep dive on everything, but to choose the things that are important to each person as an individual, and then, you know, it's not, well, I'm gonna do a bunch of online research, the reason I don't prefer that term is because it sounds an awful lot like homework, but if what you're interested in is to know the facts behind an issue that is interesting to you, go find the bricks, go find the brick behind the wall, and it's going to take time,
Shawn Baker-Garcia:it's going
Scott Olson:to take work, but it's inherently valuable, and I think that's part of the message of the 2 Parachutes Podcast.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:That's right, I was just gonna say, it's hard,
Scott Olson:but it's valuable. It will give you something that you didn't have before.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:And I'll just add a fine point to that, like, you know, that very well stated, you know, recommendation, which is that sometimes, and I know we're gonna hate to admit this about ourselves, you know, sometimes it's actually not that hard at all. Sometimes you're you're being sort of subjected to the clickbait phenomenon, right, where you see a headline, and it's like, you know, the other example was, like, I guess, the early days of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. Vaccine. It was like, you know, uh-huh. Blood clot risk triples.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Right? Well, okay. That's that's pretty scary sounding, and maybe I'm not gonna go take the Johnson and Johnson vaccine now because I saw a headline. But I would be willing to wager that, like, whatever the full blown article, which many of us, myself included, these days don't have the patience to sift through the full text of an article anymore because we've all got adult ADHD late onset from social media like exposure, is, you know, you might actually find embedded in that full article that, oh, but, like, we're talking about one case for every million people. So we've just gone from one to three cases of blood clots out of three you know what I'm saying?
Shawn Baker-Garcia:So, like Yeah. So so, you know, yes, the the case is tripled, but the the objective context that could sort of detrigger that otherwise very triggering headline is usually, I would say, in most journalism, probably still there. I'll give them at least that much benefit of the doubt. Now in moving forward in coming years as as we see the decline of professional journalism, which I think we're seeing a very steep decline, you know, and maybe that'll become less and less true, and maybe everything is just clickbait throughout even an entire article without any real substance or, you know, some of that detail that you would otherwise find, you know, in the perusing the Sunday e Sunday morning newspaper. Right?
Shawn Baker-Garcia:You know, where you'd really get into meaty articles or in, like, a publication like The Economist or or, you know, Foreign Policy magazine or something. Right? You you know, substantive analysis on on an issue that isn't relying solely on that sort of rage bait or click bait headline, which is always, by the way, a sure indication as Bill Maher would like to remind us. You know? That's one surefire way that the publication you're reading is garbage.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:You know what I mean? And and and has an an an holy agenda, essentially. Right? So so, you know, just as a tool for listeners out there, again, the you know, one of the easiest ways that you can do the hard work of interacting is when you see a clickbait headline like that or if you see a statistic that seems really scary, look deeper. Just look deeper.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Just read the full article. Scan it, at least. You know what I mean? To try to contextualize what that statistic actually represents from an absolute risk sort of perspective versus, you know.
Scott Olson:Yeah, and I think part of the message that is shaking loose for me as I listen to you is that the facts are there. They may be hidden, they may be unintentionally hidden, they may The be intentionally person that is pushing forward the clickbait or the sound bite may not even be aware of the facts because they have an agenda or because they've got to do 14 of these an hour and so they just need to produce volume. Yeah. But the bottom line is, we here at the 2 Parachutes Podcast are here to tell you that the facts are actually there, and one of the wonderful things about our modern time is we now have AI, and for all of the doom and gloom surrounding AI and how it's gonna screw people over. AI is wonderful when it comes to scrubbing huge data for specific facts.
Scott Olson:If you ask AI for an opinion, you're gonna get misled because you're asking a word prediction algorithm for a value judgment. Is this good or is this bad? But if you ask AI to list the research that shows no connection between vaccines and autism, and the 10 articles that, or pieces of research, that show a high correlation between vaccines and autism, you all of a sudden now have a big brickyard full of bricks, and it's up to you to read that stuff, but AI can pull it quickly, and so we may be transitioning into another topic on AI, but it's as we progress, as time goes by, one of the trends I think that you can see, and there are facts to support this, are that our tools always get better. And when a new tool comes in, some people are scared and some people don't want the change and some people are early adapters and they think it can do way more than it can do. But it's still a tool and it's still useful.
Scott Olson:And so getting, you know, an example of the tool and learning how to use it and seeing what it makes worse and seeing what it makes better, I think, is a more productive way of going forward so you can understand, I mean, it's the old saw, one of my favorite old saws, you know, fire is neither good or bad. It can cook your dinner or it can burn your house down. It's how you use it that matters. AI is the same. There are a number of stories out there about how AI has, you know, led people to die or commit suicide or commit murder.
Scott Olson:There are other stories out there about how AI is doing great things, when used correctly, creates efficiency and productivity. And so, it's good. AI can help you find facts, AI can help you find facts that are hidden deeply, you need to ask the right questions, but that's a learned skill, so there is a way, there is a way, And you can understand it. You, the listening audience here, if we have anybody left after this hour, you can find this stuff, and it's worth doing. It's worth doing.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:It's a great way to end this session. Yeah.
Scott Olson:Yes. Well, on that note, I guess we'll wrap this one up, everyone. And we hope to see you on the next edition of the 2 Parachutes Podcast.
Shawn Baker-Garcia:Thanks, everyone.