Tiptoe Through the Tulips

Tiptoe through the tulips. Welcome. This is the Elevate Podcast, and I'm your host, Chrissanne Long. And with me, as always, is Rob Arturi. You like that, huh?

Thank you so much for singing.

Well, I wanted to add an element of my musical talent to the show. So I thought—

Pure joy, Chrissanne. That is pure, unadulterated joy.

Good. Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it.

We'll go with that.

So, Tiptoe Through the Tulips. We're really going to talk— we're not going to talk about Tiny Tim. We're going to talk about—

I wish we could play the song, but for copyright purposes, we can't. But you can do it.

But it's so incredible that a man's voice could have such a high pitch.

It is.

It's amazing. I mean, you just listen. If you listen to any of the live recordings of his voice and you watch him with his ukulele, you just wonder, is that real? And then you have to finally— you have to— yeah, that's real.

Well, it's because it doesn't even sound like a falsetto, like the Bee Gees or even like Aerosmith, Steven Tyler. When men sing falsetto, it can get really high, but you can kind of tell. But he just sounds like a straight up soprano.

Yeah. Anyway, so we named it Tiptoe Through the Tulips because sometimes in life and in current situations, sometimes we're tiptoeing around topics. Right. So that's kind of where I was kind of connected to the title of Tiptoe Through the Tulips. So cancel culture is really what we're going to start talking about. And I'm going to tell you kind of a funny story on my end. I am new to this term. So yes, I am not as well-versed in all of these terminologies that exist in our media and in the world and whatnot. So recently, and I'm not going to say how recently, but it was less than a year ago, I heard the term cancel culture and I'm like scratching my head going, what is that? And I immediately thought it was like, you know, not getting a show renewed. Right. So it's like Ozark got renewed for another season, so they didn't get canceled. So the cancel culture, that's what I thought, that was my brain. So I Googled it and I learned a little bit more about what the cancel culture actually is. And so since you're a lot more educated on the topic, why don't you give your off-the-street definition of cancel culture?

Sure. And it's not, I don't, I wouldn't use the word educated. I would just say it's been something on my radar because It's a cultural trend. Basically, cancel culture is the, the cultural phenomenon in which when somebody, whether it's a person, uh, it's usually somebody prominent, right? So it's usually a celebrity or some public figure or a business that says something that goes against a cultural narrative that a lot of people share. There is a, a, a sharp, uh, fierce outcry to essentially bring this person down, right? So years ago, uh, the CEO of Chick-fil-A, the founder's son, was giving a, uh, an interview and mentioned that he personally believed in traditional marriage. Okay. Um, those were his personal beliefs. They didn't get into the doctrine of the company and, and they, that, you know, that they had plans to discriminate. It was just him talking about his personal religious beliefs. That was the impetus for a movement against Chick-fil-A, as if the chicken sandwich company itself was on a crusade against people with different lifestyles. Now there's, you know, you can, you can go back and forth on this and I don't want to get, you know, one way or the other. But the bottom line is that what happened was you had one large group of people mobilizing, saying this company overall is awful and we need to bring it down. We need boycotts, we need protests. There was no conversation. There was a knee-jerk reaction. The same thing happened with, um, uh, what's her name? Um, the butter lady. Paula Deen.

Oh yeah.

Okay. Who admitted using racially charged speech 30 years ago.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, in the 30 subsequent years, she's lived her life a very different way and has a track record that has nothing to do with racial exploitation. But as a woman from the older South, an older woman talking about an evolution of personal growth, it didn't matter. What mattered was she used a word 30 years ago, and she was destroyed publicly and professionally because of it. And this is the kind of thing that we're seeing. And it's a very disturbing trend. It's not even just political, it goes on all kinds of different boundaries. But the, the unifying principle is that there is absolutely no conversation. There's no context. And there is zero, zero, uh, possibility of redemption. And those three things are a danger to any, uh, cohesive society.

Well, and it, and it also creates a fear as you are building a business or establishing a reputation and walking that tightrope that we talked about. It's like we are all sharing our voices and we all have those, the rights to those voices. But the minute that someone gets to, like you said, a level of prominence and they say the wrong thing, it can all come crashing down. Is this fear? And I don't think it's a realistic fear at this point in time, but it can happen if you take a position. And so a more recent example would be Goya.

Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, you stole my example, Chrissanne Long. I had it all teed up.

But if it, if it, if it doesn't work, so what I think where we are in this polarized place in, in society is that it, the, the Goya boycott actually backfired. Now people are saying, well, so did the Chick-fil-A back—

so did Chick-fil-A.

Chick-fil-A backfired too. But again, people are probably not as well, I don't know. I mean, it's been years since the Chick-fil-A situation happened. Right.

That was, been a while back, but it's, it, it's the same thing. It's just happening again.

Right.

Right now, because there was a little bit of a difference. So the Chick-fil-A one was more of a religious divide. The Goya one was a political divide.

Right.

And it's ironic because now some of these companies are figuring out that they can use cancel culture to their advantage, right? Because the greatest minds in business, they think way ahead of most people, especially small-minded, myopic people who are obsessed with cultural trends. And they look at this stuff and they go, well, You know, if we come out in favor of this, who is our target market? And if our average consumer is likely to, to believe one thing and think one way, then we can essentially create a PR whirlwind out of something and we can sell a ton of black beans. Now, I don't necessarily think that that was the, the plan for Goya Foods because The CEO also embraced Obama in other circumstances, but it wasn't so much a big political thing. It was like, you know, you couldn't— people had a very different reaction during the Obama years if you embraced the president or you were welcome the president, right, as they do right now. So now it was like you would thought the man came out and that like that Trump dress that that actress had one day or some, which was not the case. He was talking about jobs and economic opportunity. But in 2020, That's too much for one segment of the population. So again, you're right, it backfired. It's— but it is a great, uh, recent example of what we're talking about.

Yeah. And it— and so let me give you some of my perspective as I've gotten a little bit more familiar with the, with the term. It's nothing new. Like, it's been in history, it's been in literature. I mean, I told you when we were prepping for the show, you know, for me, when I thought about it, I was like, okay, cancel culture, that's kind of like Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. You know, this woman commits adultery, so she walks around with an A. She was canceled in that society and ruled, you know, no longer fit to be a part of their community. So that hasn't— it's not new. It's just that now we have mechanisms in place like social media to voice our concerns. And so there's an argument that people who are pro-cancel culture, which seems odd to me that there are people who would really love to be able to cancel people, Well, they don't call themselves pro-cancel culture.

What they call themselves— they believe they're free speech. They're called— no, not free speech, because if you think about it, free speech means you could say whatever you want and we should protect that. What they are, they're social— they're out there, advocates of social justice. We'll call them social justice warriors. That's the euphemism.

Okay.

But essentially, they don't think that they're canceling people any more than a police officer thinks they're canceling a criminal. They believe they are doing a righteous act by tearing down somebody that they believe is morally wrong. That's the issue. The issue is we assign moral judgment to so many things in today's society that really doesn't need to be there. And if we really paid a little bit less attention to what we believe the moral judgment is of other people's actions and just focused on how we live our lives and how we do things, I I think we'd all be a lot happier. But cancel culture is an obsession with external forces and that external locus of control where everything is a battle of good and evil, good and bad. It's not political, it's not religious, it's raw good or bad. And you must—

There's also— Right, well, okay, but the argument is that I've seen is that it's accountability. It's like, okay, you now have a platform, you're an influencer, you're famous. You stand in front of the television and you have an audience of millions and you say what you say, and we have never been able to say anything against you or about you. Maybe an editorial, you know, maybe amongst our friends, maybe we stop watching your show, but we're just one person. But the mob mentality or the mob outrage then added— adds to the collective negativity that this opportunity for them starts to build and We're now in this fearmongering. I mean, that's really what it boils down to. It's like people with pitchforks and torches are coming at your door to destroy you because you may have said something that we, someone or a group of someones disagreed with. And to me, it's an illustration of how unhealthy we are becoming as a culture.

Well, it goes beyond that, right? I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it goes beyond that. This isn't even just about what you say today. This is used, it is weaponized. What you said about the, the mob is absolutely correct. Okay. I understand this may have started with the notion of accountability, but the problem is that the use of social media has allowed these opinions to foment, uh, very rapidly to spread like wildfire. And be— and these mobs get basically, uh, these— they get put together extremely fast. Well, when you do that with such haste, there's not a lot of deliberation. There's not a— there's not a cooling-off period. There's not sufficient time to have an intelligent, rational conversation. And then, so not only do you have knee-jerk reactions to things that were said today, the, the really dark side of cancel culture is when the mob that believes they're empowered for righteousness— when the mob doesn't like you for some other reason, they will dig, dig, and dig into your past and find, and find something that you said or did, and then they will cancel you retroactively from that, right? That's the difference, because it allows for no evolution. We've all done things in our life, we've all said things that if they were taken out of context would make us look horrific. And maybe they were said in context, but at a time in our lives when we were young and stupid and immature and we have grown as people. If we don't allow for the evolution of people to, to be reflected in our opinions, and if we don't understand that people do change, they do evolve over periods of especially long periods of time. Then we have the idea that, like, however you, you were when you were 10 years old, then why do we even have a juvenile justice system, right? Why don't we just— well, if you're 5 years old and you steal, then you should go to jail, you should go to prison, right? Well, that's, that's ridiculous. The same with saying, I said something inappropriate many, many years ago, and I've atoned for it. And here's, you know, here's my track record of living a very different life from what I said. The problem is, is that with today's modern cancel culture, that conversation never takes place.

Right.

Right.

And there's— there is no open dialogue. There is no healthy discussion. There is no, like you said, chance of redemption. Like, can I explain myself? Can I— can I give you some context? Maybe it was taken out of context. Maybe I was responding to a question and nobody knew what the question was, whatever it is. I mean, everything is so volatile. And so explosive in a sense of when it capitulates. And so we have this, this danger of building your platform. These, these superstars, these megastars are not socially educated in how to communicate necessarily to a mob or to a huge audience. So, you know, you see it in, in athletes, you know, in athlete and athletes that are, you know, NCAA players, and, and they're just becoming stars as 17, 18, and 19-year-olds. But now they have followers on Twitter, and one false move, one statement that they make that's inappropriate, and they're still teenagers, um, that can cancel culture backfire on them as a player for the future, you know. And, and, and we're— my whole point of bringing this up on the Elevate Pulp podcast to me is We as adults and, and, and community leaders, business leaders, parents need to be aware that these things exist because these are the things that our children are accessing. They're seeing this unfold in front of their very eyes and there isn't anyone to teach them about it. At least with Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, there was a teacher teaching that story to me and we were able to have a discussion about how that is not the appropriate way to handle someone's you know, mistakes or missteps or poor behavior. But rehabilitation is a thing, you know, becoming a better person, learning from our past. All of these things are important for us to be able to do as human beings. But in the cancel culture environment, there is none of that. You're just— you're dead. You're dead to me. And students, I mean, kids are ghosting each other. You know, one day they're having a conversation, texting back and forth. Everything's groovy. Maybe they're dating, maybe they're getting to know one another. And then one kid says something that upsets the other or talks behind the other person's back, but nobody really knows what happened. And suddenly the other kid isn't responding back to texts. And it's happening with adults too. I'm not saying it's just happening with kids, but if we don't teach our youth or our up-and-coming business leaders or others, this is going to become how we operate as professionals, as how we operate as people in the community, community leaders. And it's basically, it's a sense of bullying. It's like, I want my way, so I'm going to fight you and publicly blast you. And if I get some traction behind me with people following with me in my mob mentality, I'm actually going to defeat you by using this way to attack. And I think this is an awful future if we don't do something about it, at least from a political standpoint. I'm not political, at least from a local standpoint. I think we can really do some good to ensure that who we are, how we are treating one another, is not emulating this cancel culture concept.

Yeah, because it doesn't get better in time.

No, it gets worse.

It does. It concentrates. So we have to have these conversations now because, look, the, the other side of it, when you were talking about like the athletes, is just like, uh, corporations have figured out one way or the other Right? What are the scale? We, we tend to think these big corporations have these social consciousnesses, and the truth is it's really just marketing, right? Yeah. So you wanna, you wanna know where all of the, the socially conscious, uh, uh, campaigns come from. They're, they're not coming out of the, the CEO's budget or the CEO's salary. They're coming outta the marketing budget. So sorry folks, it's an economics lesson. But, but going back to, uh, the other side of it is there's a lot of people who are trying to predict. They're trying to ride these cultural waves, uh, like they're surfing, and they're trying to gain progress on it. So sometimes you'd say, well, you know, that you posted on Facebook the other day, what made Michael Jordan so amazing?

Okay, right.

And my comment to you was that he understood that both Republicans and Democrats buy shoes. And that was a really oversimplification of it. But the truth was he understood how to self-market and he understood how to make the— how to have the biggest brand. And it meant that getting political on little things— now, he could donate money to whatever campaign he wanted, whatever candidate. And I don't even know the guy's politics, to be honest. I don't care.

Totally not part of the brand when you think of who he is.

Right. Because it wasn't part of that. And what we're seeing today is because we live in such divided times politically, people are using this to their advantage. So when an athlete says, especially an athlete that came from a low-income community, defund the police, that athlete can say that because chances are they live in a gated community. They have an armed entourage that protects them when they're out and about. But you know what happens when you start defunding law enforcement? And cutting back on law enforcement, those communities, low-income communities, suffer the most because they're filled to the gills with good people who don't have a lot. And as soon as the police pull back from that, the criminal element in those communities runs amok. And you're seeing that unfold right now around the country. We're not seeing that to the extent here in our community, thankfully, uh, because we have a very different approach. And, uh, but it's a very real thing. So it's very easy to say a lot of these things because you don't actually live it. You don't walk the walk.

Well, and it's not necessarily ever implemented to a point where you can see what actually will happen. You have to make some projections and some assumptions, and you have to start to look through that. So if you go back in history and you think of, um, communism or socialism or, or things that when they were in theory, when they were written out, you know, here's Here is Marxist theory. It actually reads pretty well. Like, you think about it, you're like, oh, everybody gets their share and we're all working together. And it's not— then you're not able to immediately see how the imbalance begins or how the government now has more control than they should have. You don't see it until it plays itself out. And so in theory, some of these things sound good because it's like, okay, well, we're just going to react. But that's the problem is that we're reacting without a plan. We're not reacting with how are we going to calculate? How are we going to measure? How are we going to do the things that need to be done in order for this plan to be put into place? And nobody wants to plan. Everybody just wants to make decisions and capitulate a problem to the point where it's like, oh, this is what we're going to do and make drastic decisions. But that isn't going to work for us to build community. It's not going to work to build a society back up to a point where we can actually get along with one another. It's just going to continue to, to, um, pit us against each other.

Yeah. And ultimately, the— as somebody that has studied economic theory, Marx is brilliant so long as you suspend humanity, so long as you suspend the, the, the parts of us that are just the flaws of humans, right, in general. And our— our—

exactly.

If you take— if you take the, the human condition out of it on paper, yeah, it works great, right? It's just— it fails every single time that it's tried because it's not realistic and it doesn't take into account all these other variables So, you know, the— but those are the conversations that we're talking about. So that's an economic example. But the truth is, let's look at it on a, on a, on a local level, right? Let's look at what happens here locally. You have a small business and the, the owner of the business says something or, or somebody doesn't like the owner for whatever reason, and they dig up something they said once in a post or what have you. And they, they go, they go off the deep end, right? It's taken and it's used, it's weaponized. What we've done is today, we've replaced the torches and the pitchforks with tweets and posts and reviews and these types of things. It's just a, it's a digital pitchfork that we have nowadays.

Exactly, exactly. And, you know, if you've ever read any literature that was based in any kind of a utopian environment, right, the stories, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Lost Horizon, any of these stories that are written to depict a utopian society end up proving the utopian society's impossibility, right? You start to see the humanity. And I'm actually watching Hanna on Amazon, we just finished season 2, and you see it, it's not characterized outwardly in the characters, but towards the end of the season when a couple of the girls are given some opportunities to go do a job and you see the girls that didn't get picked, jealousy, right? And this jealousy is now the problem with the system that this organization has created to try and create these people that women, young women that are going to go and like take over the world kind of thing. They're going to, they're going to end up attacking each other because they're human, even though Even though they, they want to do right and they care about this, the cause that they're employed to do, they still have the human element of feeling slighted or picked over or jealous. And therefore they're going to also have that side of them, even though they have the training, they're now gonna also behave like a human being.

It's interesting because, you know, we, we understand as people that animals have a protective instinct. Okay, we know that if you see a bear with bear cubs, you're in a lot of trouble because that mama bear will do any— even if you're not really a threat, they're not taking any chances, right? We can understand that in the abstract, looking at the animal kingdom, but then we like to look at ourselves as if we are totally exempt from that. And what you're talking about is something that Milton Friedman is, in my opinion, one of the greatest economists of all time. People do not do things overall on a macro sense against their own self-interest. And when, when you craft a society based upon what you think should be people's self-interest, and that begins to conflict with their actual self-interest, you, you start to have cracks. And that's where all of these things go wrong. And, and it all has to do with locus of control. So the thing that made America really great was that when people came here, they got nothing, but they had a lot of opportunity. Everything was riding on them. As we go outside of that and things become more centralized and more preordained, what you see is on some level, maybe that makes it a little bit easier for some people, but it also creates a tremendous amount of angst because when you remove control and when you remove responsibilities and headaches from people, you remove their own ability to, to, to create or to influence their own destiny. It's a double-edged sword. And, and I believe that's where a lot of the angst and a lot of the unrest that we see today is really coming from. Because if you look back into things like the, the civil rights movement, okay, nobody argues that the civil rights movement was not necessary or it was not productive. But look at what happened. And there were some terrible things that happened. But when you look at how it was addressed and the incredible progress that was made throughout that period of time, it's hard to argue that, you know, they— their methods were correct and they were justified and they were positive. Now we look back today and we look at what we're doing, and you have to ask yourself, what is the end goal here? There is really no stated goal. There's just a lot of whining and complaining. And some people have legitimate, you know, concerns and gripes, but it's all mixed in with the pitchforks and everything else, and it's so muddied. And the concern that I have for things like, you know, with this cancel culture is where we don't have a hierarchy of what's legitimate and what's not. And if you don't have that clear hierarchy, you can't distinguish the unproductive agitators from those people who are truly altruistic and trying to bring about positive change for everybody. And if we can't make that distinction, then the agitators and those, they win because the other people start to tune them out and the agitators just gain more and more support and it devolves. And you're seeing that happen in other places around the country where they have these like, what was it in Portland where they had that like autonomous zone? I mean, how'd that work out? Right.

Right. So for like 3 days, maybe it was 24 hours, right?

And people were killing people. It's ridiculous. The fact that they even entertained such a foolish concept is a testament to just how, how off base it is. But we need to look at it as a cautionary tale and we need to understand that there are, there are ways to go about doing these things and then there are ways to not. And one of the things I mentioned to you that I thought was a really positive thing that the community did in response to all these protests and things was having these public forums and these were local civic and business leaders listened to people talking. And one of the things I think it's really important is because there's, there's a lot of opinions on all sides and we're not here to litigate who was right and who was wrong. In fact, I'm not taking any position at all because I certainly have my own opinions on different issues. But at no point do I think the conversation shouldn't take place, because what we're talking about with this cancel culture is a lack of that conversation. And it's just, you know, zero to pitchforks. And that's not a good thing.

Right.

But whether or not you agree with what somebody says at a town hall meeting to the mayor and representatives from government and business, whether you agree or disagree is irrelevant. Right. The fact that the conversation took place and ultimately what we saw in our community and around the county was a de-escalation when there are other parts of the country where things are completely devolving and they're a mess. I truly believe the majority of people just want to be heard. And whether things change or whether you agree, it doesn't matter. It lowers the temperature for everybody. And that's why things like that are so important. It's not a matter of whether you agree or not. Freedom of speech works both ways, right? You have to listen to everybody whether you agree or not. And if we can't have the conversation, things are gonna get bad. And I don't think we want that.

And that goes back to one of our common threads in many of our episodes is the way social media is being used. When I first started using it, I really thought it was a way to have, healthy conversations. And I think if I would go back 9, 10 years, there was a lot of healthy conversations I learned from people because I have an open mind. And so I would ask a question maybe with a bias, but then I would see a different side of something that I hadn't considered before because it was an open dialog and I was a willing person to be, to be educated or to be maybe convinced of a side of things that I wasn't aware of. And so I think we are so entrenched in our beliefs And I say beliefs because they're not knowns. We don't call them knowns. These are our beliefs. And we live based on them. We live based on our own beliefs. And by golly, don't come and tell me that what I believe is wrong.

But at least—

by golly, there it is. Got it in there. But, but we have to stop using our logical brains and start using a more human-centric brain. And I think what ends up happening or what has ended up happening, at least from where I sit and where I feel that I can understand and I can relate to that anger, you know, somebody says something that I am just so angry about and I'm— it hurts. It's down to your core because you're so against it and, and yet you're helpless to do anything about it, right? Like you're just a person, like I said earlier. And you, you get into that space, but what can you do? And so eventually you get to this side of, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. So now our behavior is modeling the behavior that we have seen, right? Sure. So we're only doing the things that we have been taught to do by the people leading us. And so we're now just participating in the same exact problems that we've personally as individuals probably hated, but we don't know any other way cuz nobody's ever taught us any other way.

Well, if you were— the idea is if you are afraid of one mob, right, then you simply join the other mob.

Yes, exactly. And that's, that's exactly the worst decision.

I mean, that's— but that's, that's gang mentality, right? You can talk about it in the context of MS-13 or, you know, today, or you can go talk about it in Crips and Bloods and all of these things. So years ago, in my previous career, I took some gang courses, and it was fascinating because you understand the psychology behind a lot of these things. And we're just seeing it played out. People aren't necessarily wearing, you know, different color rags on their— I don't know, they have those pink hats and things too. But, you know, essentially, there are serious similarities between what criminal street gangs do and what, um, what people and social justice people, political parties, uh, do. And it's because we're trying to align ourselves with those because we perceive a threat. That's the central issue. It's the perceived threat. It's because people aren't going to feel like they're going to be heard. They have to have a coalition behind them. So if I'm one, if I lean one way, this group comes after me, this group will defend me. That is not a good solution to the problem. That is a— that we are devolving from a civilized society into a more of a tribal mentality. And I can't understand it. It doesn't really compute for me why that's better. 'Cause I don't think it is.

Well, I think what's happening is we're finding ourselves with less time for free thinking, or at least dialogues that encourage that, right? So as a kid, we would have sobremesa. Cuban family, we would eat dinner, the dishes would be cleared, and we would sit for hours. I mean, literally 2 or 3 hours. As a child, I'm sitting around these adults having dialogue, some getting angry, some getting upset, you know, having, but having healthy discussion where we're, we're working it out and learning about the ways of our family or a different way of thinking. We don't have those opportunities, right? It's, it's like my way or the highway, and if you don't agree with me, let me go find somebody who does.

Well, the ironic part is we have those opportunities, right? We don't use them. Well, right, we have more time.

We're not invested in them. We're not willing to go seek them out.

You want another honest truth? We're lazy.

Yeah, I agree with that. Right?

It's a hard truth. People don't necessarily want to hear it, but we are lazy. We don't want to do the work. We don't want to put the time in. We don't want to think for ourselves. So what we do is we take— we join a group identity. And again, I'm not singling out any group, because if you're if you have a group identity, then you do this. I don't care who it is. And you just essentially adopt whatever the consensus is, or you muffle.

I think I muffle more, you know, in certain situations. So I have friend groups or I have, you know, connections and people that I hang out with socially. And, you know, I crave meaningful, deep conversation. Okay, I really do. Like, I love having meaningful, deep conversations with people, even if I don't agree with them and I'm not going to change their mind and they're not going to change our mind. But a nice little healthy debate is awesome to me. It's like exhilaration 101, right? Sure. And I don't have— I feel like we muffle our relationships to talk about the superficial things and the things that are, you know, just, oh, you know, did you hear what so-and-so said? Or, oh, you know, what Netflix show are you binging on today? And You know, and I, you know, I want more of that. I just don't know necessarily how to cultivate it because when I cultivate it, I'm normally asked, like, given a shush. It's like, well, you know, that's— we're just hanging out, Chrissanne. Why do you have to get so deep? Why do you have to get so, you know, into these dialogues and into these conversations? I'm like, why not? Yeah, we could all learn something. We could, we could enjoy like the conversation for the sake of conversation. So So that's just me. And so I— that's why I seek out, you know, very people who I can have these discussions with, like you and our friend Brian Stevens. And yeah, you know, a lot of people that just understand that I'm not— I'm not out to argue to win. I'm out to argue to understand my own argument better. That's kind of how it works.

But so there's— there's two— two points to this, right? Number one, one of the terms that I really don't like is your truth, right? My truth, your truth. And the reason is, you said it a while ago, everybody has their own perspective. They have their own perceptions, their own opinions. Nobody is, is denying that there is— we have differences of opinions and perceptions, right? But if we have— if we want to have these discussions, we have to agree that truth is truth, period. There is only one truth. Okay, you can, you can have your own guess to the riddle. But there is only one real answer. This is what you know, this is what really happened, etc. Now, that's not to discount other people's opinions, because they, their perception is different. And we have to take it into account because it does. It does relate to their experience, right? And all these things are important for interpersonal relations. But we have to distinguish the two. Just the idea that because you think something, doesn't necessarily make it right, right? There doesn't make it— doesn't make it true. Just because you believe something is a certain way, it does not make it true. There are things that we can prove, and there are things that we just think, and we have to differentiate those two things. So, and the other thing is, when you're talking about, you know, you want to have these high, you know, these real in-depth conversations— it was the old joke, like, we, we raised a couple generations saying you can't talk about race, politics, or religion, and now we have an entire generation of people who are incapable of talking rationally and reasonably about race, politics, or religion, right? Because we didn't have those. If you cannot have those discussions and understand that you can disagree without being enemies, um, that people have differences of opinion, but those opinions don't necessarily define who we are in our entirety— if you don't have that understanding, then you— and you simply make these, these tribal adoptions it can be really, really problematic. And that's where I see where we are. And that's why, you know, we want to have some of these conversations. And again, this episode isn't about telling people what to think. It's quite the opposite. But it's the need that we have to have these conversations. We should have them nationally, but we can't really influence that. But I hope that we're having them locally. I hope that when somebody in a local business owner says something or does something, that, that irritates a large chunk of the population for whatever it might be, that we as people of this county have the, the maturity to stand up and do like we did with the, with the racial discussion, right? To put aside whether or not you think that we should or shouldn't have the conversation and just have the conversation.

Have it.

Let voices be heard. Let people explain and let people make their own judgments. Don't just adopt because somebody you know, says that you should feel this way or that way. Not everything is Hatfields and the McCoys. I don't think either of those groups fared very well.

Right. Well, of course they didn't, um, except for the fact that they maybe survived, but faring well is a different story. Um, but you know, I think where this all comes down to and like, okay, what's the point of this discussion? Where does, where do we land as far as what is an action plan for this community for Polk County. I think it comes down to elections. I think it comes down to seeing the atmosphere, the culture that we want as a community and voting against any vitriolic or toxic or negative environment that you feel could, if it capitulates, if it continues, you have to, like I said, if you're going to apply this political regime, it's not that there's a regime, but You apply the politics to 10 years from now. What is it going to look like if we go down this road? Is this the road we want to go down, or do we want to go down a more balanced path where people are able to respect one another and not call names or, or call people out and embarrass them or go to this cancel culture mentality, which is the next step from vitriol, right? It's like, all right, I'm okay with this, but I'm not okay with this. So now I'm going to cut you, you know, cut you at your knees because, you know, you, you stepped across the line, an imaginary line that nobody knew existed. And so we've gotta create a healthier environment for ourselves by either cultivating new leadership, you know, young leaders, encouraging them, building them up, supporting them, helping them to learn how to think and to, to, to think intelligently and freely and not, you know, corrupting them with, oh, this is the way you think. And so you must think the way that we think. And if you don't think the way we think, then you're never going to succeed. Not that kind of cultivating, but cultivating that creative mind to problem solve and consider all of the options and then make decisions on their own. There's a line in Yellowstone. We were also watching Yellowstone lately, and in the show, Kayce, the son, has to make a decision and his dad says, You know, well, whatever you decide. And, and he, Casey says, well, help me decide. He goes, no, I'm not going to help you decide. You have to make the decision. And however, whatever, whatever you decide, I will support you. And I think we do a lot of that deciding for people, especially in their younger years. We've got to let them decide, go down that path, learn if it was a mistake or if it was a win. And then we feel more confident to make better decisions going forward because we learned something from that. Good decision or we learned something from that bad decision.

Well, yeah. So I would say this before I— because I'll forget it. I've been reciting a quote for a long time and there's a really good book. It's a hard read, but it's a great book called The Fourth Turning. But essentially there's a cycle in evolution, okay? In human evolution and culture and society. And it can be summed up into 4 phrases, right? Tough times create tough men. Tough men create easier times. Easier times create weak men. And weak men create tough times. And that is the, the, the fourth turning is essentially going from that third to the fourth. And I hate to say this because I have 3 kids But that's where we are. Okay? We have a generation who thought if they made the road easier for the child, that life would be better. And what we failed to realize, because I think— and I think it was done altruistically, right? Because you want to make things easier. You don't want to see people struggle. But the problem is, is that we have lost the concept of the value of struggle. And we've lost the idea of, or an appreciation rather, of what comes from going through that struggle. All I hear about is self-esteem. Why do we have generations of young people out there with such horrific self-esteem that they need safe spaces? The reason is because we have a foolish belief that you can actually give people self-esteem by telling them nice things about themselves. You know, you're so good at everything, little Johnny. The truth is, little Johnny will smile, but little Johnny does not believe you right now. When, when little Johnny actually earns something on his, his own, that's where you learn real self-esteem.

Overcoming adversity. He knows he earned it because he worked for it.

Yeah, yeah. And you cannot give that. Overcoming adversity is extremely important. In building true self-esteem and self-worth. That's why we have an epidemic of youthful suicide nowadays. Okay, we can talk about the, the social media and the cyberbullying. And yes, all that comes into play. But those are symptoms of a bigger problem. And it's a societal problem that, you know, when I talk about what we really are talking about here is the difference between a civilized society and a tribal society. In a tribal society, you have two tribes and the, and the goal is one must kill the other one because they think that they're going to be killed. All right. That is barbaric. We've lived that existence for, for, uh, centuries, uh, as humans. We like to think that we have outgrown that, but if you really look close at our core, we are still those same people. We just pretend to be civilized. And that's not a bad thing. But we have to remember just how close to being uncivilized we really are.

Well, and I think— I think you say pretend, but pretending to be civilized means we understand and appreciate civilization. We want to be more civilized, but we're very base. We're humans. So there is still this— this very black and white or good versus evil kind of dichotomy that you love, that your favorite word.

It's a great word.

And, and that's it. That's, that's, that's really as simple as we are. We want to think we're much more complex than that. We're, we're so civilized. But the reality is we appreciate civilization. We want to be more civilized. So we're aspiring to that or we're pretending to be that. But at the bottom, when it, when it comes down to it, this, this dog eat dog kind of barbarism starts to take hold.

Yep, it's true. And I think ultimately all we can do is our part. We can have these conversations. I hope we have them as a community. I hope that we impart the need for deliberation and that we can really understand that we don't— we need to take the time to have these conversations. Especially with, uh, our kids. And that's really important.

And we can't always have a conversation that's going to end up with 10 action steps and these are the things that we're going to do. I think what ends up happening, and, and this is what I've been hearing in these dialogues, you know, these open dialogues, they're very important, they're very valuable because people are feeling validated just by being heard. And we don't give that concept enough credit. Just listen to me. Let me share how I feel. When I walk away, I've gotten it out. It's off my chest. I know that you heard me. It's on the record. You and I now have a different understanding than we had before I shared this experience with you. And now we can potentially work together towards solutions. But every meeting does not have to come out of a discussion with, all right, now what are we going to do? We've got to do— we've got to do something. We definitely have to do something. I shared in the Race Relations Forum when I was able to address the commission and the community, you know, I really feel like we have to do something about this. The way that logical things have always been done, the autocratic, you know, top-down mentality has to start to shift. But first, we need to listen and realize how people are reacting to the culture that we have as a business community, or as just in general, as as a civilization from a more logical to a more human-centered. And human-centered means we're going to listen to one another and we're just going to do that and start with that opportunity and listening, asking people to tell them their— tell, tell you their story and then just say thank you for sharing and allow that person that space because we do not give one another enough of that space.

So I, I think, you know, to kind of wrap up the point, I think if you, if you own a business, I think if you are, uh, doing your best and you're only human, um, you want to be careful about what, what's being said, what you say in the community and that sort of thing. But you also, I think we, we also as a community need to understand that people are human We need to take these things slow. We need to wait a minute or two before we react. But ultimately, I think we need to remember that we are— we're all people, we're going to make mistakes. There has to be a path for redemption if it is genuine. And that can't happen unless we, we allow people to be heard. And we go from there. I hate the phrase, we'll agree to disagree, because for me, it just sounds so cliché.

Even though, you know, I'm fond of cliché, but it's also just tabling the conversation for another day. It does.

It's not going to—

we're not going to get anywhere. So we can go around in circles and circles, or we can just say, hey, let's put it on the table. We'll come back to it at another time.

Yeah. And it's— to me, it's just an oversimplification, right? But I think it— there is a value in, in being able to at least understand another perspective, whether you agree with it or not, and then moving forward. Because it's not— it doesn't have to define everything about us. It's not every part of us. I have, I have many, many dear friends with whom I disagree sharply with on politics, but that doesn't define how we are as people. You know, they're great people. And why would I— I would, I would encourage every single person out there to really listen to this. It's, it's so easy today to get so divided even within families, forget locusts, forget communities, we're talking individual family. It's so easy to get so divided along those lines. You have to pull yourself back a little bit. And you have to realize that nobody is perfect. You're not perfect. And you just have to let some of that stuff go.

Well, and be willing to have an open mind if you can. I mean, I don't think that's possible for everyone. Right out of the gate, but you got to work towards it. So it's a goal. We're working towards civilization. Then we also have to see that there is another side and there's another human on the other side. That is a part that we forget. We, we combat ideologies or we combat beliefs, but we forget that the person holding that ideology or belief walked 30, 40, 50 years in a life that they've— they have a reason to think that way. They have a reason to believe that way. So we can't unend— we can't upend every thought that they've ever had or every belief that they have. We have to find a way to come together on finding middle ground, you know, understanding that it's not right and wrong, left and right, black and white. There's a lot of gray area in all of these different areas that we need to start looking toward.

Couldn't, couldn't say it any better.

Okay. Well, I— did you have anything else you wanted to say before we said goodbye?

One thing I did, I wanted to give a shout out to the Polk County Sheriff's Office Homicide Unit. Unit, of which I was a member many, many years ago. Uh, I'm very, very proud, uh, of the work that they are doing— the detectives, the crime scene technicians. So there— I mentioned it on our last week's episode about a tragedy down in Frostproof. It was the, the triple homicide that happened down there. And, um, within just a couple days really of, of the event, they've made 3 arrests in, in that horrific crime. So They're doing great work. I joke that this is— there's a lot of things you can get away with in this county, but you don't want to kill somebody in this county. It's something we take life very seriously. But I really, I really commend them for the great work that they do. I mean, there's, there are, you know, a lot of people have different opinions of law enforcement. But let me tell you, when you've, when you've held the hand of somebody who's lost a loved one to some sort of unspeakable tragedy and horrific act, you have a different appreciation for the value of law enforcement. And we can always do things better. But there are some situations where what the work that they do is irreplaceable. So good on them. Proud to, to be a veteran of that. And I'm just— I'm glad they're still— they're still hard at work.

So, well, I'm going to start ending every episode with kind of a, I don't know, post of the week, something that caught my attention and gathered my thoughts and that I'm going to share and who is who is the person of the source of the quote. Um, and so I'm gonna share a quote from a post from Adam Grant who wrote the book Give and Take. I think I've talked about that book on the, on a, an episode before. He's also written a book called The Originals. Um, so follow him on social media. He's a really good, um, balanced thinker. And this was his quote, uh, just one day ago. If you define success solely in terms of gaining wealth, achievement, or influence, what you often lose is freedom. One of the greatest accomplishments in life is earning the freedom to choose how you spend your time. No currency is more valuable or more scarce than autonomy. And it was funny because I was thinking about how free I feel. You know, I talked about my purging last, you know, episode and getting rid of things. And, but I'm also—

20 yards of garbage.

20 yards of trash. Um, but I, I'm also free. I'm not beholden to anyone. Like, my thoughts are mine and I'm allowed to have them, and no one can take that away from me. And I just, I value that. So, um, follow Adam Grant, grab one of his books, and if you want to talk about some of the stuff that he shares, I'm always open to dialogue about that.

Absolutely. All right.

All right, well, thanks for listening, and remember, we have a new episode each week, so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. And remember to leave us a review review. We do read every single one of them. You can always find all of our episodes at elevatepulp.com, and if there's something you want to hear about on an upcoming episode, reach out to us on Facebook at Elevate Pulp.