Communication Breakdown!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:13

It is Monday, and you know what that means. Welcome back to another edition of Two Nobodies Who Know Nothing with myself and Robert Watson. Robert, what's going on, man?

SPEAKER_00 0:24

It is a beautiful Monday, and I thought we would talk about communication.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

What's that?

SPEAKER_00 0:33

So, yeah. Well, so uh I had a a friend, uh, somebody I was serious with, and I won't give any more details than that, but she would say, Listen, I want to try on a dress for you, and I want to know what you think. And so I would say, Oh, super. And so she would walk out with the dress on. And she said, What do you think? And she said, and I would say, Well, I I like it. And she said, No, no, what do you really think? And my response was, why did you take what I said to mean anything other than what I said, right? In other words, I liked it. No, no, no. I really need to know what you think. Folks, if our words can't mean what we say, then what are we supposed to do? How how are we supposed to communicate with each other? And this is a real struggle we have in our culture because it when somebody says something like, Do you like this? and you say no, and then they ask you to qualify your no, why? I mean, did you like it? No. Well, I mean, what do you what do you you know, what do you really think? Come on, seriously, folks? Um, you know, let your yes be yes and your no be no because we we're gonna look at the actions that follow the words and try to decipher whether the person is good for their work, right? But if you don't take what I say on the front end and I can't communicate with you on the front end, how in the world are you ever going to assess my words and my actions if you don't you're not listening to what I say? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

It's a it's a pretty interesting thing. You know, it's funny that you brought up this topic because I am struggling like with I'm struggling with communication right now in my work situation. Now, I don't have a problem communicating with people because, you know, I obviously just when people ask me something, I say something. You know, I have a real tough time and get kind of worked over with the fact that people cannot communicate, and this is something that has turned into I there's a whole bunch of reasons why communication is special, and I don't think that this situation that you're talking about really it may or may not have anything to do with that, but we have people in this world who are afraid to have a conversation anymore, even. And you can't even do that. Like you can't have, you know, I have so many people coming to me bitching and complaining about everything else that's going on, and I go, Well, did you talk to the source? Did you talk to the person? Did you are you just coming to complain? Well, no, I just want to talk to you about it. I'm like, well, nothing is going to get fixed when I'm not the decision maker, and I can't fix that. You have to talk to the decision maker, whoever that may be, whether it be your wife, whether it be your significant other, whether it be your boss, whatever. And I think that that is just something that we've gotten um attuned to. And it's funny that I I know I'm gonna be rambling here for a minute, but we just got this we got a comment on one of our posts for last week when we were talking about well, shouldn't you need to take a training class for um for gun safety? Like, should that be a requirement? Which required to drive cars kill more people than anyone in the world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that someone's like, oh, so I need this to exercise this and this and this, like just going off about it. And it's like, have you seen the whole episode? Do you know what happened? Do you know what's going on? No, because we live our lives 30 seconds at a time, and we make these snap judgments off a 30-second clip because we cannot focus enough and learn to communicate. It's it's a it's a weird thing, it's a world, weird world. And then your situation is them deciphering it, right? So, yes, I like it. Well, why or what? Or how come, or what do you really mean, you know? And it's it's just that interpretation. We just cannot get focused on that anymore.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

So uh I'll have to bring the communication and the gun safety thing together. Okay. So I'm in I'm in basic training, and you know, the instructions for the firing range are really, really, really pretty simple, right? Always keep the weapon pointed downrange or at the ground.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Right?

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Right, downrange or at the ground. Simple. Yeah, two two places you have it downrange or at the ground. Okay. And so we're we're we're firing, and we have a pause in firing to assess. And the drill sergeant says something to the guy, and he he's got his weapon pointed downrange, and the drill sergeant says something to the guy, and he turns himself and his weapon right, you know, and of course, at that point, drill sergeants are diving on the guy because he's taking a loaded weapon and he's literally pointed it over at the next pit, right? Yeah, and again, it's like two choices downrange or at the ground.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Okay, the weapon is loaded, it's live. It's no different, and I laugh. It's no different than going to the grenade range, right? Yeah, with the live grenades, right? Pull pin throw you you laugh, but it's not funny. Because what is interesting is so there's this uh concrete embankment thing that we set behind, right? What's so interesting about, and it's probably that thick, concrete's pretty, and so you're in this concrete thing, you look up over the wall, throw the grenade at a truck tire, right? And then you duck back down. It's good to duck back down, the fragmentation grenades, and you can hear the little things going for quite a while. But what's interesting is when you go look at the front of the pit, the the blockade, how much of it's been eaten away by people who have not thrown the grenade very far.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Oh, yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Meaning, you know, and I cannot tell you the number of people, swear to God, that have right, pulled the pin and dropped the grenade. Right. In the in the pit with the drill instructor.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

Yeah, I mean it's it's insane to me. It's the communication of this whole scenario, even like with the gun safety thing anyway, it's this person is saying that it's my constitutional right. You're right, it's your constitutional right. You want to know something about that constitution when it was written? You know, however long ago it was, I'm not like I can't remember what 250 years ago, however long it was, I don't know the actual date that it was written. But the fact of the matter is, is that constitution, when it was written and that rule was written, you know what used to happen? Every single person in this country had a gun because they needed to hunt and fish and do all these other things other than just go to war. And every single one of those people got taught gun safety by their parent. They weren't able just to go walk in. I mean, they could go walk in and buy a gun, but they weren't, that was something that you had to learn how to do was to take care of this gun, to point it downrange, to do whatever. Last night I was watching, and this is obviously TV, but I was watching Yellowstone, and they pull up on these two guys. Cops are coming down this way, and then the the cattle people, the I can't remember what they're called, the livestock agents are coming down this way, the trucks in the middle. They got all the cop cars lined up on this side, all the cop cars lined up on this side, the trucks in the middle, and they both start opening fire at the vehicle going this way, like this. Okay? Oh, what do you think could happen? I mean, that's not reality, but we're watching that on TV. And you go out to the gun range nowadays, and you go out and you shoot, and you have bullets flying at you this way because no one is paying attention to what is going down here. Like, and it's not a gun range, but like here in Idaho, we can go drive out to BLM land and we can go shoot. And a smart person will go and find a hill to shoot into, and the dumb person will go on top of the hill and shoot this way back at the other people and not even know it, and they can't even see it because they didn't pay attention to what they're doing. So this is what we have going on, and this is just in a target practing situ or target practice situation. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense to me. You don't think you need to learn how to know where you should be with that? You think you should just be able to walk into a store and buy a gun. I have guns. I learned how to use them properly, I use them safely. You can't just walk in, go buy a car, and just start driving. It doesn't work that way. Sorry. Back to that gun thing. It's like that's just a thing that happened.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Well, it's this, it's it's a it's a hot button issue because people think that taking a gun safety course is a slippery slope to eroding their constitutional right.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

And they think like a gateway drug for um more legislation. And here's the point. I agree with you. I agree that that's a worry, a concern. I agree, no question. Okay, but I also have to look at it and go, listen, I've been around weapons since I enlisted. Right. Right. And the reality, I mean, and as a kid I was too, but I'm talking about the high-powered stuff.

unknown 9:58

Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

And so the point is that did I think guns weapon safety was an issue? Oh my god, yes. I mean, you talk talk about you know, fire and move, yeah, small unit tactics things. Oh my gosh, yes. I mean, this is this is not small stuff, so all I'm simply saying is safety is a big deal. Safety for you who's even using it, right? How how many people have issues with uh weapons every single year cleaning them? Right. Why how in the world do you have a an issue with a weapon going off right you're cleaning it? How? When when the rule again, gun safety rules, right? Open the breach. Okay, whatever you're doing, open the weapon, check, make sure. I mean, come on, these are really simple things.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

But I'm back to my brain goes back to what was it like in the 1800s when they first invented guns, when they were muzzle loaders, when you're pouring the powder down the barrel, you're putting the ball in there, you're lighting, you're igniting gunpowder right in front of your eyeballs. Like they just figured that out, just walked in, got the gun, just figured it out, or did they have to learn how to do that stuff?

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Right. And uh, the other thing is I always think about because um our M16s are what you call an M4 now, have this issue of cooking off. So what happens is the weapon gets hot, the barrel gets hot, and so the magazine comes up, the round comes up into the breach, and the minute it comes up, instead of going being triggered, it basically cooks off because it's so hot. And so all of a sudden you have, and I've had a weapon blow out. Yeah, and so the reality is there's a lot more going on than just keep the weapon pointed downranger at the ground. Yeah, there's a lot about knowing how your weapon functions that that can get a lot of people hurt. And again, as somebody who's had a weapon blow out on them, right? And and I to be honest with you, I'd only probably put um I don't know, 200 rounds downrange at that point. I it should not have been, I should not have it a cook-off issue. But our M60s used to get so hot that the barrel would melt. Yep. So, I mean, there was a lot, there's a lot more going on than the simple, you know, keep the weapon pointed downrange and at the ground. So learning your weapon is part of the safety process. And so that's something that people understand that if you're getting a six-shooter, how different is that from a magazine? How different is that from a breech loader, how you know, all these things matter.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Yeah, and I mean the angle is way different to you. I you you've got a you've got a short little gun that you're pointing down. You could be pointing at you could shoot yourself, you could be pointing at your feet, you could do the wrong thing. So, yeah, I mean, and and that's the thing. It's it all through that whole deal, and we'll bring this back to communication, but anything that you're doing, it's a communication thing. Like when I went hunting, we have three people going down a beat field in a row, pheasant hunting, with a dog in front of us, running across from each other, and we communicate. Your swing goes this far, your swing goes this far, mine in the middle goes like this. If I am in the middle and the bird's in the middle, it's my shot. If it's to the right or the left, it's your shot. But do not cross paths, do not point them at each other. You have to communicate. You have to tell people how to do that or what to do.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Where's your field of fire?

SPEAKER_01 13:30

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Okay. I mean, you know, whether you're running a defensive position or an offensive position, uh, for us in the military, where's our field of fire? Where are we crossing at? Yeah. Okay. Where where are we getting ahead of each other where we can we you know friendly fire becomes an issue if you don't think friendly fire is an issue? Again, you don't know the Pat Tillman story, you don't know a bunch of other stories where, you know, in fact, fire was rained down upon our own people. Again, that's based upon communication, yeah, right? If you're not communicating properly, what happens?

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Yeah, you don't like, I mean, communication is a big thing too. It's like you don't like, okay, let's stop talking about guns then. Fine. That's a community, that's a point of communication so that people don't get killed, don't get shot, don't get murdered, don't get have hunting accidents, don't have those type of things. But life is the same way. We have to learn to be able to understand and articulate what we're talking about. And I think one of the big things that I have, the conversations that I have all the time with everyone, is we just sit here and we just text, right? That's all we do. And I don't know how many times I've texted someone, and they're like, you don't have to get mean about it, you don't have to be mad about it. And it's like, I'm not. I'm you asked me a question, I answered the question. I answered it, how it would be answered if you were looking me in the eyes or if you're listening to my voice and the inflection and those things in my voice, you would be able to get these social cues that you are not getting. And one of the things that we're learning, and I'm listening to my 12-year-old talk about this, is not being able to communicate at school, not being able to talk to your teachers, not be able to talk to your peers because they don't know how, because what used to be a conversation is now a written text message. And we don't we're losing that communication situation. I mean, it's it's disappearing because we can't sit down and have a conversation just like you and I are here right now. And it it's just a it's a tough thing. Social interaction, when I became a PE teacher, part of PE is to teach kids how to socially interact. Because in what other places will you be so close to other peers having to possibly physically touch someone in a way that you have to learn how to, you know, football, right? I had to run into someone, I had to put my hands on them, I had to be able to do that because if I didn't, what am I gonna do? I'm not gonna be effective. They used to have I hated it. They had dance classes and PE so that you could learn to dance with someone, so that you could know how to be in someone else's space without it being, you know, whatever you want to call it. And it's just amazing to me we don't do these things anymore because kids don't want to. Ew, yuck, a boy, ooh, yuck, this, you know, like whatever. It's we don't do it anymore. We don't know how to. We don't even get out of our own houses to go hang out with people anymore. I I'm guilty of it myself. You know, like I don't go to parties, I don't go to my it's these are things that I would like to do, but I just don't do it because why? Did you freeze up on me? Uh oh you're there. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

No, no, no. Um no, but I mean this is this is the the the common issue we see expressed across the entire spectrum. Most of the conversations, and fortunately my better half has learned me call. Don't text.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Text when you don't have another option. Yep. Um I understand that, but call. Why? It's simple. Guess what? It's faster. It really truly is. I know that people think texting's easier. No, it's not. Phone call is so much faster. Now, granted, you don't want to intrude upon someone's day or space or something like that. Totally get it. Send a little text. Hey, you got a moment to talk? That's a lot of the times what I do.

unknown 17:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

You have a moment to talk. Why? It's so much faster for me to be able to get on the phone with them and go through whatever it is. It's the same thing, you know, again, back in since I'm a perpetual college student. Um, one of the communications issues is people will send messages and our stuff, and I said, I want to talk to a human.

unknown 17:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

Why? I'm tired of talking to AIs, I'm tired of talking by email. Let me let me express my problem. Because a lot of times what happens is the context in my voice tells you that I'm not upset, I'm not mad, I'm just trying to work through the problem. Right. Okay. And can you help me? And the reality is, is one of the most the fastest way to get something done is to look somebody in the face and say, Can you help me? Right. Why? Because we naturally are inclined to try to help if we can. Right. Oh, square dancing.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Oh, she's talking about the auto, correct? She's like, you sit there, and it is funny how that becomes whatever it becomes. But my my thing, and I you know this about me probably, we haven't done it in quite a few years, but like using the voice, the voice text is I use Telegram and WhatsApp with most people because it's just easier to sit there and and hold the button and talk for a minute and then send it, and then they can listen to it when they have time and then they can respond back. But I have I have the same scenario with with other people as well. They start texting you and you get three or four messages in, and the next thing you know, it's like, I'm not gonna sit here and just keep texting. Let's have a let's have a conversation and it it obviously you got time to talk to me, you know. So call and talk. The problem is that it turns into more than just this is all we talk about. There's a bunch of other things that we have to talk about too. And it still it still doesn't matter to me, you know, but we we beat this dead horse where oh, I just don't have time. I don't have time, I don't want to talk to you, I don't want to look someone in the face, I don't want to, you know. It's a weird deal.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

We do have time, and that's the quality of our lives are going to be measured by the quality of our interactions with others.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Right.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

Okay. I mean, if if we want to live, if we want to spend all of our time living in our own between our own ears, okay, but that's not where the real joy of life comes. The real joy of life is interacting, is loving, caring, uh interacting with others. That that's the joy of life.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

And that's not even where learning comes from. I mean, you think about it, like learning, I've learned more from you having a conversation than I've learned from myself having a conversation in my head, you know? Of course.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

And again, you you know this from the learning models. The prime learning model is doing what? Is watching someone else do it. Yeah. Okay. Um in the medical model for surgeons, it's C one, do one, teach one. That's the model first is a surgery model. Well, if you don't interact with people, there will be no C1. Okay, so where do you get to the do one if you don't get to the C one? And it's what we do. Learning to throw baseball, learning to throw football. Hockey shot, what are you doing? Uh everybody goes, Well, I'm watching a YouTube video. Okay. Um, I probably would not do that that way. I probably would get a live human because a live human would teach you about balance and a live human would teach you how it felt. And and granted, maybe the YouTube video can get you there, but it would be easier to be in front of somebody.

SPEAKER_01 21:04

Yeah. It just yeah, and the other thing is too, is I think that people get lost too in the fact that teaching someone how to do something, you you literally think about the steps and have to explain how those steps are done in order to get to do it. Like I, you know, being a teacher, you know, knowing how that was was like, it's just like that everything I do goes into that. My training is into training someone. And I had a I have a guy that I'm teaching I'm training myself. I haven't had it got a chance to spend as much time with him as I'd like to, but I've trained him enough where he can kind of be self sufficient on his own but still have questions that he can call me and ask me, and I can help him. And then we're like, Well, we're gonna need you to train this guy. And so he's like, I don't even have time to train that guy because I'm too busy trying to figure it out on my own. And I said, Guess what? When you have to think through those steps and explain. Those to someone else, you're educating yourself and you're learning more every single time you do it. And that's how I got where I got. I just kept doing it. And when I didn't know, I either called someone and asked them, or I went and looked in the resource guide and figured out what works and how to do it. You know, so you're using those resources that you have to learn how to do it. And if you can tell someone else how to do it, they're gonna know too. And you're gonna learn more because it's almost like doing it twice every time you teach someone to do it.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Yeah, and it one of the things that happens in academia is we do peer review. And we do peer review. People think peer review is for um making sure the quality of the product. Well, of course it is, but one of the biggest things it does, it is allow you to take your idea, put it on paper, present it as a process, an idea and a logic to someone else, then have the person get this tell you the way they see and hear what you're saying. In other words, does it make sense? And based upon my knowledge, my background, my experience, is there any other way, instead of looking as it is a critique, is there any other way that I can improve what you're doing? In other words, I have nine steps that make this process amazing, but this other person comes in and says, Listen, in my experience, if you just add this tenth step, you will refine the process amazingly more than you have. And you go, I didn't think about it that way. Or again, what is that out of a process is it's also communication. It's making sure that I get the idea out cleanly. Because one of the things that happens is you've done this before, write a paper. Now, put the presentation together for the paper you just wrote.

SPEAKER_01 23:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

And watch how much better the paper gets when you have to make a presentation.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Yeah, when you have to communicate what you actually wrote down.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Yeah, exactly. It sounds really good when you wrote it on paper. When you put it up in slides, you go, oh man, that didn't really make sense. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:14

Yeah, it's it's just, I don't know. I mean, it's a lost art, and we have to figure out how to get back there, I feel like, or we're gonna be stuck because you know, this having AI communicate for you doesn't even give you the thought process to think it through yourself, you know. And I'm guilty of this as well, but I'll take something and I'll I'll put it in there and I'll I write it out, I'll read it, then I'll copy and paste it, drop it into chat GPT. What do you think of this? It'll clean it up a little bit and I'll put it back into the email or the text message or whatever. But I don't do that every time, but it when it gets to a point where you have a, you know, like in customer service, right? You have a customer who one of the goals is when a customer has made this decision, they've made this choice, they pick this, like we have arguments, but the dumbest conversations that we ever have is a customer picked out a color, they don't like it. Oh, I had to pick it out from a swatch, you told me this would work, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They have this buyer's remorse of what they bought because they picked it out and decided when they actually got it that was the wrong choice. And you have to kind of turn the situation back on them and say, Did I make the mistake or did you make the mistake? You have to have a little ownership ownership in what you did. And sometimes you can't articulate that very well, and it can come across as you're dumb, you did, you know, like that's how the customer reads it, and you have to find a way to manipulate the situation, not manipulate it, but change, change their thinking to help them understand what they did and where you're coming from. Because at the end of the day, it's gonna cost someone money, and you're gonna make the person who was there to help you, and you put you picked it out and you purchased it, pay for your mistake. And a lot of times, you know, a good person will go, Well, you know, and they'll go, Okay, yes, I did make that mistake, and what is it gonna take to fix it? You know, and at that point, then the person who sold it to you is more willing to go, Well, I'll give it to you at a discounted price, way below what I actually sold it to, so that I can make you happy. But this is ultimately your choice, you know.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

Yeah, and you know as well as I do that if you take a wall and put a little piece of color on it, that the little piece of color looks one way on a wall bounded in white or beige, right, than it does on a full wall. And so what you always used to laugh is is you paint this little piece, and that people go, Well, that's just really we were talking about uh uh my uh better half's uh daughters who decided to paint their room lime green. They thought that lime green, because it looked good in a small place, was good, and then they didn't stop at the walls, they put lime green on the ceiling. So, yeah. And so you can imagine what that little swatch of lime green looked like when it was on every wall and the ceiling, right? Yeah, there was a lot of lime green. I bet. And again, you know, one of the experiences in being able to communicate with people is you can simply say, hey, listen, that looks really good against a white backdrop in a small space, but let me tell you, let me let me do a bigger swatch for you. And you make a bigger, and they go, Whoa, that's a lot of green. And you go, Yeah, that's my point. Is now, see, that's communication again.

SPEAKER_01 27:29

Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

Oh, there you go, Nikki.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

That's funny.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

But but that's back to the same idea of being able to communicate, and you simply say to somebody, yes, I know it's a swatch, but let's look at this in a bigger way because I know this is gonna present a problem because I know what the eye does.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

Okay, that's back to communication again. And if you're not effectively communicating, you're gonna run into problem after problem after problem after problem. And again, that's what we do to get over that. We communicate.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

Yep, it's a lost art. It is a lost art.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

You didn't tell me whether you liked your lime green room, Nikki.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

Well, Robert, what another great conversation. Communication is one of those things that we really need to talk about. Um, but uh appreciate you being here. What do you got going on this week, Robert?

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Well, I'm I'm writing it at Global Strategy Institute.substack.com, and this week I'm talking about America's favorability in the world.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Very nice, great topic. This week we have on Shaping Success Treasure Valley, we got it's a called it's rodeo week. The Caldwell Night Rodeo is this week, which is here in Treasure Valley. If you're listening from the Treasure Valley, check out a special edition with that. We've got the sponsor, the bourbon sponsor of Caldwell Night Rodeo, Andy Koenig, coming up on Shaping Success Treasure Valley. That drops Friday. And uh got catch me and Jay Finning on One Drink Wednesday, seven o'clock Pacific Standard Time every Wednesday. Until next time, Robert, we'll see ya.

SPEAKER_00 29:05

Yeah, have a wonderful week, everyone.