The Next Question

Hosts: Jan, Rob, Dee, & Jim

Social media getting a bit contentious? With the national dialogue approaching DEFCON 2, we take a look at how to negotiate contentious conversations without losing principles and without losing face.

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Transcript

[Music]

JIM: Dee, this one’s for you, all right?

DEE: Mm-Hmm.

JIM: See if you’ve got this guy. Ichiro Suzuki, do you know who this is?

DEE: He’s a baseball player.

JIM: He’s a retired baseball player, that’s right. Why has he been in the news recently?

DEE: He was nominated for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

JIM: He’s just been voted in.

DEE: Oh, voted in, yes.

JIM: And that’s the controversy. 394 votes cast. He received 393.

DEE: Right.

JIM: Who is this writer that didn’t vote for him? And he had this to say, he said, if he knew who he was, he would invite him over to his house, “we’ll have a drink together, and have a good chat.” And I’m thinking, isn’t that a great way to approach a detractor?

JIM (voice-over): How gracious is that? When someone votes against me, is my first reaction to invite them over to my house for a drink and a good chat? Probably not, but why not? Let’s be honest, the national dialogue has soured somewhat recently, wouldn’t you agree? We’ve moved from healthy debate to a diet of packaged, processed talking points sourced from our favorite single point of view, news feeds. Political interviews, Senate confirmation hearings, social media, there’s nothing new there. No one is listening. Everyone is firing their bullet points across an ever widening gorge, and it’s hard to see a way out. When everyone has exhausted their supply of prefab answers, will we have reached an impasse, a dead end?

[Music begins]

JIM (voice-over): Maybe it’s that moment right then, when we do something for which no one has a ready-made meme that they can copy and paste at the world. Maybe that’s the time for something new. Maybe that’s the time for the next question.

[Music]

JIM: …came from Japan, where he played in the Nippon Professional League for a while, and accumulated a bunch of hits there, a bunch of records there, and then he came into the major leagues. He holds the single season hit record with 262 hits in one season, and how many games are there for him to accumulate those?

ROB: 160 some.

JIM: Oh, that’s pretty impressive. And that was the beginning, when he hit that 262, that was the beginning of a 10 year run of 200 plus hits. And he had a 10 year run of Gold Glove awards too. 10 in a row for a right fielder, tying - I’m looking to Jan and Rob right here.

ROB: Al Kaline.

JAN: Oh, there you go. Yes.

JIM: Al Kaline with 10, very good. Now here’s another reason for mentioning that, because there’s a writer named Jeff Passon, and he’s going to be like a headhunter. He’s gonna go after this guy. He calls the writer a coward. He assumed he knew why the guy didn’t reveal his name, and then he judged him based on his assumption, which is a classic error that I see all the time, especially on social media. What I’d like to do is see if we can move beyond that. You know, how can we go move ahead with our conversation?

JAN: I used AI to prepare for this.

JIM: Did you? How did you prepare? What did you prepare?

JAN: I wanna know what are the characteristics of stoicism? Well, I have to be virtuous.

DEE: Mm-Hmm.

ROB: Oh.

JAN: And I also have to…

JIM: How do they define that?

JAN: I’m just giving you the bullet points. I don’t have any real understanding. I’m just telling you what the list says.

DEE: Isn’t it like thinking on a higher - not on a higher level, but being generous of spirits, like slow to judge sort of thing? I mean, it’s all like characteristics of an honorable person being honorable, isn’t it?

JIM :Sure. There are basic four pillars to it. One is wisdom, you know, think well. Another is temperance, manage yourself well.

JAN: Mm-Hmm.

JIM: Another is courage and justice, address your community well. I mean, this is an ancient idea. You have positive emotions and you have negative emotions. And one of the goals of stoicism is to emphasize the positive and try to deal with the negative so the negative ones aren’t in your life all the time. There was another guy at the same time named Epicurus, and this is where we get our word Epicurean, and it usually has to do with food. But Epicurus had this idea of emphasize the positive, push the negative things aside, and that led to a sort of hedonism where it’s pleasure seeking all the time. And so Epicurean has been slipped into thinking as something that has to do with self-indulgence of all the pleasures in life. The Stoics took a different turn with this positive and negative. Yes, you want the positive feelings, but the negative feelings are there to strengthen you, and you play off of them. If you’ve been through this before and you’ve taken it on board and you’ve resolved it, then your experience is broader and you have a better way of setting the negative, not aside, but not letting it infect you.

DEE: Control you.

JIM: Yeah, when negative feelings come up, you can see them as a challenge to grow rather than something that needs to be pushed aside in a way.

DEE: So I would guess that’s where the justice comes in? Or that would be connected?

JIM: Well, all of them, all of them. For me, I look at it as - I look at today from tomorrow’s perspective and not looking at today from yesterday’s perspective. Yesterday can be crippling to you, or it can be illusory. But if you’re thinking about tomorrow, how do I want to look back on what I did today? How can I make tomorrow better by giving tomorrow great memories of today?

DEE: Usually when I’m angry, it’s because I see, or I hear of, injustice…

JAN: Yeah.

DEE: …which drives me to want to see justice.

JIM: Yeah.

DEE: I mean, that’s where I’m making a connection.

JIM: Does anyone here, just show of hands, did anyone here ever use social media?

JAN: That’s funny.

DEE: I’ve…

ROB: Heard of it.

DEE: …greatly reduced my social media.

JIM: You know, things like MySpace, things like that.

JAN: Old school. Old school boy.

JIM: So in social media, one of the exercises I do is before I click on that button in my browser that says Facebook, let’s say, I think what am I likely to find here? And how am I gonna react to it when I see it? I could see a post from someone with whom I disagree. And it could be about a hot button topic.

ROB: Mm-Hmm.

JIM: And so what am I gonna do with that? That’s one of the tools of the stoic. In the morning, wake up, what’s your day gonna be like? Realize it’s not gonna be that, but you’ve got plans. And how are you gonna confront things that distract you?

JAN: The way you describe stoicism to me is that ability to just pause before you do. And, I mean, it’s just the practical word I’m coming up with for it all. When you’re responding to anything, you wanna pause and reflect on where to place that. And that also helps me - I’ll take the temperance and say emotionally, ’cause I can respond very easily from a defensiveness or an emotional response. But if I pause for a moment and think about what’s an effective way to respond, I’m gonna be happier with my choice.

DEE: I had a moment this week with Facebook, where somebody posted something I greatly disagreed with. The knee-jerk reaction is to comment and say, “Well, no.” But so I had an argument in my head with this person [laughter] for pretty much the rest of the evening. And then I just left it.

JAN: So, what I do…

ROB: Is that satisfying?

DEE: To a certain point, but it also, with wisdom, I’ve learned nothing I could say would work. And only if I got into the nitty gritty of it, I would say this person would have been incapable of comprehending what I was saying. So it was just like, no, you just gotta leave it, ’cause you’re not gonna get anywhere.

ROB: Well, I think you need to take that into consideration.

DEE: Mm-Hmm.

ROB: I mean, I’ve gotta draw the line with people that maybe believe something, but it’s totally divorced from the facts. There’s a difference between belief and truth.

DEE: Yeah.

ROB: I think it might be true for you, but if it doesn’t follow the facts, I don’t know how to talk to a person like that. And so probably it’s a good thing I’m not on social media.

DEE: Yeah.

ROB: Because…

DEE: You would go crazy, right?

ROB: I would. I would say things that wouldn’t help. Might make me feel better.

JAN: Well, it kinda depends what your goal is. I mean, there are people with whom I engage for understanding why they said what they did. In thinking about our conversation today, I was thinking about who are the people that I would engage with, people who are not the same opinion as me, but maybe would be willing to think through in a conversation. There are people that are a long way away from me and motivated by things that are very different from me that I’m not sure it would be worthwhile to engage with. So I try to - I failed that this week, by the way, on social media, but I try to think about that and think, “This person, where are they coming from? How can I learn more about where they’re coming from if I don’t already know”? Which is what Jim is speaking about. I don’t want - if it’s somebody that I know very well, maybe my assumptions are correct, but if it’s somebody - or maybe they’re not, but I’m more likely if I know them well. But if I don’t know them well, I’m probably not gonna engage without trying to find out where they’re coming from.

ROB: Yeah. There was a technique that we employed when we were teaching total quality management, improvement, continuous improvement, and it’s called “The Five Whys.” And if you just keep asking the question why, by the time you get to five, generally you’ve gone to the core of what the person is trying to say. And that’s kind of what you were saying, Jan, you like to know why people think what they think. “Why do you believe that?” And then, “Well, why is that?” They keep asking the question, “Why?” A lot of times you can get to a point, maybe you’ve been a point where you can agree, but it takes patience to go through that with some people.

JAN: Well, you have to shut yourself, your reactionary self down and listen.

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: And because my goal’s gonna be find common ground and work from that. And some of the most effective listening I’ve been part of in a group, where we’re talking about racism, is to kind of remove the big “racism” word and get down to what we have in common, that maybe you don’t even think about the race part till you get further down the road.

JIM: When you’re talking about “The Five Whys,” Rob…

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: …see, now I have a better understanding of things because I was thinking, like, the two-year-old who was just being so two-year-old. [Laughter] “Why? Why? Why? Why?” and then you realize, inside their mind, they're saying, “I'm just trying to get to a core understanding of what you're saying, dad.”

ROB: That’s true. That’s right. You're never too young.

JIM: Dee, you when you were talking about, “Oh, I'm not gonna engage because they wouldn't understand.”

DEE: Yeah, I thought of that after I said it.

JIM: What did you think about? When you said that?

DEE: Well, okay. The individual posted they were grateful for certain people in their lives Because they helped them form, I guess, ideas. What I wanted to say is,”Aren't you capable of thinking for yourself? Why are you relying on other individuals to think for you?” The implication was these people helped them understand or come to a certain point of view that they had, and I just thought, no, they're letting someone else think for them. It would be their ability to think on their own to to generate their own ideas and it came through in that post. They didn't have that skill or they they had not practiced that skill I guess is what I'm trying to say. Did that make sense?

JIM: But doesn't that short-circuit your ability to communicate with them? That assumption you've you've decided ahead of time that they're not going to be able to take on board something, therefore your conversation stops there.

DEE: That's true, but this has been a consistent thing in years where I’ve seen, and I’m like, I assume, I will say, this person has come to their conclusions or beliefs based on other, I guess, stronger-willed people in their lives who help them think a certain way.

JIM: Can you think of a question you could ask that person that would get more information, that wouldn’t have them put up a wall against you? Because sometimes when you ask a question, it can seem like an affront…

DEE: Right.

JIM: …like you’re challenging them. And so they go defensive and then there’s no conversation anymore. It’s just lobbing bullet points at each other. But can you think of a question that says, you know, it starts with something, “Well, that’s interesting. How did you come up with that idea?” You know, okay. “Well, it was someone had said something,” they said. “Oh, okay, so do you think they were right with that?” Get them to evaluate their ideas - the ideas they’ve received from others - on their own terms.

DEE: Yeah, no, I hear what you’re saying. I guess I went in a few different directions. One, I was upset with the thinking going on. Two, I was upset that this person has allowed themselves to be influenced by others, or they put themselves in a position of inferiority in their thinking as compared to - it was like this male dominance thing that they’ve fallen into that trap of, “Oh, poor little me, I’m so grateful for my husband who thinks this way,” or, you know. And I jump on it all the time because I see too many women allowing themselves to think, oh, they’re inferior to, say, this male in their life who helps them understand things. And that’s what was going through. So I had anger on multiple levels, on that level itself, and then on the subject matter that was being discussed, so.

JAN: It probably was, I’m thinking the subject matter might’ve been the trigger.

DEE: Yes.

JAN: If you had seen it with a different subject matter and maybe different people…

DEE: Mm-Hmm.

JAN: …you might’ve reacted differently?

DEE: Maybe, yeah.

JAN: Possible.

DEE: Two things that are my triggers.

JAN: Yeah.

DEE: One, women allowing themselves to feel or believe they are inferior to a male. And they’re not even aware of it, and it’s probably they’ve been raised a certain way and they just slip into it naturally. ’Cause I can tell you, I tell my girls at school, “Do not let a guy influence you or make you think a certain way. No, no, no, we don’t go down that road.” So I try to be a positive, strong female influence and help my girls think for themselves.

JAN: Like the [unintelligible]

DEE: ’Cause it drives me nuts. [Laughs]

JIM: I think we have a question from the audience.

[Laughter]

JAN: I know, I just wanna say, what I loved about what you just said in processing that is, you recognize your own triggers, okay? So maybe that is what makes you say, “I’m not gonna engage that right now because I’m recognizing I have an emotional reaction to that.” And I think that’s a healthy pause. You could go back some time, maybe not so emotionally impacted and ask the question. But Jim made an important point that I always have to be aware of. Because I ask “why” a lot, I can be misinterpreted because I’m asking for information. And people sometimes read that as a challenge…

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: …and so I have to think very carefully, and this is why I prefer a face-to-face or a verbal discussion, not social media. I have to think carefully about the tone I’m using when I say why. Jim set it up well, when he said, “That’s interesting” - engage - “That’s interesting perspective. How have you come to that?” Or, “Why do you think that?” - allows for some space in there, and it’s not like, “Why the heck do you think that?”

JIM: Well, it’s a spoonful of sugar idea. What’s gonna set it up? If you say, “Where did you get that information?” there’s no tone of voice that you’ve provided…

JAN: Exactly.

JIM: …and so the listener is gonna provide their own tone of voice to you based on, “Well, this is a contentious thing, so that’s a challenge.” What if you said something right up front and, say it’s something, “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” and then do it.

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: So you first give a little bit of sweetening to it and give a little bit of space that, “Actually I’m inquiring of you right now; I’m not challenging you,” moves the conversation ahead. Another sort of strategy in this that I’ve been considering is, in a conversation like that, maybe what I don’t want to do is engage in that conversation. I want to engage, or set the groundwork for the next conversation I’m gonna have with that person. And so I’m thinking what I need to do is, all right, let’s back off here. How can I make this so that the next time we talk is possible? So put myself as a listener, not someone that’s gonna counter anything that they say, just listen, and just listen again. And they are realizing, oh, they’re not getting any pushback. They’re feeling comfortable. They’re feeling open, which allows the next conversation to happen. Part of it too, part of the goal of the conversation is they’ve just said something that I would never say. What would it take from me to say the same thing they did? All right, do I need more information? Do I need a certain point of view? Do I need a lobotomy? What do I need that would make me say the same thing that they just said? And then I have to measure, okay, would that compromise me too much? Would that help me grow? What is it gonna do to me? And that inquiry is very instructive if you’re open to it. If you’re ready to co-author the conversation with the other person, rather than just treat it as a soliloquy or a monologue. If I come into conversations that have turned contentious, I have to be very honest with myself and say, “What did I do to cause that?” or, “What did I do to contribute to that?” or, “What didn’t I do that could have stopped that from happening?” Then I’m, in the stoic way, “This was a negative thing. Now I’ve got to broaden out. How did I accommodate that? How didn’t I?” Now when I come into the next one, when I’m about to hit that Facebook button on my browser, what am I likely to find there? And how do I want to respond to it? And how tomorrow do I want to look back on today with satisfaction?

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: So you can, you can run into someone that is simply flat out, “This is me and it’s not gonna change,” which means that approach to that person, we either stop the approach to the person or we find another way to do it. Well, I turn it around the other way. What if someone made assumptions about me, said, “I’m not gonna engage Jim on this because he won’t understand what I’m saying. He doesn’t have what it takes. He doesn’t have the background. He doesn’t have the education. He doesn’t have the experience to understand what I’m gonna do.” What if I found out someone was thinking about me that way? How would I feel about that? Anger, shame, whatever it is. And then think, “Who am I doing that to? Who am I encouraging to feel defeated or to feel anger or to feel shame?” And then I think, “All right, if that’s the way it is, if I’m that antagonist, maybe I need to find another way to engage.”

ROB: You’re a better person than I am, Jim.

JIM: No, I’m not.

[Laughter]

ROB: Yeah, no you are.

JIM: No, I’ve got the wounds to show it.

ROB: Well, yeah, but I’m saying...

JAN: We’re in a day and age where that is an uncommon experience - probably because of social media, or at least it plays out there - where we have our script ready for what we think, what we believe, and other people do, too. And so we’re not hearing what’s being said, but also this is where I’m gonna run into a problem. We are also in a time of - where I think some lines that need to be drawn. I don’t remember who it was. It might have been Maya Angelou who said, she had a rule in her house where, “If somebody said something racist in my house, they’re going to leave.” That’s kind of where I get stuck. There are moments when I wanna understand, “How did you come to think that?” But we have so much hate speech flying around right now that I am not interested, to be perfectly honest, I’m not interested in engaging that.

DEE: Getting down to drawing the line, I think that’s where you come down to the foundation. You have to have your pillars and know why you have them and then how to recognize when those are being crossed. And I think, like, when you talk about racism, a lot of people would say, no, they’re not racist. They’re justifying it in some way that they feel is legitimate and they’re able, and they do not see that they’re racist, that the line has become murky for them. I would say if it comes down to, you know, immigrants, people would say something like, “Well, they’re taking jobs. They’re here illegally,” but when we get down to it, there’s only certain immigrants they have problems with. ’Cause when I say I’m an immigrant, one, either people are surprised or they say, “Well, it doesn’t pertain to you because you did it the right way.” I’ll hear that a lot too. That’s where for me, it’s so obvious. Do you not hear the racism that’s coming through? It’s the brown people you have the problem with.

JIM: It could be. I don’t know that that’s what they’re after. They could be after something else. They could be after, “I don’t like the way the country’s going. I can’t define it. I haven’t been able to define it, but it feels like it has these things. And this guy over here is saying something that, yeah, yeah, I think that’s about right.” It could be that. I don’t know yet until I’ve actually talked to the person to find out what is it that they’re actually afraid of? Or what is it that they’re motivated by? And if I go in with the idea, “Well, they’re racist,” that - you’ve just flattened that person out of being…

DEE: Right.

JIM: …a whole person. So it’s dismissive of the person. What’s the thing in Harry Potter, Sorcerer’s Stone, Philosopher’s Stone? They’re falling down and this tree starts to grab them. And Hermione is the one that says, “Just relax.”

ROB: Just relax.”

JAN: Oh, yeah.

DEE: That’s the first movie, isn’t it?

JIM: Yeah, the first one, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Sorcerer’s Stone. And she says, “Just relax.” In other words, when you fight against it, it holds you and it’s going to destroy you. But if you just relax, then you can make some progress.

JAN: What do you do, Jim, when somebody though, you’ve had an exchange with them and they do say something that is by definition racist. I mean, I could take the Elon Musk “Heil” thing. Okay, we can watch how people have decided that’s not what it is. Okay, but it was what it was. And…

JIM: Stephen Fry is good on this. He says, “Elon Musk is not a Nazi. The Nazis made really good cars.”

JAN: *Ba-dum-bum.* [laughing] I set you up well, yeah.

JIM: I thought it was hilarious.

JAN: It’s a wonderful line. But there are these, there are these points. There are maybe people who don’t know why they think that way. I mean, go back to Deanna’s example. There are people that just have a feeling, sort of like you’re saying, “There’s a feeling the country’s not going right and I’m not comfortable. Now somebody’s put some policies forward that might solve my problem. And I’m not recognizing the connection to race and those policies. I just know that I’m not comfortable with the way things are.” So you do have to get to the next question to try to get to what that is. But there are also people today that are racist. Last - yesterday - Trump has decided to cut off aid to South Africa because the white landowners are not being treated fairly. Okay, now what’s under that? What’s under that? We have heard that before. If we have any understanding of history, we know where to put these things. I mean, if we don’t have any understanding of history, that’s another problem. But we know what “white landowners” means. So that is a racist policy and we can see it throughout right now. And I think not calling it out or finding a way to call it out is not something I can live with. So I have...

JIM: Here’s an experiment, an exercise that’s done by Stoics. (My glasses [uniintelligible].) I like to do it as a gratitude thought experiment. And if you’re driving and listening to this right now, don’t follow these instructions. Close your eyes, and imagine something that you really care about not being there. Right? Just imagine for a moment that it could be a person, it could be an animal companion, it could be the security of a house, it could be anything. Just imagine for a minute that that is not there, and absorb that feeling. Then open your eyes and realize, “No, that’s not true. That person is still there. That animal is still there. I still have this house.” It gives you a shot of gratitude. And so the next time you see that person or that animal, or you go home and say, “This is our home,” you are filled with a positive feeling towards that. You’ve set an anchor of “what if?” but you don’t dwell on it. It’s not dwelling on the negative. It’s a way of exercising your gratitude for something. Because, how many times - Well, it happened with our dog Pip, who is doing fairly well. Don’t you think?

JAN: Oh yeah, he looks good.

JIM: He’s not 100%, but he seems fully functional and happy and that. But I remember the way I felt when it was first diagnosed that he had this meningoencephalitis and it can, within a week, cause us to lose him. And I remember what I felt like during that week. And I remember what I felt - and I was an emotional mess for this three pound dog. And then I find out, every day I look at him, I just, there’s so much gratitude. And I want him to feel so happy. And you know, it’s the, that thought is a stoic exercise to express gratitude to things and look at that world in the positive thing and not take for granted what we have. “Uh oh, I could lose this. Uh oh, I could lose this.” Oh no, no, no, no, that’s not it. “I have this.” So it’s gratitude for what you have rather than disappointment at what you don’t have. You know, “I don’t have the boat that my neighbor has. And he must have more money than I do.” And then I’m just filling myself with this negativity. I said, “You know what I’ve got? First, I’ve got Deanna. I’ve got - I am a wealthy, rich man. I can get food. I haven’t been hungry ever unless I’ve done it deliberately to myself. I’ve never gone in want.” Imagine going back two, three, four generations and telling your ancestors, “You know, there’ll be a time when you can have this. They will be able to diagnose this. And we have solutions to that now. And we have this and we have this. And tomorrow is even gonna be better.”

[Music]

JIM (voice-over): In “Star Trek, The Next Generation,” in an episode called “The Wounded,” Miles O’Brien is at a bar talking with an old enemy from the Cardassian Union. He describes a Cardassian attack on an outpost and how he defended himself with a phaser that had accidentally been put on maximum. He says he had never killed anything before that. And then he says, “It’s not you I hate, Cardassian. It’s what I became because of you.”

Let’s take care how we respond when attacked, how we defend ourselves and others. Let’s supply tomorrow with a memory of our actions that speaks of courage and justice, temperance and wisdom.

Until next time.

[Music ends]