Why Smart Women Podcast
Welcome to the Why Smart Women Podcast, hosted by Annie McCubbin. We explore why women sometimes make the wrong choices and offer insightful guidance for better, informed decisions. Through engaging discussions, interviews, and real-life stories, we empower women to harness their intelligence, question their instincts, and navigate life's complexities with confidence. Join us each week to uncover the secrets of smarter decision-making and celebrate the brilliance of women everywhere.
Why Smart Women Podcast
Why are we so quick to say ‘ I’m not racist but…….’?
What happens when our mental shortcuts lead us astray? In this thought-provoking episode, I dive deep into the psychology behind prejudice and how our brains create harmful generalizations about people who don't look or sound like us.
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You are listening to the why Smart Women podcast, the podcast that helps smart women work out why we repeatedly make the wrong decisions and how to make better ones. From relationships, career choices, finances, to faux fur, jackets and kale smoothies. Every moment of every day, we're making decisions. Let's make them good ones. I'm your host, annie McCubbin, and, as a woman of a certain age, I've made my own share of really bad decisions. Not my husband, I don't mean him, though I did go through some shockers to find him, and I wish this podcast had been around to save me from myself. This podcast will give you insights into the working of your own brain, which will blow your mind. I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I'm recording and you are listening on this day. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Well, hello, smart women, and welcome back to the why Smart Women podcast. Today I am back home in Sydney, australia, on the northern beaches, back from Barrel, and this is where I am broadcasting. For those of you that live overseas. Hello everybody. Thank you very much for listening. On the weekend here in Australia, we had a series of anti-immigration marches, so in most of our capital cities, yeah, they're a deeply disturbing event. The people that attend are a strange sort of combination of anti-vaxxers, sovereign citizens, people that would like to bring back the white Australia policy and, most disturbinglyly, neo-nazis. So, in the face of this and I will be talking to the snarky Gherkin on Thursday about his take on the marches, but in the interim I thought I would play an excerpt from my book. Now, I wrote my book in 2021. Of course, racism is all is as old as humanity itself, but I wrote my book back in 2021 and one of the chapters as you know you may not know my book is set in a block of flats and in one of the chapters, mrs Hume, who is one of the elderly neighbours in the block of flats, who holds some fairly racist ideas, finds herself in a situation where her preconceived idea of people that aren't like her is challenged. So here we are, um chapter I think it's chapter three of my. Is that right, harrison one? Excuse me, I'm just flicking through my book as I'm speaking to you. Yeah, I think, pretty sure it's chapter three. Yes, it is well done, annie, remembering that's been a while since I wrote it. So it's chapter three of why smart women Make Bad Decisions. Now Critical Thinking Can Protect them, and it's called Cat Meets the Neighbours. Hope you enjoy it. Chapter three Cat Meets the Neighbours. There's a cat in the block.
Speaker 1:Mrs Hume has a sick sense about these things. Not that she minds cats per se, but the body corporate rules are there for a reason. She suspects the couple in flat seven. They rent. Not that she minds renters per se, but renters have a different relationship with law and order.
Speaker 1:Mrs Hume straightens her cardigan in the hall mirror, combs her grey bob, applies lipstick, noting the area of lip that requires coverage has diminished arms herself with the body corporate agreement, double deadlocks the door and heads downstairs, her arthritic knee slowing the descent. She knocks discreetly but firmly on the door of flat seven. It's opened by the girl, a glass of wine in her hand. It's barely gone five. Mrs Hume smiles and hopes her face has taken on a pleasant aspect while looking discreetly past the girl into the flat to validate her cat's suspicions. The girl doesn't return her smile and Mrs Hume readies herself for battle. But then the girl, in an act completely alien to Mrs Hume, throws her arms around her neck and bursts into loud, heaving sobs.
Speaker 1:Mrs Hume barely knows the girl. She'd had to admonish her once about the position of her bin on the verge. But that's it. The girl is thin but surprisingly strong. She clings on so fiercely that Mrs Hume feels slightly winded. She thinks it would be impolite to shift her position and worries that the respondent pressure she's applying is too light and tentative. She realises neither of them has spoken. Mrs Hume feels she should say something or at least make a comforting noise.
Speaker 1:The girl sobbing is echoing around the landing. Mrs Hume is preparing herself to make the comforting noise when Mr Yee from Flat 9 opens his door to investigate. His English is terrible. Mrs Hume disengages one arm and points to the girl while making a crying face to demonstrate that the girl is upset and she's comforting her. He frowns. He's from China. He may not understand what's going on. She's not sure if crying is permitted in Asia. She wishes it wasn't here.
Speaker 1:The door from flat eight opens and Mr Kovachik makes an appearance. It's now like Pitt Street Mall on the landing. Mr Kovacic, whose English is also disappointing, is of course irresistibly drawn to the drama. He, being Croatian, is well-versed in crying, yelling and all other forms of human expression. Mr Kovacic, his wife and his unmarried daughter conduct all conversations as if they were standing on the tarmac at Tullamarine. Mrs Hume indicates with the same arm she'd used to clarify the situation to Mr Yee that all is well. Ignoring her reassurance, mr Kovacic begins traversing the landing, his big arms outstretched and, to Mrs Hume's extreme discomfort, wraps her and the sobbing girl in a large hug. Oh Kat, he says to the girl. Mrs Hume looks discreetly over her shoulder. Mr Yee, to her relief, remains in his doorway.
Speaker 1:Mr Kovacic asks what the problem is. Mrs Hume thinks this is intrusive. If the girl wanted to divulge the problem she would have. Mrs Hume's shoulders are now damp from the girl's tears and half a glass of Shiraz is now trickling down her back. The girl is composing herself to answer. Mrs Hume wishes she'd hurry. Mr Kovacic smells. Mrs Kovacic should spend more time washing his shirts and less time yelling. Mrs Hume wants to go back to her flat to change her cardigan, but she doesn't know how to extricate herself. The cat has gone. Cat whispers into the recently formed triumvirate. I knew it, mrs Hume thinks.
Speaker 1:Oh cat, says Mr Kovacic reverentially.
Speaker 2:Big pussy run away.
Speaker 1:Well, mrs Hume says, moving back onto the familiar and reassuring ground of regulations, you're not really meant to have one. Mr Kovachik, bringing a rich disregard of rules from his country of origin, looks disapprovingly at her. The girl says I didn't like her, but I miss her. Now she's gone. Like my wife says Mr Kovacic, I don't like her, but I miss her when she goes to the shops. Mrs Hume thinks people should be more discreet about their personal lives. It wasn't my cat.
Speaker 2:I wish I could say the same about my wife says Mr Kovacic.
Speaker 1:Mr Yee's wife, who, by the look of their male, unaccountably has a different surname to Mr Yee, has now joined Mr Yee in their doorway. They are whispering quietly. The girl's eyes are swollen and mascara has run down her face in two rivulets. Mr Kovacic frees one arm to dab at her face with his handkerchief. Mrs Hume uses the opportunity to free herself from the yoke of his arm. She's tempted to ask him to dab her back. Come in, says the girl. Mr Kovacic shadows Cat inside, tailed closely by Mrs Hume. Mr Yee and his wife follow in their slipstream and the entire group is now standing just inside her front door. Mrs Hume is not sure if Mr Yee and his wife were part of the invitation, but doesn't feel she has the authority to question their inclusion. The flat is a disturbing combination of chaos and emptiness. The girl has no couch or coffee table, just two unpainted, splintered kitchen chairs positioned in front of the television.
Speaker 2:Where is boy?
Speaker 1:asks Mr Kovacic. Gone, says the girl and begins sobbing again. Mr Kovacic puts his arm around her and indicates with an inclination of his head that Mrs Hume should make some tea. She feels this instruction is outside her remit but in the spirit of neighbourliness, she moves towards the sink. She wishes she hadn't. You could grow enough penicillin in it to fight a pandemic. Also, there's no kettle. What sort of person lives their life without a kettle? She boils the water in a pot. She tentatively opens the fridge. There is a limp cucumber, half a can of chickpeas, a takeaway container of indeterminate age and contents and a container of milk. No wonder the girl is so thin and emotional. She's clearly an anorexic alcoholic. Mrs Hume picks up the milk and sniffs tentatively. Surprisingly, it's fine. Probably for the wretched cat. She thinks. Surprisingly, it's fine, probably for the wretched cat. She thinks. Misty and his wife are still standing just inside the door. She offers them tea by a series of hand movements and the miming of a teacup in a bag. They decline. Thank you, says the girl, accepting the tea.
Speaker 1:You're very kind. The girl gestures for her to sit in one of the two kitchen chairs. She hesitates. The girl says my partner loves those chairs. Said they were rust. Mr Kovacic picks up one of the chairs and examines the underside.
Speaker 2:Boy is stupid, Chair is shit. He says I put out in council clean-up for you.
Speaker 1:The girl looks mournfully at the chairs. Mrs Hume feels compelled to sit. She lowers herself warily. She is now uncomfortable as well as damp. Abruptly Mr Kovacic cups his hands and screams loudly in his native tongue in the direction of his flat. Mrs Kovacic screams back. The walls reverberate. Mrs Hume indicates with her developing mind skills that Mr Yee or his wife should join her. She feels they should show solidarity with the uncomfortable sitting. Again they decline. They clearly don't drink tea or sit in company. Two minutes later Mrs Kovacic and her unmarried daughter bustle in, bearing a red kitchen chair and a bag of food. The unmarried daughter yells something at Mr Kovacic and deposits the chair. Mrs Kovacic puts the bag on the bench, kisses the girl on the cheek, moves to the sink, indicates to her unmarried daughter and Mr Yee's wife to join her and commences cleaning. They all chat away in some Croatian-Chinese hybrid. Mr Kovacic moves to the bench and starts unpacking the bag. Cat, he says, putting a biscuit in his mouth.
Speaker 2:Eat, eat.
Speaker 1:The cat. The girl says loved biscuits. That's why big pussy is fat says Mr Kovacic, putting a biscuit into the girl's hand. Mrs Hume is worried. The girl is going to start crying again. Mrs Kovacic turns from the sink and smiles. Don't be sad. She says the boy was a shit. Mr Yee's wife tuts in obvious agreement. The unmarried daughter pauses in her task of wiping down the bench.
Speaker 2:You should come out for a drink with Helen and I. Kat, We'll get you smashed on a margarita or two.
Speaker 1:Mr Kovacic roars with laughter.
Speaker 2:Nika one bad boy doesn't mean she doesn't like boys anymore.
Speaker 1:He says Settle down Dad. She says flicking him with a tea towel.
Speaker 2:I'm just suggesting we take her out for a drink.
Speaker 1:Mrs Hume is quietly aghast. She had assumed the daughter's unmarried status was due to a lack of personal charm. Now she has to consider a less palatable option. Mrs Kovacic puts her arm around her daughter and kisses her on the cheek. Nika, she says this is lovely idea. Mr Kovacic walks towards Kat and puts a hand on her shoulder.
Speaker 2:Boy was bad bully Kat. I hear him through the walls, Better he run away.
Speaker 1:Kat turns to look at Mrs Kovacic and Mrs Yee then looks up at Mr Kovacic, smiles sadly and takes a small bite out of the biscuit. A sensation arises in Mrs Hume's chest like a foot being laced into a shoe two sizes too small. She places her hand discreetly onto her sternum, worried. The heart attack she's feared is finally here. She glances at Mr Yee's wife, mrs Kovacic, and the Kovacic's unmarried daughter. Are they the last humans she will see? If she died, would they organise her awake at the flats, serve sauerkraut and black bean soup? The lacing in the shoe tightens Her heart constricts so fiercely she has to clutch the arm of the chair. She gasps and leans forward astounded. The others haven't noticed. She feels the panic rise as the lacing tugs so strongly. Her breath is forced up into her throat. Her vision narrows. She focuses on the back of Mrs Kovacic at the sink, willing her to turn around, mouthing the word help and as if her will has compelled her. Mrs Kovacic, mid-plate dry turns, but Mrs Kovacic doesn't look towards her. She looks at Kat. Mrs Hume watches through her diminishing circle of vision as Mrs Kovacic smiles warmly at Kat. Kat, accepting the offer of the clean plate, smiles back. A sob trapped somewhere deep inside.
Speaker 1:Mrs Hume escapes. The lacing around her heart loosens, the pain recedes, her vision clears, breath re-enters her lungs. She realises in an epiphanous rush that this is not the heart attack she had prepared for. This is not a physical condition. This is grief Grief for the lost years. Looking out at the world, she wants to be among them.
Speaker 1:She's grieving for her lost place at the sink. She wants to be one with Misty's wife and Mrs Kovacic to plunge her hands gloveless into hot water, to know their first names, to stand with them shoulder to shoulder while they laugh at her poor attempts at Croatian and Chinese to have them confide in her that the boy was a shit to call her Lucy. She comprehends that she is lonely. She aches for the hand of the daughter. She never had to touch her on the shoulder. Mrs Hume is now worried. She may sob uncontrollably, perhaps outdo the girl. That would not be good. Mr Kovacic would want her involved for another group hug. She feels a soft touch on her shoulder. The Kovacic's unmarried daughter stands there a cup of tea in her hand.
Speaker 3:You okay, Mrs Hume.
Speaker 1:She asks handing her the cup. Mrs Hume looks up at her and is so struck by the warmth of her smile she reaches up and briefly squeezes her hand. The front door squeaks open. They turn in unison towards it. Mr Yee stands there, the cat in his arms.
Speaker 3:She hadn't gone far.
Speaker 1:He says in remarkably good English she missed you, cat. The cat looks his arms. She hadn't gone far. He says in remarkably good English she missed you, cat. The cat looks uninterested. The girl taking the cat carefully from Mr Yee smiles at Mrs Hume. I'm sorry, mrs Hume, what did you come to see me about? Mrs Hume takes a large and shaky breath, rises from the seat and walks towards Cat and the cat. She scratches the cat behind the ear. Mr Hume was a vicious bully Cat, she says. He died 10 years ago. I don't miss him.
Speaker 1:Mrs Hume wonders at these words that have spilled from her mouth. She looks fixedly at the cat, feeling the warmth under her soft fur. She cannot move her gaze for fear of what she'll see in the neighbours' faces. She senses the focus of the room shift, the molecules turn on their axis and settle around her. The air thickens and stills. She holds her breath. She hears footsteps, feels a tap on her arm. Mrs Kovacic stands there a tea towel in her hand. Here, mrs Hume. She says you want to wipe? The air thins, disperses. Mrs Hume smiles and turns towards Mrs Kovacic. I do. She says Call me Lucy.
Speaker 1:Mrs Hume from Flat 10 and her mental shortcuts Okay. So you're probably looking at Mrs Hume and thinking typical old person making racist judgments while you sit there shining your non-judgmental medal. Well, not so fast, soldier. There are a few reasons why Mrs Hume makes the erroneous judgment she does. There are things going on in her head that might be going on, at least to some degree, in your head too. It's the subconscious. Again, it's up to its old tricks. Let's hear it.
Speaker 1:For heuristics, the first trick is the heuristic. What's a heuristic? Well, glad you asked. A heuristic is a mental shortcut. We need to be able to use a rule of thumb, an educated guess, to survive in a highly complex environment. The cognitive load, brain stress required to think through every little decision from scratch would have rendered us obsolete as a race long ago. Otherwise we have survived via the use of heuristics.
Speaker 1:We use mental shortcuts, heuristics all the time. These cause generalizations in our thinking. It's when you think someone has a particular trait or behavior because they are from a certain ethnic group or religion. Because they are from a certain ethnic group or religion, they don't Think about generalisations. We humans love them To a greater or lesser degree. We all stereotype. Stereotyping is adaptive. We need to make sense of the world by grouping things into broad categories. We know that a border collie and a basenji are both dogs, even though they look different, because they both wag their tails and bark. Actually, the basenji doesn't bark, so that wasn't a good example, but you get my point.
Speaker 1:Mrs Hume is coming to her mostly subconscious decisions about the yis and the kvarchiks by using heuristics. We all do it. The availability heuristic is a common cognitive bias whereby you draw conclusions about people or events based on information and memories that come most easily to mind. When Mrs Hume thinks about the Kvarchiks, the Kvarchik's daughter, kat, and the Yees, she uses the availability heuristic. She makes assumptions about who they are based on her experience or perceptions of people of the same ethnic origin, sexual orientation and age. If you've ever been called a typical woman, you've also been pigeonholed by a brain under the influence of the availability heuristic.
Speaker 1:Another example is how the media fills our brain space with news about disasters. If I asked you if the world is a more dangerous place now than it was 100 years ago, you'd probably consider saying yes. The data, of course, tells a different story. This is the safest time to be alive. If you want to investigate this notion further, read Hans Rosling's Factfulness, which details the reality of the improvement in the human condition over the past century. Yet our brains, constantly fed images of plane crashes, robberies and murders, make the incorrect assumption that we're hovering on the brink of disaster. All the time, our attention is drawn to things that most easily come to mind. It appears more dangerous to fly in a plane than to get in a car, because aeroplane disasters are more easily called to mind. However, getting in your car on your daily commute is a more dangerous activity, statistically speaking, than flying from Sydney to London.
Speaker 1:We're tribal. Yes, we're tribal. We all form conclusions about groups of people and endow them with stereotyped characteristics from a very early age. Whether our tribalism is based on region, ethnicity, sexuality, sport, sporting team, political persuasion or social strata, there's a natural impulse to endow your own tribe with positive characteristics. We are the cool tribe and we are right. Other people who are not in our tribe are uncool and definitely wrong, probably about everything. We can base our coolness and rightness on, whatever context we want.
Speaker 1:People outside of our group are the others Not only the other, but very likely undesirable. Not from our region. They probably have some pretty ordinary habits Different religion, political persuasion or sexual orientation. They are definitely not going to be as righteous morally or as generally right and reasonable as us Remember. All this is happening subconsciously. Most of us don't get up in the morning with the intention of thinking ungenerous things about other people. Also, in our skewed and subconscious perception of the other other groups can become homogenous, uniform, all apparently thinking and behaving the same way with the same intention, whereas our people are all wildly individualistic, more interesting and just generally all around a better quality of person, or so we think. Of course, politicians cynically make use of this brain bias to convince people that outsiders are dangerous criminals intent on taking our jobs and possibly murdering us in our beds.
Speaker 1:We're better off being compassionate than empathetic. Uncomfortably, we're likely to be more empathetic towards our own tribe than outsiders. This might seem like a non-problem, but actually empathy has a lot of limitations. If someone hurts one of our people, we might be motivated to dish out some serious punishment. We are more likely to wreak revenge on anyone who we deem has hurt someone from our tribe. This can make us punitive and overly emotional in our response. We can literally weaponize empathy. Also, tempting though it may be, joining someone in their distress can be counterproductive. Once you've climbed inside someone troubles with them, it's much harder to actually help them as you lose the advantage of emotional distance. Also, roaming around in someone else's pain can be exhausting. There's evidence that having compassion is a better option. Compassion is where you're more likely to extend kindness to all people, not just your own tribe. If you want to read more on the limits of empathy, read Paul Bloom's Against Empathy.
Speaker 1:Not everybody is born with the same opportunities. Be kind. You don't know what people have been through. Also, as usual, some confirmation bias. Mrs Hume isn't setting out to be selective in her thinking. None of us are, it's automatic. She is also under the sway of our old friend confirmation bias our capacity to only notice and remember things that confirm an already held belief. The yeas, as represented in Mrs Hume's subconscious, are impassive, inscrutable and indifferent to learning English. She hasn't noticed and therefore hasn't stored the memory, the times in the past when they've spoken English and demonstrated care and expression. In Mrs Hume's preconception, the Kovacsics are loud, hysterical and argumentative. She doesn't notice and therefore doesn't store the memory when they talk quietly and are conciliatory and kind. Luckily, events can confront our subconscious bias and challenge unhelpful thinking In the course of one afternoon.
Speaker 1:Mrs Hume's long-held and cherished beliefs about renters, people who come from Croatia, people who come from China, people who have a different sexual orientation, people who break the rules and people who have cats come in for some serious challenges. The neighbor's kindness, the cross-cultural camaraderie and the Kovacic's non-judgmental attitude and emotional availability all cut across Mrs Hume's brittle self-defense, exposing her to the reality of being human and the complexity that entails. This is often an emotional experience. Exposing someone to the humanity of the other can blow apart their preconceptions. This is more powerful and persuasive than simply telling them that their thinking is wrong. Stay connected to people. There's a lot of evidence that being plugged into a community is one of the most important things you can do for your health Getting smarter.
Speaker 1:The result of these cognitive biases is, of course, the judgments we make every day of our lives, both the small judgments we make every day of our lives. Both the small judgments we make about individuals and the large, deeply troubling judgments we make about whole groups. It's easy to look at other people and see how generalised and judgmental they can be in their thinking. It's harder to look past our own heuristics. Reacting is easy, thinking is hard. Get your thoughts straight.
Speaker 1:The ism assessment Are you making an assessment of someone based on their ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, sexual preference, accent, gender or political persuasion? Stop it, you have no idea who they are. Take the books back to the library. Are you loading yourself up with stories that tell you everything is going badly? Remember, we perceive things to be true when they most easily come to mind. If you consume media all day, it looks bad out there.
Speaker 1:The pros and cons of empathy Empathy can be exhausting. Beware of climbing into other people's realities and swimming around in their pain with them. Remember, because we have a tribal brain, we're more likely to empathize with someone we perceive to be from your tribe If you can move towards a more compassionate place. End of chapter three. Well, I hope you enjoyed that, that reading that excerpt from my first book the actors were Odile Leclasio, david McCubbin, anna Phillips and myself I do think it's interesting how people can hold really, really racist views until they're in a situation where their preconceived idea of who a person is is actually blown out of the water once they get a little bit closer to them. And I think that's a really good lesson for all of us if we're othering other people making decisions on who they are, based on their gender or their age, or their race or their sexuality. So in the face of these rallies, last week I wrote a piece which I thought. Rather than me babbling at you, I thought I'd read it. So here we go. This is the piece I wrote in response to the weekend's anti-immigration rallies.
Speaker 1:My father-in-law has been diagnosed with a serious illness. His endocrine surgeon, his GP, his neurologist are from Sri Lanka, india and Thailand. One of them, a professor, rang me at 8pm on Wednesday to inform me of some results. He didn't have to do that. He would have had to interrupt his dinner with his family, but he did because he's decent, ethical and compassionate. I don't know if he was born here. Strangely enough, it doesn't matter to me. What does matter to me is that he would have turned on the TV tonight and been exposed, along with his children, to the worst this country has to offer.
Speaker 1:My mother lived the last 15 years of her life in the befuddling fog of Alzheimer's. She was taken care of by a squad of empathic, light-hearted carers, mostly immigrants from Nepal. My cousin, who I visited yesterday, has descended far too early into the same terrible fog. She was led across the room to me by two young women. I don't know where they were from because I don't care, but somewhere on the subcontinent. Come on, jen. One of them said, leading her towards me by the hand let's go and see your cousin.
Speaker 1:So I wanted to ask the people who attended the anti-immigration march today which of these immigrants would you send home? And before you squib the question and tell me it's not about being racist, it's about mass immigration causing the housing and the cost of living crisis, then maybe use your critical thinking skills and search the data on the ABS on overseas arrival. The ABS is the Australian Bureau of Statistics. If you're gathering your information from a 2GB shock jock I'm looking at you, ben Fordham or Sky News then you may find there's some bias in there. If I can analyse the complex geopolitical issues behind the housing and cost of living, then I trust you can too.
Speaker 1:If you've now lost interest in this article, then perhaps the real reason you're queuing up to hate on immigrants is because it's easy. Your brain likes the feeling of belonging to a tribe. You might like the feeling of being out on a march on a late winter day in Sydney with other white folk. You might like the feeling of being wrapped in a nylon Australian flag, which was highly likely to have been made in China. You probably like the feeling of looking around you and seeing a dearth of non-European faces. You might like the fact that the woman standing next to you, probably eating a spring roll while hating on Asians, is from your tribe.
Speaker 1:And by your brave actions today, you're going to stop an immigrant from robbing her of her god-given right to a job and a house. So I look forward to you getting behind the re-immigration policy and cutting immigration. I look forward to you taking all the jobs the immigrants have robbed you of. I look forward to you working 16 hours a day in a Vietnamese restaurant. I look forward to you spooning food into the mouths of the elderly and cleaning the hospital toilets. But most of all, I look forward to the moment you present to a hospital with your hand clutching at the terrible pain in your chest and saying help, I need a doctor, and dr sing appearing, stethoscope at the ready, and you saying, no, I want a doctor who was born here. Please, brave warrior, send me footage of you sending dr sing away while you heroically stick to your nationalistic ideals. Anywho, all the best with the ill-disguised racism. I'm off to have a Vietnamese meal. We're just pausing for a minute to hear a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3:The why Smart Women podcast is brought to you by Coup, a boutique training, coaching and media production company. A Coup, spelt C-O-U-P, is a decisive act of leadership, and decisive leadership requires critical thinking. So well done you for investing time to think about your thinking, if your leadership or relationships would benefit from some grounded and creative support. If you want team training or a conference presentation, reach out for a confidential one-on-one conversation using the link in the description or go to coupco.
Speaker 1:Yes, so that's the piece I wrote. I know that it's only a small, relatively small amount of people, even though they thought well, the organisers and there was a lot of kerfuffle among the organisers let me tell you that because the neo-Nazis moved in and tried to take over and actually managed to. So they thought there was going to be hundreds of thousands of people at these rallies and there simply wasn't. I think it's good to remember that it is a small number, but I put myself in the shoes of somebody who is from an immigrant background and I think to myself what would it be like? What would it be like to turn on the television and see a whole lot of white people standing in a park, wrapped in flags, saying negative things about your heritage?
Speaker 1:And I'm sorry, but I wonder at the intellect of the people that hold these deeply well stupid views. It shows absolutely no analysis at all. It's this simplistic notion. There's a housing crisis, there's a cost of living crisis. God knows it must be the immigrants. Well, it's not the immigrants and people you know they like an easy answer.
Speaker 1:So thanks for listening. I'll be having a really good chat to the Snarky Gherkin on Thursday. So tune in on Thursday and listen to the Snarky Gherkin and I, because he has some really, really interesting ideas on why people hold some of these really divisive and ill-informed opinions. Anyway, wherever you are in the world, I hope you're having a lovely day. So stay safe, stay well, keep your critical thinking hat on and whatever else you do, please, please, be kind to your neighbours and to people that maybe don't look or sound like you. Thanks for listening. See you later.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning in to why Smart Women with me, annie McCubbin. I hope today's episode has ignited your curiosity and left you feeling inspired by my anti-motivational style. Join me next time as we continue to unravel the fascinating layers of our brains and develop ways to sort out the fact from the fiction and the over 6,000 thoughts we have in the course of every day. Remember, intelligence isn't enough. You can be as smart as paint, but it's not just about what you know. It's about how you think and in all this talk of whether or not you can trust your gut if you ever feel unsafe, whether it's in the street, at work, in a car park, in a bar or in your own home. Please, please, respect that gut feeling.
Speaker 1:Staying safe needs to be our primary objective. We can build better lives, but we have to stay safe to do that. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast and share it with your fellow smart women and allies. Together, we're hopefully reshaping the narrative around women and making better decisions. So until next time, stay sharp, stay savvy and keep your critical thinking hat shiny. This is Annie McCubbin signing off from why Smart Women. See you later. This episode was produced by Harrison Hess. It was executive produced and written by me, annie McCubbin.
