The Gossipy Friend, how Twitter has destroyed our bond with one button; why friendship is so important and can save our society, especially right at this moment in time.

Sharing stories is the key to bonding. We explain the difference between sharing and telling a story. Then we get to the bad sharing which is another kind of storytelling/sharing (gossip) that destroys our bond, and we use Twitter as an example of how our society has lost the ability to connect. In this episode, we have a solution to bring us back together again.  There is a way out of this. There is a way to have a better life, to have a beautiful society. And it's not as hard as you think. You don't have to figure out how to move mountains. You just have to sit in simplicity

#Twitter, #gossip, #bonding, #connection, #storytelling, #misinformation, #crazy, #stupid, #the art of friendship, #land of Shinar, #The story of Babel, #Tower of Babel, #fragmentation, #confirmation bias, 

TRANSCRIPT

The Gossipy Friend
[00:00:00] Fawn: Yay for us. Hi everybody. Yay for us, meaning all of us together listening right now. Hi everyone. Guess what? I was partaking in a very boring conversation yesterday
[00:00:15] Matt: was
[00:00:15] Fawn: that with me? You were there, but you were not the reason for the boredom, but you were. I think we were all contributing to the boredom because neither side wanted to talk about anything.
Because one side lives and believes radically different than ours. All this
[00:00:32] Matt: would be yes, yes. The call
[00:00:34] Fawn: with family
[00:00:35] Matt: family.
[00:00:36] Fawn: So as the conversation was being had on speakerphone and the whole family's at the table, I must admit that I was zoning out ( Matt exclaims sarcastically) and we are surrounded by boxes in our kitchen, at the moment, there was one box that was in front of me and it had in big, big letters "BELONG", like belong B E L O N G. And I started to play like, oh, what other words can I make out of belong? And so I realized with belong, you can create "ONE GLOBE". We all belong to one globe. So I was tripping out on that, the whole conversation; one global. Am I the only one tripping out on that?
Isn't that great?!?!
Anyway,
[00:01:20] Matt: you know, actually, nevermind.
[00:01:21] Fawn: No, go ahead.
[00:01:22] Matt: Well, I wrote a computer program because that's what I do. And I programmed peoples, I programmed all of the house names of the house into it. And as it turns out, if I scramble up the letters in ALLEGRA, it actually spells like a genus of birds or something random.
I mean, it's weird. Yeah, nobody else's full names came out to
anything, but,
[00:01:43] Fawn: but collectively our names come to "FAME".
[00:01:46] Matt: Well, that's the first letter of each
[00:01:48] Fawn: that's as complex as I can get.
[00:01:50] Matt: I understand.
Oh my God. I should get all the letters together. Scramble them up.
[00:01:56] Fawn: Okay. Stop. So we digress. We have digressed even before we have started, we have a really good show today.
Oh, well, you know, show we have a really important topic we want to talk about. We're really eager to get into. So I'm going to start. And then Matt, you come in. Okay. Matt is covering his mouth cause I told them don't you interrupt me? Let me, let me get my thoughts out first because I am the Chewbacca. I can't play games with people. If you interrupt me, or if you disagree with me or if you win, I get really mad, I, I can't function after that in a normal way.
Matt is looking away. All right. So here we go. Initially, we were going to talk about the, what did we call it initially? The title we were going to use
[00:02:47] Matt: "The Disagreeable Friend" ,
[00:02:48] Fawn: "The Disagreeable Friend" , and as we were delving into it, I realized, oh my goodness, this goes back to what we learned some years ago that, people get labeled as crazy or stupid.
Right? When you are no longer able to understand someone's viewpoint, those two words destroy everything. And it gives you free reign to say, I'm not going to listen to you because you're crazy or you're stupid. As we were delving into this and doing a lot of thinking about it, I realized we should really be calling it "The Gossipy Friend".
So here we go guys. Here is my, my take on it. And then you tell me what you think.
"The Gossipy Friend," and the gossipy friend I'm going to label really, I'm talking about social media, the gossipy friend, and how it has destroyed our bond.
Why friendship is so important and can save our society, especially right at this moment in time.
There's a story that most people know. It comes after Noah building the Ark, when they landed on land, they formed a city.
And the story of a city where everyone's spoke the same language and they were able to create everything; that nothing was impossible for them. That was their society. But eventually the city was destroyed because the society reached a point that even though the people all spoke the same language.
People were not able to communicate or understand each other, even speaking the same language, having the same experiences, something happened to break all that apart. Usually there are three ingredients, I think. There are three ingredients that hold a bond for us as a family, as a collective. I'm talking about friendships.
Friendship to me is key for family, for everything. The core of every institution for me and why I'm doing what I'm doing with this podcast, with everything I'm talking about over the years, the core of everything from my point of view is friendship. You can't have family without friendship. You can't have a marriage without friendship. You can't have society without friendship. You get what I'm saying?
These are the three components that exist to hold this together, to hold this bond together. One is experience. For example, being in a field with a certain expertise. That everyone trusts like a teacher or a doctor; someone who's studied something and you have faith and trust in this person to do their job or to lead.
Number two is like an elder, an elder doesn't have to be someone old. It means someone wise that can lead a community that can bring people together. That's number two. Number three of the bond that I'm talking about that needs to happen, the third component would be shared stories.
The only way we can really relate to one another is to share a story. If you tell a story it's like quite superficial . But if you share a story, you get all your senses in there and you can understand the person's point of view, or I can get you to understand my point of view because, in describing something to you, I bring you right there with me and you can understand where I'm coming from or where I came from.
And you have empathy and you have an understanding.
So in sharing my story, I would use all my senses to tell you about my experience. For example, I'm trying to think of an example of a story right now. All right. Um, a couple of days ago, I was so here's my story from a couple of days ago, I was summoned for jury duty. Matt is shaking his head. Um, I went and on the jury notice, it says jury duty is , one day, maybe three days. We get there.
And in this room there's like almost a hundred people in there, all jurors. And I'm getting nervous because one it's been a while since I've been in a room with that many people like close, except for the airport and the airplane. And two. I'm very fearful of the law. Like institutions like that, like hospitals, government buildings, I always feel nervous, uncomfortable. Because I'm an empath, I can pick things up that most people can just shrug off. I can't shrug it off. I pick up on people's emotions. I go to the grocery store, I'm touching something that someone else has touched and I feel that person, it sounds absurd, but that's how, that's how I am.
Friends who become friends with me at first, think it's funny or I'm making it up. Until they see firsthand. No, I can't look at this movie because I, I, I'm not able to live normally after seeing an image that may last only a few seconds. I can't look at violence. It's not entertainment for me. It's scary to me. It is heartbreaking. And I'm not using those words lightly. It's heartbreaking to see someone else get hurt. It's not entertainment and I don't need to go there. I already feel the injustices of the world. I feel all of that. So it's not necessary. I digressed. So here I am. I'm hoping that I won't be called and then they give us more information.
It turns out that what we're going to be part of, is a murder trial. I'm like, oh my God. Out of all people to get picked, I am the worst person. I can not be non-judgemental I cannot be non-emotional. I cannot be logical. I'm purely emotion. That's how I am very, very emotional. Anyway, I'm like, well, maybe they won't pick me out of a hundred people, they wanted 38 and then from 38, they were going to go to 14. Well guess who was front and center sitting two and a half feet away from prosecution and what do you call the other side? The defendants prosecutor. Oh my God. And then the judge, and I don't know what my demeanor was, but guys I was sitting, I was in the front row.
And when you come, in at the, the, the way I was noticing the way the prosecution and the defendants, even, I think the judge that didn't, wasn't really looking at her at that point, but I felt like we were being scanned in a mystical way. Like scanned, like the people, the lawyers, every single person coming in, they were doing it so fast and so methodically, so robotic in a way that it scared the hell out of me, that I was like, what are they picking up on every person and how are they able to do it so fast? They're makinging judgments right there on who they want and what your demeanor is and who you are. Like, God knows what they've been trained to pick up, but it made me really scared that whatever it is about me is being judged right now.
And so, and then they're asking me not to judge. I was sitting there in the front row. I had my bag with me that had , hand sanitizer, um, my phone that was turned off, I had some paper and a pen, you know, like normal stuff you would have in your bag. I was holding onto this and I looked down and you could see my white knuckles.
I was clasping my hands together, trying to not cry because I was so scared, but I also, I was feeling in my heart, I was trying to figure out what happened. Someone was murdered. Oh my God. I, I, um, I was distraught immediately. And so then they tell you you're not allowed to speak of this to anyone. You're not allowed to read the paper.
You're not allowed to go on the internet. You're not allowed to watch the news. You're not allowed to speak to anyone in your life about what's happening here. I'm like, oh my God, I can't. I am going to explode. Like I, I'm just gonna, I, I, I can't deal with this. I cannot handle with the amount of stress I've lived in my life. Um, I'm not a normal person that can cu .
What's the word, Matt? I can't
[00:11:26] Matt: compartmentalize
[00:11:27] Fawn: compartmentalize, things like that. I'm an emotional person.
[00:11:33] Matt: Right.
[00:11:34] Fawn: Um, anyway, needless to say, I started to have a panic attack and. And, um, I w I, I raised my hand and I went up to the judge and they saw my demeanor that they shouldn't be working with me
[00:11:52] Matt: to say the least.
[00:11:53] Fawn: I mean, I'm laughing because out of, um, nervousness, because I mean, I felt so many things. I felt sad and I felt scared because I, I can't do this. I can't judge someone else's life and condemn them or not condemn them. I don't think that I can be... Um, like I said, I, I can't, I cannot, we put my emotions to the side to make a decision.
Anyway, um, they excused me. And when they said, I don't know if they said you are excused, I didn't hear it. So I kept sitting there. I went back to my seat facing the prosecution. And then, then someone took my seat and I still didn't get it. So I ended up moving to the side of the courtroom and then the judge was like, she called out my name and that terrified me.
I'm like you told everybody my name and she's like, get out,
I'm sweating and I'm telling you this, but you see, I just shared a story with you. , but I'm sure Matt, where you able to be in the courtroom with me?
[00:12:58] Matt: Yes.
[00:12:58] Fawn: So that's sharing a story. It's vulnerable. I don't like to tell people that I'm this emotional. I don't like to share my vulnerability like that, but I'm doing it.
I'm, I'm stepping over my zone of comfort to tell you this story, to share something with you, so you understand. That's what sharing a story means. And I think that's one of the most important things in friendship. And, to me, friendship means a bond. It is family, it is society and that's what's most important.
And I think that's why this podcast is so important, because when people, hear that, we talk about the art of friendship. They're like, oh yeah, it's some fluffy show where we preach to you, how to make friends. No, it's about sharing stories of life and that's how we bond. And that is the art of friendship.
So back to the gossipy friend. So those are the three components; experience, leadership and sharing. Social media and the retweet button comes in because we were reading this article and it was talking about that. It was talking about how social media has made people stupid and it and used the word stupid.
I'm like, okay. Article. I understand what you're saying, but it was so depressing reading this. was it not, Matt? It was scary and depressing.
[00:14:30] Matt: Absolutely
[00:14:31] Fawn: much like "The Social Dilemma" it's like, yeah. Thank you for telling us the truth that we already knew, but you kind of left us hanging you, you created this and then you're just going to say, I don't know.
[00:14:43] Matt: This is what's happening, guys. Okay. Let's
move on.
[00:14:45] Fawn: That's not helpful. Okay. Show me the story, but bring it back up with a solution or a thought of a solution. You know what I'm saying? So we were reading this article and, and I, and we totally agree because years ago when we started this friendship movement, we said, look, guys, you have to get off the computer.
So that's why we started the, the matchmaking service for platonic friends. We said just because you have likes and follows. You would think you have friends, that's not it guys, you're being lulled into this lie that you have community, you know? Sure. You could have a business and you have all these friends following you, providing you with something, but that's not true friendship right there. And so we were like, Hey, come on. Let's figure out. Remember the art of friendship and remember the art of meeting one another and the art of the beauty of recognizing one another. In-person. And maintaining that bond in life, right?
Arm in arm, eating together and making jokes together, walking together, looking at the sunrise or the sunset together, sharing a drink. Come on. That's what we're talking about. We want to get there. Right? We want to get back to that. The feeling of safety, you know, like the world is a safe place,
[00:16:09] Matt: right.
Exactly.
[00:16:10] Fawn: Getting back to this social media and the retweet button, and also the like, and the share button as I was looking at this, I realized, wow, words are spread. The words that are spread, will eventually end up completely changed. And so leading to logic versus emotion where emotion always trumps logic, which is what Matt says.
[00:16:36] Matt: We say that all the time,
[00:16:38] Fawn: you taught me that. Emotion trumps logic and creates a whole new world of anger because anger is destructive and anger is what feeds this beast. Very rarely do people gossip about high, energetic, loving, positive things. The truth is that the negative scary stuff is the stuff that sells in a society that is so controlled by fear.
You better buy this. If you don't buy this, your life will be horrible
[00:17:11] Matt: or your children's lives will be horrible.
[00:17:13] Fawn: Right? If you look at commercials, almost all of them have a fear component in there. So you're pulled you're propelled into rushing to get this thing because you're scared.
Right? And it's a lie. It's a way to feed whatever this is, that's not working in our society and I'm not saying you shouldn't go out and buy stuff. Oh my gosh. I want to buy all kinds of shiny stuff and make things even more beautiful. But when you're controlled by fear, that's not okay.
And eventually whatever you boughtout of that fear, you always have that target on it that reminds you of fear, fear of fear. And eventually you're going to want to get rid of that. And where does it end up? In the landfill? Going back to what gives you joy, you will eventually you will snap out of that trance that you were put into buying this thing.
And you're like, I don't want this. It doesn't bring me joy. And it's just such a waste.
When you have enough gossip, eventually all trust is lost, completely lost. And that's the problem today. We don't trust anything.
I want to show you how friendship is really the key, and we don't need anything, but that one friendship, it doesn't matter if it's democratic autocracy.
So there comes a point like now where we realize that all along, all the stories we have been told are ridiculous, from doctors, you know, we go to the doctor and now we don't trust the doctor because the doctor, we realized things have changed so much that they don't even know .How many times Matt have we gone to the doctor and we say, we've discovered this.
And they're like, I don't know anything about that.
[00:19:05] Matt: Well, there's so much,
[00:19:07] Fawn: but we can't trust them anymore. And they're so wanting to be right. That they want to stick to what they know and say, this is the right way. But we know that there are other ways. I go to the acupuncturist because I appreciate the 3000, 5000 years of experience. And yet the modern medicine, beautiful medicine technology medicine that we have now, which is wonderful.
Doesn't know a lot. So I've lost my trust
[00:19:37] Matt: Knows different things. Let's be careful.
[00:19:41] Fawn: So from doctors to teachers. We don't trust the school system. We homeschool, we have we're original homeschoolers because we've seen, you know, we both come from families where there are teachers, and we've seen firsthand how ridiculous the school system is.
So we're like, no, don't trust you. And then you have the government as well. And we all have been experiencing that. So I'm not going to get too much into that. So we have to turn to ourselves. Which gets us into this lonely place that we're in right now, starting all over to find friends, family that we can build life with.
It's not easily done. It's like dating all over again. Remember we said that years ago we were trying to find good friends and we're like, oh my, I was like, oh my God, Matt. He's like dating all over again to find you, but we're just trying to find friends to have dinner with, to share a conversation with, and we would meet people and we'd say, yay, we found the one.
And then we're like, oh no,
[00:20:44] Matt: I've never said we found the one it's because people we can
get along with.
[00:20:48] Fawn: I was thinking, we found the ones. Yay. And then total sheer disappointment in the middle of the date, thinking, how are we going to get out of this? And I'm sure they were thinking the same about us. It just, it was dating all over again.
And finding most people that are embedded with major issues and don't have the capacity for friendship. So you find people you're trying to date, you're trying to make friends, but most people don't seem like they're in the right head space or they don't have the capacity to be searching for friends because they're dealing with fires in their lives.
Emotional fires, physical fires. There's a lot happening for everyone. And no one has the luxury of saying, ah, I would like to go to brunch today. Or go shopping for a pretty dress today, or guys, what would you say
[00:21:40] Matt: go shopping
for a pretty dress of course, no. Um, there aren't days that those occur though.
[00:21:46] Fawn: Yes. I'm not, I'm not trying to be like, this is all of life, but just bear with me. Okay. Just bear with me. We can share our stories. No, we can't. I don't think so. We can't share our stories and create a bond because communication is so twisted right now, communication has been completely destroyed much like going back to that story of Babel.
[00:22:12] Matt: Yes. It's the tower
of Babel.
[00:22:14] Fawn: Okay. Take a look at our society, like, think about all the movement. We move around nomadically looking for the right community, the right place to live with the right job. Everyone's always moving. Even if you live in one place, think about it. How easy is it to just get on a plane and end up a few hours later on the other side of the globe, it's constant movement.
And then when that happens, I feel like we become homesick in this new environment, missing the connections we had with others, looking for anything that resembles a home that we once knew, which leads to this term, confirmation bias, which is the tendency to find any minuscule amount of evidence that could resemble what we remember, what gives us comfort ,that resembles what we want to believe. You can think of this with like normal politics, but you can think of, think of it as dating, or making a new friend. You see someone and you're so desperate to connect. You know, first glance, this person is bad to the bone, right?
Let's think about the dates. I'll speak for myself. I would see a guy I'm like, oh no, this guy, you, you gave me the term freight train. This guy is a freight train, but because I'm so wanting connection, I'll find any minuscule little head of a pin evidence to say, this guy is my man and I will hold on to that.
[00:23:58] Matt: That's a little scary,
[00:23:59] Fawn: but that's how we are now. I'll speak for other, my friends who also, when we were dating, same thing. Think about it when you meet someone, you know, it's not the right fit, but you, you just want to connect so, so badly that you'll find anything, anything to latch onto, and then you create their whole vibe it becomes that for you until a few months later, it comes crashing down because that's not who they were. There's another way to describe it where you think, this person's always late . And then you think of yourself and you think, well, I'm always late because I have a very important excuse.
So I'm not a late person. I'm late because this happened to me. Whereas you're just as guilty as being late. It's kind of, isn't it kind of like confirmation bias, the same example where you can twist it around to make it more comfortable for yourself. And make yourself like the good guy. Well, yeah,
[00:25:01] Matt: you can resort facts to suit any viewpoint.
And
[00:25:05] Fawn: you can, it's kind of like saying like, like I've told you I've come across people who make a racist judgment about someone and I'll say, wow, that's my background. And they'll say to me, oh, you're not one of them. What, you're not one of that.
You're one of us, I'm sure you guys get the point. I think that the best way out of this trap is to go against the feeling of comfort and seek out people with opposing views and ideas.
And I think this is what we need to do especially in the United States,
it's the dating metaphor again, to date the person you normally wouldn't date to find true love. How many times did I date the same guy over and over again, hoping for different results. And then I met you and you were so different than everybody else that I was not into it at first. I was scared. I was like, no, I can't date this guy. Thank goodness. Thank goodness that I felt the love. And I realized, oh my goodness, this is, this is it.
Because let's face it. If your track record for dating has results that are not good. How's that working out for you? So same with our society right now, we can find the people that we think, think just like us or against the same people that were against that they're outraged by the same things we are outraged by it's that whole gossipy thing that has taken over.
We're losing track of our connections because we're so angry and so heated by this gossip thing that has spread that we're not able to communicate anymore.
Let's go back and visit the word crazy and the word stupid. These labels, these words will shut it all down. In the United States, when we went to Iraq, we were fighting the "terrorists". I'm using air quotes. The reason. It felt like , the rhetoric that I was hearing, the words that I was hearing in the media, I was constantly hearing crazy,
[00:27:30] Matt: right.
[00:27:31] Fawn: The word crazy. And especially, dealing with certain family members that are so opposite politically than us. Their justification for harming this other group was they're crazy. They're crazy. They need to be taken out. They're crazy. We tend to label human beings as crazy when things get uncomfortable, when we don't want to be in their shoes when we don't want to hear their stories.
So we label them as crazy. It's like looking at a baby who is crying for something and we're like, well, that baby is crazy. What no. That baby is needing something, is trying to communicate to you. And the longer that you ignore this baby, the louder, the screams will get. Well, that's humanity. You can't label them as crazy.
You have to understand why they're doing things that they're doing. They are human beings. And I'm not trying to say that I'm justifying horrible things like killing each other. I'm not doing that. Please understand. What I'm trying to say is it's a desperate reaction. It is a desperate end to something that has gone for many years, many decades, many centuries that have gone unheard, they've gone ignored.
the only way out, in my opinion, the only way out of this mess, is to listen and to understand. We need to relate to the point of view of an opposition. You know, the crazy and the stupid, they must be stupid. Don't get how stupid they are. No, believe me, there are many people out there. I've looking at the TV, shaking my head, saying the same thing.
Like these people are ignorant. At the same time. I do realize there's a road that led them to this behavior, to these words that they're using. And I need to understand that
because through this chain of gossip, it is their frustrations,
all of our frustrations that has led to all the fights and the fragmented society that we have right now. I don't think changing politics is going to help. I do not think that getting rid of social media will help. I think what helps is
realizing how to tell a story and realizing how to listen to someone's story and get back to that connection. I think that is key. And that's why we're doing what we're doing. That is why I am here with you every week, trying to get back the art of friendship.
[00:30:16] Matt: Wow. That was a lot of stuff. I had to be quiet for a really long
time.
[00:30:20] Fawn: It wasn't a lot of stuff. 37 minutes worth it's because I maybe pontificated on extra things to make my point clear, but it's really not
[00:30:29] Matt: about no, and I, I get it. I get it. It's just, there's so much to circle back to unfortunately, or unfortunately, see, I would say.
Moving away from friendship for just a second, moving towards society, societies, typically successful society, you know, going all the way back to Babel, which actually was a real thing and a real tower and a real everything. And the story and the Bible does have historical facts behind it. There is a city I want to say it's Babylon,
[00:30:58] Fawn: but I'm not sure.
No, it was like, it starts with an S H S H I N a R. Shinar.
[00:31:04] Matt: Anyways. I remember looking at this city, actually in a God, one of the millions of books in my parents' house, anyways, there was a tower and the legend says that they were building a tower that was going to reach heaven and God was like, no, we're not going to have
this.
[00:31:22] Fawn: Yeah. I think that's man's perspective saying, God will say that God wouldn't say that, but I think they were trying to, they were achieving perfection. And that might be we're achieving a utopia that
[00:31:33] Matt: might be don't know, but so God took and scattered them to all corners of the globe and gave them 75 kajillion languages Merry Christmas.
[00:31:43] Fawn: Is that what the Bible said?
[00:31:44] Matt: Yeah.
[00:31:46] Fawn: So the way I understood it was, they all had the same language, but they were splintered it all. So, yeah, I think it's man, that, that says God's splintered at all. I think the people splintered it all,
[00:31:59] Matt: well, again, sometimes the Bible, you know, if you choose to read it, not as absolute fact, you view it as this is stuff that happened, but maybe not in this way,
[00:32:12] Fawn: we are God's
[00:32:14] Matt: again.
Who knows. Um, but anyways, what we're looking at is, societies typically have, God, what is it? And it's hectic to say, but they typically have shared blood. They've spilled blood for the same things. They have shared gods, which is very tricky in today's society. And they have shared enemies.
[00:32:36] Fawn: Right. And it's that shared enemy that unites them.
[00:32:39] Matt: Exactly. But if, if you take a look historically way back when I'm part Scandinavian, part German, that gives me the Viking heritage. But, you know, at one of the shared stories that the Vikings had, they had a lot of them was about their God of war and justice and the God of war and justice, Norse gods are messed up.
But anyways, he didn't have an arm. Well, what happened? Well, he put his arm into the mouth of a Wolf because they want her to put a leash on him. And that was the only way that he could get them to trust him. And so he bit, and he lied to him and he bit off his arms, but in the process,
[00:33:13] Fawn: yes.
Could the mouth of the Wolf be gossip,
[00:33:16] Matt: anything could be anything. Right. But what's key here is that if you were raised on this story, on this folklore, Then you knew that you need to sacrifice whatever it took for the good of your tribe. And as a shared story, as a shared ideal, as a shared everything, all of a sudden your society started banding around this stuff.
And what we see now is we're unwilling. Everybody has their own point of view, which is great and is proper and is a million other things, but sometimes. Somebody jumps into an argument in the middle of all their assumptions. Can
[00:33:55] Fawn: I interrupt for a second? I understand that you saw, you brought up the word sacrifice.
That's true because
Norse
[00:34:02] Matt: we're big on sacrifice.
[00:34:04] Fawn: Well, yeah, I mean to achieve, a bond, like to keep that bond stable, you have to sacrifice, but when you reach a point where you're so stretched thin, you have nothing to sacrifice anymore. And I think that's the problem because we don't have that capacity anymore.
[00:34:23] Matt: Right. I get it.
I totally get it. We need to,
[00:34:27] Fawn: we need to recharge.
[00:34:28] Matt: Yes, exactly. I was about to say, we need to figure out how we can enter into a world of compromise into a world of trying to understand.
[00:34:37] Fawn: So listen, this is what I'm saying when you are heard. Have you ever been so distraught and so angry or distraught?
Let's just say so emotional. And then someone shows you kindness in a split second you're recharged.
[00:34:54] Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I've I've had one or three of those moments and they came at very pivotal times for me. That was very good for me. Absolutely. I've been there.
[00:35:02] Fawn: So
you see there's hope
[00:35:04] Matt: absolutely.
[00:35:05] Fawn: In a split second, guys.
Things can change for the best, but I'm sorry. I interrupted you. Figure out we're talking about sacrificing. I
[00:35:14] Matt: was, but I was talking about how societies coalesce around certain ideals and certain things. And that happens both on the societal level and on the one-to-one level where people actually communicate with each other, they share their hopes, their fears, their dreams.
And even if the other person doesn't share it, they at least listen and they try and understand and understanding comes over time and comes perhaps even over repetition. That's part of friendship and that's why it's important. And I've always had friends who were different than me.
Um, and I dunno if that's just because I'm so flipping different, it's hard to find someone who is like me or, or what that story really looks like or I'm, or I gravitate towards people who are different than me, but I really like having my challenges, having my beliefs challenged, my challenges believed no, my beliefs
challenged.
[00:36:04] Fawn: Yeah. Your challenges believed right.
[00:36:07] Matt: Well, that's true
sometimes, but, um, yeah, it's just, I think
it's like it's funny after speaking with the fam whose beliefs are very different, it made me focus back in, on of all people, Walter Cronkite. We don't have a Walter Cronkite.
[00:36:27] Fawn: Well, I mean,
[00:36:28] Matt: he kind of this and he was, he was a newscaster and he was like the newscaster, he was CBS newscaster. And when he said that the war in Vietnam was not winnable.
Boom, all of a sudden it was about how the heck do we get out of Vietnam? It wasn't about more investment or any of the rest of it. It was how the act, how the H do we get out?.
[00:36:50] Fawn: Well, here's a person that was respected. He had authority. He was an elder in the community. But now, because no one is heard everyone is speaking and it's not the logical speaking.
It's purely emotional. And you have so many, so many, ah, so many tweets and I'm going to use the word tweet, but I'm, I'm talking about there's so many versions of something and we're purposely being flooded with gossip that is not true at all so that we can't communicate anymore so that we can't bond anymore, that we can't understand or hear each other anymore because there's too much.
And most of it is just garbage.
[00:37:40] Matt: And there is a lot of it. Do you know? I found out he was like the first newscaster, who actually got a whole half an hour to talk about the news on TV. Cause before that it was only 15 minutes. That's on the news. In the course of
[00:37:56] Fawn: a broadcast 15 minutes a day, every day.
Well,
[00:38:00] Matt: I'm sure there was probably some something in the Mo um, I think there was something in the morning and then something in the evening.
[00:38:05] Fawn: Sure. There was local news and the
weather,
[00:38:07] Matt: but you also got your news from the newspaper and you know, you got it from a authoritative
sources
[00:38:15] Fawn: and now it's 24 hours a day, but
[00:38:17] Matt: it's also it's it's information from random.
non- accredited sources. So it's a tricky thingto distil truth
[00:38:26] Fawn: it's basically, gossip, it's taking a heated, heated idea and yelling about it and creating a mob mentality around it because you keep spreading it, retweeting it, sharing it over and over and over again. And even if it's written down word for word in a tweet, the symbolism, the vibe of it, the emotion of it
will completely change the meaning or the meaning maybe originally was intended for not so good purposes, but it will spread like lighting a match to a very dry field of tumbleweed.
[00:39:03] Matt: Right? Absolutely because you know, let's not forget that Twitter, Facebook. All these kinds of technological organizations that they're there to make money.
They're not there to share truth. They're not there to build community. They're there to make money. And so they're going to go down whatever path moral or immoral that will generate the most revenue. And sometimes it's even the most revenue on a quarter by quarter basis. Things get real scary there too, because it's all about, we only care about the next three months. We're not trying to build something wonderful where they're making money.
[00:39:40] Fawn: And it's like really Twitter, Facebook, all that stuff was initially started by one group on the far right and one group on the far left. And was it like 9% of the population on each side basically started these conversations, their ideas.
It was by wealthy white people, all the tweets and all the Facebook stuff. And now it's dispersed to everybody yelling, but the conversation, the rumor, the gossiping was initiated by a really suspect group, if you asked my opinion that have nothing to do with the majority of people that are living in our society.
[00:40:21] Matt: Right. And there's a whole thought behind how that happens and yeah. Like, yeah, I can, I can, yeah. I can tell a story. Margaret Atwood writer of the Handmaid's Tale should be an unimpeachable resource. She was a second wave feminist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She tweeted, wrote a letter, wrote a, did a something.
Random person was accused "Me Too" stuff. And she said he deserves to have an inquiry and they deserve to come to the truth. Whatever that truth is, FLAMBEED by saying, we need to go through a process and figure out if this guy is actually guilty. FLAMBEED... said she was, she wasn't a real feminist. She's not a post something, something from.
Jesper saying dude should
to be tried,
[00:41:13] Fawn: like I said, like how you always say emotion trumps logic.
[00:41:18] Matt: Hello. Right. And in this case, it's, it's about, if you question your own sides, beliefs as a moderate, the radicals will FLAMBE you. And that's what we're looking at. We're looking at a definite pull away from things in the middle.
[00:41:36] Fawn: So they know the correct thing is to look at someone with completely different views than yours. And that's the key to uniting our society. They know that, but then you're not allowed to do that.
[00:41:50] Matt: Well, I'm
going to give something up. If I, you know, to get to the middle, typically you have to sacrifice something, but the other person needs to sacrifice something.
[00:42:00] Fawn: And they don't and really nobody has any means to sacrifice anything anymore because
[00:42:04] Matt: everybody's so exhausted.
[00:42:07] Fawn: So once again, if we get back to friendship in a split second, you will be regenerated, but you have to come to the very basic, basic point of having very limited outsourcing of things around your life.
Just come to the basic point of having a human to human connection without any other influences.
[00:42:30] Matt: I can't argue with that. You know, I think it's, it's definitely important to speak with those people that you don't necessarily agree with to try and understand, to try and undersatnd. And, and to try and find common ground, I've found common ground with people that I, I don't know.
I have literally, aside from the fact that we both program nothing in common with,
[00:42:54] Fawn: and here's the thing, Matt, we can't have the story be about politics that we can't have the story be about the story that we're all fighting about. It has to be a story that goes to the basic basic values. The story of what you ate.
The story of how you felt today, going into a situation today, the story of, oh my goodness, I am not fit to handle a jury trial, but these other people thank goodness think so differently from me that they're able to do that. But sharing the stories; we're not talking about politics,
we're talking about the basic core human emotions,
[00:43:35] Matt: right? We're talking about the things that unite us as people, not the things that divide us as, I don't know, thinking, I don't know, rational, blah, blah, blah.
[00:43:44] Fawn: How you love, who you love? What are you good at? What is your hobby?
How do you see the world leave politics out of it, but how do you see, what did you see today? I saw this craziest looking squirrel today. Crazy.
I saw the weirdest looking squirrel today. Pointy ears. It looked like he had gone to the beauty parlor and put red highlights on his head or hers.
[00:44:16] Matt: I'm not sure what else I have to share.
[00:44:18] Fawn: ' cause we keep an open mind because we came to the conclusion. Really. There is a way out of this. There is a way to have a better life, to have a beautiful society. And it's not as hard as you think. You don't have to figure out how to move mountains. You just have to sit in simplicity. It's really, as simple as that, just look at someone and allow them to share their story because trust me, no one wants to keep talking about politics after awhile
[00:44:53] Matt: and share your stories.
[00:44:56] Fawn: Yeah, you have to be vulnerable. And so this is different than sacrifice because you're not really sacrificing, but you are being vulnerable. And who cares, what other people think, right. You're afraid to share your story because you're afraid of how people talk about you, which leads us back to this concept and this whole mess we're in.
Well, if you don't care about it, if you don't care what someone thinks of you, because really it's like, okay, well, I'll go back to the dating metaphor. If you're ready to have children, and you're still single, and you're looking for someone to partner with that also wants children. You know, they tell you never talking about that on, on the first date.
I kind of disagree. I mean, yeah, you should get to know the person first, but yeah, you don't want to waste time and you lay it all out there. This is what I am. This is who I am. This is what I would like. This is my focus in life. And if that turns them off, well, thank you. Let's let's get rid of that.
Like immediately.
[00:45:59] Matt: What does it
fail quickly
[00:46:01] Fawn: fail quickly, move on because you will find your true goodness. You will find what you're looking for faster. You don't have to waste three months or six months or 10 years being honest and being vulnerable is a win a winning situation and being honest and being vulnerable and sharing your story,
it's a win for society. That's what we're about. Thank you so much for listening to us. We love you so much. We ask you to please contact us, go to our friendly world podcast.com. Reach out to us. We will reach, reach you, and we want to connect with you. We want to talk to you and discuss ideas with you, please.
There's a free gift waiting for you. Please go to our website, our friendly world podcast.com share, be a part of our family. And again, thank you so much. We love you. We'll talk to you in just a few days, and we're here for you in the days between just reach out to us. Love you be well. Bye bye. Bye.