Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Tom, welcome aboard. It's a pleasure to talk to you today. I appreciate you joining our show.
I wanted to do something very weird. Usually we have this question at the end, but I think today it's appropriate to ask it at the beginning.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: All right.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: If you had to go back to 20 year old Tom, what would you advise him?
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Wow. What would I advise him? I would advise him to keep as 20 year old Tom, I was right just about breaking through into my career.
I would advise him to not be selfish and kind of turn, while it's important to concentrate on a career, it's also important to kind of turn your eyes outward to what's going on in the world around you. I think at the time, I was very much focused on me, me, me, me. And that's very common for that age. But you can't start too early, kind of caring about the world around you and your community and whatnot. So I think I would probably advise him to be more like that, I guess.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Bring us back 20 years back and to your personal challenge, what opened your eyes to kind of think beyond yourself?
[00:01:12] Speaker B: I took a. I did a volunteer gig reading for the blind. I'm from Philadelphia, and at the time, Philadelphia had something called the radio Information center for the Blind. This was a basically a low power AM station, carrier current, it was called. You had to subscribe to it.
The quality wasn't great, but if you were blind and you had a certain. You passed a certain application process, you got the radio information center for the blind, and it was people basically reading newspapers, reading magazines, reading anything that was printed that would be even peripherally interesting to blind people. So I had some time on my hands, and I said, you know, I need to do something other than just, you know, working and doing school. So I signed up to do this once or twice a week, and I really thought it was great. They were so happy to have me there as a volunteer, first of all. And it turned out that, I mean, I listened to the product, and I found it barely listenable, but the audience was huge, and it was really like a service. Like, people actually appreciated having things read to them. So that was kind of the beginning of the idea that doing stuff for other people, we should all be doing something for other people that were not getting paid for. That's kind of where it started.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Did you feel that your experiences volunteering, did that change you in any way?
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say so.
The main volunteer experience I've had was being on my local rescue squad as an EMT in Fanwood here in New Jersey for 20.
I was actually practicing for 2022 years. The last three years, I've been a life member. I don't actually go on calls anymore because of my back, my knee, my hip. Don't. Let's not even start. But it certainly shows you that people need each other.
You can't just for everything that exists in the world, and every time you need help, you just can't reach into your pocket and peel off dollar bills and pay people. We need each other. We need a network of support, neighbors. We need people who care about us, even. Even, you know, just kind of on the surface. We need to keep kind of our eyes and ears open for our, you know, for what? For our. Mostly our very young people and our very old people. So volunteering really drives that home. And, you know, as a secondary thing, it makes you feel like, you know, you're like a half decent human being. You know, you're not just. You know, you're not just out there making the dough. You're actually helping other people. And I think that's, you know, it doesn't get any better than that, really.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: When you think back over 22 years as an EMT volunteer, what's the strongest memory that you can recall?
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Well, I guess I have two strong memories, and one is a good one and one is a bad one. The good one was, I was involved in a number of calls where we actually saved somebody who had no heartbeat, and through CPR and AEd and then some drug therapy with a team of people, watched that person suddenly breathe again, and then over the next few years, saw her come and go as part of the community. You know, she got back to her normal life, and she had. She was older to begin with, but she had another good eight years of life with her husband and her family, and that was really cool. When she finally did pass away, she was in her early eighties. I went to her viewing, and her family was there, and they said, you know, we really appreciated the fact that you gave her eight more years. Me, it wasn't just me, of course, it was a team, but that was pretty much a high point. That really drove home to me why I went and did that in the first place. If you can help one person, great. And then the lowest point was probably one of the worst calls I was on, which was a poor woman who. She was caught in a thunderstorm in our town, and she pulled her car over in the middle of the storm, and a hot electrical wire came down on top of her car, and she knew it was hot because she could see it sparking. So she saw it out the driver's side window of her car, and she decided, I'm not going out there. I need to get out of the car, but I'm going to go out on the passenger side. And what she didn't know was that the wire was partially draped in the gutter on the passenger side of the car. She stepped on it, we surmised later, and was electrocuted instantly. And I went on that call with my team and with some firefighters and a police officer and the poor. This was a woman in her twenties, maybe. Turned out later we found out she was just driving home from work. You know, she had the flesh on her leg from, like, her hip had been totally burned off. And, you know, I think that it probably was instantaneous, but it was really just a kind of a shocking scene. And I'd never seen anything like that. I'd seen people who had died before, but that was so graphic and traumatic. I felt very bad for her family and just for the whole circumstance.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: First of all, you know, I'll say both to you and your son, you mentioned before that he's in the, in service as a police officer. Thank you both for the service and all the support that you've given the community over the years. This is not an, this is not a, an easy job. And I would say more so as a volunteer, you, you can be in danger. I mean, if you didn't notice that live wire in the, in the puddle of water and you stepped in it, you could be at risk.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, part of our training, and any first responder, the training is always, your safety is for, you know, seen safety. And, you know, our priority at a call is me, my partner, my patient. Because if we're no good and if we're not, if we're hurt or, you know, dead, God forbid, we're not helping anybody. But, yeah, it's, the whole volunteer thing is, you know, I've had many people ask, you know, what does it take to do that? And I always tell them, look, this is not the same as, like, helping the old folks at the assisted living home, you know, do art crafts and stuff. You have to actually go take a course. You have to be certified, and then you have to actually go on calls when, you know, and they never happen at a good time. They always happen in the middle of the night or when you're getting ready to sit down to dinner. And, yeah, there's a certain risk involved. You know, in our town, police officers always accompanied us, and they always went into the house first to make sure we were safe. But I've also responded in towns in the city just next to us here, where there is rarely a police officer on the call. And so you do kind of, you know, it can be a little bit of a crapshoot. I'm fortunate that I've never had, you know, knock on wood, you know, any kind of a, you know, a jackpot waiting for me. But, you know, I guess. I guess the question is, why do we do it? I enjoyed the excitement and kind of the unknown and, you know, I guess to a certain amount of risk. And, you know, there's nothing cool than riding in an ambulance with the siren on and watching people get out of your way.
[00:07:53] Speaker A: I can't remember the exact quote, but it says that really, communities are measured by. I think it was something like the humanity of its members. And you're really showcasing that. So I appreciate it. I appreciate that you wrote a book I wanted before. First of all, what's the book called? Let's start with that.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: I just happen to have a copy here. It's called wreck and return.
This is a novel. It's fiction, but it's based on fact very briefly. It's about a guy who works at a tv station in New York, but in his volunteer life, he's an EMT in his New Jersey town. He does the two together for eight years. And the whole process is kind of complicated by his alcohol use, which turns out to be a very, very bad thing. And a number of parallels about this story are taken from my life. I did both of those jobs.
I did have an alcohol issue, and I've been sober for a long time now. But part of it was to basically write a kind of cautionary. And the bad thing that happened to my character in here did not happen to me, but it certainly could have, you know, crashing an ambulance while you're drunk on a call. That's not good. You know, it's my feeling that people drive drunk all the time, and I'm sure there are responders out there who shouldn't be responding after they had alcohol like I did in real life. And as I said, bad things never really happened to me to that extent in my real life. But, you know, I had the freedom to write a, you know, something really horrible in this piece of fiction here. So, sorry I went on there a little bit, but no, that's kind of what we're about.
[00:09:27] Speaker A: I appreciate that. There's a few topics I wanted to touch on one. You're a prolific author. This is far from your first book, so I wanted to mention that the thing that struck me as incredibly curious is, why did you go down the fiction route, and you have such an incredible story. Why did you decide to fictionalize it?
[00:09:48] Speaker B: That's a great question, because I actually started writing this as a memoir, as a nonfiction memoir, because after 20 plus years, I had a million have a million stories about, you know, people who were helped, people who couldn't be helped, people who, you know, all kinds of the whole cross section. And when I got into about 50 pages of it, I realized that I'm talking about actual. Even though I changed names and streets, I didn't use any real names or street addresses. Obviously, this is a small town that I live in, and, you know, small town.
It's very possible that some of the people here are, number one, still with us. Number two, might recognize family members.
Even if I kind of dress the calls up a little bit, I didn't want there to be any question that somebody would recognize themselves or a family member in these calls, because when you go on a call, you're basically with somebody at their absolute worst moment, and we take a privacy pledge not to talk about the call outside the ambulance, et cetera, et cetera. So I decided, let's make this fiction. So I not only changed everything, but I made the calls. Every call in here is based on something that actually happened, but I made them a little more generic, and I broadened them out a little bit. So it would be very difficult for anybody to recognize themselves in here. Privacy. Patient privacy is such a high priority in any kind of medical endeavor. I just didn't want to come anywhere close to violating that. So I went fiction. There is a certain sacrifice there, but the story is still a story about people and a human being and humanity, frailty and vulnerability. And I think that still comes through.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: Appreciate that.
I wanted to go back to the book's name.
It starts with wrecked, and you said that you went through your own journey towards sobriety, and this is based on your own experience. I want to take you back to the moment where you hit your rock bottom and started that journey. Would you humbly be so kind to share that story with us?
[00:11:52] Speaker B: Sure. The good news is that I never got to the point where I wrapped my car around a utility pole. I never got fired. I never got arrested, which is kind of a miracle if you think about how many times I drove behind the wheel when I shouldn't have, and I don't have one of those dramatic stories of almost cracking my skull or hurting somebody. But I think the moment came. One night, I was sitting, you know, I did all my best drinking at home, first of all, in my, in my den in front of the tv. And, you know, at that time, my sons were a lot younger. You know, I quit drinking 23 years ago. So we're talking 20, some 24 or five years ago. And they're both thrown men now, but, you know, they were on the couch watching tv. I was watching tv, and I was at a point where I was falling asleep in my chair after having two or three or more drinks. And there was one night when my one son started saying, dad, dad. And he said, dad? And I went, what? He said, what did you mean by what you just said? And I had no idea what he was talking about. I had said something. I either dreamed it or I fantasized it, or I was responding to the tv. I had no idea what he was talking about. And that's called a blackout in the, in the alcohol world. And I had another instance where my wife basically told me the next day that, you know, I had, you know, said and done a couple of things, nothing bad, but I just had absolutely no memory of it. And I, and I. I instantly was taken back to the years when my dad, rest his soul. And my dad was not an alcoholic, that I believe. I don't believe he was, but he did enjoy his alcohol at the end of his day, and he would fall asleep in his chair. So I saw this image of me falling in my sleep in my chair, that this would be a lasting image that my sons would have and couple that with having blackouts. You know, to me, that was enough of a red flag where I needed to deal with it. And at the same time, at that time, I was seeing a therapist for a work issue. I was having my boss and I weren't getting along, and I thought I was at least half the problem. And those pesky therapists, they swoop right in on your sub. They ask you right away, do you drink alcohol? How much do you drink? And of course, my knee jerk reaction was the same as everybody else's. Oh, I only have one or two drinks every night. And somebody who's been to many drunk driving accidents, that's the same exact answer that a drunk driver always gives. Oh, I only had two beers. Oh, I had two wines. So I saw this happening in myself, and she was able to actually have me look in the mirror and say, I want you. When you come back next week. Tell me how much you really drink every night. So the combination of those factors really kind of came to a head when the night of July 3, 2001, I ran out of vodka, and instead of running to the liquor store, I said, all right, let's not run to the liquor store. Let's have a glass of plain tonic on the rocks. And that's what I did. And I did that one night, and I woke up the next day, I wasn't hungover, and I didn't feel bad. And I said, let's do that another day. Suddenly, two weeks went by, and after that, it was kind of history. The first two weeks were hard, and after that, I never looked back. So that's my very long story. To your very simple question.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: I appreciate that. I wanted to ask about this gray line between understanding that you have a problem versus have a problem. Is there a simple answer to this? That it's a certain number of drinks. It's something that happens. Do you have to hit rock bottom?
Is there so much, many more of us that are on verge of having a problem and they just haven't hit it? What's your opinion in regards to consumption of alcohol and other recreational drugs?
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Sure. I found out going to. I subsequently went to AA meetings for a couple of years. The only person who can really say you're an alcoholic is you. Right. Other people.
And, you know, I've seen this in other people who drink a lot. And I, you know, I did watch my dad over the years, when your drinking starts affecting in a very real way the people around you, the people you work with, the people you love and your own.
When your own behavior starts becoming erratic and dysfunctional, that's kind of when you need to start paying attention. You know, you can go online to. There's every AA website has this little mini test you can take. There's a bunch of. I think there's ten questions. If you answer, I think, four of them, yes, supposedly you're an alcoholic. You know, I've known people who have had alcohol all their lives, and they've lived productive lives, and they haven't hurt anybody and they haven't hurt themselves. They just, you know, they know they like to drink and they get drunk and they do that in private, and the next day they, you know, go on. But I think that kind of the litmus test is when it starts affecting other people in a. In a negative way, in some cases, in a very negative way. You know, hitting rock bottom is not necessary. In fact, hopefully, you're not hitting rock bottom, because that can mean somebody dies, and we certainly don't want that.
[00:17:01] Speaker A: I kind of love and hate that definition for two reasons. One, because it's kind of like the mental illness, right? You're not mentally ill as long as you're. You're. You're doing well, you're not hurting others. So from a perspective, it makes sense.
What I don't like about that definition is you could be almost there. You could be, like, on that edge.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: That's true.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: Doing something bad, and it doesn't give you a really, a clear way to stay away. And you could be just a second away, and it could happen any day.
You mentioned it. You made it. You fictionalized it as part of your book. This idea of having a car accident while under the influence. What's the right amount of alcohol that you can drink while driving?
[00:17:47] Speaker B: Zero.
[00:17:47] Speaker A: Absolutely. And that is.
I feel like that is not common practice nowadays in the United States. I don't know how, and I probably shouldn't say United States. This is probably, I would imagine, internationally. I've heard through my travel, Germany and France, that. But even that the number zero is not accepted to. Oh, yeah, you can have a glass of wine. Right. Not. No problem whatsoever.
What would you. Well, you have kids. What do you tell your kids about drinking and driving? You're talking about the kind of the teenage years, right, where they're getting their shit together, not as adults.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: Yeah. My younger son, he drank a lot in his college years especially. In fact, we found a bunch of empty plastic.
Plastic alcohol bottles under his bed one day. And I don't know how long they were there, but it was obviously that he was. He was drinking a lot. And, you know, all he can say is, after they reach a certain age, they are adults. They become independent. A lot of times, lecturing is the absolute worst thing because people turn that off. I don't respond to being lectured and nagged either. All you can do is say, look, I trust you, and I know that you know right from wrong, but I. I hope you know that this is not a good path and that this could end up in trouble for you.
Honestly, it was never a huge issue while they were living at home. And even when they were at college, I never got the feeling that there was kind of like a red line about to be approached.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: Appreciate that. I'll be honest, my kids are pretty young, so all things. As it comes to all the things that make a dad lose sleep overnight, I have two sons and a daughter, so that was quite a selfish question.
[00:19:36] Speaker B: Well, you know, the best example every kid has is their parents, even if their parents are fighting and divor, you know, your kids learn everything from you guys. So to me, I thought the best gift I gave to my sons was to stop drinking. I stopped smoking many years before that was, I'm an addictive guy, you know, I can't just have, I could never just have a glass of wine. I'd have to have the whole bottle. I could never have, like, five cigarettes. I had to drink. I had to have the whole pack right away. And same with food, you know, I just recently lost a bunch of weight because I always eat. I did all those things for the same emotional reasons, not because I needed them. So the best example you can set as a parent is to just, you know, try not to destroy yourself before your time.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: I want to do a sharp change of topic. Would you, would you have gone into media? Would you have worked in media and CB's for so many years?
[00:20:29] Speaker B: In retrospect, I think that for a long time, and even before I moved to New Jersey, I had thought about a career as a nurse. But the broadcasting business really kind of, I always loved writing, and writing became kind of an obsession with me late in high school, and after a career day at which a local anchorman came to our school, I said, hey, if I get into broadcasting, I can write a lot. I can write every day. I can write real stories.
And that just kind of appealed to me. I don't think that I ever regretted getting into it. I regret things that happened along the way, like getting fired a couple times. But I always thought that a medical career, not as a doctor, but as a nurse, would have been something that I would have been really good at. I did look into it. I just, it would have required a complete change and a complete, a whole new path at school and money and all this stuff. And because I'm basically a lazy person, I decided, now, just do what I'm doing.
[00:21:29] Speaker A: I'll call you out on that one. I don't think lazy people volunteer as emts.
What were your challenges in your broadcasting career and also what kept you going?
[00:21:41] Speaker B: Sure. The challenges in, you know, the challenges in any nation where there's a free press is maintaining a free press. And for a journalist, that means really striving to tell the truth, no matter what it takes and no matter who you piss off, essentially, that becomes very apparent during things like presidential campaigns, as we all see, anytime there's, you know, this going on, you're going to have one side who blames the press.
That's certainly the way here in the United States. If, you know, a political figure doesn't.
Yeah, yeah. Doesn't like the way things are going. One of the knee jerk reactions is to, is to blame the media. So it's always a challenge to not only tell the truth and to find the truth and find people who will tell you the truth, but then maintain that, you know, Forbes magazine does a yearly of the most reviled and least respected jobs in America. And the last one is always like a journalist. And the second to last one is like a lawyer, right? Or, no, an elected official. That's right. And I've been both. Right. So I've been an elected councilman in my town and a journalist. And those are both right down here. So that's an ongoing challenge. And it's getting harder and harder because news agencies in America, and I think elsewhere, they're doing more with less. They're hiring younger people, they're getting rid of more experienced people, they're getting rid of layers of editorial checks. So you have to kind of, as a news consumer, be really kind of cognizant of where you're getting your news. Social media should be your last choice, a more established company. But even there, you often have the danger of a going right from some person's laptop right out into the world when there should be at least one or two levels of editorial judgment there. So those are the challenges. The challenge is kind of ongoing and it's kind of a big answer, I.
[00:23:37] Speaker A: Guess I want to dive into this thing. I think many of us feel incorrectly that fake news is a new thing. Yeah, I would argue that is completely untrue.
[00:23:49] Speaker B: Fake news is not a new thing. However, I would say the advent of social media in the last 1520 years has really emphasized how much fake news there is out there. You know, social media changed everything.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: So let's, let's dive into that a little bit.
I think most people don't think about this, but Craigslist really harmed the journalistic, investigative journalistic industry.
What was the big revenue source for newspapers back in the day?
[00:24:18] Speaker B: The big revenue source has always been advertising and sustaining advertising. Not just a little guy who places an ad this big, but the Ford Motor Company that places full page ads over the course of a year.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: So what happened is that this revenue basically dried up a little bit slowly, and then all at once, when Craigslist came along, when Google came along, Yahoo came along. So journalists do nothing, have a certain pain spot for all these tech giants, because really they've taken away all these revenue sources. Now newspapers across the world are finding it much harder to be funded. You see them doing a lot of things that are much more, let's say, populistic and not using a worse word.
Has this had a lasting impact on communities in the United States and around the world? Or is it like, who cares? So the ads go to Google, the ads go to newspapers. Who cares? Does it matter?
[00:25:21] Speaker B: I think it definitely matters in my community here in New Jersey. Excuse me, we have one local newspaper, and it's a weekly, and it covers seven towns because the owner needs to get ads from seven towns to keep the paper printed.
And they have, I think, one full time reporter and a couple of part time reporters, and they have scaled back their coverage, you know, to try to stretch those few people out to cover many different towns, which, you know, some communities have no newspaper anymore at all. They have an online news presence, and most of the time, I think a lot of, maybe not most of the time, a huge plurality at that time. Those news online entities are news aggregators. They take stories from the AP, from USA Today, from wherever they can get them, and they put them up there, and there's little, if any, original reporting. So I think that local communities are suffering because just getting the news about what happened at your council meeting, you know, I live in a community where people work. They can't get to the council meeting because most of them are coming home from work at 07:00 at night. So they actually depend on either streaming it on Facebook or reading about it four days later in the local paper. But I think it's a tremendous liability for communities really around the world that no longer have a viable newspaper that can't afford to print because they don't get enough revenue. And then kind of these online sources that, again, they're so revenue driven, it's all about getting the ads. It's like the news is almost secondary. So as a news consumer, you really have to shop around. It's like buying a refrigerator. You have to check different sources in different places and check ratings.
You have to work a little harder now to get actual news.
[00:27:11] Speaker A: You mentioned this topic of bias in news sources. Can we trust any one newspaper or news outlet?
[00:27:23] Speaker B: I just had this conversation with a very good friend of mine who found online somewhere there is a meme that's actually, it's a survey of all the known news agencies, and it makes a little graph with far left on the left, far right on the right, and in the middle is supposedly the unbiased and this person who did this piled all these news agencies and all these different columns. I'll tell you what I told my good buddy Don. News gathering and news reporting is a completely human process. No matter how much techniques there are out there and technical know how, it still comes down to the people who are gathering the information, writing the information, and presenting the information. And I think we can all stipulate as humans that we all have biases of all kinds, and we bring them wherever we go. You know, as an old school journalist, and I went to journalism school, and I, you know, I. And this meant a lot to me, and I'm hoping that it's the same thing as taught in journalism schools today. Sometimes I wonder, you know, the whole idea of leaving your biases at the door and trying to report things as fairly and honestly and as two sidedly as possible is what it's all about. So the answer is, who do you trust? That's really a kind of a trial and error thing. But what I told Don is don't trust pretty much anything you see. Be suspicious of anything on social media, period. And start first at recognized, longstanding news organizations. The New York Times, NPR, the CBC in Canada, Reuters. There are local newspapers, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles. I mean, those papers have suffered, too. But start with kind of the name brand people. And, you know, some of these people have the reputation, some of these papers and news agencies have the reputation of being liberal or conservative. You know, I'd have to say that they all have editorial boards that express opinions as the board. But by and large, I really think that newspaper reporting and reporting by the traditional, hardcore, old school media in the United States has been pretty good.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: My dad used to say that the only way to get the truth was to read multiple sources.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: There is no one newspaper there that is fair and balanced.
[00:29:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, I hope people do that. I have a feeling most people don't do that. They put Fox News on and they leave it on all day where they read, you know, the New York Post, which I personally would use to stick under my dog when he goes and does a number two. But that's just me. But, you know, this people, people tend to listen to and read what they believe.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: You know, I think that's such an interesting thing, because we used to kind of buy into our own dog food by reading a certain newspaper or a certain editorial that we knew was kind of regurgitating. It's a very human thing. It's what a humanity. Hear the things that support our belief system. It's actually an incredibly difficult thing to proactively decide. I'm going to challenge the things that I believe in. Are they true? Are they right?
[00:30:35] Speaker B: Totally true.
[00:30:36] Speaker A: I would argue it can even be dangerous. Right.
It's an uncomfortable life to challenge your own beliefs, even on a weekly basis.
[00:30:45] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:30:47] Speaker A: I want to stick on this point for a moment. And would you, do you think that's important for us in the United States specifically to challenge our own beliefs?
[00:30:58] Speaker B: Yes, I do. And, you know, for all the reasons that you just stated, which basically is that it's really hard to do that as humans. Our nature is to stay in our tribe, you know, but all you have to do is look at what's happening politically now, and we're not going to get into a protracted political conversation. But I think that in the last few years, we've seen people kind of choose sides more than they ever did. I remember when Republicans and Democrats, you could disagree, but you didn't hate each other and you didn't threaten to kill each other. Now that's actually happening. So I do think that's a problem. And I think a lot of it comes from that whole human instinct to kind of stay with your own and kind of protect your own. And it's a shame. I just wish that more people who watch MSNBC would occasionally tune into Fox and vice versa and, you know, just kind of get a little bit of the other side to try to walk another walk in those people's shoes, at least for a minute.
[00:31:54] Speaker A: I think the play, the moment in time where I kind of woke up or became aware that there is a real problem is when I was talking to a, this person that used to live in our area, she, her son was in our, in our kindergarten with my son. And the way she introduced herself was, oh, do you hate Trump, too?
[00:32:19] Speaker B: Oh, man.
[00:32:20] Speaker A: And I, I didn't know, like, I didn't know how to respond to that. And the follow up to that was, you know, and, oh, don't worry, there we have nobody. No. You know, and I was like, that doesn't feel right to me. Me.
[00:32:36] Speaker B: Yeah, that's toxic, man. And she's teaching that to her kids.
[00:32:39] Speaker A: You know, I want to ask you a question.
Is this just a small thing and we shouldn't really care about this? I would almost call it breakdown in our ability to talk to each other in the United States, or is this a real problem in your, you know.
[00:32:53] Speaker B: I think it, I think it can be a real problem when you look at other places in the world where people of, you know, different tribes, I just use that word very broadly. But, you know, when you look at the, the Middle east always comes to mind because they have intractable problems there that just seem like they're intractable. I think in the United States, I keep hearing people who claim that a civil war is possible. I don't know that it's ever going to get to that, but I think that it's a dangerous time. And that we saw on January 6 a couple of years ago that we came pretty close to that and we saw what was possible.
And in a country where, you know, so many people carry guns, it makes me concerned about what the next thing is going to be, you know? So, yeah, I think it's. It's definitely something we need to worry about and we need to work on as a society.
[00:33:45] Speaker A: I think it was. I can't remember the organization's name, but they had this incredibly interesting. I think it was something. Maybe vote America or something America. But they had this incredibly interesting process, which I actually joined once, where they try to bring equal amounts of right wing and left wing people onto this, like, almost zoom. It's a dedicated platform, and then it goes through about ten questions where they are intentionally pivoting people against each other from who they select and the people. But the questions that they ask are not diversive and what they show, which. And I thought this was incredibly interesting, that on almost every diverse issue that Americans are notoriously known for fighting about, there's actually much more that Americans agree upon than they don't. I thought that was so interesting that we had.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: I totally believe that.
[00:34:42] Speaker A: It shocked me, honestly. I mean, we're kind of where there's psychology biases at work here as well. But it surprised me that we actually agree on much more than we disagree upon it. And we even taught, I, we talked about abortion, pro life, for all the things, all of the most difficult topics. And yet somehow a group of people were selected to have opposing spectrums came to agreement at the end. And it kind of makes you wonder if there's a little bit here where both sides are really working to take issues that are ethical issues, and there's no necessarily real right answer for an ethical issue. Right. If we go back to the more classic, classical examples, oh, you know, you got to pull a lever and you either kill your mother or you kill five people. What's the right answer? Right? So I feel like a lot of the political items are really ethical issues that the american people are kind of struggling through, but there isn't necessarily a 100% right answer. There's a million shades of gray, and yet that's kind of the focus of our politics. So I thought that was really interesting.
[00:35:55] Speaker B: I agree with you there. And I also think that that calls into question polling.
We're subjected to all these polls every single day. I personally believe, and I'm not a big supporter of my former governor, Chris Christie, but every once in a while, he came out with a little gem. And one of the gems of his that I agree with is that people lie in polls. I think people give an opinion that they think is expected of them. You're not there when the poll or polling person asks him or her the question, who is this answer aimed at?
As you said, there are so many questions that don't have a clear right or wrong answer. Polling forces people to come down on one side or another. And I think that we're going to find that out in the voting booth, which is the only poll that really counts in the US, as far as I'm concerned. But how many people really believe what they. Back in 2016, the media were all ready to call Hillary Clinton our next president because all the polls said that she was way ahead. And look, it turned out to be bullshit. It turned out that Donald Trump actually won. And why was that? Because I think a lot of people lied. But I think also the media didn't completely do its job that time and just kind of report. But, yeah, I think that you're totally right. I think that we have more in common than we will even admit to the people on the other side.
[00:37:19] Speaker A: There's actually, there's a lot of scientific research in the domain of social psychology that shows you can completely change how people will answer an item of a specific topic based on how you ask the question.
[00:37:32] Speaker B: Totally.
[00:37:33] Speaker A: And, you know, when you write up the news article, 67% whatever, you don't show how they ask the question. You show whatever is the, you know, the. The version of the title that was made up in order to articulate the news, which, again, could include some kind of bias of the outlet or whatever.
[00:37:50] Speaker B: And you don't see the demeanor of the person asking the question. You know, is that person being snarky? Is that person throwing out body language in which he or she is expecting you to answer a certain way? Yeah, but no, you're totally.
[00:38:02] Speaker A: Or there's ten minutes of a preamble and then that the interviewer says, well, we only have two options. Yes or no. Know or what to find. Or it's like, well, this is a complicated issue. Well, we have to have an answer. I don't know if our audience has been through that process, but there is a, you know, as in all things, there's a level of complexity in the psychology that goes in there. Wonderful. Tom, what a wonderful discussion. I really appreciate you coming on today. I think we touched on a lot of really interesting questions and talk. I want to ask you one last piece of advice. A lot of our audience are young people starting off their career navigating what I think today is kind of incredibly complicated times where we kind of walk through this. Right. It's not trivial. What is the right answer? What would you advise our young listeners today in regards to a longer term vision of their life and making good decisions?
[00:39:03] Speaker B: I think the most. The first thing you need to do, and this is not easy for a lot of people, but the first thing to do is to love yourself, is to have confidence in yourself, is to realize that you are human, that you're not perfect, you're never going to be perfect, but that you can do your best within that very broad framework. And the second thing is to learn to walk in other people's shoes. You know, I'd have to say that, you know, when I was in 8th grade and I went to an all white school, and this was in the mid sixties when Philadelphia had the desegregated schools, I remember the first day a busload of black kids from some other neighborhood showed up, got off the bus, and I actually felt bad because I imagined what it must be like to be one of those kids suddenly showing up in this neighborhood in this brand new school. They don't know anybody. You know, they stand out, of course, I think, in so many different landmarks along life and along a career path, if you can feel what it feels like to be somebody else, somebody who you're competing against or somebody who you're going to work with, the amount of understanding you get from that, it just fills volumes. So I would say love yourself and try to imagine what it's like being the other guy.
[00:40:20] Speaker A: I love that.
Tom, thank you so much for joining today. I appreciate you.
[00:40:24] Speaker B: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
