Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Full Auto Friday - Round 63 - Magic Words

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

Traditionally, Fridays are for Q and A. Every so often I encounter a situation that I think deserves individual attention, and today is one of those days. Magic words....You know what I mean, words that people say in the attempt to shut you up, shut you down, or compel and elicit specific behavior. I had my first direct experience with an individual that decided that I fit the bill for her "magic word," and let's just say the conversation that followed was an interesting one. This episode is about my thoughts on the experience and the entire era of "magic words" that we now seem to find ourselves in. https://military.finance/andy-stumpf  

What's up, everybody? I have a special edition, Fuller Friday, for you today, but I'll get into that in a minute. Before that, let's talk quickly about the sponsors that make this podcast possible. Today's Full Off Friday is brought to you by Benchmade Knives. They are headquartered in Oregon City, which is actually a really cool place. I've been there and seen their facility. It was awesome. And they had been manufacturing high-quality cutlery for over 30 years. If you want to do the math, they were established in 1987. They take great pride in the fact that they manufacture. an heirloom product that has the potential of being passed down from generation to generation with proper use and care. Each of the Benchmade knives carries a limited lifetime warranty and free sharpening and maintenance throughout the life of the knife, which many people don't actually realize that. You can send it back in, and they're going to refurbish this sucker for you, and it's going to come back ready to go. Benchmade puts a strong emphasis on family values and tradition, encompassing the people and products that they create, and they offer an incredibly wide spectrum of products. hunting tactical outdoor survival edc whatever you're into they have it check out benchmaid dot com you will not be disappointed this episode is also brought to you by military finance now this is the second time

that i've talked about this organization and i'm going to open with what i said the first time do not ever at any time think that anything that comes out of my mouth is investment advice i am not the person to look at when it comes to those things and i am by no stretch an expert on cryptocurrency From my outside perspective of the crypto world, there's people out there playing crypto roulette investing in a lot of brand new coins and the hopes that one of them is going to hit and they're going to become a billionaire overnight and be able to drive a Bugatti to go get their Del Taco or whatever it may be, even though there's none of those up here in Montana. Military finance reached out to me and actually couldn't be happier to partner with them.

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And that's it for the business side of the house. Let's get into Fallout on Friday, number 63. Close now. Good morning, everybody. It's Friday. Traditionally, of course, I do Q&A. Occasionally, though, sometimes something will present itself to me, and I can dedicate a Friday episode to specifically that topic. It's actually one of the cool things about having two episodes per week. One of them is obviously a conversation with a guest, but Friday gives me a little bit of flexibility. So I'm going to give you some backstory, and I'm going to title this episode, Magic Words. And hopefully after

this backstory, it'll make a little bit of sense. And I do have a few questions here that I could answer, but I'm going to see how long this actually takes me to get through because I think it's a really important topic. I think it's something that we can all learn from. And I hope in my discussion and unpacking of my experience and my thoughts on the experience, hopefully it can help change somebody's mind and then in due course change their behavior. So let's begin. This last weekend, I was helping a buddy out who was working a portion of the security at a very large music festival here in the Flathead Valley. It was under the big sky.

And let me just say this. It was awesome. The music was great. The temperature was extremely hot. But there's no control of that. And if anybody's ever heard of under the big sky, and if they do it in subsequent years, I highly recommend that you come.

It was actually the second concert that I've ever been to. I know before people reach out and like, what the fuck, man? How have you ever been to a concert? I don't know. I never went to any. I've been to two now. One, I just sat there and watched.

It was cool. This one, I was there for all three days. It was also very cool to see all the acts. But I digress. So I was working for my buddy. We'll go with a hypothetical name. So the name for this story, the person I was working for is named Nelson. And again, I was working a portion of the security.

We were splitting the security on the two VIP areas. I used the word security very lightly. What I was actually doing is I was checking. I was checking wristbands to make sure that the appropriate wristbands made it through the gate that I was standing at and that those that didn't have the appropriate wristband did not. It was really, it was the front leading edge, right? It was really, really was that front leading edge of the spoon, as I like to describe it. Just cut both ways. Three days, hot, sunny, lots of alcohol involved. And one of my favorite things to do is to people watch. which I got a lot of, and sit down, not actually in this case, sit down, but sit there and talk with people who would come up. Some would hang out at the gate for a long period of time. Others

would pass by after giving me my thoughts on my education and who I am as a person when I wouldn't allow them to have access. I think everybody who took the time to give me their thoughts. But while being at the gate, I had a very interesting interaction with an individual that terminated with this individual trying to use what I call magic words on me. So here's what happened. At the venue, there are obviously areas where people spectating or listening to the concert are allowed. And there are obviously areas where you're not going to be allowed. There were bathrooms provided. And the policy at the festival, and this really shouldn't shock anybody, is that if you exit the grounds of the festival and go on to private property and decide

to whip your dick out, where a cop a squat and just piss. You know, I saw people pissing on other people's cars. There was an individual we caught literally urinating on top of the cooler that we were using to fill up our water bottles. Of course, no other water bottles were filled from that cooler after we caught this individual. The point being, if you did that, you got ejected. Standing policy, if you trespass and go piss, you are going to get a ticket out of the festival, which should be, I mean, expected, right? Like, that's how I would expect to be treated. And I think that's how most people would expect to be treated if they did that as well. It's really straightforward. It's actually quite a black and white policy. So on the third day,

by the time we got to the third day, I feel like we had probably ejected. And by we, me and the guy that I was working with, we'll go with another hypothetical name. His name was Jeff. He caught zero pissers. He literally, literally was unable. to see people who are directly in front of him urinating. I'm going to get him a prescription for, actually, I'll get him an appointment first and then just pay for the prescription for his glasses. That's not part of the story necessarily. But by the third day, I'd say we were about 10 people that had been ejected for exactly what I had just described, essentially trespassing and then going to the bathroom. All of them up until that point were men.

Now, the third day, there was a woman who I saw go through the fence line. and my process with this was they would go through the fence line. I'm not going to chase somebody out into private property in the hopes of catching them with their dick in their hand or mid-squat. Like, that'll just save that for somebody else. It's pretty easy to cover that distance with my eye and I can see all that I need to, probably much more than I wanted to. So this woman left. She came back. I was waiting for it the gap in the gate.

I was like, hey, I hate to tell you, but, you know, the policy here, that there's a reason why this says emergency exit. which, FYI, having to go to the bathroom is not an emergency. It's like life, limb or eyesight or things you would call 911 for. And policy is you're going to get ejected, turned her over to a sheriff's deputy and away they go. She wanted to go get her backpack first. Of course, you're going to be able to do that. She was kind of running around pretty irritated. Obviously, had been, well, it's hard to say.

I can't say if she could be consuming alcohol. My suspicion would be that she was. Point is she ended up getting ejected. Now, apparently she was there with some friends, and I didn't realize that these two groups of people were connected, the individual and then the woman that ended up approaching me. But what I'll say is this. The woman who ended up approaching me, I actually saw her having a pretty heated and emotional interaction with, I'm going to guess, was her a significant other. And oftentimes, I don't, when it comes to the whole, you know, being at an area with that many people, it's not about actually watching individuals. What catches my attention is mechanics or the body mechanics or behavior. Rapid movement of hands back and forth that stands out around the abnormal behavior.

That's actually the kind of stuff that I'm looking for when I'm in environments like that. So it happened to catch my eye, very heated argument, terminated in her in tears and stomping away. And then she eventually came back and was with this woman who actually went out of the gates. And I say that because I realize that this person was probably in an emotionally compromised state. I had watched them already have an argument. And so when she approached me to come talk to me, I recognized her and I realized like, okay, this might be likely very emotional. So I'm going to let her get it out.

And then, you know, maybe we can talk about what it is she had to say. So she came up to me. She put her finger in my face and she said, I just want you to know that you are a misogynist. And this is how I land on the subject for today, which is, like I said, magic words. I'm going to say that this woman was at least, she was in her 20s, probably closer to 20 than she was to 30. And I think that's important because it seems like, at least for the past few years, people of that age have been growing up in an environment where they think that if you say certain words, and I think we all, all of you listening to

this podcast right now know what words I'm talking about. Some very common ones would be racism. sexism, bigotry, maybe even misogyny. They feel like the person saying that, that it's either going to shut you down, it's going to shut you up, or it's going to compel some type of action, where it's just this meat cleaver coming down and there is no recovery from it. They label you with that or they say it to you, and you're supposed to just take it and immediately change your behavior. And the reality is, for everybody listening, that there are no magic.

words. The only thing I did when she said that to me is I chuckled a little bit. And I asked her, can you explain to me how your friend, I mean, obviously she told me she was, before she told me she was a misogynist, I was a misogynist. She told me that she was there with that woman. And I said, I saw you guys sitting together. And then she said, you're a misogynist. And I said, can you explain to me why? And she proceeded to tell me how I was discriminating against this woman because she had a vagina instead of a penis. And if it was a man who had gone outside of the gate, it would have been quicker and easier for a man to do so, and that I likely had let men do that. And it was only because it was a woman and it took her longer that I

chose to single her out and eject her from the concert. Now, let's talk about this in the bigger picture. Like I said, I knew she was coming up in an emotional state, so I didn't really feel like having a conversation about how she's making this snapshot decision based only on the one interaction that she had seen. Had she seen the other men getting injected? Absolutely not. And if she had seen it in the totality, perhaps she would have had a different impression. And I said, I just said, you know what, it's not actually a matter of it being a man or a woman. What it really is is a matter of trespassing and urinating on private property and coming back in. I really don't care if it's a man or a woman. Because what I caught out of the corner of my eye was the person going

outside of the gate. And I saw the individual going outside of the gate and then determine it was a woman based off of their behavior. I didn't make a decision as to whether or not they were going to get ejected, whether not it was a man or a woman. It was purely based off of their behavior. And I explained that to her. And then it degraded into, well, then you're just a piece of shit, which is oftentimes what happens when you challenge somebody who really hasn't put that much thought into their

beliefs or their argument, right? It's an intellectually weak position to come up to somebody and just say, hey, you know what, you're a misogynist because of one thing that I have seen, and I'm just going to go ahead and blanketly label you as that in the hopes that it has some magic power or spell over you. And oftentimes what I find is when you push back on people who have an intellectually weak understanding of their own beliefs or what it is that they're saying, it changes into instead an argument about an idea. It becomes a description or an attack on an individual, which is known as an ad hominem attack.

and I'm not trying to insult anybody's intelligence by explaining that. I didn't know what that meant for a long time, and I would hear the term ad hominem attack. And so I needed to figure out what it meant. And that's exactly what happened with the interaction I had with this young woman. It went from, this is what I think of you. And when I push back on what she thought of me and why and what misogyny actually is and what misogyny is actually not, it became, well, I don't want to talk about that anymore. Let's talk about how you are a piece of shit, which here's the deal. I will have a conversation with anybody.

I actually ended up having about a four or five minute interaction with this woman where we kind of went back and forth. And if you come at me with an intellectually weak idea, obviously I make a living, I guess, to a degree, having conversations and talking back and forth. So I'm totally willing to engage. But if you come at me with a very weak intellectual position and then you want to attack who I am as a person, I'm going to fuck start your face intellectually. I'm going to go back and forth with you with your ideas, and I'm going to shoot down all of the bullshit that you come at me with. And then when you get to a place where you're just going to tell me that I should go,

fuck myself, I'm going to say, you know what, I hope that you have a nice day. Because what I'm actually talking about is a victim mentality. That is when I see people who rely on these magic words and whatever it may be, systematic racism, misogyny, sexism, racism, and gender. general. Let me be very clear. Those things they all exist. I absolutely know, understand, and believe that those things exist. But if you try to apply those words to everything, then they have no meaning whatsoever. If everything to you looks like misogyny, because you are either tooled or trained, are not fucking smart enough to realize that if you are always looking for something,

you're going to find it regardless of whether or not it's true or not. If you would try to apply it across everything, it actually means nothing. You're actually undermining something that should be incredibly powerful and incredibly impactful. You're diluting it to the point where nobody cares. If words are going to have meaning, they need to be applied correctly to things that they actually describe or to things that are actually real. If you don't do that, you are literally degrading the foundation on which you are trying to build on top of. And I'm sorry, from my personal perspective, the people that I see doing that the most are living their life with a victim mentality. They are

completely and utterly focused on the obstacles that are what they perceive to be presented in front of them. It is an external locus of control. These people, and not everybody, but I'm talking about the people that I see using these magic words the most, seem to believe that they have no control over anything and that the world is pitted against them. And what they want to do is point out obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. They are obstacle focused. And if they happen to get around an obstacle, all they can do is point out the next one. as opposed to being on the other side of that coin, where you are solution-oriented or solution-focused, which would be the internal locus of control.

I am going to take charge of absolutely everything that I have control of, that absolutely everything that I touch. I will take control of my life, my behavior, my thoughts, and my actions. The most successful people that I know are ones who are solution-oriented and have and live and just exude, this internal locus of control. They spend their time kicking life in the fucking dick, as opposed to talking to people about all of these reasons why they cannot be successful. If you're always looking for obstacles, you're always going to find them. And don't get I'll say it again. I absolutely believe that racism, sexism, misogyny, it absolutely exists. Does oppression exist in the United States?

I would say, I would say probably, but to a degree that is far lower than what most people portray it to be. Are there unequal beginnings in the United States of America? Fuck, yes, there are. But you know what? There's also amazing success stories from beginnings that a lot of people would describe as suboptimal. And I would recommend going back and listening to two podcasts specifically that, stick out in my mind. One of them is Remy Adelecki, and the other one is Shuresh Madhaven. Go back and listen to those episodes and listen to those two individuals in their own voice and their own words talking about

what they have accomplished and what they had to do to go through those things. Those two individuals are solution-oriented. They do not walk around with a victim mentality. Here's the hard truth that nobody wants to really talk about when it comes to these magic words in the victim mentality. It's so much easier to blame your lack of fill in the blank, health, happiness, success on something external than to go look in the fucking mirror and take individual accountability and responsibility on your actions and your station in life. Is the world fair? No. No, it's not fair at all. Are things going to happen to you that are outside of your control?

Yes, they are. Do you have any control over that, how people are going to treat you, how business situations may play? themselves out. You don't. You really don't. But I'll go back to something that I say often, right? You have oftentimes no control over what happens to you, but you have complete and total control over how you receive the things that happened to you and the actions you take moving forward. To anybody who is listening to this, who is at their earlier journey in life, who upon reflection may hopefully have the realization that they perhaps are leaning on these words, that they feel are magical. My hope would be that you could take some time to think about what it is that you're

actually trying to achieve by saying these things, what it is that you are actually trying to potentially excuse in your own behavior or elicit in somebody else's behavior by saying these things. And maybe before you go, start throwing these magic words at people in the hopes of shutting them down or shutting them up or eliciting a behavior, you can take a really hard look in the mirror first and take control of the only thing that you have control of, which is yourself. There's no magic words, people. The real magic is in controlling what is between your ears and then allowing that to inform your behavior in the world around you. And that's it. That's all I'm to talk about this Friday. Super short, one topic, no magic words. Oh, and one more thing. To the

woman who came up to me and gave me the old who'sy what's it and the how-toes, I hope you enjoyed the rest of the concert and perhaps put a little bit more thought into what it is that you believe and what it is that you're actually looking for in life. See you guys. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. Thanks for taking the time to tune in, whether you're listening on an audio-only platform or you're watching on YouTube, I appreciate that you take the time every week to tune in. People ask me a lot, what can they do to help me spread the word? And the answer is actually embedded in the question. The biggest thing you guys can do to help me if you enjoy the podcast and you think it would be helpful to others is

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