How not to be stupid and foolish

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It seems today more than ever, there is some kind
of deficiency in thinking that is causing confusion, frustration, and
even fear among the masses. We're going to talk today
how to address that, essentially, how to handle being surrounded
by stupid just to hit with inside strategic relations. There

(00:22):
seems to be some kind of mind virus that's dumbing
down decisions literally stupid people everywhere. Now, I was thinking
about some of the examples of this, But what I
try to do in these presentations is maintain politically neutral
as possible. And I do that because very often the
conditions in which identify a problem will be biased by

(00:44):
your belief system, and then if I trigger something in
your belief system, you may not see the underlying point
that both sides have the problem. All sides have the problem.
Whether you're a Republican or independent, or a libertarian or
a liberal or whatever the titles are. You're going to notice,

(01:05):
for example, a presidential candidate now and in the past
may say something that is verifiably incorrect and nobody calls
them out, or they get excessively called out for something,
or they get made fun of for something, and within

(01:25):
the campaign itself, and since I'm trying to be careful here.
I can't point it out, but within the campaign itself,
people will be complete enemies, and then after the campaign
is over, they'll be best of friends. This is theater
at the best, but complete ignorance at the worst. And

(01:47):
it happens in how we address issues like fentanol, individual's
decisions to do looting, economic policy that doesn't have the
intended effect, It actually creates an unintended effect. We have
the problem where we have blind obedience and not only
political parties, but general belief systems and individuals are not

(02:08):
open to new perspectives or even reason. In fact, the
social norms reinforce behaviors that are counterproductive to individual activities.
And that's another point to hear that part of the
problem is that if you telegraphed out the behavior that
some people are participating in, it would not improve their

(02:29):
situation and may even be detrimental to the long term
outcomes that many people desire. Now, what do we do
about this? Because it is a problem. We see people
do things like, for example, corporate scandal, millions and billions
of dollars of customer service customer activities, and then they
cheat the customers to make a little bit extra money. Now,

(02:51):
of course, they're not going to get much trouble because
when the regulatory agency finds out, there finds our fraction
of the gain. But again, companies still do this. Now,
what if these politicians, corporate executives, leaders in your community
are actually not stupid. What if they're just functioning in
their own self interest. They're not performing the duty in

(03:15):
which they were assigned, but they're performing the duty in
which serves their underlying needs and interests. It's part of
a deception. So now they don't look stupid on purpose,
they may try to look more like a common person
rather than a political elite. They might try to look
like they're part of the crowd. And that's because corporate

(03:38):
executives and politicians and those folks are the minority when
it comes to occupational positioning. They're the minority. They're at
the top of the pyramid. And so what if this
dumbness that we're seeing, this mind virus and confusion that
we see among people is by design and actually a

(03:59):
function of serving their own interest or maintaining the power
that they have. See, that's something you have to consider
and inside strategic relations we talk about how to look
at the world around you objectively in order to determine
what path you should take based on facts, not fantasy. Well,
what if you're the only one noticing, or maybe you're

(04:21):
just now noticing, Like George Carlin used to say, there's
a party and you weren't invited, and so what of
this stupidity that you're seeing is the result of insider
behavior that you simply don't understand the plan. Now, this
can go positive, this is going to go negative. But
if they were moving in a positive direction, you wouldn't
think they were stupid. See, our perception of someone else's

(04:44):
intelligence is reliant on our own perception of self. So,
if you're a highly intelligent person in a particular field
and you see somebody in the same field doing something
that is counterproductive, something that doesn't produce the outcomes that
they're looking for, something that is not well informed, it's

(05:05):
going to look stupid to you. But then again, someone
who is not well informed looking at your behavior, even
though you're performing correctly, could think that you're doing something
that is counterproductive. This is the thinking. This is a
critical thinking that we're talking about here, because when you

(05:26):
can unlock this, you can actually see opportunities. See if
you've looked at the facts and you've done the homework
and you realize that they're lying to you. They may
even despise who you are, they may despise what you believe.
They have a cognitive bias or a prejudice, then you

(05:46):
can realize that sometimes this is pure manipulation. Looks dumb
to you. Why are they making that dumb decision? Why
are they doing these stupid things? Well, again, they have
their reason for doing these things, and now finally they
could actually just really be stupid, very low IQ. They
don't have experience in the area which you're working, they're

(06:07):
not confident in themselves. They want to be in charge
of something that's far beyond their capabilities, far beyond their knowledge.
All of these things have to be considered now without
considering these underlying factors. Very often we have some default responses,

(06:28):
and we'll talk about those right now, because at the
end of this we're we're going to cover kind of
an action plan to make sure you're making good and
valid decisions for the information available to you and you're
not falling into mental traps or misinformation or distractions that
are designed to keep you from figuring this stuff out.

(06:48):
Because anytime there's conflict, anytime there's you know, money moving,
there's opportunity. And if you want to gain influence in
a marketplace, if you want to lead field in your
area of business, if you want to be a recognized expert,
you've got to understand what's going on in society and
you cannot make these mistakes of doing what regular people do.

(07:10):
So the first thing folks tend to do when they
see a stupid person is they if they see enough
of them, they'll just decide to drop out of society.
There are many times I would just love to live
in the woods and not have to deal with people.
Then again, where would my external resources come from if
there's no external world, If I'm foraging my own berries

(07:31):
and living in the woods in a loincloth and nashes.
You know, there have been times in nineteen seventies, nineteen
sixties where people dropped out of society. They're also beaten.
Next before that, in the nineteen forties nineteen fifties, there
was the whole hobo revolution where people just dropped out
of society. Now, if you've see the trend of people
dropping out of society. Maybe you can monetize that. A

(07:53):
lot of airbnbs are monetizing the experience of being away
and being out of nature. But again, just dropping out
of society without thinking further, you're going to miss out
an opportunity. Next, you could silence the other party. I
saw today John Kerrey talked about something about how the
First Amendment gets in the way, and people wanted to

(08:15):
censor him for wanting to take away the First Amendment. Now,
I'm completely simplifying the conversation, But to silence one person
who's advocating silencing another, then everybody's going to be quiet,
and people are still going to take the actions and
behaviors they think are most appropriate for their belief system,
most appropriate for their personal benefit, most appropriate for the

(08:37):
world in which they grew up in, or they so
much desire. So again, we don't want to silence the
other voice. I'd rather hear you speak and know you're
stupid than have you hidden or feel pressured not to
say something. Next, what do they do? They put those
folks away for their own good. There is a push

(09:00):
in society lately to just want to put in jail
the people who, especially journalists, who can speak out, who
challenge power is to put the journalists in jail, or
to put the enemy in jail for their own good,
for their own good, not for any other particular reason
other than that they are a harm to themselves, not others.

(09:27):
Think about this, Think about this. These are like the
knee jerk reactions a lot of people have when they're
surrounded by stupid people. What's another one, the appeal for
an authority, so you hear something dumb, you see a
dumb behavior. Karen's and Kins do this a lot. They
see something that they don't understand, they see something they're
frustrate with, and they want to call the manager, they

(09:50):
want to call the police. And that's again, it's their
way of controlling the world around them. And you're looking
at it. I mean, you're saying, this is an idiot.
This person's wasting my time. This person is calling the
police for nothing. But in their mind, there's some law,
there's some rule, there's something you violated, and they actually

(10:11):
think they're a hero. Now, when you understand this, you
can turn the situation around. You can work with that
person in a way to get them to go away.
You can distract them with something else. We can talk
about those strategies at another time. What else can you do?
You see a stupid person, they want you to do
stupid things. You don't want to do stupid things. You

(10:31):
can fight them. You can fight them with every ounce
of your being. You can get worked up, frustrated and
push back against them, But do you really gain any ground?
Mark Twain says, don't argue with stupid people. They'll pull
you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Think about this. Folks are our default reactive behaviors, causing

(10:57):
more harm than good. And if someone is being stupid,
saying dumb things, pushing an agenda upon you, do they
want you to respond irrationally fighting them, you know, so
you can fight them with every ounce of your being.
Maybe that's what they want, so that they can now
point at you and say, look at this person. They're violent,

(11:18):
they're dangerous. We got to put them away for their
own good. They're the enemy that we should be fighting against,
obviously from their behavior. But again, the behavior could be provoked,
it could be pressured upon. There's a factor where a
lot of people want to send their children to fight them.
So this happens very often in war, we see a

(11:39):
conflict somewhere and there's some special interests that want I
forgot the guy, the general's name, but the book is
called War as a Racket. And they talked about how
the standard oil crisis and how the bananas in these
what we call banana republics today, were some special interests
that wanted the government to intervene. They had an appeal

(12:00):
to authority, and the authority thought, well, it's going to
help us, So we're going to intervene, and we're going
to send in troops. And in fact, it's violating people's rights,
it's misuse of tax dollars. It's an an unapproved but
very often justified after the fact activity that's pushed off

(12:21):
on somebody else. Now, again, there's a lot of people
that there's a lot of ways that you can react
to stupid people, especially in a political environment, especially when
it comes to civil unrest, especially when it comes to
economic or global policy. And I could go into many
of those, but let's talk about the actions. What can
you do, what can.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
You ask, what can you do to inter perspective in
order to avoid being taken advantage of, even abused, or
even made fearful of what you're seeing when it comes
to stupid people, people that are difficulteole that are hard
to work with, whether it's a corporate environment, whether it's

(13:04):
a political environment, whether.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
It's in your local town or even your family. What
can you do? And I'm going to go over a
few of these items, and then I'll give you a
resource that you can get more details for free. First off,
you can take action in the sense of asking, how
might you be manipulated? So you see something and they're
doing stupid how might that behavior on their part be

(13:29):
manipulating ideas and concepts, be manipulating your perception of the situation,
be manipulating other people's perception of you. Very important question
to ask. Number two, you can ask where is the
profit in this? They are very often I will fall
down a rabbit hole chasing something and I'll discover something
I didn't want to find. And this is okay. When

(13:51):
I'm in a risk management situation and I'm looking at
maybe human resources risks associated with COVID, maybe looking at
insider threats associated with an activity that happened at a
different company, or technology threats, it's okay when you do it.
Risk management to fall down the rabbit holes at times

(14:14):
which you still got to ask, where's the profit in this?
And now what types of profit are we talking about?
We're talking about profits that protect your personal interest of safety,
of sound mind, of financialcy, of growth. Where's the profit
in this? Next, we want to challenge the facts in

(14:34):
the conspiracies, because unfortunately, there's been a pretty good track
record on things that have been called conspiracy that turned
out to be true. I did a commissioned report in
twenty nineteen end of the year about COVID, and we
were looking at human resources risks and the origination of
the virus. And it was a private report that I

(14:55):
put together later started publishing some of the materials in
coordination with the people I wrote the report for, and
just because some of the facts were coming out, and
many of those facts got me banned from social media.
Many of those facts got other people discredited and laid
out in the news as is heretics and as people

(15:15):
that didn't know what they're talking about. It turns out
and a year or two later they were right. Now again,
if I go into each of these individual points, your
cognitive bias will will cause you to miss the underlying
point is that there's more behavior you can take to
resolve the situation than they can lie about or pressure.

(15:36):
Like I said, I've got I got eight points written
down here. There's more points that we can talk about later.
Here's one other items and covers. I'll let you know
what the offer is here a free offer, and then
we'll go on from there. You can set yourself up
for success without them. This is important. I see this

(15:57):
a lot where there's economic crisis. A lot of people
want to participate in the economic crisis. They want to
be part of the crowd. When my mindset is to
just set up a parallel economy and opt out of
their nonsense and opt out of their nonsense. And again,
this is what we have when we're dealing with stupid
people and stupid people. There's all kinds of stupid people,
and we can go into different categories as stupid. But

(16:20):
if you cross as your mind, if you have the
thought in your mind that someone you're dealing with is stupid,
consider these factors. I'm gonna give you a few more
before we end, But consider these factors. Are they doing
it on purpose? Is there something that you don't know about?
Is there something that they're trying to do to get
something from you or to put impose upon you. And

(16:43):
so I put a report together called Dealing with Stupid People.
And it's just a tip sheet. It's some bullet points
things that you can consider when you get dragged into
some kind of fu pah or some kind of of
just dumb situation. And it's a checklist and you can

(17:03):
kind of go through the bullet point items and you
can ask yourself, you know, am I looking at this
with clear perspective? Am I missing information that would be
valuable to me? And of course this is a PDF file.
You can download it from the website www dot inside
Strategic relations dot com. Just simply go to the contact

(17:26):
page and ask for Dealing with Stupid People. Make sure
you include your email address and names so I can
email it to you. But again, if you don't have
these insights, you're going to be exposed to someone else's agenda,
someone else's plan, someone else's ignorance, someone else's stupidity, someone
else's Well, let's go onto the next tip number eight

(17:51):
is try to understand the other person. Again, can we
derive something about the other person? Because see a lot
of folks will just kneed jerk hate somebody for being different,
and they'll just want to push that other person out
of society because their observation, their perception of that individual

(18:14):
is that that person is harmful, that that person is dumb,
that that person has innate defects. But if you start
to understand the other person, you start looking at their context.
And I know all this takes a lot of effort,
so primarily going to use it in business environments because
the upside is incredible. We'll talk about that shortly. But
you want to try to understand the other person. So

(18:37):
what's the upside in this, Well, when you can deal
with stupid people, the upside is that you don't waste
energy being frustrated by their deficiency. Now, again, if you
objectively look at this and you realize there isn't a
deficiency here, the person knows what they're talking about, then
you've helped yourself alleviate the problem of being treated in

(19:00):
the sense of these jerk reactions. See, a lot of
folks are afraid to speak up in a meeting because
folks might might start beating down on you. They might
dogpile you and say, oh, that's never going to work.
We tried that in the in the eighteen hundreds and
it didn't work, then it's not going to work now,
you know, ignoring the fact that we've got new technology
and tools. You know, maybe younger workers say, oh, those

(19:21):
older people don't know what they're talking about because they're
stuck in rigid old ideas. Yet rigid old ideas are
fixed that way because they tend to have consistency. But
the older person does need to listen to the new
idea because the old wine can go into new bottles.
That means that basically what has worked before might work
again if we apply it with different tools. And again,

(19:46):
this is the type of critical thinking that AI cannot do.
Artificial intelligence cannot do this because artificial intelligence is pre
programmed with its observations, with its biases, with its training.
And as a human you can say, look, I don't
agree with you. I personally think you're kind of dumb,
But tell me more about what you're thinking. Tell me

(20:08):
more about what you're thinking. I'd like to understand your circumstances.
I like to understand your situations. What are we trying
to accomplish here? Artificial intelligence can't do that. Artificial intelligence
is going to tell you, oh, we can't talk about
that topic, and then you're going to spend a lot
of time and effort manipulating it to get it to
talk about the topic. Hypothetically, if such and such is true,

(20:30):
then what would happen with this? Again, Folks, we don't
want to We want to first be able to identify
if somebody's actually stupid. We want to be able to
understand our biases and why we think that way. We
ultimately want to be able to leverage because this gives
us the upper hand. This gives us the influence in
a situation. We can change our language. Sometimes when I'll

(20:51):
call technical support, they want to just tell me to
turn it off and turn it back on again, reboot
the router, and I can converse with them understanding they're
probably reading a script and get to the next level
of support, or to get somebody to look at to
look at it in a different way. That's going to
give me perspective to solve the underlying problem. Now, a

(21:13):
lot of times in dealing with stupid people in corporate environments,
we can use an issue management approach. We can use
a communications approach. This tip sheet that we're offering you
helps you kind of have a library of potential approaches,
kind of have a library to approach this situation with
new and fresh ideas so that you don't get trapped

(21:37):
in the knee with jerk reactions or be punished or
canceled or or excluded because of other people's poor and
limited understanding of dealing with stupid people. Remember, you can
be the stupid person too. I could be giving you
a podcast today and you could use the information we're

(21:57):
sharing here, and you look at this and in your
own mind you say, just don't know what he's talking about. Yet,
I know that I have more than three decades of
experience dealing with difficult people, working in difficult environments. I've
worked on two billion dollar projects. I've managed portfolios of
thirty four million dollars in storage installations. I've helped clients
go from four hundred thousand dollars a year to twenty

(22:17):
two million dollars a year in funds received. I've created
more than a billion dollars in new business cost savings
and other regulatory avoidance in the last twenty something years.
I've documented these experiences. I've done analysis on these experience

(22:38):
and many times I've been the stupid person in the room.
I didn't realize the other person had an agenda. I
was too transparent because I wanted to converse with someone
who I believe was thinking rationally. But no, they were
thinking about their long term benefit, not the mutual value
and benefit that we talk about here. Again, if you'd
like to get a copy of this Dealing with Stupid people,

(23:00):
it's a tip sheet and it has a bunch of
different ideas and concepts to look at a situation differently
so that you can develop that influence, develop that control,
develop that authority to move a situation forward. In fact,
you can turn these things on yourself to better understand

(23:21):
situations so you can make better financial decisions, better investment decisions,
better strategic decisions. Now, this is for entrepreneurs and executives,
subject matter experts, professionals in your industry, and it's for
high stakes because it does require a little bit of effort.
But again, if you've got a million dollar idea, if

(23:41):
you've got a twenty million dollar business opportunity, if you've
got a fifty million dollar market, that you can turn
around and take your slice of the pie, because again,
you understand things more clearly than other people than visit
www dot inside strategic relations dot com. Go to the
contact page. Okay, I need you to follow simple instructions

(24:04):
in order to ask for the report dealing with Stupid People.
I'm gonna give you a tip sheet. It's gonna help
you get started. It's gonna be quick and easy to understand.
It's in a PDF. You can print it out on
your computer if you want and go through it, and
then again if you want to practice some of these strategies.
I'm sure if you're in a corporate environment, if you're
in a business environment, if you're just out dealing with

(24:25):
the day to day local and federal administration, you'll get
more than enough opportunity and you'll feel a different level
of confidence dealing with stupid people and getting results. Thanks
for listening. I'm just in hit with inside Strategic Relations,
where we help you transform business relationships into profits guaranteed.

(24:46):
And again that tip sheets available at www dot inside
strategic relations dot com. Go to the contact page and
ask for dealing with Stupid People and you conclude any
questions you have, but yas for dealing with Stupid people,
and we'll email you to tip sheet, thanks for listening,
See you in the next one.