Transcript
Hello everyone, welcome to another DailyJim. Today is Tuesday, March 19th, 2024.
I want to talk about something I watched yesterday and the implications. I want to talk about Elon Musk, Don Lemon, and the dangers of one-way vulnerability.
So, I watched, it was about a one-hour conversation between Don Lemon and Elon Musk yesterday, and I had heard it was "controversial" and I wanted to watch it but when I say conversation it was actually more of an interview and I was hoping for a conversation. And so what I mean by that is I think interviews tend to be one way, there is one person who is interviewing the other person, the other person opens up, tends to open up emotionally, that tends to open up about one's business, life, etc. And the interviewer tends to not do that, or actually, are often taught to not do that. And what I was hoping for was a two-way opening up where both Elon Musk and Don Lemon would open up and share their perspectives and their experiences and their feelings and their thoughts and opinions and beliefs, etc.
And I think it can be really dangerous when it's only one way.
And I think in society, we often love the one-way vulnerability. We have a lot of journalists or interviewers, and we also have, a lot of times, therapy, talk therapy, and can be very one-way—often the therapist is taught to not open up. And I think there's a real danger in that.
So to share a personal experience many years ago there was a girl that I had dated and we hadn't seen each other for one or two years and she came to visit, I was in San Francisco, and before we were hanging out we were just in the mall or something at the food court and she said, "Yeah, I just had a conversation earlier that, you know, somebody texted me and this happened and I started to cry." I was like, "Oh, okay." And then we went on and we toured around the town, I was showing her around town. And she said, she just kept asking me some questions, I started opening up more—I think it was questions about us dating or whatnot—I opened up more about how I was feeling and what I was thinking. And I opened up more and more. And I got to a point where I felt really vulnerable, really raw.
And I started to get really frustrated and started to get really annoyed. And then it clicked to me. "Oh, I'm sitting here. It's almost like I'm sitting here naked, vulnerable and raw. And she's just sitting there perfectly, fully clothed, confident, strong." Now I use naked as a metaphor.
And then I remembered, oh, she said that she had this conversation with somebody right before this. And she started crying. And so I asked her, I said, "What happened? Why were you crying? And then she started opening up and I felt so much better because we were sharing a space of vulnerability.
And I think what happened in the conversation with Elon Musk and Don Lemon is that Don Lemon kept asking Elon Musk to open up question after question after question...and honestly, I was quite impressed with how much Elon was opening up so much so that I think Don Lemon remarked after the interview, in some other channel, he said that Elon Musk was very touchy-feely and maybe one of of the most sensitive people he's ever interacted with or ever interviewed, rather. And I was quite impressed by that.
And then as the conversation went on, Elon seemed to get more agitated and more frustrated and more upset, which reminded me of what happened to me when I was the one that was comparably more vulnerable. And then at times Elon was asking Don to open up. "Hey so what is your perspective on this? What is your experience? What are your beliefs on this? What would you identify as? And Don did a little bit, but then would redirect to a deeper question to Elon. And I wonder how much of the agitation, how much of the feeling upset that Elon was going through was a result of the imbalance of vulnerability.
And I think, I would say unfortunately, we praise such coldness and such closed-offness from interviewers, from journalists, from, frankly, in society. We bend over backwards to celebrate coolness instead of warmth. I don't get it so much. We celebrate indifference more than we celebrate warmth and feeling. And, so even so much that Oprah had a show on the other day and it was talking about weight loss. And I saw it, said, "Ooo, I would love to watch this because I want to hear Oprah's perspective on her losing all the weight from taking these drugs and how it's been a lifelong struggle for her." And from what I saw, it was mostly a conversation about the science behind these weight loss drugs. And I was watching some other show, I think it was CNN, where the anchor praised Oprah for maintaining her journalistic distance or something. I'm like, "What the hell? No! Why can't we open up as humans and say what we're actually going through? How often does this happen in a relationship, whether it's a romantic relationship or a family relationship or a business relationship, where one person opens up and shows the cards and the other person stays back and says, "Nope, I'm just gonna stand here." What would happen if we actually both opened up?
And so I think what went wrong in that conversation, or rather, why it's maybe even ruined the deal that they were supposed to have afterwards, is that there was an imbalance in vulnerability and for some reason, we seem to celebrate that in society. And I wish we would celebrate and encourage people to open up on both sides so that it was a two-way vulnerability, two-way conversation instead of a one-way, which people can frame as an interrogation. And I think people frame it as an interrogation because it's that, that discrepancy. One person is opening up and sharing everything and the other person is distant and closed and guarded. And I'm just tired of watching people act like robots. Hell, even the robots nowadays, AI seems to be more effusive and expressive than a lot of humans. You know, that whole adage of—I don't know if it's an adage—but this belief that robots are very non-feeling, maybe that was in the past, but nowadays AI is getting pretty good at actually expressing more about feelings than a lot of us humans are.
And so I hope that maybe Don Lemon or Elon Musk or someone else just listens to this episode because, what would the world look like if both sides opened up? If we met each other in a vulnerability instead of just put the spotlight on the other person's vulnerability? And realize that we're both struggling?
Last thing I'll say is that I had a friend the other day call me out on something thing that he didn't like that I was doing. He really was upset with my behavior. And he started to say like what he was going through, "I'm, you know, I'm struggling with this. I'm doing this. I'm doing this." And then he said, "But it's not about me. It's about you." And I'm thinking, "It's about both of us." When we feel upset by somebody else, their behavior, it's about them and what they've done, but it's also about us and what we've done or haven't done or what we felt. And I want to hear both sides. I don't want to hear just my perspective. I don't want to hear how I'm just doing bad things or I'm doing good things. I want to hear about how I'm feeling. I want to hear how about somebody else's feeling. I want it to be a connection, a two-way connection instead of this one-way, it's almost like a one-way disconnection. I don't know. But I'm gonna end because if I go too long, then people won't listen. That's a fear of mine, right? So it is about me but it's also about others.
So, on that note I really hope that people will open up both ways. That we open up to how we're feeling and we open up to how other people are feeling. We share what's going on with us and we ask and hope to hear what's going on with others. Or even if they don't share it, we imagine it because, man, why didn't Elon Musk throw back at Don Lemon and say, "OK, so what happened? Why did you get fired from CNN? And really ask him questions, not to interrogate or to malign him, but really just to understand what his experience is like. He was asking Elon Musk about racism and some of these things and says, "You know, it's my lived experience." And then I look on the Wikipedia article and it seems Don Lemon may have been fired partially because of him being accused of being sexist or misogynist or whatever term people used. It's like, let's talk about that experience. How was that for you? Did it hurt? What scared you? What confused you? What was that process like? I just, I guess I am much more interested in two-way conversations than one-way interviews.
So that's the whole idea of what, you know, obviously me broadcasting and why I struggle sometimes with this one-way format is because I like to actually have conversations. So if people want to have conversations with me, if you want to come on the podcast, let me know. I'm going to start having conversations with people on the podcast and some of them are gonna be intense, and it may scare people, but I am tired of dancing around the surface and having these fake conversations where we all just hold our cards to our chest and nobody's really talking about what's actually happening, what they're actually feeling.
So, I appreciated how Elon showed up. I wish Don, I believe Don had a lot of training in doing, in, in keeping his cards to his chest and so I hope in the future some of his conversations, also have him opening up because I also care to hear what Don is thinking and Don is feeling.
And so, on that note I'm going to go pick up pizza and I hope to talk to you all soon bye. .
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