Conversation with a Stranger

4-6% lost forever

side view of a young girl flying over a city

While I understand that more and more people are waking up to the truth and are accepting the reality of our manipulated existence, every once in a while, you run into someone who makes you aware there are still people who refuse to not only accept the truth but even listen. They are literally incapable of listening. To the point of talking over you to avoid listening.

How do we deal with these kinds of people? Do we argue with them, do we match insult for insult, or do we simply do like it says in the Bible, shake the dust off our sandals and walk to the next town. Some people won’t be reached, they can’t be reached, and we need to accept this.

The other day after meeting with a client at a Starbucks, I pulled out a book to unwind for 20-30 minutes before getting my free refill of iced coffee and heading back to the office. A few minutes into reading the Raymond Chandler 1940’s detective novel I brought, a man plopped his things down next to me and went to the counter to order a coffee.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see he looked a little strange, a little flaky, the kind of person that comes to Starbucks in the middle of a workday because they want to be around other people, in need of a conversation, even if it is with a complete stranger.

I realize this is a lot to assume about a person with just a quick glance, but some people just have that look about them. Weird and lonely. It’s surprising how accurate your instincts are when you listen to them. We are supercomputers able to make decisions and determinations in the blink of an eye. Women probably understand this better than men, making split second decisions about men in public when safety is a concern.

The man sat down next to me with a room full of empty seats and tables. I made sure not to look up, I kept my head in my book, hopefully he would get the clue that I wasn’t interested in having a conversation with him, that I wanted to read my book and drink my iced coffee.

It didn’t work, after 30-seconds he asked me what I was reading. I couldn’t be rude, so I said it was an old detective novel, it was a bit of escapism for me going back to another time. A time when people didn’t have computers on their desks or smartphones in their hands, and the 1940’s detective-lingo was like a foreign language.

I don’t know what I was thinking giving so much detail, I should have just said, “A Raymond Chandler novel”, smiled and put my nose back in the book. I did smile and put my nose back in the book, but it was too late, he immediately interjected that he was reading a book on marketing, and that he was a small business owner, he was an inventor.

Doubling down on my stupidity, unable to be impolite, I asked him what he invented. This was a mistake; he went into painstaking detail. After five minutes of listening to him talk about himself, I motioned toward going back to reading my book. A kind of double handshake if you will. A few seconds later seeing that I began reading again, and without my asking about it, he began to talk about the book he was reading.

He went on about the importance of marketing, about how it didn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the world if no one knew about it. He then started talking about successful businessmen and how they grew their companies. He said at some point they can’t spend their money as fast as they are making it. According to him, Elon Musk can’t spend his money fast enough, as hard as he tries.

Finally, I interjected into this one-sided conversation, stating that Elon Musk wasn’t actually a very good example because he doesn’t live in a mansion or own a super yacht as billionaires like Bezos or Gates. I said that Musk doesn’t really treat his money like it’s his own, he understands it’s not, that he is the steward of billion-dollar companies that he was put in charge of running. I said that most billionaires don’t become billionaires through brilliant marketing; by outworking their competitors and having ingenious ideas. They are often handed their businesses; they are made the face of their companies.

To which he strangely got angry and said, “What am I supposed to do with that information, how does knowing that help me?” He said, “I don’t want to talk about it, change the subject.” To which I calmly said I actually have the opposite point of view, I refuse to talk about superficial things like the weather or sports, or mainstream media talking points, I’m only interested in talking about things like what really makes the world tick.

He had such a strange reaction to hearing something that is contrary to his existing beliefs. He quickly changed the subject of the conversation that I so obviously didn’t want to have with him in the first place to AI, and how awesome it is. I said I believed AI is very valuable and I use it every day, but one has to be careful with it. You have to check everything it says because it makes a lot of mistakes. With hostility in his voice, he then asked me why I was so negative about AI.

He got on his phone and a few seconds later looked up showing me how in just a few seconds he used AI to make a video of his daughter flying over a city. I so badly wanted to say in a sarcastic, fake angry voice, “How does knowing this help me?” Instead, I bit my lip as he said, “I just did that in a few seconds using AI, why do you feel the need to reject AI?”

At this point everything he said was in a hostile voice. I calmly explained to him that I don’t reject AI and actually use it every day, I think it is incredibly useful, but you have to double check everything you get from AI because it hallucinates and says things that are easy to see are incorrect. If you can see obvious mistakes, then there must also be mistakes that aren’t so obvious.

To which he blurted out, “It’s complicated”. I said, “It’s complicated” isn’t enough of an explanation for me, it’s the kind of thing one says when they can’t figure out why a relationship isn’t working. Again he said, “Why are you so negative?”

I reiterated that I’m not negative towards AI, I’m just cautious and curious as to why it makes the mistakes it makes, like giving people four or six fingers. He said this is because AI sees more faces than hands, so it doesn’t know hands as well as faces. To which I asked, “Then why when I use AI to animate a picture of my Korean wife who has light hair, does it turn her into a Caucasian?” “If it knows faces so well, why does it turn a Korean person into a Northern European because of their hair color?” To which he explained, “It’s complicated.”

After several accusations of not listening to him and being overly negative, I looked at my watch and said, “I need to go.” At this point my 20 minutes really was up. In leaving he said, “Yeah, you should go.”

Who says that? “Yeah, you should go.” I didn’t want to have a conversation with the guy; he refused to accept any of my social cues clearly showing that I just wanted to read my book. The guy refused to listen to anything that didn’t align perfectly with his view of the world, and if you didn’t agree with him, it’s because you don’t listen and are overly negative. Fifty words to my one word and he accused me of not listening. It’s weird how that works.

I was proud of myself for not going off on the guy who was completely obnoxious. But leaving the situation, it made me understand something about myself, something that needs to change. I allowed him to negatively affect me for the rest of the day. It, as well as a couple of other technology issues I had to deal with, put me in a bad mood, which I brought home with me to my family.

Shaking the dust off your sandals and moving on to the next town doesn’t just mean moving on, it means not taking the dirt with you. I understand now that the second part is as important as the first. I’m going to repeat that because I think it is really important, shaking the dust off your sandals and moving on to the next town doesn’t just mean moving on, it means not taking the dirt with you.

How many of us allow others to affect our mood, or to make us believe that life is anything less than a gift? How many negative people cause us to be just a little more negative, a little more afraid or a little more ungrateful?

It’s easy to simply remember, “Oh, don’t have a conversation with that guy,” or “Don’t tune into that influencer’s podcast.” But the harder part is not absorbing others negativity, fear, anger and ingratitude. The harder part is understanding when the people or messaging we expose ourselves to are actually making us a worse version of ourselves.