Ep. 388: "Medical Lunch"
John: Hello.
Merlin: Give me that one again.
Merlin: You've got to wait like five seconds.
Merlin: Give me another one.
John: Sorry, the sound is all screwed up anyway.
John: I'm sorry.
John: No, no, it's okay.
John: It's audio video settings.
John: Audio video.
John: Audio video settings.
John: Okay, here's the audio video settings.
John: But it doesn't help.
Merlin: What is it?
Merlin: It sounds weird in your hands.
John: No, it's not in the cans.
John: It's coming.
John: You can hear me in the microphone.
John: I can only hear you through the internal machine.
John: And Skype system preferences doesn't really help, so I'm going to go to system preferences.
Merlin: Up in your menu bar, do you get the speaker icon?
Merlin: The speaker with the little waves coming out?
John: It doesn't put it in my menu bar.
Merlin: Look for, like where you would go to click to change the volume up there.
Merlin: There we go.
Merlin: There we go.
Merlin: There's a good shortcut.
Merlin: So, you know, if you option click on that speaker, it gives you, you can go straight to your inputs and outputs.
Merlin: Weirdly, there is no speaker up there.
Merlin: Maybe that's turned off.
John: I don't know why that would be.
John: I wouldn't have turned that off.
John: You wouldn't do that.
John: You run stock.
John: Yeah, I run stock.
John: I'm not some fancy guy who's like, oh, I don't have a show.
John: Is this the show?
John: I think this might be the show.
Merlin: It starts when it starts and it ends when it ends.
Merlin: And whatever's not in the show is necessarily not in the show.
John: That is something that I had a long, it took me a long time to figure that out.
John: I'm still figuring it out, buddy.
John: There was a lot of stuff I thought was in the show that wasn't in the show.
John: Yeah, I make a lot of assumptions.
John: I'm not going to lie.
John: I have started to assume that I can get up...
John: Without an alarm in time for the show.
John: Now that we have moved the show back an hour because I am very good.
John: I don't know.
John: This was a, this was a thing I always wanted.
John: This was a dream I had that I would be one of those people that had an internal clock and, and wouldn't need clocks.
John: Yeah.
John: Would just, just know when things were.
John: And I do.
Merlin: I'm lucky that I do.
Merlin: But when you're awake, you have a pretty good sense of 3 p.m.ness.
John: No, no, no.
John: I can lay down and say, I'm going to take a nine-minute nap.
Merlin: Okay, that's what I was going to ask.
Merlin: The people who say they can do that blow my mind.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: And it gradually came to me.
John: It wasn't a thing I always had.
John: It was a thing that...
John: I don't know.
John: I just trained or something.
John: But what happened today?
John: You know, we recorded we record a show on the hour.
Merlin: We have for many years, our tradition, I believe, has been for, I want to say years, has been we are scheduled to record Mondays at 10 a.m.
Merlin: Pacific time.
Merlin: Correct.
Merlin: And then we recently, you know, in these challenging times, said, well, who are we fooling?
Merlin: We're both sleeping later, going to bed later.
Merlin: Let's just, I'm moving everything out.
Merlin: Let's go at 11 instead, right?
Merlin: That's where we left it.
John: That's right, because prior to the epidemic –
John: There were just too many things to do in a day to start recording at 11.
John: It just burned a whole – or I'm sorry, at 10, right.
John: And honestly, the only show I recorded at 11 was with Dan Benjamin.
John: And it was because Dan Benjamin has to have his lunch at a certain hour.
John: And when I would suggest that we record it at a different hour, he would say, but how can I do that?
John: I won't be able to have lunch.
John: Right.
John: And I would say, well, the way you would do it is move your lunch.
Merlin: But he says it like it's dialysis.
John: Absolutely.
John: How would I do that if I can't get my medical lunch?
John: How can I do it?
John: I have to have lunch.
John: It's noon.
John: It's a prescription lunch, yes.
John: It's noon my time.
John: I have to have lunch.
John: And I'm like, yeah, I know, but it's like super inconvenient for me and wouldn't really be that inconvenient for you.
John: And he says...
John: Well, yes, it would.
John: It's right in the middle of lunch.
John: So and I speak as someone who has lunch at different times, sometimes doesn't have lunch.
John: So I don't know what it's like to have lunch at noon every day.
John: But now I see after, as you say, years, I see the wisdom of Dan Benjamin.
John: It's really better to start at 11.
John: Because I stay up so late.
John: I'm so tired.
Merlin: I'm so tired.
Merlin: You know, it's something I've been realizing and talked about this with the You Look Nice Today guys is, you know, as we try to navigate our way into trying some new things, I was saying how I feel like this is just a gut check, but I feel like I do a better job
Merlin: doing different kinds of shows at different times of day.
Merlin: But there's no internal or external logic to it.
Merlin: I do know that I sometimes struggle, especially now more than ever in these times, with recording with Dan at 8.30 a.m.
Merlin: That's become, in the last three months, just a skosh early for me.
Merlin: But sometimes the results are really good.
Merlin: Because I start off the show maybe a little more subdued and I can kind of like dial it in.
Merlin: But I learned a long time ago, I should not do too many podcast recordings at night.
Merlin: And if I do them at night, it's important that I not drink a lot.
Merlin: And my shows got better when I did that.
Merlin: Because it used to be with You Look Nice Today, we always recorded at night.
Merlin: And we sometimes quite obviously had had some beverages.
Yeah.
Merlin: And I still have one sometimes, but that's not professional.
John: That was early in podcasting.
Merlin: We didn't know any better.
Merlin: Who knew?
Merlin: Oh, you were young.
Merlin: I got up early today because they did the big Apple developer conference today, so I was watching that.
John: Oh, right, right, right.
John: Everybody's very excited.
John: Marco Arment is jumping up and down, isn't he?
John: Are you tracking everything that's happening?
John: It's wild.
John: No, no, no.
John: Because my story is that I rolled over
John: stretched all looked at my clock and it was 10 59 so much for that internal clock eh well no i'd done it because i was supposed to get up at 11 or i was supposed to be somewhere at 11 and i got there i got there at 10 59 and i was like oh no and i picked up my phone i texted you and of all the people of all the people i work with merlin you are the
John: absolute best at getting a text that says, can we go 15 minutes late?
John: And you say... No prob, Bob.
John: Sure.
John: Sure.
John: I say no prob, Bob.
John: Sure.
John: 15 minutes.
John: Now, every other person I work with, everybody in my family, the mayor's office, everybody, when I do that, they're like, ah, okay.
Merlin: Did they do this, John?
Merlin: Did they go...
Merlin: Do they suck air?
Merlin: Do they go... Yeah, they'd be like... Okay.
Merlin: You know what the key part of that is, though?
Merlin: And I'm not trying to, as the NYPD says, I'm not trying to kettle you here.
Merlin: But I think the important part, and this is not you, this is anybody, when somebody says, including me, where somebody, like if I have to go poop, and I could poop pretty quickly, but I know everything takes longer than you think.
Merlin: So whenever somebody says, oh, I'm running late or something, something, what do I always say?
Merlin: First of all, I say, no problem, Bob.
Merlin: But then I say, let's just make a quarter after or let's make it half past.
Merlin: And, you know, it's like when I was a kid, there was this park, state park in Florida called Booker Creek.
Merlin: And it used to be the first time I ever saw this.
Merlin: And now you see it all the time.
Merlin: It's so interesting.
Merlin: They had all of their speed limits in the park.
Merlin: were unusual numbers so like for example in this congested area the parking um the speed limit rather would be something like nine miles per hour oh that's so good so yeah so tell me why that's good because i have a thought oh 19 miles an hour because you're noticing right you don't when you see a zero and that could be anything but if you're specific with somebody like it it undoes our
Merlin: Some nembulant approach to time.
Merlin: If you say this, my friend Dennis used to do this all the time.
Merlin: He said, hey, listen, the movie starts at 7.30.
Merlin: Why don't we plan to leave here at 6.56?
Merlin: So good.
Merlin: Isn't it?
Merlin: I mean, maybe it's dumb, but I think it kind of works.
John: It does.
John: Well, you know, I set every clock in my house and in my life slightly differently from every other clock.
Yeah.
Merlin: So if you're in my life... You're not doing Vince Lombardi.
Merlin: You're doing more like a time Loki.
Merlin: You're like an agent of your own chaos.
John: In my house, the microwave is set, let's say, seven minutes fast.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: The clock in my car is about 12 minutes fast.
John: The old clock on the mantel...
John: can sometimes be 15 minutes fast.
John: They're all a little fast, but they're different amounts of fast.
John: And when I realized that I could change the time on my Apple Watch, I set that a little bit off too, sometimes as much as 11 minutes fast.
John: Interesting.
John: Are all my clocks fast?
John: So I always feel like I'm almost late to something, which I am.
John: I also don't know how late I am.
John: So I can never look at a clock and say, oh, I got 10 more minutes than that because it's 10 minutes fast.
John: It's always like, oh, I don't really know how much faster that is.
John: So I better get going.
John: I'm still late.
John: I learned about speed limit signs, an interesting thing.
John: Because like most people, speed limit signs a long time ago went from kind of being just a suggestion to being like a sign about what the cops up ahead might think is the speed limit to being...
John: It's just a sign that I look through.
John: It's just a thing that's blocking my view.
Merlin: You're saying it went from a thing that you would doggedly pursue to make sure you get it right to where now it might as well be like a billboard for a personal injury attorney?
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: And yet, when I started going on these motorcycle trips, and when I say these, I mean two.
John: I've been on two motorcycle trips.
John: Two more than me.
John: But I realized that this – because on a motorcycle, of course, you're having a super different experience of everything.
John: Every aspect of being on just a normal road is completely heightened and exploded by being on a motorcycle.
John: Right.
John: But as you – but on a motorcycle, one of the things – and I'm on these big displacement motorcycles which feel like they're too much motorcycle for me anyway.
John: Right.
John: And so as you initiate a turn, at least on these trips that I'm on, as I initiate any turn, just a gradual turn on a country road, I am – at least 30% of my brain is consumed with the fear that I'm going to do it wrong and I'm going to crash and die.
John: And so you go into these turns and you're like,
John: your mind is so focused, just like, and now I'm initiating the turn, and now I have begun the turn, and now I am in the turn.
Merlin: You really have to be so in the moment and yet relaxed.
Merlin: It seems like a very kind of, almost a martial arts approach, because there's so much less fault tolerance, right?
Merlin: You have so many fewer cubic inches touching the road at a given time, and things that a car could just kind of bump over could really send you ass over a tea kettle, right?
Yeah.
John: It's that, but also in a car, if I overshoot a turn or if there's a goat in the road or something.
John: A goat in the road.
John: You know, a goat in the road.
John: Especially in Oregon, right?
John: Everywhere you go, it's just like, ugh, a goat in the road.
John: But if you slam on the brakes in a car and the car goes into a skid, I know what that's –
John: going to do.
John: I know how to recover from a skid in a car.
John: I know how to take evasive action in a car.
John: I know how to, you know, I can do all kinds of things in a car because I know what I'm doing.
John: But on a motorcycle, it's not just the risk of doing it wrong.
John: It's then also not knowing how to recover, not knowing how to recover from a skid on a motorcycle, not knowing how to take evasive action on a motorcycle.
John: Because I'm in this, this state of just like, I am barely hanging on to this.
John: You know, I've got my fingernails on the edge of the cliff at all times because I'm only just able to, and it's the fear of, I mean, I'm, and I'm, I'm, I'm overstating it.
John: Like I've ridden two wheeled vehicles my whole life, motor, motor vehicles, but you know, not these big things, not at these speeds, not in these conditions, right?
John: A Vespa is,
John: If I come around a corner and there's a goat in the road and I'm on my Vespa, I do know what to do.
John: But I'm not going 75 miles an hour.
Merlin: It's because of the speed where you're already driving more conservatively.
Merlin: You probably don't even have the same quality.
Merlin: You're not going to go as fast.
Merlin: I'm guessing the brakes aren't as good as on a full big boy motorcycle.
John: It's completely different.
John: A Vespa does not weigh 2,500 pounds or whatever these big things are.
John: And also, like a Vespa –
John: I mean, in a pinch, you could just step off of a Vespa and let it hit the goat.
John: And you, you know, tumble in the ditch.
John: You can't do that with these things.
John: Anyway, what I started to notice was that the speed limit signs are absolutely 100% tied to the road.
John: They are...
John: The way that the corners are structured, the way they're built, the way they're banked, the radius of them, the sight lines up ahead, what's coming up on the corner, you know, up ahead of the one you're on, all of those things are taken into consideration and reflected in the speed limit signs.
John: And it blew my mind that...
John: They're not just that they're not arbitrary, but they're not based on one simple formula.
John: It's not like, oh, well, this is a 30 mile an hour.
Merlin: It also has to take so many different kinds of things, like obviously things like the curve of the road, the visibility, the likelihood of a side street unloading unvisibly.
Merlin: And you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like you wouldn't see somebody pulling out of a driveway.
Merlin: Obviously, if you're driving around in Northern California and going up some of those crazy hills in Redwood country, that's going to be different.
Merlin: But you also have to account for – it's like when you do risk management and trying to guess the –
Merlin: how to keep an area safe.
Merlin: You model for an adult, you model for a worker, you model for a child, and you model for a trespasser.
Merlin: Because the trespasser is like, if somebody came into this area and waded into this water for 20 minutes, you have to model what kind of exposure would they get.
Merlin: Isn't that kind of part of it?
Merlin: Again, with that mountain road, it could be a bike, it could be a small truck, it could certainly be a car, and all of that has to feed into that.
Merlin: And isn't there a rule of thumb about – maybe I'm thinking of those.
Merlin: Remember those old Shell ads about counting two seconds when you're behind?
John: Keep your car ahead of you, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, and then wasn't there some rule of thumb about going so many car lengths per so many tens of miles per hour and stuff like that?
Merlin: Doesn't that also factor into it?
Merlin: Like, are you coming up on a stop sign?
Merlin: Are you going to be moving from – we want to kind of ramp you down from a highway to moving through this small town?
Merlin: That kind of stuff.
Yes.
John: Well, and also the degree to which the road is banked, you know, there are banked corners, there are flat corners, there are corners in between, you know.
John: But all of this, as you're riding these roads, for me at least, this like gradual dawning appreciation for engineers and the fact that, I mean, if you spend any time on roads,
John: With your eyes open, you're going to eventually realize, wow, this is engineered.
John: Everything about it.
John: And engineers had to come into this environment and make this.
John: And that is incredible, what they've done.
John: The things they've calculated into it.
John: The the the things that they built, you know, that that seem like, oh, they just piled up some dirt and paved it.
John: And it's like, oh, my God, no.
John: You know, there are so many bridges and culverts and stuff that you don't even notice.
John: But also, like, you can't just pour dirt.
John: in a wetland and build a road on it you know it's like but not unless you're in the south in the south you just throw a bunch of dead mules in there and pave it this episode of rodrick on the line is brought to you by squarespace
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Merlin: Oh, no, my goat.
Merlin: And goats.
Merlin: Dead goats.
Merlin: You know how the marina district is all built on garbage and shipwrecks?
John: That's true here in Seattle, too.
John: The whole Soto area, it's just like...
John: It's like old bottles, dead horses, like Indian canoes.
John: They just put everything that they thought didn't have any value.
John: All these canoes that now would be in museums around the world.
John: So anyway, and the thing about the motorcycling is I was always exactly 10 miles over the posted speed limit because –
John: The motorcycle, because the speed limit is conservative, but also, you know, the motorcycle is agile.
John: But I never was 12 miles over it.
John: It was, you know, it was between 8 and 10 miles over it, I was fine.
John: And it felt like exactly the right tempo.
John: But if I went a little bit over it, you know, I could just, I would just feel it.
John: that I was going too fast and that it was dangerous.
John: And the fact that those speed limit signs, and even though they were just in increments of 5, 20, 25, 30, 35, they had been calibrated a lot more carefully than I thought.
John: And so when I think about speed limit signs that say 19 miles an hour or 29 miles an hour, that just feels hilarious to me, but it also, it would, I think...
John: shock me into thinking that those speed limit signs or it's shocked me into realizing that those speed limit signs actually reflected a calculation rather than just um you know they they got a cardboard box full of signs and they're reaching in there like give me a 35 well 30 is fine
John: So, yeah, I'm like super fan.
Merlin: I remember the single probably best piece of advice I heard about appreciating Shakespeare is pretty obvious, which is, you know, if it's a play, see it performed as a play.
Merlin: If it's a poem or a sonnet, hear it read aloud.
Merlin: I would say the second best was that in the absence of getting to see a performance of one of the plays, if you're stuck just reading it like a monster, I think I didn't learn this till college, but I remember hearing that it's really important to read Shakespeare carefully.
Merlin: you will discover a speed at which to read Shakespeare that would be most sort of meaningful and you'll be able to get the most from it.
Merlin: You won't get everything from it, but if you read it too slow and you really like pour over every syllable, you're going to get so hung up on stuff that you don't know, right?
Merlin: It's not going to be fun.
Merlin: And if you read it too fast, you're just simply not going to get any of it.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: There's a velocity that feels good.
Merlin: And I think that's true for a lot of stuff in life.
Merlin: I feel like this does apply on highways.
Merlin: So everybody knows that a highway has – like a U.S.
Merlin: highway has a maximum speed limit.
Merlin: But I believe there's also an implicit minimum speed limit.
Merlin: Like you're not supposed to be going 15 on a highway because that's not safe.
Right.
Merlin: The people we said this probably since the beginning of this program, people need to get out of your way so you can get through Seattle.
Merlin: But also, there is a community velocity to being on the road that lets everybody make smarter decisions.
Merlin: Again, it's why, for example, at a four-way stop, you not only should wait for your turn, but you must take your turn with confidence.
Merlin: Because if you don't take your turn when it's your turn...
Merlin: It's very confusing to everybody else at their stop sign.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like your abundance of caution is making it less safe.
John: We can't have roundabouts in the United States because nobody can figure it out.
John: People stop.
John: I love a traffic circle.
John: I love it so much.
John: Did you know that the minimum speed limit on a freeway is 45 miles an hour?
John: I would have guessed 40.
John: I believe 40.
John: 45 is, that's pretty high, really.
John: Yeah, well, get off the interstate if it seems high to you.
John: Hey.
John: Wiener.
John: Easy, Tex.
Ha, ha, ha.
John: Just as God made me, sir.
Merlin: You turkey.
John: Got the old cruise control set on 40 miles an hour, son.
Merlin: And like, yeah, you know what?
Merlin: We got to get away.
Merlin: I don't want to rehash the whole driving issue.
Merlin: But appreciation for engineering is, I don't know, it is pretty wild.
Merlin: You know, if you were the sort of person who listened to podcasts, and I know that you're not, there's one I would really recommend to you.
Merlin: Oh, I was up all late last night listening to podcasts.
Merlin: You love your podcast.
Merlin: Don't talk to me before I've had my podcast.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: This guy, an English guy called Tim Harford, who is an interesting turns out guy, has a wonderful podcast called Cautionary Tales.
Merlin: And the logline is, my podcast telling true stories about mistakes and what we should learn from them.
Merlin: And so I'm going to mention this to you before, but it's a very, very good show where whether it's Chernobyl or whether it is –
Merlin: a World War I civilian pretending to be a German officer, or whether it's the waiter at the Beverly Hills Supper Club trying to get people out.
Merlin: There's all of these things that we can learn from giant disasters about the small...
Merlin: disasters.
Merlin: And this week's episode, I don't know, it's called A Tsunami of Misery.
Merlin: So here's the logline for this.
Merlin: Saving people from an urgent threat can cause their lives to be blighted in profound yet hidden ways.
Merlin: And so it's basically about deciding
Merlin: after the tsunamis they've had in Japan, how big of a seawall will they need to make to prevent against a tsunami hitting the Fukushima plant?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: And like all the estimates that go into that.
Merlin: And it's, I love the, I love hearing how people think about these things.
Merlin: And I love, I love the obvious.
Merlin: I love the unobvious.
Merlin: I love all the things that go into like, yeah, but did we account for this?
Merlin: The classic, certainly apocryphal tale,
Merlin: Please don't email me.
Merlin: But the apocryphal tale, it's the frog in boiling water of architecture.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: The one about the grand opening for the beautiful all-glass library.
Merlin: Before they brought the books in, they're going to have this cocktail party to say, hey, this is done, all over but the shouting.
Merlin: And one of the people says to the architect, in this apocryphal story, I can't believe you were able to make this beautiful glass building and it'll still be able to hold all of those tons and tons and tons of books.
Yeah.
Merlin: Now, in the apocryphal story, he goes, whoopsie.
Merlin: Books?
Merlin: I should have accounted for that.
Merlin: Well, that's certainly an apocryphal story, but I'll bet you stuff like that happens all the time, especially when you're working by yourself.
Merlin: Because there's nobody there to pair with you and push back on overly ambitious, often cost-cutting measures.
Merlin: So now you get stuff like in Florida, there's this bridge in Stewart that's about to just fall down.
Yeah.
Merlin: there's it's i think it's still operating but like those cracks add up and like you you have to model for so many different things and you got to think about well this kind of car when when this car gets sold in massachusetts we have to account for the fact that there's going to be ice and there's going to be salt to get rid of the ice do we do something to all of our cars nationally because they will be affected especially you know what i'm saying
Merlin: It's like you have to walk through so many different things and there's always limitations.
Merlin: There's always budgets and deadlines.
Merlin: And what an exhilarating and difficult job being an engineer must be.
John: I hate to always be the one that – yeah, that's right.
John: That ties that into the social sciences.
John: But, you know, we talk a lot about how design by committee –
John: creates problems because sometimes the solution to what you're describing, which is an architect working apocryphally, ends up not having thought it through and so we need to get other people in the room.
John: But then the problem with that is you get too many people in the room and there's a guy from Zimtech and there's a guy from Zimco and it starts to be like, well, we can't afford that.
John: And pretty soon somebody says, well, what about –
John: This is an ADA compliant.
John: And then another person says, well, what, you know, what if we wanted to turn this into a hovercraft and then it becomes the design falls apart.
John: The problem in the social sciences is that there's very little collaboration often.
John: And so what you get is these, these engineered theories, but there is no oversight or there's no, there's no, there's nobody saying, no, wait a minute.
John: Shouldn't we add in,
John: a factor for the fact that there are no sight lines on this corner.
John: Like, yeah, the way this corner is banked, you could do it at 45 miles an hour, but there's an intersection right around the corner and you can't see it.
John: So we need to slow the traffic down.
John: And if you're coming up with a theory of how human beings interact with each other or how government works or, you know, like the stuff that comes out of universities and think tanks,
John: That oftentimes we make public policy based on a theory that someone publishes and that gets republished and people talk about.
John: Yeah.
John: But there isn't a process of – there's not enough of a process of vetting and testing those theories anymore before people start making policy about them.
John: And now increasingly that all social policy is made on the internet in a split second –
John: There isn't even a sense that those things – that there should be any engineering behind a theory other than that somebody said it.
John: Somebody that you trust published it or even reposted it.
John: Yeah.
John: Reposted it without comment.
John: And that – trying to find the right blend, not just in engineering but in every other kind of what we used to think of as the world of expertise –
John: The right blend of let's not just trust this one person who's a mad genius or who's working in isolation.
John: We need other human eyes on this and we need collaboration.
John: But also let's not let it get bogged down in a bureaucratic process where people are in the room that don't belong there or where we're trying to serve too many masters.
John: Like to find the perfect – like if you and I had a third person on this show.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
John: We tried it one time.
John: Do you remember?
John: Do you remember the one time we tried it?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: We had an idea that we were going to expand our franchise a little bit by talking to people who are ongoing characters on the show.
Right.
Merlin: We were going to... Because I didn't want the work, and I had a feeling it would be harder than it seemed.
Merlin: And we tried it once, and that turned out to be true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
John: We had we had one attempt at having one of our one of our many favorite characters come on the show and be himself.
John: And he's much, much worse in person than we make him out to be.
John: Yeah.
John: And that show had to.
John: And it's kind of like the show that we tried to do you, me and Syracuse.
John: Syracuse.
John: Syracuse.
John: Where it was just like we got on the show and he yelled at me about evolution for an hour.
Merlin: And skiing.
Merlin: And so what do you think it would mean if we had a third?
Merlin: You think if we get a third, like a permanent third person and they come in and keep us honest?
John: I'm saying that's the problem.
John: It couldn't happen.
Merlin: It couldn't happen.
Merlin: That's a different show.
Merlin: It would be a very different show.
John: There's not room in this world for a third between you and me.
John: There's not oxygen in the room and we're not even in the same room.
John: Wow.
John: There's not oxygen in the virtual room.
John: We need an engineer just to pump oxygen into that space for this third person to survive.
Merlin: Yeah, I don't need another person in my life telling me what I'm doing wrong.
Merlin: I get enough of that from Syracuse and my family and everyone else.
Merlin: I'm trying to remember.
Merlin: I'm getting that weird feeling that not only have we talked about this, like all topics, but I feel like we might have gotten in an argument about this and I don't remember.
Merlin: But I don't remember specifically.
Merlin: But you know about the replication crisis, especially in psychology?
Merlin: You know about this.
Merlin: There are certain kinds of studies that are just tentpole studies that people are still quoting to this day.
Merlin: And almost every single one of them has something wrong with it that we didn't discover for a pretty long time.
Merlin: It could be like the Stanford prison experiment, you know, or the specific one with the shocking people one.
Merlin: Like that's very kind of unethical.
Merlin: The monkeys with the bananas.
John: You got the rat over here.
Merlin: Well, you got this guy, no soup.
Merlin: So the other day in one of my late afternoon fever dreams about how scared I am about Corona is –
Merlin: I was searching for—you know me, I love an analogy—and I was searching for an analogy that suits my feeling that we're going through a large experiment right now.
Merlin: I mean, one theme in my thinking about corona, such as it is, is that every time somebody tries to talk about anything beyond a very small area with very recent data—
Merlin: It's bullshit.
Merlin: It's only this is only useful if we are extremely specific about extreme, you know, within a margin of the margin of error that we know.
Merlin: But, you know, it doesn't mix.
Merlin: Like I said yesterday on the Internet, it's fucking I mean, having national covid numbers is like having a national weather forecast.
Merlin: Like I would not want to use that to make a decision about where I live, how I live, where I live.
Merlin: but i was struggling with how do we how do we say this well like my feeling all along has been like guys we're never gonna get well first of all there's no normal to return to let's just put that in the rearview mirror but we're never gonna get back to anything close to normal until we tamp this thing way the fuck down wear a goddamn mask and stay inside for three weeks and this will go down wear a mask tamp it down
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: But I mean, all this, the problem is that everybody keeps going off half cocked and we see what happens when that occurs.
Merlin: It's now even the national numbers are crazy right now.
Merlin: Anyway, I was saying like, it reminded me of that, the very famous bit of turns out research, which is the marshmallow test.
Merlin: The marshmallow test.
Merlin: The marshmallow test.
Merlin: You hear about a lot in behavioral economics and turns out reporting.
Merlin: And the notion of that was we've discovered, I believe it was something from the 60s or 70s, that we – every single bit of this is stupid in retrospect.
Merlin: But we sat a kid down and said, I'm going to put this marshmallow in front of you.
Merlin: But if you cannot eat it for five minutes, I'll give you two or whatever.
John: Two marshmallows later, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: We talk about this all the time, even still.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I feel like I'd heard that that was, well, maybe most importantly, some other less important things that I'll mention in a second.
Merlin: But most importantly, that that was a victim of the replication crisis in that when they finally, after years of people quoting this, got around to many different people trying to replicate it.
Merlin: People tried to replicate it and did not get the same results.
Merlin: Now, I must also say in passing, there's all kinds of bullshit about grit tied up in that.
Merlin: And like, well, you know, it's like my friends in college were much more okay with not having money than I was because they always had a fallback plan and a parent who could wire them money.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: And so they seemed like they were handling adversity better, but they just had never had their ass kicked, right?
Merlin: More grit.
Merlin: They had grit.
Merlin: Oh, grit.
Merlin: Oh, John, grit is so important.
Merlin: Isn't it funny how so many white kids have grit?
Merlin: They did have grit.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And the other one just lacked the grit.
Merlin: But that to me is so interesting.
Merlin: And there's a whole field about this.
Merlin: I've mentioned there's this guy at Stanford who studies this exclusively with his group.
Merlin: He's one of the people who was very concerned about the Elizabeth Holmes company.
Merlin: You know, he walked by on the Stanford campus one day and was like, hmm, I wonder what that's all about.
Merlin: But the replication crisis is so huge.
Merlin: What I'm trying to get at is that in terms of this, there is no like sort of rubric that's shared across all of the sciences for what we're trying to accomplish here.
Merlin: And we sometimes we don't even have the same teacher's edition that we're working out of.
Merlin: So, of course, it's going to be confusing when a city planner and like a civic engineer and a designer and a mayor, you know,
Merlin: you know, start getting real.
John: Well, and then you add in, you add in all those people and then you add in somebody whose expertise is in the realm of diversity.
John: Someone whose expertise is in the realm of, of, um, you know, how people interact with machines or, you know, you know what I mean?
John: Like you answer, you take all those people, you take all the engineers, put them in a room with politicians, but then you put them in the room with people, which are social scientists.
John: And there is absolutely no, no baseline.
John: Um,
John: Where people are – because they're not speaking the same language and there's no – and we don't make it – we don't make any attempt to have a common language anymore, even within university graduates, right?
John: And I think a lot of people think of themselves in one profession as the necessary corrective to another profession, right?
John: Right.
John: Like my job is to be the one that keeps those people with that job in check.
John: Right.
John: Like if it weren't for me and my job, if it weren't for my profession, those people would run amok.
John: And there's there's like that's kind of baked into to America in a way we think of the press.
John: as the thing that keeps government in check.
John: We think of the Supreme Court as the thing that keeps Congress in check and both as keeping the presidency in check.
John: Yeah, checks and balances, right?
John: Checks and balances.
John: But that idea that like journalists keep X in check or engineers are the ones that keep city planners in check or, you know, increasingly –
John: like a civilian review board is who's trying to keep the cops in check and and all this like keeping in check is a job but really there's a really what you what you have is an actual job right the journalist job isn't to keep government in check it's a journalist has a actual job which is to do journalism and keeping the government in check is a
John: It should be a byproduct of you actually doing a job, a good job.
John: Like keeping the government in check should be the outcome of good reporting and keeping the Congress in check should be an outcome of the Supreme Court, not its job.
John: And that's true also of all the times that social scientists and engineers interact.
John: But you see in the meetings, you see the way that people interact with each other, and they're just listening to the other person trying to find faults in their argument or trying to find the flaw in their plan.
John: They think of their job as to be like a Snoopy vulture.
John: Like a devil's advocate almost.
John: Or worse.
John: What's the worst of it?
John: The version of a devil's advocate that's that has no Are you just like being a gadfly?
John: Yeah, a gadfly right that has no actual plan of their own that they feel like they're just there to And you know a lot of those people are the ones that walk out of the meetings feeling like they really did their work today because everything that the other person proposed they found a flaw with and shot down and
John: I think that's a big part of meeting culture.
John: I think it's a big part of corporate culture now that, that all you have to do in a meeting is shoot somebody else's ideas down.
John: Right.
John: You don't even have to come in with ideas because of this, because of this mistaken notion that being, uh, the antidote or, you know, being the corrective that keeps someone else in check is like, um, is like God's work somehow.
John: Because, you know, boy, this guy over here with all these ideas, he didn't think about the fact that that the toilet water flushes in the opposite direction in Australia.
John: It's like, oh, fuck guy.
John: Really?
John: I mean, that's the thing that now this meeting's unraveled and we all have to go break out and.
Merlin: But isn't there some role for – I'm thinking about a term I learned when I was visiting.
Merlin: Yeah, I was in Madison.
Merlin: My friend who's a professor there brought me in to talk.
Merlin: And the phrase that he uses in academia is problematizing.
Merlin: which sounds like you're just being an asshole, but I think it's an idea in academia that... Well, think about this.
Merlin: Think about the weird thing a lot of people misunderstand, which is when you hear something from the Supreme Court or any kind of an appeals court, you notice that sometimes there are certain judges and justices that ask surprisingly difficult questions of one side and not the other.
Merlin: And I think on first blush, people hear that and think, well, obviously they're going to rule against that person that they're asking the hard questions to.
Merlin: It's my understanding that it can often be something like the opposite of that, which is on the one hand, like I want to give you the opportunity as the person with the stronger case to make that case even stronger.
Merlin: And if your case is really good, I'm also going to give you the ammunition to deal with the appeal that will come out of this.
Merlin: So I'm going to push the person who has the better argument harder because they can handle that.
Merlin: I'm going to problematize what you're asking and I'm going to push back.
Merlin: But would you contrast that with like just trying to dunk on somebody at a meeting?
John: Well, it's the difference between being lazy and wanting to – I mean the desire to dunk on people at a meeting is to walk out of that meeting the hero.
John: The engineer that's putting those speed limit signs, whoever's job it is on the Oregon public highways to at the end of the process –
John: And they've designed those roads with speed limits in mind.
John: There's not some engineer that's just throwing up roads and then somebody that comes along behind with a tape measure and is like, well, I guess this is a 35-mile road.
John: They see it way ahead.
John: But nobody – the person that put those signs in the ground or that calculated those speed limits and said, here, this is what we're calling this.
John: They don't get a medal, right?
John: No one ever knows their name.
John: They're not.
Merlin: They're just another bureaucrat.
Merlin: Am I right?
John: Yeah.
John: You know, it's a guy in a hard hat that when you're driving, you know, some flagger has a slow sign and you drive by and you're like, God, why don't you guys get it?
John: And you pass 15 people in hard hats.
Merlin: You are here specifically to slow me down.
John: Yeah, right.
John: You people with your dumb road repair.
John: You pass one of those people with a hard hat and she's the one that designed the freaking thing and standing there with a clipboard.
John: Yeah.
John: No heroes in it.
John: And I think probably the only heroism is at the end of 30 years of the Oregon Department of Public Works, they give you a certificate.
John: Probably not even a gold watch anymore.
John: Compared to somebody who's sitting in that meeting –
John: Um, sitting in the meeting where the road is getting built up at city hall and saying, oh, well, you know, we can't, uh, we can't have a road that comes around the corner there.
John: No sight lines because whatever, you know, um, what, what's going to happen if a guy that's never been on a motorcycle before goes around that corner and didn't see the sign, you know, just, just throwing up that kind of what's going to happen if we're just trying to, trying to
John: Trying to make a thing more complicated than it is.
John: Trying to make a thing fail.
John: Trying to make a good idea fail.
Merlin: Not out of good faith.
Merlin: There's a certain amount of bad faith to it.
John: Yeah, and a certain amount of laziness.
John: A certain amount of unwillingness to... A certain amount of looking at somebody who has a hard job and wanting to make your job seem as hard as theirs...
John: Wanting to seem as much of an expert as they are.
John: This is an engineer who's building a road.
John: I studied political science and my thesis was on the bonobos and how they like to jack one another off.
John: And so that means that my feeling about this curve in the road is as good as yours.
John: And I know I'm putting myself in a position because I said it as I'm part of the commentariat on Internet and computer and city planning and all that.
John: I mean, I sit here on my squeaky chair and talk about things I'd have no expertise on.
John: But.
John: I'm part of a commentariat, not part of a committee.
Merlin: I was bitching the other day because I don't know what it is.
Merlin: I feel like everybody, probably including me, but people who should know better have become so sloppy.
Merlin: certainly in tweets, like, but like journalists were like, Oh God, I, my friend John Gruber and I talk about this, how we, how reluctant we are to, you know, reblog or retweet something that's got like a typo in it because you're like, well, that makes me look bad if I do that.
Merlin: But like, I've just been noticing more and more, like, especially in the Washington post where I feel like they are deliberately trying to make me insane and
Merlin: Because these are in, like, full-on, sometimes opinion pieces.
Merlin: But, you know, any piece that's in the Washington Post has been through, I think, several layers of editing.
Merlin: Yeah, what do you think?
Merlin: Well, yeah, but, I mean, you've got line editing.
Merlin: You've got a first edit, a second edit.
Merlin: Like, there's revisions and all that going through.
Merlin: And plus, if you – but you'll see an error that's like, dude, my phone would have caught that.
Merlin: Like, it's –
John: I think that they've laid off all those people with green visors.
Merlin: All the green visors.
Merlin: But, you know, if somebody were to say to me, well, yeah, well, you have typos all the time, you know, my response would be, yeah, but I'm not the Washington Post.
Merlin: I'm not the president.
Merlin: Like, we turn to these people because of that expertise that they have.
Merlin: And, you know, maybe that's part of my problem in the commentary.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: John Dickerson said something the other day, he said, it was two days ago, saying, what's the term for only engaging with an argument by the worst act done on behalf of it?
Merlin: And he claims there's a line that, you know, just in looking at the way that we, I mean, you can slice that thing a million different ways, but we see it all the time, where it's like the most conceivable, outlandish, far-fetched corner case that
Merlin: This happened one time type of thing comes to define an entire argument or movement, right?
Merlin: And the phrase he says via, I think, Jonah Goldberg from the Times, the term is nut picking.
Merlin: Nut picking.
Merlin: Yeah, you go out and you try to go, you look straight past what the person is trying to say.
Merlin: that is substantial and specific and you make it weird and abstract and try to find one hypothetical and you're like ha ha you sir will shrink up and call yourself a corncob because you are pwned by me you know that's kind of what we're talking about right pound lol yeah i don't think i don't think about for instance you and you me and you and our dog named boo
John: I don't think when we comment and critique on the world as we see it that our goal is to tear it down or tear people of good faith down, tear good things apart either for our own amusement or to make ourselves seem bigger than we are.
John: Because we don't have a – we don't really have a dog in that race, right?
John: I mean at least on my part, I spent a lot of time defending parts of the American story or parts of the – parts of government that seem from the outside to be opaque and ill-mannered and ill-intentioned.
John: And a lot of my journey in running for office was to say like, you know what?
John: This is actually –
John: This seems like it is – this whole process seems like it's corrupted but it's really the effect of a bunch of – a combination of benign circumstances and a combination of well-meaning people.
John: who with very good educations, trying to do the right thing, have created a structure that none of them can extricate themselves from, you know, like, uh, uh, this is not the, the reason that we don't have, um,
John: smooth paved roads in this part of Seattle is not because somebody at City Hall wants you to have a bad day.
John: It's because of the taxing structure that was put in place by the legislature that doesn't allow the city to fund this kind of construction without there being a referendum that isn't going to happen.
Merlin: So we're straight back to assumptions, aren't we?
Merlin: Like we talked about at the beginning, there's an assumption there of like always assuming some kind of conspiracy or ill will or that somebody is deliberately trying to fuck with you because your road is bad.
John: And what's weird is as somebody who's against conspiracies in general, against the concept, there's so much evidence right now of conspiracies, like like small scale panty anti conspiracies just on the just this whole business with the fireworks.
John: Oh, God.
John: Is this really – there seems to be ample evidence that this is really happening, that somehow –
John: Huge crates of fireworks have been delivered to the inner cities of all the cities that stood up during Black Lives Matter because it's like a war zone in these places.
Merlin: You think it's real?
John: You think it's happening?
John: No, no, no.
John: I'm just curious.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, what I don't know is what I don't know.
John: Yeah.
John: I know what it's like to have fireworks going off all night long.
John: I saw one from Harlem last night that, that show it was three o'clock in the morning and it was like a parade of cop cars going around the block with their sirens on bumper to bumper in West Harlem at three, three o'clock in the morning with no, I mean, they were, they're just in a parade, literally in a parade, but it's, it's very hard for me as somebody who's, who's my whole life has,
John: looked at conspiracy and found that i was a person who who believed that the simplest answer was probably the best and the simplest answer is almost never that a secret tribe a secret tribunal of jews in switzerland is running the banks you know like it seems like a simpler answer is probably that people
John: largely of goodwill some of them motivated by greed have created a situation you know that the reagan administration deregulated the banks and some bankers saw an opportunity and they thought what they were doing was going to be good for the economy and it was it's just that um you know like a cascading set of
John: Of people trying mostly to do the right thing and thinking that, yeah, this is going to benefit me too has created a situation where it becomes an untenable financial situation.
John: It's not that capitalism is intrinsically –
John: bad as much as it is, hey, if you take government regulation away, you're going to end up with an unregulated industry, right?
John: But now, how do I come out and say conspiracies are fake?
John: Because there are so many of them.
John: Every morning I wake up and I walk across the bones of the 50 conspiracies that were laid out on the internet just last night.
John: And to make a sweeping generalization that like, oh, come on, it's not like the cops are
John: Doing this.
John: It's not like it's not like the cops have the brains to put a conspiracy together.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, look at look at how much worse things could be right now if if even the George W. Bush administration were pulling some of the shit that the Trump people are trying to pull.
Merlin: It's just they're so bad at it.
Merlin: And they keep failing at it.
Merlin: But it's another part of this.
Merlin: And this is way before we ever get to, if you like, privilege.
Merlin: But just in terms of like sort of an Occam's razor or, sorry, more like a cognitive bias.
Merlin: Let's put it that way.
Merlin: What about evolution?
Merlin: And skiing and cars.
Merlin: We don't tend to over-notice the things that are neutral or that benefit us.
Merlin: Those seem normal because we deserve it.
Merlin: What we notice are the things that are damaging to us or the things that might become damaging to us.
Merlin: And I feel like that's where there's a lot of fertile ground for conspiracy thinking.
Merlin: There must be some explanation for why my life is the way it is.
Merlin: And now I just need to reverse engineer who is out to get people like me.
Merlin: And so of course it's the Jews, or of course it's, you know, the Italians or whoever.
Merlin: But don't you think, isn't that part of it is like the, if you did an honest accounting of all the ways in which things have mostly gone pretty good for you, perhaps, you might be less likely to think that there are cabals that are just, because the truth is nobody cares about you.
Merlin: I mean, see, it's worse than them being out to get you.
Merlin: It's that they...
Merlin: It's like Don Draper says, I don't think of you at all.
Right.
John: Well, and the trick to that, that actually nobody cares about you, is when I think about my mom –
John: At no point in her life did anyone ever tell her that things were fair.
Merlin: Oh, wow.
Merlin: Yes.
John: That's quite a different baseline.
John: Right?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: She has absolutely no expectation that things will be fair.
John: And if you say that's not fair to her, in a situation that she has control over, she will say, I'm doing my best to make this fair.
John: Because I – primarily because I don't want anyone to feel that favoritism is playing a role.
John: So in a situation with my sister and me in the Christmas presents we got, she recognized that favoritism, which she had experienced as a kid, she was on the receiving end of the wrong kind of favoritism.
John: She watched favoritism as a deficit to her.
John: So she's working to try and balance favoritism in things that she can.
John: But she does that – she's doing that because she recognizes the pain that favoritism causes on the small scale.
John: But in terms of like when she looks at life on a large scale, she feels like there is a decreasing ability –
John: From the small scale, which is like I'm going to cut this sandwich in half and I'm going to give half to you and half to you.
John: And I have the power to place that knife somewhere.
John: And where I put that knife, I can be careless or I can be careful.
John: And I'm going to try and be careful because I can control this.
John: But as you expand outward from that to fairness in a school, for instance, where it's like I've got 30 kids in my class and I want to be fair, but it's not like I can put a knife in the middle of a sandwich.
John: I have to apportion out my time, my intellectual and emotional resources among these 30 kids to try to make it as effective.
John: Equal and equitable as I can.
John: But how do you do that, really?
John: It's not it's not as easy as cutting a sandwich.
Merlin: Because what everybody needs is different.
John: Everybody needs is different.
John: And you're one person and you have only X amount of training and you have only X number of of texts.
John: And you can only know a kid so much.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And but like, I mean, I feel like I've cited this on so many shows, I won't oversight it here.
Merlin: But I've seen a fair number of let's just say pithy sayings and graphics to explain some of the difference between, you know, um,
Merlin: equality and justice and all of those things.
Merlin: And it's often things like it involves a kid standing on a box to see over a fence or something like that.
Merlin: But you have to put it in terms that are that clear and relatively simple to say that, well, in the words of one of my kid's teachers, you know, fairness isn't everybody getting the same thing.
Merlin: It's people, everybody getting what they need to succeed, which is a damn sight more tricky than just saying everybody gets exactly one orange slice, regardless of how much food you've had in the last 24 hours.
Merlin: It's just that, I mean, if we want to move somewhere closer to a just society, the second part of that will be implementing that sort of fairness.
Merlin: But the first part of that is trying to convince these hogs and chuds that they are not losing out by other people having an opportunity to.
Merlin: And if they are losing out because other people are getting opportunities, they never deserve that opportunity in the first place, in my opinion.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But that's something it's again, go back straight back to these cognitive biases, go back to loss aversion, just the idea that people, you know, people are much more worked up about losing a dollar than gaining a dollar.
Merlin: And we'll do these kind of odd things to try and keep themselves safe and protected.
Merlin: And, you know, also John heritage, you got to really think about our heritage in history.
John: The thing about fairness, though, is that fairness is completely subjective and it's very easy to to be wherever you are and feel like you have been treated unfairly and to project that backwards on systems.
John: Right.
John: Because if you trace it from like if you trace it from a school to then, you know, it's a teacher trying to to split their attention among 30 kids and then you realize there's there's 30 classes in this school.
John: And then you realize that this school is one of 30 schools in a school district.
John: And that school district is one of 30 school districts in the state.
John: That's a lot of levels.
John: And at every level, even if everybody is trying to be fair and trying to do a good job and is a good person and an honest person.
John: trying to do the best they can with what they have, if you take any product of that school district as an adult and sit them down in a chair and go, was it fair?
John: It's extremely, it's so much easier for that person to say, no, I wasn't treated fairly.
John: And to build, in a lot of ways, a little castle in their heart about how they weren't treated fairly.
John: Especially if they are either raised or
John: or living in a culture as an adult where the currency is often, like, calculated in terms of fairness rather than in terms of... And there are innumerable cases where you can say, well, this school got way more resources than that school.
John: I mean, I'm not saying that there's no fairness, or there's no lack of fairness.
John: But studying my mom, who was raised with very little...
John: expectation that any aspect of society was going to be fair to her.
John: And so when she got a good shake, when she got an even deal in places –
John: It was never her expectation and she didn't really celebrate it either.
John: It often was a thing that she had to accomplish for herself or it ended up being fair because she fought.
Merlin: Part of this is her location.
Merlin: Part of it's being somewhat impoverished.
Merlin: Certainly part of it's being a woman.
John: And a lot of it is the time, right?
Merlin: I don't think... Like rural Ohio in the 40s or whatever.
John: Right.
John: But even in New York City in the 40s, I don't think anybody thought about fairness.
John: I don't think fairness was a concept that got into our heads as a... Well, fairness as an extension of justice or even a component of justice.
John: Like there's justice.
John: And fairness is...
John: I don't think what people were talking about until very recently.
John: I think justice is so different from fairness that maybe it's unrelated.
John: And we have equated them because it's easy to do.
John: And I think it's a lazy aspect of our current world.
John: It's a bad analogy to say that
John: that justice, which is, um, you know, which is like, uh, a concept that is carved out of granite and fairness, which is made out of balloons.
John: And to say that they are, that even that fairness is a thing that is just justice light or justice for dummies.
John: It's really not, you know,
John: And justice is something – I mean, justice is something that you have a sword in one hand and a scale in the other.
John: And fairness is a piece of cake on a paper plate.
John: So –
John: so watching you know watching my mom and realizing that i live in a i live in a world where the language is very different from hers and very different from my dad's and very different from any of the people that i read about who lived before me and let alone people younger than me who have who are way way further out on the on the fairness uh wing because it's been because it's it's a it's a direction we've taken you know it's a
John: It's a conceptual direction we've taken in a lot of ways because justice is so hard to achieve.
John: Justice is often bloody.
John: And it's hard to stay focused.
John: It's hard to not sag your shoulders and say, well, in order to get to justice, let's back-engineer it from...
John: And let's say, well, everybody got a, everybody got a can of Fanta with their lunch.
John: So that's fair.
John: And so that works toward justice.
John: It's like, it doesn't really, it's a, you know, the can of Fanta, um,
John: like an equal portion of ketchup on everybody's tray isn't like... I really want you to be in charge of something.
Merlin: Just because I just want to know how it would turn out.
Merlin: I'm not saying this in a provocative way.
Merlin: I would just like to watch you implement something because you have such a mind for this.
Merlin: I would like you to run the simulation for a while.
Yeah.
Merlin: You think you'd like that maybe for a weekend?
John: I don't know.
John: I had a friend who runs a hotel text me the other day and she was like, do you think that you would be good at managing people?
John: Have you ever managed people?
Merlin: Yikes.
John: And I was like, it was so crazy because I thought about it because my, of course, initial reaction was like, well, sure.
John: And then I thought about it.
John: I was like, when was the last time you managed, buddy?
John: Not like being the leader of a band.
Merlin: That's really more of a shepherd there.
Merlin: You're more of the titular goat.
John: Yeah, I was juggling rats.
John: I think there's a big difference.
Merlin: Also, I think there's a huge difference when people think of management and boss and all that kind of thing.
Merlin: I think people from the outside think of pushing people around.
Merlin: But there's a big difference to me between managing people and managing resources, for example.
Merlin: There are people who may not have the greatest people skills, but can be great resource managers.
Merlin: They might be really good at just making sure everybody is scheduling the conference room correctly.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It's just that what people are so attracted to, like, how soon do I get to push people around phase of my career?
Yeah.
John: And I realized I don't I have never managed people.
John: I've never had a job where I was the man.
John: I was the assistant manager of the off ramp grunge bar.
John: Yeah.
John: But it was an assistant managerial position that was 100 percent toothless.
John: I was, you know, the owner was running a complete cult of personality and made me the assistant manager manager.
John: To just keep to put a layer of insulation between him and the staff.
John: But when the staff came to me, all I could do was go to the owner and ask.
John: And when the owner said something, all I could do is come tell the staff what to do.
John: I mean, I had no.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: A long time ago, I heard somebody say something along the lines of power is not the ability to say no.
Merlin: It's the ability to say yes.
Merlin: And it sounds like you're in that position there where you're mostly there to say no to people.
John: Well, and, you know, he said – the owner one day said like, oh, everybody's been doing such a good job.
John: You know, go out and give everybody like a shift drink, whatever they want.
John: And I was like, hey, everybody, you know, come on.
John: I'm going to give everybody a shift drink.
John: And it was kind of my big moment as the assistant manager.
John: I was going to get everybody a drink.
John: And one of the –
John: One of the staff, I don't even remember what her job was, and she was actually the owner's pet.
John: She was terrible at her job, but for some reason he had what always felt like a very strange relationship with her.
John: Maybe it was drug relationship with her or some kind of blackmail situation.
John: But she was like, give me some shambord.
John: I want a glass of Chambord.
John: And I was like, sure.
John: I mean, I was 22.
John: I didn't know what anything was.
John: I didn't know what anything was.
John: And I ordered a glass of Chambord.
John: And then Lee Ray heard about it.
John: And he was like, that's expensive stuff.
John: And I was like, you said give everybody a shift drink.
John: Like, how much does it cost?
John: $5 at the time.
John: And he was like, you just, you know, what I meant was a well drink.
John: That was the extent of my managerial experience.
John: And I realized I've never been a manager, and I don't have any real idea what kind of a manager I would be, and I suspect maybe not a good one.
Merlin: Oh, absolutely.
John: I suspect I would be really bad at it, right?
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: Where it's just like, I mean, can you imagine managing 20 people?
Merlin: What a nightmare.
Merlin: I've only ever formally, that wasn't even my employee.
Merlin: There was the guy who sold banner ads for our dot com.
Merlin: And my boss was like, can you deal with this guy?
Merlin: And I was like, yeah, sure, whatever.
Merlin: But like, you know, I had stuff to do and I had no interest in doing this.
Merlin: And it was like a week before my boss was like, did you know he's like running his like an eBay business out of here?
Merlin: I was like, I did not.
Merlin: I don't like talking to him.
Merlin: He's from Castro Valley, and he's very strange.
Merlin: And not the Castro neighborhood, but out in the East Bay.
Merlin: He's a very odd man.
Merlin: And it turned out, yeah, he was really bad.
Merlin: He was terrible at his job.
Merlin: But it was a job that would be kind of difficult to be good at, because this is the caveman age of selling advertising on the internet.
Merlin: But, you know, it's kind of the punch the monkey era.
Merlin: But my boss was like, yeah, you're not going to do that anymore.
Merlin: I'm like, oh, I think that's probably a very good idea.
Merlin: I do not have the comportment.
Merlin: I don't have the brain for doing this.
Merlin: And other people do, which is interesting.
Merlin: Because as with salespeople, I think there are some people who are born to do sales.
Merlin: And they could sell anything.
Merlin: And I think there are people, you know, I can't prove this in every instance.
Merlin: I think there are people who are born to manage and could manage anybody.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Irrespective of the field, the domain.
Merlin: If you understand what motivates people, you can be a good manager.
Merlin: You can be, but lacking that.
Merlin: I'm a terrible judge of character and don't like human beings.
Merlin: I'm probably the wrong person to be looming over the banner ad guy.
John: And I'm afraid that I would be a micromanager.
John: That I would be telling people what to do, but then...
John: Like my mom was with me, you know, coming in and saying like, oh, that was good.
John: But here you just needed to stop on your toys.
John: Yeah.
John: Let me just stop on your toys for a second.