Ep. 213: "Desk Bobbies"
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Hello?
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
I get the sense every Monday, a little bit after 10, no big deal, when I ask you that question, you really think about it for a minute.
I say, how's it going?
And I really feel like you're not responding by rote.
You're turning it over.
Maybe you're not awake yet, but it seems like something you're turning over in your mind.
Yeah, you know, I think that I try to answer every platitudinal inquiry from everybody authentically.
I mean, I'm not somebody that sits in the supermarket, or in your case, the line at Bartels.
I don't know what that is.
Is that a hot dog place?
Walgreens, Walgreens.
No, yeah, Walgreens.
Walgreens, yeah.
You're not somebody that... I'm not somebody, rather, who will sit there in response to the guy saying,
How you doing today?
Go, oh, my sciatica.
Oy vey.
Oy vey is mere.
But the other night I was at the grocery store at 11.59 that closes at 12.
I was having a bad day.
And the guy that was working there has been working there for a long time.
He's always working there the late shift.
He's not like one of the old guys.
He's in his late 30s.
And he carries himself with a very sort of ice cube level of intensity.
I've tried to banter with him many times.
He's not interested in bantering with me.
When I'm in a good mood, he doesn't care.
When I just play it cool, he doesn't care.
He's not registering me.
And whether it's, you know, I'm used to flirting with everybody.
And he surely has noticed me because I'm flirting with him like crazy.
He just isn't going to give me any.
When you work somewhere, you know, you are aware of more people than you might realize.
You know, like you probably at the newsstand, you could probably sit down and if you really put your mind to it at that time, have made a list of like 30 characters that you know just a tiny bit about.
Oh, more than that.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
Just like, yeah, a lot.
But his vibe is just not having it.
He's a cool character.
That's right.
And so it's just the two of us in the store.
It's 1159.
The store is closing.
I've tried to make chit chat with him over the years.
I surrendered a long time ago and not not unfriendly to him, but just like I'm not chit chatting.
Right.
You know, that's not what you want.
But he says, how's it going tonight?
And I was having a really bad day.
And I said, you know, today has been really bad.
And I have no idea why I did it.
He asked me a question.
You were vulnerable.
And you would want this story to end with us, like with him stopping what he was doing and going, wow, man, tell me about it.
Like a bartender.
But that's not how the story ends.
He continued to ring up my pity food, which was like a piece of cake, a bowl of a box of ice cream, and a...
DiGiorno pizza.
Oh, no.
Here's your pity food.
And then he was like, you know, have a nice night or whatever, like zero acknowledgement.
And I was like, yeah, right on.
I'm glad that we're both still in character.
Have a good night.
Yeah.
Whatever.
But yeah, did you read that article, Merlin, recently about the...
Division of the Metropolitan Police in Britain that is now using super recognizers?
Mm-mm.
It's like a super taster, but for faces?
Yes.
I just literally guessed that.
That's very good.
Everybody's bitter.
Everyone is bitter except these people.
Okay, so seriously, what is this?
This is a human, as they say.
Yeah, we've had, we're all aware of face blindness being a real problem for people that have face blindness.
They can't recognize, I mean, pure face blindness, you can't even recognize yourself in the mirror.
Yeah, this is why reading those Oliver Sacks books is such a trip.
And actually, I do have a topic that I want to bring up that's related to this.
There are certain kinds of things where just even knowing that they exist, no matter how inoculated you feel or how healthy you think you probably are, you cannot help but start doing the third act of Sixth Sense, like running through your head.
Like, are there times when I had this and didn't know it?
You know what I'm saying?
Well, this article is really fascinating.
There's a...
It's fascinating in part because it's so obvious.
It's one of these moments where it's like, gah!
But it didn't come from a university.
It wasn't a scientist-initiated program.
It was just some detective at the...
At the, you know, some Bobby, I guess.
I don't know what a Bobby is, frankly.
I think to be a Bobby, you have to have a hat and twirl a nightstick.
Turns out that's because the London Metropolitan Police Force was started by a man named Robert.
Really?
Turns out.
So a guy there is like, look, we've got more CCTV cameras than any other place in the world by a factor of 10.
But all this information is not being processed because we don't have the capacity to process it.
We keep buying all these new computer programs, but computers can't really wade through the millions of faces we record every day.
This system is like a useless system.
But he noticed that there were certain detectives...
that would just be sort of out doing their job and somebody would walk past and they'd be like, that guy, there's a warrant out for his arrest from 17 years ago for purse snatching.
It's a little bit Dustin Hoffman, right?
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
I'm avoiding saying it, but it's somebody who has not just an uncanny ability to see a face and associate it, but then to have that data be able to pull up quickly and go like, I know why I know that person.
I see people on the street and I'm like, I think that person was my waitress five years ago, but I couldn't tell you exactly.
Well, and so these are these people that have this gift, right?
And so he made up a test for them, or there's some kind of test, face recognition test.
And there are all these people working at the police department already who are like, oh yeah, I work in the evidence room, or I'm the lady that processes all the data reams.
And he just gave this test around, and there are certain people that
that recognize all the bit characters in movies.
And they're like, oh, that guy who's playing the farmer in the background was the guy that was playing the 15th soldier from the left in that war movie.
They just have this photo recognition of faces.
And he compiled them into a little gang.
And said, here, now start combing through all this CCTV footage that's kind of been pre-combed, you know, like using algorithms.
We've narrowed it down to just 10,000 pictures or something.
And this little team is like, that's the guy, that's the guy, that's the guy just solving crimes.
Just what I want to do, Merlin, all I want to do is solve crimes.
All any of us want to do is solve crimes.
It's always there.
These people are solving crimes.
It was something that they already know how to do.
They have a superpower, basically.
It's a superpower.
Yeah.
And so then this article goes on to say, statistically, it's...
inevitable that there are police officers out there who have face blindness who are I mean a big part of your job is like that's the guy I saw him do it or you know like I recognize the perp from across the store and there are cops out there who are like yeah I'm a policeman I can't tell
two completely different looking people apart.
And they're making IDs and they're testifying in court.
Right, notoriously unreliable.
Right, and that's true.
But notoriously unreliable lineups and that type of thing are unreliable amongst the hoi polloi.
But these people, there are people, and when you start to think about it,
There's statistically a large number of people that have this talent in varying degrees.
And even among the people that have it, there are some who are recognized as amazing magicians.
That's amazing.
So the article starts to say, why wouldn't you give this test to every police officer
And people that have face blindness should not be beat cops.
It should be exclusionary.
They should maybe be desk bobbies.
A desk bobby, right.
Or like some kind of other bobby.
Like an evidence room bobby or like a morgue bobby.
We need all different kinds of Bobbies.
Sure.
If you want to be a Bobby, be a morgue Bobby.
And even in a morgue, you're going to have to recognize some faces.
You don't want to put the one guy in the one box and the other gal in the other box.
Mm-mm.
So, but it, you know, you sit there and you're like, okay, there's one police station in the world that's doing this now.
And even that feels like somebody higher up could eliminate it in an afternoon just because they don't like the guy's face.
Ha!
Nice.
But it's just started this cascading wave of, in my head, of what...
of what is plainly obvious, which is that people have aptitudes.
That's exactly what I was thinking, yeah.
And we're always testing, you know, testing kids, testing, testing, testing, testing for things.
You know, we're testing.
I mean, when I first moved to Seattle, I tried to get a job as a doorman in a fancy building.
And I was given like a 40-page test twice.
that was one of those tests that was like, if I saw a fellow employee steal a paperclip, I would, A, call the police.
Is it like a Myers-Briggs kind of thing or an MMPI?
No, it's trying to determine if I am honest.
Oh, right.
Like one of these things where it's like, if I saw a fellow employee steal a paperclip, I would call the police, call the FBI, tackle him to the floor,
Or curl up in a ball and cry.
And it's like none of the above.
Well, you have to pick one.
Like these tests that are just crazy.
You see a tortoise on its back baking in the sun.
I totally agree.
Not least because I think there are superpowers that probably exist that aren't the kind of things you would see in DC and Marvel.
But you also think about, I don't want to be too reductive here, but think about
giving kids tests in school which is so Rife with problems and it's just but I mean so the basic idea is like okay well I'm gonna give you a test of what we studied this week in Arithmetic and you know all these things we told you that there's going to be a test and we were going to give you this test the thing is though like the the most important thing about taking a test is knowing how to take a test and
which we don't teach people really until they take an elective, you know, SAT prep.
They don't, you know, where you learn that there's a lot of gaming to it in some ways.
For that kind of test, yeah, it's a, there's a, for standardized test, let's call it.
I'm trying to say is, first of all, I think we have to always admit that in the same way that managers tend to hire people that they would like to manage, you're not going to hire somebody who you can't manage.
The way that a company changes and grows and, as John Syracuse says, evolves is going to be heavily circumscribed by the interests and
hang-ups of the people who are making hiring decisions so it's i mean it's a little bit of a of a rabbit hole here but you know that's one reason companies don't change as quickly as people would like is because they're not changing the kind of people that they hire so it's it's kind of crazy to think that it would change but it's also a matter of you know and i i would never want to say anything disparaging about teachers or you know administrators but they've got a job to do their job is to run the school
You know, it's yeah, sure.
Secondarily, you want the kids to be educated.
But there is this Professor X part of my brain that thinks like, you know, there's think about all of the things involving mental, organic, chemical things that we've learned that make us vastly rethink the way we treated what you might call mental illness or madness over the past millennium.
Right.
It's not necessarily it's not bad humors.
It's not that you have a troll living in your head, you know, and kids that were in the Brown reading group when I was in third grade, we now understand they might have a spectrum disorder or they might have a chemical imbalance or there could be all kinds of things that help explain that.
But until we have a way to name and measure it like it isn't real.
And so in this, this is what fascinates me about what you're saying is like how many things are out there we just haven't figured out might exist because we don't know what to call it or how to measure it.
Well, and I think it, I think what it's inspiring me to think about is like we spend a lot of time measuring and there are a lot of things we're afraid to measure, right?
This is, this is one of the big, big problems of liberalism or about the problem of just equality, the idea of equality.
It's as soon as you start measuring people, you get into this posture of like, let's say there's somebody wants to be a Bobby and they take an exam and they have face blindness.
Now, you can make a strong case that face blindness actually precludes them from being able to properly do the job of policing, street policing.
But you can imagine the lawsuit also that, you know, I want to be a police officer.
Oh, it's like a disability.
Yeah, I'm being discriminated against because I have face blindness.
All right.
And then the other side is like, well, no, I mean, we have a job for you here in the Bobby Morgue.
And then you realize, well, now there's 800 people working in the Bobby Morgue because they all wanted to be police officers and they all have face blindness.
Right.
And I've always said about college professors, like the people that right now we use...
the PhD system to determine who our professors are.
But sort of like running for city council, the ability to get a PhD and the ability to be a good interesting instructor on a topic are in some ways mutually exclusive.
Like running for city council and being a city council person are totally different jobs.
And so our colleges are built around the idea that PhDs are the teachers, but PhDs are not interesting.
But PhDs then, people who have had PhDs for years also become the people who make the rules and what to measure.
And so the best teachers are storytellers.
And people that get up and have a mental map of the topic and are able to make it interesting and connect it to other things and are scintillating.
And that requires a kind of mind that is antithetical almost to doing a deep dive on, you know, on Zelda Fitzgerald's diaries and
and writing a 900-page exegesis on two months of Zelda Fitzgerald's diaries.
It's like, that's not an interesting storyteller.
If you can do that successfully, congratulations, here's a chest full of ribbons.
You should be buried in the stacks for the rest of your career doing that, which you would clearly love.
You shouldn't be, like, put in front of a group of 18-year-olds who are tossing Frisbees in the back of your class and given the impossible goal of making it interesting to them.
You should be a library Bobby.
You should be a library Bobby.
Yeah.
So, for instance, you know, we talk about that all the time, this feeling of being underused or of trying to find your duck.
And in so many ways, it's, like, for me, it's been obvious for a long time.
I have a mental geography.
you know, I can, and it's just, it's exactly like face recognition.
Um, there's, I mean, if you give me a piece of information, I can put it into an architecture that I've built in my mind of history and geography.
And I, and I, and I find the little, you know, and it's like the, it's like the Indiana Jones warehouse, um,
and I wheel the little cart of this new piece of information down a long hallway, and I turn left, and I know where it goes.
It's cataloged in my mind.
And when I interact with other people that don't have it, which is most people, I'm always confused.
Like, oh, oh, I see.
Not only do you not know...
That where we stand and where you live there are 15 different roads you could take back to your house because you only ever take I just don't think that way you don't see it You don't see your house and where we are now in in a map It's not that different from having perfect pitch where even if you describe it to somebody They still can't really know what it's like right to know that like every almost every sound that they hear Fall somewhere on like a map of tones for them and nobody else would even be aware that that exists let alone be able to do it
Yeah, and there are plenty of people who see that note and can pull it out and tell you where it fits into chords and you know, it's like they have it in their head.
let alone the architecture of how does the French Revolution play into, how did the French Revolution affect World War I, right?
That's a similar kind of geography.
Now, what my face blindnesses are, I can think of probably a few, but again, you don't know what your face blindnesses are.
That's the whole point.
Yeah, I don't know where the big canker sore in my smooth skin is.
but there's no, no one has ever found a place.
I mean, you and I have found this place.
We carved out a place where we can use our, um, our face recognition, our, our, our abilities here, you know, to, uh, but, but it's sort of even, even here incomplete because we're, we've never really been tested for what we're,
what it is and you think all the jobs in the world that need a you or a me or anyone listening like all the all the places where it's like oh my god you can you totally you it's a party trick for you to name all the all the bit actors and all the other movies you've seen them in that's like a party gag and then you go back to your job
of uh working in a factory making milkshake mix when you're just pushing a rock up a hill because that's your racket now and there's never been a way to know how to fit that stuff in and civilization is like our whole culture is missing uh we're all losing out on being able to use your ability
which is native to you, and you're missing out on the experience of going to work every day and saying, solving crimes, solving crimes.
But if the person who's in a position, person or person's in a position to decide whether to test for that is somebody who suffers from face blindness,
Not to be nefarious, but they have very few motivations to go out, unless they're pretty big-hearted and civil, to go out and find the people who do have it.
Here's what's amazing about this story.
The cop that put this team of Bobbies together does not have... He's not a super recognizer.
He's not a super recognizer.
He just was a cop trying to solve crimes.
And he's like, I keep...
having really good luck going over to this uh this small group of people that sit over here in the in the morgue and asking them if they've ever seen this guy before and he had just enough authority that he could say can you know can these people be tasked to me for this this period of time let me try this out and i don't think he's a i think he's not very popular with the brass because he does he plays by his own rules sure like he's over there just like
He's a little bit rogue.
He slaps his gun down on the desk.
Well, he's a bobby, so he slaps his napkin down on the desk.
His Johnny Club.
And he says, God damn it, mate!
You have British blindness.
I got so much to say about this.
Listen to the pen!
But yeah, I mean, right?
It reverberates throughout everything.
Well, and just a quickie here is that, you know, I'm very interested in these ideas of what we test, what we measure, what we can see.
And, you know, we go through these phases where we watch a lot of Harry Potter.
And I was just thinking yesterday we were watching the...
And I was thinking how interesting is, like, how many layers of knowability and visibility there are in Harry Potter.
Like, for example, muggles can't see Hogwarts.
So if a muggle were to go to Scotland and found where Hogwarts was, it would look like destructed land because magic.
But the point is that if you if he walked across Hogwarts, would he bump into buildings?
I don't think so.
I think it's disguised in such a way that basically to anybody who's not in the wizarding community, it just, for the sake of argument, let's just understand that they can't see Hogwarts.
But then let's say you are a wizard or a witch and you come to Hogwarts.
Well, then you have all, there's still further layers of these things where, for example, there's a certain kind of, in this particular film, there's a certain kind of, you know, this mythic beast, this like ghost horse thing.
Ghost horse.
kind of like was winged it's really cool but like Harry sees this thing and he's like does anybody else see this and the only other person who sees it is Luna Lovegood and Luna says well the only people who can see that are people who've seen death so there's but there's all these layers and layers and layers and I know that that's a fantasy novel for kids but I think there's all kinds of stuff like that going on where just because you can see this one thing doesn't mean you can see these other things and sometimes the only way we derive any understanding is by accident so what did they tell us
When we were in high school, they said, okay, if you want to go to college, you got to take the SAT or the ACT.
And here's the thing about the SAT.
The SAT, like here's what we know about the SAT is that people who do well on the SAT, there's a high correlation between people doing well on the SAT and doing well in college.
Which, if you really think about it, is super interesting, I think.
Because it's not saying that it's because you're smart at stuff.
It's because you tested well on that one kind of test.
Now, who knows?
There could be a dozen other things that indicate...
to a 70, 80th percentile, how well you will or won't do in college.
But that's the blunt instrument we've got.
And so this hugely important decision about whether we're going to allow you into our college is based heavily on how well you did on this test.
And it's not exactly how well you did on the test that matters.
It's that that correlation is what matters.
So there's this part of me that wonders, as we blunder ignorantly through life, not knowing what causes what, I wonder if we're eventually going to get to this minority report later.
like point where we can retroactively go back and look at big data to go like well here's big patterns like people who did well in politics and were honest tended to show these patterns at different points in life so and that's that's what the interesting thing about the SAT and the college
is that all makes sense up to a point, right?
Here we have a college, we want people to come here who are gonna do well on it, and this test measures what we, you know, this test tends to measure skills that you will need to do well in college.
I'm sorry, let me drop the other shoe just to state the obvious.
The thing that we can't know, because you can't prove a negative, is we can't know the number of people who never even took the SAT, let alone didn't do well on it.
We have no way to know those could be the greatest student we've ever gotten, but the model we have doesn't fit that kind of scattershot approach.
There's no test out there.
There's no means out there for going, unless you're going to put a lot of wetware on it.
There's no way to really know, like, who's this kid in the inner city that might be the greatest student we've ever got?
Well, it depends on what we call a great student.
Who's deciding who's allowed in here?
And you know what?
We lose money as an institution if we get people in here who drop out.
Like, that is a bad pattern.
It looks bad on the books.
And so we have to stick with this conservative approach.
That's all I wanted to say.
It's a very, very blunt instrument.
I guess the worser thing about it is that
The extension of that thinking is that if you do well in college, you will be valuable to society.
Because there's a higher correlation for that.
But that is the thing that's unmeasurable.
Right.
If you're talking about the University of Pennsylvania and you're talking about here's what the University of Pennsylvania teaches, here's how it's socially structured, here's where it's located, here are the parameters of the University of Pennsylvania and what it's capable of.
And then you say the SAT perfectly measures who is going to do well at the University of Pennsylvania.
I mean, I...
And it says, oh, it excludes all these people that are from different cultural backgrounds.
It excludes all these people that have face recognition skills but aren't good at math or whatever.
Maybe they do very well at the Wharton School of Business without taking into account that their father will be loaning them a million dollars in the near future that allows them to create their empire, just as a random example.
As a random example.
It's hard to account for those things.
But...
But the massive fallacy is to presume that colleges then became the exclusive path to having a supervisory role in our culture.
You always were able, supposedly, to work your way up from the mail room.
We put college in this middle place where its job was to filter out people who weren't going to be supervisors, who didn't have the metal or the cognitive skill to be a leader.
It's like officer candidate school.
And we've never thought about that again, right?
I mean colleges do not actually do a very good job of finding leaders and colleges promote people.
I mean being good in college does not make you a leader.
And statistically now, all we have is, well, did people who go to college, did they become leaders?
Well, yeah, because they're rich and because it's self-reinforcing and all the insanity around the idea that we would impose a system and then never really...
try to validate its findings by any means other than by using its own language, you know?
And I've felt this my whole life, right?
Some of the smartest people I knew when I was 15, the kids that were really, really burning hot at 15 years old who were rebelling against their parents already, who were in trouble with the school, and they were kids, right?
So they were ding-a-lings.
They thought that
that they were going to be part of a revolution of some kind or, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
But like the Kurt Cobains, let's call them just the, the, the outsiders at 15 years old, some of the 15 year old outsiders were, uh,
Just fucking smartish, the smartest kids.
And the quote unquote smart kids at school really looked down their noses at them and were threatened by them.
Everybody was threatened by them.
But the whole system, all the parents, all the teachers, all the school, everything were really targeting those kids.
to like get them out of here basically, you know, not even trying to reform them.
I'm not talking about the, you know, the schools do a pretty good job of like, oh, this kid is not excelling and we're going to put him in a special class and we're going to try and get him through this process.
You know, it's important to the schools to like help people that are struggling to get them through.
But that small group of people, the small group of teenagers who are like,
from a very early age, 13 years old, already maybe struggling with drugs,
already insecure home life very very insecure home life who are coming to school full of of anxiety and aggression who are just like just stupid stuff like if your parents fight a lot maybe you don't sleep very well right or if your parents fight a lot maybe that's how you think problems get solved right right uh and but they're like they're hurting but they're also very smart and sensitive like i i just got a facebook message from a friend of mine that he was the first person i ever knew that had a tattoo
When he was 16 years old, he had a tattoo of a smiling skull smoking a joint.
There's a lot of problems physiologically with that.
Yeah.
I can think of at least three.
Wait a minute.
They're all smiling.
And the skull is tattooed on the inside of his left arm.
And this was back when the only people that had tattoos were in the Navy.
Yeah.
And I was like, what the, what did you do to yourself?
And he's like, what do you mean?
I've got to fucking, this tattoo is like, this is me, man.
And he was, that was back in the days when a punk rocker could get a tattoo of a skull smoking a joint.
And there wasn't any confusion about whether or not he was a hippie.
You know what I mean?
Like, no, he's not a hippie.
He got a freaking tattoo.
Hippies didn't start getting tattoos till later.
And he was like such a he was so he lived in a trailer park.
His parents were on drugs.
He was so sensitive and such a delightful, delicate person.
And I watched life just hammer him.
And after high school, life continued to hammer him.
And I got a message from him the other day, still alive.
A lot of our mutual friends that were closer to him than me are all dead.
It was like a, it was, they just died from,
from drugs and from being um too sensitive frankly he didn't somehow he survived and i heard from him i hadn't heard from him in years and every time i every time i interacted with him after high school i always had this same feeling he was one of the smartest ones of all of us and he was shit on constantly he took it with good grace you know he was just like
He handled it pretty well considering.
And he made a life for himself.
But he was brutalized.
And so I go on and I'm like talking to him on Facebook and I look at his profile and he's an old man now.
He's like a little old man.
And I think...
You know, the aptitudes that he had, the artistic ability and the, you know, the sensitivity, right?
He was meant for something.
He was meant to do something.
If we had an ability to test for... If we truly had an ability to test for aptitude, we would have...
culturally right at 15 years old, pulled this kid out of school and said, Oh my God, hello.
Like here is your, here, let's just, let's, we don't need this anymore.
You know, like high school isn't where, where you need to be.
You need to be over here and we're going to put you in this special place and you're going to do these special things.
And, you know, obviously, right, we all kind of feel like we wish something like that had happened to us, or at least I have spent a lot of my life wishing that somebody had grabbed me by the hand.
But it was also like in my, I remember like senior year, remember my Americanism versus communism class?
I mean, I remember hearing for years that this is what happens in the Soviet Union.
Like what the age of whatever, whatever arbitrary number they made up, but the age of 10, they give you a test.
And if you don't do well in that, then you become a machinist and there's a track.
And once you're on that track, you can never go back.
It's not like America where anybody can be the president.
Right.
And that's the thing we always say about Japan, right?
If you don't, if you don't pass the, the preschool admission test, then you're on your way to the, you know, you're going to be a pearl diver.
Right.
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Instead of a... You know, and I don't mean to say that the pearl diving jobs aren't hard to get.
No.
But yeah, that's what I was saying before, right?
Like, the American premise is that you should be able to be a police officer even if you have face blindness.
The American premise is that you should be able to muscle your way in or use your ingenuity or your guile to have any job you want.
And there shouldn't be any limitations.
And it's a very slippery slope, I think, in a lot of our minds to going from something very logical like
Police detectives should be super recognizers to all of a sudden feeling very uncomfortable about the fact that there's predestination.
Yeah.
And we're filtering people too hard and all of a sudden, you know, you got to get through all these filters and then we're Gattaca.
But it's also, just to problematize it a little bit, the thing is when you talk about somebody who's a super recognizer, well, what are they super recognizing at?
And it just depends on what level, the level at which you want to try to solve the problem that we call, what, civility, crime, whatever you want to call it.
The trouble is, by the time you get down to the level of super recognizing, well, have we vetted all the people whose faces are being recognized?
I guess we're assuming, in this case, that those are all baddies, right, that have to go down.
I guess it just interests me to think about, like, in that case, that's a very interesting technical hack that really sounds like it would work.
But it does assume that the policing is being done well, fairly and justly, and that those are baddies that need to be cut so they don't blow up the Ferris wheel or whatever.
Yeah.
I mean, I think you're talking about the job of super recognizer is not those aren't the prosecutors, right?
They're just the tool.
It is a lot like Minority Report in some ways.
I haven't seen that.
Is that the one where the cars all go up and down the walls like roaches?
That might be Fifth Element.
But Minority Report, the notion is that there are these... Oh, sure, they can see a little bit into the future.
There's these mythological characters, these three sisters who lay in this pool of water, something-something magic and science.
But basically, they are often able to detect...
when a crime is about to happen which you know to begin with is a pretty great idea for a sci-fi story but then there's a lot of interest in the the interesting part to me is in the implementation and how it's vetted yeah and how the little wooden ball rolls out and like there's this entire like chain of custody to it and it's all done part of what makes the i've never read the the book or the story but um
But it's it is very interesting.
And then then, of course, you know, there's there has to be a story which is like, you know, how can we really trust the system?
Do we know this?
But I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, yeah, I mean, it's I think that like all like all solutions, technological solutions, and this does feel like a thought technology.
And so it is a technological solution and it will it would invent invariably.
develop other problems, right?
But the problem that this would be trying to solve is the problem of false recognition and the problem, I think the main selling point of it is that it would be addressing this perception that we have that we're all being surveilled all the time
But there are cameras everywhere.
But if you get held up in front of a convenience store and there are five cameras pointing at you and you say, the guy held me up right here and there's all this footage of it,
Nine times out of 10, I think the cops are like, well, you know, it's a minor crime and we don't have the resources to devote to, uh, you know, looking at every CCTV.
I mean, it was, it was like when I got robbed last year and they found the, you know, the neighboring police department found my stuff the next morning.
But they didn't have that's a terrific example.
That's a great example.
They didn't have the even the small the small ability to to cross reference.
Well, in this zip code, a guy lost a tennis racket.
In that zip code, we found a tennis racket.
What should we do?
Well, let's sell that tennis racket at an auction, and we'll apologize profusely to the other guy.
It's just like, come on!
So yeah, it's trying to solve certain problems in policing with this new super...
These super cops, super Bobbies.
But, yeah, it doesn't solve the problem of, like, well, why did that kid take the wallet?
But you wonder, I mean, and I think this is a little bit Star Trek-y now, but, like,
One of my big complaints about Next Generation, and boy, you should see the file of complaints about Next Generation I have.
I'm intrigued.
I've just started watching that program.
But one of my complaints is that... The lighting?
Lighting's not very good.
No, it's not the lighting.
It is that Riker is very annoying to me.
Oh, I kind of like Riker.
Well, it's because Riker sort of resembles me.
Oh, sure.
And I don't like it.
Yeah, I get that.
It's uncanny valley.
People are like, oh, Riker.
And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
That is not that Riker.
No, I am Riker.
That's not Riker.
But no, my problem is that the idea, the premise of Commander Troy is never really fully explored.
Is she the empath?
Yeah.
Here is Troy.
She's an officer.
And she's in this position because she has a superpower.
Right now, it's never suggested that Captain Picard or that Riker are in their command jobs because they have superpowers.
They did well in command school.
Will Wheaton's character is precocious, but I'm sure his father pulled some strings.
But here's Troy, and she has this, like, basically this psionic power.
She's a proto-mutant, right?
She's sort of almost X-Men-y.
But she's only used in that show to, like,
As like a glorified school psychologist, right?
She sits down with people.
She's like, how are you feeling?
Oh, she has like space wrap sessions.
Yeah.
Like, is everything good right now?
I can sense that you're feeling, you know, stressed or whatever.
How do you feel about that?
What?
No.
Like, it's absolutely right.
that there should be empaths and we know who they are in our own lives right who are who's your most empathetic friend you know the people that have that ability and a lot of the time and i would say the majority of the time they are not people who actually become psychologists they you know what i mean the people the people who are best at politics do not become politicians i mean they do but they're boy they really shouldn't be there
Well, right.
And the people that be in my experience, that's the psychology and political science is where all the nuts go.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, there's a lot of kooks that become psychologists because they want, you know, they want to be that person.
They have this tremendous desire to be the intermediary.
I think a lot of them start out.
I think a lot of the reason people sign up for classes freshman year is like, I know I'm a flaming mess.
I need to figure this out.
And then they end up becoming a practitioner.
And like running for office, I really do think that it is that the perceived job of a psychologist to a freshman, let's say, is, oh, I get to sit in a position of authority.
People come in and they tell me their problems and I solve them.
Now that's not what being a psychologist is.
Or a grocery checkout clerk.
Right, that's like, I mean, if you want that kind of authority over people, you should join the army.
Um, but those are, but the people that gravitate toward that job are like, make that initial error.
And the people who are sitting and saying like, oh, my friend is having a really bad day.
I can't, you know, I just can't go to work today.
I have to stay with my friend because she's really having a hard time.
And it's like, wow, you're taking a day off work because your friend is having a bad day.
That's amazing.
Like that is a, that is a talent or a, you know, that's a, a mutant ability.
Mm hmm.
But so next generation, I kept waiting for the storylines.
I kept waiting for the Troy storylines to be really, really crucial in the sense that she does have this special knowledge and special ability that's so much greater than just, and I'm not saying she had, I don't know who the writers of that show, how they intended her to be, but the whole premise that at that point in the future,
we would culturally recognize the importance of empaths and put them into an officer's job on a spacecraft, it would suggest that the culture at the time understood empaths to be more meaningful than the writing of the show suggested, right?
Yeah, yeah, I get it.
It's, you know, they put her in the job of like... It sounds like you're also saying that just narratively, the juiciness of somebody, like the plot juiciness of somebody with that kind of ability wasn't fully utilized in the story.
Is that right?
Yes.
Right.
Right.
I mean, I'm talking about just generally the next generation cosmology.
If you're going to make the leap to say, yes, we have sentient robots...
children and empaths all having made it through officer candidate school and on the bridge of a spacecraft.
let's really explore why they're there and not just have them be, you know, like every once in a while they get their own episode.
For instance, if Wil Wheaton is a teenager who is, what was his job?
Like a pilot or something of the spaceship?
Yeah, I don't know.
What was he precocious at?
Well, that's, I don't know.
He... He's really smart.
He knew where there was a dead body up the railroad tracks.
Oh, sure, sure, sure.
But, uh...
Was that him?
He's the one who figured that out?
No, I never saw that movie.
Oh, it's a good movie.
It seemed like it was for kids.
You should watch Stranger Things on Netflix.
I don't have Netflix.
I don't have TV.
I kept waiting on Next Generation as they're walking down the halls like and then they're walking down the halls.
They're kind of doing a West Wing except on a spacecraft.
I kept waiting for other crew members to be teenagers.
They call it a talking track.
A talking track.
But like how come there were no like Will is not only...
He's not only the smart kid, he's the only smart kid that ever got into the Air Force.
That seems pretty weird.
If you're living in a world where a really smart kid could get that far, why wouldn't there be like a smart kid that was a guy?
I don't know.
I see that you're not very interested in my Star Trek.
No, I'm a little interested.
I also know that mentioning anything about this is going to get you so much feedback about what you got wrong that I wish I could save you from yourself.
Oh, you're talking about it for Star Trek.
Oh, yeah, for the Star Trek.
Let's get away from Star Trek then, because, you know, our good friends, Adam Franica and Ben Harrison, have an award-winning podcast.
They were Phony nominated for that, I think.
Yeah, that's a Phony nominated podcast about Next Generation.
And it's such a, it's so embarrassing.
I'm so embarrassed for them that it's popular.
I can't speak for my friend Scott McNulty, but my friend Scott McNulty does a show called Random Trek, and I think you should really be on it.
I think people have mentioned this to you on the internet before, but I really wish you would be on Scott's show.
And so basically what happens is a big wheel spins, and a random episode of Star Trek is picked, and then someone talks about it.
And it could be somebody who's really into Star Trek, or it could be me in one case.
I was on an episode.
I don't know anything.
I don't know fuck all about Star Trek.
But I think you would be, if you'd be willing to spin the wheel, I think you would be a nice asset for that program.
Well, and you know about me that I am willing to spin the wheel.
God, if anything.
True, true.
Let's just spitball right now for a second.
Come up with one...
superpower that you think is present in sort of a one derivation of mankind, like an undetected superpower that you wish that we tested for?
That's a really good question.
And so like just to so like something where there's something that some people seem capable of that feels uncanny, maybe.
And useful.
And you just don't have a simple way of explaining why they are so much better at a seemingly invisible talent than other people.
Right?
Kind of?
I mean, one of those, this is not very funny, but one of those is good judgment.
Like some people seem to just, and without being like, you know, it's not religious, it's not philosophical, it's not ethical, but some people have a very...
Like the same way you talk about being able to see kind of the tapestry of history, like an Indiana Jones warehouse.
I think some people have just a really built-in sense of like what the best thing to do right now is.
Yes.
That's a boring one.
No, no, no.
That's why I look at people and I go, you know what?
God, you're so right.
That makes so much sense.
There's no risk associated with what you're saying and huge, potentially huge payoff to what you're saying.
Is this your whole life?
You just walk around knowing what to do?
Yeah.
How do you do that?
Yeah.
Well, and what's crazy is in our culture, we already have a job called judge, but the people that get appointed to be judges have to go through this whole elaborate PhD program.
And by the time you have been filtered all the way to sitting up on the bench and being a judge,
Who knows what skills you have?
Yeah.
And I mean, that's the other part of this.
I hate to sound cynical, but the other part of that is like it's we're back to the wire.
I mean, it's like you're part of a system.
You you are beholden to people to have that job in some way, no matter.
I mean, everybody who has a job, like you always say, even Bono has a boss.
Everybody has somebody they've got to keep happy.
There's no way you could be completely neutral about something.
Well, but that's what's so interesting about the Judge Wapner, Judge Judy, let's say Judge John Hodgman, where they found, you know, in the case of Wapner and Judy, they found jurists.
Sounds like a terrible puppet show.
Wapner and Judy.
Wapner and Judy actually made the first rotary engine.
I did not know that.
Interesting.
Yeah, it's the Wapner Judy.
It was named after the sound it made.
Wapner Judy, Wapner Judy.
But, you know, like I have always felt again, not that I have great judgment, but I have I have the talent my dad had.
My mom used to say she would be she would because she was his she ran his office when he was in private practice.
And she would say she would read the brief of one side of this dispute.
And she would say, well, they have an iron iron tight case.
And then she'd read she'd read the other one.
And she'd be like, my God, they have an iron tight.
You know, there's absolutely no way you could resolve it.
It's going to be a stalemate or an impasse.
There's no way.
Both of these, there's no way to decide who is right in this because there's just no deciding.
Yeah.
And then my dad would waltz in, incapable of filing things alphabetically, incapable of working more than three hours a day, you know, like incapable not only of balancing a checkbook, but of finding his checkbook.
But my dad would waltz in, read both things and say, oh, here's the solution.
And it would be like, what?
And both parties would say, I agree.
And they'd shake hands and the problem was resolved.
And my mom still talks about it.
Having been divorced from him now for 50 years or whatever, 45 years, she's like, it was the most incredible talent.
And he did it over and over and I could never figure out.
After having watched him do it, I would read these things and I would try to apply his filter.
Like retroactively go reverse engineer his decision?
Yeah, or just, you know, like, now I've been doing this for a long time.
I know him intimately well.
What is he going to do here?
I cannot see what he's going to do, even though I know his process.
I know.
And he'd walk in, he'd read both things, and he wasn't even aware of it being a process.
He's just like, oh, the solution is blah, blah, blah.
I think there's so many things.
And again, I'm not trying to be funny, but I think there are things as simple as people who, and I don't know if this comes down to taste or smell or what or a different kind of judgment, but people who are with very little training are just very good cooks and know, for example, just what would be appropriate as an ingredient, as a dish.
As a component of a larger meal.
That sounds like a silly one, but I think that's kind of a special gift.
Another one is that, like I've seen this in some friends, where there are some people who are unerringly kind and thoughtful and know just the right thing to do.
which again now to me to anybody else to a normal person who just like buys hallmark cards and sends them out hakuna matata but for me i look at that and i go how do you know just the right thing to say to somebody when somebody in their family died and not sound like a dick or how do you like you were on vacation in honduras and knew to buy this particular two dollar item
that somebody would treasure for the rest of their life.
You've met my friend Christine.
She's like that.
Christine always brings a gift, and you're like, how do you do that?
How does your brain, how do you work for George Lucas and still have the ability to remember what all of your friends like and have it somewhere floating through your mind at a given time as something to act on?
That feels like magic to me.
Yeah, it is.
The people that know exactly what gift to give are truly magicians.
And I think some of those, right, like I had a friend whose job it was to fill up the iPods of famous people.
Right.
She did Courtney Love's iPod.
Yeah, just Drew Barrymore's iPod.
Drew Barrymore, that's it, Drew Barrymore.
there are a lot of people I think in college who love music, who, who think that their love of music is a special talent.
And very few people have like a supernatural understanding of how music works with one another.
You know, the great DJs like, but, but, but there are a lot of people who want to be in music because they love music.
And, but, and, and I think there are people whose jobs are to be like gift buyers and,
But it seems like such a it's such a bougie world where, yes, I live in, you know, I live on the outskirts of Beverly Hills and my job is to be an executive gift buyer for.
But that's just that's how it evidences itself in this culture right now, because we don't have another way to harness their skills.
Right.
If you but but think about the value of just like hanging out your shingle.
in in in the sunset in san francisco you open a storefront your kid graduates from stanford and announces i've decided on my career i'm gonna i'm gonna fill celebrity ipods well that you know but like take take it out of the the world of rich people and imagine being somebody who's just like yeah hi i'll fill your ipod and i'll find gifts for your friends
for a nominal fee.
And have us culturally recognize that that is a skill and you no longer have to beat yourself up because you don't know what gifts to give people.
You just go to the gift buyer.
And that's a legitimate job.
But services like letter writing, where you can hire somebody to write important letters for you.
Yeah.
That's a thing.
And that seems, I mean, grant writer is one of the most incredible, the people that are great at writing grants, and I meet them all the time, who are like, oh, I love writing grants.
It's like, really?
The thing that I would rather gouge out my eyeballs with a fucking fork than do?
You love to do?
And they're like, oh, yeah, give me some grants to write.
Oh, boy.
It's just like, okay, now I really do feel like there are very, very different species on this planet all masquerading as human.
If you love to write grants, oh, yeah, I love to write them and get them and write some more.
Woo!
Fuck.
But the people that amaze me are the diffusers.
The people who are as somebody who finds it very difficult to diffuse a situation where there's where the tension is rising.
Yeah.
Those people that can just be that can that can take a really tense situation and then every all of a sudden everybody's laughing.
yeah and you're like and you can feel them in the room like exuding a kind of magic yeah what did you just do how did you just do that and suddenly you feel everybody feels kind of small to make a big deal about it you're like wow this is we can totally deal with this this is this is this is not perfect but like wow this the temperature and barometric pressure of the room have completely changed with this person being here and they never condescended to anybody you don't feel like they're they're trying to get over on you
And they don't even have to say, hey, you guys, let's do to do.
It's just more like there's sometimes people just have a certain kind of presence that brings out people's better angels.
And so let's say a person that has that talent.
Yeah, they're also smart and they're also personable and they're also, you know, like ambitious or whatever.
And they they go to college and they do well and they get a job.
at Amazon.com, let's call it.
Let's say there's a business called Amazon.com that hires a lot of people.
For the sake of argument, yeah.
And let's say they work there.
It's a very unusual name for a thing.
It conjures up the image of a river, a very large river.
What are you selling, piranha?
Yeah, you're washing piranha and fresh water sharks and leaves.
Let's just call them leaves.
Think about all the leaves that go down the Amazon.
But so this person's working there in a capacity that has some authority.
They're managing a group of people, and they're doing a really good job.
And every once in a while, some situation arises between two employees.
And this person is there, and as a small subset of what they do as a manager, they resolve this conflict, and everybody walks away feeling good, right?
And we see this type of thing all the time.
Oh, my manager's really good at resolving conflicts.
But out there somewhere in that job is a super diffuser, right?
Somebody who would be capable of resolving state conflicts.
Oh, they're like the wolf, except for massive human disagreements.
Yeah, they have the ability.
I talk fast and I drive fast.
Let's get this thing settled.
Let's get this thing settled.
You, get some Windex.
You, change out of that sweatshirt.
Banana slugs.
So there are people with that level of magic.
Yeah.
In resolving disputes, but it's masked by their just general sort of talent and they end up in a job where they do well and they are doing a good job, but we didn't find them.
We didn't find them and say, you have this talent.
It's a super talent.
And where you where we need you really is in the State Department.
Well, and the thing or even like, let's say that's an aspect of your job where everybody goes, you know, wow, Jennifer is super good at making everybody act like an adult without being condescending.
But maybe Jennifer's that's maybe that's not her main job.
Maybe that's not how she's rewarded.
Maybe that's not how she's acknowledged.
Maybe that's not how she was recruited.
But that's not going to be something that necessarily if she's a corporate attorney who's mainly a litigator that may come up a couple of times a year.
But if she's just there to be a bulldog and like scream the other side down, that skill, you know, while being there may not be beneficial to her work.
Well, or even if it even if it really is a big part of why Jennifer became an executive vice president.
at, let's say, a company called Apple, right?
Why are you needlessly muddying these examples with making people wonder who you're talking about?
Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer.
Let's say that, right?
And we think of her as being extremely successful and of her problem-solving ability or her conflict resolution ability being a major component of what made her a success there.
But what we never knew was how gifted she was at that one thing and how much that gift actually overshadowed her management ability or her usefulness to Apple.
she was the magneto of solving conflicts.
Yeah.
But, but there was never an opportunity to see how truly gifted she was because she was, you know, she was given these simple things of like, Oh, well, you know, Bob said that Jim's playing his radio too loud.
And Jim says that he was told, uh, you know, he can play quietly after 11.
Yeah.
That that was his stapler or whatever.
And she's like, let me handle this.
And she does.
And everybody's like, wow, thank God.
Jennifer's here.
But meanwhile,
You know, meanwhile, the Stuxnet is dissolving centrifuges in Iran because we can't find a single person that can make sense of of the negotiation around the table like Herman Blix or whatever isn't doing a good enough job.
And if we put Jennifer in there.
She'd be like, oh, listen, he can play it quietly after 11.
And you guys can use these centrifuges to make, you know, to refine uranium, but only for the... But Jennifer's in a building full of nails where they just need another hammer.
See, that's exactly right.
Jennifer in a building full of nails.
La la la.
That actually kind of sounds more like a Belle and Sebastian song.
Yeah, it does.
I can't even do a fucking Belle and Sebastian impression.
She rides the desk.
She's the jockey of the dissolution.
Friends of mine.
You're pretty good.
That got a little Sean Nelson-y at the end.
She was the hammer of the building and a friend of mine.
You know what I think about?
Here's something people do.
That was probably the end.
I liked it, but I also like the now.
There's much more to say, but we'll cut this off.
But here's another thing.
Think about this.
I don't know a better word for this, and it sounds creepy to even...
Talk about it, think about it, but there's a kind of, I guess, what you might consider retroactive or forensic research you can do.
This goes back to something I was saying earlier, where I do sometimes think, not just with crime, but in lots of other situations, is there a way to look at patterns...
of some kind and see that, oh my goodness, given this set of conditions over this period of time, people who do the following three things in this order before the age of 20 will almost inevitably do this one thing by the age of 50.
It's very abstract, right?
But I think that's a thing.
I think that's a real thing.
And I think when you think about profiles and courage type thing, what are these common things people have?
But think about this.
I think one of the ways it seems to me we use that forensic ability is to identify – I'm going to use the parlance here – to identify at-risk children.
So that's a phrase we use, and that's code.
Here's what that means, is that we know that there are a set of conditions –
And that there's a set of consequent maybe behaviors that tend to lead kids to say, you know, get into crime, sell drugs, whatever the 80s version of this is.
And if you're good at this, you can identify at-risk kids early and try to give them opportunities that will at least keep them from going the wrong way.
And my sense is that there is some kind of a forensic thing there beginning with where they live.
Are they in an area with lots of, you know...
as we used to say, broken families.
Like, are they living with their grandmother?
And there's not a lot of money and not much supervision.
Maybe they're in a foster home.
I bet there's seven things.
So you could go, wow, if this 12-year-old black kid in Philadelphia meets all seven of these criteria, we really need to keep our eye on that guy.
And I suspect that's a way that you could use that kind of forensic research.
And I guess I'm just wondering now, like, is there something more positive?
Is there an opportunity thing that we could do?
Right, right.
Like, how do we go and identify the magneto of empathy somewhere in Philadelphia?
And that's the million-dollar question, right?
How do we do this positively without it becoming a test for who doesn't get to be a cop?
Precisely.
Right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is not meant to be an exclusionary thing.
It's just that if this is what we have to do testing with, then it is going to be selective in a way that's going to exclude people.
Yeah, yeah.
In music, I was walking down the aisle of a store the other day.
And it was the third time in a row I heard squeeze.
Each of the prior three days, I'd heard squeeze playing somewhere in a store.
And by the third time you hear squeeze three days in a row, you're like, what's going on?
That sounds like a message.
Some kind of squeeze quickening.
We are ready for the Anchorman.
Hot coffee in bed.
Listening to squeeze as I'm walking through the... Black coffee in bed.
Damn it.
As I'm walking through the store, and I suddenly heard...
in squeeze, the echo of
or rather the pre-echo, the pre-verb of a songwriter that I used to love here in Seattle.
His name was Rob Benson.
He was a great songwriter, a very great pop songwriter, and he was super influenced by Squeeze.
And, you know, in the way that people used to say like, oh, he's really influenced by XTC and Squeeze, you could hear the influences.
But there was a certain passage of Squeeze where I was like, if, you know, if I didn't already know this was Squeeze song, I would have thought it was a Rob Benson song.
And it started me thinking about Rob, who was one of the most talented of all of us, just a natural melodicist, a great vocalist.
And he just didn't make it all the way through to the big show, you know, for whatever reason.
Yeah, yeah.
There's a lot of stories like that up there, I bet.
Well, there are.
And the thing is that... Oh, flop.
Like, shouldn't flop have been bigger?
Flop should have been a lot bigger for whatever reason.
Flop wasn't.
And you come to think of it, and particularly if you've made it over to the other side a little bit,
You think of it as like, well, you just have to just things people get weeded out.
Right.
It's not it's not a pure meritocracy shrug.
You know, there were there were a lot of ways in which Rob was a like one of the best front men.
But Rob could never quite figure out how to work his amp or what.
You know, there were always things about it where it was like, well, you know, that was an opportunity that you guys could have taken a little bit more aggressively and for whatever reason you didn't.
And so that's the reason.
That's the why.
So within music and the arts, and I think in business and in the army,
There's a sense that like, well, the cream rises to the top and it's not always the guy that's the best singer or the best sergeant or the best banker, but it's a competitive enough process and hard enough to get through that the people that do get there, they might not have been the most gifted, but they're definitely not dummies, you know, like it was hard.
They got there.
But the stuff we're talking about, which is like, well, if the Magneto of problem solving decided at a young age they wanted to be a guitar player and they were a good guitar player and got far enough along that it seemed like they were on their way to the show and then they didn't make it.
And then frustrated and defeated by that, they went to work at a warehouse.
Like, we triple, quadruple missed an opportunity.
Yeah.
Just happens that Sports Warehouse was hiring.
Yeah, right.
And so all these tests that we're giving...
to elementary school kids, which are like, how well did the teacher put these spelling lessons into your brain and how, you know, how able are you to, to regurgitate them when we could be saying, okay, everybody today, here's what we're going to do.
Match the faces.
Okay.
And everybody takes the test and it's like, oh, but we're not looking to grade in anybody.
We're just looking for the one kid in the school who gets a perfect score.
It's like what?
Like the Ender's Game or Men in Black.
Like, you know, here's all these these elites that have been trained all of their life.
But like, we're going to find this one kid who's going to go into the system.
Yeah.
The one kid that's like a super recognizer.
And then we're just like, hey, you know, Janet, would you like to come?
Do you remember me?
Yes, of course I do.
That's right.
Would you like to come with with Barton?
He'd like to show you a special room.
And Janet's like, OK.
And Barton walks her down the hall and Barton's like, Janet, we'd like to initiate you into a special program.
Oh, dear.
You know, and you're just like, OK, well, Janet's not in school with us anymore, but now we're going to play some more games.
Hey, here's a problem.
Who can solve this problem?
It's just a simulation.
One kid is like, well, the answer is simple, Zabow.
And they're like, oh, Elijah, would you like to come with Barton?
We have to go talk to your parents.
Yeah, and the danger, of course, is that all the people that are left in the school that did not test out into anything interesting...
are all just now, they're in some 1984 hellscape where it's like, okay, well, you know.
It's like Brazil.
You keep trying to get more desk, pulling your desk through the wall.
Yeah, or the scene in Animal House that I always reference.
Oh, I'd like you to meet Ahmed.
But, you know, to call the people who are truly gifted, oh, it's just so, as soon as I use the word call,
You know, it's so fraught with all this, like, eugenical energy.
We talked before about, like, in the age before we came along, you would call it the gifted class.
And then you had to come up with all these squirrely names.
In my case, Differentiated Educational Opportunities, or DEO is what they called it.
It's not gifted.
It's not advanced.
It's DEO.
It's a technology.
Yeah.
Well, they called it Program for Academically and Creatively Talented, or PACT.
Oh, nice.
but then uh then i think but initially the first program i was in was called dig which was i don't know that's one of those ones where it could mean either way at my kids school they have a program called roar which is for the opposite kind of direction right you want to try and roar yeah uh but yeah so how do you balance this with like the sense that all men are created equal and and women included
And when I meet Thomas Jefferson, I'm going to compel him to include women in the sequel.
All men and women included, plus men, everybody, right?
Not just the white ones.
You don't need a TV to listen to Hamilton.
You don't even need a TV.
I get it.
I get it from you and from Hodgman.
I've heard almost every song.
Give me 15 minutes and I will change your life.
I heard Adam Savage talking about it.
Just a moment, just a moment.
It's coming at me from all sides.
I feel like I'm drowning in a pudding pool.
The pudding is Hamilton.
So, Janet and Ephraim?
What's his name?
Barton?
Elijah.
Elijah and Barton.
They both go with Barton.
They're taking Ender out and they're putting him in the academy with Harrison Ford.
Barton's job is to not scare kids as he takes them down a hallway.
And he's the anti-clown.
Unfortunately, he sounds exactly like Bob Odenkirt in the sketch world.
Tell the people what you told me earlier.
Please don't kill me.
We mention it every week for a reason.
I watched it again.
I watched it again last week.
I know, I did it too.
What was I watching the other day?
I sent it to Sean.
I was like, I miss watching TV with you.
Oh, God.
You're right.
You know, not being creepy around kids.
No, just let's do a lightning round.
What are some other ones?
What are some other super abilities?
Oh, knowing where to go for dinner.
Oh, my God.
If you could hire somebody.
whose only job was to tell you, and they're not getting any kickbacks.
Nope, nope, nope.
There's no yelping, but they just go, hey, you know what?
Let's go get those green noodles we like.
Yes!
You know what would be perfect tonight?
Is a little bit of Ethiopian food.
I didn't even think of Ethiopian food.
I never would have thought of that.
yeah there's those but see a lot of these come down to um well you know like i'm always mentioning perfect pitch because that fascinates me because i don't have perfect pitch i i have i have the kind of pitch where even though i'm not a good singer like i can frequently start singing a song because it's kind of playing in my head like i know i don't i couldn't tell you what key it's started in yeah like i can just start singing like i know this is how talk about talk about the passion is in d and this is how it starts
Talk about the passion.
That's probably pretty close.
Check it out.
Captain Marm will now run that through a meter and tell me if that was a D. Please don't do that.
What I want.
What I want.
I want an ethicist.
There are people who understand that not everything is black and white, and there are people that understand that the fact that things are not black and white is not confusing.
There are a lot of sides to every story, but also there are lies of omission that are better than the truth sometimes.
There are conditions and solutions are...
There's an ethical path.
There's a best practice.
And, you know, a lot of time we live in a place, we live in a world where the people that tell the truth all the time presume a, like a moral superiority.
And if you tell a little white lie or you, you know, you kind of prevaricate a little bit, you feel guilty about it.
Even if it feels expedient and you come out of it saying like, well, we got the project accomplished.
I had to tell Bob that we needed him off site that day when in fact we just wanted him not to be here.
And the problem is that people that privilege people.
Social expediency.
Well, people that people that say complete honesty is the highest good.
You know, a lot of those people are kind of sociopathic.
Complete honesty is not always that there is a reason that there's lying in it.
Right.
If complete honesty were just a pure good.
I'm happy that you like your baby, but it is a grotesquerie.
Yes, your child is the second ugliest baby I've ever seen.
The first ugliest baby was just a little uglier than your baby.
I realize that if I told you it was the ugliest baby I've ever seen, you would not realize that I have seen many, many ugly babies.
And I know them well enough to say that yours is the second ugliest, which is to say a very, very ugly baby.
Right.
I value honesty.
Hello.
Hello.
But, you know, my problem personally is that I learned...
as a young person, to obfuscate my movements.
Right?
We're not just talking about jumping out of a train at the last minute.
No.
Are you talking about codes and dog whistles?
A little bit, in the sense that it was, if somebody said, what did you do last night?
And it was a simple question.
I would and continue to would often answer, oh, I went to the movies last night when in fact I went to the library.
Classic misdirection.
That's right.
And in fact, and this has been pointed out to me a thousand times.
In fact, saying I went to the library was actually a cooler thing to say.
Saying, oh, I went to the library was at least a conversation starter.
Whoa, what were you doing at the library?
Oh, I was just reading.
Why would you say you went to the movies?
Well, the answer is I just didn't want people to know what I was doing.
Yeah, I totally agree.
But the problem is... People know too many things about people.
Well, they do, yeah.
And I got into that habit as a young person and I think motivated by a desire not to be completely known, motivated by a... Not to be knowable.
Not to be knowable.
And not to, you know, motivated by a sort of introverted...
desire to be separate a little bit and to be contained, you know, or to not just be like accessible to everybody.
But the problem is, as I've gotten older, that habit and instinct
really gets in the way of being intimate with people because when somebody that you're intimate with says where did you go yesterday and you say I went to the movies and they say that's weird because I just bumped into our mutual friend and they said they saw you at the library bum bum bum
Yeah, I do.
And I'm like, and then they say, why are you lying?
And the premise is that I'm lying because I'm covering something up, and I'm not.
That's the point of a good spy craft.
That's right.
Right?
I mean, no.
No, if you only lied when you had something to cover up, you'd be a terrible spy.
Yeah, right.
You get off the plane, you assume you're being followed.
Plausible deniability, too, right?
But it actually is becoming a major issue in my life right now.
Because I don't know how to, you know, I'm a full grown man.
I have responsibilities.
But there are sometimes I just say that I am doing one thing when I'm doing another.
Just to preserve that feeling of what feels very safe to me, secure.
That feeling that I, that, you know, not everybody knows what I'm doing.
And I would love to sit down with like somebody that has the superpower of being able to know,
Being able to resolve that problem for me, right?
This is a major issue, and it seems like a minor, tiny little thing.
Where they could find a way for you to be, how do you put this, less dishonest, but still be able to have the sense of security.
I'm trying to phrase this in a very general way because I don't know what the solution is, but it would involve you feeling better, other people feeling better, but you still maintaining something important to you.
Yeah, because my whole life, people that are close to me or want to be close to me have said, well, the solution to it is that you just start telling me what you're doing.
And I go, yeah.
Easy.
Let's slow your roll.
I know.
I know.
And they're like, well, if you loved me, you wouldn't feel like you needed to be apart from me.
And it's like, well, hold on now.
I love my mom.
I feel like I want to be apart from her.
Easy, easy.
But I carry a lot of guilt because...
Because, yeah, I hear what you're saying.
I'm not trying to exclude you from me, right?
But this is a kind of ethical problem that doesn't rise up to the level of, like, let's ask my priest.
But you could use some tips from Jennifer or Janet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Somebody who's like, oh, I feel this situation.
And they see it.
It's like somebody who can solve the word search.
They just look at it and boom, it's just jumping right out.
And they would see that and go, obviously, here's one way you could do that.
Yeah.
Small scale spiritual counseling that doesn't require that I join.
Oh, I like that.
Right?
And there are those people all around us who just have that ability.
And I call my sister, who's very, very... She's very...
intense into the world of emotion but you know she's coming at it from a place of super intensity like you know get to know yourself break down all walls burn your body in a pyre rise up as a phoenix
And I'm like, yes, yes, I do want to do that.
But I also just want to just I kind of just want to get my fingers around this little issue of like, I want to be close to people.
I don't want them to feel I'm excluding them.
But somehow I'm constantly habitually telling little teeny lies of omission just to keep a buffer between me and everybody.
Interesting.
And, you know, I just want a little friend to say people's superpower is sniffing out little lies, too.
that's absolutely true there are people you can lie to all day and they're just like that's me i'll never figure it out yeah i'm a terrible judge of character and i can't tell when people are like i can't tell anything you can't tell when somebody's lying to you i can tell when i can tell when somebody i feel like i can tell when somebody is nervously bullshitting me for reasons but um no i just i don't know i just i just throw up my hands
But all of these require some ability to see a situation in a way other people do not and to identify a solution that's really not obvious.
Yeah.
Or not obvious to the people that don't have your talent.
Are you still there?
No, I'm still here.
I'm listening.
I'm pausing the fucking podcast because next door for the next two months, they're going to apparently be banging on the wall all day long.
You hear that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was wondering if you were playing the bongos while we were talking.
The other day was stones.
They were blowing up stones in the floor and carrying them out and then dropping them.
What are they?
They're going to turn it into a really cool little oyster bar or something.
I couldn't say.
Right?
Right?
Oh, that's right, of course, because if you said... My problem is I lie and then identify that I just lied.
That's my super skill.
No, it's not!