Synecdoche (E)

0:00Synecdoche is not a small city near Albany, New York. Synecdoche is an often mispronounced but important concept of using the part to describe the whole. For example, the headline could be, Tehran backs off from negotiations. Does that mean that every single person in Tehran decided not to be part of the negotiations? Is it referring to Iran, the entire country? Or are we talking about what a few politicians in charge of the government decided to do? Hello, it's John from Glasgow in Ecosse. And you're listening to a special episode of Akimbo's archives.

0:54Before we begin with our story of the space shuttle and Spiro Agnew, here's my favorite mispronunciation of synecdoche. Synecine and dody chody. Okay, so back to the work at hand. The space shuttle. It doesn't make any sense. How did we end up with such an expensive boondoggle of a device that ended up costing billions and billions of dollars and never achieved its stated goals? Well, here's how we got there. In 1969, NASA was literally flying high. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

1:46We had put a man on the moon and brought him back safely. They had achieved their mission before the decade was out. And so now the question is, what to do next? In 1966, NASA was 4.5 % of all of the money spent by the federal government that year. NASA administrators challenged the people at NASA in the late 60s to make a wish list. What should NASA do next? And the list was filled with wishes. It included things like a shuttle from orbit to the moon, powered by nuclear engines. It included a manned trip to Mars, a space station, mining of asteroids, all sorts of great stuff that NASA wanted to do.

2:41The problem with this plan is that it was going to cost even more than putting someone on the moon. And the problem with this plan was that at the moment, Richard Nixon was in no mood to spend more money. And so, incented by their mission and their goals and their careers, people at NASA put pen to paper and tried to figure out how to get the camel's nose into the tent. How to begin the process of maintaining our presence in space. because the alternative was to shut the whole thing down. Well, Spiro Agnew, the second worst vice president in my memory, ended up being in charge of a committee to figure out what they should do about the space shuttle.

3:32The people on the committee reverse-engineered the math because it turns out each incremental mission of the space shuttle was in fact cheaper than a disposable rocket. The question was, how many missions did you need to run a year to make the math compelling? Well, even with the optimistic estimates they had about their costs, without incorporating things like the tiles that would need to be replaced, they came up with 50. 50 missions a year. In order to do that, they needed the Department of Defense to give them a green light. The Department of Defense, of course, had requirements for much bigger payloads than they planned for, which means they had to make the shuttle more expensive for missions that would launch from a military base in California, which actually never occurred.

4:31What this meant was that they made compromises in the space shuttle system in order for it to look like a reasonable expenditure. What they ended up with was a little bit of a boondoggle, a difficult engineering project that ended up costing way more than anyone expected. Here was the first interesting side effect. The Soviet Union saw what NASA was building. And when they ran the numbers, they decided it was impossible that the White House, there was Synecdoche again, would have put together a plan unless they were secretly intending to do something else with it. Perhaps the Soviets began, oh, I'm using Synecdoche again, perhaps the Soviets believed that it would be taking off from a military base in California, flying over the Soviet Union as it entered space.

5:31And because its payload capacity was so huge, Bombs could be dropped really quickly outside of the space shuttle, destroying targets inside the Soviet Union. They also noticed that the payload could bring 3 ,000 tons up, but only 1 ,500 tons down. What that meant was it was designed to leave a lot of stuff in space. Maybe it was built to leave laser weapons in orbit. The Soviets decided that the only rational response was to duplicate the shuttle. They called it the Buran. And keep it in reserve so that once they figured out what we were up to, they could instantly match us. Well, they built one.

6:14The picture is in the show notes. You can see it. It looks exactly like the space shuttle. And it flew just one successful mission. They stored it in a warehouse which collapsed under the weight of a storm, and it's gone forever. What the Soviets failed to factor in is that there wasn't a White House that was deciding. That in fact, there isn't a little man or a little woman inside each one of these institutions that is becoming a rational actor, making a big, thoughtful, long-term decision based on all available data. that, in fact, that is not how governments make decisions. A book was written about the Cuban Missile Crisis called The Essence of Decision.

7:10It is weighty and detailed, but what it does is provide us with a breakthrough about how organizations decide. What predominates in the way we think about how a country makes a decision is called the rational actor model. And what we say, if we're a political analyst or even a citizen, is why did that country decide to do this? If I were them, I would never have done it. The rational actor implies, it implies that what organizations do, including corporations and whole countries is act as if a little homunculus, a thoughtful, informed individual is making decisions. But in fact, that's not what's true.

8:04And what Herbert Simon and others have pointed out is that that is not the way organizations decide. The organizational process, and you can read this in the show notes, looks like this. One, when faced with a crisis, Government leaders don't look at it as a whole, but they break it down and they assign each piece to parts of the bureaucracy that already exist. So if you think about it from a corporation's point of view, the legal department looks at the legal issues, the engineering department looks at the engineering issues, the PR department looks at the PR issues, and on and on. Each person is incented to maximize the thing that is their responsibility and their skill.

8:49Number two, because of time and resource limitations, rather than evaluating all possible courses of action to see which one is most likely to work, leaders settle on the first proposal that adequately addresses the issue. This term is called satisficing. Maximizing is too expensive. As long as it's good enough, that's what we should do now. Number three, leaders gravitate towards solutions that limit short-term uncertainty. That eliminating uncertainty is what drives department heads and others to make their decisions. Next one, organizations often follow set repertoires and procedures when taking actions.

9:39Is this any surprise at all? Why would we develop a new repertoire if we have a proven shortcut that we've used before that hasn't gotten us in trouble that we can use again? And finally, because of the large resources and time required to fully plan and mobilize actions within a large organization, leaders are effectively limited to pre-existing plans. And this is why organizations shatter and fail. Because when the world changes too much, their pre-existing methods aren't the thing they need to use. So if we look, for example, at the massive shift that has happened when we walked away from spectrum, from NBC, CBS, ABC, from the limited amount of electromagnetic spectrum that could be allocated to a network, and then moved to cable, well, the switch was most of the people who make content didn't change anything.

10:44They just said, oh, good, more channels. But then we switched to YouTube. They didn't know what to do because they needed a new playbook. And then we switched to Netflix and everyone was caught flat-footed except for Reed Hastings and his tiny team because that shift wasn't going to respond to pre-existing playbooks. It needed a new playbook. But here's the punchline. In 1968, they started the Nobel Prize in economics. Most people think it's a real Nobel Prize, like physics and biology and medicine and chemistry. It's not. It was funded by a bank. It was founded in 1968, only 51 years ago. And the reason it's a fake Nobel Prize is this, that almost everything in economics is based on the rational actor model.

11:37That economics from the first day has been based on the following idea. Individuals with adequate information seeking to maximize their own short and long-term interests will make decisions according to the laws of economics. But it turns out that the idea that there's a homunculus, that there is a little voice in your head that is a rational actor, is incorrect. And Marvin Minsky foreshadowed this a long time ago in his book, The Society of Mind. Here's one way to think about it. A few weeks ago, I almost burned down my house. I was making the famous carrots baked in olive oil recipe in which you take some carrots, peel them, put them in a baking sheet with some olive oil and slowly roast them for hours.

12:32And what you got to do on a regular basis is take it out of the oven, turn them over, put them back in. So I'm taking the pan out of the oven and as I'm doing it, I burn my finger. Because I burned my finger, I instantly dropped the pan. The pan turns upside down, dumping the olive oil into the oven and starting a conflagration. Just flames, like a fireplace worth of flames inside my oven. Fortunately, we had a fire extinguisher handy. Mo put the fire out. Everything was good. But I needed a new oven. anyway was this in my long-term interest to dump olive oil all over the inside of my oven starting a fire and almost burning down my house of course not but i didn't get to decide my pinky decided my pinky and my skin and that short-term decider the one that acts instantly said get your hand away from this and i'm pretty sure if i had to do it all over again i would have had no choice the second time, that we do not have one voice inside of our head that is a rational actor.

13:46We actually have many bureaucracies all working at the same time with tropes and stereotypes and shorthands. Some of them are based on instant response to, oh boy, someone just burned me. They burned me emotionally or they burned me with heat, but I feel burned. I'm going to jump back. We are moved by fear or greed by the memes we've seen before and the dreams we have for tomorrow. And we are easily manipulated because smart, unethical marketers know that we don't have a little man or a woman inside of us who is a rational, thoughtful, long-term actor. What this means is the statement, I applied for a job at Starbucks, but they didn't like me, isn't completely true.

14:40Because what actually happened was the person who interviewed you didn't like you. But Starbucks as an entity, we have no idea how Starbucks as an entity felt about your application. what gets really interesting is when we think about applying this multiple minds idea to an individual. Because if individuals have multiple minds, the one that drops the pan when it gets burned, the one that jumps to conclusions, the one that's really good at long-term selfless thinking, then in any given moment, there is no you, there is no me. There's just the sum total of all of those systems, each working at their own bureaucratic pace, each trying to satisfy its own bureaucratic objectives.

15:36So yeah, we're responsible for what we do. But when we say I or you, what we're really talking about is the we, the we of multiple minds, all working it out at the same time, battling against each other for the action that then appears, just as all the functionaries in the Soviet Union battled with each other over the Cuban Missile Crisis, just as that pro golfer who hit a hole-in-one on the last hole and went in the rough this time, is many, many people, each competing with one another to become the one that we see when we look at them. So let's go through the list again, but this time not about organizations, but about the voices inside our own heads.

16:26When faced with a crisis, we don't look at it as a whole, but break it down and assign it to pre-assigned roles in our own head. Because of time and resource limitations, rather than evaluating all possible courses of action to see which one's most likely to work, we settle on the first proposal that adequately addresses the issue. We satisfy almost all the time. We gravitate towards solutions that limit short-term uncertainty. Well, there you go. That's behavioral economics in a nutshell. We follow set repertoires and procedures, when taking actions, we find ourselves in a rut doing it the same way.

17:10That's called a habit. And finally, because of the large resources and time, and I'm going to add here, fear required to fully plan and mobilize actions, we are effectively limited to pre-existing habits. So there you go. Spiro Agnew, economics, the space shuttle, the voice inside our head, and our commitment to listening, to the fight, all of those things lead to the following output. We aren't rational actors. Inside of us is an organization. That organization has a process. And each one of those voices in our head is busy doing its own job. And the actions that are seen on the outside, the ones that Synecdoche would call Seth or Bob or Tracy or Fran, well, there is not one of those people.

18:13There's just the sum total of all of our processes. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. As always, we love hearing from you. If you visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, you'll find a show page about every episode, as well as a link you can click on to ask your question.

18:59Three really juicy questions came in before the holiday weekend. Here we go. Hey, Seth. Jackson from Melbourne, Australia. I found your episode last week astonishingly beautiful in all the simplest of ways. As someone who lives in a city where we greatly appreciate and understand a good cup of coffee, I resonate with the quality of inconvenience. But I'm often confronted at the rising amount of people around me opting for a$1 machine coffee from 7-Eleven. I really enjoy the industry I work in, but I find myself defending the client will as you put it, cross the street for me. But more often than not, I have little success.

19:33So I guess my question is, how do you know when to trust and defend your inconvenient work path because you think the outcome will be that of value? Or should I start getting the 7-Eleven coffee in order to please? What's the balance between the fresh and the frozen pizza? Thanks, Seth. Love your work. I think you've nailed the tension just right here. And it goes a little bit like this. Almost nobody wants the inconvenient variety. Almost nobody will pay extra in time or money for better. And almost nobody is enough. That what's happened as markets have opened, as we have connected people across the world, is that the masses of people seem to want supermarket sushi.

20:23They seem to want the frozen pizza. They seem to want the dollar coffee. The masses of people are wrong because the masses of people don't care. If they cared, they would wait in line for better. But the choice we have to make as providers is whether we will race to the bottom to be cheaper and more convenient for people who don't care, or if we will accept the limitations, a ceiling on how big we can get in exchange for being prized by the people who do care. And the place of maximum pain is when we are in between, when we are sort of making sort of better stuff for people who sort of care. That spot, that is the spot of the pretty good independent bookstore, of the pretty good local pizzeria that is whining and complaining that people are buying Domino's instead.

21:22Well, maybe they're buying Domino's instead because you're not better enough to get the people who care to insist. What I know, at least here in New York, is that the extraordinary coffee places, pizza places, and sushi places have a waiting list because there are enough people who care. You don't want to open in a town or you don't want to create something that doesn't go online if there are no people who care. The goal is find the people who care and for them, do work that matters. Hey, Seth, this is Jordan, and this is my question. In listening to your last episode, how can you handcraft software, apps, websites, like you can handcraft the pizza that you described.

22:17Thank you for all you do. Looking forward to the next episode. I love the idea of bringing the sterile, scalable world of digital into this conversation about what it means to create something that is not just convenient. So I'll give you two examples. The first one, the current one, is a piece of software called Superhuman. Superhuman makes email that's expensive. dollar a day, to use superhuman to answer your email. That's approximately a billion times more than the cost of every other email client. So what kind of person is going to pay extra? Well, we begin with this. If you are processing a lot of email, then an email program that is thoughtfully designed and regularly updated, which is organized around the idea of making your day better, not making a profit for the person who created it by sucking you deeper and deeper into other activities.

23:17There are some people who want that. But what they've done to add to the inconvenience is sort of extraordinary. I started using superhuman about six or eight months ago. It's not a paid plug for them. It's just a great story. And first I was on the waiting list. When I got off the waiting list, I got a note that said, the only way to get superhuman in addition to paying for it is our CEO needs to come to your office and sit next to you for an hour installing it and teaching you how it works. Well, I'm a little bit of an egomaniac and I figure, well, they're just doing that because they read my blog or listen to my podcast.

23:55But in fact, they have done this with every single one of their 15 ,000 paying customers. not only the CEO, apparently it's a team of five people, have hand-onboarded more than 10 ,000 users. On the day that I got onboarded, the CEO had flown to New York to do four different people. And I said to him, this doesn't scale. He said, exactly. That's exactly right. Because if we can get the first 15 ,000 people to understand how to use it right, they will stick with us. And then I added, at a dollar a day, that whole thing pays for itself. Not to mention the fact that sitting for an hour with each and every user causes them, as inconvenient as it sounds, to get better at making the software good.

24:45So when I think about the late, great Apple computer, the most valuable company in the world, except not the most valuable company to me, I remember the early days. I met Guy Kawasaki in 1983. I remember beta testing the original Mac. The team that worked on the original Mac, people like Susan who designed the original icons, they did an enormous amount of inconvenient things, things that were dramatically better than they needed to be. There was craftsmanship there. It wasn't the knurled edges of a piece of metal. It was done in software. Things worked far better than they needed to. And it has been a long time since Apple took a leap like that with Mac software.

25:34Now it's filled with shortcuts and bobby pins and things held together with scotch tape because their goal is no longer to be better than they need to be. Their goal is to make a luxury product for people who aren't going to use it the same sort of way. So that's a mini rant there. But what we are looking for, the people who care, is software that is willing to be inconvenient at first because it will give the user joy and connection and power and the thrill of using something that was better made than it needed to be. Hi Seth, I'm Marcos from Monterey Bay, California. I've been digging into your podcast archives and there's an episode you have on status roles.

26:20and I recently went to a conference and I saw several online influential people there and that are bigger than me in my niche. I saw them, but I did not say hi because of several reasons. The first reason being I don't really admire their work. So it seems I would only say hi because they have a huge online presence. Secondly, I felt like another groupie trying to get their attention if I went up to them. And the most important reason is I felt like I would be lowering my status if I approach them. I know these situations touch on personal insecurities, but there's something to say for having some kind of self-respect.

26:57If I'm googly-eyed over someone, aren't I inherently diminishing my own value? I've had a love and hate relationship with status because it feels good when I get admiration, but it sucks when I'm in a room where I'm lower status, or at least by comparison. I wish I didn't feel like this, but I know it's a very human thing to experience. I'm just wondering what is your take on this dynamic. I would like to think that I would approach you if I ever saw you in public, but I'm not sure how I would do that without making you feel like I'm trying to take something from you. I hope you can share your thoughts.

27:30Thank you. Thank you for your honest question about status rules. That's one of the very earliest episodes of this podcast. And if you haven't listened to it, please go back and listen. It's one of my favorites. It's one of the reasons I started the Akimbo podcast. So what's going on here? You are correct that at conferences, status expresses itself in all sorts of fascinating ways. I am not sure, however, that you or the person who you are talking about benefits if you don't engage with them. That when you engage with someone else, it might be that you are raising their status and lowering yours.

28:10Or if you see the engagement as an opportunity to learn and to teach, it may very well be that you influence that person more than they influence you. Then when we talk to someone of higher status, we have a choice to make. We can choose through all of our interactions to acknowledge their higher status. And if it helps in our interaction to do that, we should. On the other hand, we can talk to that person as a peer. Talking to that person as a peer might be stressful at first, but in my experience, that person enjoys the ability to be talked to as a peer. They enjoy the intimacy and the fact that they are a fellow person, not someone famous.

28:59I am sure that when people walk up to Warren Buffett, particularly when he visits China, Most of the time, they're talking to him like he is the Warren Buffett. And I'm just guessing. But I would imagine that maybe, just maybe, he wants to have a conversation about duplicate bridge or the weather or something else in your mutual experiences where there are two peers engaging with one another. So often, a story about status happens in our head long before it happens out loud. and you need to be clear about whether that story in your head is helping you achieve the change you seek to make. So there you go.

29:41Thank you for your questions this week. We'll see you next time.