The spirit of the game (E)

0:00It's a surprise to some people to realize that Ultimate Frisbee is one of the great modern sports. It combines the athleticism of soccer with the elegance of the best moments of basketball, the play calling of the most complicated moments in football, all in one modern sport. But the best thing about Ultimate Frisbee, the surprising thing, is the concept built into the rules called the spirit of the game. Hey, it's Kevin Beach, and this is a special archived episode of Akemba.

0:42What sets Ultimate Frisbee apart, what will make it the only sport of its kind if it ends up in the Olympics, is that there are no referees. Built deep into the structure of Ultimate Frisbee is the idea that every player calls her own fouls, that every player is responsible for calling themselves out if they're harassing somebody, touching them when they're not supposed to interfere with the frisbee, breaking any of the rules. This idea that you play in the spirit of the game, that you're taking a longer-term view for what it means to engage in a sport or a game, happens to be revolutionary in our modern world.

1:30The idea of our modern world is that you're supposed to win right now, that selfish behavior is the best behavior, that the short term is the best term. An ultimate frisbee flies in the face of that thinking. Ayn Rand was a much more successful novelist than philosopher. She published several books about philosophy, talking about epistemology, challenging Descartes and Hume and the other greats of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. And professional philosophers don't really pay a lot of attention to the details of her amateur philosophy. But there are plenty of people who have read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead who have taken her at her fictional word and decided that selfishness and egoism, as she called it, is the best way to live in the world.

2:30Rand grew up in the Soviet Union, which would explain some of the emotion behind sentences like this one. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by the disciples of altruism? From this beginning, it's not that hard to get into a cycle that says, no one should decide what's best for you other than you, and that in every situation what we ought to do is maximize our personal self-interest. That if enough people are maximizing their personal self-interest engaged in an economy, then resources will be allocated in the most efficient way.

3:23It's not too hard to go from that to money is an effective measure of how much value you created. Therefore, the thinking may go, making more money is the economy and humanity's way of telling you you're doing a good job. Which means you can go a little further and say the hedge fund manager is adding more value to the world than the lifeguard who saved the lives of three little kids, but she was only making$14 an hour. Well, there's a bunch of problems with this line of thinking, but we're going to begin by looking, as we did in Ultimate, at the idea of games. Years ago, we had a family trivial pursuit tournament.

4:14And as always happens in family tournaments, it was a little hot and heavy, and we were getting near the finals. And the trivial pursuit question for our team to win was, what's the official required color to be worn in ping pong tournaments? And we had a big argument on our team. Black, brown, black, brown. The theory was it had to be something that the white ball would stand out against. Finally, we ended our argument and said black. And my aunt gleefully looked up and said, you lose. The answer on the card is dark. And we said, wait, wait, wait. Dark isn't a color. It doesn't matter. It says dark on the card, you lose.

4:58Well, this is a problem because it wasn't in the spirit of the game. And 40 years later, I still remember the discussion. I almost lost my job because I didn't understand the spirit of the game. Years ago, with my great boss David Cease, at Spinnaker, where we played games sometimes, we had a diplomacy tournament. Diplomacy is one of the great board games of all time. It's a simulation of world domination. There aren't a lot of rules. There's room for backroom dealing. The game can take weeks to play. So we had a five-person diplomacy game going on. And about the eighth or ninth round, when it starts to get really significant, David and I formed an alliance.

5:46His continent and my continent would work together to defeat the other three players. Well, soon after I formed that alliance, I set up a different alliance with Bill. Bill and I, taking advantage of the fact that David trusted me, double-crossed him and wiped him out of the game. He was so hurt by this that he almost fired me. It took a week before things got back to normal. Because my problem was, I had forgotten that playing a game of diplomacy with my boss was more than playing a game of diplomacy with my boss. It was part of a larger arc. And because I abandoned the spirit of our longer arc, Even though I won the game, I lost something along the way.

6:38The challenge that adherents to Ayn Rand have, who are misreading or exaggerating her work, is that they get confused about self-interest and they get confused about selfishness. because the fact is that if you can rescue a kid, even though it's going to cost you a$400 pair of brand new leather shoes, you should probably rescue the kid because we measure more than what happens right now and we measure more than how much does it cost. That the story we tell ourselves may mean that what's in our self-interest is to do things that look altruistic. That when we act in the spirit of the game, we get to be part of a culture.

7:32And being part of a culture may mean, usually means, sacrificing short-term monetary benefits in exchange for making things better. So should you be required to give money to help kids in your neighborhood get educated in a public school? Well, they're not your kids. Why should you be required? Wouldn't you end up with more money if you just got to keep it? Sure, yes, you'd have more money in the short run, but you'd end up living in a world filled with uneducated people. in the long run, you come out ahead. Maybe not ahead in cash, but you come out ahead in joy. You come out ahead in well-being.

8:23The problem with unrestrained corporatism was understood all the way back to Adam Smith, one of the pioneers of writing about capitalism. There are all sorts of problems with capitalism that require somebody to figure out what the rules are. Here are a couple. One of them is addiction. Should a company be able to make and sell an item that addicts people to it so that they have no choice, pretty much, but to come back and buy more of it, even if this act causes them to suffer? Should heroin be legal? If it's legal, should it be legal to market to 12-year-olds? If it's legal, should it be legal to give it away for free to get people addicted to it, so they'll have to come back and buy more.

9:14The next problem, ironically called monopoly, is the idea that once someone controls most of the board, then their life for the rest of the people gets more difficult. That person who has a monopoly in the short run will be able to extract all sorts of unfair rents, and people will have little choice but to live with that. I say ironically because monopoly was originally invented, actually invented, by a woman named Lizzie Meiji who built it with two sets of rules. Her hope was that when people saw how horrible it was to be under a monopolist, they would embrace the other set of rules, which were actually built around restraint on someone controlling the entire game.

10:09A group of Quakers in Atlantic City loved the game and customized it with the names of the streets in their town. And soon thereafter, it was stolen by a guy named Charles Darrow, who took credit for the whole thing, and licensed it to Parker Brothers. Several years later, Parker Brothers, seeing Lizzie's original patent, bought it from her for$500 and no royalties. Of course, the Monopoly game is the one that became popular because it's fun to torture your brothers and your sisters. The next idea, the next defect in unrestrained corporatism are externalities. Is it okay for a company to dump its waste in the ocean, even if the act of dumping that waste is going to kill millions of fish?

11:02Is that okay? Well, in the short run, it's the best selfish behavior. It feels altruistic to unilaterally decide to spend extra money to design something so that you don't have to dump your stuff in the ocean. Is it okay for a company to put its smoke into the air, causing a change in the environment? Because the air is owned by everyone. If it's not okay to do that, are we going to count on them to understand the long-term benefits? And what about the acts of each person in that system? Because if it's a public company and the stock market doesn't get the joke, then all of the employees of the public company get punished when that public company acts in its long-term interest because it is part of the culture.

11:55What about resource development? Plenty of people look at the Internet and say, this is the triumph of what happens when the government doesn't do things. Except the government built the Internet. That's why it even exists. That the roads that we count on, the fact that I can pick up the telephone, how did that telephone get connected to somebody over there? That there are shared resource developments made by associations, by committees, by governments that don't make sense for any individual monopolist or any individual corporation to build and all of us benefit from them. The idea of cheating.

12:38It is in your short-term selfish interest to market a product that you say, for example, is organic and charge extra for it, but then behind the scenes run around and fill it with junk. Who's to stop you from doing that? Where does the self-regulation kick in? How would it ever work? And then the last one, which I already alluded to, is this idea of measurement challenges. Money isn't always, in fact, isn't usually the best way to measure someone or an organization's contribution to the culture. Not just the vivid example of spending your time rescuing kids, spending your time being a social worker versus spending your time day trading stocks.

13:26It goes to who's contributing to the culture in what way. So a musician or an artist or a writer who creates something that changes our conversation but doesn't get paid for it, do we want that to happen? Or do we want to live in a culture where the only thing that you get rewarded for in any way is something that you can get paid for? A lot of this notion of selfishness comes from misunderstanding, misunderstanding time horizons. Selfish in the short run, selfish in the long run. We think about a soldier who's with his unit, and a hand grenade lands on the ground, and it's going to kill several people.

14:08So he throws himself on it, sacrificing his life. Is that altruistic? Or did he make the selfish decision that it was better to die today than to live with the knowledge for the rest of his life that he stood by while his peers died when he could have stopped it? All of this is about the story we tell ourselves. And the story we tell ourselves about our role, our opportunity, and our obligation informs what's in our self-interest. Richard Dawkins wrote a book, and part of it has been misunderstood by millions of people who never bothered to read the book. The title of the book is The Selfish Gene.

14:53and if you mispronounce the selfish gene just as if you mispronounce the name of the band Foo Fighters there was once when we did Saturday Night Live and Christopher Walken was the host amazing and he comes up and he's like he said he asked us if the accent was on Foo or Fighters and we know who he is like of course we know how he speaks and we said uh the accent is on Fighters actually ladies and gentlemen Foo Fighters is that you think the book is about the gene for being selfish. It's not about that at all. Genes don't make us selfish. In fact, it's quite likely, we can see this in honeybees and ants and in humans, that genes make us cultural, that genes make us connected, that genes keep us from being selfish.

15:46No, the title of Dawkins' book implies the fact that each gene, if we were going to personify it, acts in a selfish way for that gene. That that gene's job is to figure out how to have grandchildren. Because if it figures out how to have grandchildren, it will get passed on. But it doesn't make us selfish. In fact, it's all about how does it make us connected. Consider the case of a crab spider. The crab spider will have some babies. Then she'll give those babies the unfertilized eggs to eat. And then after they've eaten them, they'll eat the mother. Is that selfish? Well, the gene that's responsible for this obviously has been passed on.

16:34This altruism on the part of the mother works because it ensures that the next generation has a chance to move forward. It's easy to be glib about selfishness. It's easy to say things like, everything the government does, it screws up. But as Dan Carlin points out in his great hardcore history episode about Genghis Khan, And then, at night, he gets on his horse and he rides away. When there is no government, when it's truly the libertarian world that some would like to live in, It's very easy for someone who amasses power to exploit their desire for short-term self-interest in ways that hurt everyone else.

17:25There are probably more people on earth related to Genghis Khan than anybody else because he raped so many women. He created a series of bargains with the warriors in the steppes of Mongolia. that enabled each of them to get the assets and resources they needed to invade other cities. What they would do is show up on horseback, surround the walled town, and offer a deal. And the deal was, let us in, we will loot your stuff, but then we will leave you alone. If you don't let us in, we're going to stay here, assault your city, take everything, and kill everyone. And then regardless of what the town elders decided, they looted the town and killed just about everyone, taking the remaining people as prisoners.

18:23The point of the story is that once someone in an environment like that amasses a little power, if they don't care about the culture or the long term, they can use that power to amass more power. This is one reason why the net neutrality argument is so problematic for people who would prefer that the government not do anything. Because what net neutrality argues for is a level playing field that will allow people to come out of nowhere with offerings that help others without being blocked by the dominant forces. that corporatism often flies in the face of capitalism, which often flies in the face of knitting together a mutually beneficial culture.

19:16And so in the spirit of the game, we have to decide what the game is. We, the players in the game, have to decide what we're going to do when someone doesn't honor a deal, what we're going to do when someone just plays for the short run, What we're going to do when monopolies start ignoring the effects of their actions. So back to this idea of the spirit of the game. What we have a chance to do when we're playing diplomacy or trivial pursuit or ultimate frisbee, what we have a chance to do when we're lobbying Congress or voting, what we have a chance to do when we talk to one another is decide what it means when we say people like us do things like this.

20:05If we spread the Ayn Randian idea that what people like us do is take and take and take and it's everyone out for themselves. If we spread the idea that minimum wage makes no sense, you should pay as little as possible and that people who want to get paid more should figure it out, well, then that's what's going to happen because that's going to be the rules of the game. But if there are no rules, there is no game. And so we get to decide what the rules are. And the rules could easily be, you know what? That one-minute time frame that the day trader loves isn't the one minute I want to live inside.

20:48We'd like there to be a 30-year time frame or a 300-year time frame. We'd like to build a culture where, yeah, there's a minimum wage. Because when there's a minimum wage and people get paid more, in the short run they have more to spend, which benefits the economy. But in the long run, they have more to invest. They can find more dignity. They can live a safer, healthier life. They can educate one another. that, yes, we want companies to not dump stuff in the ocean and the air. And yes, we want companies to be honest about what's inside their stuff. That the externalities that are created by corporatism and capitalism affect all of us.

21:34There's no such thing as side effects. There's only effects. And if we build a culture where the only people who get rewarded are the people who embrace the spirit of the game, then we're going to end up with more happiness, more satisfaction, more joy, happier kids, and a better place to live for the long run. That to say that altruism is evil is to fall into a trap of syllogism, a syllogism that says, this happened, therefore it will always happen. So no, I'm not arguing for inefficiency. I'm arguing exactly the opposite. That culture creates efficiency by establishing a game where we can be the best version of ourselves.

22:22And that game, when we play in the spirit of that game, is about the fact that we'll get something, but so will other people. And this cycle of contribution, as opposed to this cycle of misunderstood semantics, and misunderstood time frames means that we're all in agreement. We're in agreement that the very best way to figure out what people want is to figure out how you can help get what you want by helping them get what they want. And maybe what you want is to be part of a culture that's productive. Maybe what you want is to not have to excuse side effects, but instead to embrace effects, that what each of us is capable of doing in an economy that is more connected than any economy anyone has ever imagined in history is to build a world where the spirit of the game says that the best thing you can do is call your own fowls.

23:26But if you don't call your own fowls, the culture is going to make it really clear that you're not one of us. 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 usual, we got some great questions this time. If you've got a question about the last episode, please visit akimbo.link, A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button.

24:15I got two questions that don't sound like they're related, but they are, so I thought I'd try to answer them in one piece woven together. Here's the first one. Hi, Seth. This is Jethro in Alaska. I'm in education. And as I try to move people to change education, I get pushback sometimes that feels like people think that I'm saying that because we need to change, all their previous work is awful. That's certainly not what I'm saying, but we do need to change and be better no matter what state we're in. Even if we're fantastic, we can always get better. How do I talk to them about change and invite them to change without making it sound like I'm denigrating all their previous hard and valuable work?

25:01And the second one. Hey, Seth, it's Stephen from Belfont, Pennsylvania. I've taken your advice about blogging, and I totally see the value in doing it. I've gone 43 days in a row so far. I don't really have an end game except to continue shipping creatively. So my question, what can you say about creative practices that might not have a defined final destination? Does it make sense to apply critical path methodology to those ongoing creative efforts? Thanks for showing up to work every day, Seth. Like many, many others, I'm grateful. Both of you are talking about something that I refer to as design thinking.

25:50And I think design thinking is incredibly powerful and often overlooked. It comes down to the simple question. This work I'm doing, what's it for? An educator who's trying to work with a classroom of kids. Why? What's it for? A blogger who's blogging every day. Why? What's it for? this hour I'm going to spend cleaning my inbox or going to a meeting, what's it for? Is the what's it for I'm trying to accomplish best met by the work I'm about to do? So if I'm dealing with some teachers, hardworking teachers, teachers who have their heart in the right place, who've shown up and shown up and shown up to do this work, this generous, important work.

26:40I asked them, well, what's it for? Is it to have your kids get a good grade on a standardized exam? Why? What's that for? Is it to get them into college? Why? What's that for? Is it to make their parents happy, the administrators happy? Is it to get through the day without someone throwing a chair through a window? These actions we're taking, the sending the kid to the principal's office, to giving the student an A. What's it for? If we can have a conversation about what's it for, if we can get aligned about what's it for, it's entirely likely that hard working, insightful people will come to similar conclusions about what to do next.

27:22And that doesn't require admitting that the old work was bad, or even acknowledging or deciding that it was bad. The old work might have been fine, but for a different, what's it for? If it turns out that the purpose of school in the 1960s or 70s was to create compliant factory workers because we had a shortage of them, then yeah, that was the right work to do if that's what you wanted to get out of it. But if our goal going forward is to create autonomous, creative, independent, hardworking, dignified, generous, connected idea workers, then maybe because the what's it for has changed, what we're going to do all day has changed.

28:13And when I think about blogging every day, I love the idea of being able to do a creative endeavor without getting hung up on what's the prize. Give, give, give, get. What do I get? What do I get? It might just be that the what's it for is to stretch a muscle, that the what's it for is to create a generous community because you can without regard for the prize at the end. Because if we take that thinking long enough, the prize at the end is we get a nicer tombstone on our grave. Along the way, we do lots of things that aren't focused on the end. It might simply be that the what's it for is to say, I can do good work, I can share good work.

29:00I can make this culture one that I am glad to be living in. And if we can agree on the what's it for, then of course we can use a critical path method because it gets to the heart of why we did it in the first place. That if all we're doing is dillying or dallying, or even, dare I say, dilly-dallying, then we don't need to optimize anything. We don't need to worry about thrashing or shipping because we're dilly-dallying. If that's the what's it for, please, by all means, dilly-dally some more. But if you've got a different what's it for, then the critical path will present itself. So there you go.

29:44I'll try to get to more questions next episode. Thanks for listening. Go make a ruckus.