PRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. JACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 219 of Greater Than Code. I’m Jacob Stoebel and I’m here with my co-host, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Jacob and I’m here with my co-host, Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Thank you very much, Rein. I’m here with our guest today, Mando Escamilla. Mando is a longtime friend of the podcast and the guy who’s been in tech for a longtime also. Yeah, so we’re happy to have him on the show today. MANDO: Thanks, Damien. I didn’t realize that that mini bio was going to make me sound so old, but truth is truth when you get into truth. Thanks for having me. I’m having a little bit of a geek out moment right now being on this podcast that I’ve listened to for, what was it now, 219 episodes? One of the things that this podcast has helped me with over the years is understanding how the thoughts and the feelings and the place in our community that I feel that I am. This podcast has talked about those kinds of issues and thoughts and things over and over and over again in a way that's helped me process those thoughts and feelings with everything that's been going on for the last year or so, but especially in the past two or three weeks. As we're recording this, now it's January 15th of 2021, I haven't checked the news in 30 minutes, but I don't think there's been an attempted coup today. [chuckles] But who knows, right? REIN: The day is young. MANDO: Yeah, there's a lot of daylight left, I guess. It’s been really hard. This past year has been really hard and the past couple of weeks have been really hard for me. I think people sometimes ask this question without expecting a real honest, true answer, but I'd like, if y'all don't mind, a really honest and straight answer from y'all when I ask how are y'all doing? DAMIEN: That is a wonderful question. This is a great place to, as you mentioned, dig into how things are affecting us because there's a lot hand wave going on and I really want to dig into that, but you know this podcast and so, the first thing we need to do is ask you, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? MANDO: [laughs] So I was trying to avoid having to answer that question by distracting you all. I appreciate you calling me out on it, man. That's just solid podcasting right there. My superpower, if I have one, is my willingness to talk about anything personal with anyone else. [laughs] The way that I got it, I think is probably how most people who end up in this place get it. You end up getting forced into it by someone through some sort of a traumatic experience. For me, it was when I was going through my divorce and I was just a wreck and my buddy, Will, took me out to dinner. I think actually, at the time, I may have been staying with him. I think I hadn't moved out of the house for a little bit. So we went out to dinner to this place here in Austin called Kerbey Lane, which is a 24-hour diner, and we went there because it was like 2:00 in the morning and it was the only place open that wasn't fast-food. We're at this restaurant waiting to get seated. The restaurant itself is like a converted old house and we go in the front door, which was the old front door to the house and so you stand in this foyer sitting room kind of situation while you're waiting to get seated. I was all messed up and my buddy, Will, is trying to get me to talk. He's trying to get just something out of me and I'm just being evasive and not giving him what he wanted, which what he wanted was for me to talk. He was doing it for me and I didn't want to, and I didn't want to, and he's pushing and he's pushing and he's been pushing all night, but he kept going while we're sitting there with like, I don't know, two or three other parties. There's almost ten people standing around us in this tiny little enclosed area and he's like, “Come on, man. Just tell me, just talk to me.” Like, “What's going on? What are you feeling?” I'm like, “Dude, not right now, especially like, I didn't want to tell you before when it was just you and me, I don't want to tell you now,” and he keeps pushing, keeps pushing and I felt something. I actually felt like a physical sensation in my head and I don't know if that's where the phrase “he snapped” comes from or not, but I felt like a kick in my head and I lost it. I started just yelling at him. Like, “You want to know how I feel? You want –?” and in the middle of this restaurant, I'm yelling at him almost at the top of my lungs about how my wife doesn't love me, how I'm afraid my kids are going to hate me, how I ruined their lives; I laid it out for 5 minutes. To my buddy’s credit, he just kind of sat there, he didn't try to shush me and he just to kind of sat there and was like, “All right, well, now we can get somewhere.” I've had to relearn this lesson a little bit because since then, when people would ask me how I was doing, I tell them like, for real tell them. [laughter] Turns out, there aren't a lot of people who are ready. REIN: Care? MANDO: Yeah. Well, and care. Care or are ready for a 5-minute listening ordeal. They're not emotionally prepared for that amount of work that you're putting on them. I've tried to back down on that a little bit, but as y'all can see, I don't do such a good job all the time. REIN: Okay. So first of all, remember that you asked for this. [laughter] MANDO: That’s right. That’s right. DAMIEN: I can certainly relate. I actually had this conversation just yesterday where I told an acquaintance of mine when people ask me – for some reason, I'm an honest person. I don't know why; I don't know where that came from. I feel the need to be honest. So when the waiter comes up and asks, “How are you doing?” I stop and think, and then I tell them, “I'm great,” which is almost always true. MANDO: That's fantastic, man. [laughs] I'm not, which makes it hard to [laughs] It can be a little more emotional burden leaning on people. Circling back a little bit. Damien, would you say that you're doing great right now? DAMIEN: Oh, I am multitudes. [laughs] MANDO: That’s right. DAMIEN: I wanted to start with you, though. [chuckles] MANDO: With me? Oh, okay. DAMIEN: How are you doing with the hand wave with what's going on? MANDO: Yeah. Not great for sure. Between the pandemic, the government response, the public response, the insurrection day last week, and everything that's happened since then, my personal faith in humanity, not only is it at an all-time low, but it's lower than I would have ever thought possible. Like way below the bottom of what 2019 Mando thought we'd be at. It's tough because I've always been a pretty positive person, a pretty assume the best intentions of the people kind of person, pretty trusting, kind of open and caring and loving person and this year has gotten me shook and it's got me questioning if that's a way I can continue to live my life moving forward. I still don't know where I'm going to come out on it, to be honest. So yeah, not great [laughs] is how I'm doing. DAMIEN: Yeah. MANDO: Is this stuff hitting y'all the same way? Am I seeing things in a different way from y'all? DAMIEN: I can definitely share the being shook, the meeting to re-examine the foundations of—and I feel like I'm stating it in a broader and scarier sense, but being re-examined, the foundations of humanity, the nature of people, the nature of societies, and this is honestly something that's been happening for me for a very long time. I was trained as a hypnotist in 2015 and the thing you learn as a hypnotist is that people are not rational and logical. They don't do things because, which is something I knew already because before I was a hypnotist, I was a professional gambler. That led me to a lot of studying of [laughter] the human psychology. You read up about why people make decisions they make and how they make the decisions they make. It's not what I was taught growing up. It's not like this happens so, somebody did this. It's not like oh, they thought this so they did that. It's really mostly the opposite; they did that and they thought how to do it otherwise. But the really tricky part of this – and this is a journey that I've been on since at least 2008. The really tricky part of this is that I learned all this and I learned it from a scientific standpoint, some logical standpoints, and reasonable standpoints, and several different directions and it never actually impacted how I view the world and how I behave about it. Because like I said, reason and logic does not change action and behavior. In fact, using reason and logic, it didn't impact me. So this year has been very different as in I'm much more appreciative of my own need for how I can change, how I am and my behavior, and how other people's behavior is influenced and created and the hand wave stuff that's going on has been a big part of that. MANDO: Interesting. That's a really interesting perspective because it I had not thought of it in those terms. When you're talking about rationality versus non-rationality of decision-making or behaviors, my initial knee jerk reaction to that was if we're not rational actors, which we aren't, then the actions that we take and the things that we do must reflect who we are on the inside. Like the basis or basis, this is the right word. But like the core of our beliefs and our feelings. I think about the idea of wearing a mask right now through the pandemic. There are studies that show that wearing a mask helps. There are older, smaller studies that show that wearing a mask might not be as effective as they say. But ultimately, in most places you have a choice. There's an actual decision that needs to be made: am I going to wear a mask, or am I not going to wear a mask? And you see individuals who are yelling at the checkout lady at Walgreens because they don't want to wear a mask and make this a big federal case about how their freedoms are being infringed on or whatever. It's like, well, you could just. You could just wear it even if you don't believe it's doing any good. Even if you don't agree. If you feel like you've—quotey fingers—“done your research” and you saw a couple of Alex Jones’ podcasts or whatever and it's like the mask is going to give you throat cancer or whatever. You could just wear it on the off chance that maybe it's going to do some good or at least it's not going to hurt. But it just seems like – and that's what I mean by the rational versus the non-rational. You could think through, you could actually have this thought process that you go through and then decide whether or not to do it or not. But it seems as though so many people, they're not following that rational process and the actions that they're taking have negative impact on society at large and that's the thing that I don't know how to grapple with and how to deal with. DAMIEN: Yeah. Rationality does not rule the universe, rationality does not rule humans, not how humans act and realizing that and literally, I learned this scientifically and I spent 5 years on the internet trying to explain it to people. [laughs] MANDO: Yeah, yeah! DAMIEN: That doesn’t work! [laughs] MANDO: No! DAMIEN: So why try doing it? [laughs] MANDO: Right, right. DAMIEN: Right? It's really having the ground fall out from underneath me and go, “Okay, I need to move about the world in a different way. See the world in a different way if I’m to be affective and happy.” I wake up, I feel lost a lot. Sometimes I just wander the streets and go, “What the hell?” MANDO: That might be the best way to describe how I've been feeling, I don't know, since April, May. It's been hard to put a finger on it because it's not just sad. There is a part of me that sad and I've gone through it all. Like I've been super in touch with my anger. I've been sad. I've been depressed. I've been hungry. I put on [laughs] like 20 pounds since all this has started. But lost is really… Thank you, man. I hadn't been able to wrap my head around it in that way, but lost and unmoored. The things that I thought I knew, I don't know. The assumptions and thoughts and feelings that I had about people in my life and people in my spheres, it was like, “Oh, I didn't know that you were the kind of person who would yell at the lady in Target because you didn't want to wear a mask.” Wow. That's really sad and lost. DAMIEN: Yeah. So I'll share with you what I'm doing to be less lost. [laughs] Is there a word for that? I’m lost to find myself. That's a silly expression anyway, to sort of get some mooring and some connections how I can interact with reality now knowing that reality is not what I thought it was. Not what I learned in school with what came from Plato, Copernicus, and Descartes. Good lord, Descartes. So here are some of my new anchors and these come from the things you were talking about from emotion, from the core. I don't like to say base because there's a lot of in this culture that there's a hierarchy of what's valuable, important and intellectuality and rationality is on top of the hierarchy so, base reinforces that sort of thing. But this is core. This goes to much more of what we are as human and the biggest thing for me is narrative. Narrative, and story and then along with those: emotion, song, rhyme, repetition, and affiliation. These are the things that drive humans and humanity and so, these are the things you have to start with, if you going to understand hand wave, what’s going on. MANDO: Is this where we start talking about Ted Lasso? If we're talking about the narrative [laughs] because man, that show has helped me quite a bit. JACOB: I have not started that series, though I am interested. But do you want to fill in for people who aren’t familiar what that show is all about? MANDO: Yeah, sure. So the titular character, Ted Lasso, he is an American college football coach who has gotten some success coaching a no name, second tier, looks like a division three football team and they go from winning nothing to winning the championship in one year, all because of this coach, Ted Lasso. He gets picked up and hired by this English Premier League soccer team to come over there and coach – DAMIEN: Premier League being the top league and the top sport in England. MANDO: In England, which I didn't know until I watched the show. I don't keep track of football and so I didn't know what Premier League, or Championship League, or any of that stuff was. For those might be looking to watch this show, don't feel like you have to know soccer to enjoy it because I didn't and I super did. So he goes over there and he knows nothing about soccer. He goes to his assistant coach; his assistant coach is reading whatever the equivalent of Soccer for Dummies is on the plane as they're flying over to England. But the thing about the show that has really, I don't know, carried me through some stuff if on the first pass, the main character, Ted Lasso the coach, he is, I don't know, Rein unyielding the optimistic. Is that a good way to describe how he is? REIN: Yeah. MANDO: No matter what, right. No matter what situation, he remains not only optimistic, but upbeat and positive. The first time I watched the series, that was the thing. If you watch the series and afterwards, you're like, “Man, all right, I'm going to be like this guy.” This is how I want to model my life. I'm tired. I'm tired of being in the way that I am. If he can do it, I can do it. All of that stuff and that lasts for about 30 minutes and then he ended up Twitter or something and you're like, “Oh. Nope, never mind. [laughs] This is impossible.” So I watched it again. Just started the series over again just to get another hit. Like, “If I watch it again, maybe I'll get back to that same spot,” and then you start seeing more of the character and you start seeing how he plays with the other characters. You start to pick up on little things that you didn't pick up the first time through; there's little clues that they leave. Jake, if you're going to watch it, I don't want to spoil it for you buddy. But there's little clues that they leave along some of the episodes to show you that he's not doing okay. He's trying his best to be okay, but it's not always like that and so, you start peel away more and more from the show. I don't know, man. It's really, really well done TV, which in and of itself is just kind of a pleasure to watch. It's always good to just see high-quality stuff, but then to have it be not wholesome—that's not the right word. Delightful, maybe. I don't know, it makes you feel good when you're watching it. Uplifting in a weird way. JACOB: I definitely resonate with that. Something that I had realized, even back when this started last spring, was I had suddenly a really high desire to find stories, whether that's in TV, or books, or video games. Stories that were just incredibly engrossing and just being able to get lost in a world for as long as possible. Something I've also been thinking about is there's so much going on. Waving my hands, of course. I find myself feeling guilty for wanting to step out of this world as much as possible and on one hand, there's merits to being like, “Hey, we actually have to pay attention and [chuckles] use what agency I have.” On the other hand, I'm wondering are we all being a little too hard on ourselves and if so, why? MANDO: Yeah. I think about that quite a bit as well. For me, I know that, as I've sat with that for a while, the place that I've gotten is that I also at times feel like there isn't much that I can do to affect change in the larger scheme of things and the things that I can do, that I know of, I'm doing already. I feel as though that's not enough and the least I can do is stay abreast of what's happening even though, all it does is make me feel bad. [laughs] I don't know if it's a self-destructive kind of thing where you're saying you feel guilty for stepping out of it. I don't know if it's because I feel guilty that I'm not doing more. So I want to keep punching myself down a little bit by constantly scrolling through Twitter, or not blocking or muting the maggot people on my Facebook feed. Every morning, [chuckles] I'll open it up and look at it and be like, “Ugh.” I could just not. I could just not open it, or I could just block them, or I could just unfriend them, or I could mute them. I have so many options, but it's almost as though I need to keep getting enraged by it, even though I don't do anything about it. I need to stay in touch with those feelings because I'm afraid that if I don't, it's admitting that it's okay and it's not. REIN: The thing I really like about Ted Lasso is that it would have been really easy to write that character in a very lazy way where Ted Lasso is a superhero, optimism is a superpower, and nothing bad happens to him. In the first episode or two, they set up that expectation that that's how the show is going to be, but like Mando was talking about, they subvert it and it turns out that he is a deeply flawed human being and damaged, and that optimism is his coping mechanism. MANDO: Yeah. It's amazing to see. It took me a couple of times watching it through to see the impact that that has on the other characters. Damien, how you were saying before. You have this rational view, or this idea that the world should be this rational way and people should be these rational actors within it. Then you see this guy who no matter what you do to him, stays painfully optimistic and it takes a while for these characters to realize, Rein, like you were saying that he is in fact, really messed up in certain areas and he gets affected deeply by things and this is just how he tries to press to cope with it, because he's irrational in a different way [laughs] than you initially think. Jacob, you said that you had found yourself looking for other narratives to get lost in. Ted Lasso was mine for a while. Do you have any others that the folks that are listening that if they're looking for something to distract themselves for a while? JACOB: I can't necessarily say that I have anything that you likely haven't heard of. I started the Marvel cinematic universe, finally. That was something that I had missed and then just decided well, I missed it so no point in catching up, but then we got a Disney+ subscription and I'm like, “You know what, I'm going to go for it.” I get on our exercise bike, I use MCU as an incentive to pair with doing something that's good for my body and that's what I've been doing the last several weeks. Mandalorian, I've watched. Both seasons. I don't know that I can necessarily name anything incredibly profound, but it's almost like it doesn't matter. MANDO: It doesn’t. JACOB: It’s like anything that’s written halfway good, is just about world-building and you can sort of imagine the world that you've been dropped into and just expand infinitely. Oh, there's a book, The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow. It's just terrific book. I don't even know how to describe what it's about, but it's basically what if 10,000 books all smooshed together and they were all within the same universe. MANDO: I guess, maybe a broader question. This is going back to what Damien was trying to get at earlier, before I hijacked the conversation about Ted Lasso. What other things have y'all been doing to either try to get unlost or to distract yourself from what's going on, or to act as some self-care, self-soothing, whatever it is, however you've been managing your way through the past almost a year now? DAMIEN: I wasn't going to admit it, but I am watching the entirety of the MCU. I made the mistake of including the TV shows. MANDO: Oh, boy. DAMIEN: The ones I can get ahold of. That is a lot of video entertainment, but most of it is really good and it's a great distraction. Just listening to you today, Mando, I become more aware of how much I've been feeling. Last night alone, I spent a good chunk of yesterday evening on the couch, vegging out, not even watching TV. I think I had some reality TV on because I don’t know. MANDO: [inaudible], right. DAMIEN: But I'm done with the band. I'm not doing anything. I'm just not doing things and realizing that that's a result of things I'm feeling because I'm not normally able to pinpoint or recognize my feelings, but yeah. So one of the things, narratives are great, both as a coping mechanism and as a distraction, but they're also super valuable as an agent of understanding and change. MANDO: Yeah. DAMIEN: If you want to understand the actions people take, understand the narratives that they believe in, the narratives that they see, and if you want to change how you react to things, change your narrative. I'm a huge fan of meta-narrative. I'm super excited about WandaVision. Although, now it’s going to take me a while to get to it [laughs] because understanding narrative, though is so important to me and knowing that I can understand people and what they want to do by understanding that the narrative and I can change what people are going to do by changing their narrative and that includes myself and really, start with myself. MANDO: Yeah. I want to go back to something that you said just a little bit earlier and you mentioned it offhandedly that you oftentimes, have a hard time connecting with your emotions. What does that feel like to you? Is it just like a numbness or what is –? As someone who is very connected to their emotions, [laughs] I'm super curious what this is like. DAMIEN: It's a lack of awareness. It's like asking someone who is colorblind, what does red look like? MANDO: Got you. DAMIEN: Maybe that's not how colorblindness works, I don't know. But where I see it is when I look back and go, “Huh, that wasn't a nice thing to say. Why did I say that?” [chuckles] Or, “Huh, why was I vegged out on the couch not doing anything fun, or productive, or useful for 4 hours? Oh, I was feeling something!” MANDO: I get ya. I get ya. It's been very difficult for me because one of the ways, if y'all can't tell yet, that I process and deal with my emotions is by talking with other people about it. My close friends know in a pre-COVID world when they'd get a text message at 4:45 in the afternoon on a Tuesday saying, “Hey, want to go get a happy hour, grab a beer?” [laughs] It was like, “Oh, Mando needs to talk about something.” [laughs] So being in a world where the only people I have to really engage with and talk through stuff with are the two dogs that I’ve got. It's been tough and certainly, you don't have whatever that outlet is, whatever that connection is to help you to identify these things and work through them. Because then otherwise, you end up realizing that it's 11:30 at night and there's half a gallon of ice cream that's empty and Netflix is asking me if you want to watch another episode of My 600-lb Life or whatever and you're like, “Ah, man, I really had to get some stuff though tonight and yet here I am.” But Jacob, how you were saying earlier, that's okay. If that's all you can do. I don’t know, there's a whole other segment of stuff that we can talk about with the Silicon Valley hustle mentality; you’ve always got to be grinding, you’ve always got to be killing it, you've always got to be productive and active and getting stuff done, and then feeling shame and remorse if you're not doing that. I know something that I’ve been dealing with recently is being okay with not being as productive as I used to be. So as someone who leads well, a very small team now, but a slightly larger team not too long ago, being okay with your team not being as productive, it happened and being willing to have the conversations with your folks when they snap at you in Slack or on a Zoom call or they miss stand-up or whatever. Obviously, the communication is required, is important, and needs to happen. But it's been hard for me to make that internal shift in my expectations, both in myself and people in all of my different spheres, friends that I had that text back and forth all day. Sometimes they drop off for a couple of days, you don't hear back from that and some days you just can't. Some days you literally can't, you don't have it in you to reply to a text message and that's okay. JACOB: There's something that you are getting done that and a lot. I wish more of us were getting it done, but hopefully, many of us are doing this and we're not acknowledging it. We're not leaving our house and that's an active thing we are doing and it is contributing to our community. As a person who is married to an asthmatic who has asthma, I am incredibly – I want to acknowledge that that is a sacrifice for a lot of people, especially extroverted people, and that is a very tangible contribution. So I feel like when any of us are feeling like wow, I'm not getting anything done. wow, like wasting my time. You're doing whatever it takes. You're doing what you need to do to not do this other thing, which is talking yourself into leaving the house and talking yourself in a sort of magical thinking about like, “Yeah, this will be fine, and go and do something reckless that contributes to spreading the virus. That's real stuff and I think we don't acknowledge that that doesn't come without costs. MANDO: Yeah, that’s a good point, man. It's a really good point. I was driving home yesterday from my friend's house. We have potted up so the only places that we go really, are to each other's houses; we work together at the same company and it's almost like a coworking environment. Took the exit off the freeway to come to the house, drove by the local bar, that I would have normally stopped, had a drink on my way home, and talked to my bar friends and caught up, and done that before I came home to finish my day. As I drove by, the parking lot was packed. I was so angry! I'm still angry because man, there was nothing more than I wanted to do than to pull over, stop, have a beer, and catch up, you know what I mean? But you can't. You can't and yeah, you're right. I know me personally, I don't give myself enough credit for not doing that, but just because yeah, it is hard. When I got home, I was like, it was harder than the last time that I drove past and saw it full like that. You know what I mean? I can feel that rationality slowly eroding day by day. It’s just tough. DAMIEN: I'll tell you a story and it's a story I just made up. MANDO: Even better. DAMIEN: And it's a story about a widget factory. They made the best widgets in the world. They're very proud of what they did as a team and they were in a small town, in a small country that was world famous for the widgets. All around the world, their widgets were known and highly regarded and their product. The whole company town, everybody knew each other and they built these amazing, amazing widgets. Then one day, there was a lightning storm. Lightning struck a tree outside of town and set it on fire, which set the rest of the forest on fire, which set the widget factory on fire, which set the village on fire and the whole widget factory and the town and they all burned to rubble and many people died. In the weeks that followed and in the months that followed, the people who had been building widgets for years, for decades, for generations building the world's greatest widgets, what they did instead of building widgets now, they dug out the rubble. They cared for the dead, they cared for the injured, they recovered what they could from their homes and their workplaces. They rebuilt their homes and their workplaces and they rebuilt their communities. They rebuilt everything that they had lost in this fire and they didn't make any widgets for weeks, for months. Nobody said, “You need to make more widgets.” Nobody said, “You've lost your role as the grand widget makers in the world because you're not making widgets.” And nobody said, “You need to do better because you're supposed to be making widgets. You're not making widgets.” I think that's where we are now. There's a fire raging. Who am I to be upset because I'm not writing my poem, making my widget, in the fire? My God, I’ve got to grab a hose and a bucket. Okay! Shut up and grab a bucket or at least get out of the building of straw. [laughs] MANDO: Yeah. It's like what Jacob was saying earlier. Sitting at home and watching Ted Lasso and not going out to the bar and not going out to dinner, it feels like you're just sitting there watching TV, but you are actually grabbing a hose and a bucket. That's good, man. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. DAMIEN: Works so much better than the rational reason explanation of how to do it and why, huh? MANDO: Oh yeah, for sure. I guess, the difficulty lies in living in a world where not everyone agrees that there's a fire raging. [chuckles] DAMIEN: Yeah, they’ve got a very different story. MANDO: Yeah, that makes it tough. The other thing that's been helping me, this week especially, is the sea shanty TikTok, which I'm sure has pervaded or seeped in to everyone here. But I don’t know what it is about it. It's not just catchy. There's something, I don't know if it's the video along with it and seeing the people with the smiles on their faces, really getting into it and doing their thing. But oh man, that is, I say this word too much, but it is delightful. It’s been really nice. DAMIEN: Yeah. It throws me how I will listen to a 45-second clip over and over and over. [laughs] MANDO: Yes! Yes! [laughs] I'm glad that they don't have individual counters; it's like 3 million views, 240 views of yours. [laughter] Because man, yeah, I'll sit there and watch it four times in a row and then do something else and then see it come up on like a tweet 5 minutes later and be like, “Ooh, I’ve got to watch it again!” DAMIEN: Right?! MANDO: Like I can’t just roll past it. [laughter] It's like you’ve got to get that Wellerman fix again. I don't know what it is, but yeah. DAMIEN: I’m going to try and guess because I made a list. Remember, I said earlier talking about re-mooring ourselves in this world that isn't Cartesian or platonic and I wrote this down because it's going to be important part of my view of the universe now. I wrote down, I tried to put an order, too. Narrative affiliation, rhyme, rhythm, salt, these are the things that drive humans and drive humanity. MANDO: One more time. It was narrative affiliation? DAMIEN: Narrative affiliation, rhyme, rhythm, and song and I'm still working on these categories so, you're seeing a work-in-progress here. That sea shanty, the Wellerman song? MANDO: Yeah. DAMIEN: It has a narrative. It was tough, I had to do a lot of reading to get the narrative out. [laughs] MANDO: As a research fan, Damien, easy, easy. This is a family podcast, man. I don't know. DAMIEN: There’s a sense of affiliation not just among the people performing it together, but among all of us, like you brought it up. I knew exactly what you were talking about. There's a worldwide affiliation that's happening there. Obviously, there's rhyme. There's an amazing rhythm. It is a song. Maybe those are the same category, I don't know. [laughs] MANDO: Yeah. Well, they might be just different facets at the same thing. But I don't know if this is part of the story that I project on it. But I hear one of these sea shanties, my brain immediately goes to two places. It goes to a place where there's 20 dudes on a boat at oars rowing and singing the song to keep them paid and then it also goes to an old-timey pub where a bunch of Ren Fair cats are sitting there drinking with their giant flagons or whatever and singing these songs as they come into shore. One of those I don't want to be involved in at all, but another one of those scenes, I really, really, really, I want to be at a bar singing songs with my friends while drinking a beer. DAMIEN: I mean, I don't think that those worlds are too far apart. MANDO: Yeah. DAMIEN: I don't think the experience of whatever it is that whalers do. [laughs] Obviously, it's very different. It's very hard work being a sailor and a whaler, but the experience in the moments when everything is humming along and you're all singing together, I think they're astonishingly similar. MANDO: Yeah. You see what you will write, but I miss – I was sitting with some friends in Slack yesterday and I don’t know what it was, but we all started just listing out all the things that we missed and I would not have thought that going into the office and sitting in a meeting in a conference room with like 20 people, I would say that I missed that, but kind of miss it sometimes. I think it's just different kinds of views or projections into communities that you have that I don't have anymore. I miss tech meetups. I thought I was done [laughs] with the tech meetup world. It's like, I've eaten my fair share of free pizza on a Tuesday night, I'm good. But man, I miss sitting in a room with a bunch of nerds talking about Rails, or Java, or Kafka, or whatever. Yeah, we never sang a sea shanty while we were doing that stuff, [laughs] but I guess, we were – DAMIEN: Next time. MANDO: We had a shared narrative. We had a shared narrative, not so much rhythm or rhyme or song, but there are pieces there. But I get sea shanties pick-me-ups [laughs] for all those reasons, I guess. DAMIEN: Very, very advanced technology for human pick-me-ups. MANDO: [laughs] For sure. For sure. I guess, the other thing that when I remember to do it, it really helps, but I don't remember super often and I wish I could is a practice of gratitude for the communities that I do have. I'm super grateful to be here talking to you all about this stuff and working through with y'all. Super grateful for one, for having a job and two, for being able to work. I work with my best friends. There's some interesting stresses that come from that; mostly around the idea that these are people that I love and I don't want to let them down and if I don't hit my own internal goals, or targets, or get us to where I think we should be by certain days or whatever. There's an extra personal investment in it that keeps me up at night sometimes. But the other side of that coin is that when you do hit on them and you are successful, these are your family that is able to reap the benefits of it. That's pretty amazing. I'm grateful for the friends that I have, that we keep in touch with on a daily basis on Slack, or messages, or Discord, or whatever. It’s certainly not the same as being able to go to their house and give them a hug. But other thing from Ted Lasso, there was a quote where they just lost this game and the coach, he says something to the effect of “It's hard and it hurts, but there's something that's worse in this world than being sad and it's being sad at being alone,” and he's like, “Y'all aren't alone. You’ve got the whole locker room.” That was his point. There are a lot of people who are alone and at times, when I personally feel alone, I try and remember that even though, I can't wrap my arms around them, I still have people. That makes me feel better. [laughs] Any listeners that we have that you find yourself feeling alone, go to the website greaterthancode.com. Everyone there has Facebook, Twitter, emails. You’re feeling alone? You're not. You’ve got a bunch of people here or at least one. I'll speak for everyone else on this episode so sorry, y'all. Yeah, do something. Send us an email, like DM, add on Twitter, whatever. You’ve got people. That's my Mister Rogers moment, I guess. Which was another thing. Mister Rogers’ wife passed away yesterday, that had me shook. I was like, “It must just be the rawness of everything that's going on just got me emotionally, super raw,” but anything like that. I feel like if 2 years ago, if Fred Rogers’ wife had passed away, I would have been like, “Oh man, that's a shame.” [chuckles] But yesterday I was like, “I need a minute.” It’s like, “Nobody talk because I can't deal with it right now. She's gone.” I don't even know her first name, but it just hit so hard. Anyone else magnify like that or is it just me? You could say it's just me, it's fine. [laughs] REIN: No. I mean, as a parent, I feel that. I don't know folks who don't have kids have any good reason that is for there's basically an animated spin-off of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. It's called Daniel Tiger. Just listening on what my 3-year-old is watching in the other room while I'm trying to work and they normalize all kinds of things like death, explaining what that, it just occurred to me. It would be just awful if my son lost somebody he loves to this virus, but if he lost someone he loved and he didn't even conceptually understand what death was, that would just be… MANDO: How do you – yeah. REIN: Exactly. So it's like, I am just so glad just teaching my son about some really heavy topics about what life is about and frankly, teaching me about how to talk to them about them. I have so much, so much love for Fred Rogers. More than I realized as a kid. [chuckles] MANDO: Yeah. Same. It wasn't until I was a grownup that you go back and watch a clip of a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood or whatever, and him staring at the camera and saying, “You're special just the way you are.” It hits different when you're 35 [laughs] than when you were 5. It's like, “Oh shit! I am! I am special just the way I am.” I guess, we knew it when we were 5 and then we forgot it over the next 30 years. I don't know. It hit different. REIN: So, you know the Mister Rogers song, What Do You Do with the Mad that You Feel? I think about that song a lot. MANDO: Yes. There's a little bit of a modernized version of that that I saw come by a week or two ago with, of all people, Elmo and Dave Matthews. There was a song that Dave Matthews sang with Elmo on Sesame Street, I saw a clip not too long ago, where they talk about feeling mad, not liking it, and then digging into it and seeing what the real emotions underneath that mad were, and how to deal with it. I don't know, a 60-second song or whatever and then at the end, I'm like, “All right, rewind, take some notes. This is good, I need to bring this up with my therapist next week.” This is good stuff right here. But a lot of those Fred Rogers songs, man, I didn't realize at the time how truthful and useful they were. He was tapped into something, for sure. The thing that's so impressive to me, how you were saying, Jacob was that I talk about these heavy things in a way that makes sense to a kid or at least approachable because these are super abstract or can be abstract concepts, feelings, and things. To talk about them in a way that kids can wrap their heads around and also feel included, not pushed away. It's universal enough that every kid can be like, “Oh yeah, I know what it feels like to be mad and I know what it feels like to not know what to do with that.” JACOB: Yeah. My son, he has questions. I feel like this question comes up once a week or something, it'd be like, “Why doesn't everything last forever?” Or yesterday, this was one is he said, “What's suffering?” and variations on that. I think like the message from Fred Rogers that I've always taken away is normalize and encourage the asking of questions because he doesn't know not to ask, or he doesn't know what's not okay to ask about, or what he ought to know and shouldn't ask. I just feel like that is like something we as adults have unlearned or learned that we shouldn't do is there are just so many things we're not supposed to ask about, or inquire about, interrogate. What it's taught me is what can I do, at work or in other spheres, to normalize the asking questions and the interrogating of really, anything that you happen to be thinking about and just how that can drive narrative and community and people just voicing, “This is what I don't know and I want to know about it.” REIN: There's another thing that Mister Rogers said that I also think about a lot, which is, “If it's mentionable, it’s manageable.” JACOB: Yes, exactly. MANDO: Oh, yeah. I need to kind of think on that a little bit because there's a lot there. REIN: Also, it gives you a way to get at managing things that are hard to manage by working backwards. Okay, if it's mentionable, it's manageable. How do I make it mentionable? Is that easier? MANDO: Yeah, yeah. The best places I've worked at have been in places or teams where universally, it was understood that it was okay to ask questions and you weren't going to get a RTFM or, “Oh, I can't believe you don't know that,” or any of those kinds of responses. It made for environments where if people accidentally did something that was pretty terrible, made some sort of mistake or drop the production database, whatever had caused some sort of production outage. Rather than trying to cover it up or make things worse, as soon as it happened, you'd get at here in Slack like, “Uh oh, I did something I need help,” and things became manageable because they were mentionable. In an environment where everything isn't mentionable, you end up with these edges in places where there are things that can't be managed, I guess REIN: Another thing I think about a lot and this gets back to some of the behaviors we're seeing that are so hard to understand is that no one does the wrong thing on purpose. So if you see someone who's doing the wrong thing and the question you ask is, “Why did you do the wrong thing?” You won't get an answer because it's nonsense. It's a nonsense question. The question to ask ism “Why did you think this was the right thing?” The question to ask about, for example, the people who stormed the Capitol was, “What was their worldview, their narrative, their moral structure like such that they thought doing that was right? DAMIEN: That was so good, I feel the need to repeat it. No one does the wrong thing on purpose. Asking somebody why did you do the wrong thing is never going to get you an answer, it's a nonsense question. Everybody's doing the right thing. Everybody's doing the best they can and what they think is right at the right time. So if you see somebody doing something that doesn't seem right to you, the question is, “Why did you think that was the right thing to do?” REIN: And you might think, “Well, what about compulsive behavior?” What compulsive behavior demonstrates is that our rational mind’s ability to decide what is right is very limited compared to if you consider the mind as a whole. Your mind, as a whole, is doing the thing it wants to do. Even if at some level, your rational mind knows it's a bad idea, you're still doing it because you, as a whole, think it's the right thing to do and your rational thought has relatively little say in some circumstances. MANDO: Now you're talking about the half gallon of ice cream. Even though I know I shouldn't eat the whole pint of ice cream in one sitting. Even though I know that it's not healthy for me. I know that I should be making better food choices or whatever. REIN: Right and so if I say, “Well, you did that because you want it to,” and you say, “Well, no, I didn't want to do it, but I did it anyway.” My response is, “We're using the word you in two different ways.” [laughter] MANDO: Yes. Yes. Yeah, there was definitely a you that really wanted to do that. REIN: We tend to think that our conscious thought is the totality of our identity and especially, a very small part. DAMIEN: And a big part and this is something I learned a long, long time ago, again, when studying as a hypnotist and it didn't affect how I did anything at all, because of course, I learned it rationally. But what has changed that is something that actually happened on this podcast, recording episode of this podcast, which when someone introduced me to the concept of the individual on the elephants. The rational mind, one of the views that Rein talked about, is that individual elephant and the whole you is the individual on the elephant. Yelling at the guy standing on top of the reins is not going to move the elephant. REIN: Yeah. DAMIEN: Those aren't going to be [inaudible]. REIN: So Ackoff says that it's something like 98% of cognition is not conscious and the way that you know this has to be true is that the brain is set up for massive parallel processing, but conscious thought is linear and sequential. MANDO: Yeah! DAMIEN: One of my favorite experiments there is they did an fMRI study that can determine people will make decisions hundreds of milliseconds before they know they're making the decisions. There's also a great and a totally different scientific way to do this. They did an experiment with two images. There might've been people in the images, I forget. But you ask the subject, “Which image do you prefer?” and the subject picks one. Then there's a bit of sleight of hand to switch the images and then we show them the image that they ostensibly picked, which isn't the one they picked and ask them why they picked that one and get great, logical answers. MANDO: Why did they picked the one that they're not showing them? DAMIEN: The one that they didn't pick. MANDO: Yeah. Wow, true. JACOB: I heard it on a podcast that this concept of a stimulus and then emotion like a lion jumps out in front of me and I get scared is backwards in my mind that it's like, I'm still trying to wrap my head around. That we look inward towards our body and we see oh, my heart is beating fast. What feelings do I want to make it out about, in a nutshell? We see our body doing something and then the emotion comes after that. DAMIEN: Yeah, there is no cognition without emotion and there is no emotion without the body. This is really, if you think about planning, if you think about like, “I'm going to make a decision, I'm a future-oriented person,” but everybody thinks in the future because we're human. I'm going to make a decision and which way am I going to go? Am I going to go on the right or left? And it really, what happens is I imagine those scenarios, I have an emotional reaction, which are sensations in my body that I then observe and that's how rationality, that's how cognition, that's how decision-making happens. REIN: And this is what I love about What Do You Do with the Mad that You Feel? because in a single sentence of single syllable words— they're all four letters or less—what he's getting across to children is that emotions arise in our minds and our conscious minds unbidden. We don't control that. What our rational or conscious mind allows us to do is decide what to do with them sometimes. MANDO: [laughs] Yeah. REIN: If you ask what differentiates humans from other animals, you can say language, you can say extensive tool use, you can say civilization, but this is, I think one of the things. It’s the ability for there to be a higher-level cognitive function that happens after emotional and affective responses, and that it's capable of mediating between those responses and action. That's the thing that makes us special. MANDO: My reflection is a kind of, I don't know, enlightenment, a light bulb that Damien helped splash on in my head, which is gave me a very specific name to how I'm feeling right now, which is lost. And it really is appropriate because there's a sadness in that. There's a fear in that. There's an anger in that. There's a despair. The picture I keep getting in my head is being a kid in a supermarket when you get separated from your parents and that panic moment where you realize that you're alone and lost, and are helpless and scared and you don't know what to do. That's a very, very good way to explain how I have been feeling recently and it's always helpful to put name to things. I don’t know how to fix it, but it's at least a better starting point than the before. So thank you, Damien. I very much appreciate that. DAMIEN: Oh, you're welcome and it is an honor to be able to do that for you and I'll piggyback on that. My big reflection comes from, [chuckles] since we’re in a mutual admiration club now. witnessing you, Mando. The big realization I had was the value of interrogating my feelings. It would be a good – I'm not going to commit to this. [laughter] But it would be a good practice for me to actually do that like, to just set a schedule and do that on a daily basis. What was I feeling? What am I feeling? Witnessing you do it and then doing it with you because that's how humans work [laughs] has been very valuable to me. So thank you for that. MANDO: Right on, man. Thanks for having me. It's been a dream to come on this podcast and be able to talk with y'all and especially be able to talk like the way we did; actually talk about how we're feeling and how we're coping, what we’re going to do about it, what to do if we can’t do. It doesn't really matter what we end up doing individually because knowing that we're all here together for each other, that's one of the few things that gives me hope for the future that I'm not as alone as I feel. So thank you all for that. It's been a blessing. REIN: I’m going to paraphrase Russell Ackoff here by saying that a community is not the sum of its members but the product of their relationships. MANDO: Ooh. Yeah. Who was that, Rein? REIN: Russell Ackoff. The original context was, “A system is not the sum of its components but the product of its interactions.” MANDO: Got you, okay. Yeah. I like yours a little better, but. [chuckles] REIN: Okay, good work, everyone. JACOB: This was great, yeah. DAMIEN: Awesome, yes. MANDO: Yeah. Thanks, guys.