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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:01.644)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Barry Lamb, professor of philosophy at UC Riverside and the founder, host, basically everything for Hi-Fi Nation. And we're here today to talk about his book, Fewer Rules, Better People, The Case for Discretion. Dr. Lamb, wonderful to have you on today.
Barry Lam (00:22.291)
very happy to meet you PJ, very happy to be on.
PJ Wehry (00:26.54)
So first question I ask almost every guest, Dr. Lam, why this book?
Barry Lam (00:33.582)
The book is a kind of culmination of both frustration and hope, think. One way of describing it, this is kind of a love letter to human decision making in an era of rules, procedures, and even automation, Software.
drop down menus, things that constrain, metrics, things that judge you on a scale of zero to five. It's a kind of love letter to...
human judgment, human decisions. And I think the time, I thought the time was right for someone to do that. And I think it's just an interesting time to be thinking about these kinds of issues.
PJ Wehry (01:34.178)
that drop down menu really just brought back some bad memories. I'm not gonna lie. The zero to five metric, we were just filling out some scholarship paperwork for our kids and they were sitting right there and I never, I'll mention in passing if they're, how they're doing in terms of like grade level, we homeschool. but I just don't focus on that. I focus on them, right? That's one of the benefits of homeschooling and to see them just sit there and be like,
Barry Lam (01:38.606)
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Barry Lam (01:52.12)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (02:01.568)
What are you going to put down for us for zero to five? Like, we grade level below grade level? And like, it was so important to them. I'm like, you know that no one's going to look at this, right? Like the person who's going to look in this does not care. and, but to see, that they want to be, you know, like that feedback is so crucial, but that's such a terrible way. Zero to five, it cuts off so much.
Barry Lam (02:26.25)
It's, it's, you know, it's also, I mean, the way that I mean, it's it was pervading our lives even before the pandemic. like since the pandemic, it's almost like like, why do I need to rank my filet-o-fish purchase from zero to five? Why do I know I'm serious about this kind of thing? Like, why do I need? Why do I why do I like like
PJ Wehry (02:49.056)
Yes, I know you are.
Barry Lam (02:53.292)
No matter what you do, like if you tap a card, somehow it gets your email address and you have to like review every last thing that you're purchasing. Like, I got a boba tea, please rank us. And then you get like three follow-up emails. people might be wondering, like, what does this have to do with Barry Lamb's book, Fewer Rules, Better People? But it's that everything, every single institution, including consumer goods and everything is like,
trying to shortcut the way that people think and make decisions about, you know, what kind of tea or coffee I want to buy into like a rating and ranking so that you can get fed precisely the thing that is the highest ranked thing, right? And so like, I mean, what that does is what all of these metrics do is it kind of like erases the art of judgment. Like you have a sense of what your kids are, which kid is good at what and not.
that good at what and who has some attention span issues and which kid will never play for the football team, but the other one is a little more sportive. You have all of these nuanced things, right? And then all of a sudden, because you're homeschooling, you have to rank them on a scale of zero to five for some bureaucratic reason so that there could be some computer program that lists the kids and say, look, this parent ranked the kid 3.6. And so they're lower on the, it's like,
That's, you know, you already have these judgments already made, but they're just not good. They there needs to be like the bureaucratic system needs like the ranking.
PJ Wehry (04:30.806)
Yeah, it was very generous for me to say that the person who's going to look at this doesn't care. The idea that someone actually is even going to look at this is pretty generous, right? Like it's, it's just going to run through some system. I, as an example, they asked about my seven year old who, is neurodivergent in some sense, right? and he asked about his, his language arts and his reading comprehension is very good. It's way past his, his grade level.
Barry Lam (04:32.344)
Yeah.
Barry Lam (04:38.947)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (05:00.908)
But his handwriting is like his father's. It's atrocious, right? Like his writing skills, he's actually, the thoughts are there, but actually getting it out on paper. And so how do you answer zero to five, all these things? And you know, you're like, that's not, like for him, I don't need to get him to read more. need to like, no, you sit down and like, at this point, your thoughts are good enough that we need to get them out, but they need to be understandable, right?
Barry Lam (05:16.566)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ Wehry (05:30.752)
I mean, that's the pot calling the kettle black, because...
Barry Lam (05:32.867)
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people think, like, there's a lot of, you know, I mean, it's clear from your show that you're really interested in philosophy. And there's all this stuff about modern life, about the existential crisis of human beings. But only recently are philosophers actually talking about the way in which, really, the biggest feature of modern life is the way that some number.
kind of like defines you, right? So like for kids, it's GPA, right? The earliest, you know, when you become an adult is your awareness of your credit score, right? Like that's the thing that's like the most prominent feature of living in the 21st century, right? And if you're, God forbid, but like all of these kids who are doing Uber and like all these gig works, like...
They're defined by their ranking, right? That's like, they're a 4.7 versus a 4.8 versus a 4.2. And so much of decision making now is like, oh, I'm driving through this town. Let's look up where I should stop at a restaurant. What's my threshold? Is it a 4.4 or is it a 4.2? Like, that's the predominant feature of 21st century life. And more of that is coming. And eventually, you know, I mean like,
it's taken over the dating world, right? So young people, we're so lucky, right, PJ? We're way past that. But these young people, they're on these apps, you know? And then there's these numbers that you screen out and all this stuff. I'm just like, if anything's a feature of 21st century life and moving forward, it's the reduction of all human information to certain kinds of numbers.
PJ Wehry (07:07.583)
yeah.
Barry Lam (07:25.142)
so that you don't have to make kind of judgments that what we would call qualitative judgments about anything anymore. It would just be like the pure quantification because that kind of stuff is what is monetizable. It's what's measurable for policy. Everything in the world right now, the language of it is metrics.
PJ Wehry (07:51.564)
Yeah, yeah, we're trading in a lot of senses, we're trading responsibility for rules.
Barry Lam (07:58.499)
Yeah, I mean, the connection between rules and metrics is a very close connection. We've been doing this thing with rules for even longer than that. So there's clearly a human tendency to do this, to want to do this. I talk a lot about this in the book, like what are the good reasons to do this? Because ultimately, I'm going to critique it.
PJ Wehry (08:09.345)
Yes, yeah.
PJ Wehry (08:23.436)
Yes.
Barry Lam (08:28.162)
But there really are good reasons for all of this kind of thing. It actually would be quite chaotic if there wasn't a standardized measure, and there's two standardized measures, for young people who are applying to college, right? If there's no standardized measure, there's no such thing as a GPA, and there's no such thing as a SAT score or whatever these two major numbers are, it would be
purely qualitative information and then people would have to like watch every last video a kid made or read every last essay they did and read all of these reports about all the good things and the bad things. and that's great if you're making friends, right? But if you like have, know, tens of millions of people applying for something, then you want something like numbers. that's one of the reasons for it.
PJ Wehry (09:27.01)
Do think that's in part the reason for the rise of numbers is the growth of the population in comparison to, I mean, when you talk about discretion and wisdom, it does seem to be an ancient idea, right? Like we have like, I mean, that's a little bit stereotyping, but you know, like that, at a low level, we're like, wisdom of the ancients or, you know, something like that.
Barry Lam (09:39.052)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Barry Lam (09:48.931)
Yeah, look, there are things that are uniquely new, the resorting to rules and the resorting to instruction manuals and the resorting to numbers is really a fundamental feature of humans living together at scale. So if we were still in communities of about 50 to 150 people, tribal communities, mostly kinship related, but...
you know, maybe some sort of extended kinship relationships where even a lot of what we would call trade is like mostly reciprocal and all that. You know, there isn't that much pressure to put numbers on how much something is worth, who owes what to whom. know, once you grow beyond communities like that, you immediately start having this need. And what we're doing
And what we're doing at the digital scale is just so much easier to do all that. The record keeping is no longer a kind of burden. We don't have boxes of papers anymore to have to deal with. And as soon as that happens, there's no friction between having to rank everybody and then keeping a record. will we find? If you think about it, back in the day before we had all of this access to digital information,
Like how would we know a person's ranking or whatever it is? Like if they were a plumber, like what is, how would you find the ranking of plumbers in your local community? That would be like purely just, you you go to a hardware store, you talk to people and you would just chit chat about it, right? And yeah, yeah, yeah. But as soon as you have no friction, yeah, so it's a feature of scale and like you can't say that it's all bad. Of course it's not all bad. Can you say that it's more bad than good?
PJ Wehry (11:32.172)
Yeah, it's word of mouth only.
Barry Lam (11:46.99)
That's even a hard thing to say, right? But I think,
PJ Wehry (11:51.5)
It almost depends on the situation, like you have to have some discernment with it or something.
Barry Lam (11:56.495)
Yeah, I mean, we're starting to learn, for instance, that the digitalization of, I mean, we're only starting to learn this now in 2025, the digitalization of dating or interpersonal relationships with young people is more bad than good, right? So there was a long time, was, you know, we didn't know, right? It was like, okay, so young people used to meet like when they were in communities together or where they would go out and they would be.
PJ Wehry (12:13.58)
Yes.
Barry Lam (12:24.974)
centers where they would meet, know, like town squares and and theaters and all this other stuff. And then it turns out it was all digital and it was like, oh, is that good or bad? I don't know. We were not quite sure. And it turns out it's just net bad. Right. Yeah. And and they they'll they'll tell you that. Yeah. With respect to things like knowing the reputation of plumbers, contractors, the kind of thing if you have a house.
PJ Wehry (12:37.336)
Yeah
PJ Wehry (12:41.967)
yeah.
Barry Lam (12:52.406)
I'm not sure that's net bad, actually. You move to a new area, you very rarely need someone to fix your air conditioning. how often, how much information can you possibly have? And that kind of thing might be very good. There's somebody who's the top ranked person in your area and so forth. Yeah, it really depends.
PJ Wehry (13:18.028)
Yeah, absolutely. so, I don't want to, I've enjoyed this, as we've kind of started out, but I think it'd be good to define, you have two kind of main terms that you really rely on and one is discretion. And the other one is bureaucracy. also, I mean, you obviously put a lot of effort into your titles and into your chapter titles. enjoy them, but I especially loved the laws of Bureau dynamics. I'm.
Barry Lam (13:46.498)
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ Wehry (13:47.032)
I'm definitely just going to steal that. I'll give credit when it's appropriate, but just sitting at a dinner table just because it's the laws of Bureau dynamics, but that's really good. So can we talk a little bit about what discretion is and then what bureaucracy is?
Barry Lam (13:58.297)
Yeah.
Barry Lam (14:06.478)
Great. discretion is, the way that I define it is, is the ability of an individual who's within a system of rules or within a bureaucracy to set aside a rule. That's one kind of discretion, right? So the classic example is if you're a cop and you see a jaywalker, right? You don't have to ticket every single jaywalker, especially if you're on the East Coast. It's like a ridiculous idea.
to think that a cop is gonna ticket every jaywalker. But there's a law that, it's not ridiculous in California, by the way. If you come out here, you'll stand at an intersection and there's a red light and you're like, I'm gonna cross. But everybody else is just standing there scared out of their mind that something would happen because there's less discretion about ticketing jaywalkers. So that's a classic example. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (14:56.77)
Really? I've always grown up on the East Coast. did not know that. I always thought jaywalking was like this fantasy crime that people talked about. I've never seen someone get a.
Barry Lam (15:04.652)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. no, no, no, no, No, go to Los Angeles. So there's a way of talking about that. People talk about this like, are we on Los Angeles rules or are we on New York rules? Right. And and and I lived in New York for whatever, 20, 22 years, like in the New York metropolitan area. And this coming coming out here, it's just like, wow, everybody is just scared out of their mind. And but when I was growing up, it was just like you would never, ever set foot in an intersection.
if the no walk sign was on. And that's because there was just a lot of ticketing of jaywalkers in Southern California. It's just the way it is. So discretion is like that. That's one of the classic examples to be able to set aside a rule. Another example of this is closer to what we have been talking about was the ability to make a judgment.
on the basis of a list of factors without a formula for doing so. And so one great example is like you're hiring for a job and you do an interview and there's a list of factors you're looking for. Can this person work well with others? Does it sound like they can do the job? Do I like them? Like a list of stuff. But notice that when you make decisions like this, nobody says,
Give a number from 0 to 5 about your bearability. And then on top of all these numbers, maybe you have five numbers, here's how you compute. The first number, you divide that by 2 and then add it to the second number, divide it by 3. I call that algorithmic decision making. And by the way, this is how ranking and scoring algorithms work on apps.
PJ Wehry (16:41.218)
Yeah.
Barry Lam (16:56.138)
So I think even with your Uber, it's not just the sum total of all of your five stars. It's like, well, if you get a five star on a five minute ride, that's like less weight than if you do a five star on like a two hour ride, stuff like that. When humans make that kind of decision, it's a discretionary decision. You know you're weighing these factors, but you're not doing it algorithmically. The opposite of that is if there's an algorithm you have to calculate in this way to make that, then it's not a discretionary decision anymore.
So it's the ability and the final kind of discretion is the ability to interpret right so when you kind of read a book and if I ask you is it good or is it boring or something like that these are terms that give you a wide range of like all right let me I can interpret boring and like this part is dry it's a little bit not right point you know that kind of stuff
These terms are kind of more fluid terms. So discretion gives you the ability to interpret these fluid terms in your own way. Whereas the opposite of that would be precision. So it would be like, does this book have 620 words in it? Those kinds of measures are not discretionary. so another example would be like in sports, umpires.
are supposed to call balls and strikes. That's supposed to be not discretionary. There's a rule for the strike zone. mean, it turns out that people know that that's just not true. But there's a rule. Yeah, there's a rule that says there's a box you're supposed to draw from the middle of the chest down to your knees and the width of the plate. And that's what they're supposed to call. And then there's the other rules that are completely discretionary, which is like, did this?
PJ Wehry (18:33.623)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Barry Lam (18:51.558)
this act is this act so beyond the pale you got to toss the person out of the game right and like there's no like lines that are drawn anywhere that says like these are the lines so that's what discretion is bureaucracy is what everybody thinks it is it's an organization of scale that has rules in it procedures and people who are in charge of particular kinds of procedures within
that organization and they're supposed to do something. yeah, and a lot of them do, right? So schools are a bureaucracy. They're supposed to educate your child, right? Police departments are a bureaucracy. Governments are a bureaucracy. Your banks are a bureaucracy. Hospitals are a bureaucracy.
PJ Wehry (19:38.294)
Yeah, yeah. And I think that your mention of people is really helpful too, because you have people whose job isn't authority and it isn't to get a job done. It is to focus on the rules and procedures, right? Bureaucrats, right? Like it's a professional thing.
Barry Lam (19:54.819)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's right. Yeah, no, that's right. And there's a, think, certain anthropologists talk about this as a feature. there are plenty of jobs where you are both doing something and you're a bureaucrat. So teachers are totally like this, right? They teach, right? But then there's a side of it where it's like they're just like really, like it's all bureaucratic. They enter numbers into a computer system, right? And then they, yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (20:10.4)
Yeah, yeah.
PJ Wehry (20:20.94)
I'm an ex-teacher, this is really painful. just want, continue, but yes.
Barry Lam (20:24.994)
No, that's right. have to issue a report on a problematic student and all this other stuff. So that's not completely correct. And then there are people who are just bureaucrats. And we know that that exists. And so they're usually what are called mid-level managers. So they're not actually teaching, but they're the person between.
a teacher and something else, right? So like an assistant principal is like purely a bureaucrat, right? It's like, you know, they're in charge with like scheduling the classes, you know? I mean, not a lot of assistant principals do that, but like they're, right? So if a parent calls angry, they're the first person to go to. Everybody can think of, you know, the person who's in charge of billing in like the hospital.
They're not the nurse, they're not the doctor, but they are the person between the insurance company and the doctor. And that's a big class and a ballooning class. And that turns out to be a much bigger class. And that's a feature of a law of bureau dynamics. So we'll get to that. So as bureaucracies evolve, that's the class that gets bigger.
PJ Wehry (21:41.068)
Yeah, yeah.
PJ Wehry (21:45.942)
Yeah. and the, just to, I've written a little bit about this, haven't published it or anything, but just sat down and thought about, and for me, the one that comes to mind is the person who sits at the desk. And I don't think most people love this job. I think they just do it because it's a job, but the, person that the front desk, for DMV. Right? Like, it's just like that person, like that's, that's a famously bureaucratic.
Barry Lam (22:03.34)
Yeah.
Barry Lam (22:07.126)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. totally.
Barry Lam (22:13.218)
Yeah. Yeah, they're not doing the driving test, right? Like there's somebody else who's in the car with you for the driving test. They are, like you're the doing the driving, right? They're like, yeah, like they're like, you know, which line do you have to go to is a person. Like a person, there's like different lines at the DMV, right? And there's one person who's just in charge of telling people which line to go in.
PJ Wehry (22:17.271)
Right, right.
Barry Lam (22:43.074)
And then there's another person in the line, right? Like, this is the driver's test line for new drivers. This is the driver's test line for out-of-state drivers who are coming in trying to get right. And that's like a different person. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (22:57.304)
triaging for bureaucracy. I did want to mention too, you mentioned the interview process and how it would be strange, but we are seeing, I think in many fields, but especially the tech field, the majority of the interview process is now handled by AI. So it's algorithmic. mean, even that, even the interview process is becoming algorithmic.
Barry Lam (22:59.49)
That's right. That's right.
Barry Lam (23:15.63)
Yeah, no, that's, so AI, yeah. Yeah, AI looms really large sort of in the background and like explicitly in one of the chapters. I finished this book a year ago, right? And you already know it, it's there a year ago and now it's just literally there. AI is sort of the natural endpoint of bureaucratization, right? Because it's.
There's no human being involved whatsoever. And AI is now not only in the screening process for resumes, it's also in the actual interview and the assessment. And all of the assessments are not human judge assessments. It's completely metric-based assessments. yeah, all the reasons for why you wanted some numbers in the first place is the reason why these people go all the way to AI.
PJ Wehry (24:12.3)
So I think now natural follow up, what are the laws of bureau dynamics?
Barry Lam (24:18.286)
Gosh, you know, I should have had three and I had two in the book because, you know, the play on words is like thermodynamics, right? And there are actually three laws in there. gosh, so here's one way to think about the laws of thermodynamics, right? So for one thing, rules tend to get more complex and not simpler, right? In other words, like there tend to be more rules and not fewer rules across time.
And that's just, it's like if anything was a feature of the evolution of bureaucracies, that's like top of the list, right? Because sort of the way bureaucracies emerge is that you...
ahead of time to anticipate what the organization needs. Here's one example that I like to give. It's also from the book. You you're trying to scale your restaurant to be like an international franchise, right? And what's important, you you have one store and in your one store you have, you know, 10 employees. You know, you could tell them, this is what I want you to do, this is right, did so on.
But as soon as you want to reproduce that same restaurant at 50 other locations, now we need rules. So you start off with the rules, and the rules are like, what's the uniform? What do you say when somebody walks into the door? That's the first thing that you ask a customer if you're going through a drive-through. What's the first thing you say at the drive-through? What's the line of cooking? Where's the beef and where's the buns and so forth?
how many pre-made burgers do you need versus all this other stuff. And then somebody's going to mess up. Or somebody's going to find in the rules, well, the rules didn't say I couldn't have an ear piercing, know all those stretch piercings that sometimes you walk into like a stir. They said you're allowed earrings, but then all of a sudden there might be like.
Barry Lam (26:34.07)
somebody who has this huge stretch piercing and then like management doesn't like that, but there's nowhere in the book. So then you add it, right? And so, I mean, that's sort of like a recipe in all of bureaucracy. Like anybody who's like even a 30 year old adult who's been through anything in a part of a workplace or a doctor's office or whatever will recognize this feature that there was some kind of violation or some kind of thing that like stretched the rules and then they just like built a rule on top of
If you've ever done your taxes, you'll recognize this. You're like, why is it not just whatever, 20 % of what I earned? Well, because what I earned, people start bending that. And it turns out that when grandma gave me the 10K, I didn't earn that, so I'm not going to write that off. And then the government's like, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. How can this person, there's somebody out there, I guarantee it.
who had $200,000 worth of gifts. Like it's only gifts. Nobody has $200,000 worth of gifts. So then you like close that loophole with another rule, right? And then eventually you get the US tax code, right? You have all the building codes that are local to us, the noise ordinances. And then in workplaces, like I actually looked this up. I actually looked at the McDonald's rule book for franchises. And it's like, it reads like this, right? Like you, even just the dress code, you're like, oh.
PJ Wehry (28:00.287)
yeah.
Barry Lam (28:03.498)
I see what happened there, right? Somebody showed up with a stretch piercing, right? Or somebody's shirt was the right color, but a little too baggy. so now they needed a rule about how fitted the shirt has to be. A manager has to be able to pull it, and it has to come out only three inches, or something like that. That's the evolution of bureaucracy.
PJ Wehry (28:05.227)
Yeah
PJ Wehry (28:27.254)
Yeah, absolutely. Interesting thing to me too, as you're talking about this, is when you talk about that piercing, there's different ways of handling.
the what happens retroactively, right? Like the first guy to come in with a really huge piercing. It's like, well, you make the rule after it's like, now do you fire him or, this is a fascinating thing to me is, and I think this is kind of in some ways the opposite of discretion are the creation of artifacts in the system. Like the way that that guy gets grandfathered in. so everyone's like in the rule book, it's like no stretch piercings. And then you're like, there's one guy who locks around.
Barry Lam (28:47.336)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Barry Lam (28:57.89)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ Wehry (29:07.128)
Because he got to grandfather in because they wrote it after he came on, right? And they don't want to fire him, they can't, or they can't fire him or something like that. And those kind of artifacts are really fascinating and they're great clues for history, the history of how things are formed, right?
Barry Lam (29:10.924)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Barry Lam (29:22.55)
Yeah, totally, totally. And look, and the way I see it, like sort of like the Barry Lamb way of looking at it is the non-bureaucratic way of doing it. Just like go talk to the hey kid, you know, like that freaks people out. Like, could you not wear it? Right? I mean, like maybe some kid is going to escalate it. What, are you going to fire me? That's discrimination, know, right, whatever. But the default way of just
But that's not really the default way of doing it, right? Especially in the United States, right? The default way of doing it is like, would that kid have a cause? if that kid has a cause, then we need to have a lawyer go through the rule book and add the rule. But grandfather the kid in, right? Does that make sense? yeah, you know, so like, there's a, everything surrounding this is the idea that, that we're afraid of discretion, right? We're afraid of, right? So like the whole resorting to lawyers is a thing that's about.
PJ Wehry (30:06.86)
Yeah. yeah.
Barry Lam (30:21.048)
That's a fear of discretion, right? So the idea that like, okay, we need to bring lawyers in and lawyers are like, precisely you have lawyers there because they are the anti-discretion individuals, right? So this term that I use throughout the book is legalism, right? Legalism is the thing where you have to have a write out in advance exactly what it is that's allowed or not allowed, right? And.
And what you're describing is exactly that, right? The reason you have this grandfathered-in clause with this new rule about the piercing is precisely because people just didn't think the right way to deal with this is just to go, hey kid, that's freaking people out. I don't think we should wear that here at work, right? And work it out between human beings.
PJ Wehry (31:07.256)
Well, you said the noise ordinance thing. I mean, that's such a great example of this where it's like, Oh, you have, you have two neighbors who have bad social skills and one couldn't just go talk to the other and be like, Hey, it's 10 o'clock at night. Do you mind not playing your music so loud? And the other neighbor going, Oh, I'm sorry. And he's turning the music down. Right? Like it could be that simple, but instead it's like, uh, you know, someone comes up and starts like yelling from like the sidewalk and the other person comes to the front door and it's like,
you know, screw you two, you know, they start yelling at each other and then they're turning the music up louder, they're playing it later because it's like, okay, well, we need a rule about this. And it's like, or, you know, maybe better people.
Barry Lam (31:48.195)
Yeah, lot of the things, yeah, a lot of the things that these things arise precisely because there are people who are incapable of living literally next to each other, in your example, and want third party intervention. And as soon as you want third party intervention, there's gotta be some way of the two people, the two sides not, the two sides,
can't think there's favoritism, right? And so what rules do is like, okay, there's no favoritism, right? Like that's why we like rules in sports, like, because we want both sides to be playing by the same ones, right? But then, so then you have rules and then there are enforcers. The funny thing you mentioned about North ordinance is I think this is an example in the book, which I actually looked up the local North ordinance here where I lived. And it was a legalistic rule. was literally like,
this many decibels within 10 feet of the property line as measured by a something decibel meter. And it was like, no human being, none of us have a sense of whether or not I'm violating that rule. It's like, I don't have a decibel meter. I actually don't know within five feet of my property line. I'm not quite sure where my line is. But those things had to be.
written that way precisely because you had people first complaining about noise. Then you had people complaining about the cop who was enforcing it, Like saying, I don't trust that guy. I don't think I was in violation. Show me where in the rule book, right? That like this particular act of mine, like idling my car at 10.30 PM violated that. And so they needed to have a very specific rule about the decibel meters within someone's like property line.
for the cop to be able to say, see, I'm fair, right? All of which could have been settled, right, in a way that didn't invoke that.
PJ Wehry (33:47.394)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (33:53.964)
Well, and this is where you see, depending on the person's temperament, but with a bureaucrat, with a cop, enforcers or bureaucrats, you see that response of, hey, look, it's nothing personal. It's just the rule. Everybody has to go by it. I mean, how many times have we had that conversation with people? And what it is, is it's shifting the responsibility. Like the cop may actually like absolutely be annoyed with you. The bureaucrat might like actively dislike you.
Barry Lam (34:12.898)
That's right. totally, 100%.
PJ Wehry (34:23.564)
but they can talk like that and they can shift the responsibility for the decision, even if they could make your life easier, to the rules.
Barry Lam (34:28.876)
Yeah, yeah. I think that, so there's a lot of things to say about that, right? So we hate it when people shift all the responsibility to the rules. And rightfully so. We shouldn't shift the responsibility from people enforcing the rules to rules, because everybody recognized that there are stupid rules.
And everybody recognized that there are good rules, but that don't apply in certain individual circumstance. Everybody recognizes that jaywalking. If in New York City people didn't jaywalk, you would never be able to get anywhere. It's just true. You can predict your walk uptown and how long it's going to take you precisely because you are not stopping
PJ Wehry (35:12.994)
Yeah
Barry Lam (35:25.738)
every time there's a red light across this street, right? Like you're just waiting for the cars to go by and then you just, and you keep walking. Because everybody recognizes that, then everybody recognized that even for enforcers, when something is just an unreasonable time to be enforcing the rules, they can let it go. They really can. They're deciding not to. So it's actually disingenuous to say, I can't do anything about it, it's just the rules, okay? Because.
Usually they can. Now, in circumstances in which they can, like they would literally lose their job or get fined themselves for not enforcing a rule. Then you have a regime that I call mandatory enforcement, right? You have mandatory enforcement where even the people who are in charge of enforcing have no judgment, right? We have a very good right to complain against that, right? Because there's almost very, very few rules in this world, are rules where
There is no circumstance whatsoever where you can't violate that. Even rules against killing are like, well, self-defense, defense of others. And there's borderline cases of this kind of stuff. yeah, so we have a right to complain when people just say, these are the rules. I can't do anything about it in one of two ways. One is.
Typically enforcers really do have discretion. They will not get in trouble for letting something go. Or two, if it's mandatory enforcement and they have no, then that is a bad system. It's a bad system to require everybody to be a cop that doesn't have, it's a bad system, like it's a bad system with your kids. You have a rule about curfew or you have a rule about no whatever, no crayons on the floor or something like that.
Are there zero circumstances where there are, you can't make an exception? Of course not. Of course there's circumstances. And then you'd be a pretty bad parent if you actually like punished your kid in one of those circumstances.
PJ Wehry (37:33.164)
Yeah, our rule is you have to eat at the table, but you know, it's Friday night, there's a movie and we pull some pizza out and go sit on the couch and watch it, you know, watch on TV. Now, and this is the other side to it. They have lost that privilege, right? A couple of times because I've found like crusts, like, know, inside couch and stuff. like, all right, so not ready for that. Yeah. Like we're back to the table and they're like,
Barry Lam (37:44.215)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Barry Lam (37:54.895)
Yep, there you go.
PJ Wehry (38:01.716)
you let us do it last time. I'm like, and you made a mess last time, right? And that's, that's more discretion, which of course is much easier with like five people, but.
Barry Lam (38:07.49)
That's two, yeah. Yeah, but that's what you want. like, like I think one of the points like I try to hammer home in the book is that you don't want to raise a kid who like is afraid of as they're eating the pizza at the table to carry it out and look in and see what's on the TV in the other room. Could you could you imagine the kid that you've raised who's like, I can't do this. I'm going to get in trouble. What's that kid going to be like out in the world?
where they're like, suppose they're in charge of like other people. Like the sole motivation that that kid has is that they're gonna be in trouble for breaking a rule, a rule they've never thought about whether it's important or not. They've never thought about whether it applies in this circumstance or not. Like that's, I don't want my kid like that. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (38:55.286)
Yeah. Well, for however many rules we create, mean, I think I just saw an article talking about Peter Thiel said, every kid will make every decision after asking AI. they're like, I, this is not a good thing, right? Like this is like, this is not what we're supposed to be doing. it makes me think, and I wrote this down earlier as you were talking, but discretion is a capacity and ability. And one of the problems, like there are right times to have rules.
Barry Lam (39:08.898)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (39:23.308)
But the more that we put in rules, the less we practice it. And it is an ability you have to practice. It is something you can lose or you can never gain if you don't practice it. And I think that's probably like the, however, especially with more people, especially with bigger societies, we feel this need for rules, but it is diminishing this capacity because it does not give us opportunity to practice it in meaningful ways.
Barry Lam (39:47.443)
yeah, mean, you're outsourcing, whenever you outsource a kind of important kind of decision making and kind of thinking, the part of your mind that is involved in that decision making gets atrophied. Let me give you just two examples that everybody will recognize right away, which is your ability to navigate without GPS.
So, know, yeah, Yeah, yeah. But we know this because the younger you are, the more reliant on GPS you have been in your ability, driving or whatever to navigate, the less of a just like even a general sense that, you know, know, whatever Rockefeller Center is north.
PJ Wehry (40:17.656)
I don't wanna talk about, my gosh. I was bad with directions before. It's terrible now, yeah, yeah.
Barry Lam (40:47.342)
of Grand Central and also a little east, like just to have just a general map. Forget about like how many blocks north, south, east, west things are, right? Even if you just have this general sense. And my 12-year-old has no general sense whatsoever of even where we are relative to the supermarket we go to, right? Like that it's a little bit north of here or something like that, right? And people are like this.
And you know, you're talking about how bad you are at this. And it couldn't possibly be that GPS is making it better. Right. Like, right. If you had to, you know, look at a physical map that wasn't, you know, reorientable the way that GPS is and all that for, you know, the first five years that you were driving or whatever, it's got to be an ongoing way in your own neighborhood.
you at least have the sense of your neighborhood, like the general geography of it and so forth. You know, when I moved back to Southern California, you know, like I grew up having just the most general sense of where the freeways are relative to each other. So I can actually do that. And my wife never did. She grew up inland. So but she's completely reliant on GPS. She couldn't tell you where the 605 hits the 10, where it hits the 57 and so forth, which is like a very important
skill to have. so it actually, so like that's one example. But when it comes to human decision making, I think the biggest one that I see, the complete reliance on technology and metrics and all that, is the ability to make discretionary judgments about other people. So an example that I use a lot is like there's a
there's speed laws, right? You can't go 55 here, you can't go 45 there, right? But all of these laws have this like, never drive faster than it's clause, right? And so for any speed that the speed limit says, you know, if it's snowing or if it's foggy, right? You should have a sense that you should be going slower, right? But it's not only that you should have a sense that you're going slower, that safety is lower.
Barry Lam (43:10.594)
You should have a sense of what a cop might think about what's safe. So it's not just whether you think it's safe, it's whether a cop watching you might think it's safe. That's a second order kind of judgment, right? It's a judgment about another person's mind. It's not a judgment about just like your own safety. That goes completely away if you're outsourcing, right? If you're outsourcing to digital devices, if you're outsourcing to rules, if you're outsourcing to procedures.
PJ Wehry (43:24.855)
Yeah.
Barry Lam (43:39.427)
The final example I'll use is that everybody, no matter how inexperienced they are, can follow a recipe. But how many people truly understand what it is to make buttermilk biscuits, right? Meaning, like, you have a general sense about the fat versus the flour versus the water proportions. And you know that if this goes wrong, it's because you put too much this.
that or the other and how it's supposed to feel. Discretionary judgment about everything is like the ability to know and understand buttermilk biscuits. Rules are just like follow the recipe, exactly what's the teaspoon amount of baking powder and so forth. You might end up at the same place. You might end up making these biscuits in exactly the same way. But one person has a kind of knowledge and wisdom about it and the other person doesn't.
PJ Wehry (44:37.474)
Well, and I bake a lot of sourdough. that, that rings true for me. there's two things. One is there just is no replacement for the feel of the dough because your ingredients, I mean, this goes into, don't have time to get into all the food stuff and the way that we approach food, but, not all flour is the same. Not even for the same company, right? Like there's, there's small variations, but the other side to it is when things go wrong, takes discretion. takes this, this sense of judgment.
Barry Lam (44:52.824)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, yeah.
PJ Wehry (45:07.138)
to be able to trace what's going on. Like if you're following a recipe and something doesn't turn out right, you can go and check against the recipe and be like, I missed a step. But if you don't see anything, then you have no idea. Whereas, like if something goes wrong with sourdough, I know what to check because I understand it, right? If that makes sense.
Barry Lam (45:21.762)
Yeah, look.
Barry Lam (45:27.33)
Yeah. 100%. I mean, I could talk about cooking all day. Yeah. So you're pointing something out that I think a lot of people will recognize too is actually it's not even in the best case scenario, AL will give you the good result. But we're not in the best case scenario at all. And most of the time,
PJ Wehry (45:32.203)
Yeah
Barry Lam (45:53.709)
Like the person who understands the sourdough makes the better fucking sourdough. Like that's just true. Right? It's just absolutely true. Right? You know, so like that's true. I actually think the person who makes the better judgment and knows directions better, like actually gets there. Because like you get you follow the GPS. You're like, that doesn't look right. Right. It doesn't look right. Like at this at this time of day or whatever, like that, like if you go that direction, you're you're not really going to, know, and like people who have a sense of judgment like know this.
PJ Wehry (46:13.42)
Yeah, right, right, yeah.
Barry Lam (46:23.694)
kind of stuff. And with cooking, that's what understanding and judgment from experience gives you. I've been at Thanksgiving dinners where I a friend who was like, or abusing this recipe for stuffing. I like, good. it's all it calls for five cups of chicken broth. I said, cups? That's an enormous amount. But you had absolutely no sense of how much the proportions are supposed to be for stuffing.
PJ Wehry (46:48.023)
Yeah.
Barry Lam (46:51.348)
It could have said five, it could have said two, it have said anything. But that's what it is that having, learning to cook not just from recipes, but from an understanding of it. And it takes time, it takes experience, it takes mistakes, and it takes different kinds of mistakes, as you all know, to know very quickly. Sometimes you forget.
ingredients, right? But with enough experience, like, something's wrong, right? You have this sense, like you're making a thing. You're like, something's not right here. Like, I forgot the, you know, like that, something like that, right? And that just happens with cooking all the time, right? In a way that recipe algorithmic procedures, you know, you just don't have.
PJ Wehry (47:25.568)
Yeah. yeah.
PJ Wehry (47:32.566)
Yeah. 100%.
PJ Wehry (47:43.894)
And you touched on it, the difference is that if you go by the recipes, if you go by AI, it's easy. And that's really what this is about, right? It's like, it's much harder to try and get along with a difficult neighbor than it is to just be like, here are the rules, I got, you I called in big brother, big brother's doing this for you. So I have to use this, you were talking about the GPS, this actually just happened to my wife and I, she accidentally switched her Google profile to an old one.
Barry Lam (47:52.501)
yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (48:12.504)
and it tried to send us to our old house and we were driving, we were driving and I've been driving for like 45 minutes and I was like, this is not, you know, it was like, it wasn't too far off, but I was like, we were about 10 minutes out of the way and I was like, this is not, this is the, you hit the wrong, so like, where are you sending us? And I, of course we could have been waiting till, if there hadn't been discretion, we could have been waiting until we got there, right? I mean, she was, she was.
Barry Lam (48:12.856)
Yeah. All right, OK.
Barry Lam (48:21.73)
This is it.
Yeah, yeah,
Barry Lam (48:30.85)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Barry Lam (48:37.208)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (48:40.438)
messing with the kids in the back so she wasn't paying attention like obviously that's my job but yeah.
Barry Lam (48:43.01)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel for everybody's over reliance on GPS. like, you know, what if I'm in a new town, I don't think I would take an inordinate amount of time of, you know, looking at the map and then like internalizing that, you know, Hyde Park is north of here and like Beacon is south of here. Like, I just wouldn't.
PJ Wehry (49:04.042)
Yeah.
Barry Lam (49:11.822)
I wouldn't do that either. And with respect to cooking, know, like my child who decided she wanted to make herself dinner went from zero to pesto in 15 minutes. Okay. It wasn't great because she, you know, Googled it or AI'd it, right? And like, obviously if you're going to be, if you're interested in developing a kind of judgment, you're like, okay, I kind of have to understand the theory of pesto, right? Like there's the green, but then there's also the
like how much fat and then like different nuts have different kinds of, you kind of, I said, you could do that, right? And then you would do that by, you wouldn't be going from zero and 50 zero to pesto in 15 minutes. No way you would go from zero to something and maybe a half an hour with some thinking and judgment. And then you would do it again and again and again and again. And then after like the 10th time, you would have like a sense, right? That like, right. And so, and, and, and you still wouldn't get to the point where
PJ Wehry (49:44.501)
yeah.
Barry Lam (50:09.954)
Like if you didn't have pine nuts and you had these other nuts, like which is the one I should use? Like more experienced cooks will go, well, you shouldn't use that one. Right? You shouldn't use that one. You should use that one. Right? But then she would Google it. Right? Right? like that's completely outsourced. But if you had an understanding of it, you'd be like, you know, I think so pine nuts are a mild nut. Right? Pretty fatty. Right? And like that's not a mild nut. Right? Like and so on. You could get the.
PJ Wehry (50:18.298)
yeah.
PJ Wehry (50:37.612)
Yeah. Walnuts or something.
Barry Lam (50:39.468)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's right. That's right. Like these are like, you know, you know, people are going to think this book's mostly about like navigating GPS or like recipes and stuff. I really think that kind of transposed over into way more impactful areas like criminal justice and and governments and governance is really important.
Because what we do in that domain, we don't think about it as the art of human judgment. Some people do. And they're the ones who are really good bureaucrats. The really good bureaucrats are the ones like, yeah, I have lots of experience and knowledge about a certain domain. A really good cop is not like an action hero that we see in television. A really good cop.
is somebody who is like the really good cook comes across a scenario in which they're on a call and there's a conflict. Somebody might be going nuts and then says they're gonna kill themselves wielding a knife and then somebody says like arrest them and that a really good cop is able to enter that scenario and everybody leaves fine. And like what that takes is not a rule book. There might be rule books. And there might be like
laws about certain things, right? And it might be that they're fully in the clear if they draw a gun and mistakenly shoot someone or whatever, or arrest everybody on site. That's all within the realm of things that are allowed. But who's the good cop is what I'm trying to say, right? Who is the good cop, right? And the really good cop is the person who is able to leave with everybody happy about the outcome of the scenario. No violence was done, right?
PJ Wehry (52:21.429)
Yay!
Barry Lam (52:32.928)
No arrest had to be made, right? Because that's the purpose of a peacekeeper, isn't it? Right? In a community. Yeah, and that's the kind of thing that's like way, way harder to use a rule book on.
PJ Wehry (52:49.688)
Well, I do the majority of the cooking for our house. my apologies for getting stuck on this, but I want to relate it. Just a personal note, as you talk about the failure and the effort, I learned to make gumbo and I made it twice a week for six months. My poor wife, but people I made gumbo. Yeah. Yeah. Like, but now people like, they like my gumbo, right? Like that.
Barry Lam (52:54.38)
I could talk. Yeah, yeah. I could talk about that all day. Yeah.
Barry Lam (53:09.55)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It takes a long time. Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (53:18.102)
Like hopefully at that point, if my gumbo's still bad, then you know, maybe I should try something else. But as you're talking about this inter, like you're talking about the good cop. I was thinking about, for instance, if you have dried oregano, how fresh that is, even at the store and how long it sat, you know, not that I've ever had a spice sit longer than six months in my cabinet. Never. Of course that never happens. But you know that you need more.
Barry Lam (53:33.282)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (53:47.378)
if it's sat there longer, right? And that's something that you're not gonna see in the ounces or the tablespoons or the teaspoons. That comes from lots of little knowledge. There's lots of little knowledge that doesn't sit in a recipe that kind of, that you can't, it would take too long to explain all of it, right? And so that's where the sense comes in. And just in the same way it is with like the oregano or all that little bits of knowledge,
Barry Lam (54:07.064)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ Wehry (54:15.948)
The good cop in this instance has enough interpersonal. And so this is where what you're talking about, I believe is so fundamental and I love it. think it's so important, but the, the good cop understands the right tone of voice makes all the difference, right? It's not just him perceiving what's going on and having like, all right, what's the next thing I need to do? It's okay. I should talk softer to this person. I should raise my voice with this person. I should, you know, like there's.
They understand they've been in enough situations. They've developed a sense for what does peacekeeping look like and what does it look like? I mean, and this is something that we're losing a lot of. mean, you talk about that. We started with the dating, think, bringing it back around like.
Okay, I have this questionnaire I fill out and then it matches us, right? And so we are a match. it's like, whereas there's a, talk about chemistry, you know, before dating services, this idea of, there's, there's body language and there's, and these are all sense things. These are things that you can't really break down.
Barry Lam (55:06.318)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Barry Lam (55:20.45)
Yeah. Yeah. You know.
So many things, I mean, basically what we're talking about, PJ, is like, so many things are a certain way on paper. And they're not that way, not on paper, right? know, chemistries like this, I mean, everything we're talking about, cooking is like this, right? Violence scenarios that cops can enter into are like this, right? Criminal justice systems, right? Like, so, yeah.
PJ Wehry (55:52.28)
Criminal justice systems? like courts? Yep.
Barry Lam (55:56.343)
Right, so there's this whole chapter about sentencing guidelines, right? was literally people trying to, on paper, think, what's the punishment for this? Right? On paper, right? So it's like, so there's just this group of bureaucrats every year that sit around going, all right, let's now update of these 43 crimes with six subcategories each. Is that like?
PJ Wehry (56:07.799)
Yes.
Barry Lam (56:22.382)
18 months, all right, but if we made that 18 months, we gotta make that 23 months, you know, like and so forth, right, on paper. And now there's literally a person in front of you with all the details of their life laid out before you and the details of the crime, right? I mean, what we tried to do in the criminal justice system for 40 years was like, forget about it, judges. You don't get to like make a judgment at all. Look at what we put on paper, do that, right? And that's what we did. And you know,
You know, imagine, imagine, you know, going into the business of being a chef, for instance, and saying, and then developing all of that, or trying to develop all of your knowledge of, you know, the textures of gumbo are different in the order ingredients and all that. And then all of a sudden, working for somebody and says, no, do what we have here on this paper, right, every single time. Right. And that's a way of removing discretion.
Right. And in the interest of why did they do that. Right. So there's a lot of different reasons. But one reason is like PJ we may trust you but we don't trust the next guy. So we want that person to make the gumbo this way. I'm sorry. That means you have to make the gumbo this way. But you know that's that's the price we're going to pay. And that's sort of the deal that we've been striking as we're moving more and more discretion from people. We are just making it. I mean we're.
We've made it so that you're less and less able to be the person who does exercise it, precisely because we're afraid of the bad ones that are made by the people who are exercising it poorly. And so we're like, you gotta all follow a recipe now.
PJ Wehry (58:05.846)
Yeah. And would you say, as I'm listening to you, we're talking about the GPS, we're talking about the criminal justice system, good judges, bad judges, good cops, bad cops, which of course, you know, that's flattening things a little bit, but I think people understand what we're saying with that. The thing that rules can't help you with is purpose, right? The purpose sets the rules and really to set purposes, you have to be able to...
If you're ever going to assume any authority, which if you're going to become an adult, you should be able to, right? Like you're talking about like that's what you don't want for your kid is for your kid to be like, I refuse to accept any responsibility for my life. Right. and so. It, for instance, with the GPS, like the GPS can't tell you where to go. It can't, I can't tell you your destination. You have to tell the destination and then it tells you how to get there.
Barry Lam (58:38.531)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (59:03.136)
Right? And so if, if something appears, that's where like the judgment along the way, you're like, wait, this isn't the right destination. Right? That's, that's key. It's the same thing with the good cop, the bad cop, the good judge, the bad judge, you're getting flattening that out, but like, this guy's actually not concerned about justice or this guy actually has justice in mind. And so I trust him to mess with the rules, but I don't trust this guy to mess with the rules. And so this is where, but to, know,
Barry Lam (59:23.884)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (59:32.044)
But when you give up discretion, you give up the ability to really learn how to set purposes too. Does that make sense?
Barry Lam (59:39.715)
Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. And it's also important that when you set a purpose, you recognize that that's the ultimate thing. It's not just following the rules, right? The rules are there because of the purpose, right? And so if you find yourself in a situation where you're like, no, my purpose is this, and the rules don't actually take me there, right? You have to be able to recognize that.
PJ Wehry (59:52.224)
Right. Right.
Barry Lam (01:00:08.494)
So much of bureaucracy has turned into people thinking that the rules are there for the sake of the rules. They don't answer to the purpose that they're there for. And once you recognize that they answer to the purpose that they're there for, you recognize that's the goal that we're all in here that this bureaucracy for. you know, gosh, let me think about, you know,
An important example from okay, so I'll just use another example from my from my life. So when we moved to California my wife had to Transfer her teaching credential from New York to California Which is a very bureaucratic process because California is very bureaucratic and teaching credentials are very bureaucratic anyways You go through a huge process of like, you know finding your old college transcripts And then saying that this class actually counted for math, even though it's not a math court blah blah blah blah blah
at the very end of this process, which is like, you have to submit all this documentation, you have six months of them reviewing it. Her application came back and it said, we cannot approve it because all the paperwork is fine, but the signature on this particular sheet that verified something was not ink dried.
you actually signed it and printed out the PDF. Now, what is the purpose of the transferring of teaching credentials and so forth, and teaching credentials in general? The purpose is to make sure that people have the right qualifications to teach your kids, that you don't have a teacher in front of them that doesn't know how to teach kids. So here's something that I thought, this bureaucrat who rejected this application,
PJ Wehry (01:02:06.424)
You
Barry Lam (01:02:06.868)
After looking through all of this, did this person think that this applicant was trying to scam the government and go into teaching kids who, when they didn't belong, teaching kids, right? I don't think that person thought that at all, right? Because like, we're talking about really intricate documentation about graduate school, undergraduate, right? You're like, you're like copy of your birth certificates in there and like all this other stuff. It's just this one rule that said,
The signature has to be ink dried as opposed to signed on an e-document and printed out. There was a rule. She probably missed it amongst the sea of rules. But as a bureaucrat, do you think that you were doing a disservice to the children by prolonging this another six months requiring that person to sign it?
If you had to ask them and they were being honest, they probably would say, no, no, no. But it's just a rule. have to follow it. I think that's a bad excuse. Because if you have a purpose and you already are of the judgment and you're a professional now, that actually it's contrary to the purpose not to approve this for this one particular rule. Instead, what this bureaucrat did, yeah.
PJ Wehry (01:03:28.76)
Can I? God. no, no.
Barry Lam (01:03:30.86)
Yeah, was go with the rule for the sake of the rule.
PJ Wehry (01:03:34.006)
Yes, yes. And I actually think that's very generous of you because for them to say, I did it because this is the rule. More likely, they just didn't think about it at all. Right? Like, you know, like the more thing is like they, like, they didn't stop and think like, this is the rule. They're just like, they didn't have this thing. You know, like literally, they just sent it back immediately. They're not, they probably didn't even consider how much time is put onto it from the other person's end. Like they're probably thinking about what's for lunch.
Barry Lam (01:03:37.442)
Yeah
Barry Lam (01:03:45.848)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (01:04:03.8)
We're probably thinking about when's the next episode coming out. And that's what rules allow you to do. That's probably the good thing is they allow you to think about other things because you can just give it away. But this is such a clear example of like, you just like waste it six months of, you know, your wife's time, but also like she could have been like teaching kids, right? Like this is like, like.
Barry Lam (01:04:08.405)
Hahaha
Barry Lam (01:04:23.374)
teaching. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. And there's a teacher shortage. And they're trying to attract teachers from out of state, right? This is explicit. It's been reported on. But they still did that. And yeah, you're right. I always err on the side of a generous interpretation. I'm not even sure whether your interpretation makes them better or makes it work. Or mine does.
PJ Wehry (01:04:28.685)
Right!
Right, yeah.
PJ Wehry (01:04:50.036)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it.
Barry Lam (01:04:53.422)
Yeah, yeah, it's here's, know, Barry Lam's tirade against by the book bureaucrats, you know
PJ Wehry (01:05:03.704)
Yeah. And I love it. And I appreciate you coming on today. I want to be respectful of your time. If I can ask one more question as we wrap it up. For someone who's just listened to this episode, besides buying and reading your excellent book, what would you tell them to either think about or do over the upcoming week after listening to this episode?
Barry Lam (01:05:28.102)
I think that they should be mindful of whether they're a bureaucrat in the sense that they have enforcement power. No, I'm serious. If they have enforcement power over somebody else and everybody has, no matter what job you're at, just because of where we are in society, like you're probably a bureaucrat in some way. There's some kind of like rule enforcement or something that you hold over some, whether you're a librarian, teachers are definitely, right?
PJ Wehry (01:05:37.772)
Yeah, I know you.
Pfft
PJ Wehry (01:05:48.578)
Mm-hmm.
Barry Lam (01:05:57.912)
you know, you like, you know, are in charge of shipping for like an import company or something like that, right? And you're involved, and some people are like, their job is to be like, look at rules and like, rules. The thing I want people like that to think about is just, is there a way for me to exercise more discretion in my job? Because I think not only will you,
be better at your job by doing that. You're actually going to be a better person. You're actually going to feel better about yourself than think that you're some kind of automaton. You're a piece of software there for rule enforcement. So I would say something like that. And then the second thing is never, ever accept from a politician or a
prosecutor or DA or a police officer that they're just following the law, right? Because that's the law. If you don't like the law, you shouldn't pass it. Pass another one. Because it's just true that discretion is built in to law enforcement at all levels, state, federal, and that the person who's enforcing it is doing it because that's their decision, right?
PJ Wehry (01:06:58.84)
Hmm.
Barry Lam (01:07:21.462)
And so, and just make sure you know that and you think about.
PJ Wehry (01:07:27.458)
Beautiful answer, Dr. Barry Lamb. Absolute joy having you on today. Thank you.
Barry Lam (01:07:31.864)
Thank you, PJ.