Fat Tony's Podcast
Captivating conversations with amazing experts. Inspired by the works of Nassim Taleb, amongst others. Hosted by Sebastian David Lees.
Fat Tony's Podcast
Megan Preston Meyer - Uncertainty, Supply Chains, and Stories that Matter
What happens when a data analytics expert trades boardrooms for bedtime stories? In this captivating conversation, Megan Preston Meyer reveals her remarkable journey from corporate number-cruncher to children's book author with a fascinating twist.
For over a decade, Megan worked in analytics and supply chain management, helping companies extract value from their data. Yet beneath this corporate exterior lay a childhood dream of becoming an author. Five years ago, she took a leap of faith, stepping away from her secure career to pursue writing full-time – and hasn't looked back since.
Her unique contribution to children's literature comes in the form of books that don't shy away from complex concepts. The "Supply Jane and FIFO Adventures" introduce young readers to operations concepts through engaging stories, while her latest release, "Max Entropy and the Avalanche," tackles uncertainty and prediction limitations through two contrasting characters. As Megan explains, "I didn't set out to write a Taleb book for kids," yet she's created exactly that – a thoughtful exploration of chaos theory and model limitations accessible to young minds.
What makes her approach so refreshing is her refusal to oversimplify. "It is not my job in 24 pages to explain the entire world of supply chain," she notes. Instead, she introduces vocabulary and awareness, laying foundations children can build upon through repeated exposure. Perhaps most surprisingly, adults frequently report learning alongside their children when reading her books.
Beyond children's literature, Megan has crafted "The Corporate Elements Mysteries," cozy mysteries set in office environments that explore workplace absurdities with humour and insight. This dual approach to storytelling allows her to process and share her corporate experiences through different lenses.
Our conversation weaves through educational philosophy, the invisible infrastructure that powers our world, and the balance between planning and resilience. Megan's work represents a brilliant example of repurposing specialized knowledge for broader impact, demonstrating how professional expertise can transform into accessible stories that resonate across generations.
Discover how stories can make complex ideas digestible and why introducing children to concepts like uncertainty might be one of the most valuable gifts we can give them in an increasingly unpredictable world.
Fat Tony's is more than a podcast - it's a community. Join our community at FatTonys.net.
Welcome everyone to another edition of the Fat Tony's podcast. I'm your host, seb Lise. Today's guest is a children's author with a fascinating past in the world of insights and analytics. For over a decade she's helped organizations make sense of their data and, in her own words, driven thousands of decisions and unlocked millions of dollars of value for billions of companies in trillions of ways. But now she's turned her talents to storytelling not about the data we do see, but the stories data doesn't tell. She's the creator of the Supply Chain and FIFO Adventures, a series of picture books that introduce kids to supply chain and operations concepts in a fun, approachable way. She's also the author of the Corporate Elements Mysteries, a cozy mystery series for millennials that explores the balancing acts between life and work. And today she's here to talk about, amongst other things, her latest release, max Entropy and the Avalanche, a new story that promises adventure, insight and a fresh take on uncertainty. Megan Preston-Mayer, it's an absolute pleasure. Welcome to Fat Tonys.
Megan Preston Meyer:Thank you, seb, I'm glad to be here.
Sebastian David Lees:So the softball obvious question is you know, working in a corporate environment analytics, data consulting and then moving to children's author, that's an interesting journey. Could you tell us a little bit about the background of that journey, what prompted it and how you made that transition?
Megan Preston Meyer:Sure, if we were going to go way to the beginning, if you had asked me when I was eight years old what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said an author. But when you know where I was growing up, when I was growing up you couldn't just be an author. So I went to college, I, you know. I got an MBA, I went into the business world and I wrote on the side my entire, my entire life I've been writing, but I never really. You know, that was a hobby and work, work, and I got into analytics and I really. So I started out in supply chain and then moved more towards pure analytics and I really enjoyed it. But I realized what I really liked about it was the kind of the communicating the insights, like the data part was fun, but that was sort of just the table stakes. You know, I had to find, I had to find out something from the numbers that was worth telling people. But I liked the telling people part a lot better.
Megan Preston Meyer:And so the arc of my career moved more and more towards communication and then one day I decided, you know what, I'm just going to go for it. I'm going to take a year out of my corporate career, try to become a, try to become a writer. See what happens. And I figured after a year, if it really didn't work, I could brush off my CV and get back into the corporate world. And that was five years ago. And so far I'm still. I'm still, you know, not on anybody's payroll. So we'll see how long I can keep this up.
Sebastian David Lees:So we'll see how long I can keep this up. Wow, that's fantastic. I think it's so relevant. There there's this kind of modern idea that you sort of go into these traditional careers and then doing something for fun cannot be work. Yet historically that wasn't the case at all and we've had this separation of concern in modernity and I think we're sort of finding our way back to that old way now and I totally get it.
Sebastian David Lees:I think there's also that element of build a safety net, first something that brings home the bacon, and then experimenting what Taleb I suppose, would call extremistan, these extremistan environments where you can go for it, and I think as well. It's an interesting segue because some of these ideas are also talked about in your books and I couldn't help noticing in your latest book, max Entropy and the Avalanche, a lot of these concepts are related to ideas of previous guests that we've had on this podcast Emanuel Derman, for example, with his book Models Behaving Badly, which talks about the flaws and dangers when we rely too heavily on models and obviously concepts of Nassim Taleb, which most almost all listeners of this podcast will be familiar with. Did those authors, did those ideas influence you with this, or is that a happy coincidence?
Megan Preston Meyer:I think that's a hard question, because I wouldn't say that I read something else and then decided, okay, I'm going to. I didn't set out to write a Talibook for kids. I guess I didn't take these concepts and say, how am I going to put? You know, put them into a fun little story, make it rhyme and then try, and you know, teach six-year-olds these concepts. But I've definitely been influenced. I mean, this is something, this idea of uncertainty, the like, the faults and models, the difficulty of prediction and resilience I mean these are things that I've been thinking about for a long time, both in my corporate career and since then, and so I'm sure it's. You know, there's nothing new under the sun, and especially as a writer, this is one of the things that you have to come to terms with very early on is that you aren't coming up with anything original ever. You're just stating it differently, and so I think I've just stated it a little differently.
Sebastian David Lees:I think it's really novel doing this kind of thing as a children's author because I've got to say I don't think I've ever seen these kinds of concepts communicated in a children's book before. And you say there's nothing new under the sun. But I do think this is a really novel, new approach to it and there's something wider I wanted to talk about a little bit later, which is related to why, certainly in the British education system, we don't at school kind of teach these life skills, teach these principles. But before that, before we get too ahead of ourselves, I wanted to ask specifically about being a children's author. Writing for children is a craft in itself and it's one of those things that looks deceptively simple but is in fact incredibly difficult to do. How do you balance simplifying what can be very complex topics without dumbing them down but making them accessible to children?
Megan Preston Meyer:That's a good question and that's not one that when I started out I hadn't actively thought about it and now that I look back I've tried to sort of fit you know fit reasoning, reasoning to what I've done.
Megan Preston Meyer:But I think the key to any sort of communication, whether it's to kids, whether it's to adults, is give people just the amount of information that they need and, I guess, also keep in mind how many more times they will be exposed to this message books is that it is not my job in 24 pages to explain the entire world of supply chain or the entire, you know, concept of uncertainty. It is. It is to bring the make, the you know, bring the awareness to the concept, bring in a couple of terms so that kids can start building the vocabulary, so when they hear these concepts repeated again they'll be able to recognize it and then to can say, oh, that's like supply chain and FIFO, or oh, that's like max entropy. Then they'll start being able to add more and more layers on top of layers until they get a good understanding of the entire concept.
Sebastian David Lees:I think that's really important, the kind of reinforcement of education and so many of the mental models we learned growing up. We start off with the idea and then it's almost like layers of an onion. We build it up a little bit. High school physics, we learn the model of the atom and then you go to college and you learn well, actually that's not quite true, it's a little bit more advanced. So we build up our perception of the world and it's's absolutely fascinating.
Sebastian David Lees:I was talking to I can't remember who it was, but a previous guest on this podcast, when we were talking about how storytelling has this fractal element to it, in that you can have a story and you could make a nine-hour film trilogy out of that story, or you could make a five-minute parable out of that story and that five minutes parable would still maintain 90, 95 percent of the essence of the, of the moral or the concept of the film. So it have this enormous compression algorithm to it, for want of a better word. That's my software side coming out, where it's almost like we've evolved as storytellers or I personally believe we evolve as storytellers because it has this amazing ability to compress information and the oldest correct me if I'm wrong here. I'm gonna have a listener tell me I'm wrong here. But I've heard about aboriginal and there are stories that have been passed down for six, seven, 8,000 years now and we originally thought they were myths. But now we're finding geological evidence that backs up that these stories are a form of oral history telling but were preserved all these years later.
Sebastian David Lees:So I think you're absolutely right on that. So I still love how novel a concept this is. And I know on the flip side you've got your young children's stories and then you've also got your corporate elements, mysteries. That's another niche that I didn't really know about, actually until just before this interview, but they're described as cozy mysteries set in corporate environments. Could you tell me a little bit more about those?
Megan Preston Meyer:Yeah, and one thing about so most of the things I write are very niche. I heard one time, a long time ago, some advice that said niche down and then niche down again, and and I've taken that seriously. Whether it's led to success or not is another story. But if you're going to write kids books, make them about supply chain management. If you're going to write cozy mysteries and cozy mysteries, that's a fairly big genre of literature. Those are the mysteries where you don't see there's not a lot of blood and gore described. There's, you know, there's not a lot of swearing or sex most of the time. So they are just.
Megan Preston Meyer:I think Agatha Christie sort of created the genre and then Murder. She Wrote the TV show. That's kind of the canonical cozy mystery. And now they're becoming more modern because they you know, the cliche is that they're all about little old ladies wearing cardigans. You know, in a tiny town in Maine that has a death rate of like 40, you know, 40 people per hundred every so. So but they're they're becoming more modern and I decided, like the, I was going to get into this genre.
Megan Preston Meyer:Well, no, I can't even say that I didn't decide I was going to get into the genre. Well, no, I can't even say that I didn't decide I was going to get into the genre. I wrote a book and it happened to fit into this genre and fire brand. The first in the corporate elements mysteries is it's sort of semi autobiographical. It's about a girl who gets her MBA and her first big corporate job and then has to solve a mystery. And so I never I didn't have to solve a mystery, at least not a mystery Like my main character has to solve but a lot of the the trappings of the book are just there. It's more about corporate absurdity than the plot really, and and so I kind of like I just wrote that book and then sort of found a genre to slot it into.
Sebastian David Lees:I think this is quite serendipitous when you're talking about cozy mysteries becoming more modern. Just last night me and my partner were watching a series called Poker Face which I think kind of reinvents the murder. She wrote concept for a modern audience, for a modern audience, and it's exactly that you know lady who travels around solving a murder every happens to stumble upon it but written for a new generation. And I think the slight twist is she has this superpower where she can tell if someone's lying. And I swear we're not sponsored by this, but it's well worth watching. And you're right, and I was an absolutely enormous Agatha Christie fan growing up. Had all the books really really loved. Well worth watching. And you're right, and I was. I was an absolutely enormous agatha christie fan growing up. Had all the books, really really loved those books.
Sebastian David Lees:And again, corporate absurdity. Yes, I think we all have been there many, many times. Um, I think we could do a whole podcast on why corporate absurdity exists and why we tie themselves into those knots. So let's talk a little bit about Max Entropy now. Max Entropy and the Avalanche. So this is the latest book being released. Is it early June? Have I got that right?
Megan Preston Meyer:It's actually. The on sale date is May 20th, but one of the nice things about being an independent publisher is that no one will know about it until I tell them about it, so it's kind of on sale when I start marketing.
Sebastian David Lees:When it does go on sale, we will put the confirmed date, obviously below this, on all of our different platforms and we'll also put a link to it. Can you tell us a little bit about the book, and without giving too much, much away again, what inspired it, what's about and, yeah, anything, anything you want to mention about it?
Megan Preston Meyer:Yeah, this one is.
Megan Preston Meyer:So it's not part of the supply chain series but and it's aimed at kids, it's, it's fully illustrated. I worked with the same illustrator that, anita Amersdorfer, that I've been working with on all the supply chain books, but this one is a little more it's, it's, there's a lot more for or I guess there's equal amounts for, adults and kids in this book, I would think. And it's also I don't want to, I don't want to oversell it or say that there's layers and layers of deep philosophical meaning, because the read time is about three and a half minutes. So it's a fun little story. It rhymes and it follows the story of two little boys. One is named Max Entropy he gets the title billing, and then his friend is named Predict Sean. And Max Entropy and Predict Sean tend to look at the world in different ways. They come at it from very different perspectives and the story follows the boys as they wake up on what they think will be a snow day off from school and turns out a little differently than probably either one of them expected.
Sebastian David Lees:I don't want to give too much away. You say it's not overly philosophical, but I found a lot of layers to unpack on this and maybe it's just because I'm a huge Taleb nerd, but I immediately, with the two main characters, started thinking of the kind of Nassim Taleb Nate Silver feud for want of a better word. For those who don't know, nate Silver is oh gosh, I wish, is it FiveThirtyEight? The kind of prediction company he founded. It's a three-digit number and he shot to fame by claiming, I think, having a very high accuracy rate of election US election forecasts. And now he's branched that, grown that into a cottage industry of prediction. And Taleb has always been quite wary of anyone in a prediction game, but Nate Silver especially. And they've had some very interesting discussions, arguments Definitely not suitable for children, but really interesting if you want a maybe slightly more adult version of this theme before you buy the book and read it to your children.
Sebastian David Lees:I also love framing the avalanche as a concept for this, because it's just like you say, taking these complex topics and distilling them and just making them accessible to children and A children love, love snow, absolutely love snow, and you know snow days are one of the the most vivid memories of my childhood actually I'm showing my age here, but being huddled around the the high five radio in the living room, I'm waiting to hear if my school was on the list of schools that's going to be closed that day. And the absolute joy of you know the school's closed because there's too much snow and then you can go and play all day. So I think that's a really emotional, resonating thing for kids and when I read it the first thing I thought of.
Sebastian David Lees:In the uk for people of a age, there is an extremely famous incident with a very famous weather reader called Michael Fish who in 1987 went on one of the main networks and there was warnings about a storm coming to the UK and he went on super confidently telling everybody in the country not to worry, there's going to be no storm, there's no danger, nothing's going to hit, it's going to divert, you don't have to do anything.
Sebastian David Lees:And then, of course, that didn't happen at all. I think the storm claimed 18 lives, it caused one and a half billion pounds worth of damage and it just absolutely destroyed the country. It was a a hurricane, and this is played so often, this famous clip now even to this day, as a kind of parable about the dangers of confidently over predicting very chaotic things like the weather. So when I read this, that's the first thing I thought of, and I think a lot of british people of a certain age will find that. But I'm going to include a youtube link to that clip for non-British people as well, because I really love it.
Megan Preston Meyer:Okay yeah, I've never heard of that story, but I wish I had. I will be the first person to click on that link.
Sebastian David Lees:It's one of those things. You know, he's a goofy guy, he's got a crazy 80s tie, but in the day he was kind of like the UK weather version of Walter Cronkite I guess it's the best way to describe it to American listeners, and he just totally fluffed it. And again, you know. Going back to what we mentioned earlier, I think it's really important to teach these kind of ideas to kids because certainly in the UK schools don't and we have a very what I suppose I would call traditional curriculum here. You know, you do learn maths, you do learn these sort of things, but you learn them in quite an abstract, non-real world way. We learn about percentages and compounding, but we never have a lesson on the importance of mortgage, interest rates and how to understand what you're actually paying back and things like that. So did that come into play at all when you were thinking about this and what are your experiences in, I guess, the American education system, and do you think we need more of that?
Megan Preston Meyer:I think, yeah, so I I went. I'm a product of the American education system. I live in Switzerland now and so I I don't have kids, but I know enough about, I know, I know kids and I know enough about the Swiss education system. I don't know much about the British system, but I think that we are I don't want but mathematics sort of in a vacuum, and then I learned, you know, then we would learn science in a vacuum. There was very, you know, very little sort of cross-disciplinary focus, very little, you know, emphasis on actually using some of these concepts in the real world. You know if you could fill out a worksheet or if you could get enough right answers on a test. That's, you know, that was good enough. There's the meme about, you know, we don't know how to do taxes, but we know that mitochondria is the powerhouse of a cell, and I think so in the.
Megan Preston Meyer:One of the really nice things about the Swiss system is that there's not so much of a, it's not a single track kind of single. Everyone is funneled into the same route. So in the US, like where I grew up, when I grew up, the expectation was that I would go to a liberal arts college and then probably get a master's degree, and I think that right there, just having that expectation that you know that every child is going to follow that track and end up in sort of a white collar like knowledge job A, that's not realistic, and even if it was, we would still, you know like there would still be implications on you know, on how the education system should work, because it doesn't seem like it when you're in school, but the vast majority of your life is spent outside of school in the real world, and so we should probably be focusing more on that yeah, absolutely the.
Sebastian David Lees:The interesting thing about being in a vacuum, you're right. I remember growing up it felt. Looking back you don't realize it, but looking back it's very much about. Can you demonstrate knowledge of this? Yes, we've ticked that box. Do the paper, do the exam, move on, and then you kind of forget 90 percent of it within a few years. And there's very little cross-pollination of concepts and ideas. And, of course, the whole root of innovation in the real world is cross-pollination of ideas and concepts and finding new ways to to use different things. So it's almost like we're taught in a vacuum, convex to what happens in the real world.
Sebastian David Lees:And and there's an essay by Paul Graham, who was the founder of Y Combinator, startup Accelerator, and he talks about how high schools, when you look at them in a historical perspective, are really, really bizarre. Because for thousands of years, what you would have is apprenticeships or learning, where you would have young adults, adolescents, in an environment with people of all age groups. They'd be talking to 40-year-olds, 50-year-olds, 20-year-olds, and so they'd learn through being around those people and that exchange of wisdom. What we do now is shove a bunch of you know, prepubescent and puberty, hormone driven teenagers into one room together and we get this lord of the flies kind of clique system where you have the popular kids and the nerdy kids and all this and it's just such an abnormal environment for a teenager to be in. And really that has come about because of modernity and almost because we have nine to five jobs as a kind of daycare to a certain extent, not necessarily because that's the best way for young adults of that age to be learning concepts yeah, yeah what?
Sebastian David Lees:what I love is your books try to address this and obviously again I've mentioned it. But this element of taking mediocre stan ideas and talking about things like non-linearity, complexity, entropy, certainly a little bit of entropy as well in max entropy, I suppose, if I'm going to segue a little bit of all the children's books you had growing up I know I certainly know there's nothing like this, but there's anything that you loved growing up that had a direct correlational influence to this, or something or a children's book that exists today that, in your research, has influenced you on this there's.
Megan Preston Meyer:So when I was growing up I loved the, the berenstein bears and I'm not sure if those you know like, if those are, if uk readers would be familiar with those, but it was a series of books. There's probably 20 of them, 30 of them, there were so many and they were on very specific themes. You know, the Berenstain Bears go to the grocery store, the Berenstain Bears go to work, the Berenstain Bears do this and do that, but they were all very, you know, like they were bears and they were talking. So it wasn't completely real world, but they were always doing real world and they were talking. So they weren't. You know, it wasn't completely real world, but they were always doing real world. They were in real world scenarios, doing real world tasks, and they were.
Megan Preston Meyer:You know, I didn't think of it as such when I was a kid, but I just I loved the variety.
Megan Preston Meyer:And then there's also another one I don't know if I read this when I was a kid or I've just discovered it more recently but Richard Scarry, richard Scarry's Busy World, it's I probably should have like I would have it had it would have been around when I was younger. But that's another one where there's just, you know there's, there's so much going on. The illustrations are very busy. There's, you know, there's cars zooming everywhere, there's apartment buildings, there's stores, and I think something about just the variety and the kind of the magnitude of activities. Those always really appealed to me because that's what life is like. I mean, life is not like you were, like we were saying about the education system. It's not this contrived sort of very sterile institution where you know it's put together in a certain way more for the convenience of, you know, of society than for any real function and life is messy and chaotic and busy and fun. And I think those are that's the message we should be giving to kids.
Sebastian David Lees:Yeah, I agree, and I think kids kind of intuitively grasp that. I mean, it's almost trained out of them through your 12 years of education or whatnot. There's a couple of things I want to pick up. Firstly, you mentioned Heavily Illustrated, and I know your books as well are heavily illustrated and you have a partnership there. Was that something you decided upon from the beginning or is that something that evolved throughout the course of developing the idea of children's stories?
Megan Preston Meyer:When I, when I first came up with the idea for FIFO Saves the Day is the very first supply chain and FIFO adventure and I can't draw I wouldn't have been able to do it justice, and so I knew from the beginning I needed an illustrator and so I went on Upwork and I was very prepared to have every single page. I would have kind of sketched out here's what I think should happen, sort of the storyboard, and then just have someone clean it up for me. But I found Aneta and I very clearly saw that she was probably. She is such a professional, she's so gifted, and things that I would never have thought about she was able to bring through in illustrations and I mean that was. It's always really nice to be surprised by your own project, your own work. That's amazing.
Sebastian David Lees:I do love the illustrations. I've got to say, and I am a visual person anyway, I've always been a visual person and even as a software developer, I imagine software, I imagine processes in a visual way. So anything that's heavily visual sucks me in straight away. I want to ask a little bit about, I suppose, talking a little bit more about your own corporate experiences, and I know you still do corporate work, you still do some consulting work as well. I think I saw on your website If that's a little bit out of date, let me know children's author and writing about some of these concepts and corporate experiences allowed you to distill and and grow in your own experience in the corporate world. Has it, has it kind of? Have you derived insight through going through this process?
Megan Preston Meyer:that's a good question. The the closest I get to corporate work these days is it's. I have a wider perspective on it and it's. You know, at first I left and I was like the corporate world, everything is so backwards, everything is so, you know, like people are so absurd, I mean like it's. It's just, you know it doesn't make any sense and oh, these poor people who are in there still stuck in the in the rat race. And then I sort of chilled out a little bit and I realized you know like it is a. It is a strange environment.
Megan Preston Meyer:A lot of corporations, a lot of larger organizations do put people into these unnatural situations where there's competition and there's hierarchy and there's.
Megan Preston Meyer:You know, you act differently at work than you do outside of work. Almost all of us do, and that's, you know, like, I think, is I've. I've been able to be a little bit more accepting of it, I guess. And so you know like you go into it and if you put on your corporate voice and you go, and you put on your corporate voice and you go and you put on your corporate persona and get your job done and then go away, that's, that's okay, you know, there's, as long as you don't lose yourself in the corporate persona and as and I think that's part of the danger we see sometimes with we hear these big decisions coming out of huge multinational companies and I think a lot of people have sort of lost the their outside of work personas and if you know, and then you, then you get lost in the absurdity and you make absurd decisions and if they're at a large enough scale that it affects the rest of us, then there's a danger.
Sebastian David Lees:Yeah, I think that's a really, really interesting thought, the idea of putting your corporate mask or work mask on. Absolutely I think everybody does that and I think that's a kind of unspoken trade-off. We mediate ourselves so that we can work together in large groups. I think if everybody, one of the phrases that was doing the rounds a few years back was bring your full self to work or whole self to work, and I remember thinking that's a terrible idea. If everybody did that, everybody would hate each other and you would not be able to collaborate and get everything done, because we're all so different, we all have our own neuroses and quirks and the whole idea is to leave us behind so we can collaborate, and it does create a slightly artificial environment.
Sebastian David Lees:I do think that has got got worse over the last 30 or 40 years. Maybe I'm just glamorizing, but I've worked in, I've consulted for quite a few, uh, large financial institutions, and when I speak to some of the old guard about the way it was in the 70s and the 80s yes, it was bad in a hundred ways. You only need to talk about sexism and all sorts of horrible things feel like there was more soul and personality to these environments, which maybe the trade-off we've made is that they're now more egalitarian at the expense of being a little bit more soulless. But whatever the reason, I think it is important not to just dismiss them as oh, this is crazy, or backwards, or, at the end of the day, again.
Sebastian David Lees:Again going back to some of the concepts, I think some of the wider concepts that you talk about and Taleb talks about is this idea of black boxes, and these things evolve and work in a way that are multidimensional and that we maybe might not understand at a surface level. So they may look bizarre and crazy, but they've almost evolved to work that way and they do work and they make billions of dollars for the respect of it and they generate huge amounts of wealth. So I think you're right, I think there's that perspective. When you're in the thick of it, it can feel like you're living in a madhouse, and I said that several times to my partner and, yeah, I think, taking that step back, you can have a bit more of a long view, slightly more distance view of it.
Megan Preston Meyer:Yeah, yeah, I think one of the things that I have learned, that has probably one of it's probably the most important thing I've learned and one of my least favorite things to have learned is that nothing is black and white and there's no. You can just not make any blanket statements. And even you know, like I understand the irony of saying you can't make blanket statements. But no, work is not bad or good, it just is. And you know, and I mean you can say that about almost anything.
Megan Preston Meyer:And there are, like you said, there's always trade-offs, and it's just a matter of sort of finding your own spot on the spectrum and saying I will be, I will be exactly this soulless for money, but no more. Or I will be exactly this you know absurd or I will be exactly this competitive and sort of turn off the more human side of me to rise to this pay grade, and after that I'm done. So it's finding your place on the spectrum, setting your boundaries, but also realizing that for most of us, setting a boundary so far as to say like I'm not going to play the game Like it's just, that's not realistic. Most of us have to play the game to some extent and if you can play the game and not be, you know, like, if you can just sort of, if you can be okay with the game that you're playing, if you can understand the rules and just say all right, it is a game, but I'm going to play it, I think that will. That made me a lot happier and hopefully that can help others.
Sebastian David Lees:That's really interesting, I think, when I've had my darker moments being in these kind of environments yeah, reminding yourself it's a game. Reframing it in that way is really interesting, because basketball is absurd on the surface of it. When you think about it people being paid millions of dollars to throw a ball around a square, but the rules of the. When you think about that people being paid millions of dollars to throw a ball around a square, but the rules of the game and that's really really interesting. I love that reframing it as a game. It sounds simple, but I suppose, like all great simple ideas, it's something I've never fully thought about before. I love that. So I suppose, talking about ideas maybe not simple ideas I'd not thought of before have you ever had an adult come to you, maybe after reading one of your books to their kids who hadn't thought about some of the concepts you talked about before and said, oh, you know, this is fantastic. So I learned something from this too.
Megan Preston Meyer:I have actually, and so a lot of the kids' books, a lot of the supply chain books, are parents who are in the supply chain field by them, and so they already have some ideas, and that's sort of the standard flow where a parent reads it to their kids to sort of impart their knowledge knowledge they have to their child.
Megan Preston Meyer:But I also have a lot of people who you know, that I happen to know, and who know me, and they think, oh, wow, you know, like Megan wrote a book, I'm going to, I'm going to get this book, and so then it's kind of the opposite Well, not the opposite flow, but like the parent also doesn't have a lot of supply chain knowledge, the kid doesn't either. So they're learning together. And and that's been neat too because it's it's another one of those. I fall into this trap where I assume the things that I know, everybody knows, like the environment that I'm in, everyone else at least has some inkling of, and so I throw around terms like operations, management or logistics or inventory, and I assume that that's just common knowledge and it's not to a lot of people, and so it's been really interesting to see that people who are in you know, who are nurses or teachers or in completely different fields, reading these books and and saying, oh, that's. You know, that's cool.
Sebastian David Lees:We both learned something at bedtime last night there's this idea, isn't there, that you just internalize what you do to such an extent that you just assume everybody knows this, and I do this with websites all the time. I get enraged by small things I notice that nobody else would even know or care about. And what's interesting is a lot of the globalized world now runs on this invisible infrastructure, these invisible processes, of which supply chain is one of them, and we had a story in the uk here a few, two or three days ago about there's a big retail and grocery chain here, marks and spencers, that was hit by a cyber attack under a third order effect of that is it completely destroyed their supply chain.
Sebastian David Lees:And I actually missed this news story for whatever reason. And I was in marcus expenses yesterday and I was like why? Why the shelves half empty? And my partner said, oh, you know, it's for supply chain disruption. I was like what so these invisible processes where you just automatically assume the shelves are full for whatever reason and then you learn about things like jit and how that's great in one way, but just in time sorry for for I'm guilty of my own thing there people know what jit is, um, but how it's great in one way but can introduce weakness when you have these, these disruptive events.
Sebastian David Lees:And I also read a book a few years back called the box, which was about the shipping container industry, which sounds quite dry, but I absolutely loved it. It was a really interesting read and just this invisible infrastructure and process that just has such a big impact on every aspect of our life and I wish we had more literature like that that exposes these processes to people who you know they might not want to do a career in it, they might not want to do a textbook on it, but getting the highlights is genuinely quite interesting yeah, yeah, and what you're saying.
Megan Preston Meyer:I call this the sort of the hidden logic of the world, and you, you're exactly right. It's all there, this infrastructure and these processes, and I would argue that it's not invisible necessarily, or when it works it is, it's just like anything else, it hums along. But one of the things that I love about a supply chain and operations and some of these more like, they're quite tangible disciplines, and I think that's why it works well for kids, kids books, because you can take a kid to down to the docks and you can look at these shipping containers. I mean, shipping containers are, that's a perfect example of something that it's invisible because you see them all the time, or trucks on the highway, or you know, like you, just they're part of the fabric of the world and so you don't notice them until they're not there or until you know they're spilling, or you know blocking a canal or doing something that you don't want them to do.
Megan Preston Meyer:But if you take the time to kind of look at, you know, look at a dock, look at a truck, look at, you know, the back room, kind of peer into the back room at a grocery store you can see a lot of the stuff in motion and I think that can make it. You know, it can be quite tangible and concrete as opposed to I mean I could not be a coder Like all. That's. The kind of stuff that I find is, you know, invisible infrastructure, like all of this more abstract kind of ones and zeros, and we need you know. But it's so funny what you say too about how now everything is so intertwined that a cyber attack can make it so you can't fill your grocery order yeah, absolutely it's.
Sebastian David Lees:I suppose we've. I suppose there are three, three things I want to pick up before we run out of time, and the first one was about this, this, this, what my friend gerald actually would call a kind of over-connected world, and how everything now is becoming more intertwined so that these third order effects, these cascade failure situations, as I call them, are becoming more and more prominent. It seems like there isn't really, you know, every couple of months or something, I think. The last time we met up in Chicago there was the cloud strike, I said, which caused global flights to go down, so a few of us couldn't make it. And I think what's interesting is, by exposing these processes to kids early on, and especially in the new book, using the avalanche as a kind of metaphor for these things and the dangers of prediction, we're just getting those concepts in early now.
Sebastian David Lees:When I read this, I wanted to ask you so, the two characters in this book, they're sort of the polar opposites of each other and we talk about one as, I suppose, obviously, entropy, non-linearity, the dangers of forecasting, and the other one being the more, I suppose, what you call classic, non-linear, scientific approach. What's the idea that they are two distinct characters, because part of me read it as how we both have this side of us in our brain, these two kind of ways of looking at the world, and they're doing battle with each other sometimes and we have to tame one or the other, depending on what kind of environment we're in and mediating it. Am I over reading this, or with? How are you looking into it that way?
Megan Preston Meyer:no, I don't think so. I think I think you're exactly right and I was very careful to not make a good guy and a bad guy. I didn't want, I didn't want either one of them to be clearly right and the other one clearly wrong. Obviously I have there's a little bit of a bias and kind of you know, like maybe 60, 40, 70, 30, kind of which way you should, which way you should lean. But I think, and I think we, just like you say we have both and we need both. I mean, we need to be rational and and logical and we need to like we can't just be completely chaotic and just, you know, see how the wind blows. We need to do some prediction, we need to do some planning, but we also need to be resilient and and just and robust enough to you know, whatever happens, to not get so sort of paralyzed by being wrong about our prediction.
Megan Preston Meyer:That was one thing I learned in the corporate world is that you will never be right. I mean the anytime you're predicting you, just you, you try to be less wrong and I mean, hey, that's not a great, just not a great mode to live in. Your kind of highest aspiration is to be less wrong, but I think having this idea, especially for kids, that you will be, you know like make your best guess, do your due diligence, but when you're wrong, pick yourself up and start. You know, figure out what you're going to do next. I think that's good for all of us.
Sebastian David Lees:Yeah, absolutely. And again, I think we can be guilty on this corner of Twitter of being a little bit overzealous about, oh, models are terrible, models are bad. But we were talking with Emmanuel Derman and he was saying the point isn't that models are bad, models are good and models are useful. It's about understanding the limitations of the models you create and that's where the balance lies between the two characters in your story invisible infrastructure, and what I love is kids go through these phases, like they go through their train phase, they go through their truck. It's very, very common. So being able to hijack that phase, that very common phase but yeah, these are trucks, but like, look at the layer beyond this I think that's a really nice way. I don't want to say I'm sneaking under the radar because that sounds a bit machiavellian, but it's a really nice way of introducing those, those concepts, to kids. Right we're, we are.
Sebastian David Lees:I'm mindful of time, as always on this show, so I'm going to move on to kind of what I call the lightning round, which is very quick questions from community members, people who listen to the show but they might be interested in asking they're not super long answers, so please don't worry. And, as always, you never know what. We've had some wild and wacky questions from people in the past, so let's see what we've got. If max entropy had a theme song, what would it be?
Megan Preston Meyer:I can like. A little jingle just came into my mind. I don't know what it is. It might be the a team theme song. I'm not sure was it.
Sebastian David Lees:In 2005, a statistical modeler was in prison for a crime he didn't commit. Okay, great. So supply chain hero, cozy, mystery sleuth or children's author, which is the most fun to write the the cozy mysteries are the most fun to write, just because it's.
Megan Preston Meyer:I mean, half of it is like a diary, like most of when I write those. Most of the job is editing out the things that no one is going to care about except me, but I think that's the most fun okay, moving on, we've got, let's have a look at these, let's pick one that's slightly different.
Sebastian David Lees:So I suppose, going back to your wider experience, what would you say is one of the most underrated or misunderstood concepts in operations management or supply chain management?
Megan Preston Meyer:Good question. I think the people who I think it's kind of misunderstood by other people and this is, you know, any insider is going to say well, the people who work in supply chain know all of the concepts. But I think there is this I mean, a lot of times, operations management, supply chain because it's so tangible, it's kind of the limiting reagent and there's you can't make things go faster, you can't I mean, you're still held by the laws of physics a lot of times, and whereas in many other disciplines or other functions you can kind of change a slide on a powerpoint and make like, make a big, you know, actual change. Um, you can't do that a lot of times in operations and I think that's misunderstood yeah, absolutely.
Sebastian David Lees:I think software's. It might be a little bit to blame for this because with software it can be quite trivial to change things and alter things. The cost is negligible cycles. I've seen that bleed into other areas as a management fad or management trend where it's maybe not appropriate to be honest.
Megan Preston Meyer:Yeah yeah, Shipping fast does break things sometimes in the real world.
Sebastian David Lees:And you can't just roll out a new release and it updates automatically. There are real world consequences of that, and again, this is coming back to Taleb's idea of skin in the game, where the Victorian railway engineers would have to sleep under the bridges with their family for the first few nights. They're operational, and mechanisms like that. Okay, I think we've got time for one more question, which was so what's next for you after the avalanche? Do you have to expand on my question a little bit? The way I read this is do you have a kind of arc planned for these characters and do you have different arcs in the pipeline, or are you taking it one book at a time?
Megan Preston Meyer:This one. I'm taking one book at a time. I don't have another book planned. I have some ideas, but this book the entirety of the story and, like most of the like, final form of the text, took about 20 minutes start to finish. So it was very sort of I was inspired, I wrote it down and so if I get you know if I am inspired for another Max entropy and prediction story, I will you know. I at this point there's no way to know. There's like I can't predict if there's going to be another one.
Sebastian David Lees:So we'll, we'll all just see. I look forward, look forward to seeing. Well, I think we're just about running out of time, just about running out of time, but I suppose, before we wrap up, is there anything else you wanted to mention, any shout outs, anything you want to shamelessly plug? Anything at all really you wanted to mention?
Megan Preston Meyer:I think I mean shameless plug for the books. A lot of the conversation has been a shameless plug for the books. But the Adventures of Supply, jane and FIFO, read them to your Kids. Firebrand, read it Yourself. Max, entropy and the Avalanche all of you can read it together.
Sebastian David Lees:Awesome. Well, thank you very much. It's been an absolutely brilliant conversation. It's been really intriguing to be able to frame a lot of the ideas that I love, that this community loves, through the lens of children's books. I think it's an absolutely brilliant idea. I think it will resonate strongly with the members of this community who do have kids, who love these ideas. And, yeah, I look forward to seeing more, but for now I'll just say, megan Preston-Mayer, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming to Pat Tony's.
Megan Preston Meyer:Yeah, thanks so much, Seb. This has been wonderful.