Toby Stuart

Or you get Adam Grant on the show and then anybody would be thrilled to get to be here.

It absolutely is true that one of the sources of status is merit.

Merit's a super complicated concept on itself.

The fallacy of the meritocracy in the sort of Horatio Alger sense in that you could argue there's more of a myth about meritocracy in the contemporary United States than is backed up by the amount of social mobility.

Yeah, exactly.

Do we live in any sense in a straight meritocracy where the best and most talented and most deserving win?

No.

No.

This is the great philosophical point.

It's like, what is a meritocracy?

Who gets to choose what merit is?

who deserves it and that's where like wine was amazing learning about wine in the book because there are these markets with critics like the film business roger ebert and the famous film critics and metacritic and rotten tomatoes the critics are super influential but wine is this one industry where there was just a guy who he was like lord of the rings he was the czar of it he dominated

the evaluation of wine.

Guy's name's Robert Parker, and he had this publication called The Wine Advocate.

But what's merit when you drink a bottle of wine?

What constitutes an amazing wine?

Well, there's also these fun experiments.

So they'll give professional SOMs, wine tasters, flights of wine.

Imagine giving a wine critic 12 small samples of wine.

And then people have thought of some clever experiments like take the same wine and put it into three of the glasses and then see if it's rated the same every time.