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Hamlet Was Wrong

Hamlet Was Wrong

Released Thursday, 6th August 2020
 3 people rated this episode
Hamlet Was Wrong

Hamlet Was Wrong

Hamlet Was Wrong

Hamlet Was Wrong

Thursday, 6th August 2020
 3 people rated this episode
Rate Episode

Episode Transcript

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0:15

Pushkin. Here's

0:20

what we're doing today. Ready, but are you did?

0:22

I'm going to do an episode of revisionist History

0:26

in which I you know, I'm I'm obsessed

0:28

with hiring. I've always been obsessed

0:30

with that. So what I'm doing is

0:32

I'm interviewing all the people I ever hired, and

0:34

you you're the first person I ever

0:37

hired. I wear

0:39

that badge pretty proudly. I'll tell

0:41

you what. Stacy

0:44

Kalish my first assistant.

0:46

I'd never had an assistant before, but

0:49

maybe fifteen years ago, right after

0:51

publishing my second book, Blink, I realized

0:53

I was spending all my time answering emails

0:56

and booking travel instead of writing,

0:59

so I decided I needed some help.

1:02

I didn't remember the circumstances

1:05

under which you came to work for

1:07

me, so I thought I would I would just ask you

1:10

remind me again how I found you. A

1:14

big theme of what follows is that I

1:16

have no memory, names, faces, dates.

1:18

I basically forget everything. A

1:20

normal person doesn't have to do research on

1:23

their own life, but I'm afraid I

1:25

do. Okay,

1:27

so I have some funny, funny

1:30

memories around

1:32

the whole hiring situation.

1:35

So you've found me. How it

1:37

happened was I

1:40

had just finished grad school and

1:42

was looking for a job. Stacy

1:45

knew someone who knew someone

1:47

who had an assistant who knew me, or

1:49

something like that. Very complicated. Anyway,

1:51

I got Stacy's name and just emailed

1:54

her out of the blue. You're

1:56

like, you don't know me, but I'm looking for an assistant,

1:59

you know, would you be interested? We

2:01

met the next day for coffee. We chatted

2:04

for literally, I'm going to say, all

2:06

of thirty minutes. Yeah,

2:08

and so, yeah, we were you were going to

2:11

you were traveling to South Africa. All

2:13

we spoke about of what I can remember

2:16

is you had said, oh, you have an accent.

2:19

You have an accent. I'm like, yeah, I was born in South Africa.

2:21

And then you moved to Australia, like, oh,

2:23

I'm going to South Africa for business or

2:25

you know, for Europe speaking

2:27

engagements. The next day and so I think

2:30

for about twenty minutes, all we talked about was

2:32

like recommendations of what you should do in South

2:34

Africa. That pretty much I think

2:37

was it's a rigorous job.

2:39

Interviewing rigorous, Like, yes, you really

2:41

vetted me through and through my

2:43

knowledge were best to eat in South Africa.

2:46

So we talked about that, and

2:48

I remember hilariously being very

2:51

concerned because I just got in a nose

2:53

ring and I remember thinking,

2:55

oh, I don't know, you know, is he going to like

2:58

should I take the nose ring out for the interview?

3:00

Well he notices this, you know,

3:03

is it proper or professional of me? And I

3:06

literally remember like maybe six months

3:08

to a year later, when I was obviously

3:10

had been working for you all that time, and I said

3:13

to you something about like did you ever notice

3:15

that or something about my nose ring came out? You're like,

3:17

oh, I didn't even know you had one. But

3:20

I've agonized overwhere that to keep this

3:22

nose ring in or not for

3:25

fear that it would you know, I don't know if

3:27

it would be a bad look. And you did

3:29

not for like the entire year or

3:31

the first year that I worked for you did not even notice

3:34

that I had a nose ring. I

3:37

didn't notice then. I don't remember. Now

3:39

this is getting off to a bad start. My

3:44

name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening

3:47

to my podcast about Things Overlooked

3:49

and Misunderstood. In

3:52

this episode, I turned the unflinching

3:55

analytic gaze, that is revisionist history

3:58

upon myself. Let

4:06

us use as our text VI immortal

4:08

lines the New Testament Matthew

4:11

seven, Verse five. Thou

4:16

hypocrite, first cast out

4:18

the beam out of thine own eye, and

4:23

then shalt thou see clearly to

4:25

cast out the moat out of thy brother's

4:27

eye. You

4:37

had emailed me and we'd met the next morning

4:40

because you were leaving, I think shortly

4:42

after that for South Africa. We

4:45

spoke for about thirty minutes, twenty twenty

4:47

five of which was about South Africa, and

4:49

then you left and you said to me,

4:51

said, okay, great. Um, you

4:53

know, I got a couple more people to interview, and

4:56

so I guess I'll be in touch when I'm back from my travel

4:58

in like two weeks or so. I'm like, okay, you

5:01

know, good to meet you, and I'm being kind

5:03

of nervous you left. I thought, oh god, i'mna have to wait

5:05

now for two weeks to find out and about

5:08

I'm gonna say. Ten to fifteen minutes

5:10

later, my phone rang

5:14

and I answered it and You're like, hey,

5:17

it's Malcolm again. So listen.

5:20

You seem nice enough. Why don't you just come

5:22

by and start tomorrow. Like

5:28

It's like the least professional hiring story

5:30

I've heard in my life. And

5:33

the funniest thing as well is I was like,

5:35

this must have been like a

5:38

blink moment for him. I mean, you

5:40

had just finished riding blink. That's when

5:42

I started with you, like two thousand and five, right

5:44

after that book. And I remember laughing

5:47

with you again a few months later, well

5:49

into you know, the job, and

5:51

saying to you, you know when you hired

5:53

me? You know, we didn't You didn't really

5:56

vent me much. Was it like

5:58

a blink moment? You just knew And you

6:00

said to me, Nah, I just

6:02

couldn't be bothered going through any more interview

6:06

and you seem nice enough. That was like,

6:09

you see nice. I just didn't feel like interviewing anyone

6:11

else. As

6:14

I've stated, I remember none of this,

6:16

but it all seems a little strange, doesn't

6:18

it. I was about to hand Stacy

6:21

access to all of my

6:23

business credit cards, male

6:25

media requests. I would soon make

6:27

her my main intermediary with the

6:30

entire outside world. Did

6:32

I appear to have read your resume skimmed?

6:38

Maybe? Did I ask you? Do you remember

6:40

if I asked you any questions about your schooling.

6:43

No, did you have any previous

6:45

work experience that was relevant? I

6:49

had interned and worked

6:51

at Frontline, but I mean that's

6:53

more documentary. Yeah really,

6:55

yeah, it was a resume obviously

6:57

didn't work. Who

7:00

knew front Line? Well that's impressive.

7:02

If I'd done that, I might might have hired you

7:04

in ten minutes and I supposed to twenty five. Now.

7:08

My first defense reaction to what Stacy

7:10

was telling me was this was my first

7:12

hire. What did I know? Then

7:15

she reminded me of someone else.

7:18

Do you still work with the bud Nick?

7:22

Oh my god, I'd forgotten that story,

7:25

the bud Nick Don bud Nick, even

7:28

though I've barely gotten started here. This

7:30

requires a digression. Well

7:33

that's a fun story from my end. Well,

7:36

I'd just like you to I'd like to tell

7:38

us what the white year with this two

7:41

thousand and five? How can you remember

7:43

that? Because I'm a Silvan

7:47

The blink had just hit

7:49

the shelves blink

7:51

in case you hadn't picked up on it is about

7:53

the power of first impressions. Don

7:56

had just read it and liked it. So

7:59

anyway, one day I was I was

8:01

out for lunch or

8:03

went to the bank or something, and I'm walking back to my office

8:06

and there you are.

8:08

I see me walking down the street

8:11

in the opposite direction of me, and

8:13

I knew immediately who you were, but I couldn't

8:16

think of your name, couldn't think of your name, couldn't

8:18

think of your name. You passed me by.

8:20

I turned, I opened my mouth. I yelled

8:22

out, Hey, Malcolm, but

8:25

I didn't know your name. I just yelled out hey

8:27

Malcolm, just like

8:29

in the book blink, and you stopped and

8:31

you turned around. And I seemed like a

8:34

nice enough guy, and you picked

8:36

up on my energy of being excited

8:38

by the book. So we were standing on the street talking

8:40

for a while, and I said, gee, I would

8:42

love it if you would autograph my book for

8:45

me. And then it dawned on me. We

8:47

were around the corner from my office, so

8:50

I said, you know what, we're around the corner from my office,

8:53

and you came up to my office. You

8:56

still didn't know my name, you didn't know who

8:58

I was. I was just a nice guy in the street.

9:00

And you come up to my office and

9:02

we're sitting there talking and that's when

9:04

you notice things on my desk and you see

9:06

the initial CPA

9:09

and you say to me, oh, you're an accountant.

9:12

I said, yeah, I'm an accountant. And you

9:14

said, gee, I'm really not that

9:16

happy with the accountants I'm using right

9:18

now? Can I hire you?

9:24

And I was a little like excited

9:26

and dumbfounded at the same time, and I

9:28

said, slow down, I

9:31

said, I said, we'll

9:33

make an appointment. Well, sit, and we'll talk

9:35

about what your situation

9:38

is and what kind of advice I could possibly

9:40

give you, and then you'll figure

9:42

out if you want to hire me or not. And

9:44

he said no, no, no, I want to hire And I said,

9:47

no, we're gonna We're gonna do

9:49

this right. We're not going to do this impulsively.

9:51

And eventually you came to my office and I gave

9:53

you a consultation and you hired me.

9:56

So a perfect stranger, short

9:58

guy red hair, runs up to me

10:00

on Medicine Avenue, Malcolm Malcolm,

10:03

and five minutes later, I'm trying to hire

10:05

him to handle all of my most sensitive

10:08

affairs. Who am

10:10

I? So

10:14

you wouldn't let me. I was like, I'll, I want to hire

10:16

you, but you wouldn't let me. I wouldn't let you.

10:18

Why would Yeah? Because

10:21

I wanted to have a serious conversation

10:24

where where I gave you a consultation

10:26

and I discussed what planning

10:29

ideas I had for you. I

10:31

wanted to make sure that

10:33

you made your decision not based

10:35

on impulse, but based

10:38

on some knowledge and trust

10:42

and confidence that I knew what I

10:44

was talking about. But I had just told

10:47

you. But the reason I didn't

10:49

like my old account. They never had any conversation

10:51

with me. I didn't know any about accounting,

10:54

So how can I How can I have an intelligent

10:56

conversation with you about whether

10:58

you should be my account if I'd never had an

11:00

intelligent conversation with an account, But I let it

11:02

should be my account, Yeah, precisely.

11:04

And it goes around and around and around whatever.

11:07

This is getting embarrassed, all

11:11

right? Now comes the part where I

11:13

try and defend myself. In

11:15

every season ever Visionist history, I

11:18

fall in love with someone I interview. Last

11:20

season it was Tony Gebli, the tea

11:22

connoisseur who accused me of being

11:25

a tea bro. Meeting Tony

11:27

for reasons I don't entirely understand, made

11:29

me very happy. The season

11:32

before that, it was Casey Bowles, the

11:34

musician from Nashville, who sang a

11:36

song that brings me to tears every time I

11:38

hear it. She grew up playing

11:40

gaw Girl, Well

11:44

Row Down Dream.

11:47

It's JHC. HollyHood, Kaci

11:51

b O L L Siste

11:53

Friday. When this is over look her

11:55

up this

11:58

season. The interview that surprised me the

12:00

most was with someone named Adam Cronkrite.

12:03

I talked about him in the episode on Democratic

12:06

Lotteries. Adam has made it his

12:08

life's work to convince grade school kids

12:10

to choose their student council governments

12:13

by picking names out of a hat. Actually,

12:16

since Adam works in Bolivia by picking

12:18

fava beans out of a clay pot, can

12:21

I ask you if your question? Yeah, that's

12:23

Adam. After we talked, he seemed

12:25

slightly mystified about why I had

12:28

emailed him one day out of the blue.

12:30

So how do you find out about lottery selection?

12:33

Like democratic lottery concepts? I was just interesting.

12:35

I've always been interested in lotteries, and

12:40

I just was rooting around

12:42

online and I ran across the

12:44

work you were doing. I mean, it's as simple as I was sitting

12:47

in my coffee shop over there. That was

12:49

the day I contacted you I was like, this

12:51

is really interesting and it

12:54

was totally random. Now

12:56

there's a very important distinction with

12:58

this whole lottery thing. It's between

13:01

agnosticism and nihilism.

13:06

Agnosticism is about indifference.

13:09

It's an elaborate gallic shrug. The

13:14

agnostic would say, the reason to

13:16

choose people randomly for positions

13:18

of leadership is that basically anyone

13:20

can do the job. The army in

13:22

war time has an agnostic position,

13:25

their belief as they can take almost any able

13:27

bodied person and turn them into

13:29

a reasonably effective soldier. But

13:32

that's not Adam Cronkwrite's position. He

13:35

absolutely thinks that they are good leaders

13:37

and bad leaders, and not everyone is cut

13:39

out to be student council president. He

13:41

just doesn't believe that the systems we currently use

13:44

are any good, So he says, why

13:47

bother just pull a name out of a hat.

13:50

Now, Adam would argue that's in the interests

13:52

of a fair system,

13:55

but let's be clear, he's a nihilist.

13:57

He does not look at the vast apparatus of

14:00

democratic selection, honed and perfected

14:02

over many centuries and shrug. That's

14:05

what the agnostic would do. No, he

14:07

looks at those elaborate us, and

14:10

he rolls his eyes. He says, give

14:12

me a break. That's

14:15

my position too when it comes to hiring. I

14:17

look at all the folklore and ritual around

14:20

predicting how well people will perform,

14:22

and I say, give me a break. I

14:25

am an eye roller, not a shrugger. I

14:27

am a nihilist, and my task

14:29

in this episode of revisionist history is

14:32

to convince you to be a nihilist too.

14:43

The patron saint of Hiring nihilism,

14:45

without question, was the author

14:48

and educator Lawrence Peter. All

14:50

of us in the Hiring nihilist community

14:53

worship at his feet. When

15:00

I was a boy, I used to

15:02

believe my parents and believe my teachers,

15:04

and that you should have respect for your

15:06

elders and betters, and that the men upstairs

15:08

knew what they were doing. That's Peter.

15:11

He was a Canadian, as am I, of course,

15:14

And I don't know if you remember from the Lottery

15:16

episode, but Adam Cronkwright went

15:18

to university in Canada. The

15:20

nihilist strain runs deep in the land

15:23

of the Frozen Prairie. Anyway.

15:26

Lawrence Peter was a great aphorist,

15:28

famous for saying things like the

15:31

noblest of all dogs is the hot dog.

15:33

It feeds the hand that bites it. He

15:36

was also deeply involved in something called

15:38

the Kinetic Sculpture Race in Humboldt

15:40

County, California, which is really

15:42

hard to explain except to say that

15:44

it's kind of like the Triathlon of the

15:46

art world, involving sculptures on

15:49

wheels that are required to perform

15:51

certain feats. Peter

15:53

famously proposed a special prize

15:56

called the Golden Dinosaur Award,

15:58

to be given to the first machine to break down

16:00

immediately after the start, which

16:03

if you knew Lawrence Peter, you would recognize

16:06

as being very Lawrence Peter. Because

16:08

his professional obsession was

16:11

with incompetence. He had

16:13

a connoisseur's eye for it. And

16:16

as I looked around me, I

16:18

saw a sign on the door that said emergency

16:21

exit authorized personnel

16:24

only. I wondered who had written that,

16:27

But then later I saw

16:29

another science had emergency exit

16:32

not to be used under any circumstances.

16:36

Lawrence Peter formulated one of the most famous

16:38

laws in social science. He

16:40

called it the Peter principle. The

16:45

Peter principal states very simply, then, in

16:48

any hierarchy, an employee

16:50

tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

16:53

That's where he stays. People

16:59

get promoted based on a prediction

17:01

about their ability to handle the next job on

17:03

the hierarchy, and they keep rising

17:06

until the prediction is wrong. You

17:09

see, in any organization where

17:12

competence is essentially

17:15

eligibility for promotion and

17:17

incompetence is a bar to promotion.

17:20

Wherever those rules apply, people

17:22

will rise to the level of incompetence and

17:25

tend to stay there. Lawrence

17:27

Peter wrote a book called Peter Principle

17:29

in nineteen sixty nine, and it is

17:32

delightful, exactly in a Lawrence

17:34

Peter sort of way, Like he has

17:36

a whole riff on the special case of someone

17:38

who is incompetent or promoted anyway

17:41

kicked upstairs a movie

17:43

calls percussive sublimation,

17:46

or the case when an incompetent person

17:49

is moved out of the way but given a long

17:51

job title as compensation. Peter

17:54

called that a lateral arabesque.

17:59

Now chances are you've heard of the Peter principle.

18:02

I'm guessing as a kind of joke. Ha ha, that's

18:04

why my boss is so bad. But it's

18:06

not a joke. Allow

18:14

me to direct you to the work of a fellow

18:17

member of the Hiring Nihilist Club. Allan

18:19

Benson, economist at the University

18:21

of Minnesota. While he

18:24

was doing his doctorate at MIT, he

18:26

got bitten by the Peter principal bug

18:29

I started to go to sales managements conferences,

18:32

and I found that there was this adage that

18:34

the best salesperson doesn't necessarily make the

18:36

best manager. But then

18:39

people would laugh and say, but we do it anyway,

18:41

and I wanted to find out why. The

18:44

great advantage of using salespeople to validate

18:46

the Peter principle, Benson realizes

18:49

is that you can measure performance really easily.

18:51

It's not like assessing the performance of engineers

18:54

or politicians. No, it's super

18:56

straightforward. You just look at how many sales

18:59

the salesperson has made. And it's also

19:01

easy to measure how good a sales manager

19:03

is. You just add up the sales of the

19:05

salespeople the manager's managing. So

19:08

Allan bensons a tech company that

19:10

sells one of those software platforms

19:12

for sales organizations, kind

19:14

of like salesforce dot Com, and he

19:17

gets access to all of their customers

19:19

data. Four hundred firms, one

19:22

hundred thousand salespeople. The

19:24

first thing he finds is a confirmation

19:26

of the famous eighty twenty rule that

19:29

twenty percent of the salespeople are

19:31

responsible for eighty percent of

19:33

the sales across the board. It's

19:36

not that we don't know who is a good salesperson.

19:39

We definitely know some people

19:41

are really good. Second

19:43

thing, he finds that those superstars

19:46

get rewarded. What we found in

19:48

the data is that top salespeople

19:51

are far far more likely to be

19:53

promoted into sales management than

19:56

people who are outside of that top twenty percent

19:58

or who aren't the best person on the team.

20:01

Of course, that makes sense. You

20:03

give the stars a promotion. That's what everyone

20:06

does. Okay, now

20:08

it gets interested what happens

20:10

when those stars take over as

20:12

manager their salespeople

20:14

than salespeople who they manage. Their performances

20:17

becomes worse under them than it was

20:19

under their prior managers. The

20:21

stars get promoted, and they're terrible managers.

20:24

How terrible? Really terrible.

20:26

Benson looked at an alternate promotion scenario

20:29

where companies decide to promote not the

20:31

stars, but the salespeople who are

20:33

good at collaborating nice, friendly

20:36

people who work well with others, and

20:38

teams managed by the friendly people do

20:41

thirty percent better than the teams managed

20:43

by the superstars thirty percent.

20:45

It's huge. Now, you might

20:47

say, what does this have to do with nihilism?

20:50

This is just an argument for promoting friendly

20:52

people over superstars. That's

20:55

not eye rolling or even shrugging.

20:57

Well, I haven't told you about Benson's last

21:00

finding, because Benson

21:02

found a fatal flaw in the alternate

21:04

promoting scenario, the one that seems

21:07

to work thirty percent better, which

21:09

is this, if

21:11

you promote the friendly salespeople over

21:14

the top salespeople, then the top

21:16

salespeople get upset, so

21:18

upset that their performance suffers and

21:20

they aren't so top anymore. The

21:23

whole thing is so magnificently

21:25

perverse, isn't it. All

21:28

Your sales come from the same small group

21:30

of people who expect to be promoted

21:32

as a reward for their excellence. But

21:35

if you promote them out of sales, which

21:37

you get in return, is a lousy manager.

21:39

And if you don't promote them and

21:42

you pass them over in favor of some warm

21:44

and fuzzy into personal woos,

21:47

the top performers will pout and

21:50

stop trying. So what are's supposed

21:52

to do? You could pay the

21:54

superstars more and more and give them

21:56

fancier titles in the maneuver Lawrence

21:58

Peter called the lateral Arabesque.

22:01

But you've still insulted them by passing

22:03

them over for the friendly woofs. Another

22:07

idea that some Peter Prince theorists

22:09

have floated is lotteries they

22:12

end up where Adam Cronkwright ended up, put

22:14

everyone's name in a hat and promote the winner.

22:16

I mean, why not, But then

22:19

why have a boss at all? The concept

22:22

of a boss is that a boss knows more than

22:24

the people there bossing. There's

22:26

even a school of thought in the upper

22:28

reaches of Peter principal world that

22:31

the best solution is just to man

22:33

up, forget everything else,

22:35

and deliberately promote the incompetent,

22:38

because this way you won't lose one of your

22:40

superstars by turning them into a lousy manager.

22:43

You'll just transfer an incompetent

22:45

person from their present position of

22:48

incompetence to another position

22:50

of incompetence upstairs

22:52

somewhere where they will occupy a position

22:55

which, according to the Peter principle,

22:57

was bound to be occupied by an incompetent

23:00

person sooner or later. Anyway, did

23:02

you follow that, Peter

23:06

principal? Theorizing gets very

23:09

meta, very quickly, which

23:12

is why most people would rather console

23:14

themselves with the soothing vanalities of

23:16

merit and prediction and hierarchy.

23:20

Only a select few are

23:23

willing to face the truth. And

23:25

who are those brave and lonely heretics,

23:29

the nihilists, people like

23:31

me who look at the world with a

23:33

cold and unflinching eye and say,

23:36

under the circumstances, why bother

23:39

to learn the first thing about any

23:41

new perspective? Job candidate,

23:51

Things went well with my first hire, Stacy,

23:54

but eventually Stacy needed to move on,

23:57

and so I had to go through the whole process

23:59

all over again with Sarah.

24:02

Basically, we

24:05

didn't talk about anything professional at

24:07

all, as I reculer, it was a

24:10

little bit about family and that

24:13

I was half American, and that I could you

24:15

know that I knew the fifty States of America and alphabetical

24:17

order. That's Sarah remembering

24:20

my second ever job in review. And

24:23

you taught me a Yiddish word.

24:26

I taught you a Yiddish word. Well,

24:28

you wanted to know if I knew about

24:31

the word, maybe you had

24:33

just had just learned it. I don't know, but it's the word

24:36

that is the kind of the opposite

24:39

directional flow of nachas, so nachus

24:41

being like the joy that your children give you, and

24:43

this word being us, Yeah,

24:46

the one that you give them, Yes, yes,

24:50

nahas and yours. I had just

24:53

given are given a speech

24:55

to like some Jewish organization

24:58

in Boston, and of

25:00

course I'm not Jewish, So I was filled

25:02

with anxiety, and so I said, I said, well,

25:04

I have to impress them early on. And

25:06

so I began my speech by

25:09

with something about the distinction

25:11

between yochas and nus.

25:14

It was not nas, right,

25:17

yeah, So

25:19

there I was schooling you Jewish

25:23

person well about Yiddish.

25:27

I hired Sarah by email the

25:30

same afternoon we met. She was another

25:32

recent college graduate. I didn't really

25:34

bring up the job description during the interview

25:37

because by that point I wasn't really sure

25:39

what my current assistant was up to. I

25:41

mean, how would I know? Her job was to

25:43

do things so that I didn't have to do them. So

25:46

if I knew what she was doing, she wouldn't

25:48

be doing her job, would she? So

25:50

Stacy briefed Sarah about practical

25:53

things and much more, apparently

25:55

because now I remember that

25:57

the two pieces of advice that she kind of impressed

26:00

upon me, like tablets, were respect

26:03

his privacy and be nice to his

26:05

parents. As it turned out,

26:07

Sarah was exceedingly to my parents.

26:10

My father thought you just were the bee's knees.

26:12

He was like, you were his

26:14

favorite. You were absolutely his favorite. I

26:17

think I told you that strange and wonderful

26:19

dinner that I had just with the two of them, with

26:22

your mom and die. What happened? What

26:24

happened? Oh, not

26:27

just that. It was when it was, I know,

26:29

a New Yorker festival and you were flying off, and

26:31

I just went to see if they needed anything, and I went

26:33

to see if they were okay, and they asked if I wanted to join them

26:35

for dinner. And no

26:37

one had told me what you're supposed to do in

26:40

a moment like that, like are you supposed to go

26:42

for dinner with your bosses parents? Are You're absolutely

26:44

not supposed to go for dinner with your boss's parents.

26:48

So I did, and

26:51

they were just so they were so kind to me,

26:53

Malcolm, and just like very warm

26:56

and interesting and that was. That was the

26:58

time I think I wrote you about it was when they

27:00

asked the way To asked if we wanted pepper on

27:03

our soup, and I just said yes because I thought

27:05

that's what you're supposed to say. And your dad said, I don't

27:07

know, I haven't tried it yet. And

27:10

it was just it just

27:12

it was like it was brilliant to me that you could

27:14

just I guess he was like he was being

27:16

a mathematician or assignedist about his soup. But

27:20

it was such a nice Oh,

27:24

I missed my father so much. The

27:27

soup agnostic says, go

27:29

ahead, put pepper in. It's

27:31

not going to make much difference either way.

27:33

The soup nihilist says, pepper

27:36

can make a great deal of difference. But it

27:38

is impossible for me to find out whether the waiter

27:40

is offering me pepper because the soup

27:42

leaves the kitchen deliberately under pepper, or

27:44

because the restaurant offers pepper as an amenity

27:47

regardless of the pepperiness of its

27:49

offerings. Sarah took the

27:52

nihilist position, as would I.

27:54

Of course I always get the pepper. But

27:56

Graham Gladwell was not a soup nihilist.

27:59

He was a soup empiricist. He

28:01

tried the soup, then considered

28:03

the pepper. But

28:06

on all other matters he took the same approach,

28:09

which as I do, what do you think I get

28:11

it from?

28:13

One snowy day, when we were going to visit

28:15

friends, my father took an off ramp

28:18

too fast, skidded down the embankment,

28:20

and landed on the on ramp facing

28:22

around direction, whereupon he drove

28:25

off the on ramp onto a road

28:27

that none of us had ever seen before. And

28:30

then he announced, oh,

28:32

this is the way I wanted to go all along. Did

28:36

he mean that, Yes,

28:38

he did. He

28:41

believed that if you were on a road for whatever

28:43

reason, then that's the road you should take.

28:45

If an accountant appears before you hire

28:48

the accountant, if Stacy seems

28:50

nice, hire Stacy. That is

28:53

the way Gladwell's think. This

28:56

is in fact the subject of my eulogy from

28:58

my father at his funeral a few years ago, which

29:01

was one of those funerals that wasn't exactly

29:04

funereal in a sense that there was

29:06

so much Graham glabbled in the air that about

29:08

halfway through all forgot we was supposed to be

29:10

grieving for my part. I

29:12

got up and spoke about all the ways in which my father

29:14

would have objected to his own funeral. This

29:17

has been a meticulously planned service

29:20

so far. My father did not believe in

29:22

planning anything. The only

29:24

reason anything in my father's

29:27

life was planned was because,

29:29

in a spectacularly fortunate

29:32

failure of due diligence, he

29:35

married my mother. Then

29:39

I talked about one of my heroes, albert

29:41

O. Hirshman, who is the true

29:43

godfather of my kind of nihilism,

29:46

even more than Lawrence Peter. Hirshman

29:48

was an economist and one of the towering

29:51

intellectuals of the twentieth century. He

29:53

helped save the lives of countless Jews in the Second

29:55

World War. Later he traveled

29:57

to exotic lands. He was a man

29:59

of action as well as words. His

30:02

guiding principle was always that Hamlet

30:04

was wrong, and by

30:07

that he meant that Hamlet

30:09

was someone whose doubts made

30:11

him incapable of acting right.

30:14

Hamlet was frozen to be or

30:16

not to be, that's the question. But

30:18

Hirshman's point was that Hamlet had it backwards.

30:21

That your doubts should free you, because

30:24

once you've accepted that you

30:26

don't know what happens next, that

30:28

you can't predict or plan everything

30:31

in your life, then you're free to act

30:34

because what's holding you back? What

30:37

is there to be afraid of if you've given up

30:39

on the illusion of knowing what could possibly

30:42

happen. I love

30:44

Hirshman because he reminds me of my father.

30:48

I think my father thought that Hamlet was

30:50

wrong. He believed

30:52

in God even though no mathematical

30:54

proof exists of God's existence.

30:57

Doubt did not compromise his

30:59

faith. It was what gave him freedom

31:01

to believe. He

31:03

married my mother even though the world told him

31:07

not to do that. He went

31:09

on walks without knowing where he would end

31:11

up. He never looked at a map. He would

31:13

just say, I'm going to follow my nose. He

31:16

built a greenhouse even though he didn't

31:18

know anything about carpentry. I

31:22

remember once looking out the window as a child,

31:26

and I saw the cat,

31:28

the house cat, streaking at top

31:30

speed with his ears back, and

31:33

following the cat, our dog

31:35

at top speed with his ears

31:37

back, look of terror in his eyes,

31:40

and then Pappy sprinting at

31:44

top speed for the safety of the house. And I thought,

31:46

what on earth and then I

31:48

saw this huge swarm of angry

31:51

bees. Pappy

31:54

felt the freedom to be a beekeeper, even

31:57

though he didn't really understand how bees worked.

32:02

I like to think that I learned from the best. Hamlet

32:07

never kept bees, but Hamlet

32:09

never had any fresh honey.

32:13

I'll stop because if my father

32:15

thought a speaker I'd gone on too long, he would

32:17

just get up and leave. He

32:20

would actually be taking a walk. At this point,

32:31

my hiring nihilism failed just once.

32:34

It was with the assistant who came after, Jane.

32:37

Jane was Sarah's roommate, whom I heart

32:39

because I liked Sarah, and I thought, under

32:41

the transitive property that if Sarah

32:43

was great, surely that meant that Jane would

32:45

be great too, because what are the odds Sarah

32:47

doesn't have good taste in roommates. And

32:49

sure enough, Jane was great. Jane

32:53

turned out to be the kind of person who would plan

32:55

the D Day invasion and then check in with

32:57

Churchill and Roosevelt at five on like a Friday

33:00

and say do you need anything more from

33:02

me before the weekend. Anyway,

33:05

Jane wanted to move on, and I hired.

33:08

I'm going to call her Susan Susan

33:12

seemed super nice, but she was

33:14

not a good assistant. In a span

33:16

of just a few weeks, she made one air after

33:19

another, some trivial, some major.

33:22

Then, just as I was about to go out

33:24

on a book tour, she announced she was taking

33:26

another job, leaving me in the lurch.

33:31

I reprimanded her. She knew it

33:33

wasn't working out. She was upset

33:35

and apologized. I

33:38

had forgotten about the whole incident until

33:40

in the course of my forensic analysis of

33:42

my hiring history, one of my old assistants

33:45

reminded me. So I searched

33:47

back through my old emails and found

33:49

this an email from me to

33:51

Susan. Dear

33:54

Susan, please don't

33:56

beat yourself up. Some people

33:58

are good at this kind of work. Some people

34:01

are not. It has no larger significance.

34:03

It's like how high you can jump, or whether

34:06

you were good at bowling. You are probably

34:08

best for more scholarly pursuits in the end,

34:10

which is not a bad thing. I was probably

34:13

exactly the same way at your age.

34:19

I kind of can't believe I wrote that email. It

34:22

sounds so sweet and understanding, But

34:24

I'm not sweet and understanding, am I?

34:26

No? Not really, what I

34:28

am is a hiring nihilist, and

34:30

the appearance of graciousness is simply

34:33

one of the wonderful side effects of hiring

34:35

nihilism. Because if you believe

34:37

that nothing in someone's performance in one

34:39

job predicts their future performance

34:42

in another job, if you believe

34:44

that the whole prediction system when it

34:46

comes to people is just an extravagant

34:48

exercise in self delusion, then

34:51

you are free to say to Susan, it's okay.

34:54

The fact that you didn't work out as my assistant

34:57

has no larger significance because

35:00

it doesn't. Life's too short. You

35:02

need an accountant, You meet an accountant, hire

35:05

the accountant, You meet Stacy,

35:07

and you cancel all your other interviews

35:09

because you realize, what's the point.

35:12

The nihilist believes that people are mysterious

35:14

and unpredictable, that life

35:16

is a big crapshoot, and at most of

35:18

the systems we put in place are there just to

35:21

satisfy our illusion that we can see

35:23

into the future. My

35:25

email went on, I'm

35:28

sorry I was as harsh as I was with you.

35:30

It's just that this is a rather stressful time

35:33

and I have a million things going on. But

35:35

Jacob, I believe is just the

35:38

kind of anal obsessive, detail

35:40

oriented sort who will serve me

35:42

well. Smiley face. So

35:45

all's well, that ends well, good

35:47

luck with your next job. I wish you

35:49

all the best. Am

35:54

Wait Jacob, Yes,

35:57

Jacob Smith Susan's

36:00

successor Yeah, that's right.

36:02

Do you remember where the interview was? Who

36:04

was at your place? And I remember that you

36:07

know me, I don't really like dress up dress up,

36:09

but I dressed up as much as I do. And

36:12

I specifically remember that you were like,

36:15

you weren't wearing shoes, and I think I had to take off

36:17

my shoes. And do you remember

36:19

what we talked? What I asked

36:22

you about the obviously,

36:24

the thing that always stuck with me is that you asked if I could drive

36:26

stick shift, which I

36:28

said yes. That was the big one. I remember

36:31

you asked what my parents did, which I thought was a good

36:33

question. I loved the fact that your

36:35

parents were teachers. Those two answers

36:37

seal it for me. Do

36:40

you remember how long this interview was? I

36:42

remember it was at like one and

36:44

being out of there and it was like one twenty and I was like, well

36:47

that either one really well or really poorly good. That was

36:49

the fastest job interview ever had.

36:52

And that's with like five to seven

36:54

minutes of just probably small talk and kind of getting

36:56

settled in. Yeah, the three

36:59

things in Dear B two you you

37:01

drive stick, your parents are teachers, and then

37:03

you said something something that you said. But then I'm

37:05

so annal that I would do something stupping.

37:07

I was like, wait, he self, admitting

37:09

to be anals is fantastic. It's exactly what

37:11

I want. It's

37:14

is funny in retrospect because I don't actually think

37:16

I'm that anal. I think I was playing

37:18

that up. I think I was, Yeah, but

37:21

I actually but no, no, See, if I

37:23

might defend myself, I am as interested in

37:25

someone who understands that they need to represent

37:27

themselves as anal as I am

37:30

in someone who is truly amal. Right,

37:32

right, yeah, you wouldn't actually want me to be so

37:34

yeah. No, And

37:38

how did Jacob work out well

37:41

for once in your life? Listen

37:43

to the credits. Revisions

37:49

History is produced by Jacob

37:52

Smith and Mei La Belle, with leaving

37:55

gets to Eloise Lytton and Anna

37:57

Naim. Our editor is Julia

37:59

Barton. Flawn Williams is our Engineer.

38:02

Fact checking by Beth Johnson, original

38:04

music by Luis Gara. Special thanks

38:07

to Carly Migliori, Heather fe Eric

38:09

Sandler, Maggie Taylor and l

38:11

haf A Jacob Weisberg. Revisionist

38:15

History is brought to you by

38:17

Pushkin Industries and you

38:19

a resident nihilist, Malcolm

38:21

Glauder

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