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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