Speaker 1: Pushkin. Here's what we're doing today. Ready, but are you did?
Speaker 1: I'm going to do an episode of revisionist History in
Speaker 1: which I you know, I'm I'm obsessed with hiring. I've
Speaker 1: always been obsessed with that. So what I'm doing is
Speaker 1: I'm interviewing all the people I ever hired, and you
Speaker 1: you're the first person I ever hired. I wear that
Speaker 1: badge pretty proudly. I'll tell you what. Stacy Kalish my
Speaker 1: first assistant. I'd never had an assistant before, but maybe
Speaker 1: fifteen years ago, right after publishing my second book, Blink,
Speaker 1: I realized I was spending all my time answering emails
Speaker 1: and booking travel instead of writing, so I decided I
Speaker 1: needed some help. I didn't remember the circumstances under which
Speaker 1: you came to work for me, so I thought I
Speaker 1: would I would just ask you remind me again how
Speaker 1: I found you. A big theme of what follows is
Speaker 1: that I have no memory, names, faces, dates. I basically
Speaker 1: forget everything. A normal person doesn't have to do research
Speaker 1: on their own life, but I'm afraid I do. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I have some funny, funny memories around the whole
Speaker 1: hiring situation. So you've found me. How it happened was
Speaker 1: I had just finished grad school and was looking for
Speaker 1: a job. Stacy knew someone who knew someone who had
Speaker 1: an assistant who knew me, or something like that. Very complicated. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I got Stacy's name and just emailed her out of
Speaker 1: the blue. You're like, you don't know me, but I'm
Speaker 1: looking for an assistant, you know, would you be interested?
Speaker 1: We met the next day for coffee. We chatted for literally,
Speaker 1: I'm going to say, all of thirty minutes. Yeah, and so, yeah,
Speaker 1: we were you were going to you were traveling to
Speaker 1: South Africa. All we spoke about of what I can
Speaker 1: remember is you had said, oh, you have an accent.
Speaker 1: You have an accent. I'm like, yeah, I was born
Speaker 1: in South Africa. And then you moved to Australia, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going to South Africa for business or you know,
Speaker 1: for Europe speaking engagements. The next day and so I
Speaker 1: think for about twenty minutes, all we talked about was
Speaker 1: like recommendations of what you should do in South Africa.
Speaker 1: That pretty much I think was it's a rigorous job.
Speaker 1: Interviewing rigorous, Like, yes, you really vetted me through and
Speaker 1: through my knowledge were best to eat in South Africa.
Speaker 1: So we talked about that, and I remember hilariously being
Speaker 1: very concerned because I just got in a nose ring
Speaker 1: and I remember thinking, oh, I don't know, you know,
Speaker 1: is he going to like should I take the nose
Speaker 1: ring out for the interview? Well he notices this, you know,
Speaker 1: is it proper or professional of me? And I literally
Speaker 1: remember like maybe six months to a year later, when
Speaker 1: I was obviously had been working for you all that time,
Speaker 1: and I said to you something about like did you
Speaker 1: ever notice that or something about my nose ring came out?
Speaker 1: You're like, oh, I didn't even know you had one.
Speaker 1: But I've agonized overwhere that to keep this nose ring
Speaker 1: in or not for fear that it would you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it would be a bad look.
Speaker 1: And you did not for like the entire year or
Speaker 1: the first year that I worked for you did not
Speaker 1: even notice that I had a nose ring. I didn't
Speaker 1: notice then. I don't remember. Now this is getting off
Speaker 1: to a bad start. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're
Speaker 1: listening to my podcast about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood. In
Speaker 1: this episode, I turned the unflinching analytic gaze, that is
Speaker 1: revisionist history upon myself. Let us use as our text
Speaker 1: VI immortal lines the New Testament Matthew seven, Verse five.
Speaker 1: Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine
Speaker 1: own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast
Speaker 1: out the moat out of thy brother's eye. You had
Speaker 1: emailed me and we'd met the next morning because you
Speaker 1: were leaving, I think shortly after that for South Africa.
Speaker 1: We spoke for about thirty minutes, twenty twenty five of
Speaker 1: which was about South Africa, and then you left and
Speaker 1: you said to me, said, okay, great. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: I got a couple more people to interview, and so
Speaker 1: I guess I'll be in touch when I'm back from
Speaker 1: my travel in like two weeks or so. I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: you know, good to meet you, and I'm being kind
Speaker 1: of nervous you left. I thought, oh god, i'mna have
Speaker 1: to wait now for two weeks to find out and
Speaker 1: about I'm gonna say. Ten to fifteen minutes later, my
Speaker 1: phone rang and I answered it and You're like, hey,
Speaker 1: it's Malcolm again. So listen. You seem nice enough. Why
Speaker 1: don't you just come by and start tomorrow. Like It's
Speaker 1: like the least professional hiring story I've heard in my life.
Speaker 1: And the funniest thing as well is I was like,
Speaker 1: this must have been like a blink moment for him.
Speaker 1: I mean, you had just finished riding blink. That's when
Speaker 1: I started with you, like two thousand and five, right
Speaker 1: after that book. And I remember laughing with you again
Speaker 1: a few months later, well into you know, the job,
Speaker 1: and saying to you, you know when you hired me?
Speaker 1: You know, we didn't You didn't really vent me much.
Speaker 1: Was it like a blink moment? You just knew And
Speaker 1: you said to me, Nah, I just couldn't be bothered
Speaker 1: going through any more interview and you seem nice enough.
Speaker 1: That was like, you see nice. I just didn't feel
Speaker 1: like interviewing anyone else. As I've stated, I remember none
Speaker 1: of this, but it all seems a little strange, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: I was about to hand Stacy access to all of
Speaker 1: my business credit cards, male media requests. I would soon
Speaker 1: make her my main intermediary with the entire outside world.
Speaker 1: Did I appear to have read your resume skimmed? Maybe?
Speaker 1: Did I ask you? Do you remember if I asked
Speaker 1: you any questions about your schooling. No, did you have
Speaker 1: any previous work experience that was relevant? I had interned
Speaker 1: and worked at Frontline, but I mean that's more documentary.
Speaker 1: Yeah really, yeah, it was a resume obviously didn't work.
Speaker 1: Who knew front Line? Well that's impressive. If I'd done that,
Speaker 1: I might might have hired you in ten minutes and
Speaker 1: I supposed to twenty five. Now. My first defense reaction
Speaker 1: to what Stacy was telling me was this was my
Speaker 1: first hire. What did I know? Then she reminded me
Speaker 1: of someone else. Do you still work with the bud Nick?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I'd forgotten that story, the bud Nick
Speaker 1: Don bud Nick, even though I've barely gotten started here.
Speaker 1: This requires a digression. Well that's a fun story from
Speaker 1: my end. Well, I'd just like you to I'd like
Speaker 1: to tell us what the white year with this two
Speaker 1: thousand and five? How can you remember that? Because I'm
Speaker 1: a Silvan The blink had just hit the shelves blink
Speaker 1: in case you hadn't picked up on it is about
Speaker 1: the power of first impressions. Don had just read it
Speaker 1: and liked it. So anyway, one day I was I
Speaker 1: was out for lunch or went to the bank or something,
Speaker 1: and I'm walking back to my office and there you are.
Speaker 1: I see me walking down the street in the opposite
Speaker 1: direction of me, and I knew immediately who you were,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't think of your name, couldn't think of
Speaker 1: your name, couldn't think of your name. You passed me by.
Speaker 1: I turned, I opened my mouth. I yelled out, Hey, Malcolm,
Speaker 1: but I didn't know your name. I just yelled out
Speaker 1: hey Malcolm, just like in the book blink, and you
Speaker 1: stopped and you turned around. And I seemed like a
Speaker 1: nice enough guy, and you picked up on my energy
Speaker 1: of being excited by the book. So we were standing
Speaker 1: on the street talking for a while, and I said, gee,
Speaker 1: I would love it if you would autograph my book
Speaker 1: for me. And then it dawned on me. We were
Speaker 1: around the corner from my office, so I said, you
Speaker 1: know what, we're around the corner from my office, and
Speaker 1: you came up to my office. You still didn't know
Speaker 1: my name, you didn't know who I was. I was
Speaker 1: just a nice guy in the street. And you come
Speaker 1: up to my office and we're sitting there talking and
Speaker 1: that's when you notice things on my desk and you
Speaker 1: see the initial CPA and you say to me, oh,
Speaker 1: you're an accountant. I said, yeah, I'm an accountant. And
Speaker 1: you said, gee, I'm really not that happy with the
Speaker 1: accountants I'm using right now? Can I hire you? And
Speaker 1: I was a little like excited and dumbfounded at the
Speaker 1: same time, and I said, slow down, I said, I said,
Speaker 1: we'll make an appointment. Well, sit, and we'll talk about
Speaker 1: what your situation is and what kind of advice I
Speaker 1: could possibly give you, and then you'll figure out if
Speaker 1: you want to hire me or not. And he said no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I want to hire And I said, no, we're gonna
Speaker 1: We're gonna do this right. We're not going to do
Speaker 1: this impulsively. And eventually you came to my office and
Speaker 1: I gave you a consultation and you hired me. So
Speaker 1: a perfect stranger, short guy red hair, runs up to
Speaker 1: me on Medicine Avenue, Malcolm Malcolm, and five minutes later,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to hire him to handle all of my
Speaker 1: most sensitive affairs. Who am I? So you wouldn't let me.
Speaker 1: I was like, I'll, I want to hire you, but
Speaker 1: you wouldn't let me. I wouldn't let you. Why would Yeah?
Speaker 1: Because I wanted to have a serious conversation where where
Speaker 1: I gave you a consultation and I discussed what planning
Speaker 1: ideas I had for you. I wanted to make sure
Speaker 1: that you made your decision not based on impulse, but
Speaker 1: based on some knowledge and trust and confidence that I
Speaker 1: knew what I was talking about. But I had just
Speaker 1: told you. But the reason I didn't like my old account.
Speaker 1: They never had any conversation with me. I didn't know
Speaker 1: any about accounting, So how can I How can I
Speaker 1: have an intelligent conversation with you about whether you should
Speaker 1: be my account if I'd never had an intelligent conversation
Speaker 1: with an account, But I let it should be my account, Yeah, precisely.
Speaker 1: And it goes around and around and around whatever. This
Speaker 1: is getting embarrassed, all right? Now comes the part where
Speaker 1: I try and defend myself. In every season ever Visionist history,
Speaker 1: I fall in love with someone I interview. Last season
Speaker 1: it was Tony Gebli, the tea connoisseur who accused me
Speaker 1: of being a tea bro. Meeting Tony for reasons I
Speaker 1: don't entirely understand, made me very happy. The season before that,
Speaker 1: it was Casey Bowles, the musician from Nashville, who sang
Speaker 1: a song that brings me to tears every time I
Speaker 1: hear it. She grew up playing gaw Girl, Well Row
Speaker 1: Down Dream. It's JHC. HollyHood, Kaci b O L L
Speaker 1: Siste Friday. When this is over look her up this season.
Speaker 1: The interview that surprised me the most was with someone
Speaker 1: named Adam Cronkrite. I talked about him in the episode
Speaker 1: on Democratic Lotteries. Adam has made it his life's work
Speaker 1: to convince grade school kids to choose their student council
Speaker 1: governments by picking names out of a hat. Actually, since
Speaker 1: Adam works in Bolivia by picking fava beans out of
Speaker 1: a clay pot, can I ask you if your question? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's Adam. After we talked, he seemed slightly mystified about
Speaker 1: why I had emailed him one day out of the blue.
Speaker 1: So how do you find out about lottery selection? Like
Speaker 1: democratic lottery concepts? I was just interesting. I've always been
Speaker 1: interested in lotteries, and I just was rooting around online
Speaker 1: and I ran across the work you were doing. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's as simple as I was sitting in my coffee
Speaker 1: shop over there. That was the day I contacted you
Speaker 1: I was like, this is really interesting and it was
Speaker 1: totally random. Now there's a very important distinction with this
Speaker 1: whole lottery thing. It's between agnosticism and nihilism. Agnosticism is
Speaker 1: about indifference. It's an elaborate gallic shrug. The agnostic would say,
Speaker 1: the reason to choose people randomly for positions of leadership
Speaker 1: is that basically anyone can do the job. The army
Speaker 1: in war time has an agnostic position, their belief as
Speaker 1: they can take almost any able bodied person and turn
Speaker 1: them into a reasonably effective soldier. But that's not Adam
Speaker 1: Cronkwrite's position. He absolutely thinks that they are good leaders
Speaker 1: and bad leaders, and not everyone is cut out to
Speaker 1: be student council president. He just doesn't believe that the
Speaker 1: systems we currently use are any good, So he says,
Speaker 1: why bother just pull a name out of a hat. Now,
Speaker 1: Adam would argue that's in the interests of a fair system,
Speaker 1: but let's be clear, he's a nihilist. He does not
Speaker 1: look at the vast apparatus of democratic selection, honed and
Speaker 1: perfected over many centuries and shrug. That's what the agnostic
Speaker 1: would do. No, he looks at those elaborate us, and
Speaker 1: he rolls his eyes. He says, give me a break.
Speaker 1: That's my position too when it comes to hiring. I
Speaker 1: look at all the folklore and ritual around predicting how
Speaker 1: well people will perform, and I say, give me a break.
Speaker 1: I am an eye roller, not a shrugger. I am
Speaker 1: a nihilist, and my task in this episode of revisionist
Speaker 1: history is to convince you to be a nihilist too.
Speaker 1: The patron saint of Hiring nihilism, without question, was the
Speaker 1: author and educator Lawrence Peter. All of us in the
Speaker 1: Hiring nihilist community worship at his feet. When I was
Speaker 1: a boy, I used to believe my parents and believe
Speaker 1: my teachers, and that you should have respect for your
Speaker 1: elders and betters, and that the men upstairs knew what
Speaker 1: they were doing. That's Peter. He was a Canadian, as
Speaker 1: am I, of course, And I don't know if you
Speaker 1: remember from the Lottery episode, but Adam Cronkwright went to
Speaker 1: university in Canada. The nihilist strain runs deep in the
Speaker 1: land of the Frozen Prairie. Anyway. Lawrence Peter was a
Speaker 1: great aphorist, famous for saying things like the noblest of
Speaker 1: all dogs is the hot dog. It feeds the hand
Speaker 1: that bites it. He was also deeply involved in something
Speaker 1: called the Kinetic Sculpture Race in Humboldt County, California, which
Speaker 1: is really hard to explain except to say that it's
Speaker 1: kind of like the Triathlon of the art world, involving
Speaker 1: sculptures on wheels that are required to perform certain feats.
Speaker 1: Peter famously proposed a special prize called the Golden Dinosaur Award,
Speaker 1: to be given to the first machine to break down
Speaker 1: immediately after the start, which if you knew Lawrence Peter,
Speaker 1: you would recognize as being very Lawrence Peter. Because his
Speaker 1: professional obsession was with incompetence. He had a connoisseur's eye
Speaker 1: for it. And as I looked around me, I saw
Speaker 1: a sign on the door that said emergency exit authorized
Speaker 1: personnel only. I wondered who had written that, But then
Speaker 1: later I saw another science had emergency exit not to
Speaker 1: be used under any circumstances. Lawrence Peter formulated one of
Speaker 1: the most famous laws in social science. He called it
Speaker 1: the Peter principle. The Peter principal states very simply, then,
Speaker 1: in any hierarchy, an employee tends to rise to his
Speaker 1: level of incompetence. That's where he stays. People get promoted
Speaker 1: based on a prediction about their ability to handle the
Speaker 1: next job on the hierarchy, and they keep rising until
Speaker 1: the prediction is wrong. You see, in any organization where
Speaker 1: competence is essentially eligibility for promotion and incompetence is a
Speaker 1: bar to promotion. Wherever those rules apply, people will rise
Speaker 1: to the level of incompetence and tend to stay there.
Speaker 1: Lawrence Peter wrote a book called Peter Principle in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine, and it is delightful, exactly in a Lawrence
Speaker 1: Peter sort of way, Like he has a whole riff
Speaker 1: on the special case of someone who is incompetent or
Speaker 1: promoted anyway kicked upstairs a movie calls percussive sublimation, or
Speaker 1: the case when an incompetent person is moved out of
Speaker 1: the way but given a long job title as compensation.
Speaker 1: Peter called that a lateral arabesque. Now chances are you've
Speaker 1: heard of the Peter principle. I'm guessing as a kind
Speaker 1: of joke. Ha ha, that's why my boss is so bad.
Speaker 1: But it's not a joke. Allow me to direct you
Speaker 1: to the work of a fellow member of the Hiring
Speaker 1: Nihilist Club. Allan Benson, economist at the University of Minnesota.
Speaker 1: While he was doing his doctorate at MIT, he got
Speaker 1: bitten by the Peter principal bug I started to go
Speaker 1: to sales managements conferences, and I found that there was
Speaker 1: this adage that the best salesperson doesn't necessarily make the
Speaker 1: best manager. But then people would laugh and say, but
Speaker 1: we do it anyway, and I wanted to find out why.
Speaker 1: The great advantage of using salespeople to validate the Peter principle,
Speaker 1: Benson realizes is that you can measure performance really easily.
Speaker 1: It's not like assessing the performance of engineers or politicians. No,
Speaker 1: it's super straightforward. You just look at how many sales
Speaker 1: the salesperson has made. And it's also easy to measure
Speaker 1: how good a sales manager is. You just add up
Speaker 1: the sales of the salespeople the manager's managing. So Allan
Speaker 1: bensons a tech company that sells one of those software
Speaker 1: platforms for sales organizations, kind of like salesforce dot Com,
Speaker 1: and he gets access to all of their customers data.
Speaker 1: Four hundred firms, one hundred thousand salespeople. The first thing
Speaker 1: he finds is a confirmation of the famous eighty twenty
Speaker 1: rule that twenty percent of the salespeople are responsible for
Speaker 1: eighty percent of the sales across the board. It's not
Speaker 1: that we don't know who is a good salesperson. We
Speaker 1: definitely know some people are really good. Second thing, he
Speaker 1: finds that those superstars get rewarded. What we found in
Speaker 1: the data is that top salespeople are far far more
Speaker 1: likely to be promoted into sales management than people who
Speaker 1: are outside of that top twenty percent or who aren't
Speaker 1: the best person on the team. Of course, that makes sense.
Speaker 1: You give the stars a promotion. That's what everyone does. Okay,
Speaker 1: now it gets interested what happens when those stars take
Speaker 1: over as manager their salespeople than salespeople who they manage.
Speaker 1: Their performances becomes worse under them than it was under
Speaker 1: their prior managers. The stars get promoted, and they're terrible managers.
Speaker 1: How terrible? Really terrible. Benson looked at an alternate promotion
Speaker 1: scenario where companies decide to promote not the stars, but
Speaker 1: the salespeople who are good at collaborating nice, friendly people
Speaker 1: who work well with others, and teams managed by the
Speaker 1: friendly people do thirty percent better than the teams managed
Speaker 1: by the superstars thirty percent. It's huge. Now, you might say,
Speaker 1: what does this have to do with nihilism? This is
Speaker 1: just an argument for promoting friendly people over superstars. That's
Speaker 1: not eye rolling or even shrugging. Well, I haven't told
Speaker 1: you about Benson's last finding, because Benson found a fatal
Speaker 1: flaw in the alternate promoting scenario, the one that seems
Speaker 1: to work thirty percent better, which is this, if you
Speaker 1: promote the friendly salespeople over the top salespeople, then the
Speaker 1: top salespeople get upset, so upset that their performance suffers
Speaker 1: and they aren't so top anymore. The whole thing is
Speaker 1: so magnificently perverse, isn't it. All Your sales come from
Speaker 1: the same small group of people who expect to be
Speaker 1: promoted as a reward for their excellence. But if you
Speaker 1: promote them out of sales, which you get in return,
Speaker 1: is a lousy manager. And if you don't promote them
Speaker 1: and you pass them over in favor of some warm
Speaker 1: and fuzzy into personal woos, the top performers will pout
Speaker 1: and stop trying. So what are's supposed to do? You
Speaker 1: could pay the superstars more and more and give them
Speaker 1: fancier titles in the maneuver Lawrence Peter called the lateral Arabesque.
Speaker 1: But you've still insulted them by passing them over for
Speaker 1: the friendly woofs. Another idea that some Peter Prince theorists
Speaker 1: have floated is lotteries they end up where Adam Cronkwright
Speaker 1: ended up, put everyone's name in a hat and promote
Speaker 1: the winner. I mean, why not, But then why have
Speaker 1: a boss at all? The concept of a boss is
Speaker 1: that a boss knows more than the people there bossing.
Speaker 1: There's even a school of thought in the upper reaches
Speaker 1: of Peter principal world that the best solution is just
Speaker 1: to man up, forget everything else, and deliberately promote the incompetent,
Speaker 1: because this way you won't lose one of your superstars
Speaker 1: by turning them into a lousy manager. You'll just transfer
Speaker 1: an incompetent person from their present position of incompetence to
Speaker 1: another position of incompetence upstairs somewhere where they will occupy
Speaker 1: a position which, according to the Peter principle, was bound
Speaker 1: to be occupied by an incompetent person sooner or later. Anyway,
Speaker 1: did you follow that, Peter principal? Theorizing gets very meta,
Speaker 1: very quickly, which is why most people would rather console
Speaker 1: themselves with the soothing vanalities of merit and prediction and hierarchy.
Speaker 1: Only a select few are willing to face the truth.
Speaker 1: And who are those brave and lonely heretics, the nihilists,
Speaker 1: people like me who look at the world with a
Speaker 1: cold and unflinching eye and say, under the circumstances, why
Speaker 1: bother to learn the first thing about any new perspective?
Speaker 1: Job candidate, Things went well with my first hire, Stacy,
Speaker 1: but eventually Stacy needed to move on, and so I
Speaker 1: had to go through the whole process all over again
Speaker 1: with Sarah. Basically, we didn't talk about anything professional at all,
Speaker 1: as I reculer, it was a little bit about family
Speaker 1: and that I was half American, and that I could
Speaker 1: you know that I knew the fifty States of America
Speaker 1: and alphabetical order. That's Sarah remembering my second ever job
Speaker 1: in review. And you taught me a Yiddish word. I
Speaker 1: taught you a Yiddish word. Well, you wanted to know
Speaker 1: if I knew about the word, maybe you had just
Speaker 1: had just learned it. I don't know, but it's the
Speaker 1: word that is the kind of the opposite directional flow
Speaker 1: of nachas, so nachus being like the joy that your
Speaker 1: children give you, and this word being us, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: one that you give them, Yes, yes, nahas and yours.
Speaker 1: I had just given are given a speech to like
Speaker 1: some Jewish organization in Boston, and of course I'm not Jewish,
Speaker 1: So I was filled with anxiety, and so I said,
Speaker 1: I said, well, I have to impress them early on.
Speaker 1: And so I began my speech by with something about
Speaker 1: the distinction between yochas and nus. It was not nas, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: So there I was schooling you Jewish person well about Yiddish.
Speaker 1: I hired Sarah by email the same afternoon we met.
Speaker 1: She was another recent college graduate. I didn't really bring
Speaker 1: up the job description during the interview because by that
Speaker 1: point I wasn't really sure what my current assistant was
Speaker 1: up to. I mean, how would I know? Her job
Speaker 1: was to do things so that I didn't have to
Speaker 1: do them. So if I knew what she was doing,
Speaker 1: she wouldn't be doing her job, would she? So Stacy
Speaker 1: briefed Sarah about practical things and much more, apparently because
Speaker 1: now I remember that the two pieces of advice that
Speaker 1: she kind of impressed upon me, like tablets, were respect
Speaker 1: his privacy and be nice to his parents. As it
Speaker 1: turned out, Sarah was exceedingly to my parents. My father
Speaker 1: thought you just were the bee's knees. He was like,
Speaker 1: you were his favorite. You were absolutely his favorite. I
Speaker 1: think I told you that strange and wonderful dinner that
Speaker 1: I had just with the two of them, with your
Speaker 1: mom and die. What happened? What happened? Oh, not just that.
Speaker 1: It was when it was, I know, a New Yorker
Speaker 1: festival and you were flying off, and I just went
Speaker 1: to see if they needed anything, and I went to
Speaker 1: see if they were okay, and they asked if I
Speaker 1: wanted to join them for dinner. And no one had
Speaker 1: told me what you're supposed to do in a moment
Speaker 1: like that, like are you supposed to go for dinner
Speaker 1: with your bosses parents? Are You're absolutely not supposed to
Speaker 1: go for dinner with your boss's parents. So I did,
Speaker 1: and they were just so they were so kind to me, Malcolm,
Speaker 1: and just like very warm and interesting and that was.
Speaker 1: That was the time I think I wrote you about
Speaker 1: it was when they asked the way To asked if
Speaker 1: we wanted pepper on our soup, and I just said
Speaker 1: yes because I thought that's what you're supposed to say.
Speaker 1: And your dad said, I don't know, I haven't tried
Speaker 1: it yet. And it was just it just it was
Speaker 1: like it was brilliant to me that you could just
Speaker 1: I guess he was like he was being a mathematician
Speaker 1: or assignedist about his soup. But it was such a
Speaker 1: nice Oh, I missed my father so much. The soup
Speaker 1: agnostic says, go ahead, put pepper in. It's not going
Speaker 1: to make much difference either way. The soup nihilist says,
Speaker 1: pepper can make a great deal of difference. But it
Speaker 1: is impossible for me to find out whether the waiter
Speaker 1: is offering me pepper because the soup leaves the kitchen
Speaker 1: deliberately under pepper, or because the restaurant offers pepper as
Speaker 1: an amenity regardless of the pepperiness of its offerings. Sarah
Speaker 1: took the nihilist position, as would I. Of course I
Speaker 1: always get the pepper. But Graham Gladwell was not a
Speaker 1: soup nihilist. He was a soup empiricist. He tried the soup,
Speaker 1: then considered the pepper. But on all other matters he
Speaker 1: took the same approach, which as I do, what do
Speaker 1: you think I get it from? One snowy day, when
Speaker 1: we were going to visit friends, my father took an
Speaker 1: off ramp too fast, skidded down the embankment, and landed
Speaker 1: on the on ramp facing around direction, whereupon he drove
Speaker 1: off the on ramp onto a road that none of
Speaker 1: us had ever seen before. And then he announced, oh,
Speaker 1: this is the way I wanted to go all along.
Speaker 1: Did he mean that, Yes, he did. He believed that
Speaker 1: if you were on a road for whatever reason, then
Speaker 1: that's the road you should take. If an accountant appears
Speaker 1: before you hire the accountant, if Stacy seems nice, hire Stacy.
Speaker 1: That is the way Gladwell's think. This is in fact
Speaker 1: the subject of my eulogy from my father at his
Speaker 1: funeral a few years ago, which was one of those
Speaker 1: funerals that wasn't exactly funereal in a sense that there
Speaker 1: was so much Graham glabbled in the air that about
Speaker 1: halfway through all forgot we was supposed to be grieving
Speaker 1: for my part. I got up and spoke about all
Speaker 1: the ways in which my father would have objected to
Speaker 1: his own funeral. This has been a meticulously planned service
Speaker 1: so far. My father did not believe in planning anything.
Speaker 1: The only reason anything in my father's life was planned
Speaker 1: was because, in a spectacularly fortunate failure of due diligence,
Speaker 1: he married my mother. Then I talked about one of
Speaker 1: my heroes, albert O. Hirshman, who is the true godfather
Speaker 1: of my kind of nihilism, even more than Lawrence Peter.
Speaker 1: Hirshman was an economist and one of the towering intellectuals
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century. He helped save the lives of
Speaker 1: countless Jews in the Second World War. Later he traveled
Speaker 1: to exotic lands. He was a man of action as
Speaker 1: well as words. His guiding principle was always that Hamlet
Speaker 1: was wrong, and by that he meant that Hamlet was
Speaker 1: someone whose doubts made him incapable of acting right. Hamlet
Speaker 1: was frozen to be or not to be, that's the question.
Speaker 1: But Hirshman's point was that Hamlet had it backwards. That
Speaker 1: your doubts should free you, because once you've accepted that
Speaker 1: you don't know what happens next, that you can't predict
Speaker 1: or plan everything in your life, then you're free to
Speaker 1: act because what's holding you back? What is there to
Speaker 1: be afraid of if you've given up on the illusion
Speaker 1: of knowing what could possibly happen. I love Hirshman because
Speaker 1: he reminds me of my father. I think my father
Speaker 1: thought that Hamlet was wrong. He believed in God even
Speaker 1: though no mathematical proof exists of God's existence. Doubt did
Speaker 1: not compromise his faith. It was what gave him freedom
Speaker 1: to believe. He married my mother even though the world
Speaker 1: told him not to do that. He went on walks
Speaker 1: without knowing where he would end up. He never looked
Speaker 1: at a map. He would just say, I'm going to
Speaker 1: follow my nose. He built a greenhouse even though he
Speaker 1: didn't know anything about carpentry. I remember once looking out
Speaker 1: the window as a child, and I saw the cat,
Speaker 1: the house cat, streaking at top speed with his ears back,
Speaker 1: and following the cat, our dog at top speed with
Speaker 1: his ears back, look of terror in his eyes, and
Speaker 1: then Pappy sprinting at top speed for the safety of
Speaker 1: the house. And I thought, what on earth and then
Speaker 1: I saw this huge swarm of angry bees. Pappy felt
Speaker 1: the freedom to be a beekeeper, even though he didn't
Speaker 1: really understand how bees worked. I like to think that
Speaker 1: I learned from the best. Hamlet never kept bees, but
Speaker 1: Hamlet never had any fresh honey. I'll stop because if
Speaker 1: my father thought a speaker I'd gone on too long,
Speaker 1: he would just get up and leave. He would actually
Speaker 1: be taking a walk. At this point, my hiring nihilism
Speaker 1: failed just once. It was with the assistant who came after, Jane.
Speaker 1: Jane was Sarah's roommate, whom I heart because I liked Sarah,
Speaker 1: and I thought, under the transitive property that if Sarah
Speaker 1: was great, surely that meant that Jane would be great too,
Speaker 1: because what are the odds Sarah doesn't have good taste
Speaker 1: in roommates. And sure enough, Jane was great. Jane turned
Speaker 1: out to be the kind of person who would plan
Speaker 1: the D Day invasion and then check in with Churchill
Speaker 1: and Roosevelt at five on like a Friday and say
Speaker 1: do you need anything more from me before the weekend. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Jane wanted to move on, and I hired. I'm going
Speaker 1: to call her Susan Susan seemed super nice, but she
Speaker 1: was not a good assistant. In a span of just
Speaker 1: a few weeks, she made one air after another, some trivial,
Speaker 1: some major. Then, just as I was about to go
Speaker 1: out on a book tour, she announced she was taking
Speaker 1: another job, leaving me in the lurch. I reprimanded her.
Speaker 1: She knew it wasn't working out. She was upset and apologized.
Speaker 1: I had forgotten about the whole incident until in the
Speaker 1: course of my forensic analysis of my hiring history, one
Speaker 1: of my old assistants reminded me. So I searched back
Speaker 1: through my old emails and found this an email from
Speaker 1: me to Susan. Dear Susan, please don't beat yourself up.
Speaker 1: Some people are good at this kind of work. Some
Speaker 1: people are not. It has no larger significance. It's like
Speaker 1: how high you can jump, or whether you were good
Speaker 1: at bowling. You are probably best for more scholarly pursuits
Speaker 1: in the end, which is not a bad thing. I
Speaker 1: was probably exactly the same way at your age. I
Speaker 1: kind of can't believe I wrote that email. It sounds
Speaker 1: so sweet and understanding, But I'm not sweet and understanding,
Speaker 1: am I? No? Not really, what I am is a
Speaker 1: hiring nihilist, and the appearance of graciousness is simply one
Speaker 1: of the wonderful side effects of hiring nihilism. Because if
Speaker 1: you believe that nothing in someone's performance in one job
Speaker 1: predicts their future performance in another job, if you believe
Speaker 1: that the whole prediction system when it comes to people
Speaker 1: is just an extravagant exercise in self delusion, then you
Speaker 1: are free to say to Susan, it's okay. The fact
Speaker 1: that you didn't work out as my assistant has no
Speaker 1: larger significance because it doesn't. Life's too short. You need
Speaker 1: an accountant, You meet an accountant, hire the accountant, You
Speaker 1: meet Stacy, and you cancel all your other interviews because
Speaker 1: you realize, what's the point. The nihilist believes that people
Speaker 1: are mysterious and unpredictable, that life is a big crapshoot,
Speaker 1: and at most of the systems we put in place
Speaker 1: are there just to satisfy our illusion that we can
Speaker 1: see into the future. My email went on, I'm sorry
Speaker 1: I was as harsh as I was with you. It's
Speaker 1: just that this is a rather stressful time and I
Speaker 1: have a million things going on. But Jacob, I believe
Speaker 1: is just the kind of anal obsessive, detail oriented sort
Speaker 1: who will serve me well. Smiley face. So all's well,
Speaker 1: that ends well, good luck with your next job. I
Speaker 1: wish you all the best. Am Wait Jacob, Yes, Jacob
Speaker 1: Smith Susan's successor Yeah, that's right. Do you remember where
Speaker 1: the interview was? Who was at your place? And I
Speaker 1: remember that you know me, I don't really like dress
Speaker 1: up dress up, but I dressed up as much as
Speaker 1: I do. And I specifically remember that you were like,
Speaker 1: you weren't wearing shoes, and I think I had to
Speaker 1: take off my shoes. And do you remember what we talked?
Speaker 1: What I asked you about the obviously, the thing that
Speaker 1: always stuck with me is that you asked if I
Speaker 1: could drive stick shift, which I said yes. That was
Speaker 1: the big one. I remember you asked what my parents did,
Speaker 1: which I thought was a good question. I loved the
Speaker 1: fact that your parents were teachers. Those two answers seal
Speaker 1: it for me. Do you remember how long this interview was?
Speaker 1: I remember it was at like one and being out
Speaker 1: of there and it was like one twenty and I
Speaker 1: was like, well that either one really well or really
Speaker 1: poorly good. That was the fastest job interview ever had.
Speaker 1: And that's with like five to seven minutes of just
Speaker 1: probably small talk and kind of getting settled in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the three things in Dear B two you you drive stick,
Speaker 1: your parents are teachers, and then you said something something
Speaker 1: that you said. But then I'm so annal that I
Speaker 1: would do something stupping. I was like, wait, he self,
Speaker 1: admitting to be anals is fantastic. It's exactly what I want.
Speaker 1: It's is funny in retrospect because I don't actually think
Speaker 1: I'm that anal. I think I was playing that up.
Speaker 1: I think I was, Yeah, but I actually but no, no, See,
Speaker 1: if I might defend myself, I am as interested in
Speaker 1: someone who understands that they need to represent themselves as
Speaker 1: anal as I am in someone who is truly amal. Right, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't actually want me to be so yeah. No,
Speaker 1: And how did Jacob work out well for once in
Speaker 1: your life? Listen to the credits. Revisions History is produced
Speaker 1: by Jacob Smith and Mei La Belle, with leaving gets
Speaker 1: to Eloise Lytton and Anna Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Flawn Williams is our Engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson,
Speaker 1: original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to Carly Migliori,
Speaker 1: Heather fe Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor and l haf A
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin
Speaker 1: Industries and you a resident nihilist, Malcolm Glauder