Speaker 1: Pushkin. Here's what we're doing today, Ready, but do we
Speaker 1: do it? I'm going to do an episode of revisionist
Speaker 1: History in which I you know, I'm obsessed with hiring.
Speaker 1: I've always been obsessed with that. So what I'm doing
Speaker 1: is I'm interviewing all the people I ever hired, and
Speaker 1: you you're the first person I hired.
Speaker 2: And wear that badge pretty proudly. I'll tell you what.
Speaker 1: Stacy Kailish my first assistant. I'd never had an assistant before,
Speaker 1: but maybe 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 just ask you remind me again how I found you.
Speaker 1: A big theme of what follows is that I have
Speaker 1: no memory, names, faces, dates. I basically forget everything. A
Speaker 1: normal person doesn't have to do research on their own life,
Speaker 1: but I'm afraid I do.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I have some funny, funny memories around the
Speaker 2: whole hiring situation. So you've found me? How it happened
Speaker 2: was I had just finished grad school and was looking
Speaker 2: for a job.
Speaker 1: Stacy knew someone who knew someone who had an assistant
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: You're like, you don't know me, but I'm looking for
Speaker 2: an assistant, you know, would you be interested?
Speaker 1: We met the next day for coffee.
Speaker 2: We chatted for literally, I'm gonna say, all of thirty minutes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so, yeah, we were you.
Speaker 2: Were going to you were traveling to South Africa. All
Speaker 2: we spoke about of what I can remember is you
Speaker 2: had said, oh, you have an accent. You have an accent.
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, I was born in South Africa and then,
Speaker 2: you know, moved to Australia. They're like, oh, I'm going
Speaker 2: to South Africa for business or you know, for Europe
Speaker 2: speaking engagements. The next day and so I think for
Speaker 2: about twenty minutes, all we talked about was like recommendations
Speaker 2: of what you should do in South Africa.
Speaker 1: That pretty much I think was it's a rigorous job.
Speaker 2: Rigorous, like, yes, you really vetted me through and through
Speaker 2: my knowledge, where best to eat in South Africa. So
Speaker 2: we talked about that, and I remember hilariously being very
Speaker 2: concerned because I just got in a nose ring, and
Speaker 2: I remember thinking, oh, I don't know, you know, is
Speaker 2: he going to like should I take the nose ring
Speaker 2: out for the interview? Will he notice?
Speaker 3: Is this?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: Is it proper or professional of me? And I literally
Speaker 2: remember like maybe six months to a year later, when
Speaker 2: I was obviously had been working for you all that time,
Speaker 2: and I said to you something about like did you
Speaker 2: ever notice that or something about my nose ring came out?
Speaker 2: You're like, Oh, I didn't even know you had one.
Speaker 2: But I agonized, I'm aware that to keep this nose
Speaker 2: ring in or not for fear that it would you know,
Speaker 2: I don't know if it would be a bad look.
Speaker 2: And you did not for like the entire year, the
Speaker 2: first year that I worked for you, did not even
Speaker 2: notice that I had a nose ring.
Speaker 1: I didn't notice then, I don't remember. Now this is
Speaker 1: getting off to a bad start. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: You're listening to my podcast about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood.
Speaker 1: In this episode, I turned the unflinching analytic gaze that
Speaker 1: is revisionist history upon myself. Let us use as our
Speaker 1: text via mortal lines for the New Testament Matthew seven,
Speaker 1: verse five, Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out
Speaker 1: of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly
Speaker 1: to cast out the moat out of thy brother's eye.
Speaker 2: You had emailed me and we'd met the next morning
Speaker 2: because you were leaving, I think shortly after that for
Speaker 2: South Africa. We spoke for about thirty minutes, twenty twenty
Speaker 2: five of which was about South Africa, and then you
Speaker 2: left and you said to me, he said, okay, great.
Speaker 2: You know, I got a couple more people to interview,
Speaker 2: and so I guess I'll be in touch when I'm
Speaker 2: back for my travel in like two weeks or so.
Speaker 2: I'm like, okay, you know, good to meet you, And
Speaker 2: being kind of nervous you left, I thought, oh god,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna have to wait now for two weeks to
Speaker 2: find out and about I'm gonna say. Ten to fifteen
Speaker 2: minutes later, my phone rang and I answered it and
Speaker 2: you're like, hey, it's Malcolm again.
Speaker 5: So listen.
Speaker 2: You seem nice enough. Why don't you just come by
Speaker 2: and start tomorrow.
Speaker 1: It's just like. It was like the least professional hiring
Speaker 1: story I ever heard in my life.
Speaker 2: And the funniest thing as well, is I was like,
Speaker 2: this must have been like a blink moment for him.
Speaker 2: I mean, you had just finished writing Blink. That's when
Speaker 2: I'd started with you, like two thousand and five, right
Speaker 2: after that book. And I remember laughing with you again
Speaker 2: a few months later, well into you know, the job,
Speaker 2: and saying to you, you know when you hired me, Yo,
Speaker 2: you didn't really met me much. Was it like a
Speaker 2: blink moment?
Speaker 1: You just knew and you said to me.
Speaker 2: Nah, I just couldn't be bothered going through any more interviews,
Speaker 2: and you seem nice enough. That was seem nice. I
Speaker 2: just didn't feel like interviewing anyone else.
Speaker 1: As I've stated, I remember none of this, but it
Speaker 1: all seems a little strange, doesn't it. I was about
Speaker 1: to hand Stacy access to all of my business, credit cards, mail,
Speaker 1: media requests. I would soon make her my main intermediary
Speaker 1: with the entire outside world. Did I appear to have
Speaker 1: read your resume?
Speaker 2: Um skimmed?
Speaker 6: Maybe?
Speaker 1: Did I ask you? Do you rememory if I asked
Speaker 1: you any questions about your schooling? No, did you have
Speaker 1: any previous work experience that was relevant?
Speaker 2: I had interned and worked at Frontline, but I mean
Speaker 2: that's more documentary.
Speaker 3: It is not really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was on my resume.
Speaker 7: You obviously didn't.
Speaker 1: Who knew Frontline? Well that's impressive. If I'd done that,
Speaker 1: I might might have hired you in ten minutes. And
Speaker 1: it's posted twenty five Now. My first defense reaction to
Speaker 1: what Stacy was telling me was this was my first hire.
Speaker 1: What did I know? Then she reminded me of someone else.
Speaker 2: Do you still work with the Buttnick?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I'd forgotten that story, the Buttnick Don Budnick.
Speaker 1: Even though I've barely gotten started here. This requires a digression.
Speaker 5: Well that's a fun story from my end.
Speaker 7: Well, I'd just like you to I'd like to tell it.
Speaker 7: What year was this?
Speaker 3: Five?
Speaker 7: How can you remember that?
Speaker 5: Because I'm a savant, the blink had just hit the shelves.
Speaker 1: Blink in case you hadn't picked up on it is
Speaker 1: about the power of first impressions. Don had just read
Speaker 1: it and liked it.
Speaker 5: So anyway, one day I was I was out for lunch,
Speaker 5: or I went to the bank or something, and I'm
Speaker 5: walking back to my office and there and there you are.
Speaker 5: I see me walking down the street in the opposite
Speaker 5: direction of me, and I knew immediately who you were.
Speaker 5: But I couldn't think of your name. Couldn't think of
Speaker 5: your name, couldn't think of your name. You passed me by.
Speaker 5: I turn, I opened my mouth, I yelled out, hey, Malcolm,
Speaker 5: but I didn't know your name. I just yelled out, hey, Malcolm, Yeah,
Speaker 5: just like in the book blink. And you stopped and
Speaker 5: you turned around. And I seemed like a nice enough guy,
Speaker 5: and you picked up on my energy of being excited
Speaker 5: by the book. So we were standing on the street
Speaker 5: talking for a while and I said, gee, I would
Speaker 5: love it if you would autograph my book for me.
Speaker 5: And then it dawned on me. We were around the
Speaker 5: corner from my office, so I said, you know what,
Speaker 5: We're around the corner from my office. And you came
Speaker 5: up to my office. You still didn't know my name,
Speaker 5: you didn't know who I was. I was just a
Speaker 5: nice guy in the street. And you come up to
Speaker 5: my office and were sitting there talking, and that's when
Speaker 5: you notice things on my desk and you see the
Speaker 5: initial CPA, and you say to me, oh, you're an accountant.
Speaker 5: I said, yeah, I'm an accountant. And you said, gee,
Speaker 5: I'm really not that happy with the accountants I'm using
Speaker 5: right now? Can I hire you? And I was a
Speaker 5: little excited and dumbfounded at the same time, and I said,
Speaker 5: slow down, I said, I said, we'll make an appointment. Well,
Speaker 5: sit and we'll talk about what your situation is and
Speaker 5: what kind of advice I could possibly give you, and
Speaker 5: then you'll figure out if you want to hire me
Speaker 5: or not. And you said no, no, I want to
Speaker 5: hire and I said, no, we're going to We're do
Speaker 5: this right. We're not going to do this impulsively. And
Speaker 5: eventually you came to my office and I gave you
Speaker 5: a consultation and you hired me.
Speaker 1: So a perfect stranger, short guy, red hair, runs up
Speaker 1: to me on Madison 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?
Speaker 7: So you wouldn't let me. I was like, I want
Speaker 7: to hire you, but you wouldn't let me.
Speaker 5: I wouldn't let you yet because I wanted to have
Speaker 5: a serious conversation where where I gave you a consultation
Speaker 5: and I discussed what planning ideas I had for you.
Speaker 5: I wanted to make sure that you made your decision
Speaker 5: not based on impulse, but based on some knowledge and
Speaker 5: trust and confidence that I knew what I was talking about.
Speaker 7: But I had just told you that the reason I
Speaker 7: didn't like my old account was they never had any
Speaker 7: conversation with me other I didn't know any about accounting.
Speaker 7: So how can I How can I have an intelligent
Speaker 7: conversation with you about whether you should be my account
Speaker 7: if I have never had any intelligent conversation with an
Speaker 7: account but thou whether it should.
Speaker 5: Be my accountant precisely, And it goes around and around
Speaker 5: and around whatever.
Speaker 1: This is getting embarrassed, all right? Now comes the part
Speaker 1: where I try and defend myself. In every season of
Speaker 1: Revisionist History, I fall in love with someone I interview.
Speaker 1: Last season it was Tony Gebli, the T connoisseur, who
Speaker 1: accused me of being a T bro meaning Tony for
Speaker 1: reasons I don't entirely understand, made me very happy. The
Speaker 1: season before that, it was Casey Bowles, the musician from Nashville,
Speaker 1: who sang a song that brings me to tears every
Speaker 1: time I hear it.
Speaker 7: She grew up playing cowgirl.
Speaker 1: In a ROTWN dreams GC holl kac I b O
Speaker 1: l l s when this is over look her up.
Speaker 1: This season, the interview that surprised me the most was
Speaker 1: with someone named Adam Kronkrite. I talked about him in
Speaker 1: the episode on democratic Lotteries. Adam has made it his
Speaker 1: life's work to convince grade school kids to choose their
Speaker 1: student council governments by picking names out of a hat. Actually,
Speaker 1: since Adam works in Bolivia by picking father beans out
Speaker 1: of a clay pot, can I ask you for 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 concerts? I was just interested. 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's totally random.
Speaker 1: Now there's a very important distinction with this whole lottery thing.
Speaker 1: It's between agnosticism and nihilism. Agnosticism is about indifference. It's
Speaker 1: an elaborate gallic shrug. The agnostic would say, the reason
Speaker 1: to choose people randomly for positions of leadership is that
Speaker 1: basically anyone can do the job. The army in wartime
Speaker 1: has an agnostic position. Their belief is they can take
Speaker 1: almost any able bodied person and turn them into a
Speaker 1: reasonably effective soldier. But that's not Adam kronk Wright's position.
Speaker 1: He absolutely thinks that there are good leaders and bad leaders,
Speaker 1: and not everyone is cut out to be student council president.
Speaker 1: He just doesn't believe that the systems we currently use
Speaker 1: are any good, so he says, why bother just pull
Speaker 1: a name out of a hat. Now Adam would argue
Speaker 1: that's in the interests of a fair system, but let's
Speaker 1: be clear, he's a nihilist. He does not look at
Speaker 1: the vast apparatus of democratic selection, honed and perfected over
Speaker 1: many centuries and shrug. That's what the agnostic would do. No,
Speaker 1: he looks at those elaborates rtuals and he rolls his eyes.
Speaker 1: He says, give me a break. That's my position too.
Speaker 1: When it comes to Hiring. I look at all the
Speaker 1: folklore and ritual around predicting how well people will perform,
Speaker 1: and I say, give me a break. I am an
Speaker 1: eye roller, not a shrugger. I am a nihilist, and
Speaker 1: my task in this episode of revisionist history is to
Speaker 1: convince you to be a nihilist too. The patron saint
Speaker 1: of Hiring Nihilism, without question, was the author and educator
Speaker 1: Lawrence Peter. All of us in the Hiring nihilist community
Speaker 1: worship at his feed.
Speaker 4: When I was a boy, I used to believe my
Speaker 4: parents and believe my teachers, and that you should have
Speaker 4: respect for your elders and betters, and that the men
Speaker 4: upstairs what they were doing.
Speaker 1: That's Peter. He was a Canadian, as am I, of course,
Speaker 1: And I don't know if you remember from the Lottery episode,
Speaker 1: but Adam Kronkwright went to university in Canada. The nihilist
Speaker 1: strain runs deep in the land of the Frozen Prairie anyway.
Speaker 1: Lawrence Peter was a great afhorist, famous for saying things
Speaker 1: like the noblest of all dogs is the hot dog.
Speaker 1: It feeds the hand that bites it. He was also
Speaker 1: deeply involved in something called the Kinetic Sculpture Race in
Speaker 1: Humboldt County, California, which is really hard to explain, except
Speaker 1: to say that it's kind of like the Triathlon of
Speaker 1: the art world, involving sculptures on wheels that are required
Speaker 1: to perform certain feats. Peter famously proposed a special prize
Speaker 1: called the Golden Dinosaur Award, to be given to the
Speaker 1: first machine to break down immediately after the start, which
Speaker 1: if you knew Lawrence Peter, you would recognize as being
Speaker 1: very Lawrence Peter. Because his professional obsession was with incompetence.
Speaker 1: He had a connoisseur's eye for it.
Speaker 4: And as I looked around me, I saw a sign
Speaker 4: on the door that said emergency exit authorized personnel only.
Speaker 4: I wondered who'd written that, But then later I saw
Speaker 4: another scien It said emergency exit not to be used
Speaker 4: under any circumstances.
Speaker 1: Lawrence Peter formulated one of the most famous laws in
Speaker 1: social science. He called it the Peter principle.
Speaker 4: The Peter principal states very simply that in any hierarchy,
Speaker 4: an employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
Speaker 4: That's where he stays.
Speaker 1: People get promoted based on a prediction about their ability
Speaker 1: to handle the next job on the hierarchy, and they
Speaker 1: keep rising until the prediction is wrong.
Speaker 4: You see, in any organization where competence is essentially eligibility
Speaker 4: for promotion and incompetence is a bar to promotion. Wherever
Speaker 4: those rules apply, people who rise to the level of
Speaker 4: 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. Haha, 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, Alan 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.
Speaker 8: Bug I started to go to sales management conferences, and
Speaker 8: I found that there was this adage that the best
Speaker 8: sales person doesn't necessarily make the best manager. But then
Speaker 8: people would laugh and say, but we do it anyway,
Speaker 8: 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 Alan
Speaker 1: Benson's 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 customer's 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.
Speaker 8: What we found in the data is that top salespeople
Speaker 8: are far far more likely to be promoted into sales
Speaker 8: management than people who are outside of that top twenty
Speaker 8: percent or who aren't the best person on the team.
Speaker 1: Of course, that makes sense. You give the stars a promotion.
Speaker 1: That's what everyone does. Okay, Now it gets interesting. What
Speaker 1: happens when those stars take over as manager.
Speaker 8: Their salespeople than salespeople who they manage. Their performances becomes
Speaker 8: worse under them than it was under their prior managers.
Speaker 1: The stars get promoted, and they're terrible managers. How terrible,
Speaker 1: really terrible. Benson looked at an alternate promotion scenario where
Speaker 1: companies decide to promote not the stars but the salespeople
Speaker 1: who are good at collaborating, nice, friendly people who work
Speaker 1: well with others, and teams managed by the friendly people
Speaker 1: do thirty percent better than the teams managed by the
Speaker 1: superstars thirty percent. That's huge. Now, you might say, what
Speaker 1: does this have to do with nihilism? This is just
Speaker 1: an argument for promoting friendly people over superstars. That's not
Speaker 1: eye rolling or even shrugging. Well, I haven't told you
Speaker 1: about Benson's last finding, because Benson found a fatal flaw
Speaker 1: in the alternate promoting scenario, the one that seems to
Speaker 1: work thirty percent better, which is this, if you promote
Speaker 1: the friendly salespeople over the top salespeople, then the top
Speaker 1: salespeople get upset, so upset that their performance suffers and
Speaker 1: they aren't so top anymore. The whole thing is so
Speaker 1: magnificently perverse, isn't it. All Your sales come from the
Speaker 1: same small group of people who expect to be promoted
Speaker 1: as a reward for their excellence. But if you promote
Speaker 1: them out of sales, what you get in return is
Speaker 1: a lousy manager. And if you don't promote them and
Speaker 1: you pass them over in favor of some warm and
Speaker 1: fuzzy into personal woos, the top performers will pout and
Speaker 1: stop trying. So what are you 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 wooss. Another idea that some Peter Princes theorists
Speaker 1: have floated is lotteries they end up where Adam Kronkwright
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 they're 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 lowsy 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 principle, theorizing gets very meta,
Speaker 1: very quickly, which is why most people would rather console
Speaker 1: themselves with the soothing banalities 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.
Speaker 6: Basically, we didn't talk about anything professional at all. As
Speaker 6: I recall it, it was a little bit about family
Speaker 6: and that I was half American, and that I could
Speaker 6: you know that I knew the fifty states of America
Speaker 6: in alphabetical order.
Speaker 1: That's Sarah remembering my second ever job in review.
Speaker 6: And you taught me a Yiddish word.
Speaker 1: I taught you a Yiddish word.
Speaker 6: Well, you wanted to know if I knew about the
Speaker 6: A word. Maybe you had just had just learned it.
Speaker 6: I don't know, but it's the word that is the
Speaker 6: kind of the opposite directional flow of nahus. So nahas
Speaker 6: being like the joy that your children give you, and
Speaker 6: this word being ucus, Yeah, the one that you give them.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, nas and yus. I had just given. I
Speaker 1: given a speech to like some Jewish organization in Boston,
Speaker 1: and of course I'm not Jewish, so I was filled
Speaker 1: with anxiety, and so I said, well, I have to
Speaker 1: impress them early on. And so I began my speech
Speaker 1: by with something about the distinction between yuchus and nucus.
Speaker 1: It was nacus us, right, yeah, So there I was
Speaker 1: schooling you Jewish person well about Yiddish. I hired Sarah
Speaker 1: by email the same afternoon we met. She was another
Speaker 1: recent college graduate. I didn't really bring up the job
Speaker 1: description during the interview because by that point I wasn't
Speaker 1: really sure what my current assistant was up to. I mean,
Speaker 1: how would I know? Her job was to do things
Speaker 1: so that I didn't have to do them. So if
Speaker 1: I knew what she was doing, she wouldn't be doing
Speaker 1: her job, would she. So Stacy briefed Sarah about practical
Speaker 1: things and much more.
Speaker 6: Apparently because now I remember that the two pieces of
Speaker 6: advice that she kind of impressed upon me, like tablets
Speaker 6: were respect his privacy, and be nice to his parents.
Speaker 1: As it turned out, Sarah was exceedingly to my parents.
Speaker 1: My father thought you just were the bee's knees. He
Speaker 1: was like, you were his favorite. You were absolutely his favorite.
Speaker 6: I think I told you that strange and wonderful dinner
Speaker 6: that I had just with the two of them, with your.
Speaker 7: Mom and dad.
Speaker 1: What happened? What happened?
Speaker 6: Oh, not just that. It was when it was I know,
Speaker 6: New Yorker Festival and you were flying off and I
Speaker 6: just went to see if they needed anything, and I
Speaker 6: went to see if they were okay, and they asked
Speaker 6: if I wanted to join them for dinner, And no
Speaker 6: one had told me what you're supposed to do in
Speaker 6: a moment like that, like are you supposed to go
Speaker 6: for dinner with your boss's parents? Are you're absolutely not
Speaker 6: supposed to go for dinner with your boss's parents. So
Speaker 6: I did and they were just so they were so
Speaker 6: kind to me, Malcolm, and just like very warm and interesting.
Speaker 6: And that was that. That was the time I think
Speaker 6: I wrote you about it. It was when they asked
Speaker 6: the way to ask if we wanted pepper on our soup,
Speaker 6: and I just said yes because I thought that's what
Speaker 6: you're supposed to say. And your dad said, I don't know,
Speaker 6: I haven't tried it yet. And it was just it
Speaker 6: just it was like it was brilliant to me that
Speaker 6: you could just I guess it was like he was
Speaker 6: being a mathematician or a scientist about his soup. But
Speaker 6: it was such a nice Oh, that's so love, love
Speaker 6: that I.
Speaker 1: Missed my father so much. The soup agnostic says, go ahead,
Speaker 1: put pepper in. It's not going to make much difference
Speaker 1: either way. The soup nihilists says, pepper can make a
Speaker 1: great deal of difference. But it is impossible for me
Speaker 1: to find out whether the waiter is offering me pepper
Speaker 1: because the soup leaves the kitchen deliberately under peppered, or
Speaker 1: because the restaurant offers pepper as an amenity regardless of
Speaker 1: the pepperiness of its offerings. Sarah took the nihilist position,
Speaker 1: as would I. Of course I always get the pepper.
Speaker 1: But Graham Gladwell was not a soup nihilist. He was
Speaker 1: a soup empiricist. He tried the soup then considered the pepper,
Speaker 1: but on all other matters he took the same approach
Speaker 1: as I do. What do you think I get it
Speaker 1: from One snowy day when we were going to visit friends,
Speaker 1: my father took an off ramp too fast, skid it
Speaker 1: down the embankment, and landed on the on ramp facing
Speaker 1: a wrong direction, whereupon he drove off the on ramp
Speaker 1: onto a road that none of us had ever seen before.
Speaker 1: And then he announced, Oh, this is the way I
Speaker 1: wanted to go all along. Did he mean that? Yes,
Speaker 1: he did. He believed that if you were on a
Speaker 1: road for whatever reason, then that's the road you should take.
Speaker 1: If an accountant appears before you hire the accountant, if
Speaker 1: Stacy seems nice, hire Stacy. That is the way Gladwells think.
Speaker 1: This is in fact the subject of my eulogy from
Speaker 1: my father at his funeral a few years ago, which
Speaker 1: was one of those funerals that wasn't exactly funereal in
Speaker 1: a sense that there was so much Graham Glable in
Speaker 1: the air that about halfway through we are forgot we
Speaker 1: were supposed to be grieving. For my part, I got
Speaker 1: up and spoke about all the ways in which my
Speaker 1: father would have objected to his own funeral. This has
Speaker 1: been a meticulously planned service so far. My father did
Speaker 1: not believe in planning anything. The only reason anything in
Speaker 1: my life's my father's life was planned was because, in
Speaker 1: a spectacularly fortunate failure of due diligence, he married my mother.
Speaker 1: Then I talked about one of my heroes, Albert O. Hirshman,
Speaker 1: who is the true godfather of my kind of nihilism,
Speaker 1: even more than Laurence Peter. Hirshman was an economist and
Speaker 1: one of the towering intellectuals of the twentieth century. He
Speaker 1: helped save the lives of countless Jews in the Second
Speaker 1: World War. Later, he traveled to exotic lands. He was
Speaker 1: a man of action as well as words. His guiding
Speaker 1: principle was always that Hamlet was wrong, and by that
Speaker 1: he meant that Hamlet was someone whose doubts made him
Speaker 1: incapable of acting right. Hamlet was frozen. To be or
Speaker 1: not to be, that's the question. But Hershman's point was
Speaker 1: that Hamlet had it backwards. That your doubts should free you,
Speaker 1: because once you've accepted that you don't know what happens next,
Speaker 1: that you can't predict or plan everything in your life.
Speaker 1: Then you're free to act because what's holding you back?
Speaker 1: What is there to be afraid of if you've given
Speaker 1: up on the illusion of knowing what could possibly happen.
Speaker 1: I love Hirshman because he reminds me of my father.
Speaker 1: I think my father thought that Hamlet was wrong. He
Speaker 1: believed in God even though no mathematical proof exists of
Speaker 1: God's existence. Doubt did not compromise his faith. It was
Speaker 1: what gave him freedom to believe. He married my mother
Speaker 1: even though the world told him not to do that.
Speaker 1: He went on walks without knowing where he would end up.
Speaker 1: He never looked at a map. He would just say,
Speaker 1: I'm going to follow my nose. He built a greenhouse
Speaker 1: even though he didn't know anything about carpentry. I remember
Speaker 1: once looking out the window as a child, and I
Speaker 1: saw the cat, the house cat, streaking at top speed
Speaker 1: with his ears back, and following the cat, our dog
Speaker 1: at top speed with his ears back, look of terror
Speaker 1: in his eyes. And then Pappy sprinting at top speed
Speaker 1: for the safety of the house, and I thought, what
Speaker 1: on earth? And then I saw this huge swarm of
Speaker 1: angry bees. Happy felt the freedom to be a bee keeper,
Speaker 1: even though he didn't really understand how bees worked. I
Speaker 1: like to think that I learned from the best. Hamlet
Speaker 1: never kept bees, but Hamlet never had any fresh honey.
Speaker 1: I'll stop because if my father thought a speaker had
Speaker 1: gone on too long, he would just get up and leave.
Speaker 1: He would actually be taking a walk. At this point,
Speaker 1: my hiring nihilism failed just once. It was with the
Speaker 1: assistant who came after, Jane. Jane was Sarah's roommate, whom
Speaker 1: I hired because I liked Sarah, and I thought, under
Speaker 1: the transit of property that if Sarah was great, surely
Speaker 1: that meant that Jane would be great too, because one
Speaker 1: of the odds, Sarah doesn't have good taste in roommates.
Speaker 1: And sure enough, Jane was great. Jane turned out to
Speaker 1: be the kind of person who would plan the D
Speaker 1: Day invasion and then check in with Churchill and Roosevelt
Speaker 1: at five on like a Friday and say, do you
Speaker 1: need anything more from me before the weekend. Anyway, Jane
Speaker 1: wanted to move on, and I hired I'm going to
Speaker 1: call Susan. Susan seemed super nice, but she was not
Speaker 1: a good assistant in a span of just a few weeks.
Speaker 1: She made one air after another, some trivial, some major. Then,
Speaker 1: just as I was about to go out on a
Speaker 1: book tour, she announced she was taking another job, leaving
Speaker 1: me in the lurch. I reprimanded her. She knew it
Speaker 1: wasn't working out. She was upset and apologized. I had
Speaker 1: forgotten about the whole incident until in the course of
Speaker 1: my forensic analysis of my hiring history, one of my
Speaker 1: old assistants reminded me. So I searched back to my
Speaker 1: old emails and found this an email from me to Susan.
Speaker 1: Dear Susan, please don't beat yourself up. Some people are
Speaker 1: good at this kind of work. Some people are not.
Speaker 1: It has no larger significance. It's like how high you
Speaker 1: can jump, or whether you are good at bowling. You
Speaker 1: are probably best for more scholarly pursuits in the end,
Speaker 1: which is not a bad thing. I was probably exactly
Speaker 1: the same way at your age. I kind of can't
Speaker 1: believe I wrote that email. It sounds so sweet and understanding,
Speaker 1: But I'm not sweet and understanding, am I?
Speaker 7: No?
Speaker 1: Not really. What I am is a hiring nihilist, and
Speaker 1: the appearance of graciousness is simply one of the wonderful
Speaker 1: side effects of hiring nihilism, because if you believe that
Speaker 1: nothing in someone's performance in one job predicts their future
Speaker 1: performance in another job, if you believe that the whole
Speaker 1: prediction system when it comes to people is just an
Speaker 1: extravagant exercise in self delusion, then you're free to say
Speaker 1: to Susan, it's okay, the fact that you didn't work
Speaker 1: out as my assistant has no larger significance because it doesn't.
Speaker 1: Life's too short. You need an accountant, You meet an accountant,
Speaker 1: hire the accountant, you meet Stacy, and you cancel all
Speaker 1: your other interviews because you realize, what's the point. The
Speaker 1: nihilist believes that people are mysterious and unpredictable, that life
Speaker 1: is a big crapshoot, and at most of the systems
Speaker 1: we put in place are there just to satisfy our
Speaker 1: illusion that we can see into the future. My email
Speaker 1: went on, I'm sorry I was as harsh as I
Speaker 1: was with you. It's just that this is a rather
Speaker 1: stressful time and I have a million things going on.
Speaker 1: But Jacob, I believe is just the kind of anal
Speaker 1: obsessive detail oriented sort who will serve me well? Smiley face.
Speaker 1: So all's well, that ends well, good luck with your
Speaker 1: next job. I wish you all the best. Am wait Jacob, Yes,
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith Susan's successor. Yeah, that's right. Do you remember
Speaker 1: where the interview was?
Speaker 3: Who's at your place? And I remember that you know me,
Speaker 3: I don't really like dress dress up, but I dressed
Speaker 3: up as much as I do. And I specifically remember
Speaker 3: that you were like, you weren't wearing shoes, and I
Speaker 3: think I had to take off my shoes.
Speaker 1: And do you remember what we talked?
Speaker 3: What I asked you about the obviously, the thing that
Speaker 3: always stuck with me is that you asked if I
Speaker 3: could drive stick shift, which I said yes. That was
Speaker 3: the big one. I remember you asked what my parents did,
Speaker 3: which I thought was a good question.
Speaker 1: I loved the fact that your parents were teachers. Those
Speaker 1: two answers settled it for me. Do you remember how
Speaker 1: long this interview was?
Speaker 3: I remember it was at like one and being out
Speaker 3: of there and it was like one twenty and I
Speaker 3: was like, well, that either went really well or really poorly,
Speaker 3: because it's the fastest job interviewer ever had. And that's
Speaker 3: with like five to seven minutes of just probably small
Speaker 3: talk and kind of getting settled in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are three things in DEARB. Two, you drive stick,
Speaker 1: your parents are teachers. And then you said something, and
Speaker 1: you said, but then I'm so anal that I would
Speaker 1: do something something. I was like, Wait, self, admitting to
Speaker 1: be animals is fantastic. This is exactly what I want.
Speaker 3: It's just funny in retrospect because I don't actually think
Speaker 3: I'm that anal. I think I was playing that up.
Speaker 1: I think I was, yeah, but 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 anal.
Speaker 3: Right, right, yeah, you wouldn't actually want me to be
Speaker 3: so yeah?
Speaker 1: No, And how did Jacob work out well for once
Speaker 1: in your life? Listen to the credits. Revisious History is
Speaker 1: produced by Jacob Smith and me La Belle, with Leaving Gusto,
Speaker 1: Eloise Litton and on A. Naim Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Lawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson.
Speaker 1: Original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to Carly Migliori,
Speaker 1: Heather Fay, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, and l Hafe Jacob Weissberg.
Speaker 1: Revisionist history is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and
Speaker 1: your resident nihilist, Malcolm glad