Hamlet Was Wrong

SPEAKER_10: Pushkin. SPEAKER_06: You can find inspiring stories almost anywhere. SPEAKER_13: For instance, check out the co-founders of Girls Who Do Interiors. This Miami-based design company was started by three friends when they were still in school. And right from the start, they turned to Chase for Business for everything from banking and payments acceptance to credit cards. And they handled them all in one place with the Chase Mobile App. It's so important to have that kind of help when you're just starting out. Learn more at ChaseforBusiness.com. Make more of what's yours. Chase Mobile App is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. SPEAKER_02: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on this show, you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back, and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_11: Here's what we're doing today. Ready? What are we doing? I'm going to do an episode of Revisionist History in which I, you know, I'm obsessed with hiring. I've always been obsessed with it. So what I'm doing is I'm interviewing all the people I ever hired. And you, you're the first person I ever hired. SPEAKER_04: I wear that badge pretty proudly, I'll tell you what. SPEAKER_11: Stacy Kalish, my first assistant. I'd never had an assistant before. But maybe 15 years ago, right after publishing my second book, Blink, I realized I was spending all my time answering emails and booking travel instead of writing. So I decided I needed some help. I didn't remember the circumstances under which you came to work for me. So I thought I would just ask you. Remind me again how I found you. A big theme of what follows is that I have no memory. Names, faces, dates. I basically forget everything. A normal person doesn't have to do research on their own life. But I'm afraid I do. SPEAKER_04: Okay, so I have some funny, funny memories around the whole hiring situation. So you found me. How it happened was I had just finished grad school and was looking for a job. Stacy knew someone who knew someone who had an assistant who knew me or something like that. SPEAKER_11: Very complicated. Anyway, I got Stacy's name and just emailed her out of the blue. SPEAKER_04: You're like, you don't know me, but I'm looking for an assistant. You know, would you be interested? We met the next day for coffee. SPEAKER_11: We chatted for literally, I'm going to say all of 30 minutes. SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And so, yeah, you were traveling to South Africa. All we spoke about of what I can remember is you had said, oh, you have an accent. I'm like, yeah, I was born in South Africa and then moved to Australia. You're like, oh, I'm going to South Africa for business or for your speaking engagements the next day. And so I think for about 20 minutes, all we talked about was recommendations of what you should do in South Africa. That pretty much, I think, was a rigorous job interview. SPEAKER_11: Rigorous. SPEAKER_04: Like, yes, you really vetted me through and through my knowledge of where best to eat in South Africa. So we talked about that. And I remember hilariously being very concerned because I had just gotten a nose ring and I remember thinking, oh, I don't know, you know, is he going to, should I take the nose ring out for the interview? Will he notice? Is this, you know, is it proper or professional of me? And I, I literally remember like maybe six months to a year later when I was obviously had been working for you all that time. And I said to you something about like, did you ever notice that or something about my nose ring came out? You're like, oh, I didn't even know you had one. But I agonized over whether to keep this nose ring in or not for fear that it would, you know, I don't know if it would be a bad look. And you did not for like the entire year, the first year that I worked for you did not even notice that I had a nose ring. SPEAKER_11: I didn't notice then. I don't remember now. This is getting off to a bad start. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, I turn the unflinching analytic gaze that is revisionist history upon myself. Let us use as our text the immortal lines from the New Testament, Matthew 7 verse 5. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the moat out of thy brother's eye. You had emailed me and we'd met the next morning because you were leaving, I think, shortly after that for South Africa. SPEAKER_04: We spoke for about 30 minutes, 20, 25 of which was about South Africa. And then you left and you said to me, you said, OK, great. You know, I got a couple more people to interview. And so I guess I'll be in touch when I'm back from my travel in like two weeks or so. I'm like, OK, you know, good to meet you. And we're being kind of nervous. You left. I thought, oh, God, I have to wait now for two weeks to find out. And about, I'm going to say 10 to 15 minutes later, my phone rang and I answered it. And you're like, hey, it's Malcolm again. So listen, you seem nice enough. Why don't you just come by and start tomorrow? SPEAKER_11: This is like the least professional hiring story I've ever heard in my life. SPEAKER_04: And the funniest thing as well is I was like, this must have been like a blink moment for him. I mean, you had just finished writing Blink. That's when I'd started with you, like 2005, right after that book. And I remember laughing with you again a few months later, well into, you know, the job and saying to you, you know, when you hired me, you know, we didn't you didn't really vet me much. Was it like a blink moment you just knew? And you said to me, no, I just couldn't be bothered going through any more interviews. And you seem nice enough. That was like you seem nice. I just didn't feel like interviewing anyone else. SPEAKER_11: As I've stated, I remember none of this, but it all seems a little strange, doesn't it? I was about to hand Stacey access to all of my business, credit cards, mail, media requests. I would soon make her my main intermediary with the entire outside world. Did I appear to have read your resume? SPEAKER_04: Um, skimmed, maybe? Did I ask you, do you remember if I asked you any questions about your schooling? SPEAKER_11: No. Did you have any previous work experience that was relevant? SPEAKER_04: I had interned and worked at Frontline, but I mean, that's more documentary. Really? Yeah, it was on my resume. SPEAKER_11: Who knew? Frontline? Well, that's impressive. I've done that. I might have hired you in 10 minutes and then suppose to 25. Now, my first defensive reaction to what Stacey was telling me was, this was my first hire. What did I know? Then she reminded me of someone else. Do you still work with the Budnick? SPEAKER_11: Oh my God, I'd forgotten that story. The Budnick, Don Budnick. Even though I've barely gotten started here, this requires a digression. SPEAKER_05: Well, that's a fun story from my end. Well, I'd like you to tell it. What year was this? SPEAKER_12: 2005. How come you remember that? SPEAKER_05: Because I'm a savant. Blink had just hit the shelves. SPEAKER_11: Blink, in case you hadn't picked up on it, is about the power of first impressions. Don had just read it and liked it. SPEAKER_05: So anyway, one day I was out for lunch or I went to the bank or something and I'm walking back to my office. And there you are. I see you walking down the street in the opposite direction of me. And I knew immediately who you were, but I couldn't think of your name, couldn't think of your name, couldn't think of your name. You pass me by, I turn, I open my mouth, I yell out, Hey Malcolm! But I didn't know your name, I just yelled out, Hey Malcolm! Just like in the book Blink. And you stopped and you turned around and I seemed like a nice enough guy. And you picked up on my energy of being excited by the book. So we were standing on the street talking for a while. And I said, gee, I would love it if you would autograph my book for me. And then it dawned on me, we were around the corner from my office. So I said, you know what, we're around the corner from my office. And you came up to my office, you still didn't know my name, you didn't know who I was, I was just a nice guy in the street. And you come up to my office and we're sitting there talking and that's when you notice things on my desk and you see the initial CPA. And you say to me, Oh, you're an accountant? I said, yeah, I'm an accountant. And you said, gee, I'm really not that happy with the accountants I'm using right now. Can I hire you? And I was a little excited and dumbfounded at the same time and I said, slow down. SPEAKER_05: I said, we'll make an appointment, we'll sit and we'll talk about what your situation is and what kind of advice I could possibly give you. SPEAKER_05: And then you'll figure out if you want to hire me or not. And you said, no, no, no, I want to hire. And I said, no, we're going to do this right. We're not going to do this impulsively. And eventually you came to my office and I gave you a consultation and you hired me. SPEAKER_11: So a perfect stranger, short guy, red hair, runs up to me on Madison Avenue, Malcolm, Malcolm. And five minutes later, I'm trying to hire him to handle all of my most sensitive affairs. Who am I? So you wouldn't let me. I was like, I want to hire you. But you wouldn't let me. SPEAKER_12: I wouldn't let you. SPEAKER_05: Why wouldn't you let me? SPEAKER_05: Yeah, because I wanted to have a serious conversation where I gave you a consultation and I discussed what planning ideas I had for you. I wanted to make sure that you made your decision not based on impulse, but based on some knowledge and trust and confidence that I knew what I was talking about. But I had just told you that the reason I didn't like my old accountants is they never had any conversations with me. SPEAKER_12: In other words, I didn't know anything about accounting. So how can I have an intelligent conversation with you about whether you should be my accountant if I've never had an intelligent conversation with an accountant about whether this should be my accountant? SPEAKER_05: Precisely. And it goes around and around and around. Whatever. This is getting embarrassing. SPEAKER_11: All right. Now comes the part where I try and defend myself. In every season of Revisionist History, I fall in love with someone I interview. Last season, it was Tony Gebelie, the tea connoisseur, who accused me of being a tea bro. Meeting Tony, for reasons I don't entirely understand, made me very happy. The season before that, it was Casey Bowles, the musician from Nashville, who sang a song that brings me to tears every time I hear it. She grew up playing cowgirl in a railroad town, dreaming she'd see Hollywood someday. SPEAKER_11: K-A-C-I-B-O-L-L-S. When this is over, look her up. SPEAKER_11: This season, the interview that surprised me the most was with someone named Adam Cronkwright. I talked about him in the episode on Democratic lotteries. Adam has made it his life's work to convince grade school kids to choose their student council governments by picking names out of a hat. Actually, since Adam works in Bolivia, by picking fava beans out of a clay pot. Can I ask you a few questions? Yeah. That's Adam, after we talked. He seemed slightly mystified about why I had emailed him one day out of the blue. So how did you find out about lottery selection, like Democratic lottery concepts? SPEAKER_13: I was just interested. I've always been interested in lotteries. SPEAKER_11: And I just was rooting around online, and I ran across the work you were doing. I mean, it was as simple as I was sitting in my coffee shop over there. That was the day I contacted you. I was like, this is really interesting. And then it was totally random. Now, there's a very important distinction with this whole lottery thing. It's between agnosticism and nihilism. Agnosticism is about indifference. It's an elaborate, Gallic shrug. The agnostic would say, the reason to choose people randomly for positions of leadership is that basically anyone can do the job. The army in wartime has an agnostic position. Their belief is they can take almost any able-bodied person and turn them into a reasonably effective soldier. But that's not Adam Cronkite's position. He absolutely thinks that there are good leaders and bad leaders, and not everyone is cut out to be student council president. He just doesn't believe that the systems we currently use are any good. So he says, why bother? Just pull a name out of a hat. Now, Adam would argue that's in the interest of a fair system. But let's be clear. He's a nihilist. He does not look at the vast apparatus of democratic selection, honed and perfected over many centuries, and shrug. That's what the agnostic would do. No, he looks at those elaborate rituals and he rolls his eyes. He says, give me a break. SPEAKER_11: That's my position too, when it comes to hiring. I look at all the folklore and ritual around predicting how well people will perform, and I say, give me a break. I am an eye roller, not a shrugger. I am a nihilist. And my task in this episode of Revisionist History is to convince you to be a nihilist too. SPEAKER_06: As a business, you can build AI to help coders code faster, customer service respond quicker, and employees handle repetitive tasks in less time. Let's create AI that transforms business with Watson X. Learn more at ibm.com slash Watson X. IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_11: Do you know that right now, as you listen to this, there's an astronaut named Frank Rubio in some tiny spacecraft way, way up there in space. He left for the International Space Station in September of last year, thought he was going for six months. And then once he was up there, NASA called him up and said, actually, Frank, we want you out there for a year. 371 days to be exact. My question is, if you're NASA and you pull that bait and switch once, how do you recruit the next crop of astronauts? I mean, you say to your recruits, I need you to leave your family and friends and everything you know and love dearly, eat food out of a tube, but only for six months. And they're like, wait, look at Frank. That's what you told him. And he's still up there. Recruiting for astronauts, if you're NASA, is hard. If only there was some sophisticated job recruiting site capable of finding those few Americans who are perfectly happy to float around in space for an undetermined length of time. Sadly, for NASA, there's no such tool. But for the rest of us? Oh, yes, there is. ZipRecruiter. New hires cost on average $4,700 for all of us non-spaceflight companies. And with that kind of money at stake, you have to get it right. So what's the most effective way to find the right people for your roles? ZipRecruiter. See for yourself. Right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Gladwell and experience the value ZipRecruiter brings to hiring. Once you post your job, ZipRecruiter's smart technology works quickly to identify people whose skills and experience line up with exactly what you want. It's simple. ZipRecruiter helps you get hiring right. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free before you commit. ZipRecruiter.com slash Gladwell. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash G-L-A-D-W-E-L-L. ZipRecruiter. The smartest way to hire. Somewhere out there, believe it or not, there's someone who wants Frank Rubio's job. SPEAKER_11: Let's talk about Pandora's box. According to Greek mythology, Pandora was given a box from the gods that contains special gifts, but they forbade her from opening it. In the end, Pandora's curiosity got the best of her. She opened the box, thereby unleashing curses upon mankind. Cut to three thousand years later and we could very well be talking about the story of those mattresses in a box. You know what I'm talking about. They promised something special inside. But in the end, many would say it's a curse. After all, they're just glorified slabs of foam that are crushed, crammed into a box and then left on your doorstep. If you want a mattress that feels like a true gift from the gods, consider a Saatva luxury mattress. Saatvas don't come in a box. That kind of quality simply can't be crammed into a cardboard container. What's more, Saatva will set up your new mattress for you and take your old one at no extra charge. If history has taught us anything, it's do not open Pandora's box. And right now you'll save two hundred dollars on a thousand dollars or more at Saatva.com slash Gladwell. That's S double A TVA dot com slash Gladwell. SPEAKER_11: The patron saint of hiring nihilism, without question, was the author and educator, Lawrence Peter. All of us in the hiring nihilist community worship at his feet. SPEAKER_08: When I was a boy, I used to believe my parents and believe my teachers and that you should have respect for your elders and betters and that the men upstairs knew what they were doing. SPEAKER_11: That's Peter. He was a Canadian, as am I, of course. And I don't know if you remember from the lottery episode, but Adam Cronkrite went to university in Canada. The nihilist strain runs deep in the land of the frozen prairie. Anyway. Lawrence Peter was a great aphorist, famous for saying things like, the noblest of all dogs is the hot dog. It feeds the hand that bites it. He was also deeply involved in something called the kinetic sculpture race in Humboldt County, California, which is really hard to explain, except to say that it's kind of like the triathlon of the art world involving sculptures on wheels that are required to perform certain feats. Peter famously proposed a special prize called the Golden Dinosaur Award to be given to the first machine to break down immediately after the start, which if you knew Lawrence Peter, you would recognize as being very Lawrence Peter, because his great professional obsession was with incompetence. He had a connoisseur's eye for it. And as I looked around me, I saw a sign on the door that said, Emergency Exit. Authorized personnel only. I wondered who'd written that. But then later I saw another sign that said, Emergency Exit. Not to be used under any circumstances. SPEAKER_08: Lawrence Peter formulated one of the most famous laws in social science. He called it the Peter Principle. SPEAKER_08: The Peter Principle states very simply that in any hierarchy, an employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. That's where he stays. SPEAKER_11: People get promoted based on a prediction about their ability to handle the next job on the hierarchy. And they keep rising until the prediction is wrong. SPEAKER_08: You see, in any organization where competence is essentially eligibility for promotion and incompetence is a bar to promotion, wherever those rules apply, people will rise to their level of incompetence and tend to stay there. SPEAKER_11: Lawrence Peter wrote a book called The Peter Principle in 1969. And it is delightful exactly in a Lawrence Peter sort of way. Like, he has a whole riff on the special case of someone who is incompetent but promoted anyway, kicked upstairs. A move he calls, Percussive Sublimation. Or the case when an incompetent person is moved out of the way but given a long job title as compensation. Peter called that a Lateral Arabesque. Now, chances are you've heard of the Peter Principle. I'm guessing as a kind of joke. Ha ha, that's why my boss is so bad. But it's not a joke. Allow me to direct you to the work of a fellow member of the Hiring Nihilist Club, Alan Benson, economist at the University of Minnesota. While he was doing his doctorate at MIT, he got bitten by the Peter Principle bug. SPEAKER_09: I started to go to sales management conferences and I found that there was this adage that the best salesperson doesn't necessarily make the best manager. But then people would laugh and say, but we do it anyway. And I wanted to find out why. The great advantage of using salespeople to validate the Peter Principle, Benson realizes, is that you can measure performance really easily. It's not like assessing the performance of engineers or politicians. No, it's super straightforward. You just look at how many sales the salesperson has made. SPEAKER_11: And it's also easy to measure how good a sales manager is. You just add up the sales of the salespeople the manager is managing. So Alan Benson finds a tech company that sells one of those software platforms for sales organizations, kind of like Salesforce.com. And he gets access to all of their customers' data. 400 firms, 100,000 salespeople. The first thing he finds is a confirmation of the famous 80-20 rule, that 20% of the salespeople are responsible for 80% of the sales across the board. It's not that we don't know who is a good salesperson. We definitely know. Some people are really good. Second thing, he finds that those superstars get rewarded. SPEAKER_09: What we found in the data was that top salespeople are far, far more likely to be promoted into sales management than people who are outside of that top 20% or who aren't the best person on the team. SPEAKER_11: Of course, that makes sense. You give the stars a promotion. That's what everyone does. Okay, now it gets interesting. What happens when those stars take over as manager? SPEAKER_09: Their salespeople, the salespeople who they manage, their performance becomes worse under them than it was under their prior managers. The stars get promoted and they're terrible managers. How terrible? Really terrible. SPEAKER_11: Benson looked at an alternate promotion scenario where companies decide to promote not the stars, but the salespeople who are good at collaborating. Nice friendly people who work well with others. And teams managed by the friendly people do 30% better than the teams managed by the superstars. 30%. That's huge. Now you might say, what does this have to do with nihilism? This is just an argument for promoting friendly people over superstars. That's not eye-rolling or even shrugging. Well, I haven't told you about Benson's last finding because Benson found a fatal flaw in the alternate promoting scenario, the one that seems to work 30% better, which is this. If you promote the friendly salespeople over the top salespeople, then the top salespeople get upset. So upset that their performance suffers and they aren't so top anymore. The whole thing is so magnificently perverse, isn't it? All your sales come from the same small group of people who expect to be promoted as a reward for their excellence. But if you promote them out of sales, what you get in return is a lousy manager. And if you don't promote them and you pass them over in favor of some warm and fuzzy interpersonal wuss, the top performers will pout and stop trying. So what are you supposed to do? You could pay the superstars more and more and give them fancier titles in the maneuver Lawrence Peter called the lateral arabesque, but you've still insulted them by passing them over for the friendly wuss. Another idea that some Peter Principle theorists have floated is lotteries. They end up where Adam Cronkwright ended up, put everyone's name in a hat and promote the winner. I mean, why not? But then why have a boss at all? The whole concept of a boss is that a boss knows more than the people they're bossing. SPEAKER_11: There's even a school of thought in the upper reaches of Peter Principle world that the best solution is just to man up, forget everything else and deliberately promote the incompetent. Because this way you won't lose one of your superstars by turning them into a lousy manager. You'll just transfer an incompetent person from their present position of incompetence to another position of incompetence upstairs somewhere where they will occupy a position which, according to the Peter Principle, was bound to be occupied by an incompetent person sooner or later anyway. Did you follow that? Peter Principle theorizing gets very meta very quickly, which is why most people would rather console themselves with the soothing banalities of merit and prediction and hierarchy. Only a select few are willing to face the truth. And who are those brave and lonely heretics? The nihilists. People like me. SPEAKER_11: Who look at the world with a cold and unflinching eye and say, under the circumstances, why bother to learn the first thing about any new prospective job candidate? SPEAKER_06: What's in X? Learn more at IBM dot com slash Watson X IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_11: Let's talk about Pandora's box. According to Greek mythology, Pandora was given a box from the gods that contains special gifts, but they forbade her from opening it. In the end, Pandora's curiosity got the best of her. She opened the box, thereby unleashing curses upon mankind. Cut to three thousand years later, and we could very well be talking about the story of those mattresses in a box. You know what I'm talking about. They promise something special inside. But in the end, many would say it's a curse. After all, they're just glorified slabs of foam that are crushed, crammed into a box and then left on your doorstep. If you want a mattress that feels like a true gift from the gods, consider a Saatva luxury mattress. Saatvas don't come in a box. That kind of quality simply can't be crammed into a cardboard container. What's more, Saatva will set up your new mattress for you and take your old one at no extra charge. If history has taught us anything, it's do not open Pandora's box. And right now you'll save two hundred dollars on a thousand dollars or more at Saatva dot com slash Gladwell. That's S double A TVA dot com slash Gladwell. Picture this. It's Monday morning. You're cruising through hundreds of unread emails. You didn't know you needed Mimecast. Your impulse to promptly click, download or respond could be the launch of a cyber attack. You see, an email address is a direct digital path to the mind, the machine and the data of every person in your organization. That means your M365 accounts are at risk of cyber attacks. But you can put your mind at ease with Mimecast. They developed an integrated, frictionless solution that fortifies your existing email security and reduces risk, cost and complexity, allowing your organization to work protected. Best of all, you can get set up in under five minutes with a free 30 day trial of their advanced email security and see all the malicious threats that your current security solution is letting through the cracks. So before you click your next email, visit Mimecast dot com for your free 30 day trial. That's M I M E C A S T dot com to learn how you can work protected with Mimecast. SPEAKER_11: Things went well with my first hire, Stacey, but eventually Stacey needed to move on. And so I had to go through the whole process all over again with Sarah. Basically, we didn't talk about anything professional at all, as I recall it. It was a little bit about family and that I was half American and that I could, you know, that I knew the 50 states of America in alphabetical order. SPEAKER_11: That's Sarah, remembering my second ever job interview. SPEAKER_03: And you taught me a Yiddish word. I taught you a Yiddish word? SPEAKER_10: Well, you wanted to know if I knew about the, a word, maybe you had just learned it, I don't know. But it's the word that is the kind of the opposite directional flow of nachas. SPEAKER_03: So nachas being like the joy that your children give you. And this word being Yuchas? Yeah, the one that you give them? Yes, yes. Nachas and Yuchas. I had just given, I had given a speech to like some Jewish organization in Boston. And of course, I'm not Jewish. So I was filled with anxiety. And so I said, I said, Well, I have to impress them early on. SPEAKER_11: And so I began my speech by with something about the distinction between Yuchas and Nuchas. SPEAKER_10: It was not nachas, nachas, right? Yeah. SPEAKER_11: So there I was schooling you, Jewish person, about Yiddish. SPEAKER_10: I hired Sarah by email the same afternoon we met. She was another recent college graduate. I didn't really bring up the job description during the interview, because by that point, I wasn't really sure what my current assistant was up to. SPEAKER_11: I mean, how would I know? Her job was to do things so that I didn't have to do them. So if I knew what she was doing, she wouldn't be doing her job, would she? So Stacey briefed Sarah about practical things, and much more apparently. Because now I remember that the two pieces of advice that she kind of impressed upon me like tablets were respect his privacy, and be nice to his parents. SPEAKER_11: As it turned out, Sarah was exceedingly nice to my parents. My father thought you just were the bee's knees. He was like, you were his favorite. You were absolutely his favorite. SPEAKER_10: I think I told you that strange and wonderful dinner that I had just with the two of them. With your mom and dad. SPEAKER_11: What happened? SPEAKER_03: Oh, just that it was when it was, I know, New Yorker festival and you were flying off and I just went to see if they needed anything. And I went to see if they were okay. And they asked if I wanted to join them for dinner. And no one had told me what you're supposed to do in a moment like that. Like, are you supposed to go for dinner with your boss's parents? Are you absolutely not supposed to go for dinner with your boss's parents? So I did. And they were just so they were so kind to me, Malcolm, and just like very warm and interesting. And that was that that was the time I think I wrote you about it was when they asked the waiter asked if we wanted pepper on our soup. And I just said yes, because I thought that's what you're supposed to say. And your dad said, I don't know, I haven't tried it yet. And it was just, it just it was like it was brilliant to me that you could just, I guess he was like he was being a mathematician or a scientist about his soup. But it was such a nice. Oh, that's so lovely. SPEAKER_10: I love that. I miss my father so much. SPEAKER_11: The soup agnostic says, go ahead, put pepper in. It's not going to make much difference either way. The soup nihilist says, pepper can make a great deal of difference, but it is impossible for me to find out whether the waiter is offering me pepper, because the soup leaves the kitchen deliberately under peppered, or because the restaurant offers pepper as an amenity, regardless of the pepperiness of its offerings. Sarah took the nihilist position, as would I, of course, I always get the pepper. But Graham Gladwell was not a soup nihilist. He was a soup empiricist. He tried to soup, then considered the pepper. But on all other matters, he took the same approach as I do. Where do you think I get it from? One snowy day, when we were going to visit friends, my father took an off-ramp too fast, skidded down the embankment, and landed on the on-ramp, facing the wrong direction, whereupon he drove off the on-ramp onto a road that none of us had ever seen before. And then he announced, oh, this is the way I wanted to go all along. Did he mean that? Yes, he did. He believed that if you were on a road, for whatever reason, then that's the road you should take. If an accountant appears before you, hire the accountant. If Stacy seems nice, hire Stacy. That is the way Gladwells think. This is, in fact, the subject of my eulogy for my father at his funeral a few years ago, which was one of those funerals that wasn't exactly funereal, in a sense that there was so much Graham Gladwell in the air that about halfway through we all forgot we were supposed to be grieving. For my part, I got up and spoke about all the ways in which my father would have objected to his own funeral. This has been a meticulously planned service so far. My father did not believe in planning anything. The only reason anything in my life, my father's life, was planned was because in a spectacularly fortunate failure of due diligence, he married my mother. Then I talked about one of my heroes, Albert O. Hirschman, who is the true godfather of my kind of nihilism, even more than Lawrence Peter. Hirschman was an economist and one of the towering intellectuals of the 20th century. He helped save the lives of countless Jews in the Second World War. Later, he traveled to exotic lands. He was a man of action, as well as words. His guiding principle was always that Hamlet was wrong. And by that he meant that Hamlet was someone whose doubts made him incapable of acting. Right? Hamlet was frozen. To be or not to be, that's the question. But Hirschman's point was that Hamlet had it backwards. That your doubts should free you. Because once you've accepted that you don't know what happens next, that you can't predict or plan everything in your life, then you're free to act. Because what's holding you back? What is there to be afraid of if you've given up on the illusion of knowing what could possibly happen? I love Hirschman because he reminds me of my father. I think my father thought that Hamlet was wrong. He believed in God even though no mathematical proof exists of God's existence. Doubt did not compromise his faith. It was what gave him freedom to believe. He married my mother even though the world told him not to do that. He went on walks without knowing where he would end up. He never looked at a map. He would just say, I'm going to follow my nose. He built a greenhouse even though he didn't know anything about carpentry. I remember once looking out the window as a child and I saw the cat, the house cat, streaking at top speed with his ears back. And following the cat, our dog at top speed with his ears back, looking for terror in his eyes. And then Pappy sprinting at top speed for the safety of the house. And I thought, what on earth? And then I saw this huge swarm of angry bees. Pappy felt the freedom to be a beekeeper even though he didn't really understand how bees worked. I like to think that I learned from the best. Hamlet never kept bees, but Hamlet never had any fresh honey. I'll stop because if my father thought a speaker had gone on too long, he would just get up and leave. He would actually be taking a walk at this point. My hiring nihilism failed just once. It was with the assistant who came after Jane. Jane was Sarah's roommate, whom I hired because I liked Sarah and I thought, under the transitive property, that if Sarah was great, surely that meant that Jane would be great too, because what are the odds Sarah doesn't have good taste in roommates? And sure enough, Jane was great. SPEAKER_11: Jane turned out to be the kind of person who would plan the D-Day invasion and then check in with Churchill and Roosevelt at five on like a Friday and say, do you need anything more from me before the weekend? Anyway, Jane wanted to move on and I hired, I'm going to call her Susan. Susan seemed super nice, but she was not a good assistant. In a span of just a few weeks, she made one error after another, some trivial, some major. Then, just as I was about to go out on a book tour, she announced she was taking another job, leaving me in the lurch. I reprimanded her. She knew it wasn't working out. She was upset and apologized. I had forgotten about the whole incident until in the course of my forensic analysis of my hiring history, one of my old assistants reminded me. So I searched back through my old emails and found this, an email from me to Susan. Dear Susan, please don't beat yourself up. Some people are good at this kind of work, some people are not. It has no larger significance. It's like how high you can jump or whether you are good at bowling. You are probably best for more scholarly pursuits in the end, which is not a bad thing. I was probably exactly the same way at your age. I kind of can't believe I wrote that email. It sounds so sweet and understanding, but I'm not sweet and understanding, am I? No, not really. What I am is a hiring nihilist, and the appearance of graciousness is simply one of the wonderful side effects of hiring nihilism. Because if you believe that nothing in someone's performance in one job predicts their future performance in another job, if you believe that the whole prediction system, when it comes to people, is just an extravagant exercise in self-delusion, then you are free to say to Susan, it's okay. The fact that you didn't work out as my assistant has no larger significance. Because it doesn't. Life's too short. You need an accountant, you meet an accountant, hire the accountant. You meet Stacy, and you cancel all your other interviews because you realize, what's the point? The nihilist believes that people are mysterious and unpredictable, that life is a big crapshoot, and that most of the systems we put in place are there just to satisfy our illusion that we can see into the future. My email went on, I'm sorry I was as harsh as I was with you. It's just that this is a rather stressful time, and I have a million things going on. But Jacob, I believe, is just the kind of anal, obsessive, detail-oriented sort who will serve me well. Smiley face. So all's well that ends well. Good luck with your next job. I wish you all the best. Am. SPEAKER_11: Wait. Jacob? Yes. Jacob Smith. Susan's successor. Yeah, that's right. Do you remember where the interview was? SPEAKER_07: It was at your place, and I remember that, you know me, I don't really dress up, dress up, but I dressed up as much as I do. And I specifically remember that you weren't wearing shoes, and I think I had to take off my shoes. And do you remember what we talked, what I asked you about? SPEAKER_07: Obviously the thing that always stuck with me is that you asked if I could drive a stick shift, which I said yes. That was the big one. I remember you asked what my parents did, which I thought was a good question. SPEAKER_11: I loved the fact that your parents were teachers. Those two answers sealed it for me. Do you remember how long this interview was? SPEAKER_07: I remember it was at like one, and being out of there, and it was like 120, and I was like, well that either went really well or really poorly because now it's the fastest job interview I ever had. And that's with like five to seven minutes of just probably small talk and kind of getting settled in. SPEAKER_10: Yeah. Three things endear me to you. You drive stick, your parents are teachers, and then you said something, something, something, and you said, but then I'm so anal that I would do something, something. I was like, wait, he's self-admitting to be anal? This is fantastic. This is exactly what I want. SPEAKER_11: It's just funny in retrospect because I don't actually think I'm that anal. I think I was playing that up. I think I was. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, you're not. But actually, but no, no, see if I might defend myself. I'm as interested in someone who understands that they need to represent themselves as anal as I am in someone who is truly anal. SPEAKER_07: Right, right. Yeah, you wouldn't actually want me to be, yeah. No, no, no, no. SPEAKER_11: And how did Jacob work out? Well, for once in your life, listen to the credits. Revigious History is produced by Jacob Smith and Mia Labelle with Lee Mingistu, Eloise Litton, and Ana Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carly Migliori, Heather Fain, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, and El Jefe, Jacob Weisberg. Revigious History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and your resident nihilist, Malcolm Gladwell. SPEAKER_11: Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's re-examine employee benefits with the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance. You'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got your back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. SPEAKER_01: With millions of books on Amazon, there's a reading feeling for everyone. 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