Revisionist History - Hamlet Was Wrong

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

The delicate science of hiring nihilism, examined in five deeply-personal case studies.Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. hiring. I've always been obsessed with that. 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. I wear that badge pretty proudly, I'll tell you what. Stacey 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. 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. Stacey knew someone who knew someone who had an assistant who knew me or something like that. Very complicated. Anyway, I got Stacey's name and just emailed her out of the blue. 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. We chatted for literally, I'm going to say all of 30 minutes. Yeah. And so yeah, we were you were going to

you were traveling to South Africa. all we spoke about of what I can remember is you had said oh you have an accent you have an accent I'm like yeah I was born in South Africa and then I'll you know move to Australia like I'm going to South Africa for business or you know for your speaking engagements the next day and so I think for about 20 minutes all we talked about was like recommendations of what you should do in South Africa. That pretty much I think was. It's a rigorous job interview. Rigorous.

Like, yes, you really vetted me through and through my knowledge of where best to eat in South Africa. We talked about that. And I remember hilariously being very concerned because I just got in a nose ring and I remember thinking, oh, I don't know, you know, is he going to, like, 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 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 notice that oh 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. 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 mote 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 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 said, okay, great. You know, I've 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, okay, you know, good to meet you. And when being kind of nervous, you left, I thought, oh God, I'm gonna have to wait now for two weeks to find out. And about, I'm gonna 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 this is like this is like the least professional hiring story I've ever heard in my life. 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. Um, was it like a blink moment you just knew? And you said to me, nah, 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. 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? Um, skimmed, maybe. Did I ask you, do you remember if I asked you any questions about your schooling? No. Did you have any previous work experience

that was relevant? I had interned and worked at Frontline, but I mean, that's more documentary stuff. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Really? Yeah, it was on my resume. So you obviously didn't know that.

Who knew? Frontline. Well, that's impressive. If I'd known that, I might have hired you in 10 minutes and not supposed 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? Oh my God, I'd forgotten that story. The Budnick, Don Budnick. Even though I've barely gotten

started here, this requires a digression. Well, that's a fun story from my end. Well, I'd like you to tell it. What year was this? 2005. How can you remember that? Because I'm a savant. Blink had just hit the shelves. 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. 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, like, excited and dumbfounded at the same time, and I said, slow down. 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. And then you'll figure out if you want to hire me or not. And he 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. 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? 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 accountant was they never had any conversation with me. 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 account? Precisely, and it goes around and around and around. Whatever. This is getting embarrassing. 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 Geble, 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

K-A-C-I-B-O-L-L-S When this is over, look her up. This season, the interview that surprised me the most was with someone named Adam Cronkright. 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? I was just interested. I've always been interested in lotteries.

And I just was rooting around online and I ran across the work you were doing. I mean, it's 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's 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 Cronkright'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. 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. It's been said that nice guys finish last.

But is that really true? I'm Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, and I'm exploring that very question. Join me for my new mini-series on the art of fairness. We'll travel from New York to Tahiti to India on a quest to learn how to succeed without being a jerk. We'll examine stories of villains undone by their villainy and monstrous self-devouring egos. And we'll delve into the extraordinary power of decency. We'll face mutiny on the vast Pacific Ocean, blaze a trail with a pioneering skyscraper and dare to confront a formidable empire.

The art of fairness on cautionary tales. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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. 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. 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 Cronkright 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. Lawrence Peter formulated one of the most famous laws in social science. He called it the Peter Principle. 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. 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. 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.

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 it's 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. 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 a salesperson has made. And it's also easy to measure how good a sales manager is. You just add up the sales of the salespeople the manager's 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. 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 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. 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? 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. 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 Cronkright 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. 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. 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? It's been said that nice guys finish last. But is that really true? I'm Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, and I'm exploring that very question. Join me for my new miniseries on the art of fairness.

We'll travel from New York to Tahiti to India on a quest to learn how to succeed without being a jerk. We'll examine stories of villains undone by their villainy and monstrous self-devouring egos and we'll delve into the extraordinary power of decency. We'll face mutiny on the vast Pacific Ocean, blaze a trail with a pioneering skyscraper, and dare to confront a formidable empire. The art of fairness on cautionary tales. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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. That's Sarah remembering my second ever job interview. And you taught me a Yiddish word. I taught you a Yiddish word? Well, you wanted to know if I knew about the, a word, maybe had just I just learned it I don't know but it's the word that is the kind of the opposite directional flow of nachas so nachas being like the joy that your children give you and this word being yukas yeah the one that you give them yes yes Nachas and Yachas. I had just given a speech to some Jewish organization in Boston. And of course, I'm not Jewish.

So I was filled with anxiety. And so I said, well, I have to impress them early on. And so I began my speech with something about the distinction between Yachas and Nachas. It was Nachas, right? Nachas, yeah. So there I was schooling you, Jewish person, about Yiddish. 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. 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 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. 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. I think I told you that strange and wonderful dinner that I had just with the two of them, with your mom and dad. What happened? What happened? Oh, no, just that it was when it was, I don't know, New Yorker festival and you were flying off and I just went to see if they needed anything. And I 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 um 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. I love that.

I miss my father so much. 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 underpeppered, 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 the 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 Stacey seems nice, hire Stacey. 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 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 and following the cat our dog at top speed with ears back look of 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. Happy 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 transit of 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. 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. 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're 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 Stacey 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. M. Wait, Jacob? Yes, Jacob Smith, Susan's successor. Yeah, that's right.

Do you remember where the interview was? It was at your place. And I remember that, you know me, I don't really like dress up, dress up, but I dressed up as much as I do. And I specifically remember that you were like you weren't wearing shoes and i think i had to take off my shoes and do you remember what we uh what we talked what i asked you about the the obviously the thing that always stuck with me is you asked if i could drive stick shift um which i said yes that was the big one i remember you asked what my parents did which i thought was a good question. I loved the fact that your parents were teachers. Those two answers seal

it for me. Do you remember how long this interview was? 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 that was 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. Yeah. There are three things that dear 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. 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. 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. Right, right. Yeah, you wouldn't actually want me to be, yeah. No, no, no, no.

And how did Jacob work out? Well, for once in your life, listen to the credits. Revisionist History is produced by Jacob Smith and Mila Bell with Lee Mangistu, Eloise Litton, and Ana Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton.

Flan Williams is our engineer. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, and El Jefe, Jacob Weisberg. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and your resident nihilist, Malcolm Gladwell.