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.com
Pushkin. Here's what we're doing today. Ready, but are you did? I'm going to do an episode of revisionist History in which I you know, I'm I'm obsessed with 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. Stacy Kalish my first assistant. I'd never had an assistant before, but maybe fifteen 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 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've 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. Very complicated. Anyway, I got Stacy'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 thirty 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 you moved to Australia, like, oh, I'm going to South Africa for business or you know, for Europe speaking engagements. The next day and so I think for about twenty 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. Interviewing rigorous, Like, yes, you really vetted me through and through my knowledge were best to eat in South Africa. So 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? Well he notices 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 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've agonized overwhere that 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 or 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 turned the unflinching analytic gaze, that is revisionist history upon myself. Let us use as our text VI immortal lines the New Testament Matthew seven, Verse five. 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. We spoke for about thirty minutes, twenty twenty five of which was about South Africa, and then you left and you said to me, said, okay, great. Um, 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, okay, you know, good to meet you, and I'm being kind of nervous you left. I thought, oh god, i'mna have to wait now for two weeks to find out and about I'm gonna say. Ten to fifteen 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. Like It's like the least professional hiring story I've 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 riding blink. That's when I started with you, like two thousand and five, 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 vent me much. 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 interview and you seem nice enough. That was like, you see 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 Stacy access to all of my business credit cards, male media requests. I would soon make her my main intermediary with the entire outside world. Did I appear to have read your resume 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. Yeah really, yeah, it was a resume obviously didn't work. Who knew front Line? Well that's impressive. If I'd done that, I might might have hired you in ten minutes and I supposed to twenty five. Now. My first defense reaction to what Stacy 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 bud Nick? Oh my god, I'd forgotten that story, the bud Nick Don bud Nick, even though I've barely gotten started here. This requires a digression. Well that's a fun story from my end. Well, I'd just like you to I'd like to tell us what the white year with this two thousand and five? How can you remember that? Because I'm a Silvan The 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 I was out for lunch or went to the bank or something, and I'm walking back to my office and there you are. I see me 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 passed me by. I turned, I opened my mouth. I yelled 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, I said, we'll make an appointment. Well, 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 gonna We're gonna 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 Medicine 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'll, I want to hire you, but you wouldn't let me. I wouldn't let you. Why would Yeah? Because I wanted to have a serious conversation where 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. But the reason I didn't like my old account. They never had any conversation with me. I didn't know any about accounting, So how can I How can I have an intelligent conversation with you about whether you should be my account if I'd never had an intelligent conversation with an account, But I let it should be my account, Yeah, precisely. And it goes around and around and around whatever. This is getting embarrassed, all right? Now comes the part where I try and defend myself. In every season ever Visionist history, I fall in love with someone I interview. Last season it was Tony Gebli, 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 gaw Girl, Well Row Down Dream. It's JHC. HollyHood, Kaci b O L L Siste Friday. When this is over look her up this season. The interview that surprised me the most was with someone named Adam Cronkrite. 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 if your question? 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 do you find out about lottery selection? Like democratic lottery concepts? I was just interesting. 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 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 war time has an agnostic position, their belief as they can take almost any able bodied person and turn them into a reasonably effective soldier. But that's not Adam Cronkwrite's position. He absolutely thinks that they 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 interests 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 us, 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. 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 Cronkwright 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 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 had written that, But then later I saw another science had 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 principal states very simply, then, 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 the level of incompetence and tend to stay there. Lawrence Peter wrote a book called Peter Principle in nineteen sixty nine, 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 or promoted anyway kicked upstairs a movie 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. Allan Benson, economist at the University of Minnesota. While he was doing his doctorate at MIT, he got bitten by the Peter principal bug I started to go to sales managements 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. 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 Allan bensons a tech company that sells one of those software platforms for sales organizations, kind of like salesforce dot Com, and he gets access to all of their customers data. Four hundred firms, one hundred thousand salespeople. The first thing he finds is a confirmation of the famous eighty twenty rule that twenty percent of the salespeople are responsible for eighty percent 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 is that top salespeople are far far more likely to be promoted into sales management than people who are outside of that top twenty percent 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 interested what happens when those stars take over as manager their salespeople than salespeople who they manage. Their performances 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 thirty percent better than the teams managed by the superstars thirty percent. It'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 thirty percent 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, which 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 into personal woos, the top performers will pout and stop trying. So what are's 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 woofs. Another idea that some Peter Prince 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 concept of a boss is that a boss knows more than the people there bossing. There's even a school of thought in the upper reaches of Peter principal 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 principal? Theorizing gets very meta, very quickly, which is why most people would rather console themselves with the soothing vanalities 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 perspective? Job candidate, Things went well with my first hire, Stacy, but eventually Stacy 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 reculer, it was a little bit about family and that I was half American, and that I could you know that I knew the fifty States of America and alphabetical order. That's Sarah remembering my second ever job in review. And you taught me a Yiddish word. I taught you a Yiddish word. Well, you wanted to know if I knew about the word, maybe you had just had just learned it. I don't know, but it's the word that is the kind of the opposite directional flow of nachas, so nachus being like the joy that your children give you, and this word being us, Yeah, the one that you give them, Yes, yes, nahas and yours. I had just given are 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. And so I began my speech by with something about the distinction between yochas and nus. It was not nas, right, yeah, So there I was schooling you Jewish person well 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 Stacy 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. As it turned out, Sarah was exceedingly 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 die. What happened? What happened? Oh, not just that. It was when it was, I know, a 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 bosses parents? Are You're 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 was the time I think I wrote you about it was when they asked the way To 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 assignedist about his soup. But it was such a nice Oh, I missed 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 under pepper, 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, which as I do, what 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 around 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 Gladwell's think. This is in fact the subject of my eulogy from 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 glabbled in the air that about halfway through all forgot we was 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. Hirshman, who is the true godfather of my kind of nihilism, even more than Lawrence Peter. Hirshman was an economist and one of the towering intellectuals of the twentieth 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 Hirshman'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 Hirshman 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, 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. 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 I'd 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 heart 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. 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 air 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 were 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 at 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 Wait Jacob, Yes, Jacob Smith Susan's successor Yeah, that's right. Do you remember where the interview was? Who 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 talked? What I asked you about the obviously, the thing that always stuck with me is that you asked if I could drive 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. 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 one twenty and I was like, well that either one really well or really poorly good. That was the fastest job interview ever had. And that's with like five to seven minutes of just probably small talk and kind of getting settled in. Yeah, the three things in Dear B two you you drive stick, your parents are teachers, and then you said something something that you said. But then I'm so annal that I would do something stupping. I was like, wait, he self, admitting to be anals is fantastic. It's exactly what I want. It's is 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, but I actually but no, no, See, if I might defend myself, I am as interested in someone who understands that they need to represent themselves as anal as I am in someone who is truly amal. Right, right, yeah, you wouldn't actually want me to be so yeah. No, And how did Jacob work out well for once in your life? Listen to the credits. Revisions History is produced by Jacob Smith and Mei La Belle, with leaving gets to Eloise Lytton and Anna Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our Engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson, original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to Carly Migliori, Heather fe Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor and l haf A Jacob Weisberg. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and you a resident nihilist, Malcolm Glauder