If Books Could Kill - Who Moved My Cheese？

00:00:00.000 You know, the Kendrick Lamar song, bitch, don't kill my vibe. 1.00

00:00:03.500 Yeah. 1.00

00:00:03.960 All week I have had bitch who moved my cheese in my head. 1.00

00:00:09.420 And I understand that that doesn't make any sense, but I can't help it. 1.00

00:00:12.480 It's been there.

00:00:13.380 Well, make it a zinger then, Peter. 0.99

00:00:15.160 I don't know how to fucking do that. 0.98

00:00:16.420 You can't turn this to a zinger. 1.00

00:00:18.120 Bitch who moved my cheese. 1.00

00:00:19.080 Bitch who moved my cheese. 1.00

00:00:20.180 I think you were just going to make a cheese joke. 1.00

00:00:21.920 Like I wanted to read this book, but I couldn't camembert it or something.

00:00:26.180 Good Lord.

00:00:27.680 My God.

00:00:28.600 there's so many things to choose from i'm gonna be honest if i had thought about it i would have

00:00:33.440 written down every cheese i could have i could think of in advance that way i could just bust

00:00:37.660 out puns as they come to me there's still time peter there's still time yeah you're gonna be

00:00:42.920 going through some data set that you looked at and i'm gonna be just like just googling like list

00:00:48.000 of cheeses you did it with pinocchio characters no reason you can't do it with cheese that was

00:00:54.440 off of the dome folks i know you had the thing open in front of you you don't know anything

00:00:58.820 there's no way you knew that many characters from pinocchio i think all right i got it i got let's

00:01:03.100 just do it all right peter michael what do you know about who moved my cheese most of our books

00:01:09.660 are books that you pick up in an airport on a whim and this is the first one that your boss

00:01:15.940 forces you to read

00:01:17.040 since this is a book that deals with cheese and mazes and mice i was gonna have you guess

00:01:39.200 what the subtitle of the book is let's get that cheddar

00:01:42.340 no it's so much worse than that it's who moved my cheese colon an amazing way to deal with change

00:01:52.460 in your work and your life by spencer johnson md so the emphasis is on the maze it's supposed to

00:01:58.640 be hyphenated a dash amazing but then they seem to forget that in a lot of like the reprintings

00:02:03.920 and like news articles about it so it just is like amazing and you're looking at it you're like

00:02:07.780 is that a coincidence? Like, do they know? The stupidity of it is kind of the perfect

00:02:12.160 encapsulation of this. Right. This book is a little bit unique on our show in that it is 1.00

00:02:17.960 the shortest book we've ever read and the most demonic book we've ever read. This is a book of

00:02:25.100 staggering malignancy and yet is packed into 94 pages of large type with numerous like illustrations.

00:02:33.240 Pretty upset that you took this book from me.

00:02:36.620 94 pages, large type with drawings?

00:02:39.380 Hell yes.

00:02:40.500 That's a Peter book.

00:02:41.600 We were just talking about how in your episodes, we tend to read less of the books than in

00:02:45.400 my episodes.

00:02:45.920 For this episode, we're going to read like 30% of the book.

00:02:49.540 Like I have some excerpts and like that's somewhere between a third and a half of the

00:02:54.120 full text.

00:02:54.880 Well, look, I'm excited.

00:02:57.240 Ever since we started the show, I've said, Michael, we're reading too many real books.

00:03:01.200 why not a novella link business allegory? Why can't we do one of those?

00:03:08.580 I had never heard of this book before we started this podcast and got a million

00:03:11.400 requests for this, but this was a massive bestseller. So it comes out in 1998. It sells,

00:03:18.200 I heard different numbers, but up to 20 million copies. I found a random article from New York

00:03:24.140 Times three years after it was published that it had been number one on the bestseller list for so

00:03:29.580 long that stores like Barnes and Noble were just like taking it off the shelf. Like, you know,

00:03:34.060 they have that like little display where it's like top 20 bestsellers in America. They're like,

00:03:37.880 it's been three years. You don't get to be on the shelf anymore. People think we're not

00:03:40.900 refreshing it. It was like a huge phenomenon. Is this real sales or is this like how nursing

00:03:47.500 homes buy conservative books? This is very central to this book's success and the ideology of the

00:03:54.080 book, which we will get into. This is a list from a book called The Disposable American.

00:04:00.040 Southwest Airlines purchased 27,000 copies for all of its employees and sent a copy to every

00:04:05.940 person's home. Mercedes-Benz ordered more than 7,000 copies and uses the book in its training

00:04:11.560 program. The Bank of Hawaii distributed 4,000 copies to its staff. Amway bought and distributed

00:04:16.740 15,000 copies for its sales force. The NCAA sent out a mailing to 450 universities reminding them

00:04:23.980 to use the book for faculty and incoming students our society is toast folks absolutely cooked

00:04:31.100 i like how at least like three quarters of these are just like either scam companies or just like

00:04:36.500 the worst company you know right like wells fargo is like hey this this is interesting there was

00:04:42.380 also a wave of parodies after this book became a massive smash there were numerous books called 0.87

00:04:47.840 who cut the cheese what the fuck which i'm also hearing in the kendrick tune now yeah this is 0.51

00:04:53.200 the most cursed sentence from a wikipedia entry i've ever seen andy borowitz published a parody 0.98

00:04:58.860 who moved my soap the ceo's guide to surviving prison in 2003 i like that the um the immediate

00:05:06.260 reaction was that like the least funny people on earth scrambled to write who cut the cheese

00:05:11.940 what are those books about okay so as usual we are going to start with the first couple paragraphs

00:05:19.140 of the book. We are going to take breaks from the book throughout because it is so asinine that it's 0.74

00:05:25.280 very difficult to stick with it for longer than 15 minutes at a time. Folks, please stay with us 0.55

00:05:29.560 while we do 10 minutes of complete silence to refresh our brains in the middle of this episode.

00:05:35.220 So here is the opening paragraphs. It's kind of long. This book has a framing device.

00:05:42.260 One sunny Sunday in Chicago, several former classmates who were good friends in school

00:05:47.740 gathered for lunch, having attended their high school reunion the night before.

00:05:51.780 They wanted to hear more about what was happening in each other's lives.

00:05:54.900 After a good deal of kidding and a good meal, they settled into an interesting conversation.

00:05:59.620 I like it when writers tell me that something is about to be interesting

00:06:02.060 rather than just writing an interesting conversation.

00:06:04.820 Angela, who had been one of the most popular people in the class, said,

00:06:07.840 Life sure turned out differently than I thought it would when we were in school.

00:06:10.700 A lot has changed.

00:06:11.960 It certainly has, Nathan echoed.

00:06:14.100 They knew he had gone into his family's business, which had operated pretty much the same

00:06:19.040 and had been a part of the local community for as long as they could remember.

00:06:22.760 So they were surprised when he seemed concerned.

00:06:25.760 But have you noticed how we don't want to change when things change?

00:06:29.480 When things change.

00:06:30.460 Carlos said, I guess we resist changing because we're afraid of change.

00:06:35.320 Good point, Carlos.

00:06:37.460 Carlos, you were captain of the football team, Jessica said.

00:06:40.820 I never thought I'd hear you say anything about being afraid.

00:06:44.100 They all laughed as they realized that although they had gone off in different directions,

00:06:48.800 from working at home to managing companies, they were experiencing similar feelings.

00:06:53.760 Nice dig at people who work from home there. 1.00

00:06:55.340 From managing a business to being a complete fucking loser at home. 1.00

00:06:58.220 Being a fucking loser. 1.00

00:06:59.160 Everyone was trying to cope with the unexpected changes that were happening to them in recent years. 1.00

00:07:04.420 And most admitted that they did not know a good way to handle them.

00:07:07.760 Peter and Mike laughed as they both realized how much they deal with change in their lives.

00:07:11.620 Carlos, you were the captain of the football team.

00:07:13.700 I never thought you'd be scared of anything because I am a little baby.

00:07:17.560 And then we get a little bit more, we get a little bit more.

00:07:21.060 Then Michael said, I used to be afraid of change when a big, sorry, this is the worst

00:07:26.000 writing I've ever seen.

00:07:27.380 We thought we liked change, but we don't like change.

00:07:29.800 But then something changed everything.

00:07:31.200 I used to be afraid of change.

00:07:32.680 When a big change came along in our business, we didn't know what to do.

00:07:36.380 That is, he continued, until I heard a funny little story that changed everything.

00:07:41.060 Changed everything.

00:07:41.860 How so, Nathan asked.

00:07:43.700 Well, the story changed the way I looked at change.

00:07:46.960 At first, I was annoyed with the obvious simplicity of the story

00:07:49.320 because it sounded like something we might have been told in school.

00:07:51.980 Then I realized I was really annoyed with myself for not seeing the obvious

00:07:54.920 and doing what works when things change.

00:07:57.620 I thought the story was bad, but it turns out I was bad.

00:08:00.200 Later, I passed the story on to some people in our company,

00:08:02.800 and they passed it on to others.

00:08:04.360 And soon, our business did much better because most of us adapted to change better.

00:08:09.480 However, there were a few people who said they got nothing out of it.

00:08:13.240 They either knew the lessons and were already living them, or more commonly, they thought

00:08:17.320 they already knew everything and didn't want to learn.

00:08:20.400 Some people don't want to learn.

00:08:21.320 When one of our senior executives, who was having difficulty adapting, said the story

00:08:25.120 was a waste of time, other people kidded him, saying they knew which character he was in

00:08:29.460 the story, meaning the one who learned nothing new and did not change.

00:08:34.120 God, there's nothing worse than a parable that has within it someone who rejects the

00:08:40.240 parable.

00:08:40.800 Yeah, I know.

00:08:41.200 Everyone's like, you're just like Bruce.

00:08:43.060 You're just like Bruce from the story.

00:08:44.800 So we then get to the actual parable.

00:08:47.140 Are you ready, Peter?

00:08:48.020 I'm going to start to walk you through it.

00:08:49.500 We're going to do storytelling now.

00:08:50.560 So this is a story about four creatures running around a endless maze.

00:08:57.080 Two of the creatures are little mice named Sniff and Scurry.

00:09:01.480 Michael says, or the story says,

00:09:03.600 the mice, Sniff and Scurry, possessing simple brains and good instincts,

00:09:07.360 searched for hard little nibbling cheese they liked, as mice often do.

00:09:11.340 Okay.

00:09:11.840 There's also two little people, so basically people, but they're the size of mice.

00:09:16.820 The two little people, Hem and Ha, used their complex brains,

00:09:21.080 filled with many beliefs and emotions,

00:09:22.960 to search for a very different kind of cheese, with a capital C,

00:09:26.840 which they believed would make them feel happy and successful.

00:09:30.440 That's how you know a parable is good.

00:09:32.680 When you're like, all right, I've got mice, they're looking for cheese in a maze.

00:09:37.360 And then you're like, actually, this isn't going to work unless they're a tiny mice-sized

00:09:41.280 people.

00:09:42.060 It's also very important that the names of the characters describe what they do.

00:09:46.080 So the mice Sniff and Scurry, their method of searching around the maze is Sniff sniffs

00:09:52.140 around for cheese.

00:09:53.380 But then what does Scurry do, Michael?

00:09:57.580 And then Scurry runs in the direction of the smell.

00:10:02.220 It then says, like the mice, the two little people, Hem and Haw, also use their ability

00:10:07.340 to think and learn from their past experiences.

00:10:10.140 However, they relied on their complex brains

00:10:12.900 to develop more sophisticated methods of finding cheese.

00:10:16.140 Okay.

00:10:16.500 Sometimes they did well,

00:10:17.820 but at other times,

00:10:18.760 their powerful human beliefs and emotions took over

00:10:20.880 and clouded the way they looked at things.

00:10:23.080 It made life in the maze more complicated and challenging.

00:10:26.080 All right.

00:10:26.480 We are given no examples of this.

00:10:28.280 Okay.

00:10:29.420 Life in the maze.

00:10:30.460 So it sort of implies that like the mice are doing this

00:10:32.400 in like this unsophisticated way,

00:10:33.960 even though like searching systematically

00:10:35.480 seems kind of sophisticated to me.

00:10:37.340 And then the little people are doing it in like a more complicated way because their human brains lead them to have like beliefs that guide their actions.

00:10:46.200 Right.

00:10:46.460 Okay.

00:10:46.720 One day they stumble upon Cheese Station C, which is the biggest mountain of cheese any of them have ever seen.

00:10:54.580 And they all dash toward it and they're all wearing running shoes because they're running around the maze.

00:11:01.200 And Sniff and Scurry put their running shoes, like tie the laces together and put them around their necks.

00:11:05.940 So they always have their running shoes nearby.

00:11:08.240 That makes sense.

00:11:08.880 But Hem and Ha put their shoes away.

00:11:12.440 And instead of going out every morning with their running shoes, they sort of settle down

00:11:17.080 and they start to take for granted that there is this giant mountain of cheese.

00:11:22.480 He says, it wasn't long before Hem and Ha regarded the cheese they found at Cheese Station C

00:11:27.800 as their cheese.

00:11:29.780 To make themselves feel more at home, Hem and Ha decorated the walls with sayings

00:11:34.240 and even drew pictures of cheese around them, which made them smile.

00:11:38.300 One read, having cheese makes you happy.

00:11:41.020 We deserve this cheese, Hem said.

00:11:43.140 We certainly had to work long and hard enough to find it.

00:11:45.760 He picked up a nice fresh piece and ate it.

00:11:48.440 Afterward, Hem fell asleep, as he often did.

00:11:51.720 Every night, the little people would waddle home full of cheese,

00:11:54.820 and every morning, they would confidently return for more.

00:11:58.680 Soon, they became so comfortable, they didn't even notice what was happening.

00:12:03.440 Was the cheese depleting?

00:12:05.340 Peter, I can't believe you went ahead of us in the story.

00:12:08.340 Sorry.

00:12:09.100 I got really focused on the fact that I want a sign in my home that says we deserve this cheese.

00:12:16.060 So basically, they then come out one day and all of the cheese is missing.

00:12:22.240 He says, since Sniff and Scurry had noticed the supply of cheese had been getting smaller every day, something the author has not told us, they were prepared for the inevitable and knew instinctively what to do.

00:12:32.760 They looked at each other, removed the running shoes they had tied together, and hung conveniently around their necks, put them on their feet, and laced them up.

00:12:40.400 The mice did not overanalyze things.

00:12:43.160 To the mice, the problem and the answer were both simple.

00:12:46.180 The situation at Cheese Station C had changed, so Sniff and Scurry decided to change.

00:12:51.940 They both looked out onto the maze.

00:12:54.040 Then Sniff lifted his nose, sniffed, and nodded to Scurry, who took off running through the maze, while Sniff followed as fast as he could.

00:13:01.380 So there are two types of people.

00:13:03.560 You have these overthinkers festering in their cheese.

00:13:09.180 And then you have the mice and they have one thought.

00:13:12.520 The thought is like, cheese, cheese, get it.

00:13:14.840 Whereas the spoiled mini humans, which from what I can gather, could have also been mice, just like a different type of mouse, right?

00:13:24.640 The thing with the mice makes no sense.

00:13:28.320 I don't know why he added this weird distinction. 1.00

00:13:30.560 Well, I guess he's doing it because he's like, you need to reduce the amount of shit happening in your brain to the level of a dumbass mouse. 1.00

00:13:39.920 Yeah. 1.00

00:13:40.080 As a parable, this is both doing too much and too little at the same time.

00:13:44.120 Because if it was just four mice with different personalities, then it would sort of be legible as like, oh, OK, they're running around a maze because like that's what mice do.

00:13:53.100 Right.

00:13:53.320 But as soon as you introduce humans, then it's like, wait, why are humans in the maze?

00:13:58.240 Like you need all this extra lore to understand that.

00:14:03.380 He also has this weird thing that we had in the earlier excerpt where he's like, oh, the mice are running around for cheese, but the humans are looking for capital C cheese, like a different kind of cheese.

00:14:15.920 And in this section, he's like, oh, humans mean cheese to be different things.

00:14:21.000 So like some people, for them, cheese is a nice new house or cheese can be a sports car.

00:14:26.220 and you're like no in the parable the cheese is cheese right like he's adding all these weird

00:14:31.820 extra layers of like mice are simple and humans have complex brains but that's just mice and

00:14:37.800 humans that's not like a parable i'd like to see the mouse actually run a business though i bet

00:14:43.320 those little little guys could do it so here is the next section here's what the here's what the

00:14:48.220 humans do here's what the humans do okay hell yeah i'm only saying this to you because i want

00:14:51.900 you to do little voices for the the different people before i do the voices what ethnicity

00:14:56.760 does he say you need to not make this a running joke on the show

00:15:02.300 i have ever since you complained about it my my favorite new bit is um pretending that michael

00:15:12.000 hobbs is a racist in his free time you have to stop what no cheese ham yelled he continued yelling

00:15:19.640 No cheese? No cheese? 0.96

00:15:21.260 As though if he shouted loud enough, someone would put it back.

00:15:25.120 Who moved my cheese? He hollered.

00:15:27.240 That's the name of the book.

00:15:28.340 The name of the book.

00:15:29.340 Finally, he put his hands on his hips.

00:15:31.440 His face turned red, and he screamed at the top of his voice,

00:15:34.680 It's not fair.

00:15:36.700 Haw just shook his head in disbelief.

00:15:38.360 He, too, had counted on finding cheese at Cheese Station C.

00:15:42.200 He stood there for a long time, frozen with shock.

00:15:45.080 He was just not ready for this.

00:15:47.140 He didn't want to deal with what was facing him,

00:15:48.780 So he just tuned everything out.

00:15:50.480 The little people's behavior was not very attractive or productive, but it was understandable.

00:15:54.620 Instead of dealing with change, they're just throwing a tantrum over there. 0.99

00:15:57.320 If you had a giant pile of cheese and then one day it was gone, I feel like you get a day to just be like, this fucking sucks, dude. 0.99

00:16:07.540 I really liked it when there was that pile of cheese. 0.98

00:16:09.840 There's also – he also set us up earlier by saying one day they go to the substation and there's no cheese.

00:16:15.280 But then he kind of quietly tells us in dialogue that actually the cheese had been dwindling.

00:16:19.940 And later he tells us that the cheese had been getting moldy. 0.99

00:16:23.280 So this now positions these two humans as like rock dumb. 0.99

00:16:27.540 It turns out they blew it. 1.00

00:16:29.900 Blew like the cheese.

00:16:31.340 This is the first of many cheese puns I'll be introducing throughout this episode.

00:16:37.120 Horrible.

00:16:37.940 I guess they'll be going back to their cottage empty handed.

00:16:41.160 Oh my God.

00:16:41.900 Cottage cheese. 1.00

00:16:44.200 Fuck. 1.00

00:16:45.280 go back to calling me racist this is too much you got it 1.00

00:16:49.840 so i guess my puns aren't good enough for you oh my god so we then get a long 0.89

00:16:58.260 we then get a long sequence where basically the two humans just like sit there moaning

00:17:07.300 like we used to have cheese but now we don't have cheese he then starts this running bit

00:17:14.080 where one of the characters writes something on the wall so he says him and ha went home that night

00:17:20.560 hungry and discouraged but before they left ha wrote on the wall the more important your cheese

00:17:25.900 is to you the more you want to hold on to it he's just just losing his mind and it's like this is

00:17:31.140 basically the author being like in case in case you didn't get the point of the previous two pages

00:17:35.680 right here's like a nice little summary of it i love the idea of giant scientists looming above 0.98

00:17:42.180 Of all of this being like, Jesus Christ, we created dumb little humans. 0.95

00:17:46.180 We are now going to do a little reading of the script. 0.98

00:17:50.920 I think you should be the reluctant little person and I will be the adventurous little person.

00:17:56.340 Ham analyzed the situation over and over and eventually his complicated brain with its huge belief system took hold.

00:18:03.440 Why did they do this to me, he demanded.

00:18:05.500 What's really going on here?

00:18:07.280 Finally, Ha opened his eyes, looked around and said, by the way, where are Sniff and Scurry?

00:18:12.400 Do you think they know something we don't?

00:18:14.100 What would they know? 0.80

00:18:15.000 They're just mice.

00:18:15.980 They just respond to what happens.

00:18:17.600 We're little people.

00:18:18.620 We're smarter than mice.

00:18:19.960 We should be able to figure this out.

00:18:21.500 I know we're smarter, but we don't seem to be acting smarter at the moment.

00:18:25.040 Things are changing around here, Hem.

00:18:26.760 Maybe we need to change and do things differently.

00:18:29.100 Why should we change?

00:18:30.340 We're little people.

00:18:31.360 We're special.

00:18:32.560 This sort of thing should not happen to us.

00:18:34.280 Or if it does, we should at least get some benefits.

00:18:37.320 Why should we get benefits?

00:18:38.880 Because we're entitled.

00:18:40.980 Entitled to what?

00:18:42.180 We're entitled to our cheese.

00:18:44.760 Why?

00:18:45.700 Because we didn't cause this problem.

00:18:48.500 Somebody else did this, and we should get something out of it.

00:18:51.720 Maybe we should simply stop analyzing the situation so much and go find some new cheese.

00:18:56.820 Oh, no.

00:18:57.680 I'm going to get to the bottom of this.

00:18:59.680 Very subtle stuff happening.

00:19:01.000 Very subtle stuff.

00:19:02.000 I'm with him because someone is doing this to them.

00:19:04.700 They're in a maze.

00:19:06.140 A scientist has created tiny humans, put them in a maze with mice,

00:19:11.620 giving them all shoes and also all they want is benefits all the time they're not entitled to

00:19:16.440 benefits we have made welfare queen little people all they want is the free cheese and they're not 0.92

00:19:23.720 willing to work for it so this i mean for fuck's sake there's a thing in this book where it's sort 0.94

00:19:30.420 of allegedly a parable but it's like it's so thuddingly obvious throughout like what he means 0.94

00:19:37.620 I love the idea that that guy, Michael, is still just explaining this at a dinner.

00:19:43.940 Carlos is listening to this at an Olive Garden right now.

00:19:48.060 Michael, I have to get back to my wife.

00:19:50.580 You've now taken up 45 minutes of our dinner with this bizarre parable about change management.

00:19:55.520 So, OK, we're going to take a little break.

00:19:58.160 We're at a suspenseful part of the story.

00:19:59.740 OK.

00:19:59.960 The little people are asking for more cheese despite not deserving it.

00:20:04.280 So we're going to take a little break and talk about Spencer Johnson, M.D., the man who wrote this story.

00:20:11.480 One of the, I think, most appealing things about Spencer Johnson is that he gave very few interviews over his life.

00:20:18.920 There's no photo of him in the book jacket of any of his books. 0.97

00:20:22.680 And I got like almost all of his books because I was like, there's no biographical information about this fucking guy. 0.86

00:20:29.300 Like surely one of these books, he's written like a million books. 0.90

00:20:31.600 surely one of them he describes like a little like i grew up here i did this then i switch

00:20:36.280 there's essentially no information like he was not somebody who's like seeking fame that's a dream 0.97

00:20:40.900 you just write some dumb ass bullshit and then get incredibly rich and balance so the only thing we

00:20:47.320 have to go on is the about the author text which is almost identical in all of his books and has 1.00

00:20:52.920 been almost identical for like 30 years so i'm gonna send you the first paragraph keep in mind

00:21:01.300 most authors write their own

00:21:03.380 about the author. So we're just

00:21:05.340 going to have that little fact in mind.

00:21:07.280 Okay. Spencer...

00:21:09.000 This guy

00:21:11.320 rocks. Okay. Spencer

00:21:13.320 Johnson, M.D., is one of the most

00:21:15.100 respected and beloved authors in the world.

00:21:17.520 He has inspired and entertained

00:21:18.920 millions with his insightful stories that speak

00:21:21.320 directly to the heart and soul.

00:21:23.760 He has often been referred to as

00:21:25.200 the best there is at taking

00:21:27.060 complex subjects and presenting simple

00:21:29.220 solutions that work. People often describe

00:21:31.240 him that way. Here is the rest of it. This is the intro to Who Moved My Cheese for Teens,

00:21:39.240 which I also read for this. I'm sorry, but is this existing parable not simple enough for

00:21:43.220 teenagers? No, the thing is, the framing device is different. It's like a bunch of high school

00:21:47.400 kids in the cafeteria, but the parable itself is the same. Sorry, he published a whole different

00:21:51.840 book where the only difference is in the introductory chapter where a bunch of people

00:22:00.100 are in a cafeteria instead of a restaurant, that's a whole other book.

00:22:03.460 And then one of them is like this girl dealing to like the change that she's managing is

00:22:07.980 like her dad left.

00:22:08.920 Spencer Johnson, you are a king.

00:22:10.220 He's using the cheese.

00:22:13.200 I forgive you for whatever crime Michael is going to tell me that you committed later.

00:22:18.240 Two decades after the story was created, this book, Who Moved My Cheese?, was published.

00:22:22.980 It soon became an accelerating word of mouth number one international bestseller with one

00:22:27.520 million hardcover copies in print within the first 16 months. People have reported that what

00:22:32.560 they discovered in the story has improved their careers, businesses, health, and marriages.

00:22:37.680 Critics, on the other hand, do not understand how many... Critics, on the other hand, do not

00:22:42.960 understand how so many people could find it so valuable. They say the story is so simple,

00:22:47.220 a child could understand it, as it is just obvious common sense. They get nothing out of the story.

00:22:52.900 i love putting like a sick burn on your haters in your author bio that rules book jacket of your book

00:23:01.760 it's like michael hobbs grew up in seattle washington people who don't like his podcast 0.99

00:23:07.540 are fucking losers they will my critics will die without cheese so very again very little 0.98

00:23:15.220 information about this guy he's born in south dakota he grows up in la he trains as a surgeon 1.00

00:23:22.380 originally. That's where the MD comes from. I was all ready to like, it's a fake MD or something,

00:23:27.460 but like, no, it appears to be real. He studied in Ireland. He died in 2017 from his New York

00:23:32.960 Times obituary, as they're going through his biographical information, they say.

00:23:37.040 With medical clerkships at the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School, he seemed assured of a

00:23:41.340 physician's career. But while working in the hospital, he grew frustrated at seeing the same

00:23:46.040 patients return with the same ailments, as if they were not trying to better their lives,

00:23:50.560 said margaret mcbride his literary agent he felt a lot of diseases were people lacking something in

00:23:55.680 their soul she said he wanted to fix them from the inside isn't fixing them from the inside what

00:24:00.620 surgeons do so this is chekhov's toxic positivity we're going to see how this informs the content

00:24:06.880 and the impact of the book later but for now spencer johnson ends up leaving medicine and

00:24:14.360 going to work as like a PR person for a medical devices company. And nights and weekends,

00:24:20.640 he starts writing children's books. Okay. And they're all like little parables. So one of

00:24:25.620 them is like, the Wright brothers, the value of patience. Louis Pasteur, the value of believing

00:24:30.560 in yourself. Charles Dickens, the value of imagination. This is so perfect, dude. This

00:24:35.700 guy who writes stories for literal babies just writes one and is like, this one's for adults.

00:24:41.800 and every corporate executive on earth is like, whoa, everyone in my business needs to read this. 0.99

00:24:48.780 Do you want to get to the real good shit? Who Moved My Cheese is not his first business 0.99

00:24:52.960 bestseller. His first business bestseller was 15 years before called The One Minute Manager.

00:24:58.620 Hell yeah. Okay.

00:24:59.420 In the early 80s, he links up with this guy, Kenneth Blanchard, who's a consultant to a

00:25:02.680 bunch of companies, motivational speaker type guy, but he's really bad at like marketing his

00:25:07.740 messages. So at the time, there are sort of like business bestsellers, like what we now would think

00:25:13.280 of as like business airport books. Those do sort of exist, but they're all really dry. They're more

00:25:18.640 like textbooks and they're like 500 pages long. Like this category of business-oriented self-help

00:25:24.620 garbage doesn't really exist in the early 1980s. And so this kind of Blanchard guy is making a ton

00:25:29.360 of money as like a motivational speaker and consulting companies, but his previous book is

00:25:33.780 called management of organizational behavior utilizing human resources. This is great that

00:25:39.340 there used to be an industry of like actually informative business books. And they just got

00:25:44.220 dumber and dumber and dumber until finally it's like, there were two mice in a maze and two little 0.99

00:25:50.780 tiny people. So like him and this kind of Blanchard guy get together. They write this book called The 1.00

00:25:55.140 One Minute Manager. And as they're shopping it around to publishers, all the publishers are like,

00:26:00.300 this isn't a real book. It's like 65 pages. Like we can't charge full price for this.

00:26:05.320 And him and Kenneth are like, no, no, no, you must charge full price for this because business

00:26:10.400 people don't have a lot of time. And if it's discounted, people are going to think it's not

00:26:14.500 worth as much. So you actually need to charge the full, it was $15 in 1983 bucks. So like 40 bucks,

00:26:21.100 you need to charge 40 bucks. And so this turned out to be like a genuine insight that like

00:26:28.580 business people want something like easily digestible. Okay. These books kind of disappear

00:26:33.420 from the cultural consciousness really quickly because they're always churning through and

00:26:37.120 getting replaced by new fads. But like this book was a massive deal, The One Minute Manager,

00:26:41.740 and it spawns a whole series of books. Okay. So there's like The One Minute Salesperson,

00:26:46.980 One Minute For Myself, The One Minute Teacher, and The One Minute Father.

00:26:51.380 I'm ready to be The One Minute Father. That is all the time I have for my child.

00:26:56.140 So basically, this is how Spencer Johnson becomes – I mean, he's essentially a management guru for like 10 to 15 years before Who Moved My Cheese comes out.

00:27:05.820 He publishes some other books during that time too, all of which did really well.

00:27:09.000 But he basically cracked this code of like less than 100 pages, charge full price, and like tell companies these like simple messages basically.

00:27:18.100 Dude, The One Minute Father, what a title.

00:27:20.720 That's going to stick with me.

00:27:22.060 Sorry.

00:27:22.560 That's like resonating.

00:27:24.040 Like the hook being like, you barely have to spend any time at all parenting your child.

00:27:30.000 It's like four minute abs.

00:27:31.880 In the work context, it makes total sense because of course you don't, you know, you

00:27:35.440 don't want to like engage with work any more than you have to for most people.

00:27:39.200 But to think that like the, that it works just the same with parenting.

00:27:43.960 That is beautiful.

00:27:45.060 Loving my kids any percent.

00:27:46.480 One minute lovemaking, my guide to marriage.

00:27:49.900 So back to the book. When we when we left off, our little people were in a huff.

00:27:56.600 They were hemming and hawing, you might say.

00:27:59.160 And they are still fighting amongst themselves and just saying, oh, no, we should just come back to Cheese Station C again and again.

00:28:06.980 Maybe there will be more cheese here.

00:28:09.460 So here's the next script. You're going to be hem again. You're going to be hem.

00:28:13.720 OK.

00:28:13.940 The more clearly Haw saw the image of himself finding and enjoying new cheese,

00:28:18.280 the more he saw himself leaving Cheese Station C.

00:28:21.560 Let's go.

00:28:22.500 No, I like it here.

00:28:23.940 It's comfortable.

00:28:25.000 It's what I know.

00:28:26.280 Besides, it's dangerous out there.

00:28:28.080 No, it isn't.

00:28:29.100 We've run through many parts of the maze before, and we can do it again.

00:28:32.200 I'm getting too old for that,

00:28:33.760 and I'm afraid I'm not interested in getting lost and making a fool of myself.

00:28:37.460 You know, if we just work harder, we'll find that nothing has really changed that much.

00:28:41.180 The cheese is probably nearby.

00:28:42.460 eye. Maybe they just hid it behind the wall. The next day, Hem and Ha returned with tools.

00:28:47.400 Hem held the chisel, while Ha banged on the hammer until they made a hole in the wall of Cheese

00:28:51.580 Station C. They peered inside, but found no cheese. They were disappointed, but believed

00:28:56.720 they could solve the problem. So they started earlier, stayed longer, and worked harder. But

00:29:00.900 after a while, all they had was a large hole in the wall. Ha was beginning to realize the difference

00:29:06.140 between activity and productivity. Maybe we should just sit here and see what happens.

00:29:10.980 Sooner or later, they have to put the cheese back.

00:29:13.480 Ha wanted to believe that.

00:29:14.880 So each day he went home to rest and returned reluctantly with him to Cheese Station C.

00:29:19.160 But cheese never reappeared.

00:29:21.180 Finally, one day Ha began laughing at himself.

00:29:24.200 Ha ha, look at us.

00:29:25.860 We keep doing the same things over and over again and wonder why things don't get better.

00:29:29.860 It's okay.

00:29:30.980 The listeners aren't going to understand why this is weird, but he spells out the laughter.

00:29:36.500 I know.

00:29:37.040 H-A-W-H-A-W, which is ha-ha, which is also the name of the little person.

00:29:43.060 So it just reads like he's saying his own name twice.

00:29:45.660 Ha-ha, look at us.

00:29:47.640 This is awful writing.

00:29:49.860 How did no editor jump in here?

00:29:51.960 Also, even for something that's really short, it's like the pacing.

00:29:55.640 It's like, okay, they're still there.

00:29:56.720 We know what's going to happen.

00:29:58.820 We don't need more scenes of them, like, just staying in the same place and they're still

00:30:03.380 not cheese.

00:30:04.080 Like, okay, we get it.

00:30:05.180 You said 94 pages, but now that I'm, like, hearing the arc of this story, this is a three-page story.

00:30:10.680 Easily. Easily.

00:30:11.820 It's 2.30 a.m. at Olive Garden right now, and Carlos is going to jump out of the window.

00:30:17.400 There's also this weird thing.

00:30:18.520 This has nothing to do with anything, but I'm just completely baffled.

00:30:21.040 It says, obviously, Ha decides to leave.

00:30:23.220 We all know this is going to happen.

00:30:24.120 So Ha decides to leave.

00:30:25.220 He's going to leave him, the fear of change guy.

00:30:27.380 He's going to leave him in the maze at Cheese Station C, and he's going to go out and he's going to search for new cheese.

00:30:31.660 And it says, as Ha prepared to leave, he started to feel more alive, knowing that he was finally able to laugh at himself, let go, and move on.

00:30:40.900 Ha laughed and announced, it's maze time.

00:30:44.540 It's maze time.

00:30:45.860 That's what I've always said.

00:30:47.000 Which, like, is that a pun or something?

00:30:49.080 This is the climax of the story, right?

00:30:53.680 When Ha lets loose his famous catchphrase, it's maze time.

00:30:59.140 Okay.

00:30:59.700 Okay, so he then, okay.

00:31:04.080 God, this book is so repetitive. 0.97

00:31:05.360 I like don't want to make you read the same fucking thing like 300 times, although there's no way not to do that. 0.97

00:31:09.100 And I guess now that Hem has been abandoned, he's Prove alone in his house. 0.97

00:31:17.220 Still got it, folks.

00:31:20.160 So basically, Haw leaves, but he's afraid.

00:31:23.580 There's this long sequence where he's wandering around and he's like, I'm afraid.

00:31:26.140 There's dark corridors in the maze.

00:31:27.600 There might be monsters in there.

00:31:29.660 Watch out. 1.00

00:31:30.920 Fuck. 1.00

00:31:33.340 You literally have a list in front of you, don't you? 1.00

00:31:35.400 Oh, no.

00:31:35.940 Yeah, that wasn't a joke.

00:31:36.840 There really is a list.

00:31:39.920 You're just workshopping these as I'm talking.

00:31:41.820 You've completely disengaged.

00:31:43.160 I've been, well, to be fair, I've been waiting to say monster for a while.

00:31:46.360 That was like one of the ones that jumped out to me as a real possibility up top.

00:31:52.600 So we then have Ha wandering around the maze and he's just, he can't find it.

00:31:57.080 He's afraid of the cheese.

00:31:59.700 Whenever he started to get discouraged, he reminded himself that what he was doing, as uncomfortable as it was in the moment, was in reality much better than staying in the cheeseless situation.

00:32:10.540 He was taking control rather than simply letting things happen to him.

00:32:14.720 You can't just let things brie.

00:32:17.580 Wait, that one doesn't even work.

00:32:19.460 That doesn't even work.

00:32:20.280 Well, I was going to try to say brief if the opportunity arose.

00:32:26.420 but that's worse oh yeah i think maybe the most famous thing that comes out of this book and i

00:32:33.080 think this is where it comes from as he's leaving he's very nervous to go wander around the maze

00:32:38.040 he writes what would you do if you weren't afraid and this becomes like in all the sort of 0.73

00:32:43.720 epilogue shit about like the the footprint of this book what would you do if you weren't afraid 0.92

00:32:48.320 is like one of the catchphrases that comes up all the time he writes it in his own blood on the wall 0.97

00:32:52.600 he also writes smell the cheese often so you know when it is getting old okay so he's he is

00:33:00.080 losing his mind he's walking through this this maze for cheese his mind is fading meanwhile

00:33:07.280 ham is back at home just dying with dignity well also starvation doesn't seem to be a risk because

00:33:12.560 it appears that this it's been like weeks now that they haven't had cheese and nothing's bad

00:33:16.240 seems to be happening i feel like he hasn't done enough world building okay here is the final

00:33:21.500 section of this section.

00:33:24.220 This is where it gets very suspenseful.

00:33:25.780 Haw wondered if Hem had moved on

00:33:27.680 or if he was still paralyzed by his own fears.

00:33:30.400 Then Haw remembered the times

00:33:31.940 when he had felt his best in the maze.

00:33:34.300 It was when he was moving along.

00:33:36.160 He wrote on the wall, knowing

00:33:37.740 it was as much a reminder to himself as

00:33:39.800 it was a marking for his friend Hem, hopefully

00:33:41.680 to follow. Movement in a new

00:33:43.720 direction helps you find new cheese.

00:33:46.060 The words of the prophets. To his surprise,

00:33:48.320 Haw started to enjoy himself more

00:33:49.760 and more. Why do I feel so good? He wondered. I don't have any cheese and I don't know where I'm

00:33:54.400 going. Before long, he knew why he felt good. He stopped to write again on the wall. When you stop

00:34:00.200 being afraid, you feel good. He feels good. The more clearly he saw the image of himself enjoying

00:34:04.980 new cheese, the more real and believable it became. He could sense that he was going to find it.

00:34:10.840 He wrote, imagining yourself enjoying your new cheese leads you to it. Imagine your cheese. I

00:34:16.240 love a parable where they just explain the feelings that the character has it's like yeah

00:34:23.680 this guy's searching in a maze lost starving but he feels good because he's trying and you're like

00:34:33.380 yeah his life is an immortal nightmare and yet he is happy so this little sequence here was where

00:34:41.760 the demonicness of the book really became clear to me. Because the whole thing obviously is

00:34:47.840 propaganda for people being okay with change, right? When someone above your head changes

00:34:52.460 something in a way that harms you, you should just adjust to the change, right? You shouldn't

00:34:56.280 sit there complaining. You shouldn't be asking for benefits. You shouldn't be trying to figure

00:35:00.780 out what went wrong, right? You should just move on really quickly, right?

00:35:03.440 You should wander the halls of your office writing on the wall,

00:35:07.200 what would you do if you weren't afraid?

00:35:09.140 Even like, even as pernicious as that is, we then get to this sequence where it's like, once he realizes he's moving forward, he feels good.

00:35:17.160 So it's now telling us that it's like, well, once you just accept that and move on and basically become this little mice scurrying around the maze, then you're actually happier.

00:35:25.500 You felt bad, but what if you just felt good?

00:35:27.540 Yeah, exactly.

00:35:28.000 What if you just felt good?

00:35:28.940 And actually, once you accept the fact that you can't do anything and that change just happens and like, don't look backwards, you're going to achieve some kind of self-actualization, right?

00:35:37.740 It's not enough just to promise you, like, everything will be okay in the end.

00:35:41.360 They're now promising you this is actually going to make you happier.

00:35:44.280 Right.

00:35:44.520 So we're going to depart from the book a little bit to talk about the message of the book and where the message of the book comes from, the context in which this book is getting released. 0.96

00:35:54.440 This is my attempt, Peter, to try to make this episode interesting because this is a fucking 94-page book. 0.55

00:35:59.200 I think it's been interesting. 0.99

00:36:01.460 I'm losing my fucking mind. 0.99

00:36:02.880 And the thing is, this book is indicative of an ideological shift that I'm sure you've heard a lot about. 0.99

00:36:11.760 You know the rise of the sort of shareholder value model that came to take over corporate America in the 80s and 90s?

00:36:18.400 Can you summarize this?

00:36:19.620 Yeah, the idea that the primary goal of business is to increase value for shareholders.

00:36:26.900 the most direct consequence of which is that employees are not viewed as stakeholders in a

00:36:34.240 company in the same way. So you can do many things like layoffs, for example, that benefit

00:36:40.100 shareholders to the expense of employees. Exactly. And this book comes out in 1998,

00:36:44.820 which is really – the release of this book in the year 1998 kind of marks the end of that shift.

00:36:49.380 That shift was complete. I've read various accounts of like the rise of this ideology,

00:36:53.740 but I don't know that I ever really understood what caused it. And there's also, it's also often

00:37:00.400 contrasted with, you know, before the shareholder value model, corporations really cared about their

00:37:04.860 workers and they cared about their communities. And now it's all profits, right? That always felt

00:37:10.100 a little bit one-dimensional to me, right? Because companies have always cared about profit.

00:37:14.080 Yeah.

00:37:14.300 So why did they suddenly start caring about them in this radically different and more harmful way?

00:37:19.640 I never really understood what originated this. So before the stakeholder value model,

00:37:25.680 the previous model was known as retain and reinvest. So after World War II, America was

00:37:31.240 kind of the last country left standing. We had all these companies that were doing really well,

00:37:35.120 and it was really easy to be a profitable company in like the 50s and 60s. And there was a kind of

00:37:40.140 groupthink at the time that when you're a successful company, what you should do is retain

00:37:45.000 and reinvest your profits. So what you want to do is you want to buy other companies, acquire firms

00:37:50.860 that are doing something slightly different from you. And you also want to maintain a large

00:37:55.220 workforce. The example that really stuck out to me was Gulf and Western. You watch old movies and

00:38:00.420 we like Paramount Pictures, a Gulf and Western company. Yeah. Gulf and Western was a Texas oil

00:38:05.100 company. And then in the 1960s, because this conglomeration model is so popular, it buys up

00:38:10.500 an auto parts firm. It buys a sugar plantation. It buys a Polynesian tourism company. It buys

00:38:16.920 Paramount Pictures. It buys the clothing company that runs the Miss Universe pageant. It buys a

00:38:21.640 gold mine and it buys Madison Square Garden. And this was like what companies were expected to do

00:38:26.940 at the time. And then what starts to happen is in the 1970s, the problems with this model start to

00:38:33.060 emerge. So one of them is just a lot of these companies are way too fucking big, right? If

00:38:37.680 you're the head of an oil company, all of a sudden you're determining whether Paramount should make

00:38:41.620 like comedies or action movies next year. Like you're just not qualified to do that, right? So

00:38:45.700 you have a huge amount of inefficiency. And a lot of these companies were genuinely very bloated,

00:38:51.240 right? And America hadn't really faced competition in the post-World War II world until, you know,

00:38:56.880 Europe and Japan start like producing their own really good companies. And, you know, the obvious

00:39:02.320 example is the automakers, right? That American companies were completely bloated. They were

00:39:06.200 essentially running a tripartite monopoly. And then all of a sudden like Honda and Toyota come

00:39:10.360 in and it's like, oh shit, they're making good cars for cheap that don't use a ton of gas and 0.99

00:39:15.120 we're just absolutely getting walloped. So it became more and more clear throughout the 70s 0.99

00:39:19.780 that like companies needed to change. Like this model had gone too far.

00:39:24.640 Another really big change was essentially all the economic growth of the 1960s started to slow down

00:39:30.140 in the 70s. So let me send you a paragraph. This is from a fascinating article called

00:39:36.720 Shareholder Value and Workforce Downsizing, 1981-2006 by Jinwook Jung.

00:39:41.640 The prosperity of the post-war years came to an end in the 1970s, culminating in stagflation

00:39:46.660 and bear markets. As a result, many large U.S. companies experienced a chronic decline in their

00:39:51.440 market share and profitability. This stimulated emerging power groups and financial markets to

00:39:55.900 search for a remedy. Leading the charge were institutional investors such as large public

00:40:00.160 pension and mutual funds. In a social movement like fashion, they began to challenge management

00:40:05.600 of leading U.S. firms and promoted the new financial orthodoxy that the only legitimate

00:40:09.920 goal of corporations is to maximize returns to their shareholders. So this is kind of like bleak

00:40:14.980 that, you know, as more people started getting pension funds, these pension funds started

00:40:19.500 becoming more activists and saying, hey, wait a minute, why aren't you producing enough profits

00:40:23.180 for us. And this has always been the argument for the shareholder value model, right? That this is

00:40:28.160 sort of democratic in a sense because the shareholder gains get passed through to pension

00:40:36.120 funds, et cetera, that are held by middle-class citizens who then benefit. Exactly. That's the

00:40:44.500 logic anyway, right? Or at least the way that people are defending it at the time. So as these

00:40:49.260 institutional investors become more powerful. There's also a series of deregulations throughout

00:40:53.500 the 1970s, which allow institutional investors to hold more corporations. There used to be limits on

00:40:58.400 how much corporate equity they could hold. Those are lifted. There's reforms that Wall Street

00:41:02.700 pushes for in the early 1980s that deregulate savings and loans. There's all kinds of junk 0.87

00:41:06.920 bonds flowing around. There's just like a series, like little TikTok small movements that nobody

00:41:11.040 really notices as being all that big of a deal throughout the 70s and 80s. But it becomes much

00:41:16.560 easier for these institutional investors to essentially become activists in parallel with

00:41:21.580 this and somewhat linked to it. There's also the thing where a lot of CEOs start to be paid in stock

00:41:25.100 options. And so all of the incentives are essentially for like making these companies

00:41:29.860 more quote unquote lean, which typically involves laying off a shitload of people.

00:41:34.960 So throughout the 1990s, we essentially get an unprecedented wave of layoffs. There's a really

00:41:41.720 interesting feature in the New York Times in 1996 that says 43 million jobs were lost between 1979

00:41:48.280 and 1996. There's a survey in the 90s that one third of all households had a family member lose

00:41:54.760 a job. You know, companies in America, of course, they'd always done layoffs, like companies go out

00:41:59.080 business, that's part of having an economy. But what was different about the wave of layoffs in

00:42:03.300 the 1990s was that they were, first of all, hitting middle class people, right? This wasn't

00:42:07.080 just like manufacturing jobs being outsourced overseas. And so that meant that it got a lot

00:42:10.860 more media attention, right? Because middle class people were losing their jobs. And then

00:42:13.920 companies are doing layoffs when times were good. Yeah, it wasn't like we need to shrink because

00:42:19.920 it's the only way that will survive. It's like, we boosted profits. And now we're gonna trim the

00:42:24.800 fat. Yeah. And this is something we've totally become used to, like the tech companies just did

00:42:28.640 this video game companies are doing this now. But like this, this was a new thing in the 1990s. And

00:42:33.400 was like a huge political issue. I almost feel like now, something like layoffs have been have

00:42:38.940 become completely depoliticized. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting. This is just something

00:42:42.320 that happens. There's also this weird rise of, you know, kind of the first green shoots of gig

00:42:46.960 work economy that, you know, 42 million people lost their jobs basically in the 1980s and 1990s,

00:42:53.020 but 70 million people got jobs during that time. So the economy overall was growing and the economy

00:43:00.140 was replacing the jobs that were lost kind of on the aggregate level. But for a lot of individuals

00:43:05.900 who were pushed out of the workforce, a lot of them never got back in. There's now statistics

00:43:10.560 about people who were laid off during this period, around one third of them got jobs that paid less

00:43:16.160 money. 35% of people who were laid off were unemployed for more than two years. And there's

00:43:22.580 this really fucked up study of people who were laid off during the 1982 recession that 20 years 0.69

00:43:28.600 later, they were still earning 20% less than people who weren't laid off during that recession.

00:43:34.300 Where this book comes into it is that this was a shift in the quality of American jobs.

00:43:39.020 You have this vast increase in precarity.

00:43:41.760 So essentially, you get this feeling that like anyone can lose their job at any time. 0.99

00:43:45.800 It doesn't matter whether you fucked up at work. 0.95

00:43:47.440 It doesn't even matter whether your company is doing bad, right? 0.99

00:43:50.080 You can just get laid off.

00:43:52.020 And there's a decent, you know, one in three chance you're either not going to get a job

00:43:56.980 again, especially if you're older.

00:43:58.180 It was really hard on older workers.

00:44:00.440 And even if you do get a job, there's a one in three chance.

00:44:03.360 it's not going to pay as much. And so essentially both managers and workers needed an ideology

00:44:09.500 to help them deal with this, right? Managers needed an explanation that could let them not

00:44:14.760 feel like a huge piece of shit for laying people off, right? And this is where you get this euphemism 0.99

00:44:21.580 of change management, right? And there were change management consultants that companies would bring

00:44:26.080 in that oftentimes would do layoffs, but then would also do these bizarre motivational speeches

00:44:32.240 as part of the layoffs of like, you're going to be better in the new job. Like, don't think of

00:44:36.300 this as the end of one opportunity. Think of this as the beginning of something new, the new you,

00:44:41.240 right? They had to sell this back to workers as, oh, you're going to be better in the end.

00:44:46.700 If you're moving forward, you're actually going to be happier. 0.96

00:44:49.800 This all sort of interestingly situates the book because it's not just corporate bullshit, 0.97

00:44:56.200 but a specific type of corporate bullshit that's meant to like ease the transition from one type 0.98

00:45:03.620 of business world to another. It's not just like you should learn to be a better employee. It's 0.95

00:45:09.640 like, yeah, we're going to be firing some of you sometimes. And if you want to be a success,

00:45:16.440 you need to learn to navigate that maze. And here's a little book where you're a science

00:45:25.380 experiment that's the yeah that's the allegory is uh you are being tortured by scientists it's also

00:45:32.420 kind of perfect in that 1998 was the year where there was the highest economic growth for the

00:45:37.980 entire decade and there were more layoffs than any other year in the decade i would have loved to see

00:45:43.240 the dot-com crash update to this like the recession update to who moved my cheese so

00:45:50.560 So this is an excerpt from Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided, How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, which is a really good chronicle of the rise of, like, the motivation industry.

00:46:03.520 Reality sucks, a computer scientist with a master's degree who can find only short-term, benefit-free contract jobs told me.

00:46:09.980 But you can't change reality, at least not in an easy and obvious way.

00:46:13.460 You could join a social movement working to create an adequate safety net or to bring about more humane corporate policies, but those efforts might take a lifetime.

00:46:21.400 For now, you can only change your perception of reality from negative and bitter to positive and accepting.

00:46:26.940 This was the corporate world's great gift to its laid-off employees and the overworked survivors, positive thinking.

00:46:32.920 She also has this, which this is only tangentially relevant, but I can't help myself.

00:46:39.500 So this is about the motivational seminars that companies were doing in the 90s.

00:46:42.560 For example, in the midst of downsizing in the mid-90s, 9x subjected its employees to mandatory exercises such as one in which you had to show how many ways you could jump around a room.

00:46:53.320 Oh, no.

00:46:54.620 So the employees jumped on one leg, on both legs, with their hands in the air, with one hand covering an eye.

00:47:01.560 They jumped, and they jumped, and they jumped some more.

00:47:04.040 Then the leaders would say things like, look how creative you are.

00:47:07.200 How many different ways you can manage to jump around the room?

00:47:09.660 i would be jumping out a window dude check this one out these are like adults dude it's so

00:47:18.980 belittling absolutely not i'm coming back with a gun so i read who moved my cheese.com

00:47:25.220 which like archive.org like it's not around anymore but it has testimonials from people

00:47:31.700 who like used who moved my cheese in the workplace and like what's so fascinating about it is they're

00:47:38.380 almost all from managers. It's not like workers were like, hey, I use this and it was actually

00:47:42.620 really helpful for me. It was manager saying, I gave this to my employees. I loved making those

00:47:47.740 little sluts jump around the room. They looked pathetic. Dude, but it also recasts that list of 1.00

00:47:55.320 companies at the beginning, right? Where it's like Southwest Airlines sent it to 27,000 employees to

00:48:00.240 their homes. This is layoff propaganda, right? It's like, if you get laid off for no fucking

00:48:05.380 reason. Don't just sit there and ask, you know, ooh, who did this to me? Don't ask for benefits. 0.99

00:48:11.200 Move forward. No one, like there was no pull from workers for this. It was always pushed

00:48:15.600 from management. So I'm going to make you read one of the testimonials from this website.

00:48:22.100 This book was very halluminating.

00:48:28.940 That would be so much better than what this actually is, Peter.

00:48:31.780 All right. There's a title that says, Boss, Employees Share Large Cheese Platter.

00:48:38.200 Large Cheese Platter.

00:48:39.160 As my new title at work, CEO, Chief Excitement Officer, permits, I realized that if I shared

00:48:45.180 the wealth of wisdom inside these 95 pages with my staff, perhaps it would excite them

00:48:49.700 as well. I thought maybe it would improve their lives and expose them to the reality

00:48:53.740 of what is and what can become of each and every one of us in the workforce. Imagine

00:48:59.240 being talked to like this by someone with a job this fake absolutely go fuck yourself dude go 1.00

00:49:06.060 fuck yourself they say on a tuesday morning i asked my staff to report to work at 8 45 a.m 1.00

00:49:12.280 we open at 10 30 i'm gonna lose it all employees were present and anxious to find out why they were 1.00

00:49:22.560 there early i'll bet they were yeah i know what the fuck are we doing i felt like a teacher ready 0.91

00:49:27.060 to tell a story to her students. 0.98

00:49:29.100 I read the entire book to them.

00:49:30.720 Many employees shared that when I was reading the book,

00:49:33.040 they could relate that it was actually themselves

00:49:35.200 they were hearing,

00:49:36.220 while others believed it would help them in their paths.

00:49:39.560 Everyone loved it, but in different ways,

00:49:40.980 in slightly different ways.

00:49:41.880 Now when I have a new project to introduce,

00:49:43.940 all I have to say is today is new cheese day.

00:49:48.700 I think I'm having a panic attack.

00:49:53.220 Instead of eyebrows or smirks,

00:49:55.480 I now get great big smiles.

00:49:57.060 because they see it as an opportunity for growth and development new cheese new cheese 1.00

00:50:02.840 this is like so crystallized the book for me that it's just empowerment of the fucking dumbest and 1.00

00:50:09.800 worst boss you've ever had for them to feel like they're like now we're all friends here 0.99

00:50:15.560 aren't we better now that we've read this this has made me so upset 1.00

00:50:18.960 coming in a fucking hour and a half early this person is such a piece of shit scumbag i can't 1.00

00:50:26.400 even believe it new cheese new carrot i'm dangling in front of your stupid fucking faces dude i know 1.00

00:50:33.360 the only thing that could make this worse is if we're a landlord doing it to their tenants 1.00

00:50:37.400 also i love that they fucking got this and put it on whomovemycheese.com this is not like a random 0.55

00:50:44.160 internet comment right they get a submission they choose to put it on their website with like a 1.00

00:50:48.780 headline and shit so they're like yeah we're proud of this god these people are filth scum 1.00

00:50:55.320 of the air. Dude, the worst. This is doing something to my body. Just thinking about 1.00

00:51:00.980 these bosses. Thinking about a boss gathering you and reading a book to you two hours before

00:51:06.880 work starts. Reading propaganda to you at 8.45 in the morning. If I'm ever a boss, I'm going to do

00:51:13.060 this, but with Cormac McCarthy. I'm going to be like, sit down. Sit down. I'm about to ruin your

00:51:17.640 day. So, okay. Are you ready to get to finally the denouement of the parable, Peter? Are you

00:51:23.720 ready to finish this off? Let's do it. Let's do it. So Ha is still wandering the maze looking for

00:51:28.360 new cheese. He's finding little nibbles, but he hasn't found anything substantial. Okay. Here is

00:51:34.140 the next section. Ha decided to go back and see if Hem was ready to join him. He offered Hem bits

00:51:40.540 of new cheese, but was turned down. Hem appreciated his friend's gesture, but said, I don't think I

00:51:45.280 would like new cheese. It's not what I'm used to. I want my own cheese back and I'm not going to

00:51:49.480 change until I get what I want. Bad attitude. Todd just shook his head in disappointment and

00:51:53.920 reluctantly went back out on his own. As he returned to the farthest point he had reached

00:51:58.540 in the maze, he missed his friend, but realized he liked what he was discovering. Even before he

00:52:02.740 found what he hoped would be a great supply of new cheese, if ever, he knew that what made him

00:52:07.940 happy wasn't just having cheese. He was happy when he wasn't being run by his fear. He liked what he

00:52:13.320 was doing now. Again, just dog shit as a parable. It's cool that you don't have a job. It's actually 1.00

00:52:19.280 awesome i know i've hit on this before but this metaphor where you are the rat begging for cheese 0.65

00:52:26.900 is unbelievable

00:52:28.240 he's he actually he wrote a sequel called out of the maze which i also read where it's much more

00:52:36.500 explicit that like when you change your beliefs you change what happens to you like it's much

00:52:41.200 more leaning into like the secret it's like if you believe that you'll find new cheese you will

00:52:45.660 find new cheese, but he's kind of hinting at it here. They're turning like your department being

00:52:50.380 downsized into like a personal challenge, like something that you need to overcome emotionally.

00:52:57.600 You're welcome for laying you off. You need to be willing to go out on a limb.

00:53:01.800 Burger, cheese, limber to cheese. That's not even a, you're on the alphabetical list.

00:53:06.800 No, I just remember that one from the list I looked at earlier. Thank you very much.

00:53:10.640 I'm not looking at it right now. You're thinking of anything that rhymes with burrata right now.

00:53:14.540 The main takeaway I have from looking at the list is there are a lot of cheeses that don't really rhyme with anything.

00:53:21.220 I've been waiting for one of these little people to get cold so I could say maybe he should put on his cotilla.

00:53:27.300 Oh, that doesn't even—

00:53:28.540 And these are all good and I'm tired of you saying that they don't make sense.

00:53:37.700 I'm getting pretty fed up with your attitude, Michael.

00:53:40.820 I can't.

00:53:41.660 the thing is i looked up the list when you went to the bathroom and i've been sitting here

00:53:47.100 waiting to say that you've made so many puns that you've entered the feda verse

00:53:50.980 but that doesn't even make that doesn't make sense how are you saying that mine 0.99

00:53:53.840 you're just you're putting together shit like that 0.95

00:53:57.080 okay so now okay we're almost done peter i know we're both trying to get ourselves out of this 0.99

00:54:04.860 book as fast as fucking possible he then finds cheese station n which has an even bigger pile 0.86

00:54:13.040 of cheese sure he gets there and the mice are already there haw quickly said his hellos and 0.98

00:54:19.380 soon took bites of every one of his favorite cheeses he pulled off his shoes tied the laces

00:54:23.880 together and hung them around his neck in case he needed them again sniff and scurry laughed they

00:54:29.200 nodded their heads in admiration. Then Ha jumped into the new cheese. When he had eaten his fill,

00:54:35.400 he lifted his piece of fresh cheese and made a toast. Hooray for change.

00:54:39.640 Nice.

00:54:40.000 Also keep in mind when we're reading this, every time he says change, he means layoffs.

00:54:44.120 Right.

00:54:44.480 So then I'm going to make you read the very last, the last couple paragraphs,

00:54:50.000 the emotional crescendo of the book, Peter.

00:54:52.320 He knew he had learned something useful about moving on from his mice friends, Sniff and Scurry.

00:54:57.000 They kept life simple.

00:54:58.360 They didn't overanalyze or overcomplicate things.

00:55:01.180 When the situation changed and the cheese had been moved, they changed and moved with the cheese.

00:55:04.980 He would remember that.

00:55:06.440 Haw had also used his wonderful brain to do what little people do better than mice.

00:55:11.060 He envisioned himself in realistic detail finding something better, much better.

00:55:15.900 There's no evidence in this book that his brain has helped him in any way.

00:55:18.700 Yeah, I don't even understand.

00:55:19.480 He says he's used his brain to do what he can do better than mice, but what? 1.00

00:55:22.700 He was late to the fucking cheese. 0.99

00:55:24.280 There's also nothing he can do. 1.00

00:55:25.500 You're in a maze.

00:55:26.460 All you can do is find the cheese.

00:55:28.840 He reflected on the mistakes he had made in the past and used them to plan for his future.

00:55:33.540 He knew that you could learn to deal with change.

00:55:36.480 You could be more aware of the need to keep things simple, be flexible, and move quickly.

00:55:40.780 You did not need to overcomplicate matters or confuse yourself with fearful beliefs.

00:55:45.420 You could notice when the little changes began so that you would be better prepared for the big change that might be coming.

00:55:50.920 He knew he needed to adapt faster, for if you do not adapt in time, you might as well not adapt at all.

00:55:56.700 He had to admit that the biggest inhibitor to change lies within yourself and that nothing gets better until you change.

00:56:03.100 You change. You have to change.

00:56:04.460 He realized that there is always new cheese out there, whether you recognize it at the time or not.

00:56:09.480 But is that true in this scenario?

00:56:11.320 Do we know that there is new cheese?

00:56:13.100 No.

00:56:13.500 Just they're in a maze.

00:56:14.860 Yeah.

00:56:15.160 this is an argument for the unexamined life this is a book for hobgoblins of little minds 1.00

00:56:23.520 you want to be stupid that's like yeah you want to you want to succeed as an employee you need 1.00

00:56:28.900 to be a dumb little bitch go get your go run after your cheese bitch that's that's the lesson 1.00

00:56:34.300 oops we moved the cheese run run motherfucker also as usual the only insights in these books 1.00

00:56:40.180 are accidental they're telling themselves that there will always be new cheese but the cheese 0.99

00:56:45.300 is being put there by the same people who built the maze presumably right you live in hell and the

00:56:51.140 person who has created this hell for you is also giving you little rewards to make you forget that

00:56:57.220 you live in hell that's also a lot of jobs they made him and haw human beings i realize now so 1.00

00:57:03.500 So that it wasn't so on the nose that you are a fucking rat. 1.00

00:57:09.600 We then go back to our framing device. 1.00

00:57:12.000 Oh, we're back at the Olive Garden.

00:57:13.360 We're back at Olive Garden.

00:57:14.460 Hell yeah.

00:57:14.920 They all trade stories about how they've struggled to adapt to change.

00:57:17.940 Nathan, his family runs a chain of small businesses and they're being put out of business by like a big box store.

00:57:25.540 And he has this whole thing where he's like, I guess we didn't adapt to change fast enough.

00:57:30.020 It's our fault. 1.00

00:57:30.840 Cuts to a refugee camp. 1.00

00:57:32.760 You did not adapt quickly enough. 1.00

00:57:34.880 You have to hunt for the cheese.

00:57:37.400 No, this is actually not that much better, Peter.

00:57:39.860 So here's another little snippet.

00:57:42.220 Angela asked, do you think that Ham ever changed and found new cheese?

00:57:46.100 New cheese.

00:57:47.080 Elaine said, I think he did.

00:57:48.760 What are you talking about? 1.00

00:57:49.780 This is a fake story that your dumbest friend just told you. 1.00

00:57:53.940 I don't, Corey said. 1.00

00:57:55.720 Some people never change and they pay a price for it.

00:57:58.820 I see people like Ham in my medical practice.

00:58:00.860 They feel entitled to their cheese.

00:58:03.560 They feel like victims when it's taken away and blame others.

00:58:07.360 I'm sorry, is this person talking about patients?

00:58:12.260 Patients seeking medical care?

00:58:13.840 Imagine someone reading this to you at 8.45 in the morning at a pizza hut.

00:58:18.340 He is.

00:58:19.220 They get sicker than people who let go and move on.

00:58:22.660 You gotta love the amount of contempt in these books.

00:58:25.440 It always comes through.

00:58:26.980 The cheese is a kidney that works.

00:58:29.080 And then we get to the real crescendo of this book, Peter, is people are like, well, Michael, what is your experience with the parable?

00:58:37.480 You told us the parable.

00:58:39.100 So we're going to do a little script here.

00:58:40.620 I'm going to be Carlos.

00:58:41.780 Okay.

00:58:42.320 So they're following up.

00:58:43.540 They're like, that was a good – it was cool that you told that parable for an hour and a half at this reunion, Michael.

00:58:49.180 But I have follow-up questions.

00:58:51.120 I'm asking you about your experience.

00:58:53.160 Our sniffs could sniff out changes in the marketplace.

00:58:55.660 So they helped us update our corporate vision.

00:58:58.000 They were encouraged to identify how the changes could result in new products and services our customers would want. 0.73

00:59:04.700 The Sniffs loved it and told us they enjoyed working in a place that recognized change and adapted in time.

00:59:10.980 It's such evocative writing.

00:59:12.040 He's like, they gave us ideas for new products and services.

00:59:15.260 Wow.

00:59:16.020 It's vivid.

00:59:16.720 It's really, I get a mental picture.

00:59:18.500 Our Scurries like to get things done.

00:59:20.680 So they were encouraged to take actions based on the new corporate vision.

00:59:23.940 They were then rewarded for actions that brought us new cheese.

00:59:29.080 They liked working in a company that valued action and results.

00:59:33.560 What about the hems and haws? 0.61

00:59:34.880 Unfortunately, the hems were the anchors that slowed us down.

00:59:38.320 They were either too comfortable or too afraid to change.

00:59:41.980 Some of our hems changed only when they saw the sensible vision we painted

00:59:45.980 that showed them how changing would work to their advantage.

00:59:49.260 What did you do with the hems who didn't change?

00:59:51.240 We had to let them go, Michael said sadly.

00:59:54.720 Good read.

00:59:55.360 Good read, Peter.

00:59:56.380 Excellent work.

00:59:57.000 We wanted to keep all our employees, but we knew if our business didn't change quickly

01:00:01.300 enough, we would all be in trouble. 1.00

01:00:03.860 I like how they make it seem like the hems being let go is like the result of their shitty 0.99

01:00:10.900 personality. 0.99

01:00:11.980 I know.

01:00:12.740 When the actual reason that this book exists is to give people like a fraudulent coping

01:00:17.600 mechanism for layoffs as opposed to like layoffs will happen and when they do we're gonna read you

01:00:24.680 the dumbest book on earth i also love how explicit he's being that like this is a book for layoffs 0.69

01:00:31.300 like this is a book for people right most of you who are doing layoffs but you're essentially 0.99

01:00:35.580 expected to project this down onto people you are laying off right this is one of the worst

01:00:40.680 parables i've ever heard i told you man the most demonic thing we've ever read on this show

01:00:45.060 I stand by this.

01:00:46.240 I just I want to hear him side more.

01:00:48.340 I want I want them to cut to him writing the cheese is a lie on every wall, building a

01:00:55.240 structure with mirrors to shine lights in the eyes of the scientists just to fight back

01:01:01.000 against God. 0.57

01:01:01.980 Let me out.

01:01:02.820 So that's the story.

01:01:04.140 I want to do a little epilogue of I mean, this this whole trend in the 80s and 90s of all

01:01:11.380 these mass layoffs is kind of bleak enough, but there's an epilogue that's even bleaker.

01:01:17.780 So when I was doing all this reading about the wave of downsizings in the 80s and 90s,

01:01:22.960 the most remarkable thing is that the downsizing doesn't work. So there's tons of studies on the

01:01:30.920 effect of downsizing on stock prices, and it doesn't actually boost stock prices. There's

01:01:36.480 an infamous AT&T layoff in 1996, where the day after their stock price goes up by around three

01:01:42.900 bucks and a week after their stock price is down by seven bucks. So I found a fascinating article

01:01:48.760 from 2015 called, Does Employee Downsizing Really Work? The Empirical Evidence. It says,

01:01:55.600 downsizing often does not yield anticipated benefits. And there is limited consensus among

01:02:00.420 researchers on whether employee downsizing creates value. In other words, while the use of

01:02:05.460 downsizing has been pervasive in the business world, there is still much that we do not know

01:02:09.940 about when and how much downsizing could create value. There's a lot of subtlety here. The simplest

01:02:15.600 way to put it is that layoffs can be inefficient in that it's often difficult for businesses to

01:02:22.320 target their layoffs properly. They create new inefficiencies, right? Everyone's seen this.

01:02:29.100 There are layoffs and suddenly a job that someone was doing well has to be done by someone else

01:02:34.040 who's not as familiar with it, et cetera, right?

01:02:36.500 The other side of it is that once there is more growth,

01:02:39.700 they will inevitably need to hire more.

01:02:41.900 And then hiring is also inefficient, right?

01:02:44.140 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:02:44.580 So you can often make the argument

01:02:47.820 that a company that conducted a set of layoffs

01:02:50.140 and then a few years later did a bunch of hiring

01:02:53.120 would have been better off staying the course.

01:02:55.800 This is exactly what we're getting into.

01:02:57.120 So for this, I read a really fascinating book

01:02:59.180 called Downsizing in America,

01:03:00.620 which was thunderously boring,

01:03:03.040 but just like a list of all of the statistics about like everything we know about downsizing

01:03:08.540 basically. And what's so interesting about all these mass layoffs in the 1990s is that most of

01:03:13.920 these companies quietly hired more positions than they cut. So a company will announce like,

01:03:19.360 oh, we're doing 10,000, we're cutting 10,000 jobs. And then you look two years later and

01:03:23.240 they've hired 12,000 people. There's a lot of reasons why these don't really work as far as

01:03:28.520 stock price. I mean, a lot of the layoffs were being done very quickly. So there's surveys of

01:03:33.560 HR managers where they say they have less than two months to decide who gets cut, right? And if

01:03:38.580 you're cutting like 30% of your workforce and you have two months to decide, like you're going to

01:03:42.380 cut a lot of good people and keep a lot of bad people. So like they were not being done in a

01:03:46.220 particularly smart way. Also, another interesting impact of layoffs is that it wildly reduces

01:03:52.160 morale for people who don't get laid off. And oftentimes what happens is the good people who

01:03:56.800 can get other jobs at other firms, oftentimes leave in the year after that. So you usually,

01:04:01.940 after these mass layoffs, you usually see huge increases in turnover rates for the next year.

01:04:07.680 So you end up having to do a shitload of rehiring, even of the people who stayed,

01:04:11.860 even above and beyond the people that you cut immediately. And also it's usually pretty bad

01:04:16.860 publicity. It depends on sort of the context in which this is being done. But even as a way of

01:04:22.080 boosting your share price in the short term, a lot of layoffs make it look like you're a wounded

01:04:26.580 animal and people don't want to invest in your company. Yeah. Although now I feel like companies

01:04:31.580 have learned this and so they all do it together now. It's not like Google's doing layoffs. It's

01:04:38.000 like tech is conducting layoffs in mass. And this is what the book found that it's like,

01:04:43.520 if you look at all of the, the impacts of downsizing, like they, it gets very granular

01:04:48.100 in this book. It's super interesting is that basically the only real effect of downsizing

01:04:53.380 is it keeps wages lower.

01:04:55.700 So if you have an entire sector,

01:04:57.060 which happened in numerous sectors in the 1990s,

01:04:59.560 everybody gets fired.

01:05:00.460 All of a sudden, the market is flooded with applicants.

01:05:02.860 Jackpot.

01:05:03.300 And so they can keep wages either where they are

01:05:05.280 or they can actually lower wages

01:05:06.500 and get people back in

01:05:07.340 because there's so many people desperate for jobs.

01:05:09.080 Desperate for jobs or hungry for cheese, would you say?

01:05:12.640 I love that we're getting to a point

01:05:14.720 where it seems like the only purpose

01:05:17.660 that layoffs serve is to increase human suffering.

01:05:23.100 That's what you're telling me.

01:05:24.520 Well, also the main thing is this has come out more recently in the sort of sociological

01:05:28.440 literature because the econ literature is like, huh, everyone is doing this thing that

01:05:32.140 makes no sense.

01:05:33.220 Weird.

01:05:33.720 But then they like don't really think about it or like analyze it.

01:05:36.180 Well, we are all rational animals.

01:05:37.580 So I'm sure that there is a reason for it somewhere.

01:05:39.760 Exactly.

01:05:40.100 This is what's so interesting to me is like they're always defended on the grounds of

01:05:43.600 like, well, sorry, you lost your job, but this is just economic efficiency.

01:05:46.700 But it turns out these aren't efficient.

01:05:48.440 Right.

01:05:48.700 It appears that a lot of this was just groupthink.

01:05:53.740 So in the same way that the groupthink in the 60s and 70s was like, when you have money,

01:05:57.960 you should invest it in like diversifying your portfolio and becoming one of these bizarre

01:06:01.480 companies that does like 50 million things.

01:06:03.520 There was this groupthink in the 90s that was like, you have to downsize, even if it

01:06:07.440 doesn't make any sense.

01:06:08.660 Yeah.

01:06:08.880 It was just something managers were told that they should do.

01:06:11.820 And it was something that boards expected you to do and investors expected.

01:06:14.720 But it wasn't actually a rational thing to do in many cases. 0.93

01:06:18.700 it was a fad. A lot of corporate leadership is performative. Yeah. You can do woke performative

01:06:26.720 stuff like DEI, or you can do the cool libertarian performative stuff, which is layoffs. Yeah.

01:06:33.660 Show people that you mean business by ruining a thousand families. Exactly. I think, I mean,

01:06:40.900 I hate this term, but this is a form of like a virtue signaling. I feel like groupthink on the

01:06:46.500 left or this sort of echo chambers, whatever, we always talk about that as a problem only among

01:06:52.640 like the most marginalized populations or like populations that don't have a lot of power.

01:06:56.560 Like groupthink among college students is a real problem now.

01:06:59.740 I feel like it's almost obvious now that like probably the worst epidemic of groupthink on

01:07:05.500 earth is whatever's happening among Silicon Valley billionaires right now.

01:07:09.880 Yeah. So I want to end with a quote from a really interesting article called,

01:07:15.280 What Was the New Economy? by Thomas Frank, which is one of the first things I read for this.

01:07:19.400 And so here is Thomas Frank talking about who moved my cheese. I feel like this is a good

01:07:26.800 summary. It's a parable of worker powerlessness told in a style simple enough and a typeface

01:07:31.640 big enough for third graders. Everywhere I've gone in the country, I've met people whose bosses

01:07:35.960 have forced them to read this book or watch one of the videos or decorate their walls with who

01:07:40.480 moved my cheese accessories one guy told me his entire division was required to meet in a room

01:07:45.400 and read the obscene thing aloud without exception every person i've ever talked to about who moved

01:07:51.000 my cheese has hated it preach that's incredible and that's this is like i this colors the stories 0.98

01:07:57.900 of so many managers making their employees read this bullshit i know you you can feel yourself 0.99

01:08:03.940 getting dumber you can feel yourself getting dumber it's like youtube shorts like i gathered 0.99

01:08:07.780 my employees two hours early to read them this and they seemed engaged it's like it's literally 0.98

01:08:13.440 their job to look engaged right yeah they're just trying to be nice they're just trying to impress

01:08:18.720 you they're just trying not to uh alienate their boss the only reason that they are listening to

01:08:24.200 this is because they know that there's a decent chance that next year their job is going to be 1.00

01:08:28.180 gorgon sola oh god god damn it god damn it i got the list too motherfucker how are you getting the 1.00

01:08:35.320 last one how are you getting the last one right now fuck fuck you didn't get there does any does 1.00

01:08:42.380 anything wrong with appenzeller michael you are a fontina of good fuck of puns yes all right folks 1.00

01:08:54.380 we'll see you we'll see you in a couple weeks 0.95

01:09:05.320 Thank you.

If Books Could Kill - October 10, 2024

Who Moved My Cheese？

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