If Books Could Kill

The airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds

If Books Could Kill

Who Moved My Cheese?

October 10, 2024

What should workers do when they get laid off? In 1998 a bleak, asinine bestseller told them to find another whey.

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Sources:

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Peter: You know the Kendrick Lamar song, Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe?

Michael: Yeah. Yeah.

Peter: All week I have had bitch who moved my cheese in my head. [Michael laughs] And I understand that doesn't make any sense, but I can't help it. It's been there.

Michael: Well, make it a zinger then, Peter.

Peter: I don't know how to fucking do that.

Michael: Bitch, who moved my cheese.

Peter: You can't turn this into a zinger.

Michael: Bitch who moved my cheese.

Peter: Bitch who moved my cheese.

Michael: I think you’re just going to make a cheese joke. I wanted to read this book, but I couldn't camembert or something.

Peter: Good lord. [Michael laughs] My God. [laughs]

Michael: There are so many things to choose from.

Peter: I'm going to be honest. If I had thought about it, I would have written down every cheese I could think of in advance, that way I could just bust out puns as they come to me.

Michael: There's still time, Peter. There's still time.

Peter: [laughs] Yeah. You're going to be going through some data set that you looked at, and I'm going to be just googling list of cheeses.

[laughter]

Michael: You did it with Pinocchio characters. No reason you can't do it with cheese.

Peter: That was off the dome, folks.

Michael: I know you had the thing open in front of you.

Peter: You don't know anything.

Michael: There's no way you knew that many characters from Pinocchio.

Peter: I think. All right, I got it. I got it. Let's just do it.

Michael: All right. All right, Peter.

Peter: Michael.

Michael: What do you know about “Who Moved My Cheese?”

Peter: Most of our books are books that you pick up in an airport on a whim. And this is the first one that your boss forces you to read.

[If Books Could Kill theme]

Michael: Since this is a book that deals with cheese and mazes and mice, I was going to have you guess what the subtitle of the book is.

Peter: Let's get that cheddar.

Michael: [laughs] No, it's so much worse than that. It's Who Moved My Cheese?: An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life by Spencer Johnson, MD.

Peter: So, the emphasis is on the maze.

Michael: It's supposed to be hyphenated, A-Mazing but then they seem to forget that in a lot of the reprintings and news articles about it. So, it just is amazing. And you're looking [Peter laughs] at it, you're like, “Is that a coincidence? Do they know?” The stupidity of it is kind of the perfect encapsulation of this.

Peter: Right.

Michael: This book is a little bit unique on our show in that it is the shortest book we've ever read and the most demonic book we've ever read. [Peter laughs] This is a book of staggering malignancy, and yet is packed into 94 pages of large type with numerous illustrations.

Peter: Pretty upset that you took this book from me. 94 pages large type with drawings? Hell, yes. [Michael laughs] That's a Peter book.

Michael: We were just talking about how in your episodes, we tend to read less of the books than in my episodes. For this episode, we're going to read 30% of the book. [Peter laughs] I have some excerpts and that's somewhere between a third and a half of the full text.

Peter: Well, look, I'm excited. Ever since we started the show, I've said, “Michael, we're reading too many real books. Why not a novella link business allegory? [Michael laughs] Why can't we do one of those?”

Michael: I had never heard of this book before we started this podcast and got a million requests for this, but this was a massive bestseller, so it comes out in 1998. It sells, I heard different numbers, but up to 20 million copies. I found a random article from New York Times three years after it was published that it had been number one on the bestseller list for so long that stores like Barnes & Noble were just taking it off the shelf. They have that, little display where it's top 20 bestsellers in America. They're like, “It's been three years. You don't get to be on this shelf anymore.” People think we're not refreshing it. [Peter laughs] It was like a huge phenomenon.

Peter: Is this real sales or is this how nursing homes buy conservative books?

Michael: This is very central to this book's success and the ideology of the book, which we will get into. This is a list from a book called The Disposable American. Southwest Airlines purchased 27,000 copies for all of its employees and sent a copy to every person's home.

Peter: Yes.

Michael: Mercedes Benz ordered more than 7000 copies and uses the book in its training program, The Bank of Hawaii distributed 4000 copies to its staff, Amway bought and distributed 15,000 copies for its sales force, the NCAA sent out a mailing to 450 universities reminding them to use the book for faculty and incoming students.

Peter: Our society is toast, folks. [Michael laughs] Absolutely cooked.

Michael: I like how at least three quarters of these are just either scam companies or just like the worst company you know? [laughs]

Peter: Right? Wells Fargo is like, “Hey, this is interesting.”

Michael: There was also a wave of parodies after this book became a massive smash. There were numerous books called Who Cut the Cheese?-

Peter: What the fuck?

Michael: -which I'm also here in the Kendrick tune now.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: This is the most cursed sentence from a Wikipedia entry I've ever seen. Andy Borowitz published a parody Who Moved My Soap?: The CEO's Guide to Surviving Prison in 2003.

Peter: I like that the immediate reaction was that the least funny people on earth scrambled to write Who Cut the Cheese? What are those books about? [laughs]

Michael: Okay, so as usual, we are going to start with the first couple paragraphs of the book. We are going to take breaks from the book throughout because it is so asinine that it's very difficult to stick with it for longer than 15 minutes at a time.

Peter: Folks, please stay with us while we do 10 minutes of complete silence to refresh our brains in the middle of this episode. [Michael laughs]

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

Peter: One sunny Sunday in Chicago, several former classmates who were good friends in school gathered for lunch, having attended their high school reunion the night before. They wanted to hear more about what was happening in each other’s lives. After a good deal of kidding and a good meal, they settled into an interesting conversation.

Michael: I like it when writers tell me that something is about to be interesting [Peter laughs] rather than just writing an interesting conversation.

Peter: Angela, who had been one of the most popular people in the class, said, “Life sure turned out differently than I thought it would when we were in school. A lot has changed.” “It certainly has,” Nathan echoed. They knew he had gone into his family’s business, which had operated pretty much the same and had been a part of the local community for as long as they could remember. So, they were surprised when he seemed concerned. But have you noticed how we don’t want to change when things change?

Michael: When things change.

Peter: Carlos said, “I guess we resist changing because we are afraid of change.” [Michael laughs] Good point, Carlos. “Carlos, you were captain of the football team,” Jessica said. “I never thought I’d hear you say anything about being afraid.” They all laughed as they realized that although they had gone off in different directions from working at home to managing companies, they were experiencing similar feelings.

Michael: Nice dig at people who work from home there.

Peter: From managing a business to being a complete fucking loser.

Michael: Being a fucking loser. [laughs]

Peter: Everyone was trying to cope with the unexpected changes that were happening to them in recent years and most admitted that they did not know a good way to handle them.

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

Peter: Carlos, you were the captain of the football team. I never thought you'd be scared of anything because I am a little baby.

Michael: And then we get a little bit more, we get a little bit more.

Peter: Then Michael said, I used to be afraid of change when a [laughs] sorry, this is the worst writing I've ever seen.

Michael: We thought we liked to change, but we don't like change but then something changed everything.

Peter: I used to be afraid of change. When a big change came along in our business, we didn't know what to do. That is, he continued, until I heard a funny little story that changed everything.

Michael: Changed everything?

Peter: “How so?” Nathan asked. Well, the story changed the way I looked at change. At first, I was annoyed with the obvious simplicity of the story because it sounded like something we might have been told in school. Then I realized I was really annoyed with myself for not seeing the obvious and doing what works when things change.

Michael: I thought the story was bad, but it turns out I was bad.

Peter: Later, I passed the story on to some people in our company, and they passed it on to others. And soon our business did much better because most of us adapted to change better. However, there were a few people who said they got nothing out of it. They either knew the lessons and were already living them, or more commonly, they thought they already knew everything and didn't want to learn.

Michael: Some people don't want to learn.

Peter: When one of our senior executives, who was having difficulty adapting, said the story was a waste of time, other people kidded him, saying they knew which character he was in the story. Meaning the one who learned nothing new and did not change. Yeah, there's nothing worse than a parable that has within it someone who rejects the parable.

Michael: Yeah, I know.

Peter: Everyone's like, “You're just like Bruce. You're just like Bruce from the story.”

Michael: [laughs] So, we then get to the actual parable. Are you ready, Peter? I'm going to start to walk you through it. We're going to do storytelling now. So, this is a story about four creatures running around an endless maze. Two of the creatures are little mice named Sniff and Scurry. Michael says, or the story says, “The mice, Sniff and Scurry, possessing simple brains and good instincts, searched for hard, little nibbling cheese they liked, as mice often do. There's also two little people. So basically people, but they're the size of mice. The two little people, Hem and Haw, used their complex brains, filled with many beliefs and emotions, to search for a very different Cheese which they believed would make them feel happy and successful.”

Peter: That's how you know a parable is good when you're like, “All right, I've got mice they're looking for. They're looking for cheese in a maze.” And then you're like, “Actually, this isn't going to work unless there are tiny mice-sized people.”

Michael: It's also very important that the names of the characters describe what they do. So, the mice Sniff and Scurry, their method of searching around the maze is Sniff sniffs around for cheese.

Peter: But then what does Scurry do Michael?

[laughter]

Michael: And then Scurry runs in the direction of the smell. It then says, “Like the mice, the two little people, Hem and Haw also used their ability to think and learn from their past experiences. However, they relied on their complex brains to develop more sophisticated methods of finding cheese.”

Peter: Okay.

Michael: Sometimes they did well, but at other times, their powerful human beliefs and emotions took over and clouded the way they looked at things. It made life in the maze more complicated and challenging. All right, we are given no examples of this.

Peter: [laughs] Okay. Life in the maze.

Michael: So, it implies that the mice are doing this in this unsophisticated way, even though searching systematically seems sophisticated to me. And then the little people are doing it in a more complicated way because their human brains lead them to have beliefs that guide their actions.

Peter: Right. Okay.

Michael: One day, they stumble upon Cheese Station C, which is the biggest mountain of cheese any of them have ever seen, and they all dash toward it, and they're all wearing running shoes because they're running around the maze, and Sniff and Scurry put their running shoes, tie the laces together and put them around their necks so they always have their running shoes nearby.

Peter: That makes sense.

Michael: But Hem and Haw put their shoes away, and instead of going out every morning with their running shoes, they settle down, and they start to take for granted that there is this giant mountain of cheese. He says, “It wasn't long before Hem and Haw regarded the cheese they found at Cheese Station C as their cheese.” To make themselves feel more at home, Hem and Haw decorated the walls with sayings and even drew pictures of cheese around them, which made them smile. One read, “Having cheese makes you happy.” “We deserve this cheese.” Hem said, “we certainly had to work long and hard enough to find it.” He picked up a nice fresh piece and ate it."

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Afterward, Hem fell asleep as he often did. Every night, the little people would waddle home full of cheese, and every morning, they would confidently return for more.

Peter: Nice.

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

Peter: Was the cheese depleting?

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

Peter: Sorry. I got really focused on the fact that I want a sign in my home that says, “We deserve this cheese.”

Michael: [laughs] So, basically, they then come out one day and all of the cheese is missing, 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. 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. The mice did not overanalyze things.

Peter: Yep.

Michael: To the mice, the problem and the answer were both simple. The situation at Cheese Station C had changed. So, Sniff and Scurry decided to change. They both looked out onto the maze. 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.

Peter: So, there are two types of people. You have these overthinkers festering in their cheese, and then you have the mice, and they have one thought. The thought is like, “Cheese, cheese. Get it?” Whereas the spoiled mini humans, which from what I can gather, could have also been mice, just like a different type of mouse. Right?

Michael: [laughs] The thing with the mice makes no sense. I don't know why he added this weird distinction.

Peter: 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.”

Michael: Yeah. As a parable, this is both doing too much and too little at the same time because if it was just four mice with different personalities, then it would be legible as like, “Oh, okay, they're running around a maze because that's what mice do.” But as soon as you introduce humans, then it's like, “Wait, why are humans in the maze?” Like, you need all this extra lore to understand that 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 Cheese like a different kind of cheese.” And in this section, he's like, “Oh, humans mean cheese to be different things.” So, some people, for them, cheese is a nice new house or cheese can be a sports car.

And you're like, “No, in the parable, the cheese is cheese” He's adding all these weird extra layers of mice are simple and humans have complex brains. But that's just mice and humans. That's not like a parable.

Peter: I'd like to see the mouse actually run a business though. I bet those little guys could do it.

Michael: So, here is the next section. Here's what the humans do. Here's what the humans do.

Peter: Okay? Hell yeah.

Michael: I'm only sending this to you because I want you to do little voices for the different people.

Peter: Before I do the voices, what ethnicity does he say?

Michael: [laughs] You need to not make this a running joke on the show. Fuck.

[laughter]

Peter: I have ever since you complained about it, my favorite new bit is pretending that Michael Hobbs is a racist in his free time.

Michael: [laughs] You have to stop.

Peter: “What? No cheese.” Ham yelled. He continued yelling, “No cheese. No cheese,” as though if he shouted loud enough, someone would put it back. “Who moved my cheese?” he hollered. What's the name of the book?

Michael: Send them the book.

Peter: Finally, he put his hands on his hips. His face turned red, and he screamed at the top of his voice. “It's not fair.” Haw just shook his head in disbelief. He too had counted on finding cheese at Cheese Station C. He stood there for a long time, frozen with shock. He was just not ready for this. He didn't want to deal with what was facing him, so he just tuned everything out. The little people's behavior was not very attractive or productive, but it was understandable.

Michael: Instead of dealing with change, they're just throwing a tantrum over there.

Peter: 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.” [Michael laughs] I really liked it when there was that pile of cheese.

Michael: He also set us up earlier by saying, one day they go to the substation and there's no cheese. But then he quietly tells us in dialogue that actually the cheese had been dwindling. And later he tells us that the cheese had been getting moldy. So, this now positions these two humans as rock dumb.

Peter: It turns out they “blue” it, blue like the cheese.

Michael: Oh God, you can’t. Oh Jesus.

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

Michael: Horrible.

Peter: I guess they'll be going back to their cottage empty handed.

Michael: Oh, my God. [laughs]

Peter: Cottage cheese.

Michael: Fuck. Go back to calling me racist. This is too much.

Peter: [laughs] You got it. [Michael laughs] I guess my puns aren't gouda enough for you.

Michael: Oh, my God. So, we then get a long-- [crosstalk]

Peter: Hooks.

[laughter]

Michael: We then get a long sequence where basically the two humans just sit there moaning like, “We used to have cheese, but now we don't have cheese.” He then starts this running bit where one of the characters writes something on the wall. So, he says, “Hem and Haw went home that night hungry and discouraged. But before they left, Haw wrote on the wall, the more important your cheese is to you, the more you want to hold onto it.”

Peter: He's just losing his mind.

Michael: And, this is basically the author being like, in case you didn't get the point of the previous two pages, here's like a nice little summary of it.

Peter: I love the idea of giant scientists looming above all of this, being like, “Jesus Christ, we created dumb little humans.”

Michael: We are now going to do a little reading of the script. I think you should be the reluctant little person and I will be the adventurous little person.

Peter: Hem analyzed the situation over and over, and eventually his complicated brain with its huge belief system took hold. “Why did they do this to me?” He demanded. “What's really going on here?”

Michael: Finally, Haw opened his eyes, looked around, and said, “By the way, where are Sniff and Scurry? Do you think they know something we don't?”

Peter: What would they know? They're just mice. They just respond to what happens. We're little people. We're smarter than mice. We should be able to figure this out.

Michael: I know we're smarter, but we don't seem to be acting smarter at the moment. Things are changing around here, Hem. Maybe we need to change and do things differently.

Peter: Why should we change? We're little people. We're special. This sort of thing should not happen to us. or if it does, we should at least get some benefits.

Michael: Why should we get benefits?

Peter: Because we're entitled.

Michael: Entitled to what?

Peter: We're entitled to our cheese.

Michael: Why?

Peter: Because we didn't cause this problem. Somebody else did this and we should get something out of it.

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

Peter: Oh, no. I'm going to get to the bottom of this.

Michael: Very subtle stuff happening, very subtle stuff.

Peter: I'm with him because someone is doing this to them. They're in a maze, [Michael laughs] a scientist has created tiny humans, put them in a maze with mice, giving them all shoes.

Michael: And also, all they want is benefits all the time. They're not entitled to benefits.

Peter: We have made welfare queen little people. [Michael laughs] All they want is the free cheese and they're not willing to work for it.

Michael: So, this I mean, for fuck sake, there's a thing in this book where it's allegedly a parable, but it's like. It's so thuddingly obvious throughout, like what he means.

Peter: I love the idea. That guy Michael is still just explaining this at a dinner. Carlos is listening to this at an Olive Garden right now. [Michael laughs] Michael, I have to get back to my wife. You've now taken up 45 minutes of our dinner with this bizarre parable about change management.

Michael: So, okay, we're going to take a little break. We're at a suspenseful part of the story.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: The little people are asking for more cheese despite not deserving it.

Peter: Yep.

Michael: So, we're going to take a little break and talk about Spencer Johnson, MD, the man who wrote this story.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: One of the, I think, most appealing things about Spencer Johnson is that he gave very few interviews over his life. There's no photo of him in the book jacket of any of his books. And I got almost all of his books because I was like, “There's no biographical information about this fucking guy. He's written a million books. Surely one of them he describes a little, like, “I grew up here, I did this, then I switched.” There's essentially no information. He was not somebody who was seeking fame.

Peter: That's a dream. You just write some dumbass bullshit and then get incredibly rich and bounce.

Michael: So, the only thing we have to go on is about the author text, which is almost identical in all of his books and has been almost identical for 30 years. So, I'm going to send you the first paragraph. Keep in mind, most authors write their own about the author. So, we're just going to have that little fact in mind.

Peter: Okay, Spencer-- [laughs] This guy rocks. Okay. Spencer Johnson, MD, is one of the most respected and beloved authors in the world. He has inspired and entertained millions with his insightful stories that speak directly to the heart and soul. He has often been referred to as the best there is at taking complex subjects and presenting simple solutions that work.

Michael: People often describe him that way. Here is the rest of it. This is the intro to Who Moved My Cheese? for Teens, which I also read for this.

Peter: I'm sorry, but is this existing parable not simple enough for teenagers?

Michael: No. The thing is, the framing device is different. It's like a bunch of high school kids in the cafeteria, but the parable itself is the same.

Peter: Sorry. He published a whole different book where the only difference-

Michael: [laughs] It's like four babies.

Peter: -is that the introductory chapter, where a bunch of people are in a cafeteria instead of a restaurant, that's a whole other book.

Michael: And then one of them is, “This girl dealing to, the change that she's managing is her dad left.”

Peter: Spencer Johnson, you are a king.

Michael: He is using the cheese. [laughs]

Peter: I forgive you for whatever crime Michael is going to tell me that you committed later. Two decades after the story was created, this book, Who Moved My Cheese? was published. It soon became an accelerating word of mouth, number one international bestseller with 1 million hardcover copies in print within the first 16 months. People have reported that what they discovered in the story has improved their careers, businesses, health and marriages. Critics on the other hand, do not understand how so many people could find it so valuable. They say the story is so simple, a child could understand it as it is just obvious common sense. They get nothing out of the story.

Michael: [laughs] I love putting like a sick burn on your haters in your author bio.

Peter: That rules.

Michael: On a book jacket of your book. [laughs] It's like Michael Hobbs grew up in Seattle, Washington. People who don't like his podcast are fucking losers. [laughs]

Peter: My critics will die without cheese.

Michael: Again, very little information about this guy. He's born in South Dakota. He grows up in LA. He trains as a surgeon originally. That's where the MD comes from. I was all ready to like, “It's a fake MD or something, but like, no, it appears to be real.” He studied in Ireland. He died in 2017. From his New York Times obituary, as they're going through his biographical information, they say, “With medical clerkships at the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School, he seemed assured of a physician's career. But while working in the hospital, he grew frustrated at seeing the same patients return with the same ailments as if they were not trying to better their lives,” said Margaret McBride, his literary agent. He felt a lot of diseases were people lacking something in their soul, she said. He wanted to fix them from the inside.

Peter: Isn't fixing them from the inside what surgeons do?

Michael: So, this is Chekhov's toxic positivity. We're going to see how this informs the content and the impact of the book later. But for now, Spencer Johnson ends up leaving medicine and going to work as a PR person for a medical devices company. And nights and weekends he starts writing children's books and they're all like little parables. So, one of them is like the Wright Brothers, The Value of Patience. Louis Pasteur, The Value of Believing in Yourself. Charles Dickens, The Value of Imagination.

Peter: This is so perfect, dude. This guy who writes stories for literal babies just writes one and is like, this one's for adults. And every corporate executive on earth is like, “Whoa,” everyone in my business needs to read this.

Michael: Do you want to get to the real good shit, Who Moved My Cheese is not his first business bestseller. His first business bestseller was 15 years before, called The One Minute Manager.

Peter: Hell, yeah. Okay.

Michael: In the early 80s, he links up with this guy, Kenneth Blanchard, who's a consultant to a bunch of companies, motivational speaker type guy. But he's really bad at marketing his messages. So, at the time, there are sort of business bestsellers, what we now would think of as business airport books. Those do exist, but they're all really dry. They're more like textbooks and they're like 500 pages long. This category of business-oriented self-help garbage doesn't really exist in the early 1980s. And so, this Kenneth Blanchard guy is making a ton of money as a motivational speaker and consulting companies. But his previous book is called Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources.

Peter: This is great that there used to be an industry of actually informative business books.

Michael: Yeah. I know.

Peter: And they just got dumber and dumber and dumber until finally it's like “There were two mice in a maze and two little tiny people.”

Michael: [laughs] So, him and this Kenneth Blanchard guy get together. They write this book called The One Minute Manager. And as they're shopping it around to publishers, all the publishers are like, “This isn't a real book. It's like 65 pages. We can't charge full price for this.” And him and Kenneth are like, “No, no. no. You must charge full price for this” because business people don't have a lot of time, and if it's discounted, people are going to think it's not worth as much. So, you actually need to charge the full. It was $15 in 1983, like 40 bucks. You need to charge 40 bucks. And so, this turned out to be a genuine insight, business people want something easily digestible.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: These books disappear from the cultural consciousness really quickly because they're always churning through and getting replaced by new fads. But this book was a massive deal, The One Minute Manager, and it spawns a whole series of books.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: So, there's like, The One Minute Salesperson, One Minute for Yourself, The One Minute Teacher, and The One Minute Father.

Peter: I'm ready to be the one-minute father. [Michael laughs] That is all the time I have for my child.

Michael: So, basically, this is how Spencer Johnson becomes-- I mean, he's essentially a management guru for 10 to 15 years before Who Moved My Cheese? comes out. He publishes some other books during that time too, all of which did really well, but he basically cracked this code of less than 100 pages, charge full price, and tell companies these simple messages basically.

Peter: Dude, The One Minute Father, what a title. That's going to stick with me. [Michael laughs] Sorry. That's resonating. the hook being you barely have to spend any time at all parenting your child.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. It's like four-minute abs.

Peter: In the work context, it makes total sense because, yeah, of course, you don't want to engage with work anymore than you have to for most people but to think that it works just the same with parenting. That is beautiful.

Michael: Loving my kids any percent.

Peter: One-minute love making. my guide to marriage.

[laughter]

Michael: So back to the book. When we left off, our little people were in a huff.

Peter: They were hemming and hawing, you might say.

Michael: And they are still fighting amongst themselves and just saying, “Oh, no, we should just come back to Cheese Station C again and again, maybe there will be more cheese here.” So, here's the next script. You're going to be Hem again, you're going to be Hem.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: The more clearly Haw saw the image of himself finding and enjoying new cheese, the more he saw himself leaving Cheese Station C. Let's go.

Peter: No, I like it here. It's comfortable. It's what I know. Besides, it's dangerous out there.

Michael: No, it isn't. We've run through many parts of the maze before and we can do it again.

Peter: I'm getting too old for that. And I'm afraid I'm not interested in getting lost and making a fool of myself. If we just work harder, we’ll find that nothing has really changed that much. The cheese is probably nearby. Maybe they just hid it behind the wall.

Michael: The next day, Hem and Haw returned with tools. Hem held the chisel while Haw banged on the hammer until they made a hole in the wall of Cheese Station C. They peered inside, but found no cheese. They were disappointed, but believed they could solve the problem. So, they started earlier, stayed longer, and worked harder. But after a while, all they had was a large hole in the wall. Haw was beginning to realize the difference between activity and productivity.

Peter: Maybe we should just sit here and see what happens.

[laughter]

Peter: Sooner or later, they have to put the cheese back.

Michael: Haw wanted to believe that. So, each day he went home to rest and returned reluctantly with Hem to Cheese Station C. But cheese never reappeared. Finally, one day, Haw began laughing at himself. “Haw, haw, look at us. We keep doing the same things over and over again and wonder why things don’t get better.”

Peter: Okay. The listeners aren’t going to understand why this is weird, but he spells out the laughter.

Michael: I know. It's Haw.

Peter: Haw, haw, which is haw, haw, which is also the name of the little person. So, it just reads like he's saying his own name twice. “Haw, haw. Look at us.” This is awful writing. [Michael laughs] How did no editor jump in here?

Michael: Also, even for something that's really short, it's like the pacing it's like, “Okay, they're still there. We know what's going to happen.” [laughs] We don't need more scenes of them, just staying in the same place, and they're still not cheap. Like, “Okay, we get it.”

Peter: You said 94 pages. But now that I'm hearing the arc of the story, this is a three-page story.

Michael: Easily, easily.

Peter: It's 02:30 AM at Olive Garden right now, [Michael laughs] and Carlos is going to jump out of the window.

Michael: There's also this weird thing. This has nothing to do with anything, but I'm just completely baffled. It says, “Obviously, Haw decides to leave. We all know this is going to happen. So, Haw decides to leave. He's going to leave Hem, the fear of change guy. 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. And it says, “As Haw prepared to leave, he started to feel more alive. Knowing that he was finally able to laugh at himself, let go and move on. Haw laughed and announced, it's maze time.”

Peter: It's maze time. That's what I've always said.

Michael: Which, like, is that a pun or something?

Peter: [laughs] This is the climax of the story, right? When Haw lets loose his famous catchphrase. It's maze time.

Michael: It's maze time. [laughs] Okay. God, this book is so repetitive. I don't want to make you read the same fucking thing 300 times although there's no way not to do that.

Peter: And I guess now that Hem-

Michael: Oh, no.

Peter: -has been abandoned, he's prov-alone in his house. [Michael laughs] Still got it, folks. [laughs]

Michael: So, basically, Haw leaves, but he's afraid. There's this long sequence where he's wandering around and he's like, “I'm afraid there's dark corridors in the maze.”

Peter: There might be monsters in there. Watch out.

Michael: [laughs] Fuck. You literally have a list in front of you, don't you?

Peter: Oh, no. Yeah, that wasn't a joke. There really is a list.

Michael: [laughs] You're just workshopping these as I'm talking. You've completely disengaged. [laughs]

Peter: Well, to be fair, I've been waiting to say monster for a while. That was one of the ones that jumped out to me as a real possibility up top.

Michael: [laughs] So, we then have Haw wandering around the maze, and he can't find it. He's afraid of the cheese. 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. He was taking control rather than simply letting things happen to him.

Peter: You can't just let things brie.

Michael: [laughs] Wait that doesn't even work. That doesn't even work. No, [makes a buzzer sound] no.

Peter: All right. I was going to try to say brie-f if the opportunity arose.

Michael: But that's worse. That’s worse.

Peter: Oh, yeah. I think maybe the most famous thing that comes out of this book, and I think this is where it comes from. As he's leaving, he's very nervous to go wander around the maze. He writes, “What would you do if you weren't afraid?” And this becomes like, in all the sort of epilogue shit about the footprint of this book, what would you do if you weren't afraid? Is like one of the catchphrases that comes up all the time.

Peter: He writes it in his own blood on the wall.

Michael: [laughs] He also writes smell the cheese often so you know when it is getting old.

Peter: Okay, so he is losing his mind. He's walking through this maze for cheese. His mind is fading. Meanwhile, Ham's back at home, just dying with dignity.

Michael: Well, also, starvation doesn't seem to be a risk because it appears that it's been like weeks now that they haven't had cheese and nothing bad seems to be happening. I feel like he hasn't done enough world building. Okay, here is the final section of this section. This is where it gets very suspenseful.

Peter: Haw wondered if Hem had moved on, or if he was still paralyzed by his own fears. Then Haw remembered the times when he had felt his best in the maze. It was when he was moving along. He wrote on the wall, knowing it was as much a reminder to himself as it was a marking for his friend Hem. Hopefully to follow, movement in a new direction helps you find new cheese.

Michael: The words of the prophets.

Peter: To his surprise, Haw started to enjoy himself more and more. “Why do I feel so good?” He wondered. I don’t have any cheese and I don’t know where I am going. Before long, he knew why he felt good. He stopped to write again on the wall. When you stop being afraid, you feel good.

Michael: He feels good.

Peter: The more clearly, he saw the image of himself enjoying new cheese, the more real and believable it became. He could sense that he was going to find it. He wrote, imagining yourself enjoying your new cheese leads you to it.

Michael: Imagine your cheese.

Peter: I love a parable where they just explain the feelings that the character has. [Michael laughs] It's like, “Yeah, this guy's searching in a maze, lost, starving, but he feels good because he's trying.” And you're like, “Yeah.”

Michael: His life is an immortal nightmare, and yet he is happy. So, this little sequence here was where the demonic-ness of the book really became clear to me. Because the whole thing obviously is propaganda for people being okay with change, right. When someone above your head changes something in a way that harms you, you should just adjust to the change. You shouldn't sit there complaining. You shouldn't be asking for benefits. You shouldn't be trying to figure out what went wrong. You should just move on really quickly.

Peter: You should wander the halls of your office writing on the wall, what would you do if you weren't afraid?

Michael: 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. 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.”

Peter: You felt bad, but what if you just felt good?

Michael: Yeah, exactly.

Peter: What if you just felt good.

Michael: Actually, once you accept the fact that you can't do anything and that change just happens and don't look backwards, you're going to achieve some kind of self-actualization, right? It's not enough just to promise you, everything will be okay in the end. They're now promising you this is actually going to make you happier.

Peter: Right, right.

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

Peter: I think it's been interesting.

[laughter]

Michael: Losing my fucking mind. The thing is, this book is indicative of an ideological shift that I'm sure you've heard a lot about. You know, the rise of the sort of shareholder value model that came to take over corporate America in the 80s and 90s.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Can you summarize this?

Peter: Yeah. The idea that the primary goal of business is to increase value for shareholders.

Michael: Yes.

Peter: The most direct consequence of which is that employees are not viewed as stakeholders in a company in the same way. So, you can do many things, like layoffs, for example, that benefit shareholders to the expense of employees.

Michael: Exactly. And this book comes out in 1998, the release of this book in the year 1998 marks the end of that shift. That shift was complete. I've read various accounts of the rise of this ideology, but I don't know that I ever really understood what caused it. And it's also often contrasted with before the shareholder value model, corporations really cared about their workers and they cared about their communities, and now it's all profits. That always felt a little bit one dimensional to me. Because companies have always cared about profit, so why did they suddenly start caring about them in this radically different and more harmful way? I never really understood what originated this. So, before the stakeholder value model, the previous model was known as retain and reinvest.

So, after World War II, America was the last country left standing. We had all these companies that were doing really well, and it was really easy to be a profitable company in the 50s and 60s. And there was a groupthink at the time that when you're a successful company, what you should do is retain and reinvest your profits. So, what you want to do is you want to buy other companies, acquire firms that are doing something slightly different from you, and you also want to maintain a large workforce. The example that really stuck out to me was Gulf and Western. You watch old movies and it'd be like, Paramount Pictures, a Gulf and Western company.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Gulf and Western was a Texas oil company. And then in the 1960s, because this conglomeration model is so popular, it buys up an auto parts firm, it buys a sugar plantation, it buys a Polynesian Tourism Company, it buys Paramount Pictures, it buys the clothing company that runs the Miss Universe Pageant, it buys a gold mine, and it buys Madison Square Garden.

Peter: Huh-huh.

Michael: And this was what companies were expected to do at the time. And then what starts to happen is in the 1970s, the problems with this model start to emerge. Lot of these companies are just way too fucking big, right? If you're the head of an oil company, all of a sudden, you're determining whether Paramount should make comedies or action movies next year. You're just not qualified to do that. So, you have a huge amount of inefficiency.

And a lot of these companies were genuinely very bloated. And America hadn't really faced competition in the post-World War II world until Europe and Japan start producing their own really good companies. And the obvious example is the automakers, that American companies were completely bloated. They were essentially running a tripartite monopoly. And then all of a sudden, Honda and Toyota come in and it's like, “Oh, shit, they're making good cars for cheap that don't use a ton of gas, and we were just absolutely getting walloped.” So, it became more and more clear throughout the 70s that companies needed to change. This model had gone too far. Another really big change was essentially all the economic growth of the 1960s started to slow down in the 1970s.

So, let me send you a paragraph this is from a fascinating article called Shareholder Value and Workforce Downsizing, 1981-2006 by Jin Wook Jung.

Peter: The prosperity of the post war years came to an end in the 1970s, culminating in stagflation and bear markets. As a result, many large US companies experienced a chronic decline in their market share and profitability. This stimulated emerging power groups and financial markets to search for a remedy. Leading the charge were institutional investors such as large public pension and mutual funds. In a social movement like fashion, they began to challenge management of leading US firms and promoted the new financial orthodoxy that the only legitimate goal of corporations is to maximize returns to their shareholders.

Michael: So, this is bleak as more people started getting pension funds, these pension funds started becoming more activists and saying, “Hey, wait a minute, why aren't you producing enough profits for us?”

Peter: And this has always been the argument for the shareholder value model. That this is democratic in a sense, because the shareholder gains get passed through to pension funds, etc., that are held by middle class citizens who then benefit.

Michael: Exactly. That's the logic anyway or at least the way that people are defending it at the time. So, as these institutional investors become more powerful, there's also a series of deregulations throughout the 1970s which allow institutional investors to hold more corporations. There used to be limits on how much corporate equity they could hold. Those are lifted. There is reforms that Wall Street pushes for in the early 1980s that deregulate savings and loans. There is all kind of junk bonds flowing around. There's just like a series like little TikTok small movements that nobody really notices as being all that big of a deal throughout the 70s and 80s. But it becomes much easier for these institutional investors to essentially become activists in parallel with this and somewhat linked to it. There's also the thing where a lot of CEOs start to be paid in stock options.

And so, all of the incentives are essentially for making these companies more, “Lean,” which typically involves laying off a shitload of people. So, throughout the 1990s, we essentially get an unprecedented wave of layoffs. There's a really interesting feature in the New York Times in 1996 that says 43 million jobs were lost between 1979 and 1996. There's a survey in the 90s that one third of all households had a family member lose a job. Companies in America, of course, they're always in layoffs, like companies go to business that's part of having an economy. But what was different about the wave of layoffs in the 1990s was that they were first of all hitting middle class people. This wasn't just like manufacturing jobs being outsourced overseas.

And so, that meant that it got a lot more media attention, right, because middle class people were losing their jobs. And then companies started doing layoffs when times were good. It wasn't like, we need to shrink because it's the only way that we'll survive. It's like we boosted profits and now we're going to trim the facts of.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: And this is something we've totally become used to. Like the tech companies just did this, video game companies are doing this now, but like this was a new thing in the 1990s and was like a huge political issue.

Peter: I almost feel like now something like layoffs have become completely depoliticized.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting.

Peter: This is just something that happens.

Michael: There's also this weird rise of the first green shoots of gig work economy that 42 million people lost their jobs basically in the 1980s and 1990s, but 70 million people got jobs during that time. So, the economy overall was growing and the economy was replacing the jobs that were lost kind of on the aggregate level. But for a lot of individuals who were pushed out of the workforce, a lot of them never got back in. There's now statistics about people who were laid off during this period. Around one third of them got jobs that paid less money. 35% of people who were laid off were unemployed for more than two years. And there is this really fucked up study of people who were laid off during the 1982 recession that 20 years later they were still earning 20% less-- [crosstalk]

Peter: Wow.

Michael: -than people who weren’t laid off during that recession. Where this book comes into it is that this was a shift in the quality of American jobs. You have this vast increase in precarity. So, essentially you get this feeling that like anyone can lose their job at any time, it doesn't matter whether you fucked up at work, it doesn't even matter whether your company is doing bad. You can just get laid off. And there's a decent one in three chance you're either not going to get a job again, especially if you're older. It was really hard on older workers, and even if you do get a job, there's a one in three chance it's not going to pay as much. And so essentially, both managers and workers needed an ideology to help them deal with this.

Managers needed an explanation that could let them not feel like a huge piece of shit for laying people off. [laughs] This is where you get this euphemism of change management. And there were change management consultants that companies would bring in that oftentimes would do layoffs, but then would also do these bizarre motivational speeches as part of the layoffs of, like, you're going to better in the new job. Don't think of this as the end of one opportunity. Think of this as the beginning of something new, the new you, right? They had to sell this back to workers as, “Oh, you're going to better in the end.” If you're moving forward, you're actually going to be happier.

Peter: This all interestingly situates the book, because it's not just corporate bullshit, but a specific type of corporate bullshit that's meant to ease the transition from one type of business world to another. It's not just like, “You should learn to be a better employee.” It's like, “Yeah, we're going to be firing some of you sometimes.” And if you want to be a success, you need to learn to navigate that maze.” And here's a little book where you're a science experiment. That's the allegory, is you are being tortured by scientists.

Michael: It's also perfect in that 1998 was the year where there was the highest economic growth for the entire decade and there were more layoffs than any other year in the decade.

Peter: I would have loved to see the dotcom crash update to this, [Michael laughs] like the recession update to Who Moved My Cheese? [laughs]

Michael: 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 the motivation industry.

Peter: Reality sucks, a computer scientist with a Master’s degree who can find only short-term benefit free contract jobs told me. But you can't change reality, at least not in an easy and obvious way. 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. For now, you can only change your perception of reality from negative and bitter to positive and accepting. This was the corporate world's great gift to its laid off employees and the overworked survivors positive thinking.

Michael: She also has this, which this is only tangentially relevant, but I can't help myself. So, this is about the motivational seminars that companies were doing in the 90s.

Peter: For example, in the midst of downsizing in the mid-90s Nine X subjected its employees to mandatory exercises, such as one in which you had to show how many ways you could jump around a room. Oh, no. [Michael laughs] So, the employees jumped on one leg, on both legs, with their hands in the air, with one hand covering an eye. They jumped, and they jumped and they jumped some more. Then the leaders would say things like, “Look how creative you are. How many different ways you can manage to jump around the room.” [Michael laughs] I would be jumping out a window folks,-

Michael: Dude [laughs].

Peter: -check this one out.

Michael: [laughs] These are like adults, dude. It's so belittling the shit.

Peter: Absolutely not. I'm coming back with a gun.

Michael: So, I have read whomovedmycheese.com, which is like, archive.org, it's not around anymore. But it has testimonials from people who used Who Moved My Cheese? in the workplace. And what's so fascinating about it is they're almost all for managers. It's not like workers were like, “Hey, I use this. And it was actually really helpful for me.” It was manager saying, “I gave this to my employees.”

Peter: I loved making those little sluts jump around the room.

Michael: I know, I know. [ laughs]

Peter: They looked pathetic.

Michael: Dude, but it also recasts that list of companies at the beginning, right, where it's like, Southwest Airlines sent it to 27,000 employees to their homes. This is layoff propaganda. It's like, if you get laid off for no fucking reason, don't just sit there and ask, “who did this to me?” Don't ask for benefits. Move forward. Like there was no pull from workers for this, it was always pushed from management. So, I'm going to make you read one of the testimonials from this website.

Peter: This book was very hallouminating.

[laughter]

Michael: That would be so much better than what this actually is, Peter.

Peter: [laughs] All right, there's a title that says, Boss, Employees Share Large Cheese Platter.

Michael: Large cheese platter.

Peter: As my new title at work, CEO, chief excitement officer, permits I realized that if I shared the wealth of wisdom inside these 95 pages with my staff, perhaps it would excite them as well. I thought maybe it would improve their lives and expose them to the reality of what is and what can become of each and every one of us in the workforce. Imagine being talked to like this by someone with a job this fake. Absolutely, go fuck yourself, dude, go fuck yourself. They say, “On a Tuesday morning, I asked my staff to report to work at 08:45 AM. We open at 10:30.”

[laughter]

I'm going to lose it. All employees were present and anxious to find out why they were there early.

Michael: I'll bet they were.

Peter: Yeah, I know.

Michael: What the fuck are we doing here?

Peter: I felt like a teacher ready to tell a story to her students. I read the entire book to them. Many employees shared that when I was reading the book, they could relate that it was actually themselves they were hearing, while others believed it would help them in their paths.

Michael: Everyone loved it, but in different ways, in slightly different ways.

Peter: Now when I have a new project to introduce, all I have to say is, “Today is new cheese day.” I think I'm having a panic attack. [Michael laughs] Instead of eyebrows or smirks, I now get great big smiles because they see it as an opportunity for growth and development. New cheese.

Michael: New cheese. This is so crystallized the book for me that it's just empowerment of the fucking dumbest and worst boss you've ever had. [laughs] For them to feel like now we're all friends here, aren't we? Better, now that we've read this?

Peter: This has made me so upset.

Michael: [laughs] Coming in a fucking hour and a half early.

Peter: This person is such a piece of shit scumbag. I can't even believe.

Michael: [laughs] Unbelievable.

Peter: New cheese, new carrot, I'm dangling in front of your stupid fucking faces.

Michael: Dude. I know.

Peter: The only thing that could make this worse is if we were a landlord doing it to their tenants.

Michael: Also, I love that they fucking got this and put it on whomovedmycheese.com This is not like a random Internet comment. They get a submission. They choose to put it on their website with a headline and shit. So, they're like, “Yeah, we're proud of this.”

Peter: God. These people are filth, scum of the earth.

Michael: [laughs] Dude. The worst.

Peter: This is doing something to my body. Just thinking about these bosses. [Michael laughs] Thinking about a boss, like, gathering you and reading a book to you two hours before work starts.

Michael: Reading propaganda to you at 08:45 in the morning.

Peter: If I'm ever a boss, I'm going to do this. But with Cormac McCarthy, [Michael laughs] I'm going to be like, “Sit down. Sit down. I'm about to ruin your day.”

Michael: So. Okay, are you ready to get to finally, the denouement of the parable? Peter, are you ready to finish this off?

Peter: Let's do it. Let's do it.

Michael: So, Haw is still wandering the maze looking for new cheese. He's finding little nibbles, but he hasn't found anything substantial. Okay, here is the next section.

Peter: Haw decided to go back and see if Hem was ready to join him. He offered Hem bits of new cheese, but was turned down. Hem appreciated his friend's gesture, but said, “I don't think I would like new cheese. It's not what I'm used to. I want my own cheese back, and I'm not going to change until I get what I want.”

Michael: Bad attitude.

Peter: Haw just shook his head in disappointment and reluctantly went back out on his own. As he returned to the farthest point he had reached in the maze, he missed his friend, but realized he liked what he was discovering. Even before he found what he hoped would be a great supply of new cheese. If ever he knew that what made him happy wasn't just having cheese. He was happy when he wasn't being run by his fear. He liked what he was doing now.

Michael: Again, just dog shit as a parable.

Peter: It's cool that you don't have a job. It's actually awesome. [Michael laughs] I know I've hit on this before, but this metaphor where you are the rat begging for cheese is unbelievable.

Michael: [laughs] He wrote a sequel called Out of The Maze, which I also read, where it's much more explicit that when you change your beliefs, you change what happens to you. It's much more leaning into, the secret that it's like, if you believe that you'll find new cheese, you will find new cheese. But he's kind of hinting at it here.

Peter: They’re turning, like, your department being downsized into a personal challenge like, something that you need to overcome emotionally.

Michael: You're welcome for laying you off.

Peter: You need to be willing to go out on a Limb-urger cheese, Limburger cheese.

Michael: That's not even-- you're on the alphabetical list. [laughs]

Peter: No, I just remember that one from the list I looked at earlier. Thank you very much. I'm not looking at it right now.

Michael: You think of anything that rhymes with burrata right now.

Peter: The main takeaway I have from looking at the list is there are a lot of cheeses that don't really rhyme with anything. [Michael laughs] I've been waiting for one of these little people to get cold, so I could say, maybe he should put on his cotija for about-- [crosstalk]

Michael: Oh, that doesn't--

Peter: And these are all good, [Michael laughs] and I'm tired of you saying that they don't make sense.

[laughter]

I'm getting pretty feta up with your attitude, Michael.

Michael: I can’t. [laughs] The thing is, I looked up the list when you went to the bathroom, and I've been sitting here waiting to say that you've made so many puns that you've entered the Fetavers, but that doesn't even make sense.

Peter: That doesn't make sense. How are you saying that mine don't make sense? And you're just putting together shit like that?

[laughter]

Michael: Okay, so now. Okay. We're almost done, Peter. I know, we're both trying to get ourselves out of this book as fast as fucking possible. He then finds Cheese Station N, which has an even bigger pile of cheese. He gets there and the mice are already there. Haw quickly said his hellos and soon took bites of every one of his favorite cheeses. He pulled off his shoes, tied the laces together, and hung them around his neck in case he needed them again. Sniff and Scurry laughed. They nodded their heads in admiration. Then Haw jumped into the new cheese. When he had eaten his fill, he lifted his piece of fresh cheese and made a toast. Hooray for change.

Peter: Nice.

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

Peter: Right?

Michael: So, then I'm going to make you read the last couple paragraphs, the emotional crescendo, the book, Peter.

Peter: He knew he had learned something useful about moving on from his mice friends, Sniff and Scurry. They kept life simple. They didn't overanalyze or overcomplicate things. When the situation changed and the cheese had been moved, they changed and moved with the cheese. He would remember that. Haw had also used his wonderful brain to do what little people do better than mice. He envisioned himself in realistic detail, finding something better, much better.

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

Peter: Yeah, I don't even understand what.

Michael: He says, he has used his brain to do what he can do better than mice, but what? He was late to the fucking cheese.

Peter: There's also nothing he can do. You're in a maze. All you can do is find the cheese. [Michael laughs] He reflected on the mistakes he had made in the past and used them to plan for his future. He knew that you could learn to deal with change. You could be more aware of the need to keep things simple, be flexible, and move quickly. You did not need to overcomplicate matters or confuse yourself with fearful beliefs. You could notice when the little changes began so that you would better prepared for the big change that might be coming. He knew he needed to adapt faster. For if you do not adapt in time, you might as well not adapt at all. He had to admit that the biggest inhibitor to change lies within yourself. And that nothing gets better until you change.

Michael: You change, you have to change.

Peter: He realized that there is always new cheese out there, whether you recognize it at the time or not. But is that true in this scenario? Do we know that there's new cheese?

Michael: No.

Peter: They're in a maze.

Michael: Yeah. [laughs] This is an argument for the unexamined life. [Peter laughs] This is a book for hobgoblins of little minds.

Peter: You want to be stupid. You want to succeed as an employee, you need to be a dumb little bitch. Go run after your cheese, bitch. That's the lesson. “Oops, we moved the cheese, run, run, motherfucker.”

Michael: Also, as usual, the only insights in these books are accidental. They're telling themselves that there will always be new cheese, but the cheese is being put there by the same people who built the maze, presumably.

Peter: Right.

Michael: You live in hell. And the person who has created this hell for you is also giving you little rewards to make you forget that you live in hell. That's also a lot of jobs.

Peter: They made Hem and Haw human beings, I realize now so that it wasn't so on the nose [Michael laughs] that you are a fucking rat.

Michael: We then go back to our framing device.

Peter: Oh, we're back at the Olive Garden.

Michael: We're back at Olive Garden.

Peter: Hell, yeah.

Michael: They all trade stories about how they've struggled to adapt to change. Nathan, his family runs a chain of small businesses, and they're being put out of business by a big box store. And he has this whole thing where he's like, I guess we didn't adapt to change fast enough. It's our fault.

Peter: Cuts to a refugee camp, [Michael laughs] you do not adapt quickly enough. You have to hunt for the cheese.

Michael: No, this is actually not that much better, Peter. So, here's another little snippet.

Peter: Angela asked, “Do you think that Hem ever changed and found new cheese?”

Michael: New cheese?

Peter: Elaine said, “I think he did.” What are you talking about? This is a fake story that your dumbest friend just told you. [Michael laughs] “I don't.” Corey said, “Some people never change and they pay a price for it. I see people like him in my medical practice. They feel entitled to their cheese. They feel like victims when it's taken away and blame others.” I'm sorry, is this person talking about patients?

[laughter]

Patients seeking medical care.

Michael: Imagine someone reading this to you at 08:45 in the morning at a Pizza Hut.

Peter: Yes. They get sicker than people who let go and move on.

Michael: You got to love the amount of contempt in these books. It always comes through.

Peter: The cheese is a kidney that works.

Michael: 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?” You told us the parable, so we're going to do a little script here. I'm going to be Carlos.

Peter: Okay, so they're following up. 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, but I have follow up questions.”

Michael: I'm asking you about your experience.

Peter: “Our Sniffs could sniff out changes in the marketplace, so they helped us update our corporate vision. They were encouraged to identify how the changes could result in new products and services our customers would want. The Sniffs loved it and told us they enjoyed working in a place that recognized change and adapted in time”.

Michael: It's such evocative writing. He's like, “They gave us ideas for new products and services.” [Peter laughs] Wow. It's vivid. It's really. I get a mental picture.

Peter: Our Scurry’s like to get things done, so they were encouraged to take actions based on the new corporate vision. They were then rewarded for actions that brought us new cheese. They liked working in a company that valued action and results.

Michael: What about the Hems and Haws?

Peter: Unfortunately, the Hems were the anchors that slowed us down. They were either too comfortable or too afraid to change. Some of our Hems changed only when they saw the sensible vision we painted. That showed them how changing would work to their advantage.

Michael: What did you do with the Hems who didn't change?

Peter: “We had to let them go,” Michael said sadly. [laughs]

Michael: Good read, good read, Peter. Excellent work.

Peter: We wanted to keep all our employees, but we knew if our business didn't change quickly enough, we would all be in trouble. I like how they make it seem like the Hems being let go is the result of their shitty personality, [Michael laughs] when the actual reason that this book exists is to give people a fraudulent coping mechanism for layoffs, as opposed to layoffs will happen and when they do, we're going to read you the dumbest book on earth.

Michael: I also love how explicit he's being that this is a book for layoffs. This is a book for people, mostly people who are doing layoffs. But you're essentially expected to project this down onto people you are laying off.

Peter: This is one of the worst parables I've ever heard in my life.

Michael: I told you, man, the most demonic thing we've ever read on this show. I stand by this.

Peter: I want to hear Hems side more. I want them to cut to Hem writing the cheese is a lie on every wall. [Michael laughs] Building a structure with mirrors to shine lights in the eyes of the scientists just to fight back against God. Let me out.

Michael: I want to do a little epilogue, I mean, this whole trend in the 80s and 90s of all these mass layoffs is kind of bleak enough, but there's an epilogue that's even bleaker. So, when I was doing all this reading about the wave of downsizings in the 80s and 90s, the most remarkable thing is that the downsizing doesn't work. So, there's tons of studies on the effect of downsizing on stock prices, and it doesn't actually boost stock prices. There's an infamous AT&T layoff in 1996 where the day after their stock price goes up by around $3 and a week after their stock price is down by $7. So, I found a fascinating article from 2015 called Does Employee Downsizing Really Work? The Empirical Evidence. It says, “Downsizing often does not yield anticipated benefits. And there is limited consensus among researchers on whether employee downsizing creates value. In other words, while the use of downsizing has been pervasive in the business world, there is still much that we do not know about when and how much downsizing could create value.”

Peter: There's a lot of subtlety here. The simplest way to put it is that layoffs can be inefficient in that it's often difficult for businesses to target their layoffs properly. They create new inefficiencies. Everyone's seeing this. There are layoffs and suddenly a job that someone was doing well has to be done by someone else who's not as familiar with it, etc. The other side of it is that once there is more growth, they will inevitably need to hire more and then hiring is also inefficient.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter: So, you can often make the argument that a company that conducted a set of layoffs and then a few years later did a bunch of hiring would have been better off staying the course.

Michael: This is exactly what we're getting into. So, for this, I read a really fascinating book called Downsizing in America, which was thunderously boring, but just like a list of all of the statistics about everything we know about downsizing, basically. And what's so interesting about all these mass layoffs in the 1990s is that most of these companies quietly hired more positions than they cut. So, company will announce, like, “Oh, we're cutting 10,000 jobs.” And then you look two years later and they've hired 12,000 people. There's a lot of reasons why these don't really work as far as stock price. I mean, a lot of the layoffs were being done very quickly. So, there's surveys of HR managers where they say they have less than two months to decide who gets cut.

And if you're cutting like 30% of your workforce and you have two months to decide, you're going to cut a lot of good people and keep a lot of bad people, so they were not being done in a particularly smart way. Also, another interesting impact of layoffs is that it wildly reduces morale for people who don't get laid off. And oftentimes what happens is the good people who can get other jobs at other firms oftentimes leave in the year after that. So, after these mass layoffs, you usually see huge increases in turnover rates for the next year. So, you end up having to do a shitload of rehiring even of the people who stayed right, even above and beyond the people that you cut immediately. And also, it's usually pretty bad publicity.

It depends on the context in which this is being done. But even as a way of boosting your share price in the short term, a lot of layoffs make it look like you're a wounded animal and people don't want to invest in your company.

Peter: Yeah. Although now I feel like companies have learned this and so they all do it together now.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter: It's not Google's doing layoffs. It's like tech is conducting layoffs in mass.

Michael: And this is what the book found that it's like, if you look at all of the impact of downsizing, it gets very granular in this book. It's super interesting is that basically the only real effect of downsizing is it keeps wages lower.

Peter: Sick. Yeah.

Michael: So, if you have an entire sector, which happened in numerous sectors in the 1990s, everybody gets fired. All of a sudden, the market is flooded with applicants.

Peter: Jackpot.

Michael: And so, they can keep wages either where they are or they can actually lower wages and get people back in because there's so many people desperate for jobs.

Peter: Desperate for jobs or hungry for cheese, would you say? [Michael laughs] I love that we're getting to a point where it seems like the only purpose that layoffs serve is to increase human suffering. [Michael laughs] That's what you're telling me.

Michael: Well, also the main thing is this has come out more recently in the sociological literature because the Econ literature is like, “Huh, everyone is doing this thing that makes no sense.” Weird. But then they don't really think about it or analyze it.

Peter: Well, we are all rational animals, so I'm sure that there is a reason for it somewhere.

Michael: Exactly. This is what's so interesting to me is like, they're always defended on the grounds of like, “Well, sorry you lost your job, but this is just economic efficiency.” But it turns out these aren't efficient.

Peter: Right.

Michael: It appears that a lot of this was just groupthink. So, in the same way that the Groupthink in the 60s and 70s was like, “When you have money, you should invest it in diversifying your portfolio and becoming one of these bizarre companies that does 50 million things.” There was this Groupthink in the 90s that was like, “You have to downsize, even if it doesn't make any sense.”

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: It was just something managers were told that they should do, and it was something that boards expected you to do and investors expected. But it wasn't actually a rational thing to do in many cases, it was a fad.

Peter: A lot of corporate leadership is performative.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: You can do woke performative stuff like DEI or you can do the cool libertarian performative stuff, which is layoffs.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: Show people that you mean business by ruining a thousand families.

Michael: Exactly. I think, I mean, I hate this term, but this is a form of virtue signaling. I feel like Groupthink on the left or this echo chambers, whatever, we always talk about that as a problem only among the most marginalized populations or populations don't have a lot of power. Groupthink among college students is a real problem now [laughs].

Peter: I feel like it's almost obvious now that probably the worst epidemic of Groupthink on earth is whatever's happening among Silicon Valley billionaires right now.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I want to end with a quote from a really interesting article called What Was the New Economy? by Thomas Frank, which is one of the first things I read for this. And so here is Thomas Frank talking about Who Moved My Cheese? I feel like this is a good summary.

Peter: It's a parable of worker powerlessness told in a style simple enough and a typeface big enough for third graders. Everywhere I've gone in the country, I've met people whose bosses have forced them to read this book or watch one of the videos or decorate their walls with Who Moved My Cheese? Accessories. One guy told me his entire division was required to meet in a room and read the obscene thing aloud. Without exception, every person I've ever talked to about Who Moved My Cheese? has hated it.

Michael: Preach.

Peter: That's incredible. This colors the stories of so many managers making their employees read this bullshit.

Michael: I know. You can feel yourself getting dumber. You can feel yourself getting dumber. It's like YouTube shorts.

Peter: I gathered my employees 2 hours early to read them this, and they seemed engaged. It's literally their job to look engaged. Right?

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: They're just trying to be nice. They're just trying to impress you. They're just trying not to alienate their boss.

Michael: The only reason that they are listening to this is because they know that there's a decent chance that next year their job is going to be [unintelligible [01:08:28].

Peter: Oh, goddamn it. Goddamn it. Goddamn it.

Michael: I got the list too, motherfucker.

Peter: How are you getting the last one. [Michael laughs] How are you getting the last one right now? Fuck. Fuck.

Michael: You didn't get there? Does anything wrong with Appenzeller?

Peter: Michael, you are a fontina-- [crosstalk]

[laughter]

Peter: Of puns. Yes. All right, folks, we'll see you, we will see you in a couple weeks.

[laughter]

[music]

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