Legacy of a Jerk (Rebroadcast)

What happens to your reputation when you're no longer around to defend it?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:48Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:19Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:09Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Someone dies. Let's say it's your mother. And of all the unhappy things to deal with, you also have to write an obituary for the local paper. Here's one that appeared in a couple of small-town Pennsylvania newspapers last year. Carol "Fritzi" Miller-Roberson departed this world Friday, December 2, 2011, from her beloved second home in Ahijic, Mexico. Here, I'm going to let her daughter, Amy Roberson, read you the rest.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  She'll be remembered as an astute businesswoman, a rabbit historian, a fascinating hostess, and a boundless creative. She loved her family, history, antiques, horses, the arts, and good gossip. Her regular emails to family were often unintentionally hilarious, as her typing was spotty, and her typos, and her typos were legendary.

• 3:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, easy for you to say. Sorry. Okay.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Regardless, Carol wrote short stories and was working on a screenplay. She was a difficult mother and a horrendous mother-in-law. She will still be missed. Carol is survived by her children, Mark and Anne of Venetia, Pennsylvania, and Amy Jethke of Melbourne Beach, Florida.

• 4:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Amy, wait. I'm sorry.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is just one of the best, well, I don't know about best. It is one of the most unusual lines in any obituary. "She was a difficult mother and a horrendous mother-in-law." And then, lovingly, "she will still be missed." So first of all, who wrote this obituary? Was that you?

• 4:20Speaker 01

  I wrote it, yes.

• 4:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  And were you close with your mom or not particularly?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  No, not, no, not close at all. Probably the last 20 years, I'd seen her maybe three or four times.

• 4:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, I see. So I have to say, first of all, I don't mean to forget the obvious, my condolences on your mom's death.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Well, thank you, thank you.

• 4:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Second of all, there is the old injunction against speaking ill of the dead, and you did it. Did that change you in any way, kind of going against that societal injunction of speaking ill of the dead?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  I, you know, this is not the whole story. These few hundred words are not the whole story of my mother, but they're honest words.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  I, you know, you think how you want to be remembered, and really, that's my belief, is that when you are gone, you just live on in people's memories. So if, if you're lying in the obituary, or you're just glossing over everything, and it's just a, a list of names of survivors and dates and awards you won and places you worked, you may be, you know, allowing the person who's gone to maybe leave the memories a little bit quicker.

• 5:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let me ask you just one last question. Imagine then that you're going to write your own obituary, okay? And you're going to write it now, knowing that you're not going to die for a long, long, long time. What's the one line in that obituary that's equivalent to the one line you wrote about your mom? What's the difficult part of your legacy?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Wasn't nice to her mother?

• 6:10Speaker 02

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 6:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Carol Robertson was, according to her own daughter, a "difficult mother" and a horrendous mother-in-law. And that obituary lives on, online, forever. How many online obituaries do you now host? Many millions.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  About 75% of all Americans who die each day have an obituary on Legacy.com.

• 7:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Legacy.com founder Stoffer Bartle and Hayes Ferguson, the company's COO. Their website adds about 5,000 obituaries a day. So you can find millions and millions of obituaries, including the one that Amy Robertson wrote about her difficult mom, Carol. And anyone can leave behind a comment, as you would on a news site or a blog post. But here's what's interesting. Even for someone whose own daughter called her "a difficult mother" and "a horrendous mother-in-law", none of the comments on that obituary are negative. That's not a coincidence. It's by design. Legacy.com does not believe in speaking ill of the dead.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  You can write anything you'd like, but it will not get posted if it does not meet our guidelines. And our guidelines are pretty straightforward. We won't post inappropriate comments. And what that means is everything from copyrighted work to foul language to really nasty things about the deceased.

• 8:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's right. Legacy.com weeds out the negative comments. Now, software can help, can catch vulgarities and other keywords, but this task requires real, live, human screeners. Ferguson and Bartle told me that even though only a very small percentage of comments are mean-spirited, more than half of the company's 120 employees are screeners. So Legacy.com believes that a legacy truly is forever and that it shouldn't be sullied by inappropriate comments. Even if the deceased was, let's say...

• 8:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  A jerk. Does this make sense? What should the legacy of a jerk be? That is the question we are playing with today. Let's start by talking about legacy in general. Let's start on the baseball diamond. Roberto Clemente, born in Puerto Rico, wound up playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates and became one of the best and most dynamic players in Pittsburgh history. In fact, in baseball history.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  Matlack on the 0-1. Bobby hits a drive into the back into left center field. There she is, a double for Roberto.

• 9:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  In the final week of the 1972 season, Clemente got his 3,000th career base hit, just the 11th player to ever reach that number. Overall, it was a great season for a great Pirates team that came within one run of making it to the World Series. Bob Smizik was a sports writer in Pittsburgh at the time. He would never deny that Clemente was a great player, but, well, here's the but.

• 9:49Speaker 05

  Roberto was a guy who had a myriad of maladies and was called by some a hypochondriac. Now, this is in an era where, you know, you may be familiar with the term gamer. A gamer is a guy who wants to play every day. And back then, everyone was a gamer. Well, Clemente, in the term gamer that I knew, was not a gamer. He was a guy who even in his early years, sat out the second games of double headers. In other words, he was too tired to play the second game of double headers. Not always, but often, and believe me, later in his career, always.

• 10:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, OK, big deal. Maybe Clemente was a malinger. Maybe he didn't hold the door open for ladies. I don't know. The fact is, he ended the season with 3,000 hits, and the city of Pittsburgh liked this a lot. Pittsburgh loves its sports more than just about any other city I can think of. And the thing about 1972 is that the Pittsburgh Steelers, the football team, was also having a great season. And this was news. The Steelers had been pretty terrible for most of their 40 years, but this year, they turned it around. They even made the playoffs. And the irony was that the team's namesake, the steelmaking industry, was cratering. Tens of thousands of jobs were vanishing.

• 11:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  The city was falling into a deep, dark funk. But the football Steelers, well, they offered some much-needed cheer. On December 23rd, they hosted the Oakland Raiders in the first round of the playoffs. It was a close game, but the Steelers were about to win, when, with barely a minute left to play, the Raiders scored a touchdown, took the lead. The whole city groaned with despair. But then, with just 22 seconds left, on fourth down, a Steelers rookie named Franco Harris caught a deflected pass, and he galloped into the end zone to win the game. It was a miraculous play. It became known as the immaculate reception.

• 11:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  And to this day, it is widely considered the single greatest play in NFL history.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  I don't even know where it came from. Where did he come from?

• 12:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, the Steelers now prepared to host their next opponent, the Miami Dolphins, and whoever won that game would go on to the Super Bowl. It was New Year's Eve, 1972. Bob Smizik, the sports writer, he was in the stadium.

• 12:24Speaker 05

  It was a glorious day. I was in the stands, watching the game as a paying customer. The temperatures, I believe, were in the high 60s, maybe in the 70s. The Steelers lost a great game. A fake punt return undid them. And everyone went home pretty unhappy at 3, 5, 6 o'clock at night. And then, 6 hours later, 5 hours later, word began seeping out that there were things a lot worse than losing a football game. Word was coming out that Roberto Clemente's plane not only had gone down, but he was lost in the flight and indeed was dead.

• 13:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  There had been a serious earthquake in Nicaragua. Clemente decided to fly down from Puerto Rico with a plane load full of first aid supplies and food and clothing. But his plane, old and overloaded, lost power and crashed into the sea soon after takeoff. All 5 people on board died.

• 13:32Speaker 05

  Once, he died, and he died a hero's death. I mean, there was nothing, no one ever said anything negative about him. The malingering, that is ancient history. He was a magnanimous person, a great gentleman, a true leader. He was given all these qualities that he may or may not have had. I knew him a little bit, and he was a good guy. And he was a dignified, proud man, but he was not a saint. There are no saints walking this planet. They're very few and far between. But he has been elevated to sainthood in Pittsburgh, and I would certainly not try to dispute that. But he was just another, he was just a great, great baseball player who was a human being.

• 14:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Roberto Clemente was essentially canonized. In Pittsburgh, people turned out en masse to mourn him. Puerto Rico declared three days of mourning. The Baseball Hall of Fame inducted Clemente the following August, waiving the typical five-year waiting period for new inductees. His death was so dramatic, so noble, that his legacy as a hero was set. Whatever Smizik or anyone else may have not liked about Clemente would be forgotten forever. Other baseball players, meanwhile, have the opposite reputation. Who would you say is the biggest jerk who ever played baseball?

• 15:03Speaker 05

  Certainly, if you've ever read anything about Ty Cobb, he was an all-time jerk and a really bad guy.

• 15:11Speaker 06

  My name is Charlie Leerson. I'm a writer from New York, and now I'm working on a book about Ty Cobb, perhaps the most interesting baseball player of all time.

• 15:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  The most interesting baseball player of all time. So when I think of Ty Cobb, I have to admit, two things come to mind. Great, a great, great baseball player in just about every phase of the game, and massive jerk. Am I mostly right, somewhat wrong?

• 15:42Speaker 06

  Well, you know, I'm about halfway into my book and my project, and so I'm in the process of discovering things. But more and more, as I do my research, I'm finding a kind of a real, live human being who sort of doesn't resemble either the jerk or the saint that some of his supporters will put forth.

• 16:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Charlie, I have to say, this is a little bit surprising to those of us who have been raised to think that Ty Cobb was one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived, but also one of the most inhuman humans who ever lived. So I had asked my go-to guy on matters of baseball character, that's my 11-year-old son, and I'd asked him about Ty Cobb. He reads a ton of baseball books. So here's what he told me about Ty Cobb. He said that Cobb was in the KKK, that he had to stay out of Ohio for 18 months because he killed a black waiter in Cleveland. He said that Cobb spit on fans when they booed him, that he once punched a fan when he got booed. He always spiked opposing players.

• 16:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, Charlie, you are not calling my son a liar, are you?

• 16:48Speaker 06

  No, but it's very interesting to hear some of the things that he said because all of them are rooted in some kind of historical reality, but in some cases, the cord is almost broken that ties them to reality.

• 17:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you want to go one by one on some of the charges? So KKK, was Ty Cobb a member of the Ku Klux Klan?

• 17:07Speaker 06

  No, he wasn't, and nothing like it ever.

• 17:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  My son said that Ty Cobb killed a black waiter.

• 17:15Speaker 06

  This is a very interesting case. This refers to something that happened in 1909 when Ty Cobb, after dinner with George M. Cohan, the famous Broadway showman in Cleveland, came back to his hotel, had a scuffle with the white elevator operator. The white security guard intervened. They wound up getting in a more physical scuffle, and Cobb was arrested as a result of that, but no one was killed, and no one was black.

• 17:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  I got to think, I mean, as you tell me this, I'm getting kind of chills. As a journalist myself, I'm thinking, there's a jerk out there, and he's got a legacy. There's a legacy of a jerk, and you're exploring his actual life, pre-legacy, and you're finding that a lot of it differs with the legacy. So what's your response and emotion to that?

• 18:05Speaker 06

  Well, I'm trying to figure out what's going on. You know, I'm in the middle of writing this book, and I'm seeing it as there's something that's going on here that probably doesn't have too much to do exactly with Ty Cobb. He's just sort of the excuse for it. There's kind of this mass psychology thing, and I think that it's a self-righteous feeling that's motivating people to say, to express themselves by saying, "I'm not a racist."

• 18:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh.

• 18:29Speaker 06

  "I think this man is terrible, and I'll paint him as even more terrible."

• 18:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  So when sports fans get together to talk about Ty Cobb, and they talk about what a horrible racist he is, you're saying that's their way of bonding over the fact that they're not like him?

• 18:44Speaker 06

  Yes, yes. It's kind of like what happens in a prison when a child molester comes in, and all the other prisoners want to kill him to show that they are superior to somebody.

• 18:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  But maybe there's something else going on here, too. Could it be that we want to believe the worst about people? That Ty Cobb, for instance, really was a racist and a jerk? Or even if we don't necessarily want to believe things like that, are we perhaps programmed in that direction?

• 19:19Speaker 07

  We might have read 500 papers or more, spanning everything from marriages, friendship, financial gains and losses, health. There were about 15 different categories that we studied, and we see the effect very clearly in all of them.

• 19:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Kathleen Voss. She's a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota. Some years back, she co-authored a paper in a psychology journal called "Bad is Stronger Than Good."

• 19:50Speaker 07

  When people encounter something negative or something unfavorable, it changes the way they feel, think, and behave in a much bigger way compared to when they encounter some favorable or positive news or information.

• 20:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  So believing that Ty Cobb was a big jerk isn't that hard to do because...

• 20:07Speaker 07

  You can be a truth-telling individual your entire life, and if you say one lie, you're now a liar. Like, qualitatively, you're branded a liar. You're branded immoral, even though an immoral person's done tons of moral things in his or her life.

• 20:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Voss and her co-authors argued that we have a built-in wariness of other people.

• 20:27Speaker 07

  Because you and I wouldn't be here today if we didn't have a psychological system that was hypersensitive to threats, dangers, obstacles, and things that could potentially kill us. Think about what we tell our children: "Come on into this van." You know, no, you don't-- kids are not going into any vans with anybody. I mean, think of the potential in that versus, you know, they happen to miss out on a fun experience with a family friend, you know? Their lives are not that different, right? But you go into one stranger's van, and you may never come out. Death only has to win once, and life has to win every day.

• 21:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, we may be programmed, on some level and to some degree, to think the worst of others. But what if that thing you believe isn't true? What if, for instance, Ty Cobb's reputation as a monster was kind of fictional? Consider this. In 1960, 32 years after he retired from baseball, Cobb began working on his autobiography with a sportswriter named Al Stump. Cobb was very sick, and he died 10 months after the work began, but the book still came out. It was a pretty standard baseball memoir, told from Cobb's point of view. But then, just five months later, Al Stump, the ghostwriter, publishes his version

• 21:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  of the Ty Cobb story in True Magazine. Now, Stump's article portrayed Cobb as a violent, drunk murderer. Pretty different legacy, right? So, the magazine article got Stump a lot of attention, won a sportswriting award, and it pretty much established the legend of the monster that my son came to know as Ty Cobb. Then, many years later, Al Stump again writes about Ty Cobb, this time, a full-length biography. Not surprisingly, it still paints a pretty horrific picture. And then, that book is turned into a movie, with Tommy Lee Jones playing the sociopathic Ty Cobb. Charlie Leerson, whom we heard from

• 22:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  earlier, the guy who's writing a new biography of Ty Cobb, he says the legacy of Ty Cobb was largely shaped by one man.

• 22:44Speaker 06

  Now, it was 30 years later that Stump got the idea to write, to flesh that out, that true article into a book.

• 22:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Into his second book about Ty Cobb.

• 22:56Speaker 06

  About Ty Cobb.

• 22:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Heavily critical.

• 22:58Speaker 06

  Heavily critical, and just depicting a man in his last days of life, dying of cancer, trying to drug and drink himself into a state of some comfort and being cranky. It also went on, though, and told stories- About how Cobb bullwhipped his son, for example, and how Cobb, in the present day, was so mean and cheap and cranky that he would--kids would write him letters asking for autographs or pictures, and he would not only not answer the letters, he'd steal the stamps.

• 23:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  I love it.

• 23:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, on every--on every level, Stump knew how to paint this, you know--

• 23:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Interesting.

• 23:40Speaker 06

  This character.

• 23:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  I want to read you a passage here. This is from a Washington Post article about Cobb after the movie and the second book came out. So it says, "The book is out, and the movie will be showing, da-da-da, and now everyone is reminded for sure that Ty Cobb was indeed a vicious, demonic fiend who took to the ball field every day with blood, not his own, in his eye, and how he cut and ravaged and savaged his way to all those records, 90, he put in baseball's archives." So this, Charlie, is not just a jerk off the field, but a guy who was great at baseball, who this article makes the case, was great on the field because he was a jerk or a cheater or vicious or a monster.

• 24:24Speaker 06

  Well, that's just people, you know, just typing. You know, that has--that has nothing to do with thinking or history. You know, let me tell you something about Al Stump. The Hall of Fame found out that a Ty Cobb diary, supposedly very valuable they had in their possession, was forged, and the forger turned out to be, after an FBI investigation, Al Stump. Stump would go out and buy things at flea markets and put Cobb's initials on them and sell them, and Cobb wasn't around to defend himself.

• 25:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, can it be strategic to act like a jerk? So he was a faux jerk.

• 25:14Speaker 08

  He was a faux jerk, but he knew how to manipulate--

• 25:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's not bad.

• 25:19Speaker 08

  Strategically jerk them.

• 25:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what do you do when you see a jerk and notice that you have a lot in common with him? Maybe you'll decide to change your life.

• 25:29Speaker 09

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• 25:59Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 26:44Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 27:02Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 27:45Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 28:07Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 28:41Speaker 02

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 28:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Welcome back. This episode is called Legacy of a Jerk. We were talking about Ty Cobb, one of the greatest baseball players in history, and, according to the standard biographies, one of the biggest jerks who ever lived. Unless, as his new biographer, Charlie Leerson, tells us, Ty Cobb actually wasn't such a jerk. Now, athletes and other entertainers, I would argue, are different from you and me. Because the thing they do, the thing they're known for, has almost nothing to do with the kind of person they are. And for the rest of us, that's not the case. My Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt teaches economics at the University of Chicago.

• 29:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  I called him up to ask about his experience with jerks.

• 29:49Speaker 08

  So one of my colleagues at the business school at Chicago, when he first started teaching, the students could be very demanding. And among their many demands was they were upset that the handouts he had given were not three-hole punched. And so they raised their hand and they said, "Professor, it really is upsetting to us that the handouts aren't three-hole punched." And he said, "What are you talking about? The handouts are not three-hole punched? I'll be back in a minute." And he walked out of the room. And he was outside the room around a corner typing on his BlackBerry. And another professor came up to him and was talking to him and said, "Oh, I gotta

• 30:34Speaker 08

  go back to teaching." And he said, "Well, why are you out in the hallway if you're supposed to be teaching?" And he didn't really explain. He went back into the room. And he went back to the room and he said to the students, "Look, I went down to the people who do the Xeroxing and I read them the riot act. And I said, 'If you ever fail to three-hole punch another thing for my class, I'm gonna have you fired.'" And this guy got some of the highest teacher ratings of any teacher ever at the Chicago Business School.

• 31:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  So he was a faux jerk?

• 31:08Speaker 08

  He was a faux jerk, but he knew how to manipulate strategically jerk them.

• 31:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  I love it. Letting your students think that you're a jerk to some faceless Xeroxing drones in order to enhance your own reputation. This made me think of another economist.

• 31:31Speaker 10

  I'm Robin Hanson. I'm an associate professor of economics at George Mason University.

• 31:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hanson spends a lot of time thinking about how people manage their reputations.

• 31:42Speaker 10

  And I have many fascinating papers that you should be impressed by.

• 31:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, when you tell me that we should be impressed by your papers, you're just coming right out and say it.

• 31:54Speaker 10

  Exactly.

• 31:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's nothing subtle about that signal.

• 31:57Speaker 10

  Right, and that makes it funny. It's funny how funny it is to be straightforward about these things.

• 32:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  And whether we're making it very overt like that, or doing it in much more subtle ways, this might all come under the big umbrella of what's called signaling theory, correct?

• 32:13Speaker 10

  Or showing off.

• 32:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah, is signaling theory just fancy academic language for showing off, then?

• 32:20Speaker 10

  It is. So jerk has a whole bunch of associations, and now that I think about it, they should probably be separated somewhat.

• 32:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, separate them for me.

• 32:33Speaker 10

  So, one thing about very successful people is that they're typically overwhelmingly focused on their career, or their ambition, or their accomplishment. And that tends to grate on people around them socially. They'll neglect their family, they'll neglect their kids, they'll neglect friends they knew in high school, etc. They'll neglect everything, pretty much, for the purpose of achieving this particular thing. So, those are often, they're considered jerks. They don't organize high school reunions, they don't pitch in at the softball event on Saturday that you want them to. You might think they're a jerk because you ask them to do things that other people are willing to do to pitch in for their community, and they won't, because they're so focused on their particular thing.

• 33:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, it sounds like you're saying that's a kind of excusable mode of what might be conceived of as jerkitude, because they simply have chosen to be very focused on something?

• 33:28Speaker 10

  Well, it depends, of course, on what they're focused on. If they focus on something that we can admire, then we do excuse it somewhat. If they're focused on something we don't admire, then we... If they're a Holocaust denier, and they're spending all their free time doing that, then...

• 33:43Speaker 10

  That you might admire their obsession and their focus, but not so much the net effect. You might think the world would be better off if they weren't so obsessed with that and just were a regular guy.

• 33:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so that's one kind of jerkiness, the hyper-focus which causes you to shirk off the regular duties that would make you not a jerk. What else? What other kinds of...

• 34:01Speaker 10

  Another kind would be argumentative. So I recently reread Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, and he says basically, never tell anybody you disagree with them.

• 34:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Huh.

• 34:11Speaker 10

  Always.

• 34:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's all you have to do.

• 34:13Speaker 10

  Well, it's one of the... He has many things to do, but it's certainly one thing that will cut down on a lot of our arguments, is you never admit you disagree. You indirectly say things at most, or change the subject, etc. And there are many people who don't follow that rule. There are many people who will directly challenge somebody who disagrees with them, and some do that better than others, but many people think that's a jerk.

• 34:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  And let me ask you this. I just wonder if you have anything to say about how death will change the legacy of anyone, but particularly a jerk?

• 34:47Speaker 10

  Well, dead people are safer people to like because they can't change their mind and embarrass you. So it's always a risk to endorse anybody while they're still alive, especially somebody who's known for flying off the handle in various ways, because then they could just do something that embarrassed you and made you sorry you ever endorsed them. So once somebody's dead, they're safely beyond, for the most part, having done things that will embarrass you. The other big way to be redeemed as a jerk is for people to see the cause that you were a jerk for as something noble and laudable. So we're often

• 35:27Speaker 10

  tolerant of jerky actors, jerky directors, jerky musicians, jerky athletes, because, well, they were jerky in support of something that we can admire.

• 35:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't know about you, but when Robin Hanson said these words...

• 35:47Speaker 10

  The other big way to be redeemed as a jerk is for people to see the cause that you were a jerk for as something noble and laudable.

• 35:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  One particular person came to mind.

• 35:58Speaker 11

  We are introducing the industry milestone product, Macintosh. We are calling it iPhone. And we call it the iPad. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.

• 36:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, of course, was Steve Jobs introducing some of the very wonderful products that Apple has come up with over the past few decades. In that last clip, we heard him speaking at Stanford's commencement in 2005, talking about Apple becoming a $2 billion company. Now, Jobs died at age 56 from pancreatic cancer in October of 2011. By then, Apple had a market value of some $350 billion, making it the world's most valuable company. Here's his friend and Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak.

• 37:10Speaker 12

  I am incredibly lucky to him for everything in my life. He gets a reputation for being a strong leader and being brash, but to me, he was just always so kind, such a good friend. And I'm just gonna miss him.

• 37:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Brash is a polite way of putting it. Steve Jobs had a reputation for being, A, an almost unprecedentedly creative inventor, or at least a man who harnessed and synthesized other people's inventions, and, B, a world-class jerk. Yes, he was brilliant, but he was also petulant and arrogant and just mean to people in a way that nearly defies explanation.

• 37:52Speaker 13

  Once he started working on this book with me... He just wanted to talk on and on, which was great.

• 38:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Walter Isaacson is an author, journalist, and CEO of the Aspen Institute. Jobs handpicked Isaacson to write his biography, which wound up being published just a couple of weeks after Jobs died.

• 38:14Speaker 13

  I mean, we would, we met probably for 50 times, and sometimes it would be for hours on end, just riding the old neighborhood, taking walks. And I think he had been very, very private over the years. And when he decided to open up, he just wanted to open up everything. He also said, you know, "I'm famous for being brutally honest with people. I want you to be brutally honest in this book."

• 38:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Steve Jobs knew he would die relatively soon when he asked Isaacson to write his biography. So as much as the writer would have a chance to shape the subject's legacy, the subject was being proactive in shaping his own legacy.

• 38:54Speaker 13

  You know, there are two sets of reactions. People who've never been in business or never been entrepreneurs, and generally older people, you know, their first reaction, especially to the first half of the book, is, boy, he was kind of a jerk, and he was hard to deal with. I didn't know he had such a prickly personality. Younger entrepreneurs, people who've been in business, people who know how things work, their reaction is totally different, which is, wow, this guy was a genius. This is how, not that he was a jerk, but that he drove people to do things they thought were impossible. And I think the real business lessons in there were initially lost in some of the original reviews by people

• 39:36Speaker 13

  who focused just far too much on his personality. Steve just didn't have that filter. He said, "You want me to be one of those velvet-gloved people who always speaks with a silver tongue? That's not me. I'm a middle-class kid from California, and if something sucks, I'm going to tell people it sucks."

• 39:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  I asked Isaacson how strategic Jobs was in his jerkitude. That is, could he control himself to the point where he could turn off the jerk when he needed to?

• 40:08Speaker 13

  Well, I think if you're a jerk to people, they end up leaving, especially when they can. When you're tough on people, but you allow them to be tough back on you, which is what Steve did, and you're inspiring and compelling, then they don't leave. Anybody can be a jerk and then people will just leave. But if you look at Eddie Q, Phil Schiller, Scott Forstel, Tim Cook, Johnny Ive, these are really A++ players who have stayed at Apple for the past 15, 20 years, and they would have left if Steve were truly being humiliating to them or a jerk.

• 40:49Speaker 13

  So I think you have to realize that anybody can be a jerk, but you have to be as inspiring, compelling, and inspirational.

• 40:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  One of my favorites, this is just a small incident. You write about a meeting with a chip supplier where Jobs stormed into a meeting and quote, "started shouting that they were [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] holes." So this is a business meeting, and this is the CEO of Apple. You're not going to find that strategy in How to Win Friends and Influence People, right?

• 41:15Speaker 13

  Yes, but as you remember the end of that story...

• 41:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  It worked, yeah, it worked.

• 41:19Speaker 13

  They ended up delivering, not only delivering the chips...

• 41:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  And wearing the shirts.

• 41:22Speaker 13

  ...on time, but wearing t-shirts that said on the back, "Team FDA," for those words that I did not know you could say on the radio.

• 41:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, you know, it's public radio. I'm just curious, what did you change in your life, either as head of the Aspen Institute or as a writer, or maybe as a husband and father, as a result of spending so much time with Jobs and writing about him?

• 41:51Speaker 13

  You know, it's probably counterintuitive, but noticing how many people were sort of surprised by how tough of a personality could be, or the tales, all of which are on the record in the book, so I hope they're not exaggerated, but their tales, you know, there's none of these tales off the record. But when I heard all these tales about how he could get mad at the desk clerk at a hotel or whatever, I tried to make sure, since I will never be as talented to invent the iPod or the iPad, that at least I'm nice to every desk clerk at every hotel, because, you know, you realize people do talk about that, and that sometimes makes a big impact on people.

• 42:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  It does make you wonder what your own legacy will be. Will you be the kind of person whose meanness is exposed in death? She was a difficult mother and a horrendous mother-in-law. Or whose legacy is protected by the nature of your death?

• 42:52Speaker 05

  He was a magnanimous person, a great gentleman, a true leader. He was given all these qualities that he may or may not have had.

• 43:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Maybe your reputation will be exaggerated, dragged through the mud.

• 43:05Speaker 06

  Cobb bullwhipped his son. He was so mean and cheap and cranky.

• 43:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or, maybe you'll be the kind of person who, even when you're called a jerk, is so revered for what you've accomplished, that even your jerkitude itself proves to be an inspiration for people.

• 43:26Speaker 09

  I read Steve Jobs' book pretty much the day it came out.

• 43:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Brad Wardell. He lives in Canton, Michigan. He's the founder and CEO of a software and computer game company called Stardoc. When Wardell read the Steve Jobs biography, he learned a different lesson than the one he planned.

• 43:45Speaker 09

  I went into it thinking I was picking up a business book. And it became pretty clear that Steve Jobs, for all that he had accomplished, very much regretted not spending more time with his family. And it dawned on me that there was a whole part of life that he feels he had missed out on. That's when I realized, well, gosh, you know, my son, my son at the time was almost 15 years old and, and I couldn't tell you, I mean, that's high school and I couldn't tell you in the name of any teacher he had ever had.

• 44:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wardell has three kids, but like a lot of entrepreneurs, he devoted a lot of his time and his mental energies to his company. He says he worked 80 to 100 hours a week for years. He was exhausted. When you read the Steve Jobs book, he says, it was like looking in the mirror and he did not like it.

• 44:42Speaker 09

  One of the stories in the book has to do with he would go and see what's going on on someone's computer and just say, that's total crap, you should be fired. And now, and I was never quite that harsh, but I, there were days where I'd go by and say, that looks awful, you know, redo it. You know, when I started this company, I was only, you know, in my very early twenties and I can tell you as someone with no training or skills of dealing with humans or, you know, people, I was probably the worst person in the world to be a CEO. And I saw that in Steve, in the book where Steve Jobs was often pretty mean and I could unfortunately relate to that.

• 45:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wardell says he was so involved in his work that he hadn't been to a grocery store in about 15 years. So he decided to change his life. He cut back to what most people would consider a normal work life, about 40 hours a week. He was surprised to find out how much he'd been missing.

• 45:49Speaker 09

  So now that I had this time, I've discovered all these neat things. And I bought a bunch of flashlights because they make LED flashlights. So that's really interesting. And different types of air fresheners. Did you know there's products that just change the smell of the air?

• 46:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  And now that he was spending more time with his family, he had to learn to not treat them like employees.

• 46:11Speaker 09

  Well, that was another problem. At first, we'd had meetings. We had a calendar and I would set up hourly projects for everyone. And then we did evaluations and reviews and stuff on how everyone did, on their chores. And they had to write reports. That didn't go over real well. It turns out, people don't like that.

• 46:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Wardell has learned that you can't run your family like a business, and you can't run your business the way he was running it if you ever want to see your family. And it was Steve Jobs who helped teach him this. For Brad Wardell, the legacy of Steve Jobs was, "Do not be like Steve Jobs."

• 47:00Speaker 09

  It wasn't that I thought everything was hunky-dory when I read the book, because I don't want to... Otherwise, it comes across as pretty melodramatic. It's more like it was the last straw, so to speak. It was a catalyst to actually go and really pull the trigger. The big thing is just that Steve Jobs dying and realizing that, you know, that he wasn't able to make up to his kids, or to himself, or to his wife, all the things he meant to do later. And that even though he had all this success and wealth, that he couldn't save himself was really, in itself, a big, big, you know, moment.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Amanda Aronchek. Our staff includes Susie Lechtenberg, Catherine Wells, David Herman, Borey Lam, and Chris Bannon. Jake Smith is our intern, Colin Campbell. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 48:39Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 49:10Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 49:49Speaker 14

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• 50:48Speaker 15

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