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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #181 (Interview)

Published about 1 month ago • 6 min read

Family Photo:
Group Interview

Last week, I had a group interview as part of my application to Leadership SLO.

Leadership SLO is a 10-month community program that explores the inner-workings of San Luis Obispo County. One Friday each month, cohort participants gather to tour a farm, or a police station, or a government building, examining San Luis Obispo and its leadership through different lenses.

A friend of mine is in this year's cohort, and encouraged me to apply for 2026. Applying involved an application essay, a letter of recommendation, and a group interview. The Cooptimize 4-day workweek gives me flexibility to experiment these side-quests, so I applied.

Leadership SLO's group interview format was new to me: meeting at the Chamber of Commerce, six applicants sat across a table from six Leadership SLO alumni. Six interview questions were printed and provided to the applicants at the beginning of the interview. An alumnus would ask one question, after which each applicant was given one minute to answer. Then the next alumnus would ask the next question. The questions were answered 'crossfire-style' so a different applicant would respond first to each question.

Questions ranged from: "Other than SLO, where is a place you'd most like to be?", "What's something your passionate about?", "What's something you've learned recently?", "Tell us about a mistake you've made and what happened."

It was an efficient getting-to-know-you process. In less than an hour, each applicant had spoken about 6-mintues total, yet I think everyone in the room got a sense of what everyone was like.

There are over 70 applicants for the 36 spots in the next cohort. In their selection criteria, Leadership SLO explains cohorts are built to balance industries, perspectives, and experiences. That means it's not enough for me to be in the top half of applicants, I'll need to be in the top half of applicants working as remote enterprise data consults within a cooperative organizational structure.

Wish me luck!

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Also of note: a couple weeks ago, I attended the Central Coast Writer's Conference.

(another Cooptimize 4-day workweek side-quest)

The conference was an chance to embrace my identity as a writer, as well as connect with other local writers. My favorite conference session, however, had nothing to do with writing:

Adam Montiel, a local radio/podcast host, presented on The Art of Interview.

His presentation discussed crafting engaging, thoughtful questions, and using curiosity to both make guests comfortable and draw them out. Interview is a journalism skill, but it's also a general business skill. A lot of business consulting is like therapy sessions to drill into the root causes of business problems. While we were recently doing Cooptimize job interviews, it occurred to me that interviewing skill is like a muscle that needs to be exercised to develop.

One of Adam's tips was that if you're doing a Zoom interview, try to show both your palms within the first 10 seconds. For evolutionary psychology reasons, this should help put your guest at ease.

Worth giving it a try.

Dad Jokes:
Mock Interview

Source: Twitter, via Reddit, and later, LinkedIn

Highlights:
Technical Interview

Flounder Mode by Brie Wolfson

I started my career at Google selling AdWords to small businesses, and finished my first quarter as the number three seller in North America. Professional opportunities immediately unfolded—early nods for management, trips to global offices to present my “best practices,” my face on slides next to impressive metrics, and attention from more senior leaders.
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It’s hard to say why none of that seemed very interesting, but it didn’t. What I did like was starting a campaign to rename the conference rooms and helping my coworker launch his internal content series, G-Chat with Charleton, in which he would interview Google executives while sitting with them in a two-person snuggie. I had earned myself a ticket to the fast career track at one of the coolest companies in Silicon Valley, but climbing the corporate ladder just wasn’t for me.

Reflections on Palantir by Nabeel S. Qureshi

I also interviewed with the CEO, Alex Karp and talked to other members of the leadership team. I probably don’t need to convince you that Karp is weird - just watch an interview with him. I can’t say what Karp and I talked about, but he gives a good flavor for his style in a 2012 interview:
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I like to meet candidates with no data about them: no résumé, no preliminary discussions or job description, just the candidate and me in a room. I ask a fairly random question, one that is orthogonal to anything they would be doing at Palantir. I then watch how they disaggregate the question, if they appreciate how many different ways there are to see the same thing. I like to keep interviews short, about 10 minutes. Otherwise, people move into their learned responses and you don’t get a sense of who they really are.

Cautionary Tales | "I get in trouble when I say things like this" - Michael Lewis on Sam Bankman-Fried

Michael Lewis: I thought it was actually ingenius, because I try to do this with subjects, and especially if you only have a short time with them. You're so much better off doing something with someone than just talking to them if you're trying to kind of get some insight into how they tick.
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The best job interview I ever had: it was to lead teenage girls through Europe when I was twenty-two years old. I went to the tour agency, and the guy who ran the tour agency said, “God, I forgot you had an interview this day. We're supposed to move the furniture from this office down the hall of the other office. Could you just help me do that, and then, if we have time left over, we'll talk?”
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And I spent an hour moving furniture with this guy, and I left. He said, “I'll call you about the interview later,” and I left bewildered. Then, like a week later he said, “You have the job.”
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Two months later, I'm in a hotel room with my fellow leader in Bruges, and I said, “You know, this was odd. I was never interviewed,” and I explained what happened. He said, “I moved that furniture too, back the other way!"
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It was a really smart way to kind of figure out whether someone was collaborative, whether they could pick up stuff quickly, how they interacted with people.
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So I took it as a sign you were a clever journalist when you did this.

Generative AI in a Nutshell - Einstein In Your Basement

Write a prompt, look at the result, add a follow up prompt to provide more information, or edit the original prompt, and rinse and repeat until you get a good result. In this third approach, I ask it to interview me. So instead of me providing a bunch of context up front, I'm basically saying, what do you need to know in order to help me? And then it will propose a workshop agenda. After I often combine these two, I provide a bit of context and then I tell it to ask me if it needs any more information.

Rise of the Idiot Interviewer by Nathan J. Robinson

The Nelk Boys, by their own admission, did not do a good job interviewing Netanyahu, asking questions like: “You [and Trump] are very tight, right? Would you call it a ‘bromance’?” They asked Netanyahu what his go-to McDonald’s order is. They raved about the nightlife in Tel Aviv. (“Tel Aviv is lit!”) The closest they came to asking a critical question was when Nelk Boy Kyle Forgeard said that “I’ll see or read stuff on X and people will say, like Israel is killing babies or they’re starving people,” to which Netanyahu just replied “That’s completely false.” (It is true.) Forgeard admitted during the episode that “I see so much stuff about what’s going on in Israel and Iran and Palestine, and to be honest, I just really don’t know what is going on there.” That certainly showed.
...
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“We’re probably not the best at asking questions” is a good candidate for the Understatement of the Century award. But this Nelk’s view that audiences should “form their own opinion” reflects a common mistake about the role of an interviewer. The audience can only make up its opinion based on what they are exposed to. If they’re not exposed to counterarguments, they’re not going to be able to reach an informed conclusion. The interviewer’s job is to get the facts out on the table so that the audience is able to have an “educated” view on the subject.
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This is especially important when the person you are talking to is a head of state. Government officials lie and spin the facts, and they are very good at it, so an audience is not necessarily going to know when they’re being misled. The questioner must therefore cut through the evasions and half-truths and make the politician squarely face the truth. They will still evade, deflect, and mislead, but their evasions will at least be pointed out.

iamJoshKnox Highlights:

Synthesis Interview | How to Juggle

video preview​

I once applied to be a tutor with Synthesis. Part of their interview was, "Make a 3-minute video where you teach something," for which I made this video.

I didn't get the job.

Don't let that discourage you in your juggling practice though. On an unrelated note, all the Synthesis math tutors are AI now.

Want to Be Interviewed?

I am trying to flex my interviewing muscle:
​Please REPLY if you'd like to do a 30-minute interview with me for a Podcast that doesn't yet exist.

Or book some time on my calendar if there's anything else you'd like to chat about:
​https://calendly.com/iamjoshknox

Until next week,
​iamJoshKnox​

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Josh Knox

Hi! I am Josh Knox. Read more of me here: 👇

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