Give someone a week to write a brief report and they will spend a week on it; give them a day and they will just write it. This episode traces the idea back to C. Northcote Parkinson's 1955 essay in The Economist, where the naval historian paired the familiar rule that work expands to fill the time available with a sharper claim: administrative staff grows regardless of workload. His evidence was the British Admiralty and the Colonial Office, which hit its peak headcount at the moment it had no colonies left to administer.

The hosts unpack his two forces of multiplication, officials hiring subordinates rather than rivals and then making work for one another, his mock-scientific formula for five to seven percent annual growth, and Gorbachev's remark that Parkinson's law works everywhere. They then cover the law of triviality and bike-sheddin ...